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DF: Did he came with John Cage or was he alone?
JD: No, well... There were a number of different composers giving workshops. David was one of them. David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Frederic Rzewski,... and a few others, I don't remember everybody. 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.
DF: What signal was sent to the object?
JD: It could be any type of signal. The only real criteria for the signal was to make that signal so that it excites the resonant nodes. So it's possible to use a signal that the object doesn't like and it does very little, but if you use the signal that it does like, then there's a large transformation.
DF: Was the input signal always electronic?
JB: Yes. It could be either an electronically generated signal, it could be a recorded signal, it could be any kind of signal, but the idea was that it had to be specific to exciting the resonance.
DF: There were contact microphones used as well?
JD: 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.
DF: We are now talking about Rainforest IV, have you also worked on the previous versions?
JD: Recently we were reconstructing the original one. David did a version for Merce Cunningham, for a dance of Merce’s called RainForest. That was known as the first one. (Merce's title used the large “F”, and David just used the regular “f”... just to confuse this!). They did it in 1968. 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.
Then there are some disputes on what was really called Rainforest II. And there was a third version, that was very brief, that David did with John Cage. That one was using John's voice, but there's also another variation that was not using John's voice... So, the variations II and III are confused historically.
DF: Which version was David showing in the workshop in 1973?
JD: The thing you have to realize is that David never really made these distinctions about versions. The very first one was called Rainforest, the second and third were called Rainforest, and when we started what we called RainForest IV, that was also called Rainforest for many years. There wasn't a difference between the titles. We've sort of done that because it helps historically defining the different versions. So the version that Composers Inside Electronics performed was never called Rainforest IV until, I think about 1980 or 1981, when we wanted to put out an album in Berlin and the problem was the recordings rights - David had already released an album called Rainforest, so that is when it became Rainforest IV.
DF: Did Composers Inside Electronics came together before 1973?
JD: No, the group came together for the “New Music in New Hampshire”. That was the starting point of the group. It wasn't really officially called Composers Inside Electronics until 1976. In 1976 David was invited by the Festival d’Automne to make a large presentation, and he wanted to have this group working with him on Rainforest present our own works, as well as to do some others works. We did performances of Kosugi’s Catch Wave, of Cage’s Cartridge Music, and Rainforest. He wanted to have a name for this group and that's when we were sitting down and coming up with this name Composers Inside Electronics. It was probably '75/'76, just before we did this Festival d’Automne, in Paris.
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.
DF: Do you think that this idea of “being inside” was also suggested by his very practical way of producing sound, really next to objects, using transducers to make surfaces vibrates?
JD: Well, I think that the concept David had was related to his approach to his music, particularly with his electronics. It wasn't just Rainforest alone, but it was the idea that 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, and so, I think this idea of Composer Inside Electronics really came from that desire.
DF: How many people were in the group at the beginning?
JD: In the beginning it was myself, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, and Bill Viola. That was sort of the original group with some others, that took part in the workshop, but didn't continue. We were all in our early twenties.
David had this idea that he was finished with the Rainforest concept, and he was going to give it away to us to use. I think that the result of the workshop was a surprise for him, because he was using small objects, and then we went out and got these large wagon wheel, big wine barrel, bed springs. The difference was these all needed to be suspended in order to make them resonate and they were quite large. We had this large barn and we were hanging all these objects from the beams of the top. And so, all of a sudden you have this sculptural environment you can walk through, and walk around. I think some of this was a surprise to David, that it took this direction, so we did the performance there in the barn. Going on at the same time, there was a workshop with Gordon Mumma and David Behrman on building electronic circuits. So lot of us were building circuits that we were going to use to perform with Rainforest. What happened was that we did a performance in a town called Chocorua in the state of the New Hampshire. I think David probably thought: “This is now done, the workshop was great, it's over”. A while later a bunch of us said “We would love to perform it again! Would you consider doing it again?” Bill Viola made an arrangement in Syracuse, with the Everson Museum to do a performance there, and then Ralph Jones found an opportunity in Buffalo. So, all of a sudden it started to continue, and I'm not sure that at the beginning David thought this was going to grow and become something. That version, the Rainforest IV, I think now it has been performed over 125 times, in more than 45 different cities.
DF: Rainforest was not the only work of the group, right?
JD: No, particularly later in the 70s we also started to do collaborative works, where one person would have an idea and all of us would perform that work together, rather than just independent works that we would perform ourself. In 1977/78 we did two series of performances in this space in NY called The Kitchen, and that was the beginning of this period where we did a lot of collaborative works together.
DF: Which kind of contact microphones were you using in this first period?
JD: At that time we didn't have piezo disks. We were using phonograph cartridges. David was familiar with those from the work with Cage's Cartridge Music. These were salt crystal phonograph cartridges from a company called Astatic. They had one called 12u, and that was a model where you have a hole to insert the needle, and instead of the needle we just inserted a piece of steel wire, and then attach the wire to whatever object.
DF: So you don't have too fragile a needle needle?
JD: Yes, and they put out a fairly strong signal, but you would have to use a pre-amplifier. Then they started to get very hard to find because that was the end of the period where people were using regular phonograph needles. There was a period where David and I were searching in all of these electronics shops just to buy all the cartridges we could find.
In the meantime there were other kinds of contact microphones that we used. One of them was a throat-microphone, that was used for people with bad hearing, for the deaf. This was usually just put against your throat, but it could also been put against bone, and there was another one that was made for driving bone, for people with hearing difficulties and you put it right against your jaw and it drives sound into your head. Both worked well for amplifying the objects.
DF: Where did you find them?
JD: You have to realize that most of these could be used either as a microphone, as a loudspeaker.
I was living in Washington and there was a school for the deaf nearby and they were using some of these. The other ones we used were devices made for cutting records: “disk-cutters” they were called. They were the opposite, when you are making a record they would actually cut the track, and those could be used in reverse also, for microphones. That was the period, after the cartridges started to disappear, that we were trying to find other contact microphones.
I had one that was used for listening to heart beating on an unborn infant. We had quite a collection of different kinds of contact microphones and David started collecting other ones as well, so it wasn't just the phono-cartridges.
DF: When did you start to use the piezo disk?
JD: That's a good question. I don't remember the exact year. Probably mid '80s...
DF: Did you already know Richard Lerman at that time?
JD: Oh yes, Richard Lerman and I were very good friends. He performed once or twice with us, but not on regular basis. But David and he were also good friends.
DF: Because he told me he was using piezo-disks around '78, for his piece Travelon Gamelon...
JD: Yes, If Richard was using piezo around '78, then we were using them also. Because he and I spent a lot of time together. But I prefer the phono-cartridges because they had a much richer sound. The problem with the piezo disks is that they usually have a center resonance frequency. Whereas the phono cartridges used a RIAA frequency compensation. That was a curve for phono-cartridges which used a reverse curve in your pre-amplifier that brought out a lot of the bass with a much warmer bass sound than the piezo-disks which tend to be more biased towards the higher frequencies.
DF: When you were using all these kinds of different contact microphones that you have mentioned, did all of them have different features and needs?
JD: They all needed a form of pre-amplifier, with a specific circuit. Also there were impedance differences. You had to match the impedance better for each of the different kinds, so we were trying a number of different kinds of microphones/pre-amplifiers, based on which kind of contact microphone it was. The throat mics didn't have to use a different equalization, for they went through a regular microphone pre-amp as long as the impedance was matched. The throat mics were lower impedance, whereas the piezo disks had quite a higher impedance.
DF: Which other projects were using these kind of microphones in a quite relevant way?
JD: We were even using them with the piece that Martin Kalve created called Earthing. He was using feedback generated where you placed a guitar pickup and a transducer on an object, and as you moved the guitar pickup it would create different feedback nodes. All of us were using contact microphones as amplifiers for objects in other collaborative works. I had a piece called Ebers+Mole, that used transducers and contact microphones as well. In that work I used a long piece of thin bamboo, maybe about two meters long, which was suspended at one end, and at the other end had a very fine wire that went 3 or 4 meters long to a suspended phono-cartridge. I used a transducer on one end of the bamboo to drive the signal through the resonating bamboo and through the fine wire to the phono cartridge. I created a rhythmic sound that was transformed by its travel through the bamboo and the vibrating wire.
APPENDIX 2 - INTERVIEW with JOHN DRISCOLL
Skype interview with the composer John Driscoll (member of the collective Composers Inside Electronics).
The following interview appears as the interviewer, Daniela Fantechi, transcribed it.
[John Driscoll participated in the workshop about Rainforest, that David Tudor gave in the music conference called “New Music in New Hampshire”, in the summer of 1973]