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CR611
Pioneers of Electronic Music
In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job which no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born.
Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years. It was the first large electronic music center in the united States, thanks to the path breaking support of the Rockefeller Foundation and encouragement from two of the country's leading universities. The Center became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of classical electronic music in the world. All of the music on this historic reissue is the result of the pioneering work of the Center and its composers.
Vladimir Ussachevsky was born in 1911 of a Russian family in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia. An hereditary Mongolian prince, as a young person he became a gifted pianist in the Romantic repertoire. After the Russian Revolutioin, his father was arrested and later executed in a Siberian prison for his outspoken criticism of the new Russian government. Vladimir fled Mongolia to join the rest of his family in California. There he graduated in music from Pomona College where he studied harmony, counterpoint, music history and composition. After receiving his B.A. in 1935, Ussachevsky went on to get a Master of Music degree from Eastman School of Music in 1936, and the Ph.D. in composition from Eastman School in 1939. His early works were known for their rich choral and lush instrumental scoring in Neo-Romantic style. In 1947, after serving in the U.S. Army Intelligence division in World War II, he joined the Columbia University Music Department as an Instructor.
And so in 1951, Ussachevsky took on the job of teaching the department's newly purchased tape recorder. This tape recorder had a speed-change switch, so he began to experiment with changing the speed of piano sounds that he had recorded. He then met Peter Mauzey and undergraduate engineering student at Columbia who was in charge of the WKCR (the University radio station) Magnecord tape recorder, and who built the station's first mixer. Mauzey used this mixer and tape recorder to demonstrate tape feedback to Ussechevsky, using as sound sources a live microphone, phonograph recordings, and radio sound effects.
Ussachevsky was intrigued and asked Mauzey to build him such a device, which the young student subsequently did. The Mauzey's feedback box and the departmental tape recorder both on top of his piano, and a Western Electric microphone on a floor-stand nearby, Ussachevsky improvised on the piano, listening to the recorded effect on earphones. He would raise or lower the feedback controls and the tape recorder's speed to see what the musical effects would be. The tape, of course, recorded these feedback experiments: he would keep what pleased him.
Such were the techniques and equipment used by Ussachevsky to create the first electronic music compositions to be played in the United States. Ussachevsky's composition Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition, and Underwater Valse, all created in 1951, were premiered at the Composers Forum concert on May 5, 1952 in New York City - the first concert of electronic music in America. Virgil Thomson rote that the pieces were “utterly charming and delighted the audience to no end.”
Otto Luening was born in 1900 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. From 1915 to 1917 he studied flute, piano, harmony nadn orchestration in the Royal Academy of Music in Munich, Germany. At the outsbreak of the First World War he left Munich, and studied composition in Zurich with Ferruccio Busoni. Back in America, Luening taught at the University of Arizona and Bennington College before joining the Columbia University Music Department as full professor and chairman of the Barnard College Music Department. Also known as a flutist and an opera conductor, Luening has been influential in American funding organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Luening is the author of an anecdotal autobiographical account of his life in music, The Odyssey of an American Composer.
In the summer of 1952, Luening invited Ussachevsky to bring his equipment to the Bennington College Composers Conference in Vermont. Ussachevsky drove up with his equipment and set it up as in his previous experiments: Mauzey's feedback box and the tape recorder on top of the piano, with the earphones ready. This time, however, he set up the microphone so that it would pick up not only his piano playing, but also Luening's improvisations on his flute. Ussachevsky put on the earphones to listen to the electronic effects that were actually going on to the tape. They both began to improvise on piano and flute as Ussachevsky changed the amount of feedback and the speed of the tape recorder by manipulating dials and switches for musical effect. Though these tape manipulation experiments techniques were developed which expanded the aural language of the piano and flute beyond their registral and idiomatic possibilities.
Still later in that summer of 1952 Ussaschevsky transported the equipment to Henry Cowell's house in Woodstock, New York, where Ussaschevsky created the materials for his piece Sonic Contours, and Luening his tape pieces Low Speed, Invention in Twelve Tones, and Fantasy in Space. On October 28, 1952, Leopold Stokowski presented these Ussachevsky and Luening compositions at a concert at the Museum of Modern Art. The first four pieces on this disc are presented in the same order in which they appeared on that historic concert of electronic music.
Also, often present at the experimentation sessions with Ussaschevssky and Luening was engineer Peter Mauzey. His task was adjusting the spatial relationship between Luening and the microphone. Mauzey also built a prototype mixer. In 1953 Ussachevsky and Luening got a small grant to expand their equipment with filters, sine-square oscillators, and another Ampex tape recorder. With Mauzey's small mixer and this additional equipment, Ussachevsky and Luening created the first works for tape and live musicians: Rhapsodic Variations for Tape Recorder and Orchestra (1953-54) and A Poem in Cycles and Bells (1954), also for orchestra and tape.
At this point Ussaschevsky became aware of similar musical experiments in Europe, and in 1953 flew to Paris to introduce his and Luening's work on Paris Radio. He also went to Cologne to introduce it to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert.
Up to now the studio had resided primarily in Ussachevsky's living room. Then in 1955, he and Luening were given a small studio on the Columbia campus in an old building called “The Gate House,” which had once been the entry point for the Bloomindale Asylum for the Insane. In these gothic surroundings, such works as Ussachevsky's Piece for Tape Recorder (1956) and his collaboration with Luening King Lear (1956) were created.
In 1957, a permanent studio was built on campus on the ground floor of McMillin theatre. But this studio was not built for teaching, and was too small to accommodate other composers. Finally, in 1959, with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was founded by Ussachevsky and Luening of Columbia and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions of Princeton. Ussachevsky was designated Chairman, and Peter Mauzey was appointed director of Engineering. As Chairman, Ussachevsky designed the teaching curriculum and studio facilities and administered the organization until his retirement in 1980.
Over the twenty years of his directorship of the Electronic Music Center, Ussachevsky shaped the future of electronic music in the United States. Through his gracious, energetic leadership, and his technological and aesthetic expertise, electronic music centers began springing up all over the country. Ussachevsky personally trained many of the most important figures in electronic music today. He invited hundreds of composers from every continent to come and create music at the Center. He also contributed to the design of important technological developments such as the Moog and Buchia synthesizers. After a long, distinguished composing and teaching career, Ussachevsky died in 1990 in New York City.
The guest composers and Columbia-associated composers who have produced pieces at the Center include Bulent Arel, Luciano Berio, Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman, Arthur Kreiger, Daria Semegen, Pril Smiley and Edgard Varese. Ussachevsky's own students at the Center include Jon Appleton, Wendy Carlos, Charles Dodge, Robert Moog, Alice Shields, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen. Of the seven composers most closely associated with the Center from its early years, six are present on this disc. (The seventh is Milton Babbitt whose seminal electronic work Vision and Prayer is available on CRI CDE 521).
Bulent Arel (b. 1919, Istanbul, Turkey, d. 1990, Stony Brook, New York) was the first staff member to join the new Center. An international lead in Turkish art and music, Arel graduated from the Ankara Conservatory. Conductor and Music Director of major orchestras and choruses in Turkey, he also studied sound engineering with engineers from the Paris Radio, and then became the first Music Director of Radio Ankara. In 1957 he pioneered in electronic music by composing Music for String Quartet and Oscillator. In 1959 Arel was invited by the Rockefeller foundation to join the staff of the Columbia-Princeton electronic Music Center as Research Associate to Ussaschevsky. Starting in 1963, he taught composition and electronic music at Yale University, and designed and installed their first electronic music studio. For seven years he also taught composition and electronic music at Columbia. From 1971 on, he was Professor of Music and founding director of the Electronic Music Studios at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Joining the staff shortly after Arel was Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934, Buenos Aires, Argentina). Davidovsky won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1971 for his Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and tape, one of a series of pieces for electronic tape and live instrumentalists for which he is well known. After Ussaschevsky's retirement in 1980, Davidovsky became director of the Center, henceforth called the Electronic Music Center of Columbia University. As Professor of Music at Columbia, Davidovsky continues to teach electronic music and composition.
Pril Smiley (b. 1943, Mohonk Lake, New York) began her apprenticeship with Ussachevsky and her long association with the Center in 1963, when, on New Year's Day, she first met Ussaschevsky in the middle of a blizzard. Smiley assisted Ussachevsky on several of his classic works, including the score to the film No Exit (available on New Word Records CD 90398-2). From 1966 to 1982 Smiley composed over forty electronic music scores for major theater, film and dance productions. Nine were composed for stage productions at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Smiley is currently Associate Director of the Center.
Alice Shields (b. 1943, New York City) was the next to arrive on the teaching staff of the Center at Columbia, from where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in composition. She had been Ussachevsky's teaching assistant in Sixteenth-Century Counterpoint, and in 1965 started working as Ussachevsky's assistant at the Electronic Music Center. While working with Ussaschevsky on his film, theatrical, and electronic opera pieces, she performed as an opera singer at Lincoln Center and wrote electronic music-theater pieces and operas of her own. Shields continues to perform in and record her own operas. IN her electronic compositions she primarily uses concrete or sampled sound whether on MIDI, on the SUN computer, or in the analog studio. From 1965 to 1980, Shields and Smiley carried the main burden of assisting the actual studio work of composers who were enrolled in the two graduate coursed in electronic music composition. Shields was Associate Director of the Center from 1978 to 1982.
Ussachevsky
SONIC CONTOURS (1952)
This piece extends Ussachevsky's earlier explorations of feedback and speed variation. Here he uses careful splicing and mixing to achieve striking manipulations of piano sounds. For example, some chords are cut off instantaneously in a manner that a live pianist could never perform. Ussaschevsky spoke of having two primary objectives in this piece: to make the sensation of each line moving at its own rate clearly perceptible, and to achieve an asymmetry of canonic structures that would avoid interfering with the clarity of the other lines.
Ussachevssky also incorporated some “found” sounds into Sonic Contours. One portion includes a sped-up conversation between Ussachevsky, his wife Betty, and Peter Mauzey as they listen to themselves speak with feedback. (In the part of this conversation that I could detect by filtering, I heard Vladimir say “Why?” Betty answers “No.” He says “Why?” She: “Because.” He says “Yes.”) Sonic Contours consists of four sections of delightful, joyous music.
Luening
LOW SPEED (1952)
In the creation process of Low Speed, Luening made sketches on which he based his flute improvisations. He transposed the first recording an octave lower, and successive versions each a fifth higher than the initial recording. Feedback produced a kind of unearthly, ghostly counterpart of the live flute. A rather solemn mood is established.
Luening
INVENTION IN TWELVE TONES (1952)
This piece is in two parts, the first in slow tempo, the second fast. Continuous canons mix with fed-back flute, which sustain a lyrical mood until we hear a cadencing signal, rising from the flat sixth degree, to the flat seventh, to the tonic.
Luening
FANTASY IN SPACE (1952)
Again a lovely, lyrical piece. Luening recorded himself playing the flute, and then while listening on earphones, taped a second flute part over the first, and a third and fourth over that, resulting in the equivalent of a flute quartet. At the end, he included an original folk-like melody on the flute, without manipulation. Again, there is a melodic cadencing to the tonic at this point, as well as a ritardando signaling closure.
Luening-Ussachevsky
INCANTATION (1953)
This is a piece in three parts: a brief introduction, a vocal section, and a coda. The fed-back flute is in relaxed, medium register; the piano is often speeded up and played backwards. A mellow, gently rocking mood is established through the soft dynamic of the gently rising and falling pitch contours. Eventually, a muted male voice is heard in the strange, ascending intonations of supplication. The voice, moaning and speaking incomprehensibly, is played backwards. The sound materials also included alto recorder, bell sonorities, and a plate.
Luening
MOONFLIGHT (1968)
This piece in four sections might be considered an aria for the flute. After introducing the flute in the first section, Luening uses ascending and descending arpeggios in the second section. One is carried gently onwards, and eventually an un-manipulated flute in the foreground “sings' a simple (but original) American “folk-tune.” The ascending and descending arpeggios end this dreamy piece.
Ussachevsky
PIECE FOR TAPE RECORDER (1956)
Here Ussachevsky intended to see if basing everything in a piece on a limited number of sound sources actually led to musical coherence. As sound sources he recorded and transformed a single stroke on a gong, the sound of a jet plane, a single note on a kettledrum, a piano, an organ, four oscillator tones, and the noise from a tape recorder switch. Having developed these materials, he set himself the challenge of assembling them together in a logical continuity.
Smiley
KOLYOSA (1970)
Koylosa, says Smiley, is the Russian word for wheels, wheels revolving in space. Indeed, one can listen to this piece as if it were being played by non-human percussionists, who can instantly move in all dimensions of space. Long sounds and short sounds are contrasted; tension is furthered by building one event at one tempo, while another is changing at a different tempo - a form of rhythmic contrapuntal differentiation.
Events are contrasted also on the spatial dimension: Smiley plays with three degrees of perceived distance from the hearer: close, medium, and far. Tension is increased by the use of the loudspeaker transfers of moderate or fast.
The long sounds are pitched in low register, the short sounds in high. During the piece, the tempo and dynamics increase until the low, long events start rising in pitch, eventually meeting the high, short sounds with maximum tension in the middle pitch range. After this climax the rhythmic counterpoint disappears, and the tension diminishes to silence.
Arel
STEREO ELECTRONIC MUSIC NO. 2 (1970)
Commissioned by the Center for its Tenth Anniversary Celebration, this piece is based on two elements: a melodic event and percussive sounds which interrupt it. It is an example of Arel's and Ussachevsky's concept of “continuous evolution,” which is the creation of form through an expansion of Beethovenian variation technique beyond pitch and rhythm into timbre and space. The melodic motif of an ascending minor second is the stabilizing center into which huge percussive sounds swirl. As in the Smiley piece, the spatial element is significant. But here the prime contrast is between the pitched and the non-pitched elements, a contrast which peaks about two-thirds of the way through the piece, where staccato percussive sounds climax in the foreground. What follows next is one of the most eerie, chilling moments in electronic music, as masses of ascending half-steps move slowly off into the distance.
Ussaschevsky
COMPUTER PIECE NO. 1 (1968)
TWO SKETCHES FOR A COMPUTER PIECE (1971)
These pieces were both put together in an analog electronic music studio, using the sound materials produced with digital computers at the Bell telephone Laboratories.
Computer Piece No. 1 was composed from three types of materials: material initially generated on the GE 635 computer by composer-physicist Jean-Claude Risset; a succession of four-note clusters originally synthesized for Ussachevsky by F.R. Moore; and material from several “concrete” sources: a gong, Alice Shield's distorted speaking voice, and a highly modulated passage of electronic origin. The composition could have been totally pre-programmed, were it not for the fact that Ussachevsky transformed the timbres after the generation of the piece by using analog devices: the Bode frequency shifter and EMT reverberation. As such, it is an example of electronic music from computer-generated and computer processed sound materials, modified and assembled according to “classical studio” analog techniques.
Two Sketches for a Computer Piece was markedly different in the method of producing sound materials. The GROOVE program, developed by Dr. Max Matthews and F.R. Moore at Bell Labs, was used to create, store, reproduce and edit. The computer was the DDP224. The GROOVE program made possible the playing of a tunable succession of pitches in real time on a small keyboard connected to the computer. Digital-to-analog converters sent voltages into a set of saw-tooth generators and a voltage-controlled filter. A distinctly different method of computer-controlled random production of un-tuned pitches, random amplitudes and random rhythmic succession was used to obtain other sounds. An occasional sequence of softer sounds in the piece comes from a special resonant circuit designed by Dr. Matthews. Only a moderate amount of analog timbre modification was employed at certain points, but the piece is largely in the form obtained in real-time sound production, a great advantage in using the GROOVE system.
Davidovsky
SYNCHRONISMS NO. 5 (1969) for percussion ensemble and electronic sounds
The electronic sounds in this piece enter about 3 minutes after the beginning, and run to the end of the piece. The electronic sounds often enhance and extend the sounds of the live percussion instruments by affecting her attack or decay. There are two organizing elements. One consists of a held note, which then suddenly crescendos, and terminates in several prestissimo percussive sounds. The other element consists of a series of pitches of even duration in moderately slow tempo, with tremolo. In a slightly decorated form of monophony. Davidovsky connects these two elements to each other, constantly varying timbre, and often varying tempo and dynamic. Within the variation of these two gestures, one's attention is drawn to the rich variations of timbre, which are indeed klangfarben-melodie.
An interesting pint is Davidovsky's use, at the very beginning and ending of the piece, of an opening and cadential pitch-formula: he opens the piece on an ascending minor second, and ends by cadencing down a major second from the opening pitch. This signals, of course, opening and closure, and form an interesting contrast t the non-traditional, non-developmental timbre variations they contain. Towards the end of the piece, Davidovsky also adds another signal-device from traditional development forms: there is a brief, exciting electronic crescendo with cymbals which usually signal a developmental form, but here seems to provoke our awareness of two normally contradictory formal structures going on in the same piece.
Shields
THE TRANSFORMATION OF ANI (1970)
The words of this piece are from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They are recited by the dying soul, who by pronouncing the words of salvation and of identity with the saviour Osiris, is carried into eternal life. All sounds except the last, obliterating one, are made from my own voice, speaking and singing the words of the text. Each letter of the English translation has assigned a pitch, and each hieroglyph of the Egyptian was assigned a short phrase of more indefinite pitch. These two were then improvised upon to create the two non-text elements in the piece: singing-like phrases, and percussive phrases. These dramatic elements move behind and around the child-like, inexpressive speaking voice in explosive bursts. The text is in three verses which follow the transmutation of the speaker.
- Alice Shields
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Ussachevsky: SONIC CONTOURS (1952) (7:19)
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Luening: LOW SPEED (1952) (3:41)
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Luening: INVENTION IN TWELVE TONES (1952) (3:42)
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Luening: FANTASY IN SPACE (1952) (2:51)
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Luening-Ussachevsky: INCANTATION (1953) (2:32)
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Luening: MOONFLIGHT (1968) (2:55)
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Ussachevsky: PIECE FOR TAPE RECORDER (1956) (5:38)
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Smiley: KOLYOSA (1970) (6:37)
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Arel: STERO ELECTRONIC MUSIC NO. 2 (1970) (14:18)
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Ussachevsky: COMPUTER PIECE NO. 1 (1968) (3:42)
Ussachevsky: TWO SKETCHES FOR A COMPUTER PIECE (1971) (3:06)
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I. Sketch 1 (0:56)
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II. Sketch 2 (2:10)
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Davidovsky: SYNCHRONISMS NO. 5 (1969) (8:32)
Ray Des Roches, Richard Fitz, Claire Heldrich, Donald Marcone, Howard Van Hyning, percussion; Harvey Solberge, conductor
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Shileds: THE TRANSFORMATION OF ANI (1970) (9:04)
Total Playing Time: 75:11
* & © 1991
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