VARIATIONS #1 Devoted to Exploring the Complex Map of Sound Art from Different Points of View Organised in Curatorial Series
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Curatorial > VARIATIONS With this section, RWM continues a line of programmes VARIATIONS #1 devoted to exploring the complex map of sound art from different points of view organised in curatorial series. Transition 'Variation' is the formal term for a musical composition based The first episode of this overview of appropriative collage in music covers the on a previous musical work, and many of those traditional years 1909 through 1961, beginning with Charles Ives, who composed in a cut methods (changing the key, meter, rhythm, harmonies or and paste style with sheet music in a way that anticipated what later composers tempi of a piece) are used in much the same manner today would do with multi-track tapes and mixers. We skip through decades to arrive at by sampling musicians. But the practice of sampling is more 'Twisting The Dials', the Happiness Boys' 1928 tribute to late night radio surfing, than a simple modernization or expansion of the number of before moving to John Cage's proto-sampling pieces for radio and tape, 'Credo In options available to those who seek their inspiration in the US' and the 'Imaginary Landscapes'. We witness the million-selling cut-in records refinement of previous composition. The history of this music of Buchanan and Goodman and the resulting lawsuits, Richard Maxfield's tape cut-ups of a sermonizing preacher, and conclude with James Tenney's dedicated traces nearly as far back as the advent of recording, and its dissection of a single recording of Elvis: 'Collage No. 1', the first remix . emergence and development mirrors the increasingly self- conscious relationship of society to its experience of music. Starting with the precedents achieved by Charles Ives and The concept of an original work of music, attributible to and owned by a single John Cage, VARIATIONS will present an overview of the major author is a fairly recent development. Music was passed on through generations landmarks in Sampling Music, following examples in as an oral culture, communicated through sound itself across generations, even for centuries after the invention of written music. Only by the fourteenth century twentieth century composition, folk art and commercial had it become standard practice for a composer to sign his name to a piece of media through to the meeting of all those threads in the music, slowly reenforcing the concept of the author as individual creator. present day. Curated by Jon Leidecker. 01. Transcript PDF Contents: Hello, my name is Jon Leidecker, and welcome to the first of a eight episode 01. Transcript series called VARIATIONS covering the history of appropriative collage in music – 02. Acknowledgments new compositions made using recordings of older ones. It's a practice that in the 03. Copyright note eighties became known as 'Sampling', after the Digital Sampler, a breakthrough instrument which was designed to mimic traditional musical instruments by allowing the player to trigger recordings of them on a keyboard. But it didn't take long for musicians to realize that the true strength of the sampler was the way in Jon Leidecker was born in 1970 in Washington D.C. to two which it made it easy to collage and manipulate the best sounds from their physicists. Since 1990 he has performed appropriative favorite records, creating new pieces of music. This practice entered the popular collage music under the psuedonym Wobbly, aiming for mainstream by the eighties, long after many observers had identified collage as extended narratives spun from spontaneous yet coherent the defining new art form of the twentieth century, the roots of this music go multi-sample polyphony. Selected recent works are freely back just as far. Over the course of this series, we'll be looking at those roots as available online. http://detritus.net/wobbly/ appropriative collage developed across both experimental and mainstream paths. The idea of a completely original piece of music is a fairly recent one. Music was passed on through sound, through generations, even for centuries after the invention of written music. Only gradually, and centuries after the implementation of written notation, did it become standard practice for a composer to sign his name to a piece of music and claim it entirely as his own, giving rise to the cult of the individual composer. But as recording supplanted sheet music in the twentieth century, the presence of communal influence became unavoidably obvious once again as composers began to use older recordings to make new recordings. We can now hear the process of influence. We can now hear the presence of more than one voice. And there is a reason why people don't say they listen to a record – they say that they play one. From the beginning, recordings have been instruments. We begin with a composer who could easily kick off almost any overview of experimental music in the United States. Charles Ives wrote exclusively for orchestral instruments, and so might seem an odd figure to begin with for a history of Sampling. But he is the transitional figure between composers who used the previous technology of sheet music, and those who would soon avail themselves of the technology of electronic recording and mixing to forms of music into a single vision. In almost every important way, sampling begins here. This is the 'Barn Dance' from the Holidays Symphony, written in 1908, with William Strickland conducting the Imperial Tokyo Philharmonic. http://rwm.macba.cat Charles Ives, 'Barn Dance' (William Strickland with the Imperial Tokyo Philharmonic), 1908 100 years later, many of those melodies, the hits of the late nineteenth century, are still familiar to us. Ives helped himself to all of them. Quotation in music was nothing new – the Variation, the Quodlibet, the Medley go back for centuries. But Ives does more than quote individual tunes, he conveys to the listener the environment in which they were played. The event itself, right down to the mistakes of musicians having too much fun, and the guy on the floor joining in on mouth harp. Different musicians in the band perform the same tune as a march, as a waltz, as a polka – all at the same time. The night ramps up, then winds down, save for the drunken fiddler. This piece wouldn't have worked if he'd written his own melodies – in order to refer to a communal, shared experience, it requires the actual tunes. But it is less about those tunes, than it is a picture in sound of the way people celebrated over one hundred years ago. Composer Elliot Carter, who met the older Ives as a young student of music finding his own style: 'As for myself, I have always been fascinated by the polyrhythmic aspect of Ives's music, as well as its multiple layering, but perplexed at times by the disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity, caused largely by the constant use of musical quotations in many works. To me, a composer develops his own personal language, suitable to express his field of experience and thought. When he borrows music from another style and thought from his own, he is admitting that he did not really experience what he is presenting but has to borrow from someone else who did. It is, to me, disappointing that Ives too frequently was unable or unwilling to invent musical material that expressed his own vision authentically, instead of relying on the material of others. But what is striking and remarkable in his work, like much of the First and Second Piano Sonatas, is an extraordinary musical achievement.' [Charles Ives] Carter's comments represent an older notion of the composer perfectly, as someone who innovates entirely through the drive of his own personal expression. But an American voice soaks in everything, and Ives stayed true to the core definition of a composer as someone who puts things together. Ives' later music puts everything together with interwoven references and interdependent depictions of every strand of music known to the American people – jazz, marching bands, church hymnals, Irish & African-american spirituals, ragtime and even classical. Ives is frequently hailed for his early use of atonality, well before other composers found their ways to it, but upon closer listening, it is not atonality but pantonality, the sound of every key playing at once. These dissonances contain the most exciting harmonies yet – the point is not atonality, but rather about a music that contains as much of the world as possible. Also notable is the way that Ives sampled himself in the materials of his written scores, sometimes cutting and pasting entire fragments from earlier works on top of each other, in almost exactly the same way people later worked with magnetic tape and then computers. He created ever larger and denser pieces for orchestra through editing and revising, slowly crafting a layered world in which all his favorite music co-existed. His works moved beyond simple 'pictures-in-sound' to transcendental portraits of the experience of being alive. Charles Ives, 'Fourth Symphony, Second Movement' (Michael Tilson Thomas with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), 1918 Finished in 1916, the fourth symphony was first premiered in 1965. Another half century would be needed before musicians could relate to this level of overload, though the direction was already clear. The specialist market for phonograph records of music from around the world was growing, and disseminating this variety to national audiences was radio. Our next record comes from 1928. The Happiness Boys were a duo who had taken their vaudeville act to morning radio, adding sound effects & musical cues from records to their routines. When they recorded a tribute to the medium of radio, they realized that much of radio's magic came not just from the programs http://rwm.macba.cat themselves, but the collisions between them that happened when you got up and changed the channel.