Pierre Schaeffer - L'Œuvre Musicale 4 x cd (INA-GRM, 1990)

The four discs collected here cover the bulk of Pierre Schaeffer's concrète works (and act as addendum to my previously posted three disc version). The set begins with his pre-tape days when he composed using multiple turntables mixing sound effects recordings direct to lathe. The earliest recordings here were created in 1948 while serving as radio engineer for Radiodiffusion Française and are built from sounds ranging from locomotives and whirligigs to pots, pans, piano, and percussion. Each of those collages eventually made their way onto the air. His "Suite Pour 14 Instruments" is an amalgam of orchestral sounds rendered far beyond their original context.

Where these early works clearly function as experiments for Schaeffer, once Pierre Henry joins in as his assistant, the music takes on both a playfulness and a refinement of detail that eventually became landmarks of the French approach to musique concrète. The processes became increasingly laborious, and those who once flocked to Schaeffer's studio to work in this new medium became disillusioned by the demand and patience that the work required. Schaeffer and Henry worked together for eight years amassing a daunting sound library, some of which never fully materialed. Included here is an Henry work from 1988, created in homage to Schaeffer using fragments of their Orpheus 51 and 53. Though Schaeffer retired from music in 1960, he returned to sound studies in the late 1970s, eventually revisiting some early works. Those too are collected here, and the bridge in time is event as Schaeffer breathes new life into his early techniques while also incorporating a more defined sound. Included as well are the results of Schaeffer's studies of psycho-acoustics, presented here as the two part Le Trièdre Fertile. The newly included fourth disc gathers interviews and assorted radio material as well.

mp3s, 320 kbps
Les Incunables (1948-1950) & Les Œuvres Communes (1950-1953 Et 1988)
Les Révisions (1948-1952) Et Œuvres Postérieures (1957-1979) & Documents (1948-1990)

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Les Incunables (1948-1950)
Les Œuvres Communes (1950-1953 Et 1988
Les Révisions (1948-1952) Et Œuvres Postérieures (1957-1979)
Documents (1948-1990)

James Tenney - Selected Works 1961-1969 (Frog Peak, 2001)

Tenney is different things for different people. Some know his writings, others his piano work, others his percussion pieces. He was also one of the early proponents of computer music. The first couple tracks here are tape pieces, one of them a mangling of Elvis' "Blue Suede Shoes". Often he uses computer algorithms to determine different parameters of the sound. He used those same stochastic processes to dictate a player piano scroll, also heard here. The last track is one of my favorite bits of electronic music, using Shepard tones to simulate a continuously rising note. During my college radio days, I used to play this during talk sets and it made every pause in speech extremely difficult to overcome. The magic is in how, despite the processes sometimes coming off as technical and formal, Tenney pulls each piece off in ways that are engaging and even funny. He is without question a master of all his crafts.

Selected Works
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Andreas Oldörp - Lotos (Nur/Nicht/Nur, 2008)

Andreas Oldörp is a German sound artist active since the mid 1980's who is fascinated, as many other sound artists are, by the interactions of sound and space. For his Lotos installation--created as part of the Klang Zeit Festival of 2008--Oldörp fitted the chapel of the Dominican Church in Münster with several glass cyllinders, into which he feeds gas burners. The ignition creates a singing flame, producing a variety of overtones as the vibrations and exhaust sound within the pipes.


This recording documents Oldörp and four other sound artists and improvisors as they interact with the Lotos installation. Notes are not made as to how the contributors crafted their sound, but a glance at each artist's past work helps decipher what is heard. Oldörp begins the disc with intermittent complimentary timbres that could easily be additional singing-flame pipes. Rolf Julius contributes fragile tinkling and gentle sonorities that most likely are from electronic sources. Instrument builder Stephan Froleyks conjures frenzied tones at first before ascending to an unidentified whistle that flitters amidst the dense hum of the installation. The disc closes with the duo of Poul Naes and violinist and Zeitkratzer member Burkhard Schlothauer as they unify quite transparently with the Lotos. Though crafted from several different dates over the installation's run, the disc is sequenced continuously.

Lotos
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Gunner Møller Pedersen - Et Lydår, A Sound Year (Danachord, 1982; Dacapo, 2001)

Gunner Møller Pedersen belongs to the second generation of Danish makers of tape music, leaning more on the spacier Else Marie Pade end of the spectrum than the sputtering Jørgen Plaetner-styled one. Though delightfully excessive in its own right, Et Lydår displays much more respect for day-to-day responsibilities than some of his other works. Et Lydår is essentially an aural calender. Pedersen created a thirty minute piece representing each month of the year, amounting to six (!!!) discs of music. It's easy to consider this completely out of hand, until you realize you've lived an entire year in just six hours. That kind of savings doesn't come cheap. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, here it is condensed into a measly stereo. I'm far underqualified to speak to the month-to-month changes in Denmark, but he could have easily veered into the overly literal yet did not. "February" does conjure an icy expanse, while "June" is surprisingly pastoral. On the whole, each piece maintains an impressive balance of imagery and abstraction. He's clearly well-humored enough not to overdo things by accident.

Et Lydår
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Ramon Sender - Desert Ambulance (Locust, 2006)

A better-late-than-never missive from the early days of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, conjured from near nothing at the hands of co-founder Ramon Sender. Though set to tape in the early 60's, these recordings only emerged some four years past. In its infancy, the SFTMC was something of a hodgepodge affair, with much of its equipment arriving via generous nods of an interested representative from nearby Ampex. The opening piece, "Kore" (1962), embodies that kitchen sink approach; Sender crafted it in the attic studio manipulating tape speed by hand, with scraped piano strings and the improvised sounds of several Conservatory chorus members. The spacey, jump-start squeak and squiggle leave little remnant of the source intact. On the flip side is one of Sender's most recognized works, "Desert Ambulance" (1964), an audio-visual collaboration with projections by Tony Martin (a still from which serves as the album's cover). The work was written for Pauline Oliveros on accordion, its score a tape piece broadcast over headphones that propels Oliveros' imaginative playing. The playful tape work that the audience hears is built from plundered music snippets and a variety of other sounds, all triggered by a Chamberlain Music Master.

Desert Ambulance
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Iannis Xenakis (Perf. by William Winant) - Psappha 7'' (Dolor Del Estamago, 1995)

Psappha is one of only a few solo percussion pieces (possibly only two?) devised by Iannis Xenakis. Although specific instruments are left up to the performer's discretion, Xenakis intended the piece for groups of wood, skin, and metal instruments. In lieu of standard notation, the score is divided amongst those intended timbres.


Score via iannis-xenakis.org
The piece relies largely on layered patterns that span the timbral range. The density of the patterns vary greatly and some sections call for great force from the performer. Much like Conlon Nancarrow's player piano pieces and maybe more aptly Stockhausen's Zylkus, the piece places significant demand on the performer. One particularly daunting section calls for 25 hits per second. There is a certain level of problem-solving required before the piece can even begin. San Francisco-based percussionist William Winant rises to the occasion in this 1995 recording. Winant has most admirably tackled pieces across the new music spectrum from the likes of Cage, Tenney, Reich, Stockhausen, and Feldman.

Psappha

As if the technical demands weren't enough, there is also a groove and finesse to the piece. The following video is of another performance of Psappha courtesy of the excellent Steven Schick, whose torso fully embraces the piece's groove. Schick too has immersed himself deeply in Xenakis's percussion works.

Christina Kubisch - Sechs Spiegel (Edition RZ, 1995)

Sechs Spiegel (Six Levels) captures forty minutes of an audio/visual installation by the always imaginative Christina Kubisch in Saarbrücken, Germany. In the organ gallery of a Baroque church, Kubisch mounted six slates on the parapet before the organ's pipes. Each slate was coated in a luminescent pigment which shimmered in response to the fall of light in the gallery.



Paired with each slate is the sound of a drinking glass finessed into vibration. It is unclear whether a photosensitive connectivity between slab and sound existed, or if the resonances played out continuously with any synchronicity between it and the light play merely imagined. There does seem to be an ebb and flow to the sound document, giving way to both harmonious and dissonant passages. The installation ran from mid December, 1994, until the end of January, 1995.



Sechs Spiegel
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