RFI: Electroacoustic music

Electro-acoustic (as far as I know, I haven't got loads of knowledge on this yet) is to do with incorporating acoustic instruments with concrete sounds. It hasn't got anything to do with electronic music (e.g. synthesiser music).

Electroacoustic musicians= Paul Dolden. Check out his double CD L'ivresse de la vitesse. Also, Hildegard westerkamp's Transformations.

Has anybody got further recommendations?

Michael McNabb – ‘Dreamsong’
http://www.mcnabb.com/music/records/dreamsng.html

Alejandro Viñao - Triple Concerto
http://www.vinao.com/

Boulez - ‘Répons’
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/20.21/cds/boulez_-_repons/main.html

George Benjamin - ‘Antara’
http://www.nimbus.ltd.uk/nrl/main/5167a.html

Jonathan Harvey - ‘Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco’
http://mac-texier.ircam.fr/textes/c00000038/n00000996/

Steve Reich – ‘Different Trains’
http://www.birdpages.purplenet.co.uk/magazine/stevereichdifferenttrain s.htm

Also, many works by Berio, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Reich and other big league contemporary composers use tape, microphones/loudspeakers or computer-assisted 'treatments' in their compositions. Some of these made a point of not calling what they did 'electroacoustic' however.

Specifically on the computer-music front, check out works by Tristan Murail :
http://www.music.columbia.edu/faculty/murail.html

Hope this helps (apologies, I'm too lazy to do the links properly.)

It starts mid-century with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. It has a pop presence now in the work of people like Matmos and Scratch Pet Land.

There's a fabulous CD-ROM (in French, and slanted to French musicians) about this made by INA/GRM/Hyptique. You can preview it here:

http://www.hyptique.net/catalogue/indexv2.html

The recommendation for Ohm: Early Gurus...is an excellent one, though it may be a bit much at 3CDs. If you're looking for a good one-disc set, I'd recommend something called Early Modulations: Vintage Volts, on the Caipirinha label (www.caipirinha.com): it starts with Otto Luening w/ Vladimir Ussachevsky and works its way up to Subotnick, with stops along the way for Xenakis, Cage, Schaeffer and a few more.

Is there any reason to listen to it? Hard to say. Occasionally I like listening to the early stuff to realize just how non- revolutionary some of today's music really is. And as someone who put together some electroacoustic stuff for my coursework, I can say this: it's often a lot more fun to create it than to listen to it. But I still love to listen to it from time to time, too.

Well, Ohm is terrific but can it really count as an electro- acoustic primer? I think of the bulk of the material on there as purely electronic, perhaps only veering into e-a territory towards the end with the likes of Lucier, Amacher and Eno.

Perhaps I'm just too hung up on my "they create electro-acoustic music = they are from Canada" thang. It possibly comes down to the point at which a fairly literal description of a form of composition became a (barely?) marketable genre (70s?).

You're quite right, it's just that the Eno selection on Ohm is from Ambient 4: On Land, which I think of as the environmental end of e-a.

Another quick glance over the track listing of the Ohm set leads me to believe that a good chunk of the first two discs would qualify.

You may be right - I should probably listen to it all again instead of keeping it all lovely and pristine in its slipcase. Not much of the 40s and 50s material struck me as being concerned with electronic manipulation of yr actual transcribed acoustic event. Could be completely wrong on this.

holy toledo

http://www.ubu.com/sound/electronic.html

jeeeeeeez

uhh where to begin with that

at the beginning!

page is not loading for me... :-(

This is from a 62 CD set called "The History of Electroacoustic Music" that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Brazilian student.

!!!

curated by the brazilian student's professor, that is--the student then put it online.

there's tons of great stuff in there, for sure--i love a lot of this stuff--but seeing it presented as a giant mass of undifferentiated, un-annotated data makes me feel strange and a little bit queasy

yah, its a bit much. and impersonal. but i think its an easy way to sample stuff that you might want to delve into in a deeper way later.

one way that something like ubuweb works for me is to open it in one browser and find something to listen to and in another browser seek out info on the composition i'm playing or on the composer. kinda make my own liner-notes that way.

i love ubuweb, but you know what would make ubuweb truly unstoppable? if they supplied thoughtful long-form editorial content--essays, interviews, reviews, etc--to go with the lists of downloads. that would require a real budget, though, which they don't have. they could easily mow down the wire, for example, if they went down the pathway of being more like a magazine.

i'm just glad they do what they do. but, yeah, that would be great.

actually, if they were just able to reproduce old essays/liner-notes to go along with the recordings, that would be cool too.

Hmm... No excuse with the internet for not being able to seek out your own information. My only gripe is 'right-click, Save Link As...-Save' 462 times'. Not sure if it'd take longer working out what I've already got...

get a download manager - you can get the whole thing in one shot

that isn't curated, that's just a dogpile

and while I usually hate it when sideliners respond to someone's massive effort by complaining about notably absent figures... the fact that there's so much fringe stuff here and so many important pieces missing stings a bit.

& the version of Xenakis' 'l'egend d'eer' is that dadblasted overcompressed Pape remix, not the Xenakis master

427-442 is one of the top ten most remarkable electronic music records of all time though

No excuse with the internet for not being able to seek out your own information.

if getting your information from cobbled-together Wikipedia entries and YouTube clips and mp3 blogs counts as adequate, I am hanging up my hat

this reminds me that I should edit the Wikipedia entry on Beatriz Ferreyra--it's nearly nonexistent and she's one of the few women in this giant data dump

but I'll get to that after I finish writing a Wikipedia entry on Meredith Monk's 'Dolmen Music,' which does not exist

it will exist after you enter it.

i thought it was funny when someone on facebook pointed out some list of music writers on wiki and said - there are no women on this list! - and someone else said something like - typical wikipedia its all men! - and my maria posted something like - um, you know anyone can edit wikipedia articles, right?

okay maybe not FUNNY but sometimes if you want something done right...

i will often write about something on the internet because there is nothing on the internet about that thing. it's easy! not on wiki but here and elsewhere.

often its just me and an old wfmu playlist...it can get lonely out there...

Beatriz Ferreyra--it's nearly nonexistent and she's one of the few women in this giant data dump

the bizarre lack of female composers in this list is very striking considering how many obvious people were left out, but there weren't so many other major figures / pieces missing (no David Tudor, mostly only the academically-ensconced US figures so not even Dockstader let alone Raymond Scott) -- this isn't curation, this is a clump. it provides a service at the same time that it provides a headache

it's up to you guys to recompile this with missing major figures and women and republish it as 103 CDs

ok there is one Tudor appearance here, that two minute collaboration with Cage that appeared on that strange Siemans Studio album. that is about the most random thing you could choose to represent the person that many feel to be the primary pioneer of electronic music as a live performance medium (for instance)

but no one is mistaking this to be anything other than what it is, despite the title at the top of the page being 'History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001)'

xpost nobody say a single word about this post please

http://halocyan.com/#/2010/10/phthalo-records-podcast-4-women-in-electronic-music-1938-1982/

i finally scored a vinyl box of messiaen's catalogue d'oiseaux yesterday. american pressing on vox, but i can live with that.

"due to the wide dynamic range of messiaen's "catalogue d'oiseaux", it was not possible to accomodate the entire cycle on 3 records without compromising the sound quality. and so, an exceptional 4th record has been added to a vox box."

thanks vox!

uh...not that its electroacoustic. just thought of it looking at that list again.

It makes me wonder what the syllabus for this class looked like.

But also it makes me think about the ways that information is presented. So let's say you download all of these files, in this giant list, which is ordered chronologically. And then they go onto your computer, where they will also exist as a giant list, to be played in iTunes or whatever, perhaps on shuffle. And in your iTunes library they will be listed under the name of the composer, and the name of the track, and perhaps the year. A better way of visualizing this list would be horizontal as well as vertical--so you see how composers/studios/aesthetics/countries connect to and within each other, and also to the larger culture, as a sort of big web of stuff. Presumably that's what a semester-long course would do--your professor would make these connections.

New section of Ubuweb with full PDFs of vintage electronic music periodicals, articles, patents, etc -- great stuff here:

http://ubu.com/emr/index.html

i saw that! and i have no idea when i will dive into all of that. its daunting. but its fun to try. the whole site is kinda like that. when i did my emp thing in los angeles david grubbs was on my panel and he did a thing on online archives that was really good. he talked about a subscription archive and now i'm blanking on the name...

anyway, most of his thing was on ubuweb and i felt bad that i hadn't actually looked at the site in a LONG time! and now of course there is even more on there than ever...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqiNdSu-gC4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUqwj83boY

I once wrote Ubu through their "help us digitize" form offering to digitize just so I'd have a good reason to consume (some of) it in a structured way, but they never wrote back.

What Geeta suggests would be awesome, but kind of at odds with their "lay low from the copyright police" goals.

What Geeta suggests would be awesome, but kind of at odds with their "lay low from the copyright police" goals.

So let's say that Ubuweb didn't add new editorial content, but instead made connections in their archive within the material that they're already hosting. For example, it looks like they've posted the entirety of 'Mixtur' by Stockhausen, as 40 separate mp3s. Then, on another part of their site, in an issue of Electronic Music Review, there's Stockhausen's 'Notes on Mixtur' (1964), which would be useful to look at, if you were listening to those mp3s.

What Ubuweb needs, more than a volunteer digitizer, is a volunteer web designer and a volunteer web developer. The site is pretty much in HTML 1.0, which is part of its charm, but...

Milton, this is not a post about having heard your post live and it being awesome, er, the link from your post, not your post, though i could read it out loud to myself i guess ...

is it just the music or does it include the discussion of relationships?

graham lambkin and jason lescalleet's recent works are where it's at for this sort of stuff

Haven't really read this thread yet, just wanted to say that somebody recently recommended a podcast along similar lines that sounded interesting: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-history-of-electronic-music/id263938523

graham lambkin and jason lescalleet's recent works are where it's at for this sort of stuff

― jumpskins, Saturday, 18 June 2011 00:38 (2 days ago)

The last record was *amazing*

http://avantgardeproject.conus.info/mirror/index.htm