The Electronic Century Part II: Tales of the Tape

Mar 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Joel Chadabe

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

While the Paris studio was getting started in the late 1940s, Louis and Bebe Barron established a small commercial studio in New York. They composed several electronic film scores, among them one for the well-known 1956 film Forbidden Planet. They also worked with John Cage in 1951.

As soon as tape recorders became available, Cage became interested in exploring ways they could be used in composing music. He decided to start what he called the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. An architect and friend, Paul Williams, was willing to fund the project. In 1951, Cage began working with the Barrons to assemble a large and varied library of taped sounds. He worked first with David Tudor, then with Earle Brown, to cut and splice those sounds into a tape composition, Williams Mix.

The work took place in Cage's loft on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Cage cut the tapes into short pieces, then flipped coins to decide how to order them. Using this method, Cage and Brown finished Williams Mix together. They then worked together on Brown's Octet. In 1954, the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape wound down, partly because the money ran out and partly because Cage moved on to other projects.

While John Cage and Earle Brown spliced together snippets of tape in lower Manhattan, other events were unfolding uptown. In 1952 at Columbia University, Vladimir Ussachevsky presented a concert that included his first electronic compositions. Shortly afterward, he began working with composer Otto Luening in Bennington, Vermont, and in various living rooms and studios in New York City.

On October 28, 1952, Ussachevsky and Luening presented a concert of their music at the Museum of Modern Art in New York-significant because it was the first public concert of tape music in the United States. The program included Ussachevsky's Sonic Contours and Luening's Fantasy in Space. After that, the two men became busy with radio appearances, other concerts, commissions, and fellowships. This flurry of activity led to the establishment of a tape studio at Columbia University in 1955 (see Fig. 5).

The studio flourished. In 1959, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ussachevsky, Luening, and Princeton professor Milton Babbit established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and acquired the Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer. The center also housed three tape studios, and in the next ten years, more than 60 composers from 11 countries came to New York to work there.

Among them was Mario Davidovsky, who arrived from Argentina in 1960 and became one of the major composers of tape music. Davidovsky's Synchronisms no. 5 (1969), based on an interplay between electronic sounds on tape and live percussionists, is a good example of his style. His Synchronisms no. 6, for piano and tape, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1971.

ON TO MILAN

Ussachevsky and Luening's concert at the Museum of Modern Art had another important consequence. Luciano Berio, visiting New York from Milan, Italy, was in the audience and became excited by the possibilities of this new medium. When he returned to Italy a few months later, he met composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, and they decided to work together to explore the potential of tape music. In 1955, they established Studio di Fonologia at the Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI) studios in Milan.

Berio's best-known work to come out of this studio was Omaggio a Joyce (Homage to Joyce), finished in 1958. Berio asked his wife, Cathy Berberian, to recite from chapter 11 of James Joyce's Ulysses. He then processed the words electronically and with tape-recorder manipulations. Of particular interest is how he mixed different versions of the same sound to produce sounds that suggest the meanings of other words.

Many other composers worked at the Milan studio. Henri Pousseur composed Scambi (Exchanges) in 1957 by filtering white noise. In 1958, John Cage visited Milan and composed a tape version of his earlier composition Fontana Mix by using random numbers to determine the length of the tape segments. (While there, Cage distinguished himself by appearing on an Italian television quiz show, correctly answering questions about mushrooms.)

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

John Cage continued his groundbreaking work into the 1970s. In 1972, he composed Bird Cage, which juxtaposed the sounds of birds recorded in aviaries, the sounds of Cage himself singing Mureau (an earlier composition of his based on Thoreau's writings), and sounds recorded randomly from the environment.

In 1979, Cage composed Roaratorio, the largest in scope of all tape music compositions in the number of sounds used and a fitting piece with which to designate the end of an era. In it, Cage recorded, collected, and randomly combined all of the sounds that James Joyce mentions in Finnegans Wake. In performance, the tapes were played while Cage read his own recomposed version of Finnegans Wake. At the same time, Irish musicians played traditional Irish folk music. Roaratorio gathered an enormous variety of sounds—doors closing in Dublin, a river flowing, a glass placed on a bar, a car passing in the street—and assembled them as music.

The idea of using tape to juxtapose sounds in any combination from any source was so powerful that tape studios quickly formed throughout the world. The first round of work was done not only in New York, Paris, Cologne, and Milan, but also in studios formed in London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Stockholm—in short, everywhere.

It was an exciting time in the history of music, and it seemed to many composers that anything was possible. Around the world they shared the common goal of creating a new kind of music based on the availability of all sounds.

Joel Chadabe, composer, is author of Electric Sound and president of the Electronic Music Foundation. He can be reached at chadabe@emf.org.

TAPE-MUSIC HIT PARADE

The following recommended materials are available from CDeMUSIC at www.cdemusic.org.

John Cage 25-Year Retrospective Concert (Wergo) includes Imaginary Landscape no. 1 and Williams Mix from the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.

Forbidden Planet (GNP Crescendo) by Louis and Bebe Barron is the original 1956 soundtrack to the famous science fiction film.

Pierre Schaeffer: L'Oeuvre Musicale (EMF Media) brings together all of Schaeffer's musical works, including his collaborations with Pierre Henry.

Xenakis: Electronic Music (EMF Media) includes all of Xenakis's early works.

Pierre Henry (Harmonia Mundi, France) includes Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, one of the most elegant works of early musique concrete.

Elektronische Musik 1952-1960 (Stockhausen Verlag) includes Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge and Kontakte.

Hymnen (Stockhausen Verlag), by Karlheinz Stockhausen, uses the national anthems of the world as source material.

Mikrophonie I and II; Telemusik (Stockhausen Verlag), by Karlheinz Stockhausen, includes sounds from Asia and elsewhere.

Electro Acoustic Music Classics (Neuma) includes Edgard Varese's Poeme Electronique, first performed at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

Electronic Music Pioneers (CRI) includes works by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening that were played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 28, 1952.

Henri Pousseur (BV Haast) includes Scambi, composed in 1957 in Milan.

Berio/Maderna (BV Haast) includes Berio's Omaggio a Joyce, based on text from James Joyce's Ulysses.

John Cage Bird Cage (EMF Media) is a major collage work by John Cage, based largely on the sounds of birds recorded in aviaries.

Roaratorio (Wergo), by John Cage, includes Cage reading, Irish musicians playing and singing, and all the sounds mentioned in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Pauline Oliveros: Electronic Works (Paradigm) includes I of IV and other early compositions that use tape.

I Am Sitting in a Room (Lovely Music), by Alvin Lucier, uses tape recorders and room resonance to transform words into abstract sounds.

A Sound Map of the Hudson River (Lovely Music), by Annea Lockwood, records the Hudson River from its source in the Adirondack Mountains to the Lower Bay of New York City and the Atlantic Ocean.

You can read more about tape music and the history of electronic music in the book Electric Sound by Joel Chadabe (Prentice Hall, 1996).

The Electronic Century, Parts I–IV

Part I: Beginnings

Part III: Computers and Analog Synthesizers

Part IV: The Seeds of the Future