ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC?

ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC?Author(s): JONATHAN HARVEYSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 133, No. 5345 (APRIL 1985), pp. 313-319Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41373953 .

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ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC:

A NEW AESTHETIC?

A paper by PROFESSOR JONATHAN HARVEY ,

МЛ, PhD, D Mus

Professor of Music, University of Sussex, given to the Society on Wednesday 28th November 1984 ,

with Sir Ian Hunter ; MBE , a Vice-President of the Society , in the Chair

THE CHAIRMAN: I am delighted that we have so many here tonight to welcome Jonathan Harvey. He was born in 1 939 in Sutton Coldfield and from 1 948 to 1952 was a chorister at St. Michael's College, Tenbury, and from 1952-7 a pupil at Repton. Then he went to St. John's College, Cambridge on a major scholarship. On Benjamin Britten's advice, he studied with Erwin Stein and later with Hans Keller. In 1964 Glasgow University awarded him a PhD for a thesis on The Composer's Idea of his Inspiration and in the same year he joined the Department of Music at Southampton University as a lecturer. He also worked from time to time as a professional 'cellist; he tells me he still plays. A Harkness Fellowship enabled him to study at Princeton University in 1969-70 and in 1972 he was awarded a DMus. Since 1980 he has been Professor of

Music at Sussex University. His major study of Stock- hausen was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. He produces music of all kinds. In England his

choral Church music is widely performed, but his repu- tation in Europe and America is founded to a consider- able extent on the success of his electro-acoustic music - in particular Mortuos Piango , Vivos Voco , which was created in the electronic workshop of IRC AM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris; it is of course Boulez's organization. The work has been heard in numerous countries and recorded by Erato. Another recent recording, of his String Quartet, has won the Gramophone award for the best contemporary music record of 1984. Jonathan has received a third invitation to write a major experimental piece using the IRCAM electronic studio.

The following paper, which was illustrated with recordings, was then given.

ALTHOUGH it may seem an odd thing to say, / % modern music is one of the least corrupted

1 'of the arts. The old cliché about moder- nism - that its shock has turned into chic - cannot be levelled at music. It remains difficult, challenging. It cannot be comfortably absorbed and purveyed for fashionable sums. But this honest quality, which has its faithful core of admirers, accords ill with our tendencies to popularize art, to sell it to large numbers of people, to subsidize and televise. British art mandarins are prepared to go only a small dis- tance into pushing their impressively increasing

public towards the unknown, and contemporary music of the more advanced variety is the point at which they stop.

I would therefore like to talk, if you will for- give me, in a somewhat evangelical tone, about a particularly significant aspect of modern music - electronic music or electro-acoustic music as it is usually called, and its problematic location in British society now.

My perspective has been gained mostly abroad, in particular from Pierre Boulez's centre in Paris for research and creative work in this field called L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS

Acoustique/Musique, or IRCAM for short. It was built at President Pompidou's behest with a budget of 60 million francs in 1974 and a staff of 54 permanent and many visiting scientists and musicians. The nearest British equivalent is EMAS, the Electro- Acoustic Music Association of Great Britain, which has plans for a comparatively modest National Centre and a professional staff of one.

Let me try to summarize the present state of play in Britain. The field of electro-acoustic music is now a very wide one. Within it must be included at one edge otherwise conventional music, which uses some degree of amplification for a certain part of the ensemble, or for all of it, and at another edge music which includes an electronic instrument or two. The pop and rock music world involves both of these ensemble- types frequently. The classical concert world increasingly involves selective amplification techniques for music composed since the Second World War: this is more common on the continent, but an example in Britain would be the amplification often requested for Birtwistle's works.

At the centre of the field are tape music and 'live' electronics. In these electronic technology is indispensable to the essence of the music, as opposed to adding something at a more surface level.

The field is wide but rather confused in form. There is an asymmetry, as Raymond Williams would say. On the one hand the normal economic processes of society demand an ever- developing progress in technology, particularly in electronics and information technology. The results of research are quickly applied and economic rewards are often handsome. The uninhibited pop and rock worlds with their ever-new synthesizers and treatment units, and the increasing use of rudimentary synthesizers in the toy market, are two musical examples.

On the other hand in the world of 'serious' musical culture all sorts of inhibitions and taboos are present - it is not a free, expansive market. The culture is essentially conservative, preserv- ing in ever more perfect form the heritage of the past. Instrument makers in this world are not economic masochists, naturally they do not research new-technology instruments, but go on making old ones. This has been the situation, more or less, and with the minor exception of percussion instruments, since nineteenth-century 314

PROCEEDINGS musicians 'discovered' the past. This historicism is considered by Boulez, for instance, to be 'a revealing symptom of the dangers a culture runs when it confesses its poverty so openly; it is engaged not in making models, nor in destroying them to create fresh ones, but in reconstructing them and venerating them like totems as symbols of a golden age which has been totally abolished'.

It occasionally happens that an area which has evolved in society can leap across to an area which has not, and give it an unexpected lift. This was possible in architecture at the time when con- crete was invented. In music it is again possible. Electronics is able to supply just the technology needed to liberate instrument-making technology. The world opened by electronics is there for composers and lovers of new sound-experiences to exploit. The asymmetry has become so acute that the extremely rapid developments in the one field can now hardly help affecting the extremely slow developments in the other. The contact with electronic technology of children at school, students in their studies and adults at leisure and work is accelerating exponentially.

How resistant the taboos and inhibitions of the museum culture will be is difficult to assess, even so. Early opportunities were lost, such as the initial openness of the BBC Radiophonie Workshop, now closed to non-staff composers for a great many years (Derek Bourgeois and I were solitary exceptions): the result being that Britain, unlike most countries, has no radio studio where many of its composers work. (Some such studios even give composers commissions amounting to full-time salaries.) As I write this, news has come of the first BBC Commission for a composer to make a 'concert' work in the Radiophonie Workshop. Good news at last! Live electronic groups such as Gentle Fire or Inter- modulation died away ten years ago without creating a real break-through. The Stockhausen generation, whose musical thinking is funda- mentally conditioned by an early upbringing in a studio, simply doesn't exist in Britain, with the possible exception of Tristram Cary, who soon emigrated to Australia.

Yet the signs are that those taboos are now lifting. The list of hirers of the Electro-acoustic Music Association's equipment pool gives a good indication of the quality of recent performers of electro-acoustic music. It includes many new music groups, the London Sinfonietta, Glynde- bourne Opera, Redcliffe Concerts, the BBC, the



APRIL 1985 Arts Council. Tim Souster's Electronic Music Now Arts Council Network tour was by all reports everywhere better attended than most such tours, and, as Souster told me, by a pre- dominantly young audience - ťnot the same sort as you would see at a string quartet concert'. The monthly electro-acoustic music concerts currently being presented by EMAS in London are attracting comparatively numerous audiences ('about 100') for Sunday afternoon sessions. The BBC has presented 3 series (of 2, 10 and 8 programmes) on this music in the last three years.

The younger generation of composers of electro- acoustic music, though few in number, has been outstandingly successful. Denis Smalley, for instance, whose influence can be seen in the high quality studio set up at East Anglia University, won the overall prize of distinction in this year's Bourges International Electro-acoustic Music Awards competition. The British record is inter- nationally recognized as being one of the best. Small studios are now set up in the majority of universities and at many polytechnics and colleges. They must produce some hundred graduates annually who are trained and eager to go further in this branch of music. The institu- tions who pay for these studios evidently recognize a new need, a new climate. The University Grants Committee recognizes the necessity for backing them. That these annual 100 graduates must either achieve the unlikely and get an insti- tutional post or give up sophisticated electronic work as they pass out of the gates is highly unsatisfactory for the art and highly frustrating for them.

I have met no knowledgeable person who denies that Britain lags behind the Continent and the USA in its capability to produce and dis- seminate electro-acoustic music in quantity, if not quality; there is simply much greater access to good studios in these countries. Two examples might suffice. Denis Smalley's above-men- tioned work, like many of the British successes, had to be made partially abroad. Nothing as sophisticated as the synthesizer he used in Canada is accessible in Britain, nor is the support that goes with it. There is a steady proces- sion of frustrated British composers to IRCAM. From my own experience I can say that there is not even the remotest possibility that my IRCAM works could have been made in Britain.

The second example is of one EMAS composer who wistfully reported that his work had been

ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC? broadcast in 17 countries, but the BBC had refused it.

So in order to make any overall assessment of the rôle of electro-acoustic music in our culture, one must think more broadly than in national terms - we are obviously something of an exception. I have been able to pick up a lot of clues during my extended periods at IRCAM, and the evidence does point to a lifting of the taboos, to a powerful upward curve taking flight. That's not to say that avant-gardeism will suddenly become popular, it won't. But it is to say that even tradi- tionally-minded composers are likely increasingly to demand the use of electronics in their scores. The history of instrumental development, when it does occur, suggests that once something of this magnitude and range takes root it doesn't wither, but accumulates. One might confidently expect every respectable orchestra in 25 years' time to have its electronics department, just as, since the days of early Stravinsky and Varese, it has had its percussion department.

The reason why a museum culture is prepared, at this point in its history, to accept the gift from the world of technology is profound and complex and would have to be answered also in terms of aesthetics and the evolution of man's creative consciousness. I have attempted a personal answer elsewhere, and will summarize it here.

In some of the best new music employing electronics we find the tools of an emergent ideology. Music is both physical object and mental object. There is the external source of the sound, the instrument, which we perceive through our senses, our ears and eyes (or perhaps mind's eyes). And then there's the immanent object we ourselves construct, joining together the moments of time in our memories and making a pattern and meaning. We constitute the music according to the interplay of the composer's codes and our own, the references to past meaning and usage of sound, the patterning of repetition and variation within the work itself. A Chinese peasant's codes would be totally different from Wagner's, and our own different from both.

Physical and mental, external and internal often interplay fascinatingly in our listening experiences. The beginning of a note, its attack, for instance, is the most characteristic part of its sound. Cut off the attack and you very often can't distinguish an oboe from a flute. So, at the attack, attention is drawn to the physical. A split second later it moves to the mental and enjoys the formal

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS beauties of the sound in its context with others. During a performance attention leaps back and forth between instrumental gesture and pure form.

But often in the new sound world being born through electronics, though the sounds may seem very physical at times, there is no known instrument that can be pictured in the hands of a seated performer. There's also no fixed identifiable place from which the sound issues; if the sound is stereo or quadraphonic it usually moves around the concert space, and the loudspeakers remain enig- matically unhelpful. No physical picture, no externality, comes.

Also, it's in the nature of electro-acoustic music to explore the internal acoustic structure of 'notes' rather than use notes as innocent data in musical argument. Stockhausen's treatment of the Russian national anthem in his work Hymnen, for instance, slows the chords down to the point where he jumps around inside them exploring different timbre-structures. (Example) This points towards stillness, or movement within something essentially static; no instrument pictures and no note arguments.

There are no physical shackles to keep the sound sources to earth - no seated violins - the sounds can fly incognito around the acoustic space. Form there still is, of course. In a sense, it is pure immanence (there's a lack of identifiable source for the sound), but also it is pure timbre. Colours no longer have a secondary status: it's impossible to replace one with another, as one might a flute with a recorder. Colours and pattern are one and the same. The pattern lies in the structure of colour itself. Everything has changed. ( Example )

I believe we are in a period of change not unlike that which occurred in music around 1600, when the bass quite suddenly became important, and the melody above it became the bearer of individualized passions. The collectivity of motet and early madrigal were outmoded. Now the bass has lost its conviction once more. And the language is wide open to new tunings, more complex sounds beyond even the world of un- tuned percussion such as cymbals and drums, the most anarchic sound elements admitted in pre-war music. I also believe that many of the feelings in medieval and oriental music are now being rediscovered, and that new music is closer to their spirituality in its eschewal of the personal emotionalism of tonality (neither medieval 316

PROCEEDINGS nor oriental music welcomes subjectivism, in general). It is of the essence of art that it extends our narrow, insecure selves into new territory. Unless art changes our lives, expands us towards our greater, unbounded selves, towards 'egolessness' as many religions would say, it is not art. Spiritual values, civilized values, die when art no longer makes us lose 'ourselves' in artistic experience. If musical expansion is not to be stifled it needs new media.

The greatest living composer and visionary, Pierre Boulez, has pointed the way and provided the means - for France. We don't have a Boulez or Pompidou in Britain, but we can easily do something. We simply need faith that it is worth doing, and collaboration. A basic organization exists in the form of EMAS. EMAS should be allowed to build or convert a Centre (they have plans ready). It would be both an electronic studio open to composers and a space for public performances. It would make sense to share such a building with other musical organizations, and such a space could be used for rehearsals, com- mercial recordings, non-EMAS concerts, jazz, dance, music-theatre events, etc. There is scope for income for EMAS in all these categories, if the site were not too inaccessible, and that could be important in the early stages. Further, a sophisticated lighting and video projection set- up might well make the Centre the leading expo- nent of the Theatre of Technology school where adventurous and experimental theatre directors could work. One does not envisage electro- acoustic music filling the daily timetable of events on its own, in any case. Many directors and choreographers are now much more intensely aware of the rôle of sound in their productions, and might light up to the offer of EMAS resources and expertise. Cross-fertilization of the arts is once more at an exciting new stage because of the electronic break-through.

Several people have suggested the formation of an EMAS-associated ensemble or pool of players. They would be expected to achieve a profile for high quality EA music performance. They would commission new repertoire and exploit whatever possibilities the equipment pool can offer. The model of the Ensemble Intercontemporain at IRCAM would seem to be a good one, where the group does not encourage the new music ghetto-syndrome, but plays mixed programmes to a wide range of audiences (with a pedagogical side available when appropriate).



APRIL 1985 This might be financed in a way little different from any other successful contemporary music group in Britain (Lontano, Gemini, Electric Phoenix, Singcircle, etc).

Further co-operations that have been mooted are with the BBC and IBA. The former's Radio- phonic Workshop is keen to break out of its background programme music rôle, and work with external composers. The present director, Brian Hodgson, is keen to open discussions about electro-acoustic music in Britain, which will in- clude the Director of the BBC Research Depart- ment at Kingswood Warren. If a research link with this, the country's most advanced sound technology research centre, were established, or even some space-sharing scheme with the BBC were agreed, then the pooling of expertise would be of enormous mutual benefit. Meetings must happen; beyond that it is impossible to predict what may occur. The interested parties are many: performers, sound archive and information per- sonnel, industrial researchers, educationalists.

The purpose of the meetings would be to impress on those present the disgraceful lack of any major open studio in Britain, and describe the benefits which a studio and performance centre could bring, both aesthetically and as a form of research - the example of IRCAM can of course by now be held up as a serious and successful contributor in both fields. If enough different concerns pooled some resources into a

ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC? National Centre, its magnitude and status would be greatly increased.

My hard sell is all the more desperate because I detect a lack of confidence in present-day British arts-subsidizers compared with other countries. Nobody seems to know where the important things in art are any more. Bryan Appleyard put his finger on this precisely in his recent book The Culture Club - Crisis in the Arts. Music in the concert hall has a way of insisting

on your attention that the visual arts or the spoken word do not, perhaps because it is much louder, for one thing. People are therefore more afraid to expose themselves to danger'. I don't want to say that modern music is unpleasant but good for you, a sort of sonic medicine, rather that your creative spirit is called for, a sense of adventure, and that this will reward with extra- ordinary pleasures. The initial hurdles, though, can be daunting. You have to be prepared to jump into a vast sea without knowing quite what your fate will be. Britain seems to be stuck on those hurdles, which is a pity, because many of us know that new music contains deep spiritual experiences telling us about our time, aiding our evolution of consciousness, in a way not available from our museum culture, however magni- ficent that may itself be. Example with introduction: MORTUOS PLANGO , VIVOS VOCO - Jonathan Harvey

DISCUSSION

MR. SIDNEY HARRISON, FGSM, HonRAM (retired piano professor - Royal Academy of Music): Through- out all the changes in music over the centuries there have been three constant elements; song, dance and sex. Are those three elements now destined to disappear?

THE LECTURER: I do not see why any of them should. I regard electronics as a medium, just as the piano or the organ are media. The organ did not make sex disappear. Electronics are simply a machine, a very exciting medium with immense possibilities. They do not supplant anything, they merely supplement, but that is a very important function.

DR. VALERIE PRESTON-DUNLOP(Laban Centre for Movement and Dance): Could you tell us about any problems in the notation of electronic music which you have encountered and any solutions which you might have to offer?

THE LECTURER: It depends whether the work is to be for live performers and what you require of them. T о stick with a tape is often very tricky; it can be something of a little dictator, quite unbudgeable, and so the performer has to know clearly what is on the tape, and if the sounds are not conceived in the conventional tonal system then of course new signs have to be invented; with various degrees of ingenuity being called for. Some composers are successful at this; others leave it all a little bit vague and create problems for the performers. This is something in the state of a very new art which has to be worked out. There are many individual solutions; the trouble is that they are not yet standardized.

MR. D. GRIMALDI: Do you consider that your work is an extension of concepts that already exist in music?

THE LECTURER: I think it is an extension because both the boy and the bell already exist. The structure

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS of the bell informs everything that happens in the piece, so in a sense I am taking something that exists in nature and making an extension of it. There are certain abstractions, as one might say in painting, where a known form becomes something quite unknown which has no correspondent in the natural world. In the sphere of sound, the sound colour becomes something which one has never heard before. In the domain of form exactly the same principles apply as to what remains the same, what is varied. Most musical concepts remain constant, though extended. In my paper I talked about some of the aesthetic matters which were changing: the practice of listening into the nature of the colour of the sound itself, for example; this is a shift of emphasis.

MRS. GEORGETTE SHERIDAN: IRCAM is based in Paris; so is UNESCO, from which the Americans are withdrawing their support and England is promis- ing to follow suit. Culture is what people go to war for; Hitler liked Wagner, a pop group wrote a song called Winchester Cathedral, the Beatles music was expected to break social barriers, yet on television we are witnessing the pictures of the miners' strike. You spoke of the way the Chinese peasants receive some music, you pointed out that the two bars of the Russian anthem are those of a piece of music by a well known writer; the piece we heard is based on your culture, the Christian culture. Is this electronic music a new fron- tier? How can this new sound help mankind?

THE LECTURER: I have written pieces taking texts and themes from other cultures, and so have many other composers. As a matter of fact I think a new internationalism is what is coming of all this. Think of the rôle of computers and information technology in break- ing down barriers. We have an international computer language. At IRCAM you meet a truly international gathering of artists and scientists who come from behind the Iron Curtain too. Soon to appear is a new journal, the Contemporary Music Review , which devotes its first issue to IRCAM and its work. This will have offices in Moscow, Tokyo, New York and London. Iron Curtain composers are running the Russian side. I think composers are nowadays taking every step towards international attitudes.

DR. J. G. COLLINGWOOD: It seems to me that a great deal of the pleasure and satisfaction that one gets out of music - and out of all art - is to do with recognition. Now there is an enormous extension of possibilities. Would you agree with this idea of the pleasure of recognition, and is there a danger that it is going to get lost?

the lecturer: Totally unfamiliar music without any of the precedents that lead up to it is difficult. I have been urging people to make the effort to 318

PROCEEDINGS

open their minds because I think that adventure, loss of self, willingness to experience something strange, are of the very essence of art. Without that expansion we are all going to be insecure, tight little egos.

MR. GILES EASTERBROOK: Bearing in mind the beauty of sound in a lot of what we have heard tonight and the fact that it can liberate us from the growing expense of orchestras, do you think that in electro- phonic music we have not only a new aesthetic, but perhaps a new, vernacular, non-élitist art form? Should composers be working for this?

THE LECTURER: Certainly, I think the vernacular is coming. You only have to look in the Christmas shop windows and see all the children's synthesizers, which adults buy mostly. Everybody is going to be able to make their own musical sounds very easily and a new kind of playing will take place. Whether composers should be doing anything about this I am not sure. We have always had a wide variety, from light music composers to rock musicians to 'serious' classical concert composers and it is likely that that spectrum will continue. I am most concerned about the adventurous side because that is what is threatened.

MR. PATRICK CARNEGY (Music Books Editor, Faber and Faber Ltd): A source of satisfaction to you must be the idea that you can realize something exactly as you want it without any intermediary. What about a piece of music composed in such a way that someone could use the controls on his playback equipment to decide not merely the volume and frequency charac- teristics but also between, say, a number of possible tracks on the tape, between a number of compositional alternatives? You basically compose the piece but there are variables enabling the individual in his arm- chair to join in your adventure.

THE LECTURER: I think that has been done and will be done more. The private ownership of synthesizers and even computer systems is mushrooming. At Dart- mouth College in the States every music student must possess a microcomputer before being allowed on to the course, and that is not an isolated example by any means. Such factors already breed new concert-hall audiences. At electronic music concerts a lot of young people come who are mostly concerned with non-concert hall music. They would not normally be seen in a 'classical' concert hall, but they do find great excitement in this exploration of sound, often, I suppose, from their rock experiences. It is a crossing of the usual barrier at the concert-hall door.

MR. BARRY ANDERSON: If we are now on the brink of a break-through in terms of electro-acoustic and computer music in this country, would you like to define the differences that we face to-day compared



APRIL 1985 with those of twenty years ago? Some of the works which we already recognize as great achievements are nearly thirty years old.

THE LECTURER: Obviously worrying to some people is the lack of human musicality in this art. In recent years we have seen the growth of live electronics so that a violinist or a trombonist can use the computer or the electronic set-up as an extension of a very sensi- tive instrument that has been developed for centuries; nothing is lost and a lot is gained. The strides made by live electronic music are enormous. That has been one of the main subjects of research at IRCAM. The computer has been taught to analyse sounds that are fed into it, which is not easy, and then to respond to them in certain programmable ways, by imitation, by con- tradiction, by all sorts of different things that the composer might require. This elaborate process has become so fast and efficient that sometimes the res- ponse is too quick. I know a flautist who was very dis- concerted that the computer was responding immedi- ately one or two millionths of a second after he had played, which is totally unlike what he had met in most accompanists he had worked with. So the programme had to be slowed down and then he could cope with it. The jazz trombonist, George Lewis, is another good example. Someone has developed a microcomputer system with which he gives popular and mas- sively attended concerts in Paris, he and the microcomputer talking to each other. The computer above all has developed in the last

five years and the atmosphere seems to be changing. A corner has been reached which we were working towards slowly. Boulez is a very important influence. For many years he changed the climate of listening to contemporary orchestral music. Now he is seeking to change the media available for composers. IRCAM selects each year twenty composers to work there. The jury he appoints each year finds what is good in Japan, Thailand, North America - wherever - and it is recorded in Paris; a great internationalism is beginning to come about, a knowledge of what people are doing in different cultures and the ways in which new electronic media can be exploited. It seems that com- munications accelerate in an electronic age.

THE REVEREND ALAN LUFF: You spoke a good deal about the kinds of (electronic) sounds which were coming into use for which one could not picture an origin. Do you find it more profitable yourself to work with sounds of known origin such as the bell and the boy's voice in your piece?

ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC? THE LECTURER: The difficulty is to make the

sounds live. In a lot of earlier electronic music we heard music from machines which was difficult to identify; it was a mechanical sound, and rather dead. I have often been much warmer towards living sounds of greater complexity and internal interest, but nevertheless I see the great revolution to be moving away from that towards unknown sounds, or if you like from the extension of the familiar by painless steps outwards into the unpictureable. As long as one never loses the sense of life in the sounds, as long as one does not get into the dehumanized area which we all hate so much, then I think that this area will yield something relatively new in terms of consciousness of musical sensations, musical experiences, in fact a new psychic perception.

MRS. DEBORAH WEARING: I should be most interested to know how you as a composer view the human element in live performance. We have discussed the difficulties of interpreting notation correctly and achieving an accurate execution. You talked about base- lessness, egolessness, and I wonder where, to you, the human live performer fits in? Is it important, to retain the sense of life and immediacy for the listener, to have a personal performer in addition to the machinery?

THE LECTURER: That is a complex question and I sympathize very much with what I suspect is your feeling for the live performer and all that is incompar- ably profound and important in music. My extensions of that are really in the direction of not destroying it, but of making it expand more. We have, after all, instruments like the gong or the organ which have very little to do with the live player. They are mechanical instruments and yet we find great spiritual experience is possible through their sounds. Sometimes one is moving off into that area where the nervous, live quality of the violinist's bow, an incredibly complex acoustic phenomenon, changes into one of these more mechanical areas like that of the gong or the organ, and another sound world is opened up. That kind of extension has been permitted because we have loved our organs and our gongs. Anything that is struck is basically 'dead' after the initial excitement of the body; it is not a live sound. So we know this already. Handled sensitively, such sounds lead to 'universal' expressions: we need these just as deeply as 'individual' expressions.

THE CHAIRMAN: I am sure you would wish me to thank Jonathan Harvey not only for a fascinating lec- ture, but also for having fielded the questions so well.

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ELECTRONICS IN MUSIC: A NEW AESTHETIC?