Tempo 63 (250) 63–76 © 2009 Cambridge University Press 63 doi:10.1017/S0040298209000369 Printed in the United Kingdom book reviews Short Circuit fork along with the subject voice in an early form The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music edited by Nick of SMPTE timecoding. By adjusting the wave- Collins and Julio d’Escriván. Cambridge University Press, form transfer so that the tuning fork trace was £48.00 (hardback), £17.99 (paperback). perfectly regular, it was possible to eliminate any distortion from the reproduced voice recording. Among the more historically interesting musi- In retrospect, the choice of lyric comes across as cal events of 2008 were the recovery of the earli- a mysterious premonition of Debussy’s atmos- est surviving recorded item of British computer pheric Claire de Lune for piano, even hinting at the music; the resynthesis in California of one of the dark otherworld of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, earliest known voice recordings from a phonauto- a setting of poems by another Belgian, symbolist graph wave trace originally made by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, and deliberately staged in the Léon Scott in 1860; and the Scottish première of oracular style of a cylinder recorded séance. Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings, a BBC Prom com- Performed by a University of Manchester mission for 11 electronically voice-modulated Small-Scale Experimental Machine (a Ferranti solo instruments and orchestra. The most poign- Mark I) to a software program designed by ant perhaps is the Scott recording. From a high- Christopher Strachey, a friend of Alan Turing, resolution scan of a copy of the original waveform and recovered from an archive acetate disc of a of a few seconds’ duration, scratched in white programme originally recorded in the autumn by a trembling hog bristle on black wax-coated of 1951 for the BBC Children’s Hour, the synthe- paper, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National sized melody of God save the King is of interest as Laboratory have been able to recover the voice a symbolic act linking the development of com- of a young female, presumed to be the inventor’s puting and codebreaking devices in the Bletchley daughter, singing a fragment of the second verse era during and after the second world war, with of ‘Au clair de la lune’ in a clear, unforced voice: musical emblems of nationhood and a new age of Au clair de la lune information theory.2 The association of computer Pierrot répondit … and electronic music with Cold War intelligence The sample is posted online for anyone to hear.1 initiatives, including speech recognition and Apart from pleasure at hearing the natural interception, is a major reason why institutional beauty of so young a voice perfectly reproduced electronic music developed in the piecemeal way from a century and a half ago – very different in it did, why it continued to be funded covertly by character from the politically conscious mes- the military when progress was slow and musical sage to future generations recorded by Florence results inconclusive, and why it has been so diffi- Nightingale on an Edison cylinder in 1890 – what cult to extract any coherent history of the period, is most astonishing is the quality of the sound, a delivered in sensible English, from surviving veter- tribute to the recovery technology, to the excel- ans of those early days. I have previously discussed lent acoustic design of Scott’s second generation the interconnectedness of electronic music, laboratory phonautograph, and not forgetting speech science, and cognition theory in relation the contribution of Rudolf Koenig, Scott’s scien- to Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, and more tific equipment consultant and manufacturer. ‘We particularly Hymnen, in my book Other Planets had a tuning fork side by side with the recording’, and elsewhere online.3 The discovery of a British remarked Earl Cornell, a scientist involved in the national anthem among the first computer-gen- recovery of the voice signal, following its pres- erated melodies, 15 years in advance of Hymnen entation at an Audio Science event at Stanford and Max Mathews’s FORTRAN encoded interpo- University on 28 March 2008. Because the Scott lation of The British Grenadiers into When Johnny recorder was manually rotated, making the trace comes marching home, is just another inadvertent recording potentially unstable, it was Koenig’s bright idea to record the waveform of a tuning 2 Jonathan Fildes, ‘“Oldest” computer music unveiled’. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458489.stm (3 April 2009). 3 Robin Maconie, Other Planets. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7318180.stm (3 April 2005), pp. 271–81. See also www.jimstonebraker.com/maconie- 2009). looking_glass.htm . http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 07 Dec 2010 IP address: 194.80.32.10 64 tempo reminder of the culture of secrecy and hand-in- One would also like to think that the present glove relationship of electronic music and the publication might acknowledge Penny Souster, military culminating in the founding of IRCAM former partner of Tim Souster and recently retired in 1977. I have no moral objection to this partner- music books editor of Cambridge University ship, which has a long and authentic history. I only Press. As an aspiring composer of electronic wish it had led to a greater number of musically music and cofounder, along with Roger Smalley interesting results. and Peter Britton, of the Stockhausen-inspired Potentially the most exciting development live electronics trio Intermodulation in the 1970s, in British electronic music of 2008 – and pos- Tim deserves at least a mention on the British por- sibly ever – was the première on 18 August 2008 tion of the honour roll, given that coeditor Nick of Jonathan Harvey’s BBC Prom commission Collins is himself a live electronics specialist. One Speakings for electronically modified solo instru- looks in vain however for any mention of Tim, or ments and orchestra. Although he now affects the Roger, or Peter. Or the group Intermodulation. enigmatic demeanour of a Yoda of sci-fi mythol- Or even intermodulation as a process in electronic ogy, Harvey’s long association with IRCAM, and music. Indeed, having read the book and taken his willingness (or so it seems) to lend his consid- note of the uneven, Facebook qualities of con- erable compositional gifts in the service of the tributor selection, writing, proofing, bibliogra- intelligence agenda that has guided Boulez and phy and indexing, it is hard to imagine the present his team of software designers into new and inter- volume as in any way a tribute to the professional esting areas, make him worthy of more serious and musical standards of Penny Souster’s edito- and protracted attention from a British electronic rial legacy. The incoherence is in fact so striking, culture indelibly branded with the theme of Dr and the level of ignorance so marked in so many Who. To those in the know, the idea of imprinting departments – literary, musical, and technical – as the shapes and resonances of human speech on to incline an informed reader to view the book a live orchestra is open to be read as a Boulezian in its present state as the dismembered object of rejoinder, some 40 years in the making, to the fab- some kind of predatory struggle between the gen- ulous cacophony of electronics and orchestra of erations, from which the generation X representa- Stockhausen’s Mixtur. I have not heard the work. tives of an already out of date laptop aesthetic But the idea itself is exciting enough, and wheth- have emerged as temporary victors. er Speakings proves to be a finished attempt or I am bound to feel a certain sympathy for the merely a work in progress, the objectives of such EMAS group of 1979 (now Sonic Arts) to which a musical initiative are evidently of mainstream I once briefly contributed as club secretary and significance. newsletter editor. That buoyant collective includ- Events from 2008 cannot be expected to figure ed Barry Anderson, inventor of the world’s longest in a survey of electronic music published in 2007. tape loop and provider of tape music for Harrison However what a reader does have a right to expect Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus; Hugh Davies, inde- from such a survey – particularly one compiled for fatigable chronicler of electronic music and use as an undergraduate textbook and published inventor of the shozyg, a portable sound effects over the imprint of a major university publishing machine; Simon Emmerson at City and Peter house – is an overview of sufficient completeness Manning at Durham, both of whom have pub- to allow a reader to place such newsworthy events lished useful books on electronic and computer in context and appreciate their significance, intel- music; Richard Orton at York, who found amaz- lectual as well as musical. Electronic music may be ing (and musically significant) things to do with regarded superficially as a minority interest, just industrial vibrators, even though nothing came of one topic in a series dedicated to selected reper- it; Michael Greenhough at Cardiff, who developed toires, composers, and genres. The difference is intelligent music software some years ahead of that whereas a basic understanding of western David Cope; Dave Malham, ambisonics systems music is sufficient to come to terms with the spe- expert, also at York; and Lawrence Casserley at cifics of most individual subject areas in such a list, RCM. When I last looked, most of these people in order for a reader to be safely inducted into the were still around. They are not mentioned in the art and history of electronic music, a grounding in book.