Tristram Cary: Continuum: Electronic Music For Stereo Tape (1969)

Abstract

"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 Cary Show more