Concert: Twenty Years of Electroacoustic Music in America, 1952-1972

Shiley Theatre
Mimmi Fulmer, Soprano
Rachel Rudich, Flute
Bertram Turetzky, Contrabass
Robert Keefe, Program Introduction

Program

Ms. Fulmer

Mr. Turetzky

Ms. Rudich

Program Notes and Biographies of the Composers

Concert: Twenty Years of Electroacoustic Music in America, 1952-1972

Jon Appleton (Dartmouth College)

Chef d'Oeuvre (1967)

Inspired by musique concrète, Chef d'Oeuvre used as its source material a singing commercial for Chef-Boy-ar-dee pizzas sung by the Andrews Sisters. Using "classical" tape studio techniques, the work significantly departed from the serious nature of most electroacoustic music composed at that time. The work was released on a 45 rpm single by Flying Dutchman records in 1969 and made a brief appearance on the popular music charts.

Newark Airport Rock (1968)

Newark Airport Rock-Stranded by a snow storm in the Newark airport terminal in 1968, the composer, posing as a radio interviewer, asked fifty fellow passengers what they thought about "the new electronic music." Subsequently, the best responses were spliced together and superimposed on rock drum track with an added "sequencer" obligato so popular in academic electronic music of the period. This humorous work appeared on the flip side of the single referred to above.

Jon Appleton was born in Hollywood, California in 1939. He studied at Reed College, the University of Oregon and Columbia University. He is currently the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music at Dartmouth College where he directs a graduate program in electroacoustic music. His music is recorded on the Flying Dutchman, Folkways/Smithsonian, Centaur and Nonesuch record labels.

Milton Babbitt (Juilliard School of Music, Princeton University, Emeritus)

Vision and Prayer (1961)
Vision and Prayer, written by Milton Babbitt for soprano and synthesized tape, was the first piece to combine live vocal performance with tape. Composed in 1961, it continues to offer rewards and challenges to performers. This presentation will address some of the difficulties in learning the piece, and conclude with a complete performance. Dylan Thomas's poem has twelve shaped stanzas, six diamonds and six hourglasses, and in Babbitt's setting the twelve stanzas and three tape interludes are highly differentiated in texture and character. The steps a singer usually takes to prepare a performance (learning pitches, getting difficult leaps, range, articulations, breathing, and dynamics comfortable vocally, and playing whatever possible in the score on the piano) are the merest beginning to performing Vision and Prayer. The score is in standard notation, and contains the vocal line and pitches and rhythms for the tape part, but the timbres, registers, and dynamics on the tape are left to the singer to assimilate and correlate with what is in the score, which is in effect an incomplete orchestral reduction of the tape. Other considerations are: maintaining one's pitch sense, learning rhythms in reference to both the barline and the tape's rhythms, and adjusting balance so that the tape is audible at important cues for the singer, but doesn't drown her out. In performance, the difficulties of preparation should not be paramount, but yield to the beauty of this landmark piece.

Milton Babbitt (b. 1916, Philadelphia) received his early musical training in Jackson, Mississippi and simultaneously it was apparent that he also possessed an aptitude for mathematics. He received a Bachelors degree from New York University in 1935 and a Masters degree from Princeton University in 1942. He also studied with Roger Sessions. He taught mathematics at Princeton University from 1942-45 and music from 1948-84. Babbitt also held a Guggenheim grant in 1961 and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1965). At Princeton and Columbia Universities, he initiated an experimental program of electronic music, with the assistance of a newly constructed synthesizer. He also taught at Juilliard from 1973. Babbitt extended Schoenberg's theory of twelve tones and broadened the serial principle to include twelve different note values, twelve different time intervals between instrumental entries, twelve different dynamic levels, and twelve different instrumental timbres. He introduced the term "combinatoriality" with symmetric parts of a tone-row designated as "derivations." Babbitt's serial application of rhythmic values is explained in his paper "Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium" (Perspectives of New Music: Fall, 1962).

Mario Davidovsky (Columbia University)

Synchronisms No. 1 (1963)
Mario Davidovsky states that Synchronisms No. 1 (also Nos. 2 and 3) "belong[s] to a series of short pieces wherein conventional instruments are used in conjunction with electronic sounds. The attempt...has been made to preserve the typical characteristics of the conventional instruments and of the electronic medium respectively - yet to achieve integration of both into a coherent musical texture. ...To achieve pitch coherence between the conventional instruments which use the 12-tone chromatic scale and the electronic medium which is non-tempered, use is made of tonal occurrences of very high density - manifested for example by a very high speed succession of attacks, possible only in the electronic medium. Thus, in such instances - based on high speed and short duration of separate tones, it is impossible for the ear to perceive the pure pitch value of each separate event; though in reacting, it does trace, so to speak, a statistical curve of the density. Only in a very few instances have tempered electronic pitches been employed in the Synchronisms. Throughout all three pieces, the tape recorded has been used as an integral part of the instrumental fabric."

Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934, Buenos Aires, Argentina) began his musical studies in Argentina, where he studied with Guillermo Graetzer, Teodoro Fuchs, Erwin Leuchter, and Ernesto Epstein. He came to the United States in 1958 and then studied with Otto Luening and Aaron Copland. Mr. Davidovsky has attained numerous major awards, fellowships and commissions, which include two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission.

Charles Dodge (Brooklyn College, City University of New York)

Speech Songs: When I am with You (1972) The Days are Ahead (1972)
Speech Songs was made in the early days of computer voice synthesis at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It has been called a "computer music classic." The work is a setting, for computer synthesized voices, of four short, humorously surrealistic poems by Mark Strand. It was realized by the composer in 1972 using a computer speech synthesis system created by Dr. Joseph Olive. The first and fourth songs of the set will be played today. They are:

When I am with You

When I am with you, I am two places at once.
When you are with me, you have just arrived<
with a suitcase which you pack with one hand
and unpack with the other.

The Days are Ahead

The days are ahead
1,926,346 to 1,926,345.
Later the nights will catch up.

Charles Dodge gained recognition early in his career for his orchestral and chamber music. He went on to become one of the first composers to realize the vast potential of the computer for broadening the composer's palette. As early as the mid 1960s he was experimenting with direct digital synthesis of sound. Since those early days, Dodge has shown a particular interest in the relationship between the human voice (the original musical instrument) and its computer counterpart. His works have incorporated the sounds of live, recorded and synthesized voices articulating texts by a number of contemporary authors. The voice in these works is frequently combined with computer-synthesized sound. He has also composed a series of works combining acoustic instruments with computer sound. Dodge's works have been commissioned, performed and recorded internationally. He is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Robert Erickson (University of California, San Diego)

Ricercar a 3 (1967)
This piece, for contrabass and two recorded basses, was composed for the outstanding virtuoso performer of avant-garde music-bassist Bertram Turetzky.

American composer Robert Erickson (b. 1917, Marquette, Michigan) studied with Wesley La Violette at the Chicago Conservatory and with Ernst Krenek at Hamline University in St. Paul where he received a Bachelors degree (1943) and a Masters degree (1947). In 1950 he attended a seminar in composition led by Roger Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. He was appointed Professor of Composition at the University of California-San Diego in 1967. Erickson's publications include the following: The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide to Melody and Counterpoint (1955) and Sound Structures in Music (1975).

Otto Luening (Columbia University, Emeritus)

Fantasy in Space (1952)
The dexterity of the flute is examined in Fantasy in Space. Luening recorded himself playing the flute. While listening on earphones, he taped a second flute part over the first, and a third and fourth over that, thus creating the equivalent of a flute quartet. He included an original folk-like melody on the flute, without exploitation at the end of the piece. Luening attempted to compose a piece which would communicate with an audience conditioned to impressionistic, virtuoso and tonal music.

Otto Luening (b. 1900, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Munich, Germany from 1915 to 1917. He left Munich at the beginning of World War I and studied composition in Zurich with Ferruccio Busoni, where he learned about electronic sound in production as a potential compositional tool. When he came to the United States, he taught at the University of Arizona and Bennington College before becoming Professor of Music at Columbia University and chairman of the Barnard College Music Department. He often collaborated with Vladimir Ussachevsky, and together they developed techniques which expanded the aural language of the piano and flute beyond their standard potential. Luening has been significant in American funding organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is also known as a flutist and an opera conductor.

Vladimir Ussachevsky

Sonic Contours (1952)
In Sonic Contours, Ussachevsky utilizes precise splicing and mixing to attain striking exploitations of piano sounds. Through the use of a tape recorder and other electronic mechanisms, Sonic Contours broadens Ussachevsky's previous explorations of feedback and speed variation. The range of sounds employed in this piece is expanded to include notes an octave above and two octaves below standard piano range. Authentic piano sounds are altered through regulated electronic distortion. Ussachevsky stated that his two main objectives in this piece were: (1) to create the sensation of each line moving at its own rate definitely perceptible; and (2) to achieve an asymmetry of canonic structures that would avoid interfering with the clarity of the other lines. Human voices are used succinctly before the final dance-like segment of the piece. All the other sounds used are obtained from the piano.

Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911-1990, born Hailar, Manchuria) came to the United States in 1930. He graduated in music from Pomona College in California. He received a Bachelors degree in 1935, a Masters degree (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from the Eastman School of Music. After serving in the United States Army Intelligence division, in 1947 he taught at Columbia University. He began to experiment with tape-recorder composition in 1951 when his job was to care for the department's newly obtained tape recorder. At his Composers Forum concert on May 5, 1952 in New York City, his pieces Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition, and Underwater Valse were premiered. This was the first concert of electronic music in America. He was one of the founders of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1957 and 1960. Ussachevsky started experimenting with the synthesizer with the aid of a computer in 1968. He was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973.

Incantation (1953) by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky
Incantation uses sounds similar to familiar bell sonorities, woodwind instruments, and the human voice. Also included in the sound materials are alto recorder and a plate. Its three sections of include: a brief introduction, a vocal section, and a coda. Some of the features highlighted in this piece are a fed-back flute in a relaxed, medium register, the piano speeded up and played backwards. A muted male voice, moaning and speaking incomprehensively, is also played backwards.

Edgar Varèse

Poème electronique (1958)
Poème electronique was developed in close collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier for the Philips Radio Corporations's pavilion at the Brussels Exposition. As an example of Organized Sound, the actual components that went into the piece's "orchestration" are not as important as the way these constituents are organized. The sound was accompanied by a series of projected images chosen by Le Corbusier. Initial audience reactions included "terror, anger, stunned awe, amusement, and wild enthusiasm."

French-born American composer Edgar Varèse (b. Paris, 1883; d. New York, 1965) significantly influenced the direction of contemporary music with his innovation of the principle of organizing the materials and forms of sound. Paris and Burgundy were the locations of his early childhood. In 1892, he studied composition with Giovanni Bolzoni. In 1904 he enrolled in the Schola Cantorum, where he studied composition, counterpoint, and fugue with Albert Roussel, preclassical music with Charles Bordes, and conducting with Vincent d'Indy. In 1905, he entered the composition class of Charles-Marie Widor at the Paris Conservatory. Varèse went to New York in 1915, where, with Salzedo, he founded the International Composers' Guild (1921), devoted to new music, which lasted until 1927. With Slonimsky, Ives, Cowell, and Chávez, he founded the Pan-American Association of Composers. He returned to Paris during 1928-32, and then taught in America. He began to experiment with tape and electronics in 1953.