Artist: Walter CarlosThis record also features neat electronic compositions from Andres Lewin-Richter, Tzvi Avni and Ilhan Mimaroglu. Here are liner notes about the LP and about electronic music of the mid-'60s from Professor Vladimir Ussachevsky, along with some notes from composer Walter Carlos about the song I've posted here:
This recording of electronic music presents the works of
four authors who come from four different countries with
quite varied musical backgrounds. Two of them have
considerable knowledge of electronics which stems from
a formal engineering training in one case, and from a high
degree of practical experience in the other. Diversity of
styles is in evidence, as each composer's style is his own
concern. The common experience for these composers
has been the use of technical resources at the Columbia-
Princeton Electronic Music Center and the investigation of
specialized methods for the evolution and transformation
of recorded sound materials, conducted in my course at
Columbia and further demonstrated in private sessions
by technicians. This work is done in Studio 106, located
in McMillin Theatre on the campus of Columbia University
in the same room where the older Columbia University
Tape Studeo was housed. The present studio has been
considerably expanded in recent years and has become
a part of a complex of three studios and a small laboratory
established under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant given to
Columbia and Princeton Universities in 1959.
With the notable exception of the very unique possibilities
offered by the RCA Sound Synthesizer located in Studio 318,
the standard and specialized equipment of the Center is
devoted to the production of sound materials by "Classical"
methods, common to all electronic music studios. Thus,
materials (of either purely electronic or non-electronic origin)
recorded on tape, may be subjected to manipulation by
tape speed variation, electronic filtering, several types
of frequency modulation, artificial reverberation, etc. Tape
cutting and splicing by hand still occupies a good deal
of time in preparing the sound patterns and arranging
them in longer sequences. Techniques are available to
create certain types of rhythmic patterns and timebre
variations by semi-automatic methods, but the materials
thus produced are of limited usefulness. Much time in clasroom
discussion is devoted to the structural considerations which we
believe to be quite challenging and of paramount importance
in the electronic music medium, rich as it is in unusual timbres
and opportunities for the realization of complex rhythms.
It is hard to imagine that there is much occasion any
more for claiming that electronic music is "dehumanized" in
its context. Electronic music simply undertakes to express,
by different means, human situations, ideas, and emotions.
-- Vladimir Ussachevsky, Professor of Music—Columbia University
* * * * *
Dialogues For Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) is
rhapsodic in character, deriving most of its thematic-motivic
construction from an ascending series of gradually diminishing
intervals, forming an almost-serial basis for the piece. Two
of the themes are developed and transformed at some
length, i.e., the piano's theme in twelfths at the entrance
of the electronic sound, and the rhythmic novelty of a rising
and accelerating series of seven eighth-notes, heard in the
middle and latter portions of the piece.
-- Walter Carlos
four authors who come from four different countries with
quite varied musical backgrounds. Two of them have
considerable knowledge of electronics which stems from
a formal engineering training in one case, and from a high
degree of practical experience in the other. Diversity of
styles is in evidence, as each composer's style is his own
concern. The common experience for these composers
has been the use of technical resources at the Columbia-
Princeton Electronic Music Center and the investigation of
specialized methods for the evolution and transformation
of recorded sound materials, conducted in my course at
Columbia and further demonstrated in private sessions
by technicians. This work is done in Studio 106, located
in McMillin Theatre on the campus of Columbia University
in the same room where the older Columbia University
Tape Studeo was housed. The present studio has been
considerably expanded in recent years and has become
a part of a complex of three studios and a small laboratory
established under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant given to
Columbia and Princeton Universities in 1959.
With the notable exception of the very unique possibilities
offered by the RCA Sound Synthesizer located in Studio 318,
the standard and specialized equipment of the Center is
devoted to the production of sound materials by "Classical"
methods, common to all electronic music studios. Thus,
materials (of either purely electronic or non-electronic origin)
recorded on tape, may be subjected to manipulation by
tape speed variation, electronic filtering, several types
of frequency modulation, artificial reverberation, etc. Tape
cutting and splicing by hand still occupies a good deal
of time in preparing the sound patterns and arranging
them in longer sequences. Techniques are available to
create certain types of rhythmic patterns and timebre
variations by semi-automatic methods, but the materials
thus produced are of limited usefulness. Much time in clasroom
discussion is devoted to the structural considerations which we
believe to be quite challenging and of paramount importance
in the electronic music medium, rich as it is in unusual timbres
and opportunities for the realization of complex rhythms.
It is hard to imagine that there is much occasion any
more for claiming that electronic music is "dehumanized" in
its context. Electronic music simply undertakes to express,
by different means, human situations, ideas, and emotions.
-- Vladimir Ussachevsky, Professor of Music—Columbia University
* * * * *
Dialogues For Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) is
rhapsodic in character, deriving most of its thematic-motivic
construction from an ascending series of gradually diminishing
intervals, forming an almost-serial basis for the piece. Two
of the themes are developed and transformed at some
length, i.e., the piano's theme in twelfths at the entrance
of the electronic sound, and the rhythmic novelty of a rising
and accelerating series of seven eighth-notes, heard in the
middle and latter portions of the piece.
-- Walter Carlos
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