From Odyssey 32 16 0160:

Pauline Oliveros was born in 1932 in Houston, Texas. She studied composition with Robert Erickson and Thomas Nee and was a member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from 1961 through 1967, working and touring with fellow composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. In 1966, she became Director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College and is currently Lecturer in Electronic Sound at the music department of the University of California at San Diego. She writes of the work presented here:

"I of IV was made in July, 1966, at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. It is a real time studio performance composition (no editing or tape splicing), utilizing the techniques of amplifying combination tones and tape repetition. The combination-tone technique was one which I developed in 1965 at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

"The equipment consisted of twelve sine-tone square-wave generators connected to an organ keyboard, two line amplifiers, mixer, Hammond spring-type reverb and two stereo tape recorders. Eleven generators were set to operate above twenty thousand cycles per second, and one generator at below one cycle per second. The keyboard output was routed to the line amplifiers, reverb, and then to channel A of recorder 1. The tape was threaded from recorder 1 to recorder 2. Recorder 2 was on playback only. Recorder 2 provided playback repetition approximately eight seconds later. Recorder 1 channel A was routed to recorder 1 channel B, and recorder 1 channel B to recorder 1 channel A in a double feedback loop. Recorder 2 channel A was routed to recorder 1 channel A, and recorder 2 channel B was routed to recorder 1 channel B. The tape repetition contributed timbre and dynamic changes to steady state sounds. The combination tones produced by the eleven generators and the bias frequencies of the tape recorders were pulse modulated by the sub-audio generator."


From Candide CE 31113:

For many years, Virgil Thomson was the only member of the music community to be aware of the work of Lucia Dlugoszewski, which he described as "music of great delicacy, originality and beauty of sound and of unusually high level. with intellectual and poetic aspects." The New York School of Painters and Poets, like Robert Motherwell, John Ashberry and Ad Reinhardt, however, supported Dlugoszewski's music with enthusiasm as early as 1954 when she wrote Here and Now With Watchers for her invention, the "timbre piano."

Typically, it was sculptor David Smith and painter Herman Cherry who arranged her first New York concert at the Five Spot Cafe in 1958. Not until the 1970's did the music world catch up with the painters and poets. Official recognition became secure in 1975 when the National Endowment for the Arts, in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic, commissioned her Abyss and Caress, and Pierre Boulez conducted the first performance, which was chosen as one of the year's ten best, both by The Village Voice and the Soho New York News. In 1976. the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation awarded Fire Fragile Flight a recording grant.

About Fire Fragile Flight, Dlugoszewski, in describing her personal sources of music for the piece, wrote: "In the Great Lakes country where I was born, the delicacy of deciduous trees in early March has a kind of elusive swiftness of form. provoking in the ear a strange risk of hearing whose moment in time is always daybreak."

Essential to this music is a sense of architecture based on the delicacies of speed. There are 65 point-leaps triggering "startle-juxtapositions" into new material and hangings almost unsupported from 4 keystones. The point-leaps hanging totally unsupported from the last keystone are absolutely free. A certain time sense is deliberately heightened by these almost dangerous leaping speed ratios.

Jamake Highwater in the Soho Weekly News wrote Fire Fragile Flight is an absolutely astonishing piece of music . . . a refined center of energy which moved clearly and dramatically towards a superb climactic resolution . . . a marvelous musical experience, like a dream. We felt for certain that we had been emotionally affected by an experience we did not quite comprehend. That form is the ultimate nature of musical response."

Paul Hume in the Washington Post wrote "These sounds were obviously at the command of a superb intelligence who sought by these means to suggest the 'sudden leaping' of light, the 'quick falls' of 'fragile' and the climbing intensity 'arrivals' of fire."

Leighton Kerner in the Village Voice wrote "As in so much of Miss Dlugoszewski's work . . . the mighty tension between an astonishing freedom in exploring fresh instrumental techniques end a vigorous, complex energy behind the aural impact . . . all this is held within a structured scheme both elaborate and brave . . . a spectacular new score and 10 concerts worth of virtuosity."


From Folkways FTS 33902:

ANGELS OF THE INMOST HEAVEN, by Lucia Dlugoszewski (7:27)

Mark Gould, Louis Ranger, tru,npets; Per Brevig, David Taylor, trombones; Martin Smith, French Horn; Gerard Schwarz, conductor

ANGELS OF THE INMOST HEAVEN, dedicated to Ralph and Mary Dorazio, exists both as a work for concert performance and for the stage as choreographed by Erick Hawkins. Compositionally, ANGELS explores three major structural levels: timbre, density, and phrase permutations. Timbre permutations are manifested in extraordinary variations of glissandos, lip and finger trills, and constant shifting of a marvelous variety of mutes. Transformations of density from the most extreme called NOVA (bursts of energy generated by intense playing speed) through CORONA (densities of great transparency created by the sudden decay of individual instruments) to CLEAR CORE (tiny distinctions in static solid walls of very high density through subtle changes in pitch/range and timbre).

The work is divided into eight equal continuous parts of fifty five seconds duration with a slight "stretching" and "curving" at the end of each section. Throughout the score extensive use is made of the most extreme contrasts in dynamics and speed. Sudden explosions of incredibly fast notes adjacent to extremely soft expansive glissandos. Passages exploring the greatest possible density ("positive clear core") juxtaposed with the purest transparent scoring ("negative clear core"). Wide leaps which expand the outer boundaries of the instruments to new heights played simultaneously with quarter tone trills on one note constituting the most minute intervallic relationships. The direct experience of listening to the music of Lucia Dlugoszewski is first and foremost an encounter with the sheer poetry of sound best described in her September-October 1973 article for MAIN CURRENTS IN MODERN THOUGHT. "What strange risk of hearing can bring sound to music-a hearing whose obligation awakens a sensibility so new that it is forever a unique, new-born, anti-death surprise created now and now and now...a hearing whose moment in time is always daybreak."

Lucia Dlugoszewski was born in Detroit, where she attended the Conservatory of Music; in New York she studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition with Felix Salzer and Edgard Varese. She has taught at New York University, the New School, and the Foundation for Modern Dance. Miss Dlugoszewski has composed numerous works on commission from the Living Theater, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the American Brass Quintet, among others. She is composer-in residence with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. In 1966, Miss Dlugoszewski received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

Notes by Joel Thome


From Nonesuch H-71237:

1. Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) Outline,for Flute, Percussion and String Bass (An Improvisation Chart) (1963) (14:19)

Nancy Turetzky, flutes Ronald George, percussion

2. Ben Johnston (b. 1926) Casta Bertram (1969) (10:42)

Produced by Lewis Prince & Bertram Turetzky. Engineering Lewis Prince

Casta Bertram was mixed & transformed by the composer with Jaap Spek

BERTRAM TURETZKY, contrabass

Pauline Oliveros, for many years one of the moving forces in the San Francisco Tape Center, is also most prominently represented on recordings by electronic music, to the unfortunate neglect of her instrumental compositions. Miss Oliveros' years of work with improvisation, both as performer and as teacher, are reflected in Outline, which, in her words, "presents performers with an opportunity to improvise in several ways: to choose pitches according to the given contour, to make rhythms in the spaces provided, and to improvise without directions within a given time length. The written material provides the influence for the style of improvisation." The work was written in 1963 for Mr. Turetzky and his wife Nancy, and premiered in May of that year by the Turetzkys at Yale University. Miss Oliveros, a colleague of Mr. Turetzky's on the UCSD music faculty, worked with the performers and the engineer to assure the authoritative quality of this recording.

Ben Johnston, born in Georgia in 1926, has been with the music faculty of the University of Illinois since 1951, where he currently serves as Professor of Composition and Theory. Among his most widely performed works are Knocking Piece (piano interior and two percussionists), String Quartet No. 2 (recorded on Nonesuch H-71224), and Duo for flute and string bass (recorded by the Turetzkys on Advance FGR-1) .

Casta Bertram is a realization of Casta* [the first of 4 Do-It-Yourself Pieces [1969]; the other three are Recipe for a*; Conference, A Telephone Happening; and Knocking Piece II). The score for Casta* as provided below also requires a circuit schematic which may be devised by the performer working with his own engineer or may be obtained from the composer in the version used for the premiere.

CASTA*

Choose 4 stage locations: (1) to record; (2) (elevated) to type, with voice mike and contact mike for typewriter; (3) (spotlighted) to perform live against tape loops recorded earlier in performance; and (4) to record (technician with 3 tape recorders, minimum 3 loudspeakers, 3 tape loops, mixers, 3 mikes as described, earphones for technician and performer).

Prepare sound and score components: (1) 4 segments, 45 seconds each, of vocal and instrumental noises, at least 1/3 vocal, many scatological; (2) a list of these noises clearly identifying each; (3) 25 standard repertory excerpts, from very brief to a phrase or two in length, many virtuosic. Sequence of events: (1) Record segment 1 on loop 1. (2) Record segment 2 mixed with segment 1 on loop 2. (3) Record segment 3 mixed with mixture of segments 1 and 2 on loop 2. (4) Record segment 4 mixed with mixture of segments 1, 2, and 3 on loop 1. (During above sequence, repeat last sound of each segment until next is set to record.)

(5) After segment 4, go to typewriter while repeating final sound. (6) Type on file cards 25 of the sounds listed, while humming, whistling, and otherwise travestying your repertory excerpts. (During [6], technician records 45 seconds of it on loop 2. He also takes out one second of loop 3 and splices it into loop 1 .)

(7) Go to spotlight area, shuffling file cards, while technician begins to play back loops. (8) Perform repertory excerpts one by one. After each, perform noise on top file card, throwing card into audience. After excerpt 24 throw away score of excerpts also. (During [7] and [8], technician begins loops one by one, building volume until last 45 seconds drowns out performer.) (9) Technician escorts performer, still playing excerpt 25, from stage. On first bow he turns off sound.

Duration: 10 minutes maximum.

*Substitute one of your names here.

Commenting on his realization of Casta", Mr. Turetzky notes that "the repertoire I chose for the Johnston has some of the best loved and best hated contrabass solos in the literature plus a few request tunes." After the initial engineering and recording of the basic performance material (loops, excerpts, other sounds) by Lewis Prince, the other operations, involving mixing and transformation, were made by the composer with engineer Jaap Spek. 

BARNEY CHILDS


From Odyssey 32 16 0156:

Pauline Oliveros: Sound Patterns

Toshi Ichyanagi: Extended Voices (for Voices With Moog Synthesizer and Buchla Associates Electronic Modular System)

The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, Alvin Lucier, Director

In Pauline Oliveros' jet-propelled Sound Patterns, the conductor deals with precise, difficult rhythmic structures that have many changes of tempo. The singers improvise pitches within broad areas of high, middle, and low and are asked to produce a varied assortment of sounds, including whispers, tongue-clicks, lip-pops, and finger-snaps. The vocal noises along with tone clusters produced by the pitch improvisations, create a humorous electronic effect. 

In Ichyanagi's Extended Voices, singers use musical instruments, such as slide whistles, to extend the range of their voices. At the same time, electronic instruments transform the voices in terms of timbre, range, and dynamics. The written score consists mostly of sustained sounds and glissandos of varying lengths and speeds. The development of the material depends upon a cueing arrangement that instructs the singer to perform in relation to sounds he hears another performer make. Extended Voices also includes a pre-recorded tape, composed of purely electronically produced sounds, that functions as complementary or accompaniment material.