Pimmon, “while (not &fission) &”

Junior Varsity KM, “(export) 02”

Andreas Berthling, “with(in.III)”

A full description of the invalidObject Series can be found here, with further details about the individual artists and releases, as well as music files for listening or download, at the links below:

• Pita, break
• Scanner, case
• Cray, comment
• Taylor Deupree, continue
• Rsundin, default
• Kim Cascone, delete
• Later Days, do
• Folder, else
• Junior Varsity KM, export
• Steve Roden, for
• Warmdesk, function
• V/Vm, if
• eM, import
• Stephan Mathieu, in
• *0, label
• Electric Company, new
• Eloy Anzola, return
• Goem, switch
• Ekkehard Ehlers, this
• Richard Chartier, typeof
• Massimo, var
• Akira Rabelais, void
• Pimmon, while
• Andreas Berthling, with

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Michael Praetorius, a composer of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, wrote that an organ with the first modern keyboard arrangement had been built in Halberstadt’s cathedral in 1361. This organ was the first one with a claviature of 12 notes and this claviature is used on our keyboard instruments today. So one can say that the cradle of modern music was in Halberstadt. Subtract 1361 from the millennial year 2000, and the result is 639.

Though the choice of the calculation used to determine the unusual length of the performance may seem somewhat arbitrary (not to mention equating the location of the first organ with a “modern” keyboard with the birthplace of “modern music”), it is certainly not inappropriate given Cage’s predilection for the random. The composition itself is of indeterminate duration and Cage did note that it should be played “as slow as possible,” and this effectively leaves the door open for extended performances, so why not 639 years?

Such an idea certainly has its precedents, one of them being Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893), though its monumental length of 18+ hours seems downright puny when compared to the 600+ years of Organ2/ASLSP. (It’s worth recalling that Cage organized the first complete public performance of Vexations in 1963.) Another antecedent is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7, which consists of just two pitches – the B below middle C and the F# above it – “to be held for a long time,” according to the composer’s instructions. Organ2/ASLSP is actually closer to the former than the latter, though, since Young’s piece is of indefinite duration and could go on, theoretically at least, forever.

What is unprecedented here is that, since the performance will last several lifetimes, if indeed it can actually be completed, no one will ever hear it in its entirety, at least not in real time. Thus, it may well be the first public presentation of a work of art that can only be experienced in part, the intentional impossibility of perceiving a work in its totality being a relatively rare phenomenon. And it certainly gives new meaning to the cliché “ars longa, vita brevis.”

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• John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt
• As Slow As Possible – Wikipedia

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ProLoop User Interface

(Letting the mind wander, sweep wide, loop back…)

The loop fascinates, whether as idea, object, or aesthetic device. It spurs the mind on, sends it spinning, causes it to wonder: will this ever end?

Technically, it shouldn’t, because the loop = infinity (whose symbol – ∞ – is itself a loop). Among the things that can stop it: the pause button, the fade out, a power failure, exhaustion, boredom, ellipses.…

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In music, the loop is an early motor of compositional dynamism. The round and canon, their technological grandchild the tape loop, and the latter’s relations: the proto- and pseudo-loops (the former orchestral and playerly, like Satie’s Furniture Music, Reich’s many phase pieces, Adams’ Shaker Loops, et al; the latter electronic and virtual, such as old-school “digital delay” effects, the looping feature of programs like Pro Tools and Garage Band, and stand-alone loop players like ProLoop), are all variations on a theme: the perpetual movement machine.

In fact, devices like ProLoop represent an apotheosis of the loop: whereas in most cases the loop is a means to an end, in that of loop players such as this, it is itself the end, the goal being more to work with loops for what they are than to use them for what they add. They go from ornament, as in the The Beatles’ 1966 “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for example, to main event, as in Brian Eno’s “1/2” from his 1978 Ambient 1: Music for Airports, recently reprised in Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill’s iPhone app Air.

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In narrative the loop implies circularity, fatality, self-reflexivity. That Ionesco’s Bald Soprano (and its progeny, Pedro Pietri’s The Masses are Asses) ends as it began suggests that things never change, that everyone is the same or at least interchangeable, that life is a trap. That the end of Robbe-Grillet and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad features the beginning of the play whose ending we saw in the opening scenes implies that the outcome was decided from the beginning, that it was inescapable, that it may be beginning again. The same is true of the Quay Brothers’ Stille Nacht III (Tales from Vienna Woods), whose ending is a replay of the central event of the film – a bullet grazing the testicle of a deer effigy – and thus represents the eternalizing of that action. Not unlike night 602 of the 1,001 Nights as fictionalized by Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and elsewhere (but referenced as fact by Foucault in his essay “Language to Infinity”), in which, due to a copyist’s error, Scheherazade begins telling the stories of the 1,001 nights all over again (and will do so of course each time she hits that 602nd night).

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The loop is present in nature in ocean currents, the asteroid and Kuiper belts, as well as in the orbits of planets, comets, and other heavenly bodies, as Luke Twyman’s SolarBeat beautifully (and musically) illustrates. The cyclical nature of time with its repeating units (days, seasons, years), all products of the Earth’s revolution and orbit, can also be seen as a loop, its most emblematic representation being the circular clock face (but also: the functioning of clockworks, the movement of the hands).

The loop is a fundamental trope of repetition, giving otherwise abstract cyclical occurrences a simple shape by which to visualize, understand, and remember them.

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Composed in 1956, Radio Music is Cage’s second work for radio, the first being Imaginary Landscape No. 4 from 1951, which I spoke of in an earlier post. Like the latter piece, Radio Music was composed using chance operations and is inherently indeterminate, given the nature of the radio (the piece is scored for a variable ensemble of from one to eight radios). Unlike Imaginary Landscape No. 4, however, Radio Music was not transcribed using conventional musical notation and thus doesn’t require music reading skills to perform. Rather, the score contains columns of numbers indicating radio frequencies occasionally separated by horizontal rules, which indicate silences. The piece is divided into four parts, which can also be separated by silences if the performers so choose. The duration of the frequencies like that of the silences is left to their discretion, but a introductory note stipulates that a performance should not exceed 6 minutes.

Guy de Bièvre has made some interesting comments about contemporary performances of Radio Music, which are problematized by the changes, technological and otherwise, that the medium has undergone since the time the piece was created. “Looking at the score now, 50 years later,” he says, “raises a number of questions. The radio landscape has changed enormously since 1956. The radios themselves have changed, they sound different.” (JCAR) He elaborates:

The sounds were very different content and quality wise. Especially today with digital radio and analog radio presets on the one hand and internet radio on the other. Some people will never hear static or a station fading again.

Hence the challenge to transcribe Radio Music for internet broadcasts. This raises some immediate questions:

– how do we interpret the original wavelengths?
– what about the absence of static, or the impossibility to tune in between 2 stations?
– what about the latency due to switching between radio stations? (RM)

Such questions in no way take away from the conceptual and philosophical issues raised by this and Cage’s other works for the radio, rather, they have to do with the mechanics of performance and of course how the piece will sound. Given the nature of these changes, Bièvre claims that it is not possible to give a historically accurate performance of the work, in other words to make Radio Music sound as it did at the time it was composed.

That’s true of course, but it also serves to convey one of the central lessons that Cage sought to teach through his work, one that he himself learned in the late ’40s when he heard another pianist perform The Perilous Night, one of his compositions for the prepared piano. “His preparation of the piano was so poor,” Cage later wrote, “that I wished at the time that I had never written the music.” A later, more successful performance of the same piece by a different pianist brought Cage to the realization that, though he may try, he could not control how his music would sound when performed by others. This lead to the understanding that he did not “own” it, that once published and out in the world his music would have a life – and sound – of its own, and that, should he continue to compose, he would have to accept and live with that. As Cage himself explained:

When I first placed objects between piano strings, it was with the desire to possess sounds (to be able to repeat them). But, as the music left my home and went from piano to piano and from pianist to pianist, it became clear that not only two pianists essentially different from one another, but two pianos are not the same either. Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion.

The prepared piano, impressions I had from the work of artist friends, study of Zen Buddhism, ramblings in fields and forests looking for mushrooms, all led me to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be.

And so my work since the early ’fifties has been increasingly indeterminate. (HTPCBP)

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• John Cage database: “Radio Music”
• Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (internal link)

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One of the 77 Million Paintings

I recently had an opportunity to see Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I enjoyed it so much I went back to see it again … and again. On each occasion I sat in the darkened room for what seemed like a micro eternity, watching the slowly changing shapes and colors of the digital “paintings” and listening to the sparse sounds of the music, which was alternately soothing and jarring, combine and recombine in a seemingly inexhaustible series of permutations.

77 Million Paintings is a work of combinatory art that strongly recalls Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille millards de poèmes [“100,000,000 Poems”] (1961), a sonnet cycle which the reader can read and change one line – as opposed to just one page – at a time; it thus potentially comprises 10¹⁴ (or one-hundred-thousand-billion) sonnets. Like the latter, 77 Million Paintings is an interactive, permutational work. Unlike it, 77 Million Paintings is also autopoietic or self-generating: thanks to digital technology, Eno’s work runs by itself, creating ever-new combinations of sounds, shapes and colors. To use a term that he himself has popularized for this type of piece, 77 Million Paintings is a “generative” work.

Eno’s experimentation with autopoietic systems goes back to the 1970s, with Discreet Music (1975) and Music for Airports (1978). They were inspired by Steve Reich’s early tape loop/phase compositions like It’s gonna rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), though they are also related to Satie’s Vexations (ca 1893) and his Musique d’ameublement [“Furniture Music”] (1917–1923), as well as to musical rounds and canons more generally speaking. (It is perhaps only a coincidence that the “B” side of Discreet Music contains three reworkings of Pachelbel’s Canon in D major. (But then again, perhaps it isn’t.)) The chief difference between them is that the latter works do not have the autopoietic quality of the former: as the music of these proto-loops consists of a few shorts bars repeated over and over, each repetition will always be exactly the same.

One of the chief attractions of these works, aside from their strictly musical qualities of course, is that they could go on indefinitely, constituting (at least potentially) a type of perpetual music. Well, they would were it not for the inherent limitations of successive generations of audio media. Until recently, the listener could only ever experience these works in relatively brief chunks, from the 25 or so minutes of one side of an LP to the approximately 60-minute length of a CD. This problem was overcome with the 1996 release of Eno’s Generative Music 1, which included not only 12 recorded tracks produced with the Koan generative music system, but a copy of the software itself, thus allowing users to create their own, theoretically endless, autopoietic compositions.

Though Koan is no longer available, listeners can experience and experiment with generative music using Bloom and Trope, interactive generative music apps created by Eno and Peter Chilvers for the iPhone and iPod Touch. 77 Million Paintings also exists in a software version that users can play, whether passively or interactively, on their own computers.

Autopoiectic works raise some interesting questions about the nature of art and art works, the role of the artist, and the very definition and relevance of the concepts of creativity and originality. Questions like: is a system which generates aesthetic results a work of art, or are the results generated by the system the work, or both (or neither)? Can someone who sets up systems and lets them run be considered an artist, especially if he cannot foresee or does not seek to control its output? Aren’t artists supposed to determine all aspects of their work and aren’t art works supposed to be finished, finite? Can something that is different each time we experience it be considered “a” work (and if not, what is it)? And if it is different each time, can it be considered original, i.e. what exactly is original about it – a given instance of it? The fact that there is no “original,” only iterations? Something else?

These are hardly new issues, though you might think they were if you read some of the on-line reviews of 77 Million Paintings. Some viewers were frustrated because they couldn’t discern a cogent message and subsequently felt that the work had nothing intelligible to say. (As if that in itself were not significant, though it does miss the point.) Others felt that it is no different than any of the other light-and-sound works that Eno has been making since the 1990s and thus was not “new” in any way, which is odd when you consider that the very specificity of the work is that it is constantly generating different audio-visual patterns and combinations. (By the way, the same criticism could be made of many works by John Cage, Steve Reich, or any one of a number of other composers or artists whose body of work flows from and reflects a guiding principle or question.)

Wherever one’s opinion on the issue, those interested in modern and contemporary music should experience 77 Million Paintings at least once. If nothing else, it gives new meaning to the otherwise obsolete term “long-playing.”

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• Brian Eno, “Generative Music”
• Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process”

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Written in 1951, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is scored for twelve radios. Two performers “play” each radio, one dialing the frequency, the other changing the volume and tone. The work is notated conventionally, i.e. with notes expressing duration placed on a five-line staff, and was composed using chance operations (in this case coin tosses), as was Cage’s Music of Changes, written at the same time. Though their compositional methods were identical, the two works differ in one fundamental respect: given the nature of the instruments they employ – the piano in the former case and the radio in the latter – Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is indeterminate whereas Music of Changes is not.

The indeterminacy stems from the fact that radios produce sounds that vary according to frequency, time of day, and geographic location. It follows that those sounds cannot be determined in advance, and thus that each performance of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 will be different in ways that cannot be predicted. According to Cage himself, the experience of indeterminacy was the motivation for the piece:

When I wrote the Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios, it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpredictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins. Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself. (quoted in CCJC, 57)

The “leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself” that Cage refers to here was to become one of his guiding principles, the goal being to eliminate individual will, preference, and desires, in a word, to give up control. The Western musical tradition, with its emphasis on originality and individuality, not to mention the regimented, hierarchical nature of the orchestra, indeed of diatonic harmony itself, had become suspect to Cage. Throughout his career he sought ways around these impediments, as he saw them, and at the time he clearly hoped that composing for the radio via chance operations would allow him to bypass them, as he explained in the concluding lines to an article detailing the compositional procedure of Imaginary Landscape No. 4:

It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and “traditions” of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration. (CDPC, 59)

In the mid- to late-1950s Cage would write three more works for radio, namely Speech (1955), Radio Music (1956), and Music Walk (1958), before abandoning the instrument, though he did later compose for television, audio tape, records, and other electronic sound sources.

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• John Cage Database: “Imaginary Landscape No. 4”
• John Cage Links

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The following sampler from ShortWaveMusic is intended to fire your imagination. If it catches your ear as well I recommend that you visit the site and work your way through the archive; you won’t be disappointed. The truly smitten may also wish to download the catalog of more than 100 recordings that had appeared on the blog between 2005–’08, and will find instructions on how to do so here. Now, on to the sounds…

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Dark Radio

“[This is] a short layer piece incorporating what sounds like three or four radio sources. I’m pretty sure this is just a brief recording of one of my all-night sleep installations.”

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SWM09.04: आकाशवाणी

“I would have remained a music-illiterate myself, had I not been in bed one monsoon with asthma, and listened to the radio to fill the hours. Around 2 a.m., I chanced upon some haunting music being played on the General Overseas Service of All India Radio. While the rest of India slept I listened, and was converted…” – Ramachandra Guha

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SWM09.00: Qrv Qrv Qrv de ShortWaveMusic

“Station: Unidentified XMTR Test Sequence
Frequency: 11885 kHz
Transmitter: Unknown
Rec Date: Wed 09-Sep-2009 : 0406 UTC”

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SWM09.08: Modernizing Khan Asparuh

“This piece is an example of ‘arranged folklore’ attributed to the Upper Thracian region of Southern Bulgaria, most likely performed by Donka Koleva, a Bulgarian-born and trained singer now living in New York.”

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Duelling XMTRs! #3

“…a collision of modern Eastern electronics and Qu’ranic recitation which sounds so natural to our world-fusion-softened ears that it hardly registers as an accident of propagation at all. You could probably even dance to it …”

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KJES (“King Jesus Eternal Savior”)

“…in certain fluke moments of peculiar propagation and signal chaos, KJES [“one of the weirder evangelical shortwave stations”] occasionally crosses the line from lip-biting strangeness to an inexplicable burlap-dress beauty.”

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If you are as captivated by the beauty of these disembodied sounds as I am, you might consider purchasing a copy of At the Tone, Weiskopf’s “ ‘Little History’ of NIST Radio Stations WWV and WWVH” (you’ll find a teaser for it here). Be sure to keep an ear out for his forthcoming Historical Longwave CD Project, too. In the meanwhile, you can enjoy his first “catalog mix,” 833-45: Howth St PART/SEQ (Pananorama Mix), a sound collage incorporating “shortwave elements, Qur’an recitation, and music,” which you can read about and download here.

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