Day 205: Musique concrète—from Vienna to teaching
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
205 — Musique concrète techniques
23-February-1972
(Mittwoch–Wed.)
TRANSCRIPT
Basically, a good day. If anyone else ever reads
this, it’s going to be pretty boring.
Got 3 hrs. practicing of horn and piano. I think,
tomorrow, at my lesson, I will attempt to begin very
logically in “how” to play.
Spent rest of the day in electronic music. 7-1/2
hours. Most of this time was spent in making “a war”
– and only the rocket arsenals. It just goes to show,
how war is such a waste of resources.
Then saw Heiler #4—fantastic. The way he plays the
music (good and with expression) just allows me to
sit around and bask in it. It just makes you feel
good. One of his pupils, an Austrian named Gustav—a
really great guy with a sense of humor—was asked the
question, “What do you think of it, Gustav?” Reply:
“He’s getting the hang of it.” I’m beginning to
wonder how the English language books are being made
up nowadays.
REFLECTIONS
A good day for horn and electronic music.
Anton Heiler. Another
great Heiler concert with his interpretive style at
the organ. Always a treat.
War.
My
electronic piece, from the sound of a breaking glass,
is programmatic and emulates nature and man-made
sounds. It sounds like I’m creating an actual “war.”
My guess is that as I manipulated sound and it
resembled real sounds, I got the idea to tell a
story. Sounds corny, today. I do try to put emotion
into all my projects and so maybe it came out
allright.
Today, I might call it a soundscape.
Concrète
techniques. I don’t
remember everything I did but I do remember some of
the techniques.
•
Tape speed. You can
play tapes at different speeds, slow down, speed up
and record on another recorder. Then successively
change speeds again.
•
Layering and textures. You can
layer sounds to create textures and events/motives by
playing tapes of sound events on three tape recorders
and recording the result on a fourth recorder.
•
Tape splicing. This was
the big one. We were using 1/4 inch 15-inch tape
reels. We had metal tape-splicing blocks, razor
blades and splicing tape. I specifically remember
splicing together many short “snippets” to create
various rhythms and sound montages. This was probably
the premier technique.
•
Sound manipulation. Playing
sound backwards, hand-manipulation through dragging
(what’s the word…scrubbing) were part of the
techniques.
•
Filtering. I believe
that we had low-pass and high-pass electronic filters
that we were allowed to use to color the sound. I do
not believe that we had a reverb unit.
•
No traditional electronics. In those
days, there was no electronic keyboard, or MIDI
keyboard, or the famous electronic modules from Moog,
Buchla, or Serge that came about in the “electronic
music” revolution in later years. We were primarily
using tape recorders.
•
A two-second sound. The sound
of the breaking glass opened the composition. It was
about 2 seconds long. My first composition was 20
minutes. I was proud of the fact that “technically” I
got an immense amount of sound material out of that
single sound.
•
Teaching with sound. My Vienna
experience with Prof. Kaufmann’s musique concrète
course truly influenced my own composition and
teaching for years to come. As a young instrumental
teacher, I created an electronic music and filmmaking
program for middle school students. I’ll talk about
it in future posts.
John
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