IS THERE ANY ESCAPE FROM NOISE?

​In our machine dominated age there is hardly any escape from noise. Even in the most remote wilderness outpost planes will fly overhead to disrupt the sound of the wind in the trees and the birds in the wind. In the city it is so much part of the background we have to tune in to the noise in order to notice it because we’ve become adept at tuning it out. Roaring motors, the incessant hum of the computer fan, the refrigerator coolant, metal grinding at the light industrial factory down the street, the roar of traffic on I-75, the beep of a truck backing up, these and many other noises are all part of our daily soundscape.
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Throughout human history musicians have sought to mimic the sounds around them, the gentle drone of the tanpura, a stringed instrument that accompanies sitar, flute, voice and other instruments in classical Indian music, was said to mimic the gentle murmur of the rivers and streams. Should it be a surprise then, that in the nineteenth and twentieth century musicians and composers started to mimic the sounds of the machines around them? In bluegrass and jazz there are a whole slew of songs that copied the entrancing rhythms of the train. As more and more machines filled up the cities is at any wonder that the beginnings of a new genre of music –noise music- started to emerge? Is it any wonder, that as acoustic and sound technology progressed, our music making practices also came to be dominated by machines. 

THE ART OF NOISES

And just what is music anyway? There are many definitions from across the span of time and human culture. Each definition has been made to fit the type, style and particular practice or praxis of music.  

In his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises the Italian Futurist thinker Luigi Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape. In reaction to those new conditions he thought there should be a new approach to composition and musical instrumentation. He traced the history of Western music back to Greek musical theory which was based on the mathematical tetrachord of Pythagoras. This did not allow for harmony. This changed during the middle-ages first with the invention of plainchant in Christian monastic communities. Plainchant employs the modal system and this is used to work out the relative pitches of each line on the staff, and was the first revival of musical notation after knowledge of the ancient Greek system was lost. In the late 9th century, plainsong began to evolve into organum, which led to the development of polyphony. Until then the chord did not exist, as such.

Russolo thought that the chord was the "complete sound." He noted that in history chords developed slowly over time, first moving from the "consonant triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize contemporary music." He pointed out that early music tried to create sounds that were sweet and pure, and then it evolved to become more and more complex. By the time of Schoenberg and the twelve tone revolution of serial music musicians sought to create new and more dissonant chords. These dissonant chords brought music ever closer to his idea of "noise-sound."

With the relative quiet of nature and pre-industrial cities disturbed Russolo thought a new sonic palette was required. He proposed that electronics and other technology would allow futurist musicians to substitute for the limited variety of timbres available in the traditional orchestra. His view was that we must "break out of this limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds." This would be done with new technology that would allow us to manipulate noises in ways that never could have been done with earlier instruments. In that, he was quite correct.

Russolo wasn’t the only one thinking of the aesthetics of noise, or seeking new definitions of music. French Modernist composer Edgar Varèse said that “music is organized sound.” It was a statement he used as a guidepost for his aesthetic vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" An open view of music allows new elements to come into the development of musical traditions, where a bound view would try to keep out those things out that did not fit the preexisting definition.
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Out of this current of noise music initiated in part by Russolo and Varese a new class of musician would emerge, the musician of sounds.

MUSICIAN OF SOUNDS
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Fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer developed his theory and practice of musique concrète during the 1930s and ‘40s and saw it spread to people such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, the founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, F.C. Judd and many others in the 50’s. Musique concrète was a practical application of Russolo’s idea of “noise-sound” and exploration of expanded timbres possible through then new studio techniques. It was also a way of making music according to the “organized sound” definition and was distinct from previous methods by being the first type of music completely dependent on recording and broadcast studios.
In musique concrète sounds are sampled and modified through the application of audio effects and tape manipulation techniques, then reassembled into a form of montage or collage. It can feature any sounds derived from any recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, field recordings of the natural and man-made environment or sounds created in the studio. Schaeffer was an experimental audio researcher who combined his work in the field of radio communications with a love for electro-acoustics.  Because Schaeffer was the first to use and develop these studio music making methods he is considered a pioneer of electronic music, and one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. These recording and sampling techniques which he was the first to use and practice are now part of the standard operating procedures used by nearly all record production companies around the world.  Schaeffer’s efforts and influence in this area earned him the title “Musician of Sounds.”

Schaeffer, born in 1910, had a wide variety of interests throughout his eighty-five years on this planet. He worked variously across the fields of composing, writing, broadcasting, engineering, and as a musicologist and acoustician. His work was innovative in science and art. It was after World War II that he developed musique concrète, all while continuing to write for essays, short novels, biographies and pieces for the radio. Much of his writing was geared towards the philosophy and theory of music, which he then later demonstrated in his compositions.

It is interesting to think of the influences on him as a person. Both his parents were musicians, his father a violinist, and his mother a singer, but they discouraged him from pursuing a career in music and instead pushed him into engineering. He studied at the the École Polytechnique where he received a diploma in radio broadcasting. He brought the perspective and approach of an engineer with his inborn musicality to bear on his various activities.

Schaeffer got his first telecommunications gig in 1934 is Strasbourg. The next year he got married and the couple had their first child before moving to Paris where he began work at Radiodiffusion Française (now called Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, RTF). As he worked in broadcasting he started to drift away from his initial interests in telecommunications towards music. When these two sides met he really began to excel.
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After convincing the management at the radio station of the alternate possibilities inherent in the audio and broadcast equipment, as well as the possibility of using records and phonographs as a means for making new music he started to experiment. He would records sounds to phonographs and speed them up, slow them down, play them backwards and run them through other audio processing devices, and mixing sounds together. While all this is just par for the course in today’s studios, it was the bleeding edge of innovation at the time.  
With these mastered he started to work with people he met via the RTF. All this experimentation had as a natural outgrowth a style that leant itself to the avant-garde of the day. The sounds he produced challenged the way music had been thought of and heard. With the use of his own and his colleagues engineering acumen new electronic instruments were made to expand on the initial processes in the audio lab, which eventually became formalized as the Club d’Essai, or Test Club. 

CLUB D’ESSAI

In 1942 Pierre founded the Studio d'Essai, later dubbed the Club d'Essai at RTF. The Club was active in the French resistance during World War II, later to become a center of musical activity. It started as an outgrowth of Schaeffer’s radiophonic explorations, but with a focus on being radio active in the Resistance on French radio. It was responsible for the first broadcasts to liberated Paris in August 1944. He was joined in the leadership of the Club by Jacques Copeau, the theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. 
It was at the Club where many of Schaeffer’s ideas were put to the test. After the war Schaeffer had written a paper that discussed questions about how sound recording creates a transformations in the perception of time, due to the ability to slow down and speed up sounds. The essay showed his grasp of sound manipulation techniques which were also demonstrated in his compositions.

In 1948 Schaeffer initiated a formal “research in to noises” at the Club d'Essai and on October 5th of that year presented the results of his experimentation at a concert given in Paris. Five works for phonograph (known collectively as Cinq études de bruits—Five Studies of Noises) including Etude violette (Study in Purple) and Etude aux chemins de fer (Study of the Railroads), were presented. This was the first flowering of the musique concrete style, and from the Club d’Essai another research group was born.

GRM: Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète

In 1949 another key figure in the development of Musique Concrète stepped onto the stage. By the time Pierre Henry met Pierre Schaeffer via Club d’Essai the twenty-one year percussionist-composer old had already been experimenting with sounds produced by various objects for six years. He was obsessed with the idea of integrating noise into music, and had already studied with the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Nadia Boulanger, and Félix Passerone at the Paris Conservatoire from 1938 to 1948.

For the next nine years he worked at the Club d'Essai studio at RTF. In 1950 he collaborated with Schaeffer on the piece Symphonie pour un homme seul. Two years later he scored the first musique concrète to appear in a commercial film, Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Henry remained a very active composer and scored for a number of other films and ballets.

Together the two Pierres were quite a pair and founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in 1951. This gave Schaeffer a new studio, which included a tape recorder. This was a significant development for him as he previously only worked with phonographs and turntables to produce music.  This sped up the work process, and also added a new dimension with the ability to cut up and splice tape in new arrangements, something not possible on a phonograph. Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape.

Eventually Schaeffer had enough experimentation and material under his belt to publish À la Recherche d'une Musique Concrète ("In Search of a Concrete Music") in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point.

Schaeffer remained active in other aspects of music and radio throughout the ‘50s. In 1954 he co-founded Ocora, a music label and facility for training broadcast technicians. Ocora stood for the “Office de Coopération Radiophonique”. The purpose of the label was to preserve via recordings, rural soundscapes in Africa. Doing this kind of work also put Schaeffer at the forefront of field recording work, and in the preservation of traditional music. The training side of the operation helped get people trained to work with the African national broadcasting services. 

His last electronic noise etude was realized in 1959, the "Study of Objects" (Etudes aux Objets).
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For Pierre Henry’s part, two years after leaving the RTF, he founded with Jean Baronnet the first private electronic studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio. Later Henry made a tribute to composing his Écho d'Orphée.

A CONCRETE LEGACY

usique remains concrete. Schaeffer had known of the “noise orchestras” of his predecessor Luigi Russolo, but took the concept of noise music and developed it further by making it clear that any and all sounds had a part to play in the vocabulary of music. He created the toolkit later experimenters took as a starting point. He was the original sampler. In all his work he emphasized the role of play, or jeu, in making music. His ide of jeu in music came from the French verb jouer. It shares the same dual meaning as the English word play. To play is to have two things at once: to make pleasing sounds or songs on a musical instrument, and to engage with things as way of enjoyment and recreation. Taking sounds and manipulating them, seeing what certain processes will do to them, is at the heart of discover and play inside the radiophonic laboratory. The ability to play opens up the mind to new possibilities.   
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This article originally appeared in the April 2020 edition of the Q-Fiver.

If you enjoyed this article please consider reading the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. 

In 1988, the same year Negativland was pioneering the concept and practice of the Teletour, another maverick experimental music composer produced a radio concert like no other before or since. His name is Alvin Curran and the piece in question was his Crystal Psalms, a concerto for musicians in six European nations, simultaneously performed, mixed and broadcast live in stereo to listeners stretched from Palermo, Italy to Helsinki, Finland via six separate but synchronized radio stations.

The name of the radio concerto came from an event that Curran wanted to commemorate with the solemnness it was due; Kristallnacht otherwise known as Crystal Night or Night of the Broken Glass. It had happened fifty years before the broadcast on November 9th and 10th in Germany. This was the date of the November Pogroms when civilian and Nazi paramilitary forces mobbed the streets to attack Jewish people and their property. This horrendous event was dubbed Kristallnacht due to all the broken glass left on the ground after the windows of their stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed.

On Kristallnacht rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. They ransacked and set fire to homes, hospitals and schools. 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This was the opening prelude before the sick opus of the Third Reich’s genocide. It was Hitler’s green light, ramping up his twisted plans. The Third Reich had moved on from economic, political and social persecution to physical violence and murder. The Holocaust had begun.

The year before the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht a number of cultural and arts organization had begun making plans for a series of worldwide memorial events. Alvin Curran was in on some of these conversations. Curran had long been part of a vanguard group of ex-pat American composers living in Italy. He was also a founding member of the collective acoustic and electronic improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva, sometimes known as a Million Electron Volts or simply MEV. They formed in Rome in 1966 and are still active today.

Started by three young Americans with Masters degrees in music composition from Yale and Princeton, MEV combined an Ivy-League classical pedigree with a tendency towards musical anarchism. Just as their music often involved chance operations, or the use of random procedures, the members of the group met by chance (or was it Providence?) on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome in 1965. Without scores, without conductors, they went like bold explorers into the primeval past of music, and its future. Curran says of the band, “….Composers all, nurtured in renowned ivy gardens; some mowed lawns. They met in Rome, near the Cloaca Maxima—and without further ado, began like experimental archeologists to reconstruct the origins of human music. They collected shards of every audible sound, they amplified the inaudible ones, they declared that any vibrating object was itself ‘music,’ they used electricity as a new musical space and cultural theory, they ultimately laid the groundwork for a new common practice. Every audible gurgle, sigh, thump, scratch, blast, every contrapuntal scrimmage, every wall of sound, every two-bit drone, life-threatening collision, heave of melodic reflux that pointed to unmediated liberation, wailing utopias, or other disappearing acts—anything in fact that hinted at the potential unity among all things, space, and times—were MEV’s ‘materia prima.’” 

Curran draws from this same ‘materia prima’ as a prolific musician and composer and by the 1980’s had an established solo career. At the time of this writing that solo career is now long and storied. Crystal Psalms is just one of his many innovative works. It is also just one of a number of pieces he created specifically for radio. To my knowledge it is the most technically complex of the pieces he has written for radio.

Crystal Psalms was unique in its conception and required hard dedicated work to pull off. Perhaps that is why these kind of radio events are rare. Of course their rarity could also be due to the lack of imagination on the part of the corporate media that dominates the airwaves. The project brought together over 300 people, including musicians and technicians, in six major European cities. These musicians and technicians, separated into groups at these six locations, could not see or hear what was happening at the other locations. Yet together they performed as a unified ensemble to realize Curran’s score. In commemorating a dark and destructive moment of human history Curran demonstrated our creative possibilities for international artistic and technological collaboration.

Curran organized the concert in the fall of 1987 at a meeting in Rome. The producers from each of the six radio stations were there. These included Danmarks Radio; Hessicher Rundfunk, Germany, ORF, Austria; Radio France; RAI, Italy; VPRO, Holland.  The RAI in Rome was chosen to be the main technical center, and HQ, probably due to the fact that this was the facility closest to the composer. Alvin wrote the music between May and September at his home in Poggidoro, about an hour drive outside the city.

The score was written for six groups of complementary ensembles –one group at each station in each country. These ensembles consisted of a mixed chorus (16-32 voices), a quartet of strings or winds, a percussionist and accordionist. Each of these six groups was conducted independent of each other. And even though they were separated by large distances in space, each of the ensembles played in time together. To accomplish this a recorded time track was heard by each conductor that kept them all synchronized.
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Besides the live music, pre-recorded tapes were also used. These tapes were filled with the sounds of Jewish life. Among those heard was the ancient shofar (a ritual ram's horn that has been a mainstay in Curran’s music), recordings of the Yemenite Jews praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall (the “Wailing” Wall). Other sounds on the tape included children from Roman Jewish orphanage, recordings of many famous Eastern European cantors sourced from various sound archives. Curran even included sounds from his family. He recorded his young niece singing her Bat Mitzvah prayers and his father singing in Yiddish at a family get-together. Birds, trains, and ship horns make appearances. But throughout it all is the sound of breaking glass. Meanwhile the live chorus is singing fragments from the Renaissance Jewish composers Salomone Rossi from Italy and another named Caceres from a famous Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Curran also used choral fragments from versions of the Jewish liturgy composed Lewandowski and Sulzer in the 19th century.

Crystal Psalms is made up of two long sections, 24 minutes, and 29 minutes. tructured in two contiguous sections. In the first there is a ton of percussion created from fallen and thrown objects. Amidst all these heavy sounds he used an 18-voice polyphonic structure to weave an increasingly dense texture from the musical fragments being carried by each "voice". As these fragments repeat the weave is brought ever closer together.

In the second part elements from the pre-recorded tape are more apparent. It moves from one moment to the next, one location or place in time before jumping to something else. Curran says, “Here tonal chords are anchored to nothing, innocent children recite their lessons in the midst of raging international chaos.” Idling cars, Yiddish lullaby’s, are separated by glass breaking, and all undergirded by moments on the accordion, organ and fiddles. A familiar melody will quickly disappear when blasted by noise. A solemn choir sings amidst the sound of someone shuffling through the debris. Fog horns drift in and out as telephones go unanswered. The listener with an ear for classical music will recognize bits of Verdi’s “Va Pensiero” turned into a menacing loop. At the end of it all, the cawing of menacing crows, a murder of crows, who have come feed off the destruction.

Curran writes of his piece that “There is no guiding text other than the mysterious reccurring sounds of the Hebrew alphabet and the recitation of disconnected numbers in German, so the listeners, like the musicians, are left to navigate in a sea of structured disorder with nothing but blind faith and the clothes on their backs -- survivors of raw sonic history.”

The event of the radio broadcast was for Curran a very special moment. In creating it, this experience of human artistic and technological collaboration, existed for him alongside the memory of the inhuman pogrom memorialized on its 50th anniversary. Curran say, “By focusing on this almost incomprehensible moment in our recent history, I do not intend to offer yet another lesson on the Holocaust, but simply wish to make a clear personal musical statement and to solicit a conscious act of remembering -- remembering not only this moment of unparalleled human madness of fifty years ago, but of all crimes against humanity anywhere anytime.  Without remembering there is no learning; without learning no remembering.  And without remembering and learning there is no survival.”

The radio concert was a one off event, never to be performed live again. However recordings from each of the stations involved were made and in 1991 Alvin remixed these into an album. Writing about all of this I’m reminded of something the American folk-singer and storyteller Utah Philips said in regards to memory. “…the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.”

Let us remember then, the stories in history, personal or global, we would do well not to repeat and those other stories where people work together towards a common good. Just as this day is the product of all our past actions, so tomorrow will be built on what we do today.

Sources:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/CrystalPsalmsnotes.html
https://nationalsawdust.org/event/mev-musica-elettronica-viva/
Crystal Psalms, New Albion records, 1994

This article originally appeared in the March issue of the Q-Fiver, the newsletter of the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society.

​Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.

Before Sirius XM was launched St. GIGA existed in an orbit of its own, an orbit that broadcast its content in harmony with the movement of the Pacific tides. The Japanese company became the first Satellite Digital Audio Broadcast Corportion formed as a subsidiary of the satellite TV company WOWOW. Transmission tests commenced on November 30, 1990 and regular transmissions started at the end of March, 1991. The company adopted a commercial free broadcasting model but to listen to St. GIGA you needed a subscription. The subscription was worth the money though, because the soothing content of their programs was like nothing else before or since. With a receiver set to 11.8042 GHz the pioneering satellite radio station known as St. GIGA took listeners on a gentle journey of ebb and flow.

When parent company WOWOW decided to expand into the realm of radio they knew they would need some help. As business executives they were all in agreement that they weren’t cool and knew nothing about music. To come up with the name they solicited a poll to everyday “persons on the streets” and St. GIGA was selected. Yet they remained in the dark about what to put on the air. They were in need of a creative director to format the content of the satellite service and the searchlight landed on Hiroshi Yokoi.  Yokoi had just worked on the popular J-Wave FM station founded in 1988 and which still broadcasts today on 81.3 mhz in Tokyo.

Yokoi was considered an innovator in the field, as was J-Wave. J-Wave's slogan is "The Best Music on the Planet," and the programmers aren’t mere DJs, they are known as "navigators" or nabigētā, and they guide listeners on voyages of discovery. J-Wave’s music could be considered to be the equivalent of top 40 but one of their innovations was the use of hundreds of different jingles to separate programs from commercials. These jingles are played at the same decibel level and are variations on a single melody; the jingles and give the station a unique sonic signature and identity. In 1994 J-Wave also moved to being simulcast via satellite and some of its programs became syndicated on various community radio stations throughout Japan. Due to his work on J-Wave the execs at WOWWOW thought Yokoi would be a good fit for St. GIGA.

Soon after he signed on Yokoi crafted a radical and artistic proposal for the station concept. The men in suits who controlled the money reacted with skepticism. Yet after a few months of traditional broadcasting the executives adopted Yokoi's concept for a probation period. Later he was given full discretion to shape the programming and future course of St. GIGA.

What Yokoi had in mind was a “Tide of Sound.” The concept was quite revolutionary. To tie in with the concept, the station motto became, "I'm here. — I'm glad you're there. — We are St.GIGA." This was a tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan in which the alien life forms called harmoniums communicate using only the phrases "Here I am" and "So glad you are." Yokoi was also influenced by writer Kevin W. Kelley's book The Home Planet. Kelley’s book was a collection of color photographs taken in space capturing the beauty of planet earth. The photos were pared with personal accounts of the experience of seeing earth from space by astronauts and cosmonauts. These two influences formed a communication methodology that broke new ground in the world of broadcasting.

As part of Yokoi’s concept the St. GIGA broadcasts followed no externally fixed program schedule. It was not based on a solar calendar week, where a certain show would recur every Sunday at 7 PM. Instead Yokoi had the genius to base the transmissions around a tide table. Themes for broadcasts were based on a cyclical motif and tried to approximate the current tidal cycle according to the Rule of Twelfths throughout a 24-hour day.

The Rule of Twelfths is an approximation to a sine wave curve. The formula can be used as a rule of thumb for estimating a changing quantity where both the quantity and the steps are easily divisible by 12. It has been typically used for estimating the height of the tide. The rate of flow in a tide increases smoothly to a maximum halfway point between high and low tide, before smoothly decreasing to zero again. The rule is also used to make predictions on the change in day length over the seasons.

Tidal changes are non-linear. This means that in the first hours of a tidal shift the tide might not rise or fall very much, yet as the cycle progresses the rising or falling will accelerate through the mid hours. The Rule of Twelfths applies to the semidiurnal tide - a tide having two high waters and two low waters during a tidal day, which is exactly what happens in most locations. The semidiurnal tide period lasts for a period of 12 hours and 25.2 minutes from low to high tide, and then repeats back to low tide again. The full and new moons also have effects on the tide, as do the first and third quarter moons.
The transmissions of St. GIGA followed this pattern in a unique way, mimicking the swell of the tides and the course of the moon. With his “Tide of Sounds” broadcasting process the end of one show and the beginning of another was not demarcated or clearly defined as folks are used to hearing on the radio. Instead, gradually, using the Rule of Twelfths songs of one genre would flow into and intersperse with songs and material from the prior genre until the new genre, just like a high or low ocean tide, became predominant. Yokoi designed it this way so that listeners could relax into waves of sound "like a baby sleeps in the womb." These "Tide of Sounds" broadcasts operated under the awesome principle of "No Commercials, No DJs, No News Broadcasts, No Talk." If only more radio stations would follow this principle and ethic. Of course this absence of commercials and talk was only possible because the service was subscription based.

Besides the timing of the broadcasts the content was also informed by St. GIGA’s tidal and lunar oriented schedule. It was heavy on ambient music, smooth jazz and field recordings from the natural world. One of the programs was called “Tide Table” and featured live environmental sound broadcasts of waves crashing on the ocean shore. The "Tide of Sounds" broadcasts often featured high-quality digital recordings of nature sounds accompanied by spoken word narration by the "Voice." The part of the "Voice" was played by a number of notable Japanese poets and actors including Ryo Michiko among others. "Voice" performances often consisted of all new poetry composed specifically for the show.
Ambient music, environmental sound recordings and poetry? It sounds perfect. I wonder what other funding models might be developed to breathe new life into this kind of innovative broadcast format? It seems like this mode could be set up and used by low-power community FM or AM stations, or on Part 15 compliant hobby broadcasting stations.

Due to the popularity of the environmental sound recordings and the overall library of material they played, St. GIGA was able to fund field recording trips to collect “biomusic” a term that includes bird songs, whale songs, dolphins, or the sounds of other animals and plants in their natural landscape. Biomusic recording artists were sent to places such as England, the Canary Islands, Mikonos, Venice, Bali, Tahiti, Martinique, Hanson Island (BC), and Maui, all to capture and create and transmit new worlds of sound for the listeners.
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Ambient musicians were also commissioned to create original albums and works for the satellite station. Kim Cascone, under his Heavenly Music Corporation moniker, made and released the album Lunar Phase for broadcast from the bird. The album includes the song “St. Giga” and was released in 1995. It was from listening to this record that I learned of St. GIGA in the first place and went on to track down some of the recordings from the station that fans have made available on youtube. The Heavenly Music Corporation was a perfect fit for St. GIGA because the music is both heavenly, and in this instance, came down from the heavens.

The satellite gained something of a cult following and fanzines such as BSFan Journal and G-Mania sprang up to write about the music and report on the allied ambient, mood, and electronic scene in Japan.

St.GIGA also released CDs of their music on their own label and the popular American ambient label Hearts of Space (also a fabulous late night radio show). A number of thematic books were published at the high tide of the satellites popularity including the multi-volume St.GIGA Stylebook and Current of dreams: An introduction to St.GIGA programming. This contained the full text of Yokoi's original concept proposal. Later books included Trends in Dreaming - St.GIGA's Hiroshi Yokoi's General Office.

Despite all this by the mid ‘90s the company was in financial trouble. The popularity of the satellite had peaked and was starting to flow back into the ocean. The market for ambient and related forms of music was not as strong as had been initially anticipated. Plus there was the pesky problem of a financial recession in Japan. Then there was the related issue of strapped consumers not wanting to invest in the expensive antennas and tuners needed to pick up the broadcasts. So St. GIGA formed a partnership with Nintendo. Because that’s what you do if you are a popular Japanese satellite radio company in financial trouble. At this point Nintendo had become the largest shareholder in the company and with their influence the Tide of Sound broadcasts were cut back in order to bring some of their own programming on board.

With the video game company kicking them some dough, they started to broadcast digitally encoded games to owners of the Super Famicoms system between the spring of 1995 and the summer of 2000.The Super Famicom was the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo made an accessory component to work with the Super Famicom called the Satellaview. This was a satellite modem never released in America or Europe. The Satellaview allowed the users to connect to St.GIGA.  During a special segment called Super Famicom Hour game data was broadcast. During this transmission people could download games to the Satellaview's internal memory or an optional Memory Pak. Super Famicom Hour actually lasted from noon to two am, so it took away a good chunk of time from St. GIGA’s original programming.
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Unlike other services offered by competitors the Satellaview did not have online multiplayer capabilities. This was due to the one-way nature of commercial satellite radio. Despite this limited amounts of data could be sent back through the radio connection. The service featured numerous quizzes and other competitions which required players to send their answers back up to the bird

Another new service related to the games was called SoundLink. CD-quality sound was streamed through the St. GIGA satellite connection to accompany real time play of video games such as the three versions of BS Zelda. The SoundLink included a fully-voiced "narrator" who would guide and give helpful hints and advice to the players throughout the game. Because the SoundLink required a live broadcast of music with a voice track, some games could only be played at the time of transmission. After the last broadcast of the SoundLink data was over, that game could never be played ever again. Some time-sensitive games were split into separate transmissions on different days to allow for the play of longer games.

Due to the rewritability of the cartridges and the fact that SoundLink broadcasts were streamed live and not downloaded during the noon-2AM  Super Famicom “Hour” time slot, and because the games have never been rereleased by Nintendo, they have become extremely rare. Yet some can be played in partial emulation. This has been achieved by the extreme level of devotion and skill in this corner of high-geekdom. The subculture of collectors and game enthusiasts have exerted much effort engaged in electronic archaeology by extracting old data from heavily rewritten data cartridges in order to try to reproduce these games via emulation.

SoundLink also featured a type of enhanced magazine. This functioned as a mashup of a radio drama mixed with images and text. Unlike all other Satellaview content, SoundLink content was only available for an additional fee of ¥600 a month.

As St.GIGA’s tide continued to ebb out it broadcast talk shows and entertainment news programs about celebrity idols, as well as a variety show. The shows were slotted to match the schedules of video game and pop culture addicted students as the station's audience had shifted radically, much to the disappointment of its original devotees, the ambient music fans. Before long the station had ceased transmissions of all "Time & Tide" programs including the much-admired Tidal Currents show. Fan publications such as BSFan Journal became replaced by ‘zines that focused on the video game content. Towards the end of its life St.GIGA had focused all of its energies on Satellaview transmissions.

Until 1999 the Satellaview service was controlled by both St. GIGA and Nintendo. After 1999 St. GIGA was the sole controller of the service, as Nintendo broke its partnership with the radio station due to a dispute. However, the service was only turned off in 2000. By 2001 St. GIGA was nearly bankrupt.
​
Around this time Yokoi the director had also been stricken with cancer.  After his death in March of 2003 St.GIGA was rechristened Club COSMO under the leadership of Shinichi Matsuo. Broadcasts continued until October 1, when the company was forced to sell its licensing rights to World Independent Networks Japan Inc. (WINJ). WireBee immediately began bankruptcy procedures, and all recording instruments and 241 tapes of nature sounds were auctioned off at open market for a total divided sale price of ¥5 million.
St. GIGA had reached low tide. It is my hope that it and Hioroshi Yokoi, the man who made it so brilliant, remains in orbit in a heavenly and oceanic musical realm.  

REFERENCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.GIGA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Wave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_twelfths
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Satellaview

Read the other articles in the RADIOPHONIC LABORATORY serie.

Even in the strange and eccentric world of the ham radio operator, Fred Judd G2BCX (1914–1992) was something of an outlier and maverick.  Fred designed two well-known antennas, the Slim Jim and the ZL Special. Both of these are now antenna standards. Fred was also an advocate of early British electronic music, inventing or modifying the tools he needed to make this adventurous music along the way. G2BCX was the quintessential tinkerer;  a man who loved audio, radio, and the new possibilities for music being opened up by the careful application of capacitors.

As a radar technician in the armed forces during WWII Fred had the opportunity to develop his electrical aptitude and became a full blown engineer. After the war he found a spot working for the Kelvin Hughes company where he researched and developed marine radar devices.  To this day Kelvin Hughes continues to create navigation and surveillance systems.
Fred was a man of strong ambition, and the day job in electronics wasn’t enough to keep him satisfied. As part of his side hustle he wrote articles for hobbyist magazines on radio and the new remote control models coming to market. The first of his 11 published books hit the shelves in 1954. When Amateur Tape Recording (ATR) magazine was launched in 1959 he joined the staff as technical editor and wrote on all kinds of topics connected to tape, electronics and hi-fi.

The slim jim antenna for which G2BCX remains famous among hams is itself a variation on the J-Pole. The J-pole is at the time of this writing a 110 year old design, first invented by Hans Beggerow in 1909 for use on Zeppelin airships. In that regard, the J-Pole, commonly made of copper, can also be considered a steampunk antenna.  Trailed behind the airship, the J-Pole was made of a single element, one half wavelength long radiator with a quarter wave parallel tuning stub for the feedline. By 1936 this design had been refined into the J configuration and given the J Antenna name in 1943, now just called a J Pole.

Fred introduced his J-pole variant in 1978. He derived the name from its slim profile and the J type matching stub (J Integrated Matching). It has similar performance and characteristics to a simple or folded Half-wave antenna and identical to the traditional J-pole construction. Judd found the Slim Jim produces a lower takeoff angle and better electrical performance than a 5/8 wavelength ground plane antenna.  Slim Jim antennas made from ladder transmission line use the existing parallel conductor for the folded dipole element.
The ZL special antenna came from another variant Judd made, this time on the 2-element horizontal phased array created by George Prichard ZL3MH –hence the name ZL Special in tribute to Prichard’s work. L.B. Cebik, W4RNL has written up a detailed analysis of this design at: http://www.antentop.org/w4rnl.001/mu5a.html.

It can be presumed that when Fred wasn’t at work, or on the air as a ham, he was engaged in another aspect of his electronics hobby: making circuits sing. He also wrote one of the first how-to books in the world for making electronic music in 1961, titled Electronic Music and Musique Concrete. It included circuit diagrams alongside practical do-it-yourself tips. (A copy of this tome is available from the Public Library of Cincinnati along with his Radio and Electronic Hobbies book.)

Around this time he also promoted the creation of electronic music via lectures and demonstrations at amateur tape recording clubs all around Britain. As an editor and writer for the Amateur Tape Recording magazine he had access to these clubs and lots of street cred within them. Fred started putting out 7” records of electronic music which were made available through the magazine. Judd was also the editor of Practical Electronics magazine. Chris Carter was an avid reader of both of these magazines and spent time building a lot of the circuits Judd published. Chris Carter went on to be a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial music band. Chris continued to innovate in electronic music with his wife Cosey Fan Tutti as Chris & Cosey and latter Carter Tutti.  

As any sci-fi movie or old-time radio show buff will know, one of the things electronic music is perfect for is making sound effects, and Fred became adept at making his own. Have you ever flipped around on the tube and come across the strange sci-fi puppet show Space Patrol? Broadcast in 1963 on the ITV network it was the first on British television show to have a composed electronic music soundtrack running throughout the whole series. Fred made those sounds himself using the techniques of tape manipulation, loops and tone generators in his home studio in London.

The Castle record label and its sister label Contrast issued a range of sound effects discs that he made in his studio, including 3 discs of electronic music. These tracks were later issued by library label Studio G, who specialized in providing stock music and sounds, on the Electronic Age album.

Fred also prototyped and built his own synthesizer. This simple voltage controlled, keyboard-operated unit was used to generate, shape and switch electronic sounds. The feat was small but impressive as it predated the Synket, Moog and Buchla synths.

Fred was also interested in the visualization of electronic sounds. One can imagine he knew his way around an oscilloscope and other test equipment. His tinkering in this area led to his Chromasonics system. By running a pulse generator and amplifier into a modified black and white tv that had a high speed color scanning wheel placed in front of the screen Judd was able to make trippy abstract patterns that moved in accordance with the sound input from oscillators or tape recordings. At the 1963 Audio Fair in London he demonstrated Chromasonics with much acclaim, but interest from electronics firm Stuzzi never made it to commercial development.

From the late 1970s Judd continued to operate as a ham from his home in Cantley, Norfolk. Towards the end of his life, he built several detailed reconstructions of early electrical devices including a Wimshurst machine and Edison phonograph. He was honoured by the University of East Anglia for constructing a working replica of apparatus used by Heinrich Hertz, but it seems that none of this equipment, the Chromasonics apparatus or his experimental music-making machinery has survived. He became a silent key in 1992.

In 2010 all of his remaining original quarter inch tapes have been cataloged and deposited with the British Library Sound Archive. In 2011 Ian Helliwell made a documentary on Judd called Practical ElectronicaA retrospective album gathering together as much of his experimental music as can be located, titled Electronics Without Tears was released by the Public Information label. It also contained an official biography of Judd written by Helliwell. It is available from their bandcamp page at: https://publicinformation.bandcamp.com/album/electronics-without-tears.
​

Here is a short bibliography of books by Fred C. Judd:

Radio control for model ships, boats and aircraft. London: Data publications, 1954.
Electronic music and musique concrète. London : N. Spearman, 1961.
Tape recording for everyone. Blackie, 1962.
Radio and electronic hobbies. London: Museum Press, 1963.
Circuits for audio and tape recording. Haymarket Press, 1966.
Electronics in music. London: Spearman, 1972.
Amateur radio. Newnes Technical Books, 1980.
Two-metre antenna handbook. Newnes Technical, 1980.
CB radio. Newnes Technical, 1982.
Radio wave propagation : (HF bands). London : Heinemann, 1987.

​Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Judd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-pole_antenna
https://thequietus.com/articles/12386-f-c-judd-interpretations-interview-holly-herndon-perc-public-information
Electronics Without Tears, Public Information, Biography by Ian Helliwell

This article originally appeared in theJune 2019 issue of the Q-Fiver. (All the articles in the Radiophonic Laboratory series have appeared first in various issues of the Q-Fiver.)

Magnetic Lemniscate: A Brief History of the Tape Loop

Sometimes, if the day has been hectic, when I get home I just want to kick back, relax and put on a record. Or a cassette. I still have hundreds of hours of music stored on tape, one of the finest mediums of storage ever invented. This privilege of being able to listen to recorded audio is unique in human history, and my ability to soak in the musical glow from my hi-fi system with my feet propped up and my head in my hands was built on the sweat of many researchers. The phonograph, loudspeaker and microphones all proclaimed that the age of audio had arrived. The promises made by this tech only cracked the door ajar. There was still a bolt in place on the other side barring further entry. The invention of magnetic tape recording proved to be the golden skeleton key responsible for unlocking the door to the studio of the audio engineer, and from there many other rooms in the mansion of new media.

Inside the tape studio it is possible to cut. Splice. Rewind. Fast forward. Edit. Create a new sequence for creative playback. The practice of recording and editing audio using magnetic tape was an obvious improvement over the previous electro-mechanical methods. The leap in audio fidelity alone was a dramatic feat. Further, it allowed for new practices of editing. It allowed for repetition, a key aspect of music, and so the loop was born. Splice. Snip.  Audio on magnetic tape had established itself as simply superior. The analog tape recorder made it possible to erase. Audio mistakes could be fixed at less cost by recording over a previous recording, something not possible on the shellac and vinyl based medium of the phonograph. The edit turned into an art form as tape had the advantage of being cut. Spliced, it could be joined back together in an endless profusion of edits.  Music could be rearranged, deranged, or removed.

From 1950 onwards magnetic tape quickly became the standard medium for audio master recording in the music and broadcast radio industries. This led to the development of hi-fi stereo recordings for the domestic market. If the day has been hectic, just kick back with some Les Baxter or the exotica of Martin Denny and let it transport you away from the work of the daily grind. Now in hi-fidelity, and turning at 33 1/3 rpm, longer songs and longer sounds mean more time to chill in the lounge. Sonically edited the album now offered to audio engineers the same plasticity of arrangement known to film directors. The many new combinations available became mind boggling and cinematic.

When I think of tape, I think primarily of its role in audio and video storage.  I think of the way it revolutionized sound recording, reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. I think of how I sat with a radio and it’s built in cassette player to tape those late night radio shows. To be listened to again and again. But there was also data storage on tape. Remember tape drives? They were a key technology in early computer development, allowing unparalleled amounts of data to be mechanically created, stored for long periods of time, and rapidly accessed.

When I think of tape I think of iron oxide. It’s on tape and it’s also in your blood. It’s the stuff responsible for giving it that bright red color. It’s the stuff that holds the memory of a recording on the tape making it magnetic. The memory is in the blood. Iron oxide stores the genetic memory of music. Editing a tape splices the DNA of sound. Perhaps it is this magnetic resonance of the iron oxide, a shared connection with a vital and elemental force that has given tape such a place of prominence in electronic music. Perhaps it was the way the tapes could be manipulated, slowed down, sped up, chopped up and put into new patterns, which made tape such a dream. This medium of preservation and creation is in the very blood of electronic music.

With the invention of the tape loop the dream of creating infinite music was realized. The use of the pause button had been put on hold. Tape loops are spools of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Sound is recorded on a section of magnetic tape and this tape is cut and spliced end-to-end, creating a circle which can be played over and over again, continuously, over and over. This is usually done on a reel-to-reel machine, though industrious lo-fi recording artists have been known to rig their own cassette tapes into loops. The loop originated with the musique concrète work of Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s. He used the simultaneous playing of tape loops to create phrase patterns and rhythms. Musical experimentalists continued to explore the possibilities of this method on through the 1950s and 60s. Devotees of the tape loop included Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Brian Eno.

The medium is perfect for creating phase patterns, rhythms, textures, and timbres. When the speed of a loop is accelerated to a sufficient degree a sequence of events originally perceived as a rhythm now is heard as a pitch. The variation of the rhythm in the original recording produces different timbres in the sped up sound. Tape can also be slowed down, causing the music to drop in pitch and for sounds to be stretched. Tape was also used to create echo systems. The first delay effects were made using tape loops improvised on reel-to-reels by shortening or lengthening the loop of tape and adjusting the read and write heads, to create an echo whose time parameters could be adjusted. This delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.

Being the pioneer he was Stockhausen made extensive use of loops in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Kontakte (1958–60) and he used the technique for live performance in Solo (1965–66).  Steve Reich was the composer to use the technique the most, specifically in his "phasing" pieces Come Out (1966) and It's Gonna Rain (1965).

In the realm of popular music it was used to great effect in the 60’s and 70’s. Think of the psychedelic music of the Beatles on the White album and of its use in the progressive rock and ambient genres. A standard loop on a standard reel-to-reel is at most a few seconds long. This is not enough for some composers.  To create a longer loop a standard practice was to use two reel-to-reels or for even longer stretches of tape, to run them around mic stands, or even door knobs. Perhaps the best known album made with this technique was Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Ambient 1. This recording ushered in the vast and sprawling genre of ambient. In creating his 1978 landmark Eno reported that for one song, "the tape loops was seventy-nine feet long and the other eighty-three feet". 

Enter William Basinski

Texas born Basinski is a classically trained clarinetist who studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas State University in the late 1970s. At the age of twenty in 1978 he became inspired by the techniques of Steve Reich and Brian Eno and started the process of developing his own musical vocabulary using old reel-to-reel tape decks. Basinski experimented with short looped melodies. When played against themselves the loops created a pleasant feedback. Working with this discovery he created his singular meditative, melancholy style within the drone and ambient genres.

Basinki’s first release was Shortwave Music. First created in 1983, it wasn’t released until 1998 when Carsten Nicolai's Raster-Noton label put it out in a small vinyl edition. It was followed by his shortwave magnum opus The River. Basinski writes, "As a young composer in the early 1980’s I was experimenting with tape loops: recording and mixing them with sounds coming from the airwaves. The idea was to capture music out of the ether. In NYC, there was a very powerful radio station, I can’t remember the call letters, but it was the station that played American popular standards….that is, the ‘1001 Strings’ smoothed out, de-syncopated versions of the American popular standards: what was commonly referred to then as Muzak, or ‘elevator music’. In those days, there was no Prozac, only Muzak to smooth out the seams and ease the tension of hectic neurotic life in the mid-late 20th century. At any rate, this station was so powerful, it could be picked up by simply running a wire across the floor, so frequently I was picking up background transmissions in my recordings. Since it was inevitable and I had no choice in the matter, I began experimenting with recording off the radio small loops of string intros, outros and interludes randomly in my primitive studio in Brooklyn. I would then slow them down a couple of speeds and as if peering into a microscope, to see what I could discover beneath the glossy surface. Frequently, these loops held great depth and melancholy. This appealed to me greatly and I created a vast archive of these loops to later experiment with. I am still using this archive to this day.”

Having this library of ‘found’ material became very important to his work, as it became the basis for many future albums and releases. Something else he found at a thrift store was also important, the machine that would provide his radio static. “I bought a wonderful old Hallicrafters shortwave radio at the Goodwill around the corner and began listening to that. The sounds coming from this magical device were awesome. The idea that one could hear transmissions from ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or Japan or London was thrilling and mysterious. The waves of shifting static and interstellar particle showers were mind-boggling to a young man who grew up in the shadow of the space race.

I was having a problem with a 60 Hz ground loop hum in my recordings. I had no idea what was causing it at the time…probably our fluorescent lights…just that it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. So I decided to try to mask it with the shortwave radio static. I would set the Hallicrafters on a pleasing in-between-stations setting teeming with showers of sparkling static and record live while mixing my loops. The results were extraordinary. The Hallicrafters would sometimes shift focus as if responding to the music coming from the loops. Occasionally a distant station from the Middle East perhaps, would slide into range just for a moment like a lingering column of cigarette smoke swirling slowly in a spotlight. I was very encouraged and excited. I didn’t know if I was really a composer, or if this was music, but to me it was magic! I loved it and was in my laboratory every night after work, like Dr. Frankenstien, just waiting to see what fascinating and strange sounds would bubble up next. The results of this period of experimentation were the Shortwave Music pieces and ultimately, the 90 minute masterwork of the series, The River. It would be over 25 years before these pieces would be released to the public."

Even though it wasn’t until the late 90’s that his music saw release on a label Basinski remained very active in the NYC music scene. He was a member of many bands including the Gretchen Langheld Ensemble and House Afire. In 1989, he opened his own performance space, "Arcadia" at 118 N. 11th Street. In the 1990s he helped put together many intimate underground shows at his space for artists like Diamanda Galás, Rasputina, The Murmurs, and Antony as well as his own experimental electronic/improvisation band, Life on Mars. In 2000, he made a film titled Fountain with artists James Elaine and Roger Justice.

In August and September 2001 Basinski started work on what would become his most recognizable piece, the epic four-volume album The Disintegration Loops. The album is made up of old tape loops whose quality had degraded. In an attempt to salvage these loops by recording them onto a digital format, the magnetic iron oxide ferrite on the tapes slowly crumbled. With each pass of the tape over the head on the reel-to-reel deck more and more of the iron oxide fell off.  The loops were allowed to play for extended periods as they deteriorated further, with increasing gaps and cracks and spaces in the music. These sounds were treated further with a spatializing reverb effect to further enhance their haunting aura. Basinski was able to capture the sound of their disintegration and the results were beautiful and stunning. The disintegration of these tapes was made all the more poignant as he finished his work on them on the morning of 9/11. Basinksi sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends listening to the finished project as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The artwork that accompanies the album features stills of footage he shot of the NYC skyline in the aftermath of the attack. In September  2012, the record label Temporary Residence reissued the entire Disintegration Loops series as a 9xLP box set, marking the project's 10-year anniversary as well as its impending induction into the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The creation of the Disintegration Loops was something of an accident, timestamped by their own destruction and the terrible tragedy of 9/11.  The four albums are perfect as a reminder of the beauty to be found in imperfection, as a reminder of our own transience, of our own ultimate disintegration, of how the iron oxide in our blood will once again return to dust.

References:
Live wires :a history of electronic music by Daniel Warner, Reaktion Books Ltd,  London, England, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sound_recording
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_loop
William Basinki’s website: http://www.mmlxii.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Basinski
https://wavefarm.org/ta/works/azeqwc

Holger Czukay was another musician who was fascinated with the sounds of shortwave listening. He brought his love of radio and communications technology on board with him when he helped to found the influential krautrock band Can in 1968. Shortwave listening continued to inform Czukay’s musical practice in his solo and other collaborative works later in his career. It all got started when he worked at a radio shop as a teenager.

 Holger had been born in the Free City of Danzig in 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II. In the aftermath of the war his family was expelled from the city when the Allies dissolved its status as free city-state and made it become a part of Poland. Growing up in those bleak times his formal primary education was limited, but he made up for it when he found work at a radio repair shop. He had already developed an interest in music and one his ideas was to become a conductor, but fate had other plans for him. Working with the radios day in and day out he developed a fondness for broadcast radio. In particular he found unique aural qualities in the static and grainy washes of the radio waves coming in across the shortwave bands. At the shop he also became familiar with basic electrical repair work and rudimentary engineering. All of this would serve him well when building the studio for Can. In his work with the band he not only played bass and other instruments but acted as the chief audio engineer.

He spoke about this time, and his fascination with the mystery of electricity, in an interview. “When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I didn't know if I wanted to become a technician or a musician. And when you are so young you think the one has to exclude the other. So in the very beginning I thought I am sort of a musical wonder-child, and want to become a conductor and that was very very serious, but there was no chance to get educated as I was a refugee after the war. And then, suddenly, electricity. Electricity was such a fascinating thing - it was something. And then I became the boy in a shop who carries the radios to repair them and carries them back again. That was so-called three-dimensional radio, before stereo. There was one front speaker in the radio and at the side, there were two treble speakers which gave an image of spatial depth. I must say these radios sounded fantastic.”

In 1963 at the age of twenty-five he Czukay decided to pursue the musical side of his vocation and begin studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Courses for New Music. This is where he met up with Irmin Schmidt, another founding member of Can, who was also a student of Stockhausen’s. As much as Can itself was one of the guiding forces of Krautrock, or Kosmiche music as it was also called, a broad style of experimental rock music developed in Germany in the late 60s. Krautrock was for the most part divorced from the traditional blues and rock and roll influences of British and American rock music scenes of the time. Krautrock featured more electronic elements and contributed to the further development electronic music and ambient music as well as the birth of post-punk, alternative rock and New Age music. Stockhausen himself could be thought of as one of its chief instigators, a kind of Godfather of the genre. This was due not only to his influence as a teacher of German musicians, but because of his pioneering work with the raw elements of electronic music itself at the WDR studios.

Eccentric British rock musician and author Julian Cope discusses the importance of Stockhausen’s composition Hymnen in his book Krautrock Sampler. He considered that piece in particular pivotal to the whole Krautrock movement. It’s release had “repercussions all over W. Germany, and not least in the heads of young artists. It was a huge 113 minute piece, subtitled ‘anthems for electronic and concrete sounds’. Hymnen was divided up into four LP sides, titled Region I, Region II, Region III and Region IV.” In a previous column I had discussed this piece of music as an early attempt at creating ‘world music’. With its sounds of shortwave receivers and electronics it plays anthems from various countries in an attempt to unify them. What he did with the German anthem, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ had a liberating effect on young Germany, who had grown up under the shadow of the worst kind of nationalism. Cope writes of the German publics reaction, “The left-wing didn’t see the funny side at all and accused him of appealing to the basest German feelings, whilst the right-wing hated him for vilifying their pride and joy, and letting the Europeans laugh at them. Stockhausen had just returned from six months at the University of California, where he had lectured on experimental music. Among those at his seminar’s were the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and many other psychedelic musicians. Far from snubbing the new music Stockhausen was seen at a Jefferson Airplane show at the Filmore West and was quoted as saying that the music ‘…really blows my mind.’ So whilst the young German artists loved Stockhausen for embracing their own rock’n’roll culture, they doubly loved him for what they recognized as the beginning of a freeing of all German symbols. By reducing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ to its minimum possible length he had codified it…Stockhausen had unconsciously diffused a symbol of oppression, and so enabled the people to have it back.”
​
Czukay’s time studying with Stockhausen was as important to the development of Krautrock as was Hymnen itself. In fact while Stockhausen was working on Hymnen at the WDR studio during the day, Holger Czukay and the other members of a pre-Can group, the Technical Space Composers Crew, would go in and use the equipment at night to record their own album Canaxis. In the piece ‘Boat Woman’s Song’ some of Czukay’s early pioneering use of sampling can be heard. The proto-ambient pieces of music on this record were painstakingly assembled from tape loops and segments of a traditional Vietnamese folk song. In an interview Czukay spoke of the experience. “When Stockhausen left for home, we had a second key and went in and switched everything on. We went in and Canaxis was produced in one night. In one night the main song ‘Boat Woman Song’ was done. I prepared myself at night at home, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so in four hours the whole thing was done.” David Johnson helped Czukay and Rolf Dammers engineer the album. “He knew the studio a bit better than me. He was engineering a bit, switching on stuff, copying from one machine to another…and that was okay. In four hours the job was done.”  The music on Canaxis is eerie and beautiful and haunting. It is both a part of this world, but also not of it. It seems as if it has come to us from beyond, and some fifty years later it still sounds fresh, as all timeless music does. 

Stockhausen influenced Czukay in other ways. It hadn’t originally been Czukay’s intention to become a rock musician. He was more interested in classical music, which he thought was the best, with a definite leaning towards it’s avant-garde. “Therefore I went to Stockhausen as he was the most interesting person. Very radical in his thoughts. With the invention of electronic music he could replace all other musicians suddenly: that was not only an experiment; that was a revolution! I thought that is the right man, yeah? So I studied with him for about three years. Until I finally said, if a bird is ready to fly, he leaves his nest and that is what I have done.”

After leaving the nest Holger became a music teacher in his own right as a way to make a living. Later he was able to work full time as a musician, because as he often joked, he was married to a rich woman. Teachers always learn from their students though and his were teaching him about the rock and pop music of the time, playing him records of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd's stood out to him, as did the song I am the Walrus by the Beatles. Czukay fell in love with that masterpiece of psychedelic pop. In particular he loved the way bursts of AM static and the sound of tuning between stations had been used for a musical effect at the end of the cut.

All of these influences and elements would fused together in his work with Can, a project begun while he was still a teacher. Irmin Schmidt’s mark on the band was equally massive, and he was just steeped, if not more, in the 20th century avant-garde, but exploring his contribution is not in the scope of this article. For most of his time in the band, Czukay played bass, but toward the end he gave up that instrument altogether in favor of a shortwave radio. He speaks about Stockhausen’s influence in making this switch.

 “A shortwave radio is just basically an unpredictable synthesizer. You don’t know what it’s going to bring from one moment to the next. It surprises you all the time and you have to react spontaneously. The idea came from Stockhausen again. He made a piece called ‘Short Wave’ [‘Kurzwellen’]. And I could hear that the musicians were searching for music, for stations or whatever, and he was sitting in the middle of it all and the sounds came into his hands and he made music out of it. He was mixing it live – and composing it live. He had a kind of plan, but didn’t know what the plan would bring him. With Can, I would mix stuff in with what the rest of the band were playing. Also, we were searching for a singer and we didn’t find one – we tested many, but couldn’t find anyone – so I thought: ‘why not look to the radio for someone instead? The man inside the radio does not hear us, but we hear him.’” This he used without additional effects. “The radio has a VFO – an oscillator – where you can receive single side-bands, which means just half of the waves and you can decode it – it’s like a ring modulator. And that’s more than enough. The other members of Can were very open to these unpredictable uses of instruments, especially in the early days.”

​His work with radios in a musical setting was a way for him to bring in energies from outside the band into their work. In his own words, “I looked for the devices to bring a different world into the group again and they had to react on that. That was the idea, working with a radio or working with tapes or working with a telephone. I even had this idea that with a transmitter, we could transmit and receive things back again. Or to call up people like today's radio shows where people call up or you call people. This sort of interaction I wanted to establish. But the group was not interested in this. So I finished with Can and went my own way. And here, I really followed this. I was working on that for a few years (with Can) but then I found it that it wasn't fun anymore. I continued alone then worked with other people.” 

Can had a great run as a band from 1968 to 1979. Afterwards Czukay continued to flourish with his solo recordings, including albums like Radio Wave Surfer. The methods he developed for using radio as an instrument he termed radio painting. He continued to make solo albums and collaborate with other musicians on various project throughout the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s. He died of unknown causes on September 5, 2017.

All of this tells you the who, what, where, when and why. But to get the full experience I invite you to blow your mind by listening to Stockhausen, Can, Holger Czukay, and other crispy Krautrock bands! There is no better place to start than with Hymnen, the Can discography. 

Sources:
Krautrock Sampler: one head’s guide to great Kosmische muisk 1968-onwards by Julian Cope, Head Heritage, 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Czukay

Interviews:
http://www.factmag.com/2017/09/06/holger-czukay-interview/https://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial?id_capsula=584#
http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/czukay.html

Starting in the early 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen composed several instrumental works which he called "process compositions". These did away with traditional stave notation and instead used symbols including plus, minus, and equal signs that indicated the successive transformations of sounds that were otherwise unspecified or unforeseeable by the composer. In this way he brings elements of improvisation into the fold of Western classical music where the strict adherence to a fixed score left little room for interpretation by musicians. The scores in his process pieces don’t dictate specific notes or ways of playing but rather specify the way a sound is to be changed or imitated. Taking a cue from his studies of information theory Stockhausen created a way of writing music that is similar to computer programming. The program “determines the way information is processed while leaving the choice of information to be processed to the individual user.” (Maconie 1990, 156-157)
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Stockhausen’s process pieces include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968). Eventually they led to the text based processes of his intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70).
Kurzwellen (Short waves), the third of the process pieces also marks the beginning of Stockhausen’s magnificent voyage using shortwave receivers as a medium for musical transportation.  The formal procedures in Kurzwellen (and the others) are fixed. Stockhausen thinks of these not as fixed in the way Beethoven’s Fifth symphony is a fixed piece that will sound the same to a greater or larger degree from recording to recording or performance to performance.  Only the processes themselves are fixed. These are indicated primarily by plus, minus, and equal signs and constitute the composition.

Yet the sound materials themselves, like the knobs on the tuners, are variable. The process scores can be followed and bring about very different results each time they are played and yet somehow still sound similar. The sound material coming in from the shortwave radios is unpredictable. Yet the prescribed processes themselves can be heard from one performance to another as being "the same".  These developments in musical theory and practice make live performances and new recordings exciting events.

The sounds coming in from the radio are what they players use as source material for the process of transformation as indicated by the score. Each player has a radio at their station. Stockhausen writes, “An undreamed intensity of listening and of intuitive playing is reached – and shared by all co-players and listeners – through the concentration of all players on unforseeable events coming from the realm of short-waves, in which one only very rarely knows who composed or produced them, how they came into being or from where, and in which all possible acoustic phenomena can appear.”

In practice the performers search for desirable sounds on the radio. These are for the most part the more  abstract and noisy sounds found in the spectrum. Then they replicate those sounds on their instruments and transform them by using variations in register, volume, duration or rhythmic density. There are additional instructions in the score for players to form synchronous duo, trio and quartet events, where players play together in tandem, or alternatively trade short events with one another. 

Part of the reason Stockhausen proscribed shortwave receivers rather than just the AM and FM broadcast band receivers most often used by John Cage is that they pulled in sounds from around the world. This played into his idea of creating a kind of world music. Shortwave also has a rich variety of sounds that allows the musicians greater freedom in finding sound material transform.

He continued to use shortwave radios in the pieces Spiral, Pole for 2, and Expo for 3. Writing of Spiral the composer says, "Doesn't almost everyone own a short-wave receiver?  And doesn't everyone have a voice? Wouldn't it be an artful way of life for everyone, to transform the unexpected (which one can receive on a short-wave radio) into new music - i.e. into a consciously-formed sound process which awakens all intuitive, mental, sensitive and artistic faculties, and makes them become creative, so that this awareness and these faculties rise like a spiral?!"

Expo is kind of the penultimate of these pieces, though it shares close similarities with Spiral and Pole, differing mostly in the number of players. All can be heard as being part of the same family of process pieces using shortwave radio. Expo was written for Stockhausen's 1970 stay in Japan at the World Fair in Osaka ("EXPO '70").  For the Fair Stockhausen designed a large spherical auditorium that was then developed by his collaborator Fritz Bornemann. Outfitted with 50 loudspeakers the audience was literally surrounded on all sides by sound. Karlheinz was able to control the movement of the sound mix around these speakers, moving the audio vertically and horizontally. Sometimes he created rising and falling spiral motions using what was termed a "rotation mill". There were also various balcony stages and platforms as the podium that gave the works peformed there further spatial dimension. For 183 his crew of twenty performed daily from 3:30 to 9pm. With breaks for individual musicians I’m guessing. The German pavilion became one of the main attractions at Expo '70.
These pieces represent a kind of music where both musicians and listeners must surrender completely to the process without worrying about the outcome. As humans this “not worrying about the outcome” of an action or a path taken can be a brutal challenge. These works embody a philosophy that has the effect of helping me to worry less about outcomes in my life. Process music as applied to my life gives me a sense of freedom from the outcome of an action. This allows me to be more present with the action itself as it happens, whether it is writing, radio, or some other activity. Listening to process music reminds me that I need to surrender to what I am doing in the moment. Surrender is difficult. Part of the joy to be found in the arts is submitting to how they grasp hold of us. Listening itself becomes a transformation.
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To the amateur radio or SWLing enthusiast the sounds of Kurzwellen will be familiar. The static crashes and buzzes, warbling of telemetry, announcers in multiple languages and mysterious numbers stations are sweet nectars of sound for the radio hobbyist. Listening to these recordings is like drinking a fine wine. I prefer it served in a darkened room with ears open to the world.

Sources:
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/ (plus/minus series of articles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_music
The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, by Robin Maconie, 2nd edition.

Gesang der Jünglinge

There is a mystery in the sounds of the vowels. There is a mystery in the sound of the human voice as it is uttered from the mouth and born into the air. And there is a mystery in the way electrons, interacting inside an oscillating circuit, can be synthesized and made to sing. Karlheinz Stockhausen set out to investigate these mysteries of human speech and circuitry as a scientist of sound, using the newly available radiophonic equipment at the WDR’s Studio for Electronic Music. The end result of his research was bridged into the vessel of music, giving the ideas behind his inquiries an aesthetic and spiritual form. In doing so he unleashed his electroacoustic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) into the world.

Part of his inspiration for Gesang der Jünglinge came from his studies of linguistics and phonetics at the Bonn between 1954 and 1956, with his mentor Werner Meyer-Eppler. The other part came from his spiritual inclinations. At the time of its composition Stockhausen was a devout Catholic. His original conception for the piece was for it to be a sacred electronic Mass born from his personal conviction. According to the official biography, he had asked his other mentor Herbert Heimert to write to the Diocesan office of the Archbishop for permission to have the proposed work performed in the Cologne Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe. The request was refused on grounds that loudspeakers had no place inside a church. No records of this request have been uncovered, so this story is now considered apocryphal. There are doubts that Eimert, who was a Protestant, ever actually brought up the subject with Johannes Overath. Johannes was the man at the Archdiocese responsible for granting or denying such requests and by March 1955 had become a member of the Broadcasting Council. It is likely Heimert and Overath were associates. What we can substantiate is that Stockhausen did have ambitions to create an electronic Mass and that he experienced frustrations and setbacks in his search for a suitable sacred venue for its performance, one that would be sanctioned by the authorities at the church.

These frustrations did not stop him however from realizing his sound-vision. The lectures given by Meyer-Eppler had seeded inspiration in his mind, and those seeds were in the form of syllables, vowels, phonemes, and fricatives. Stockhausen set to work creating music where voices merged in a sublime continuum with synthetic tones that he built from scratch in the studio. To achieve the desired effect of mixing human voice with electronics he needed pure speech timbres. He decided to use the talents of Josef Protschka, a 12-year old boy chorister who sang fragments derived and permutated from the “Song of the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace” in the 3rd book of Daniel. In the story three youths are tossed into the furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. They are rescued from the devouring flames by an angel who hears them singing a song of their faith.This story resonated strongly with Stockhausen at the time. He considered himself to be a fiery youth. Still in his twenties he was full of energy, but was under verbal fire and critical attack from the classical music establishment who lambasted him for his earlier works. Gesang der Jünglinge showed his devotion to the divine through song despite this persecution.

The electronic bedrock of the piece was made from generated sine tones, pulses, and filtered white noise. The recordings of the boy soprano’s voice were made to mimic the electronic sounds: vowels are harmonic spectra which may be conceived as based on sine tones; fricatives and sibilants are like filtered white noise; and the plosives resemble the pulses. Each part of the score was composed along a scale that ran from discrete events to statistically structured massed "complexes" of sound. The composition is now over sixty years old, yet the synthetic and organic textures Stockhausen pioneered for it are still fresh. They speak of something new, and angelic.

Stockhausen eventually triumphed over his persecution when he won the prestigious Polar Music Prize (often considered the "Nobel Prize of music") in 2001. At the ceremony he controlled the sound projection of Gesang der Jünglinge through the four loudspeakers surrounding the audience.
​

These breakthroughs in 20th century composition practice wouldn’t have been possible without the foresight of the WDR in creating an Electronic Music Studio and promoting new music on their stations.

Telemusik

As the world caught wind of the work being done at the WDR’s Electronic Music Studio, other radio stations and broadcasting corporations followed suit. NHK (Nippon HosoKyokai) in Japan built their electronic music studio in 1955, directly modeling it on the one at WDR. In 1958 the BBC created their famous Radiophonic Workshop. (I blame starting to watch Doctor Who as a ten year old, with its strange soundtrack and incidental music, for what became my lifelong fascination with electronic music.) The studio at NHK was just over ten years old when they invited Stockhausen over to work there and create two pieces for their airwaves. 
When he arrived in Japan Karlheinz was severely jet lagged and disoriented. For several days he couldn’t sleep. That’s when the strange hallucinatory visions set in. Laying awake in bed one night his mind was flooded with ideas of  "technical processes, formal relationships, pictures of the notation, of human relationships, etc.—all at once and in a network too tangled up to be unraveled into one process.” These musings of the night took on a life of their own and from them he created Telemusik.

Of Stockhausen’s many ambitions, one of them was to make a unified music for the whole planet. He was able to do that in this piece though the results sounded nothing like the “world music” or “world beat” genre often found on CD racks in coffee houses and gift shops. In the 20 minutes of the piece he mixed in found sounds, folk songs and ritual music from all over the world including the countries Hungary, Spain, China, Japan, the Amazons, Sahara, Bali and Vietnam. He also used new electronic sounds and traditional Japanese instruments to create what he called "a higher unity…a universality of past, present, and future, of different places and spaces: TELE-MUSIK." This practice of taking and combining sound sources from all over is now widely practiced across all genres of music in the form of sampling. But for Karlheinz it wasn’t simply making audio collage or taking one sample to build a song around it. Even though he used samples from existing recordings to make something different, he also developed a new audio process that he termed intermodulation.
In his own words he speaks of the difference between collage and intermodulation. “I didn’t want a collage, I wanted to find out if I could influence the traits of an existing kind of music, a piece of characteristic music using the traits of other music. Then I found a new modulation technique, with which I could modulate the melody curve of a singing priest with electronic timbres, for example. In any case, the abstract sound material must dominate, otherwise the result is really mishmash, and the music becomes arbitrary. I don’t like that.” For example he used "the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with Shipibo music from the Amazon, and then further imposing a rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard"

Stockhausen kept the pitch range of Telemusik piece deliberately high, between 6 and 12 kHz. This is so that the intermodulation can project sounds downwards occasionally. He wanted some of the sections to seem “far away because the ear cannot analyse it” and then abruptly it would enter “the normal audible range and suddenly became understandable". The title of the piece comes from Greek tele, "afar, far off", as in "telephone" or "television". The music works consistently to bring what was “distant” close up. Cultures which were once far away from each other can now be seen up close, brought together by the power of telecommunications systems, new media formats, new music. By using recordings of traditional folk and ritual music from around the world Stockhausen brought the past brought up close and into the future by mixing it with electronics.

To accomplish all this at the NHK studio he used a 6-track tape machine and a number of signal processors including high and low-pass filters, amplitude modulators and other existing equipment. Stockhausen also designed a few new circuits for use in the composition. One of these was the Gagaku Circuit named after the Japanese Gagaku orchestra music it was designed to modulate. It used 2 ring-modulators in series to create double ring-modulation mixes of the sampled sounds.12 kHz was used in both the 1st and 2nd ring-modulation, with a glissando in the 2nd ring modulation stage. Then music was frequency-filtered in different stages at 6 kHz and 5.5 kHz.

Writer Ed Chang explains the effect of the Gagaku Circuit: “For example, in one scenario the 1st ring modulation A used a very high 12 kHz sine-wave base frequency, resulting in a very high-pitched buzzing texture (for example, a piano note of A, or 0.440 kHz, would become a high 12.440 kHz and 11.560 kHz).The 2nd ring-mod B base frequency (in this case with a slight glissando variation on the same 12 kHz base frequency) has the effect of ‘demodulating’ the signal (bringing it back down to near A).  This demodulated signal is also frequency filtered to accentuate low frequencies (dark sound).These 2 elements (high buzzing from the 1st signal and low distorted sounds from the 2nd) are intermittently mixed together with faders. By varying the 2 ring-mod base frequencies and the 3 frequency filters, different effects could be achieved.  This process of modulation and demodulation is what Stockhausen means when he says he was able to ‘reflect a few parts downwards’.”

The score was dedicated to the Japanese people and the first public performance took place at the NHK studios in Tokyo on 25 April 1966.
​

Hymnen

Telemusik prepared Stockhausen for his next monumental undertaking, Hymnen (Anthem) made at the WDR studio. The piece had already been started before Telemusik but he had to set it aside while in Japan. Hymnen is a mesmerizing elaboration of the studio technique of intermodulation first mastered at NHK in Japan. It is also a continuation of his quest to make a form of world music at a time when the people around the planet were becoming increasingly connected. To achieve this goal he incorporated forty national anthems from around the globe into one composition. He had collected 137 anthems in the process of composing the piece, by writing to radio stations in those countries and asking them to send recordings to Germany. The piece has four sections though it was first slated for six. The last two never materialized. These anthems from around the world are intermodulated into an intricate web of sound lasting around two hours long. Thrown into the kaleidoscopic mix are all manner of other sounds produced from sine wave generators, shortwave radio, his voice speaking, and many others. Whenever I listen to Hymnen the sounds of the music from different nations reminds me of someone tuning across the shortwave bands. In the audio spectrum and in the radio spectrum borders and boundaries are porous, permeable. And that is one of the things I love about amateur radio: the sharing of good will between women and men from all across the globe, our signals reaching each other across space to make the formerly distant close. Hymnen ends with a new anthem for a utopian realm called "Hymunion". Perhaps it can be reached through the shared communion that comes from truly listening to each other. 

John Cage's composition Imaginary Landscape No. 4 wasn't the end of his engagement with the use of radio as a sound source. In fact his imagination, now glowing like a hot tube, was just getting warmed up. I will turn to his next experiments shortly, but I wanted to dwell for a moment on his earliest radio work, that I overlooked in last month’s  article. I had quite forgotten about Cage's involvement with the Boy Scouts in Los Angeles in the early 1920's . It was during this time period that his fascination with radio was sealed. His father had built a crystal set that could be plugged into an electric light system. For his effort it got his father listed in the city directory as a "radio engineer" though he had been more recently famous for his work on submarines. Cage sr. had invented parts and systems for subs that helped keep them level and also a system for running the engines on gasoline instead of batteries, which increased the speed of the subs. His father's flair for invention seemed to have been passed on to Cage jr. As a Tenderfoot in the Boy Scouts John got the idea of hosting a scouting program on the radio. First he obtained permission from his organization, and then he approached LA station KFWB who rejected his proposal. He next took his idea to KNX, and they gave the show the green light. It broadcast weekly on Friday afternoons. John at the time had considered himself destined to be in the ministry as his grandfather had been. As such he began each program with ten-minutes of oratory from a local religious person, be they minister, rabbi, or priest. The rest of the show was devoted to singing Scout songs over the air, sometimes with John accompanying his fellows on the piano. Other topics included such favorites as building fires and tying knots. KNX is still on the air on 1070 kHz in L.A. as one of the original clear channel stations, blasting a non-directional 50,000 watts. KNX had begun with a humble 5-watts when amateur Fred Christian put it on the air as 6ADZ. It was from these small beginnings, and his first taste of the airwaves, that he built on as a composer, presenter, experimenter, creating works for radio and incorporating radios themselves into a number of works.

After Imaginary Lanscape No. 4 Cage's next piece involving radio was written for a television program. His piece, Water Walk, lasts about three minutes and consists of many small actions relating to water. He timed each of his sound making actions to the precise second required by the score using a stop watch. Written for such fun sound making things as gong with water gun, and crushed ice in electric mixer, it also includes five radios and a piano. He stopped at the radios and adjusted frequency and volume, then released steam from a kettle, and plinked a few keys on the piano. Water Walk appeared live on television twice, first in 1959 in Milan, on the show Lascia o Raddoppia, an Italian version of the then popular Double or Nothing Game Show. Returning back home he got the chance to share it with American audiences on I've Got a Secret in 1960.  

Six years down the road came Variations VII that was presented on two of the nights of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering that paired artists, musicians and performers with engineers from Bell Labs in presenting new works fusing technology to contemporary art practices. The 9 Evenings was the first in a series of projects that came to be known as E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. This was the first organized large scale collaboration between artists, engineers, and scientists.  Some of the engineers included Max Mathews (whose work was included previously in this column), Bela Julesz, Billy Klüve, John Pierce, Manfred Schroeder, and Fred Waldhauer, alongside many others, around 30 in total. There were 10 artists involved including  Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman. The collaboration between the artists and engineers produced a number of "firsts" for technology in the theater. Some were specially-designed systems and equipment.  Others repurposed existing gear in innovative ways. Closed-circuit television and television projection was used on stage for the first time; an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness; a Doppler sonar device translated movement into sound; a fiber-optics camera picked up objects in a performer's pocket; and portable wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers transmitted speech and body sounds to loudspeakers.  The performances took place between October 13-23, 1966 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street. Around 1000 people attended each evening.

The engineering side for Cage's piece was overseen by Cecil H. Coker whose primary area of focus was acoustic research, specializing in articulatory speech synthesis. Coker, with two colleagues, wrote the first software text-to-speech program in 1973. Coker had worked with Cage before on the piece Variations V helping to develop a system of for using photoelectric cells to provide lighting and randomly triggered sounds. Variations VII was considerably more involved though it still used photoelectric cells as a key component for triggering sounds.

In composing Variations VII, Cage used no previously prepared sources of music. It consisted only of "those sounds which are in that air at the moment of performance." Part of the elaborate set up included ten telephone lines installed to the Armory and kept open at various locations in New York City. Some of the places they were connected to included Luchow's restaurant, the Aviary, the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station, the ASPCA lost dog kennel, The New York Times press room, Merce Cunningham’s dance studio, and one next to fellow composer Terry Riley's turtle tank. Magnetic pickups on the telephone receivers fed these sound sources into Cage's sound manipulation system, and from there to a dozen loudspeakers, one ceiling speaker. He also used 20 radios, one tuned to the police department dispatch),  2 television bands, and 2 Geiger counters. Oscillators and a pulse generator were other sound sources. Rounding it all off were a dozen household appliances such as blenders, fans, a juicer, and washing machine, wired with contact microphones. If that wasn't enough sounds from four wired body parts, heart, brain, lungs and stomach were included in the unpredictable mix. The entire set up stood on a platform with equipment stretched across two long tables. Cage, David Tudor and three other musicians moved around between the rows twisting knobs, plugging and unplugging cords and circuits, and flipping switches. Adding further randomness to the mix were the 30 photocells and lights mounted at ankle level around the performance area. These  activated and triggered different sound sources as the performers, and audience who came in close to watch, moved around the set up.
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 Video artist Naim June Paik compared the roaring noise of Variations VII  to a Niagra Falls of sound. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. And since so many of the sounds came from live sound sources an exact sound replica can never be recreated. Paik also considered to be Cage's masterpiece performance in the realm of electronic music. 

​The Maker and Hacker movements have had a great success in continuing to build relationships between the technically minded and the artistically minded. Ham radio has different restrictions imposed on it by the FCC. However it seems to me that somehow Hams could still work in creative ways with artists and musicians, and continue to forge vital connections between art and technology. 

​Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012.
Reception: the radio works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, by Alana Pagnutti, Smith and Brown, 2016.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_Evenings:_Theatre_and_Engineering
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=611   

​The development of telecommunications technology and electronic circuits had a major impact on the creation of new musical instruments from the very beginnings of the field. But it was only in 1951 that a composer first got the idea that the radio itself could be used as a musical instrument.  Since then the use of radio as a source for live, unpredictable sound, music, and voice has become commonplace across the genres of contemporary classical, and the various styles of electronic, rock and pop music. The next several installments of the music of radio series will explore some of the key composers and pieces of music that used radios as the primary instrument. Using the radio as an instrument has become part of what composer Alvin Curran has called "the new common practice" or grab-bag of themes, principles, and methods being used to create the sonic backdrop of the landscape that everyone now inhabits in this age of electronic multimedia.

"It's not a physical landscape. It's a term reserved for the new technologies. It's a landscape in the future. It's as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass." John Cage wrote this about his series of Imaginary Landscape compositions that first began in 1939 with No. 1, written for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal. It was potentially the first piece of electroacoustic music ever composed. The turntables played test tones. Some were constant, others had a sliding pitch. From the very beginning the piece was envisioned for radio, to be performed for either live or recorded broadcast. Since Cage had been a boy, he had been fascinated by the medium. Born in 1912 broadcasting was still in its infancy when it first reached his ears. Radio was so new anything could be done with it. The lackluster formats most common on the broadcasting portions of the spectrum now could well use an injection of the wonder the medium held in those first few decades.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was written while Cage held a teaching position at the Cornish School in Seattle. The school had been founded by Nellie Cornish, who had received some education in radio technology from Edward R. Murrow when visiting him at the CBS station in New York. In 1936 she created at Cornish the first school for radio technology in the United States. The studio at the school was equipped with the latest broadcasting and recording gear. It was there that Cage first began to experiment with the use of electrical sounds for musical purposes. At that time he was deep into writing percussion music and he began incorporating the sounds of radio and oscillator frequencies into these pieces. Reporting on Imaginary Landscape No. 1 the Seattle Star wrote that it was a "staccato roar of radio static and ghastly, ghostly whistles with intermittent shrieks". While this might have terrified listeners of the time, anymore people take such music as a matter of course, paying it no mind, especially when it is used in such things as the soundtrack or incidental music in film and television.

In 1941 Cage had found himself spending a large part of the year in Chicago. It was here that his interest in radio music continued to grow. Around this time he had published an article "For More New Sounds" in the journal Modern Music. In this essay he wrote about the similarities to be found between the materials used to create sound effects in radio studios and the instruments in the percussion wing of an orchestra. One of his interests was to bring radio sound-effects to the concert hall. He wrote, "organizations of sound effects, with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind, can be made. Such compositions could be represented by themselves as 'experimental radio music'". That same year he got to work with the poet Kenneth Patchen in creating a radio play for CBS. The first draft of the musical score was scrapped by the sound engineers however. Some of the sounds he wanted to create, such as the escape of compressed air were too expensive to produce for the program, he was told. After some revisions he eventually gave CBS something they considered acceptable. The resulting piece by Cage and Patchen, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was broadcast on May 31st, 1942. The surreal text by the poet was mixed with sounds of telephones, crying babies, rain, foghorns and Cage's metallic percussion instruments. In 1942 he also wrote No. 2 and 3 in the Imaginary Landscape series. No. 2 was written for tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum, buzzers, water gong, metal wastebasket, lion's roar and amplified coil of wire. No. 3 required musicians to play tin cans again, muted gongs, audio frequency oscillators, variable speed turntables with frequency recordings and recordings of generator whines, amplified coil of wire, amplified marimbula (a Caribbean instrument similar to the African thumb piano), and electric buzzer.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 was first performed in 1951 and is scored for 12 radios played by 24 musicians, two on each radio, one to control the tuning, the other to control the volume. It is a great example of indeterminate music. The only guarantee about the piece is that no performance of it will never be heard the same way. This is guaranteed because John incorporates chance operations to determine how much the dials of each radio are to be turned by each performer. The novelty of each performance is also guaranteed by the nature of radio itself. Depending on the place and time of a performance, the things coming out of the radio speakers are going to be different. During its premier concert at Columbia University's McMillin Theater those in the audience heard the word "Korea" over and over again, as well as snippets of a Mozart violin concerto, news about baseball, static, and silence. The performance took place around midnight and many of the stations in New York had already gone off the air for the night.  Of course the silence never bothered Cage, who considered  in an integral part of the experience. He had said that "silence, to my mind is as much a part of music as sound."

Listening to a recording of this piece from 2008 reveals the prevalence of country music and commercials. Voices come in and say things like "60 percent off" and read the weather and the latest buzz words in the news cycle. Many people listening today might be as confused about the "musical" quality of such a piece as they were back in 1951. But what John Cage has done  is to ask people to tune in and experience the unpredictable sounds and signals coming in from the radios and from the world, as a form of music.

The Imaginary Landscape compositions came to a close with No. 5  a work for magnetic tape recorder and any 42 phonograph records. This piece in the series was written in the same year as he began work on Williams Mix, for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch magnetic tapes, that became the first piece of octophonic music. As John Cage continued to compose until his death in 1992, he continued to work musically with new technology, including early computer music compositions in the 1960's.  A number of other composers and musicians have taken a vast amount of inspiration from Cage's work with radio and continued to build on it. These will be explored in further transmissions.     

A lot of these recordings are available to listen to on the wonderful UbuWeb:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html

Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Landscape