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Looper's Delight
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The trouble is that people have an innate predisposition to "homesteading" in art, as it is the first to be recognisably published that is the one that is considered a founder. But I think artistic influence is a Markov Chain. Every time I read a post by any of you, I go off to find out what the person has done. Given the plasticity of the brain, every one of you has altered my brain (thanks!) because of that. The outcome of the influence is a different matter. RTF published an annual "state of the art" report from 1948 to the mid 60s (while tape was still cool) and we can plot the spread out of the Morphophone and its descendants. The first person to merge Musique Concrete and live stuff was (IIRC) Stockhausen with Gesang der Jungling in 1955. But Stockhausen used a modified version of the Morphophone. He studied with Schaeffer in Paris the year before and adapted his technology. Schaeffer studied with Gurdjieff, who had wandered Asia collecting music and tales of instruments making mountains sing and contraptions that made music with a means noone understood. Gurdjieff was influenced by the Azov poets who sang annually to make a mountain sing - this is shown beautifully in the opening to the film "Meetings with Remarkable Men". So if Gurdjieff's dad hadn't taken him to see the Azovs... But Stockhausen was at Cologne because of the comment of the phonologist Meyer-Eppler had made on a broadcast about all future compositions being written to tape, because he heard Dudley demonstrate the Vocoder, because Bell labs wanted to get better transmission of voice. Meanwhile Riley was influence by Stockhausen and composed Spectra (1959 I think) under his influence - I think of Zeitmasse, which was a serialish work. But Cage (who was influenced so heavily by Cowell, who wrote enthusiastically of the mechanical creation of infrasounds by the Russian professor whose name eludes me right now - this is all being written in a hurry at work on the sly and I really don't want googling Russian+Cowell+Infrasound in the proxy cache) wangles a research grant to employ the Barrons who make the tape music for films. Riley would have heard those soundtracks surely. The there is Otto Leunig. Meanwhile also Phil Cochran's Strata was the first published piece for instruments and long delay tape (?1964?) from a graphic score and the noise around that piece doesn't (I think) mention Riley. He's alive so he could be asked how he got to know about it. Meanwhile it was the incandescent genius of Oliveros at the SF tape centre and her sense of performance in tape that would have been very much in the mix here. But (and a very big but it is ) it was LaMonte Young that did the direct inject of jazz into the system - his love of Coltrane was infectious, and Riley saw the capabilities of the (then) new music as both improvisatory and cyclical. With jazz comes the imp of improvisation, and having fun, and creating the new on the spot. And that meant that Riley - who undoubtedly had all of the above influences in his musical DNA realised the jazz potential in tape delay and the time-lag-accumulator. And the Markov chain for Jazz in 1959 is mind-numbingly complex. > Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 20:26:07 +0000 > From: akbutler@tiscali.co.uk > To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com > Subject: Re: The Historic and Aesthetic Origins of Live Looping > > > > On 26/10/2014 18:52, Rick Walker wrote: > > > Terry Riley's work with the Time Lag Accumulator technique is a lot more interesting to me as an > > Stockhausen's use of tape delay in the formation of Musique Concrete. > > Stockhausen's set up also had feedback. > > > Does anyone else resonate with these distinctions about our aesthetic and historical origins? > > Have to admit that I'm not familiar with Riley's tape work. > > ..but yes, Matt's invention would seem like the beginning. > > The interesting thing is that Stockhausen had a way of > doing long delay with feedback with just one > modified tape deck. > ...but no-one seems to care about that. > > > I expect that innovations are generally done by folks > with little talent for self promotion, and that hence > they aren't recorded by history. > > > > ..and yes, I get that you have a foot in both camps in that respect :-) > > andy > |