Chadabe Lectures
A framework, in this context, is a generalized concept of structure. Frameworks for thought in all fields, music, art, science, have changed together through the 20th century and into the 21st.
What follows here are notes on 20th-century frameworks and how they have changed. The emphasis will shift, however, from the section on interaction, towards the end of the century, to looking at examples of electronic instruments and performances during this current period.
•
Anthropomorphic projection
1600 to 1900
Science. In his Principia in 1687, Newton described time as absolute: Absolute Time is liable to no change. How does time pass? Synchronous, deterministic, palindromic, human scale. Imagine an orrery.
Music reflects our emotions, rhythms, voices. You are what you sing. How old is the Duke in Rigoletto, for example?
Music. Quartet from Rigoletto (1851) by Giuseppe Verdi
Different people sing different songs within the same time scale.
•
Parallel universe
1900 to 1925
Science. In 1905, Albert Einstein presented the Special Theory of Relativity, a major change in physics and a major change in our view of time. At the same time, there was a major change in music and the arts. Time was understood to pass in asynchronous simultaneity.
Music. Charles Ives‘ Putnam’s Camp was begun in 1903, then composed 1911-1914, later revised.
Music. Claude Debussy’s La Soirée dans Grenade, composed in 1903, contains simultaneities that are expressed as quick cuts (as in films), samples grabbed from different simultaneous lines and placed one after another, as if a camera was quickly pointed in a different direction. Btw, Debussy is performing the piano.
Music. Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, composed in 1911, is an example of quick cuts and superimpositions.
Time passed in asynchronous stories in music, in the visual arts, and in science. Not only Einstein, but other physicists were exploring sub-atomic structures.
Science. J. J. Thompson, for example, in 1897, saw atoms as charged electrons moving through a positive charge. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford saw atoms as a nucleus surrounded by space and electrons. In 1923, Louis de Broglie found that particles, such as electrons, have wave properties.
•
New structures
1925 to 1950
Music. Following World War 1, European music became less tonal. In 1919, Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer published a composition titled Nomos, Opus 19, developed a new structure called “the law of the twelve tones,” the point being that all twelve notes had to be used before any could be repeated. Arnold Schoenberg used that structure from 1921 as a move away from the atonality in music before the war. The new structure became known as the “twelve-tone system,” used by Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Schoenberg, together members of the Second Viennese School.
Science. Scientists continued to explore atomic structure. Working with Neils Bohr in Copenhagen, Werner Heisenberg proposed his Uncertainty Principle, which stated, in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as developed between 1925 and 1927 by Heisenberg and Neils Bohr, that the movement and position of an electron can not be measured at the same time.
Music. Schoenberg moved from Germany to the United States in 1933. In 1935, he became a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles. John Cage was among his students. Cage liked Schoenberg, as he told me, but he preferred the nature of environmental sound to the twelve-tone system. And Cage predicted, as early as 1937 at the Cornish School in Seattle, in a talk titled The Future of Music CREDO, that music in the future would include all sounds.
Music. In 1938, in accompanying a dancer, Cage placed screws, pieces of rubber, and other objects inside a piano, creating what came to be known as prepared piano. The best example of his prepared piano, however, is Sonatas and Interludes, composed in 1946-48.
Music. In 1939, still in Seattle, he composed Imaginary Landscape 1, with two variable-speed phono turntables playing frequency recordings, a muted piano, and a large Chinese cymbal.
•
Philips Pavilion, Brussels World Fair, 1958
Underlying complexity
1950 to 1975
Sounds became liberated. It was not expected that each sound should relate to what came before or what led to the next. A term often used to describe groups of sounds (and physical objects in the visual arts) was items and arrangements.
Music. In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer went to Batignolles, in the northeast area of Paris, and recorded locomotives using a direct-to-disc recorder. He coined the term musique concrète. The first composition was Etude aux Chemins de Fer.
Tape recorders appeared in 1950, which led to what I called “The Great Opening Up of Music to All Sounds.” Editing became possible. Any sound could be brought into a concert hall.
Audio. In his Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, begun in 1951, John Cage used a random number process based on the I Ching to compose Williams Mix.
Music. In 1952, extending the use of the twelve-tone system to what became called serialism, the idea being to use number series to calculate not only notes, but also loudness, duration, attack characteristic, and all aspects of sounds, Pierre Boulez composed Structures Book 1, for two pianos, with an algorithmic parametric description of sound. Not electronic but it exemplifies an electronic process.
Music. Karlheinz Stockhausen returned from Paris to Cologne to work in the new electronic sound studio. Beyond his initial studies, his first composition, in 1956, was Gesang der Junglinge.
Music. Luciano Berio composed Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) in Milan in 1958, based on Cathy Berberian’s recitation of text from chapter 11 of James Joyce’ Ulysses.
Music. Edgard Varèse’ Poème Electronique, composed for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, is a superb and intuitive example of working with sound objects.
Music. For Concret P.H., composed in 1958 for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair, Iannis Xenakis simulated complexity with smoldering charcoal.
Music. In 1964, Milton Babbitt composed Philomel, also with a parametric description for sound, using the RCA Mark II Synthesizer.
A new sense of structure, based on an underlying complex schemata, became widely employed in music. Randomness in John Cage’s music, serialism in Pierre Boulez’ and Milton Babbitt’s music, simulation of engineering methods in Iannis Xenakis’ music, were used in various ways to create compositions.
•
Milton Babbitt at RCA Synthesizer 1959
Salvatore Martirano with the SalMar
Interaction
1975 to 2000
In 1957, Max Mathews, at Bell Labs in New Jersey, created Music I. Encouraged by John Pierce, Mathews and Joan Miller, in 1962, finished Music IV. It became known that computers could be used to create music.
Music. Jean-Claude Risset, in Paris, interested in computers, went to Bell Labs in 1964 as a research composer and developed additive synthesis as a technique for generating sounds. Risset composed Flight and Countdown in Computer Suite from Little Boy (1968).
Music. At about the same time, John Chowning, based in Stanford University, became interested in composing with computers. Chowning went to Bell Labs, met Risset and Mathews, and became interested in frequency modulation (FM) as a synthesis technique. Chowning composed Stria in 1975.
Music. There was a wide range of experimentation, as in Dexter Morrill’s work with a trumpet sound (1975).
Music. Also at about the same time, Robert Moog developed an analog synthesizer in New York State and became known for Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach (1968) and Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Lucky Man (1968).
Music. Donald Buchla became known in San Francisco for Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967).
Music. Paul Ketoff, in Rome, developed an analog synthesizer called the SynKet. John Eaton composed Songs for RPB (1965).
As synthesizers, both analog and digital, became available, new methods of composition, and new concepts for musical instruments, became possible. Salvatore Martirano and I, independently but simultaneously, for example, created the first interactive instruments.
Music. In 1971, I used the CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio) System, at the State University of New York at Albany, to compose Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing.
Music. At about the same time, in 1972, Salvatore Martirano finished building-and-composing The SalMar Construction at the University of Illinois at Champain/Urbana.
Music. In 1978, I composed Solo and performed it in 1979 at the New Music New York Festival in New York. Bob Moog built the antenae.
Music. In 2012, Richard Lainhart composed Manhattan Sounds.
•
Joel Chadabe at the CEMS System 1970
Joel Chadabe performing Synclavier 1979
Emergence
2000 to …
As Carla Scaletti said it, “An emergent entity is characterized by its constituent parts and by the way those parts interact with each other. The rules specifying those interactions are relatively simple and local; there is no central control. Emergent properties (or patterns or behaviors) are those that could not have been foreseen solely by examining the constituent parts in isolation.”
As I put it, on August 10, 2017, reading a fortune cookie after a Chinese meal in a restaurant in Albany: Out of confusion comes new patterns.
Music. In 2001, I used Kyma, a new approach to music technology, to compose Many Times Chris.
And Many Times Benjamin.
•