CSM 05: Electroacoustic Music
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Item Open Access Tristram Cary: Continuum: Electronic Music For Stereo Tape (1969)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1969) Composer: Tristram Cary; Stines, Niven"Continuum is a piece of pure electronic music, realised in my studio at Fressingfield, Suffolk, with voltage controlled and manual equipment, some designed and built by myself. The piece was commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival and designed for large spaces. It was premiered in a school chapel, and one of the best English environments for it has been the Round House in London. It stands in the middle of my 'voltage control' period before I e rune eriously involved in computers. Continuum is about time, seen as stretching endles ly in both directions from our position as we move through it. The continuum sound is a mesh of over forty pitches, undulating at different amounts and speeds, and all the material for the piece is extracted from this dense but flexible cluster. There are three episodes, imagined as slices of time captured like camera snapshots, briefly emerging with full clarity, decaying and again returning to the stream. (See Diagram 1). During the prelude distant, distorted sounds are heard behind the continuum mesh, as if trying to penetrate it, and the pitch and energy of the mesh gradually reduce until they do. The first episode emerges from this point, and modulated, short sounds combined with long, almost melodic lines rise to a climax, at which point a clang-like motive (already heard distantly in the prelude) is added. The three motives then fall rapidly away, losing energy until the continuum reasserts itself, though not at full strength. The mesh is again interrupted for the second episode by a new motive (also derived from the continuum) of 'chopped' undulations making changing pitch patterns at different speeds. These are superimposed, giving an increasingly dense texture, and earlier motives from episode 1 are also added (with changes), so that the piece gradually gets richer by including 'memories' of older events. After episode 2 there is a moment of silence - the continuum is still there, but we have lost sight of it. The longest and most elaborate episode is the third, containing (as before) new material as well as new forms of earlier motives. At the climax the whole mesh is heard as a solid wall of sound, with no undulations. As with the earlier episodes, the texture gradually falls and weakens, until in the coda the continuum recovers to full strength. some of the motives (including the 'clang') being heard again in versions similar to those of the prelude. I concluded that the only logical way of ending this piece was simply to stop; any kind of tidy finish would destroy the idea of continuity. To use the camera analogy again, the lens cap suddenly blots out the view, but we know it is still there." -- Tristram CaryItem Open Access Peter Tahourdin: San Diego Canons (1983)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1983) Composer: Peter Tahourdin; Stines, Niven"I came to Australia from Britain in 1964 at the age of 35. A few years afterwards, in a radio interview, I was asked if living and working in Australia had influenced my music. I replied that the influence was an indirect one, that I felt freer in Australia to explore and expeti ment. Being so far from Europe had lifted the burden of the immense weight of the European tradition, so that I no longer felt artistically constrained by both the splendour and the limitations inherent in that tradition. It was not that I had ceased to value the richness of European music, nor that I wished to deny my cultural heritage, but that I felt I had simply escaped from its dominance. At the time I found it ironic, though perfectly understandable and desirable, that many of the students I taught in Australia sought to go to Europe, to rtudy there and to experience at first hand the same tradition I had so recently been glad to leave behind me. Now, twenty years later, I find that one of the glories of Australian music is its diversity; it explores many paths and owes allegiance to many different artistic sensibilities, whether they stem from within our own culture and environment, from Asia, from America or from Europe. This diversity, I believe, gives to Australian music a unique vitality that sadly is often appreciated rather better in other countries than it is in Australia itself. Australian painting, literature and cinema have already become firmly established in the international arena Australian music, happily, is beginning to follow suit. When foreign performers bring our own music back to us, no doubt we will more readily celebrate the musical riches that are so rapidly expanding amongst us. This suggests, of course, that Australian music has a cosmopolitan outlook, that it is healthily extrovert and dominated by no single tradition. It is this, I believe, that is ainong its greatest strengths. In my own music, given my English background, it is not surprising that my European roots are strongly evident. But in the twenty-four years I have lived in Australia, I have had plenty of opportunity to look around me. I have visited (and learnt from) America, India and South-East Asia, and I have returned to Europe. There is certainly a danger in diversity: it can too easily lead to ghbness, producing a half digested mishmash of nothing in particular. I hope this has not been so in the manner in which external influences have impinged upon me and have been reflected in my work. San Diego Canons came from a five week visit to the University of California at San Diego in 1980. In the Center for Music Experiment there is a unique collection of percussion instruments, c�reated over a number of years by various visitors to the University: suspended wooden discs of different sizes1 a similar array of metal discs, a drum supporting a row of steel rods that produce an ethereal scale of ascending pitches as the rods become progressively shorter, and of course many others. One evening I spent a couple of hours playing and recording these instruments, subsequently composing a short tape piece from the material I had recorded. However, I was not entirely satisfied with the result and decided to make another piece from the same material. In 1982 I visited Bali and, like many others, became fascinated by the life and culture I found there. Early in 1983, with the sound of Balinese music still strong in Beyond the moon Beyond the darkness Starkness my mind, I tackled the San Diego material again. The piece that resulted is a sequence of two and four part canons that links together these diverse percussive sonorities. Though originally designed for four spatially separate channels, the piece works well, I think, in its stereo format." -- Peter TahourdinItem Open Access Ian Fredericks: Some Quiet Graveyard (1984)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1984) Composer: Ian Fredericks; Stines, Niven"Some Quiet Graveyard was inspired by thoughts of the awesomeness of the universe. Hanging raggedly off an insignificant star in a minor galaxy somewhere on the outskirts of the universe is a minor planet which on a cosmic time scale can at best be considered' some quiet graveyard'. Beyond the moon Beyond the darkness Starkness One small cloud of dust Just Some Quiet Graveyard Beyond the spee of light. In most cases when I compose a piece I use the work as a study for the exploration of some aspect of the technology. This leads to a very intimate relationship with the technology and often involves design and construction of equipment and/or the development of computer software. A feedback situation then exists where musical requirements directly dictate technological research and design and these in turn modify the musical possibilities. Two things were of special interest in Some Quiet Graveyard. First, all waveforms used in the piece were generated using a synthesis technique which I call 'continuous dynamic additive synthesis'. This was implemented on an Apple II computer with Mountain Computer music cards installed. A real time performance instrument was designed which allows a joystick continuously to vary the relative levels of a family of sine waves which form the harmonic of the sound. By moving the joystick during performance, timbre constantly changes. All sounds in Some Quiet Graveyard were generated using this device - not by changing a 'voice patch' but by 'playing' the joystic. The second interesting feature was the continuous spatial manipulation of all sounds. Several performance devices were designed and built for this. One was a foot pedal operated device which varies parameters relating to the relative distance of a sound source from the listener. This was used to generate envelopes for the drum-like sounds. These 'notes' were then panned into four channels using a small computer built for the purpose. Hand controlled devices were used for the melodic lines. The end result of this technical work was a studio full of ~tuff which allowed me to play the various musical lines onto multi-track tape recorders while continuously manipulating timbre and spatial position. The versatility of such performance control considerably influenced the composition of Some Quiet Graveyard. Melodic movement is related to spatial movement in several ways: melodic intervals are seen as variations in Doppler Shift, dynamic range (particularly crescendo and diminuendo) is derived from the 'nearness' of a note to the listener and melodic climax is heightened by causing the instruments to move close to the listener. A counterpoint between spatial movement and melodic movement is established using only one melodic line. For the concert performance of this piece, four channel playback is used and a visual element is included. This consists of the projection of computer generated images derived from photographs of stars and galaxies. The colour of the projection is continuously varied by altering the relative brightness of red, green and blue projections which are then mixed to a composite colour. The mixing process here is similar to the process of mixing relative levels of harmonics to derive a composite sound tone for timbre synthesis as described above. The result is a close relationship between musical timbre and image colour. This piece is dedicated to my wife Dawn." -- Ian FredericksItem Open Access David Worrall: Butterflies Flutter By (1987)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1987) Composer: David Worrall; Stines, Niven"Most of the material for Butterflies Flutter By was composed in May 1986 as part of a larger work, A Sensitive Chaos, for movement artists and dynamic visual projections. This present realisation, created in June 1987, makes extensive use of space as an integral component of the composition. The primary driving force of the work is rhythmic and spatial. The work consists of three texture layers each of which is made by the concatenation of many small phrases of different time lengths. The lilting 'triplet' rhythm is in fact made by juxtaposing durations in Fibonacci ratios (5:8, 8:5 etc.). Each small phrase is repeated many times. Because the number of repetitions is constantly varying (most often prime multiples), it is not immediately obvious when the changes in phrase will occur. In the original four channel version, these layers are being constantly panned around the listening plane, in spatial counterpoint. This stereo version retains some of the feeling of this counterpoint. The coda breaks the flow of this counterpoint and provides an unexpected twist. The work was composed using a Fairlight CMI-2X, an 8 bit sampling computer, using its MCL control language. The sounds of the work were made by sampling woodwind instruments (mainly flutes) and processing these using looping and filtering techniques." -- David WorrallItem Open Access John Exton: Breathing Space (1972)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1972) Composer: John Exton; Stines, Niven"Breathing Space was created in the recording studio of the University of Surrey and the electronic music studio of University College, Cardiff. The piece was originally produced in a four channel version, and is here mixed down to two channels. It is a fantasy based upon the quietest sounds of the human voice (sighs, whispers, etc.) extended, imitated and punctuated by other sounds generated either percussively or electronically. There is thus developed a complete spectrum of imtlar quiet sounds, ranging through the human to the mechanical and the synth ic. This sound spectrum is continuous, the different classes of sounds merging imperceptibly into each other. We live in an environment which is becoming progressively (and insidiously) more artificial, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to know whether the sounds that surround us are of genuinely human origm, or made by semi-human operations on tools or machines, or are totally synthetic, generated without human intervention at all. This is the situation which Breathing Space explores. There are no firm landmarks or points of reference within its sound material and, similarly, the piece has no definite beginning or end. Time simply flows with the passing sounds." -- John Exton