Women in Electronic Music 1977

New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition part 4

​It’s hard enough to be a composer. Have you ever tried writing music down on paper from your head and then finding, and asking, a bunch of highly trained and skilled musicians to play the stuff you heard inside your head? The opportunities to write a symphony or chamber work were there- finding the opportunity to get it performed and played, another matter all together. It was hard enough to do this as a man. If you happened to be female, well, the opportunities were even fewer.

Electronic music offered a workaround for this. It was in part why so many composers got into the electronic music game. Sure, equipment could be scarce or expensive, but at its most basic, the tape machines, a composer could still get to work crafting their own material. It was also part of the reason many women composers in the 20th century took to electronics: it was a way to bypass the barriers to entry and just start making what they wanted. Many of these works ended up being for recorded media, as well as being intermedia.

In this post I am going to look at just one album, a compilation, and introduce some of the wonderful women composers. Consider these some of the founding mothers of electronic music in America. The album is called Women in Electronic Music 1977, but it has the prominent subtitle, New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media.

As Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the original liner notes, “The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely ‘electronic’ (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid Fifties and the late Sixties. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the ‘academic’ avant-garde.”

By combining mediums and genres, the work here is often healing, humorous, thought provoking, and at times transcendent. Megan Roberts work takes in the world of rock music, lending an entry point for listeners unused to the sometimes uncompromising sound worlds associated with experimental music. Laurie Anderson’s emphasis on poetic narrative gives listeners a net of words to latch onto in the sonic sea of miasmic bliss. Other pieces range from sinewave meditations to exploratory field recordings.
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The entire album is a snapshot of an important and fertile time in the arts. Looking at what other women artists were doing around the same time gives something of the flavor of the era. Joanna Russ had just published her science fiction novel The Female Man in 1975. It’s a tale following the parallel lives of four women in universes parallel. Each world has different ideas and notions about gender roles and shows how those societies operate according to those roles. In 1978, Russ came out wit her short novel, We Who Are About To… Camouflaged into the typical survival story of a group of spacer astronauts colonizing a new world, is a story of what happens when long-term survival is threatened. The men think the only way to continue is to impregnate the unnamed narrator. As the tensions build, she reaches the point where she has to defend herself against rape, and kills the men, before going hungry, and ultimately (spoilers) ending her own life. A lot of critics panned the book at the time, but Samuel R. Delany, whose critical imagination is itself unparalleled, suggested in his introduction to a new edition that the book was “a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,” and that “Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.” (Emphasis mine.) Being itself gives its own meaning to life.

Kathy Acker

​The 1970s also saw Kathy Acker’s literary rise that would culminate in the 1980s. Acker was a experimental novelist who was as transgressive in her words as was Delany. She made extensive use of her own biographical material, and sent it spinning through a centrifuge of cut-up techniques and other ways of working with words as she grappled with sexuality, trauma, language, identity, and an ever-simmering rebellion.

Kathy Acker

​In the visual arts Cindy Sherman was shaking things up with her photography, and she herself was the subject of much of those photos. Transformation was the name of the game, and she transformed herself continually, shedding her skin like a snake through the use of makeup, prosthetics, wigs, ornate costumes and elaborate sets. At the center of these transformations was the detournement of an array of female stereotypes culled from popular culture and history.

The sounds heard on this album can be thought of as a corollary to these other kind of avantgarde and artistic activity in other media, and they are all from women pioneering their own paths in the last decade before the Reaganomic nightmare unfurled.

I continue to find inspiration in the works of artists such as these. Yet there are many amazing women electronic musicians working right now. That’s why I want to tell you about this year’s Oram Awards. The awards were named after the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. The award exists as “a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.” For details on how to submit your music check out oramawards.com You will have until July 19th to get something in, and you don’t have to be any previously released music or work.

THE SPECULATIVE SPHERES OF JOHANA M. BEYER

One of the charges that gets leveled against the kind of music often made by avantgarde composers is that it is too academic. That no one outside the academy has any use for listening to such “music,” that it is all just stuff for the brain and little for the heart and emotions that music has so long sought to stir.
Music will forever stimulate the heart and music, but tastes vary, and not all music stirs people the same way. Some music was designed to stimulate the intellect, the mental body, and this is as valid as popular love ballads and dance floor hits.

Some music will forever be speculative. According to composer Phil Legard, “speculative music combines metaphysics, cosmology and acoustic science to relate harmonics and tuning to the music of the spheres, and the moral qualities which those spheres were believed to affect in men and women.” While speculative music has its origins in ancient times and millennia past, the appeal of speculative music for composers and listeners has never disappeared, even if its appeal is a minority taste.
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Speculative music appears on this compilation album showcasing the contributions women composers have made to the ars electronica, because even in the age of the machine, musicians have never stopped turning their ears to the music of the spheres. In the opening piece on this album Johanna M. Beyer tunes into the cosmic celestial movements in the heavens above us.

It is fitting that her 1938 composition starts off the album. It is one of the first known works scored for electronic music written by a female composer.

Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1888 but emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the late 1920s or early thirties. She was a pianist but in 1934 she took the percussion class that one of the ubermensch of American experimentalism, Henry Cowell, taught at the New School for Social Research, aka, the University in Exile, aka The New School University.

The New School was a very experimental social milieu indeed. It was founded in 1919 by a group of grouch, dissatisfied intellectuals who were sick of the bulbous bureaucracy and blasted biliousness of so-called higher ed in America. Among its luminary instigators were John Dewey, Thorstein Velben, and Charles Beard. It started off as a night-school where lectures could be taken in for a modest fee. Since the New School was not in the business of handing out degrees, they were free to dispense with any kind of admission requirement. In places such as these adventurous music teachers could teach a curriculum of their own calibration.

Beyer had a very close friendship with Cowell, perhaps a romantically intimate relationship, but her life was intertwined with others reveling in the modernism of those past times. She knew John Cage, theosophist Dane Rudhyar, and the folklorist and musicologist John Seeger, his wife, the ultramodernist native Ohioan, Ruth Crawford.

Charles and Ruth had a daughter, Peggy Seeger, and some guy named Pete. Their family was significantly involved in the folk music revival. Ruth had worked closely with John and Alan Lomax, and Peggy went on to marry British folknik Ewan MacColl. In a roundabout way all of this tangential information leads us to the contribution Laurie Spiegel made on the Women in Electronic Music Album.

LAURIE SPIEGELS FOLKSY GROOVE

Spiegel was one of the key composers exploring the new frontiers of science and music at Bell Labs was Laurie Spiegel. The year was 1973, and at age twenty-eight she was already an accomplished musician with a restless curiosity when she started working with the GROOVE interactive compositional soft-ware. Having honed her skill and ability through scholarly devotion to musical practice and study, she was the kind of person who could see the creative potential in the new tools the facility was creating and make something timeless.
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This compilation features the first movement of her Appalachian Grove, made like much of her other early electronic output at Bell Labs. The piece here is built around folk harmonies and shows how electronic music can also be folk music, parsing out themes as pastoral and rural even with the use of machines.

​Like many musicians before her, Laurie Spiegel had been fascinated by the Pythagorean dream of a music of the spheres. When she set about turning Kepler’s speculative seventeenth century composition into music, she had no idea her music would actually be traveling through the spheres. Putting forth Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, Harmonices Mundi was based on the varying speeds of orbit of the planets around the sun. He wanted to be able to hear “the celestial music that only God could hear,” as Spiegel said, continuing, “Kepler had written down his instructions but it had not been possible to actually turn it into sound at that time. But now we had the technology. So I programmed the astronomical data into the computer, told it how to play it, and it just ran.” Her realization of Johann Kepler’s Harmoni Mundi, a cut of which is featured on the Golden Record sent into outer-space on the unmanned Voyager exploratory craft.

(I have explored Spiegel’s work in further detail in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.)

IN THE FLUX WITH ANNEA LOCKWOOD

If all roads lead to fluxus, it should be no surprise to find those who have a connection to Fluxus on this album as well. Annea Lockwood is the one to represent. It makes sense that Fluxus would leave behind a trace of inspiration here. On this record the idea of electronic music is considered as a medium, but it is just one media among many, and many of the people documented were inspired to combine media with the electronic music. Indeed, this can be one of the effects of electronic music in general. Electronic music is a malleable medium, built up from electrons and shaping of sound waves, as such it is relatively easy to mix and combine it with other mediums. So much so, electronic sounds have become the background music of our time.

Lockwood was born in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1939, moved to England in the beginning of the sixties where she studied at the Royal College of Music, and attended the legendary Darmstadt course, and completed her studies at Cologne, stomping ground of Karlheinz Stockhausen. She took courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig, who was at the head of the WDR Electronic Music Studio. Lockwood was very hip to what was going on back in the states, though too, and felt a kinship with the people who had put together the ONCE Festival (Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley) and those who later became the Sonic Arts Union (Mumma, Ashley, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier) as well as Pauline Oliveros.

In 1973 composer Ruth Anderson (see below) invited her to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, and so Lockwood moved to the United States. During the sixties she worked on the Glass Concerts.

During the late 1960s, Lockwood created works such as the Glass Concerts, and audio-visual performance work for amplified glass that exuded otherworldly timbres. My first introduction to her music was a recording of the A Sound Map of the Hudson River, made from extensive field recordings along different locations of that great body of water.

Perhaps her most fluxus feeling work is the series of Piano Transplants she did between 1969-82. She had been inspired by the work of cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard who pioneered the realm of heart transplants. For her work, she took broken down and disused pianos and further burned, drowned, beached and planted them in an English garden. Pianos continue to be burned around the globe as part of the adjacent Piano Burning work.

In the seventies she started to get deeper into the possibilities of field recording. Lawrence English, who reissued the late 1975 work World Rhythms for his Room40 label, an excerpt of which is featured on this comp, put it this way: “It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was.

World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into the world, and beyond. It expanded outward from many of the compositions and themes Annea Lockwood had been exploring since the 1960s. It sought to take those learnings and apply them to a new set of terrains and circumstances. Moreover, it suggested a sensing of sound that was drawn from profound curiosity, matched only by patience.”
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That sense of patient, slow, deep listening is reflected throughout her work. In 2016 she created a tribute Pauline Oliveros, a graphic score called “Bayouborne, for Pauline” that maps six of the converging bayous around Houston, Texas, the birthplace of Oliveros.

THE SIDEBAND BUTTERFLYS OF PAULINE OLIVEROS
Pauline Oliveros is another artist featured on this compilation. How could she not be? Her influence remains pervasive across the field of improvisation, electronic music and her own efforts at establishing the practice of deep listening, continues to inspire new generations of sound explorers.
As I mentioned in one of the recent pieces I wrote on her work, this piece, “Bye Bye Butterfly” was my first introduction to her work, and the creative use of sideband technique in audio, still blows me away every time I listen.

(Read my other articles on Pauline Oliveros:  A Deep Listening Starter Pack and Slowing Down, Listening Deep)

THE ELECTROACOUSTIC PUNK OF MEGAN ROBERTS

The burgeoning punk ethos of the seventies and the legacy of rock and roll gave Megan Roberts one strand of her inspiration. She married that with electroacoustics, creating an experimental work that also has a touchstone in the world of semi-popular culture.

“I Could Sit Here all Day” is full of aggressive wailing and screaming. It’s best played with the volume cranked to eleven. There is a raw, ritualistic feeling to it, just like there is to the primitive convulsions and gyrations of punk. We can see in her a parallel to that of Diamanda Galas.

Roberts was born in New York on October 12th of 1952, and then moved to California while still a baby. Decades later she was studying under Robert Ashley at Mills College in Oakland where the experimental scene was in full flux. There it was all about multimedia exploration in the realms of audio, video, dance and theater, melting into that swirling chaos, the decadent and primal rhythms of rock and rolls tribal beat.

In 1976 she had created a work using unichore- ovideoelectrobiosonics called “Suite for a Small Chamber.” What is a unichore? It is a kind of dance choreography where the body movements of the dancer are wired to electronic devices to trigger synthesizers and tape-loops. The ovideoelectrobiosonics is reference to her work combining bird and animal sounds, live audio and video feeds, along with other biological elements. “Factory” is a video she made that came out in 1976, and for this piece she utilizes the technique of strobosonic photophonos-copy. In other words, it’s a percussion piece where ultra-fast cuts from one image to another. The colors and motion map onto sound as rhythm and timbre. The work recalls the film Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Léger and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy that set the music of George Antheil into a Dadaist centrifuge.
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“I Could Sit Here All Day” is scored for birds, drums, and disembodied human voices, and is a descent into preterhuman realms of consciousness.

ON POINT WITH RUTH ANDERSON
Evelyn Ruth Anderson was born in Kalispell, Montana on the spring equinox in 1928. She spent two decades studying music. Among her teachers were the legendary Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud, whose modernist influences extended vastly. She also hung out at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where she studied under Vladimir Ussachevsky. Among her paying gigs she worked as an arranger for NBC-TV, doing compositions for their programs, and later worked for the Lincoln Center Theater. Artists got to eat.
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Her collage piece SUM (State of the Union Message) is included on the Lesbian American Composers collection, issued by the label CRI (Composers Recordings Incorporated -many of the titles by this label later got swooped up by New World Records to keep them in print).

​SUM is a masterclass in commercial audio collage on her piece “SUM.” It is literally commercial, because its source material is made entirely from commercials. In this piece you can hear such wonderful juxtapositions as “America’s favorite snack: Geritol.” Supposedly it also mimics a speech given by Richard Nixon. This is a precursor to the willfully disdainful and humorous works of people like Wayne Butane. DUMP is another one in the same vein, both from 1970.

Points is quite different from these collage works, and is a minimalist drone piece using pure sine tones. From an electronic point of view, these are the building blocks of all sound. The person who crafts with sine tones crafts their own sonic universe, and she was such a craftswoman. She died in 2019 shortly after she approved the test pressings for an LP of her work, entitled Here. The record was put out by Arc Light Editions in February 2020.

THE VIRAL NARRATIVES OF LAURIE ANDERSON

The last two pieces on the album are from another Anderson, this time Laurie Anderson. More than anyone else on the album, she has made her imprint further into popular culture. Like David Bowie, and her late husband Lou Reed, she embraced the androgynous, and played roles in her performance art where androgyny was showcased.

​Again, she has worked across the multimedia spectrum. Born in 1947, her early artistic training started with the violin and sculpture. Her recorded work and performances have focused on the poetic power of language, electronic technology as artistic tools, and idiosyncratic use of visual imagery.
This album features two of her early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go.”

n the 1980s she catalpulted out of the insular art worlds and into expanded public consciousness through her UK chart hitting single “O Superman,” part of her larger expansive work United States Live, though it was featured on her debut album Big Science. United States Live can be considered as her early magnum opus (others would follow). Through spoken word, animated vignettes, and performance art and strange sounds she gives her impressions about the vagaries of life life in the United States.
Thus Anderson can be seen as completing this electronic circuit of American music. Her concert film Home of the Brave would come out in 1986. Her unique voice and interpretation of the American spirit warrants further exploration and contemplation.
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Read the Rest of the New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition Series:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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