John Cage (1939 – )
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Wendy Carlos and The LSI Philharmonic Orchestra
All Sounds Programmed And Performed On The GDS / Synergy Synthesizers by Wendy Carlos
For The LSI Technology, This Album Is Dedicated To NASA
Produced by Wendy Carlos, 1984
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
One of the great early CDs – perfect for the ‘new’ digital format (compact disc) – amazing with headphones and lights out.
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Wendy Carlos
THE SOUNDS
I love the orchestra. In fact, when I switched from physics to music as my major in college, the opportunity to work with and write for orchestra was no small motivation.
When it appeared that the new field of electronic music could give a composer all of the resources of an orchestra and more in a room-sized studio, I jumped at it and enrolled in graduate school of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, then (1962) the only such facility in the United States.
The crude means of the classic electronic studio of that time, with a splice or two for each note of taped music could produce magical and dramatic musical effects and textures, but they were certainly no substitue for an orchestra.
When I met Bob Moog in the early 1960s and began to work with his synthesizers, then at least I could interpret music with real performance values, as I attempted to prove with my ‘Switched On’ recordings. Indeed, electronic music had become real music at last ! For a while I thought that we were getting close to the ‘orchestra in a box.’
However, it did not take long for me to learn that this common belief was really a misconception. By 1968, when I was finishing my second album (The Well-Tempered Synthesizer), I had already discovered that the ‘infinite possibilities’ of the synthesizer were actually very narrow – to the point of boredom, if one were honest about it. It was all too easy to sound thick and turgid, even with only two or three tracks of this presumably wonderful new sound.
Somehow the sounds of the older acoustic instruments were still much better. I began to understand that it was the utter simplicity of the synthesizer’s sounds that was their downfall. Acoustic instruments evolved over the ages to satisfy the human desire for subtly complex sounds. The synthesizer, as it evolved over only a few decades, produced sounds that were neither subtle nor complex and became boring with repetition, once the novelty wore off.
Even the most refined of today’s analog synthesizers generate timbres that are far removed from physical reality, with their pure sine, sawtooth and square waves, plus a bit of filtering and modulation – all very easy to describe in words or pictures or numbers. Just try to describe the waveshapes from a (well-played) violin, horn or timpani!
Technology now exists that can digitally sample or record a few notes of rich acoustic sources and then play them back from a keyboard (at different speeds to produce other pitches) like the old Mellotron. While this does have its usefulness, a few minutes spent with one of these machines will show you the limitations of the Xerox copy approach, if subtlety or flexibility is desired.
Even many of the wonderful new digital synthesizers made available over the past few years in a variety of forms, including a lot of bells and whistles and special convenience features, are still unable to control sounds much past the simple stage of the original modular Moog machines. The basic design of each presupposes this or that kind of sound variation to be ‘unimportant’ or “‘naudible,’ thus limiting the possibility of control.
Finally, what I consider to be the prime departure from the previous limitations was developed a few years ago by Hal Alles at Bell Labs. He modestly avoided making sweeping simplifications in his designs, which evolved to be open-ended enough, yet controllable, to permit subtle complexities in sounds akin to the best acoustic instruments. His series of prototypes eventually resulted in the GDS and Synergy digital synthesizers from Digital Keyboards. Their first task was to assemble a user-friendly software and control package for the Alles generator card.
The next step, which I undertook in 1982, was building a library of voices (nearly 500 by now, many were also made available on cartridges from Digital Keyboards) replicating as closely as possible the features of acoustic instruments. Album notes are not the place to describe the complexities of the several hundred details that must be programmed for each note of each instrument with various dynamic levels and performing methods. It is intimidating, yet ultimately fascinating. I recommend the exercise to any of you with a love of sound and some background in acoustics and computers. Expect it to take some years, but I promise you will learn a lot!
The results may not be perfect; mine are perhaps only something like 70-95% successful as replicas that sound just the way those ‘real’ instruments do. (I like that term: ‘replicas.’) But perform and record several dozen of these replicas together in an ensemble and you can produce what this recording demonstrates: the world’s first digitally synthesized orchestra, thanks to the miracles of LSI technology (‘Large Scale Integration’ circuits, i.e., computer chips).
All sounds on this recording were digitally synthesized and fine-tuned by ear. No digital sampling techniques were employed. No microphones were used at any stage, thus eliminating one of the weakest links in audio. It was not necessary to disguise sounds with a lot of echo and phasing to hide their inadequacies.
With digital delay and time processing, it was possible to achieve a balance between natural room-sound ambience and three dimensional stereo placement, resulting in an uncanny sense of ‘scrim free’ orchestral transparency on the digitally mastered recording.
But why do all this? Do we now have the ‘orchestra in a box’? Not really, considering the time and effort required to produce an orchestral recording in this manner. Rather we should consider the reality of replication as only a measure of the quality of the synthesis, not as the ultimate goal. The goal ought to be providing the base on which to build new sounds with orchestral qualities that have not been heard before but are equally satisfying to the ear.
This album represents my attempt to provide that base; look for the next steps using the experimental hybrid and imaginary sounds which have grown out of this work.
So the LSI Philharmonic is born. This recording celebrates itself within the bounds of the initial library of orchestral replicas I created. I present it to you as my encomium to the orchestra. After all, imitation is a high form of flattery. (But in most ways I still prefer the original.)
THE MUSIC
I have long had an idea as to the reason there is so small an audience for serious contemporary music. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in ‘From Bauhaus To Our House,’ since about World War 1, architects (and fine artists, too) have become more afraid of appearing ‘bourgeois’ from wanting to give delight to their audience. In so doing they have moved in smaller and smaller concentric circles until all stand on the same square inch of safely non-bourgeois style.
I believe this applies as much to modern music as to the other arts. So, is it any wonder that the audience at large has fled to the decidedly more human pop culture? My hunch is that they don’t hate music that is ‘modern,’ only music that is ‘boring’!
Consiering that the music composed for this album is no less important to me than the sounds. Written as for orchestra, it is based on astronomical subjects.
‘COSMOLOGICAL IMPRESSSIONS’ is a suite of three movements. The first ‘Genisis’ portrays a wide-angle view of the universe. Sounds grow out of the void and crystalize into a high fifth in bassoons and cellos. This builds slowly and deliberately with increasing complexity into a ‘dawn of life’ theme over swirling impressionistic arpeggios. trumpet and then pipe organ join in crescendo at the broad climax followed by a reposeful ending.
‘Eden,’ the second movement, is a peaceful combination of diatonic tune over simple harmonic chaconne. Three main themes and three sub-themes are woven into a continuous contrapuntal fabric in moderate 3/4 meter to depict the straightforward elegance of the legendary garden.
The distances between galaxies are incomprehensibly vast, unbearably lonely in the third movement, ‘IC’ (for ‘Intergalactic Communications’), we try a radio signal ‘Hello, we exist!’ Not wanting to appear to square or dull, we probably avoid 4/4 and choose something more subtle, like the intricate 13/8 used here. An allegro theme is repeated over and over, first in bassoon, then clarinet. Above it floats the melancholy adagio counter-theme in violins and horns as the message continues over lightyears and parsecs, until eternity meets infinity…
‘MOONSCAPES’ is a nine movement suite, a larger work in the spirit of Holst’s ‘The Planets.’ The topic here is the major moons of the solar system for which we have at last, thanks to NASA, real images of real worlds, each with its own personality. (Appropriate, these are images reconstructed by computer from digital information!) Working outwards from the sun, we encounter:
‘Luna,’ for Earth’s moon, the most familiar one in the solar system, is the longest movement. From traditional associations with ‘love’ and ‘lunacy,’ it takes the form of a concerto for schizophrenic soloist. Two main themes, one dramatic, the other romantic; alternate between soloist and orchestra. The solo begins as a violin, becomes a violoncello, and then nervously retreats to become a trumpet, a clarinet and a bass clarinet, before returning as a violin just in time for a variation on the romantic theme. All five personalities alternate freely through the cheery coda. There a sixth personality, combining violin timbre with the percussive envelope of a piano, is momentarliy disclosed. (This is the only sound on the record that cannot be made with a traditional orchestra!)
‘Phobos and Deimos’ are the two tiny moons of Mars. They move the fastest and are probably the least attractive moons in the system. Here they are given musical voice as a rondo / scherzo with two gnome-like themes tied together with three contrasting sub-themes. The first theme, for Phobos, is a sort of shouting match between horns and trombones. The second, for Deimos, is a dour dance. The harmonies explore stacked major thirds and stacked fifths.
‘Ganymede,’ the largest moon in the solar system (even bigger than Mercury), is one of Jupiter’s satellites. Its size and varied, attractive surface features suggested bouyant, happy and generous music, which brought to mind a jazz waltz. Three main and two seccondary themes contrapuntally weave in and out over a ten-bar chord progression, occasionally shortened to create asymetrical interest in both harmony and rhythm. Solos in horn, flute, alto sax and bassoon highlight the entrance of each new theme.
‘Europa,’ another of Jupiter’s moons, projects a slow impressionistic mood. Two angular themes float over an accompaniment that undulates in varying ostinati. The ending is hopeful; beneath the cracked-ice surface there may be life waiting to be thawed from its frozen prison as in Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2010.’ (This is the only movement to employ processing. Subtle phasing was added to the string tracks.)
‘Io’ is a tempestuous scherzo, a perpetuum mobile, in keeping with Jupiter’s red-orange volcanic moon. The surface is constantly changing, yet appears the same, and the music bubbles along as a passacoglio with eleven varied repetitions. The relentless theme and harmony are built in fourths and major seconds.
‘Callisto,’ the last of Jupiter’s moons in the Suite, is a heavily cratered, desolate body. The music has a simple ABA form, with a sad, lyrical theme for each A, and a 5/4 ostinato in B over which nonsynchronous orchestral textures wax and wane. Harmonies are bitonal and quartal, the meter is frequently surprisingly complex despite the gentle nature of the melancholy mood.
‘Rhea,’ the second-largest moon of Saturn, is the briefest movement. It features clusters and tri-tonality, but at a more spirited tempo than usual for cluster-music, and a simple theme over the cluster harmonies. (The ‘electronic’ sound quality is totaly an artifact of the clusters used; the effect would sound nearly the same with acoustic instruments.) The meter is a compound 4 + 3/4 but the music flows gracefully and lightly over this with an uncomplicated sound not unlike the attractive appearance of the moon.
‘Titan,’ Saturn’s largest moon (also larger than Mercury), has been thought likely to contain life. But Voyager’s photos revealed that the thick rust-colored, hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere that makes life possible totally obscures the surface. The music reflects this enigma. It is dark and brooding, with pre-dominant use of the low instruments, a tuba solo, soft bass drum and tom-tom. The adagio in 3/4 with constantly shifting downbeat sits on an unvarying pedal harmony of E-flat minor over A minor.
”Iapetus,’ the third largest of Saturn’s moons, has an appearance unique in the solar system. One side is nearly charcoal black, while the other is bright and reflective, although the surface itself is not particularly complex. This most contrasting movement of the Suite is composed with only two main themes, each of which takes on several moods and styles. The ending, with an extended coda, also exploresa quiet aleatoric impressionism, a fat tutti / recapitulation, and an unusual solo percussion toccato, which brings the Suite to an energetic conclusion. (For now anyway – NASA may yet bring us images of the moons of Uranus and Neptune…)
Wendy Carlos
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TRACK LISTING:
Wendy Carlos (1939 – )
COSMOLOGICAL IMPRESSIONS
- Genesis [7:10]
- Eden [4:25]
- I.C. (Intergalactic Communications) [3:40]
MOONSCAPES
- Luna [8:40]
- Phobus and Deimos [2:45]
- Ganymede [4:22]
- Europa [4:15]
- Io [4:28]
- Callisto [4:28]
- Rhea [1:50]
- Titan [3:43]
- Iapetus [5:48]
No video of a performance of ‘Digital Moonscapes’ – so here is a short documentary about Wendy Carlos.
FINAL THOUGHT:
A groundbreaking electronic soundscape from the 1980s that holds up as music and not something to be filed away in a music museum. Plus, the liner notes are basically Carlos reviewing herself and giving herself the highest of marks!
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company