Four more early electronic pieces

Richard Maxfield – Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered Over the Ocean) (1959).  Six minutes of bleeps and bloops.  There doesn’t seem to be any additive synthesis going on;  it’s all pure sine tones, which is to say the most colorless sound material available.  It was his first electronic piece, so I don’t want to be too harsh, but I really get nothing out of it, even with the help of an evocative title.

Luigi Nono – Omaggio a Vedova (1960).  On the other hand, this is Nono’s first electronic piece and it’s a hundred times more sophisticated than Sine Music.  Stylistically it reminds me a bit of the Evangelisti piece I wrote about in my last post, but its focus is overwhelmingly on clangorous sounds rather than floating ones;  the overall impression I get is of enormous steel machines in a giant warehouse. Particularly striking is the passage starting around 3:40, in which the sound field is overtaken by a wild, thrashing ball of filtered noise, which then sputters out into silence.  It’s certainly the most visceral moment I’ve heard in a Nono piece, though to be fair I don’t know very much of his music.  The title is a reference to the painter Emilio Vedova, who often designed sets and costumes for Nono’s operas, and I can certainly hear an affinity between these violent slashes of sound and Vedova’s violent slashes of color.  (Also, I’d really like to see some of those Vedova paintings in person!)

Kenneth Gaburo – The Wasting of Lucrecetzia (1964).  We now return from Milan to the US, specifically the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign.  If Omaggio a Vedova sounded like an otherworldly factory, The Wasting of Lucrecetzia sounds like a dance band from another planet.  As far as I can tell, the piece is be built from layers upon layers of screaming voices, drums and saxophones, sometimes played back at normal speed, but sometimes — more and more often as the piece continues — sped up to a frenetic chipmunk-squeal.  At the end some of the layers drop out, leaving the piece to conclude with a barrage of rhythmic, high-frequency, insectile buzzing.  I had no idea anything like this existed in 1964.  It sounds like an outtake from a Faust album, or a particularly experimental Olivia Tremor Control side project.

Kenneth Gaburo – Lemon Drops (1965).  I always like it when a composer tries something new in each piece.  While Lemon Drops does share The Wasting of Lucrecetzia‘s textural density and use of instrumental samples, its mood and sound world are completely different.  This time Gaburo combines layers of improvisatory atonal lines played on what sounds like a Wurlitzer with electronically generated sounds — mostly bloopy bass notes but once, just over halfway through the piece, a jarring mid-register warble that sounds like it was probably created with a Buchla synthesizer.  Despite its meandering quality and the overwhelming density it builds to by the end, it’s a surprisingly satisfying piece.  Its methods of construction are totally different, but its character reminds me of the similarly overstuffed music of Brooklyn sound-collagist Noah Creshevsky.

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