TWENTIETH- - Synapse Music

256 Timbre and Texture: Electronic
TAPE AND INSTRUMENT, LIVE PERFORMANCE,
AND INTERACTIVE COMPUTER MUSIC
The performance of an electronic composition in the concert hall is a somewhat eerie experience
for the uninitiated. Because there is no parade of perfonners onto the stage, the
audience is usually alerted to the fact that the piece is about to begin by dimming the lights.
Then someone (seen or unseen) starts the playback device, and the audience listens, facing
an empty stage. The applause at the end of the piece is not the for the performer, who is,
after all, only a tape recorder or CD player, but instead for the composer, who mayor may
not even be there to hear it. Though the experience may seem a bit strange to those who are
new to it, there is at least an advantage in hearing the music over a sound system that is
probably superior to most home systems.
Whether or not large audiences will ever warm to a concert format of this kind remains
to be seen. Certainly the proliferation of CD recordings has made electronic music
more widely available to the public. but the typical electronic music concert sti ll exists outside
of the mainstream of concert life. Composers have developed several responses to the
situation. One response has been to design more elaborate playback systems comprised of
many loudspeakers (8, 16, 32 or more), and to focus the concert on the act of distributing,
or diffusing, the prerecorded sound throughout the available speakers. Some composers
work in multichannel formats, going beyond the two channels of stereo to compose works
that take advantage of special speaker installations. Initially li mited to concert halls, mulLichannel
works are finding lheir way into the home th rough the increasing popularity of
DVD-Video players and their accompanying 5.1 audio channels.'
Combined tape music and live instrument works can be seen as another response to
the empty concert stage, but thcy also were developed for their own aesthetic reasons.
Early examples include Edgard Varese's Deserts (1954), for woodwinds, brass, percussion,
and tape, and Stockbausen's Contact (Kontakte) (1960), for piano, percussion, and tape (an
example of "moment form ," discussed in Chapter 7). The tape portions of these works used
all of the tools available to the electronic composer-a wide variety of electronically synthesized
sounds as well as sampled sounds. Often, these sampled sounds were derived
from the acoustic instruments used in the piece. such as in Jacob Druckman's Animus II
(1968). Davidovsky's Synchronisms is a series of compositions that explored ideas of ensemble
between acoustic performers and tightly integrated electronic parts.
The term live electronics can refer to various techniques, from simple amplification
of conventional instruments- George Crumb's Black Angels (1970) for amplified string
quartet- to live pelformance using electronic instruments, such as keyboard synthesizers.
Philip Glass created his own keyboard synthesizer ensemble to perform his earl y minimalist
compositions, such as Floe found on the Glassworks CD (1984) More recentl y, the term
has come to mean the use of live, computer-generated synthesis andlor interactive computer
processing of acoustic instruments.
Because MIDI is primarily a set of performance instructions, it was (and is) an
important tool for composers interested in creating works of highly interactive electroacoustic
music. Eight Sketches: Duet for One Pianist (1989) by Jean-Claude Risset has
the pi ani st playing on a special acoustic piano that sends and responds to MIDI data
(such as a Yamaha Disklavier). The performance information is sent to a computer,