Day 239: Looking for Broken Glass
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
239 — Looking for Broken Glass
28-March-1972
(Dienstag–Tue.)
TRANSCRIPT
Another fairly productive
day. Except less horn. Some typing. Keeping busy
anyway.
REFLECTIONS
In 1972, A busy normal day.
Looking
for Broken Glass. I have
mentioned before, how I think I have lost my original
electronic tape, 1/4” 15-inch tape reel, of my
current work in the electronic music
studio—Fantasy
on Broken Glass. For
years, I have purposely kept this tape—in case I had
the ability to dub it to a digital format. The tape
was a large-reel, 15 ips, 2-track, 1/4” tape. In the
past, I did own a Teac tape recorder that played this
format. Unfortunately, that was given away or sold a
long time ago by my brothers—during the many years I
was away from home. At the time, there was no digital
format to copy to.
Regardless, I tried to find the tape and couldn’t
find it. This past winter, I cleaned out our attic
and threw away many things, and packed many things in
storage. I can’t find it in storage. Did I
accidentally throw it out? I can’t believe it, if it
did actually happen.
Tape
splices. Interestingly,
this original tape had hundreds of “tape splices”
which I used to create all of the different elements
of the composition. Yes, we used tape blocks, razor
blades and splicing tape. It was a learning
adventure. I also had an “examples” tape that
demonstrated how I made the many different sound
elements. These would be a great educational resource
in showing how to manipulate sound. Using today’s
computers and software, you could emulate the
compositional techniques digitally. When I’m retired,
I’ll do that.
A
desperate email. In a
desperate attempt to see if I can find a copy of the
original tape, I found an English site for the
Hochschule für Musik and sent them an email/contact
request. Here is a bit a the letter, in English and
German. How’s my German? (German in opening photo;
English below.)
No
response yet. Either they don’t use that web site
often, or they are not sure what to do. It is also
possible the electronic music center has moved away.
If you are in the Vienna Hochschule für Musik und
Darstellende Kunst and can help me, please email me.
Editor’s note: there are only a few readers of this
blog and they are not in Vienna. Sure, it’s a
desperate cry for help. 
John
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