​The next stop on this tour of the do it yourself landscape is from a state in the middle of America’s north coast, Michigan. When Robert Ashley collided with Gordon Mumma at Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan, alongside other figures in the arts and music scene there, it set into motion a series of cascades that resulted in the establishment of the fiercely independent Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music, the ONCE Festival and the Sonic Arts Union whose echoes still reverberate down the corridors of musical history. Many of the people who became involved in this Midwest scene made important contributions to the development of electronic and experimental music. They blended-in a fierce Midwest ethos of self-determination into what would become the backbone of a growing DIY movement.

Robert Ashley: Composer and Speech Analyst

Robert Ashley was born in 1930 and at eighteen was enrolled at University of Michigan and graduated four years later with a degree in music theory. He studied for a time at the Manhattan School of Music before signing on as a musician with the US Army. While in New York he lodged at a place called the International House, which was just across from Julliard’s old location at 122nd street and Claremont Ave. Living in the room across from him was a person whom he went on to have a lasting connection with: George Manupelli, a painter and later a filmmaker who started the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1963. Throughout the ’50s and ‘60s Robert and George collaborated together on over half a dozen films.

Through their friendship George had another heavy influence on Robert: marriage and the military. George had gotten drafted in 1953, and was sent to New Jersey and Maryland for service. Yet he kept coming back to New York to visit Ashley on days off. George had a girlfriend named Betty Johnson who lived in Boston and Betty had a roommate, Mary Tsaltas, whom she introduced to Robert. Robert and Mary had an instant and magnetic attraction to each other, and after being in each-other’s company for only thirty hours, they decided to get hitched. Of course they wanted their friends to be there on the occasion, too, so George and Betty went ahead and got married as well.

“They thought I should come along, so I went grudgingly” Manupelli said. In a joint ceremony held on April 11, 1954 the two couples made it official.

Manupelli got assigned to Puerto Rico by the Army, and after Robert finished his Master’s degree later that year, he signed up for the service as a musician, hoping to follow his friend. Instead he got assigned to Killeen, Texas. He played a little bit of everything while in the lone star state: drums in the marching band; piano, bassoon and clarinet for the concert band. While he was in Texas he made another friend with composer Richard Waters, whose works were later played as part of the ONCE Festival.

Meanwhile Robert and Mary had a son together, and Manupelli had decided to get his doctorate at Columbia. Ashley wanted to get in on the PhD game too. He applied to the University of Michigan back in his home town of Ann Arbor where he tried to get in to the composition program. “Three times I brought in a piece and three times they said, ‘It’s not playable’.”

So Robert did what many creative individuals do when faced with an obstacle: he sidestepped the challenge. The diversion would have a curious effect on his later compositions and how they incorporated distinctive speech patterns, and ways of talking, singing, enunciating, uttering. It was at this time he started getting interested in electronic music, and his investigations led him to the Speech Research Laboratories. The research and work he engaged in there gave him a unique compositional skill set that was not unlike Stockhausen’s studies with Werner Meyer-Eppler in the realm of phonetics and speech synthesis. The institute itself was funded by Bell Laboratories, one of many of their tentacles that reached out into the diverse byways and corners of American academia.
​     
Ashley’s new boss was Gordon Peterson who had joined the University of Michigan in the Department of Speech as an assistant professor in 1953. His main interests were in acoustics and phonetics. With funding secured from Bell he created the Speech Research Laboratories where he was active in building the electronic equipment for speech analysis, creating an anechoic chamber to make recordings in, and the study of basic phonetic patterns of speech and speech synthesis.

Ashley liked to hang around the department, where he investigated the electronics in the lab and their work in general. Peterson took him on as a “special student”. While Ashley continued to petition the composition department, headed by composer Ross Lee Finney, he took classes in such subjects as logic, linguistics, and the anthropology of speech habits. He also worked with a doctoral student for three entire years looking into the causes behind stuttering. He assisted with the ground-breaking experiments that showed a micro-second delay between the impulse to say something and the sound corrective feedback. When this colleague whom Ashley was working with accepted a job offer from the University of Pittsburgh he faced another turning point. He could either continue to work on the project as his own thesis which his cohort had offered him or he could return to the call of his vocation as composer. Finishing the project would have been an easy way to get set up with a teaching position, but he made a more difficult decision, and chose a harder road.

He went to Peterson and told him “Three years ago you were very generous with me but I promised myself I would be a composer.”

He walked out of the department without looking back. Yet the practical hands on experience with electronics and the deepened knowledge of the components of speech stayed with him forever. What he had learned about stuttering and the volition to speak would become important aspects of one of his landmark works, Automatic Writing.

In the meantime, as if by some cosmic chance operation, George Manupelli had come to Michigan in 1957 where he had landed a teaching position at the Central Michigan University two hours north of Ann Arbor in Mount Pleasant. All the players to create the ONCE Festival were being arranged on the board of life though they did not know what was to come. Five years later George would be installed on the faculty of UM. The close proximity between Ashley and George allowed them to continue their friendship and start collaborating.
George had dialed in his focus by this point from painting to film. Establishing roots in Ann Arbor gave him the solidity he needed to start the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1963, which he continued to be the acting producer of its first seventeen years. At the time of this writing the film festival is still a going concern.
​
And in those hallowed halls of higher education in Michigan some other matters relating to film, light, moving images and music were also beginning to stir.   

Gordon Mumma: Horn Master and Maestro of Homebrewed Electronics

Mumma was five years younger than Ashley, born in Farmingham, Massachusetts, and his family moved a few times before landing in Michigan. He was just as devoted to music though his education had taken an even less conventional route than Ashley’s. His first big musical turn on was a family trip to the Ice Capades where he was more interested in the live orchestra than what was happening on stage.

He started playing the horn in the junior high school orchestra, and his aptitude got him a spot with the high school orchestra. It soon became an activity not just to focus on, but part of his life blood, and a guide toward his future destiny. He also started taking piano lessons at age twelve. And while the horn was an instrument he could totally fuse with, he became an accomplished pianist, even if not one who was at the level of a professional soloist. It was another skill in his toolbox that he could apply to playing and composing the new music of his time.

In high school his musical activities expanded to encompass playing with a number of amateur and semi-professional orchestras around southeast Michigan. The family was now based in Ferndale and it was a ripe period for him. Rehearsing from the revered cannon of western classical music several nights a week became more important to him than his classes. He was rubbing elbows with musicians from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and studying under its regular horn player, Kenneth Schultz.

He got to go to the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan four summers in a row. His experiences there sealed the deal for his life path, as he started also composing. In 1951 he took first prize for a two-movement string quartet at Michigan High School. The competition was judged by Ross Lee Finney whom he and Ashley would continue to rub shoulders and bang heads with. 
 
In a way similar to fellow Midwesterner Bob Heil, whose work is explored later in this chapter, Mumma’s intelligence and self-propelled activities made school seem superfluous. Where Heil ended up muddling his way through, Mumma got expelled. He was in orchestra rehearsal, but instead of playing along with yet another boring Haydn tune, he had slipped into playing a Stan Kenton jazz arrangement.

The out of touch teach struck the wrong chord with Mumma when she called it “that nigger music.” Incensed and enraged by her words and reaction, Mumma had his own outburst, and walked out of the school, tearing a door off the hinges on his way out, promising never to return. Jazz has a liberating effect that way.

The incident was salvaged by his principal who could see Mumma’s inherent talent. Without even a high school diploma, the principal was able to help get him into the University of Michigan music department underneath Finney in 1952.

In the spring of 1952 Mumma met the saxophonist Sigurd Rascher while he was playing with William Revelli’s University of Michigan Concert Band. Rascher turned him on to the music of David Tudor. Mumma was so impressed by Rascher and his description of the pianist that in February of 1953 he made a long trip by bus and train to Des Moines, Iowa to see Rascher play. Rascher introduced Mumma to Tudor. It was the beginning of a long friendship and the seed from which a number of collaborations between the two artists grew. The next month in March, he went along with other composition students to the Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of Illinois. It was there he saw Tudor play a recital featuring the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Pierre Boulez among others. It was also the occasion for his first meeting with John Cage. These were some of the vital connections that would go on to reverberate throughout Mumma’s life. 
 
Meanwhile Finney was an abrasive individual who continued to attack abrasive and dissonant music. He didn’t hold back on criticisms of student work to save their delicate egos. Mumma and Finney soon got into a tug of war with each. This time it wasn’t over jazz music, but a decadent piece of serialism. When Mumma brought a twelve-tone canonic trio to Finney’s office the autocratic composer crumpled up the young man’s score and through it out of his eighth floor window. At that point Gordon quit the music department and transferred to literature, but didn’t stick around long enough to pass go and collect a degree.

Mumma was done following standard trajectories. To make some money he got a series of jobs, first as a record store clerk and then as a hospital orderly. Yet it was another job he got that had a key influence on his music and career as a composer. It was a keystone in his artistic development. He got hired on as a technical assistant at a seismology lab and started spending his free time building electronic music equipment. Working with technical equipment gave him the additional know how he needed to become an electronic music composer at a time when off the shelf electronic musical instruments were not available with ease. He also learned all about seismographs. In a similar way to how Ashley was influenced by his work in the Speech Research Laboratory, and would later use ideas about compulsive speech and his personal experience with mild Tourette syndrome to create Automatic Writing, so too would Mumma leverage his growing knowledge about earth tectonics and seismographs to create a series of works: the Mograph series of piano and electronic pieces he later composed.
​
Mumma was at home in the lab, as he had been drawn to tinkering at an early age. Before he hit his teenage years he had deconstructed his father’s record player so it could play both backwards and forwards and he’d be able to control the speed. The ability to vary playback speed was also one of the things that impressed him about using tape. “I found that I could change their speed and I learned about tape editing. I started out with a pair of scissors and Scotch tape,” he said. Soon he became infatuated with the possibilities. His friends in the literature department got him on board to compose for the one act plays they were writing. The school theater had a reel-to-reel to use and instead of having live music some of these plays used pre-recorded soundtracks he came up with.

Milton Cohen's Space Theater and the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music

Even though Mumma wasn’t enrolled in college anymore, he was still hanging around, a fixture in a soon to be blossoming scene. He even attended lectures by Finney, as these were open to anyone who was interested, no term paper required. He also liked to hang out at the College of Architecture and Design. It was there he met Milton Cohen for the first time, shortly after Cohen had arrived in Ann Arbor in 1957.

Milton Cohen was an assistant art professor and painter who had become fascinated with the possibilities for using electric light as a medium. He was working on a long term project called he called Space Theatre that involved the projection of moving images on a number of large intersecting fabric screens.

First built in his loft studio, it eventually became a portable geodesic dome built and designed with the help of architects Joseph Wehrer and Harold Borkin. They also built the gear for projection and lighting on the cheap. Cohen’s idea for Space Theatre was to, “explore the mobile relationships of projected light and color in space and their dramatic integration with music.” Cohen wanted to create a cyclic and serial multimedia experience that did away with linear three-act dramatic forms.

It was while in Cohen’s studio that Mumma was introduced to Robert Ashley. Cohen needed innovative musicians to work with and the two were recruited, having hit it off together when they met. They started making music together for the weekly Space Theatre performances.

The university didn’t have an electronic music studio, but Mumma and Ashley were both highly motivated to work in the medium. Just as Subotnick, Sender and Oliveros had done with the SFTMC, they decided to create their own studio. In 1958 the pair started the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music. The studio was not in just one location but was split between the available spaces at Mumma’s place, Ashley’s home, and at Cohen’s loft space.

The Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music was a real do it yourself affair. The late fifties were a perfect time to build things from scratch. At the time, electronic hobbyists were building everything, from speakers, to microphones, to transceivers. Supplies were readily available for amateur radio operators, radio and TV repairmen, and from the junk bins found in surplus military stores and second hand shops. Information was also flowing from books and the many magazines aimed at hobbyists and tinkerers. Mumma got good at making his own equipment and put together a sine-wave oscillator from a kit. Then he built a tape recorder and a mixer. In this manner, scrounging around Ann Arbor, gathering up vacuum tubes, switches, and all the odds and ends needed to solder his own circuits, Mumma put together his own electronic music set up using anything and everything he could find, all fixed together with elbow grease and his own ingenuity.

Ashley and Mumma used these homebrewed set ups to produce the swirling, electronic, mind bending soundtrack for Cohen’s Space Theater light shows. Some of the visual elements of the Space Theater included slides and films made by George Manupelli. All of the material was presented in sixty to ninety minute long montaged and collaged, kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory performances held together around themes that included the four elements, seasons, the human body, different colors and more. A spellbound audience sat in the center of the twenty sided dome that was the canvas for Cohen’s imaginative show.

Behind the magic curtain Mumma and Ashley worked together playing the tapes they prepared. The tapes included field recordings, instruments being played and manipulated on tape, and other audio experiments. Mumma was one of the first to get into amplifying the sounds of everyday objects, including glass tubes, but also things like toy instruments, by attaching transducers to them. With recordings of these in hand, he was able to edit and modify the resulting tapes to create a Midwest take on musique concrete. The pair had also gotten hold of an old piano which they took apart to play the strings on the inside like a harp, just as Joe Meek had done on his gleefully unhinged pop records. 

With an array of envelopes, filters, and gate control, Mumma learned how to further shape the sine waves from his oscillators and other sound sources. These experiences gave Ashley and Mumma the tools and confidence they needed to express themselves with freedom.

Now with the studio in place Mumma and Ashley composed electro-acoustic music for over one hundred Space Theater happenings between 1958 and 1964.  They also found themselves at the center of a burgeoning arts scene, and with their new success and experiences, they would soon be taking things up another level by their instigation and creation of the ONCE Group and Festival. They were just getting warmed up, and wouldn’t take be talked down to by music’s old guard. 

Cacciopo, Reynolds & Scavarda

The other principle composers who became part of the ONCE Group also had their roots in the collective aether of the University of Michigan. 

George Cacioppo was working on his master’s in music when Mumma first met him in 1952. Mumma played horn in the overture Cacioppo wrote for his thesis. With his degree in hand George went back to his hometown of Monroe, southeast of Ann Arbor, where he taught music for four years. Later Cacioppo reconnected with Mumma at a Finney lecture when he came back to the university while working on his doctoral in 1956. Their friendship was sealed during the hours they both spent working at Gretchen Dalley’s music store. Gretchen was a cellist and her husband Orien was the conductor of the Michigan Youth Orchestra. Music and musicians were everywhere.

Cacioppo’s primary money making work was as a radio engineer and program director at WUOM the FM station ran by the university. This was a good position both for him, and eventually the ONCE festival, as Cacioppo had access to the tape recorders used to document the events, and later played them back on the air as part of the stations programming.

Gordon Mumma recalls George, “In the mid 1950s, after I had not seen him for nearly a year, he showed up at a bookstore where I worked. He was delightfully all smiles, and though he addressed me as ‘Gordon’, he asked if I would verify my name. He had returned from several months of electroshock therapy. Nevertheless he was soon back at his radio occupation and composition of new works.”
​
Cacioppo was a crucial part of the ONCE Group, but he wasn’t always around. He suffered from depression, the reason behind the electroshocks, and later he had Crohn’s disease. For these reasons he sometimes disappeared from the circle of his friends and his occasional composition students. Yet when he was on, he was on, and his introspective and withdrawn melancholia was complemented by an abundance of creativity and a cheerful disposition that shined out when the dark clouds blew away.

​It was Cacioppo who introduced Mumma to Donald Scarvada who had been a classmate of his, both completing their masters in composition the same year. Scarvada had then gone off to Germany on a Fullbright scholarship to study with composer Phillip Jarnach. He returned a year later to do his doctoral under Finney and fell in with the other music fanatics who had started to coalesce in the area.

Roger Reynolds was another music devotee studying at UM in the late fifties. Reynolds began his musical quest when he started to learn piano as a teenager. Though encouraged by his teacher to pursue an education in music after high school, his family thought “to be a musician was a quixotic quest, and music would more appropriate as an avocation.” So Reynolds first got a degree in engineering, and he did work in the field for a brief time, going out to the west coast for a job at the Marquart Ram Jet Company. During his off hours he continued to pursue music as an avocation, so much so, that he realized it was his actual vocation. 

He quit his jet job and headed back to Michigan. The only problem with pursuing his masters in music was that he had not taken any kind of music classes at all during his undergraduate work. His was another case of a ONCE Group member laying their foundations in an unorthodox manner. As fate would have it, he was able to get over that hurdle with the help of H. Wiley Hitchcock, an assistant professor who helped guide him through the maze of higher education. There was a new honors program at the School of Music and in it he would be able to take independent courses. It ended up working out better for him this way than if he’d gone through a  more traditional course of music education, as this path provided one-on-one instruction with the best teachers in the school and he had their full attention. “I worked with Paul Cooper on orchestration, studied the Bheetoven quartets with Oliver Edel, took piano lessons with Robert Hord, and composition and analysis with Finney.” It was Finney’s course “Composition for Non-Composers” that proved to be the linchpin for Reynold’s. It gave him the necessary zeal to abandon his plan to be a piano teacher in favor of pursuing a career as a composer, a goal in which he has admirably succeeded.  

Working together Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, George Cacioppo, Donald Scarvada and Roger Reynolds gave birth to the ONCE Festival, making Ann Arbor a hub of experiemental music when national and international composers imploded on the Midwest.

RE/SOURCES:

Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music, by Gordon Mumma, University of Illinois Press, 2015
Robert Ashley, by Kyle Gann, University of Illinois, 2012
Music from the Once Festival 1961-1966, New York, NY, New World Records, p2003, 1966.
https://cse.engin.umich.edu/about/history/

.:. .:. .:.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.
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["The difference between an eccentric and a kook is an eccentric has money"-Forrest Fenn.]

Each month over the next year Sothis Medisa will feature a very brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the impotent troubadour Tiny Tim, whose freakish ways paled compared to his mastery of song. This month we are going to look at the amazing metamorphosis of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, Brother Blue.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

​Each of these sketches has come about by current research, fascination, and synchronicity. A number of the characters in this series have been new personalities for me, people whose lives I've only discovered within the past year or two. Others, like Henry Flynt, I'd heard of but hadn't investigated before.  Tiny Tim and Joybubble's had been the only two whose lives I'd read something about. In any case I'm noticing a trend where a lot of the people I've just discovered have been storyteller's such as U. Utah Phillips, Ray Hicks, and now Brother Blue.  

The man who came to be known Brother Blue was born in a rough, dirt poor section of Cleveland, Ohio. "I'm like a flower who grew up in rocky soil," he said. His father worked as a bricklayer and the neighborhood they lived in was white. Brother Blue said of it, "We were one black button in a field of snow."

Born as Hugh Morgan Hill on July 12, 1921, his younger brother had mental retardation, and couldn't pronounce "Hugh" right, and called his older sib "Brother Boo". When Hugh became a storyteller in the 1960s he changed his name to Brother Blue in part to honor his little brother. His sibling also had an obsession with butterflies, and this symbol became an important motif in Brother Blues declaimed tales. 

As a school lad, the man whose Hugh was Blue, became inspired by grade-school teacher, Miss Wunderlich who gave him the encouragement to do his best. She saw in him a bright light and nurtured his nascent  spark. 

Brother Blue served the United States during the atrocities of WWII in the army in both the Europe and Pacific theaters. Yet he had a calling towards a different theater than the theater of war, and when he came back home, having risen to the rank of first lieutenant, he went to Harvard under the G.I. Bill of Rights. He got a degree in social relations which was a combination of psychology, sociology and anthropology. In 1950 he married Ruth Edmonds, a force of nature in her own right, and then went on to earn his Masters degree in playwrighting from Yale in 1953. 

Even as much as he was drawn to theater and the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights, he had a hard time writing plays. Yet he did well in describing his story ideas to his friends, thus he gradually metamorphed from playwright-by-training to storyteller-by-calling and inclination. 

So Brother Blue settled into his vocation as a storyteller, telling stories on the street, in schools, theaters, festivals, on the corner, from pulpits, on streets, in prisons to inmates. He eventually went back to school again for his doctorate, which he received in storytelling. He performed his thesis, which was on the topic of prison storytelling, with accompaniment from a 25-piece jazz orchestra. It was this time that he also adopted the name that had come to him from his brother.

He also adopted his brothers favorite animal, the butterfly as his personal iconography. He would paint butterflies on his face and hands and he dressed from toe-to-tip-top-of-the-head in bright blue clothing, often adorned with ribbons and balloons.

To him storytelling was sacred. It was a path of redemption and awakening bringing the storyteller and those in the orbit of the story further on a path towards universal harmony. And all of creation was in the orbit of the story according to Brother Blue. He said, “When you tell a story, you tell it to all creation. It’s cosmic. It never goes away.”

Brother Blue had a number of signature tales, but one he would often say began this way. "From the middle of the middle of me, to the middle of the middle of you ..." As he declaimed he would use his entire body and being to also telle the tale. He would use his hands to make magical gestures, and tap on his heart and point to the heart of his audience. "I am older than the oldest stories, I am the storyteller."

One of his stories that dealt with the archetypal "storyteller" was that of Muddy Duddy, a musician who had the power to hear the sound of a harp playing deep within the earth.

Yet he also spun one man versions of Shakespeare, rapping them up, jazzing them out, improvising and throwing in elements from the news of the day, or being inspired to bring in elements from whomever happened to be in the crowd. He used stories as his standards, but was able to extrapolate, interpolate, and condensate them down to essential meanings. His favorite tales from whom he called Will the Shake were Othello, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear.

He mixed the old with the new, saying "I bring Homer to the streets. I bring Sophocles." And: "To tell stories, you should know Chaucer. You should know Shakespeare. You should know Keats. You have to be constantly reading. You read, you think, you create. You have to know the new moves: You must be able to rap and be able to sing the blues!"

Storytelling became his life, his mission. He performed frequently at Storytelling Festivals, sometimes showing up and declaiming on nearby streets, not even at the festival proper which was the case when U. Utah Phillips first encountered him and was caught under his spell. Phillips recalled how Brother Blue leaned into the audience with a presence. This leaning in to the present moment was something Phillips said influenced his own storytelling. 

He was also flown around the world to tell stories in various countries for various occassions. Besides teaching through stories Brother Blue also worked as an educator at the Episcopal and Harvard Divinity Schools. With his wife he taught the Harvard Storytelling Workshop. 

As a genuine griot who claimed had been anointed to storytelling by a kind of holy fire, he also employed instruments in his telling of tales. Like Ray Hicks he had adopted the French harp -or harmonica- as his main instrument, but he also employed drums and tambourines, and even chains. The chains were genuine slave chains he used in one of his stories on that subject.

At Harvard he studied with Albert Bates Lord, a professor of Slavic and comparative literature. In 1960 Lord had authored the book The Singer of Tales.  His  book discusses oral tradition as a theory of literary composition. Building on the research of Milman Parry, Lord worked with him to record Balkan guslar poets. In his book he applied their findings to Homeric and medieval epics. 

In Brother Blues storytelling he mixed all of the things he had learned from the western cannon, with stories from the African American and African traditions and Asian traditions. He read, he thought, he created.

​Meanwhile his wife Ruth Edmonds Hill was no slouch either, and she was big into the storytelling game herself. She worked as scholar, oral historian, oral storytelling editor, journal editor, educator, and as an advocate for historic preservation. Sometimes she was called Sister Ruth. 

Sister Ruth was most widely acclaimed for her work on the Black Women Oral History Project. This project consisted of interviews with 72 African American women from 1976 to 1981, conducted under the auspices of the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, now Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Sister Ruth coordinated the project and devoted herself to its completion. Many of the women interviewed were in their 70's, 80's, and 90's. 

Sister Ruth continued to collect oral histories. She made extensive field recordings, and guided interviews, of Cambodians, Chinese Americans and other ethnic and sociolect communities. Just as Brother Blue caused him to be an in demand storyteller in far locales, Sister Ruth traveled widely to conduct research and participate in conferences. 

Her and her husbands lives intertwined around oral culture: storytelling and recording the stories of everyday people.

In 1981 Brother Blue appeared as the character Merlin in George A. Romero's film Knightriders. It's a Romero film that deserves to be more widely seen. It grew in part out of his fascination with the Society for Creative Anachronism. It is modern retelling of Arthurian stories in the guise of a traveling troupe of carnies/Renfest  travelers whose particular gig is jousting on motorcycles. The group tries to live by a code of chivalry and honor gone from modern life, and consistently face obstacles with police, townies, and competition from within their own ranks. 

In this setting Brother Blue as Merlin, dressed in his usual attire acts as a spiritual guide to the king of the troupe. In film the camera zooms in on the butterfly painted on his hand in a moment of melancholy. He waves goodbye to the camera during a funeral he is officiating. Brother Blue was deeply aware of all that his animal symbol implied: gestation and transformation, change and emergence.

In his 88 years he received many accolades and awards. In 1999 he received the National Storytelling Network Lifetime Achievement award, for "sustained and exemplary contributions to storytelling in America.” The man who gave the award to him said, "His mother is verse, rhythm and rhyme, and his father is reportedly inverse time.” 

After his death in 2009 his wife Ruth received in his honor a posthumous W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, named for William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD in 1895.

Brother Blue really believed that stories change the world. Speaking of this nation's history he said, "America, I love you for what you could be! Come on America!"

He exhorted his audience and his students to tell stories from the heart. "From the middle of the middle of me, to the middle of the middle of you ..."

Brother Blue's is still out there. Now he can flutter in the spiritual realms, his soul having emerged from the cocoon of this material world. 

There are a ton of Brother Blue videos up on youtube that are worth checking out to here and witness his storytelling prowess. 
RE/SOURCES:

Ahhhh! A Tribute to Brother Blue & Ruth Emonds Hill, Yellow Moon Press, 2003

Brother Blue: A Narrative Portrait of Brother Blue a.k.a Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, by Warren Lehrer, 1995

https://www.wbur.org/news/2009/11/05/obit-brother-blue

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/arts/27hillobit.html

https://www.harvardsquare.com/history/characters/brother-blue/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Blue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Edmonds_Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Women_Oral_History_Project

In 1961 Sender built a small studio in an attic space at the conservatory. It didn’t consist of much but the schools Ampex tape recorders and some contact microphones that Sender, Oliveros and the others started playing around with. In December of that same year Sender and Oliveros put together a series of concerts called Sonics.

Each of these programs began with an improvisation, followed by playing a pre-recorded piece of tape music. At this point Morton Subotnick got it in on the fun, and joined them in their free improvisation. It wasn’t long before the idea for a studio got proposed, so they started building one.

The musical equipment the SFTMC wanted to use was expensive and their funding was meager. This forced the hands of the members to get creative and build some of their own equipment. It has served them, and the others who followed in their footsteps well as this DIY spirit was part of their whole attitude when creating the center in the first place. Building their own circuits from scratch just further baked in the can do, do it yourself attitude that was essential to the Californian spirit. The idea of circuit design as score was further reified by the essential work done at SFTMC.

Pauline had won a prize in the Netherlands for her choral piece Sound Patterns, so she was next to go off to Europe. When she came back Ramon and Subotnick had done the footwork to get the SFTMC incorporated as a non-profit, and from that point it was time to get busy making music.

Ramon Sender wrote of another aspect of their motivation to create the SFTMC. “We have felt that somewhere where the composer can find brought together all the necessities of his art in an atmosphere conducive to his developing his own personal utterance free from the pull and the tug of stylistic schools and from the competitive scramble that typifies much of the musical activity of today.

“Somewhere there should be a place where the fragmented elements of our musical life could be be melted together and recast through the reestablishment of the artist’s dialogue with his community in a new and vital way. A place where new music would find dynamic and vital expression for our own era, and by its own vitality not countenancing the isolative practices of the cliques that sicken the musical life of today.”
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The SFTMC was to become such a place, born out of its rough and ready, rumble tumble beginning. With little in the way of funding they used whatever they could scrape together. Pauline said, “It was considered, what you called a classical electronic music studio, because it was built out of equipment that was never intended for making music. It was equipment for testing in laboratories and like that.” For instance there were no sound mixers at the time as we know them today. Instead they used a telephone patch bay to passively mix the sounds. The term "patch", still widely used in electronic music, especially in terms of modular synthesizers, came from this early use in telephony and radio studios, where extra equipment could be kept on standby and patched in at a moments notice should one device fail.  The reconnection was  achieved with these patch cords and patch panels, like the jack fields of cord-type telephone switchboards.

Over the course of its life the SFTMC had homes in a few different locations. The collective was given access to 1537 Jones Street in 1962. This was a huge mansion space that was going to be demolished in a year, but in the meantime it became the perfect spot for holding shows a normal venue wouldn’t touch, and an academic hall wouldn’t allow. Since they ran the space they could also experiment with multimedia and performance art. As experimental music made contact with the emerging psychedelic culture, and with Subotnick already having a hand in multimedia it was a natural outgrowth of their activities. Film, light shows, dance, poetry –all of these found a place at the SFTMC and often combined with new music.
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Sender writes of the time, “Throughout this period we have remained independent of any university or college connection, and retained a balance in our relation to the community between our activities as a cultural agency on the one hand, and a sound recording studio on the other.”

The first year the SFTMC gave nine concerts. These included electronic pieces, and performances of new works by living composers. Lucio Berio and John Cage pieces would be rehearsed and put on their, as the teachers in the schools had no interest in this music, yet. Some of the pieces were radical for the time, such as a Robert Davis piece that had four naked people sitting on toilet seats.

This kind of venue, and the concerts put on by the ONCE Group in Michigan (to be discussed later in this chapter) became a template for the many iterations of the DIY music scenes that would emerge over the next several decades. Unutilized space was recreated in service to the arts.
​
Next the SFTMC moved to 321 Divisadero Street. The building there provided ample space for both the studio and the performance aspect, including two auditoriums. It was big enough to sublease rooms for other community groups, such as the Anna Halprin’s Dancers Workshop and KPFA, one of the flagship stations of the independent Pacifica radio network.

KPFA has been a prime disseminator of experimental and culture since it first went on the air in 1949. It reached a peak of new music experimentalism under the guidance of Charles Amirkhanian, who was the music director of KPFA from 1969 to 1992. KPFA was also the second home for Don Joyce of Negativland and his effervescent collage show Over the Edge, founded in 1981, which was another touchstone of experimental west coast culture.

In her work at the SFTMC studios Oliveros took a different tack than the time consuming and laborious tape editing process Morton Subotnick had used on his piece for the King Lear production, and standard in musique concrete. She thought the cut and splice method was all-together too intensive so she started learning how to use the tape decks as a delay system. This would be the precursor to the Enhanced Interactive System (EIS) that she used in consort with her live music playing in various versions throughout her career. She also liked to record very long sections onto tape and then play them together in continuity.

Another way she learned to manipulate her sound was by varying the record and playback speeds of the tape. She also experimented with difference tones and in doing so invented a new way of making electronic music. To create difference tones she used equipment with rich Lafayette tube oscillators, and set them above the range of hearing, around 40,000 hertz. This effect was exemplified in her 1965 piece created at the SFTMC, Bye Bye Butterfly.

Speaking of this in a 2016 lecture she said, “Then there would be differences between the two or three oscillators that I would use. If you know what a tube oscillator looks like, it has a big dial in the center of the face and it has the possibility of setting ranges so you can go above the range of hearing or in a certain range that is in hearing and below the range of hearing. The only way you could change the pitch of the sound was me to turn this dial, so that was not necessarily a good way to make some music. By setting these oscillators at above the range of hearing... I learned this from my accordion teacher. He taught me to listen to difference tones. Difference tones are the difference between two or more frequencies because they produce the difference between them below, and also above. At 40,000, in that range, you hear the low difference tones. When I first heard the difference tone sounding, and it corroborated my way, then I added the tape delay system that was used in ‘Bye Bye Butterfly.’ The way I was playing the oscillators was by just barely turning the dials. I had reduced that aspect of oscillator playing to being able to sense where you wanted to be in an improvisational way, and by listening to what was coming out. I was listening intently, and performing, to get the sounds that I got. I was very interested in layering sounds, and in taking the same tone and then microscopically varying [it] so that you got side bands, they were called. This was a simple setup, actually, but it could produce very complex results.”
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Radio operators had already figured out how to use side bands for communication. Pauline figured out how to use the same principle for modulation of audio waves. The seed that had come from listening to her grandfather’s crystal set and her father’s shortwave radio had morphed into the transformational oscillations of Bye Bye Butterfly.

As the SFTMC got up and running it drew in many creative minds who wanted to work with tape. One of those minds was Don Buchla, a California native and inventor of the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System.
​
Buchla had been born in Southgate, California in 1937. His mother was a teacher and his father was a test pilot. As a kid he took naturally to working with electronics and made a hobby out of building crystal radio sets, tinkering with ham radio gear, and welding his own electro-acoustic instruments together out of scrap steel and various components. When he went to college at the University of California in Berkeley and got a degree in Physics and the pursued a Ph.D. While working in that direction he got some practice in building klystrons at the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory.

Klystron’s were the first really powerful tool for making radio waves in the microwave spectrum. It was first built in 1937 by Russell and Sigurd Varian. It was made from a specialized linear beam vacuum tube that was used as an amplifier to boost the radio signals from the UHF range up to the microwave range. The low powered version of these instruments were used as oscillators for microwave relay communications links, and the high powered klystrons were used as output tubes for television transmitters and radar. They were also used to generate the strong burst of power needed for modern particle accelators, and it was for this last use that Buchla built these instruments. His technical skill enabled him to work on some NASA projects, as he worked towards his doctorate.

But he never got that Ph.D. The establishment at Berkeley wasn’t changing fast enough for Buchla, who got turned on and tuned in to the spiritual frequency of the sixties, and so, dropped out. 

Yet school had provided him with some very important turn ons. In addition to the klystrons and other emerging high-tech he also got exposed to musique concrète. It appealed to the same part of his creative mind that liked to make electro-acoustic instruments, and he wanted to mix his own musique concrète. His tape machine was limited in functionality, but soon, word got to him of the SFTMC where he could use their more versatile three-track tape recorder.

His visit to the SFTMC was one of those historical moments that give birth to a whole new strand in the web of his destiny.  Morton Subotnick was in the studio, and Subotnick mistook Buchla for someone he had been in contact with to design a ring modulator. It wasn’t Buchla but Buchla had the electronic chops to make it happen, and it wouldn’t be that hard for him. Even more it was just the kind of thing that got Buchla energized and excited. Buchla and Subutonic talked about what could be done.

Ramon Sender was also there and Subotnick and Sender started telling Buchla how they wanted to get away from the laborious processes involved with making electronic and electro-acoustic on tape and work with something more immediate. They wanted a tool that had the power of an analog computer but was also small enough for them to work with directly, something that could produce the results equivalent to that in a studio space but in a smaller set up.

Stemming from this meeting Subotnick and Sender commissioned Buchla to build an “electronic studio in a box.” Lucky for them they had just gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the SFTMC’s 1964-65 season and they used five hundred dollars of that money to pay Buchla for his work.

Don had already worked with analog computers so he chose to use transistors and voltage-control for his nascent box. Voltage control was especially useful as it allowed the user to play discrete notes through the oscillators. So far in the electronic music that had been made with knob controlled test equipment, a composer would have to shift manually up or down through the frequencies to reach a desired note.

This innovation made many of the tape processes redundant (though they still have their own use and charm). The electronic composer would now be free from the task of splicing tapes of frequencies recorded off oscillators and other test equipment. This is also where the sequencer enters electronic music history. He had the idea to put sixteen preset voltages into his device, the musicians could switch between. In doing so he created the sequencer.
Buchla delivered on his commission in 1965. Besides the sequencer his box had ring modulators, oscillators and other features. It turned out to be a far out hit when it was played at the psychedelic festivals being put on by members of the counter-culture in San Francisco.

As Buchla worked in California, Robert Moog was on the east coast working on his own name sake synthesizer. Independently of each other they both created voltage controlled synthesizers. This simultaneous creation of the Moog on the one hand and the Buchla Box on the other also set into place what is now seen as two different schools of synthesis, west coast and east coast. Both styles have the patch at their heart, the way the cables are connected between inputs and outputs of the synth to create their characteristic sounds.

Moog’s east coast style was exemplified by subtractive synthesis, achieved through voltage controlled low pass filtering (VCF). These VCF’s have typically employed a transistor ladder circuit that give the Moog its punchy and sharp sound that has become its sonic signature. The oscillators can produce pulse, square and sawtooth waveforms from multiple outputs. These are then put through the filters which subtract some of the harmonic elements of the sound before being swept with resonance to create changes in timbre. The signal is then routed to the voltage controlled amplifier (VCA) before going into the speakers or headphones of the musician. Further envelopes can also be placed on the sound, shaping the wave through attack, decay, sustain and release. With a patch in place it was able to be played by a traditional keyboard, giving its otherwise alien appearance and sound a certain familiarity, making the Moog palatable to musicians across the land.

The west coast style differs by employing a form of additive synthesis to simple waveforms. Instead of removing harmonics they are added to the signal. Buchla wanted his synthesizer to mimic acoustically generated sounds through the manipulation of recorded audio. One of the tools he used to change the sound in the west coast systems was the waveshaper where the input and output of a signal are mapped and then have a mathematical shaping function applied to the sound in either a fixed or variable form. Another element that gives the west coast approach its unique sound is the use of low pass gates (LPG). These act as a combination of a VCF and VCA. The LPG works in the subsonic range and sounds are only heard when control voltage (CV) is employed.

Buchla’s creation was also unique for its use of vactrols, or a light emitting diodes and photo-resistors. When voltage passes through the LED it emits light into the photoresistor. When voltage is applied to the photoresistor it develops a current proportional to the voltage applied to the LED, making the photoresistor, in effect, a voltage-controlled resistor. A vactrol can be used to adjust any parameter that would normally be used by a potentiometer or variable resistor. It was another way of doing things that typified the west coast style. Buchla used the LPG and the vactrol to create naturalistic percussive sounds modeled on bongos, marimbas and other instruments.

As mentioned before, Buchla’s instruments also incorporated a sequencer into the design. These were not featured in Moog’s instrument. What made it even more exotic is that it featured touch plates that responded to the amount of skin applied to their surface. Moog’s instrument responds as a typical keyboard, depending on how hard or soft you press the key you get changes in dynamics. By changing the sound by how much skin was applied Buchla created a way for the human to have a close and intimate connection to the instrument. The lack of keyboard also gave his line of instruments a totally new look, feel and sound. The musician thus approaching them is able to sidestep some of the typical ways of thinking about music making, ways that the keyboard reinforces. Buchla’s designs allow the musician to enter a new sound world, where intuition and experimentation are encouraged.

This was all a natural outgrowth of the west coast mindset. This idea of interfacing with the circuit would later be taken up by the low voltage and circuit bent instruments of Q.Reed Ghazal, to be explored later, some of which allowed the electricity to pass through the human body and back into the instrument.

For Morton Subotnick, Buchla’s inventions would go on to be the basis for his most touted composition, the electronic and psychedelic masterpiece Silver Apples of the Moon (1968). For this piece of music Subotnick employed a larger, expanded and more complex set up, the “Buchla 100 Series Modular Music System.” Buchla’s wizardry as instrument maker was a boon to Subotnick, whose musical imagination proved to be a boon to Buchla. Buchla’s instrument helped unleash Subotnick’s genius and expose him to a greater audience, and Subotnick’s playful and inventive music exposed the genius of the man who made the instrument, creating interest among musicians and listeners in his synthesizers. 
​
The same year that Silver Apples of the Moon came out, introducing synth music to a larger audience, another album came out that exemplified the east coast approach to synth making: Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos. Her choice of synth was the Moog, and her choice of what to play was from the classical repertoire, Bach. These different albums, both beautiful in different ways, set these schools of synthesis along their different routes of musical exploration. The west coast synths and emergent style charted out a new path linking them with the other west coast builders who had come before, and those were to follow.

The SFTMC eventually received a second Rockefeller Grant, this time for $200,000. The additional funds meant they would be able to do more with their studio and performance space. Yet before the Rockefeller’s would fork over money to the non-profit they wanted them “to have a responsible fiscal agent and that was Mills College, not us crazy artists,” according to Oliveros. So the SFTMC merged and became part of Mills College and Pauline became its first director. The grant had stipulated that it be a place “for the composition, study, and performance of contemporary music” and was shortly thereafter renamed the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).

The transition from the SFTMC to CCM happened over 1966-67 years. Many exciting concerts and events were scheduled and performed. Stockhausen came to visit in January of ’67 and gave a lecture on Momente, his work for two pianos, ring modulation and shortwave radios which at that time was still a work in progress. He also gave Bay Area premiers of Zyklus, Mikrophonie No. 1, and Telemusik.

After only a year working as director of the center Pauline got a teaching gig at the University of California. Stockhausen’s technician Jaap Spek stepped into her shoes briefly, and was then followed by co-directors Anthony Gnazzo and Lowell Cross. It was in these years that David Tudor came and gave lectures at the CCM, and performances of Variations IV which featured many of the electronic music boxes Tudor had designed and built himself.
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All of these influences laid a groundwork for musical experimentation and collaboration that was to follow in the next decade of the 1970s when the CCM was directed by Robert Ashley. For the next twelve years between 1969 and 1981, under his guidance the center became a remarkable nexus of creative activity in music, technology and art. Robert came to California by way of Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music which is another major circuit in the story of DIY electronic music.

RE/SOURCES: (for Part I and II)
https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Partch

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cowell

Lousi Barron / Bebe Barron, The Forbidden Planet OST

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/06/secret-circuits

https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview

https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/morton-subotnick-the-mad-scientist-in-the-laboratory-of-the-ecstatic-moment/

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press.

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Francisco_Tape_Music_Center

https://sfcmhistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/ramon-sender-and-new-music-at-the-conservatory/

https://web.archive.org/web/20040220191722/http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Amirkhanian.shtml

Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network by Matthew Lasar, Temple University Press; Updated, Subsequent edition (April 14, 2000)

https://moogfoundation.org/remembering-synthesizer-innovator-don-buchla-1937-2016/

Klystrons, Traveling Wave Tubes, Magnetrons, Cross-Field Amplifiers, and Gyrotrons by A.S. Gilmour, Artech, 2011

The Tube Guys, Norman H. Pond, Russ Cochran, 2008

https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/04/20/electronic-music-pioneer-bebe-barron-dead-at-82/

https://reverb.com/news/the-basics-of-east-coast-and-west-coast-synthesis

https://electronicmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Vactrol

https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/music/center-contemporary-music/archives.php

A Wild Composer: Morton Subotnick Interviewed by Robert Barry https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview
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Ankeny, Jason. "Pauline Oliveros Biography". Archived 2014-10-26 at the Wayback Machine 98.5 Kiss FM.

ARTISTIC  LINEAGES AS A WEST COAST EXPERIMENTAL CIRCUIT

​While Laurie Spiegel was wrestling with GROOVE and VAMPIRE at Bell Labs interest in the musical use of the new microcomputers was beginning to emerge in the homebrew, hacking and DIY scene on the west coast. The solar center around which the action orbited was the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) in Oakland, California.

The west coast had already been a vanguard location for experimentation in music.  There was something of a loose tradition forming around creating new musical instruments there, as exemplified in the work of Harry Partch. Partch had been one of the first western composers to systematically work out microtonal scales. Writing compositions in these scales required new custom built instruments. His unique instruments and unique music embody the west coast spirit. But it wasn’t just Partch who was experimenting with new musical instruments out on the pacific edge it had been John Cage and Henry Cowell as well.

Cowell had been a key explorer of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes in the first half of the twentieth century. When he wasn’t composing Cowell put time into writing a book titled New Musical Resources, which he penned from 1919 to 1930. Its main focus was on the rhythmic and harmonic concepts he had used in his compositions, along with some speculative music theory. This book had a lasting impact on the American avant-garde. It also got him into the game of helping to design new musical instruments. 

​After his book was published he commissioned Léon Theremin to create the Rhythmicon, also known as the Polyrhythmophone. It was a transposable keyboard instrument that could play notes in periodic rhythms proportional to the overtone series of a chosen fundamental pitch. It was the world’s first electronic rhythm machine. Cowell had proposed to Theremin that it could be built around a system of photoreceptors. It was able to play up to sixteen different rhythm patterns at the same time. Syncopation of these rhythms was optional. Cowell wrote a number of works for the instrument but it remained forgotten until Joe Meek decided to dust one off in the 1960’s and use it in his baroque pop music productions. 

Cowell’s influence spread not only from his compositions and writing, but from his work as a musical teacher; one of his students was Bebe Barron. She went on to help design, with her then husband Louis Barron, the innovative circuits and cybernetic organisms heard on the soundtrack to the Forbidden Planet.

The Forbidden Planet soundtrack from 1956 is hailed as the first entirely electronic score for a film. The producers had originally wanted Harry Partch to score the film, but he was cast aside when they heard what the Barron’s were capable of. Bebe and Louis had been brought in to make some of the sound effects. When the producers heard the amazing sounds the New York created by the couple they were hired to compose the entire hour and ten minutes of the rest of the film. MGM wanted them to move to Hollywood to be close to the film studio as the picture was made, but the couple already had all the equipment they needed back home where they were equipped to do electronic and tape work.

Even though the Barron’s weren’t Californians, through their connections in Hollywood and their innovative score they brought experimental electronic music to the movie going masses. In the liner notes to the soundtrack the composers explained their approach, which was in part influenced by their reading of Norbert Wiener and his ideas about cybernetic systems. Louis went so far as to follow the equations presented in Wiener’s book and was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. From this and other seeds the Barron’s helped spread the idea that a circuit diagram itself can be considered a score, and this idea of the circuit as score in turn took deep root at the SFTMC and later CCM, where it continued to spread and migrate from.

The Barrons: “We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a ‘voice’. [. . .]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.”

The circuits they built for their composition used vacuum tubes and carried that warm rich sound known and loved by musicians. According to how they designed the circuit it would have various characteristics in terms of timbre, pitch, and rhythm. They were especially fond of ring modulation circuits and also of applying further amplification of the signals to the circuits. Sometimes the amplification was so strong the circuit overloaded and burned out. They captured all of these sounds on tape and used the resulting library of sound to build up their compositions, using long phrases and tape delayed rhythms to create a unique sonic world unlike the other work being done with electronics and tape elsewhere in the world.
  
Another sonic lineage can be traced as the pathway of a circuit from Henry Cowell to John Cage to David Tudor. Of his many interests Cowell had written a piano piece called Aeolian Harp in 1923. It featured extended techniques that involved the player plucking and brushing the piano strings. These were a direct precursor to John Cage’s prepared piano pieces.  

David Tudor had started playing Cage’s music in 1951, giving the premiere of Music of Changes, Concert For Piano and Orchestra and 4' 33". In part through Cage he later took up composition himself. He had worked with Cage on many of his indeterminate electronic pieces and had started to learn how to build his own electrical instruments. These musical circuits and instruments that he built came to be considered as compositions in and of themselves with the circuit design as a type of graphic score. David Tudor would go on to have many ties with the CCM, giving performances, and teaching there, as detailed below.
The Barron’s and the Tudor’s shared a similar philosophy when it came to their circuits. David Tudor had said, “I don’t like to tell the machines what to do. It’s when they do something that I don’t know about, and I can help it along, then all of a sudden I know the piece is mine.”

Don Buchla was another west coast instrument builder who also had a huge influence on the shape of electronic music to come. His modular synthesizer system changed the way people approached and thought about making music. His designs shared an absence with Tudor’s: the absence of a keyboard with which to play the boxes and synths. Using an organ type keyboard to control something that wasn’t an organ and didn’t make piano sounds didn’t make sense in Buchla’s way of thinking.

“A keyboard is dictatorial.” He later said when explaining his choice to leave it behind. “When you’ve got a black-and-white keyboard there, it’s hard to play anything but keyboard music. And when there’s not a black-and-white keyboard, you get into the knobs and the wires and the interconnections and timbres, you get involved in many other aspects of the music, and it’s a far more experimental way. It’s appealing to fewer people, but it’s more exciting.” 
 As electronic music continued to evolve these ideas bounced and played off each other and off other ideas. Even as these musical practices and equipment evolved the idea of circuit design as a score in itself remained a fundamental idea within the discipline and continued to mutate as musician-builders started getting their fingertips burned on soldering irons as they homebrewed their own. 

THREE MINDS BEHIND THE SFTMC: SUBOTNICK, SENDER AND OLIVEROS

Today we take for granted that tape is something sounds and video can be recorded onto and manipulated. In the fifties and early sixties when this and the other organizations explored here had just gotten started a magnetic tape recorder was something that was more at home in the suitcase of a spy than a tool used by a musician. The San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) was founded, like its compatriots in the Radiophonic Workshop and the GRM, to explore the creative possibilities of working with magnetic tape. It was also created as a resource for musicians who wanted to work with these tools who otherwise wouldn’t have had the access to a studio.

Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros started the space as a “non-profit cultural and educational corporation.” It brought the growing do it yourself or DIY ethos into an area of music production that had been dominated by the studios of large radio and television station such as the BBC, NHK, and WDR. The creative spores released by these institutions and others like Bell Labs found fertile soil in California where the attitude of the pioneer still held sway. The center grew out of Subotnik, Sender and Oliveros’s deep love and involvement in avant-garde composition. Yet on the west coast, there was as yet, no specific place dedicated to the production of electronic sounds using reel-to-reels, tape loops, and an arsenal of six oscillators. So they built a space of their own that was to become a hive of musical, artistic and intellectual activity.

​Before diving in to their work at the tape center, a look at how the three composers  who formed it ended up in San Francisco, how they started working with tape in the first place is warranted.

Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick was the only California native of the three who started SFTMC, having been born in LA in 1933. He had gone away to Denver for college in but came back to his home state afterwards and was at Mills College in Oakland as a student during the late ‘50s. The liberal arts college had been and remains a hotbed for experimental music, John Cage having taught classes there and gave percussion concerts there in the 40’s, and Subotnick became part of that tradition. Subotnick had been a clarinetist since he was a kid and loved to write and play music. But it was in 1959 that he first had a go at making electronic music.
While at Mills he had played in the San Francisco Symphony, and composed material for TV (KQED), dance and theater pieces. Herbert Blau, director of the Actors Workshop ringed him up one day and commissioned him to write some music for a radical stage production of King Lear. Subotnick remembers the strange vision the director was going to use in the production, "It was going to take place in a kind of primordial humanity and the sets and the costumes were made from seashells."

So instead of using traditional instruments for traditional incidental music Subotnick got the idea to make a piece using tape. The actor Michael O’Sullivan had been cast for the lead role and Subotnick wanted to use his voice as the basis for the piece. “So I recorded Michael - Herb directed him - the way he was going to do the storm scene, a year in advance. I recorded it and made all the music from his voice. I cut and pasted and upside down and backwards, fast and slow. It took me almost a year."

With the actor’s voice now discombobulated in a slew of different ways he felt like he had something, and even more than the finished music it came with an insight that the tape recorder could be used as a broad canvas for painting with sound. “I realised something that I had not thought of before then, which is that I really didn't like being on the stage. And I thought, well, this technology could create a new paradigm, a new environment for composing. It would be like painting. You would be composing music as a studio art. I made the decision at that point that this new technology was going to allow for everything to be different. A new kind of composer."

Around the same time a photocopy of some lectures by Marshall McCluhan that were to become the book Undertsanding Media were being passed around in Subotnick’s circle. The book itself had not yet been published, but the ideas inside were blowing peoples minds. He was also seeing ads in the papers for the new transistors that had just started to be mass produced, and the electronic based credits cards that made a step towards making society cashless. McLuhan’s ideas mashed with the transformations he was seeing in the world around him.

With a musique concrete piece under his belt he had the idea of really moving into composing on his own, and away from playing the clarinet. He said of this moment in time, “Well I can’t give up the clarinet and writing for instruments. I don’t know anything about technology, so I have to see if I have the aptitude before I say to the San Francisco Symphony, ‘Goodbye, I don’t want to see you anymore.’ I’m going to put the clarinet away. I’m not writing any more music.”

Out of this came his 1961 piece Sound Blocks, which was his way of testing the waters as a composer before leaving the symphony. Working with the artist who did the visuals for King Lear he created a multimedia piece that involved something akin to the liquid projections of the sixties, four tracks of tape and two stereo tapes, and poet Michael McClure reading from his Flowers of Politics. The audience ate up the forty-minute piece that presaged the psychedelia that had started to emerge in that decade.
​
Realizing he had an aptitude for this new kind of music and media Subotnick eventually made the decision to become a new kind of composer.

Another new kind of composer had also been studying at Mills College. Ramon had been born in Madrid, but left with his parents for the United States during the Spanish Civil War. In New York he counted Henry Cowell among a string of composition teachers that also included Elliot Carter and George Copeland. While hanging around with the crew who surrounded Carter and Milton Babbit he got to attend a concert demonstration that was to have a profound effect on the later course of his music. The demonstration in question was of the music of Bebe and Louis Barron. Louis showed off some of the circuits and networks he had built. While Sender had enjoyed the strange sounds he heard, he also recalls that he felt the Barrons had received “a lot of very intolerant, kind of down-there-noses looks from the New York composers, who considered his approach very lowbrow.” The next segment of the entertainment that evening proceeded to open up a door to musical vistas in Sender’s mind. They played Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge.

Having heard what the Barron’s had done with electronics, and what Stockhausen had done with electronics, voice and tape, Sender realized the many possibilities tape could give the composer, though it would take a little while for the experience to gestate inside and for him to get his hands on a tape recorder as these were not in great supply at the time. When he finally did start using tape it gave him a new freedom.

Before Sender discovered the power of tape he felt he had been overtrained in music, taught so much it, and studied with so many teachers, that it resulted in a paralysis of analysis. “There came a point where I was so self-conscious about composition I was all tied up in knots. The tape recorder was a great ‘freeing’ device. It gave me, I felt, the same freedom a painter has to put a stroke on a canvas and stand back and [look at] it.”
​
In 1959 Ramon Sender went to the San Francisco Conservatory to study with Robert Erickson. It was there he met Pauline Oliveros who was also there for Erickson’s composition class. Pauline and Ramon both became interested in improvisation under Erickson’s influence. The school had a home-style Ampex tape recorder that could do two-track playback and one record. Ramon quickly realized how he could manipulate the recorder in various ways and decided to use it to create his piece Four Sanskrit Hymns as his work for the class. Working on the piece, learning how to do sound-on-sound tape dubbing, and using multiple tape players at once to construct compositions got Sender hooked on the phonics of tape, but he needed a dedicated space to work with the tapes in. He needed a studio.
​
So he set about building a room in the Conservatories attic. One of his friends was guy named David Talbot who was a technician at KPFA and he built him a small board to run his sound through. Another friend sold him his first personal tape recorder, an Ampex 601-2.
A tapehead was born and journey begun.      

Pauline Oliveros

The third member of the original SFTMC trio was Pauline Oliveros. A native of Houston, Texas she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine she started to play the accordion which was to be her instrument of choice.

Pauline was also a deep listener. To her the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to her multi-instrumentalist stockpile. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met Ramon Sender, Terry Riley and Loren Rush.

With Terry and Loren she formed one of the very first free improvisation groups. Terry had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Pauline and Loren he took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. With no score and just the instruments they sat down to improvise and catch the results on tape. Terry was on piano, Pauline on French horn, and Loren on koto and percussion. They improvised several five minute takes. They had a lot of fun playing unscored music together, and Terry had something tangible to give to the film makers as a result. When they listened to the playback together they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together.
​
In the same time period Pauline had started taking classes with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory. Pauline’s mother had also gifted her with her very first tape recorder. She met Ramon Sender in Erickson’s class and when Terry and Loren went to Europe, Pauline started improvising with Ramon. These elements of improvisation and creative use of tape remained mainstays throughout her long career as a composer and musician, with the accordion was never far away. Soon electronics were also added to her expanded pallet of sound. 

.:. .:. .:.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.

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Each month of this year I am posting a very brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the phone phreakery and child like sense of wonder present in the life of Joybubbles. This month we are going to explore the ukulele strung shenanigans of that soprano toned vaudevillian throwback, Tiny Tim. He lived a life full of verve, vision, vibrato, and not a few eccentrities. 

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

​There is much more to the story of Tiny Tim than his Tiptoe Through the Tulips or his marriage to Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson Show in December of 1969. Tiny Tim was a  true 20th century troubadour, and deeply religious all American freak, whose eccentricities were only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs. He was an archivist, entertainer, and a dandy with a ukulele. He loved show business with all his heart, all most as much as he loved Jesus. Through prayer and devotion he overcame the obstacles placed in his way to live his dream of being an entertainer.  
 
His love of old and mostly forgotten tunes dated back to his time as a kid. Born as Herbert Butros Khaury on April 12, 1932, he also went by Herbert Buckingham Khaury. His parents were of mixed religious background, and Tiny came from a priestly lineage. His mother was a Polish Jew and daughter of a Rabbi. She immigrated to America in 1914 from Brest-Litovsk, now part of Belarus. His father had been a textile worker in Beirut, Lebanon whose father was a Maronite Catholic Priest. The Maronites are an ethnoreligious Christian group whose members belong to the Syriac Maronite Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope and Catholic Church. The founding of this branch is attributed to St. Maroun  who led an ascetic life in the Taurus Mountains.  The Syriac Marionite Church is totally cool with having their priests be able to marry and have families, which is how Tiny ended up with a Rabbi grandpa on one side, and a priest grandpa on the other side of his family tree.

When Tiny was a young little whippersnapper of five years age his father thought he needed a Gramophone and he was right. It was a vintage one, wind up, and Tiny got his love for listening to the old tunes, and how he ended up getting a huge amount of his repertoire straight from the mouth of the horn.

Listening to records on the Gramophone became an addiction for Tiny and he soon caught the disease for LPs, becoming an early music and record hound. He became fascinated with the technology, with the music, and with the entertainment business. Sitting around in his New York home listening to records he started memorizing the songs, and singing them. 

​One of the first 78's he heard was "Beautiful, Ohio" sung by Henry Burr, as this was a record his dad gave him, along with the player. Burr became a very early radio singer and recording artist. In 1920 Burr made his inaugural radio appearance using a microphone from a wooden bowl with an inverted telephone transmitter. Broadcasting from Denver, Colorado this choice bit of early DX was heard by the descendants of gold bugs and others living in San Francisco. Burr was also credited with singing over the telephone lines from New York to diners wearing headphones at a Rotary dinner in California. The same year he signed a contract with the Victor record company. He became one of Tiny Tim's heroes.  

One of the music hound habits that helped build up Tiny's deep bank of songs was that of going to the New York Public Library. He spent most of his free time there. As Frank Zappa once quipped, “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” And since Tiny didn't want to get laid, believing that even kissing and touching should be refrained from until marriage, he got himself a world class education in America's popular music from years gone by from his immersion in the resources available at the NYPL. He read everything he could about the recording industry and making records, and everything he could about people like Henry Burr and others from the first few waves of recording artists. He also studied sheet music and when photocopiers became available he would copy sheet music. He continued this hobby for the rest of his life.

At age eleven he started learning to play instruments, first the violin. He would perform for his parents in the evening. At age thirteen he had an appendectomy. The year was 1945 and the harsh war years were coming to a close. He put his down time in recovery to good use, feeding his imagination and spiritual life by reading the Bible and listening to the radio.

On the school front he wasn't doing so well, having repeated the tenth grade a few times before dropping out to make his own way in the world. Frankly, school bored him and he new his destiny was the stage. By this time he'd already picked up the mandolin and ukulele as an instrumental player. While singing along with the radio one day he discovered he could go up higher than he'd thought, having a fine falsetto voice full of verve and vibrato.      

During his early years of struggle (to be followed by later years of struggle following his commercial high-point as the ruthless entertainment industry thrust him aside) he worked as a messenger for the offices of Metro Goldwyn Mayer in New York. This line of work made him even further infatuated with showbiz.  

Tiny decided to enter a talent show which was the debut of his newly discovered falsetto, with the song "You are My Sunshine." Now with a taste for the spotlight he started going to various amateur nights and clubs, performing for whoever would let him on the stage. He played in the New York subways as a busker.

He needed even more than his high voice to stand apart from all the talent trying to make it big in the Big Apple. He started dressing weird and after seeing a movie poster for actor Rudolph Valentino who was sporting long hair, he decided to grow his out as well. This was all years and years before the heyday of the hippie. People thought he looked like a freak, and he kind of was. He also took to wearing a pasty white makeup and put lotions on his skin. His mother wanted to have her son, now in his twenties committed, or at least checked out by the shrinks at Bellevue hospital. His dad talked her down.

He still hadn't adopted his signature moniker of Tiny Tim during this time when his family thought he was nuts for trying to make a go at a singing career.  

1959 was a fateful year for the young balladeer. He was working at Hubert's Museum and Live Flea Circus in Times Square under the name Larry Love the Singing Canary. He got himself a manager who started sending him off on auditions, where he continued to play unpaid. At a club in Greenwich Village he sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips and it became his piece-de-resistance. 

​His first paid gig was at a gay and lesbian bar in the village where he played for six nights a week and for six hours a night earning him ninety-six bucks a month. It's kind of ironic that it was his first paying job as later Tiny Tim was noted for his prudish and strident views about sex, as well as his homophobia. It was at this time, after following the midget act, that his manager gave him the name Tiny Tim. He had arrived at the foot of the ladder but he still had ways to climb.

A helping him came along when he started appearing in films, such as Normal Love (1963) and You Are What You Eat (1968). In the latter he sang a version of I Got You Babe and this helped him get onto the television program Laugh In, which he became a regular on. 

In 1968 he released his first LP, God Bless Tiny Tim. As he got more time in the spotlight, and other albums followed, people started to wonder whether or not Tiny Tim was just putting it on as schtick to get into the big time, or if he was as genuine as he seemed. Those who got to know him, realized it wasn't an act. Tiny was a romantic idealist and his persona was part and parcel of who and what he was. 

​In 1969 he married his first of three wives Miss Vicky on the Tonight Show. Going into the seventies he continued to perform and make appearances though his popularity had started to wain with the fickle public. He charged on though, appearing in horror movie Blood Harvest (1987), and releasing his own albums on his Vic Tim Record Label when his contracts with the big league labels were over. 

And when he stopped being able to perform in the big venues, he kept on playing in the smaller ones. In the 1990s several more albums were released. It was in the mid 1990s when apocalyptic folk musician David Tibet of Current 93 fame became obsessed with Tiny Tim. 

Tiny Tim shared with David Tibet various esoteric and eschatological views about the end times and Christianity. Like Tibet, Tiny's views were also not within the mainstream of Christian theology. Among other things Tiny believed in aliens and thought the Antichrist would most likely come from a distant galaxy. Tiny and Tibet conversed frequently with each other over the phone.

On Tibet's label Durtro he released the album Songs of an Impotent Troubadour that contained his more off the wall songs. It contained such classics as “I Used To Love Jessica Hahn, But Now I Love Stephanie Bohn,” “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year" and “She Left Me with the Herpes.” The final track was a collaboration with David Tibet called “Just What Do You Mean by ‘Antichrist’?" Steve Stapleton, best friend of Tibet, also used some of Tiny Tim's material on Nurse With Wound releases.

​Besides his non-traditonal views on the Christian end times, Tiny Tim had some other eccentricities. He bathed and washed himself often, placing an extreme importance on bodily cleanliness. This went along with his mental ideas of cleanliness. He would spell out "S-E-X" when speaking of that subject. When he brushed his teeth, which he did four times a day, he used his own mixture of Crest, Macleans and Gleem to give them a significant shine. After his baths, he wouldn't dry off with a regular cloth towel, which he thought was just a vehicle to harbor germs. He only used disposable paper towels, of the Job Squad or Bounty Microwave variety.

Yet if you were hanging out with Tiny Tim you were probably talking about music, when not discussing the alien anti-christ. If you named a song, he'd tell you who wrote it, who recorded, in what year and how it did on the charts. If he had bought the album he could even tell you what he was wearing when he bought it.

Yet the entertainment business that he loved so much discarded him when he couldn't be used to make a buck for the big guys anymore. Yet he scraped on. In 1995 he moved to Minneapolis to live with Miss Sue his third wife.

On November 30, 1996 he was scheduled to play a charity event for the Women's Catholic League Ball. A band was scheduled to play and back him, but the band leader wouldn't play the songs Tiny had brought with him, even though he knew a whole catalog of standards in his head. So Tiny took to the stage for the last time accompanied by himself on ukulele, playing songs with great verve. He never once let the venue dictate how he performed. He gave it his all. He'd already been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and after singing Tiptoe through the Tulips one last time he came off the stage shaky. He'd had a heart attack while singing the 1920's song he'd made into anthem for the Flower Children of the sixties. 

When asked about death he said, "I am ready for anything that happens. Death is never polite, even when we expect it. The only thing I pray for is the strength to go out without complaining."

At the event, a doctor in the audience tried to resuscitate him, and EMT's were called to the scene, and he was rushed to the hospital, where he died moments later. He didn't go out complaining at all, he went out singing. 

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The history of phone phreaking has fascinated me since I was a kid and first learned that people explored the telephone network as a hobby. In junior high I learned a trick using a paper clip on a payphone to get free phone calls -usually back home in Westwood from Cheviot telling my parents I'd be out skateboarding longer -or asking for a ride. Or to page someone to try and get some weed. I remember being sold a joint of oregano instead. 

I always thought I'd like to learn to phone phreak, but that era was already mostly dead out just as I was learning about it. Instead I got on to bulletin board systems before right around the time America Online was getting online. The phreaks still called to my imagination.

When I read the book Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley I got a much more intimate history of the phreaks behind the phones. One of those was a guy named Joybubbles. He was born in Richmond Virginia on 25 May 1949,  as Josef Carl Engressia, Jr.

Joybubbles was a maverick who had perfect pitch. That talent allowed him to whistle his way through the phone system. 2600 hertz was the magic key to get you into the Ma Bell's magic telecommunications kingdom. 

A bit more background may be necessary here. It all dates back to the time AT&T implemented automatic switches. These used tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling. There were tones used intended only for AT&T personell, but if a person with a phone happened to know those tones, they could use them even if they didn't work for the company. The 2600 hz tone caused a phone switch to think a call had ended while still leaving the carrier line open, allowing those who knew how to do it to make free long distance and international calls -at a time when these were very expensive. 

It was a huge loophole in the phone system the phreaks started to exploit and build a culture around. Joybubbles is credited with having discovered the tone around 1957, though at that time he still went by Joe Engressia. He was seven years old and blind. He figured out that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2637.02 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Not knowing what he had done, he called up the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. Joe Engressia is considered to be the father of phreaking. After he learned what it did, he began to use the ability to make friends and talk on the phone with people around the country.

Other phreaks started figuring out the 2600 secret as well. Bill Acker ("Bill from New York" on the phone lines) figured out how the operating principles of the network. He used a tape recorder to play a 2600 tone to the same effect. John Draper who was friends with Joe discovered the whistles that came as a free toy in Cap'n Crunch  boxes produced the necessary tone, and he took his nome de phreak from the sugary cereal.   

When Joe went to the University of South Florida in the late 1960s he earned himself the nickname "the Whistler" for his many mighty phone feats. He had figured out how to make the phone company think he was calling from a different location, thus circumventing the chance of being traced, and more importantly, the chance of getting billed, or worse. Still, he did get caught and disciplined by the University.

After picking up a degree in philosophy he  moved to Tennessee where he continued to be a phreak. Eventually the phone detectives tracked him down. The phone company SBT&T first noticed his phreaking activities in summer 1968, and an employee of the Florida Bell Telephone Company illegally monitored Engressia's telephone conversations before ratting him out to the Feds.

He was arrested and charged with malicious mischief. It might have been mischief, but he was just having fun, talking to people, exploring the network, and seeing what he could do. He got a fair amount of publicity from his arrest and the public adored him as a blind genius. It also helped spread the art of phreaking to others who wouldn't have heard about it had news not ran with the story. 

​He subsequently gave up phreaking, but remained active with ham radio. It shouldn't be suprising but many phreaks were also hams. Joe had the call sign WB0RPA, and held an amateur extra class license, the highest grade issued. He also earned both a General radiotelephone operator license and a commercial radiotelegraph operator's license, as well as a ship radar endorsement on these certificates. He even qualified for the now-obsolete aircraft radiotelegraph endorsement on the latter license, a license few people rarely got in the first place. 

He also remained active operating phone story lines. Story lines and joke lines were something phone enthusiasts put together with rudimentary answering machines. A number was given out for the line, and a person could call and listen to the recording, of jokes, the story, or whatever other subject the operator chose to speak about.  "Stories and Stuff" was the name of one his lines which he usually updated on the weekend. In the early 1980s, he ran a phone line called the "Zzzzyzzerrific Funline." It was listed in the very last entry in the phone book. On the Zzzzyzzerrific Funline he called himself Highrise Joe and would rant about how much he loved Valleyfair amusement park. Another regular topic he talked about was Up with People, a non-profit that promotes a five-month program involving travel, the performing arts, volunteering, and various workshops focused around intercultural communication to teach young adults how to interact in a multi-cultural environment and create change in communities with varying needs.

In the 1980's Joe started using and then adopted the name Joybubble's. This was followed by a decision to quit being an adult and leave his responsibilities behind him. Part of this decision came as his way of reclaiming the childhood he had lost as someone who had been abused as a kid.

In 1982 he moved to Minneapolis where he established the Church of Eternal Childhood. He became an ordained minister and set it up as a non-profit. The visionary aim of his church was to help adults reclaim the joys of childhood. He lived a monastic lifestyle in support of this goal, supporting himself on disability with occassional side gigs doing research on smells for the scent industry. Part of the outreach of his church involved reading to kids at library's and setting up phone calls to kids with terminal illnesses. He neve did lose the love of the phone. 

In 1991 he changed his name legally to Joybubbles. He used the name as the line in the sand between the unhappiness of his own childhood and the life he made for himself. 

From the time he changed his name until his death on August 8, 2007 he continued to do the work he felt mattered most: spreading a sense of childlike wonder to the world. 

“I wish everybody would take a little time, even if it’s only once a month, to get out of the rat race into the sandbox and play like a child.”

From his little apartment in Minneapolis he reached out across the telephone to people all over the world to give them his unique take on life, and spread his joy. 

“People ask me: ‘What’s your secret of happiness? You seem to be happy most of the time, when we meet up with you.’ Well, I’ll tell ya: I think one of my greatest secrets of happiness is that I can cry really hard when I need to, and I can let myself feel way, way sad. I think that crying is not a breakdown; it’s a breakthrough, and sometimes when I’m putting myself together, I have to let myself come apart.”

.:. .:. .:.
​
Sources: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html
https://www.twincities.com/2015/03/13/daily-juggle-my-child-led-me-back-to-joybubbles-the-eternal-5-year-old/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles

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Science is at its best when it engages our imaginative abilities as much as our faculties for reason and logic. Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an astrophysicist, professor, author and musician who exemplifies the fusion of imagination with scientific research. Through her embrace of the imaginative, emotional and subjective side of life she has helped return human warmth to the study of the stars. The prevalent reductionist and materialistic world view of many scientists and astronomers often strips the sense of wonder out of the study of the stars and the galaxy. These powerful radiant and mysterious planets, asteroids, and black holes then just become objects on a plotted map explained with abstract theorems, rather than things of beauty, mystery and the ineffable.

“I enthusiastically embrace the fabulous new discoveries of astrophysics, but I do not want to stop there. I want these discoveries to swim in our imaginations,” she says “to open our hearts to new ways of thinking and feeling about life, about men and women. I want us all to hear how the music of the spheres resonates with the music of our hearts.”

To conjure up an intimate portrait of the universe she has sketched out a new way of investigating the cosmos which she calls Acoustic Astronomy or Radio Computer Music Astronomy. This still nascent field marries the knowledge of the visible universe with that of the sonorous universe. This union allows for new ways of experiencing astronomical discoveries and developments. It also owes a lot of its practice to the practice of data sonification [explored in Chapter 3.]

The Italian Dr. Terenzi received her doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Milan. Her doctoral work included the field of computer music where she focused on creating a class of sound based on data sourced from radio astronomy. Her education also included musical training in operatic singing and piano from the Civic School of Music in Milan. 
She has gone on to teach at the University of Milan, lecture in countless schools and at the time of this writing is on the faculty at Florida International University in Miami. She is a tireless educator of the public on the beauty that abounds in the universe, and one of the ways she has brought this love to people is through her musical recordings. Her first album Music from the Galaxies, released in 1991, is the exemplar of Acoustic Astronomy music and is a fine album of electronic music in general. For this album she utilized the raw data from UGC 6697, a strange spiral galaxy approximately 180-million light years from Earth, located in Abell 1367, the Leo cluster.

In the liner notes to her album Terenzi explains. “UGC 6697 is an irregular galaxy presenting a peculiar radio source which seems due to a dynamic interaction between the galaxy and the galactic medium. UGC 6697 contains a circular ring of ionized gas. The dynamics are highly complex due to the presence of a small companion galaxy. A collision between the two galaxies may have occurred, causing a flow of gas to emerge from the galaxy and triggering star formation on the bright side of the ring structure.”
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UGC 6697 was studied by Professor G. Gavazzi also from the University of Milan. A number of radio telescopes made observations in the spectrum including the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope at 0.6, 1.4 and 5 Gigahertz. The Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico captured data at 1.4 Gigahertz as well. Using the 4 meter Kitt Peak National Obersavtory in neighboring Arizona, blue, red and H-aplha frames were obtained. Spectral data from the 3.6 meter European Southern Observatory Telescope in Germany was also obtained and used. 

All of this data was given to Terenzi from Gavazzi on a digital tape. Terenzi says, “Every kind of celestial radiation can be represented by a stream of numbers.” Those streams of numbers from the tape she converted to sound using the Cmusic program created by Professor F. Richard Moore from the Center for Music Experiment in San Diego. 

Moore had previously worked with Max Matthews on the development of Music V and the GROOVE system at Bell Laboratories. Then he skipped off to get a masters and then Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Stanford University in 1977. While he was there Moore built the FRMBox, a realtime digital music synthesizer. Then he joined the UC San Diego music faculty in 1979, founding the Computer Audio Research Laboratory (CARL Project) at the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research (CME, now CRCA: Center for Research in Computing and the Arts). He was the director for the Center from 1982 to 1991.

Moore also wrote one of the standard books on computer music, Elements of Computer Music, which goes into detail about the software he had also written, cmusic and pcmusic. The book and the programs are all still used by musicians today, thirty plus years on at the time of this writing.

One of the things cmusic can do is take a description of an acoustic sound and transform it into the digital numbers that can in turn be converted into a waveform, something a person can listen to, off a hardrive or burned onto a CD.

What Terenzi did was to make an analogy between galactic radiation and musical notes. She had the insight that both radio waves and sound waves have frequency and intensity. She used csound to convert the frequency and intensity to something listenable.

Of the music itself she writes, “There are some interesting aspects of the galactic sounds. Some parts seem to be well tuned around B-flat or D-minor. If you listen carefully, you can also hear several new accords and harmonies, linked together following their special sidereal rules. The predominant microtonality of the galaxy is something that could be explored during research by creating new scales and timbers. The galaxy itself can be used as a musical instrument if it is broken into fragments or combined with classical instruments.”
​
The innovations she has made as an Acoustic Astronomer have been picked up more in the arts and music world than in the laboratories of the scientist. A number of musicians who were both inspired by ambient space music combined its liminality with the tool of sonification to create records that utilized astronomical data as part of their source material.
Terenzi herself went on to work on CD-ROMs when that was a thing, write books, make more music, teach, and no matter what form it took, share her passion for the music of the spheres.  

.:. .:. .:.
Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. 

Sources:
Music from the Galaxies, 1991, Island Records
fiorella.com
https://faculty.fiu.edu/~fterenzi/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a15478/fiorella-terenzi-acoustic-astronomy/
https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/are-you-ready-willing-and-abell/
https://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/memoriam/f-richard-moore/index.html
​

​​​Do you like what you have read here? Then consider signing up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It rounds up any blog posts here as well as containing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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All good things begin with explosions –the universe through the creative act of the big bang, the creation of a new life through the big bang of love and orgasm, and neutron stars when a star somewhere between four to eight times as massive as our own sun explodes into a supernova. If the star had been larger and more massive when it went supernova it would keep on collapsing and turn into a black hole. As the protons and electrons melt away in the all-consuming fire, the core of the star collapses in on itself and the electrons and protons melt into each other to form the super dense neutron star.

Neutron stars are the smallest and densest of the currently known stellar objects. They are about the size of a small city, close to that of Manhattan Island, with a diameter of 20 kilometers. Their mass however is 1.4 times that of our sun. Gravity on a neutron star is near 2 billion times that experienced on earth. A single sugar cube would way a billion tons. The gravitation on these objects is so strong it bends the radiation of light.
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These things also spin at incredibly fast speeds, continuing to move on the momentum and energy imparted to them by the supernova explosion. They can spin as fast as 43,000 rotations per minute gradually decelerating as the force of their creation dissipates.

Some neutron stars are like lighthouses. Pulses of cosmic electromagnetic material beam out of them at nearly the speed of light. As these beams sweep past Earth they flicker like the powerful lantern or bulb inside the lighthouse. Even though this “light” is always on, it can only be detected when the keeper of the lighthouse sweeps the beam in the direction of Earth.    

Though neutron stars had been theorized as far back as the 1930s, the wild spinning ones with extreme magnetic fields that emitted radio waves and came to be known as pulsars were first detected in 1967 by Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell who were working together at the Mullard Radio Astronomical Observatory in Cambridge in 1967.

Bell had made an observation that Hewish recognized as being something deserving of further investigation, a regular pattern of pulsed radio signals. One thought was that they were caused by interference from Earth. They also had to speculate that the signals were coming from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms sending out cosmic communiques. Yet Hewish had a hunch that they were instead emissions from certain stars.

On this extraterrestrial matter Bell Burnell said, “we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"

Looking at the matter closely they observed that pulses were separated by 1:33 seconds and originated from the same place in the sky. The pulses kept to sidereal time, and the shortness of them eliminated most then-known astrophysical sources for the emissions. The rate of the pulse also eliminated that it was of human origin. They looked for the signal using another radio telescope and when it was detected this eliminated the possibility that it was caused by a fault in the instrumentation.
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They gave the signal the nickname LGM-1, for “Little Green Men” in playful honor of the possible origin. When a second pulsating signal was discovered in a different part of the sky the “Little Green Men” hypothesis was given up. Officially the pulsar was given the name CP 1919, and now has a few other names as well, PSR B1919+21 and PSR J1921+2153, none as easy to remember as LGM-1. Though first studied on radio wavelengths, have also been found to emit gamma rays, x-rays, as well as physical light.

PSR B1919+21 went on to have a life of its own in the burgeoning indie music underground. Bernard Sumner, lead guitarist and founding member of Joy Division, had noticed a unique image when leafing through the 1977 edition of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. He thought it might be an enigmatic picture to use as the cover for an album. What he happened to be looking at was a stacked plot of pulses from B1919+21.

 In the book itself there wasn’t much information about who made the image. There was the little caption that said, “Successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919, are here superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds. They are caused by rapidly spinning neutron star.” That was that. In the January 1971 issue of Scientific American the plot also made an appearance with a credit saying it was based on data collected from the Arecibo Radio Observatory, though no specific creator is given for the image itself.

The original creator of the plot chart was eventually tracked down by journalist and science writer Jen Christiansen. She noted that, “the charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970′s. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output.” So she combed through the work of students at the time and managed to trace the image to a PhD thesis by Harold D. Craft, Jr. titled “Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars.”
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Sumner passed along the image to Peter Saville, the graphic designer for the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and co-founder of Factory Records, who released the album.. Saville concurred that the image would make a great cover. The band wanted to use the image as it had originally appeared black-on-white, but Saville convinced the colors would look better reversed to white-on-black. "I was afraid it might look a little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier in black," he said.

Following Unknown Pleasure the band released a seven inch single of their song “Transmission.” The lyrics exhort the listeners to “dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio.” Continuing with the astronomical theme the sleeve contained an image of a distant galaxy.

Joy Division left an indelible stamp on the underground music scene and the development of post-punk. Their career was painfully short, a micro blip of time, as quick and fast as the radio burst transmitted by a pulsar. Ian Curtis the lead singer had been struggling with epilepsy, a failing marriage, and a deep depression and he took his own life in 1980 at the age of 23.

Their career was cut painfully short when Ian Curtis lost his battle to suicide less than a year since the release of their debut single. Although they were only together for such a short space of time, Joy Division helped change alternative music forever with their dark lyrics coupled with Curtis’ trademark delivery which were so unlike anybody else at the time. The other band members went on to found New Order as the dawn faded into day.
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Through the use of radio astronomy images as a source for innovative graphic design derived from data Joy Division set a precedent. Later musicians and artists would take that cue, along with the tools of data sonification and use it to create music from the vast pools of astrophysical information being created by researchers. 

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.

Sources:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-cover-the-science-behind-an-image-191126/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-cover-the-science-behind-an-image-191126/

Encyclopedia Brittanica

21st Century Astronomy

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EXPERIMENTAL STATIONS

It was once again in the hallowed halls of Bell Laboratories that the field of radio astronomy was born. Karl Jansky first detected radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in August of 1931. His discovery was a happy accident, one of those serendipitous coincidences born out of pure research and playful investigation. Yet Jansky had been around radio and playing with radio long before he showed up at Bell.

Born in what was then still the Territory of Oklahoma, his father Cyril M. Jansky was the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Cyril was passionate about physics, and named his son after Dr. Karl Eugen Guthe, a physicist and professor at the University of Michigan who’d been a mentor to Cyril. Cyril had been born of Czech immigrants in Wisconsin, and later returned to his home state where he retired as a professor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

Karl had a brother ten years older, Cyril Jr., a man who helped lift the United States into the radio age by helping to build some of the earliest transmitters in the country. His handiwork was on the early radio stations 9XM in Wisconsin and the 9XI in neighboring Minnesota, now stations WHA and KUOM respectively.

During WWI there had been a ban on civilian radio stations. In October of 1919 the ban was lifted and the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota applied for "War Department Training and Rehabilitation School" station licenses which they received. The “X” in both call signs designated them as experimental stations. The operation of 9XI was under the oversight of Cyril Jansky Jr. who was an electrical engineering professor at Minnesota.

In 1920 a one-kilowatt spark gap transmitter was installed at 9XI. Students used it to communicate with other amateur stations and university stations, such as their neighbors in Wisconsin where the set-up had also been overseen by Cyril Jr. As a service both stations provided weather forecast and market bulletins using Morse code. When the vacuum tube came along in 1921 they were able to start making audio broadcasts.

In the following years as the radio service became more codified, various types of licenses emerged with assigned wavelengths corresponding to whether the station provided entertainment or news and information. These changes were also reflected in the assigned call letters. The 9XI station had become WLB. The radio service was a major asset to the community when in 1922 a major snowstorm knocked out newswire services in the region. The Minneapolis Tribune asked the station's operators to help retrieve the day's news through a roundabout series of amateur radio relays, one station passing the news on to the next until it reached its destination. This type of radio relaying became a major tradition for ham radio operators. In the United States, the American Radio Relay League, the major organization and advocate for US hams, takes its name from just that tradition.

Karl Jansky grew up in this milieu and it’s no wonder he followed in the family footsteps to also become a physicist and radio engineer. He was attending the University of Wisconsin during the years when it had changed from operating as 9XM to WHA and it is very likely he was familiar with the equipment being used at the station. He graduated in 1927 with his BS in physics.

SIGNALS IN THE STATIC

Janksy quickly landed a job at Bell Labs and relocated himself to their site in Holmdel, New Jersey. Of the many things Bell Labs was interested in was the investigation of the properties of the atmosphere and ionosphere with the shortwave of the radio spectrum for use in trans-Atlantic radio telephone service.

It was early days yet in the study of propagation, noise, and everything that could affect a signal being transmitted to a distant place. Jansky’s job was to listen to the static that interfered with communication; in studying it he found signals where others may have only heard noise.

In 1933, five years before Orson Wells historic War of the Worlds broadcast, Jansky was able to pinpoint “Electrical disturbances apparently of extraterrestrial origin.” This was in fact the name of the paper he wrote on his findings. It all started out with an antenna he built.

Radio astronomy is like fishing, only instead of a pole you have an antenna to reel in the catch of distant transmissions. To do his research on atmospheric noise Karl built an antenna that was dubbed “Jansky’s Merry-Go-Round.” Mounted on a “turntable” of four Model-T Ford tires it could be rotated to determine the strength or weakness of a signal and thereby pinpoint it. It was designed to receive radio waves at a frequency of 20.5 MHz (wavelength about 14.6 meters). Next to this antenna there was a small shack that housed equipment including an analog pen-and-paper recording system that plotted the findings of the antenna.
For several months he recorded signals from all different directions and eventually he was able to categorize them. Within the noise he was able to detect thunderstorms. Close thunderstorms exhibited one set of characteristics and those far away exhibited another. Then there was a third sound he picked up, a faint steady hiss whose origins were unknown. This signal had a location of maximum intensity, rising and falling every day.

Initially he thought the hiss was from solar radiation, but he revised this initial theory after further investigation. He discussed the anomalous hiss with his friend Albert Melvin Skellett, an astrophysicist who also worked at Bell and whom later wrote a paper on the “Ionizing Effect of Meteors” and whose name appeared on many patents. Skellet looked at the data and noted that the time between the signal peaks was on an exact cycle: it restarted every 23 hours and 56 minutes. This time frame is a sidereal day, a time scale used by astronomers based on the rate of Earth’s rotation relative to the fixed stars. Armed with this knowledge he compared his observations with optical astronomy maps. He noted that the signal peaked when his antenna was pointed to the densest region of the Milky Way galaxy, in the Sagittarius constellation. Knowing that the sun was not a huge source of radio noise, he concluded that the cosmic hiss was being created by “gas and dust” in that far corner of the galaxy.

Jansky wrote up his findings in a 1933 paper titled “Electrical disturbances of apparently extraterrestrial origin.” His findings were also publicized by a New York Times article on May 5th of that year. Jansky called the sounds from space “star noise” and it was something he wanted to investigate further but he found little help. Radio was a completely new tool when applied to astronomy, and the astronomers of the time on the one hand didn’t see the ramification of its many potential uses. In the 1930s and 40s they were also hampered by the financial constraints of the Great Depression and following that, the war effort.

Meanwhile those overseeing Jansky’s work at Bell Labs didn’t see the point in his further investigation of “star noise”. They were looking for solutions to the problems affecting trans-Atlantic communication and didn’t want to sink further funds into something they couldn’t be sure would prove useful to their goal.

 A small number of scientists and astronomers were interested in his research, but Jansky didn’t live long enough to see his contributions really take off. He died at age 44 in 1950 due to a heart condition. He was later honored by having his name appended to the unit used by radio astronomers for the strength (or flux density) of radio sources. Jansky noise was also named after him and refers to high frequency static disturbances originating deep within the cosmos. These are just a few of the ways his work has been remembered.

As for the emissions coming from the center of the Milky Way, in the 1950’s astronomers and astrophysicists thought it was made by electrons in a powerful magnetic field. Today the thinking is that the radio emissions are caused by ions in orbit around a Black Hole at the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius A*.  Jansky, having pointed his antenna towards galactic center, also pointed others towards the possibilities of a field combining radio and astronomy.  

THE HAM WHO MAPPED THE RADIO STARS

Grote Reber was an amateur radio operator (W9GFZ) and amateur astronomer who followed Jansky’s lead and combined his two hobbies to make great discoveries about the cosmos we inhabit. Having heard of Jansky’s work he applied for a job at Bell Labs because he realized this new field was the one for him but the Depression still had the countries resources drained and they didn’t have anything for him. So without waiting for grants or asking anyone else’s permission he built a parabolic receiving dish in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois, and set out to do the work on his own.

The antenna or radio telescope he built was more advanced than even what Jansky had built with the funds from Bell Labs. It was made of sheet metal and shaped into a nine meter in diameter parabolic dish focused to a receiver eight meters above the dish, all connected to his radio gear. It was on a stand that could be tilted to various parts of the sky, but unlike Jansky’s it wasn’t on a turntable. Perhaps he should have hit up Ford for some spare tires. Reber completed his build in September 1937, and was able to keep radio astronomy alive during those fraught and lean years.

 It took Reber three attempts before he detected a signal which confirmed the discovery of Jansky. The first time he was looking on the 3300 MHz frequency, and the second time at 900 MHz. Finally in 1938 he was successful in detecting signals from outer space on 160 MHz. In 1940 he made his first professional publication in the Astrophysical Journal and was contacted by Yerkes Observatory who offered him a position. He turned them down and kept walking his own path. He decided to make a radiofrequency sky map and was the first to do so. This was published in 1941 and expanded in 1943.

Reber continued to trawl the megahertz fishing for signals from the stars and he hauled in quite a catch. He researched, wrote, published, rinsed and repeated, the lone radio astronomer. Yet the body of work he created in the new field became a big bang for radio astronomy that exploded after WWII. A lot of the folks getting out of the service had been trained in radio, radar, and electronic communications in one way or the other, and many of these folks went on to pursue careers in some aspect of electronics. Some of them came home and built on the foundation of radio astronomy whose waters were first explored by Jansky and Reber.
  
Reber continued his quest to explore the mysteries of the stars and the spectrum. One mystery he tinkered with had to do with a standard theory surrounding radio emissions from beyond Earth which claimed they were caused by black-body radiation, or the thermal electromagnetic radiation, including light (of which radio is an invisible form), given off by all hot bodies. According to this line of thinking scientists of the time expected there to be a greater quantity of high-energy light than low-energy due to stars and other hot bodies in the cosmos. Reber dispelled this notion by showing that there was a vast amount of low-energy radio signals able to be detected with his radio telescope system. Later in the 1950s the idea of synchrotron radiation was used as an explanation for his mysterious measurements.

Reber was a man who liked to go his own way. As the field of radio astronomy grew some areas of research were growing crowded, so he decided to study a band of frequencies that weren’t getting much attention. He looked at the medium frequency range of signals around the AM broadcast band, those in the 0.5–3 MHz range. All those frequencies below 30 MHz bounce off the ionosphere, part of the reason they are able to be picked up in distant locations. To really listen for distant signals coming in from outside he needed to go somewhere that let those signals in.

He found such a place in Tasmania, where he moved after a brief stint surfing the spectrum in Hawaii, when he received some funding from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. There in the southernmost state of Australia in the southern hemisphere, on the long winter nights when the sun barely shows his face, the pesky layer reflecting the radiowaves would go de-ionize, allowing the long waves from the stars to be caught by his radio telescope. Tasmania was also low in manmade electrical interference and RF. This allowed his equipment to receive like a dream and detect faint signals that elsewhere might have been obscured by noise.

Just as hams and shortwave listeners go to quiet out of the way spots that have low levels of manmade RF for DXpeditions, Reber’s love of radio and astronomy took him to exotic places, all in the continuing search for the ultimate DX signals –those trans-plutonian transmissions  from outside of our solar system, and perhaps even galaxy.
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For the rest of his career and life Reber lived in Tasmania searching for signals from the stars.

RADARS PUZZLING EVIDENCE

​During the war years there were some other explorations of radio astronomy happening below the radar, often being worked on by people involved in the field of radar. Radar had been shown to be a possibility for detecting objects as far back as Heinrich Hertz in 1886 when he showed that radio waves could be reflected off objects. The Russian physicist Alexander Popov developed a device for detecting distant lightning strikes in 1895. Ten years later the German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer demonstrated the use of radio to detect the “presence of distant metallic objects”, specifically ships at sea in distant fog. It was an invention that would have many practical uses. Many other radio experiments in direction finding and detection took place after this by excited investigators. 


During WWII several nations were working on the problem of radar independently though not yet called as such as part of their search for tools and effective strategies against their enemies. James Stanley Hey was a British physicist who joined the Army Operational Research Group (AORG) after a 6-week course at the Army Radio School to support his country during the fight against the Axis powers. 

Hey was tasked with one of those great traditions in radio: jamming, or rather ant-jamming in his case. Radio jamming is the intentional blocking or disrupting of a radio signal, often with another stronger interfering signal and is distinguished from natural sources of interference, and unintentional interference. It really got going as a method of miscommunication in WWII. Ground operators realized they could mislead the pilots of opposing forces by speaking in their language and leading them off in the wrong direction. Radar jamming uses the same principle, but the jammer sends out RF signals designed to interfere with those of other radar operators, saturating the enemy receiver with noise. Claude Shannon might have looked at it in terms of information theory: by increasing the noise in a system, the user has to work harder to lock on to a true signal. Jamming has also been extensively used in broadcast radio by oppressive regimes who don’t want the shortwave transmissions of other countries, such as when the United State’s station the Voice of America was jammed by the Soviet Union to stop their citizens from being able to listen. Broadcast jamming continues at the time of this writing in countries such as North Korea and China who want to keep outside transmissions, and outside messages, from entering their country.

Hey tackled the problem of German radar jamming and it led to discoveries relevant to radio astronomy. The Germans had been clever in their jams of Allied radar signals, leading to the escape of three German warships from the English Channel. Their signals had come off the French coast and interfered with those of the Allies. In February of 1942 Hey received reports of anti-aircraft radars being jammed in the 4-8 meter range of the spectrum. He found that the direction of maximum interference seemed to follow the path of the Sun. Following this lead he contacted the Royal Observatory and learned there was a very active sunspot. This led him to conclude that sunspots, which were already believed to emit streams of ions and electrons in magnetic fields of approximately 100 gauss, could also emit radio wave emissions in the meter-wavelength bands. After the war Hey continued his research in radio astronomy, working for the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern.

Around the same time G. C. Southworth of the United States also found radio noise associated with the Sun in the centimeter portion of the spectrum. Southworth was a radio engineer who worked for AT&T starting in 1923 and eventually finished his tenure with them at Bell Labs where he retired in 1955. He is mostly remembered for his development of waveguides, but he was interested in all different aspects of radio and worked on other things such as ultrashort waves, the dielectric properties of water at ultrahigh frequencies, shortwave propagation, antenna arrays, earth currents, and radio astronomy. In 1950 he published his 675-page doorstopper of a tome, Principles and Applications of Waveguide Transmission. It was his nitty-gritty exploration of microwave techniques and it was while studying that range of the spectrum that he stumbled across signals from the sun.  

Back in England, J.A. Ratcliffe was another man working on the radar problem during the war years who encountered emissions from the sun. After graduating from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in natural sciences in 1924 he started researching propagation under Edward Victor Appleton, a pioneer of radiophysics. Appleton was an assistant demonstrator in experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, part of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. Under Appleton’s tutelage Ratcliffe and M. A. F. Barnett figured out ways to understand the mystery of ‘fading’ radio signals. They investigated why transmissions faded from fixed stations that often happens at sunset. A few years later Ratcliffe became the head of a group at Cavendish whose purpose was to study how radio waves get reflected off the ionized layer in the upper atmosphere and the nature of that layer of atmosphere.

As part of Britain’s defense and signals intelligence they had built a network of anti-aircraft radar stations known as Chain Home that covered the eastern and southern coasts of the country. Various physicists and scientific types were assigned to spend a month at these stations. Ratcliffe was sent to one of these near Dover. Next he was made part of the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) who sent him to work at a Chain Home Low site. The “Low” sites were designated as such to detect planes flying below the altitudes the regular Chain Home stations were able to pick up. This work took him all around to various sites during the war.
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As the bitter years of war ended Ratcliffe was able to go back to Cavendish. The group had grown, and others soon joined in, including Martin Ryle from the TRE. Ryle ended up forming a section devoted to radio astronomy. Ryle and his colleagues developed further techniques for radio astronomy. The group went on to found the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in the 1950s. 

Soon the techniques of interferometry were added into the mix. Optical interferometry had been used already by astronomers to get the resolution of a large telescope when using multiple smaller telescopes. The electromagnetic radiation collected at each of a number of separate small telescopes is combined to re-create the image that would have been obtained with the large telescope. This process is called “aperture synthesis”. The same principle can be used for any kind of wave be it light, sound or radio.

The first radio interferometer used for astronomical observation happened in Australia in 1946 by Jospeh Lade Pawsey, Ruby Payne-Scott and Lindsay McCready who used a single converted broadside array radar antenna at 200 MHz near Sydney. They had the idea to use radio waves reflected off the sea to produce an interference pattern. This specific technique became known as sea or sea-cliff interferometry. A radio detecting antenna was placed on top of a cliff to detect electromagnetic waves coming directly from the source and waves reflected off the surface of the water.  The two sets of waves are combined to create an interference pattern such as that produced by two separate antennas.

Numerous radar users in WWII had noticed “interference fringes” or the way radar radiation returned and reflected off the sea from incoming aircraft. They exploited this to observe the sun at dawn with interference arising from its reflections off the ocean. Using a baseline of 200 meters they determined that solar radiation during a burst phase was much smaller than the solar disk itself and came from a region known to be associated with a large grouping of sunspots. From this work the group was able to lay out the principles of aperture synthesis and published their results in a 1947 paper. 

A typical radio interferometry set up involves two or more separate antennas receiving radio waves from the same astronomical object and are joined to the same receiver. The antennas can be close together or spread very far apart. A variable delay device is used to compensate for the different times the waves come into the antennas. Another way interference patterns are created is by spacing the antennas in an attempt to make the waves interfere. The distance between them for interference depends on the wavelength and on the diameter of the source of the waves. 

Back in Cambridge Martin Ryle was also working on radio interferometry. With Antony Hewish and others in the Cavendish group he developed the technique of Earth-rotation aperture synthesis at radio wavelengths. He and Hewish received a Nobel prize for this work and their other contributions to the field.

Later in the 60s and 70s computers became part of the equation and their number crunching power was applied to some of the complex math, often involving Fourier transformations, used in radio astronomy.

All of this research branched out into observing a plethora of celestial radio sources. New discoveries were made adding to humanities cosmological knowledge. Specifically a number of new classes of objects unobservable by optical telescopes including pulsars, quasars and radio galaxies were received out of the aether enabling astrophysicists, cosmologists, and others of their ilk to refine their knowledge. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first detected using radio astronomy. 
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Meanwhile further developments in radar allowed it to be used to map our neighboring planets, and the whole toolkit of radio astronomy has been used to study everything from space weather and further observations of the sun. All of this has been used as fuel for the imagination of a number of musicians who continue to hear the music of the spheres.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.
​

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​Last month in the American Iconoclast / Great American Eccentrics series we looked at the work of Peace Pilgrim. This month we are going to listen to some stories with Ray Hicks, Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

Respect is something I have for Ray Hicks, for the life he lived, the stories he told, the lives he touched. Lenard Ray Hicks August 29, 1922 – April 20, 2003) was a bard without ever calling himself a bard. He lived on Beech Mountain in North Carolina his whole entire life, knowing the land and its moods the way a long time married couple know each other. He was a storyteller, and a keeper of the Jack Tales, and these were his favorite to tell.

The most well known Jack tale is the one about when he goes and sells a cow to buy some magic beans. Instead of ending up in the poor house Jack climbs a huge beanstalk and comes face to face with a giant in the clouds. There are many more of these Jack tales besides the beanstalk story: Jack Frost, Jack the Giant Killer, Little Jack Horner, and This is the House that Jack Built just to a name a few. The stories are of Cornish and English progeny and were passed down as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, legends of the olden times. 

Now Ray Hicks family had come to America in the 1700s and his great-grandfather on his mothers side was Council Harmon  (1803-1896). Harmon's grandfather Cutliff Harmon (1748-1838) was believed to have brought the Jack tales to America when he came to settle. They found themselves in North Carolina, living deep in the hills where these stories, alongside the skills of instrument building (banjos, dulcimers' and more), distilling, foraging for food and medicine, were passed on from one generation to another. Ray grew hearing the stories and hearing the songs. The Harmon-Hicks family was  also known for having a unique knowledge of old British ballads. 

Living on the mountain, working on the land, knowing how to read the weather, knowing what tubers to eat when he was watching the cows up in the grazing patch, not even age ten. Hearing the stories whisper themselves to him as if by a wind on the mountain, seeing the hex signs his ma had painted on either side of the front door on the porch ceiling to keep out the ghosties, the knowledge percolated inside of him.

Sometimes when he was out on the land, tending to things, working alone, Ray would pull out his  Franch harp from the front pocket of his overalls and start to play. Sometimes the birds would come and listen. Perhaps because Jack still a harp, and Ray was a kind of Jack himself, he was skilled at playing the French harp -the Harmon-ica. 

Ray was experienced with old time ways of healing. A Granny Woman often came to the family when someone was sick or injured and to help deliver babies. She once saved Rays leg when it had been hit with a slop bucket thrown at him by his sister, after he stole some precious cake she was baking for her honey. The Granny Woman applied a poultice of wheat flour to his injury and it healed him. Later Ray became famous as being able to get rid of people's warts. People would even send him letters asking for help getting rid of their warts. He knew the formula and was able to do this even if they weren't sitting their together on his front porch for a spell.

Ray was a tall man, standing nearly seven feet. Perhaps some of the blood from the many encounters Jack had with giant folk had spilled into him. 

When he spoke, he spoke as if from out of time. His peculiar dialect was a bit strange even for other Appalachian's. The Hicks and Harmon families had preserved in their speech many old English terms, some that had last seen regular use in the 15th century. He learned his stories the way other storyteller's do, by listening, copying and then developing the mastery to spin a yarn.

"I wasn’t teached. That’s the way I growed up a-talking. I learned my Jack tales mostly from my dad’s father, John Benjamin Hicks. My grandmother Julie told Indian, witch and haint tales, too. I’d set and pick the burrs out of the hanks as she spun, and listen. They were both well in speech.”


The Jack tales had changed somewhat after coming to America, just as the Ballads had. In the Appalachian versions the tale would often feature a sheriff in place of a king or nobleman. 
To make his way in the world Ray worked as a farmer and mechanic. He kept to the ways of collecting herbs and plants, such as ginseng and many others, as way to make living. 

The first time he told stories in public was in 1951. He'd been invited to speak to a classroom of students at an elementary school. Since that time his reknown as a teller of tales started to spread.

Ray married Rosa Violet Harmon, who had also grown up on Beech Mountain. They had five kids together and raised them in the same cabin he had grown up in. 
He said his family was a family of talkers and that sometimes they talked just to try and out talk each other. Because talk was entertainment and that's what people did when they got together. Talked, sang, broke bread and talked some more. 

In 1973 he was invited to perform at first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He was invited back many many times. This festival is considered to be a major point in the revival of storytelling, and the festival is still a going concern. It's very fitting Ray would have told his tales there in their first year. 

Folk musician David Holt, who considered Ray to be one of his mentors said of him, " He was what we call an all day talker. He would start talking the minute you got there…start right in on a story. He had the most amazing accent, kinda talked way back in his throat. He’d say, “Jack seen a man comin down out of the woods with a great big head and he was knocking big trees down and hittin big rock boulders and wasn’t even hurtin’ a hair in his own head… he said, ‘Hello there. Who are ye?’ ‘ My name is Hardy Hard Head.’ ‘Well Hardy hard Head you must be…into my ship.’ ” By the end of the day he’d still be talking, telling you the story. You’d get up and say, “Ray, it’s gettin late, gotta go.” He’d follow you all the way up to the car standing in the road still telling the tale. You’d just have to put down the window, wave and say, “Ray, I’ll see you..love you” and drive off with him still standing there still telling the story in the middle of the dirt road."

Ray learned not to plan out his tale telling in advance. He called his style of story improvisation "unthoughted". “I learnt not to plan my stories. That’ll ruint you. I just tell the one that hits my mind when I hit the mic.” 

In 1983 Ray was named a heritage fellow through the National Endowment for the Arts. He had to be dragged to Washington to receive the award from then vice-prez George Bush. And while he was unimpressed with the fast city ways of the nations capital, it was the one of many honors and awards given to him over the course of the rest of his life. 
As Ray became famous for his gifts at telling tales, he turned down a lot of opportunities to be on TV shows and the like because he never wanted to travel farther from his home than it would take to get back the same day. He was so dedicated to his place in the world that he said no to these requests. Instead he often spoke to schools in the surrounding area. He also didn't go around talking about his ability. He had a humility about him that made it to where even some of his neighbors on the mountain and around the area didn't know the treasure they had living so close to home.

His home was important to him. It had been built in 1912 by his grandpa and with help from the extended family. He lived in it his whole life. Ray felt weird and odd when he went further afield. 

Hicks died of prostate cancer at the age of 80 in 2003 and his wife followed him into the silent clearing of the woods in 2014. 

There are many other great videos of Ray on youtube, including an hour long documentary called "Last of the Old Time Storytellers". 

The biography of him by Lynn Salsi “The Life and Times of Ray Hicks: Keeper of the Jack Tales” is a great book for those who went to dig further. In a way it is really his autobiography. It’s his words that she recorded and collected over many years and then edited into cohesive life story. Reading it you feel like you are sitting with him and his family for a spell on his cabin porch underneath the hex sign painted there by his mother to keep out the ghosties, privileged to be listening to him tell his tale. It’s a true bardic transmission.

Other re/sources: 
https://www.rayhicks.com/
https://www.davidholt.com/mentors/ray-hicks/
​https://wncmagazine.com/feature/giant_storyteller

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