Hugh Davies's Electronic Music Documentation 1961–8 James
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Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Electroacoustic Music Beyond Concert Performance, Berlin, June 2014 www.ems-network.org Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–8 James Mooney School of Music, University of Leeds, UK [email protected] Abstract I will provide an account of certain key aspects of Hugh Davies’s electronic music research and documentation in the 1960s. By presenting evidence from a range of Davies’s published (see ‘selective bibliography’) and unpublished writings I aim to show how Davies sought to document the development of the electronic music phenomenon up to 1967. In his writings from this period, Davies commented upon the fragmented nature of the electronic idiom, as evidenced—for example—in multiple parallel nomenclatures (elektronische Musik, musique concrète, Cage’s ‘Music for Tape-Recorder’ group, Varèse’s ‘organised sound,’etc.). ‘This proliferation of different names for what is basically the same kind of music,’ he wrote in 1963, ‘shows that a considerable number of composers in different countries are all trying to find a workable idiom.’ (Davies 1963b) I aim to provide an account of some of the ways that Davies described the idiom’s maturation as an international, interdisciplinary praxis, conveying – perhaps for the first time – a sense of the various international, aesthetic, and disciplinary threads coalescing into an apparently coherent whole, a process driven by the exchange of ideas across international and disciplinary boundaries. Even in his earliest unpublished writings on the subject (dating from 1961), Davies drew attention to the presence of ‘a large group of international composers’ at the WDR studio in Cologne, and also indicated the existence of studios in various different countries throughout the world. Davies’s tendency to classify by nation was not merely an organisational device, since he went on to emphasise the role of internationalisation as a potent source of musical innovation, both in the fledgling idiom of electronic music in particular and in avant-garde music more generally. Specifically, he pointed to the developmental avenues opened up via the hybridisation of already-developed international musical traditions – a phenomenon that he contrasted with the ‘on-the-spot’ invention of new musical forms, syntaxes, etc., which he referred to as ‘parlour games.’ He also drew attention to the exchange of ideas mediated by visits to electronic music studios by composers with different international and disciplinary backgrounds, and to the catalytic effect this had on the development and maturation of the electronic idiom in the late 1950s and early 60s. He sought to convey a sense of the interdisciplinary nature of electronic music by drawing parallels with the techniques of painting, sculpture and other musical traditions such as jazz in his earlier writings, and via the provision of several appendices in his International Electronic Music Catalog (Davies 1968), each of which focussed on the use of electronic music techniques in a different interdisciplinary area. All the while, Davies was working toward the production of a comprehensive inventory of electronic music, beginning in earnest with his ‘Discography,’ (Davies 1964, 1966) which listed recordings available commercially on records or for hire on magnetic tape. This 1 James Mooney Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–8 Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Electroacoustic Music Beyond Concert Performance, Berlin, June 2014 www.ems-network.org endeavour reached its pinnacle with the publication of the Catalog in 1968, which Davies estimated (quite accurately, as far as anybody can tell) accounted for ‘probably about 90% of all electronic music ever composed’ (unpublished promotional materials dated 1967). The Catalog remains, to this day, the most complete record of international electronic music activity up to the end of 1967. A broader aim of this research is to work towards an evaluation of the implications of this, historiographically speaking. To what extent, and with what consequences, do subsequent published histories of electronic music rely upon data provided in the Catalog, for instance? In what ways might Davies’s model of electronic music as an international, interdisciplinary praxis be criticised, and what might be the implications of such criticism for the field of electroacoustic music studies? Introduction This paper concerns the electronic music research and documentation of Hugh Davies, from the period 1961 to 1968. At the end of that period Davies published a volume entitled Répertoire International des Musiques Electroacoustiques/International Electronic Music Catalog (Davies 1968), in which he listed every single piece of electronic music ever composed, anywhere in the world; 39 countries were represented. He presented the erstwhile separate disciplines of musique concrète, elektronische Musik, and tape music holistically, under the umbrella term ‘electronic music.’1 He also included several appendices that documented the use of electronic music techniques in other non-musical disciplines – painting, poetry, sculpture, computing, early optical techniques – and also other musical disciplines such as pop music and jazz. One of the interesting aspects of Davies’s work is that – even in the early 1960s, when the canonical view of electronic music history was only just beginning to take hold (see footnote 1 – it challenged the hegemony of the Paris, Cologne and New York schools as the ‘main’ pioneers of electronic music by drawing attention to the many other areas in which relevant activities took place in the 1950s and earlier. A list of countries represented in the Catalog, and the titles of the appendices relevant to this paper, is given in Table 1, below. What I would like to suggest is that, with the Catalog, Davies presented electronic music – for the first time – as an apparently coherent, international, interdisciplinary praxis, whereas in the preceding literature the full extent of the international, interdisciplinary scope had only been represented at best partially, if at all. I’ll attempt to show that by, first of all, describing some of the earlier literature that was available in the late 1950s and early ‘60s – the body of literature that Davies himself consulted in the course of his research, in other words – and then comparing this to how Davies’s own research developed during that period, culminating in the publication of the Catalog. I also hope to convey some sense of what Davies’s motivation was for representing electronic music in that way, which has to do with his belief 1 Musique concrète, nominally pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer at the RTF studio in Paris, essentially involved the use of recorded ‘real-world’ sounds that were transformed using tape (or disc) techniques and formed into compositional structures following largely intuitive, perceptual criteria. Elektronische Musik, on the other hand, was pioneered by Stockhausen and others at the WDR studio in Cologne and used mainly synthesized sounds and compositional structures that were planned in advance using techniques derived from serialism. ‘Tape music’ was a term used primarily to refer to North American activities normally conceived of as being somewhat separate from European activities. This is a simplification, but captures something of the essence of what has subsequently become a canonical version of electronic music history. 2 James Mooney Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–8 Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Electroacoustic Music Beyond Concert Performance, Berlin, June 2014 www.ems-network.org in international and interdisciplinary exchange as mediators of musical innovation. I’ll do that by referring to examples from Davies’s own writings. Countries Appendices Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Jazz Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czechoslovakia, Painting Denmark, Finland, France, German Democratic Poetry Republic, German Federal Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Popular Music Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Precursors (includes disc techniques, mechanical Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, South instruments and drawn sound) Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Sculpture USSR, UK, USA, Venezuela, Yugoslavia Synthesizers (also includes computers) Table 1: Countries represented in Davies’s Catalog, and titles of the appendices that are relevant to the discussion in this paper. These provide a convenient representation of the international and interdisciplinary scope of the Catalog Davies’s Key Sources Table 2, below, lists some of the main sources that Davies himself identified as having been key to his research. Another key source named by Davies (Moles 1960) is not discussed in this paper, since it was not referenced in Davies’s research until somewhat later (Davies 1966), whereas the other sources listed in the table are all mentioned in Davies’s undergraduate thesis (Davies 1963a). 1) Pierre Schaeffer, À la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952) 2) Herbert Eimert & Karlheinz Stockhausen (eds.), Electronic Music, Die Reihe (Theodore Presser, 1955) 3) Hugh Le Caine, ‘Electronic Music’, Proceedings of the IRE, 44 (1956), pp. 457–78 4) Lejaren Hiller & Leonard Isaacson, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1959) 5) Fred Prieberg,