V/A - Women in Electronic Music (1977)

The original release featured Charles Amirkhanian’s selections of electro-acoustic works by seven women who were, or would become, prominent composers of their day. Although the 1977 album title (New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media) did not refer to gender, the project sought to raise the visibility of women in classical music. The composers selected were Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and the soon-to-be well-known Laurie Anderson.

As with many technological developments from the beginning of the twentieth century that came to fruition after World War II, the ideas of early electro-acoustic composers outpaced the readily available technology. For example, Johanna M. Beyer’s 1939 Music of the Spheres, which opens the CD, allowed violins to be substituted for the three electronic instruments specified in her original score. The first performance of Music of the Spheres as conceived by Beyer was produced and recorded in 1977 specifically for this album. After a lion’s roar and triangle duet opening, the piece unfolds with one of the electronic instruments performing an ostinato figure that gradually accelerates and then decelerates while the other two electronic instruments present a two-voice contrapuntal melody, punctuated throughout by occasional triangle attacks.

The repetitive motorized sounds that open Annea Lockwood’s World Rhythms are jolting after the serenity of Beyer’s work. A composition exploring the polyrhythms of nature, a series of initial water sounds precedes an overlapping succession of recordings of pulsars, earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, rivers, peepers, fire, storms, waves, and breathing. Recordings of nature and the shared journey are important elements in Lockwood’s work, and would be displayed again on a larger scale in her well-known A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982) and the recently completed epic A Sound Map of the Danube.

Oliveros’s 1965 San Francisco Tape Music Center work Bye Bye Butterfly demonstrates her early use of electronic music technology to create an improvised real-time performance piece. The studio equipment available to her was too large and bulky to move easily into a concert hall, so her works in this style were improvised directly to magnetic tape. She continued to work on this concept, which she called the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), and its current digital incarnation, created with design and programming contributions by Panaiotis, David Gamper, and Zevin Polzin, remains central to much of the music that Oliveros composes today. Bye Bye Butterfly opens with a primary texture of electronic combination tones processed through tape delay feedback loops. Halfway through, a recording of Madame Butterfly is introduced and processed in a similar fashion (a precursor to the digital sampling and looping we take for granted in music today). Oliveros explained that she simply wanted to include an LP recording in her new composition, and her choice of the Madame Butterfly disc was completely random. This chance selection, however, can also be heard as a metaphorical goodbye to Pauline Oliveros, the orchestral French horn player from Houston, as this spirit from the past mingles with the new sounds of the experimental composer she had become.

Appalachian Grove I, inspired by mountain fiddle music, is an up-tempo, computer-generated composition by the highly inventive and under-recognized composer Laurie Spiegel. Produced at Bell Labs in 1974 using Max Mathews’s GROOVE programming system, Spiegel says the piece was “composed in reaction to an overdose of heavy, sad, introspective contemporary music.” Spiegel’s simple computer-generated timbres result in the discrete, fast-moving dots of sound that dominate the composition. The pointillistic opening leads to a passage of sustained sounds that then return to the initial texture. A broader selection of Spiegel’s musical experiments from this period can be heard on her EMF recording Obsolete Systems.

The two Laurie Anderson pieces that close the CD, New York Social Life and Time to Go, gave the world its first exposure to the experimental composer/performance artist who would soon achieve mainstream success with the rise of Oh, Superman on the British pop charts. New York Social Life follows Anderson through a day of quick conversations often beginning with “Hey, how are you,” and ending with “really busy now,” “we should really get together,” and “got to go.” Interspersed are a gallery owner’s lament that “It’s just not like it was in the ‘60s, those were the days,” and a man from Cleveland inviting her to perform, saying her work is “not really my style, kind of trite, but listen, it’s just my opinion.” Her day ends with a friend calling to say “and listen Laurie, if you want to talk, I’ll leave my answering machine on and just give me a ring any time.” Anderson delivers her text with a waltz-like lilt accompanied by an unconventional performance on the tambura by Scott Johnson. Time to Go opens with a guitar and organ riff performed by Johnson as Anderson tells the story of Diego, a night-shift guard at the Museum of Modern Art whose job it is to snap the patrons out from their “art trances” and tell them to leave. As the story ends, a multi-tracked minimalist violin duo by Anderson thickens the texture while her voice continues to repeat the phrase “time to go.” -- Douglas Cohen

1. Johanna M. Beyer - Music Of The Spheres (1938)
Performed by The Electric Weasel Ensemble
Donald Buchla: Frequency Shifting
Brenda Hutchinson - Pulse Control
Allen Strange , David Morse , Stephen Ruppenthal - Synthesizer
Charles Amirkhanian - Triangle
2. Annea Lockwood - World Rhythms (1975)
3. Pauline Oliveros - Bye Bye Butterfly (1965)
4. Laurie Spiegel - Appalachian Grove I (1974)
5. Megan Roberts - I Could Sit Here All Day (1976)
Danny Sofer - Drums
Phill Loarie & William Novak - Voice
6. Ruth Anderson - Points (1973-74)
7. Laurie Anderson - New York Social Life (1977)
Scott Johnson - Tambura
8. Laurie Anderson - Time To Go (1977)
Scott Johnson - Guitar, Organ

Compilation by Charles Amirkhanian.
Originally released on LP by 1750 Arch Records, 1977.
CD re-release by CRI in 1997 and New World Records in 2006.

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Harry Partch - The Wayward + And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma

The second volume of CRI's series of Partch works includes several major pieces and a couple of exquisite jewels. The first four compositions are grouped under the general heading, "The Wayward," all of which deal, in part, with the musical rendering of everyday American speech, particularly the slang employed by migrant workers and hobos in the Depression era of the 1930s. "U.S. Highball" is a string of such exclamations, asides, and dispirited remarks set to a nonet of Partch's idiosyncratic instruments, including various percussion, strings, and justly tuned organs. The exoticism of the instrumental sound contrasts squarely with the everyday patterns of the speech (both sung and spoken), creating a unique kind of tension rarely encountered elsewhere.

Next, who but Partch would have though of orchestrating the cries of newsboys selling their wares on a foggy San Francisco night? Or setting the text of a letter from a friend to music, sometimes chatty, sometimes carping on personal matters? The result is hugely affecting, as the composer is able to ferret out the deep humanity beneath the superficial observations and provide precisely the right accompaniment, not quite sentimental but extremely sympathetic. For "Barstow," Partch went to an even more basic text source: the inscriptions and graffiti found on a highway railing in the remote California town, left over the years by itinerant travelers, not all of it "respectable" by any means (the piece ends with the shout, "Why in hell did you come, anyway?").

The final work, "And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma," is sheer bliss, a showpiece for his invented instruments arranged in a series of 34 one-minute-long sections, gradually increasing from duos to a concluding septet. Many of the themes were working models for those employed in his soon-to-be-written masterwork Delusion of the Fury. They are scrumptious lines full of otherworldly melodies and infectious rhythms, both serving as wonderful illustrations of his instruments' capabilities and utterly delightful miniatures in their own right. A superb recording, The Harry Partch Collection, Vol. 2 is a must-have for any self-respecting fan and a reasonable introduction to the composer's work for the intrigued listener. Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide

[01-04: The Wayward]
01. U.S. Highball - A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip (1943, rev. 1955; recorded 1958)
02. San Francisco - A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties (1943, rev. 1955; recorded 1958)
03. The Letter (1943, rev. 1972; recorded 1972)
04. Barstow - Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (1941, rev. 1968; recorded 1982)

05. And on The Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma (1963-64, rev. 1966; recorded 1964)


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V/A - Pioneers of Electronic Music

In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born.

Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years. It was the first large electronic music center in the United States, thanks to the path-breaking support of the Rockefeller Foundation and encouragement from two of the country’s leading universities. The Center became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of electronic music in the world. All of the music on this historic reissue is the result of the pioneering work of the Center and its composers.

The guest composers and Columbia-associated composers who have produced pieces at the Center include Bülent Arel, Luciano Berio, Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman, Arthur Kreiger, Daria Semegen, Pril Smiley, and Edgard Varèse. Ussachevsky’s own students at the Center included Jon Appleton, Wendy Carlos, Charles Dodge, Robert Moog, Alice Shields, Harvey Sollberger, and Charles Wuorinen. Of the seven composers most closely associated with the Center from its early years, six are present on this disc.

01. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Sonic Contours (1952)
02. Otto Luening - Low Speed (1952)
03. Otto Luening - Invention in Twelve Tones (1952)
04. Otto Luening - Fantasy in Space (1952)
05. Otto Luening/Vladimir Ussachevsky - Incantation (1953)
06. Otto Luening - Moonflight (1968)
07. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Piece for a Tape Recorder (1956)
08. Pril Smiley - Kolyosa (1970)
09. Bulent Arel - Stereo Electronic Music #2 (1970)
10. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Computer Piece #1 (1968)
11. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Two Sketches for a Computer Piece #1 (1971)
12. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Two Sketches for a Computer Piece #2 (1971)
13. Mario Davidovsky - Synchronisms #5 (1969)
14. Alice Shields - The Transformation of Ani (1970)

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