Last night I went over to the Victoria Theatre to attend the second of the four concerts prepared for the 2019 San Francisco Tape Music Festival. In contrast to the offerings in this genre presented in a Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music this past November, the diversity of approaches to creating artifacts whose performance consists only of playback was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Indeed, by the time the program had advanced to its intermission, I realized that I had probably hit my capacity for retaining the many distinctive styles that I had encountered; and, in the words of a Zen proverb, I felt it best not to try to pour any more tea into a cup that was already filled.
As I had observed in the preview article I wrote for this Festival, 1969 was the year in which electronic music began to work its way into the mainstream. What had emerged as only a few pockets of activity following World War II had grown into major universities setting up “laboratories” for the genre within their music departments and professional studios at which skilled individuals could spend more time on creation, rather than just providing a faithful account of what vocalists and instrumentalists put into a microphone. In order to assess the progress of the “state of the art,” last night I was able to listen to one composition created in that watershed year, another from 1998, and five from the current century, three of which were completed last year.
The 1969 composition was Jon Appleton’s “Newark Airport Rock.” Appleton was the prime mover in setting up one of those aforementioned laboratories at Dartmouth College. He is now the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music there, still running a program in electroacoustic music that takes a multidisciplinary approach to music, computer science, and engineering.
Whether or not Appleton conceived of “Newark Airport Rock” as a “response” to the “call” of Pierre Schaeffer’s pioneering “Étude aux chemins de fer,” created in 1948, Appleton’s piece definitely reflects the spirit of Schaeffer’s musique concrète style, taking recordings of “real-world” sounds and transforming them into listening experiences. Such compositions work best when the listener can identify at least some of the sources captured to provide the material for subsequent creation, and the sounds of a busy airport are as recognizable today as they were when Appleton first recorded them. At the same time those with a sense of history could appreciate the extent to which Appleton was aware of how Schaeffer applied his techniques to railroad sounds. Appleton’s piece was a “response” because he could conjure up new techniques of his own applicable to his more advanced equipment (which included his use of a Moog synthesizer to provide an “accompaniment” for the airport sounds he had recorded).
The other composer on last night’s program with clear roots in Schaeffer’s work was Annette Vande Gorne, currently living in Belgium. After conservatory studies at Mons and Brussels, she moved to Paris to study with Schaeffer. In 2004 she created Figures d’espace, a fourteen-minute suite, each of whose movements explores a different connotation of the concept of space. Last night’s program presented four of those movements, each of which offered its own approach to mixing as a realization of spatial characteristics. This was also a composition in which amplitude was a key rhetorical factor, providing sonorities that may well have induced physically visceral responses in some listeners.
A more recent composer following in Appleton’s footsteps is Alistair MacDonald. “Final Times” provides an account of the entire city of Glasgow based on many of the techniques that Appleton engaged in working with the sources he captured at Newark Airport. MacDonald, however, seemed more interested in providing clear accounts of all of his sources before then venturing into editing and mixing techniques. The result is somewhat akin to those travelogue “shorts” that used to be shown in movie houses before beginning the main attraction. Even when the sources come from unfamiliar sources, one could still associate them with familiar points of reference, making for an engaging approach to a style that MacDonald calls “cinema for the ears.”
The most intense of the offerings I experienced was Eli Stine’s “No Where.” This was composed for eight separate channels and requires specific loudspeaker placement to account to establishing a sense of place. This was definitely the most visceral of the pieces I experienced. Lasting less than seven minutes, it came close to pushing my personal limit of endurance. Nevertheless, I had to admire the piece for the impact it had mustered.
Maggi Payne’s “Quicksilver” was almost as intense. However, it was limited to only two channels, which were then directed to different speakers in the Victoria space through real-time control. Payne also showed a keener sense of rhythm than was encountered in “No Where;” and the projection of the source channels may have been conceived in the interest of bringing her rhythmic patterns to listener attention.
The other two recent works provided more playful approaches to creation. Brendan Glasson’s “Here I Will Teach You How To” was based on language learning recordings; and he turned the deadpan repetitiveness of those recordings into an amusing exercise of wit. Equally amusing was “Tape Music for Children” by the Headlights duo of Derek Gedalecia and Aurora Josephson. The program note for this piece amounted to instructions for a “listening exercise.” Since all tapes were played in total darkness, one had to have familiarized oneself with those instructions to realize that they could be applied to the tape composition; but just knowing the idea behind the game made it worth playing, even if some of the specifics were either ignored or forgotten.
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