Modern science has provided composers and audiences with a whole new world of sound. Instead of vibrations resulting from strings or columns of air as with traditional instruments, sound waves can now be produced by electronic oscillations. With the invention and development of electronically generated sound, the use and alteration of everyday sound data by tape recorder, the random choices of musical happenings, the management of mathematical-musical formulas via the computer, and the psychedelic manifestations in mixed media, there is a whole host of novel possibilities. However, just because a composer is of the experimental persuasion does not necessarily place him in the front of the procession, for experiments can lead to blind alleys and dead ends just as easily as to significant breakthroughs. And if such experiments do succeed in making major breakthroughs, the mere manipulation of new materials and ideas is not sufficient in itself to become the stuff of new art forms. For that it takes the appearance and efforts of a master composer, one able to control the new resources and shape them into the forms of a new creative synthesis. So whether a composer moves in the direction of rigidly controlled serialism, orients himself toward electronic computerization, or adopts the tried-and-true traditions of selective eclecticism, only time can tell which road leads to the future. Historical experience reveals that these seemingly new phenomena are actually variants and extensions of age-old principles and basic human urges. Viewed in this objective light, the events of the last quarter of the 20th century will in all likelihood exhibit about the same mixture of old, new, and experimental elements, of conservative, liberal, and progressive directions, of past, present, and future trends as those to be encountered at any historical cross section of time.
Concrete music is the term used to identify one aspect of contemporary composition. It involves using the tape recorder to capture everyday sounds and manipulate them on magnetic tape. The procedure might be compared with the way Robert Rauschenberg puts together one of his assemblages (above), The artist selects some random objects-coke bottles, a birdcage, bedsprings, old newspaper clippings and then combines them into a three-dimensional collage, painting some sections, leaving others as they are. The composer of concrete music finds sounds and noises all around him-the clanking of trash cans, the whine of jet engines, the roar of city traffic, the sirens of fire trucks. Once recorded, these environmental sounds can be edited, the sequence controlled, and the tape run at varying speeds, spliced or scrambled, and played backwards. The material can also be filtered by eliminating overtones, with feedback added or subtracted, and certain sounds may be isolated, fragmented, and broken down into separate components. The possibilities are far-ranging. Another and more sophisticated approach is found in sounds artificially generated by means of the synthesizer used in combination with a computer. By, converting sound waves, with their elements of pitch, dynamics, duration, and tone color, into digits or a number series, the synthesizer-computer can then be programmed to produce a tape capable of being played back on a tape recorder. There are also portable synthesizers suitable for use in live performance.
Whether the musical process is improvisatory, as with concrete music and chance happenings, or rationally controlled, as with computerization, ample precedents in the musical past can be cited. Random fancy is apparently as old as music itself. If the 20thcentury composer seems to stress chance, the procedure is not essentially different from the vocal improvisations worked in medieval times on old Gregorian tunes, an organist inventing variants on Protestant hymns, Bach writing out his free toccatas and fantasies, or a virtuoso instrumentalist ad-libbing cadenzas in a classical concerto. Freedom and strictness are neither mutually nor musically exclusive, and the wise composer maintains both options separately or in combination. The work of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, both prominent figures on the international musical scene, reveal some of the possibilities of this mode of music making. When today's mathematically minded composer turns to the computer, the process may differ in kind but not in spirit from certain musical methods of the past. The mathematical basis for music, for instance, has been known ever since Pythagoras discovered the ratios of the musical intervals in the late 6th century B.C.. Some medieval composers accelerated or slowed down the note values of melodies and thereby expanded or contracted the rhythmic ratios of their isorhythmic motets. In his thirty variations on a theme, the famous "Goldberg" Variations, Bach in every third variation (the third, sixth, ninth, etc.) devised a series of canons from the unison to the ninth. In the earlier 20th century Schoenberg and Berg employed rigorous serial techniques with the tone rows and their segments appearing straightforward, in inversion, in retrograde, and in retrograde inversion. The musical thought of Milton Babbitt illustrates this approach, while a string quartet by Elliott Carter exemplifies the continuity of the classical tradition.
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