Stay in the Loop
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Dan Coren
Give electronic music a chance:
It's better than it sounds (seriously)
DAN COREN
In the 1970s, when I had Penn’s Presser Electronic Music Studio as my own personal playground (I can never thank the Penn music department sufficiently for its policy of benign neglect), I spent many happy hours hand-editing tape loops and modulating them with the oscillators of the then-keyboardless Moog synthesizer. Eventually, I hooked up with one of my students and launched a short-lived but life-changing business venture; I invite you to follow this link and scroll down until you find my name. (I suppose my partner Harry Mendell wrote that Wikipedia article; I just happened to stumble on it one day. I can vouch for its accuracy, though.)
I mention all this so you’ll understand that in writing this article, I’m not wearing my usual Recovering Classical Musicologist hat (as in “Good evening. My name is Dan, and I’m a recovering musicologist”). Instead, I write as a credentialed veteran of the early electronic music trenches. I also write as a sort of musical Rip Van Winkle— because recent events, as you’re about to read, have forced me admit the extent to which I’d lost contact with the medium that so thoroughly captivated me 30 years ago.
“Hear the unheard of at electronic musicfest,” read the headline for David R. Adler’s article in the May 31 Inquirer , announcing the third annual Electro-Music Festival that weekend at the Cheltenham Art Center. Who knew? Certainly not I.
To my delight, my wife, apparently having forgiven me for dragging her to one too many Mahler concerts, was at the very least curious and potentially enthused at the prospect of attending.
Disaster strikes
We figured we’d take in the Sunday session. Alas, the Fates had other ideas. While dressing on Saturday morning, I got my foot caught in the leg of my underwear and hopped left when I should have gone right, throwing my back into spasms beyond anything I’d experienced in years. As soon as it happened, I knew I was in for a weekend of three-I’s time— ice packs, Ibuprofen and immobility.
All wasn’t lost, though. After blundering around the electromusic.com website for a while, I found a link to a continuous webcast of the Electro-Music Festival I clicked it and found myself listening to– huh? What is that? I know that from somewhere. Oh! It’s the “Great Gate of Kiev” from Pictures at an Exhibition– in an arrangement, as it turned out, by Electric Diamond, a group that specializes in electronic orchestrations of classical music.
Not exactly what I’d expected. Of course, the whole point was that I didn’t know what to expect. But it was disappointing to find that my first encounter with the allegedly “unheard of” was basically a retread of Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’s “Switched on Bach” from nearly 40 years ago.
Jackson Pollack's musical equivalent
The previous day, I’d been listening to Marvin Rosen’s “Classical Discoveries” program on WPRB/Princeton. Rosen was playing oldies but goodies from the avant-garde music of the 20th Century: Ianis Xankis’s vocal piece, Nuits, and Pierre Boulez’s ground-breaking Second Piano Sonata. I was struck yet again by the combination of complexity, sensuality and energy of this repertory; Boulez heaves masses of piano sonority into your ears as if he were Jackson Pollack throwing paint across the canvas.
The next piece on Saturday, by a fellow known as Vytear, seemed like a link to that world. Each time you go to his niche on myspace.com, you’ll be hit by something very much like what I heard on Saturday: powerful, crackling gestures of beautiful electronic cacophony.
“This is more like it!” I thought. Sounds that sounded like direct quotes from Stockhausen’s Kontake. Cool! This guy knows his stuff! But if you take a look at Vytear’s long, long influence list, there’s not the slightest hint of any connection to what you’d think would be his natural predecessors: the European avant-garde of the 1960s. Nor, in fact, will you find anything having to do with any classical music at all– no mention of Cage, the Minimalists, Steve Reich.
When conservatism meets technical savvy
On Sunday’s webcast, a pair of remarkable lectures confirmed the strange combination of conservatism and technological savvy that Vytear had made me suspect. A fellow named Kip Rosser gave a lecture demonstration of the Theremin, a technological relic that was a novelty when my parents were newlyweds but which seems to be a continuing fascination for musicians of the Electro-Music world. He was followed by Seth Brown, who gave a passionate lecture on Thaddeus Cahill and the Telharmonium. Follow this link and you’ll get to Brown’s very odd take on the history of music and musical technology.
I’ve come to the conclusion that while these composers revere the technological innovators who made their world possible, they also seem beset by an almost parodistic American provincialism. Brown mentions John Cage, but in all the many links I’ve followed in researching this article, I’ve found not an iota of evidence that any of these musicians know anything about the pioneering efforts of what was not so long ago the European avant-garde.
“Yeah? So what?” That is, I think, a perfectly valid reaction to my criticism. A few decades ago, electronic music was the battlefront of the musical wars that had started with Arnold Schoenberg; today, everyone simply seems to be having a lot of fun. As David Adler wrote in the Inquirer article, “With more and more people accessing a veritable candy store of computer software and other high-tech tools, electronic music is undergoing a wave of democratization and globalization.” If there’s one word that summarizes this musical movement, it’s collaboration.
Electronic hums and thudding basses
Because the medium has become so accessible, a good deal of the actual music is pretty primitive. I’ve heard nothing else that exudes the gutsy energy of Vytear. The majority of the works on the “Electro-Music 07” CD sampler, which I purchased from the Festival’s website, follow the same pattern: a few sampled sounds looped over and over, with rather stereotypic electronic hums and drones fading in and out, all typically over a thudding bass ostinato, the kind you might want your neighbor to turn down at 3 a.m.
But I’m betting that a simple, accessible musical style, a general sense of musical well being, a preceding generation that wrote in an all-but-forgotten difficult, complicated idiom, are all indications of musical health. What I just described sounds a lot like 18th Century musical Vienna to me. All we’re missing is a new Joseph Haydn.
I guess academia still has its pull, though; one group at the Electro-Music Festival especially appealed to me. If you haven’t already done so, follow the link to the Princeton Laptop Orchestra’s PLOrk Beat Science and listen to the musical examples. PLOrk’s blend of technological skill, humanism, and musical inventiveness bodes very well for the future of contemporary experimental music.
To read a response, click here.
It's better than it sounds (seriously)
DAN COREN
In the 1970s, when I had Penn’s Presser Electronic Music Studio as my own personal playground (I can never thank the Penn music department sufficiently for its policy of benign neglect), I spent many happy hours hand-editing tape loops and modulating them with the oscillators of the then-keyboardless Moog synthesizer. Eventually, I hooked up with one of my students and launched a short-lived but life-changing business venture; I invite you to follow this link and scroll down until you find my name. (I suppose my partner Harry Mendell wrote that Wikipedia article; I just happened to stumble on it one day. I can vouch for its accuracy, though.)
I mention all this so you’ll understand that in writing this article, I’m not wearing my usual Recovering Classical Musicologist hat (as in “Good evening. My name is Dan, and I’m a recovering musicologist”). Instead, I write as a credentialed veteran of the early electronic music trenches. I also write as a sort of musical Rip Van Winkle— because recent events, as you’re about to read, have forced me admit the extent to which I’d lost contact with the medium that so thoroughly captivated me 30 years ago.
“Hear the unheard of at electronic musicfest,” read the headline for David R. Adler’s article in the May 31 Inquirer , announcing the third annual Electro-Music Festival that weekend at the Cheltenham Art Center. Who knew? Certainly not I.
To my delight, my wife, apparently having forgiven me for dragging her to one too many Mahler concerts, was at the very least curious and potentially enthused at the prospect of attending.
Disaster strikes
We figured we’d take in the Sunday session. Alas, the Fates had other ideas. While dressing on Saturday morning, I got my foot caught in the leg of my underwear and hopped left when I should have gone right, throwing my back into spasms beyond anything I’d experienced in years. As soon as it happened, I knew I was in for a weekend of three-I’s time— ice packs, Ibuprofen and immobility.
All wasn’t lost, though. After blundering around the electromusic.com website for a while, I found a link to a continuous webcast of the Electro-Music Festival I clicked it and found myself listening to– huh? What is that? I know that from somewhere. Oh! It’s the “Great Gate of Kiev” from Pictures at an Exhibition– in an arrangement, as it turned out, by Electric Diamond, a group that specializes in electronic orchestrations of classical music.
Not exactly what I’d expected. Of course, the whole point was that I didn’t know what to expect. But it was disappointing to find that my first encounter with the allegedly “unheard of” was basically a retread of Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’s “Switched on Bach” from nearly 40 years ago.
Jackson Pollack's musical equivalent
The previous day, I’d been listening to Marvin Rosen’s “Classical Discoveries” program on WPRB/Princeton. Rosen was playing oldies but goodies from the avant-garde music of the 20th Century: Ianis Xankis’s vocal piece, Nuits, and Pierre Boulez’s ground-breaking Second Piano Sonata. I was struck yet again by the combination of complexity, sensuality and energy of this repertory; Boulez heaves masses of piano sonority into your ears as if he were Jackson Pollack throwing paint across the canvas.
The next piece on Saturday, by a fellow known as Vytear, seemed like a link to that world. Each time you go to his niche on myspace.com, you’ll be hit by something very much like what I heard on Saturday: powerful, crackling gestures of beautiful electronic cacophony.
“This is more like it!” I thought. Sounds that sounded like direct quotes from Stockhausen’s Kontake. Cool! This guy knows his stuff! But if you take a look at Vytear’s long, long influence list, there’s not the slightest hint of any connection to what you’d think would be his natural predecessors: the European avant-garde of the 1960s. Nor, in fact, will you find anything having to do with any classical music at all– no mention of Cage, the Minimalists, Steve Reich.
When conservatism meets technical savvy
On Sunday’s webcast, a pair of remarkable lectures confirmed the strange combination of conservatism and technological savvy that Vytear had made me suspect. A fellow named Kip Rosser gave a lecture demonstration of the Theremin, a technological relic that was a novelty when my parents were newlyweds but which seems to be a continuing fascination for musicians of the Electro-Music world. He was followed by Seth Brown, who gave a passionate lecture on Thaddeus Cahill and the Telharmonium. Follow this link and you’ll get to Brown’s very odd take on the history of music and musical technology.
I’ve come to the conclusion that while these composers revere the technological innovators who made their world possible, they also seem beset by an almost parodistic American provincialism. Brown mentions John Cage, but in all the many links I’ve followed in researching this article, I’ve found not an iota of evidence that any of these musicians know anything about the pioneering efforts of what was not so long ago the European avant-garde.
“Yeah? So what?” That is, I think, a perfectly valid reaction to my criticism. A few decades ago, electronic music was the battlefront of the musical wars that had started with Arnold Schoenberg; today, everyone simply seems to be having a lot of fun. As David Adler wrote in the Inquirer article, “With more and more people accessing a veritable candy store of computer software and other high-tech tools, electronic music is undergoing a wave of democratization and globalization.” If there’s one word that summarizes this musical movement, it’s collaboration.
Electronic hums and thudding basses
Because the medium has become so accessible, a good deal of the actual music is pretty primitive. I’ve heard nothing else that exudes the gutsy energy of Vytear. The majority of the works on the “Electro-Music 07” CD sampler, which I purchased from the Festival’s website, follow the same pattern: a few sampled sounds looped over and over, with rather stereotypic electronic hums and drones fading in and out, all typically over a thudding bass ostinato, the kind you might want your neighbor to turn down at 3 a.m.
But I’m betting that a simple, accessible musical style, a general sense of musical well being, a preceding generation that wrote in an all-but-forgotten difficult, complicated idiom, are all indications of musical health. What I just described sounds a lot like 18th Century musical Vienna to me. All we’re missing is a new Joseph Haydn.
I guess academia still has its pull, though; one group at the Electro-Music Festival especially appealed to me. If you haven’t already done so, follow the link to the Princeton Laptop Orchestra’s PLOrk Beat Science and listen to the musical examples. PLOrk’s blend of technological skill, humanism, and musical inventiveness bodes very well for the future of contemporary experimental music.
To read a response, click here.
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