Music for Stanford (review)

Dexter Morrill has been active in computer music for nearly 40 years. In the early 1970s, he established a mainframe computer music studio at Colgate University in collaboration with John Chowning and Stanford University, where he had previously studied composition. About this process, the composer writes, “[o]ur studio at Colgate was in many ways a satellite of the larger Stanford system, so I could go back and forth and work at ease” (all quotations from the composer are taken from the liner notes for the disc). Mr. Morrill’s music is significantly influenced by jazz. In the late 1950s, he studied trumpet with Dizzy Gillespie and arranging with William Russo, and more recently authored a book on Woody Herman for Greenwood Press. These two often-discrete musical interests, computer music and jazz, cross-fertilize in Mr. Morrill’s music; he has, for example, collaborated with prominent jazz artists such as Stan Getz and Wynton Marsalis. As a researcher, he has focused on the analysis and synthesis of instrument tones. Commenting on this, the composer writes, “I became good friends with Jean-Claude Risset whose brilliant analysis work formed the basis of what I tried to do. My work in trumpet tone research and phrasing analysis were efforts to make some kind of contribution.”

As alluded to in the previous paragraph, Mr. Morrill’s computer music work has been conducted regularly at both Colgate University and Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Music for Stanford, the subject of this review, documents his compositional activities at Stanford between 1973 and 1995, covering a significant portion of the composer’s career. The music found on this compact disc is aesthetically diverse and has been written for a variety of media ranging from tape alone to tenor saxophone with tape to soprano with radio baton, electronics, and tape.

Getz Variations (1984), the first composition on Music for Stanford, is a piece for tenor saxophone and tape that Mr. Morrill wrote for Stan Getz; this recording features the famous saxophonist in a live outdoor performance at Stanford. J. Bradford Robinson and Barry Kernfeld describe Getz at Grove Music Online as “one of the supremely melodious improvisers in modern jazz. His style was deeply rooted in the swing period. Drawing his light, vibrato-less tone and basic approach from Lester Young, he developed a highly personal manner which, in its elegance and easy virtuosity, stood apart from the aggressive bop style of the late 1940s and 50s (grovemusic.com/).” Getz’s inimitable sound and style clearly served as Mr. Morrill’s aesthetic foundation for this composition.

Commenting on this collaboration, the composer writes, “My main concern in 1984 was how to have computer-generated sounds fit with a fabulous Jazz improviser (Stan told me early on that if it was all notated, I should get someone else to ‘read it’) . . . [I]n the Spring of 1984 I decided to have him make short recordings of improvised ideas.” Mr. Morrill also “recorded some ‘walking bass’ lines . . . and some simple brush and cymbal sounds.” He then “generated some accompaniment music at CCRMA, using John Chowning’s voice program, David Jaffe’s plucked string program, and several of Bill Schottstaedst’s programs. Finally, [he] drew small snippets of sounds from an old Woody Herman LP of Stan’s solo on Summer Sequence IV, which [he had] always felt was the greatest seven bar solo ever recorded. All of this accompaniment material was used in the final ‘tape,’ along with some of Stan’s own improvisations . . . edited and cut into small sections.”

The first movement of Getz Variations, Echoes, foregrounds the live saxophonist over a resonant, atmospheric background that is static overall but internally mobile and emulates the warm, resonant characteristics of Getz’s saxophone timbre. The second movement, Quartet, evokes the character of a jazz combo. In this movement, Getz performs alternately lyrical and virtuosic material...