Collins Ch. 4: The Post-War Sonic Boom

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Here’s Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemin de fer (Train Study; 1948), which we previewed in chapter 2:

Excerpt from Schaeffer, Le solfège de l’object sonore (The Solfege fo the Sound Object; 1967), demonstrating how easy it is to abstract sounds away from their physical associations:

 

Schaeffer’s Étude aux objects (Study on Objects, 1959), showing a more extreme version of his concept of acousmatic music.

 

Iannis Xenakis, Concret P.H. (1958), composed by building up micorosounds into sound masses

 

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Studie II (1954)

 

Luciano Bero, Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958)

 

Hugh Le Caine’s Electronic Sackbut (1948)

 

Le Caine, Dripsody (1955)

 

Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, Incantation (1953), with introduction by Leopold Stokowski (click here for a graphic score—disregard this YouTuber’s macabre imagery chosen to accompany the music.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdloz7t8NLc

 

Luening & Ussechevsky, Rhapsodic Variations for Tape Recorder and Orchestra (1954)

 

An example of some loops tape loops in action

 

Plate reverb

 

The creative possibilities of tape editing

 

See the chapter 2 notes for more examples of tape editing.

 

Noise generator, oscillator, and filters: a demonstration of subtractive synthesis:

 

Steve Reich, Come Out (1966)

 

DIY ring modulator demo (loud)

 

Ring modulation used with human voices in Stockhausen, Mikrophonie II (1965)

 

Early work from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, in Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957)

 

John Cage, WIlliams Mix (1952): Recording and Score

 

Edgard Varèse, Amériques (1922), orchestral composition demonstrating his use of sirens, noisy percussion, and thinking with groups of instruments in terms of “sound masses” and “loops”

 

The Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, with Edgard Varèse, Poème électronique and Xenakis, Concret P.H. performed inside

 

Here is Varèse, Poème électronique (1958) in full, in sync with Le Corbusier’s film:

Not on the test but of potential interest:

Current examples of commercial research in electronic music and art:

 

Current examples of private facilities that host research in electronic music and art:

 

Music hits and other major works from 1959

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doiWwVPABwo

 

This video leaves out Giacinto Scelsi’s Quattro Pezzi per una nota sola (Four Pieces on a Single Note), so here it is:

 

The author breezes past these names very quickly, so here is a bit of elaboration on their significance. They represent many innovative approaches and a fertile ground for them to flourish.

  • Early rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died and Elvis Presley was drafted into the army. This left a void for a new generation of artists to quickly fill.
  • Dave Brubeck’s most famous album Time Out features many jazz experiments inspired by classical music, including using 5 or 9 beats to each measure instead of the standard three (e.g., waltz) or 4 (e.g., march/everything else).
  • Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue introduced modal jazz, in which they spend a long time exploring one chord at a time deeply, as in Indian classical ragas.
  • Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come heralded free jazz, in which there was no predetermined chord pattern to follow.
  • The book doesn’t mention it, but Sun Ra’s Jazz in Silhouette was another advance in Sun Ra’s use of jazz to merge ancient and futuristic fantasies with black identity. He’ll come up again in a later chapter.
  • Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um explored a variety of alternative ways to build a jazz composition.
  • Giacinto Scelsi’s Quattro Pezzi per una nota sola is a dynamic orchestral elaboration of a single pitch.