Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in ... - Aaaaarg

THREE PIONEERS 127
First, I recorded six sounds of variously prepared low piano strings struck
with an iron beater, using a tape speed of 76.2 centimeters per second.
After that, I copied each sound many times and, with scissors, cut off the
attack of each sound. A few centimeters of the continuation [remaining
sound], which was, briefly, quite steady dynamically, were used. Several
of these pieces were spliced together to form a tape loop, which was then
transposed to certain pitches using a transposition machine [one of the
Phonogènes]. A few minutes of each transposition were then recorded on
separate tapes. 40
Next, the composer wanted to splice in sections of silent leader tape periodically
throughout the piece. This would transform the once-continuous sounds into a
rhythmic pattern. The few hours of supervised studio time that he had each week
would not be enough to finish editing the work. Realizing this, Stockhausen
created a makeshift editing bench at his student hostel by pounding several nails
into the top of his desk. These served as spokes for the tape reels containing his
raw sound files. He edited without being able to listen to the result, calculating
the length of his leader insertions down to the millimeter. This was done on two
separate reels of tape. Back in the studio, he synchronized the start of the tapes
and played them back so that he could mix the result onto a third tape to create
the final mix. The result was not what he had expected. As he listened to the
juxtaposed tracks, he became “increasingly pale and helpless. I had imagined
something completely different! On the following day, the sorcery despairingly
continued. I changed my series, chose other sequences, cut other lengths, spliced
different progressions, and hoped afresh for a miracle in sound.” 41
The result was a striking little one-track piece called Etude, a progression of
atomized bursts of sound. It was not much more than an exercise and lasted a
slight three minutes and fifteen seconds. But Stockhausen was affected for life by
the creation of this simple tape piece. He found that it galvanized his most
creative and obsessive forces, taking him inside the molecular structure of sound.
It was a place he liked to be, in a zone of his own. This is what he would come to
call the “unified time domain,” 42 a personal realization inspired by his
experience with tape composition. In this domain, space and time became
equivalent forces to be worked like any other material substances of music. The
technical instrumentation and editing techniques of electronic music permitted
him to gain control over all of the constituent parts of musical sound. This
appealed to his fascination with Webern’s serialism, which he and his German
colleagues had been extending.
Stockhausen’s unified time domain in music has many similarities with the
unified field theory of physics; it was his attempt to find an underlying
controlling element over all of the parameters of sound: