10 Friday, December 3, 2010 www.thenational.ae The N!tion!l thereview The N!tion!l thereview Friday, December 3, 2010 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ‘From Rising Skirt Lengths to the If ‘mood polarity’ is negative, then markets falter. Horror movies are popular, people buy Collapse of World Powers’ by Michelle drab cars and governments favour protectionist policies. That’s socionomics, so-called } music { Baddeley, Times Higher Education playlist " From Halim El-Dabh to the theremin – a look back into early incarnations of synthesised sound Resonant freq uencies Halim El-Dabh Crossing into the Electric Magnetic Without Fear (2000) The Egyptian composer’s electronic experiments include A new book details the history of the ess, whether that be a composer recordings from the Columbia- writing down notes or a musi- Princeton Electronic Music BBC Radiophonic Workshop and its cian playing them. Few people hear a soaring string quartet and Studios in the 1950s, and boundary-breaking adventures in attribute its power merely to a material made in a Cairo radio maestro’s fleeting moods, or the station 1944, which may be the electronic music, writes Andy Battaglia wood and steel of a violin. But first treated music in history. even fewer of us can hear a work El-Dabh’s curiosity has led him For all the ways they can sound The broadcast in question was an of electronic music and even try along many low-tech paths, too. strange now, it’s hard to imagine experimental spoken-word show to guess at its origins – at its real how alien the earliest electronic called Private Dreams and Public causes and effects. sounds must have seemed to those Nightmares, which enlisted elec- This transition allows for a new Various artists who first heard them. The history of tronic sound to help evoke a differ- idea, as Niebur writes, of sound Adventures in Sound electronic noises and tones stretch- ent kind of abstraction: the realm as a representation of “unknowa- El (2009) es surprisingly far back – even of the subconscious. In both pro- bleness”. It also allowed sound to into the 19th century, depending grammes, it’s notable that elec- stand as “a coherent representa- A survey of the musical on which definition you use. But tronic sounds were used to evoke a tion of a rational, logical, but un- academy’s ventures into still: imagine someone in, say, the certain kind of unknowability. And known technology”. There’s room electronic sound in the 1950s, for whom plastic was an al- in both cases, the sounds of the era for interplay between these two 1940s and 1950s. The best- chemical new substance. Consider sounded – in fact, still sound – in- aspects, even now, and it’s hard known item is probably how it must have been to hear what credibly cool. to conceive how much more there Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sounded like a throbbing, pulsing Both broadcasts were the result of Special Sound: The Creation would have been in the 1950s. signal from outer space. Or a pierc- currents within the BBC that would and Legacy of the BBC According to one of many fasci- Gesang der Jünglinge, ing tone high-pitched enough to eventually give rise to the BBC Ra- Radiophonic Workshop nating documents that Niebur but there are also rare suggest the possibility of other ee- diophonic Workshop, a collective Louis Niebur excerpts, a committee convened recordings of Edgar rie frequencies at work in worlds that came together officially in 1958 Oxford Univerity Press USA by the BBC to question the effects Varese, Pierre Schaeffer beyond our own. and set about making new sounds Dh366 of electronic music believed that and Iannis Xenakis. Of course, in certain respects, it’s with new machines and especially “musicians/engineers would be not so hard to imagine. How much new processes. It’s easy to take elec- able to deal with electronic sound do we truly understand now, when tronic sounds for granted in an age day DJ? From there, the process effects only for a limited time be- Clara Rockmore we hear electronic sounds, about when they serve so many functions, turned to technicians trimming fore succumbing to mental insta- The Art Of The Theremin their origins in electricity itself? If besides the rich body of electronic and splicing bits of magnetic tape bility”. The workshop certainly Delos (1992) we can recognise what a waveform music which they continue to gen- into loops, an anticipation of our attracted an eccentric cast of char- looks like on an oscilloscope, how erate. But ideas often lag behind current cut-and-paste age. And acters. Among them were a group This early electronic much does that help us when it the technological means that serve from there, electronic sounds of pioneering women including instrument achieved fame comes to explaining how that wave them, a pattern that must have owed much of their creation to the Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, by being eerie on two can be manipulated, broadcast, been especially marked when the modular synthesizer, whose inven- and Maddalena Fagandini, each counts. Firstly, its sound even played? Not much, for most very idea of distinctively modern tion ran alongside many develop- of whom made visionary art in an was a sort of ghostly moan. of us, and it would have helped ments of early computing. era when it was rare for women to technology itself still counted as Secondly, players didn’t even less in 1953, when electronic new. And it’s worth remembering, Perhaps more important, how- work in such high-level institu- sounds first worked their way into as the battle recedes into history, ever, is the way that electronic tional roles, much less in such a need to touch it – they just a show on the British Broadcast- that in the beginning electronic audio experiments changed how technological realm. waved their hands around. ing Corporation radio network. music was hardly considered “mu- we have come to think about That same kind of thinking – Rockmore worked with The programme was a serial drama sic” at all. sound itself. When it began, the what are these weird electronic the theremin’s inventor, called Journey into Space: A Tale of In Special Sound, Louis Niebur Radiophonic Workshop went to sounds and what might they do becoming its first virtuoso. the Future, and the sounds were at- charts the context that greeted great lengths to present its work to us? – is also what makes the tached first to a rocket launch and early pioneers of electronic sound as something other than “music”. history of early electronic music then, more mysteriously, to some around the middle of the 20th cen- Its output was regarded as “sound vital today. As the age of electronic Jeff Wayne kind of menacing presence that tury. By that time, a handful of cities effects” or “special sound,” and it sound (indeed, of electronic tech- War of the Worlds leaves a crew of spacemen con- – Paris, Cologne, New York, Milan found more favour in the BBC’s nology of all kinds), advances ever Columbia (1978) fused. One of them asks the rest if – already had established electron- New electronic sounds were used to evoke a certain kind of unknowability. And in many cases, they sounded Drama Department than in the further from its historical origins, they hear it, and if so what it might ic-music studios, staffed mostly – in fact, still sound – incredibly cool. Dezo Hoffmann / Rex Features Music Department at the time. the yearning for understanding Though it hardly broke new be. “Don’t know!” comes the reply. by eccentric men in coats and ties Partly that was in deference to only increases as the same old ground in electronic “Gives you the creeps, don’t it?” who would fuss with tangled tape- the BBC’s staff of unionised mu- mysteries linger. And it’s worth synthesis, Jeff Wayne’s The creeps is one of many soni- recorders and machines the size of cally aligned studios in the 1950s real narrative called The Disagree- ing sound effects and snippets of Niebur tells of so-called “grams sicians, who were wary of being wondering, before the question 1978 take on HG Wells’s cally induced conditions chroni- rooms. Much of the early work was and 1960s pledged allegiance to able Oyster, to later incursions into melody churned out by the group at operators”, or manipulators of old replaced by machines and their becomes too complex to ask, just novel did furnish some of cled in the new book Special Sound: done in the name of research, with the musical avant-garde, the Radio- television such as the documentary the time. gramophone record players. Cer- enigmatic operators. But it also what happened to make our world the most memorable The Creation and Legacy of the BBC the advancement of music – how- phonic Workshop slipped similar Giants of Steam and, of course, Doc- Niebur’s book asks a simple ques- tain live studio sessions at the BBC, signalled a shift in conscious- sound the way it sounds now, in all evocations of alien Radiophonic Workshop. Here are ever arcane in theory or practice – harbingers of progress into broad- tor Who. The otherworldly theme tion: “How are we meant to under- he writes, featured “three grams ness that has only become more its strange and alien wonder. technology committed to some similar reactions, from listen- held up as the highest ideal. casts intended for a wide audi- music to the latter would stand as stand the significance of these new operators armed with five or six deeply entrenched in the years ers at the time, to other electronic What distinguished the BBC Ra- ence. Special Sound revisits many the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s sounds?” Some of their notewor- turntables each, ready to insert the that followed: a shift toward Andy Battaglia is a New York-based disc. The Martian death ray sounds which were broadcast just diophonic Workshop was its deep of those shows in detail, from early most distinctive creation after its thiness, to be sure, derives from correct sound effect at the precise thinking about sound in music as writer whose work appears in The was the most chilling/fun a few years later: “cacophony”, involvement with popular pro- precursors such as a 1957 radio premiere in 1963. Yet it was by no the techniques and precedents moment required”. What is that if something more than the result Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Spin to imitate. All together “loathsome”, “lunatic ravings”. gramming. Where more academi- play by Samuel Beckett and a sur- means unique among the insinuat- that they established. Early on, not a future vision of the modern- of some particular musical proc- and Pitchfork. now: “OOOOH-LAAAA!”