Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

2. Studio Fonologico

2 Studio Fonologico Music Walk with Dancers In 1960 I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study music in Italy. I spent the first summer in Venice, followed by two years in Rome. I was lucky to have a scholarship. I remember going to a concert at La Fenice (The Phoenix) theater in Venice. It was a beautiful little late eighteenth-century Italian opera house. Verdi’s Rigoletto had its first performance there. I had seen advertised a concert of composer John Cage, pianist David Tudor, and dancers Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown. I decided to go. The concert began with David Tudor walking down the aisle of the theater and diving under the piano, making sounds on the underside of the instrument. The audience screamed. At the same time Cage, Cunningham, and Brown walked around the theater reading cards with instructions as to actions they could make. They used the whole theater as a performance space. I think the piece was Music Walk with Dancers. At one point, Cage rose up from below the stage on a hydraulic platform playing the piano. People were furious. I was flabbergasted. He used a radio as one of his instruments, too. At one moment he turned it on and got the voice of the pope asking for peace in the world. It was a wonderful moment. One man strode down the aisle with a cane. He hit the piano and said, “Now I am a composer!” I guess you could say that concert blew my mind. I stopped writing music for a year. Scambi In the early Sixties, there were several electronic music studios in Europe. Pierre Schaeffer had established a musique concrète 6 : m u s i c 1 0 9 studio in Paris. Musique concrète is music made from recorded natural and man-made sounds. A famous work from that period, by Pierre Henry, a collaborator of Schaeffer’s, was called Variations for a Door and a Sigh. The source material for this work consisted entirely of the two sounds in the title. German composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert founded a studio at the West German Radio in Cologne, and Italian composers Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna founded the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. The Milan studio consisted of a bank of twelve audio oscillators (guess why?), a white noise generator, an echo chamber, a few modification devices, including a ring modulator, filters of one kind or another, a few tape machines, and some accessory equipment. Do you know what white noise is? Theoretically, it’s all frequencies randomly mixed together, producing a hissing sound. It’s a valuable tool in testing electronic circuits and acoustic spaces because it’s neutral and covers a wide frequency band. If you want to discover the acoustical signature of a space you can pump in bursts of white noise. A spectrum analyzer will show you where the resonances are. White noise was a wonderful sound source for composers because it had a rich timbre. You could filter out frequency bands, too, giving it the suggestion of pitch. White noise is to sound what color is to light. In these early electronic music studios you basically worked with reel-to-reel tape recorders. There were no cassette or digital tape recorders then. The machines ran at various speeds: the faster, the better the sound quality. The professional standard at that time was 15 inches per second (ips), so if you cut one inch of tape, you got one-fifteenth of a second of sound. If you slowed the machine down to 7½ ips, you not only slowed the sounds down by half, but lowered their pitch by one octave, too. Playing the tape backward produced interesting results because the natural decay of a sound now became a gradual attack; the end of the sound would be abrupt. A composer could accomplish a great deal by s t u d i o f o n o l o g i c o : 7 simply manipulating tape. He or she could modify sounds, too, by adding reverberation and filtering. Bandpass filters enabled you to choose certain regions of a wideband sound complex; ring modulators added and subtracted two frequencies fed into it, producing raucous sidebands. Reverb, of course, gave everything a spacy sound, which good composers used judiciously. One of the techniques in the Milan studio was to record a library...