Four electronic pieces from the 1950s

Gottfried Michael Koenig, Klangfiguren I (1955).  The electronic music lab at Cologne’s WDR studio was only set up in 1951-2, so 1955 is still early in the history of synthesizer-based electronic music.  Surprisingly, the composers working there produced some very “musical” pieces very early on — for example, Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer’s Klangstudien I and II (1952), with their wild, reverb-drenched space-age arpeggios. Klangfiguren I, though, feels more like an exercise, like the work of someone concerned mainly with the technical possibilities of additive synthesis, tape editing and dynamic envelope shaping.  The sounds that Koenig creates must have been very fresh at the time;  their inharmonic spectra are pretty far away from anything that exists in nature, with the possible exception of churchbells.   But the piece never feels like more than the sum of its parts.  It’s just a collection of sounds, without the dynamism of Stockhausen’s stylistically similar Studie I (1953), or the eerie, greyed-out quality of his even more similar Studie II (1954).

Louis and Bebe Barron, Battle with the Invisible Monster (1956).  A short excerpt from the Forbidden Planet soundtrack.  Apparently this score caused all sorts of legal problems because the Barrons weren’t members of the Musician’s Union, with the result that they were credited with “Electronic Tonalities” rather than “Music” at the beginning of the movie.  It’s been years since I saw the movie, and I’d forgotten just how involved the score was;  in just two minutes, we have sounds that suggest futuristic machinery, alarms, vehicles and violent explosions, as well as passages that are more atmospheric than mimetic, with Theremin-like wails over clunky, plodding bass notes.  Aesthetically it’s the exact opposite of Klangfiguren I:  American-populist rather than European-esoteric, loud and in-your-face rather than restrained and cerebral, preferring chaotic maximalism over economy of means.  If you’ve read this blog at all, you can guess which one I like better.

Franco Evangelisti, Incontri di fasce sonore (1956-7).  Similar in construction to Klangfiguren I — individual sound objects floating in space, with minimal repetition and very few sustained textures — but with a much more varied timbral palette.  Here Koenig’s alien bells come up against sounds that resemble drumrolls, knife scrapes, whip cracks and clanging metal;  in fact, the title, as far as I can tell, means “Encouters of Sonic Strands.”  After a couple of listens I can’t perceive much in the way of structure (which of course doesn’t mean there isn’t any!), but it’s impressive how much he manages to make electronically generated sounds resemble musique concrète.

Vladimir Ussachevsky, Linear Contrasts (1958).  And now a work from the director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  I was expecting it to share the European pieces’ floaty abstract quality — but despite the dry title, it’s actually closer in construction to what Louis and Bebe Barron were doing in L.A.: spooky ambient synth washes, wailing high notes over percussive, metallic grooves, and conventional dramatic elements like gradual buildups and climaxes.  It also alludes to the pitch language of acoustic instruments;  in fact, there’s a passage about two and a half minutes that sounds more like a processed piano than something generated using sine-wave oscillators.  I don’t know if the recorded sound vs. synthesized sound war ever existed in the States, but considering that Stockhausen put an end to it in Europe in 1956 with Gesang der Jünglinge, it seems safe to speculate that there actually is a piano in there, playing atonal melodies in the middle of a warbling thicket of noise.

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