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The Machine in the Garden
The Harvard University Elston Lecture for 2007
Given at Paine Hall, Harvard University, May 3, 2007

In 1968 a mysterious-looking device with blinking red and amber lights, dials, meters and a cat’s cradle of thin grey cables was wheeled into an empty attic room in the Harvard Music Department. In a building otherwise devoted to worn-out grand pianos, blackboards with musical staves, and stacks of printed music, it contributed an anomalous and eerie presence like a piece of medical technology or an experiment from a nearby physics lab.

The machine sat on a large bench top, and with its three panels suggested a space-age triptych of buttons, switches, jacks and a tangle of multicolored electrical cables. It was one of the first “modular” electronic music synthesizers, made by an eccentric and brilliant inventor in California, Don Buchla. Even before my first encounter with it, the sound of the synthesizer was well on its way to becoming familiar to the ears of anyone listening to popular music in that era. Its metallic, shiny, futuristic timbre would soon enchant a whole generation of listeners who would automatically associate its sound with the pyschedelic experience, its timbres emblematic of the love generation, suggesting—wink wink-- “alternate” states of consciousness. The modular synthesizer was the newest and most accessibly prepackaged advance in the slow but steady evolution of musical instruments powered by electricity rather than by the muscles—the hands, the arms, the lips or diaphragms--of the performer.

My life, both as a composer and as a performer, has been dominated by the confrontation of “naturally” produced acoustical sound with that which is electronically produced, i.e. comes from a loudspeaker. The marriage of these two means of making and reproducing music has been a fact of life since Thomas Edison first recorded his voice onto a hard rubber disc at the end of the 19th century. The invention of sound reproduction is THE historical dividing line between the Old World and the New World of music. Recordings, radio transmission, microphones, loudspeakers not only facilitated the rise of popular culture, but they also radically changed how music is consumed. Absorbing a new piece of music could become a much easier, more passive activity. As a young boy growing up in the 1960’s, I learned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony first by hearing it on an LP recording by Toscanini. Even though I heard live concerts from time to time, 90% of the virgin experiences I had with the the classical canon, not to mention the great works of American jazz, came through the small speakers of “hi fi” set, later replaced by a “stereo” system. By comparison an adolescent Aaron Copland, living at the time of the First World War, could only have heard a symphonic work by attending a live concert, and chances were slender that the performance would be at the level of my Toscanini recording. The only alternative to live concerts would be to get hold of the printed music and play it on the piano. This was indeed how most curious musicians learned the repertoire in the days before recorded music.  When Brahms finished one of his symphonies, the first order of business was to arrange it for piano, either for solo or for four hands. The act of absorbing the work in this manner required skills and effort far beyond the passive involvement of a record-collector sitting in front of a stereo console. Musical sophistication or “literacy” was an exception rather than a rule, and in a frontier culture like America’s in the nineteenth century, it was a rarity shared almost exclusively by the upper classes. The musical education of the young Charles Ives, living in small town Connecticut in the 1880’s, included everything from the usual piano lessons to playing organ in the local church, watching his father’s marching band rehearse, learning Beethoven and Schumann by laborious hours at the keyboard, and composing pieces that might never be performed live except by himself at the piano. The future composer of the Fourth Symphony and the Concord Sonata took learned the repertoire first-hand, but he gained that knowledge only through real effort and without having easy access to what I, growing up 80 years later, was collecting in my burgeoning LP record collection.

Recorded music had an impact on twentieth century musical culture so profound that historians have not even begun to analyze its effect. There is little doubt that the easy availability of recorded music created a more passive listening audience, with many learning the repertory simply by putting an LP or a cd on a machine and immediately receiving the full color recorded version of a symphony or concerto as opposed to learning the work only via the printed page. On the other hand recordings, especially in the era of compact disks, increased our awareness and familiarity with a vast range of styles. What began in the 1920’s as newly invented 78 rpm disks that could barely contain more than a few minutes of scratchy, tinny sound evolved within the following eighty years to digitally compressed soundfiles that can contain an entire Wagner opera and allow it to be transmitted in a matter of minutes over an internet cable. By the year 2000, the pressing issue for music consumers was no longer one of accessibility or availability, but rather one of discrimination. How did one find something new and of true value amid the blizzard of recordings currently available? Even more serious was the question “how can one make the public aware of your own creations amidst the din and chaos of what is already out there?”

Each new advance in technology has provoked a generalized anxiety over the quality of the essential musical experience. At first, serious musicians worried that recorded music, with its emphasis on pristine technical perfection, would be to music what prepackaged food is to fresh, organic produce.  But this fear doesn’t seem to have been confirmed. If anything, recorded music may have actually been a stimulus to performers, prodding them to even higher levels of technical accuracy.

One need only to listen to an archival recording of the New York Philharmonic or the Concertgebouw Orchestra from the 1920’s to hear how standards of ensemble playing and rhythmic precision have evolved in the intervening years. Much of this is due to the expectations that recorded music has nutured in us. It is as if the recorded version of a work acts like a mirror in harsh light, threatening to expose the slightest wrinkle or blemish on the surface. Classical musicians today have to assume that kind of clinical perfection in their live performances. It is part of their job description, and the rare artist who can join technical perfection to absolute spontanaiety and unpredictability—a Marta Argerich  or a Yo-yo Ma—has managed a peculiarly personal triumph over what has threatened to become too literal and too rigid and perfect a tradition of performing.

The union of technology and live performance, however, has always been an agonistic struggle fraught with colliding aesthetic values. For purists, that collision comes down to a single choice: do we listen to music through loudspeakers or do we experience it directly from the human source, whether it be someone singing, playing a violin or guitar or a hundred-piece orchestra playing live in a concert hall? Popular music has never troubled itself with these decisions. Amplification and electronic manipulation have gone hand-in-hand with the invention of new styles in popular music. Rock would be unthinkable without amplification. Hip-hop would never have come into being were it not for the digital sampler. I have long thought that signal advances in the evolution of musical style are more often due to some new technological breakthrough rather than to the genius of an individual composer. The emphatic, percussive language of Beethoven could never have been imagined in the previous era of harpsichords and viols. The invention of the electric guitar enabled a new expressive style based largely on that instrument’s ability to sustain sound electronically and vary its timbre by distortion and modulation. Jimi Hendrix understood this better than anyone.

One frequently cited definition of music is that it is “organized sound.” Most of what we commonly consider “music” involves tones or pitches. We learn early in our musical education that these tones are the result of air molecules being pushed and pulled in a regular, periodic movement. Air itself is an elastic medium. We’re reminded of the fact that there could be no “music” in outer space because there is no air there. Any regularly vibrating body, be it a Stradavarius, a singer’s vocal chords or a humming air conditioner in the next room, produces an identifiable pitch. But we can identify it as such only if that vibration remains stable long enough for the psychoacoustic capacity of the brain to recognize its regularity. Much of what surrounds us in everyday life is “noise”, in other words,  disturbances in the elastic medium of the air that are not periodic, that do not produce a recognizable pitch. The anatomy of the inner ear and its interface with the brain is still only partially understood. Aural cognition appears to be an intricate interplay of consciously and unconsicously analyzed data. I can answer a telephone call and hear the voice of an old friend with whom I’ve not spoken in many years and nevertheless recognize within a split second whom is talking. How does my brain, so otherwise easily distracted, make such rapid and accuate calculations well in advance of a willed response?

When I was still in graduate school a professor teaching a class in acoustics gave us a test. He made tape recordings of several different instruments all playing the same pitch. One was a piccolo, another a trumpet, another a violin and another a clarinet. But before playing us the sounds of each instrument he took a razor blade and cut off the attack of each instrument’s note, so that all we could hear was the sustained sound, not its attack. It was surprising how much of each instrument’s individuality and identity had been lopped off. I could tell that all the instruments were playing the same note and that each was coming from a different instrument, but I had to struggle to recognize which instrument I was actually listening to. The lesson was that most of the characteristic information in a musical sound is in the onset, or the “attack.” Strange but true: the “attack” is largely characterized by “noise” rather than by pitch. Each instrument has highly complex “attack” characteristics, and it is from here, in this split second of the beginning of a sound, that we derive the lion’s share of the information. Of course there are many other contributing features to sound recognition, including resonance and formants, those special areas of characteristic frequency that help us to recognize words without having to painstakingly parse each sound. The  acoustic professor’s little demonstration revealed to me how much subtlety is embedded in the beginning of any sound, and how vastly evolved is the anatomical and neurological network of the ear-brain network.

But the science of psycho-acoustic perception alone cannot explain the emotional power of a vibrating string or air column. Pulsation, whether it’s the throbbing kick-drum of a rock band or whether its the much faster pulsation of a musical tone, has an immediate effect on the pyschological structures of the brain and is capable of producing a palpable change of mood in the listener. What we generally understand as “music” is an organization of these sounds into a coherent pattern. The simplest children’s song is in fact a subtle matrix of periodic frequencies coupled with  the acoustical phonemes or “noises” made by the tongue and other organs and tissues of the singer’s body. These pitches and noises become what we call “music” when we unite them in one or another form of archetectonic organization involving repetition and formal symmetries. “Tonality” is a sensation of hearing musical tones in heirarchical arrangement, giving us the sensation of a gravitational pull towards an all-powerful center. It is an ordering of sounds at a higher psychoacoustic level, specifically a human urge, although predicated on the naturally occurring ratios of a vibrating system that we otherwise call the “harmonic series.” Animals do not appear to have cognitive equipment to recognize tonal organization, although birdsong seems to involve rhythmic and intervallic cognitive factors.

Thinking about the listening experience on these most rudimentary levels has always been second nature for me. The problem with conventional music education, whether it be piano lessons for a five year-old or a full blown conservatory curriculum, is that the listening experience is inevitably presented as a closed system, the twelve tones of the “tempered” scale as represented by the white and black keys of the piano keyboard. Mastering an instrument or becoming a accomplished singer is such a daunting task that one usually plunges in without first stopping to question what are the real essentials of the listening experience.

I didn’t begin to ask these questions until I was well along in my college education. But I received stimulus to change my thinking from three very different sources, of which my firsthand experience with machines was key.

The first glimmer that there may be a different world out there happened in that same electronic music studio. As clumsy and primitive as the early “tape music” studios of the Sixties and Seventies could be, they still could shake up one’s notions about musical perception. Working with raw and primitive sound sources like sine wave oscillators or recorded snippets of ambient sound, I experienced for the first time how sound could be organized differently from the conventional tonal scheme I’d been spoon-fed since a child. The tape recorder and the synthesizer not only produced sound differently than a live instrument did, but they also suggested new and radical formal structures. Steve Reich’s early tape pieces, Come Out and Violin Phase, were cast in completely novel musical forms that could never have been dreamed of without the aid of the tape recorder. Other “machines,” be they sequencers or random voltage generators, sample and hold modules or low frequency modulators, made their own musical forms, and these forms were new and never-before imagined by any composer. It’s common to hear about how the advent of moving pictures, with its techniques of fast edits, montage and flashbacks profoundly affected novelists and prompted a transformation of the narrative form. It’s no less important to understand how the tape recorder and mixing board and the digital sequencer have suggested new musical structures and new approaches to musical form and syntax. My own musical forms owe much to these new machines. As far back as 1977, in a work for solo piano, Phrygian Gates, I composed as if the piano was a generator of waveforms. Rather than base the musical surface on small, compact motives, melodic fragments, cells or what have you, I set out to build long architectonic structures of rippling wave motion. Being “waves”, the music by definition had to be repetitive and generate a perceptible pulse. I designed the piece so that the undulations and slow transformations of mode in Phrygian Gates would avoid producing a hypnotic monotony. My idea in Phrygian Gates was to create a musical continuum that was characterized by rhythmic and harmonic stability but into which I would introduce sudden, arbitrary changes in the mood, texture, tempo and harmony. This would keep the listener continually poised to expect surprise or even shock. Those moments of shock, usually abrupt changes in the harmony, I called “gates”, a term I borrowed from electronic circuitry. Insofar as the piece was incorporated a steady pulse and utlized repetition and a slowly evolving harmonic rhythm one could classify it as a Minimalist composition. But its formal and dramatic design was the product of a systemmatic disruption of Minimalism’s usual regularities. The structural design and the behavior of its inner workings was suggested by my fascination with electronic circuits and how wave forms in a modulating circuit transformed over time. 

I had been drawn to Minimalism as a formal and expressive technique because it utilized elements of the musical experience that I felt were essential to establishing coherence: pulsation, tonality and motivic repetition. I privately acknowledged that the procedural rigors of the first generation of Minimalist works—pieces like Reich’s Drumming or Glass’s Music in Changing Parts—did not quite fit my own expressive impulses. I am, both as a composer and as a person, a much more restless organism and far less willing to sit out the gradual unfolding of a carefully designed process as it goes through its sequence of logical changes.  But I was hugely impressed by the way in which the first Minimalists had taken pulse, tonality and repetition, those primordial elements of the musical experience, and had revitalized them, finding a completely new way to use them after decades of atomization and deconstruction. This to me suggested a fresh new start at a point when music composition seemed to be reaching a creative cul de sac.

 Although much has been made of the connection between Minimalism and various non-Western musical traditions (Ghanian drumming, North Indian ragas and Balinese gamelan music, to name a few) the real truth is that much of the aesthetic of Minimalism was a response to the precise, regular, periodic behavior of machines, and particularly of electronic machines. Certainly the early, pure process works for amplifed organs and winds by Philip Glass give the impression of an autonomous electronic circuit passing back and forth over a grid of regular tones and periodic rhythms. This at times unnerving analogue of an impassive piece of technology becoming an actual musical composition both enchanted and disturbed listeners in the 1970s and 1980’s. I well remember the scorn that was heaped on Minimalist composers at the time of its first blossoming, how its use of seemingly endless repetition and its rhythmic obtuseness was an affront to sophisticated listeners, a reduction of the musical experience to the most atavistic principles. When Nixon in China was first performed in 1987, one of the country’s leading music critics wrote “Mr. Adams has done for the arpeggio what MacDonald’s has done for the hamburger.”

Another source of viewing and hearing things differently came from my first encounters with non-Western music. Even in the 1960’s it was rare anywhere in the US to hear music that did not originate in the European systems of tonality. All familar musical forms seemed to be derived from conventional European tonality, be it a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, or a pop song.  In the late Sixties, influenced like so many of my contemporaries by George Harrison’s sitar playing on several of the later Beatles albums, I began listening to recordings of the great Pakestani sarod player, Ali Akbar Khan. The world of Asian, African and Middle Eastern music suddenly opened up my ears in a radical way. I realized for the first time that there were other ways to tune a scale than the default “black and white” tuning of the piano keyboard. I also realized that “through-composed” music in which every note written down by a “auteur” composer, was actually not the norm in the rest of the world.  Indeed, the real standard is not written notation, but rather improvisation based on rhythmic patterns, melodies and harmonic structures. Skilled, carefully inflected improvisation is a tradition with a longstanding pedigree in cultures as different as in Java, India, Turkey or the jazz of the United States. Perhaps, because of its very evanescent nature and becasue of the absence of written documentation, improvised music has had to struggle to be accorded canonical value in the minds of Western “classical” scholars. During my six years at Harvard there was never a course offered on a musical tradition that wasn’t based on notation. Anything out of that was considered in the realm of anthropology or ethnomusicology.

 I also discovered that inflection in intonation, especially as it’s done in the raga singing and instrumental playing in the Indian subcontinent, could embody immense emotional force. Years later, when I composed The Dharma at Big Sur, for the electric violinist, Tracy Silverman, I did so with the keen awareness that in non-Western music, the expressive power lies in between the notes, in the meaningful slides, glissandi and portamenti that are the norm in so many other cultures.

In the European classical tradition, the piano, with its twelve precise, inflexible and immovable divisions of the octave, has dicatated musical thinking for several centuries. The piano quickly became a machine of almost tyrannical influence throughout the Western world. Its twelve equally spaced intervals force one to regard pitches as discrete entities like nations with strictly policed borders. A piano-generated melody goes from point to point with no expressive sliding in between. This is not a fault—Bach and Mozart built their entire work on this notion--but rahter it is a stylistic choice. Since the advent of the equally divided octave, Western music, particularly Western instrumental music, has prejudiced musical expression, forcing it forever to state itself according to discrete, individual pitches.

I don’t need to remind this audience how tempered tuning allowed forays into very distant keys and how it afforded composers a new and potent arsenal of expressive possibility, surprise, shock, as well as any number of new approaches to musical form. We all know how Wagner took advantage of this new lack of fixity among tonal centers to immense emotional effect. His highly evolved art of harmonic detour produced a never before-experienced universe of emotional volatility and psychological depth. When composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Babbitt contemplated the neatly symmetrical division of the octave they saw an array of twelve integers, and they designed systems to make the pitches behave according to new principles that had little or nothing to do with the traditional laws of harmony, laws that had evolved from intuitive aesthetic judgements rather than from mathematical principles. But we need to remember that even to this day tempered tuning holds a position of almost total hegemony in the Western world. Western instruments are so finely tweaked to toe the line that it’s almost impossible to make them play in other tuning systems.

And this tempered tuning system, so vividly embodied in the image of the black and white keys of the piano, does not encourage a way of treating pitch as something flexible and fluid. In the music of other cultures, and of course in the great tradition of African-American music, the expressive slide constitutes the heart of the music’s emotional power. In the ecstatic Qawwali singing of Pakistan, in melancholia of Scottish folksong, in the soaring saxophone of a great sax player or in a slashing electric guitar solo by Hendrix or Clapton, the expressive power lies in the way the tones are bent. It lies in how one goes from one pitch to another. Modern electric guitars, instruments that are defiantly indifferent to the neat, orderly black-and-white world of the piano keyboard, now come equipped with a lever that allows the performer to bend the pitch this way or that. What a pity that more instruments aren’t manufactured with similar levers!

This approach to melodic “shaping” couldn’t be more different from that in a work by Bach or Stravinsky, where pitches are separate and where there is no expressive space around them. A glissando in the middle of a Bach aria would be a positive indecency, whereas in an Indian raga it might be an expression of utmost sacred devotion. Why did music in the West become so beholden to discrete pitches? Could it be that “sliding”, or “keening” between notes was discouraged long ago by the Church, whose elders might have felt that such a use of the voice  was too expressive, too much like a human in great pain or in great sexual ecstasy? Of course both of these qualities are what make us love a great jazz saxophonist, a Billie Holiday or a master rock guitar player. But for a culture that was devoted to propriety and religious piety, the discrete, ordered division of the octave into stand-alone pitches doubtless represented a more appropriate image of Divine law.

In June of 1969 my mother gave me as a graduation gift a copy of John Cage’s Silence, a collection of writings and spoken lectures the experimental composer had just recently published. Silence called into question all my received knowledge about musical convention. Writing in a gently pedantic style borrowed from Gertrude Stein’s  Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Cage, playing the role of Perfect Fool, desconstructed the traditional musical experience, reducing sounds to their most atavistic state.  He posed as the musical Antichrist. He seemed to have little or no emotional connection to the “great works” of the Western canon. In one of his many anecdotal stories he wrote about hearing a chamber piece for clarinet by Mozart and how he’d noticed that the clarinet sounded like a square wave oscillator. Mozart’s clarinet music was dear to me and remains so inspite of my own radical changes of style. Nevertheless I could understand from this anecdote that Cage listened to music in a manner completely different than what I was accustomed to. Cage’s reponse to classical music was that of a listener who lacked what Carl Jung called the “feeling function” necessary to feel what others feel when they hear a powerfully affecting piece. Instead of being alive to the subtle emotional shadings in Mozart’s music, Cage heard the acoustical sound of a clarinet, almost as a laboratory instrument might analyze a waveform. What interested Cage was how that sound reached his ears and what its acousticals properties were. He was deaf to the Mozart insofar as it was “music.” He was unmoved by its expressive beauty and indifferent to its historical or stylistic connotations. He wanted to hear like an animal, receiving and processing a sound, whether it came from a clarinet or from a leaky drainpipe, on its own terms, without its cultural connotation.

One might accuse Cage of being purposefully obtuse, of willing the beauty and expression out of Mozart and “listening” only like an impassive microphone listens. But I don’t believe this was a conceit on Cage’s part—I think it was genuine. He wanted listeners to “open their ears” to any and all sounds. In his famous lectures given during the 1950’s at the avant garde music festival in Darmstadt Cage made the case for wiping the cultural slate clean, for completly discarding our long-cherished modes of listening to music and for adopting a new means that did not discriminate between pitches and noise. In its place he proposed to regard all aural events in a kind of utopian democratic equanimity. In Cage’s universe there would be no pride of place among sounds.  A squeaking door, a randomly tuned radio or the Moonlight Sonata played on a  Steinway were all the same—momentary disturbances in the elastic medium of the air.

I never did renounce Mozart as Mozart, but thinking about Cage also helped to liberate me from too precious a bondage to the historical weight of the past. At that time, roughly around 1970-75, Cage’s thought had the effect on me of enormous empowerment. He gave me courage to see technology as a fertile terrain for creativity. We could accept the entire world of available sounds, including noise itself, as the base material with which to mould our new compositions. For a while this extravagant liberty seemed almost too good to be true. Even in the 1940’s Cage himself had created performance works using radios, tube oscillators, kitchen appliances and other unorthodox sound sources. Later, he and David Tudor had produced pieces like Cartridge Music, using a heavily amplified phonograph stylus to amplify its contact as it passed over surfaces of wood, paper, metal, cloth and other materials. The result was a deafening roar of undifferentiated noise that, to my idealistic ears, was heralding a brave new world of aural experience. Now, looking back, I suspect that these first “experimental” pieces of Cage were the spiritual progenitors of the “grunge” aesthetic of the 1990’s.

I became a devoted acolyte. I memorized long passages from Cage’s lectures, especially those published under the title “Indeterminacy.” Profoundly under Cage’s influence I made my first geniunely original musical composition during my last year in Cambridge, a tape piece called Heavy Metal, using sounds I’d recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and mixing them with the raw electronic emissions of the Buchla synthesizer. Frying pans, old car parts, Peking Opera gongs, prepared pianos, radio static and eerily distorted human voices all swam in a vortex of spatially shifting noise and sci-fi rushes of electronic sound. I was not by any means on the leading edge of this practice. It already had a pedigree stretching back to works by Varese, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer. At first an obscure art from, “tape music” had leapt into the public imagination when the Beatles, in Sargeant Pepper, ended that album with “A Day in the Life,” a swirling vortex of tape-manipulated sound that might easily have been part of a Stockhausen or Cage “musique concrete” composition.

Eventually I began to acknowledge the hard fact that, while it is possible to have “meaning” without pitch or without tonality, these possibilities are severely limited. Even Varese, uncompromising futurist that he was,  seemed to have acknowledged this limitation, because after he composed Ionisation in 1929, scoring it for percussion orchestra, he rarely attempted a work without some kind of pitched instruments. Ionisation, a ten-minute essay in making sonata form behave without the gravitational pull of a tonal center, was a first-of-its-kind invention. The piece is effective, although I wonder whether if without Frank Zappa’s enthusiastic advocacy, its status as a “classic” would be as unquestioned as it is. With its nervous snare drum tattoos, anxious sirens and sudden eruptions of lockstep violence it evokes a nervous scenario of militaristic activity. It might be a perfect accompaniment to an old film of a dictator’s afternoon, of a Franco or a Mussolini surveying the troops. But composing with “noise” alone proved difficult, and in Ionisation Varese was able to achieve coherence and intelligbility only by creating small identifiable motifs and recirculating them throughout the piece, hinting at classical forms like rondo and sonata. In the end he reverts to pitched sounds in the piano and chimes, the arrival of which produce a startling and dramatic effect because they fill the air with resonance and color after so many minutes of  unpitched  noise.

In the mid 1970’s after having left Harvard and emigrated to San Francisco, I resumed my love affair with musical machines. I call my early San Francisco experiences my “faulty wiring” period. Still under the influence of  Cage and of his collaborator, David Tudor, I decided that the only true American composer was one who designed and built his or her own instruments. The idea of forging an “indigenous” personal language out of homemade instruments struck me as the hallmark of the independent spirit, that it was the hallmark of the maverick American musical thinker. There were ample models, not the least of whom were provocative innovators like Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow. The West Coast composer Lou Harrison, although he loathed electronics, nevertheless set an example for me by returning to ancient Greek tuning systems and constructing and composing for percussion and string instruments that embodied those temperments. My own experiments followed the line of someone who had basically solid musical instincts, a strong desire to experiment but who was also hobbled by an uncertain grasp of the mathematics and the physics of sound. I could understand the activity of waveforms and appreciate the aesthetic beauty of how they could collide and sum and modulate. But when I tried to teach myself some rudimentary calculus in order to be able to understand Fourier analysis I soon was in over my head. Nevertheless I persisted with an almost maniacal fervor, because even my limited understanding was producing revelations about the nature of sound and suggesting ideas for new pieces. I constructed my own synthesizer, using cannibalized components and circuit boards that I found in used electronic stores. Other underground composers shared with me schematic diagrams of transistors, capacitors, resistors and integrated circuits, and when I was done conducting a rehearsal or teaching a class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I would hole up in a back room or a garage with smell of hot solder and etching acid burning my nostrils. These were the days of “radical electronics”. My composer friends and I would show up for a concert in the Mills College auditorium in Oakland or in an abandoned San Francisco Tenderloin hotel, each of us packing an array of little boxes of home-made gadgetry and trailing a long tangle of cables and wires. At my invitation many friends appeared from around the country to present their live-electronic compositions—Ivan Tcherpnin, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Joan  LaBarbara, Ingram Marshall and even John Cage himself. Most had constructed, a la Rube Goldberg, their own hardware. This being the era before personal computers and laptops, all the electronic music was generated by oscillators and voltage-controlled modules. The oscillators were capricious in pitch and unpredictable in performance. A “concert” was more like a “happening”, but fortunately the prevailing aesthetic of “chance” provided a handy excuse for the frequent public meltdowns of our homegrown machines.

Of all these experimental composers of live electronics the master and chief guru was most certainly Alvin Lucier, who created not so much “compositions” as sonic systems and environments, each based on an acoustical principle that Lucier had adduced and transplanted from the laboratory to the art gallery or performance space. With my students we did the first West Coast performance of a piece with a title that more or less summed up the spirit of the times: STILL AND MOVING LINES OF SILENCE IN FAMILIES OF HYPERBOLAS.  This was a piece postulated on the behavior or low frequency sound waves. It consisted of two gigantic loudspeakers pointed at each other from a distance of roughly forty feet and powered by high amperage amplifiers. All that could be heard was a low hum of sine waves, whose frequencies we slowly modified just enough to create an eerie, palpable wobbling in the room. Like so many pieces of that era, including most of Cage’s compositions, the music was more didactic than expressive.

While I gradually lost interest in making compositions out of pure noise, I continued to be enchanted by the new world of electronically produced sound—in fact I have never lost this sense of enchantment, even though the music that made my reputation was largely written for the traditional instruments of the orchestra or for the voice. The overwhelming obstacle for composers of electronic music has been ‘how do you relate to your audience?’: ‘For whom are you making this music and how will your listeners take it in?’ The options for presenting electronic music have never been very promising. Sitting in a dark room surrounded by loudspeakers has never had much appeal for even the most committed of audiences unless the music is combined with film or some other form of visual activity. Commercial releases, LP’s or CD’s of studio-produced electronic music have proven a hard sell over the past four decades. Even  the most inventive and imaginative electronic compositions by Stockhausen, Berio, Xenakis, Subotnick, Wourinen and Marshall have long remained niche items, seldom if ever emerging from their obscurity in the back bins labelled “electronic music.” In the 1980’s the appearance of a new genre of “soft” electronic music called “New Age” briefly hinted that there might be a younger and larger audience for electronically produced music. Listeners brought up on a diet of digitally produced music seemed more willing to accept a compact disk as the end result of the creative process. Two British composers, a generation apart, invented their own genres of studio-produced music. Brian Eno, originally a rock performer with the band Roxy Music and a clever, imaginative studio producer, coined the term “ambient music” around the end of the 1970’s to describe his smooth, dreamy, opiated sound washes. Virtually acknowledging the passive nature of consuming recorded music, Eno described his exquisitely engineered Music for Airports as if it were a Cageian utopia of equanimity among the sounds. “Ambient Music”, he said,  “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting”.

More recently the genre called  “electronica” has captured the attention of many serious listeners. The British composer Aphex Twin, aka Richard David James, uses sophisticated computer programs to create an utterly new sound that could not possibly be rendered by live performers. Aphex Twin’s nervous, insect-like pulses and sharp-edged timbres suggested a non-human world as sinister and robotic as the androids of William Gibson or the Wachowski brothers.

Electronic technology first entered my composing stream in 1970 with a tape piece called Heavy Metal, based on a text by William Burroughs. (This was some considerable time before the same term was applied to a certain genre of pitilessly loud rock.) Since then many of my orchestral works have involved one or another forms of electronic technology, sometimes only in the form of a keyboard synthesizer or sampler in the orchestra, other times, as in On the Transmigration of Souls, as a fully realized sound environment, completely integrated into the orchestral setting. After the “faulty wiring” period of my first San Francisco days, I began using more reliable instruments. The advent of digital synthesizers in the early Eighties was a mixed blessing. The digital synth behaved predictably and kept the tuning and wave modulations exact and constant. No more wandering, screaming feedback loops from overcooked oscillators or burnt circuit boards. But the down side of the introduction of “digital” was that all the synthesizers came hard-wired to the conventional black and white piano keyboard. You opened the box, plugged in the synth and the first thing you did was to play the keyboard, producing some version of the long-familiar notes of the tempered scale. This of course made conventional musical organization along tonal lines very easy, but as a default mode it also made truly novel, futuristic discoveries less apt to be stumbled upon. For all the bulkiness and ornery stubbornness of my home-made synthesizer of the Seventies, it was a real “black box” waiting for me to tell it what to do. The sleek carbon-finish digital synths of the next decade, those made by Yamaha, Korg and Roland, were preprogrammed with colorful timbres, but their musical essence remained locked to the traditional tempered scale that was already hundreds of years old.

The incorporation of electronic sound into my orchestral palette in my operas and orchestral works has enabled me to enrich deeply the nature of my sound world. But it is an immensely complex undertaking to successfully marry the sound of “natural” acoustic instruments with those that come from a synthesizer, sampler or computer-generated program. The setting in the concert hall or opera house is often fraught with discontinuities. Over time I have come to realize that a generalized sound design is required to make a completely unified and satisfying experience. Ideally, when electronic sound sources are involved, the entire listening space should be organized and acoustically prepared. The acoustician and loudspeaker manufacturer, John Meyer, of Berkeley, California has recently developed a sound sytem he calls “Constellation” that he installs in a performance space after having minutely measured every resonant nook and cranny with computer-aided listening instruments. With John Meyer’s technology a dead, acoustically unresponsive space can be transformed into a live, resonant performance area. This is a major advance from merely sticking a public address cluster in the ceiling of an auditorium and hoping for the best.

Lately I have asked that when my operas are performed all aspects of the production be subject to sound design. This extends not only to the performers, the singers, chorus, orchestra and electronic sounds, but to the actual room itself. One needs nerves of steel and a will of iron to effect this. To begin with, it requires a significant budget add-on, something most orchestras and opera companies are reluctant to support. Musical purists attack the whole idea as a corruption of God’s intentions. In a New York Times review of my opera Doctor Atomic, an opera with any number of thought-provoking artistic and moral issues, the reviewer chose to devote a major part of his article to complaining about what he called “amplification”. And he returned to the subject a week later with another jeremiad, warning of the incipient corruption I was threatening to wreak on the pure, defenseless and naked human voice. One understands the gale force winds of tradition that a composer like Wagner encountered when trying to introduce a millenial change in the way his audiences experienced music drama.

The marriage of the machine to the musical experience is no more and no less a provocation and a stimulus to our normal modes of behavior than the machine’s intrusion into all other parts of our lives. It can, as our friend the music critic warned, be a source of corruption of the artform. But at the same time it can be a stimulus for new modes of aesthetic experience. Artists should take each new step in the evolutions of these machines and turn them into instruments of divine play. It’s what we do.

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