Electronic Music from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

This recording of electronic music presents the works of four authors who come from four different countries with quite varied musical backgrounds. Two of them have considerable knowledge of electronics which stems from a formal engineering training in one case, and from a high degree of practical experience in the other. Diversity of styles is in evidence, as each composer's style is his own concern. The common experience for these composers has been the use of technical resources at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the investigation of specialized methods for the evolution and transformation of recorded sound materials, conducted in my course at Columbia and further demonstrated in private sessions by technicians. This work is done in Studio 106, located in McMillin Theatre on the campus of Columbia University in the same room where the older Columbia University Tape Studio was housed. The present studio has been considerably expanded in recent years and has become a part of a complex of three studios and a small laboratory established under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant given to Columbia and Princeton Universities in 1959.

With the notable exception of the very unique possibilities offered by the RCA Sound Synthesizer located in Studio 318, the standard and specialized equipment of the Center is devoted to the production of sound materials by "Classical" methods, common to all electronic music studios. Thus, materials (of either purely electronic or non-electronic origin) recorded on tape, may be subjected to manipulation by tape speed variation, electronic filtering, several types of frequency modulation, artificial reverberation, etc. Tape cutting and splicing by hand still occupies a good deal of time in preparing the sound patterns and arranging them in longer sequences. Techniques are available to create certain types of rhythmic patterns and timbre variations by semi-automatic methods, but the materials thus produced are of limited usefulness. Much time in classroom discussion is devoted to the structural considerations which we believe to be quite challenging and of paramount importance in the electronic music medium, rich as it is in unusual timbres and opportunities for the realization of complex rhythms.

It is hard to imagine that there is much occasion any more for claiming that electronic music is "dehumanized" in its content. Electronic music simply undertakes to express, by different means, human situations, ideas, and emotions.

Vladimir Ussachevsky
Professor of Music
Columbia University

SIDE 1

Band 1. Study No. 1
My main objectives in this Study were: 1. to obtain instrument-like sounds, such as the bell-like sonorities of the opening (derived from saw-tooth waves), or those in the epilogue that resemble contrabass pizzicati (derived from sine waves), with a vast range of percussive and plucking sounds in between: and 2. to create tensions and relaxations, the former achieved through complex rhythms, increased densities of tone color, and other similar effects; the latter occurring when a high degree of intensity is diluted by the introduction of "richer" and "more familiar" sounds. The sources are all electronic.

Absolute control has been excercised over the development of component materials and their final mixing, by integrating six channels coming from four precisely synchronized tape recorders. The result is a finished composition originally designed for two-channel reproduction.

Andres Lewin-Richter

SIDE 2

Band 1. Vocalise

Vocalise was composed in the Spring of 1964. Conceived as a study, it is an attempt to create electronic music of an expressive, emotional nature. Two elements are juxtaposed: the human voice (that of Pnina Avni, my wife) and sounds from electronic sources.

These elements are stated at the beginning in a pure and simple form, but later undergo changes and variations through the use of the techniques of the electronic medium.

After the first presentation of the musical material, an elaborate process of development ensues, in which the two elements -- voice and electronic sounds -- are drawn closer and closer together until it sometimes becomes almost impossible to distinguish which is which.

The third section of the work serves as a kind of recapitulation, and the piece ends in the same characteristic lyrical mood as in the beginning.

Tzvi Avni

Band 2. Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound
Band 3. Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers

Since 1954, composers of electronic music have turned their attention to the problem of combining electronic sounds with traditional instruments. The discipline, as well as requiring new compositional skills, calls on a composer's more traditional training in matters of balance and notation, and heightens his sensitivity to the formal problems of composition in general. My pieces on this disk were designed to give the live performer maximum expressive freedom within each tape cue. The cues are not "technical improvisations in sound", but are realizations of a carefully notated score in which both live and taped portions have been composed. A competent musico-technician, once familiar with my notational techniques and compositional style, could produce, from the written score, an electronic performance differing only in interpretation from the sounds heard on this record.

Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound (1964) in contrast to Dialogues, is a very strictly organized set of six variations on an eleven-bar theme stated at the outset by the flute. The first variation is a restatement of the theme (in altered rhythm) to march-like electronic accompaniment. The second is a strict canon in three parts. The third, entirely electronic, burlesques the theme, making free use of octave transposition. The flute re-enters with the fourth variation, a passionate soliloquy with only one brief electronic punctuation. Variation five, a character variation, features rapid alternation between flute and electronic sound, and a distinctive trilling figuration. Variation six, drawn freely on materials from variations one and five, brings the piece to a brisk cadence.

Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) is rhapsodic in character, deriving most of its thematic-motivic construction from an ascending series of gradually diminishing intervals, forming an almost-serial basis for the piece. Two of the themes are developed and transformed at some length, i.e., the piano's theme in twelfths at the entrance of the electronic sound, and the rhythmic novelty of a rising and accelerating series of seven eighth-notes, heard in the middle and latter portions of the piece.

Walter Carlos