Electronic music pioneers

Subject: Electronic music pioneers
From: GUEST,AR282
Date: 28 Mar 02 - 12:00 PM

Electronic music receives scant attention by most people today especially in a forum dedicated to folk and blues but I believe this to be because we cannot see the forest for the trees. I picked up a stupendous compilation CD the other day entitled "OHM—The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948-1980" put out by the Electronic Music Foundation on the Ellipsis Arts… label (CD3670). This 3-CD set contains some of the greatest artists and pieces of the early electronic music era including many that have been favorites of mine for years. I have a vast array these artists and compositions on vinyl that I began collecting years and years ago when I was a lad in my teens. I'm ecstatic to now have at least some of them remastered digitally for CD.

All the greats are here: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varese, John Cage, Tod Dockstader, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, Morton Subotnick, Olivier Messiaen, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor, Louis and Bebe Barron, Holger Czukay and so on. But also included are the lesser known but equally creative artists as Clara Rockmore, Joji Yuasa, Richard Maxfield, Klaus Schulze (of Tangerine Dream), Maryanne Amacher, MEV, Charles Dodge, etc. Unfortunately missing are some of my favorites as George Antheil (who made music with the sound of airplane propellers) and Bulent Arel, but, well, I suppose you can't have 'em all. Maybe they'll come out with a second volume.

The liner notes are extensive and often written by the artists themselves but often include guests whose music does not appear here including Professor Chu Wen-Chung, David Behrman and Chris Cutler (lyricist and drummer for the Art Bears which also included greats Fred Frith and Dagmar Krause).

Some of the instruments you will hear were—ahem—instrumental in the formation of today's MIDI synths including the oscillator, the theremin and the ondes martenot. The theremin was odd because it was controlled by positioning the hands and body around the instrument without touching it. It produced a tone like a cross between a female opera singer and a violin. Needless to say, it is extremely difficult to control and was used mainly for campy sound FX in cartoons and old sci-fi movies (although it is featured prominently in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains"). Its inventor, Russian-born musician/physicist Leon Theremin, brought the instrument to the West at he insistence of Lenin. He met another Russian-born musician, Clara Rockmore, a violin genius, and she began to play the theremin. Included here is a piece called "Tchaikovsky: Valse Sentimentale" that Rockmore performed with her sister, pianist Nadia Reisenberg, in 1977. If one thinks the theremin is only good for campy sci-fi 50s soundtracks then one needs to hear Rockmore play this thing. Beautiful and amazingly musical and expressive—sheer genius.

Also interesting is that one of the featured artists is Raymond Scott. You jazz fans will immediately recognize the name and I had only known him as a jazz artist. Here, though, Scott contributes some highly experimental music never before released. All of you have heard Raymond Scott whether you realize it or not. It is his band playing the music on the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Tod Dockstader, who has produced some of the eeriest stuff ever heard, also did sound FX for the Tom & Jerry cartoons. I'm not sure who did the sound FX for the 3 Stooges, but don't be surprised if he was also an avant-garde musician.

The nice thing is, most of this music, as primitive as it is by today's standards, is no less startling and expressive than anything that can be created today. In fact, some of the weirder musicians today including British groups as Throbbing Gristle and Coil as well as Japanese artists as the utterly bizarre Merzbow and Ruins owe a huge debt to the material produced by the people featured here. But everybody owes them something. Brian Eno points out that no recorded music can be termed non-electronic. The microphones, tape, mixing board, and outboard studio gear is precisely the stuff that sprang out of electronic experimentation in music. The only difference is that the avant-garde musicians used these devices themselves as instruments.

Synthesizers, sequencers and MIDI have virtually taken over modern music. I have performed with this gear, as well as tape loops and samples, for years. What kept these devices and instruments alive and gave them a future were the early works heard here. What can be sequenced and recorded in only an hour today, took these pioneers days and even months of painstaking, tedious, back-breaking work. The very first musical computer that can be called a synthesizer was invented by RCA labs at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. It takes up four rooms and was controlled with a typewriter keyboard! Its finished product had to be stored on a vinyl disc that could be played back on a phonograph. Its oscillators drifted out of tune after only a few seconds. To make a composition required having to stop every few seconds to retune the oscillators. Hence even a few minutes worth of music played on the vinyl disc took months to prepare. The foremost composer using this machine is Milton Babbitt. It is the only synth he has ever used!

Bebe Barron writes that she and her husband, Louis, worked extremely hard for months to produce the amazing all-electronic soundtrack for the 50s sci-fi movie The Forbidden Planet yet she freely admits that it could be done today in only a few hours. But it was such painstaking work that convinced the more conventional musicians that there was a future for electronic instruments. If these artists had rushed through it with what Thomas Pynchon calls "the crude haste to view the finished product that marks the true amateur", synths might have fallen the wayside. But the going was slow.

I remember in the 60s and 70s that virtually any band that routinely used a synth was classified as "electronic" whereas it is routine for almost all artists to day to use them. All those lush strings, choirs, pianos, horns, organs, guitars, drums and what not that you hear on modern recordings are usually digital sounds and samples. Almost ALL sounds in movies today are dubbed in by the studio during editing. Everything from traffic noises on the street, ringing phones, police sirens, footsteps on the sidewalk or floor, opening and shutting doors, breaking windows, cheering crowds, etc. are all added in after the film is shot using synths. Even dialogue between two characters as they stand on a corner or walk down the street is dubbed in afterwards and are not the actual dialogue that took place at the shoot. My synth produces all these types of sounds and many, many more. All this technology is courtesy of the early electronic music pioneers. Also many techniques that came to be standard in the studio were developed by the electronic music pioneers. Tape-splicing, for example. Although we can digitally splice today to perfection with error correction and cross-fading, splicing was once a tedious business that involved locating 2 splice points, marking them with a wax pencil, cutting those points on the tape diagonally with a razor to remove the unwanted section and then joining the two cut-points with splicing tape. You had to make sure not to cut off a note or a cymbal ringing out. It wasn't easy, believe me. It was these gurus, though, that did this not so much to fix a song or shorten it, but by using the tape itself as an instrument. A regular song may have had one or two splices, whereas the avant-garde pieces usually had dozens and even hundreds for a single composition! Hugh Le Caine's 1955 piece "Dripsody" is an example. He recorded a single drop of water with a multi-tape recorder and then spliced it together in various patterns at all sorts of speeds to produce an amazing piece. It must have taken him weeks to do this. Today's samplers could do it in about 10 minutes. The 1969 piece "Boat-Woman-Song" by Holger Czukay (bassist for the German experimental group Can) is called "one of the earliest sample compositions ever" and helped give birth to today's sampling techniques.

A few years back, I pulled a MIDI chamber orchestra piece off the internet. I sampled a belch and used it to replace the cello. So you hear this lovely music except the cello is a loud belch hitting all the right pitches with all the right vibrato. It was so funny, I sampled myself gargling (got the idea from listening to P.D.Q. Bach) and used that to replace the violin voice. Then I sampled an arm-pit fart to replace the bass. I replaced the harpsichord with a sampled sneeze. I replaced the viola with a raspberry. The result was a human symphony made solely with various body sounds. It's the way Mozart would have sounded if he'd written something for the human body to perform—let's hear the Swingle Singers top that! The result was absolutely hilarious and done for fun. It took me about a half-hour. In the 50s, this would have been impossible to do with tape-splicing but those folks back then made it possible to do this kind of thing. But even today, it boggles minds. I played my human body symphony for friends who thought I was a genius to be able to do that. Actually, for those familiar with MIDI and sampling, it is mere child's play and totally obsolete in this modern age.

"OHM" is extremely entertaining and amazing to hear. If you hate electronic music, you'll really like this. If you love electronic music, you'll flip over this. Moreover, the graphics are very colorful and very technical-looking with knobs and wires and schematics all melded together in psychedelic sort of ways. The comp also comes with a wonder thick book of liner notes about each piece and the artists who perform them. Some of these recordings are rare indeed. Admittedly, this comp is expensive—to the tune of about $40, but it is a very worthy investment. I mean, I wasn't going to buy it either at first but I kept returning to it and picking it up. "Oh, screw it!" I thought. "You know you want it and you know you can't leave the store without it or you'll drive yourself nuts thinking about it, so buy it!" And so I did and I've been patting myself on the back ever since.

Subject: RE: Electronic music pioneers
From: AR282
Date: 29 Mar 02 - 05:23 PM

Good review, AR, but you're going to have to stop posting threads that generate so much interest! This is a music forum after all! You're taking away from threads about being ashamed of being American, pedophile priests, garden cats and solar-powered dildoes!

PS - Btw, did you catch Karl Rodelius when he came through Detroit a couple of years back? I thought I saw you there.