Sunday, January 12, 2020

“Tape Music” in the 21st Century

Last night in the second of the four concerts being presented at the Victoria Theatre by the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (SFTMF), the earliest of the twelve compositions on the program was created in 1996; and two of the compositions were only completed at the beginning of this year. It is therefore highly probable that, with possibly two exceptions, no form of physical audio tape was involved in the creation of any of those compositions. As I observed yesterday, the concept of tape music has more to do with methodology than with media. Drawing upon the pioneering musique concrète (concrete music) techniques of Pierre Schaeffer, that methodology involves “capturing” sounds from sound-producing resources that interest the composer, using technology (which may take the form of hardware or software) to transform those captured sounds, and creating new sounds by applying editing techniques to prepare for playback. Those twelve compositions presented last night made it abundantly clear that this is a genre that continues to benefit from highly innovative and engaging thinking.

Reading many of the descriptions in the program book, it became just as clear that these composers all had a gift for acute listening. They all used their gifts in different ways; but there was a prevailing sense that day-to-day experience tended, more often than not, to provide the initial foundation of inspiration to create a “tape music” composition. For example, Natasha Barrett’s “Urban Melt in Park Palais Meran” began by capturing the sound of a table tennis game taking place in a public park in the city of Graz. The sound of the ball being knocked back and forth was unmistakeable, so familiar that an attentive listener could recognize Barrett’s transformational techniques (not to mention the rhetorical sense of humor emerging from those techniques). Listening to the roughly ten minutes of the piece easily became an engaging and amusing journey from the ordinary into the extraordinary. A similar experience emerged in Michelle Moeller’s “Spoke,” based on plucking the spokes of a bicycle wheel as if they were the strings of a harp.

In a totally different vein, “Tick Tock Fugue” was a latter-day reflection on the “word jazz” techniques of Ken Nordine. Nordine could improvise his poems with the same prolific proficiency that Jerry Garcia could improvise his guitar riffs (so it should be no surprise that the two of them joined forces for one of their performance events). However, when working in a radio studio Nordine could also apply tape editing techniques to turn his improvisations into elegant polyphonic webs; and “Tick Tock Fugue” provided a latter-day perspective on the richness of that polyphony (even if the result was about as remote from the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach as could be imagined)!

Poetry also figured in Thom Blum’s “To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room.” The title is taken from the title of a poem by Bob Kaufman, and the captured sounds include those of Roscoe Lee Brown reading that poem. However, Kaufman’s son was named after Charlie Parker; so the poem also reflects a latent kinship between the free-verse expostulations of the beat poets and Parker’s capacity for wild and remote improvisational departures from familiar tunes. In Blum’s creation Parker-the-saxophonist is about as remote as Parker-the child. Rather, the “concrete” sounds behind the reading reflect a father-son relationship that is as passionate as it is poignant.

There was one short piece that tried to bring the old recording techniques back into the picture. Danielle Savage’s “Schizo Phonia” was based on the process of recovering sounds from old audio tape. In her “document” of this process, one hears not only the restored sounds but also the interruptions of the switches being operated to control the tape player. The result emerged as an imaginative approach to capturing both past and present through a single foundation of auditory experience.

These summaries only scratch the surface of the diverse abundance of listening experiences afforded by the first of the two concerts SFTMF presented last night; but it is clear that, through advances in technology, “tape music” is as vividly fruitful a genre as it had promised to be when Schaeffer first began to play with the equipment in the radio studio where he worked in the years following World War II.

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