Music&Life
Electronic Music and Life
Joel Chadabe
“Electronic Music and Life,” in Organised Sound (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press) IX:1, April 2004
History is written backwards from the present to the past. It is our perception of what is important now that guides our search for historical roots. We note something special and we ask: How did it develop?
So what is important now? The most important trend in music today, made possible entirely by electronic technology, is that music is becoming communicative of the world around us and increasingly integrated into the rhythms, activities, and experiences of everyday life. This integration stems from the use of materials, such as sounds and words that evoke thoughts and feelings relating to place, personality, and events; and from the structure of music as ongoing dynamic process, which allows for an interactive role to be played by the public in the way that music can be experienced and understood.
The relevant histories—of the expanded use of sounds in music and of music as dynamic system—are short but often confusing because of different motivations and contexts. What about the expanded use of sounds? Did Luigi Russolo, Futurist and inventor of the Intonarumori, really mean to open up music to all sounds in 1914, or was his goal merely the ‘industrialization’ of chamber music? Did John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape #1, by its inclusion of non-musical sounds, bring music closer to life in 1939? One could certainly argue in favor of Pierre Schaeffer’s intentions in 1948 when he composed his Etude aux Chemins de Fer, his first essay in musique concrète; yet years later, in the Traité des Objets Musicaux, he confused the situation by talking about identifying sounds not by their roles in life but by their morphologies.
The first distinctive moment of conceptual clarity in connecting sound to life was in R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project in the 1960s, in which Schafer’s goal was to understand how we interact, individually and collectively, with the sounds around us. The World Soundscape Project led to a school of musical composition and a multitude of soundscape compositions. Hildegard Westerkamp’s India Sound Journal (1993), for example, which grew out of her work with Schafer, is a narrative and audio sonic journey into various aspects of India’s culture, composed from soundwalks that she recorded in India.
Yet Schafer’s project, which defined the issue so well, can also be seen as the definition of a specific approach within a larger movement from which we can extract a diversity of sound-and-life connections. John Cage’s approach to sound composition, for example, was to define a territory, record all of the sounds within that territory, and then randomize the juxtapositions of the sounds to create an anarchistic world in which everything simply happens simultaneously in a cheerful symbiotic whole. His Birdcage (1972) is a complex, exuberant, and joyful fabric of juxtapositions centered around birds recorded in aviaries, with Cage’s voice and random sounds extending the sounds of the birds, creating an atmosphere that is at once good-humored and ridiculous. Representing a completely different perspective, personality, and mood, Cecile Le Prado’s Le Triangle d’Incertitude (1996) is an evocative and haunting tapestry of sounds from the coast of Belgium, France, and Spain. There are hints of ship-to-shore talk in various languages, nature sounds, and the sea, and the listener is placed in a world defined entirely by sound. And Jean-Claude Risset’s Sud (1985), based on recordings of the sea near Marseilles, portrays the power of a nature that is shaped, filtered and civilized by technology and human creativity, bringing different rhythms into play, relating different emotions and forms, and creating an energy that bonds us to the sea.
Words are special sounds. And an important aspect of sound-and-life connections in music is the use of words in a musical context. In Two Women (1998), Trevor Wishart provides an example of extended documentary art in which the portrayal of a real world personality is transformed to extend its meaning to express deeper and more universal values. He uses the voice of Margaret Thatcher to create a political cartoon; and he uses the voice of Princess Diana to create a touching personal portrait.
In 1994, Joan La Barbara composed a musical setting of Kenneth Goldsmith’s 73 Poems by recording the poems and using electronics to transform the sounds of the words. She created shadings and distance by varying the extent of transformation, and the result is that the sounds of the words convey a non-verbal communication of simple human feelings. But those simple human feelings, as expressed in each poem, are discrete moments that can be heard in any order. It was a natural step for La Barbara to allow a listener to determine the order. The presentation of 73 Poems can be in the form of an interactive installation in which members of the public can choose what comes next. The musical structure, in other words, interactive and flexible, is determined by the participation of members of the public.
The paradigm shift from musical object to dynamic system occurred in the last years of the twentieth century. An object, in general terms, is something that is defined and separated from the rest of the world by its boundaries. A musical composition as object is defined and separated from the rest of the world by the boundaries of time that represent its beginning and end. The specific structures of musical objects have changed from the synchronous and symmetrical structures of the 19th century, to the simultaneities and juxtapositions of the early 20th century, to the underlying complexity and unpredictability of the 1950s, and to the system models of the 1960s and later. But however they changed, they represent a traditional view of musical composition, not completely consonant with the interactivity of electronic systems.
A dynamic system, as against a musical object, has no time boundaries because it functions as an ongoing process. It may start or stop, but it has no beginning and no end and it operates according to its own rules. Joan La Barbara’s 73 Poems functions as a dynamic system. Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky the Subliminal Kid, created Saturation Station (2001) as a multimedia performance of emotionally-loaded images and sounds based on current events. The images and sounds are mixed live in a multimedia collage, with the effect that the listener is put in the middle of an uncontrollable and violent world. In Morton Subotnick’s Gestures (2000), members of the public perform by moving a mouse over a surface ‘map’ to control sounds. And Garth Paine’s Gestations (2000) uses a video camera to sense and map the movements and gestures of members of the public as they move through space and use that information to control an music and image process.
The operation of a dynamic system, in short, responds to its environment. It can be interactive. It can be performed by the public. It can be experienced by each person in that person’s individual time framework. It can become part of our lives.
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