Last night in the Victoria Theatre, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (SFTMF) presented the first in its annual schedule of four concerts. For those unfamiliar with the institution, this is still the only festival in the country devoted to the performance of synthesized audio compositions. The word “tape” reflects back on the early days when synthesis involved capturing sounds on audio tape, using technology to transform those recordings, and creating compositions through processes of editing and playback. All of the music on SFTMF programs is now in digital form, manipulated by hardware and software to project each composition onto an array of 24 high-end loudspeakers through real-time analog and digital control.
The earliest composer on the program was Pierre Schaeffer, who first began experimenting with the manipulation and transformation of recorded tapes while working as an engineer for Radiodiffusion Française, now expanded to Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (French radio and television broadcasting, RTF). SFTMF presented one of Schaeffer’s earliest compositions in what would later be known as the “musique concrète” (concrete music) movement. The program included “Étude pathétique,” the last of five études to be broadcast on October 5, 1948 under the title Concert de bruits (concert of noises). The piece was created from recordings of sauce pans, canal boats, singing, speech, harmonica, and piano; and, because of the first of these sources, it also became known as the “Étude aux casseroles.” This was originally a monophonic recording, whose SFTMF projection guided the attentive listener through both the sources and the transformations that constituted Schaeffer’s pioneering work.
The other contribution from the twentieth century was Pauline Oliveros’ 1992 “Poem of Change.” This amounted to her own spoken reflections about sexuality punctuated by “concrete” recordings. Her use of such sources served as a reflection of earlier years, when she served as the first director of the Mills College Tape Music Center. Nevertheless, this was a creation in which the tape music was there to provide a context for Oliveros’ narration of her highly personal prose-poem.
Two of the Azur trains in the Montreal subway system (photograph by Mtlfiredude, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
Given the richness of content, I chose to stay for only the first half of last night’s program in the hope that memory would not be overloaded by the diversity of the offerings. The remaining three compositions I experienced were all recent works. The most extensive of these was Robert Normandeau’s “Tunnel azur,” commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Azur metro system. This system is distinguished by having cars that run on rubber wheels. Nevertheless, Normandeau managed to collect a wide diversity of noises by wandering the tunnels of the system when the cars were out of service. Those noises were then supplemented by the low tones of an octobass, basically a double bass on steroids first created in Paris in 1850. Normandeau called his composition (which he revised in 2018) “a cinema for the ear;” and the intensity of its dynamics made listening a deeply-moving experience. There was similar impact in Maggi Payne’s 2018 “Heat Shield,” which was created on four distinct channels. The intensity of her dynamics provided a reflection (pun intended) of the extreme temperature levels that had to be endured by experimental satellites sent out to collect information about the sun.
In a lighter vein Sangwon Lee’s “Torturing Piano” amounted to a satirical reflection on those extended techniques that require a pianist to play the instrument from the inside. Lee’s stereo tape amounted to a guided tour of those techniques both juxtaposed and superposed. He also inserted a few measures of a Chopin performance to add a sly wink to the seriousness that most pianists bring to their execution of those extended techniques. This was the opening selection on the program, and it allowed listeners to settle into the basic projection technique of the performances before the intensity of the following selections got under way.
No comments:
Post a Comment