Electronic Music History, Culture, Interviews...

Electronic Jazz--The Early History (Part 4)

Sat, 7 Apr 2012 15:14:59 -0400

More Jazz and Tape Experiments from the 1960s
This is the forth in a multi-part overview of early experiments combining jazz and electronic music, mostly during the pre-synthesizer era of the early 1960s. This discussion is adapted from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music (Routledge, 2012) supplementing the book with additional examples.–Thom Holmes
Early creators of electronic jazz invented several different approaches to making this new kind of music. Their experiments may be grouped into two broad categories:

• Jazz incorporating prerecorded electronic music on tape (1960-1972).
• Jazz using electronic instruments and/or the sound modification of jazz instruments in performance (early years from 1965-1975).

This installment continues the discussion of early jazz experiments using prerecorded electronic music on tape. In practice, this style of electronic jazz was created by the musician who created a tape composition separately from the recording of his or her traditional jazz combo and then combined the two sets of recordings in the studio to create the finished work. These efforts brought new sound ideas into jazz prior to the widespread availability of synthesizers that could be played in a live setting.

Bob James Trio Collaborates with Ashley and Mumma, 1964
Beginning around 1963, a number of individual jazz artists found ways to connect the open-ended format of free jazz with tape music. Keyboardist Bob James (b. 1939) and his trio recorded the album Explosions in 1964 for the experimental music label ESP. The selections combined tape music composed by avant-garde composers Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, then working in Ann Arbor, with free jazz improvisations by the jazz trio. The electronic music comprised previously recorded materials that Mumma and Ashley provided for that purpose, but they were not involved in the jazz portion of the production, which James produced. The result was quirky, often noisy, and remains one of the most daring contrasts in musical styles to have been recorded in the name of jazz. French musique concrète Bernard Parmegiani (b. 1927) used a similar approach in creating JazzEx (1966) for electronic tape and jazz quartet, which premiered at the Festival international d'art contemporain de Royan, a French arts and music festival.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 1965
American Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-77) was a remarkable multi-instrumentalist. He is best known for his skill at playing two and sometimes three woodwinds at the same time and occasionally added a droning nose flute to create four-part by himself. His favored instruments were the tenor sax and two saxophone relatives, the stritch and manzello. His music was rooted in hard bop and embraced soul jazz. He had perfected the technique of circular breathing to the extent that he could blow a sound continuously for minutes at a time without pausing to take an obvious breath, a feat that I was fortunate enough to witness in person when I saw Kirk perform live in Detroit many years ago. He was funny, outspoken, and notably experimental within the genre of mainstream jazz. Kirk was also one of the first well-established, full-time jazz musicians to integrate taped electronic sounds into his music. He was interested in musique concrète, noted that Edgard Varèse was an influence on his music, and began making tape collages of ambient sounds, conversations, and musical instruments in the early 1960s.
Kirk was already a well-established recording artist with eleven albums as a leader (1956-1965) before his experiments with tape music appeared on one of his albums. The album was Rip, Rig, and Panic (Limelight 1965) and included tape music on the track “Slippery, Hippery, Flippery,” This 4:58 track opened with a Coltrane-like quotation on the tenor following by a free jazz romp by Kirk’s quartet punctuated by a cacophony of tape sounds. The tape sounds subside by the 1:58 mark and the quartet settles into an up-tempo hard bop groove. As for the source of the sounds, Kirk himself explained, "Some of the sounds I made with my horn. The rhythm section was playing free. Some of the tape sounds I got around the house--wind chimes, my voice amplified, the baby hollering. I slowed down some of the sounds, then played them all together. The head is written off a computer; I used the cycle of notes from a computer I once heard to make the line. The ending was done with an amplifier; I can shake it in a certain way to get those sounds.” The section between the 1:30 mark and 1:58 uses amplified, distorted voice and might also include cartridge noise like that done by John Cage and David Tudor with phonograph cartridges (used as contact microphones) in Cartridge Music (1960). Kirk was familiar with these sources and developed “Slippery, Hippery, Flippery” around electronic music techniques that reflected his jazz impulses. His taped sounds were not just special effects—he created them to create an interactive playing situation with his live quartet.
Kirk continued to add short bits of tape music to his later albums, although these frequently consisted of audio experiments sandwiched in between his performance tracks. The double album The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color (1975) included numerous tape music interludes between instrumental tracks that combined electronic distortion and modification with natural sounds. His sound sources included locomotives (“Portrait of Those Beautiful Ladies #2”), galloping horses (“sesroH”), and a collage of church bells, harbor sounds, thunder and explosions (“Dream #3”), the longest of these interludes being just over a minute.
Kirk was just 42 when he died from a stroke in 1977. But in the last years of his life, he had begun to incorporate synthesizers, wah wah pedals, and the lyricon (an electronic woodwind) into his increasingly complex ensemble works. Here is a classic video link http://tinyurl.com/7b4mt98 from 1969 during which Kirk plays a tiny electronic instrument called the Stylophone while he introduces the song “I Say a Little Prayer.” Another interesting video is the 1967 film by Richard Fontaine called Sound??, http://tinyurl.com/3b479c9 which intercuts interviews and practice performances by Kirk and John Cage, two leading avant garde artists from different genres of music. A fascinating sequence in the second half of the film juxtaposes Kirk working with a tape recording of distorted sounds and Cage and David Tudor setting up a performance of a work that amplifies the sounds of a bicycle, among other elements. Near the end, there is a clip of a Kirk rehearsal at Ronnie Scott’s club during which he begins the playback of a tape of prerecorded, distorted sounds and then shakes an amplifier (with reverb turned-on) to further embellish the noise.

Drums and Nature Sounds—Walter De Maria, 1964-68
Another interesting approach to combining tape music with jazz performance was explored by Walter De Maria (b. 1935). Later known primarily for his works of environmental art, De Maria is also a jazz-rock drummer. While establishing his career in art during the early 1960s, De Maria also dabbled in music and created two astonishingly fresh works on which he drummed to field recordings of environmental sounds. Cricket Music (1964) comprised 24 minutes of drumming set to the sounds of crickets and Ocean Music (1968) did much the same with the sounds of crashing waves. In each case, De Maria carefully adjusted the level of the field recordings and drumming so that at times the environmental sounds were the dominant elements to which he created complementary rhythms. De Maria’s approach combined ambient and instrumental sounds in a ritualistic way, drawing parallels to early minimalism.

Electronic Jazz--The Early History (Part 3)

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:23:13 -0500

More Jazz Experiments from the Avant-Garde–Berio and Riley in the Early 1960s

Avant-garde composer Luciano Berio (see photo above), also a veteran of the RAI electronic music laboratory in Milan, composed a large ensemble work with tape and jazz elements called Laborintus 2 (1963-65). The work was created in California while Berio was teaching at Mills College from 1962-65, and was commissioned by both French and Italian radio to commemorate the 700th anniversary or Dante’s birth. The piece was written for narrator, voices, tape, and jazz drummer.
This was a lively time in Berio’s life. He was very much in demand as an instructor at Mills College in Oakland, California. He counted among his students some of the most innovative young American composers of that generation, including Steve Reich, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, and Paul Epstein. Berio was already known for his experimental music that emphasized verbal expression and a fusing of modern music with past influences. Laborintus 2 is a 35-minute work in five parts. It brought jazz into Berio’s collection of quotable musical sources. The first fully orchestrated performance of the work took place at Mills in 1967.
Sometimes called a “no story opera,” the work was largely without a fixed rhythm except for the short but potent jazz-like sequence that occupied part four for about seven minutes. During this passage, a drummer and bass player kept time at a frantic pace leading to the introduction of a contrasting, arrhythmic sequence of electronic tape sounds. The electronic music was joined by a chorus of voices, horns, and woodwinds that exchanged phrases and noises until the beat disintegrated. Although Berio’s use of jazz in this work was more decorative than central to the premise of the piece, it was nonetheless a notoriously original work that caught the ears of many jazz musicians at the time. Berio was, of course, widely exposed to the American free jazz movement while in California, and his desire to integrate the spirit, if not specific techniques of free jazz, is indicated by his performance instructions for Laborintus 2. In Part 4 of the work--the jazz section--Berio accommodated improvisational passages, as was widely customary in avant-garde music of the time. In his case, however, he drew upon free jazz as his inspiration. His instructions read:

“These parts are free and optional in the sense that they are to be chosen and prepared
on the basis of the ability of the players and vocalist to improvise. (‘Free jazz’ style
of the sixties is recommended.)”

The jazz section consisted of a tape track of electronically-manipulated jazz improvisation over which additional players performed in real-time during the live performance. Berio produced the recorded segment with the help of several leading European free jazz artists: vocalist Christiane Legrand, clarinetist Michel Portal, drummer Jean-Pierre Drouet, and bass player Jean-François Jenny-Clarke. Live performers jammed for two or three minutes during this wildest segment of the work. The entire piece was recently revived for a 2010 performance in London by the Aurora Orchestra under conductor Nicholas Collon. He used Berio’s original tape part, retaining an authenticity to the performance that firmly rooted it in the classic age of musique concréte. “Berio’s soundworld is so unmistakably 1960s,” remarked Collon, acknowledging how the composer allowed his love of jazz to “feed into his writing in a fascinating way.”(1)
The sound clip provided below is from my copy of the original LP recording of Laborinthus 2 and comprises most of part 4, the electronic jazz portion of the piece.

Looping Chet Baker–Early Tape Delay Experiments by Terry Riley Another early jazz connection to tape music was Terry Riley, whose experiment with tape delay in Paris in 1963 found him collaborating with noted trumpeter Chet Baker. Riley may have been the first composer to create a piece using tape delay. It all came about for a Parisian Ken Dewey’s play called The Gift for which Riley provided the music. Riley was already familiar with tape loops and the use of tape echo, each of which could be produced using a single tape recorder. Riley was in Paris working in the studios of French National Radio, the legendary home of musique concréte. In working with an engineer at the studio, he described what he wanted as a “long, repeated loop,” longer than was practical with a single tape recorder. What the engineer devised was a classic tape delay circuit using two tape recorders.

Tape delay is an extended form of tape echo in which the time between repetitions is lengthened well beyond what can be normally achieved on a single tape recorder. This was most often done by using two or more widely spaced tape recorders through which a single length of magnetic tape was threaded. A sound was recorded on the ﬁrst machine and played-back on the second, creating a long delay between the ﬁrst occurrence of the sound and its repetition on the second machine. If the sound being played back on the second machine was simultaneously recorded by the ﬁrst machine, an extended echo effect was created with long delays between successive, degenerating repetitions. Riley explained, “The engineer was the first to create this technique that I know of. This began my obsession with time-lag accumulation feed-back.” (Holmes, p. 132).
For this project, Riley first recorded a jazz quartet featuring Baker, both as a unit and then individually, each musician playing solo parts in both sessions. The taped material was used to create a tape delay sequence over which the live performers also improvised another set of solos. The result was a recording of looped phrases, blending and overlapping with a variable delay pattern, creating rhythm loops juxtaposed with the tempo of the recorded jazz tracks (Riley, 2001). Riley recalls that in live performances of The Gift, Baker and his quartet played live to the tapes(2). This was a sign of sounds to come many years later when jazz artists embraced the use of digital delay as a performance and compositional tool. Music for the Gift was a remarkable mashup of classic jazz and tape manipulation that sounds incredibly modern.

The sound clip provided below is one short section of the entire work released by Riley on the Organ of Corti label in 1998.(3). I don’t believe this music was ever released prior to 1998, so it has enormous value from a historical standpoint. Although Organ of Corti indicates that the CD is sold out, it remains available on Amazon and iTunes.
Coming in Part IV: More Jazz and Tape Experiments  
Notes: Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music (New York, Routledge, 2008). Riley, Terry. Magnet Magazine, May 2001. Available online: http://www.terryriley.net/magnet_article.htm
 

Electronic Jazz--The Early History (Part 2)

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:10:07 -0400

This is the second of a multi-part overview of early experiments combining jazz and electronic music, mostly during the pre-synthesizer era of the early 1960s. --Thom Holmes

More Jazz with Prerecorded Tape Music, circa 1960s
Given that the early years of electronic music were dominated by the rivalry between French musique concrète and German elektronische Musik, it is interesting to note that early jazz experiments with tape leaned heavily toward the French approach. Why was this? Perhaps it was because Musique concrète, being largely composed of modified natural sounds, was more aesthetically appealing to the average listener than the purely electronic and detached tones of elektronische Musik. The explosive range of musique concrète was emotionally grounded in the real world and leveraged audio trickery to mask, modify, and pulverize the familiar into something new and surprising. The emotional range of musique concrète varied at times from the serene to the terrifying, perhaps even jocular. It hit the gut of the listener, and in this way shared an affinity with the emotional impact of jazz. Elektronische Musik during its early years (1951-1955) was a more objectified style, less emotional, and to many, less stimulating. The equipment used to create elektronische Musik —including tone generators, filters, and modulation circuitry –also depended on a method of composition that might be viewed as more detached than working with tape effects to manipulate recordings of natural sounds. The creation of musique concrète more closely paralleled an approach to music that was already familiar to the jazz musician, that of shaping the expressive content of raw sound material as guided by a set of rules or ideas governing the intellectual content of a piece.
In electronic jazz works intended only as tape pieces, composers familiar with the techniques of Schaeffer’s Paris studio freely added the sounds of jazz instruments to the melting pot of jet engines, automobile crashes, and kitchen pans that comprised the audio palette of musique concrète. These works were less jazz-like in conception but clearly inspired by elements of jazz. Unlike jazz, there was nothing improvisatory about the creation of a tape work. A hint of jazz can be heard in one of musique concrète’s earliest milestones. Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50), by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, composed entirely of sound material from prerecorded phonograph records, included the sound of a jazz ensemble, highly distorted, in one short section of the work called Apostrophe. Croatian composer Ivo Malec (b. 1925) composed the tape piece Dahovi (1962) in Paris, a work whose structure is more like that of the verse-solo format of a jazz composition than a typical musique concrète exercise in starkly contrasting sounds. Dixi (1967) was composed in the Experimental Music Studio of Polish Radio by Eugeniusz Rudnick (b. 1933) to explore the gradual mixing of extended sonorities, a lengthy sequence of which appears to begin with the mellow, electronically modified tones of a trumpet. François Bayle’s Solitioude (1969) is a more emphatic blend of traffic noise, orchestral strings and distorted jazz horns, drums, and electric guitar that effectively blended the rock-heavy rhythms of amplified jazz with electronic collage. Jazz trombonist and bass player Günter Christmann (b. 1942) and drummer Detlef Schönenberg (b. 1944) were members of the German experimental free jazz movement of the early 1970s, and composed some concrète works for tape including Gruppenimprovisation (1971). Another artist who deserves mention is American Frank Zappa (1940-93), a rock and jazz guitarist who delighted in spoofing pop and rock music. A devoted admirer of Edgard Varese, Zappa’s early work including the album Lumpy Gravy (1967), a daring admixture of pop rock, polyrhythmic jazz, and musique concrète, delivered enthusiastically for the value of its shock effect.
The next stage of development for electronic jazz was the combination of tape music with clearly jazz-like instrumental compositions. A model for doing this already existed in avant-garde classical music. Many of the earliest institutional and academic works of electronic music of the 1950s combined live performers and prerecorded electronic sounds. This example served as a template for musicians interested in accomplishing the same in jazz.
An early experiment combining jazz with tape music was Jazz et Jazz (1960) by French jazz critic and composer André Hodeir (b. 1921), Jazz et Jazz (U.S. and French album covers shown above) was a short, three-minute work composed for jazz ensemble in a swing style. Hodeir realized the work in three stages. During the first, he separately recorded a big band playing several composed passages and a rhythm section (bass and drums) playing along with a chord progression from the ensemble work. In the second stage, Hodeir transformed the recording of the big band passages using tape-editing techniques such as speed changes, tape reversal, filtering, and transposition (playing the tape upside down). He next added a rhythm section track, unchanged, to the electronically modified big band track. For the third stage, a piano player improvised “as indicated by the composer” along with the “composite tape background,” creating the final realization. The musique concrète treatment of the band included horns and drums in reverse, piano slowed-down and sped-up, chirping microphone taps, and a variety of comical percussive effects. The result was a carefully orchestrated crowd pleasure that could be performed live with a solo pianist exchanging passages with his or her mutated electronic doppelganger on tape.
Coming in Part III: More Jazz and Tape Experiments

Electronic Jazz--The Early History (Part 1)

Sun, 7 Aug 2011 22:51:31 -0400

This is the first of a multi-part overview of early experiments combining jazz and electronic music, mostly during the pre-synthesizer era of the early 1960s. This introduction explores general trends in the practice of electronic jazz and will be followed by profiles and examples of individual artists and their music. --Thom Holmes
The intersection of jazz and electronic music was intermittent at best until the explosion of fusion jazz in the 1970s. This is not surprising considering that each approach to music grew from different branches of the musical family tree. Modern jazz of the 1960s was a vibrant art based on a long established tradition and affinity for live performance, expert musicianship, and improvisation. Electronic music of the 1960s had only recently developed and was largely viewed as an experimental stem of classical music. Furthermore, electronic music of that time could hardly be called spontaneous. No matter what the stylistic outcome—from the mathematically calculated art music of academia to the television themes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop—all electronic music of the time had to be painstakingly assembled on magnetic tape using a razor blade and splicing block and involved little in the way of traditional musicianship. Except for the work of a few extreme experimenters such as Cage, Tudor, Mumma, Ashley (in the U.S.) and Group Ongaku (Japan), the concept of live performance in early electronic music meant little more than playing a tape over loudspeakers.
During the 1960s, only a handful of unrelated, future-minded musicians could imagine a union of electronic music with jazz. But even for them, the melding of jazz with this new technology must have seemed virtually, if not practically unattainable because of the technical obstacles to overcome. Yet, for several years before the introduction of the first commercial keyboard synthesizers, there were a few pioneers in both jazz and experimental music who believed that a union of electronic music with the expressive energy of jazz had great potential.
Early Experiments in Electronic Jazz
Miles Davis once said that the way to judge a jazz artist was not by technique but by his or her ideas. There were probably many jazz artists of the 1960s who had ideas for combining jazz and electronic music but only a select few had the resources available to make it happen. Even by the early 1960s, most individual artists could not afford the elaborate and expensive equipment needed to make, modify, record, and edit electronic sounds. There were no off-the-shelf solutions for creating electronic music until the availability of affordable voltage-controlled synthesizers by the early 1970s. Accordingly, early experimenters in electronic jazz mostly followed individual rather than institutional paths of discovery, taking advantage of whatever resources were available. Each had a personal approach that somehow managed to circumvent the technical barriers of the time while still finding a uniquely jazz-like approach to using electronic music. This Noise and Notations series comprises a brief chronicle of their achievements. A complete account may also be found in the upcoming revision of my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, fourth edition (Routledge, 2012).
A catalyst for the use of electronic music in jazz was an openly experimental attitude that embraced the world of jazz around 1960. Electronic music was considered highly experimental at the time and existed at the intersection of many kinds of music, especially classical, music for movies and television, popular song and modern dance. Jazz was also undergoing a period of exploration with the emergence of styles including modal jazz and free jazz and the integration of classical music elements in a genre called third stream jazz. This atmosphere motivated jazz musicians using various styles and approaches to seek new sounds and means of expression. A few turned to experimenting with electronic music.
Early creators of electronic jazz invented several different approaches to making this new kind of music. Their experiments may be grouped into two broad categories:
• Jazz incorporating prerecorded electronic music on tape (1960-1972).
• Jazz using electronic instruments and/or the sound modification of jazz instruments in performance (early years from 1965-1975).
This small but remarkable body of experimental works was a response to the times, born of a passion to bring new ideas into jazz and facilitated by the latest changes in technology that made electronic music possible. Historically, these early experiments might be viewed as testing the waters by introducing a new sound vocabulary to jazz that would later mature with the introduction of easier to use instruments and digital audio processing.
Jazz with Prerecorded Tape Music
From the standpoint of technology, jazz musicians working with electronic music around 1960 had little choice other than to compose their experimental sounds on magnetic tape. This led to two general practices: works incorporating jazz elements that were intended only as recorded works of musique concrète; and works that were performed by a live jazz ensemble accompanied by a magnetic tape part. In both cases, the inherent limitations of tape music—one was working with raw sound material that had to be meticulously edited as opposed to a musical instrument that could be played as part of an ensemble—tested the resourcefulness of the musician to embellish jazz with new sounds.
Barney Wilen (1937-96) was a noted French free-jazz alto saxophonist and composer. He was also a fan of Grand Prix auto racing and in 1967 attended a race in Monaco equipped with three portable reel-to-reel tape recorders to capture the sound of the entire event for a film. Tragically, near the end of the race, Italian driver Lorenzo Bandini was killed when his axle snapped and the car flipped over in a fiery crash. Saddened but inspired by the tragedy, Wilen used the audio tapes of the race as the basis for a tribute piece he called Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny of Lorenzo Bandini (1968). The work was divided into five parts corresponding to stages of the race and featured his free jazz combo playing to the accompaniment of actual race sounds. Wilen was careful to let the sounds be themselves, the music being constantly jarred and buoyed by the roaring of passing race cars, crowd sounds, PA announcers, and pit crews. The work was performed live in New York along with a film of the race.
Coming in Part II: More Jazz and Tape Experiments

Listen:
Auto Jazz, 1st Movement (5:31)

Jazz Connections--Visualizing the Stylistic Links

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 17:55:08 -0400

Jazz is a music of interconnected influences. This diagram is an experiment in visualizing the musical connections between different styles of jazz. Using this diagram, it is possible to indicate which styles of jazz are closely related without regard to their chronological history.

About the Diagram
This diagram groups genres of jazz by the similarity of key characteristics such as rhythmic, harmonic, compositional, and improvisational tendencies. Each of eighteen familiar styles of jazz are weighted against their use of twenty-one key musical characteristics. One result is the distribution of jazz styles in a clockwise fashion on the diagram from the most composed and structured (New York Stride and Swing) to the most freely improvised and experimental (Free Improvisation). The results make for lively debate. While using the diagram, see if you can explain the musical tendencies that closely link one style of jazz to another.

The idea for creating this diagram came from my experience using cladistic software in the field of evolutionary paleontology. In paleontology, the evolutionary links between different extinct species are explored by documenting and comparing anatomical features derived from skeletal remains. I thought that this objective, scientific approach would have some relevance in the historical analysis of music genres, hence my experiment with this jazz chart. This diagram could be further refined by expanding the list of musical criteria beyond the original twenty-one characteristics.

Music, Language, and Micro Utterances: An Interview with Electroacoustic Composer Jo Thomas

Sun, 8 Mar 2009 14:05:06 -0400

by Thom Holmes

Jo Thomas is an electroacoustic and experimental music composer who lives and works in London. She holds a post at the University of East London lecturing on Electronic Sound and Music Culture. Her music explores the textures of “voice, micro-sound and technological artifacts.” Thomas performs regularly in England and often collaborates with other performance artists. She is the recipient of many commissions in London and abroad and has worked in Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Boston, and at Stanford University, among other places. She recently finished a major public art sound walk in East London situated within London City Airport, the Excel Centre and Thames Barrier Park. The span of her accomplishments in electroacoustic music is quite astounding. Thomas graciously took some time to answer a few questions about her work for readers of Noise and Notations. –Thom Holmes

Holmes: What was the origin of your interest in electronic music?
Thomas: When I was 12 I was given a Yamaha synthesizer. I found playing tonal ‘tunes’ very boring so, I started to use the graphic equalizer. I spent most of my youth in my bedroom playing with the graphic equalizer, record player and tape machine. I was amazed by how sound could transform by pushing fader’s up and down and actually became quite obsessed by the need to capture those moment’s by recording them.
My sister and I recorded over hundreds of teaching tapes in the Library where my mum worked. We made up our own stories and experimented with words. This taught me a lot about microphones and tape recorder’s, it was also essentially quite illegal!
As a teenager I spend a lot of time in recording studio’s watching my Dad record jazz on his electric bass. I loved the studio environment, everything about it, including the smell of the carpets, the darkness and the gear.
When I went to university, I choose to take Electro acoustic composition with the composer Dr. Andrew Lewis. I worked in the Bangor University Electronic music studios learning how to use Pro Tools and working on ATC's. Andrew Lewis was an amazing teacher taking us to Jonty Harrison’s concerts in London and Birmingham. I think my real interest in Electronic music was placed here. From this point I associated electronic music with discovery and adventure. I decided in early 20’s that this was now an essential part of my life.
Holmes: Who was he person who most influenced you, and how?
Thomas: I think the composer Simon Emerson has influenced me the most. He is a visionary person and was my composition supervisor at City University. He taught me to respect the values of vision, trust, humility and confidence.
Holmes: What instruments or electronic gear do you play or use in your work?
Thomas: When performing live I use my Mac laptop, a mini Kaoss pad and an M Audio Mini Keyboard. Sometimes I just use the Mac and Kaoss pad, it depends how far I’m traveling and who’s paying for the taxi’s!

ABOUT COMPOSING
Holmes: Do you have a typical process for composing a piece of music?
Thomas: I go walking or swimming to compose my works. Most of my composing is essentially done this way. I also draw and paint my works out in the process of composition. My music and scores are now being exhibited in East Berlin. Photography influences my music. Within my photo’s I try to capture moments of time and change, moment’s that can’t be repeated …
I generally use the computer as a tool to create the music I hear in my imagination.
When composing at the computer I will fine edit sounds. To 0.1 -0.2 seconds then gradually build them up until. I work on Pro Tools and Audio Logic and use Peak Pro to fine edit.
I have specific ways of editing that I’ve developed over the years. I compose very quickly and enjoying the speed of the editing processes. My routine is to compose very early in the morning (4 am-8 am) and then use the rest of the day to work at the university.
Language and the human voice are the essence of my work. I try to capture the voice beyond what we hear working with sculpted utterances. My work Dark Noise is an example of this; so are Girl and also Alpha.
When working live with other’s I’ll listen and draw from their performative energy. Pitch-to-noise ratio’s are important to my work and so is harmonic structure and lyricism. I’ll develop intricate rhythms from the internal structures of the source material. I’m working with Andrea Neumann at the moment in Berlin. When we work together we draw off each other. Our work together is very rhythmical working with micro-sound structures.
I want to write music that doesn’t exist in the ‘time’ that everyday living shows itself.
–Jo Thomas
Holmes: Can you give an example of a musical idea that you are still trying to figure out how to do?
Thomas: I want to write music that doesn’t exist in the ‘time’ that everyday living shows itself.
For this I would need to create a series of time envelopes in sound. The envelopes would need to be able to travel swiftly from one moment to the next, backwards and forwards. However a trace of the present moment would never be left. Working with mobile technology and sound is the closest I have come to this but the quality is poor. I find the mobile time envelopes fascinating and want to work more within this field.

YOUR MUSIC
Holmes: How would you describe you music to somebody who hadn’t heard it?
Thomas: Challenging, lyrical and noise-based electronic music using the extremes of the dynamic spectrum. Written for concentrated Listening.
Holmes: Please describe your concept of micro-sound.
Thomas: A moment of sound which has been fine edited to 0.1 – 0.5 of a second.
“Micro” has become a word which defines our technological culture. Nano technologies, personal listening devices, the mobile phones. Within the flexibility of the Micro we have openly allowed access to the Macro, the Macro being the ether, thus Gibson’s Necromancer is now confirmed as a prelude to contemporary society. A technological vein, we hold our minds in our hands, the mobile offers physical extension of our identity and our body into a technological structure. The Micro can be a pause of silence, it can be the grain of a breath. As regards size and behaviour, Micro very naturally associates with the Kinetic behaviour of the Voice, it deifying with ease the fumbling, and unopposed nature of Human speech.
Within my own music the Micro is both represented by the material and the media on which it’s being listened.
“Glitch is the search for acceptance in human failure.”–Jo Thomas
Glitch
I actually prefer to the term ‘Glitch’ rather than micro-sound. It holds a semiotic value which I feel is stronger culturally than the micro-sound. Micro-sound is journey for perfection where as the Glitch is the search for acceptance in human failure.
Holmes: Please describe your process for composing Alpha (click here to listen).
Thomas: Within this work I wanted to deal with pitch memory establishing a strong harmonic field. I needed to create an underlying song that sounded through a body of technology. The harmonic fields are composed using blocks of microtones and constantly reducing and expanding the pitch-to-noise ratio. Thus taking omitting certain frequencies while adding others. Bass, sub-bass and high frequency definition frame the micro detail within the pitch centres.
I am influenced by the role of Technology in our everyday lives. Alpha is an Electronic music work which attempt’s to question and draw attention to this role. I am a cyborg; the computer is part of my everyday existence. When writing Alpha I was working towards a state of Cyber quintessence. I wanted to draw on the role of Electrical energy, the machine and the human agent Haraway acknowledges Cyber Quintessence as pure electrical energy….“Our best machines are made out of sunshine; they are light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum and these machines are eminently portable, mobile. …Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.”1
While Haraway’s Cyborg is based the empowerment of women using technology it is still purely metaphoric. Through the wide use of the mobile phone and PLD’s we have now all become cyborgs. Our understanding of this micro technology and what it means to us in contemporary culture is now what Andrew Blake terms in his book “the rise of popular music and multimedia domestication.”2 With these devices we can allow ourselves to experience what Jean Baudrillard terms as hyper-real simulations: escape what we choose to understand as reality through the storage of music, play and the virtual.3
Alpha was constructed both from female, male voice and synthetic sound. Within this work no original source cannot be heard. Though both genders are combined and move swiftly together though musical space.

Transformation
Thomas: In transforming the vocal material to grains of noise I reference the noise, which is captured within the space of our bodies and the inner voice of our own mind spaces. This noise may not just be a sound but a feeling of noise. Noise indeed is not just environmental or even externally audible but something deeply attached to our own experience of being. Thus, the actual act of hearing noise within music and language can become an affirmation of our own existence. Within this work the reference to noise is a reference to our own mind spaces, our own bodies captured within the ether. Alpha also works with silence. When places of silence are found within music, on reflection we may allow ourselves to hear and feel the sound of noise within these spaces.
Also the noise of the ether pulsing relentlessly was something that I wanted to capture.
Holmes: There is a musique concrète quality to some of your montages. Did you ever work in magnetic tape? Do you find a working relationship between those analog editing techniques and your computer music?
Thomas: When I was in Bangor University and also in the Electronic Music Studio’s in Huddersfield I used analogue equipment to create my sounds. I didn’t use magnetic tape though. I worked with analogue desks. I prefer the warmth of the analogue sound, as it seems to attract kinetic movement to the point of listening.
Now I used a Kaoss pad to create a lot of material, recording it via small phonic desk.
Holmes: If you could choose any composer or musician with whom to collaborate, who would they be and why?
Thomas: I would like to collaborate with Kate Bush or Miss Kitten. The Hounds of Love album (Bush) should be seminal listening for all students of sound design.
Miss Kitten is fantastic artist who has built a long career around techno culture. The rhythmic and sound definition is clear, extreme and immediate Grace is my favorite track.

PERFORMING
Holmes: When you compose do you also have live performance in mind?
Thomas: Yes I do, at the moment I am working for a performance in Berlin at the start of the month. The venue and space are as important as the sound material. When I go to the venue I will actually spend and about 2 hour’s equalizing sound material for the performance space.
Holmes: What is the worst thing that every happened to you during a performance?
Thomas: My computer crashed, I had to start it up again, however my analogue equipment and I pod+ Kaoss pad saved the day. No one noticed.

TEACHING
Holmes: Please describe the course that you teach.
Thomas: I’m leader for a course called Sound Design 1 and work with the third years on their finale Dissertation/ composition projects.
In sound design we look at the presence of Electronic Music from the start to now. We cover early composer’s of Electronic music and also cover artists that work with Dub, Techno artists and look at Sound Art.
I work in Music Culture and the School of Computer Engineering in the University of East London.
Holmes: How would you describe the awareness of your students to a sense of history in electronic music?
Thomas: Vast and knowledgeable. Electronic Music is the music of now. They love it and are hungry for theory and information. My students all make their music Electronically/Digitally. Most have MySpace music pages and some have record contracts. Most are active musicians DJ’s and Performer’s.
Holmes: What’s the biggest challenge of teaching?
Thomas: Over coming the ‘hero-worship’ of Stockhausen in the books that have been written around Electronic music.
Also explaining the term “Acousmatic.”
Holmes: How do you distribute your music?
Thomas: Via the Internet, through the British Music Information Centre. Entrance records are releasing my work on vinyl this year.
Holmes: What are you listening to these days?
Thomas: This week I’m listening to Ivo Malec, Jason Crummer Burial, the new Bernard Parmagani CD, Alireza Mashyekhi and old recording’s of Frank Sinatra.

Sources:
1 Haraway, Donna . “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991).
2Blake, Andrew,Popular Music: the age of Multi media ( Middlesex University Press 2007)
3Baudrillard, Jean (translated by Sheila Faria Glaser). Simulacra and Simulation. (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994).

Jo Thomas MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/jothomaselectrosound

Artwork associated with Angel (by Jo Thomas)

Electronic Music and The Beatles

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:50:21 -0500

by Thom Holmes

One need look no further than The Beatles for examples of classic electronic music techniques and analog synthesis in rock music. Much has been written about the importance of the recording studio to The Beatles who, at the peak of their popularity in 1966, stopped touring and spent the remaining four years of their partnership solely as recording artists. With the aid of the extraordinarily gifted producer George Martin and a cadre of talented and inquisitive recording engineers, many of the sound-making techniques associated with electronic music began to slip into the recordings of The Beatles.

The Revolver Sessions
The Beatles became fascinated with tape loops during the recording sessions for the album Revolver (1966). One of the first loops the group used was set-up by engineer Geoff Emerick for the hypnotic rhythm of the song Tomorrow Never Knows (1966). Paul McCartney was so taken with the effect that he went home and recorded a batch of additional tape loops using his guitar, the ringing sound of wine glasses, and other noises. He came back to the studio and handed Emerick a little plastic bag full of tape snippets that the engineer dutifully threaded onto a tape deck for the band to audition.1 This led to a session devoted to the live mixing of tape loops during which all five tape decks of the Abbey Road studio were employed. Many of the loops were long and required technicians to stand nearby spooling them in the air with uplifted pencils. In the control room, Emerick conducted the live mix, controlling the sound balance while others adjusted the panning and levels. Emerick likened the result to a human-enabled synthesizer. Some of the sounds were mixed into Tomorrow Never Knows, including the seagull-like noise that was made with a distorted guitar.2 Another effect used on the song was the continuously varying speed of some of the background tracks, the result of The Beatles having access to a varispeed tape recorder.
In 1971, shortly after the breakup of The Beatles, George Martin described the process of composing with tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows. He knew that the band had been listening to avant garde music, particularly that of Karlheinz Stockhausen. “They discovered Stockhausen for themselves.” detailed Martin.

…They’d bought themselves tape-recorders and they'd started playing with them in their own homes—I think Paul discovered it first; they got into making little loops for themselves. … For Tomorrow Never Knows they all went away and made loops at various speeds and brought them to me. I'd play them on a machine, keep some and discard others, and we eventually ended up with eight loops of different sounds. … Then, putting all these loops on, we got eight tape machines and put one loop on each, and I fed each of those machines into the control desk, so that by raising any of the faders at any moment you could bring up the sound of any one particular loop. We already had the rhythm track and the voice, so then we did a mix, and brought up any loop we fancied at any particular time. That's how we got that effect.3

The use of tape reversal in a Beatles’ song was first heard by the public in the release of the single Rain, also produced in 1966 just a week after Tomorrow Never Knows. There are two conflicting stories about how this effect made its way into the song. One is that John Lennon took his vocal track home and accidentally threaded it upside down on his reel-to-reel tape recorder, causing the sound to be played back in reverse. The other is that George Martin intentionally mounted the tape backwards on a tape deck in the studio to demonstrate the effect to Lennon, who had stepped out of the studio for a minute. When Lennon returned and played the tape, he was “amazed.” One way or the other, Rain “was backwards forever after that.”4 Experiments with tape loops continued to be used on various Beatle albums, from the whirling calliope effects of Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite (1967) to the atmospheric nature sounds that form an aural bridge between Here Comes the Sun and Sun King on the album Abbey Road (1969).

Carnival of Light
Paul McCartney recently shed a little more light on another famed Beatle excursion into tape music. In December of 1966, McCartney was asked by to contribute a recording for an event known as the The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave to be held at the Roundhouse in London. There were two scheduled events, one on January 28, 1967 and another on February 4, 1967. Posters for both events advertised “music composed by Paul McCartney” and the tape work may have been played several times at each of the two events. In addition to a number of rock groups, the concerts also featured a collective of BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers calling themselves Unit Delta Plus.

In a recent interview with BBC Radio 4, McCartney expressed hope that the piece—13:48 minutes long—could finally be officially released to the public if Ringo Starr and the estates of Harrison and Lennon could agree. Back in 1967, the free-form improvisation was considered too “adventurous” for release.4 George Harrison and producer George Martin, in particular, were not fond of this particular sonic experiment.
Although the piece hasn’t been heard publicly since 1967, the existence of the tape has long been known. McCartney apparently tried to include it on the Beatles Anthology in the late 1990s but was again thwarted by one of his band mates. “It was up for consideration on The Anthology and George vetoed it,” explained McCartney in a 2002 interview. “He didn't like it.”5
What’s not to like? The piece was the result of a brief recording session that McCartney organized while the Beatles had a free half hour of studio time after recording vocal overdubs for Penny Lane. The date was January 5, 1967. The work was McCartney’s idea but he enlisted all of the Beatles for the in-studio realization. “There's no lyrics, it's avant garde music,” said McCartney. “You would class it as... well you wouldn't class it actually, but it would come in the Stockhausen/John Cage bracket... John Cage would be the nearest. It's very free-form. Yeah man, it's the coolest piece of music since sliced bread!6
Lewisohn acknowledged the recording of the work, then simply called Untitled, in The Beatles Recording Sessions. The track is also known as Carnival of Light, which was an alternative name for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at which it was premiered. The piece comprised four tracks mixed in real time. McCartney gave the other members of The Beatles instructions for the performance. "I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around.” So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It's very free.”7
Lewisohn listened to the track while writing his book. He described Carnival of Light as follows:

Track one of the tape was full of distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds; track two had a distorted lead guitar; track three had the sounds of a church organ, various effects (the gargling of water was one) and voices; track four featured various indescribable sound effects with heaps of tape echo and manic tambourine.

But of all the frightening sounds it was the voices on track three which really set the scene, John and Paul screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like 'Are you all right?' and 'Barcelona!’8

McCartney still hopes to release the piece, now going on 42 years old. “I like it because it's The Beatles free, going off piste,” offer McCartney. “The time has come for it to get its moment.”9

Revolution 9
Carnival of Light was influenced by McCartney’s interest in the experimental and electronic music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The same can be said for John Lennon and Yoko Ono about Revolution 9 from The Beatles “white album.” Revolution 9 was a montage of tape loops mixed with recorded sounds from the BBC archives and live studio improvisations. The piece was constructed in a manner similar to the way that Tomorrow Never Knows was produced two years earlier. Dating from the June 1968 recording sessions for The Beatles, the 8:13′′-long work was produced by Lennon with help from Harrison and Ono, both of whom contributed occasional recitations and, in the case of Ono, high-pitched singing.10 All of the resources and technicians were once again recruited to keep theThe Beatles did for rock music what Varèse, Cage, and Stockhausen had done for classical music—they opened up the world of music to any and all possible sounds. tape loops flying and to manage the mixing in the control room. Although the final stereo version consists of several overdubs, each original track comprised a live-studio mix of whatever sounds were being looped at the time. Martin had the job of mixing the elements of Revolution 9 into a whole. “I was painting a picture in sound,” explains Martin, “and if you sat in front of the speakers you just lost yourself in stereo. All sorts of things are happening in there: you can see people running all over the place and fires burning, it was real imagery in sound. It was funny in places too, but I suppose it went on a bit long.”11

A Beatle Touch of Moog
The Beatles are not normally associated with synthesizer music but were actually one of the first groups to effectively integrate the sounds of the Moog into their music. This came about through the efforts of Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, a musical duo who also acted as sales representatives for Robert Moog and his synthesizer. Krause had already sold Moogs to George Martin and Mick Jagger and in the fall of 1968 was contacted by George Harrison for a demonstration. Harrison hired Krause to play the synthesizer on a Jackie Lomax record being produced in Hollywood. After the session, Harrison reportedly asked Krause to hang out for a bit and give him a demonstration. Krause gladly obliged and played a few patches he had been working on with Paul Beaver for a record they were producing called Gandharva. Harrison recorded the demonstration and headed back to England. He eventually purchased a Moog through Krause in early 1969 and asked him to come to London to set it up and teach him how to play it. As the story goes, Krause arrived at Harrison’s home where the synthesizer was set-up in the Beatle guitarist’s living room. Before starting the lesson, Harrison wanted to play Krause a bit of dabbling on the Moog that he had already recorded. “Apple will release it in the next few months.”12 To the amazement of Krause, the sounds on the tape were none other than the demonstration sounds that he himself had played for Harrison during the Jackie Lomax demonstration months earlier. Krause confronted Harrison on the spot, but to no avail. In spite of Krause’s complaints, the album Electronic Sound was released in May, 1969. Unwilling to spend the money required to sue a Beatle, Krause demanded that his name be removed from the album jacket. Rather than replace the original album cover, Apple smudged over his name with silver metallic ink. Electronic Sound was by no measure successful and sounded like nothing more than what it truly was: a demonstration of Moog sound effects and patches.

In the summer of 1969, while The Beatles were recording their final album, Abbey Road, Harrison had his synthesizer transported to the EMI studios for all of the group members to access. The Moog was used subtly on the album and appears on nearly every track. Producer George Martin felt that the Moog was a challenge to use but sparked the imagination of the Beatles. “When you had been used to playing real instruments,” explained Martin, “this was an innovation, and we put it to good use.”13
McCartney was playing with loops again and assembled a collection of Moog and other sounds for use on the album. “Paul took a plastic bag containing a dozen loose strands of mono tape into Abbey Road,” writes Beatles’ archivist Mark Lewisohn, “where—together with the production staff—he spent the afternoon in the studio three control room transferring the best of these onto professional four-track tape. The effects—sounding like bells, birds, bubbles and crickets chirping allowed for a perfect crossfade in the medley from Sun King into You Never Give Me Your Money.14
Musician Mike Vickers (from the group Manfred Mann) was hired to tame the Moog and provide patches for The Beatles. The instrument was installed in a booth of its own and wired into all of the available control rooms, and all of group members utilized it in one way or another. The Moog solo played on Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was performed by McCartney using a ribbon controller.15 Perhaps the most extreme Moog effect employed on the album was the three-minute span of modulated white noise added by Lennon to the conclusion of I Want You (She’s So Heavy). In 1969, Lennon mused about using the Moog on I Want You (She's so Heavy), saying, “It's pretty heavy at the ending, you know, because we used the Moog synthesizers on it and the range of sound is from minus to way over. ... well, you can't hear it; that instrument can do all sounds and we did it on the end, if you're a dog you can hear alot more.”16
While the Moog found it’s way onto Abbey Road, it was merely just one more tool in the group’s bag of aural trickery. Martin recalled, “We played the synthesizer on something like Because or Maxwell's Silver Hammer just as a different extra sound, but we were using other original sounds that weren't synthetic … and our own innovations of using different speeds and weird sounds for harmoniums and mouth organs and that sort of thing. …You have to remember that for most of the Beatle’s time, we had the Mellotron, which was a kind of synthesizer, but not an electronic one. It was simple tape passing over heads and things. We didn't get computers in those days; we didn't get anything that we have today.”17
The Beatles did for rock music what Varèse, Cage, and Stockhausen had done for classical music—they opened up the world of music to any and all possible sounds. McCartney also seems to have revived his interest in electronic music based on a close listen to his latest release, Electric Arguments (2008) with The Fireman.

1 Geoff Emerick, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles (New York:
Gotham Books, 2006), 111.
2 Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 72.
3. Interview with George Martin, Melody Maker, 1971. Available online: http://beatlesnumber9.com/martininterview1971.html Accessed November 28, 2008.
4. Georgie Rogers, Beatle’s Experiment: Macca says he wants 14 minute Beatles' avant garde track to see light. BBC Radio 4, November 17, 2008. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20081117_macca.shtml Accessed November 28, 2008.
5. Mark Ellen, “Exclusive! Lost Beatle Track Unearthed! The Rocking Vicar, April 2002. Available online: http://www.abbeyrd.net/carnival.htm Accessed November 28, 2008.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid. Rogers.
8. Ibid. Lewisohn 74.
9. Ibid. Rogers.
10. Ibid. Lewisohn, 138.
11. Ibid. Interview with George Martin, Melody Maker.
12 Bernie Krause, Into a Wild Sanctuary (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1997), 66.
13. Larry the O, “To Sir With Love: Conversations With and About Sir George Martin.” Electronic Musician, February 1999. Available online: http://emusician.com/em_spotlight/sir_with_love/. Accessed November 28, 2008.
14. Ibid. Lewisohn.
15 Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions, 185.
16. Tony Macarthur. Interview with John Lennon. Radio Luxembourg, September 27, 1969. Available online: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob03.html Accessed November 28, 2008.
17. Ibid. Larry the O.

The_Lost_Recordings_of_Lucie_Bigelow_Rosen

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 18:34:50 -0400

by Thom Holmes

You can’t make this stuff up. More than a few skeptics of the Theremin were probably uttering those words in 1930 when RCA Corp. introduced the first commercial model of the gesture-controlled electronic music instrument. It was an instrument that was played without touching it. Invented by Russian physicist León Theremin, the instrument was notoriously difficult to control but lauded by RCA as a “universal musical instrument” that anybody could play. As it turned out, producing sound on the Theremin was easy but mastering the technique was beyond the patience of most people. RCA only sold about 500 instruments.
The classic Theremin was not without its masters, however. Clara Rockmore (1911-98) is most recognized for having greatly advanced the artistry of Theremin performance. But we can also thank one of her contemporaries for supporting the inventor and expanding the original repertoire of the instrument into new musical territory. Lucie Bigelow Rosen (1890–1968), wife of prominent lawyer, banker, and art patron Walter Rosen, befriended the inventor Léon Theremin around 1930. Lucie and her husband became Theremin’s chief benefactors while he lived in New York. During the 1930s, they provided a townhouse for him at a low monthly rent next to their own on West 54th Street. Theremin had several productive years at this location as he took on commissions to construct a variety of electronic musical instruments. During this time he invented the Rhythmicon, an early form of drum machine using photoelectric principles and a keyboard; the keyboard Theremin, a primitive synthesizer designed to emulate other musical instruments; and the Terpsitone, a small space-controlled dance platform upon which the foot movements of a dancer would trigger the sounds of the Theremin.
While residing under the roof of the Rosens, Theremin hand-built two instruments for Lucie and taught her the basics of playing the gesture-controlled instrument. Under his tutelage, Rosen joined Clara Rockmore as one of the most skilled thereminists ever to play the original instrument. She was represented by a talent management agency and performed many concerts in the United States and Europe until the late 1940s.
Rosen was interested in exploring the new musical possibilities of the Theremin. She commissioned several prominent composers, including Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) and Isidor Achron (1892–1948), to write original works for her. These pieces explored the outer ranges of the Theremin’s pitches, dynamics, and timbres. Martinů’s work, the Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, Piano and Strings (1944) used the composer’s characteristically long melodic lines and blended the tonalities of the Theremin with the strings and oboe. The 15-minute piece is beyond the skills of the average thereminist, a tribute to Lucie Rosen’s virtuosity on the instrument. She premiered this work at Town Hall in New York in November 1945, along with a shorter work, Improvisation (1945) for piano and Theremin, by Achron.
Only one commercial recording is currently known of Rosen performing on the Theremin. In 1948 or 1949, near the end of her performing career, Rosen joined a recording session at Columbia Records produced by bandleader Elliot Lawrence. The piece they recorded was “Gigolette,” a dance number on which Lucie added the tones of the Theremin to a backup singing part. Some publicity photos from this session were recently unearthed along with three different releases of this 78 RPM track. One of these recordings is in my collection and its label is pictured with this article. The publicity photos and images of the two other known versions of this record can be found at the Theremin World web site along with an audio track of the recording. Theremin World contains a very nice account of the recording sessions and circumstances surrounding it. I note that the Theremin model shown in the photo at the site is that of Lucie’s portable model, the only one of her Theremin’s that still survives. Her other model was larger and resembled that owned by Clara Rockmore. It is pictured in the accompanying image of a promotional flyer for one of Rosen’s concerts.
Further documentary evidence of Lucie’s skills at the Theremin were recently unveiled as a result of my own research at her Caramoor estate in Katonah, New York. In 2002, while visiting Caramoor to examine Lucie’s one remaining Theremin, the museum’s facility manager Bill Bullock mentioned to me that there were several old disc recordings in one of the storage areas. The recordings consisted of twenty-one 78 rpm discs that Lucie Rosen had recorded privately in New York during the 1940s. Working with Caramoor, I undertook the digital restoration of the recordings.
The discs represent the only known recordings of Lucie Rosen playing the Theremin other than the Elliot Lawrence disc. The records consist primarily of practice sessions and rehearsals. With material ranging from her rendition of the popular song Danny Boy to adapted short classics by Grieg, Bizet, and Tchaikovsky, the full extent of her skill is apparent. At least two of the discs contain orchestral music only, recorded presumably so that Rosen could practice her Theremin part in preparation for a concert. One most impressive track, the title of which is unknown, displays Rosen’s most virtuosic Theremin techniques: a rapid series of notes played up and down the scale; sharp attacks; glissandi; and wide ranges in amplitude. After restoring the recordings in 2002, a few tracks were available for the public to hear as part of a temporary exhibit at the Caramoor estate. One of these recordings is available here for the first time anywhere. Just click on the icon on the right. It is from an untitled disc and was privately recorded in New York City around 1948. The disc was a 78 RPM glass master coated with acetate. Although this disc is undated, some of the other recordings date from 1946 and 1947.
Lucie Bigelow Rosen did much to advance the art of Theremin playing. She was among the first people to commission works solely for the instrument and through her frequent concertizing continued to keep the art of the Theremin alive into the 1940s. She was no slouch when it came to technical aspects of the instrument either and kept meticulous notes about its care and maintenance. Rosen was part musician and part patron, one of the first enthusiastic supporters of the art of electronic music. Summing up her sentiments about the Theremin for some concert notes, Rosen once wrote, “I do not think there is any other instrument so responsive as this to the artist when he has learned to control it, and that must be its eternal fascination.”
The accompanying photos show various views of the Rosen Theremin. Note the unusual vacuum tube that is visible on the top of the instrument (the music stand, if you will). I consulted Bob Moog about this several years ago. We both concluded that the tube appeared to be some type of preview device to pitch the instrument prior to lifting one’s hand from the volume antenna—this allowed Lucie to know what tone was going to play prior to making it audible, a very clever workaround that the inventor provided for her. In examining her technical notes more closely this year, I note that she explained the function of this tube as follows:

“To indicate correct pitch of the instrument before any sound is produced, a little neon lamp is used. Two stages of amplification are attached to the plate of the mixer tube. The second tube has in its grid circuit a choke and condenser in parallel, resonating on the frequency corresponding to the musical pitch "A". Exact tuning can be obtained by adjusting the value of this condenser to proper resonance with the frequency of "A.”

By using this adjustable pitch control, it would also have been possible to tune the Theremin to other instruments in an ensemble.
The photo below shows the right half of the front control panel of the Rosen Theremin. The ten-position rotary switch affects tone color by changing the value of capacity in the plate circuits of the output tubes. Rotation of the switch to the right connects larger capacitances and gradually eliminates high frequency harmonics, creating a purer tone. Unfortunately, the Rosen Theremin is not currently operational (photo: T. Holmes).
Most of these lost Lucie Rosen recordings are of generally poor audio fidelity. The discs most likely represent practice sessions and were not professionally produced. Even so, Lucie’s skill on the instrument is evident on many of the tracks. These recordings represent a remarkable archive of the work of one of the first people to promote and provide financial support for the art of electronic music.

This blog is adapted from Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes (Routledge, 2008).

Early Turntablism

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:21:55 -0400

by Thom Holmes

Of the recording technologies available before World War II, the turntable had audio fidelity that was marginally superior to that of optical and wire recording. Table 1 compares the audio storage specifications of several competing technologies in 1930. Drawbacks of disc recording included a play-back time limited to a few minutes at a speed of 78 rpm and, for all practical purposes, no sound editing or mixing capability. Yet disc recorders were more widely available, less expensive, and more amenable to a trial and error process of sound assembly than both wire and optical recording. Despite the limitations of disc recording, or perhaps because “invention is the mother of necessity,”(1) several composers were nonetheless compelled to experiment with turntablism. During the 1920s, turntables were often used onstage as part of performances, such as when composer Ottorino Respighi called for a disc recording of nightingales to be played during a performance of The Pines of Rome in 1924. Gramophones were a possible household item and anybody who owned one was familiar with the amusing effect of letting a turntable wind down to a stop, gradually lowering the pitch of the recording as it did so.
   In 1930, inspired by the common gramophone, composers Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) and Ernst Toch (1887–1964) found a new application for the turntable. Rather than using it passively to record the performance of other music, they experimented with the record player as the instrument itself. The occasion for their investigations was the 1930 Neue Musik festival of contemporary music in Berlin. Only a few weeks prior to the festival, the composers were immersed in trial and error tests with microphones and disc cutters, producing what may have been the first music composed exclusively for the recording medium. It was the beginning of Grammophonmusik, the roots of turntablism. Their short program of Originalwerke für Schallplatten—original works for disc— included just five works lasting only a few minutes each.
     Hindemith named his two works Trickaufnahmen (“trick recordings”) and the remaining three works by Toch were collectively named Gesprochene Musik (“spoken music”).(3) The fundamental effect exploited by each man was the amusing effect of pre-recorded sounds being played back at the wrong speed, a trait of gramophone machines with which any owner of a handcranked model was already familiar. These short works were composed using a laborious multistep recording process. Equipped only with a microphone, disc lathe (recorder), and several playback turntables, the pieces were created by first recording a set of sounds onto one disc and then re-recording them onto a second disc as the first was played back, often at a different speed. In Hindemith’s case, the Trickaufnahmen were devised for xylophone, voice, and cello, the latter being played at different speeds to change the pitch range of one of the parts. The several parts of Hindemith’s piece may have required the playback of three discs at the same time, with the composer capturing the final “mix” by holding a microphone up to the sound. Hindemith was clearly intrigued by using the turntable to change the pitch of recorded sounds and mixing them to create new interactive rhythmic sequences.
     Toch’s pieces used only voice and for these he employed a “four voice mixed choir.”(4) Recordings of Toch’s three examples of Gesprochene Musik have not survived, but one of the pieces, the charming Fuge auf der Geographie (Geographical Fugue), became Toch’s most popular work and has since served to bring many a choral performance to a disarming conclusion. Geographical Fugue is essentially an exercise in tongue-twisting geographical names spoken to dramatic effect in various permutations of volume and pace. With such lines as, “Trinidad, and the big Mississippi,” and “Nagasaki! Yokohama!” Toch’s aim was to transform spoken word into rhythmic, musical sounds. His Grammophonmusik version used disc recordings to change the speed of the voices, a technique that had the unexpected consequence of changing some of the vowel sounds or timbre of the music.
     Together, Hindemith and Toch had discovered how to transform the gramophone into a sound-generating machine that could alter the pitch and color of a given recorded sound. What Hindemith and Toch recognized was that the mechanical traits that made machine music possible could also be explored for their own, inherently structural and musical qualities. Toch clearly explained this in a statement published at the time of the festival, saying that their purpose in working with Grammophonmusik was that of “exploiting the peculiarities of its [the gramophone’s] function and by analyzing its formerly unrealized possibilities . . . thereby changing the machine’s function and creating a characteristic music of its own.”(5)
     Very few composers immediately followed Hindemith and Toch in the exploration of Grammophonmusik, with the exception of Varèse, who by 1935 was experimenting with the playback of multiple turntables simultaneously at various speeds, and John Cage, who is well known for the turntable work Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939).

1 Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture, 27 (1986): 544–60.
2 John D. Cutnell and Kenneth W. Johnson, Physics, 4th edn (New York: Wiley, 1998), 466.
3 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 100.
4 Ibid., 102.
5 Ibid.

Table 1: Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, third edition (Routledge, © 2008 Thom Holmes)