From Philips 6740 001:

GROUPE DE RECHERCHES MUSICALES DE L'O.R.T.F.

IVO MALEC SPOT

[LUC FERRARI VISAGE V]

GUY REIBEL 2 VARIATIONS EN +TOILE

BERNARD PARMEGIANI PONOMATOP+ES

BERNARD PARMEGIANI G+N+RIQUE

PIERRE SCHAEFFER/PIERRE HENRY BIDULE EN UT

IVO MALEC DAHOVI II

[PIERRE SCHAEFFER ETUDE AUX ALLURES]

FRANQOIS BAYLE SOLITIOUDE


STUDIO VOOR ELEKTRONISCHE MUZIEK UTRECHT

JAAP VINK SCREEN

MILAN STIBILJ RAINBOW

FRITS WEILAND TEXTUUR

JACOB CATS LUX

ALIREZA MASCHAYEKI SHUR

LUCTOR PONSE RADIOPHONIE

JOS KUNST EXPULSION

[GOTTFRIED MICHAEL KOENIG FUNKTION BLAU]


STUDIO OF RADIO NHK, TOKYO

TOSHIRO MAYUZUMI MANDARA, for electronic sounds and voices

MAKI ISHII KYOO, Music for multi-piano, orchestra, and electronic sounds

MINAO SHIBATA IMPROVISATION, for electronic sounds

MAKOTO MOROI SHOSANKE, for electronic sounds and Japanese traditional instruments


STUDIO EKSPERYMENTALNE POLSKIE RADIO

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI PSALMUS

ANDRZEJ DOBROWOLSKI MUSIC FOR MAGNETIC TAPE AND OBOE SOLO (Janusz Banaszek, Oboe)

[ARNE NORDHEIM SOLITAIRE]

WLODZIMIERZ KOTONSKI MICROSTRUCTURES

BOGUSLAW SCHAFFER SYMPHONY (performed according to the graphic score by Bohdan Mazurek)

Orpheus with his lute tamed wild animals . . . the loudspeakers of electro-acoustic music have brought into earshot all the sounds of creation - and even a few more - in the biggest festival of sound that man has ever known. This festival is, however, only the apotheosis of a great country fair where traditional ideas on art, music, history, culture, and even communications are knocked over like Aunt Sallies, and we are compelled, whether we will it or not, to reconsider our relation to that which is said, sung, played, or heard, and thus to that which is thought and transmitted.

To be unaware of this is to deny the evidence; we live inseparably with the loudspeaker. In front and behind, high and low, to left and right, in the street and at home, at the office, in the factory and drawing-room, in public and private, on foot or in a car, in the air or on the sea - everywhere and always we are in the company of the loudspeaker as it speaks hard and loud, low and close, insolent and insinuating, its mouth always open, inexhaustible, changing its shape, heaping together the shortcomings of our cars, and making up for the infirmity of our imaginations. It is the earmouth of radio and record-player, cinema, and television, tape-recorder and electric guitar... the list is endless.

Time and space shrink. Tokyo can hear what is happening at any instant in Paris. Turn a knob and you can be at the ends of the earth, or even on the moon. A tribe of Zulus, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, or a gang of screaming hippies may invade your living-room. The walls dissolve, the ceiling vanishes, and we are-released on the flying carpet of the sound-dream; all kinds of geographic, historical, and acoustic perspectives are open to us. Fiction outstrips reality at the gallop. The eye listens, the ear sees: a new sense is given us.

It is as well that in broadcasting studios a few strange spirits keep watch between the microphone and the transmitter. One day in 1948 an engineer-poet-musician-philosopher called Pierre Schaeffer cut a record. Light!

The expression of sound so repeated was a whole that could be dissected, a "sound object" with its own body, but also with its own profile, density, skin, organs ... In short: the sound of music of a new type, in which the tape-recorder had become instrumental in allowing us to retain it better or to manipulate it in all kinds of ways.

If the tape on which the "sound object" in question has been caught is played at a speed different to that at which it was recorded, height, length, and other characteristics are all modified. By a simple snip of the scissors the head, body, and tail of the object are cut off. Potentiometers are also capable of reducing it to an imperceptible murmur or amplifying it to the hubbub of the Last Trump. Any of its components can be filtered out and echo chambers can place it in new acoustic environments. Chains of tape-recorders can superimpose it to the nth degree on itself or other objects . . .

And so the sound, for what it was, became pliable material, supple, subject to the thought and gesture of the master creator of machines. Suddenly the composer threw his score to the winds. He was no longer limited by instruments or voices, he could act and react directly in the universe of sound without the preliminary of writing things down and with total disregard for the hazards of interpretation. The music was made and played almost without intermediary, just as the craftsman concentrates on revealing the spirit of the material he has chosen, so the man of music worked on the live, the real, the concrete. Concrete Music was born.

Soon Herbert Eimert and his disciple Karlheinz Stockhausen found a means of making the sounds for the loudspeaker by using electronic oscillation generators in the hope, temporarily justified, of a better mastery of the mysteries of sound. Electronic Music was born.

For some years the two rivals, the one in Paris and the other in Cologne, fought unmercifully. Hope was strong, but love was stronger and they ended up by marrying each other in the general surge of lyricism of the "Song of Adolescents" by Stockhausen and in the tremendous musical frescoes of Pierre Henry. Electro-acoustic Music was born. It was just a question of terminology.

New art (music? some may still ask) quickly crossed the Seine and the Rhine to spread over the whole planet, from Milan to Stockholm, from New York to Tokyo, and even from Warsaw to Moscow. In the radio laboratories, in the university laboratories, the studios now continue to multiply to the point that any attempt to count them is in vain. A crowd of impassioned researchers, of more or less inspired creators in what is now considered to count among the fine arts, work under every arch of heaven to satisfy the progressively insatiable musical appetite of the loudspeaker. For more than twenty years we have followed, step by step, stage by stage, the quest for the unsayable by the visionary engineers, the methodical poets, who, having split the atom of sound, had the mad ambition of rebuilding music.

They wandered off into virgin continents, taken with an insatiable hunger for unheard-of discoveries; they shut themselves in silent and unhealthy cellars to escape the epidemic and the general incomprehension; they fought each other and almost always made it up; they flirted in turn with the most unbridled Surrealist literature, with the most rigorous science, with the cinema, with theatre of all types; they constructed enormous machines, wrote dissertations, assembled instruments that do not exist and wrote music that cannot be read.

Finally they took the Muse of Music on their laps, called her by her name Euterpe, and, without waiting for an uncertain future, fathered a child: the music of today. And now, due to them, the noise of the street is no longer the noise of the street; the breath of wind through trees no longer sounds the same. There is no longer any sound that speaks with the same voice. The earth feels itself speak, feels itself listening. And we stand, astonished and amazed, becoming aware of this strange and yet familiar song which existed in and around us without our being aware of it. Evolution in acceleration has become a revolution. And the revolution has found a voice. Sound is not inanimate: it has a soul of which we knew nothing.

But sound in all its meanings and manifestations is no longer the possession of a favoured few: through records it has become readily available. It has already provided us with the necessary luxury of poetic discomfort, the urgent impulse to escape the habits of the ear and accepted music and to throw open the window on pastures new.

To listen to the music of the loudspeakers is, primarily, to forget all the rest, to be reborn to the essential, to enter through the object into the very quick of the musical subject which transcends sound. It is to wander in the galaxy of innumerable sounds and follow a train of free thought which is closer than ever to the language that interprets it. It is to share one of the great adventures, to partake in one of the principle conquests of our century in which man, assisted by the machines that are his brain-children, attempts to lose himself beyond the reach of reason, at the limits of the sublime.

Electro-acoustic music is barely twenty years old. That is the age of self-searching, the age of joyous maturity, and yet still the age of spring. Many a promised flower has yet to bloom.

Maurice Fleuret


PANORAMA OF ELECTRO-ACOUSTICAL MUSIC

The paths opened by the musique concrFte of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (Paris, 1948) and the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Cologne, 1950) have led to a new technical-aesthetic domain which has expanded both geographically and musically with exceptional rapidity. New York (1952), Milan (1955), then Tokyo, Warsaw, and Utrecht were the first bases of an activity which today is being pursued in more than a hundred studios scattered throughout the world, and which has already resulted in over 7,000 works.

Musically, one might say that the evolution of the electro- acoustic medium has been dual, inclined both to the development of its own specific aspect and, at the same time, to a reconciliation with tradition. On the one hand, the apparatus capable of producing sounds entirely new to the human ear is becoming more and more varied: after the filters, modulators, and tape- recorders with variable speed, have come the perfected devices for spatialisation (i.e. diffusion of four independent sound-tracks) and, above all, the combinations of synthesizers and computers which permit full automation in the process of composition.

However, the perfecting of the processes of composition on magnetic tape without the intervention of an interpreter did lead to some regret at the absence of performers. Since 1958, combined works for tape and instruments have been appearing, and one may now be present at the development of new musical forms, where the electro-acoustic transformation of the sounds is carried out on the spot and perhaps even provides the subject of improvisation.

Musical activity within the studio has profoundly modified the practice and experience of music, and one can say that the roles of the musician, the work, and the listener are no longer as distinct as they were in the past. The studio is a new musicians' city, where individual creativity is accompanied by various forms of collective musical activity. This does not rest only on the sharing of means of production and diffusion, but also on the fact that most studios operate within larger institutions in radio-television or education and research. In such circumstances, an "ivory-tower" attitude is no longer tenable for the creative artist.

These new conditions have influenced the content of the music and the way in which it reaches the listener. Having its genesis in radio, electro-acoustic music is destined to pass through a communication circuit other than the ritual of the concert. Elaborated by the intermediary of apparatus which makes possible all modification, it has a less semantic aspect than traditional music, and might more readily be compared with a picture than with a text. The position of the musician is less that of one who "expresses a thought through the means of a known language," than of one who mimes the music in communion with a listener who understands directly without recourse to a coded language. Music becomes less an experience interpreted than an experience directly shared.

David Rissit


Paris

The musical research group (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) of the O.R.T.F. is a studio for the production of electronic music and at the same time a centre for research and musical instruction. As a studio, it carries on the work of the old musique concrFte group, founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948; as a research unit, it has since 1959 been integrated into a vast working body, the Service de la Recherche of the O.R.T.F. whose explorations are not confined to music, but include all aspects of communication in general. In the musical research group, a team of composers and researchers with a wide range of special interests ensures a programme of studies and realisations related to both the educational and public spheres.

IVO MALEC was born in 1925 in Zagreb, where he studied music and won several composition prizes. He continued his studies in Paris under Olivier Messiaen, and later Pierre Schaeffer, and while maintaining close connections with musical life in Yugoslavia, settled definitely in France in 1959, becoming a permanent member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. His works, which have earned two Grands Prix du Disque are sometimes for orchestra ("Sigma," "Miniatures pour Lewis Carroll," "Oral"), sometimes for magnetic tape ("Reflets," "Dahovi I et II"), and sometimes for performer and tape ("Cantate pour elle," "Lumina").

SPOT signifies here a "blob of light projected on a screen," and the effect by analogy of a "blob of sound projected on the ear drum" is obtained by a montage of sounds drawn from the electro-acoustic work "Reflets."

DAHOVI II dates from 1961. Sounds akin to "breaths" (which translates the Serbo-Croatian word dahovi) furnish the deliberately restricted basic material of this composition. The purpose, in fact, is less to bring out individual sound effects than to emphasise the play of volumes and densities which they form among themselves and which are barely underscored by a few designs of line and shading.

[LUC FERRARI was born in 1929. He attended the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and subsequently studied with Olivier Messiaen. Since 1958 he has worked alongside Pierre Schaeffer helping to define the policies of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. As a result, he has realised a number of works ("Tautologos I et II," "HTtTrozygote," "Und so weiter," "Music promenade"). With GTrard Patris, he has made a series of television programmes ("Les Grandes Repetitions") devoted to music (Messiaen, Stockhausen, Varese, Scherchen, etc.).

VISAGE V (1959) is a composition in three sections, constructed round a continuous sound called "personnage principal." In the first section, this "personnage" decreases in thickness and intensity as six "creatures" separate from it to form rhythmic figures; the play of these "creatures" gives mobility to the second section; in the third, the "creatures" transmit their configurations to the "personnage principal," which appears in all its harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic shapes.]

GUY REIBEL was born in 1936. With a scientific as well as a musical training, he has worked since 1964 with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in various capacities. His research and experimental work, which has included collaboration on Pierre Schaeffer's "SolfFge de l'objet sonore," alternates with the composition of works which reveal a very individual curiosity regarding the transmutations of sound material ("Antinote," "Vertiges") and particularly of vocal material ("Durboth," "Carnaval").

The purpose of VARIATIONS EN ETOILE is to bring out the different relationships which occur between the constructive will of the musician and the nature of the material at his disposal. Sometimes a preliminary idea commands the sounds and "instruments" of the studio, sometimes, conversely, the possibilities of the sounds and equipment condition the musical idea. Each of the two variations chosen here from a total of six illustrates one aspect of this theme. In "Metamorphose" the machines show all their power of transformation, creating the most varied material from a simple series of impulses. In "Rupture," on the other hand, the rhymes between sound subjects flow with poetic spontaneity.

BERNARD PARMEGIANI, born in 1927, was trained as a musician and sound technician. He joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1960, his particular field of inquiry being the techniques of studio composition. He is the author of many works for magnetic tape ("L'Instant mobile," "Capture TphTmFre") and For instruments and tape ("Violostries," "Jazzex"), and also of music for cinema and television ("Socrate," "Jeu des anges").

PONOMATOPEES II - inspired by the electro-acoustic treatment of the voice and also by some of the vocal ravings of pop singers, these chomatopoeic fantasies should be heard, according to the composer, as follows: 1. Sit in the manner of bad European yogis. 2. Pretend to concentrate, thinking of nothing but what is said. 3. Catch the meaning . . . repeat . . . turn around. 4. Then "ponomatopise" . . . you will free yourself from the enjoyment of the verb!

GENERIOUE - There is a particular art employed in radio and television, which consists of establishing in the sounds of a generique (a kind of sound trailer), the character of the ensuing programme. Bernard Parmegiani has composed many generiques, both for regular items (e.g. a current events programme) and as preludes to plays (e.g. "La Ville en haut de la colline").

[PIERRE SCHAEFFER was born in 1910. His varied activities as engineer, musician, and writer led him to become the pioneer of a multilateral form of research into communication, of which the principle stages have been the founding of the Studio d'essai de la Radio Frantaise (1942), and subsequently of the Service de la Recherche de L'O.R.T.F. He is the author of radiophonic works ("La Coquille a planFtes"), of films and experimental records ("Dialogue du son et de l'image," "SolfFge de l'objet sonore"), and various writings, particularly on music ("TraitT des objets musicaux"). His compositions have marked the birth of electro- acoustic music ("Concert de bruits") and its developments ("+tudes aux allures,""aux sons animes,"and "aux objets").

+TUDE AUX ALLURES forms part of a series of exploration into musical characteristics of the world of sound which are outside the ideas of traditional music. The allure of a sound is its way of sustaining itself, by a generalised vibration, which acts on the pitch and intensity as well as on the colour. L 'Etude sets up some kinds of rhymes between various sounds with more or less tight allures.]

PIERRE HENRY, born in 1927, studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. He was the first composer to become associated with the experiments in musique concrFte of Pierre Schaeffer, with whom he has collaborated on several works, notably the "Symphonic pour un homme seul." In 1960, Pierre Henry founded an independent studio, the studio Apsome, where he has realised many works, the best-known being "Le Voyage" (1962), "Variations pour une porte et un soupir" (1963), and "Messe pour le temps present."

BIDULE EN UT (1950), which might be translated as "Thingamy in C," is the first combined work of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer. A kind of complex improvised scale on a prepared piano gives rise - by double transposition into low and high pitch - to a "three-part fugue." As the transposition affects both duration and material, it is less a matter of recognising a "theme" at different tempi, than of appreciating the manner in which the three streams blend together in a brilliant and concise ensemble movement.

FRANCOIS BAYLE was born in 1932. He is self-taught, but with long experience in experimental music; he is less devoted to the evolution of "pure" musical aesthetics than to the discovery of new musical methods engendered by contemporary techniques. His career as a composer is therefore closely linked to the fundamental and applied researches of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, in which he has been the animator since 1966. His works include compositions for magnetic tape ("Pluriel," "Espaces inhabitables," "Nadir") and film-music ("Trois portraits de l'oiseau qui n'existe pas," "Portrait-poFme de LTonor Fini").

SOLITIOUDE (1969) has been commented on thus by the composer: "Irreverent movement, in spite of a series of light genuflexions (to Duke Ellington . . . Boris Vian . . . the Soft Machine . . .). David Allen provided me with fine guitar sounds. The tape-recorders contributed some incidents. But the events of May were the most generous, offering me an abundance of teeming life, the charm-shock of their sirens. The splashes of the crowd, the applause of the sea - this pop-nature in auditory hallucination - forms one of the episodes of an 'Aventure du Cri,' in which I am engaged at the moment."

Utrecht

The history of electro-acoustic music in the Netherlands began in 1956, when Philips set up the studio in Eindhoven in which Edgar VarFse was to compose his famous "PoFme Electronique." Subsequently several studios were founded, notably in Delft, Bilthoven, and at the University of Utrecht (1960). This last studio, recently re-named the Institute of Sonology, carries out research work, apart from compositional activities proper, and also does much teaching. The University of Utrecht is therefore not only an international magnet for dedicated composers, but also for students who come to be initiated into studio techniques and the more recent techniques of composition by computer.

JAAP VINK was born in 1930. As a sound engineer he set up the Bilthoven electronic studio and directed it for six years. Since 1957 he has worked at the Utrecht studio, as composer and teacher.

SCREEN dates from 1968. As its title suggests, this composition presents itself as a surface, a vast harmonic surface, of which the spectrum evolves in continuous fashion through the action of numerous filters and superimpositions.

MILAN STIBILJ was born in 1929 in Yugoslavia, where he studied music and psychology. After courses in electronic music at the Utrecht studio, he was invited to settle in Berlin. His compositions include the "Requiem SlovFne," a Symphony, and works for various chamber-music combinations.

RAINBOW (1968) develops sound material derived from a recording of drops of water. The rhythmic figures formed by these drops are set in counterpoint with electronic sounds, in a sound-space which grows increasingly more vast, as much in its tessitura and dynamics as in actual spatial distribution.

FRITS WEILAND, born in 1933, had both a musical and scientific training. After working for radio and television in the Netherlands, he joined the Utrecht studio permanently in 1961 as a researcher and instructor.

TEXTUUR (1968) brings into play several tonal contrasts, which evolve towards a harmony of textures, through the reciprocal influence of opposing elements. In addition to the contrasts of register and harmonic material, one notices above all the opposition then reconciliation of a series of rapid impulses within a long, continuous enveloping tone.

JACOB CATS was born in 1922 and studied music with Ernest Mulder. Among the works which he has realised at the Utrecht studio since 1967, the most notable is perhaps the triptych "Lux", "Prediction I," and "Prediction II." The last of the three pieces also calls for a capella chorus and a soloist.

LUX (1968) is a symmetrical composition. The first section, recapitulated at the end of the work, makes use of drawn-out sounds, to which filtering and reverberation give a soft, blurred colouring. The middle section, by contrast, is rhythmic and lively.

ALIREZA MASCHAYEKI was born in Teheran in 1940. After studying music in his own country and in Vienna, he went on to study electronic music in Cologne, and then at the Utrecht studio, where he composed, among other works, "Autonom III" (1967).

SHUR (1968) combines electronic sounds with motives from Persian folk-music played on the cello. In their relationship to these motives, the various electronic sounds act sometimes as a contrasting element, sometimes as an extension. On the one hand short impulses contrast with the continuous nature of Persian music; on the other, the melodic oscillations which characterise the music are underlined and prolonged by a kind of electronic aureole.

LUCTOR PONSE was born in Geneva, and studied music there and in Valenciennes. He has won awards at several international composition contests, notably the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium contest, at which his Symphony (1953) and later his Violin Concerto (1965) won distinction. Since 1964, Luctor Ponse has been a regular collaborator in the activities of the Utrecht studio, where he has realised among other works, a Concerto for piano and electronic sounds and the series of "Radiophonies."

RADIOPHONIE 1 a (1968) is a rhythmic work based on the play of regular and irregular pulsations, which at times develop in continuous trajectories. The overall direction of the work is determined at one and the same time by acceleration, broadening of the tessitura, and dynamic expansion.

JOS KUNST, born in 1936, studied composition with Joep Straesser and Ton de Leeuw, and electronic music at the Utrecht studio. The Music Weeks of the Gaudeamus Foundation have brought him several prizes and also the first public performance of "Expulsion" (September, 1969).

EXPULSION is a series of seven variations, some of which join without transition while others overlap. The work often explores the intermediary sound fringe between the discontinuous and the continuous. This fringe appears when the acceleration of a series of beats changes them from the punctuated state to that of a compact mass.

[GOTTFRIED MICHAEL KOENIG was born in Magdeburg in 1926. He studied composition in Brunswick and Cologne and information theory at the University of Bonn. From 1954 to 1964 he was a permanent member of the electronic studio in Cologne, where he composed "Klangfiguren" (Tone figures). In 1964 Koenig took over the artistic direction of the Utrecht studio, where he does important work both as a composer and as a professor.

FUNKTION BLAU is one of a series of colour studies called "Functions" each of which sets out a variant of one experimental principle. This principle brings in a computer to determine variations of form and colour according to statistical laws. In this line of research, the "Functions" are methodical experiments rather than compositions in the strictly aesthetic sense of the word.]


Tokyo

Since the foundation of the studio of Radio NHK, Tokyo, in 1954, the development of electro-acoustic music in Japan has shown a constant exchange between national tradition and techniques imported from the West.

The Japanese contribution is especially interesting in the field of combined electronic instrumental music. Japan has a rich variety of traditional instruments, and there are many which blend particularly happily with electronically produced sound. However, the meeting of two sound-worlds has been most rewarding in musical forms where both modern techniques and traditional elements are readily adoptable and sometimes singularly convergent. Elements borrowed by Mayuzumi and Moroi from the vocal punctuations of the N( theatre, or the sound patterns of the shamisen are significant in this respect. Such borrowings might determine perhaps a refined breaking-up of the beat, or again a stretching of tempo in accordance with the flow of the musical material. From the standpoint of our own Western conception of tempo, we still sense an alien quality in Japanese electro-acoustic music.

TOSHIRO MAYUZUMI (born 1929) is one of the leading composers in Japan today. After completing his musical studies in Europe - notably under Tony Aubin at the Paris Conservatoire - he set out to bring Japanese and Western traditions together. Although a pioneer of electro-acoustic music in Japan, with his "Composition concrete XYZ" (1953) and particularly "Aoi no Ue" (First N( song), he has made himself equally well known in the West through his orchestral music ("Nirvana Symphony").

MANDARA for electronic sounds and voices dates from 1969. The title which is borrowed from the vocabulary of Buddhism, evokes the idea of the uncertainty of things here on earth. The work is divided into two sections. The first is composed basically of brief, shrill electronic impulses; toneless sounds gradually impose the sensation of deep breathing, which effects a transition to the second section of the work.

This is made up of complex vocal polyphony, in which murmurs, cries, and ordinary speaking are blended with typically Japanese melodic inflections.

MAKI ISHII was born in 1936 into an artistic family. In 1958 he settled in Germany, studying at the National Musical Academy in Berlin. He has written orchestral music ("Transition"), chamber works ("Aphorisms"), and electro-acoustic music.

KYOO was composed in 1968 and won an award at the National Arts Festival. The title, which means "echoes," refers to the formal concept of the work: one sound giving rise to a family of sounds which in their turn engender other families, etc. There are various sound sources: piano, brass, percussion, and electronic devices. The instrumental sounds are heard sometimes in their original form and sometimes transformed electronically. The piano in particular is treated in a variety of ways: played normally, played according to the techniques of the "prepared piano," and finally amplified and transformed instantaneously through microphones installed inside the frame.

MINAO SHIBATA was born in 1916. He studied composition with Sabro Moroi, in addition to pursuing studies in aesthetics and botany. He is at present a professor at the National College of Art and for some years has devoted himself to the development of new music in Japan. His compositions include orchestral works (Symphony), and piano pieces ("Theme and 15 Variations").

IMPROVISATION for electronic sounds dates from 1968. The title may seem surprising, since the classic studio technique is to produce sounds independently and then put them together on magnetic tape. However, improvements in equipment have now made a "live" compositional technique possible. Banks of electronic generators deliver a cascade of constantly changing sound-colours which the composer can manipulate on the spot in the manner of an instrumentalist.

MAKOTO MOROI was born in 1930, and studied music with his father, himself a composer of note. Moroi's orchestral and chamber works have earned him awards in a number of international competitions, including the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium Contest. His "Variations on the numerical principle of 7" composed in collaboration with Mayuzumi marked the debut of electronic music in Japan.

SHOSANKE is a suite of six variations on a trumpet sound traditionally associated with the Buddhist "Ceremony of the Water." Heard at the opening of the work, this sound is subsequently multiplied by electro-acoustic processes, then enhanced in turn by traditional instruments and synthetic sounds. Electronic sound is combined in the second variation with an ensemble of shakuhashi (bamboo flutes), and in the third with the shamisen (a primitive type of lute). Shamisen and shakuhashi then play alone, before joining in final polyphony, which brings in the original trumpet sound.


Warsaw

The Studio of Experimental Music of the Polish Radio was founded in 1957 by the composer and musicologist Josef Patkowsky, who has been its director ever since. His foundation was one of the signs of the dramatic revival in the arts that manifested itself at that time in Polish life. Apart from "pure" musical works, of which a very representative collection is to be found here, the studio's production has always aimed at "applied" music, intended for such media as radio and television.

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI was born in 1933 and studied at the Cracow School of Music. His "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," won the UNESCO prize of the Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs in 1961 and attracted the attention of the musical world. A wide variety of compositions, among which his great choral-orchestral work, the "St. Luke Passion" stands out from the rest, have since assured Penderecki of an important place among the great musical creators of our time.

PSALMUS (1961) which was realised in collaboration with the sound engineer Eugeniusz Rudnick, is to date the only electro- acoustic work by Penderecki. His basic material stems solely from a recording of two voices (soprano and baritone) so treated that they provide long holding-notes developing in pitch, dynamics, and colour, alternating with short impulses which display to advantage the great variety of inflection proper to the Polish language.

ANDRZEJ DOBROWOLSKI, born in 1922, studied composition as well as singing and several instruments at the Warsaw and Cracow Academies of Music. He was closely associated with the work of the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio from its beginning and his works include "Passacaglia" (1960) and "Music for Tape no. 1" (1962).

MUSIC FOR MAGNETIC TAPE AND OBOE SOLO dates from 1965. The tape was made using solely transformed oboe sounds wit the addition of a solo part for oboe. The accent is more often placed on the contrast than on the similarities between natural and manipulated sounds from the same instrument. To this end the manipulations of the tape aim at making the original sounds unrecognisable, particularly by harmonic multiplication. There is also frequent use of percussive sounds obtained on the keys of the instrument.

[ARNE NORDHEIM, born in Norway in 1931, studied music at the Oslo Academy of Music. He is the author of many works, both instrumental and electro-acoustic ("Catharsis"), and is one of a number of foreign composers invited to work at the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio.

SOLITAIRE is Nordheim's second composition. It was realised in 1969 for the opening of a Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo and was originally intended to be accompanied by light projection. The sound material - very varied at the outset - forms a general atmosphere that is at once mysterious and brilliant and in which the impression of spatial depth plays an important role. The open construction makes use of alternations and returns of elements that are contrasted dynamically, in tessitura and, above all, in quality.]

WLODZIMIERZ KOTONSKI, born in 1925, studied composition an the piano at the Warsaw Academy of Music. Associated with the work of the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio since its foundation, he has realised, among many works for cinema and theatre, some pure musical works, one of which is "Study for a clash of the cymbals" (1960).

MICROSTRUCTURES dates from 1963. The title refers to the process of micro-montage used in the composition. The sound elements, which include some brief percussion on wood and glass, have been built up from short segments according to related characteristics of the types of material, particularly granular qualities.

BOGUSLAW SCHAFFER was born in 1929 and studied composition and musicology in Cracow. He is the author of various instrumental and electro-acoustic works ("Assemblage") an has also made a name for himself with musicological works on contemporary music,

SYMPHONIE (1966) is the first work of any considerable length realised by the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio; its composition was spread out over more than a year. The basic idea was to transpose into purely electronic music the notion of the assembly of sounds of different origin that the word "symphony" suggests. The realisation of the work demanded close co-operation between the composer and the engineer, Bohdan Mazurek, who contributed a great dea1 in the suggestion and provision of suitable apparatus.

David Rissin