Listening to Acousmatic Music Cathy Lynn Cox Submitted in Partial

Listening to Acousmatic Music Cathy Lynn Cox Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2006 © 2006 Cathy Lynn Cox All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Listening to Acousmatic Music Cathy Lynn Cox This study contributes to the fledgling music-theoretical literature concerned with electroacoustic music. Specifically, it explores issues related to music composed for acousmatic listening—that is, music created using sound recording technology and experienced solely by means of diffusion through loudspeakers. Such music poses special challenges for the music theorist and analyst, as conventional analytical tools often emphasize pitch structures and the study of scores—elements often absent in acousmatic music. Attention to listening as an analytic tool has therefore gained prominence within existing theoretical literature concerned with electroacoustic music in general and acousmatic music in particular. Among the issues investigated in this study, then, are concepts of modes of listening and new models for ear training, drawing on the writings of Pierre Schaeffer, Denis Smalley, R. Murray Schafer, and others. Acousmatic music is also defined by the use of recorded environmental, or "everyday," sounds as raw compositional material; thus, questions regarding the relationship between sound and source (or implied source) are raised, leading to an investigation of concepts of mimesis in this music that stirs up nineteenth-century debates over absolute versus programmatic music. Issues of sound and source and how they may evoke a sense of virtual space or place in the listener play a part in analyses presented for Denis Smalleyj's Wind Chimes (1987), Hildegard Westerkamp's Cricket Voice (1987), Judy Klein's The Wolves of Bays Mountain (1998), as well as a discussion of Yves Daoust's Mi Bémol (1990). Table of Contents List of Illustrations . ii Acknowledgements . iii Dedication . v Chapter 1: Musicology, Music Theory and Electroacoustic Music . 1 Chapter 2: Classifications and Definitions . 18 Chapter 3: Modes of Listening . 38 Chapter 4: Ear Training, Solfège and Sound Education . 59 Chapter 5: Mimesis, Gesture and Virtual Worlds . 90 Chapter 6: Analysis . 118 Chapter 7: Conclusion . 151 Bibliography . 161 Discography . 169 Appendix A . 170 i Illustrations Figure 1.1: Graphical representation of Bernard Parmigiani's De natura sonorum: Ondes croisées created using the Acousmographe . 8 Figure 1.2: Sonogram of a sampled sound . 8 Figure 4.1: Listening exercise no. 2 from Atelier IRCAM: 10 jeux d'écoute . 73 Figure 4.2: Images based on those given by R. Murray Schafer in his ear cleaning exercise no. 42 . 83 Figure 6.1: Stereo amplitude waveform of the first fourteen seconds of Smalley's Wind Chimes . 125 Figure 6.2: Stereo amplitude waveform of the first fifty-five seconds of Smalley's Wind Chimes . 126 Figure 6.3: Map of Smalley's Wind Chimes . 128 Figure 6.4: Map of Klein's The Wolves of Bays Mountain . 139 ii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and generosity of many people. I would like to thank the Department of Music and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Columbia University for seven years of funding and especially the dissertation fellowship in my final year (2005–06). I must thank the members of my dissertation committee for their encouragement and for always giving me something new to think about: my advisor Joe Dubiel, readers Brad Garton and George Lewis from the Department of Music, Robert Hymes from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Anke Birkenmaier from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. My thanks to those members of the Department of Music's Theory Area—Fred Lerdahl, David Cohen, and the late Jonathan Kramer— who provided feedback during the proposal stage of this study. I extend many heartfelt thanks to Ian Bent. This dissertation was inspired in part from the seminar paper he allowed me to write comparing musique concrète and elektronische Musik for his "History of Theory: Modern Period" seminar, for which he generously loaned me his original edition copies of Schaeffer's À la recherche d'un musique concrète and Solfège de l'objet sonore. I reaped the benefits of his personal library once again when, upon his retirement from Columbia, he offered many of his books to graduate student homes; some of my bounty are included in the bibliography to this dissertation. Many thanks also to my colleagues at Columbia's Computer Music Center (CMC), especially former-CMCer Thanassis Rikakis for introducing me to acousmatic music by asking me to write the program notes on Denis Smalley's Vortex for the Lincoln Center iii Festival 2000 concert "Masterpieces of 20th-Century Electronic Music." Through this commission I was not only granted a copy of a recording, aural score, and published analysis of Vortex, but also had the opportunity to conduct a telephone interview with Denis Smalley, who helped untangle my confusion over the term "acousmatic." During a brief conference-related visit to Australia, I had the good fortune of meeting Alistair Riddell, who put me in contact with Carlos Palombini—who in turn kindly sent me a copy of his dissertation on Pierre Schaeffer's theoretical writings. Many thanks to them both. I thank Judy Klein and Elizabeth Hoffman for providing me with CDs of their music, and Peter Hanappe for providing me with copies of the hyptique.net CD-ROMs. Many thanks to my colleagues Mark Burford and Kate Dacey-Tsuei at Current Musicology for helping me learn to be a better writer through better editing, and for letting me take home so many review-copies of books related to this study. Thanks to my graduate-student colleagues at Columbia, especially Huey-Meei "Tyng-I" Chen and Elizabeth Keenan for mutual moral support throughout our years together, and Johanna Devaney for our informative conversations at breakfast and on the bus-ride home from SMT 2005. I would like to thank Marion Guck and Brian Alegant for their long-term support and advice during my young academic career. Finally, I thank Johnathan F. Lee for his continued insight, inspiration, critique and support. iv To Mom and Dad v 1 Chapter 1: Musicology, Music Theory and Electroacoustic Music From a North American perspective, the field of musicology is nearly as young as electroacoustic music. The New York-native-yet-German-educated Otto Kinkeldey was, in 1930, the first person to be appointed professor of musicology at an American university; earlier that same year, the New York Musicological Society was born counting Dr. Kinkeldey, Henry Cowell and Charles Seeger among its founding members. Four years later, the New York Musicological Society dissolved itself or, more accurately, re-branded itself as the American Musicological Society (AMS), electing Kinkeldey as president (Mitchell 1970:2–4). I am recounting this history as a means of introducing the following abstract for a paper read by Kinkeldey at a meeting of the Greater New York Chapter of the AMS in 1936, entitled "The Music of the Future. A Phantasy": If the musician could be enabled to manipulate his sound effects as the painter handles his pigments, if he could mix his tones and overtones, his tone-colors and tone-shadings in infinite variety without the aid of . musical instruments, and if finally he could fix the resulting complicated sound curve upon a lasting medium like the sound film, capable of being acoustically reproduced at will with the aid of electric apparatus, he will have reached the autonomy and independence of the painter. How soon a race of men accustomed to hearing music as we now hear it, with the intermediary interpreter ever present in the consciousness of the hearer, could adapt itself to a direct reception from the composer, is a difficult question. (Brook 1970:vii) Here we have Kinkeldey fantasizing about a music that would be captured on "a lasting medium like the sound film"—a fantasy that, as Barry Brook notes, would prove prophetic just over a decade later, delayed—or, perhaps, accelerated—by the intervening World War II. The medium for such a music was introduced just one year prior to Kinkeldey's paper, when in 1935 the German appliance company AEG presented the first magnetic tape recorder, the Magnetophon K1 produced by BASF, at a German radio exhibition in Berlin. In 1939 Seattle, as war broke out in Europe, John Cage composed 2 his Imaginary Landscape No.1, a work created for broadcast over the radio and whose instrumentation included two variable-speed phonograph turntables; nonetheless, Imaginary Landscape No.1 still required four performers as well as two traditional musical instruments (muted piano and cymbals) and therefore fell short of realizing Kinkeldey's fantasy. In 1943, while Paris was still under German occupation, French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer founded the Studio d'Essai at Radiodiffusion Française,1 where he pursued experiments in manipulating sounds recorded to wax cylinders. In 1948, twelve years after Kinkeldey mused about the music of the future, Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète and composed his first works for magnetic tape, the Etudes de Bruits. 1948 was also the year in which the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) published its first issue. How would this coincidence resonate with the journal's contributors given the earlier statement by the society's founding president? Apparently, not at all: during the journal's founding years, I find on its pages no mention of any musical works for the magnetic tape medium—whether by Schaeffer or any other composer, European or otherwise. Indeed, articles published within JAMS during its first two decades barely touched music of the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth century.

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