Sing the Music Electric
If, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, then the names Telharmonium, Theremin, Ondes Martenot, Buchla and Moog might signal a decidedly unusual message. All are early electronic music synthesizers, and not many years before Arthur Gottschalk came to Rice in 1977 to teach music composition and theory and establish an electronic music studio, the creation of music through the use of electronic circuits was strictly the province of avant-garde composers. Today, the sounds created by electronic instruments have revolutionized modern music the world over and are an integral part of the composition program at The Shepherd School of Music.
Gottschalk was introduced to electronic music — often referred to as electro-acoustic music — when he was a teenager and heard recordings by composers such as Morton Subotnick and Wendy Carlos. “For the first time, we had sound in a plastic form,” he said. “It really revolutionized music. We could move sound, turn it around backwards, slow it down or speed it up and otherwise manipulate it. That’s still what excites me about electronic music.”
Gottschalk studied music composition at the University of Michigan. “They had one of the first and finest electronic music programs there,” Gottschalk said, “and I had the good fortune to study with Mario Davidovsky.” A pioneer of electronic music, Davidovsky won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his Synchronisms No. 6, a piece for piano and electronic sounds.
When Gottschalk arrived at the Shepherd School, it did not own any electronic music equipment. Luckily for Rice, he had taken a number of computer science courses at Michigan. So he whipped out his soldering gun and went to work. In addition to putting together the components of a large analog synthesizer system, Gottschalk also built several computers. “That was actually a little ahead of the time,” he said. “Most people then weren’t integrating computers into the equation.”
Resynthesis
With the Rice Electro-Acoustic Music Labs, called REMLABS, up and running, electronic composition became part of the curriculum.
“Every sound needs to be carefully manicured, polished and manipulated by the composer to become music.”
— Robert Yekovich
“We require it,” Gottschalk said, “but some students are more attracted to it than others. It’s not unusual, though, to find people who initially resist suddenly becoming converts and really loving the whole idea because electronic music offers a huge palette of colors and sounds that free up the imagination.”
During its first 10 years, the studio mounted huge annual multimedia events, including Houston’s first laser light sculptures. The studio continues to offer public concerts each year as well as to feature guest composers, lecturers and performers.
In 2002, Gottschalk, who now is the chair of the composition department, turned over the reins of REMLABS to Kurt Stallmann, a composer who studied with Davidovsky at Harvard University. “We were very fortunate to get Kurt,” Gottschalk said. “He’s one of the three top people in the field.”
Stallmann first became interested in electronic music when his piano teacher placed a microphone inside a piano and processed the sounds through a Buchla synthesizer. He frequently composes for multimedia events that incorporate electronic sounds, images and live performance.
“One of the things that excites me about electronic music” Stallmann said, “is that we live in this time of intense technological development when computers and electronics are affecting every aspect of our lives on a daily basis. As a composer, I feel it’s my responsibility to incorporate these tools in my musical work.”
When Stallmann arrived at the Shepherd School, he had more than musical work ahead of him. Low levels of funding had left REMLABS out-of-date, and students had more computing power in their college rooms. But fresh funding requested by interim Dean Anne Schnoebelen allowed the purchase of new equipment.
“That first year,” Gottschalk said, “Kurt put in 80-hour weeks revamping the REMLABS into what is now a showpiece laboratory.” The resulting five-room facility includes a main teaching room set up for 5.1 surround sound, three satellite rooms that house stereo workstations and a utility room to store remote recording equipment and a computer server.
Stallmann received further support when Robert Yekovich took over as Shepherd School dean the following year. Yekovich also is an electronic composer who studied under Davidovsky at Columbia University and served as an assistant at the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center for 11 years.
“Music and technology are so tightly interwoven now, I don’t see how you couldn’t have an electronic component to composition at some level,” Yekovich said. “I learned as much about orchestrating acoustic instruments from working in an electronic studio as I did in my years of orchestration class because you work with sound in a whole different way.”
Stallmann, who also serves as the newsletter editor for SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, agreed. “When you spend time with sounds in an electronic music lab, the wonder and complexity of sound become very apparent,” he said. “The electronic music studio and its effect on the way composers think and write is one of the really interesting developments in 20th-century music.”
Not Machine Music
Exciting and interesting though it might be, electronic composition is not easy. First, the technology can be a challenge.
“The learning curve can be a technological barrier when you use electronics,” Stallmann said. “Some people view it as just taking too much of the time they’d rather devote to composing.”
The technology also can be seductive. “The danger of learning electronic music is that the devices themselves are insidiously attractive,” Gottschalk said. “One can spend all one’s time learning how to use the machines and use them in better and better ways, but ultimately, they’re no good if they don’t create music.”
Yekovich also emphasizes that the composer can’t let the machines make the music. “You can’t turn on a Buchla sequencer and record it with some random patches,” he said. “Every sound needs to be carefully manicured, polished and manipulated by the composer to become music.”
First-year doctoral student Karl Blench, who is studying composition and has worked with Stallmann in the lab, echoes Yekovich. “It’s not something you learn quickly,” he said. “It can take a few days to create 15 seconds of music.”
Another challenge is the array of almost infinite sounds and tones available to the electronic composer. “Bach found he was most creative when working with the tightest self-imposed restrictions,” Gottschalk said. “We can do the same by limiting ourselves, perhaps, to just a few sound generators, or limiting ourselves to just two instruments or one type of frequency modulation. That brings focus, and it’s easier to create.”
But even with focus, notating such music can be problematic. “Musical notation is an artifact of the historical development of music, and it doesn’t adequately represent many aspects of sound that can be controlled with a computer,” Stallmann said. “You can notate a passage for an acoustic instrument because of what you have learned about the instrument’s physical restraints. But all that breaks down with electronic music where there aren’t physical restraints, there isn’t an assumed tuning system and there isn’t even a memory of the sound you are creating.”
Digital Composition
Despite the difficulties, electronic technology offers incredible opportunities to the composer. “With electronic music, the inspiration can be much different than with traditional composition,” Gottschalk said. “I told my electronic composition students not to try to make the electronic music be something it’s not. Don’t hear a sound in your head and then spend hours trying to find it, because the sound you’re going to hear in your head will not be an electronic sound. Instead, try to find the music inherent in the circuits.”
Yekovich finds something else attractive about it. “I’m not a string player, so I can’t physically produce those sounds,” he said. “I write a string piece, and then it’s out of my hands. But electronic composition is like sound sculpture. I get to polish every microsecond of every voice, of every color. I play the music myself, in a sense, and that’s a kind of control I don’t have with traditional composition.”
Expanding Horizons
Blench, who usually writes in more traditional musical formats, said he gained a lot of experience working in the lab. “Electronic music is incorporated in so many new works, either stand-alone electronic music or in combination with live acoustical music,” he said. “Being able to use electronics in music is quite important.”
Composition major Francisco Castillo Trigueros ’06, who now studies composition at the Conservatorium von Amsterdam in the Netherlands, also tends to work with more traditional musical formats but said that his encounter with electronic music at Rice undeniably affected his approach to sound.
“In music, technology can serve as the equivalent of a microscope, allowing musicians and composers to discover the physical constitution of a sound, its spectral content and its internal rhythm,” Trigueros said. “The more we expand our awareness of sound, the wider our understanding of music can be. Resources such as REMLABS allow us to discover dimensions of sound that can’t be discerned otherwise.”
Yekovich said he would like to expand the lab with a dedicated multimedia performance space. “Right now,” he said, “there isn’t any performance space where we can experiment, bring in musicians, play around with some interesting amplification and see how it sounds through the speakers — a real creative space.”
And creation is the name of the game. “The world of electronic music is, at its best, all those sounds one never even dreamed of,” Gottschalk said. “That’s where the real beauty and the real music lie.”