A couple of weeks back I got out (again from the 'Experimental' section), a CD of music from Dr Who in the 70s. I've long admired the crazy synthetic ramblings of the early Jon Pertwee era (before Dudley Simpson's gloomy wind and brass arrangements took over), so I was very keen.
[Now with addendum!]
The CD's two tracks by Delia Derbyshire are excellent, especially Blue Veils and Golden Sands which sounds like, well, 1970s science fiction... Brian Hodgson's synth noodlings of Dudley Simpson's stuff sounds a bit crap to me, because he just played Simpson's tune through an square-wave LFO filter, which seems a bit like phoning it in. Malcolm Clarke's Synthi 100 orchestrations are also quite dire, and the CD features a special retooling of the Dr Who theme with this instrument that clearly highlights the drawbacks of all-synthetic arrangements. The hissing, screeching mania of Derbyshire's original arrangement of the theme has been replaced with a Moog lounge feel, with the don-gy don-gy bassline of the original castrated into a weird jew's harp sound. Not really worth it.
The rest of the CD features excellent 'sound effects' by Dick Mills, which are actually more like musique concrete compositions than anything else. Finally, there's Peter Howells' 'guitars!' version of the Doctor Who theme for the 80s. It's a fine update, but perhaps a bit pompy compared with the abstract moodiness of the original.
Listening to this CD took me on to Alchemists of Sound, a BBC documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This is naturally viewable on YouTube. The doco is brim full of Brit eccentricity, and well worth a peek. Alchemists of Sound is at pains to point out that the Workshop took a turn for the worse when the synthesisers started to take over from the old tape composition methods. Obviously the CD had already told me that. Even so, it's easy to be able to see the problem in hindsight, but at the time I guess synths were just as new and out there as tape effects, so the transition from great to god-awful was probably traversed with little sense of doom (although Derbyshire left the Workshop around this time, so at least someone knew all was not well).
Of course, synths certainly have their place; it's just they should never have been used for sound effects, or for 'keyboard noodles with interesting timbres'. (One thing that differentiates the amazing sound effects in Star Wars from other movies at the time is that the sound editor went off and recorded real world sounds and then manipulate them. I recall that on a Star Wars DVD he said he attempted to create R2D2's voice with just bleepings, but he felt there wasn't enough character to them, so he mixed in ring modulated human mumblings, and the result was much better. Meanwhile, in other movies sound editors would record a bit of white noise, call it a laser, then knock off for the day.)
The Radiophonic Workshop's decline through technology is pertinent to the State of Electronic Music Today. Obviously with digital sample technology we've gone beyond using just synths, but the average (and I mean, very average) laptop can do everything that the Radiophonic Workshop could ever do. Yet I have a nagging feeling that the works of the tape age, from the 1940s to the early 1970s, for all their primitiveness, are more fresh and interesting than anything created today. Or that, at least, we've lost the immediacy of the early tape works.
There are two responses to this nagging feeling. One is to play it down, and take the view that electronic music still has distance to progress, even if it does seem not much has happened in recent times. In moments of optimism I am happy to take this view because I know that tape composition barely got out of the 'experimental' phase before it was overtaken by digital techniques - indeed technology has been calling most of the shots in the last four decades, so we haven't really had a chance to really make music with an established toolset. Also, even some of those 'fresh' tape works of the 1960s were really just one-trick ponies. Think of Steve Reich's 'It's gonna rain', or Alvin Lucier's 'I am sitting in a room'. You could hardly characterise these works of having great depth or subtlety.
(Admittedly you can debate whether the electronic musical form can evolve in the sense that a single tune can be evolved into something more complex as it is in sonata form. Tunes and the interplay of different instruments is one thing, but when you're working in the realm of concrete sounds or mathematical systems of tones I get the feeling the human brain is hard-pressed to really appreciate, let alone enjoy such compositions. Certainly more simple ones using identifiable real world sounds have a more immediate impact than heavily processed compositions. Brain studies in the discipline of music psychology would shine light on this problem, though finding a definitive answer might be difficult.)
So the optimistic response is that there are still limitless possibilities in terms of what could potentially be composed if all the world is your instrument, and that you'd be a fool to write off the movement after only 50 years.
The other response to the nagging feeling, on the other hand, is that many artistic movements in the past have been superseded, or, worse still, have run their course, and that electronic music may be yet another such movement. It does not automatically follow that this should be so with electroacoustic music, but there are signs that while the technology has improved, the compositional achievements in the new medium have not. This isn't to say that the fidelity of the sound isn't better, or that the range or sophistication of works hasn't improved, rather that there has been no fundamental conceptual development upon what had already been achieved by the 1960s. Even general popular interest hasn't improved since then, for all that electronic music techniques now pervade popular music. Worse still, many composers who started out in the electroacoustic field went back to scoring works for conventional instruments (Steve Reich and Stockhausen are prominent examples).
The reason for the lack of development may be partly ideological. The silly musique concrete v. electronic music palaver of the 50s and 60s didn't help. Plus, when prominent composers begged out, a lot of the impetus dissipated, and a sense of 'sinking ship' may have led the medium to be more marginalised than it deserved to be. Certainly history seems to have given up on electroacoustic music, in that only its retro, BBC Radiophonic Workshop stylings seem to be venerated in the media.
Depending on the day, I may entertain either of the responses to that nagging feeling. Being a pessimist, I predominantly hold the latter view, but my own attachment to electroacoustic music makes the former pretty enticing. A hope for the electroacoustic medium might be to simply ignore what's happened in the past and see what can be done in the here and now. Despite my own traditionalist reverence to people like Lilburn, I think it'd be refreshing to have people just dismiss old tape-era stuff as creaky, half-cocked nonsense.* Of course, they'd have to put their money where their mouth was and make music that was genuinely good that rejected the old order. How you'd do this remains to be seen.
* Obviously this applies to rock and indeed any other moribund artistic or musical movement. I find it hard to think of an artistic field that isn't a bit played out currently.
[Addendum 28 May 2007: Visited Holger Czukay's site and dug up this interview of him, probably from the 1990s. Given the otherworldly ESOL of the translation, his views seem strangely Zen. His take is that music can only stay innovative if kids rebel against the musical interests of their parents. This kind of what I've been getting at in this post. I don't know if it's the whole story, but perhaps something as cliche as attitude may be all you need to effect change.
Interestingly, the last musical movement that I thought was interesting, the techno/house influenced dance music of the late 80s and early 90s was also probably the last one that kind of was its own thing. True, there had been disco before it, but techno/house then (the least said about now the better) didn't have the same MOR boringness. And with dance, there was a sense that our parents couldn't have come up with it.
Just listening to tracks from that period, like A Guy Called Gerald, KLF, Stone Roses, or Bjork's early albums (and hell, even the Shamen!), you get a sort of openness and freedom of imagination that you seldom get now. And fun! Well, I reckon.
Of course, you can see I'm already getting stuck in the nostalgia trap... but the kids don't have to. ]
Posted by stuart at May 26, 2007 4:02 PM