Back in the Midwest, in Cincinnati in 1966 or 1967 a random event occurred that sparked off another branch of do it yourself electronics. Qubais Reed Ghazala was looking for something in a drawer and he had given up on his search and shoved it closed. “The air was suddenly filled with cascading electronic sounds! I couldn’t believe it! I looked around, but saw nothing to give me a clue. Could it be the drawer?”

When he opened the drawer back up the sound stopped, but when he started poking around in the mess of wires and electronics again the sound reemerged and it seemed to come from the clutter. But at first he couldn’t see what was making the sound. “Then I saw it. A palm-sized transistor amplifier, left turned on with its back panel off and circuitry exposed, was shorting out amidst the decaying trinkets and salvaged parts.”

The exposed transistor was a lucky accident for Ghazala and his ticket to a lifelong pursuit and exploration of electronics. A junk drawer really is the best friend of someone who wants to tinker. In Ghazala’s case it gave him the necessary voltage to start making his own alien instruments and in turn inspired the world wide movement known as circuit bending.

He was thirteen when he heard the joyful noise emerging from his “broken” 9-volt transistor amplifier as it scraped up against another metal object in his desk. He had left it on, so when it hit up against something and the unusual sound it made struck his fervent imagination. It had reminded him of the early synthesizers, the kind that were only available for ungodly sums, such as the machine at Columbia-Princeton which cost the institute $250,000 dollars. For a broke teenager from Ohio who was an aspiring artist and musician interested in all things unusual his junk drawer hit the right note, and for the right price: scrounged up and dirt cheap.

He immediately had two ideas. “If these sounds are being created by accident, what could be done by purpose? If this can be done to an amplifier, meant to amplify a sound but to make NO SOUND itself, what would happen to SOUND-MAKING electronics when purposely shorted-out in the same way?”

It was as if the keys to the kingdom of electronic music had just been given to him. And he got them without having to go to one of the specialized electronic music studios. It was something he could do at home. Ghazala is rich with curiosity, and his natural inclinations led him down a path of tinkering and benevolent mad science. So he started playing.

“Working with this toy I discovered many really wonderful things! I found lots of these creative short-circuits, with many different responses to be had. I found that just touching the circuit with bare fingers allowed electricity to flow through the body, further shaping the sounds. I found points that would illuminate lights, and began adding other electronic components to the path of the short-circuits... capacitors, variable resistors; whatever I could find. I discovered also that when the line-output of the now circuit-bent amplifier was fed into a real stage amplifier, one of those big Vox or Fender stacks, the sound projected had nothing anymore to do with toys.”

The art of circuit bending grew out of this chance happening, though Ghazala didn’t give it that name until 1992. The technique typically uses low voltage gadgetry, so the person bending the circuits to their own whims doesn’t get fried. Battery powered toys and sound making devices of 9 volts or less are typical; and there is a plethora of disposable toys available from bargain bins in the second hand market. The ease of access to materials makes circuit bending affordable even to those musicians and makers on the tightest of budgets. Like Gordon Mumma before him Ghazala uses the surplus of his time –in his case, cheap plastic toys housing sophisticated circuits- to make music.

The process is relatively straight forward, and can be considered a kind of audio hardware hacking. First he would remove the plastic panels housing the toy to expose the electronic nervous system. With batteries inserted the toy or device is turned on he allows it to make sounds. Using an insulated test wire Ghazala touches the exposed end to various points on the circuit board and makes notes about the sounds that interest him when various connections are made.

This list of compelling contact points on the circuit board becomes Ghazala’s map for making a unique musical instrument. Using the map he can creatively rewire the salvaged toy in ways it wasn’t wired when he first opened it up. He often adds additional knobs and switches in the process. One of the key elements that many of Ghazala’s instruments have is body contact points. These are typically little metal plates that connect the musician directly in-circuit to the instrument. Because the instruments are low voltage, and because the human body is a natural conductor of electricity, a player can touch two of the contact points, and becomes part of the instrument, altering the flow of the bent circuit, making the instrument burble out a surprising variety of sounds. These sounds are variable because each player conducts the instrument differently, and even the same player will get different reactions from the instrument at different times.

Within these general parameters of practice whole worlds were waiting to be born.

Reed says “that beyond the obvious and delightful giddiness associated with toys being transformed into capable and outlandish synthesis equipment, when stripped of their target-sales housings and names all that remains of these toys is an electronic circuit lying there. And in many cases, these circuits contain sophisticated electronics capable of very high quality voices, just waiting to be nudged toward circuit-bending's anti-theory edge.”
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Reed Ghazala has created a whole suite of circuit bent instruments. The main families are based on the kind of musical and sound making toys he most often found out in the wilds of the thrift stores and second hand shops of Ohio, where he spent time hunting down items that could mutated into true artifacts. The prominent groupings are the Incantors, Aleatrons, Insectaphones, Morphiums, and Photon Clarinets. Numerous prototypes, one-offs, and variety of commissions have also come out of Reed’s Anti-Theory workshop. The Incantor, Morpheum and Aleatron series I look at here offer a window into the praxis and philosophy of circuit bending from the man who pioneered this strategy.

The Incantor’s are a grouping of aleatoric electronic instruments made by deliberately mis-wiring and short-circuiting the once common electronic Speak & Spell toy. Speak & Spell’s were a product of Texas Instruments first introduced to the public in 1978 at the Consumer Electronics Show. This high tech toy consisted of a TMC0280 linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, an alphabetic keyboard, and a receptor slot to receive one of a collection of ROM game library modules. The toy had originated as an outgrowth of Texas Instrument’s research into speech synthesis.

The Speak & Spell used trademark Solid State Speech technology that stored full words in a solid state memory format that was similar to the way calculators from the same era stored numbers. The expansion modules could be inserted through the battery receptacle to load new libraries and games. It was the first educational toy to reproduce speech without relying on tape or phonograph recording and words could be punched in and spoken in a way similar to how Texas Instrument calculators could solve a math problem. The original intention of the unit as advertised was as a tool for helping kids around age seven and up to learn the spelling and pronunciation of difficult and commonly misspelled words.

The phoneme data for the synthesis of speech was stored on two 128 kbit ROMs, the largest capacity ROM then in use. The word libraries were created from recordings of professional speakers brought in by Texas Instruments to utter and say the words. Once the voices were captured they needed to be further processed to fit the limited memory of the ROMs and this was accomplished using a computer. Once processed the words often needed further editing because of the sharp reduction and cut of the original data rate. Information had been lost and noise had been introduced into the system. Some of the recorded words had become completely unintelligible.

All the hard work required by the technicians and engineers at Texas Instruments got bent to other purposes when Reed Ghazala got his hands on a Speak & Spell. A Speak & Spell out of the box is already musical, after one of the units terminals get cross-wired, after additional electronic components such as potentiometers get installed, after the normal functioning is completely disrupted it becomes an Incantor, capable of incanting from the basic parameters of letters, words, phonemes and vowels to speaking in tongues and talking in alien languages.
 
These modifications overwhelm the unit's keyboard switch matrix and trigger an effect known in the field of electronics as key jamming or ghosting. This is something that happened on older matrix keyboards when these three keys were pressed together at once making a fourth keypress to be erroneously registered by the keyboard controller. In this manner a glitch became a feature when repurposed for music.
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Once rewired all of Ghazala’s instruments get the beauty treatment. They are repainted and made into true one of kind art objects, the equivalent of a luthier applying the final stains and varnish to violin or guitar.

The Trigon Incantor

Bolstered by the success of their Speak & Spell, Texas Instruments came out with a few variations, the Speak & Read, and the Speak & Math. With these selling along quite nicely, the company made a toy for younger kids, aiming for the toddler market. What they came up with, sick creepers be warned, was called the Touch & Tell.

The games for a Speak & Spell might ask a youngster “Can you spell the word CAR?” the Touch & Tell would just give the kid a prompt saying “Can you find the CAR? Press a picture.” The pictures in the Touch & Tell can be switched out, interchanged.

As Ghazala wrote in an article for the journal Experimental Musical Instruments (EMI), “Each displays a variable number of images and is hole-punched along the edge so as to reset hidden switches when located in place. In this way, alternate switch settings program the synthesizer's computer relative to each picture sheet. Although regarded as toys, the only thing childish about these curious talking boxes is their vocabulary. But with circuit-bending ...”

The Touch & Tell thus became subject to Reed’s recombinant techniques and once transformed became the basis for the Trigon Incantors. The “Trigon” part of these Incantors came from the three metal balls that he used to roll across the surface of the circuit bent Touch & Tell.

​Ghazala speaks, “With voice characteristics being somewhat similar, the standard and Trigon Incantor differ greatly in the playing techniques (keypad vs. steel balls). Both are capable of producing short as well as on-going streams of finely delineated digital sounds. These sounds, which range from percussive to melodic to vocal, and are constantly re-evolving through abstraction after abstraction, can be initiated on each instrument through various data entries involving the new circuit-bending switches, steel ball positioning, as well as standard keypad actuation.”

​Silence the Tongues of Prophecy is one of the songs Ghazala has made with his Incantor’s. It also features an er hu, or Chinese spiked fiddle, and another instrument he created called R.A.P (Readily Available Phonemes). This latter instrument predates the birth of hip-hop and rap music and is another one of his instruments that utilizes synthetic speech.

The Morpheum series was distinguished by the use of children’s toys that produced animal and railroad sounds. The extensive use of conductive flesh to circuit contact points made these instruments extra raw, and yet dreamy, and are perfect for being patched into an array of effects pedals. Ghazala recalls that first experience of playing with body contacts. “When I felt the jolts of electricity coursing through my body back in '67 as I began playing the Odor Box body-contacts, it struck me that I had become part of the instrument's circuitry, as in-the-matrix as any other component on the board. The circuit no longer was limited to dead matter. It didn't stop at its ‘ends’ anymore... and neither did I. This is definitely a new creature, it lives and shares electricity... the same electricity that, if taken away, would cause each to die.”
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The Morpheums can be outfitted with strap locks so they can be worn like an accordion. Only this accordion makes truly bizarre howls. Reed suggests using it as a lead instrument.

The Aleatrons are a series of circuit bent Casio keyboards that combine many of the properties Reed had previously explored in his other bending excursions: body-contact control, human voice synthesis, digital samples, the equal-tempered scale and aleatoric instruments. The Aleatrons, and specifically the SA-2 Aleatron, combine all of these techniques into one hallmark instrument.

Since the SA-2 is a thirty-two note keyboard with a built in sound library, the equal temperament bending box gets ticked first. The aleatoric element comes from a trigger switch that disrupts the normal programming routines of the instrument. The SA-2 does not have voice synthesis, but it does have a number of human-like sounds, fractal chants that emerge from chance. It also contains a plethora of digital samples from the bank of sampled percussion sounds.  

 "Whereas analog signals tend to deteriorate into static-like decay when exposed to certain circuit-bending applications, digital signals break-down into distorted routines rather than distorted tones. The tones can therefore remain sharp while their harmonic content, envelope and assembly behavior is altered. Likewise, just as it is with the musical notes, digital percussion sequences are similarly transformed. Cymbals become backward gongs, kick-drums blend into bass lines, snare drum decays are frozen into crystalline seas of sizzling metallic hiss.”

​Some instruments Reed built from the ground up like his Photon Clarinet and a variety he calls the Insectaphone. But even these latter that he built from scratch, he would then alter with circuit bending techniques to further alienize the sound.  

Requiem for a Radio

Ghazala is no stranger to the creative power of destruction. One of his musical projects and recordings was called Requiem for a Radio. For this piece he took a small plastic transistor radio, forcibly pried it apart, crushed it to bits into an electronic grinder, then melted all the pieces into a disc before sawing the disc into forty small pieces. He recorded sounds from throughout the whole process. Each of the four movements, Kyrie, Dies Irae, Sanctus and Agnus Dei are each composed exclusively from the sounds of one of the four processes the transistor radio underwent in its transformation. The resultant work is musique concrete as only Ghazala could have imagined it. With the initial distribution of the recording he sent some of the sawed pieces of the disc out along with the CD.

Part of the beauty of the circuit bending technique is that it brings instrument making and basic electronics into the hands of anyone who wants to do it. As Ghazala says, “Working with toys has advantages beyond the eccentricities and power of the final voices:  No knowledge of electronic theory is needed whatsoever to circuit-bend. Toys open themselves to the process. Anyone can do it. Simply, a wire is used to make connections between arbitrary points on the circuit while the toy is making its usual sounds. A switch is then wired between points discovered that produce an interesting sound so that the effect can be turned on at will. This procedure will usually result in a number of switches that can often be mounted on the toy's housing. If you learn to solder and can drill holes in which to mount your switches, you can circuit-bend.”

What better way to get into the electronics hobby than by reclaiming what other people no longer want and transforming them into new works of art. Reed Ghazala has built a life out of doing just that. In the process he has created a folk art for the electronic age, as he wrote articles on his instruments, and taught others how to go about bending. He even wrote a whole book on the subject.
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“The discards of our society pile up around us like coconuts in the surf. Picking up an abandoned toy, picking up a coconut, rewiring the toy, poking holes in the coconut, flipping the new switches on the toy, blowing over the new holes in the coconut, letting the toy's new music direct you to it, letting the coconut's new music direct you to it... these things are part of us. This is how musical thought systems are born.”     

Reed Ghazala’s Anti-Theory Workshop is a true laboratory of radiophonics and alchemical imagination.

References:
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Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments, by Q. Reed Ghazala, Wiley, 2005

Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments, written and produced by Bart Hopkins. ‎ Ellipsis Arts, 1998 [Book and CD set.]

http://www.anti-theory.com/ various pages within Ghazala’s website

http://www.furious.com/perfect/emi/reedghazala.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_%26_Spell_(toy)

https://cdm.link/2018/07/the-strange-cartridge-powered-speech-of-ti-touch-tell/

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

The first time Chris Brown heard the League of Automatic Music Composers was on KPFA as he was driving to a piano-tuning appointment in 1981. The music was wild, unified as an organism, yet with divergent tentacles or strands wiggling off in multiple directions like a psychedelic octopi. It was Chris’ first exposure to networked computer music, and the wriggling tentacles had put their first hooks into his brain.

Five years later Chris was working with a group who had dubbed themselves Ubu, incorporated, named after the 1896 play Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. This group had members from the LAMC and was now at work organizing experimental music concerts at galleries and community music spaces. One of the concerts the group decided to organize was called THE NETWORK MUSE – Automatic Music Band Festival. Held in an old church it brought together four different groups working with homebrewed computer music and presented performances over a few days. One of these groups was the duo of The Hub, then comprised of just Tim Perkis and John Bischoff.

At the concert Bischoff and Perkis were using a KIM-1 as a mailbox to post data used in controlling their individual music systems. This information then became available to the other player to use however and whenever they chose as they performed their combined system. The Hub had been their solution to the often messy tangle of wires and electronics that had been common during the LAMC years. Their interface was an elegant solution and a variety of computers and their users could plug into the system.

In 1987 composers Phil Niblock and Nick Collins instigated the formation of an expanded ensemble when some members of The Hub were invited to New York to give a performance at two separate locations linked together by a modem. This required the additional players and they were readily pooled from the other groups who had participated in the Network Muse. The two locations to be linked were both performance spaces, Exerimental Intermedia (XI) run by Niblock and the Clocktower (now MoMA PS1). The idea was to have a trio play at each location, that when connected via the modem became a sextet.

Bischoff and Perkis had already started playing as a trio with Mark Trayle in a group called Zero Chat Chat in the aftermath of the Automatic Music Band Festival, so it was a simple matter to recruit Chris Brown, Phil Stone, and Scott Gresham-Lancaster, who had all played in different groups at the festival to form a second trio. This expanded sextet became the Hub. They designed three pieces to play for the network, using the modem that divided the acoustics of the sextet into two trios that were still joined via the wires of information. These pieces were “Borrowing and Stealing”, “Simple Degradation” and “Vague Notions”. They also played three other pieces that were improvised independently, local to each group.

As Kyle Gann wrote in a review of the piece for the Village Voice at the time, “Equally peculiar (for those who attended a different space each night) was the oblique correspondence of identical pieces between the Clocktower and EIF, for the two audiences did not hear the same sounds. Each group fed information into the others' performance, but basic materials differed, making each piece a kind of sonic conceptual butterfly: same body, wildly different wings.”
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To many people having a group playing in two different physical locations was just a neat technological stunt. While interesting to promoters, it wasn’t the main interest of the band, though the performance did help congeal the Hub and the six composers continued to work together under the rubric. Yet the idea of the modem concert continued to haunt them and it was a spectacle they were asked to repeat in different forms. Their interest wasn’t however in the distances that separated them, but in the interactivity of the network itself, and the sounds of iconoclastic music programming of each musician that could be influenced by the musical programs of the others.  

The Hub also kept up with the new computers that continued to hit the market. The next iteration of the Hub device was based on the SYM-1 single-board computer made by Synertek. The processor was 1 MHz and it had 8k of RAM on the deck and a hexadecimal keypad for programming in machine language like the KIM. What made this an upgrade for the computer music chamber ensemble was that they built an expansion board onto the SYM that had four 6850 ACIAs (asynchronous communication interface adapters). These had connections to the 8-bit databus, seven address lines, system clock, and read and write controls. This bit of hacked together gear gave them options for connecting, interacting, musically communicating.

The homebrewed circuits were housed inside a box of clear plastic underneath the SYM with connectors on the outside. Three of the connectors were used to network three players with 1200 baud RS232 serial connections. The fourth connector went to an identical SYM-HUB they had built to host the other trio -the other half of the six piece band. These two Hubs could now communicate with each other quite speedily at 9600 baud, even though most modems in that era couldn’t send information that fast.

Phil Stone and Tim Perkis wrote a program in an assembly language used to receive and transmit messages from the players, each with their own serial port, to the Hub. The program also constantly copied stored data to the second Hub so that both memory areas had data from all the members of the group.

Stone and Perk’s wrote some comments on the program, “Devices connected to each channel make requests to write to the HUB processor table memory, and to read it. Each makes its request by sending command bytes of which the high four bits form a command field (CF) and the low four a data field (DF). In the HUB processor there are three variables kept for each channel: a current WRITE.ADDRESS (12 bits); the current READ.ADDRESS, (12 bits) and the current WRITE.DATA (8 bits). These variables for each channel can be set only by commands from that channel. All channel commands are dedicated to setting these variables, or initiating a read or write to the HUB table memory.”

The music of the Hub is in its way just as cerebral as the means used to make it. Having assembled their gear and membership, they now set about to play the endless game of composition, programming and recombination. The group were musicians first and technologists as a close secondary interest. Where most musicians work from a score, the Hub works from a spec. Individual notes are not preordained, but specifications for how a piece is to be constructed is all put in the spec. The spec can be read closely along with the schematics of the Hub. Like the blueprint for a house, the spec gives an outline or structure to the game of networked music. Even though the spec is often designed by one composer, the individual aspects of how it is prepared are left up to the programmers individual. 

HubRenga

Being based in the Bay Area, having a history with CCM and Mills College, and being part of the experimental music and arts scene meant there was a great deal of overlap between people, and a lot of potential for fruitful collaborations.  Several members of the Hub knew Ramón Sender. During the Hub years Sender had gotten interested in the collaborative aspects of writing made possible with computer networks. A fruitful collaboration was cooked up between the Hub, Ramon Sender and the Poetry group on the WELL, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link one of the oldest virtual communities and a regular online hangout spot for members of the counterculture.  

The first version ofHubRenga was performed over the air on a KPFA’s Music Special radio show hosted by Charles Amirkhanian on September 7, 1989. In this transmission the Hub was joined by novelist and musician Ramón Sender, and poets from another network, the poetry conference of The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a pioneering electronic community that operated in the Bay Area to facilitate communication between people interested in arts and alternative lifestyles. The poetry conference was a forum about poetry which subscribers to The Well could join to exchange ideas and work collaboratively. Sender was one of the hosts of the forum for a number of years.

For the HubRenga piece, the computer network of the Hub was connected to the network of the WELL. For this performance, the Japanese poetry game called the Renga was used as a format for the textual aspect of the work. Renga is a genre of collaborative Japanese poetry where alternating stanzas are linked in succession by multiple poets. Renga is typically composed live when a group of poets are gathered together. For HubRenga Ramón acted as moderator inside the KPFA studio, and browsed the poetic submissions as they came into the poetry conference forum on WELL, reading them aloud as part of the music, accompanied by an unnamed female reader.

The WELL poetry group, had been working, through Sender, for a few months with the Hub before the big date at KPFA. In keeping with traditional Renga practices, the poets worked around a theme. In departing from those practices they used a non-traditional theme. Usually the themes are based on the season when they are performed: summer, spring, autumn, winter. In this case the poets chose to use Earth as the theme. The poets came up with a common list of set words to use throughout the performance and this was given to the composer-programmers. They wrote programs that used these words as triggers. When a Hub member received a text from the WELL on his computer, their program filtered it for specific keywords, determined in advance from the list to trigger specific musical responses.

The keywords chosen by the Hub as triggers were:

embrace echo twist rumble keystone whisper charm magic worth Kaiser schlep habit mirth swap split join plus minus grace change grope skip virtuoso root bind zing wow earth intimidate outside phrase honor silt dust scan coffee vertigo online transfer hold message quote shimmer swell ricochet pour ripple rebound duck dink scintillate old retreat non-conformist flower sky cage synthesis silence crump trump immediate smack blink

This was the kind of interactive system the Hub thrived on and HubRenga was performed again in Los Angeles, along with Bonnie Barnett, an original member of Pauline Oliveros’ Womens Ensemble, who declaimed the power words. In this iteration Ramón Sender and members of the WELL Poetry Conference, participated via modem from the Bay Area.

The Hug Goes MIDI

In 1990 the Hub brought their wrecking ball to the world of MIDI music, a technical standard and communications protocol that was then only nine years old. Scott Gresham-Lancaster had been tasked with exploring its possibilities for the group. MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, allows for a plethora of electronic instruments, synthesizers, computers and other audio devices to be connected together to play, record and edit music. 

One single MIDI link on one single cable can carry up to sixteen discrete channels of information and these can all be sent to different instruments or devices, say a synth, drum machine or computer. The information carried on one of those channels includes musical instructions for pitch, velocity or attack, notation, vibrato, panning within the stereo field, and clock signals that allow one device to control the tempo of the other devices in the MIDI network. As a musician plays something that is using MIDI it all gets converted to information that is commonly used to control other sound producing modules. For instance a person is playing a synthesizer and it is triggering an external drum machine, sequencer, or other digital sound module. It is also used for recording and writing music. A player can hook a MIDI capable instrument up to a computer which then records the data. This information can be assigned different voices in a digital audio workstation, modified, and edited.     

This typical way of using MIDI –as one musician controlling an array of other instruments from one station- had no interest or appeal to members of the Hub. They wanted to break MIDI and use it for their own purposes. Scott beta-tested the then new Opcode Studio 5 MIDI interface. It was a single box unit that functioned as computer interface and MIDI patchbay with 15 inputs and outputs, processor and synchronizer. Scott played around with the hardware and learned how to program it so it could work as MIDI version of their namesake Hub. The new protocol would give them a faster messaging system that was also more flexible than their homebrewed system. Another advantage was that by using a standardized platform they would be able to share their working methods with other musicians in a way that was more accessible and closer to open source.

Yet the switch to MIDI meant a drastic change from the system they had been using. In the world of electronic music a new system means a new sound and they would either have to alter their existing pieces to fit with MIDI or start writing brand new pieces. It also changed the operational mode they had become accustomed too. Instead of the common memory shared between members, where data in any customized format could be deposited, the MIDI-HUB worked as a switchboard. Each player now had their musical data tagged and in this way identified them. 
​
“No longer was it up to each musician to specifically look at information from other players, but instead information would arrive in each player's MIDI input queue unrequested. Information about current states had to be requested from players, rather than being held on a machine that always contained the latest information. This networking system was more private, enabling person-to-person messaging, but making broadcasting more problematic. To send messages to everyone, a player would need to send the same message out individually addressed to each player. If a player failed to handle the message sent, its information was gone forever. And messages were sent more quickly under the MIDI-HUB, leading to an intensity of data traffic that was new in the music. The MIDI-HUB pieces reflected the nature of this new aspect of the band's network instrumentation.”

Waxlips was the first piece written for the MIDI-HUB and it was designed by Tim Perkis as a simple way of exploring the architecture of the network and it ended up becoming a “tune up” piece for the ensemble in their performances and tours, a way to test the system and get it up to speed before tackling other pieces from their repertoire. It was written to be simple and with minimal musical structure. Each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Once the request comes in and is received, the note message gets transformed in a fixed way and is sent on to someone else. The message can be modified by any musical rule. The only limiting factor was that in the various sections of the piece, specified with signals from a lead player, the same rule must be followed so a new-message-in gets followed by the same new-message- out. The lead player “jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests.”

Tim Perkis writes in the liner notes to the Wreckin’ Ball CD that contains recordings of Waxlips, “The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states, including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether. In initially trying to get the piece going, the main problem was one of plugging leaks: if one player missed some note requests and didn't send anything when he should, the notes would all trickle out. Different rule sets seem to have different degrees of ‘leakiness’, due to imperfect behavior of the network, and as a lead player I would occassionally double up -- sending out two requests for every one received -- to revitalize a tired net."
One of the ways the MIDI-Hub enabled the ensemble to collaborate was by receiving the output data from another musicians set up. For Alvin Curran’s Electric Rags III composition, Curran improvised on his Yamaha Disklavier electric piano. The MIDI output of his improvisation was sent through the Hub system and the ensemble players used it whatever ways they wished.

They used a similar set up again for Scot Gresham-Lancaster's Vex, a take on Erik Satie's proto-minimalist and extremely long piano piece Vexations. For this version they took Satie’s score and fed it into the HUB for a synchronized performance of the piece by Alvin Curran and the Rova Saxophone Quartet. As each note arrived into their system the Hub took the notes to create an electronic embellishment for the acoustic players they were working with.

Curran was a frequent collaborator and they worked with him on a studio version of his Erat Verbum (1993 iteration). This was a six part radio composition piece made for the Studio Akustischer Kunst of the WDR, and they worked with him on the Delta section. The piece utilizes recordings of John Cage’s famous Norton Lectures, also known as I-IV, that were fed into the HUB. The members of the group perused these and retranslated them instantly into Morse Code. Curran than live mixed the dots and dashes into a stunning fantasia. 

The stamp John Cage left across various musical subcultures and musicians was also evident in the work of The Hub. His spirit was kind of hovering in the background of things as they went about their work.

“One of the strands in the musical philosophy of The Hub was the interest in defining musical processes that generated, rather than absolutely controlled, the details of a musical composition. An acknowledged influence on this interest was the work of John Cage, and it seemed a natural extension to us to try to automate the indeterminate processes used in his work. Many of these processes are extremely time-consuming and tedious; and given that Cage was himself involved for a long time in live electronic performance, we felt a real-time realization of these processes during the progress of a performance was not only feasible, but aesthetically implied.”

In 1995 they got the opportunity to do a live realization of Cages’s Variations II at Mills College for a happening put together by David Bernstein called “Here Comes Everybody: A Conference on the Music, Writing, and Art of John Cage”. As part of the activities one evening of concerts was devoted to Cage’s electronic music and The Hub performed their version of his iconic composition.  

​Disconnectivity

Ever since the Hub had played together at their XI/ClockTower premiere in NYC,  in two separate locations connected by modem over the telephone wires, there had been pressure on the group from the many techies interested in their music for them to switch from their serial communications network to ethernet. There had also been pressure on them to do further concerts where the musicians were playing in different locations but connected via a network. In a way they had done this with the HubRenga concerts where the poets connected to the Hub via the WELL. Yet they hadn’t played together as a spatially disconnected group since the first concert.

In a way this was something that was expected of them, even if they really preferred to be in each other’s company while playing. The public fascination with the idea of musicians playing together though separated but vast distances in physical space remained a constant even though they had never repeated the experiment or incorporated as a regular part of their practice as a network ensemble.

They preferred the local area network of being in each-others company as they played. They sought a balance between the spontaneous interactions of the electronic systems they set up and the reciprocal feedback between themselves as humans making music together -an inherently social activity.

Chris Brown writes, “Since that event we have continued to receive requests for concerts to be performed remotely, that is, without all of us being physically in the same space, but have always declined, in part because we really prefer to be in the space where we can hear each other's sound directly and to see each other and communicate live. The Hub is a band of composers who use computers in their live electronic music, and our practice has been to create pieces that involve sharing data in specific ways that shape the sound and structure of each piece. We are all programmers, and instrument builders in the sense that we take the hardware and software tools available to us and reshape them to realize unconventional musical ideas.”

Eventually however The Hub succumbed to pressures to produce another concert where the members were separated in two different locations. “Points of Presence” was produced in 1997 by the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University (ASU), that linked to members of The Hub at Mills College, California Institute for the Arts and ASU over the internet. The piece nearly spelled the end of the Hub after a decade of cooperative engagement in network music composition.

“Now in 1997 new tools have become available that allow us to reapproach the remote music idea - telharmonium, points-of-presence - in a new way. Personal computers are now fast enough to produce high-quality electronic sound in real-time, allowing instrument-builders like Mike Berry to choose a purely software environment to produce home-made musical instruments. His Grainwave software, a shareware application for MacOS PowerPCs, was adopted by the group for this piece because it allows each of us to design our own sounds, and these sounds/instruments can be installed at any physical location that has a PC on which they can play - we can be independent of the hardware that produces our music, our instruments have become data which can be replicated easily in any place.

At the same time we, along with the rest of our culture, have been spending more and more time in our lives and our work communicating and collaborating on the internet. Why should we not extend our musical practice into this domain? Can we retain here the ability to define our own musical worlds, avoiding the commercial, prefab, and controlling musical aesthetics of the technological culture?”

Yet the performance itself was plagued by technical failures. They ran into many issues with the software and couldn’t debug it easily on the fly with a room full of people expecting to hear a concert. Because they weren’t in the same place they had to rely on internet chat and telephone calls to try and fix the issues. And with the different parts unable to work together as a network, the music was never able to work or lift off the ground. They were only able to play for ten minutes as a full network and they had to supply those who came to hear them with clumsy explanations of what they were trying to do.

“The technology had defeated the music. And after the concert, one by one, the Hub members turned in their resignations from the band.”

It wasn’t to be the very end of the band. Having been built as an ad hoc network they eventually found themselves reassembled again, ready for action, and all of the members of the Hub have lively musical activities they are involved with outside of the network -bringing in new information and new ideas to their working methods.

References:
The League of Automatic Music Composers: 1978-1983, New World Records No. 80671, released 2007. Collection compiled by Jon Leidecker (Wobbly).
The Hub: Boundary Layer. Tzadik. 8050-3. Three CD set with extensive liner notes and CD-Rom text files.
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. Edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Nuemark. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2005

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

As the musical computers at Bell Labs in New Jersey were winding down in the late 70s, people in the California homebrew microcomputer scene were just starting to get wound up. DIY computers had arrived and a group of electronic music experimentalists in the San Francisco Bay Area were writing programs, networking them together and seeing how they sounded in various configurations. The group was known as the League of Automatic Music Composers (LAMC), active between 1977 to 1983 before being reassembled into another musical configuration known as The Hub. LAMC can rightly be considered the first computer music group, and first network music group.

The League had its beginnings in the CCM during the time when Robert Ashley was the director. It was also the time when the first fruits of Silicon Valley were beginning to ripen and were able to be plucked off the shelf by hackers and hobbyists. At CCM these hackers and hobbyists were also experimental musicians. Because the CCM allowed for open access to its studio it drew a large crowd of people outside of strictly academic art music into its doors where they were all able to freely mix and mingle. Rock musicians met hackers, and hackers met free improvisers and jazz heads, who all met those studying the radical end of western classical music as it had evolved in the 20th century.

One of the mottos of the CCM was “if you’re not weird, get out!” It became a home for an assortment of musically inclined misfits, a place where they could fit in. Part of this already strange and heady brew was the homebrew tradition, which was very active at the Center due in part to its proximity to new integrated circuits being produced in Silicon Valley, in part due to its history as the place where the Buchla Box had been invented, and its association with the original composers who had formed SFTMC. Many of those luminaries, such as David Tudor, came to lecture and give concerts at CCM. The students had taken to the idea that building and designing circuits was part and parcel of the compositional process. The schematic diagram was seen as directly related to the graphic scores that had been innovated by the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

David Tudor and Gordon Mumma had already paved the way in their creation of electronic musical systems that once designed and built could be turned on to produce the music. These cybernetic systems were often autonomous and required little intervention from the composer as player after the system had been set up. Tudor had spent time at CCM as a composer in residence and his influence permeated the atmosphere there, particularly his idea that the job of the composer was to listen rather than to dogmatically determine every last note of a piece of music. This emphasis on listening is a theme that runs through contemporary musical practice and can be traced to this rich heritage left to us by Cage, Oliveros, and Tudor.
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In Tudor’s case he emphasized the setting up of autonomous, or automatic networks of electronics; systems that were made up of phase shifters, attenuators, amplifiers, and filters such as in his Untitled piece from 1972. The aesthetic beauty of such a piece lies in the enjoyment of listening deeply to the complex interactions of the system. This system music presents a mirror to other types of systems: human social systems, the diverse ecological systems of the natural world, complex electronic communication systems, and the way the human body is a system of organs, cells, tissues, nerves, and parts all moving together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes creating dissonant tones and clashing with noise.

By the mid-seventies the first commercial microcomputers had been made available for the average consumer. They were called micro at this time to differentiate them from their mainframe predecessors that took up entire rooms in the halls of industry and the academy. This availability meant that anyone who was willing to fork over the $250 bones one of these machines cost could have their own computer. Free from the oversight of how it was used by the folks who were in charge of the institutional mainframes, enthusiasts were able to dabble. These micro computers were integrated into the circuit of California’s music scene. 
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Jim Horton was an early adopter, and he was quick to get his hands on one of these computers. It was 1976 and the contraption was the KIM-1. This was a single board device and its name stood for how it worked: Keyboard Input Monitor.  Jim’s love of KIM soon spread out like a virus around the community and many other people started saving up their dollars to get these machines.

The KIM-1 itself consisted of just a single printed circuit board. All the components were on one side and it had a whopping memory of 1k RAM. The unit had a hexadecimal keypad used for programming. The programs themselves were saved to audiocassette.  An add-on keyboard could be attached and up to 4000 characters displayed on a television or monitor. As more people bought the machines, they started to share the programs they had written for them, and helped each-other troubleshoot the persnickety machine, and so a community of devotees grew around the devices.

The KIM-1 wasn’t Horton’s first experience working with new technology. As a musician he was trained as a flutist, but had also gotten in on the game of analog synthesis. He had gained a reputation for building very large modular patches that had the ability to self-modify. He would get his friends to bring along their synths and he would connect his synth to theirs building networks of synthesizers. After building a huge and complex patch he would let the system play itself in long eight hour concerts that lasted all night. These concerts were similar to the all night concerts Terry Riley gave and a precursor to the sleep concerts later given by electronic musician Robert Rich.

Jim Horton was the quintessential starving artist and he did his work for the glory not the gold. He had saved his meager welfare checks, and instead of buying food, literally starved himself for a synthesizer. He sacrificed to acquire the equipment necessary for realizing his soundworld. Forgoing creature comforts for greater achievement, he was known for plugging straight in to whatever work was at hand, and just getting on with things. One of his bandmates, Tim Perkis, recalls that meeting Jim was a liberating experience. He said, “Horton would show up at a gig with his tangle of loose wires and electronic components in a dresser drawer he would temporarily press into service. With my head full of hesitations born of half-digested conventional wisdom about audio circuitry, it was mind-blowing to see someone just go directly to the heart of the matter, twisting bare wires together, connecting anything to anything, and doing the deeply conceptual musical work which drove him without waiting for the right equipment to appear. He lived in a poverty that never seemed like a limitation to him, and worked with whatever means he had at hand.”

In 1977 it was Jim Horton who first proposed the idea of making a microcomputer network band. It happened in an organic way. There was already a group getting together on a regular basis to share the music they were making on their KIM computers. Some of this music was also made with analog circuits and other instruments. At one of these gatherings Horton shared his idea of banding together to create a “silicon orchestra”. He had already demonstrated that synthesizers could be networked together into self-generative, ever shifting systems of musical patches. It was a natural next step to network the computers and other circuits they were building into their own system and listen to the experimental results.

Later in the year at Mills College Horton worked with Rich Gold, one of the founding members behind LAMC. The pair put on a concert where the two of them linked their KIMs together. For the performance Horton ran an algorithmic music program based on the harmonic theories of eighteenth century mathematician Leonhard Euler. Rich Gold had written an artificial language program and these two programs interacted with each other for the show. Jim also was working with other future band member John Bischoff at the time and one of the things they had figured out was a piece where tones from John’s KIM would make Jim’s KIM transpose its melodic activity according to a set key note. Then in 1978 John, Jim and Rich all joined together as a trio to give a performance at an artist space in Berkley.

Next they were joined by composer David Behrman who had come to California to co-direct the CCM with Robert Ashley, his friend and fellow member of the Sonic Arts Union. Rich Gold and Jim Horton were studying with Behrman at CCM. It was around this time when Behrman recorded his landmark album On the Other Ocean. This album is equally at home in the related but differing milieus of New Music, Ambient, and Minimalism, and on comfortable footing displaying sustained harmonies between electronic and acoustic sounds that slowly dance and revolve around each other until the difference between them blurs. The two pieces on the album feature the KIM-1 microcomputer with flute and bassoon on the title piece, and cello and the KIM-1 on the flip side, Figure in a Clearing. In these pieces the KIM-1 “listens” to the live performers, and accompanies or marks points when particular pitches are played. When Behrman joined LAMC this principle became a recurring theme in their music.

Behrman talks of his time at Mills College, “Some of the students began bringing computers to the Mills Center for Contemporary Music; on the advice of a wise Bay Area artist, Jim Horton, Paul DeMarinis and I bought KIM-1 microcomputers. KIM-1 weighed about 10 ounces and cost around 200 dollars. Around that time I'd been building switching circuits that were placed between primitive pitch-sensors and homemade synthesizers consisting mostly of triangle-wave generators. The switching circuits took a long time to solder together and could only do one thing. It seemed that this new device called the microcomputer could simulate one of these switching networks for a while and then change, whenever you wanted, to some other one. It was fun connecting its port lines to homemade synthesizers, and also to sensors, and writing very simple software to link sensor activity with synthesizer sounds. There was something fascinating about the design of software, even though on the KIM-1 it had to be done in machine language, by pressing keys on a little hexadecimal pad. This was the dawn of 'interactivity' in California, the moment when Jobs and Wozniack were introducing the Apple computer. There was a Bay Area composers group of that era, the Microcomputer Network Band, which liked to do concerts in which the participants would wire together a group of computers on a table, turn them all on, and stand back and watch to see what would happen.”
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In November of 1978, now a quartet, the League of Automatic Music Composer gave its first performance using the name. Two years later Rich Gold and David Behrman had left the group to work on other projects. That’s when Tim Perkis swooped in to fill the spots.
Tim was interested in music made with alternate tuning systems from various parts of the globe, even playing in a local gamelan group. He was also a Just Intonation fanatic who happened to be skilled with electronics, having a graduate degree in video from California College of Arts and Crafts. If building your own homebrewed electronic instruments is a new kind of folk craft, than Perkis excelled at this craft work, programming his circuits to play in the various tuning systems he collected in his research.

Now in trio form, with a cadre of Bay area musicians and improvisers joining the festivities on occasion at various performances, they played together for four more years in this configuration. They had a habit of getting together on alternate Sundays to play at the Finnish Hall in Berkley, and people were welcome to come in and take in the scene.

Perkis writes, “Audience members could come and go as they wished, ask questions, or just sit and listen. This was a community event of sorts as other composers would show up and play or share electronic circuits they had designed and built. An interest in electronic instrument building of all kinds seemed to be ‘in the air.’ The Finnish Hall events made for quite a Berkeley scene as computer-generated sonic landscapes mixed with the sounds of folk dancing troupes rehearsing upstairs and the occasional Communist Party meeting in the back room of the venerable old building.”

During their time the LAMC distilled the spirit of the Bay area and infused its essence into their playful work practice and the music that came out of their curious explorations. Part band and part collective, they blended the communal zeitgeist of the day, with the fermenting intellectual and cultural atmosphere at work in such staples as the Whole Earth Catalog that promoted the use of personal computers alongside solar cells and sprout growing kits as part of the wave of interest in self-sufficiency and appropriate technology prevalent during a decade when the realities of hard limits were entering people’s consciousness. The members of the League had taken mega doses of the do it yourself ethos with regards to technical innovations. Everything they used was homebrewed or built from kits and modular components. All of it was on the table and subject to being taken apart, tinkered with, put to use in experiments. Then they would put it all back together again to see how it worked in a variety of combinations.

The League created networks of microcomputers and circuits with an ear towards making one large interactive musical instrument out of the member’s individual computers and components. One came from many. The members of the collective were all interested in computers and programming them to make music. They learned that when they networked their machines together and sent instructions to each other, the amassed circuits of silicon and solder were capable of eliciting what they called new “musical artificial intelligences.”
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The sound of the leagues music is like a noisy arcade that has been rewired and rerouted in an ad hoc fashion. Amidst the distortion, the random generated tones, and the disorienting arpeggios produced by the circuits and programs, something beautiful occasionally emerges, but the sounds are always interesting and stimulating to the intellect. It’s often messy and unpredictable, but what comes out of the apparent chaos has the feel of sentience and is full of life.

Without the same kind of tools being used by Max Matthews and Laurie Spiegel and others at the big institutions, it should come no surprise that the sounds the League conjured up had more in common with 8-Bit gaming soundtracks, albeit highly dosed and on a recombinant and aleatory West Coast trip, than with the kind of sounds the bigger mainframe computers were making. It was done by a group of individuals dedicated to the notion that computers and people could create their own independent networks, built at home from the circuit board up. Their music has as much in common with the lo-fi aesthetics of garage rock as it does with the pristine waveforms built from code at Bell Labs. The limitations in computer memory, the limits of space on the circuit board, and the haphazard way it all got connected to other components gave their music the flavor of strong home brewed hooch. The sounds get the job done, and in their miasmic chaos, what comes out of the mess of wires is sublime.
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The LAMC embraced their role as musical bricoleurs. According to Perkis, “We felt our work was more akin to that of our mentors and friends building gamelans (Lou Harrison and Bill Colvig), mechanical or electro-mechanical musical instruments (Tom Nunn, Chris Brown), or incorporating hacked versions of electrical and new electronic musical toys into their work (Paul DeMarinis, Laetitia Sonami), than to the contemporary institutional computer music. There was always the sense that the music arose out of the material situation, out of idiosyncratic individual players and the anarchic, ad-hoc arrangements they made.” Theirs was a mechanical musical conversation that ranged from noisy arguments to anarchic harmonies. 

Their music was also steeped in the traditions of free improvisation that had developed on the West Coast. When they set up their systems, at Finnish hall, or in the living room of a bandmate, they didn’t set about to practice a certain song or pre-composed piece of music, it was rather the ever evolving continual music of the patch in progress, the program in process, the new circuit being added to the mix, or the old circuit being mixed in a new way. Each member had a station of their own equipment, running their own programs, making their own sounds and contributing them to the spontaneous mix. The stations were set up in such a way that the microcomputers could send and receive information from each other, hence being a network band. The novel interactions of each new set up became the piece. It was composed, but it was spontaneous. With each new system set up the result was automatic.

So, as with David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros, the main activity of the musician was in listening. Making adjustments, tinkering with the system, the listening to what happened, after listening again and making new adjustments, tinkering some more and listening again in and endless cycle of discovery and surprise. When they noticed a set up that elicited sounds of beauty, or a sublime alien strangeness, they took notes so they could try to realize that same musical state again. It was true experimental music made in a laboratory they put together themselves.

In 1983 all the tinkering and hauling gear was beginning to take a toll on Jim Horton. He had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis already for some time, and in his way, endured the pain with stoic fortitude, pushing it to one side to continue living his Spartan artistic lifestyle. But it became too much. Eventually the human power supply running the operation had to be unplugged. The LAMC slowed down and then decided to disband.
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Yet the end of the LAMC wasn’t the end of what Jim and the others had started, but rather a new beginning.  Tim Perkis and John Bischoff went on to try and bring a touch of order to the chaotic mess of wires, gadgets and connections that had become their musical practice. They envisioned building a standard interface they could more easily network their computers together with. This they achieved and became the seed for Perkis and Bischoff’s next project, The Hub.

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Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.
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Mumma’s early encounters with John Cage and David Tudor, his work with them in the ONCE Festival and other situations primed him for his eventual work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Merce Cunningham was one of the great American dance artists of the 20th century. Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919. He started off learning tap dancing from a local teacher where his ear for rhythm and sense of timing were honed from an early age. He later attended the Cornish School in Seattle from 1937 to study acting and mime, but didn’t take to it. He loved the way dance could be ambiguous while also allowing for full expression of movement. Martha Graham had seen him dance during this time period and she invited him to join her company. It was through Graham that Cunnigham’s life intersected with Cage in something of a chance operation. Graham had needed a musical accompanist for her dancers. One of her pupil’s, Bonnie Bird, recommended composer Lou Harrison, who declined, but suggested in his place the young Cage. Cunningham and Cage met in 1938 and later became romantically involved, and life partners until Cage’s death in 1992.

Cunningham sometimes played in Cage’s percussion group at the time, and they had become quick friends. Over the subsequent years Merce loved to talk to John about ideas. As each of their personal situations evolved in art and life, Merce finally took the step of establishing his own dance company in 1953 and Cage came along Cage for the ride as companies music director. Cunnigham’s Company had many opportunities as it grew over the years. Cage’s own career continued with more and more in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. As each pursued their vision other musicians needed to step in to the role of director when Cage wasn’t available. Mumma and Behrman, among others, were natural choices, due to their friendship and affinity.  Mumma states it was never very clear how he ended up working with the Cunningham Dance Company, but it was something he just drifted into through these associations.

In the 60s and 70s Cunningham’s troupe made increasing use of electronics and this was an area where Mumma’s expertise could shine. He was a perfect fit; primed by his dedicated work as a creative composer, a cunning electronic technician, and as someone for whom the collaborative mode was second nature. In Mumma’s work with Cunningham’s troupe he got a chance to use all of these aspects of his character and put them to the test on tours that tested the endurance and dedication of everyone involved. The programs often involved collaborative music making and separate choreography, the latter determined by chance operations. The musicians were free to draw from their personal repertoires, and combine it with original material. 

Mesa

The first major piece Mumma wrote for Cunningham’s company was Mesa in 1966 for the dance Place. He was already working on something with David Tudor, who worked regularly in the company, when this came about. Instead of starting over he decided to alter the work in progress to accommodate the commission. Tudor had gotten into playing the Bandoneon, a relative of the accordion and squeezebox that has become popular in Argentina. It became the perfect instrument for Mesa because of its wide frequency and dynamic range. The Bandoneon can also produce long sustained drones and sounds, just what Mumma for the monolith that was taking shape.
 
Like the geological feature after which it is named, Mesa, is a tectonic slab of music sustained at one level of thrust with occasional interruptions. He had thought of using tape for the piece, but the dynamic range he wanted couldn’t be contained with the tape. That was one concept for the piece. The other was his desire to use “an inharmonic frequency spectrum with extremes of sound density.” In the performace space the placement of different portions of the sound in different loudspeakers creates a spatial diffusion. The final mixing of the sound is in the ears of the listener.

To further extend the dynamic range of Tudor’s instrument and create the timbres he imagined Mumma needed to design a circuit. The piece represented a creative problem and a technical challenge. His electronics needed to be able to translate frequencies, equalize, and required the use of logic circuitry in tricky configurations to control musical continuity. It’s another composition where the circuit diagram and instructions are more of the score than notated music.

Mumma developed Voltage Controlled Attenuators (VCA) in collaboration with Dr. William Ribbens in Ann Arbor. These extended the range while also including envelope controls. Ribbens is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Aerospace Engineering at the University.

In performance six microphones are attached to the Bandoneon, three on each side. The microphones are different with each being sensitive to different frequency bands. As a way of “thickening the plot” and for other reasons Mumma fed one mic from each side into the other side of the circuit. Six channels of sound from one instrument source are being processed to create this massive place.

Using a logic circuit Mumma was able to route control signals and program signals to different channels during performance. He used a frequency shifter with equalization that processed parts of the sound determined by internal control signals or from Tudor playing the Bandoneon. The logic circuit itself determined the source and nature of the control signal.

Mumma used a multiplier to take portions of the spectrum and transform it by whole integers to further equalize the sounds. Phase and amplitude modulators also work with portions of the sound, gating parts of the spectrum transfer with the output from the multiplier. Further gates, formant modulators, pass band filters and other baroque electrical wizardry were also built into the circuit score of Mesa. In creating the piece he was setting up a cybersonic system.

The VCA also included delays that further shaped the envelope of the program signal. Mumma wanted to use very specific delays that were not possible with either electronic manipulation, or from a mechanical source, such as building a tape delay. Mumma writes, “the solution to this problem is inherent in the concept of MESA itself, since at this point in the system it is the envelope of the otherwise sustained sounds which is to be shaped. This is achieved by subjecting the VCA control signals to frequency-sensitive thermal-delay circuitry. The wide dynamic range of the VGA is due to special bias procedures.”

Every control signal for sound modification first comes from the Bandoneon. “Because the control signals are automatically derived from the sound materials themselves, I call the process, and the music, "cybersonic".”
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What Mumma has created in Mesa is  a situation where the Bandoneonist can play a duet with a piece of electronic circuitry. A third person, most often Mumma, in performance, tweaks the circuit live to override parts of the internal logic with an artist’s intuition. 

Telepos

One of the pieces by Mumma used by Cunnigham in a variety of settings including TV Rerun was his Telepos (1972). For this he made belts to be worn by the dancers that contained small accelerometers, a device that measures vibrations and accelerations in motion. The belts were also equipped with voltage controlled oscillators and a miniature UHF transmitter. Inspired by telemetry, or the transmission of device data that is read remotely at a different point of reception, the dancers made music by their movements “in a process similar to that encountered in space travel, undersea, or biomedical research.”

Mumma worked with the group for seven full seasons and also collaborated on works with individuals from the circle. He also continued to work with Cage. One such instance was as part of the creation of a soundtrack to an electronic game of chess.

Reunion was a big piece conceived by John Cage as a chess game to be played between himself and Marcel Duchamp and a second match with Teeny Duchamp. It had a collaborative musical element performed by Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and David Tudor on an electronic chessboard designed by Lowell Cross. The chess board controlled certain aspects of the live electronic music.

Cage had first met Marcel in the early 1940’s when they were both in New York, but the meeting had been awkward, due to a blowup between Cage and Peggy Guggenheim, who had first introduced them. At that time Cage and his then-wife Xenia were being put up by Peggy after they had moved from Chicago. Cage took a gig at the Museum of Modern Art, when he also had a gig at Peggy’s new art gallery. She felt snubbed by him having a show she thought stole the spotlight from her presentation of his music in the city. At the time he was so in awe of Duchamp, he didn’t want to disturb him, but simply enjoyed in his presence.

In the winter of 1965-66 Cage’s circle and Duchamp’s overlapped again and they found themselves at the same parties. Cage had long been an admirer of Duchamp and they shared a number of sensibilities, one appreciating readymade objects and the appreciating readymade music of sound occurring everywhere in life. He wanted to reacquaint himself with Duchamp, but wasn’t sure how to go about it, until he asked Teeny if she thought Duchamp would tutor him in chess. She said to ask the man himself, and when he got the gumption to do so, Duchamp said yes.

He started to meet with Duchamp once a week to learn the game, and other social visits followed, including vacationing with the couple in Spain. Though he had used chess as a ruse to get to know the artist he admired, Cage was fascinated with the game and became a serious player. More often than not he lost to his teacher, who had played chess for decades.  
In 1968 the idea for Reunion was hatched. According to Mumma it “descended upon us at the same time” and the exact source of it was obscured amongst the collaborators. At the time Cage was very interested in expanding the people with whom he collaborated beyond the group of musicians and electronic pioneers who had clustered around him and Cunningham.

Lowell Cross was one of the people Cage was interested in working with. At the time Cross was writing a thesis that explored the history of electronic music and electronic music studios from between 1948 and 1953, and Cage played a large role in his thesis. Cross was studying media and society under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, and also ethnomusicology with Mieczysław Koliński, and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga and Myron Schaeffer.

Cage had been interested in Lowell’s work as an instrument builder, and had known about his device called the Stirrer, which was a panning system for moving up to four sounds in space which he had created between 1963-65. Cage called him in February of 1968 and asked him if he could build him an electronic chessboard capable of selecting and diffusing sounds around an audience in a concert hall as a game unfolded. Cross at first declined, politely, because he was swamped with his work at school.

Cage then made his move and said, “Perhaps you will change your mind if I tell you who my chess partner will be.” When Duchamp’s name was dropped it was enough to persuade the assiduous student to get even busier and build what would become the 16-input, 8-output chessboard used in the subsequent performance.

The chessboard had sensors that triggered the electronic music being produced by the musicians according to the way the pieces were moved. The outcome musically was beyond the control of the performers, who each had their own systems and set-ups feeding into the mix. The board was also equipped with contact microphones that picked up the movement of the pieces.

At the performance on March 5th, which kicked of the “Sightsoundsystems” performance series organized by composer Udo Kasmets, the chess players sat and smoked cigarettes and drank wine while the musicians made electronic sounds. The performance lasted for four hours and was a celebration of everyday life as a form of art. Marshall McCluhan was noted to have been in the audience.
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It was these kind of collaborative group work situations that Mumma found himself to be drawn to and a part of over and over again. Mumma’s talent as a composer, player, electronics specialist and creative thinker made him an invaluable asset to all the groups and milieus he circulated within and between.

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

Each month of 2021 will contain a biographical sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the audio obsessed OCD recluse lifestyle of David Wills, aka the Weatherman. This month we are going Native with Frances Slocum, Maconaquah.

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

Before we look at the life of the lady who came to be known as Little Bear, I want to start with some quotes from an essay by John Michael Greer where he explores the idea that the very landscape we live in effects our consciousness. Each land mass has its own effect and the land mass of North America has a particular flavor. He writes: 

"Carl Jung, while traveling in America, happened to see workers streaming out of a factory. To his European eye, many members of the crowd looked distinctly Native American, and he was startled when his host insisted there was probably not one Native American there. Both men were correct. The land—any land—puts its stamp on the bodies, the actions, and the thoughts of the people who are born and raised there; the American who tries to be European has been a butt of edged humor in Europe for centuries now, because the result always rings false to European ears."

He then goes on to discuss how "because of this imprint, reflected in details of history and culture" it's possible to get a glimpse of a future great culture and civilization that will take shape here in America.

"The first stirrings of the American great culture are fainter at this point—not surprising, as its flowering will likely be quite a bit further in the future, and we have a second pseudomorphosis to get through first. One measure of that faintness is that there isn’t yet a good clear English word for the theme that already differentiates American culture from those of other societies. Since the land keeps radiating its basic influence while peoples come and go, I’ll borrow a term from Chinook jargon—the old trade language of the northwest quarter or so of native North America, which was once spoken from northern California to Alaska and from the Pacific Ocean to the eastern slopes of the Rockies—and speak of tamanous.

Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. In a great many Native American cultures, finding and establishing a sacred relationship with one’s tamanous, via various traditional practices, is the primary religious act a person can engage in, an essential part of achieving adulthood and thus something that most people do as a matter of course. The result is a religious vision unlike any other, in which the personal relationship between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power takes center stage."
-John Michael Greer, America and Russia, Tamanous and Sobornost

This process of going Native here in America has long been underway. When colonists first arrived however, and long into the 18th and 19th centuries sometimes the person who went Native didn't have much of a choice about it. Aside from the ethical considerations of kidnapping people and making them part of your tribe, it cannot be denied that this has been part of the American experience. Some of those who were kidnapped, taken by force from their birth family, made the most out of an ordeal that often began in violence. These people, assimilated into Native tribes, have much to teach those of us who hear the call of this land that is America.​

​Frances Slocum (March 4, 1773 – March 9, 1847) who became Ma-con-na-quah, "Young Bear" or "Little Bear" was one such woman, an adopted member of the Miami people. Her story began in Warwick, Rhode Island, and ended in Indiana. At the age of four her family left New England for the Wyoming Valley of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. 

The area had already been occupied since time out of mind by the Americans who were already Native. Several historical tribes including the Susquehannock, whose tongue was the  Iroquoian language, and the Delaware, whose tongue was Algonquian, had made it a home.

In the mid-18th century settlers primarily from England ventured into the valley. Some came to do that most questionable of religious services -"missionary work"- i.e., convert the Indians from what these Christians though was their barbaric beliefs over to the sane and civilized thought systems of their own ways of life.  

Others simply wanted to farm the fertile land near the Susquehanna River and escape the freaks back home they'd been trying to get away from in the first place -often for their own religious freedom and liberty. Then the French and Indian War broke out and its violence drove the settlers away for a time. 

The colonies and colonists were often as much at odds with each other as they were with the people they were displacing. The colony of Pennsylvania and Connecticut both said the Wyoming Valley was their own -irrespective of the ancient culture already on the land. One faction was at the throat of another. They were at the throats of  one another in a series of skirmishes known as the Pennamite-Yankee Wars. The Connecticut contingent returned to the valley to settle the town of Wilkes-Barre in 1769. Yet armed bands of Pennamites were already there and took issue with the interlopers.Physical violence continued as the Revolutionary War itself broke out. United against the common enemy of the oppressive mother country, they still fought among themelves until the disputes were settled in 1780.

It was in the time of tumult that Slocum family skittered off to Luzerne County in 1777. Frances was just five years old. They had survived much of the previous violence in the area, and thought God, their Quaker beliefs, their pacifism, and the friendly relations they had with the Natives would protect them from harm. Many other souls with less courage, and perhaps less faith or foolishness,  had fled during the Battle of Wyoming in July 1778, when British soldiers, allied with Seneca warriors destroyed Forty Fort near Wilkes-Barre. More than three hundred American settlers were killed in the fight.

On November 2nd, 1778, three Delaware warriors captured her at their farm in Wilkes-Barre. The father Jonathan was away when three Delaware warriors attacked the Slocum family farm near Wilkes-Barre. Mother Ruth and eight of her ten kids escaped into the forest. But the Delaware captured five-year-old Frances in their raid, along with her brother Ebenezer who was disabled. They also snatched Wareham Kingsley, a young boy whose family was living on the Slocum farm. The Delaware didn't end up keeping Ebenezer, but the other two were taken and Frances never did see her folks again. A little over a month later the natives killed her father and grandfather. Her mother Ruth who died died in 1807 never stopped believing that one day her  daughter would be found.

Frances was given to a Delaware chief and his wife who were childless. They named her after their own youngest daughter, who had died, Weletasash. Frances recalled in her later years how the group she was with migrated from the Niagra Falls area, to Detroit, and then ended up near Fort Wayne, Indiana in what they called Kekionga.

Frances got married the first time between 1791 and 1792 but returned to live with her parents due to domestic violence. She met her second husband when she found him injured in the woods. She brought him home and her parents helped him get well and back into shape.

He was know as She-pan-can-ah, Deaf Man, because he couldn't hear. A strong warrior, Shepancanah later became a Miami chief. The pair had four children together. Their two sons died young. They also had two daughters, Kekenakushwa or Cut Finger and Ozahshinquah or Yellow Leaf. Marrying into the Miami Frances adopted another name, Maconaquah or Little Bear.

After the War of 1812 they settled along the Mississinewa River near Peru, Indiana. The next 23 years are a blank as far as the historical record goes. Yet in 1835 she shared some of her story with a visiting trader named Colonel George Ewing: the fact that she was a white woman who had been taken as a child. 

Ewing was a fluent speaker of the Miami tongue.  She spoke no English at this time  but remembered her family's name was Slocum and that they had been Quakers who lived along the Susquehanna River.

When Ewing met Slocum she was a widow living with her extended family at Deaf Man's village. The small enclave consisted of a double log cabin with two or three cabins attached to it, a corn crib, a stable, and outbuildings for livestock.  Living with her were her two daughters, Ozahshinquah (Yellow Leaf), a young widow, and Kekenakushwa (Cut Finger), Slocum's eldest daughter; Kekenakushwa's husband, Tanquakeh, a métis named Jean Baptiste Brouillette; three grandchildren; and an elderly relative.

Ewing took her story back out into the world and tried to locate her relatives. He sent a letter to the postmaster at Lancaster, PA and aske about the Slocum family and if they had a relative who had been kidnapped during the Revolutionary War. The letter never made it to its intended recipient, but was discovered two years later at which point it was published in the Lancaster Intelligencer. A minister from the Wyoming Valley read the news and passed it along to Joseph Slocum, her Brother who then got in contact with Ewing. 

In September of 1837 Joseph, his brother Isaac and sister Mary traveled with interpreters to Peru, Indiana to meet their long lost sibling.  Having confirmed her as their sister, they offered to take her back with them, but she had grown up with the Delaware and the Miami and the Indian way of life was what she knew and was accustomed. At this point she also had a family of her own. She spoke no English and had forgotten her given name was Frances. She had been fully assimilated into the life of the tribe. But it was a reunion and they got to meet their nieces and her son-in-law on their visit, and she got to see her brothers and sisters.

The village Little Bear had lived in with Deaf Man was a kind of crossroads for the multicultural American experience. Their family was not in any way the only one to be mixed racially and culturally. African-American's had also mixed with the tribe and been assimilated and lived nearby. 

At the time the U.S. Government was working on removing Indians from their land and resettling them in Kansas and other points west. The Miami were coerced to sign treaties in 1838 and 1840 that forced the Miami community in Indiana to consider moving west. All but a small portion of their remaining tribal lands in Indiana were ceded to the federal government, and in 1840 they agreed to move across the Mississippi River within five years.

Yet another deal was made in 1838. Three years after she came out as white a new treaty was made for some Miami families with individual land grants that would allow them to remain in Indiana. Among the recipients were Ozahshinquah and Kekenakushwa , her two daughters, who together received 640 acres of land, exempting them from the removal to Kansas Territory. Little Bear was recognized as the head of the family at this time, but was not named in the land grant. 

As the knowledge of her being white spread in the community it encouraged those who had been able to stay in Indiana to mask their Indian identity and try to pass. This strategy was emboldened by the political maneuverings of Miami Chief Francis Godfroy.

​Godfroy was born at Little Turtle's village (Fort Wayne) in 1788, son of a French trader and Miami woman. He ended up becoming a key figure in helping to keep some of the Miami people on Indiana land as a tribe through his landholdings and the leadership of his descendants. His treaty grant for the land around Mount Pleasant became a refuge for Miamis without land who had come home from Kansas after  returning from Kansas after their removal in 1846.

On March 3, 1845, the United States Congress passed the joint resolution that exempted Slocum and twenty-one of her Miami relatives from removal to Kansas Territory. Her Miami relations in Indiana were among the 148 individuals who formed the nucleus of the present-day Miami Nation of Indiana.

On March 3, 1845, the United States Congress passed the joint resolution that exempted Little Bear and twenty-one of her Miami relatives from removal to Kansas Territory. Her Miami relations in Indiana were among the 148 individuals who formed the nucleus of the present-day Miami Nation of Indiana.
The rest of the reservation land of the Miami’s in Indiana was ceded to the feds in 1846. Six months before Little Bear's death a major removal of more than 300 Miami began at Peru. A smaller group was removed in 1847. All told, it was less than half the Miami tribe that got removed, and more than half that either returned to Indiana or were never made to leave under the terms of the treaties.

She died at age 74 of pneumonia at Deaf Man's village. The graves were later moved when the Wabash dam was built, flooding their old home. 

Little Bear's grandson, Camillus Bundy was born in 1854, son of Ozashinquah. He was a shaman who knew the old rituals and traditions, the use of plants and other Miami lore. He was known as a gifted storyteller and farmer. He became the chief after his father. He lived most of his life on the reservation land and cared for the grave of his grandmother. He taught what he knew to his sons Charles Z and David Bondy. He also became 
the tribal attorney in charge of contacting Washington in with regards to the Eastern Miami's first formal pursuit of claims.

The Eastern Miami were bringing forward claims in regards to illegally collected taxes by the State of Indiana on Tribal Reserves. Camillus Bundy called together the Miami to discuss general claims and the future of the tribe. On September 23, 1923 60 to 80 people attended the meeting that is seen as the beginning of what is now the Miami Nation of Indiana. In 1930, at the age of 75, Camillus Bundy retired from actively pursuing Miami claims. Pimyotamah passed away in January of 1935. 

A Brief Sideshow in Peru, Indiana

The town of Peru itself also forms an interesting nexus for this story, and I hope to visit it myself, especially during the "circus days". 

Peru, Indiana was the winter headquarters of many major circuses of the time, and is recognized as the circus capital of the world. It all started in 1884 when the Wallace Company started out, with Peru as it's base. Benjamin Wallace was livery owner in Peru who took a chance on starting his own show when he bought a few rail cars worth of circus equipment. He called his entertainment the Wallace and Company’s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo and Alliance of Novelties. His show was a success and the name became simplified after he purchased the Hagenbeck Circus and it became the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus.​

​With his show wheeling out from Peru every spring, and returning in the winter, Peru became a locus for wayward clowns, trapeze artists, and anyone with a gimmick or a schtick.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West show made use of the Winter Quarters Wallace had built. There were huge barns for elephants and other exotic animals. There was even a hospital on the grounds, amidst all the other outbuildings and bric-a-brac of circus life. Lion tamers and animal trainers such as Clyde Beatty who came to the circus in the 20th century also  made it a home. Beatty's great granddaugther Tarrin Cooper lives in Peru and does the occassional roadshow highwire act. Many of the Miami Indians in the area found work with the circuses there.

In the summer Peru was quiet without all the circus folk around, but come fall they'd be back. The musicians treated the townies with the song of “Back Home Again in Indiana” from the high pitched steam calliope. The last commercial steam calliope builder in the world, David Morecraft, opened up shop in Peru in 1985 to keep these instruments and tradition alive. His calliopes are featured in the annual circus festival and parade there in July. One of the festival’s largest calliope is called the Gentry. It  was built in Cincinnati in the 1920s and is housed in a circus wagon made in Peru in 1901. The whole contraption now gets hauled on the bed of a 1949 Ford pickup.

The Ringling Brothers swooped into Peru and the circus community became there circus community. Like everywhere else in the Great Depression the town took a big hit and in 1941 the doors to the Winter Quarters closed, but the freaks.  In a desperate act to save space and money on maintenance the circus wagons were burned. Even as the old dream of the circus life died there in town, many of the freaks and carnie types couldn't leave and so joined the world of everyday people they had once entertained. Thus it is that in Peru a high concentration of people with the circus in their blood live to this day. 

​In the patches of sound bites that make up the quilt that is Negativland's 2020 album The World Will Decide, the song “Before I Ask” portrays an underlying feeling of panic that persists throughout the experience of the album. With the help of the voices of Siri, Alexa and Google, the song is able to convey a certain message about social media usage in this day and age, and how scary it can be. It contains the vocals of David “The Weatherman” Wills, who intensely shouts absurd questions into the void, each question getting weirder than the last. Like some songs on the album, this track contains a dark undertone in terms of sound. It’s the type of sound that makes people’s heart beat faster and faster, the feeling of uncertainty pushing down on them.  

Longtime Negafan's will know that the Weatherman, or the "dumb stupid Weatherman" as he is called. (Yes, sometimes he operates under the moniker of the Clorox Cowboy under certain unclean and dirty conditions.) The Weatherman is no stranger to shouting at electronic voices or having conversations with recordings. 

He is also no stranger to wiring up his whole house with outside microphones to record ambient sounds. The Weatherman is something of a "home tape" recording enthusiast, and also a radio scanner enthusiast, and a radio ham jamming enthusiast.

Remember JamCon '84? This was the collection of Over The Edge episodes presented as a radio documentary covering a convention of amateur radio jammers, with commentary on radio jamming and Culture jamming, and the history and cultures surrounding them. This whole aspect of listening to jammers in California jamming other ham radio operators was something the Weatherman really got into with his many trusty scanners.

All this jamming makes more and more sense the more you listen to Negativland. David Wills (born April 3, 1954) is one of the founding members of Negativland, and since the band hardly made any money over the first few decades of their existence, he worked as a cable repairman until he retired from that job in the 1990s. If you know he worked as a cable repairman it makes songs like "The Playboy Channel" of which he is the main narrator, or "lead singer" take on a whole new resonance.

As a cable repairman, audio enthusiast, and person who loved to make all kinds of tapes of just about everything, especially family tapes, the detritus of the Weatherman's audio recordings are littered throughout the Negativland discography, and he took center stage in many episodes of Over the Edge.

His notable Over the Edge contributions include the episodes that make up the Willsaphone Stupid Show, The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Come Out Line, Sex Dirt, and many others. As a frequent contributor and caller over the years the Weatherman's contributions can be found in many episodes of the Over the Edge. One of his greatest contributions to the show was the Booper, heard on nearly all episodes of the OTE since he first gave one to Don Joyce.

The Booper is an electronic oscillator invented by the dumb stupid Weatherman. It has been described as "an electronic noise-making device that creates unstable feedback using multiple transistors and an FM radio receiver. The resulting sounds are different each time they are played but are sure to excite the ears and engage the mind."

Wills is also a founder of the Fake Bacon Society. He is also a recluse with a bit of OCD about cleaning and cleaning products. Fans will recognize him armed with 409 and other cleaning products to wash away the sex dirt. Because he is a recluse, it has been difficult for fans of Negativland and sometimes even the band themselves to contact him. He just goes into recluse mode. Sometimes he has shown up in virtual form at Negativland concerts on a TV screen or video projector. Starting in June 2008, The Weatherman has been posting audio, video, pictures and more from his enormous archives on his section (Dumb) of the Negativland website. Many off air recordings there to listen to for the radio and scanner enthusiast.

The best way to get a sense of his personality is to listen to the radio shows he is a part of, and those Negativland songs where his vocals are prominent. You could also learn a lot from this video At Home with the Weatherman.

Back on the westcoast in 1966 Pauline Oliveros had been hired to direct the San Francisco Tape Music Center after it’s move to Mills college under the auspices of the Rockefeller grant they had received. The next year she got a competitive job offer at the University of California San Diego and left to take that position. Californians Lowell Cross and Tony Gnazzo replaced her but they soon left. When Roger Reynolds was asked if he wanted the job he’d already gotten another gig himself at UCSD as well, but he recommended Robert Ashley in his stead. In the fall of 1969 Ashley’s family packed up their bags and left Michigan for the golden sun of California. 

When he got into town he called upon Nick Bertoni for help in revamping and expanding the electronic studios at CCM. Bertoni had come to California to work on sound for film director Robert Altman. In 1968, he had settled in Berkley to form a collective household of writers, artists, musicians and scholars. Bertoni would go on to become a pioneer of the maker movement promoting the idea of tinkering as a learning method, first at the S.F. Exploratorium Museum, where he was manager of the Artist in Residence Program, and then in his own Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley where he explored electronics, woodworking, metal crafts and inventing and encouraged others to do so as well.

With Bertoni’s expertise he helped Ashley build a studio split into five sections. It included a recording studio, a tape library and a tape editing suite, a Moog synthesizer studio, and a workshop devoted to building musical instruments. Having a space whose sole purpose was the creation of new instruments kept CCM firmly at the forefront of the do it yourself ethos. This ethos was further enhanced when Ashley opened up the studio to people who weren’t even students at the college, making it a public access facility. In this way he continued the tradition and legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from which it originated.

Running the studio ended up being a good career move for Ashley. After two years in that capacity he was invited by Mills to become a professor. He agreed under the condition that he be given tenure. The professorship was a situation he thought quite ironic when he considered how his own progress in music had been hindered more than helped by many of his past music teachers, Ross Finney chief among them. “I never thought of myself as a teacher. Teachers have mostly been the bane of my existence,” he later wrote.

Never the less where other teachers had failed for Ashley, he was able to guide a number of young composers on to successful musical careers. These include Maggi Payne, who in turn went on to become a co-director of the CCM and Paul DeMarinis who went on to explore many different parameters around the convergence of technology, communications and music. John Bischoff was another of his students whose work with the League of Electronic Music Composers is explored later in this chapter. DeMarinis also sometimes played with the League.
   
It was during his time in California that Ashley’s attention turned to opera. He had dabbled in the form twice before in the 60’s but now it started to consume him. Putting on an opera isn’t cheap, and the more experimental the work is, the harder a time a composer will have finding backers to support the work. At the same time, the lack of financial backing can lead to innovation as strategies for bypassing various obstacles are sought. This latter path was the way Ashley took when he started getting interested in the form, and during his tenure at the CCM between 1969 and 1981 he established a new genre of opera.

I was in the 1970’s that Stockhausen came up with the Licht superformula and himself started writing operatic works that would take the form outside of its traditional mold and into new territories. Something must have been in the air in the 1970s when the these two different musical minds were fertilized with operas.

Ashley’s genius was to create an opera intended for television, a music that could be enjoyed comfortably in someone’s living room. Keeping with the SFTMC’s multimedia tradition his operas include video, electronic music, and improvisation. His complex and literary libretti also show the influence of his time working at the Speech Research Institute at Michigan University. Not only do the texts of his operas have multiple levels of meaning, but the way the performers are instructed to utter, sing, declaim the libretti bring the focus in to the different ways voice can be used. Ashley brought the extended techniques so popular in the ONCE Groups instrumental music to bear on vocalists as influenced by his time as a speech analyst.

AUTOMATIC WRITING

One of the pieces he worked on at CCM was to be a direct precursor for the new mode of storytelling he established in his operas and it came out of a mild form of Tourette syndrome he’d noticed he had. It was composed in recorded form over a period of five years and not released as an album until 1979, but some of the musical features of the piece and the vocal phrasings would appear in his operas that he started working concurrently, progress on them overlapping with the years.

Ashley noticed there were certain words he muttered, certain phrases he repeated out loud. He got curious about these unconscious patterns that were emerging, and asked himself, as a composer, if he could find a way of working with them musically?  

He’d recalled how Morton Feldman had made a remark that any composer who walked around with a tune in his head should be locked up. Ashley knew he had to bring forth the mysterious utterances emerging from himself, and he knew that within them was a great creative potential. To not use these “tunes” coming out of his head in some way was to hold back his gift from the world.

After some false starts trying to use these involuntary tics in voluntary live performances, Ashley came to the conclusion that working on this material might be better as a studio project.  So he started making recordings, but they weren’t coming out the way he hoped, as the conscious element was still involved, like it had been in the performance attempts. Yet he kept at it and the necessary conditions finally came about one summer when the Mills campus was dead and empty. Students had gone home or gone wherever they went on summer break. With his head free from the responsibilities of teaching, the halls and studio quiet, he inched his mouth very close to the mic and made the involuntary utterances. Eventually he captured a total of forty-eight minutes of his Tourette derived speech onto tape, and this became the basis for Automatic Writing.

With the tape in place as the base structure he was now able to develop other material to ornament his voiced unconscious. His second wife Mimi Johnson (who would later start the Lovely Music record label that released this and many other recordings) read in French a translation of Ashley’s involuntary words. Her voice forms a second character for the work. A third was made with Ashley playing moog and organ tones beneath and around the voices -the unconscious ocean from which these voices emerged.

The way the words are said by Ashley, and the way they are recited by Johnson forms a kind of template for a way of using language that would be a hallmark in his later operas. Paul Demarinis, composer and master of circuitry, who was a student of Ashley’s and David Behrman’s while at CCM, designed a switching circuit used for the piece. The final result is a landmark work of hypnagogic music that is at once ambient, spoken word, and experimental. Just as the words seem to lull one on the edge of sleep, they will also disturb and make a person sit right up at attention.

The piece is a favorite of Steve Stapleton, the man behind surrealist music outfit Nurse With Wound.  Automatic Writing was a major on influence on the album A Missing Sense. Stapleton recalls, "A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building."

MUSIC WITH ROOTS IN THE AETHER

As Automatic Writing came together in the CCM studio Ashley was still thinking of writing operas and new ways of presenting them. He was also thinking of television and how perfect television could be as a medium for new American music. Philip Glass had made a complaint that “the situation for the American composer can never improve because the only thing Americans are interested in is television and sports.” This statement got under Ashley’s skin and he took it into himself, stating the only thing he was interested in aside from music “as a composer, are television and sports: television, because like music I can have it in my home; and sports, because like in contemporary music nobody gets killed.”

Joining music with television seemed like a logical next step. He had already been composing for experimental films and also wanted to help get the music of American composers out there to the public. In a way this was a continuation of the impetus that had been behind the ONCE Festival: a forum for sharing what was happening now among American composers. Only instead of people having to drive from all across the country and show up in Ann Arbor, all they would have to do now was switch on their television set. Music in the Roots of the Aether was a way to seed the ideas of the new generation of American composers out into the minds of the public via the medium they were already entranced by. Because he liked the medium so much himself, it was obvious to combine it with opera.

“I know a lot of people who watch television for five hours straight; I do it myself. My idea of my music is to jump in bed, with whatever you like to be in bed with, drinks and whatever, there’s the TV, the music is coming out of the TV, and you watch it for six hours,” Ashley noted. He would be perfectly at home with contemporary streaming services and the habit of binge watching programs. 

With some funding he got from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations he was able to move forward with the idea of combining television, opera, and conversation with his fellow composers to create a groundbreaking cross-genre work. With cash in hand he produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether: video portraits of composers and their music. The project was a 14-hour television opera that was also a documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. For each composer an hour was dedicated to an unscripted conversation about their work and ideas, and another hour dedicated to a presentation of their music.

“I intended, first of all, to make a work of ‘musical theater’ in the medium of video, not a polemic. Music With Roots in the Aether  is the realization of an idea I had worked on in various ways for about ten years -- to make an opera of personalities and to illustrate those personalities with actual quotations, e.g., to quote the music of David Berhman by having David Berhman perform his music. … Because so much of my work has to do with ‘speech’ and its relationship to music, I conceived of Music With Roots in the Aether as a series of ‘duets' -- another composer and myself -- alternating with ‘solos’ by the composer. In each of those seven portraits the theater of the music is established in the landscape we inhabit and in the uninterrupted (‘performed’) camera style of the video recording.”
For the interviews he adopted a “casual and desultory” style. “They had to be, because of the manner in which they were made. They were made in front of a video camera, with the rule that there would be no video editing. So, the composers are just talking. Then, the conversations are edited for print to take out as much of the conversational looseness as possible.”

The composers included David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynold and Terry Riley. It premiered at the Festival d'Automne à Paris in 1976 and has since been shown worldwide in over 100 television broadcasts and closed-circuit installations.

The very nature of this work also relates to the spirit of public access television. The development of public access TV happened in parallel with developments of the open house studio concept at CCM. It was created between 1969 and 1971 by the FCC due to pressure being placed on the commission by media activists who were dissatisfied with the corporate behemoths who were the gatekeepers to the video airwaves. Even with the grant money to make the work there is an admirable scrappiness to the series.

But is it opera? According to Ashley it is, and the success of the series paved the way for him to further explore musical massage via America’s favorite medium.

PERFECT LIVES

Towards the end of his tenure as director of the CCM Ashley had worked on experiments and small pieces that later became the episodes The Park and The Backyard for his first proper TV opera Perfect Lives. Hearkening back to his Midwest origins, “These are songs about the Corn Belt / and some of the people in it / ... or on it.”

The pieces were developed musically in live performance in America and Europe. On the keyboard was Ashley’s collaborator “Blue” Gene Tyranny, whose harmonies, melodies, and playing define the character of Buddy. Ashley and Tyranny performed chamber versions on many occasions. One of these was at The Kitchen in 1978 and shortly after that concert Ashley was commissioned by The Kitchen to create Perfect Lives as an opera for television.

At the center of this work is the poetic, sing-song reading of Robert Ashley’s voice in a hypnotic syncopation. The ever-flowing words narrate a story of life in small town America updated to the time of its writing, the late 70s and early 80s. The story is filled with a number of characters but revolves around the lives of two musicians, the aforementioned Buddy who is “the World’s Greatest Piano Player” and “R”, a singer of myth and legend played by Ashley, and who can be viewed as a version of himself.

The composer describes the dramatic plot. "They fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing." One way to look at it is as a metaphysical heist drama.

As the tale unfold the couple Ed and Gwyn elope, the sheriff, his wife and a bunch old fogies at the old folks home unravel the mystery of the stolen money. Another character, Isolde, watches a sundown celebration from the door of her mom’s place. These and other characters act and sing across the television in the seven episodes that make up the opera.

Ashley described the plot as a “comic opera about reincarnation.” As such it is purportedly based on the Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet, since it deals with the corn belt, there are also fiery strains of midwestern evangelism threaded through the work. Or is that televangelism? Either way it amounts to a celebration of the everyday and perfect lives of those in the flyover states as the mundane and familiar gets transformed through music into a sublime meditation on the rebirth of the human soul.
Ashley put all the tools he had developed in collaborating with others at ONCE and CCM into practice in his operas.  “The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. The musical and visual materials are coordinated through ‘templates’, a term I have come to use to describe the subjective assignment of emotional values and moods to visual forms and corresponding musical structures. Within the rules defined by the ‘templates’ the collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, ‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage.”

In 1980 using the templates provided by Ashley’s score, John Sanborn, who became the television director of the production, recorded the basic video tracks on location in Illinois. From this bounty of material, a preview version called The Lessons was produced through the TV Lab at WNET, the same place where Laurie Spiegel had worked on the sound production for The Lathe of Heaven.

Two years later a pre-sale was obtained from Channel Four Television in the UK that made it possible to complete work on the opera. John Sanborn masterminded a shooting and editing plan for the visual elements of Ashley’s score. Then in 1983 it went into post-porduction at VCA Teletronics where Sanborn worked with Dean Winkler on processing the images and editing it all together. In 1984 the opera celebrating the American Midwest premiered on Great Britain’s Channel Four. It has since been broadcast throughout Europe and in various cities in the United States. Perfect Lives was also expanded into a live version which included orchestral music layered onto tapes by composer Peter Gordon, and the singing of Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem.

In the U.S. its cult success is owed mostly to various recorded audio versions which became favorites for late night air play on community, college and other radio stations not beholden to record companies and ad revenue. In other words: stations that weren’t jailed into restrictive formats.

For the rest of his career Ashley would continue to work in the operatic form to create a uniquely American conception of opera both in subject matter and in the use of American language and ways of talking. Kyle Gann considers Perfect Lives and Ashley’s operas in general to be “performance novels” and I concur that this is an apt moniker.

Around this time in the late 70’s and early 80’s a number of different works, that could be considered to cross the genres of spoken word, radio play or opera, and otherwise contained spoken and sung narratives started to appear. David Rosenboom’s Future Travel from 1981 is one example, a sci-fi story set to Buchla Touché & 300 Series Electric Music Box, piano, violin and percussion.

The same year David Behrman, Paul Demarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded She’s More Wild at the CCM. It started life as performance art piece described by the artists as ‘Western Performance Noir.’ The record centers on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious “Archetypal Unitized Seminar,” a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers.

Records like these and other text pieces set to music sit in the same milieu that Ashley would command in further operatic works. As “performance novels” they are uniquely positioned for transmission via a variety of telecommunications channels and mediums.

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


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David Behrman was born in Austria in 1937 and came from a family of artists and performers. He was son of noted playwright and Hollywood screenwriter S.N. Behrman. His mother Elza Heifetz Behrman was the sister of violinist Jascha Heifetz. Performance, music, and the arts were all in his blood. The family piano was something always available to him, and he spent a lot of time sitting with the instrument. His inclination towards music was encouraged and he was able to continue to study it in the world of higher education. There he met some of the people who were working towards the awakening of a distinctive American music in the classical tradition, and others who would go on to have a lasting influence over his own musical trajectory.

From the American Five the American Four

In 1953 he went to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there he met a person one of his lifelong friends and musical companion, Frederic Rzewski. It was around this time period that he also met Wallingford Riegger. He became a student of Riegger’s who initiated him into the alternative current of American classical music.
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In an interview Behrman commented, “One person from whom I learned a lot, about music and also about feisty independence, was the composer Wallingford Riegger. One year in New York, when I was 17, I went twice a week to his little apartment to take composition lessons. Riegger had taught Morton Feldman and Bob Ashley and had been a friend of Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese.” Behrman was soaking in the ambience of some rarified musical circles.

His teacher Riegger had been born in Albany, Georgia, at some point moved to Indianapolis and from there went on to school at Julliard in New York. He graduated in 1907, a member of the prestigious music schools first graduating class. Riegger went to Germany for a spell in an attempt to become a conductor. He learned a lot and also improved his cello skills before coming back to the States in 1917. Back in New York in the twenties he devoted himself to composition when he couldn’t find work as a conductor. 

Riegger was one of what was called the “American Five.” The other members of the American Five included Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, John J. Becker, and Carl Ruggers. The group aimed to cast off the long shadow of European composition. Just as the Transcendentalists and later Walt Whitman had begun to build up an American identity in literature, these composers were feeling into the wide open spaces of a new and independent American music. In particular Riegger immersed himself in the work of the New Music Society started by Henry Cowell. This society put out publications and recordings to spread the work of American composers. Riegger also played a part in forming the Pan American Association of Composers that represented composers throughout the western hemisphere.

Within the American Five, Riegger was known as an early adopter of a twelve-tone system. Though he learned the technique from Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss, he wasn’t a strict adherent to serialism. He also wasn’t strict in the way he used Schoenberg’s method. He didn’t think he needed to always use rows with twelve tones and he didn’t necessarily transpose his rows. If he wanted to use a note, he used it, and if he didn’t, he didn’t. Twelve tone techniques were just another tool in his tool box, not a rigid compositional dogma. In this he was truly part of an American tradition of using whatever tools happened to be at hand and discarding them when they didn’t suit him.
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In 1957 Riegger got summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was on their list of suspects during their investigations into communism in the musical world. Behrman recalls his former teachers political views, “He was a courageous dissenter; because of his political views his music was blackballed during the McCarthy era. He used to alternate counterpoint lessons with lessons in radical politics. It was from him that I learned about some of the independent voices in American music - about Ives and Cowell, Varese and Cage. And I'm still a fan of Riegger's; his music had a wonderful sense of sonority and rhythmic vitality.”

​​Riegger had nurtured this spirit of independence and it found full flowering in many of his students, including Behrman and Ashley. This connection to two members of the Sonic Arts Union to one of the American Five, and the spirit of independence they picked up from him was a key influence on Behrman and Ashley. Perhaps, for their generation, another name for the Sonic Arts Union might have been the American Four.

Alternating Currents

Two of his other musical friends had a huge influence on him. “Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff, had a lot to do with what was on my mind in those days. Christian was a graduate student at Harvard when I met him. He and Frederic knew a great deal about new developments in European and American music. Frederic was always the first person in the area to order the latest scores by Stockhausen and Boulez. He got them way before the Harvard Music Library did.”

In 1959 Behrman was keen to get a taste of what was going on in Europe. He had become a fan of Stockhausen, especially impressed by Gesang der Juenglinge, which was in many ways the gateway drug for a generation of electronic music composers. His imagination fired by Stockhausen, he went to the Darmstadt composition class in the summer of 1959 to study with the composer. La Monte Young and Naim June Paik were fellow students in his class, while David Tudor and Cornelius Cardew were his advisers. “Stockhausen's course was an eye-opening experience for me, in part because of his intense devotion to new music, in part because he encouraged my efforts, in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began.”

Back in the United States his friends Wolff and Rzewski hatched a plan to bring David Tudor to Harvard for a concert. All three were members of the music club but they only had a small fee to give the musician. To their surprise “not only did Tudor accept, but he brought his friends John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown with him. Tudor played new European and American music brilliantly that night; it was a moment that considerably expanded the mental horizons of many of the students who were present.”

David Tudor’s influence got the younger students further interested in the possibilities of using both traditional and electronic instruments, alone and in combinations. When Behrman met Gordon Mumma at the 1963 Feldman/Brown concert the two became fast friends, and took up a lively pen pal correspondence which also included the exchange of circuit diagrams. Mumma started tutoring him in basic electronics through the mail and gave him instructions on how to build things. Electronic music offered a workaround for young composers in the early sixties. It was often hard to get musicians to play an unknown composers work, but in the DIY milieu that was coming up around electronic music, a composer could build their own equipment and play their own compositions; in part because the building of a circuit was essential to the structure of the piece, a crucial component of the score.    

 “From David Tudor and Gordon Mumma I learned how to build little battery-powered devices that could radically alter or hugely amplify acoustic sounds. Gordon Mumma's enthusiasm was catching; he wrote me a series of letters in 1964 that were like a basic course in electronic music before there were any books on the subject. The first letter had a circuit for a ring modulator, which I eagerly built. Before that I'd had the experience of composing scores and copying out parts and asking other musicians to play them; one was always in the situation of asking favors and that didn't usually feel very good. Better was the self-reliant feeling of performing oneself, and of using homemade instruments to create sounds that no human ears had ever before experienced!”
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In 1965 Behrman had one of his electronic pieces played at the ONCE Festival. The next year the Sonic Arts Union would blossom. 

Wave Train and Runthrough

Behrman has written much fine music, well worth spending time with. Two pieces from the Sonic Arts Union era are noteworthy.

In Wave Train he uses guitar pickups placed around the body of a grand piano to explore properties of feedback and resonance. The gain on the guitar pickup is set high enough to excite the strings through its feedback. In performance Behrman would often have Mumma play the piano, while he moved the microphones around during various points in the piece, to showcase the different effects this would have on the piano.

Alvin Lucier said of the piece, “The performer’s job is to ride the feedback, raising and lowering the volume levels, creating arcs of sound waves. David likens this activity to surfing where one is constantly monitoring one’s position along a surging wave front.”
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In one sense Wave Train is a prepared piano piece in the tradition developed by Cage and Tudor; in another it explores the properties of microphones being placed around an instrument, as Stockhausen had investigated in his Mikrophonie pieces from 1964 and 1965. 

Runthrough was a piece where all four of the Sonic Arts Union members played a variety of Behrman’s homemade instruments. It is built from “cheap circuitry put together at home” and is used to make improvised music. There isn’t a score, but two of the players use the sound generators, modulators, and dials and switch to play the electronic sounds. One or two other people use flashlights to control a photocell distribution circuit that acts as a kind of mixer for the other sound sources. The audio is fed into four or eight loudspeakers set in a circle around the listeners. Behrman suggests that no skill is necessary to play the music, so it is a fun piece for non-musicians to explore. The piece emerges as players run through the various combinations and settings of the equipment, each time the sound potentially different. “Because there is neither a score nor directions, any sound which results from any combination of switch and light positioning remains part of the 'piece.' (Whatever you do with a surfboard in the surf remains a part of surfboarding).”
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This piece is an exercise in improvisation and intuition, a playful way for three or four people to listen to each other, a communion made in music and shared electricity.  

Choreographing the Music of Our Time

It was in the late 1960s that Behrman would get a job that helped bring a lot of the new music to a wider audience. He landed a gig at Columbia Records and worked on producing the “Music of Our Time” series of albums. Two of the most well-known records he helped produce for this series were by Terry Riley, his In C and A Rainbow in Curve Air. Other works that Behrman produced for the series included recordings by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier, Richard Maxfield, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Pousseur (under whom he had also studied), Steve Reich, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff.

Along with Mumma, Behrman had the privilege and opportunity to work with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe, writing music for their performances, a gig that came from their connections to Cage and Tudor. Of his time with the troupe Behrman said, “Merce Cunningham, besides being a great choreographer whose career has spanned more than a half century, has been a long-term champion of live music. He always has live music-makers in his performances and must be the only choreographer on earth who never tells the musicians he works with what to do. In 'Events' in particular -- Cunningham Company works in such a way that nothing at all about the music is prepared in advance -- musicians can explore the idea that 'a movement, a sound, a change of light' can all independently share the space and time of performance. Often coincidences occur among the media in a way that seems magical and that could never be planned.

The Cunningham Company tours have provided much experience over the years of performing repeatedly for large live audiences. Lately I've learned a lot about the use of interactive software on tours with fine musicians such as Kosugi, Stuart Dempster, Steve Lacy, Jon Gibson and others. Looking back on the earlier years, the memories of touring and performing with John Cage and David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Maryanne Amacher are very precious.”
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In 1969 fellow Sonic Arts Union member Robert Ashley was asked to come and direct the CCM at Mills College. In 1975 Behrman came and joined him as the co-director. Those years formed another chapter in his creative life.

Each month of 2021 Sothis Medias will feature a brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the fringe dweller Harlan Hubbard, this month we are going to ride the rods and look at the life of orphan, hobo, boxer and writer Jim Tully.

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

“Jim Tully was one of the fine American novelists to emerge in the 1920s and ’30s. He gained this position with intelligence, sensitivity, and hard work. . . . No matter how crazily violent or fantastic his stories are, readers accept them as nonfiction. Tully makes the improbable seem true.”— Harvey Pekar

Jim Tully is a true American hero, a writer's writer and hero who came to the fore in 1920s and '30s. He started his career as a hobo, a train hoppin' tramp, who left behind the slop and shudder of life in St. Mary's, Ohio to see the country for himself. His story is a rags to resources tale of hardscrap pluck.

Jim Tully's father was a ditch digger, an Irish immagrant named James Dennis. His mother, Bridget Marie Lawler Tully gave birth to him in 1886. Until the death of his pop, he was happy, even if living in a family whose financial condition was broke. His mom died when he was six years old, and like many kids whose moms died in that era, his father found himself unable to really care for his son. So he was sent down to Cincinnati where lived at the St. Joseph Orphanage Asylum for six more years. 

At some point he went back home to St. Mary's where he lived with his relatives, the "Shanty Irish", and the name of one of his later books, exploring the world of the underclass Irish workers in the mud spattered streets of Ohio. There wasn't much going on for him there except for hanging out with his cousins, with his Uncle John Lawler, a horse thief who was sentenced to fifteen years in the state pen for his crimes, with his grandpa, Old Hughie Tully, who had the gift of gab and was a natural storyteller, “capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.” He also had a girlfriend of sorts, herself a young prostitute, who was fond of Jim for his kind boyishness and his red hair.

On a fortuitous occasion he was hanging out at a bridge where he met a young vagabond, who convinced him there was nothing for him but hard labor if he stayed in town. He decided to head out for a life on the rails himself. This was Tully's education. His first trip took him to Muncie, Indiana, where he was quick to spend a night in a hobo jungle. It was a gateway to a  hobo jungle state of mind. AS he crisscrossed the United States by railway he spent a lot of time in the public libraries where he satiated his lust for the written word.

Sara Haardt wrote that “He became an inveterate library bum, ducking in and out of public libraries from one end of the country to the other. He read everything: biography, history, fiction; Dostoievsky, Carlyle, Olive Schreiner, Balzac, Dumas, Mark Twain, Conrad, the files of the old Smart Set.”

During the six years he spent tramping about,  he spent some time working  for a circus. Too bad running away to join the circus isn't much of a viable career option anymore as it was in the days of Tully, and the days of the Mighty Atom, another man who met his fate underneath the canvas of the big top. Another of Tully's books, Circus Parade, came out of his experiences as a laborer the traveling entertainers. He paints a lively if unflattering look at the life. In its pages you meet Blackie, a drug addict without a moral compass, the hard-ass Cameron, the owner of the circus, whose business practices erred on the side of the seedy, and Lila the four-hundred pound strong woman, amongst others.

In 1907 he'd had enough of the roadlife for a time. He'd traveled back to Ohio and found himself in Kent. There he found work as a tree surgeon, chain maker, and in another instance where his life gave material for his writing, as a boxer. His experiences in the ring gave authentic shape to his 1936 novel The Bruiser, the tale of a drifter who brawls his way up the ladder and into the heavyweights. Tully got to know a lot of boxers in his life and the characters are modeled on figures such as Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane. Tully dedicated the novel to Dempsey, whom he counted as a friend. Dempsey said of the boo, “If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I’d still be the heavyweight champion of the world today.”

During his time in Kent, inspired by all that he'd read on the road, he started giving his own words space on the page. He started writing poetry which was published in the local papers. In 1912 he decided he'd finally had enough of Ohio and moved to Hollywood, where he really started burning the midnight oil as a writer. He became a freelance journalist, which at that time was a path still open to working class folks who hadn't gone to college (1).

Tully was one of the first reporters to start covering the Hollywood scene. As a free-lancer he wrote what he wanted and how he wanted. His portrayals of people like Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked, were not always flattering, but people still loved Tully. His work writing up the exploits of the movie stars earned him the name of the most-hated man in Hollywood -and his muckraking wasn't nothing compared to the vituperation and vile seething of today's hate mongering media. Even so, Tully grew journalistic strength from the barbs and lashes thrown at his way, reveling in the title. 

As he gained success in the papers, he gave his hand to writing books, memoirs, such as Beggars of Life, about his early days as a hobo. Beggars of Life was his first book and he wrote it in a six week stint while he was living with a bootlegger. His novels that drew on his experiences followed, and he continued to write article after article. 

Critics of the day thought his work was violent, his depictions of the realities of prostitution and the life of common workers cut too close to the bone. He did not water it down for a public he thought could not handle it. He respected his audience more than that.

In writing to an editor he said, “I have tried, however futilely, to get away from all the namby-pamby trends of American literature. My reward has been misunderstanding. I am considered a roughneck because, as an artist, I seek to lay bare the broken hearts of the people from whom I sprang.... I have no whine at fate. I began with nothing and have ended with more money than is good for one. . . I write because I love to. . . I have perhaps less academic training than any man who has ever succeeded at writing in America. . . I will never be the artist I thought I would. Words are not elastic enough. . . I have done as nearly that which I set out to do as any American writer ever has. . ."

Please forget and forgo the MA in creative writing. In my opinion it is a mar on America's once vibrant literary landscape. Skip class and go to the library instead, forget the debt. Read books and consider getting into the thick of life, as Jim Tully did. 

Literature is in need of the hot fire of lived experience, and the souls like Tully who could lay it all bare and share their unique journey.

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Footnote as media rant:
1 [Matt Taibbi covers the transition of journalism from a job a blue collar type could get into without a degree, to the credentialed mire of elitism for rich kids that it is today in his excellent book Hate Inc., the "Manufacturing Dissent" of today's youtube generation ;) Hate Inc. is probably the most important book I've read this year in terms of the divide between the Coke/Pepsi type non-choice of Red Church or Blue Church.]  


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A major development that came out of the ONCE Festival was the creation of the Sonic Arts Union, first known as the Sonic Arts Group, which formed in 1966, the year of the final festival. The members of the group, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier and David Behrman had all played together in various configurations as part of the ONCE Festival and sidereal events.

The four composers had first met at a Morton Feldman and Earle Brown concert in New York City on October 11 of 1963. Ashley and Mumma had driven in just for the event, and Alvin Lucier was there to conduct the chamber chorus from Brandeis University where he was a student. David Behrman was also there. Behrman and Lucier had become friends while in Europe, introduced by pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski, who himself later became a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva.

A year after the Feldman concert Mumma and Ashley invited the Brandeis Chamber Chorus to perform at the ONCE Festival. Two years later in 1966 Lucier invited Mumma, Ashley and Behrman to perform at Brandeis. Despite the excitement to be had with four friends playing pieces together on the same evening, the Brandeis show ended up as something of a failure on the technical level. Yet something was salvaged out of it in that afterwords the four minds came together and hatched a plan to start an ongoing collective ensemble to share electronic equipment, musical ideas and help in performance.

Ashley remembered talking with Lucier after the concert. “We just had the idea that if one of us got invited to someplace, we could offer the guy four composers instead of one composer… I think that was a successful part of it. Then we started doing a lot of concerts.” They made immediate plans to embark on a tour of North America and Europe.

All the members of the Sonic Arts Union were friends who appreciated each other’s music and the different approaches to composition they each engaged in. “It was the fact that we were all very different, and doing interesting things, they different than what I was doing, different from what Ashley was doing, and all the rest of it,” said Mumma.

An artist statement written in the later sixties or early seventies explains their approach. “The four composers are devoted to the composition and performance of live electronic music. In general, Ashley's works are theatrical and are concerned with social conditions both inside and outside the musical situation, while Lucier's often refer to natural systems--brainwaves, bat and dolphin sonar and resonant frequencies of rooms. Behrman and Mumma design and build their own complex systems of electronic components for the production and control of sounds for specific works. All have used speech as well as instrumental sounds as source material for electronic processing. In addition, all have used, or intend to use, the computer.”
By this point the members of the Sonic Arts Union lived far apart geographically. Ashley was furthest away having gone to California in 1969 to head up the CCM. The rest were on the east coast. Mumma had moved to New York City to be close to Merce Cunnigham and David Tudor, as he was a resident composer with the dance troupe between 1966 and 1974. Behrman was in Stony Point, New York, and Lucier remained in Connecticut. Yet they wrote, talked on the phone, and traveled, seeing each other at concerts and other events. As such they were not just a union but a decentralized network.

Performances ranged from concerts in which four works were presented, one by each of the members, to longer, more environmental installations. Occasionally, guest musicians and visual artists got involved in the action. One of their first concerts was in November of 1966 when they played in New York on a bill with Fluxus founder Ben Patterson, Max Neuhaus, Takehisa Kosugi, and Takahiko Iimura.  

For some of the concerts the Union was joined by a cadre of wives, lovers and other artists. Shigeko Kubota, a member of the Japanese avant-garde who had been involved with Group Ongaku before moving to New York was one of these, during the years she was married to Behrman. She was a Fluxist known for her work as a video artist and for creating sculptural installations, all done in the spirit of DIY. Some of her sculptures had video monitors embedded within them playing her own videos. Mary Ashley and Mary Lucier also contributed their own pieces to the variety of events.
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At a Sonic Arts Union concert, according to Behrman, “established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch." Each of the four members built sounds from scratch in their own unique and individual ways that deserve to be explored. 

THE SONIC POETRY OF ALVIN LUCIER
For Alvin Lucier, who had composed chamber and orchestral works since 1952, the throwing away of established techniques exemplified by the ONCE Group and the Sonic Arts Union was a liberation of imagination. He had felt stifled by the formality of serialism and the often rigid parameters of academic music in general. His work with the Brandeis Chamber Chorus gave him a basis for how his future work in the precise knowledge of acoustics he acquired while working with vocal music in different settings. As Lucier started to blossom as a composer he often turned to very specific acoustic properties such as resonance, and incorporated them into the gestalt of his compositions.

He counts his 1965 piece Music for Solo Performer as the beginning of his compositional career. From that point on Lucier wrote a number of pieces investigating brainwaves, vocoders, acoustics and long thin wires that made the voice of the aether audible to the listening audience.

Pauline Oliveros called Lucier “the poet of electronic music.” His pieces are eloquent haikus, elucidating natural principles with creative insight in simple set ups underscored by profundity. Mumma said his “works are at once gemlike in their exquisitely defined concept, and large-scale, even vast, in their theatrical presence.” The Sonic Arts Union gave Lucier a vehicle for presenting these works to an expanded audience. In sharing these works with the public he has given listeners a chance to explore and experience the world of sound alongside him.     

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Music for Solo Performer

All music involves commands from the brain, whether conscious or unconscious. Music for Solo Performer demonstrates this in a unique way.  In 1965 Lucier met Edmond Dewan a scientist who was investigating alpha brainwaves. Dewan was a physicist who had stirred up the imagination of the public when he hooked up an electroencephalogram (EEG) to a lamp, and through the control of his brains alpha activity, switched the lamp on and off. His next feat was to hook the EEG up to a Morse code oscillator and spell out “I can talk” in dots and dashes.

At the time Dewan was doing this brainwave research for the US Air Force in a laboratory near Brandeis. Dewan had many interests and music was one of them. As an amateur organist he used to go over to Brandeis and visit the music department where he made the acquaintance of Lucier.

When the physicist and the composer met, Lucier had stopped writing music. Dewan helped get Lucier back into the game when he asked him if he would be interested in using his equipment to detect the alpha waves and turn them into a musical piece. It was the kickstart he needed to start writing music outside the mold of notated sheets which had stifled his creative process, so Dewan brought some of his gear to the Brandeis electronic music studio so Lucier could start experimenting with brainwaves hooked up to various electronic components and see how he could excite them.

Studying the temporal cycle of the alpha wave which has a frequency of 8-13 cycles per second Alvin hit upon the idea that they could be thought of as rhythms and so he decided to create a percussion piece.

Alpha brain waves are commonly associated with meditative states of mind and to create them a person needs to be in a relaxed mental state. This presents a problem for live performance when the nerves of a performer are often excited and on edge. Still Lucier thought the potential payoff of sitting in front of an audience, with an EEG hooked up to his head and using it to control musical activity was worth the artistic risk. So he took what he called “a dangerous course which is to sit on stage and try to produce alpha waves, live, in front of the audience.”  

It took practice to get consistent results, as he could only produce alpha waves in short bursts at the start. Lucier writes how through experimentation he found “precisely the right physical and psychological conditions” to create alpha waves for extended periods of time, or long enough for a performance in any case.

To achieve the correct physical and psychological conditions he basically had to teach himself how to meditate. He remembered a time when he had been imprinted with the memory of a monk in contemplation while he was attending preparatory school at the Portsmouth Abbey  in Rhode Island.

“I remember going into the chapel and watching a Trappist monk in the act of contemplation... he was thinking – deeply. It looked like somebody just thinking as hard as he possibly could. I remember I went back an hour later – he was in the same attitude – and I thought, ‘Well, if there’s any such thing as pure thought, that guy is doing it.’ And that impressed me a lot... So when I did the brain wave piece, you’ve got to sit and not think of anything; because if you create a visual image your alpha will block.”

EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current within the neurons of the brain and those currents being picked up by the electrodes and passed on to an amplifier. Next the signals pass through a filter allowing only the alpha waves to pass through. For Lucier’s piece the signal was then split into several different channels, each amplified again and routed to a loudspeaker. These loudspeakers were placed on snare drum heads, or other percussion instruments, so when the amplified alpha wave came into speaker it would vibrate the drum, cymbal, or the air. An assistant or two controlled the volume of individual channels to shape the piece live during the performance.

Part of the interest in watching a performance of the piece is that the soloist is just sitting there. John Cage had brought in the idea of creating a music free from the composers own ego, of allowing chance operations to control and set all parameters of a composition, from duration, to dynamics, notes and more. Lucier took a similar tack with Music for Solo Performer, creating an elegant set up in which the soloist does nothing but relax into meditation under the pressure of a staring audience.  

It was by chance that Lucier had first met Dewan, and it was this chance meeting that inspired him to take a chance at a performance whose results, from concert to concert, though similar, were largely indeterminate. It set the course for his continuing exploration of music and sound as a physical phenomenon, for using the parameters of composition to ask questions rather than showcase the same specific answer over and over again, and to use non-musical instruments as a standard operating procedure. 

After Lucier other composers took up using their brainwaves to drive instruments. Richard Teitelbaum, another member of the collective Musica Elettronica Viva, became a prominent practitioner of the form. In the mid-1960s Teitelbaum asked Robert Moog to adapt his synthesizer to use neural oscillations as control voltages.
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David Rosenboom, who worked closely with Don Buchla, also explored the uses of biofeedback in his music. His 1976 album Brainwaves is an expansive document showing the possibilities involved. Rosenboom also wrote the book on the subject, Biofeedback and the arts: results of early experiments, published the same year his album came out. Artists have continued to explore this extended musical interface with the human nervous system.

I Am Sitting in a Room: Exploring Resonant Frequencies

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

So go the words, and so begins the repetition of those words, in what is arguably Alvin Lucier’s most famous composition. The piece features Lucier recording himself reading the above text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, and re-recording it. He then re-records that recording, and repeats the process until his words totally disappear and only the sound of the resonant frequencies of the room remain. It is a fascinating piece that shows how certain frequencies in speech are emphasized as they resonate in the room. Through the process of re-recording the words eventually become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.

All rooms and spaces have characteristic resonant frequencies. A large concert hall or cathedral would have different resonant frequency than a dry walled bedroom, or a basement, or the crypt of an old church. When performed or recorded in different spaces, the end results will be of different tones and harmonies.

The inspiration for the piece came after one of Lucier’s colleagues mentioned attending a lecture by Amar Bose, the man who developed the famous Bose speakers, at MIT. Bose described how he was developing and testing a set of loudspeakers by feeding audio back into them so that the audio they had originally produced in the first place was picked up again via microphones. This triggered Lucier’s idea.

Each time Lucier’s process was repeated the sound of his speech became disarranged as specific frequencies began to supersede the words. These frequencies grow with each successive playback until Alvin’s voice disappears and the only thing left to listen to is the sound of the room. It doesn’t take long for the words to disappear. At about the 17 minute mark the formants start to deform into pure tones, and by the 27 minute mark any trace of the words has been absorbed by the room’s resonant frequency. It is a magical thing to listen to and hear how utterance can been transformed into pure tones.

The work is a great example of a process piece, where the technique itself is showcased as part and parcel of the content of the composition. It’s also an excellent example of minimalism as a repeated text is transformed over the course of 45 minutes into a long and sonorous drone.

I Am Sitting in A Room is also an exploration of the concept of generation loss. This is when the quality between subsequent copies gets reduced with each further copy. Lucier shows how the original representation is liable to disappear with each copy of a copy of a copy. Audio artifacts are introduced as the process continues and these increase during the process.

Many other musicians and composers have since used the process. The generation loss aspect of the work was notably used in 2008 by Iranian born musician Kamran Sadeghi when he was selected as a resident artist for Sastop, an artist organization utilizing an old nuclear cooling tower in Washington state. In the 1970s a group of public utilities started to build what was to be the largest single nuclear power project in United States history. Five reactors, divided between sites located near the cities of Hanford and Satsop were intended to be a solution to projected energy demands of the area.

Before the facility was completed construction stopped. There remained however a structure 423 feet across the base with a height close to 500 feet. The left behind building contained uncanny acoustic properties (the kind of place Pauline Oliveros would have liked to play in). For four years between 2004 and 2008 a small group worked to bring artists and musicians into the space, recognizing that it had unique acoustic properties, and that its weathered industrial architecture showcased a derelict beauty. 

Sadeghi was inspired by Lucier’s composition and decided to amplify an original electronic music passage two minutes in length into the open aired structure and then re-record the outcome of the tower's reverberant response. He then took the recording and reamplified back into the tower and re-recorded. He repeated this a total of ten times. The natural acoustics of the tower began to reshape the original passage until it disappeared completely. It’s a unique document of a structure exposed and re-exposed to a passage of music and the passage of time.
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Sadeghi named the piece Loss Less in reference to the audio engineering term lossless compression, a process that allows for the preservation and perfect reconstruction of audio data when a recorded waveform is reduced to differing extents for transmission without the loss of quality.

Scanner also made use of this technique on one of the versions of his architectural work, Vex.

NORTH AMERICAN TIME CAPSULE

Lucier himself explored audio compression, and specifically speech compression in his 1967 piece North American Time Capsule.  Compression may have not been top on his mind when he created the piece, but a principle function of the vocoder was to compress the audio bandwidth of the voice down. It did this by sending only the parameters of the vocal model over the communication link, instead of a direct recreation of the waveform. Since the parameters change slowly compared to the original speech the bandwidth required to transmit speech can be reduced.

Which is perfect for encryption.

This piece came about when Lucier was invited by Sylvania Applied Research Laboratories to come and use their prototype vocoder in 1967. Sylvania Electric Products was a manufacturer of a variety of electrical equipment, including transceivers, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, and the MOBIDC mainframe computer. The engineers at Sylvania were also involved in the developing the COBOL programming language.

Since he would be using the vocoder to create a work, Lucier decided on making a vocal piece and he enlisted the help of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus in what must have been one of their most interesting assignments. His score required the chorus members to “prepare a plan of activity using speech, singing, musical instruments, or any other sound producing means that might describe—to beings very far from the earth’s environment either in space or in time—the physical, social, spiritual, or any other situation in which we find ourselves at the present time.”

Along with Sylvania engineer Calvin Howard, Lucier used the vocoder to isolate and manipulate elements of speech in real time. Eight separate tracks were recorded and subsequently mixed by Lucier.

Since one way to use a vocoder is as an encryption tool, where a person with a vocoder on the other end of a transmission could decode it, Lucier got the idea that this whole piece was an encoded message for people who haven’t heard about us here in North America. The first time I heard it, close to twenty years ago at the time of this writing, I didn’t know the slightest thing about vocoders but I was captivated by the raw expressiveness exuded by all the voices -all the voices I couldn’t quite decipher.

Lucier’s instructions leave a lot left open to the vocal interpreters while still providing a sturdy sketch or outline. He wrote “Using sound, the performers might choose to convey, for example, the ideas of life and death, young and old, up and down, male and female. Sonic aspects of our technological environment, such as household appliances, trains, aircraft and automobile horns, might be used.”

These every day activities and occurrences that might be of interest to someone outside our own circles of space and time become alien to the present day listener when processed by the vocoder. The audience hears these wild utterances coming out of the time capsule as if they had dug it up themselves.
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Alvin Lucier brought a conceptual sonic poetry to the performances of the Sonic Arts Union.

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


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