Produced by David Behrman

SidelJOHN CAGE: VARIATIONS II (BMI-26:20)David Tudor, Piano

Side 2MILTON BABBITT: ENSEMBLES FOR SYNTHESIZER

(BMI—10:38)HENRI POUSSEUR: TROIS VISAGES DE Voix de la ville

LIEGE (17:50) I—L'Air et l'eau II—III—Forges

"I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments that will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard."This statement was made by John Cage as long ago as 1937. Yet, with a few "pre-historic" exceptions, it was not until the development of magnetic recording tape around 1950 that the fulfillment of this prophecy began to be truly realized. The establishment of tape studios in Paris, Cologne, Milan, New York and elsewhere enabled composers to create finished works directly on tape, utilizing both electronically generated signals and live sounds recorded through microphones. In both cases, the sounds could be further processed by electronic modification or tape manipulations. Henri Pousseur's Trois visages de Liege elegantly illustrates the refinement which can be achieved with such "classic" studio practice.With the aid of such new musical resources, composers have pursued two increasingly divergent interests, the first leading toward invention and discovery of "any and all sounds that can be heard," the second toward precise control over musical materials beyond the limits of the human performer. To facilitate such control, particularly over rhythmic problems, sophisticated programming devices, such as the RCA Music Synthesizers, the Moog Synthesizers and high-speed digital computers have been employed. Enabling the composer to specify precise values of frequency, amplitude, duration and succession of all sound events, such devices produce a completed tape composition requiring little or no editing. Milton Babbitt's Ensembles for Synthesizer is an eminent example of works in this genre.To composers whose demands had already exceeded the capabilities of most instrumentalists, the elimination of the performer was most welcome, assuring a perfect "performance" every time. To others, more interested in questions of process and change, chance and indeterminacy, plus the actions and interactions of human performers, the medium of fixed tape music seemed increasingly "deadly." Thus, in the late 1950's, a number of musicians began experimenting with "live" electronic performances. Foremost among these were John Cage (whose live electronic works actually extend back to Imaginary Landscape No. 1, of 1939) and David Tudor.John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied with Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg and D. T. Suzuki. In addition to his activities as composer and performer, Cage has written and lectured extensively. The impact of Cage's work on composers and artists throughout the world is inestimable. The noted author and critic Peter Yates calls him "the most influential composer, worldwide, of his generation." Through his interest in Oriental thought (particularly Zen) and his employment of such ideas in his work, Cage has been a significant catalyst in the drawing together of East and West. This is increasingly apparent.For more than thirty years it has been Cage's consistent concern to expand our consciousness and enhance our appreciation of the sounds—intended or accidental—that are always around us. To these ends he has composed works for conventional and unconventional instruments alike, believing all sounds to be acceptable musical materials. In 1952, Cage "opened the doors of music to the sounds which happen to be in the environment" with his 4' 33", "a piece in three movements, during all of which no sounds are intentionally produced."Cage's interest in sound and his wish to allow sounds to "be themselves" has led his work away from "ideas of order to ideas of no order." Thus, moving from the method of "considered improvisation" in Sonatas and Interludes (1948), Cage has increasingly applied chance operations to the determination of frequency, amplitude, timbre and duration in his music. In recent years, he has sought to create situations or processes which maximize the possibility of the unexpected by composing works "indeterminate with respect to performance. ... I try to keep my curiosity and awareness with regard to what's happening open, and I try to arrange my composing means so that I won't have any knowledge of what might happen. And that, by the way, is what you might call the technical difference between indeterminacy and chance operations. In the case of chance operations, one knows more or

less the elements of the universe with which one is dealing, whereas, in indeterminacy, I like to think . . . that I'm outside the circle of a known universe and dealing with things I literally don't know anything about."Variations II (1961) is a composition indeterminate of its performance, for any number of players, any sound-producing means. The score consists of six transparent plastic sheets having single straight lines, five having points. These sheets are to be superimposed, and perpendiculars then dropped from each point to each line. Measurements of these lengths are then used to determine values for each of the six "parameters": frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, point of occurrence and structure of event.In preparing the composition for performance, David Tudor's realization of the score evolved from his initial decision concerning the instrumentation. Having previously used amplification in several performances of Cage piano pieces, Tudor decided to make a version of Variations II for amplified piano, in which the total configuration would be regarded as the instrument. Therefore, any sound generated in the system (such as audio feedback) would be accepted and utilized in the performance. In working out the score, it became evident that the nature of the instrument was not compatible with specifying discrete values for each parameter. Therefore, after experimenting with a continuous scale of complexity, Tudor discarded the intervening values in favor of a concept of two basic states or conditions, simple or complex. For instance, if a timbre was specified as simple, it might be one with few harmonics; if an amplitude was complex, it might be changing in a rapid, aperiodic manner. The interpretation of each parameter with respect to the two states is limited only by its interactions with the other parameters and by the performer's imagination. The nature of each event is determined by the state of each of the parameters; the duration of each event is as long as it is required for the performer to carry out his task of interpreting all six. Thus, a composition which entails a process for its completion is given a performance which is itself a process.

Since the late 1950's, in such works as Cartridge Music, "for amplified small sounds," Cage and Tudor have explored the nature of electronic amplification and its magnifying effect on sounds and on our perceptions of them. In this performance of Variations II, each of the four channels uses a contact microphone attached to the piano and a phono cartridge to play on the strings. In addition, contact mikes and cartridges are attached to a wide variety of materials (plastics, toothpicks, pipe cleaners) which are stroked, scraped and struck on the strings. The variety and complexity of sounds which David Tudor draws forth from the piano with this odd array of everyday objects is astounding.

Freed from the conventional restraints of system, style or the control of the rational faculty, this music participates (in Cage's words) in "disorganization and a state of mind which in Zen is called no-mindedness." The listener, similarly liberated, is offered an experience that is hallucinatory, spaced out and very beautiful.

Milton Babbitt was born in Philadelphia in 1916 and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He received his B.A. from New York University and his MA. from Princeton, where he studied with Roger Sessions and where he is currently Professor of Music. He has been a frequent contributor to leading music periodicals and has lectured in the United States and abroad.

Babbitt was one of the first American composers to employ Schoen-berg's twelve-tone method, and he has continued to extend and elaborate that method into a complex system of serial composition. His Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for four Instruments (1948) were the first totally serialized works written in this country. Since then, employing such mathematical concepts as set and group theory, Professor Babbitt has continued his systematization of serial composition and in recent years has carried over these structural principles and techniques into his electronic works. He has composed four works in this medium, all created at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, of which Mr. Babbitt is a director. In the 1950's, the Center was the recipient of the half-million-dollar RCA Music Synthesizer, then the most advanced device for the production of electronic tape music. Mr. Babbitt has made it his unique province, employing it to realize all his electronic works.

Ensembles for Synthesizer exemplifies the distinguishing characteristics of Babbitt's composition, notably his adherence to the twelve pitch classes of the tempered scale, and the minimal use of sound material outside this domain. The work demonstrates the kind of high-speed virtuosity of which the synthesizer is capable. Indeed, this is "speed" music, pitch successions frequently moving at rates approaching or surpassing thresholds of human perception.

In a descriptive note prepared for a performance of the piece atLincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, the composer has' written:"The title Ensembles refers to the multiple characteristics of thework. In both its customary meaning and its more general onesignifying 'collections/ the term refers most immediately to thedifferent pitch, rhythmic, registral, textural, and timbral 'ensembles' associated with each of the many so delineated sections ofthe composition, no two of which are identical, and no one ofwhich is of more than a few seconds duration in this ten-minutework____Also, in its meaning of 'set,' the word 'ensemble' relevantly suggests the, I trust, familiar principles of tonal and temporal organization which are employed in this as in other of mycompositions."The version presented in this performance is a two-track reduction of the original four-track version."

Henri Pousseur was born in Malmedy, Belgium, in 1929. He was educated at the Royal Conservatory of Liege and at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, where he received first prizes in harmony, solfege, organ and fugue. He is presently Slee Professor of Composition at the University of New York at Buffalo and is also director of the Electronic Music Studio in Brussels.Pousseur was a leading member of the generation of composers that came to prominence after the war, a group that also included Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio. For these composers, the works of Anton Webern served as a kind of Corpus Juris Canonici, and the serial organization and pointillist textures of Pousseur's early works (Trois chants sacres, 1951; Quintet in Memory of Webern, 1955) reflect that influence. Pousseur soon realized that the arbitrary application of the series to all parameters of the music that characterized "total organization" produced a "statistical" effect not unlike the similar use of chance determinants. He has written: "A pitiless regimentation would appear to rule over this music, controlling the course of events even in its most intimate details. But, if one goes beyond a simple analysis of such music and beyond a dissection of its notations, if one relies primarily on concrete hearing... it often happens that one perceives just the contrary of such regimentation. Precisely where the most abstract constructions have been applied, it is not seldom that one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of consequences of an aleatory free play. If the charm of the music is undeniable nonetheless, that is less the result of a perfectly clear and transparent 'geometry' than of the more mysterious charm to be found in our awareness of the many distributive forms found in nature: the unhurried dispersion of passing clouds, the twinkle of pebbles in the bed of a mountain stream, or the breaking of surf against a rocky coast." Thus, in works such as Mobile for Two Pianos (1957-58) and Repons (which is dedicated to John Cage), Pousseur has introduced elements of chance or indeterminacy. In his most recent work, Votre Faust, an opera written in collaboration with the French author Michael Butor, the course of events taken by the opera is determined by the responses of the audience at each performance.Trois visages de Liege (Three Faces of Liege) was composed in 1961 in Brussels. It was commissioned by the city of Liege to accompany an outdoor show of abstract projections by the Hungarian-French artist Nicolas Schoeffer. However, as the composer notes, when the show began, the authorities of the city preferred less unusual music. "They first tried Debussy, and Bach a la Stokowski, and finally decided on Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which maybe was better adapted to the arbitary and flattering character of the projections."The composition is in three separate parts: I. L'Air et l'eau, II. Voix de la ville, and III. Forges. The composer writes: "Except for the voices and for one single pizzicato chord, from which a good part of the material of II has been derived, all the sounds used, 3ven the more 'realistic' ones in III, are purely electronic. The words used are taken from little poems in the form of children's rhymes by the young poet Jean Seaux, who died in 1962; they are made up of old, folkloristic street names of Liege, grouped by dominant characters. In II, I used the more happy, gay and 'dancing' ones (with the word Coq in the middle, which is the coat of arms of Liege, so this piece is a sort of 'blason'). In III, I chose the more dramatic poems, referring to the world of labor and the tradition of unions that surrounds this city, one of the oldest industrial cities of Europe. Just before I composed the piece, general strikes had paralyzed Belgium for some months and had led to (very limited but real) gains for the workers."

—Richard Teitelbaum

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