FOR THE ADVANCED: Avant Garde Music's Avant Garde What's Continued from Page Five 24" with less than two hours of rehearsal. AFTER hearing the American pianists Paul Jacobs or David Tudor perform it is conceiveable that anything can be played, and played well. After all, throughout the course of musical history the techniques and traditions of per- formance were developed from the music being written, and not vice versa. The broadcast of Luening and Ussachevsky's "Concerted Piece" was one of the first American network radio performances of music in an area now in its sec- ond decade of development. "Con- certed Piece" is a recent electron- ic, or American "tape recorder," composition, and was written es- pecially for this particular New York Philharmonic Concert. Early significant work in elec- tronic music was produced be- tween 1950 and 1956 in the Stu- dios of NWDR in Koln, Germany, and RAI in Milano, Italy. Other electronic music has been com- posed in Belgium, England, France, Finland, Holland, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. But it was in the German and Italian electronic music composed / '.. -''4. 4 * '4. -4 -- ~ 4,' 4 4 S ~ 4. $ / a s_ ' 4 S Everything From Chairs To Erasers BY GORDON MUMMA PNAPRIL of this year the Ameri- can musical public heard the New York Philharmonic, under Leonard Bernstein's direction, broadcast three recent musical compositions. Most people who heard the program were aston- ished, many were shocked and bewildered, some were fascinated and excited. The three works performed were "Antiphony One" by the Canadian Henry Brant, "Improvisation sur Malarme I" by the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, and the "Concerted Piece for Tape Recorder and Or- chestra" by the Americans Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachev- sky. For a good part of the audience this was the most "advanced" music they had ever heard. The conservative critics assured their readers that the avant garde were only having a field day, next week everything would return to nor- mal and the Philharmonic might again play Brahms. - For the radical critics it was not at all shocking. To them the Brant had its moments but was generally pretty old stuff, Charles Ives having done that sort of thing around the turn of the century. The Luening-Ussachevsky was too much like stock-in-trade TV and science fiction film sound effects. Cage -Score for "Fontana Mix" before 1956 by Karlheinz Stock- hausen, Gottfried Michael Koen- ig, Luciano Berio, and Bruno Maderna which clarified the prob- lems of electronic music for other composers and established musical precedents on which further elec- tronic music could either depend or rebel. MOST interesting is the fact that the amount of electronic music composed since 1956 has steadily declined. This is account- ed for by several reasons, first, by a change in the character of the European contemporary music festivals which occured about 1955. Continued on Page Ten - - - Webern-Spiritual father of the avant garde serialists. _I _ _ _ I I I i The Suit b . That Brought Fashion To Wash ''Wear! 75% Dacron -25% ยง Cotton Cord. This is the classic of wash'n'wear suits - DEANSGATE. It's completely wash'n'wear . . . and the perfect expres- sion of the natural shoulder model! Featherlight yet it rarely Wrinkles. And it wears and wears. $3995 SAF F E L L & BUS H State Street on the Campus (SEE OuR FLOOR DISPLAY EACH NIGHT) NONO " - - popular serialist Finally, for the radical critics, the Boulez was lovely, but it was an early work, and wouldn't it have been nice if we could have heard something more recent. AS THE DEBRIS settles it is a little easier to evaluate what is happening in the contemporary musical world, and to determine what sort of menace the "avant garde" really presents. The Brant "Antiphony One" is an example of "music in space" and is scored for several orches- tras which are located at different points in the concert hall. Each orchestra requires its own con- ductor, and the audience sits in the middle of all the sound. It is not a new idea, Gabrielli wrote antiphonal music for St. Marks in Venice in the 16th century, Ber- lioz; Mahler, and numerous others from the musical past have made use of music in space. Recently, in Ann Arbor, Josef Blatt and the University Sympho- ny performed Leos Janacek's "Sinfonietta" with the orchestra on stage and a retinue of brass players in the balcony. In pre- vious years the University per- formances of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" have used a large choir in the second balcony. The interest in and sales suc- cess of stereophonic apparatus in- dicates that the public is as ex- cited about music in space as many composers. IT IS WORTH mentioning three further examples of music in space. The unfinished "Universe Symphony" by the American vis- ionary Charles Ives is written for several orchestras placed at vari- ous heights on the mountains sur- rounding a valley in which the audience is seated. (To date there have been no performances). For the "ein irrender sohn" by Swedish Bo Nilsson, the perform- ers are spaced about ten seats apart, throughout the audience. A most extreme example is a work by -the American Lamont Young which was performed last April at a concert at The Living Theatre in New York City. The performers included the pianist David Tudor and composers John Cage and Toshi Ichyanigi. The musical instruments were not pianos, but rather were large wooden benches and barchairs. The performers dragged and pushed these benches and chairs around the reverberant tile fldor of the theatre lobby while the be- wildered audience wandered help- lessly about, surrounded by in- credible scraping sounds. "Improvisation sur Malarme I" by Pierre Boulez is an example of avant gard serial music for conventional instruments. It is scored for soprano voice and a large group of percussion instru- ments. THE TERM "serial music" ap- plies where the order or se- quence in which sounds occur is important to the structure of the music (as the progression of tonal centers or keys was in the music_ of Beethoven's time). This sequence is called a "ser- ies." The avant garde serialists have expanded their applications of the series from the manner used by Berg, Schonberg, and Webern in the early 20th century (when it was still only a "tone row") to include the length of sounds and their rhythmic pat- terns, the loudness of sounds, methods of attack and articula- tion, and the appearance of dif- ferent instruments and timbres. The serialists who compose for music in space have also applied their techniques to the direction of sound. Some composers employ the elaborate mathematical proced- ures of group theory, set theory, Markov processes, and differen- tial calculus for both analysis and composition. The bewildered reader finds musical journals like die Reihe, Melos, and Gravesaner Review laced with mathematical formulae. Much of this mathe- matical decor may be bunk, but some of it has revealed exciting new musical relationships. THE READER who is sceptical of mathematical applications to music (or to any art) should consider the impact of mathe- matics, specifically geometry, on the artists of the Renaissance. The sketchbooks of Piero della Francesca or Leonardo da Vinci will be most revealing. These rigorous new composi- tional procedures have resulted in music which is often extremely difficult to perform. Indeed, many serious musicians consider it im- possible. But this music is being played with increasing frequency, and performers who specialize in new music point out that the problem is rooted in' the academies and conservatories where musical per- formers are still learning tech- niques which apply only to music of the 18th and 19th centuries. That even the radical innova- tions soon become a part of the general performance techniques is illustrated by the experience of an American orchestra which re- cently recorded the serial music of Anton Webern, Rehearsals of the earlier (and easier) music consumed several weeks for each piece. But increasing familiarity with Webern's musical language enabled these performers to record the very .difficult "Concerto Op. Continued on Page Eight IGordon Mumma has studied 1 composition with Homer Kel- ler, Ross Lee Finney and Les. lei Bassett. Four of his own electric compositions were per- formed in New York last year. 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