With regard to the development of live electronic music, the artistic mate of Cage, David Tudor was truly a pioneer: after a pivotal role as a virtuoso pianist in the development of the post-war musical avant-garde, Tudor became one of the first live electronic performers, with a very personal approach to electronic technology, strongly influenced by his collaboration with Cage. After assisting in the development and performances of Cartridge Music, Tudor continued to experiment with similar setups in other pieces by Cage, such as Music for Amplified Toy Pianos (1960) and Variations II (1961). For each of these pieces, Tudor used a set of phono cartridges to amplify the piano sounds. He gradually acquired the knowledge and confidence that enabled him to design his own electronic circuits for use in conjunction with the cartridges, and he came into his own as a composer (as distinct from performer) of electronic music.
In the early '70s another group of musicians – Composers Inside Electronics – expanded Tudor’s "hands-on" way of working with electronic means. The group came together on the occasion of a workshop that Tudor gave in 1973, around his composition Rainforest, in the “New Music in New Hampshire” conference in Chocorua, NH. In the same conference there were workshops by David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Frederic Rzewski and several others. John Driscoll, Paul De Marinis, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, and Bill Viola were among the people attending Tudor's workshop. As John Driscoll remembers:
David was holding a workshop on the idea of Rainforest and of processing signals acoustically, through an acoustical transformation. So he introduced us to this idea of taking a sculptural object and putting a transducer on the object, holding directly to it, and vibrating the material. It's very common now, but at that time it was not. The idea was, what you were trying to do, was to find the signal that the object like to resonate at. So it's almost like the idea of tickling somebody. If I tickle on your shoulder, nothing... but if I find that spot, then it explodes. With the object its the same concept. You try to get the sound material that excites the resonant node of the object and then the object does all of the processing. […] In the second part of the concept, in order to hear better the subharmonics in particular, we used contact microphones on the object and re-amplified the signal that was in the material. Rainforest IV always used contact microphones as well. The same object would have a contact microphone attached to it, that would go back to an amplifier and then then the signal would go to a regular loudspeaker. You would hear it acoustically in the space, but if you put your ear against the object you hear it quite differently because then you hear inside the material. The contact microphone brought out those sounds that were in the material, so it was almost a reflection of the signal that was heard in the air, but it had a different harmonic content (for the whole interview see Appendix 2).
Rainforest was originally conceived by Tudor in 1968 for choreography by Merce Cunningham, and by 1973 the piece had already been performed in several different versions. When Tudor was asked to give a workshop in the conference “New Music in New Hampshire”, he felt that he was finished with the Rainforest concept. Therefore he considered offering it to the early-twenty composers, who were taking part in the workshop (see Tudor, 1984). But, as Driscoll recounts, during the workshop the piece took a slightly different form because of the idea of using bigger objects.
The original version used the same principles as Rainforest IV, but the real difference was that he used a table-top with small objects put on the table. In the very beginning, David made very specific electronics using a feedback oscillator that changes over time, as the source material. In the original Rainforest, the acoustic output of those smaller objects was not very audible, but the signal that was sent to the loudspeakers was quite loud. So that the idea for the original one is that you are hearing the amplified object through the loudspeaker system, but not hearing the object itself.
What was previously a table-top setup, designed for road performances with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, expanded into a large-scale set of sounding objects. During the workshop each participant experimented with transducers attaching them to any of object that could be found around the small converted farm/inn. As Bill Viola recalls someone even “blew out two transducers by trying to resonate the bathroom plumbing under the toilet” (Viola, 2004, p.49). At the same time, there was a workshop with Gordon Mumma and David Behrman on building electronic circuits, in which most of the circuits used to perform Rainforest IV were built. At the end of the workshop, the piece was performed in the town of Chocorua, NH. Here a new and larger-scale version of the piece was presented, with objects such as a wagon wheel, a wine barrel, bed springs, etc., suspended in order to resonate freely, creating an environment of sounding sculptures through which the audience could walk. After the workshop, this new version of Tudor's piece – later called Rainforest IV1 – was subsequently performed over 125 times, in more than 45 cities. The group was officially dubbed Composers Inside Electronics in 1976, when Tudor was invited to the Festival d’Automne, in Paris. He wanted to have musicians from the Chocorua workshop assist him on Rainforest (in the course of the festival they also performed Cage's Cartridge Music, works of Takehisa Kosugi, and pieces by various members of the ensemble). The name Composers Inside Electronics was chosen to represent Tudor's ideas, around which the group was shaped. As Driscoll observed:
David felt strongly that at the time music focused on the idea that you have a musical concept and then you find the instruments to realize it. He felt that it should be the reverse of that. You start with an instrument, you explore it and that suggests the music that you make. So that was the reason behind the name Composers Inside Electronics, the ideas started inside the electronics and then became musical. The instrument suggests the music. […] When he was building his electronics it was never the conventional use of the electronics. He was making this no-input mixing, and for him this was just a new concept to generate sounds. In the early '60s, nobody had computers, few people had access to the labs of electronics, and nobody had synthesizers. David explored that world trying to use electronics to make the music he was interested in (for the whole interview see Appendix 2).
In the beginning, crystal phonograph cartridges were used as contact mics in Rainforest's realizations. Tudor was familiar with them from his work with Cage on Cartridge Music. Driscoll remembers the Astatic 12u (fig. 1.4.1), which had a hole to insert the needle, that was replaced by a piece of steel wire, in order to have a less fragile contact point. Materials for DIY projects were available from electronic surplus dealers, as well as from hobby retailers such as Radio Shack, and manufacturers such as Electro-Voice (fig. 1.4.2), Kent, Astatic, Barcus Berry.
*Picture from Electro-Voice Catalogue (1957), described as: “Contact- For guitar, banjo, any vibrating-string instrument. Hi-Z . Sealed crystal. Chromium finish. 15- foot cable. List Price ...$20.00”.
Later, the kind of phonograph cartridge like the Astatic 12u became hard to find. So while collecting old cartridges in various electronics shops, the group started experimenting with other kind of contact-mics, such as throat-microphones and for bone transducers (that are put against the jaw to drive sounds into the head), both usually used for people with hearing difficulties (at that time Driscoll was living in Washington, next to a school for the deaf). Their collection (fig.1.4.3) included also “disk-cutters heads” (devices made for cutting records, used in reverse as a microphone), as well microphones used for listening to the heartbeat of a fetus.
* Clockwise from top left: small throat mike; piezo piano pickup; homemade piezo pickup; Frontline pickup. Photos © John Driscoll, used by permission.
When piezo disks became available they were included in the collection, even though Driscoll preferred the phono-cartridges for their richer sound:
The problem with the piezo disks is that they usually have a centred resonance frequency. Whereas the cartridges were made to have a curve and when you put a reverse curve in your pre-amplifier then it brought out a lot of the bass and they have a much warmer bass sound than the piezo-disks, that tend to be a little more towards the higher frequencies. Each kind of microphone needed a specific pre-amplifier, with a specific circuit. Also, there's impedance difference. So you have to match the impedance better for each of a different kind, so we were trying many kinds of microphone pre-amplifiers, based on which kind of contact-microphone it was. The throat mics didn't have to have a different equalization, it goes through a regular microphone pre-amp as long as the impedance was matched. And those were the lower impedance, while the piezo has a quite higher one.
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