The first of three concerts in this year’s San Francisco Tape Music Festival took place last night in the Southside Theater at the Fort Mason Center. The remaining two concerts will take place tonight and tomorrow night in the same venue. As I observed in my preview piece, the listening experience was very much a spatial one, sitting in a darkened space surrounded by a vast array of loudspeakers installed to capture the three dimensionality of music that exists only in recorded form. Any element of performance arose from the control of the mixing technology; and, for several of the works on the program, the composer took responsibility for this control.
At the risk of sounding too reductive (and creating the wrong impression of being too dismissive), the composition of tape music may best be understood as the product of a three-stage process of input-transformation-output:
- Recording equipment is used to capture sounds from sources selected by the composer.
- The composer then works with this material to create new material. The transformation process may involve running the source sounds through configurations of signal processing technology. It almost always involves a meticulous process of editing original and transformed material. The result is one or more “channels” of recorded material. In many respects acts of sculpting may provide a more appropriate model for composition than those of writing through some repertoire of symbolic forms.
- The resulting channels are then played through appropriate sound reproduction technology, often, as was the case last night, with “real-time” control of how they are mixed and distributed to different loudspeakers.
Needless to say, this process demands a radical shift in how a composer thinks about such matters as grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In the early days of the genre, there were composers, such as Pierre Schaeffer, who put as much effort into trying to develop a new foundation of music theory as they put into composition itself. (Schaeffer’s Traité des Objets Musicaux runs to over 650 pages.) However, there is so much diversity in how one may approach that fundamental process of composition that any attempt to converge on a single theory of tape music would be a fool’s errand.
Last night’s concert offered seven recorded works, the earliest of which was created in 1962 and the most recent having just been completed. This provided the listener with an excellent sampling of the different ways in which the input-transformation-output process has been approached; and, for the most part, that diversity may best be appreciated through the input decisions, rather than through the more sophisticated activities of the remainder of the process. The differentiating factor that is most readily grasped concerns whether the input sounds come from musical instruments or more “concrete” sources (or both).
Thus, the earliest work on the program, Paul Dresher’s 1984 “Other Fire,” may best be approached as a “landscape study.” The source material was recorded during “the better half of a year,” which Dresher spent visiting South and Southeast Asia. As he put it in his notes in the program book:
The tape recorder was running much of the time, recording sounds of both urban and rural environments and performances ranging from concert halls to all-night shadow plays to street musicians.
Transformation was based on a moderate suite of signal processing equipment and yielded about 30 hours of material, from which sounds were selected and prepared for output. The result amounted to a somewhat episodic journey, based more on a tour of different qualities of sonority than on an attempt to retrace the composer’s geographic steps.
Other works based primarily on concrete sources included Mauricio Kagel’s 1962 “Antithèse,” Christian Marclay’s 1985 “Jukebox Capriccio” (a roller-coaster ride that evokes rapidly changing jukebox selections without ever allowing any of those sections to endure long enough to be recognized), and Jean-Claude Risset’s 1985 “Sud.” This last work, which concluded the evening, was by far the most ambitious contribution and deserves further consideration. As a student I remember once coming across some liner notes for Claude Debussy’s La Mer which included Vincent d’Indy’s scathing criticism that he could neither “see, hear, smell, nor taste the sea.” “Sud” gives the impression of trying to pick up that particular gauntlet by beginning with sounds from the sea (and other natural resources) recorded near Marseille. The work even occupies the same time scale of La Mer and has its own parallel architecture of three movements. Unfortunately, that time scale tends to exceed the capacity of the composition technique, raising the theoretical question of whether or not the traversal of extended time requires foundations with a stronger sense of “progression” (as is the case with harmony), rather than a stringing-together of disjointed episodes.
The three composers who worked with instruments each did so in a distinctive manner, and the results were all highly imaginative. The “Superstrings” in the title of Adrian Moore’s 1999 work come from both piano and harpsichord. His approach to transformation only gradually discloses these sources, giving the result the effect of a journey from the alien to the familiar. In Silvia Matheus’ 2006 “Crossings,” on the other hand, one encounters lyric saxophone passages (the most explicit use of “notes” in the entire evening) within a landscape of concrete sounds, many of which were recorded in train stations. Finally, the source for the newest work on the program, “Pinball Paneer 2” by bran(…)pos, used a wide range of approaches to playing solo cello for its source material. This was definitely the most aggressive composition of the evening, leading the listener to interpret the title by feeling transported to the insides of a pinball machine. (The duration may have had something to do with the amount of time that a single ball was kept in play.)
None of this may adequately prepare the serious listener for either of the remaining two concerts in the Festival. Schaeffer may have tried to frame the genre with a theory, but its diversity will probably continue of expand as it keeps up with the sophistication of our technologies. The only real question is why we have to wait for an annual festival to find opportunities to enjoy all of that diversity.
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