From the ice cold farms and fields of Michigan to the halls of MIT and then onwards to Bell Labs at Murray Hill, Claude Shannon was a mathematical maverick and inveterate tinkerer. In the 1920s, in those places where the phone company had not deigned to bring their network, around three million farmers built their own by connecting telegraph keys to the barbed wire fences that stretched between properties. As a young boy Shannon rigged up one of these “farm networks so he and one his friend who lived half a mile away could talk to each other at night in Morse code. He was also the local kid people in the town would bring their radios to when they needed repair and he got them to work. He had the knack. He also had an aptitude for the more abstract side of a math and his mind could handle complex equations with ease. At the age of seventeen he was already in college at the University of Michigan and had published his first work in an academic journal, a solution to a math problem presented in the pages of American Mathematical Monthly. He did a double major in school and graduated with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics then headed off to MIT for his masters. While there he got under the wing of Vannevar Bush. Vannevar had followed in the footsteps of Lord Kelvin, who had created one of the world’s first analog computers, the harmonic analyzer, used to measure the ebb and flow of the tides. Vannevar’s differential analyzer was a huge electromechanical computer that was the size of a room. It solved differential equations by integration, using a wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. At school he was also introduced to the work of mathematician George Boole, whose 1854 book on algebraic logic The Laws of Thought laid down some of the essential foundations for the creation of computers. George Boole had in turn taken up the system of logic developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Might Boole have also been familiar with Leibniz’s book De Arte Combinatoria? In this book Leibniz proposed an alphabet of human thought, and was himself inspired by the Ars Magna of Ramon Lull. Leibniz wanted to take the Ars Magna, or “ultimate general art” developed by Lull as a debating tool that helped speakers combine ideas through a compilation of lists, and bring it closer to mathematics and turn it into a kind of calculus. Shannon became the inheritor of these strands of thought, through their development in the mathematics and formal logic that became Boolean algebra. Between working with Bush’s differential analyzer and his study of Boolean algebra, Shannon was able to design switching circuits. This became the subject of his 1937 master thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. Shannon was able to prove his switching circuit could be used simplify the complex and baroque system of electromechanical relays used in AT&T’s routing switches. Then he expanded his concept and showed that his circuits could solve any Boolean algebra problem. He finalized the work with a series of circuit diagrams. In writing his paper Shannon took George Boole’s algebraic insights and made them practical. Electrical switches could now implement logic. It was a watershed moment that established the integral concept behind all electronic digital computers. Digital circuit design was born. Next he had to get his PhD. It took him three more years, and his subject matter showed the first signs of multidisciplinary inclination that would later become a dominant feature of information theory. Vannevar Bush compelled him to go to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to work on his dissertation in the field of genetics. For Vannevar the logic was that if Shannon’s algebra could work on electrical relays it might also prove to be of value in the study of Mendelian heredity. His research in this area resulted in his work An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics, for which he received his PhD in 1940. The work proved to be too abstract to be useful and during his time at Cold Spring Harbor he was often distracted. In a letter to his mentor Vannevar he wrote, “I’ve been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough it seems a more productive method that sticking to one problem… Off and on I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence, including telephony, radio, television, telegraphy, etc…” With a doctorate under his belt Shannon went on to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey where his mind was able to wonder across disciplines and where he rubbed elbows with other great minds, including on occasion, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. He discussed science, math and engineering with Hermann Weyl and John Von Neumann. All of these encounters fed his mind. It wasn’t long before Shannon went elsewhere in New Jersey, to Bell Labs. There he got to rub elbows with other great minds such as Thornton Fry and Alan Turing. His prodigious talents were also being put to work for the war effort. It started with a study of noise. During WWII Shannon had worked on the SIGSALY system that was used for encrypting voice conversations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It worked by sampling the voice signal fifty times a second, digitizing it, and then masking it with a random key that sounded like the circuit noise so familiar to electrical engineers. Shannon hadn’t designed the system, but he had been tasked with trying to break it, like a hacker, to see what its weak spots were, to find out if it was an impenetrable fortress that could withstand the attempts of an enemy assault. Alan Turing was also working at Bell Labs on SIGSALY. The British had sent him over to also make sure the system was secure. If Churchill was to be communicating on it, it needed to be uncrackable. During the war effort Turing got to know Claude. The two weren’t allowed to talk about their top secret projects, cryptography, or anything related to their efforts against the Axis powers but they had plenty of other stuff to talk about, and they explored their shared passions, namely, math and the idea that machines might one day be able to learn and think. Are all numbers computable? This was a question Turing asked in his famous 1937 paper On Computable Numbers. He had shown the paper to Shannon. In it Turing defined calculation as a mechanical procedure or algorithm. This paper got the pistons in Shannon’s mind firing. Alan had said, “It is always possible to use sequences of symbols in the place of single symbols.” Shannon was already thinking of the way information gets transmitted from one place to the next. Turing used statistical analysis as part of his arsenal when breaking the Enigma ciphers. Information theory in turn ended up being based on statistics and probability theory. The meeting of these two preeminent minds was just one catalyst for the creation of the large field and sandbox of information theory. Important legwork had already been done by other investigators who had made brief excursions into the territory later mapped out by Shannon. Telecommunications in general already contained within it many ideas that would later become part of the theories core. Starting with telegraphy and Morse code in the 1830s common letters expressed with the least amount of variation, as in E, one dot. Letters not used as often have a longer expression, such as B, a dash and three dots. The whole idea of lossless data compression is embedded as a seed pattern within this system of encoding information. In 1924 Harry Nyquist published the exciting Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed in the Bell System Technical Journal. Nyquist’s research was focused on increasing the speed of a telegraph circuit. One of the first things an engineer runs into when working on this problem is how to transmit the maximum amount of intelligence on a given range of frequencies without causing interference in the circuit or others that it might be connected to. In other words how do you increase speed and amount of intelligence without adding distortion, noise or create spurious signals? In 1928, Ralph Hartley, also at Bell Labs, wrote his paper the Transmission of Information. He made it explicit that information was a measurable quantity. Information could only reflect the ability of the receiver to distinguish that one sequence of symbols had been intended by the sender rather than any other, that the letter A means A and not E. Jump forward another decade to the invention of the vocoder. It was designed to use less bandwidth, compressing the voice of the speaker into less space. Now that same technology is used in cellphones as codecs to compress the voice and so more lines of communication can be used on the phone companies allocated frequencies. WWII had a way of producing scientific side effects, discoveries that would break on through to affect civilian life after the war. While Shannon worked on SIGSALY and other cryptic work he continued to tinker on other projects. Shannon’s paper was one of the things he tinkered and had profound side effects. Twenty years after Hartley addressed the way information is transmitted, Shannon stated it this way, "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point." In addition to the ideas of clear communication across a channel Information theory also brought the following ideas into play: -The Bit, or binary digit. One bit is the information entropy of a binary random variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, or the information that is gained when the value of such a variable becomes known. -The Shannon Limit: A formula for channel capacity. This is the speed limit for a given communication channel. -Within that limit there must always be techniques for error correction that can overcome the noise level on a given channel. A transmitter may have to send more bits to a receiver at a slower rate but eventually the message will get there. His theory was a strange attractor in a chaotic system of noisy information. Noise itself tends to bring diverse disciplinary approaches together, interfering in their constitution and their dynamics. Information theory, in transmitting its own intelligence, has in its own way, interfered with other circuits of knowledge it has come in contact with. A few years later psychologist and computer scientist J.C. R. Licklider said, “It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it.” Information theory encompasses every other field it can get its hands on. It’s like a black hole, and everything in its gravitational path gets sucked in. Formed at the spoked crossroads of cryptography, mathematics, statistics, computer science, thermal physics, neurobiology, information engineering, and electrical engineering it has been applied to even more fields of study and practice: statistical inference, natural language processing, the evolution and function of molecular codes (bioinformatics), model selection in statistics, quantum computing, linguistics, plagiarism detection. It is the source code behind pattern recognition and anomaly detection, two human skills in great demand in the 21st century. I wonder if Shannon knew when he wrote ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ for the 1948 issue of the Bell Systems Technical Journal that his theory would go on to unify, fragment, and spin off into multiple disciplines and fields of human endeavor, music just one among a plethora. Yet music is a form of information. It is always in formation. And information can be sonified and used to make music. Raw data becomes audio dada. Music is communication and one way of listening to it is as a transmission of information. The principles Shannon elucidated are form of noise in the systems of world knowledge, and highlight one way of connecting different fields of study together. As information theory exploded it was quickly picked up as a tool among the more adventurous music composers. Information theory could be at the heart of making the fictional Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse a reality. Herman Hesse also dropped several hints and clues in his work that connected it with the same thinkers whose work served as a link to Boolean algebra, namely Athanasius Kircher, Lull and Leibniz who were all practitioners and advocates of the mnemonic and combinatorial arts. Like its predecessors, Information Theory is well suited to connecting the spaces between different fields. In Hesse’s masterpiece the game was created by a musician as a way of “represent[ing] with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another.” After some time passed the game was taken up by mathematicians. “…the Game was so far developed it was capable of expressing mathematical processes by special symbols and abbreviations. The players, mutually elaborating these processes, threw these abstract formulas at one another, displaying the sequences and possibilities of their science.” Hesse goes on to explain, “At various times the Game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the scientific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted to the special fields. There is documented evidence for its application to the fields of classical philology and logic. The analytical study had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and mathematical formulas. Soon after philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measured processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations, analogies, and correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas obtained this way.” In the next sections I will explore the way information theory was used and applied in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. REFERENCES: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, Simon & Schuster, 2018 The Information: a history, a theory, a flood by James Gleick, Pantheon, 2011 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, translated by Clara and Richard Winston, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990 Information Theory and Music by Joel Cohen, Behavioral Science, 7:2 (1962:Apr.) Information Theory and the Digital Age by Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi Logic and the art of memory: the quest for a universal language, by Paolo Rossi, The Athlone Press, University of Chicago, 2000.
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“There is more in man and in music than in mathematics, but music includes all that is in mathematics.”—Peter Hoffman Infotainment is usually thought of as light entertainment peppered with superficial “facts” and forgettable news. Yet another kind of infotainment exists, a musical kind that is based on mathematical algorithms. It is true entertainment that is filled with true information and though it is mathematically modeled none of it is fake. In the twentieth century interest in the multidisciplinary fields of Information Theory and Cybernetics led to dizzy bursts of creativity when their ideas were applied to making new music. These disciplines applied rigorous math to the study of communication systems and how a signal transmitted from one person can cut through the noise of other spurious signals to be received by another person. They also made explicit the role of feedback inside of a system, how signals can amplify themselves and trigger new signals. All of this was studied complex equations and formulas. Yet there is nothing new about the relationship between music and math. Algorithmic music has been made for centuries. It can be traced all the way back to Pythagoras, who thought of music and math as inseparable. If music can be formalized in terms of numbers, music can also be formalized as information or data. The “data” the ancients used to drive their compositions was the movement of the stars. Ptolemy is known to us most for his geocentric view of the cosmos and the ordered spheres the celestial bodies traveled on. Besides being an astronomer Ptolemy was also a systematic musical theorist. He believed that math was the basis for musical intervals and he saw those same intervals at play in the spacing of heavenly bodies, each planet and body corresponding to a certain modes and notes. Ptolemy was just one of many who believed in the reality of the music of the spheres. Out of these ancient Greek investigations into the nature of music and the cosmos came the first musical systems. The musician who used them was thus a mediator between the cosmic forces of the heavens above and the life of humanity here below. Western music went through myriad changes across the intervening centuries after Ptolemy. World powers rose and fell, new religions came into being. Out of the mystical monophonic plainchant uttered by Christian monks in candlelit monasteries polyphony arose, and it called for new rules and laws to govern how the multiple voices were to sing together. This was called “canonic” composition. A composer in this era (15th century) would write a line for a single voice. The canonic rule gave the additional singers and voices the necessary instruction. For instance one rule would be to for a second voice to start singing the melody begun by one voice again after a set amount of time. Other rules would denote inversions, retrograde movement, or other practices as applied to the music. From this basis the rules, voices, and number of instruments were enlarged through the renaissance until the time of the era of “Common Practice”, roughly between 1650 to 1900. This period encompassed baroque music, and the classical, romantic and impressionist movements. The 20th and 21st century are now giving birth to what Alvin Curran has called the New Common Practice. In the Common Practice Era tonal harmony and counterpoint reigned supreme, and a suite of rhythmic and durational patterns gave form to the music. These were the “algorithmic” sand boxes composers could play in. The New Common Practice, according to Curran encompasses, “the direct unmediated embracing of sound, all and any sound, as well as the connecting links between sounds, regardless of their origins, histories or specific meanings; by extension, it is the self guided compositional structuring of any number of sound objects of whatever kind sequentially and/or simultaneously in time and in space with any available means.” I’ve begun to think of this New Common Practice as embracing the entire gamut of 20th and 21st century musical practices: serialism, atonality, musique concrete, electronics, solo and collective improvisation, text pieces, and the rest of it. One vital facet of the New Common Practice is chance operations, or the use of randomizing procedures to create compositions. Chance operations have a direct relation to information theory, but this approach can already be seen making cultural inroads in the 18th century when games of chance had a brief period of popularity among composers and the musical and mathematically literate. These are a direct precursor to the deeper algorithmic musical investigations that have started to flourish in the 20th century. Much of this original algorithmic music work was done the old school way, with pencil, sheets of paper, and tables of numbers. This was the way composers plotted voice-leading in Western counterpoint. Chance operations have also been used as one way of making algorithmic music, such as the Musikalisches Würfelspiel or musical dice game, a system that used dice to randomly generate music from tables of pre-composed options. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century and a number of different versions were devised. Some didn’t use dice but just worked on the basis of choosing random numbers. In his paper on the subject Stephen Hedges wrote how the middle class in Western Europe were at the time enamored with mathematics, a pursuit as much at home in the parlors of the people as in the classroom of professors. "In this atmosphere of investigation and cataloguing, a systematic device that would seem to make it possible for anyone to write music was practically guaranteed popularity.” The earliest known example was created by Johann Philipp Kirnberger with his "The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer" in 1757. C. P. E. Bach's came out with his musical dice game "A method for making six bars of double counterpoint at the octave without knowing the rules" five years later in 1758. In 1780 Maximilian Stadler published "A table for composing minuets and trios to infinity, by playing with two dice". Mozart was even thought to have gotten in on the dice game in 1792 when an unattributed version made an appearance from his music publisher a year after the composer’s death. This has not been authenticated to be by the maestro’s hand, but as with all games of possibility, there is a chance. These games may have been one of the many inspirations behind The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. This novel was one of the primary literary inspirations and touchstones for the young Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Glass Bead Game portrays a far future culture devoted to a mystical understanding of music. It was at the center of the culture of the Castalia, that fictional province or state devoted to the pursuit of pure knowledge. As Robin Maconie put it the Glass Bead Game itself appears to be “an elusive amalgam of plainchant, rosary, abacus, staff notation, medieval disputation, astronomy, chess, and a vague premonition of computer machine code… In terms suggesting more than a passing acquaintance with Alan Turing’s 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’, the author described a game played in England and Germany, invented at the Musical Academy of Cologne, representing the quintessence of intellectuality and art, and also known as ‘Magic Theater’.” Hesse wrote his book between 1931 and 1943. The interdisciplinary game at the heart of the book prefigures Claude Shannon’s explosive Information Theory which was established in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. His paper in turn bears a debt to Alan Turing, whom Shannon met in 1942. Norbert Wiener also published his work on Cybernetics the same year as Shannon. All of these ideas were bubbling up together out of the minds of the leading intellectuals of the day. Ideas about computable numbers, the transmission of information, communication, and thinking in systems, all of which would give artists practical tools for connecting one field to another as Hesse showed was possible in the fictional world of Castalia. Robin Maconie again had the insight to see the connection between the way Alan Turing visualized “a universal computing machine as an endless tape on which calculations were expressed as a sequence of filled or vacant spaces, not unlike beads on a string”. As the Common Practice era of western music came to an end at the close of the 19th century, the mathematically inclined serialism came into its own, and as the decades wore on games of chance made a resurgence, defining much of the music of the 20th century. With the advent of computers the paper and pencil method have taken a temporary backseat in favor of methods that introduce programmed chance operations. Composers like John Cage took to the I Ching with as much tenacity as the character Elder Brother did in Hesse’s book. Karlheinz Stockhausen meanwhile used his music as means to make connections between myriad subjects and to create his own unique ‘Magic Theater’. Cybernetics and Information Theory each contributed to thinking of these and other composers. REFERENCES: Dice Music in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 184–185, Music and Letters 59: 180–87. Conceptualizing music: cognitive structure, theory and analysis, by Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Oxford, 2002 The New Common Practice by Alvin Curran http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/common.html Other planets: the complete works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950–2007, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016 Note: A set of musicians dice have been made that offer up numerous possibilities for the practicing musician. Using random process doesn't just have to be for avant-garde composers anymore! Musicians Dice: "The Musician’s Dice are patented, glossy black 12-sided dice, engraved in silver with the chromatic scale. They can be used in any number of ways – they bring the element of chance into the musical process. They're great for composing Aleatory and 12 tone-music, and as a basis for improvisation – they’re really fun in a jam session. They also make an effective study tool: they can be used as “musical flash cards” when learning harmony, and their randomness makes for fresh and challenging exercise in sight-singing and ear training. Plus, they look really cool on the coffee table, and give you a chance to throw around words like "aleatory."" Below two musicians play around with using these dice. Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.
One of the worst symphony orchestras ever to have existed in the world now gets the respect it is due in a retrospective book published by Soberscove Press, collecting the memories, memorabilia and photographs of its talented members. The Worlds Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, edited by Christopher M. Reeves and Aaron Walker, though long overdue, has arrived just in time. For those unfamiliar with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, here is the cliff notes version: founded by a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art in England 1970 this “scratch” orchestra was generally open to anyone who wanted to play and ended up drawing art students who liked music but had no musical training or, if they were actual musicians, they had to choose and play an instrument that was entirely new to them. One of the other limits or rules they set up was to only play compositions that would be recognizable even to those who weren’t classical music buffs. The William Tell Overture being one example, Bheetoven’s Fifth Symphony and Also Sprach Zarathustra being others. Their job was to play the popular classics, and to do it as amateurs. English composer Gavin Bryars was one of their founding members. The Sinfonia started off as a tongue-in-cheek performance art ensemble but quickly took on a life of its own, becoming a cultural touchstone over the decade of its existence, with concerts, albums, and a hit single on the charts. The book has arrived just in time because one of the lenses the work of the Portsmouth Sinfonia can be viewed through is that of populism; and now, when the people and politics on this planet have seen a resurgence of populist movements, the music of the Portsmouth Sinfonia can be recalled, reviewed, reassessed and their accomplishments given a wider renown. One way to think of populism is as the opposite and antithesis of elitism. I have to say I agree with noted essayist John Michael Greer and his frequent tagline that “the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea”. Populism may not be the answer to the worlds struggle against elitism, yet it is a reaction, knee jerk as it may be. Anyone who hasn’t been blind-sighted by the bourgeois will know the soi-distant have long looked down on those they deem lesser than with an upturned nose and sneer. Many of those sneering people have season tickets to their local symphony orchestra. They may not go because they are music lovers, but because it is a signifier of their class and social status. As much as the harmonious chords played under the guidance of the conductors swiftly moving baton induce in the listener a state of beatific rapture, there is on the other hand, the very idea that attending an orchestral concert puts one at the height of snobbery. After all, orchestral music is not for everyone, as ticket prices ensure. The Portsmouth Sinfonia was a remedy to all that. It put classical music back into the hands and mouthpieces, of the people. It brought a sense of lightheartedness and irreverence into the stuffy halls that were so often filled with dour, stuffy, serious people listening in such a serious way to so serious music. The Porstmouth Sinfonia made the symphony fun again, and showed that the canon of the classics shouldn’t just be left to the experts. Musical virtue wasn’t just for virtuosos, but could be celebrated by anyone who was sincere in their love of play. Still the Sinfonia was also more than that. It was an incubator for creative musicians and a doorway from which they could launch and explore what composer Alvin Curran has called the “new common Practice”, that grab bag of twentieth century compositional tools, tricks, and approaches, from the seriality of Schoneberg to the madcap tomfoolery of Fluxus. This book shows some of these explorations through the voices of the members of the Sinfonia as they recollect their ten year experiment at playing, and being playful with, the classical hits of the ages. As Brian Eno noted in the liner notes to Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics, essential reading that is provided in the book, “many of the more significant contributions to rock music, and to a lesser extent avant-garde music, have been made by enthusiastic amateurs and dabblers. Their strength is that they are able to approach the task of music making without previously acquired solutions and without a too firm concept of what is and what is not musically possible.” Thus they have not been brainwashed, I mean trained, to the strict standards and world view of the classical career musician. Gavin Bryars, who was another founding member of the orchestra speaks to this in an interview with Michael Nyman, also included in the book. He said, “Musical training is geared to seeing your output in the light of music history.” Such training is what can make the job of the classical musician stressful and stifling. Stressful because of the degree of perfection players are required to achieve, and stifling because deviation, creative or otherwise, is disavowed and un-allowed. I’m reminded of how Karlheinz Stockhausen, when exploring improvisation and intuitive music had to work really hard at un-training his classically trained ensemble of musicians in the matter of being freed from the score. The amateurs in the Portsmouth Sinfonia were free from the weight of musical history. If a wrong note was played, and many were, they could just get on with it, and let it be. This created performances full of humor and happy accidents even as they tried render the music correct as notated. Training and discipline in music give can give a kind of perfectionists freedom as it relates to playing with total accuracy, but takes that freedom away when it comes to experimenting and exploration. Under the strictures of the conductor’s baton, playing in the symphony seems to be more about taking marching orders from a dictator than playing equally with a group of fellow musicians. John Farley, who took on the role of conductor within the Sinfonia, held his baton lightly. He wasn’t so much telling the other musicians how to play, or even keeping time, but acting out the part of what an audience expects of a conductor, acting as something of a foil for the musicians he was collaborating with in the performance. One of the essential texts included in this book is “Collaborative Work at Portsmouth” written by Jeffrey Steele in 1976. His piece shows how the Sinfonia really grow out of social concerns and looking at new ways to work together. Steele’s essay allies itself from the start with the constructivist movement of art, which he had been involved with as a painter. Constructivism was more concerned with the use of art in practical and social contexts. Associated with socialism and the Russian avant-garde, it took a steely eyed look at mysticism and the spiritual content so often found in painting and music, on the one hand, and the academicism music can degenerate into on the other. The Portsmouth Sinfonia coalesced in a dialectical resolution between these two tendencies. Again, the opposite of one bad idea is usually another. The Sinfonia bypassed these binary oppositions to create a third pole. A version of Steele’s essay was originally supposed to be included in an issue of Christopher Hobbs Experimental Musical Catalogue (EMC). A “Porstmouth Anthology” had been planned as an issue of the Catalogue, and a dummy of the publication even made, but that edition of EMC never came out. It has been rescued here in this book. Other rescued bits include a selection of correspondence. Besides the populist implications, and the permission given to enthusiastic amateurs to take center stage, the book explores the ideas, philosophies and development of the various artists and musicians who made up the Sinfonia itself in the recollections section of the book where Ian Southwood, David Saunders, Suzette Worden, Robin Mortimore and the groups manager and publicist Martin Lewis all reflect on their time as members. Reading these you get the sense that the whole thing was a real community effort, a collaborative effort where everyone had a role and took initiative in whatever ways they could. A long essay by Christopher M. Reeves, one of the editors of the book, puts the whole project into historical and critical context. Reeves writes of their “transition from intellectual deconstrunction to punchline symphony is a trajectory in art that has little precedent, and points to a more general tendency in the arts throughout the 1970s, in the move from commenting or critiquing dominant culture, to becoming subordinate to it.” His essay goes from the groups origins as a cross-disciplinary adventure to their eventual appropriation by the mainstream as a kind of novelty music you might here on an episode of Dr. Demento’s radio show. Just how serious was the Sinfonia supposed to be taken?
Reeve’s puts it thus, “It is within this question that the Sinfonia found a sandbox, muddying up the distinctions between seriousness and goofing off, intellectual exercises and pithy one liners.” The Sinfonia’s last album was titled Classical Muddly. The waters left behind by them are still full of silt and only partially clear. This book does a good job at straining their efforts through a sieve and presenting the reader with the material and textual ephemera the group left behind, all in a beautifully made tome that is itself a showcase of the collaborative spirit found in the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Robert Mortimore had told Melody Maker’s Steve Lake in 1974, “The Sinfonia came about partly as a reaction against Cardew [and his similar Scratch Orchestra]. He had the classical training and his audience was very elitist. But he wasn’t achieving anything. We listened, thought, ‘well, why don’t we have a go, it can’t be all that difficult. Y’know if Benjamin Britten and Sir Adrian Boult can do it, why can’t we?” In this time when so many artistic and musical institutions are underfunded, the Portsmouth Sinfonia can serve as a model. By having trained musicians play instruments they did not originally know how to play, and by having untrained musicians pick an instrument and be a part of an ensemble, they showed that with diligence anyone can bring the western canon of classical music to life, and often do it with much more humor and life than can be heard in contemporary concert halls. Just maybe people are tired of being told how to think and what to do. Or how to play an instrument, and what “good” music should be played on that instrument. The Worlds Worst is a reminder of the inspiring example of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and the accomplishments that can be made when amateurs and in-experts take to the world’s stage and have fun making a raid on the western classical canon, wrong notes and all. The Worlds Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia edited by Christopher M. Reeves and Aaron Walker is available from Soberscove Press. Just as Daphne Oram was stepping out of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, another lady was stepping in. Though Delia Derbyshire may not be a household name, the sound of her music is certainly embedded in the brains of several generations of Science Fiction fans, as she realized the iconic score for the Doctor Who theme song in the Workshop studios. With the original Doctor Who series lasting for twenty-six continuous seasons from 1963 to 1989, the song has touched the lives of millions of people around the world. I give credit to my own love of electronic music to my being a fan of Doctor Who since I was ten years old. I remember the first time I watched, catching a rerun of an episode late one Saturday night on the local PBS station, while my parents and grandparents visited at my great-grandparents house and all those adults were talking and playing scrabble around the kitchen table. The show was like a revelation. It was the fifth Doctor, played by Peter Davison. Not only was the storyline a subject of fascination, but the sounds, and the way they melded with the visuals transported my imagination. I became a fan at that moment and ever since Doctor Who has been my favorite TV show. Though my first love remains the original series, and my first Doctor, the first few seasons of the 2005’s Doctor Who revival exceeded my expectations and I continue to tune in. There is one area where I am a Doctor Who purist though. That is where the theme song is concerned. Each new regeneration of the travelling Time Lord saw the producers of the show making slight adjustments to the song. Eventually it came to a point where, though the theme was the same, they did not use the original version as recorded, and essentially, created by Delia Derbyshire. It’s quite a shame because there was magic in that mix. The original tune was written by Ron Grainer, but he didn’t have anything to do with the production, how it was made. The project for realizing it and arranging it for electronics was given to Delia. But how did she end up at the BBC in the first place? She had been a bright girl, learning to read and write at an early age, and started training on the piano at age eight, but like many of us who have grown up as part of the working or middle-class it was radio that opened up her world. Delia said “the radio was my education”. Being involved with radio also ended up being her fate. After graduating from Barr’s Hill Grammar School in 1956 she was accepted by both Oxord and Cambridge. This was “quite something for a working class girl in the 'fifties, where only one in 10 were female,” she said. She ended up going to Girton College, Cambridge, because of a mathematics scholarship she had received. Despite some success with the mathematical theory of electricity, she claimed to have not done so well in school at the time. So she switched her focus to include music, specializing in medieval and modern music history, while graduating with a BA in mathematics. She also received a diploma, or what the British call a licentiate, from the Royal Academy of Music in the study of pianoforte. While in school she had developed an interest in the musical possibilities of everyday objects. This would later find its full expression in the musique concrete she would make and master at the BBC. While still in school in 1958 she also had the opportunity to visit the Worlds Fair in Brussels where she experienced Edgard Varèse's Poème Électronique installed in Le Corbusier's pavilion. Varèse's work was a touchstone for the new generation of electronic musicians as Daphne had also experienced this work at the Fair. Upon finishing her schooling she approached the university career office for advice. The pieces had been arranged on the board of her life but she needed help with making her next move. She told the counselor she had an interest in “sound, music and acoustics, to which they recommended a career in either deaf aids or depth sounding.” With their advice wanting, she made a move on her own and tried to get a gig at Decca Records, but was told no. No women were employed in the recording studio of the label. In lieu of a job with Decca she scored a position with the UN in Geneva as a piano and math teacher to the children of various consuls and diplomats. Later she worked as an aid to Gerald G. Gross, who worked in diplomatic functions and oversaw conferences for the International Telecommunications Union. Eventually she moved back home to Coventry where she taught at a primary school. This was followed by a brief stint in the promotions department at Boosey & Hawkes, a music publisher. The following year in 1960 she stepped into the BBC as trainee assistant studio manager. Her first job there was working on the Record Review, a program where hoity-toity critics gave their highfalutin opinions on classical music recordings. Just like Daphne Oram, she had a well-developed sense of where to drop the needle on any given platter. Delia said "some people thought I had a kind of second sight. One of the music critics would say, ‘I don't know where it is, but it's where the trombones come in’ and I'd hold it up to the light and see the trombones and put the needle down exactly where it was. And they thought it was magic." Of this time period she further elaborated, “It was very exciting, especially on the music shows. All the records had to be spun in by hand and split second timing was essential. When tapes came in I used to mark them with yellow markers to ensure that one followed another, and that there were no embarrassing gaps in between,” Not long after she had started working on the Record Review she heard about the Sound-House Daphne Oram had helped create, the Radiophonic Workshop, and she knew she wanted to be in the Sound-House, developing and working in the new field of electronic and electro-acoustic music, exploring the widest parameters of musical research. When she approached the heads of Central Programme Operation with her wish to work in the Radiophonic Workshop, they were baffled and puzzled. The Workshop wasn’t a place most people sought out to work in, it was a place people were assigned, no doubt with grumbling resentment. It was a place only the eccentric, or visionary, would choose to go. “I had done some composing but I had a running battle with the B.B.C. to let me specialise in this field. Eventually they gave me three months to prove I was good -- and I'm still here,” she noted in a newspaper article. In 1962 Delia got here wish and was assigned to the Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale. For the next decade and a year she gave the BBC a herculean effort in the creation of sound and music for about 200 radio and television shows. “I have to sense the mood which the producer is trying to achieve. He may want something abstract, or it may be a piece with changing moods which have to correspond to specific cues in either dialogue or graphic designs.” The next year was the year Doctor Who came to broadcast. The theme song was one of the first on television to be made entirely with electronics. Brian Hodgson, who worked with Delia at the Workshop, and also produced a lot of incidental music for Doctor Who commented on her work on the theme. “It was a world without synthesisers, samplers and multi-track tape recorders; Delia, assisted by her engineer Dick Mills, had to create each sound from scratch. She used concrete sources and sine- and square-wave oscillators, tuning the results, filtering and treating, cutting so that the joins were seamless, combining sound on individual tape recorders, re-recording the results, and repeating the process, over and over again.” Interviewed about the theme on a 1964 episode of the radio show Information Please she said, “the music was constructed note by note without the use of any live instrumentalists at all,” and went on to demonstrate the use of various oscillators, including the workshops famous wobbulator, which she said was “simply an oscillator which wobbles”. It was a laborious process and the Radiophonic Workshop had become the perfect laboratory for the great works of sonic separation, granulation, elaboration and final distillation of the musical substance. To create the Doctor Who theme each note was individually recorded, cut, spliced. Some of the base materials used for the process included a single plucked string, white noise, and the harmonic waveforms of test-tone oscillators. The bass line was the single plucked string. The pattern for the bass was made by splicing it, in versions that had been sped up or slowed down to create the perfect pitch, over and over again. The swoop of the lower bass layer was made through careful and calculated tweaking of the oscillators pitch. The melody was played on a keyboard attached to a rack of oscillators while the bubbling hiss and fry of some etheric vapor was made by filtering white noise and then arranging it in time on tape. Some of the notes were also redubbed at varying volumes to create the necessary dynamics heard in the song. With all the basic materia in the laboratory now prepared, ready with the proper pitch and volume, it all needed to be conjoined. To do this the first step involved taking a line of music –the bass, melody, or vaporous bubbles of white noise- and trimming each note to length by cutting the tape and sticking them all together in the right order. Next further rectifications were required, distilling these elements down further and further until a final mix was completed. At the time, there were no multitrack tape machines to ease the process. A method to mix it all together had to be improvised. Each separate portion of the song on individual reels of tape was played on separate tape machines with the outputs mixed together. Getting it all to synchronize was just one of the obstacles as not all tape players play back at exactly the same speed, and not all of them stay in sync once started. A number of submixes, or distillations, were created and these in turn synced together before the music could finally be said to be finished. When Ron Grainer first heard Delias realization of his score he was more than delighted and said "Did I really write this?" Delia relplied,"Most of it." Grainer made a valiant effort to give Delia credit as a co-composer of the theme. His attempt was blocked by the bureaucrats at the BBC who had the official policy of keeping the members of the Workshop anonymous and only giving credit to the group as a whole. Delia was not credited on screen for her work until the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who. Even so, her tenure in the Workshop was off to a grand start and she continued to produce music for radio, television and beyond. Between 1964-65 Delia got to expand her palette of sound across the canvas of radio in collaboration with playwright Barry Bermange in a series of four pieces called Inventions for Radio. These pieces were broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme and involved interviews with people on the street on such heavy subjects as dreams and the existence of God, collaged against a background of electronic soundscapes and strange noises. It was a new form of documentary radio art. Working with Bermange, the voices of the interviewees were edited in a non-linear way, creating insightful juxtapositions. For the episode on dreams she used one of her favorite musical sources, a green metal lightbulb shade being struck. The sound, as always, was later manipulated in the studio. And even though her work for the Workshop continued to remain anonymous her reputation as a musician and electronic composer started to spread to some of the senior officials at the communications behemoth. Martin Esslin, the Head of Radio Drama, sent a memo to Desmond Briscoe, than head of the Workshop, noting his regret that Delia Derbyshire and her co-worker John Harrison were not able to receive credit for the work they had on a production of “The Tower”. He wrote, “I have just been listening to the playback of the completed version of ‘The Tower’ and should like to express my deep appreciation for the excellent work done on this production by Delia Derbyshire and John Harrison. This play set them an extremely difficult task and they rose to the challenge with a degree of imaginative intuition and technical mastery which deserves the highest admiration and which will inevitably earn a lion's share of any success the production may eventually achieve. I only wish that it were possible for the names of contributors of this calibre to be mentioned in the credits in the Radio Times and on the air. But failing this I should like to register the fact that I regard their contribution to this production as being at least of equal importance to that of the producer himself.” UNIT DELTA PLUS, KALEIDOPHON & WHITE NOISE As Delia’s reputation grew, she began work on other projects outside the umbrella of the BBC. She joined forces with her friend and fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson, along with Peter Zinovieff, the creator and founder of the EMS synthesizer, to establish Unit Delta Plus. The purpose of this organization was to promote and create electronic music. A studio Zinovieff had built in a shed behind his townhouse at 49 Deodar Road in Putney served as their operational headquarters. Zinovieff had followed the research of Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset at Bell Labs. He had also read the David Alan Luce MIT thesis from 1963, “the Physical Correlates of Nonpercussive Musical Instrument Tones.” You know, the kind of thing you read on a rainy day. These were some of the influences on his own work. The three were quite the trio. They participated in a few experimental and electronic music festivals. In 1966 they demonstrated their electronic prowess at The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. This was the same event where The Beatles had been commissioned to create an avant-garde sound piece. They came up with song Carnival of Light in response had its only public playing. Though there were intervening projects, the next major one outside of the BBC was to mark another landmark in the history of electronic music. It all get sparked when Derbyshire and Hodgson met David Vorhaus. Vorhaus recalls, “I met Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, who were then in a band called Unit Delta Plus. I was on my way to an orchestral gig when the conductor told me that there was a lecture next door on the subject of electronic music. The lecture was fantastic and we got on like a house on fire, starting the Kaliedophon studio about a week later!" Vorhaus was a classical musician, trained as a bass player. He also happened to be a physics graduate and electronic engineer. The three were an electrical storm of creative energy. Together they created the Kaleidophon studio at 281-283 Camden High Street, where they made music and sound for a variety of London theatres. They also made library music, contributing many tracks to the Standard Music Library, a firm set up in collaboration with London Weekend Television (ITV) and Bucks Music Group in 1968 to provide the music for hit TV shows. These recordings were done under pseudonyms. Derbyshire’s compositions were credited to Li De La Russe, something of an anagram with a reference to her auburn hair to boot. A number of these songs made it onto the ITV shows The Tomorrow people and Timeslip, which rivaled Doctor Who. When not working on a commission they worked on their first album as the band White Noise, titled An Electric Storm. The album is a masterpiece, spanning genres of giddy electro-pop to the more austere and serious sonorities. It spans a deep emotional gamut and is an excellent and dizzying listen from start to finish. Released on the Island label, it was something of a sleeper album, or what some call a perennial seller. It is one of those albums that didn’t do as great when it was first released as it has done over time. Now it is a continual best seller. Considering the difficulties the band had in even getting it onto a label makes their achievement even more remarkable. Though the name White Noise lives on with David Vorhaus, Hodgson and Delia left the project and the studio after the first album. MUSIC OF SPHERES AND I.E.E.100 A number of other commissions, recordings and events took place as the last years of the sixties unspooled. She made music for a film by Yoko Ono, contributed to Guy Woolfenden’s electronic score for Macbeth produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and collaborated with Anthony Newley for a demo song called Moogies Bloogies that has never seen an official release. In 1970 Delia worked on an episode for the TV show series Biography that detailed the life of Johannes Kepler, the renaissance astronomer who showed that planets orbit the sun in ellipses, not perfect circles. The episode was titled, I measured the Skies and was taken from his epitaph which read: I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. In his book Harmonices Mundi from 1619 Kepler explored the relationships between musical harmony and congruence in geometrical forms and physical phenomena and related his third law of planetary motion. Medieval philosophers had spoken of the music of the spheres as metaphor. Kepler discovered actual physical harmonies in planetary motion, finding harmonic proportions in the differences between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of a planet in its orbit. A newspaper article by Christine Edge that came out around the time explained, “Kepler had interpreted the sounds made by the planets into scale notes, and Delia subjected them to her own gliding scale of electronic sounds.” A few years later she revisited the Music of the Spheres, this time producing a piece for a segment on Kepler in Joseph Bronowski's 1973 TV series The Ascent of Man. Her short piece accompanies a simple computer graphic being shown on the screen. Delia was in her own sphere and orbit, and as her velocity accelerated the people around started to notice its wobble. In 1971 the International Institute of Electrical Engineers turned 100. The BBC commemorated the anniversary with the Radiophonic Workshop in Concert event on the 19th May. Delia composed the piece I.E.E. 100 for the program, but the tape almost didn’t survive. She looked to radio and the history of electrical engineering for inspiration. She said, “I began by interpreting the actual letters, I.E.E. one hundred, in two different ways. The first one in a morse code version using the morse for I.E.E.100. This I found extremely dull, rhythmically, and so I decided to use the full stops in between the I and the two E's because full stop has a nice sound to it: it goes di-dah di-dah di-dah. I wanted to have, as well as a rhythmic motive, to have musical motive running throughout the whole piece and so I interpreted the letters again into musical terms. 'I' becomes B, the 'E' remains and 100 I've used in the roman form of C." Further elements of the piece included many touchstones of the history of telecommunications from, the development of electricity in communication from the earliest telephone to the Americans landing on the moon. She sampled the voice of Mr Gladstone congratulating Mr Edison on inventing the phonograph, used the opening and closing down of Savoy Hill, where the BBC had their initial recording studios with the voice of Lord Reith, the first general manager of the BBC, and Neil Armstrong speaking as he stepped onto the surface of the moon. “The powerful punch of Delia's rocket take-off threatened the very fabric of the Festival Hall,” Desmond Briscoe wrote. This was one of the events where Delia’s chronic perfectionism began to show itself, having a deleterious effect on her ability to finish work, despite being a professional who had tackled numerous large projects. She was working on the piece up to the last minute the night before the event, making edits, trying to make it live up to the rigorous standards she set for herself. Brian Hodgson was in charge of directing the program, and he was aware that Delia might have a breakdown and do something to the tape, so he called upon one of the Workshops engineers to secretly make a second copy of the final version of the work and to give it to him. Hodgson’s intuition and assessment of the matter was quite correct. He said of the incident, “I said to Richard [the engineer] ‘Run another set in Room 12, don't tell Delia you're doing it, and that copy bring to me in the morning, because I have an awful feeling she was going to destroy the tape.’ And he did that. And she came in the next morning in tears, around 11 o'clock. And said, ‘I've destroyed the tape, what are we going to do?’ I don't think she ever forgave me for that.” Two years later she would leave the BBC, fed up. In an interview on Radio Scotland she said, “Something serious happened around '72, '73, '74: the world went out of tune with itself and the BBC went out of tune with itself... I think, probably, when they had an accountant as director general. I didn't like the music business.” She spent a brief time working at Brian Hodgson’s Electrophon Studio, before quitting that too. It was hard for her to quit radio though, as it is for many who’ve been hooked and tried to give it up. She got a gig working as a radio operator. She says of the time, “Crazy, crazy, crazy! I was the best radio operator Laing Pipelines ever had! I answered a job in the paper for a French speaking radio operator. I just had to sleep - everything was out of tune, so I went to the north of Cumbria. It was twelve miles south of the border. I had a lovely house built from stones from Hadrian's Wall. I was in charge of three transmitters in a disused quarry. I did not want to get involved in a big organisation again. I'd fled the BBC and I thought - oh, Laing's... a local family firm! Then I found this huge consortium between Laing's and these two French companies.” By 1975 she’d stopped producing music for public consumption. According to Clive Blackburn, “in private, she never stopped writing music either. She simply refused to compromise her integrity in any way. And ultimately, she couldn't cope. She just burnt herself out. An obsessive need for perfection destroyed her." Yet in the 1990’s she started seeing the electronic music she had championed starting to come into its own. Pete Kember, a member of the psychedelic noise rock band Spacemen 3 sought Delia out and befriended her. Kember had amassed a collection of synthesizers and electronic music gear as part of his musical research and interest. He was embarking on a new project called Spectrum making the kind of music she had been at the forefront of in previous decades. Delia’s life had become chaotic though. The ravages of alcohol abuse were catching up with her body. Just as she started to work on public music again with Peter in 2001, she died of renal failure. A short 55-second collaboration they had made, called Synchrodipidity Machine (Taken from an Unfinished Dream) was released after she had departed and was dedicated to her memory. Kember credited her with "liquid paper sounds generated using fourier synthesis of sound based on photo/pixel info (B2wav - bitmap to sound programme)." After she died 267 reel-to-reel tapes and a box of a thousand papers were found in her attic. These were entrusted to Mark Ayres of the BBC and in 2007 were given on permanent loan to the University of Manchester. Almost all the tapes were digitised in 2007 by Louis Niebur and David Butler, but none of the music has been published due to copyright complications. Her life was an unfinished dream, and it is a shame she did not stick around long enough to see the credit that was later bestowed on her for her generous contributions to electronic music. Sources:
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years by Desmond Briscoe, BBC 1983 Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Louis Neibur, Oxford, 2010 https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/pioneering-women/women-of-the-workshop/delia-derbyshire http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/51LC2shThjnCNR8dd4z2SRQ/delia-derbyshire https://wikidelia.net/ https://wikidelia.net/wiki/Morse_code_musician Sound Archive: http://www.ubu.com/sound/derbyshire.html If you liked this article check out the rest in the Radiophonic Laboratory series. IS THERE ANY ESCAPE FROM NOISE? In our machine dominated age there is hardly any escape from noise. Even in the most remote wilderness outpost planes will fly overhead to disrupt the sound of the wind in the trees and the birds in the wind. In the city it is so much part of the background we have to tune in to the noise in order to notice it because we’ve become adept at tuning it out. Roaring motors, the incessant hum of the computer fan, the refrigerator coolant, metal grinding at the light industrial factory down the street, the roar of traffic on I-75, the beep of a truck backing up, these and many other noises are all part of our daily soundscape. Throughout human history musicians have sought to mimic the sounds around them, the gentle drone of the tanpura, a stringed instrument that accompanies sitar, flute, voice and other instruments in classical Indian music, was said to mimic the gentle murmur of the rivers and streams. Should it be a surprise then, that in the nineteenth and twentieth century musicians and composers started to mimic the sounds of the machines around them? In bluegrass and jazz there are a whole slew of songs that copied the entrancing rhythms of the train. As more and more machines filled up the cities is at any wonder that the beginnings of a new genre of music –noise music- started to emerge? Is it any wonder, that as acoustic and sound technology progressed, our music making practices also came to be dominated by machines. THE ART OF NOISES And just what is music anyway? There are many definitions from across the span of time and human culture. Each definition has been made to fit the type, style and particular practice or praxis of music. In his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises the Italian Futurist thinker Luigi Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape. In reaction to those new conditions he thought there should be a new approach to composition and musical instrumentation. He traced the history of Western music back to Greek musical theory which was based on the mathematical tetrachord of Pythagoras. This did not allow for harmony. This changed during the middle-ages first with the invention of plainchant in Christian monastic communities. Plainchant employs the modal system and this is used to work out the relative pitches of each line on the staff, and was the first revival of musical notation after knowledge of the ancient Greek system was lost. In the late 9th century, plainsong began to evolve into organum, which led to the development of polyphony. Until then the chord did not exist, as such. Russolo thought that the chord was the "complete sound." He noted that in history chords developed slowly over time, first moving from the "consonant triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize contemporary music." He pointed out that early music tried to create sounds that were sweet and pure, and then it evolved to become more and more complex. By the time of Schoenberg and the twelve tone revolution of serial music musicians sought to create new and more dissonant chords. These dissonant chords brought music ever closer to his idea of "noise-sound." With the relative quiet of nature and pre-industrial cities disturbed Russolo thought a new sonic palette was required. He proposed that electronics and other technology would allow futurist musicians to substitute for the limited variety of timbres available in the traditional orchestra. His view was that we must "break out of this limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds." This would be done with new technology that would allow us to manipulate noises in ways that never could have been done with earlier instruments. In that, he was quite correct. Russolo wasn’t the only one thinking of the aesthetics of noise, or seeking new definitions of music. French Modernist composer Edgar Varèse said that “music is organized sound.” It was a statement he used as a guidepost for his aesthetic vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" An open view of music allows new elements to come into the development of musical traditions, where a bound view would try to keep out those things out that did not fit the preexisting definition. Out of this current of noise music initiated in part by Russolo and Varese a new class of musician would emerge, the musician of sounds. MUSICIAN OF SOUNDS Fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer developed his theory and practice of musique concrète during the 1930s and ‘40s and saw it spread to people such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, the founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, F.C. Judd and many others in the 50’s. Musique concrète was a practical application of Russolo’s idea of “noise-sound” and exploration of expanded timbres possible through then new studio techniques. It was also a way of making music according to the “organized sound” definition and was distinct from previous methods by being the first type of music completely dependent on recording and broadcast studios. In musique concrète sounds are sampled and modified through the application of audio effects and tape manipulation techniques, then reassembled into a form of montage or collage. It can feature any sounds derived from any recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, field recordings of the natural and man-made environment or sounds created in the studio. Schaeffer was an experimental audio researcher who combined his work in the field of radio communications with a love for electro-acoustics. Because Schaeffer was the first to use and develop these studio music making methods he is considered a pioneer of electronic music, and one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. These recording and sampling techniques which he was the first to use and practice are now part of the standard operating procedures used by nearly all record production companies around the world. Schaeffer’s efforts and influence in this area earned him the title “Musician of Sounds.” Schaeffer, born in 1910, had a wide variety of interests throughout his eighty-five years on this planet. He worked variously across the fields of composing, writing, broadcasting, engineering, and as a musicologist and acoustician. His work was innovative in science and art. It was after World War II that he developed musique concrète, all while continuing to write for essays, short novels, biographies and pieces for the radio. Much of his writing was geared towards the philosophy and theory of music, which he then later demonstrated in his compositions. It is interesting to think of the influences on him as a person. Both his parents were musicians, his father a violinist, and his mother a singer, but they discouraged him from pursuing a career in music and instead pushed him into engineering. He studied at the the École Polytechnique where he received a diploma in radio broadcasting. He brought the perspective and approach of an engineer with his inborn musicality to bear on his various activities. Schaeffer got his first telecommunications gig in 1934 is Strasbourg. The next year he got married and the couple had their first child before moving to Paris where he began work at Radiodiffusion Française (now called Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, RTF). As he worked in broadcasting he started to drift away from his initial interests in telecommunications towards music. When these two sides met he really began to excel. After convincing the management at the radio station of the alternate possibilities inherent in the audio and broadcast equipment, as well as the possibility of using records and phonographs as a means for making new music he started to experiment. He would records sounds to phonographs and speed them up, slow them down, play them backwards and run them through other audio processing devices, and mixing sounds together. While all this is just par for the course in today’s studios, it was the bleeding edge of innovation at the time. With these mastered he started to work with people he met via the RTF. All this experimentation had as a natural outgrowth a style that leant itself to the avant-garde of the day. The sounds he produced challenged the way music had been thought of and heard. With the use of his own and his colleagues engineering acumen new electronic instruments were made to expand on the initial processes in the audio lab, which eventually became formalized as the Club d’Essai, or Test Club. CLUB D’ESSAI In 1942 Pierre founded the Studio d'Essai, later dubbed the Club d'Essai at RTF. The Club was active in the French resistance during World War II, later to become a center of musical activity. It started as an outgrowth of Schaeffer’s radiophonic explorations, but with a focus on being radio active in the Resistance on French radio. It was responsible for the first broadcasts to liberated Paris in August 1944. He was joined in the leadership of the Club by Jacques Copeau, the theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. It was at the Club where many of Schaeffer’s ideas were put to the test. After the war Schaeffer had written a paper that discussed questions about how sound recording creates a transformations in the perception of time, due to the ability to slow down and speed up sounds. The essay showed his grasp of sound manipulation techniques which were also demonstrated in his compositions. In 1948 Schaeffer initiated a formal “research in to noises” at the Club d'Essai and on October 5th of that year presented the results of his experimentation at a concert given in Paris. Five works for phonograph (known collectively as Cinq études de bruits—Five Studies of Noises) including Etude violette (Study in Purple) and Etude aux chemins de fer (Study of the Railroads), were presented. This was the first flowering of the musique concrete style, and from the Club d’Essai another research group was born. GRM: Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète In 1949 another key figure in the development of Musique Concrète stepped onto the stage. By the time Pierre Henry met Pierre Schaeffer via Club d’Essai the twenty-one year percussionist-composer old had already been experimenting with sounds produced by various objects for six years. He was obsessed with the idea of integrating noise into music, and had already studied with the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Nadia Boulanger, and Félix Passerone at the Paris Conservatoire from 1938 to 1948. For the next nine years he worked at the Club d'Essai studio at RTF. In 1950 he collaborated with Schaeffer on the piece Symphonie pour un homme seul. Two years later he scored the first musique concrète to appear in a commercial film, Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Henry remained a very active composer and scored for a number of other films and ballets. Together the two Pierres were quite a pair and founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in 1951. This gave Schaeffer a new studio, which included a tape recorder. This was a significant development for him as he previously only worked with phonographs and turntables to produce music. This sped up the work process, and also added a new dimension with the ability to cut up and splice tape in new arrangements, something not possible on a phonograph. Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape. Eventually Schaeffer had enough experimentation and material under his belt to publish À la Recherche d'une Musique Concrète ("In Search of a Concrete Music") in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point. Schaeffer remained active in other aspects of music and radio throughout the ‘50s. In 1954 he co-founded Ocora, a music label and facility for training broadcast technicians. Ocora stood for the “Office de Coopération Radiophonique”. The purpose of the label was to preserve via recordings, rural soundscapes in Africa. Doing this kind of work also put Schaeffer at the forefront of field recording work, and in the preservation of traditional music. The training side of the operation helped get people trained to work with the African national broadcasting services. His last electronic noise etude was realized in 1959, the "Study of Objects" (Etudes aux Objets). For Pierre Henry’s part, two years after leaving the RTF, he founded with Jean Baronnet the first private electronic studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio. Later Henry made a tribute to composing his Écho d'Orphée. A CONCRETE LEGACY
usique remains concrete. Schaeffer had known of the “noise orchestras” of his predecessor Luigi Russolo, but took the concept of noise music and developed it further by making it clear that any and all sounds had a part to play in the vocabulary of music. He created the toolkit later experimenters took as a starting point. He was the original sampler. In all his work he emphasized the role of play, or jeu, in making music. His ide of jeu in music came from the French verb jouer. It shares the same dual meaning as the English word play. To play is to have two things at once: to make pleasing sounds or songs on a musical instrument, and to engage with things as way of enjoyment and recreation. Taking sounds and manipulating them, seeing what certain processes will do to them, is at the heart of discover and play inside the radiophonic laboratory. The ability to play opens up the mind to new possibilities. *** This article originally appeared in the April 2020 edition of the Q-Fiver. If you enjoyed this article please consider reading the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. On the bus ride home from work the other day I overheard an interesting conversation. Two guys were talking about their experiences in and out of prison, with the courts, with probation, with the criminal justice system in general. The two fellows talked about how the elevators at the justice center were broke for days on end, and how because the elevators were down, visitors weren’t allowed in. Not being able to see friends and family made their stay all the more miserable. As I sat there listening in I thought it sounded right on target, par for the course with societal collapse. As local governments lose funding for repair of public buildings, it makes sense that our jails might not be first on the list to get fixed. One comment really stuck with me though. When the guy said he knew four dudes who OD’d on fentanyl while he was in the slammer, I wasn’t surprised, but I was shocked. People on the street are dying from this stuff. Now it seems so are the people who get picked up off the street by the police and thrown into jail for possession. Now they can OD from the convenience of their jail cell. I guess those cavity searches aren’t going so well. Being on the wrong side of the law hasn’t really been part of my experience. Unless you count the one trip I made to juvie for stealing cough syrup, or the time I got a slap on the wrist by a judge for some graffiti I got caught carving onto a picnic table at a park. Then there was the time I got a misdemeanor at age twenty-four when I contributed to the delinquency of a minor by buying my disabled, then nineteen year old cousin some booze. I hadn’t actually expected him to actually chug the rum. I panicked when he started falling out of his wheelchair due to being in a quick drunken stupor. I couldn’t handle the situation and had to call 911 for assistance. I did the wrong thing, then I did the right thing, and I got a hefty fine. My cousin and I are still real close, and he doesn’t blame me for the incident. I do accept the responsibility for the part I played. So unless you tally the times I’ve gotten caught breaking the law, I’ve been a law abiding citizen. My own history with alcohol and drugs is rather checkered, as you might be able to guess from the incidents above. There were other ‘incidents’ if my addled memory serves me right. One thing I’m grateful for is that I never graduated to shooting up. Several of my close friends and some other cousins did when we were all at college together in the years around the turn of the millennium. Some of them are still in the throw of those addictions now, and one is homeless living on the streets of San Francisco. I remember being offered heroin with the caveat “We’ll shoot you up. We know what we are doing.” When I review that memory it’s one of the times I’m happy to suffer from anxiety because that was just one of the times when my neurotic fears have protected me from things so much worse. But just because I didn’t shoot up doesn’t mean I didn’t do a bunch of other stupid shale, and waste a lot of time from age fourteen until I finally gave up alcohol and marijuana at age thirty-six. By that point they’d stopped working, and had been interfering in my life long enough. I didn’t hit rock bottom per se, but I hit a bottom, and was only compelled to quit when faced with a barrage of pain. It was one of the best choices I’ve ever made. It’s kind of ironic that I took the path into drugs in the first place. When I was first getting into punk music I was in adamant opposition to all that. I blasted the hardcore sounds of the band Minor Threat on my Walkman, and I was influenced by their lyrics and by the mentorship of an older vegetarian Straight Edge punk who lived down the street. He turned me on to so much good music via his mixtapes. Around that time I claimed to be Straight Edge too. Straight Edge is a philosophy that emerged from within the punk rock, hardcore and skateboarding subcultures whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational/non-prescribed drugs (marijuana, MDMA, LSD, cocaine, heroin, etc.). It has since broadened out of those specific spheres. Peer pressure is a real thing though, whether subtle or overt, and soon I abandoned the philosophy and embarked on a program of what I thought was the expansion of consciousness through the systematic derangement of all the senses. Through all the years of drinking that followed, the idealism inherent within the Straight Edge philosophy was there in the back of my mind, as conscience that had been put on mute. All these years later as I return to the philosophy I find it still has much to offer our Western society plagued with rampant drug and alcohol abuse. The term Straight Edge itself came from a song of the same name by Minor Threat. The lyrics, full of the self-righteous vehemence of youth, remain just as powerful today as when they first wrote it in Washington D.C. in 1981. “I'm a person just like you / but I've got better things to do / than sit around and fuck my head / hang out with the living dead / snort white shit up my nose / pass out at the shows / I don't even think about speed / that's just something I don't need / I've got the Straight Edge! / I'm a person just like you / but I've got better things to do / than sit around and smoke dope / 'cause I know that I can cope / laugh at the thought at eating ludes / laugh at the thought of sniffing glue / always gonna keep in touch / never gonna use a crutch / I've got the Straight Edge!” The song launched a revolution. It was a reaction to the hedonism so often found within the punk scene. The Ramones had sang the polar opposite in their song : “Now I wanna sniff some glue / Now I wanna have somethin' to do / All the kids wanna sniff some glue / All the kids want somethin' to do.” Of the many things punk rebelled against, boredom might be at the top of the list. One way to combat boredom is to take drugs to excess. This seemed to be especially true of those who had embraced the nihilism that also permeated the subculture. But not all punks thought seeking oblivion through the obliteration of consciousness was the best strategy for coping with their existential vexations. Some thought not taking drugs was the real rebellion. Some thought that not getting drunk and blitzed out of your mind was a more productive option. They did have something better to do than watch TV and have a couple of brews. In the song Bottled Violence, Minor Threat took aim at violent drunks. “Get your bravery from a six pack / Get your bravery from a half-pint / Drink your whiskey, drink your grain / Bottoms up, and you don't feel pain / Drink your whiskey, drink your grain / Bottoms up, and you don't feel pain / Go out and fight, fight / Go out and fight, fight / Go out and fight, fight / Go out and fight, fight / Bottled violence / Lose control of your body / Beat the shit out of somebody / Half-shut eyes don't see who you hit / But you don't take any shit / Half-shut eyes don't see who you hit / But you don't take any shit.” A Straight Edger preferred to develop their inner bravery. It came from resisting the allure of mindlessness that accompanied drinking and drugging. It allowed them pursue other forms of meaning when they could have just accepted the status quo. Though the core of the Straight Edge philosophy is to refrain from smoking, taking drugs, drinking alcohol, some took it further. They also included not indulging in casual sex, or eating meat as part of their lifestyle. Some even nixed caffeine, over-the-counter, and prescription drugs. For various people there were various gradations. For most of the people in the scene it wasn’t about telling other people what to do as much as it was about taking control of your own life. It remains a relevant strategy. Control yourself, control your mind, and other people have a harder time controlling you. Straight Edge is sometimes abbreviated as sXe and the X used as a symbol for the lifestyle. Journalist Michael Azerrad traced the use of the X symbol back to the band the Teen Idles. The D.C. group embarked on a brief West Coast tour in 1980. One of the gigs they were to play was at San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens, an important stop for touring bands, and a venue where Frisco locals the Dead Kennedys often played. When the band showed up club management was alarmed to discover that they were actually still teens, or at least under the legal drinking age and technically weren’t supposed to even be in the club. The management compromised, not wanting to lose out on whatever bit of money the young punks could help rake in, and besides they were already booked. As a way of showing the staff not to serve them any booze they marked each of the band members’ hands with a large black X. When the band came back home to D.C., they suggested the system to other local clubs and venues as a way to get teenagers in to see the bands without being served alcohol. This in turn sparked another movement within the punk scene where some bands, many of them hardcore or straight edge, would only play at “all ages” venues. Later that year The Teen Idles released their Minor Disturbance album. On the cover were two hands with black Xs on the back. This album sealed the deal and the mark soon became associated with the Straight Edge lifestyle. The practice of marking the hands of underage kids with an X at clubs and music venues continued to spread around the country. One of the members of Teen Idles happened to be a guy named Ian MacKaye, another was Jeff Nelson. They went on to form Minor Threat and from there the Straight Edge subculture continued to grow and evolve. It is for all these reasons that the Straight Edge movement always gets traced back to Ian MacKaye, even if he is hardly the first person to have been an abstainer. The sentiment had been bubbling up in the scene but he gave it a name, and the symbol of the X that was also adopted. In an interview for the documentary Another State of Mind MacKaye said “When I became a punk, my main fight was against the people who were around me — friends". When he was 13 he had moved from D.C. to Palo Alto, California for nine months. When he came back home his friends had started drinking and drugging. He remarked, "I said, 'God, I don't want to be like these people, man. I don't fit in at all with them.' So it was an alternative." MacKaye also noted that the symbol "wasn't supposed to signify straight edge—it was supposed to signify kids. It was about being young punk rockers... it represents youth". In later years MacKaye has often spoke about how he never intended for Straight Edge to even be a movement, but the symbol X and the name stuck. People were inspired and it took on a life of its own. Perhaps Perhaps through the clarity of Straight Edge and clean living people can retain –or regain- some of the vibrancy of youth into adulthood. The philosophy can be seen as a direct and practical response to the excess in the culture of the late 1970s and early 80s when it arose: cocaine, sleeping around, big spending. Sex wasn’t just getting your jollies off, but a connection to another person. Living without the filters and numbness and distortion imposed over the nervous system by drugs was a way to better connect with reality –and if you didn’t like the reality you found yourself in, you then had energy to go do something about, whether it was starting a band, making a ‘zine, creating a venue, or some form of direct action. Being Straight Edge was a path to meaningful activities for those who embraced the practice. Looking at the 2020’s ahead of us and all the decades of industrial strength drug abuse behind us we still have the same problems. Only Fentanyl may be what is in the headlines now, instead of ludes, coke, crack or ecstasy. As a culture in systemic decline drug abuse is just one of the symptoms, and a temporary escape or refuge for those who would numb themselves against what is often a harsh reality. I can’t judge what another person chooses to do with their bodies. I know many people who are just social drinkers or weed smokers and I have no problem with it; I just don’t happen to be one myself. I’m also in favor of decriminalization and legalization. Prohibition causes more problems than it ever cured. Yet I think there is a place within Green Wizardry for Straight Edge. The Green Wizard who is clean, or has gotten clean, will be better able to cope with life on its own terms. They also may be in a better position to help guide those neighbors, friends, or associates who happen to be suffering from an addiction, whether it comes from knowledge of twelve step recovery programs, or some other way of getting and staying sober. Everyone needs an edge in life after all. As the economy overshoots sending citizens into free fall, as colleges continue to cater to corporations over true scholarship, as the environment undergoes permutations unknown to our eldest living relatives, it is necessary to sharpen whatever edge we have. If we wish to live conscious lives of volition, if we wish to have needs and desires met, and seek to bring dreams into reality in a world full of suffering, having our own edge will help us to stay positive. People who aren’t medicated or numbed are in a better position to use their willpower to do their work in the world, in spite or despite what everyone else is doing. Straight Edge people have a lot more time on their hands. Free from chasing the next buzz or oblivion they have the energy to pursue plans that can impact their life and the lives of the people around them. This is very different from the fall out folks in the midst of substance abuse create in the wakes around them. These activities can provide purpose in the face of chaos and corruption. At my last work location in the heart of downtown Cincinnati the number of out-of-work people, hanging out stoned, drunk at noon, some OD’ing from time-to-time in the public bathrooms, shows the degree of despair at play in America. This dispirited depression is egged on by an endless negative news cycle, and a seeming lack of choices in this land where too many choices is no choice at all. Instead of cultivating an edge for discomfort, it has been blunted by blunts, numbed by the latest craft brew or mass produced malt liquor, and anesthetized by opioids. On the other end of the drug spectrum are the crystal meth stimulants driving the brain into overdrive, chasing a cascade of conspirinoid thoughts that make even the most jaded netizen of conspiracy theory darkwebs look surprisingly sane. In this liquid environment of binge eating and binge watching the latest reality reruns or sports spectacle an alternative exists: the Straight Edge and stoic alternative to sharpen the senses of the mind, body and soul in face of commodified decadence being shilled by the managerial class. In 2013 MacKaye gave a talk at the Library of Congress. Speaking of his youth in the ‘70s he said, “In high school, I loved all my friends, but so many of them were just partying. It was disappointing that that was the only form of rebellion that they could come up with, which was self-destruction.” Self-construction is the path offered by Straight Edge. Within the larger punk subculture there was often a lot of open hostility directed towards Straight Edgers. Some of it was just brash reactions against people who came off as self-righteous, holier than thou, or even militant. I remember being made fun of when I had adopted it; and as I’ve been sober these past four years, having changed my habits and behavior, I have noticed the way some people treat me different than before. Going against the grain is a small price to pay for the many gains and transformations that have occurred from straightening my ways. As Minor Threat sang in the song Out of Step “I don't smoke / I don't drink / I don't fuck / At least I can fucking think / I can't keep up! / I can't keep up! / I can't keep up! / Out of step with the world!” Writing on the influence and legacy of the scene author Nina Renata Aron says, “ask anyone who came of age in the straight edge hardcore scene what it did for them, and they’re likely to tell you it saved their life. Those who’ve seen loved ones fall victim to addiction and its attendant miseries feel the scene spared them various forms of regret, anguish, or worse. More than that, it gave them something to believe in.” Straight Edge is an antidote. It is Narcan for the individual soul in an overdosed society. REFERENCES:
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, by Michael Azzerard, 2001 Straight edge: How one 46-second song started a 35-year movement by Nina Renata Aron Curious how to be Straight Edge? Read this handy guide: How to Be Straight Edge Read the rest of the Down Home Punk series. In 1988, the same year Negativland was pioneering the concept and practice of the Teletour, another maverick experimental music composer produced a radio concert like no other before or since. His name is Alvin Curran and the piece in question was his Crystal Psalms, a concerto for musicians in six European nations, simultaneously performed, mixed and broadcast live in stereo to listeners stretched from Palermo, Italy to Helsinki, Finland via six separate but synchronized radio stations. The name of the radio concerto came from an event that Curran wanted to commemorate with the solemnness it was due; Kristallnacht otherwise known as Crystal Night or Night of the Broken Glass. It had happened fifty years before the broadcast on November 9th and 10th in Germany. This was the date of the November Pogroms when civilian and Nazi paramilitary forces mobbed the streets to attack Jewish people and their property. This horrendous event was dubbed Kristallnacht due to all the broken glass left on the ground after the windows of their stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. On Kristallnacht rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. They ransacked and set fire to homes, hospitals and schools. 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This was the opening prelude before the sick opus of the Third Reich’s genocide. It was Hitler’s green light, ramping up his twisted plans. The Third Reich had moved on from economic, political and social persecution to physical violence and murder. The Holocaust had begun. The year before the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht a number of cultural and arts organization had begun making plans for a series of worldwide memorial events. Alvin Curran was in on some of these conversations. Curran had long been part of a vanguard group of ex-pat American composers living in Italy. He was also a founding member of the collective acoustic and electronic improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva, sometimes known as a Million Electron Volts or simply MEV. They formed in Rome in 1966 and are still active today. Started by three young Americans with Masters degrees in music composition from Yale and Princeton, MEV combined an Ivy-League classical pedigree with a tendency towards musical anarchism. Just as their music often involved chance operations, or the use of random procedures, the members of the group met by chance (or was it Providence?) on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome in 1965. Without scores, without conductors, they went like bold explorers into the primeval past of music, and its future. Curran says of the band, “….Composers all, nurtured in renowned ivy gardens; some mowed lawns. They met in Rome, near the Cloaca Maxima—and without further ado, began like experimental archeologists to reconstruct the origins of human music. They collected shards of every audible sound, they amplified the inaudible ones, they declared that any vibrating object was itself ‘music,’ they used electricity as a new musical space and cultural theory, they ultimately laid the groundwork for a new common practice. Every audible gurgle, sigh, thump, scratch, blast, every contrapuntal scrimmage, every wall of sound, every two-bit drone, life-threatening collision, heave of melodic reflux that pointed to unmediated liberation, wailing utopias, or other disappearing acts—anything in fact that hinted at the potential unity among all things, space, and times—were MEV’s ‘materia prima.’” Curran draws from this same ‘materia prima’ as a prolific musician and composer and by the 1980’s had an established solo career. At the time of this writing that solo career is now long and storied. Crystal Psalms is just one of his many innovative works. It is also just one of a number of pieces he created specifically for radio. To my knowledge it is the most technically complex of the pieces he has written for radio. Crystal Psalms was unique in its conception and required hard dedicated work to pull off. Perhaps that is why these kind of radio events are rare. Of course their rarity could also be due to the lack of imagination on the part of the corporate media that dominates the airwaves. The project brought together over 300 people, including musicians and technicians, in six major European cities. These musicians and technicians, separated into groups at these six locations, could not see or hear what was happening at the other locations. Yet together they performed as a unified ensemble to realize Curran’s score. In commemorating a dark and destructive moment of human history Curran demonstrated our creative possibilities for international artistic and technological collaboration. Curran organized the concert in the fall of 1987 at a meeting in Rome. The producers from each of the six radio stations were there. These included Danmarks Radio; Hessicher Rundfunk, Germany, ORF, Austria; Radio France; RAI, Italy; VPRO, Holland. The RAI in Rome was chosen to be the main technical center, and HQ, probably due to the fact that this was the facility closest to the composer. Alvin wrote the music between May and September at his home in Poggidoro, about an hour drive outside the city. The score was written for six groups of complementary ensembles –one group at each station in each country. These ensembles consisted of a mixed chorus (16-32 voices), a quartet of strings or winds, a percussionist and accordionist. Each of these six groups was conducted independent of each other. And even though they were separated by large distances in space, each of the ensembles played in time together. To accomplish this a recorded time track was heard by each conductor that kept them all synchronized. Besides the live music, pre-recorded tapes were also used. These tapes were filled with the sounds of Jewish life. Among those heard was the ancient shofar (a ritual ram's horn that has been a mainstay in Curran’s music), recordings of the Yemenite Jews praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall (the “Wailing” Wall). Other sounds on the tape included children from Roman Jewish orphanage, recordings of many famous Eastern European cantors sourced from various sound archives. Curran even included sounds from his family. He recorded his young niece singing her Bat Mitzvah prayers and his father singing in Yiddish at a family get-together. Birds, trains, and ship horns make appearances. But throughout it all is the sound of breaking glass. Meanwhile the live chorus is singing fragments from the Renaissance Jewish composers Salomone Rossi from Italy and another named Caceres from a famous Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Curran also used choral fragments from versions of the Jewish liturgy composed Lewandowski and Sulzer in the 19th century. Crystal Psalms is made up of two long sections, 24 minutes, and 29 minutes. tructured in two contiguous sections. In the first there is a ton of percussion created from fallen and thrown objects. Amidst all these heavy sounds he used an 18-voice polyphonic structure to weave an increasingly dense texture from the musical fragments being carried by each "voice". As these fragments repeat the weave is brought ever closer together. In the second part elements from the pre-recorded tape are more apparent. It moves from one moment to the next, one location or place in time before jumping to something else. Curran says, “Here tonal chords are anchored to nothing, innocent children recite their lessons in the midst of raging international chaos.” Idling cars, Yiddish lullaby’s, are separated by glass breaking, and all undergirded by moments on the accordion, organ and fiddles. A familiar melody will quickly disappear when blasted by noise. A solemn choir sings amidst the sound of someone shuffling through the debris. Fog horns drift in and out as telephones go unanswered. The listener with an ear for classical music will recognize bits of Verdi’s “Va Pensiero” turned into a menacing loop. At the end of it all, the cawing of menacing crows, a murder of crows, who have come feed off the destruction. Curran writes of his piece that “There is no guiding text other than the mysterious reccurring sounds of the Hebrew alphabet and the recitation of disconnected numbers in German, so the listeners, like the musicians, are left to navigate in a sea of structured disorder with nothing but blind faith and the clothes on their backs -- survivors of raw sonic history.” The event of the radio broadcast was for Curran a very special moment. In creating it, this experience of human artistic and technological collaboration, existed for him alongside the memory of the inhuman pogrom memorialized on its 50th anniversary. Curran say, “By focusing on this almost incomprehensible moment in our recent history, I do not intend to offer yet another lesson on the Holocaust, but simply wish to make a clear personal musical statement and to solicit a conscious act of remembering -- remembering not only this moment of unparalleled human madness of fifty years ago, but of all crimes against humanity anywhere anytime. Without remembering there is no learning; without learning no remembering. And without remembering and learning there is no survival.” The radio concert was a one off event, never to be performed live again. However recordings from each of the stations involved were made and in 1991 Alvin remixed these into an album. Writing about all of this I’m reminded of something the American folk-singer and storyteller Utah Philips said in regards to memory. “…the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.” Let us remember then, the stories in history, personal or global, we would do well not to repeat and those other stories where people work together towards a common good. Just as this day is the product of all our past actions, so tomorrow will be built on what we do today. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/CrystalPsalmsnotes.html https://nationalsawdust.org/event/mev-musica-elettronica-viva/ Crystal Psalms, New Albion records, 1994 This article originally appeared in the March issue of the Q-Fiver, the newsletter of the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society. Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. Most people who go to see underground music, myself included, are for the most part jaded about the music, the bands, the scene, man. If you’ve been around independent music long enough there is a good chance you’ve frequented the bars, basements and other performance spaces where these bands play. As such playing at these types of venues only reaches the damaged ear drums of those who would have been their anyway. The terminal music junkies and bar flies eager to get their fix of distortion. For bands who are interested in reaching a wider segment of the population and new audiences going on tour isn’t necessarily the answer. Besides, for broke or struggling independent musicians tours are costly and time consuming. Vans filled with a bunch of music freaks who haven’t bathed in a few days, and who get really sweaty on stage when playing the drums, get smelly. Especially when mixed with the smell of half-eaten, carry out burritos. When the local hipsters don’t offer up a pad to crash at, the cost of motel rooms adds up, as do the buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken that grease the wheels and keep the band on the road. As an experiment in media and technology and as a way to get around these problems the pioneering experimental music group Negativland created a phone fidelity device that allowed them to play live music from their home studio into their humble home telephone and broadcast the concert on radio stations all over North America and in England. The Teletour was born. A radio audience is different from those found at the aforementioned hipster venues. They represent a much larger cross-section of the listening public and is a bit closer to the actual reality of the population. The Teletour allowed them to reach an audience who probably never would have stepped into a Negativland show or go to the places they play when they do perform on stage. Their first series of broadcast telephone concert known as the Teletour were performed over a period of two weeks in 1988. In total this consisted of about 20 one-hour concerts from their home studio into various community and college radio stations. Twenty-concerts in two weeks provided a lot of exposure and entertainment to the audiences who heard them. Each of these concerts was transmitted with their homebrewed phone fidelity device. Negativland appeared on the air in about 20 cities, from points as distant as Hawaii and England, all while ensconced in their Bay Area studio. The simple elegance of the idea was received with enthusiasm by the stations and their audiences. The motto for the Teletour was "From Our House to Yours," and summed up all the attractions of bypassing the usual formulas for touring. Most bands touring in the traditional way would have a difficult time playing just one gig a day. Without having to tear down, set up and drive to the next city, a lot of the pressures exerted on touring bands were made moot. Although Negativland has continued to perform live in clubs and other venues (I got to see them at the Southgate House in 2006) the Teletour remains, even all these decades later, a fresh alternative to the over-beaten path of the tour van grind. The Teletour also complimented Negativland’s close relationship with radio work as discussed in last month’s article on their KPFA radio show Over the Edge. I do think the Teletour could be taken up by other musicians and radio stations today who want to continue exploring and refining the technique. The magic of radio reaches into the unique personal space of the listeners own environment. As such the Teletour is well suited to the kind of cerebral levels of thought and stream of consciousness associations evoked by Negativland and other electronic musicians who make heavy use of sampling. For the group, there was also something super appealing about their sounds being carried electrically over the phone and going out over a radio station in some places they may never have even visited in person, to be picked up by the unsuspecting ears of a random listener. This allowed for an element of real immediate and surprise and delight to occur for those who happened to tune across the dial and listen to a kind of radio and music they may have never heard before. The Teletour also allowed Negativland to travel across vast distances at incredible speeds. They were able to jaunt between separate and isolated locations in short amounts of time. During the Teletour they were able to play several different time zones in the same evening. This way of touring also saved them money. The Teletours didn’t cost the band a dime while giving them exposure. The rules they made for Teletouring were simple. Negativland played for free. The receiving radio station only had to pick up the tab for the long-distance phone call. Each show lasted about one hour. Negativland incorporated the station's legal ID into the show so that concerts could continue uninterrupted. They also sent out posters to participating stations in advance to promote the broadcast. All of this evolved from a bit of homebrewed tech that connected their studio mixer to a normal phone line and transmitted the sounds over the line with improved audio fidelity. Phone companies do rent out high-tech and high-fidelity lines for concert transmissions; these are on the whole prohibitively expensive for the kinds of musicians who also have to hold down day jobs. Negativland made our own version. This box was originally built by David Wills (the Weatherman) in connection with Negativland's radio show, Over the Edge as explored last month. When the Weatherman wasn’t at the studio with Don Joyce he would call in to the show. He soon cooked up a method for increasing the fidelity of his call into the station. Don Joyce realized that his phoned-in material had sharpness and clarity different from the other phoned-in material. The Weatherman had hooked the output of a small mixer up to his device, and then to his phone. This setup allowed him to send a variety of sources (cassettes, instruments, microphones, etc.) directly into the phone line with a significantly enhanced frequency range. This phone fidelity device does not exactly produce high fidelity, but it does create a surprising improvement in highs and lows, and provides enough depth for effects such as reverb to work well. Having built the phone fidelity device the Weatherman spread the tech around to several of the other regular callers to OTE. The band eventually realized that it was a no brainer to use this technology to perform over the phone at remote stations as a group. In 1987 they arranged the first experiment with a college station in British Columbia, and about a year later embarked on the first full-scale Teletour. Their record label at the time, SST, set up about 20 concerts at college stations all across the country to occur over a two week period. They also arranged one concert for the BBC outlet in Sussex, England. Negativland found the Teletour to be an entirely positive experience. Playing live anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat with few expenses seems like a great idea for independent bands but for some reason it hasn’t caught on. If you would like to experiment with this little piece of empowering technology, the plans are included here, as Negativland has freely distributed these the past three decades. I think it is time for today’s independent musicians to coordinate some air time with community and college or even shortwave radio stations and bring the Teletour back to life. How To Build A Phone Fidelity Device by Negativland The parts listed here have Radio Shack catalog numbers… I’m sure anyone who wants to build this can find their equivalent. Parts list: Audio Isolation Transformer with 1:1 turns ratio, 600 ohm impendance ($3.99, Radio Shack Cat. # 273-1374) 1/4" Phono jack ($1.99 for 2, Radio Shack Cat. # 274-155C) OR RCA-style phono plugs ($2.19 for 4, Radio Shack Cat. # 274-384) Modular Dual Jack Extension Cord ($6.99, Radio Shack Cat. # 279-363) OR 2-outlet Modular Adaptor ($4.79, Radio Shack Cat. # 279-357) Modular-to-spade 12" line cord ($1.99, Radio Shack Cat. # 279-391) OPTIONAL: Telephone wiring box ($6.99, Radio Shack Cat. # 279-343) OR Wall mounting box ($1.99, Radio Shack Cat. # 279-341) How to build the device: Plug the male end of the Dual Jack Extension cord into a wall phone jack. (You can also use a 2-outlet Modular Adaptor.) Plug a standard phone into one jack on the Dual Jack Extension Cord, and plug the Modular-to-Spade Line cord into the other jack. The Modular-to-Spade Line Cord should have four wires: yellow, black, red, and green. Put tape on the ends of the yellow and black wires, as these are not needed. Connect the red wire to the red wire from the Audio Isolation Transformer, and connect the green wire to the yellow wire from the the Audio Isolation Transformer. (No need to solder, just make sure the wires are attached securely, e.g. with alligator clips if you don't know how to solder.) Connect the black and white wires from the Audio Isolation Transformer to the terminals on the 1/4" phono plug (it doesn't matter which wire goes to which terminal.) (You can also use an RCA-style plug, depending on the type of wire coming from the output of the mixer or stereo.) Again, there is no need to solder necessarily. Now plug a mono output line from the mixer or stereo into the phono jack, and you are ready to go! (You can also use a tape deck or CD player as sound input.) OPTIONAL: Since your device might be fragile (particularly if you did not solder the connections) you may wish to place the core of the setup inside of a box of some sort. I use a Telephone Wiring Box. This also has little screws and posts inside which I use to secure connections. How to operate the device: When you are calling into the radio, the trick is to use the telephone line ONLY FOR SOUND INPUT, NOT for listening to the radio. Therefore, you should put headphones on which are plugged into the radio to listen to yourself when you are on the air. Unplug the Modular-to-Spade Line Cord from the Dual Jack, so that only the telephone is plugged into the Dual Jack. You should get a dial tone when you pick up the phone. Using the telephone plugged into the Dual Jack, dial the number you want to call. When you hear that the other end's phone is ringing, plug the Modular-to- Spade Line Cord back into the Dual Jack. Once the device is reconnected, try outputting sound from your mixer. You should be able to hear the sound by listening to the telephone which is connected to the other side of the Dual Jack. If you hear sound, you should hang up the phone, put on your headphones, and wait until you are on the air. (When you hang up the phone, the line will NOT be disconnected, as you still have a line running into the other jack which is acting as a phone itself. If you do not hang up the phone, the device will still work, but the signal may not be as strong.) If you do not hear sound through the telephone, your device is probably not connected properly. When you are done, make sure you unplug the Modular-to-Spade Line Cord from the Dual Jack. Otherwise, the line will remain connected, just as if you left the phone off the hook. TIPS: Once you get on the air, try adjusting the level and EQ on your sound. You want to be loud enough to be heard, but not so loud that you are distorted or drowning out the ambient sound. You should realize that you are going to lose a lot of the sound at lower frequencies. You can boost the bass on your mixer/stereo, but still be aware that low-frequency sounds are not going to come out very clearly. Mid and high frequency sounds (under about 15 kHz) tend to come out best. IF YOU WANT TO GO IN STEREO, you need two phone lines, and two devices as above. Then you need to get both lines on the air at once! I use a computer with automatic-dialing software to make it easier to get through. Good luck, and have fun! This article originally appeared in the January edition of the Q-Fiver:
http://ohkyin.org/docs/qfiver/2020/January/Q-Fiver-Jan20.pdf Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. Financial distress and its attendant challenges in the coming Long Descent will cause a lot of people to scramble to meet their needs. Clothing is one of those needs. Most humans like to look good and feel good about themselves and others. Dressing smartly with the resources available is one to create a sense of control in your life. In a world with tight restrictions of income, expressing yourself in the way you dress is one way to be poor with style. Recently on the Ecosophia blog and here on the Green Wizards website the topic of “Being poor with style” has come into discussion. What does being poor with style mean? To me it directly relates to the LESS equation outlined by John Michael Greer in his book Blood of the Earth where LESS stands for Less Energy Stuff and Stimulation. The word style itself has one origin in the word stylus, the tool engravers would use to render drawings and texts. So style is something a person can read or see; style is an aesthetic impression on the senses, primarily visual. In the modern western sense style almost exclusively has to do with how a person dresses and how they decorate their home. So for the Green Wizard who has adopted a “down home” approach to their work being poor with style is an appropriate response to the crisis of our time. This response brings together a personal sense of aesthetics in living that emphasizes cutting back on having a huge wardrobe, unnecessary plastic junk and clutter in the home, while having entertainment that stimulates the imagination rather than wrecking and distorting it, all while curbing energy consumption. All of these things can be done in different ways, all while still looking good and being presentable. Though style does encompass home décor that will be looked at in a future article; here we will be looking at the world of clothing and dress. A Green Wizard could be anyone, anywhere. The practical knowledge of systems thinking, appropriate tech skills, and the entire corpus of ecotechnic knowledge can be stored within any human vessel no matter their size, shape or exterior look. Nor does it matter what clothes are draped over the physical form in question. A bag lady shuffling down broken sidewalks with her shopping cart may contain within her a vast library of knowledge on how to survive through scavenging and skill. She is practiced in living outside the system and on the fringes of acceptable society. She knows how to get by under harsh conditions and could be a teacher to someone who has never been thrust into that situation. The woman in the smart business suit seen on the bus ride home from downtown may be going back to her own urban household where she tinkers with solar water heating systems, wood stoves, and backyard rabbit hatches, turnip patches, all while brewing beer in her bicycle garage. The welder or construction worker in his heavy Carhartt or Dickey’s clothes may have a system in place to heat his home by burning used motor oil and thereby cut their cost and reliance on the commercial energy grid. These Green Wizards may all be in different social classes but they are Green Wizards just the same. Being a Green Wizard is determined by what a person does and knows more than how they look, or even what they may do to earn a living in the financial system, in as much as they are still a part of that system. Yet there might be some advantages to adopting a Green Wizard dress code of sorts, of learning how to be stylish on the cheap. There is some truth in the saying “clothes make the man” –or woman—and depending on what your goals as a person and Green Wizard are, a certain way of dressing may further or inhibit the accomplishment of those goals. Aside from the practical considerations of appropriate clothing for the labors and weather of the day, there is also the matter of dressing to conform or rebel against the normative standards imposed by society. Peak oil writer and financial collapse commentator James Howard Kunstler has been a devout critic of the standard dress of the typical American male. In particular he has criticized the slovenly look of fat men in cargo shorts wearing leftover t-shirt’s with corporate logos or something that says, “I love cornhole” or “I’m with stupid” –effectively announcing their own stupidity and making it easier for the rest of us to know they aren’t the kind of person we prefer to hang out with. Back in 2011 James wrote, “Europe is arguably worse off money-wise, more broke, flimsier, crapped out, crippled, and paralyzed. Sad, because in outward appearance Europe is – how shall I put this? – better turned out than America. Europe is a fit, silver-haired gentleman in a sleek Italian suit and a pair of Michael Toschi swing lace wingtips, holding a serious-looking Chiarugi leather briefcase. America is pear-shaped blob of semi-formed male flesh, in ankle-length cargo shorts, a black T-shirt featuring skull motifs, tattoos randomly assigned (as if by lottery) to visible flesh, a Sluggo buzz-cut, and a low-rider sports cap designed to make your head look flat. In other words, he lacks a certain savoir-faire compared to his European cousin. But both are broke. Neither has any idea what he will do next – though, for the American, it will probably involve the ingestion of melted cheese or drugs (or both). When the European collapses, a certain air of delicacy will attend his demise; the expired American will go up in flames in a trailer and they’ll have to sort out his remains from the melted goop of his dwelling-place with a front-end loader.” [https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the_amazing_dissolving_nation/] He goes deeper into the subject on an episode of his podcast where he discusses tattoos. “He thinks the fierce looking tattoos on young Americas are actually a sign of how deeply insecure we are as a nation. They’re also a form of ‘non-conformist-just-like-you’ consumerism… hip hop costuming… has invaded the mainstream and has made young men look like oversized babies and violent clowns.” [ https://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast_29_tattoos/ ] Kunstler also took up this theme in his World Made By Hand novels where the religious group that came to his fictional town of Union Grove set up a haberdashery and homemade clothing store. American’s used to have a grand style copied by other countries all around the world. So how did we get so sloppy? How can it be that we do not care enough about how we look that we walk around in public wearing little more than undergarments? It seems certain sectors of America have adapted to being poor, but have forgotten how to do it with style. (I also do have sympathy and understanding for those people whose choices in clothing are predicated on first having enough money to buy a meal. I also understand the modern primitive movement and how getting tattooed can help you belong to a modern tribe –or gang.) I of course respect a person’s right to choose how to dress as they please, because in the end, it’s really none of my business. Yet in America today it seems that people have often forgot that one of the purposes of dressing in a stylish way is to please others. The way you look can be a source of delight for the people who encounter you. Founding father Benjamin Franklin said, “Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.” Brett McKay the editor and main author at the Art of Manliness website wrote, “There are many ways that dressing well will benefit you personally. When you look sharp, you feel better about yourself, make a great first impression, and interact with others more confidently, all of which helps you build relationships and become a more influential man. Research shows that when people perceive you as more attractive, they assume other positive qualities about you as well (the so-called ‘halo effect’), and even find you more persuasive. One’s style is also simply a chance to express one’s personality and taste. While dressing well can thus be self-serving (and there’s nothing wrong with that), there are also more altruistic reasons to care about one’s appearance. Dressing for other people can in fact be just as, or an even more compelling, reason to do so. The idea of dressing for others is not likely to strike the modern mind very agreeably. As we pride ourselves on believing we are individualists, who don’t care what anyone else thinks, the idea of choosing clothes with reference to other people may smack of conformity. But when I speak of ‘dressing for others,’ I do not have in mind acquiescence to societal codes (which hardly still exist), where the end is merely fitting in. Rather, I am forwarding an idea of dressing well as a freely chosen service — a gift one willingly gives to others.” [This applies as much to woman as men. The full article can be found here: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/dressing-for-others/ ] In a society undergoing the painful process of collapse, the added touches of dressing well, and doing so cheaply, could be a nice touch that uplifts the individual and the people around them, helping them to live a flourishing life even as we deal with problems, challenges and predicaments. Even for those of us on the strictest of budgets could afford to have a bit more sartorial flair. It might also be possible to spread the Green Wizard meme through what I will now call “appropriate aesthetics”. What might appropriate aesthetics look like? I think for a start bioregional and economic considerations would come into play. Certain ways of dressing would be more suitable in some physical environments than others. The avoidance of man-made materials is also a consideration. Wearing plastic is hardly green. Maybe through the creation of an appropriate aesthetic it could also come to be seen as tacky. The style of punk rockers and hippie earth muffin types might also inform the look or at least the philosophy. Maybe not by what is worn, per se, but by where it comes from: Thrift stores, free benches, clothing swaps, etc. 70-75% of my own clothing comes from second hand sources. Shirts, sweaters and jackets are the easiest things to come by in thrift stores or as hand me downs. I’ve had less luck with jeans and pants in the right size but still do find some at the thrift store. The main things to buy new are socks, underwear and some shoes. A good pair of boots and a good pair of dress shoes could last decades if taken care of. The dress shoes may only be worn a few times a year for funerals, weddings and other special occasions such as job interviews. The boots if you get a good enough pair may be more of an investment, but can be re-soled when the time comes, and last just as long. I still have the same pair of nice leather dress shoes I bought sixteen years ago and expect them to continue to last. Dressing from what is found at the thrift store can also be ethical. It is one way to curb participation in buying new material that was made by people in sweat shops. When you buy at the thrift store you also help to keep some folks from the lower and underprivileged classes employed. And as Green Wizards know it is also a way to save our own funds while enjoying the flows cast off by others. Then you can use some of the money you saved to buy new products that are American made or created in the local economy by a small artisan. As the economy goes through its inevitable gasps, flits, and starts now is a good time to build a wardrobe that will last and serve your goals. So gather up the family and head on over to the local thrift shop, St. Vincent De Paul, Goodwill or other charity and see what strikes your fancy. It’s easier than you think to look good on the cheap. In doing so you might just give your own sense of well being a boost and bring some joy to others. ANOTHER POSSIBILITY Radio is a form of technological high magic. There is something inherent about the radio medium itself that by way of its magic stimulates the imagination; whether it’s a bit of long distance DX captured on the ham bands, tuning in to a remote shortwave station via another remote web SDR, a weekly net on 2 meters, or a broadcast transmission on a community FM station doesn’t matter. All these different ways of using radio share in the mystery. For broadcast radio itself, it is a literal theater of the imagination. Voices, sounds, and music edited together in a pleasing or thought provoking way have transport the listener to a region accessible no other way. Thinking of all the possibilities radio has it is a real shame that broadcasting in its commercial aspect long ago fell into such a well-worn, predictable and boring rut. The songs heard on the air when tuning across the dial have been played so many times there are almost no grooves left on the records. Talk radio is also not exempt. No matter what a person’s political persuasion may be, pundits on both sides of the aisle trot out the same plodding talking points time and again, no matter the issue at hand. It often makes me wonder what the heck the point of all the uninspired and placid propaganda blasted across the spectrum actually is; maybe it’s just a form of anti-thought to occupy the minds of hungry commuters and consumers. Broadcast radio can be so much more than what it has become. And to be fair, there is a lot out there in the ether that breaks the mold and stranglehold put on the medium by commercial interests and market forces. To find these programs, you have to dig them out of the mud, and tune around to alternate frequencies. You have to search out the community stations, the low-power stations, and even the pirate stations, namely those stations not beholden to mammon, to find programs that are willing to break the self-inflicted format categories typical of commercial radio and take you over the edge into territories that have remained largely unexplored on the air. These outlier shows are able to take risks that move the form forward without fear of reprisal. No one is paying them to be taste shapers by playing particular songs and they have no one to offend when exercising their freedom of speech because there are no image sensitive sponsors paying the bills at these stations. The next several articles in the Rad Lab will be concerned with the arts of transmission and the way innovators in broadcast radio have advanced the medium to show what it is really capable of moving beyond the narrow bandwidth imposed by advertising. OVER THE EDGE One such show holds the record for being the longest running block of free-form audio collage in the history of radio. The show is Over the Edge (OTE) on KPFA in Berkely, California. It was hosted by Don Joyce, a member of the experimental group Negativland, from 1981 until his death in 2015. The radio show and the band had close ties and there was a lot of overlap between the show, and the band, with many of the members frequently participating in the program making it hard to talk about the show without delving into the band. Negativland started in 1979 and though Joyce was a full performer and credited member he started OTE before he had met or been asked to join the band. The group was not the show and the show was not the group. It was however a match made in Contra Costa County due to the passion the original line-up had for found sound, collage and experimental music. Joyce’s own enthusiasm in those areas made the fusion of Joyce with Negativland a force multiplier for their many activities and gave them regular access to the very media they sought to rearrange. Since its beginning in 1981 OTE and Don Joyce stood far from the maddening crowd. It was a time when TV had killed the radio star. The glass teat had reached a point of ascendancy as the main cultural medium and influencer. Cable TV upended this even further and soon MTV positioned itself as the primary pusher of music and youth culture. It didn’t stop Don Joyce however (his initials are DJ after all). Though trained as a painter with a Masters degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, he loved the radio medium, from old time radio to offshore pirates. His favorite radio show was Bob and Ray and he was also inspired and influenced by the work Firesign Theater. Out of this love he was able to create such a large body of work that other radio producers, DJs and programmers, have long been left in the dust. Many can only hope to catch up with his prowess and acumen. Over the Edge is a live mix of collaged audio material sourced from all across recorded media: records, tapes, and CDs and not just music but audiobooks, lectures, self-help cassettes, recordings of other radio shows, sound bites from film and TV, homemade recordings and everything and anything else imaginable. Alongside these Don Joyce and Negativland made many specially prepared recordings for the program, wrote scripts and performed skits on the air. It could have all been just a mess of noise if not for the guiding hands of Don Joyce at the helm. Each week to guide the course of the three-to-five hour over-night show Don would have a theme. The audio samples were all related to and congealed and coalesced around the subject matter. This sometimes makes listening to an episode of the show like attending a lecture with many alternating viewpoints approaching the same subject from different angles. The source material itself was edited and mixed in such a way that it often sounded as if it was commenting on the other source material in the mix. Alongside the themes Don would play a variety of different characters as hosts of the show with many Negativland members also playing or being recurring characters. Part of this aspect came from the strong influence of Bob and Ray and Firesign Theater. These included cultural critic and director of stylistic premonitions Crosley Bendix, Dr. Oslo Norway, the media and radio historian Izzy Isn’t, and the tycoon founder of the Universal Media Netweb C. Elliot Friday. Other characters played by other Negativland members included the used car salesman Dick Goodbody, Dick Vaughn, a fan of underappreciated 1970’s music, the Weatherman and the Clorox Cowboy, among a slew of others. Here is how Don described the show himself. "OTE's weekly themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment used to do live sound cut ups and collage while mixing, including the frequent use of the now long dead analog technology of radio broadcast cart machines. On each themed episode of OTE there is a plan and there is no plan. Existing within the parallel universe of the Universal Media Netweb, the OTE mix consists of found sounds of many kinds from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses, along with live electronics (often from our Boopers [a homemade sound device built by the Weatherman from repurposed transitor radios and oscillators, ed.]), live sound processing, and all sorts of reccuring themes, topics and characters. Some of the shows involve all of Negativland, while some involve others outside of our group who participate semi-regularly. Beyond those, there are regular solo show broadcasts by Negativland member Don Joyce, who is the FCC license holder and responsible for filling the radio slot each week. All in all, if you like Negativland, you will like these shows, no matter who is involved, as they all maintain a ‘Negativ’ touch based on our live mixing techniques. OTE often employs ‘Receptacle Programming,’ which means you. Phone callers are punched into our mix with no warning. Call 510-848-4425 to deposit your programming. When your phone stops ringing, you’re on the air. Don’t say 'hello'." The receptacle aspect of the show added to the interest level of the listeners and made it a participatory program. Regular listeners became regular participants helping to co-create the show. They called in to and play their own samples and music into the receptacle of the radio. This level of audience participation in radio had never been done in quite that way on the air anywhere else. The phone calls into the studio gave the show an element that was unpredictable even to Don. With multiple lines coming in several callers could be on the air together at once. Don would add echo effects to their voices and otherwise mess with their sound, panning some to left and others to the right. If he didn’t like what a caller was adding to the mix he just hung up on them. This aspect of the show created a real sense of community around OTE. In some ways the receptacle radio aspect was like a weekly ham radio net, albeit with different FCC regulations and a totally different feel, but similar in that it was a group of people communicating over the air, just using phones. In that respect it was also similar to the chat rooms or party lines phone phreaks used to hang out and talk to each other on, yet different. Being in Berkeley, it should come as no surprise that it took on some of the character of the California counterculture as well as some of the character of the kind of people who stayed up real late at night to listen to free form radio. One word characterizes this motley crew radio freaks: creativity. All of this might sound just a tad chaotic, and it was. Yet students of chaos theory have long known that there is an underlying pattern, a blueprint of order within what might otherwise appear to be random. The untrained ear may hear the swirling debris and detritus culled and recycled from the mediasphere as unconnected, but careful listening reveals a constellation carefully stitched together across the duration of the broadcast. Perceiving this pattern requires a kind of relaxed concentration. The reward for engaging with OTE at this level goes beyond its inherent entertainment value and into the realm of an education on whatever theme or topic Don Joyce had picked for the particular episode. He was the conductor and directed the flow and course of the mix, all the while allowing others to interact with it by dialing into the receptacle. Don Joyce was a master of the combinatorial art. He had a unique talent for teasing out permutations from a wide variety of sources, arriving at an eventual synthesis and amalgamation. His canvas was the radio and his vast pallet was a gargantuan library of all the media he collected over his life. On OTE he showed again and again that all media concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple sound bites, just as words are combinations of letters. He was able to express both truth and absurdity, and the absurdity in truth, via the appropriate recombination of sounds and words, which he in turn decomposed into strange ideas and new ways of thinking by their unusual juxtapositions. Through the use of artistic intuition his combinations exposed hidden logics. Some of the themes he tackled over the years spanned more than one show and included long series of shows on How Radio Was Done (a history of broadcasting from its first days into the 90’s), How Radio Isn’t Done (all the things we could do but mostly don’t), UFOs, the Universe, All Art Radio, the Time Zones Exchange Project, Advertising Secrets, Music Is…, the Fake Bacon Breakfast Loop… and many, many others. Don Joyce lived a simplified life. He had a minimal income and spent his time creating a free radio show that was on a non-commercial station for which he did not get paid in financial dividends. The band Negativland had never been something that earned a lot of money either. Both were labors of love and gave back other rewards. Joyce died of heart failure in Oakland, California on July 22, 2015 at the age of 71. He was cremated, and the band packaged two grams of his remains with the first 1000 CD copies of Negativland's 2016 album The Cutting Edge Vol. 9: The Chopping Channel. 750 of his O.T.E. and live show Fidelipac audio carts were also sent along with those ashes. Don's remains became a viral story on the internet. It was the way he would have wanted to be remembered. Don Joyce left behind 941 three-to-five-hour-long episodes of OTE from his own personal air checks. That's over 3200 hours of live radio he recorded. Some of the early shows of OTE are still missing, but exist out there somewhere, in the memory of the eternal ether. The Internet Archive has graciously hosted all of the extant recordings of the program. These are available to listen to here: https://archive.org/details/ote
And even though Don is gone Over The Edge and Receptacle Programming continues to exist, evolve, and is still broadcasting each week on KPFA FM. Musician and latter day Negativland member Wobbly (John Leidecker) took over the reign of the program after Don’s death. Wobbly had been a frequent guest and participant on so many OTE shows it was a natural fit. OTE lives on in a new era. At the end of each show Don would play a sample of a woman reading a quote attributed to surrealist artist Man Ray, "To create is divine. To reproduce is human." The quote sums up Joyce’s approach to making radio art. He reproduced, retouched, reexamined, retransmitted the mass produced material our media saturated society threw by the wayside. It may not have been divine, but in doing so he touched and humored our humanity. SOURCES: https://archive.org/details/ote?tab=about https://blog.sfgate.com/loaded/2015/07/23/don-joyce-radio-maverick-and-member-of-negativla nd-dies-at-71/ https://www.negativland.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Joyce_(musician) |
Justin Patrick MooreAuthor of The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music. Archives
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