This morning I found myself reflecting on the final program for this year’s San Francisco Tape Music Festival, which will take place this coming Sunday evening. That program will begin with works by two particularly inventive (and controversial) composers from the last century, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. I first became acquainted with Cage when I went on mushroom hunts with him in Boulder, Colorado. (My thesis advisor at the time was teaching a summer course at the University there and had invited me to join him as teaching assistant.) My encounter with Cage led to a spurt in both my writing, particularly about the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and experiments with tape music. My encounters with Stockhausen’s music, on the other hand, were few and far between; and, to the best of my knowledge, we were never in the same place at the same time.
I think it would be fair to say that both of these composers believed strongly that the immediacy of performance should always take precedence over any attempts at “capture” through recording technology (video, as well as audio). Nevertheless, when I learned, back in the Nineties, that there would be a “complete edition” of Stockhausen’s works on compact disc, I tried to keep up with individual albums as they were released. To be fair, however, I never saw this project through to its completion, which resulted in 106 albums.
Cover design of the HYMNEN album (Stockhausen Edition no. 10, from the COMPLETE EDITION CD CATALOG)
One of the albums I did collect was the two-CD account of HYMNEN: Elektronische und Konkrete Music. This was a two-hour reflection on national anthems from around the world, which combined instrumental performance with a diversity of electronic equipment for both synthesis and transformations. For those that do not already know, “concrete music” was a genre of tape music based on recordings of natural (concrete) sounds, which may or may not also involve instrumental sounds. In HYMNEN the techniques of synthesis and transformations pretty much obliterated any brief moments when a phrase of one of those national anthems might be recognized. Nevertheless, the score was definitely intended for performance, but in a setting in which both sound and lighting could be projected in ways that would surround the audience. Furthermore, there were three different versions of performance; and the album of four CDs that I had acquired accounted for only the first two of them.
Over the course of the decades that followed my purchase of HYMNEN, my interest in its performance has come and gone. These days I would say that the interest is wistful but not particularly proactive. For the most part, I tend to be reluctant to take a “deep dive” into anything of epic proportions (and Stockhausen was never shy when it came to creating on an epic scale). For that matter any interest in the “complete edition” has pretty much faded, simply because there are too many other things clamoring for my attention!
Indeed, listening to the HYMNEN CDs reminded me of an experience with Earplay that dates back to the spring of 2019. That occasion was an all-premiere program entitled Sound and Shadow. One of the works on the program, “Feel” by Australian composer Claire Jordan triggered (for me at least) memories of Third Stream Jazz. This involved encouraging jazz combos to jam with serial techniques. Things did not turn out very well; and, at that time, I compared it with the promise of transportation by monorail, which I (and many others) described as “an idea of the future whose time quickly passed.”
I suppose one could say that Third Stream was an attempt to move into the future while informed with techniques of the past. Obviously, everything we do (including the way in which I am writing this) is informed by the past. What matters is not whether or not we are cognizant of the past but how we assess our knowledge for application into the future. My guess is that, for better or worse, we can only muddle our way into the future. The good news is that at least a few are better at muddling than others!
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