Week of 09.05.10

We did not meet for class this week due to the Labor Day holiday, so my blog is going to be an abstract of my notes of the readings I’ve done in the second chapter.
The chapter begins with a discussion of the time period of many of these events for reference and context. World War II brought about a rise in free-thinking and exploration that opened listeners up to new sounds and new forms of the arts. This social mindset played a critical role in the development and expansion of the electronic music genre. Increased interest and notoriety, combined with further advancements in technology led to further experimentations not only with the instruments themselves, but the methods and practices of composition.
Advancements in technology were seeing there way further into established mediums of musical performance. Contemporary classical music began to see the use of turntables in compositions such as Respighi’s The Pines of Rome (awesome piece) and in the works of Paul Hindermith and Ernst Toch (1887-1964). Grammophonmusik, later Turntablism, was a genre birthed from the advancements in recorded playback mediums such as the phonograph, with plastic cylinders and the gramophone with shellac discs. These machines could record and playback material that could be played along with an orchestra. This changed composition because it meant that one could compose for the purpose of recording, and consequently be recording for the purpose of performance. Intense concept.
In France, Pierre Scheaffer (b 1910), a radio broadcaster and Pierre Henry (b. 1927), a composer, were making breakthroughs in a genre that would become known as musique concrete. This is really the first genre of music composed with the purpose of being recorded. This led to concepts like Abraham Moles’s Sound Object, that music is a “sequence of sound objects” and that means that the materials used for producing sound for music are not limited to things commonly considered melodic or harmonic. Moles determined that a sound object is made up of amplitude, frequency, and time/ duration, and that these can be further dissected into attack, sustain, decay, and release. Because sound cold now be easily recorded and played back, the examination and experimentations of sound became endless, and a whole genre of music with unconventional, basic “found sounds” populated the genre. Subsequent to the technology and product, new methods of score writing, compositional principals, and performance venues had to be explored but were all generally based in the conventional musical styles.
The Germans were getting into atonal music and serialism. These are systems of music that are based on 12 tone sequence determined by the composer called a tone row. Of this genre came a true developer in the evolution of electronic music Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who began work composing in recording studios in the 1950s. Using complex multi-tape machines, oscillators, and speakers, Stockhausen delved deep into the world of electronic music composition and realization and formulated principles of composition and technological ability. These are first, a Unified Time Structure, meaning the modification of tone, dynamics, frequency and timbre via tape. Second, Splitting the Sound, that one must have the ability to edit and manipulate the smaller elements of the synthesized sound. Third, Mutli-Layered Composition, can be understood as the necessity of the control of the sound during performance, conversely not relying on the human element on performance. And Fourth, the Equality of Tone and Noise, which in Stockhausen’s words “any noise is musical” but “you can’t just use any tone in any interval” meaning that one must have more constructive thought that just the recording or generating of sound for the purpose of listening.