Max Mathews's Influence on (My) Music

Prelude

Max Mathews is unanimously considered the father of computer music. Not only did he give birth to digital sound, but he lovingly and carefully nurtured it. This new field has greatly benefited from his inventive imagination, his exceptional scientific and technical talents, his dedication to music, and his generous help to musicians and institutions.

Max's contributions to music have been so considerable that he has emerged as a major actor in artistic life today. It is significant that the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) devoted a volume to Max among their collection of composers' Portraits polychromes. To this volume, I myself contributed a 30-page chapter, "Max Mathews and the Digital Age," in which I dwelt upon what Max brought to the field. Much earlier than others, Max had the vision of personal computers; as a result, he developed tools and concepts for computer music, and he also did pioneering work in human–machine communication, text editing and printing, and dedicated computers. In my chapter, I also speak of my work with Max—it was for me a good fortune and a great privilege. I refer the reader to this Portrait polychrome about Max (Gayou 2007).

In the present article, I am not going to try to repeat or summarize that chapter. I rather wish to concentrate on the specific new possibilities that Max's work brought to the musician's disposal. A substantial body of musical works benefited from the extraordinary tools Max Mathews developed for music. I myself am considerably indebted to Max. Almost all of my own music works have directly or indirectly taken advantage of Max's tools and concepts: even my purely instrumental pieces have been marked by his influence.

I shall discuss the use of the specific possibilities developed by Max for some of my own pieces—particularly Little Boy and Songes, which are included on the 2008 Computer Music Journal DVD. [Editor's note: Max Mathews served as curator for that DVD.] I shall deal briefly with the same issue for some other works that appear on that DVD—namely, Phosphones by Emmanuel Ghent, Pacific Rimbombo by Jon Appleton, and Phoné and Turenas by John Chowning—as well as Stria by Mr. Chowning; Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey; and my own works Dialogues, Moments newtoniens, Passages, and Sud.

Little Boy

In 1968, I composed music for the play Little Boy by the late Pierre Halet (1968). The theme of the play is the revival of the Hiroshima bombing in the form of a nightmare of Eatherly, the pilot of the reconnaissance plane for the raid, who later developed feelings of guilt that jeopardized his mental health. In the play, some elements are historic and realistic, while occasionally, certain cues in the performance or in the music indicate that the action is fantastical—it happens in a man's troubled mind.

While half of the music for the play is written for soprano and chamber ensemble, I wanted to take advantage of the possibilities of computer sound synthesis to achieve special musical and theatrical effects. I abstracted a Computer Suite from Little Boy comprising only sounds synthesized by computer using Max's Music V modular synthesis software. I took advantage of a number of early experiments on sound synthesis that I performed between 1964 and 1968 while working with Max at Bell Laboratories. Several musical instruments were simulated with the computer using the results of imitation experiments done by Max and myself, notably my brass-tone studies. Certain instrumental sounds, especially those of brasses and bowed strings, initially seemed to resist attempts to produce synthetic imitations; research was necessary to better understand the ingredients of liveliness and identity for such or such instrumental timbre. The hearing process has its own specific way of recognizing sound sources. But the role of the computer was not merely to produce ersatz instruments or realistic sounds such as planes or sirens, it made it possible to endow these simulacra with some unreal quality, and to imprint into them musical structures—for example, harmonies—echoing the music performed by the singer and...