Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

8. Sonic Arts Union

8 Sonic artS union Wolfman In 1966 Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and I formed The Sonic Arts Union. I first met Bob and Gordon at the Feldman-Brown Concert in 1963. They had driven down to New York from Ann Arbor. Gordon and Bob lived in Ann Arbor and were part of a different musical culture. Often I didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. The two of them had founded an independent electronic music studio in Ann Arbor. It had nothing to do with the University of Michigan Department of Music, even though they had been there as students. They got a hold of a couple of tape recorders and invited composers from all over the country to come and make electronic music. Bob was interested in speech; he had worked in the language lab at the University of Michigan and learned a great deal about the formation of speech, as well as psychoacoustics. Gordon played the French horn, a skill he maintained throughout several works with electronics. David lived in New York. I had met him earlier through Christian Wolff at Harvard, later in the early Sixties at Darmstadt where I heard his early work, Canons, for piano (David Tudor) and percussion (Christoph Caskell). We were all trained in music, not in science or electronics, but when electronic music became a necessity, Gordon and David were inspired enough to learn electronic circuitry by themselves. I had been involved in a concert in New York a few years earlier, organized by Ben Paterson and Philip Corner under the name Sonic Arts Group, so I suggested we simply steal that name. It was s o n i c a r t s u n i o n : 71 just a name on a program. So we called ourselves the Sonic Arts Group. We weren’t really a group, however. We didn’t improvise, we didn’t collaborate. We simply shared equipment and played in each other’s pieces. One night, Bob called me and said he’d changed the name to Sonic Arts Union. He didn’t like the name Sonic Arts Group because people called us sag. Bob hated silly acronyms. I agreed. We never met and argued about anything; if one of us decided something, it was fine with the rest of us. So we became the Sonic Arts Union. sau sounded awkward, but at least it wasn’t sag. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and rem were good names. One of the signature works of the early Sixties was Robert Ashley ’s Wolfman (1964) for amplified voice and tape. It was the loudest piece of music anyone had heard at that time. I suppose you could say that it was the reverse side of Feldman’s coin. Morty’s sounds are so soft you have to lean toward the performers to hear what’s going on. Sometimes you wonder if you are hearing all of them. In Wolfman you lean back and let them come to you. The sounds are so powerful that you are in a continual state of analysis , your mind constantly moves in an effort to isolate the minutest details. Ashley is a close-up, Feldman, a long shot. Or perhaps it is the other way around. You have to lean into Feldman’s softness but you instinctively back away from Ashley’s loudness. It’s the difference between a microscope and a telescope. Throughout the piece the volume level is turned up so high that feedback is created between a microphone and loudspeakers positioned around the hall. If left unattended feedback grows and grows to unbearable levels. The British call it “howl-round.” There are several ways to control feedback: one is to use a compressor /limiter, an audio circuit designed to limit abrupt sound spikes while recording, so as not to get distortion. Another is to shift the pitch of the feedback slightly so that there is no steady tone to continually reinforce itself. Nicolas Collins does that in his work Pea 72 : m u s i c 1 0 9 Soup. He uses a phase shifter that slightly shifts the pitch of feedback strands in an installation environment. Because the pitch of the feedback is continually changing, even by extremely small increments , the feedback, which relies on a single sustained pitch for its buildup, cannot establish itself. A third way is to introduce a sound...