Day 281: Documenting the Fantasy
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
281 — Documenting the Fantasy
09-May-1972
(Dienstag–Tue.)
TRANSCRIPT
Some preparation work for
report—mischung.
Beginning “writing up” of the project
[Fantasy on Broken
Glass]. Will be a lot of work.
Saw the movie, Medea.
Interesting idea but I don’t know if I like the
movie. Scary, anyway.
REFLECTIONS
Not much for the journal today. I have no idea what
this scary movie was about.
Revising
Fantasy.
Mischung
means
“mixture.” I am obviously making revised mixes of the
composition. I know that the first version of
Fantasy
on Broken Glass was 22
minutes long (wow), and that I later revised it to
half its length (in 1973). My current work is on the
original version, as the student concert has not yet
taken place.
Documentation on
Fantasy. Today, I
say that I am beginning the writing up of the
documentation. I did find this material in a bound
student book. I have over 80 typed pages documenting
how the composition was created (for educational
purposes), including many of the techniques of
musique concrète. There are also pages of handwritten
notes and sketched scores. It’s very interesting to
read back and see how serious I was on this project.
I’ll post a few scans, though you might not be able
to read them well.
Here is a transcription of the opening page:
Thesis—Using
one normal everyday sound as a base, show in a
logical and educated manner, the many possible
manipulations and treatments of this base sound.
[This] can thus serve as an educational guide for
students or teachers as an insight into the many
possibilities, uses, techniques, materials,
equipment, problems, methods of working, and logical
progression of composing “CONCRETE MUSIC.”
The end result will be a short composition consisting
of only the sounds derived from our one “home” sound.
Thus, the reader will also be able to see how the
composition was actually “realized” from beginning to
end.
SOUND – “A glass breaking on the floor.”
Techniques
I cover are:
• tape speed manipulation (slower, faster)
• reverse direction
• filters (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass)
• ring modulation
• tape splicing (creating new sound elements)
• creating tape loops (yes, actually physically
splicing the beginning and end of the tape together)
• stereo, mono recording
• creating all the sound elements and programmatic
sound elements
• combining and layering sound elements through tape
tracks
• organizing elements into tracks (bands)
• mixing
• creating the composition
Here are some scans from the documentation.
Fantasy
tape techniques
Fantasy
tape splicing techniques
Handwritten
Fantasy
score and timings
Fantasy
score draft
John
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