1974 ISCM Electronic Music Winners

[In listening to this installment from AGP, I was stunned to hear the opening chords of the Radiohead's "Idioteque" in Paul Lansky's mild und leise @ the 43" mark. It turns out, Jonny Greenwood listened to this LP during the Kid A recording sessions and a couple of samples made their way onto the album.]

-- LINER NOTES --

In the autumn of 1974, the League of Composers-International Society for Contemporary Music, U.S. Section, organized an International Electronic Music Competition, the first undertaken by the organization. Tapes of electronic music compositions were solicited from composers and electronic music studios all over the world. A distinguished panel agreed to select the winners.

The judges were:

Bulent Arel, composer and Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mario Davidovsky, Pulitzer prizewinning composer, Co-Director of the Electronic Music Center of Columbia and Princeton Universities, and Professor of Music at City College of New York. Jean Eichelberger Ivey, composer and teacher of composition and electronic music at Peabody Conservatory of Music. J. K. Randall, composer and Professor of Music at Princeton University.

129 tapes representing composers from 15 countries were entered in the competition. Each judge listened to each tape individually, and then the judges met as a group to make their final selections. During the entire judging process, the tapes were placed in unlabeled boxes and identified only by numbers.

The winning compositions are presented in this album. It should be noted that no distinctions were made between the winning compositions, and that the order of works presented on the recording does not signify a ranking.

Program notes and biographical material have been provided by the composers.

As President of the League-ISCM and coordinator of the International Electronic Music Competition, I feel that these works, besides being excellent pieces of music, represent a wide spectrum of approaches, attitudes, styles, and technical procedures that will give the listener much enjoyment and, also, an understanding of the breadth and sophistication of current electronic music. -- Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

Maurice Wright:
Electronic Composition (1973)

Electronic Composition was completed in the spring of 1973. The piece is centered on the pitch Middle C. The timbre space is created by assigning component musical lines to various synthetic "instruments" that are comprised of simple combinations of oscillators and amplifiers and then recording these lines with careful control of reverberation and phase. Certain elements of the piece, namely the sounds that some listeners have compared to "a distant chorus," or "a mutant brass band," as well as the time-pointed clip-clop of electronically pitched horses' hooves in the brief Coda, are developed further in Cantata, a composition for tenor, percussion, and synthesized voices and instruments. -- Maurice Wright

Maurice Wright was born in Front Royal, Virginia. He was a Mary Duke Biddle Scholar at Duke University and Presidents' Fellow at Columbia University. He has studied composition with Jack Besson, Chou Wen-Chung. Paul Earls, lain Hamilton, Jacques Monod: and Charles Wuorinen; computer music and synthetic speech with Charles Dodge. He received a master's degree in 1974 from Columbia University, where he teaches Music Theory. He received the Henry Schuman Prize for Music from Duke University in 1972 and the Joseph Bearns Prize for Music from Columbia University in 1974.

Menachem Zur:
Chants, for magnetic tape (1974)

Chants, for magnetic tape was realized in the electronic studio of Columbia University in March 1974. The work is shaped by a series of phrases divided by small pauses, somewhat resembling a Gregorian chant. The pitches are organized around a nine-tone series: F Bb G, A D B, C# F# D#. The main melodic cell is the figure F ascending to Bb and descending to G. -- Menachem Zur

Menachem Zur was born in 1942 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He studied theory at the College for Teachers for Music in Tel Aviv and in the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In 1969 he came up to New York to complete his B.M. degree in Composition at the Mannes College of Music. Mr. Zur received his M.F.A. degree in Composition at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. His master's thesis in Composition was a piece for choir, magnetic tape, brass quartet, and percussion that won first prize in a contest in Jerusalem in 1973. He is currently completing his D.M.A. degree at Columbia University in New York City, and teaches music at Queens College, City University of New York.

Side 2
Richard Cann: Bonnylee (1972)

(This song was sung by an IBM 360 model 91)


Paul Lansky: mild und leise (1973/74)

mild und leise was written and synthesized during 1973-74 using the IBM 360/91 computer at Princeton University and the Music 360 synthesis program written by Barry Vercoe. I want to thank my former student Richard Cann, composer of Bonnylee, for his help in learning how to use this program, and the Princeton University Computer Center for its generous allocation of computer time. This work is dedicated to Godfrey Winham.

I would like to advise the listener to:
listen easily and slowly--this
work takes its time,
listen to changing timbres,
to chaning chords,
to changing timres within chords,
to changing chords within timbres,
listen to repetition,
to changes within repetition,
to increasinly more complex forms of the same under repetition,
listen to different ways of doing things,
to linear shapes,
to repeated chords,
--spreading out, and contracting, registrally, to simple rhythms,
--becoming complex rhythms,
listen to combinations of different ways of doing things,
listen to starts and stops as breathing points and places where new twists begin an old material,
listen to each part of the piece as an evolving growing, and more complicated form of earlier parts of the piece,
--as a way of doing things which has only gradually become possible.
listen carefully, and easily.

-- Paul Lansky