McGill Electronic Music Studio 35th Anniversary: Tornado -- Electroacoustic Compositions (review)

Hugh Le Caine is well known as one of the pioneers of electronic music, working from the 1940s through the 1970s on a series of novel instruments and studio devices. He remained ensconced as a researcher at the National Research Council of Canada throughout his career, but he was nonetheless instrumental in supporting the establishment of the first electronic music studios in Canada. He donated copies of his devices, and worked with the musicians associated with the studios to develop new ones, or modified versions of existing ones, tailored to the needs/desires of his collaborators. The studio at the University of Toronto began operations in 1959, and the one at McGill University in Montreal was launched in 1964.

It is the McGill EMS that is celebrated in this two-CD set, issued in 2001. Originally intended to signal the 35th anniversary of the studio, work on combing the studio archives for a representative historical collection of pieces began in 1999 under the direction of studio director alcides lanza. It is certainly appropriate that Hugh Le Caine be given the opening spot in the collection, as he was a composer as well as an engineer. His compositions are often dramatic, at times humorous, and Paulution, from 1972, is no exception. This piece's moniker, a pun that includes reference to then-studio director, Paul Pedersen, comes with a subtitle, "Charnel No. 5" ("a building or chamber in which bodies or bones are deposited"). The music was produced with his Polyphone instrument, a three-octave touch-sensitive keyboard capable of 36-voice polyphony with each oscillator tunable independently and provided with its own waveform shaper, all functions being voltage controlled. The sounds of this short piece are remarkably rich, given the limited palette of electronic tones, and sensitively shaped.

In the early days of electronic music studios, the particular technology installed at each facility strongly influenced the music produced. In the case of the McGill EMS, this relative distinctiveness, strongly shaped by the Le Caine instruments such as the Polyphone, continued through to the onset of the digital era, when the Synclavier became a central component of the studio. Along with the technology, though, the "sound" of the studio tends to be shaped by the particular aesthetic and cultural confluence of the people attached to it. The first director of the McGill studio was Istvan Anhalt, a Hungarian-Canadian composer with a strong interest in exploring the limits of vocal utterance and performance. His work included on this set, Canto (1967), is a "creative reduction" of a poem by Eldon Grier for chamber choir and tape. The voices recite rather than sing, following what sound to be graphically generated contours, and the electronic sounds enhance the textures of the choir parts, occasionally contributing processed vocal pronouncements.

Paul Pederson, the second director of the studio, is, according to the liner notes, the first composer in Canada to produce a computer-generated composition. His Fantasie (1967) is a tape work commissioned to accompany a presentation of hand-painted slides by Gino Bielanski. There are references to "Shepard Scales" (perpetually ascending or descending tones), and textures built from combinations of sine waves, square waves, and white noise. Apparently, much of the piece was created on Le Caine's Spectrogram, a photo-electronic device that reads rhythmic patterns drawn on a roll of paper.

alcides lanza arrived in Montreal from Argentina by way of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and has directed of the EMS at McGill since 1974 (recently succeeded by Sean Ferguson). His energy and openness over the past 30 years have been to a large extent responsible for attracting guest composers and for motivating students to explore the potential of the facilities and their own creative capacity. As a by-product of...