The Spatialisation of Stereophony: Taking Positions in Post-War Electroacoustic Music

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Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011

THE SPATIALISATION OF STEREOPHONY: TAKING POSITIONS IN POST-WAR ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC

Patrick Valiquet Faculty of Music University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom [email protected]

ABSTRACT not spring forth whole, but had to be developed over time. Contemporary use of the word stereophony as a techni- While a growing number of musicological studies attest to cal term, which only began to normalise after two-channel the aesthetic importance of spatialisation in electroacous- playback equipment became available on the home market tic music, few have questioned the notion that its aesthetic in the late 1950s, is markedly different from the use which significance should be reducible to its role in sonic struc- was current during the early years of electroacoustic mu- ture. Tracing a path across the tightly knit network of sic. In contemporary discourse, the term spatialisation commercial, institutional, technical, and musical players is used to refer to a family of techniques for organising involved in the early development of spatialisation tech- and manipulating the location, movement, and propaga- niques, this paper undermines the presumption of formal tion of sound within a listening environment. Use of the autonomy by sketching a history of some of the social and word in English can be traced back to its French cognate, discursive strategies that composers have deployed to dis- which occupied a key position in the technical lexicon of tinguish the concept of spatialisation from preexisting and musique concrete´ in the early 1950s. [54] At the time parallel concepts of multichannel stereophony. The paper of the adoption of multichannel stereophony in the early closes with some reflections on the role of spatialisation electroacoustic studios a wide variety of competing tech- in the development of electroacoustic music as a genre. niques had been available, some since the early 1930s. As late as 1960, the concept of stereophony was still inclusive 1. INTRODUCTION enough to encompass any method of sound reproduction involving more than one speaker.1 [64] The main differ- Multiple-speaker projection techniques, spatial simulation ence between the contemporary and the post-war concepts methods, site-specific and purpose-built architectural in- of stereophony is that, in the latter, the potential number stallations are among electroacoustic music’s defining con- and positioning of loudspeakers was effectively unlimited. cerns. While these techniques have been the object of a Following the gradual change in usage reveals that the variety of attempts at formalisation in Western Art Music deep integration of multichannel spatialisation techniques since the end of the Second World War, nowhere has spa- into electroacoustic concert practice, which preceded the tialisation played such an integral role in common practice establishment of formal compositional methodologies us- as in electroacoustic and computer music. The majority ing standardised recording and playback formats, did not of the existing musicological treatments of spatialisation, mean that these technologies were ever the exclusive do- however, have tended to presume that spatialisation meth- main of electroacoustic composers. In fact, the historical ods should be treated solely in terms of their coherence as sources cited in this paper call into question the notion a component of sonic structure. [31, 45, 58] The historical that the technologies of spatialisation were ever driven by study which I gloss in this paper troubles the presumption purely compositional conceptions. Instead, the evidence of structural autonomy which has prevailed in the musico- suggests that electroacoustic composers worked as mem- logical literature on electroacoustic and computer music bers of a close-knit network of technicians, theorists, and by tracing a path through the discursive, social, and tech- institutions in which multichannel sound projection was nical work involved in the process by which multichannel already a concern, developed independently from any no- spatialisation became a concern in post-war studios. It tions of musical necessity. Although it is impossible to was through this work that composers and theorists were disentangle the extent to which a change in the use of tech- able to rationalise their appropriation of the technical ap- nical language is the result of industrial standardisation paratus of multichannel stereophony from the telecom- or the work of avant-garde musicians, filling out our ac- munications and entertainment industries while simulta- count of this shift in uses does cast significant doubt upon neously constructing an aesthetic of spatialisation which delegitimised commercial music and sound design. 1The writers and editors of Die Reihe used the German equivalent in As I will show in this paper, the discourse used to this sense [24, 14, 60], and their counterparts in Paris used the French equivalent in the same way. [54, 47] Stockhausen, for one, would con- sever connections between spatialisation and the technical tinue to use the term with this broader connotation until much later in apparatus of stereophonic broadcasting and recording did his career. [62]

41 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011 the narrative, often rehearsed in the electroacoustic and it intended to be taken as unproblematic. I would par- computer music literature (see for example [19, 38, 4]), ticularly like to emphasise, echoing Simon Frith [28] in in which mono is understood to give way to two-channel contradiction to Bourdieu, that the construction of exclu- stereo, which in turn gives way to more and more sophis- sive aesthetic boundaries is not a practice unique to mem- ticated forms of multichannel reproduction in an uncom- bers of the avant-garde, essentially reducible to a form of plicated linear progression. class reproduction, [16] but a widespread practice com- The aesthetic discourse used to separate spatialisation mon among listeners, critics, and producers in a variety of in electroacoustic and computer music from parallel tech- genres. What I retain from Bourdieu, however, is the no- niques in other genres was not only descriptive, but also tion of the social space of the field as a ”structured space performative, in that it enacted a set of relationships and of competing styles and genres,” constituted relationally distinctions which might not have existed without it. [2] through their ”consensus in dissensus.” [13] Moreover, I The division of labour between composers and techni- would argue that an enriched musicological understand- cians in electroacoustic and computer music may also have ing of spatialisation techniques must be expanded to in- been effective (if not deliberately employed) as a tool to clude not only the formalised positioning and movement reinforce the isolation of a purely aesthetic level of mu- of sound, but also the various ways in which social space sical structure from the practical level at which it was is constructed within the electroacoustic genre: first by constructed, amounting to what Paul Theberge´ has called adopting certain techniques as genre-specific; second by a social technology of music. [65] By emphasising the constructing a technologically delineated topology for the social and discursive aspects of this change, distributed concert hall; and third by naturalising the connection be- throughout the network of post-war musicians, I hope to tween multichannel sound projection and spatial percep- show above all that it was not simply through technologi- tion. The social and discursive position-takings which led cal or formal innovation, but moreover through collective to the isolation of electroacoustic music as a genre from work of distinction that composers of electroacoustic mu- the broader field of technologically-mediated musics in sic isolated an independent aesthetic of spatialisation from the 1950s may be understood as the decisive first steps the wider pre-existing concept of stereophony. in securing this construction. The object of recognising these divisions, however, is not simply to downplay the contributions of individ- 2. MULTICHANNEL STEREOPHONY BEFORE ual creators or to extend artistic validation to the previ- SPATIALISATION ously unrecognised contributions of support personnel, as others have done with reference to a variety of art and Two multichannel stereophonic techniques designed speci- music worlds. [33, 7, 32] The social and discursive dis- fically for playback over loudspeakers were developed in- tinctions through which electroacoustic composers estab- dependently in the early 1930s, by Harvey Fletcher at Bell lished their aesthetic authority over multichannel spatial- Labs and by Alan Blumlein at EMI. While Blumlein’s isation techniques may be thought of as a nexus of what system was indeed limited to two channels, Fletcher’s tech- Pierre Bourdieu has referred to as ”position-takings” [17] nique allowed for three or more, depending on the space occurring in the years following the Second World War in which it was to be installed. For practical purposes, the in response to transformations in the field of musical pro- Bell Labs system was generally restricted to three chan- duction. Before the war there had literally been no space nels arranged in a row, but this could theoretically be filled for an institutionalised avant-garde. During the immediate in or extended indefinitely. [26] The first demonstration post-war period, however, a crop of newly established or of the Bell technique took place in a 1933 concert funded reconstructed academies, broadcasting authorities, festi- by the National Academy of Sciences which featured a vals, and cultural organisations emerged. These organisa- closed-circuit broadcast over dedicated telephone lines be- tions afforded a variety of new opportunities for stability tween the Academy of Music in Philadelphia and Consti- suited to artists whose work could be seen as needing in- tution Hall in Washington, D.C. [64] stitutional support, both aesthetically and financially. The Fletcher’s choice of musical collaborators is particu- symbolic appropriation of newly available technological larly revealing. In 1928, Edgar Varese` had approached resources was only one of the tools used by electroacous- Bell Labs about the possibility of setting up a research stu- tic composers to construct a project which could engage dio, but his proposal was dropped due to doubts about the with the cultural and economic capital appropriate to these marketability of Varese’s` ideas. [69] Instead, Fletcher’s new positions. In order to capture and consolidate new primary collaborator in the development of stereophonic institutional ground, aesthetic boundaries needed to be e- sound projection was the charismatic conductor of the Phi- rected on two fronts, against mass cultural banality on the ladelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski. Following the one hand, and against bourgeois classical tradition on the initial demonstrations of Fletcher’s system, Stokowski con- other. tinued to advocate the use of multichannel techniques in a My invocation of Bourdieuian sociology in an analy- widening range of applications. According to Stokowski, sis of the rhetorical and social exclusion characteristic of stereophony enabled the engineer to emphasise and enrich avant-gardes in Western Art Music is not to be understood ”the three-dimensional character of the music.” He recom- as new (see for example [12, 71, 49, 23, 21]), but nor is mended the building of large-scale ”recreation centres,”

42 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011 where through selective focusing of the speakers several until 1957, when the adoption of the two-channel Westrex concerts might be broadcast at once, allowing listeners to vinyl cutting method was forced through the intervention stroll from one to another at their leisure. [64] ”[By] hav- of the small American record label, Audio Fidelity. [27] ing loud-speakers [sic] around the walls – on the ceiling – Although the marketing of stereo during the 1950s and behind the galleries,” Stokowski wrote in 1943, ”the prin- 1960s did tend to figure the move as enabling aesthetic ciples of antiphony can be developed in new directions progress, as Peter Doyle has argued, the lack of a ”left- and brought to new heights. Instruments and voices can right axis” before the widespread adoption of multichan- answer each other from all directions. Or the tone can nel formats had not at all amounted to a deficiency. A flow around the theatre.” [63] wide range of approaches to spatial simulation were af- In 1938, Stokowski lent his support to yet another sig- forded even by single-channel formats, as evidenced by nificant experiment in the development of stereophony, the sophisticated use of reverberation and microphone dis- this time in cooperation with Walt Disney Studios and tance in recordings made at the Sun and Chess studios, RCA. The development of a dedicated sound system for and the elaborate use of multi-tracking in the work of the animated film Fantasia led to the production and test- Les Paul and Mary Ford as early as 1949. [22] By the ing of at least ten different working systems between 1938 1950s, deliberate manipulation of spatial cues was ubiq- and 1942. An early version of ”Fantasound” required ”four uitous in recorded music. It is not surprising, then, that circuits using sixty loudspeakers, mak[ing] it possible to multichannel stereophonic projection systems, adapting chase music right around an audience, out of the screen and extending pre-war techniques, were also developed at and back into it, or make notes die into infinity overhead.” several commercial and radio studios in Europe following [10] The ”road show” version, which toured the US during the war, including (but not limited to) the famous birth- the early 1940s, required three on-stage speaker groups, a places of electroacoustic music. [41] The technicians and variable set of auxiliary speakers spaced around the audi- composers at these studios did not work in isolation, how- torium, and dedicated film channels for automation. The ever, but formed a broad professional network that was system was also designed to be more or less portable, and well connected even during these early years. positioning was adapted by the engineers to suit the space afforded by the venues where it was deployed. Despite the 3. POSITIONING ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC difficulties the system caused, engineers who worked on the development of ”Fantasound” predicted that the mul- During the immediate post-war period, a number of new tichannel model would remain popular: ”having used the institutional bodies were established which afforded op- multiple-track system, no matter in what form, the ordi- portunities for research, development, and public perfor- nary sound-track reproduction is flat and dull by compar- mance for artists whose work could be seen as meriting ison.” [29] support in the effort to promote innovation, political neu- In spite of deploying similar (and lately far more fa- trality, and diversity in cultural life. [18, 6] These in- mous) rhetoric to that of Stokowski about the future of cluded the newly established Darmstadt New Music Sum- music in space, Varese` was actually denied access to the mer Courses in 1946; national and regional broadcast- technology until well after the establishment of the stu- ing authorities such as the NWDR in 1945, the SWF in dios at Paris and Cologne. Indeed, as Anne Shreffler has 1946, and the RTF in 1949; music festivals such as that pointed out, the popular ”mad-scientist” image bestowed at Donaueschingen, which had existed prior to the war upon Varese` after the war was greatly romanticised, and but was largely reinvented by Heinrich Strobel in 1950; did not correspond to any actual technical experience. [57] and cultural organisations such as the International Mu- Whatever his ambitions, in pre-war New York City the sic Council of UNESCO in 1949. Although the institu- conditions did not exist which would have afforded the tions themselves remain largely unexplored in the history position in which Varese` might otherwise have established of electroacoustic music, the technical personnel, techno- himself. In fact, despite being aesthetically declass´ e´ in logical resources and performance venues they provided comparison with Varese,` Stokowski was much more close- played an essential role in post-war experiments with mul- ly involved in the process of making multichannel sound tichannel stereophony. Moreover, in the work of ”position- projection a practical reality for musicians, precisely be- taking” I am describing in this paper it was these insti- cause his work posed less of an aesthetic challenge. tutions that opened up the new positions which electroa- Following the Second World War, the development coustic composers, with the help of a network of techni- and dissemination of stereophonic techniques was partly cians and impresarios, were determined to occupy. accelerated through the establishment of professional or- In 1954, the Swiss-German conductor and impresario ganisations such as the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Hermann Scherchen, one of the most prominent champi- in 1948 and the Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (VDT) in ons of new music and technology in post-war Europe with 1950. Multichannel film sound continued to gain in pop- close connections to both the Darmstadt Summer Courses ularity through the 1950s with the development of sys- and the Donaueschingen Festival, [59] established a pri- tems like ”Cinerama,” ”WarnerPhonic,” and four-channel vate electroacoustic research centre at his vacation home ”Cinemascope.” The simultaneous development of com- in Gravesano, Switzerland. That autumn, with funding peting multichannel systems for musical media continued from UNESCO, he organised the first congress there, invit-

43 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011 ing musicians, technicians and theorists from many of the iar situation, since in normal musical presentations the or- newly established radio and research studios in Europe chestra is found most often on the frontal plane opposite and the US. [41, 1] Most of these researchers had actu- the public.” [41] His statement echoes a distinction which ally met before, whether at conferences, festivals, or at had already become standard at the studio. their respective studios; among them were Pierre Schaef- Although early tapes produced in Schaeffer’s studio fer and his technician Jacques Poullin from the RTF stu- survive only as single channel masters [38], which was dio in Paris; and Werner Meyer-Eppler, Oskar Sala, and the only suitable format for radio broadcast or commer- Friedrich Trautwein from the new studios in Cologne and cial release at the time of their production, multichannel Berlin. What was significant about the 1954 meetings, projection played a significant role in both theory and per- however, was that their goal was to promote the potential formance practice. Like the technicians who had worked creative applications of the latest in spatial acoustics. The on the production of Fantasia twelve years earlier, com- intersection between electroacoustic recording and trans- posers and critics associated with Schaeffer’s studio con- mission technologies and concert hall or studio acoustics sidered dynamic manipulation of the sound locations to was one of the hottest topics of discussion. More than be among their work’s most sensational and revolution- a quarter of the presentations dealt directly with multi- ary aspects. [39] In his first book describing the studio, channel projection, and the agenda also included a number however, written partly as a plea to the RTF to sustain its of film, concert, and broadcast demonstrations. At these support for his experiments, Schaeffer was determined to meetings, techniques developed at the studios in Paris and distinguish spatialisation from ”ordinary stereophony” by Cologne were displayed alongside new cinematic and tele- contrasting its potential formal consistency with the banal communications industry improvements on the pre-war ”realism” of the entertainment industry.3 As he wrote, the systems developed by Bell Labs and Disney. Neverthe- role of stereophony was not to ”reproduce a preexisting less, it is already possible to detect a heightened effort relief, but to give the sound objects of musique concrete` in these early presentations to distinguish the work of the a spatial development coextensive with their own forms.” electroacoustic studios from mere commercial fancies by [54] His collaborator, the physicist and theorist Abraham emphasising the production and perceptibility of what were Moles, went further: understood to be radically new structures and experiences. Although Jacques Poullin’s presentation at Gravesano ”The experiments here are much more interesting: in 1954 was predominantly technical, his discussion of leaving aside the criteria of truth, they look to- the potentiometre` d’espace (”space potentiometer”)2 po- wards a new effect, of a new musical art form. As sitioned it not as a new application of stereophony but as much as music is a dialectic of duration and in- affording a fundamentally new form of experience. By the tensity, the new procedure is a dialectic of sound time of Poullin’s presentation the device had been a fixture in space, and I think that the term spatial music in the practices of musique concrete` for some time. It was would suit it much better.” [original emphasis] [54] employed most notably in the Symphonie pour un homme Use of the potentiometre` d’espace for concert pro- seule and the original production of the opera´ concrete` , jection even extended to tapes by composers who were Orphee´ in 1951, [20] and in 1953 at the tumultuous pro- far less convinced of Schaeffer’s overall project, such as duction of Orphee´ 53 at the New Music Festival in Donau- Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. [20] Despite their eschingen.[52] It was also demonstrated to audiences and otherwise strong disagreements, Boulez positioned him- journalists during the UNESCO-sponsored ”First Interna- self somewhat closer to Schaeffer when it concerned the tional 10 Days of Experimental Music” in Paris in 1953. distinction of spatialisation from stereophony. Writing [67] Designed partly in an effort to draw the attention of in 1955 for Die Reihe, Boulez had come to the conclu- the audience away from the proliferation of machinery on sion that the complete organisation of musical structure stage, the potentiometre` mapped the panning of sounds had left only ”projection in space” as the ”final problem from a makeshift multichannel tape deck to a performer’s connected with ’performance’”. Nevertheless, techniques conductor-like gestures. [54] Setting aside its role in en- like stereophony would only ”begin to be really fruitful gaging the audience in the spectacle, however, the key in- when they adapt[ed] to the needs of genuinely modern novation of the device was described by Poullin by con- musical thought.” Stereophony in ”common usage,” on the trasting a stimulating three dimensional experience to a other hand, had been ”vulgarized by the cinema and dif- ”normal” two dimensional listening situation: ”When the ferent sorts of son-et-lumiere` pageant.” It had to become four loudspeakers are properly placed, the listener will a ”structural necessity” if it was not to be ”swallowed up sense acoustic impressions from all directions of the space by these more demonstrative aspects.” [15] surrounding him; he finds himself thus at the middle point Following in the wake of his work with Schaeffer, of a sounding information space and thus in an unfamil- Boulez continued to be implicated in multichannel experiments on his early forays away from Paris. He had 2 Poullin’s presentation describes only one of many versions of this device, alternately known as the pupitre d’espace (space desk) and the 3Schaeffer’s comments take on special irony when one considers the pupitre de relief, which was first used in 1951. Earlier versions had fact that within the RTF the role of his studio at the time was sustained by employed only a three-channel speaker system. For contrasting technical its work as an effects shop, producing soundtracks for radio programmes descriptions see: [39, 41, 42] and for flight-training films for the French military. [55]

44 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011 met the American composer John Cage in Paris in 1949, phisticated stereophonic equipment, including a ceiling- at the recommendation of their mutual acquaintance Vir- mounted, twelve-sided diffusion speaker.[5, 37, 48] By gil Thompson, and the two maintained contact and corre- 1954, the studios at the WDR had been equipped with spondence over several years. [56] In 1951, Cage began multichannel equipment for some time, including an id- work on a collective tape music project with funding from iosyncratic four-channel Albrecht film sound recorder and the architect and impresario Paul Williams and equipment an early four-channel Telefunken T9 recorder, originally provided by the sound engineers Louis and Bebe Bar- controlled exclusively by the technicians but later used ron. [50, 3] On a visit to New York in the Autumn of to prepare the concert master tapes for Koenig’s Klang- 1952, Boulez personally delivered seven tapes produced figuren and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge¨ in the at Schaeffer’s studio, which Cage had requested to fill out spring of 1956. Facilities also included a number of speak- the program for a concert at the University of Illinois.[44] ers which could either be grouped into a three-channel ar- Boulez brought with him his own Etudes, as well as re- rangement approximating the capabilities of the PA sys- cent music by Messiaen, Schaeffer, and Pierre Henry, al- tem in the broadcasting hall, or used individually to gauge though he made sure to express that he considered these the audible effects of playing back a tape through radios latter tapes to be ”not without irony.” [44] The concert was of varying quality.[25, 35] presented on eight speakers, each connected to a single- The potential for a technologically-enabled ”spatiali- channel tape machine, arranged in a ring around the be- sation” of music (in the sense of objectification or mate- mused audience. The elaborate speaker rig was not only rialisation) had long been an important theoretical trope used for Cage’s and Brown’s famous eight channel pieces, among the founding generation at the WDR studio.[8, 9, Williams Mix and Octet 1, however, but for all of the works 11, 30] Writing nearly twenty-five years earlier, for exam- on the programme, some being played back through all ple, in an essay echoing the heroic modernism of Busoni eight, some using only a smaller subgroup, and some made and Varese,` studio co-founder Robert Beyer had predicted to ”travel around the audience,” most likely using volume a future utopia of materialised sound: ”At the end of the controls to approximate panning. [44] development [of music] stands the space-intoning, space- Writing to Boulez just over a month later, Cage echoed filling, stationary sound, oscillating around a central core, Poullin and Schaeffer in portraying multichannel projec- changeably illuminated from a tone-colour world of cos- tion as a new kind of perceptual experience, affording ”no mic expanse, a sound almost visible.” At the Darmstadt room for anything but immediate listening.” [44] Unlike Summer Courses in 1951, in a seminar offered by Beyer, his European colleagues, however, Cage had not had sig- Eimert, and Meyer-Eppler with the collaboration of Pierre nificant institutional backing for his tape music project, Schaeffer, Beyer theorised that the escape of the musical but had scraped it together with assistance from a variety object from the ”virtual” space of the score into ”real” of sources, and relied upon the academic interest of col- space through the mastery of technology would bring about leges and universities to secure performance venues. Not a ”revolution in listening.” [9] being able to rationalise from a comfortable insider posi- It was only following Cage’s visit in 1954, however, tion, then, Cage chose to bolster his work not so much that anyone at the WDR studio actually began planning against commercial banality or vulgarity as against the a work which made complete use of the available stereo- rigidity of bourgeois tradition: ”Let them build whatever phonic resources. Two multichannel works, by Koenig walls,” he wrote to Boulez, ”someone will always be get- and Stockhausen (assisted by Koenig) respectively, were ting out. [...] I also think that another architecture than prepared by the time of the third concert in 1956. While the concert hall will be needed for a hearing that is excel- Koenig downplayed the aesthetic importance of stereo- lent. The loudspeakers around the audience should also phony, [34] however, Stockhausen took the challenge par- be above the audience. Perhaps no architecture at all: out ticularly seriously. ”Stereophony,” he wrote to his close of doors with the loudspeakers on the tops of buildings. A friend Karel Goeyvaerts, was the next ”great task” lying magnetrillion!” [44] before him. [36] A few months later, in an apparent dis- Cage’s move to transgress the boundaries of traditional missal of the combined multichannel work done by Scha- aesthetics left him open to criticism from the ”high art” effer, Boulez, Cage, and Koenig over the previous five side when he brought his tape music project for its Euro- years, Stockhausen wrote in Die Reihe that his newest pean premiere at the Donaueschingen Festival at Strobel’s project would be the ”first in which the overall structure invitation the following year. Conservative West-German is to be stereophonically conceived.” This, he asserted, critics denounced the work as absurd, eccentric, and an- would finally constitute a ”new, living art-form of musical archistic. [53, 51] Composers at the studio for elektroni- composition and musical listening.” [60] sche Musik at the WDR in Cologne were also skeptical of Even after Gesang der Junglinge¨ was premiered, re- Cage’s apparent ”primitivism.” [24] Only two days after maining unfinished after having been scaled back from after the Donaueschingen concert, however, he and David six channels to five and finally to four, [68] Stockhausen’s Tudor were received in Cologne as guest performers at the work of differentiation continued. His 1958 lecture Musik studio’s second concert, which featured new tapes realised by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen4 and so- Pousseur at the second WDR studio concert were realised, according to the composers’ scores of instructions, by Stockhausen and the technical 4The compositions by Karel Goeyvaerts, Paul Gredinger, and Henri staff. [43]

45 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011 im Raum (Music in Space), presented in Darmstadt and been completely locked down. Their boundaries require then published at least four times in four different ver- continuous social and discursive work in order to operate. sions over the following year, opened with unqualified As recent ethnomusicological studies of technologically dismissals of every imaginable precedent for spatialisa- mediated musical practice such as those of Meintjes [40] tion in the western classical canon. [61] Rather than de- and Novak [46] have shown, the aesthetic coalescence tailing any of the obvious technical differences, however, of genre never boils down to purely formal categories of Stockhausen’s complaints betray his modernist aesthetic works or texts, nor is genre solely the result of deliberate bias: Gabrieli is decried as repetitive, Mozart as banal, categorisation by industries or audiences. It must be con- Berlioz as melodramatic. Acknowledging nothing which tinuously performed by both authors and publics through could possibly mediate the experiences of his audiences a complex deployment of discourses, material artefacts, in this ”first” exploration of a ”new dimension for the mu- social formations, and ideologies. The open-ended un- sical experience,” Stockhausen spatialised his own work derstanding of genre formation in electroacoustic music in part by ”de-spatialising” that of his forebears: ”The which I am suggesting can also help to undermine the no- tone’s property of being generated in a definite space and tion that recent changes in its aesthetic boundaries are the in definite locations in this space has – disregarding the direct result of a decline in the centralisation of techno- few aforementioned entries as exceptions – until now not logical resources in institutional studios. [70] In fact, the been further differentiated at all: the tone-location in the centralisation of the means of production may have been concert hall remained fixed (in front of the listener on the overstated: sophisticated multichannel technologies were stage), not only during one composition, but for all music always available both inside and outside of electroacous- written until now, and it played no role in composition.” tic studios. The problem for composers, which I have at- [61] tempted to sketch here, was not that technologies did not exist outside of the studios, but that applications outside of electroacoustic studios were actively constructed as il- 4. CONCLUSION legitimate. It would be difficult to say without sustained ethnographic study whether such distinctions are indeed The establishment of electroacoustic music in the years beginning to break down, or whether boundaries are sim- following the Second World War required ever new tech- ply shifting in a way which legitimises aspects of certain nologies and new concert spaces, and this meant inventing genres which were once outside of the canon. Recognis- new aesthetics and new modes of listening. Beyond sim- ing the fragility of this process complicates both the idea ply describing the formal necessities of their own work, that a monolithic experimental avant-garde can be defined then, the aesthetic and theoretical distinctions deployed cynically as the result of of male, upper-middle class, or by composers helped to enact a new set of spatial norms, modernist hegemony [66] and the equally problematic no- differentiating their work from parallel technological de- tion that a free-floating collection of ”progressive” musi- velopment. Although it has become common in the histor- cians is able to simply bypass the framework of genre al- ical literature of electroacoustic and computer music to at- together. [21] As I have shown, even at this ”primordial” tribute major technological innovations exclusively to the stage, electroacoustic musicians had to take and maintain small group of pioneering individuals encountered in this their positions of aesthetic authority by actively differen- paper, maintaining such assertions becomes significantly tiating themselves within a complex field of practices and more problematic the closer one comes to the rich docu- resources. mentation which survives from the post-war period. Com- posers and technicians at the new electroacoustic studios of the 1940s and 1950s were able to meet each other regu- 5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS larly at conferences and festivals, read about each other’s work in the press, and discover new technologies from Research for this paper was conducted in part at the library their colleagues in the worlds of commercial and indus- and archives of the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. trial engineering. By highlighting one aspect of that dis- The author would like to thank the faculty and staff for tinction, the discursive construction of a wall of aesthetic their support and guidance during the research process. difference between multichannel work inside and outside the electroacoustic studio, my intention has been to show 6. REFERENCES how spatialisation helped to carve out a unique position for electroacoustic music within the broader field of mu- [1] Anonymous, “Musik und Elektroakustik: Interna- sical production. An ideology of aesthetic isolation sup- tionaler Kongreß in Gravesano,” Melos, vol. 21, ported the otherwise contradictory work of appropriating no. 11, p. 331, Nov. 1954. the tools of commercial recording and broadcasting. [2] J. L. Austin, How to do things with words. Oxford: In closing, however, I would also like to emphasise Clarendon Press, 1962. that the process of positioning not be thought of as monolithic or conspiratorial, but asynchronous and open-ended. 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