COMPOSING FROM MEMORY: the convergence of archive creation and electroacoustic composition
Abstract
first published in Journal Organised Sound, 12/20/2005
The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project begun in 1996 by the author and his wife, Barbara Cassidy, captures a first-person history of many pioneering electroacoustic music composers, scientists, and engineers from 1950 to present. Transcript excerpts from The Archive are presented. Simultaneous with the founding of The Video Archive, the author began composing a series of pieces that draw on archival materials (from within and without The Video Archive) in a number of ways. Some possible compositional opportunities and approaches are mentioned and explored as embodied in the author’s Left To His Own Devices (1996), and Crossing Boundaries (2000).
The act of composing has always engaged memory. For most of the history of Western music though, this has primarily meant the working out of the composer’s memories of other music. The ability of electroacoustic music to build structures from absolutely any recorded material allows it to reference memory in new ways – to create layers of meaning in dialog with one another. Recordings of older music can be restructured into new works, to produce deliberate musical commentary on our past. And layers of text (spoken and/or sung) can add a poetic dimension – a metamusical narrative aspect. The very first electroacoustic composers recognized this possibility, but some fifty years on, a convergence of forces has led some of us to become preoccupied with the possibilities.
With all of recorded history at our disposal, the “themes” we might invoke in a new composition are endless. And once material is chosen, a composer can decide whether or not a piece reveals, even revels in its sources material. Just how much the material will remain a personal secret, and how much will be a public conversation becomes a central compositional decision. When a composer chooses iconic recordings and texts, the overt conversation with the past can capture the power of shared, communal memory. The challenge though is to do more than simply quote well-known sources and take a free ride on fame. A composer needs to digest the material and come up with a piece that through manipulation and recontextualization has something of its own to say.
My own music to date has explored a broad spectrum of possible solutions, from pieces that extract some essential quality of well-known material (such as And It Flew Upside-Down, 1994) to those that recontextualize iconic “samples” (‘Scuse Me for electric guitar and electronic sound, 1998 which is saturated with motives from Purple Haze), to a series of composer portraits (Left To His Own Devices, 1996, Milton Babbitt; Portrait of the Artist, 1997, John Lennon; Wolpe Variations, 2003, Stefan Wolpe; Into Your Ears, 2004, Mario Davidovsky), all of which draw upon interview and oral history sources as well as the subject’s music.
This series of biographically inspired compositions, most likely not by coincidence (although it seemed that way to me at the time), was begun just prior to my being swept into the creation of The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project that I have co-curated with my wife, Barbara Cassidy since 1996. The Archive is currently comprised of about fifty hours of digitally recorded interviews, primarily on American subjects, composers and engineers across a broad spectrum. Our mission is to capture a first-person history of the pioneering composers, scientists, and engineers from 1950 to present. Age and illness have since claimed several interview subjects and many other potential subjects. Luciano Berio, Earl Brown, Herbert Brun, David Lewin, and Iannis Xenakis have all died in recent years, underscoring the urgency of this work.
To date, The Archive includes Bebe Barron (who collaborated with John Cage, filmmaker Maya Deren, and choreographer Merce Cunningham); Milton Babbitt; Mario Davidovsky; David Smith, founder of Sequential Circuits; Mel Powell, (who performed with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and then established studios at Yale and CalArts); John Pierce and Max Matthews of Bell Laboratories, Morton Subotnik, and many others. The interviews have an informal, conversational quality, and often reveal much more about the subjects than their ideas about art, music, and technology. Some excerpts give a sense of the material:
Max Matthew, Bell Laboratories: I had the idea that if we could digitize speech… and get it into the computer, that we could simulate the new telephones…then, we went to a … concert… John [Pierce] looked at me and said, “The computer could do better than this, why don’t you write a program?” So I went away and wrote Music I, which did not do better… And I guess the real question, which I often ask, is why at that time we didn’t give up and forget the whole thing. There were two reasons. One was a mathematical theorem of Claude Shannon’s, which basically proved that…any sound that the human ear could hear could be made this way… The other thing was the encouragement of a number of very, I think, perceptive musicians and composers… Edgard Varèse, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Milton Babbitt.
Dave Smith: Sequential was the first, technically to ship a MIDI synthesizer in December of ’82, then at January of ’83, at the NAMM show, Roland brought over their JP6 and they plugged it into the Prophet 600, so it was the first MIDI connection, and it worked!
Bebe Barron: For a wedding present somebody gave us a wire recorder, so we were indeed very lucky when we were able to obtain the very first tape recorder in the world… in about 1949…we shot off to New York, moved to the Village. Anyway, we started a recording studio. We built almost all the equipment ourselves because there wasn’t any to buy, really. And it turned out the studio became something of a center. John [Cage] brought… Stockhausen, Edgar Varèse. Lou Harrison was a round a lot. He gave a name to our first piece…the Heavenly Menagerie.
ã 1996-98 Eric Chasalow and Barbara Cassidy
About 1997, shortly after the first round of interviews had been conducted, I was given a small grant to produce some courseware at Brandeis University. I decided to produce a multimedia timeline of the history of electroacoustic music, and chose to highlight some of the more personal interview moments – those that might draw students into the world of these pioneers at work in their studios. Since I did all of the video editing myself, it is perhaps not surprising that when I returned to work on my own music, these texts stuck in my mind and became wrapped up in the creative process. It all felt very similar to the way that poetry can work its way into the subconscious and instigate musical shapes.
Texts from oral history constitute a kind of “found poetry”. Casual spoken phrases may have little meaning in the context of a long interview. But isolated and recontextualized, one phrase can influence another, emphasizing the music of the word-sounds and the metamusic of constructed text narrative as it unfolds. Once one steps out of the realm of archivist and into the creative role of composer, the distortion of meaning for expressive purposes becomes, not only appropriate, but essential. In my own case, I have chosen two different approaches regarding respect for the words of the interview subject. Most often, I create portraits that, while they distort certain personality for emphasis, attempt to remain faithful to the historical record. In other pieces, I create a whole new script, where the subject’s voice is used primarily for its musical qualities, and the spoken text no longer refers to an individual subject, but rather to some larger idea.
Two pieces included on a 2003 New World Records CD, Left To His Own Devices, embody my two different approaches to oral history-based composition. The title composition, an homage to Milton Babbitt on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, is a somewhat satirical composer portrait, while Crossing Boundaries, commissioned to mark the millennium, turns archive voices into thematic archetypes in order to take on the larger ideas appropriate to the nature of the commission.
The 1996 composition, Left To His Own Devices was the first of my composer portrait pieces. The choice of Milton Babbitt as a subject was entirely organic, given my own history. From 1977 through 1985 I was fortunate to be part of the last generation mentored by the founders of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. The Center was an incredibly rich environment with a strong sense of community among the students, guest composers, teachers and staff. The staff and directors at the time included Mario Davidovsky, Bulent Arel, Alice Shields, Pril Smiley, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Milton Babbitt. Beginning during that time of intense study, I had many opportunities to internalize, not only a large number of personal aphorisms associated with Babbitt, but also the extraordinary quality of his voice in every sense of the word. The sheer force of personality, musical and otherwise, made it ripe for commentary. Furthermore, the sound of the RCA Mark II synthesizer, the instrument that “speaks” the electroacoustic music of Babbitt, seemed especially rich and idiosyncratic.
My title is a personal Babbitt reference. More than once in the 1970’s he told me that he intended to write only one more piece for tape and instrument -- a violin and tape piece entitled Left To My Own Devices. Sadly, not long after, the studio was broken into and the RCA vandalized, rendering it inoperable. The RCA was gone and the piece never written.
In Left To His Own Devices, I have combined archival interviews with Milton Babbitt that go back as far as the 1960’s with a virtual RCA synthesizer of my own creation. This has allowed me to write music that draws on quotations from Babbitt’s instrumental music but to have it “performed” by the sounds of the RCA. The text is my own composite of phrases that some of us have heard Milton speak many times over the years. In the best tradition of text setting, I have tried to intensify these phrases by building a dramatic, musical structure both from them and around them. The text moves among biography, thoughts on music in general, and an early lecture specifically about electronic music, allowing me to make musical puns between text and accompaniment.
Left To His Own Devices (1996) Eric Chasalow
to Milton Babbitt at 80
I am Milton Babbitt
the only composer from Jackson Mississippi (there was one other...)
an old-fashioned academic twelve-tone serialist (Right)
Fine, I have no quarrel with that whatsoever
It became our tradition
It changed the whole atmosphere of how we thought about music in every respect
into new Regions of thought about Time in music, about Order in music
It was susceptible to such enormous personal extensions and embodied such powerful compositional notions of time in music and order in music that as I say I remain unreconstructed and did not have to be born again...
You think about the piece, you think about the piece, you think in the piece, you think in the piece you’re still not satisfied you know if you sat down to write it you’d be forcing it you’d probably never write the piece, and then it clicks and you feel “Yeah, that’s what I want” and you start to compose
You think about the piece you think in the piece
you think you think you think you
youthinkaboutthepieceyouthinkaboutthepieceyouthinkinthepieceyouthinkinthepieceyouknowifyousatdowntowriteityou’dbeforcingityou’dprobablyneverwritethepieceandthenitclicksandyoufeel
back to my Firebird - No to my, Fireworks
you think you thinkabout you
you think about youthinkaboutthepiece
Fine! I have no quarrel with that whatsoever.
(fine...)
you think about the piece you
Ha ha Oh, I remember it well
Well the joy of the electronic medium is of course that anything which can be perceived and differentiated can be structured - and now those aspects are not susceptible to change
they’re not susceptible to change
and now those aspects are not susceptible to change (its a great and remarkable thing)
It was susceptible to such enormous personal extensions and embodied such powerful compositional notions of time in music and order in music
Quantitative Time
Of musical time
What’s the effect of time
What’s what’s what’s the
effect of time
Then you begin to concern yourself necessarily about quantitative time
What’s the effect of time on timbral relations Which make it possible for you to specify the temporal aspects of music, and therefore All of the aspects of music...
...how much time we had lost...
I grew up playing the clarinet, playing the violin, playing popular music of all kinds, arranging it writing it I don’t like kinds of music
But musical literacy is so lightly regarded, so slightly rewarded, that our superfluosness is being virtually legislated.
meant to diffuse and dismiss
This is one of those dreadful stories that one is hesitant to tell but it happens to be true (there are more than a few of us)
We have almost the paradoxical situation that very few people want to hear our music but very many want to write it
and again I think its characteristic of our situation
So I grew up as a performing musician as most of us do in this country if we’re going to end up trapped in music at all, I began composing when I was about four only because there was (a participant in the ongoing primary practice of contemporary musical creation) some blank music paper at the back of my violin exercise book,
you feel, yeah that’s what I want, and you start to compose,
If you learn to control those oscillations you don’t need any thing that has any kind of limitations
You’ll understand why the synthesis of sound, the creation of sound electronically was understood to be possible (its a great and remarkable thing) just as soon as it was understood that you could record sound
You simply have oscillations, electronic oscillations
Indeed
Change change c h a n g e
nothing and no nothing resents more than someone who knows nothing the know-nothing knows plenty of nothing and nothing’s plenty for him
We’re talking again about a composer who goes to a medium with a complete mastery of this medium to convey to it every aspect of his musical conception.
ã 1996 Suspicious Motives Music
Crossing Boundaries was commissioned by Bates College in celebration of the millennium. While I was given complete freedom to compose whatever I wished, the request was for a piece that would engage some aspect of the meaning of passing through this time. The piece responds to this request in several ways. The bits of English text that one hears are, taken individually, nonspecific. They consist primarily of aphorisms, and reminiscences, removed from context and recombined to make a counterpoint of different spaces, places and events and to give different senses of the passage of historical and musical time. Meaning is partly conveyed by the sound quality and inflection of the voice speaking the text fragment. Many of these text structures are autobiographical, but I expect each listener to take their own meaning from the way bits of text comment on one another.
Some of the text for this piece was extracted from interviews with family members, family videotapes, even answering machine tapes. Other text comes from the interviews conducted with my “figurative family”, the pioneers of electro-acoustic music and drawn from The Video Archive of Electro-acoustic Music. The archive subjects in this case are many and include, Charles Dodge, John Pierce, Max Matthews, Mel Powell, Ramon Sender, Alice Shields, Mario Davidovsky, and Milton Babbitt. Unlike the composer portraits however, knowledge of the precise sources is completely irrelevant (perhaps detrimental) to the experience of the piece.
Music is fundamentally about our experience of time passing. All of the elements that we think of as comprising music, pitch, rhythm, timbre, etc. interact to create a sense of moving through time. Expectations are built, thwarted, and fulfilled as a piece progresses, suggesting where the piece might be going and revealing surprising aspects of where it has been. Just as the text conveys different senses of time and place, the abstract musical fabric of Crossing Boundaries is concerned with different senses of time passing. Most of the piece is without a strong pulse or “beat”. It moves rhythmically from one large musical moment to the next one, usually reinforcing the phrasing of the text. From time to time a feeling a regular pulse does emerge, but this is often layered with some other pulse. In other places, just as we think we know what the “beat” is, it cuts off and we realize that what felt like fast music is actually very slow. Throughout the piece there is a constantly shifting perception of just how fast we are moving.
Crossing Boundaries consists of three large sections plus a “coda”. The first is primarily expository, setting up the fundamental conflicts of fast and slow, personal and universal, acoustical and electronic. The second section is slow and expansive, consisting primarily of a static, cyclical, and tonal two-part counterpoint – a soprano vocal line against a melodic bass. This soprano line is derived from a Hebrew chant and has been present as mid and background since the piece began. Text disappears for most of the episode to allow the chant to become foreground. The section is intentionally less articulated and meant to convey a very slow sense of the passage of time in a vast space. Section three reintroduces text and contains the densest counterpoint of the piece, with many contradictory pulses. A brief coda follows an obvious, mechanical false cadence of section three.
While text layers for Crossing Boundaries come from The Video Archive, musical sources include Hebrew chant (which maintains a ghostly presence throughout the piece), Beethoven’s piano music, improvised Jazz, analog synthesized electronic music, and distorted electric guitar. These were taken from recordings of my own performances or those of friends. While the practical reason for this was to avoid issues of copyright, it also makes the piece more strictly autobiographical. Some source samples come from old tapes I made with the campus band in 1974 at Bates College and my Jazz quartet at New England Conservatory in 1975. Some electronic sounds come from my student electronic pieces, made in the Bates College radio station, at New England Conservatory, and in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
Crossing Boundaries (2000) Eric Chasalow
Commissioned for the millennium by Bates College
Part 1.
It was 1913
(ah, back in those days)
a, 1910
1945 1969
(Hi Eric)
its getting Oh, its getting a little bit of a buzz, uh, that’s interesting , its
Say something!
There was no tradition
1944
It was so fascinating
It was puzzling, it was in some ways the beginning of a totally different relationship.
I dreamed of…
(Hebrew chant… “shalom”)
there was no way for me to connect this to tradition
I really immersed myself
By the early 1970’s I was ready to…
I wanted to project on her
And it really did teach one the futility of trying really to predict.
…unmusical bleeps and bloops
Dear friend, did you hear what I heard?
I heard him hollering my name from the back and I knew I was in trouble
GET! DOWN!
(with little or no self-esteem)
It was that kind of paranoid philosophy
I didn’t have a memory you cease to exist
yeah, yeah, yeah, be quite
you get the credit and the blame.
PART 2
I wasn’t really sure, where to go
I wanted no part of that world
and for that I’m grateful.
(whispering) oh! Oh, my! Oh, ok, oh my oh my.
It was 1913
I was ten years old, my sister six and my brother four.
When our usually bedtime arrived, we went to sleep as usual, but were awakened just after ten p.m. when father came home.
Oh, around 1955
After thinking it all over, I decided it was good for communication.
Part 3.
My mother taught me to sing harmony.
No, no.
Are we there yet?
Yes we are.
but what appealed to me most of all was her limp helplessness.
and there wasn’t any, real emotional attachment.
that’s not your problem
and it was hanging on a string.
They get on the machine, and run those through the machine.
I keep, trying to, see my way through to the other side
a picture’s worth a thousand words
No, No, no
Do something
Things got better is all I can say
well anyone with any common sense would do such and such
I use to worry about that a lot
Put a psychedelic cover on it, with a kinds of dirty pictures
You know, you want to be in control
and it burst into oscillations
and how did they do that? I wondered
its, its very, strange
you can turn it off, Eric.
Its getting very depressing, but that’s New York for you
Why was I born-
I, I can’t go back and pay that price
Lead me on!
I think, I think we’ve got it
you’ve about got it.
ã 2000 Suspicious Motives Music
Left to His Own Devices and Crossing Boundaries are but two examples of musical commentary or “parody” (in its oldest musical meaning) drawn from archival text and music. The current robust interest across disciplines in oral history and documentation makes this a particularly fertile time for composers who wish to extend the tradition of text setting in new and inventive ways through electroacoustic means.
Composer Eric Chasalow has enjoyed worldwide performances of his music, from Boston to Berlin and San Francisco to Seoul. A member of the Brandeis University faculty since 1990, Professor Chasalow directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. He produces the biennial BEAMS Electronic Music Marathon, on the Boston CyberArts Festival. He has been honored by, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bibliogaphy
Bukvic, I. 2004. Eric Chasalow: Left to His Own Devices. ARRAY, the journal of the ICMA. summer 2004, San Francisco: ICMA, 49-53.
Cassidy, B and E. Chasalow (eds.) 1996-2005. The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music. Newtonville.
Story, J. 2003. Chasalow, Left To His Own Devices. Fanfare. 26(6).
Discography
Chasalow, E. 2003. Crossing Boundaries (2000). On Left to His Own Devices. New York: New World Records, 80601-2.
Chasalow, E. 2003. Left to His Own Devices (1996). On Left to His Own Devices. New York: New World Records, 80601-2.
Chasalow, E. 2001. ‘Scuse Me (1998). On Electric Dream. M. Pavin, electric guitar. Vincenza: Intersound Records, IS01-7.
Copyright 2005, Eric Chasalow
