Recent Recordings of Electronic Music

Recent Recordings of Electronic MusicSwitched-On Bach by Walter Carlos; The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music by Paul Beaver;Bernard J. KrauseReview by: Hubert S. Howe, Jr.Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1969), pp. 178-181Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832303 .

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RECENT RECORDINGS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Switched-On Bach. By Walter Carlos. Columbia MS 7194.

The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music. By Paul Beaver and Bernard J. Krause. Nonesuch HC-73018.

COLUMBIA Records has just re- leased a potpourri of old favorites by J. S. Bach generated on an electronic synthesizer by that master technician, Walter Carlos. The record has become a best-seller, and it has received so much attention that it may be the first electronic record- ing to bridge the generation gap be- tween the musical establishment and enthusiasts of the electronic medium. Switched-On Bach, taken together with another recent release, The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music, pro- vides a healthy embodiment of what is best and what is worst about the current state of electronic music.

For all the disadvantages of realiz- ing what is now ancient music elec- tronically, Switched-On Bach does a great service to the uninitiated, for it presents traditional music in a new performance environment. The naive listener is confronted with completely new kinds of musical articulations, but he can still recognize the music conveyed by these means, and thus his attention is directed more to the articulations than to the music. This is quite different from listening to most electronic music for the first time, where not only the electronic qualities, but also the musical ideas themselves, are new. Furthermore, Switched-On Bach is a dazzling, slick, plastic-coated Madison Avenue com- mercial product.

Still, it is puzzling that Carlos has chosen to put himself in the position

of a performer rather than a composer. This aspect of things is bound to have a more serious effect on the relationship of the composer to the electronic medium.

A public demand for this kind of music has been created, one that will not be satisfied by the work of more serious composers. But over the long stretch, it will increase the general knowledge and sophistication of the public audience, and this will be beneficial to all concerned.

Carlos has a very traditional ap- proach to the treatment of musical articulation, and one aspect of this can be seen in his attempt in some cases to simulate the instruments for which the music was originally written. This is disappointing when it comes out sounding like an "electronic organ," but it is very success- ful in other cases. Even when he is not concerned with simulating real instruments, Carlos preserves the distinctness of parts specified in the original score, with the stereo- phonic isolation of channels em- ployed functionally. The listener will be awed by the clarity and en- semble of the performance, which is much more than could be obtained with live musicians, though behind this lurks the image of Carlos methodically playing each instru- ment all the way through, building the piece up one line at a time, as a super one-man band.

The equipment which Carlos used

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exclusively for Switched-On Bach was a Moog Synthesizer together with an eight-track tape recorder with se- lective synchronization, and the success of the record is equally due to the sophistication and versatility of this equipment, which is the subject of The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music.

Persons trying to assemble teach- ing materials for courses in the area of electronic music will probably find The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Mu- sic of great value, for it presents a written description of many funda- mental concepts and materials of electronic music, complete with a notation for studio components and sounds and a glossary of terms, together with many recorded illustra- tions, and finally, an original electronic composition entitled "Peace Three." The problem with the record is that it does not really deal with the basic concepts of electronic music, but with these concepts as they can be controlled and manipulated by means of Moog Synthesizers.1 This is not so great a drawback, for many electronic music studios now have Moog Synthesizers, and they are cer- tainly versatile and well-constructed instruments. But it would be a mis- take to conclude that this is the only way in which the materials of electronic music can be thought of or controlled, or even that these are the most basic materials at all.

In constructing any electronic music generating system, there are necessarily many compromises and arbitrary decisions which must be

made in accordance with the aims of the composers involved and the type of music to be produced. A system must include methods of generating tones and processing them in vari- ous ways, mixing them with other sounds and passing them to and from tape recorders. Although now we have come to accept certain components as standard devices, there is, nevertheless, room for infinite variety in the assembly of a complete system.

The Moog Synthesizers provide five kinds of basic signals: sine waves, sawtooth waves, pulse (square) waves, triangle waves, and white noise. These can be triggered by a keyboard or linear controller. Signal processors include amplifiers, envelope generators, filters, rever- beration units, and occasionally such devices as a ring modulator or frequency shifter. One of the most versatile aspects of the Moog Syn- thesizers is the provision of voltage control, by which certain devices can be controlled by other devices, mak- ing possible an entire range of ef- fects impossible with only manual control. There are many other im- portant facets of the Moog Synthe- sizers explained in the album.

Let us look, however, at some of the limitations already imposed by the system: first, the number of basic signals is extremely small, and includes only periodic waveforms of some simple geometric shape. While by using the filters one can obtain a frequency with practically any de- sired harmonic content, it is not true that one can obtain this same relationship transpositionally, thus rul- ing out an entire category of possible timbre relationships. Furthermore,

1 Further information is available from the R. A. Moog Co., Trumansburg, New York 14886.

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nonharmonic partials can be generated only by additive synthesis.

Second, consider the nature of the triggering devices: the keyboard can produce only one voltage at a time. While one can employ two keyboards or some other device at the same time, usually this is not practical, and thus the system is monophonic, generally requiring complicated mixing and rerecording in order to obtain polyphonic events. The Moog Synthesizers are optimized in this direction, however: as long as you can produce only one "event" at a time, you can make it an extremely complex event at that. I am not necessarily trying to suggest that the keyboard, or any of these things, are not useful devices; rather, they represent just the inherent charac- teristics of the system, which both make possible a certain class of sounds and prohibit others.

These, then, are some of the compromises one accepts in working with Moog Synthesizers, and there are others. Any physically assembled system will have similar compromises. For example, the Modular Electronic Music System designed by Buchla Associates2 has completely different operating procedures and concepts. In fact, the only practical way to provide enough possibilities to satisfy different compositional view- points may be to simulate the components through computer pro- gramming and allow each composer to assemble them according to his own needs. Of course, this has already been accomplished with the Bell Telephone Laboratories Music

IV 3 and other programs, but it has its own drawbacks, most impor- tantly the absence of hearing the result immediately as it is generated.

The most surprising aspect of the Moog Synthesizers, however, which is reflected both in Switched-On Bach and "Peace Three," is that they do not readily encourage thinking about music in new ways. Indeed, most of the recorded music produced on Moog Synthesizers is extremely con- ventional in terms of its pitch and rhythmic structure. This is further reflected in the fact that many less serious musicians, such as rock groups, are now becoming Mr. Moog's prime customers, and that several television and radio com- mercials have already felt one of the greatest impacts of the electronic music revolution. The fact that the Moog Synthesizers can generate any sound is less significant in this con- nection than the fact that they can generate stuff like "Peace Three" and Switched-On Bach with much less effort.

Perhaps the keyboard is most re- sponsible for this situation, because it encourages treating the Synthesizer as a superduper "electronic organ." If this is the case, then a solution would seem to lie in more sophisti- cated kinds of controlling devices, such as the sequencer.4 In any event,

2 Further information is available from Buchla Associates, P.O. Box 5051, Berke- ley, California 94705.

3 See J. K. Randall, "A Report From Princeton," PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1965).

4Originally designed and built by Buchla Associates, and now also manu- factured by Moog, the sequencer offers a means of semi-automatic control over a certain number of events, each of which can have separate parameters. For a description of an extremely sophisti- cated system relying upon sequencers

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the ultimate responsibility for the quality of the music rests with the composer--or

rather, as in Carlos' case, the performer-instead of with the equipment.

as a primary means of control, see Joel Chadabe, "New Approaches to Analog Studio Design," PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1967). - Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

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Recent Recordings of Electronic Music