Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music
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Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music
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Overview
Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma's writings, presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career. Here, through words and astonishing photos, is Mumma's chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century: his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music; his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music; performances with the Sonic Arts Union; and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In addition, Mumma describes his collaborations with composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.
Candid and insightful, Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252081019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2015 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cybersonic Arts
Adventures in American New Music
By Gordon Mumma, Michelle Fillion
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08101-9
CHAPTER 1
Music's Avant-Garde
What's New?
(1960)
In April of this year [1960] the American musical public heard a broadcast of three recent musical compositions played by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein: Antiphony One by Henry Brant (from Canada), Improvisation I sur Mallarmé by Pierre Boulez (France), and Concerted Piece for Tape Recorder and Orchestra by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky (United States). For a good part of the audience this was the most "advanced" music they had ever heard. The responses ranged from shock and bewilderment to fascination and excitement. Conservative critics assured their readers that the "avant-garde" was only having its field day; next week everything would return to normal and the Philharmonic might again play Brahms. For radical critics the program had not gone far enough. As the dust settles, it proves easier to appreciate Bernstein's program in the context of what's happening in the contemporary musical world and to determine what sort of menace the avant-garde really presents.
Brant's Antiphony One is an example of "music in space" scored for several orchestras located at different points in the concert hall. Each orchestra requires its own conductor, and the audience sits in the middle of the sound. This is not a new idea. Giovanni Gabrieli wrote antiphonal music for Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice in the sixteenth century, while Johann Sebastian Bach, Hector Berlioz, Gustav Mahler, and numerous others have exploited space in their music. Recently in Ann Arbor, Josef Blatt and the University Symphony performed Leoš Janácek's Sinfonietta with the orchestra on stage and a retinue of brass players in the balcony. Current sales of stereophonic apparatus indicate that the public is as excited about spatial music as are many composers.
Three further examples of spatial music deserve mention. The unfinished and undated Universe Symphony by the American visionary Charles Ives was conceived for several orchestras to be placed at various heights on the mountains surrounding a valley in which the audience is seated (to date there have been no performances). For Ein irrender Sohn (1959) by the Swede Bo Nilsson, the performers are spaced about ten seats apart throughout the audience. A more extreme case is Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (1960) by the American La Monte Young, performed this April at a concert at The Living Theatre in New York City. The performers included the pianist David Tudor, composers John Cage and Toshi Ichiyanagi, and dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. As the title suggests, the instruments were large wooden benches and bar stools that the performers dragged around the reverberant tile floor of the theater lobby, while the bewildered audience wandered among the incredible scraping sounds.
Improvisation I sur Mallarmé (1957) by Pierre Boulez, for soprano, harp, and six percussionists, is an example of avant-garde serial music for conventional instruments. The term "serial" denotes a predetermined order or sequence of sounds (or "series") within the structure of the music (much as the progression of tonal centers or keys determines structure in the music of Beethoven's time). The avant-garde serialists have expanded their applications of serialism beyond the series of pitches (or "tone row") used by Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern in the early twentieth century to include other musical properties: the length of sounds and their rhythmic patterns, the loudness of sounds, methods of attack and articulation, and instrumentation and timbre. The serialists who compose spatial music have also applied their techniques to the direction of sound.
Some composers employ elaborate mathematical procedures of group theory, set theory, Markov processes, and differential calculus for both analysis and composition. Journals such as Die Reihe, Melos, and Gravesaner Blätter laced with mathematical formulae. Much of this may be bunk, but some of it has revealed exciting new musical relationships. These rigorous procedures have resulted in music that is often extremely difficult to perform. Many serious musicians may even consider it unplayable, and understandably, for music academies and conservatories are still teaching techniques that apply largely to music of the nineteenth century and before. Yet this music is being played with increasing frequency. A confirmation that even radical innovations are soon absorbed into general performance techniques is provided by Robert Craft's recent recording of the serial music of Anton Webern with the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble. Rehearsals of each of the earlier (and easier) works consumed several weeks, while increasing familiarity with Webern's musical language enabled them to record the very difficult Concerto for Nine Instruments op. 24, with less than two hours of rehearsal. After hearing the American pianists Paul Jacobs or David Tudor perform, it is conceivable that anything can be played, and played well.
The broadcast of Luening and Ussachevsky's Concerted Piece was one of the first American network radio performances of music in an area now in its second decade of development. Concerted Piece is a recent American electronic — or "tape recorder" — composition, and was written especially for this New York Philharmonic concert. It combines electronic music and conventional instruments. Significant early work in electronic music was produced between 1950 and 1956 in the studios of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne and Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) in Milan. Although electronic music has been composed in many other centers, the German and Italian electronic music composed before 1956 by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Luciano Berio, and Bruno Maderna has clarified the problems of the genre and has established musical precedents on which other composers of electronic music could depend or against which they could rebel. But electronic music is not the sole province of younger composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, Roberto Gerhard, Ernst Krenek, and the musical radical of the 1920s, Edgard Varèse, have also worked in the medium. Varèse's Poème électronique was heard in the Le Corbusier–Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.
The patronage of two large European publishers, Universal Edition and Schott, has assisted avant-garde composers with financial support and with the publication of both conventional and electronic scores and related journals. A particularly effective proponent of the avant-garde is conductor Hermann Scherchen, who founded the publishing house Ars Viva Verlag in Mainz and established an electronic studio in Gravesano, Switzerland, to encourage advanced work in music. In the United States, conductor Robert Craft has performed, recorded, and encouraged avant-garde music for conventional instruments.
The amount of electronic music composed since 1956 has steadily declined for several reasons. The first of these is the change in the character of major European contemporary music festivals that occurred around 1955, shifting emphasis from well-established to lesser-known composers. The outcome brought younger avant-garde composers international hearing while encouraging them to write for conventional instruments without recourse to the laborious processes of electronic music. Second, European electronic composers have recently been having trouble accessing certain state-supported electronic studios because of political problems. Finally, and most important, is the development by RCA of a radical new "synthesizer" that makes it possible to compose electronic music with a vast range of sounds and precise control, while eliminating most of the time and labor of tape splicing and mixing (Stockhausen spent nearly two years producing his thirteen-minute Gesang der Jünglinge in 1955–56). Numerous foundations, including the Rockefeller, have facilitated work with the new RCA Synthesizer. To date, however, there has been little progress with this huge machine due to the encumbrances of legal, patent, and security restrictions and professional jealousies.
In contrast to the ideas and music of the above composers is the phenomenon of John Cage. Cage has explored a wide range of musical ideas, from pianos prepared with stove bolts, furniture tacks, and pencil erasers to music using the electronic modification of sound and the exploitation of silences. Certainly the most radical of these ideas is the composition of music by chance techniques or random processes. Although it has historical precedents — Mozart composed some music by drawing cards — and is justified by the aesthetics of certain Eastern philosophies, the concept of "random music" has created a greater storm of protest than even serial music. The most extreme critics are further annoyed because Cage — unlike the serialists — refuses to respond to their attacks; he is more likely to answer them by lecturing about mushroom hunting.
Surrounded with anecdote, legend, and enigma, Cage has gained many supporters. Although his following in America is predominantly of artists, writers, and dancers, with few musicians among his supporters, the young serial composers in Europe take him quite seriously (paradoxically, perhaps, as total serialization would seem to preclude random processes). Cage's popular success may be due more to his theatrical talents than to his musical ones, yet his serious musical influence is forcing composer, performer, and listener alike to re-evaluate the basic meanings of music.
Cage — the man, the music, the ideas, and the attitude — is an invigorating experience, a liberation from set and stagnant patterns of thought that appeals to the avant-garde. Under his influence some very innovative music has been conceived, such as Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor: Extraits de Pièces de chair II (1959). The pianist performs these pieces on the keyboard and in the piano by plucking, scraping, and striking the strings by hand (gloved, on occasion) and with various metal and wooden objects. One piece requires the pianist to perform dexterous, rapid passages on the tops of the keys in such a way as to make as few notes audible as possible. Those that sound, then, are by chance. The distinguished musicologist Paul Henry Lang said he was "scared" when hearing these pieces.
The listener who wants to hear new and advanced music without traveling to the European festivals or New York City has recourse to recordings. The complete works of Webern and most of Schoenberg and Berg are available, and music of the younger composers Milton Babbitt, Boulez, Cage, Morton Feldman, Koenig, Luigi Nono, Gunther Schuller, and Stockhausen has been recorded. Ann Arbor audiences will remember lectures and concerts of Babbitt, Dallapiccola, Gerhard, and Stockhausen in recent years and will note that Berio, Cage, and Tudor are scheduled for appearances here this month.
The work of the musical avant-garde may be open to criticism for its over-abundance of mathematical pseudo-physics or theatrical outrages such as scraping bar stools, but its influence on younger and older composers alike is considerable. Even the conservative Samuel Barber is studying Boulez, and contemporary classic Igor Stravinsky has employed numerous serial techniques in his recent music. Among influential avant-garde music of the past fifteen years, I would mention Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître, Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum and Movements for Piano, Gerhard's Symphony no. 2, Dallapiccola's Canti di Liberazione, and perhaps the two string quartets of Elliott Carter. It will be surprising if, in the next few decades, some of these works do not achieve the stature held today by Bartók's Violin Sonata and six string quartets, Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat, Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, Webern's Variations for Orchestra, and Berg's Wozzeck and Violin Concerto. Our complex and often confusing contemporary musical world has borne some healthy children.
CHAPTER 2Manifestations: Light and Sound
Milton Cohen's Space Theatre
(1961)
Manifestations: Light and Sound made its official debut at the Alumni Memorial Hall of the University of Michigan Museum of Art on January 11, 1961. Manifestations brings together elements of painting, cinema, theater, and concert in an artistic experience of music and imagery wholly its own. Its materials include projectors for specially created films and slides, prisms and mirrors, and electronic music equipment, all assembled under a large translucent dome where the audience enters a new experience of light and sound. At times the shifting colors and myriad images — realistic, surrealistic, or abstract — move over the entire span of the dome, extending beyond the observer's visual periphery. Suddenly the imagery dissolves into sparse, brilliant points of light that shimmer elusively from a seemingly infinite distance. The electronic music, composed on magnetic tape, moves through the space of the dome in a similar manner, sometimes reinforcing the visual drama, at other times playing against it in counterpoint. Most of the electronic music for Manifestations is by Robert Ashley and myself, although we have on occasion used music by Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and several other younger composers.
The originator and guiding spirit of the Space Theatre is artist Milton Cohen, faculty member of the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Design since 1957. Architects Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer designed and engineered the dome-theater areas as they evolved from the initial spheroid canopy in Cohen's East Liberty Street studio, installed in August 1959 [fig. I-1] to the portable geodesic dome now erected in the University of Michigan Museum of Art [see fig. I-3 below]. Borkin and Wehrer have also applied their ingenuity to the design and construction of the projection and lighting apparatus on a small budget. Cohen's intention for this project is to explore the mobile relationships of projected light and color in space and their dramatic integration with music. It differs from conventional theater in that it is serial and cyclic in form, dispensing with traditional introduction, climax, and conclusion. Each two-hour evening performance is open-ended, inviting the audience, in Cohen's words, "to remain as long as the experience proves invigorating."
I connected with Milton Cohen in 1957, shortly after his arrival in Ann Arbor. The previous year he had begun developing a theater based on projected images, and was seeking collaboration with composers working with innovative procedures in music. It was in Cohen's studio that year that I connected formally with Robert Ashley, who had already begun collaborations with film-maker George Manupelli. Ashley and I soon began working together for the weekly Space Theatre performances in Cohen's studio.
Early in 1958, Ashley and I also established the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor, at first largely to supply electronic music for the Space Theatre. The studio has evolved to supply original music for independent filmmakers and for commercial films, as well as to design unique "cybersonic" equipment for live-electronic concert music. It consists of three facilities: two home studios for our individual composition of electronic music, and a smaller one in Cohen's studio for his Space Theatre performances. Figure I-2 shows me in Cohen's studio at work on my Vectors — Soundblock 5 (completed 1959) with a typical equipment configuration: a portable tape recorder, amplifier, turntable, sound generator, and assorted tape samples and loops.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures, xi,List of Musical Examples, xiv,
List of Tables, xv,
Foreword by Christian Wolff, xvii,
Introduction by Michelle Fillion, xxi,
Preamble. Gordon Mumma:,
A Short Biography by Michelle Fillion, xxvii,
PART I. UNMARKED INTERCHANGE: ANN ARBOR AND THE ONCE YEARS (1960–66),
Editor's Introduction, 1,
1. Music's Avant-Garde: What's New? (1960), 3,
2. Manifestations: Light and Sound: Milton Cohen's Space Theatre (1961), 8,
3. An Electronic Music Studio for the Independent Composer (1964), 14,
4. The ONCE Festival and How It Happened (1967), 23,
5. The ONCE Group's Unmarked Interchange and Night Train (1967), 36,
PART II. CYBERSONICS AND THE SONIC ARTS (1966–75),
Editor's Introduction, 39,
6. Creative Aspects of Live-Performance Electronic Music Technology (1967), 43,
7. Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer 1965 (1967), 50,
8. Two Cybersonic Works: Horn and Hornpipe(1970–71/2012), 54,
9. Music in America 1970: Points of View (1970), 63,
10. A Brief Introduction to the Sound-Modifier Console and Sun(flower) Burst (1972), 65,
11. What We Did Last Summer: A Commentary on ICES 1972 (1973), 73,
12. Two Decades of Live-Electronic Music, 1950–70 (1975), 79,
13. Witchcraft, Cybersonics, and Folkloric Virtuosity (1975), 91,
PART III. IN THE CUNNINGHAM CIRCLE,
Editor's Introduction, 99,
14. A Day on the Road with the Cunningham Dance Company (1971), 105,
15. From Where the Circus Went (1975), 109,
16. Robert Rauschenberg in the Creative Fields of the Cunningham Dance Company (2012), 137,
17. With Tudor the Organist (2013), 144,
18. David Tudor the Composer along the Path to Rainforest (2006/2013), 151,
PART IV. NOT WANTING TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT JOHN (CAGE),
Editor's Introduction, 157,
19. Cage as Performer (2001), 159,
20. John Cage, Electronic Technology, and Live-Electronic Music (2012), 166,
21. Twenty-Five Minutes with John Cage, 179,
PART V. LATIN AMERICA,
Editor's Introduction, 193,
22. Innovation in Latin American Electro-Acoustical Music (1986), 195,
23. Briefly about Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano (1977), 199,
24. Uruguayan Diary: The Cuarto Curso Latinoamericano de Música Contemporánea, Cerro del Toro, Uruguay (January 3–17, 1975), 207,
PART VI. AN AMERICAN GALLERY,
Editor's Introduction, 233,
25. Nelson Mix for Gordon Mumma (1966), 235,
26. Gordon Mumma's Stovepipe for Richard Nelson (1970), 236,
27. Good Times Up on the Farm (1969/2013), 237,
28. Merce and Ludwig (1971), 239,
29. On the Ives Railroad (1977), 240,
30. A Visit to Mount Olympus with David Tudor (1996), 245,
31. On George Cacioppo (2006), 247,
32. Earle's Worlds (2007), 251,
Three Sonic Arts Union Sketches (2013), 253,
33. Speaking Robert Ashley, 254,
34. Crossings with David Behrman, 255,
35. Becoming Alvin Lucier, 256,
36. Working with Pauline Oliveros (2013), 258,
PART VII. MUMMA ON MUMMA,
Editor's Introduction, 261,
37. Notes on My Creative Procedures (2009/2013), 263,
Appendix. Selective List of Gordon Mumma's Musical Compositions, 283,
Notes, 297,
Works Cited, 315,
Index, 323,