Electronic Music

Tonight I started out by reading an interview with Alvin Lucier (last time we heard about him he was sitting in a room). Right off the bat, I found myself in disagreement with the interviewer. His opening comment was this: "Your music seems to me quite saliently non-discursive music...yet here we sit and talk about it. Should we be doing this at all?" This seemed like an overreaching effort to be provocative, because I think any composer, no matter what niche he or she works in, is open to talking about his or her music. Isn't that why humans are driven to make art? To communicate? I know that when I create something that people see or hear, and I don't get a chance to talk about what it means, I feel frustrated.

Of course I had no need to worry, because Alvin Lucier immediately shot the interviewer down: "The idea that some musicians have, that because music stands by itself it shouldn't be talked about, is not productive for me."

Lucier went on to talk about his identity crisis as a composer. He had spent a summer in Venice and been exposed to the music of Berio, Stockhausen, and Nono, and "it seemed to me that I was hearing native speakers speak their own musical language". This was fascinating to me. In class we've talked about how European influence looms over the American musical landscape. The serial movement in the mid-twentieth century became a trend in America, the same way that early American composers copied the Romantic styles of Europeans of the time. Alvin Lucier, like Ives, sought to reject that influence and forge ahead.

Later in the interview he elaborates on how his music is different: "Composers are thinking now of a timeless kind of depth; that is, of creating and going into a sound-space, rather than moving horizontally along it". This relates to the ideas of other composers we've studied, like John Cage (seemingly always relevant) - his HPSCHD has no set starting or ending point, and the audience members are entirely responsible for how they experience the piece.

The Lucier piece on tonight's listening, and one referenced frequently in the interview, was Music On A Long Thin Wire. It was far more eventful than I expected after hearing the first few seconds. Over the course of a six-minute clip, the piece alternately conveys serenity, tension, and dread through the most subtle changes in pitch and the pulses of sound waves. At times my ears were disoriented by conflicting pulses; it was a slight aural illusion. I would like to know more about the construction of this piece; all I know is that an eighty-foot wire and some old-school machinery were used.

Next I listened to Varese's Poem electronique, which should have been my starting point tonight anyway. I last heard this piece about four years ago in an undergrad class, and after hearing it again I have the utmost admiration for it. What a pioneer Varese was! I can only imagine what the first audience felt listening to this (especially since the venue was a huge pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, lined with hundreds of speakers in a primitive form of surround sound). It's pretty terrifying at points, with human voices suddenly emerging from the alien soundscapes of beeps and percussive scrapes. The piece is exceptionally well-crafted, rising above what could have been a mere gimmick. 

The video above was shown along with the premiere of the piece. You know. For maximum fear and disorientation.

Morton Subotnik's Silver Apples of the Moon was an interesting contrast to Varese. It was comprised completely of musical tones, it had a sense of pulse and forward motion, and it was based around an ostinato. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was listening to a soundtrack from some bizarre space cartoon, but I did enjoy the way it happily tweeted and blurped along.

Next. Charles Dodge - Viola Elegy. This was a pretty straightforward, expressive, and conventionally beautiful solo viola piece, with an electronic backdrop that gave it a haunting ambience. The electronic element sounded vaguely like heavily processed marimba sounds.

Then I listened to Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros. What began as high-pitched whines and dissonant tones gave way to a huge landscape of operatic singing. The electronic palette, which had become familiar after a few minutes, became a crazy framing device for the more conventional music. It was like a great European city had been lifted from its roots and was hanging suspended in the middle of some big steampunk contraption, with an inconceivably large system of gears and pistons keeping it afloat.

Ironically, this is sort of the same premise behind Bioshock Infinite, one of the most important videogames of recent years.

Something I've realized after listening to Bye Bye Butterfly and Viola Elegy: one of the powerful applications of electronic music is creating a completely separate musical space from that of acoustic instruments. With the electronic element present, all sorts of new collage or dialogue possibilities open up.

Next on the menu was Carl Stone's Shing Kee. WOW. This is sublime stuff, and it's a great example of patient listening paying off. I initially thought this would be the same loop over and over, but then something happened. The strange, not-quite coherent sample of a singer started to reveal slightly more of itself as an echo, and then transitioned to a second section where the lyrics "find words of love" could be clearly heard. I totally understand the reason for using an electronic sample here. The repetition of of a live human voice would not be sustainable for the duration of fifteen minutes, and would not allow for the complex stutter effects and echoes that Carl Stone employs. Also, part of the appeal is that the sample always appears the exact same way, so we can admire the enduring purity of the singer's voice, the way she starts her vibrato at the same exact point, and we can meditate on the meaning of "words of love". This sample happens to be from a Schubert art song called The Linden Tree, sung in English. I must admit I didn't really want this piece to end. It was a perfect, rhapsodic moment of self-contained beauty. 

I also didn't want to listen to anything else after Shing Kee, since that seemed like such a good note to end on. But alas, I had to hear David Rosenboom's "Meaning" from Systems of Judgment. Honestly, when it started I closed my eyes and could imagine myself in a videogame (in some kind of rainy level, given the rain sound effects). The warm synth pads and ambient sound effects were straight out of a new but retro-styled game. But then a bunch of strings came in and kind of ruined the effects. I wanted to live in the electronic haze longer. The string parts (including a pipa or some other Asian stringed instrument) seemed random and not purposeful. The whole thing left a bad taste.

I'm really impressed by the scope and variety of electronic music I heard tonight, and it's got me thinking about ways I could incorporate some of these techniques into my compositions.