Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center Research Articles

Michiko Toyama Disrupts the Historiography of Modernism

AbstractThe Paris-trained, Japanese composer Michiko Toyama (1913–2006) was appointed as the earliest foreign-born visiting composer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first institutionally supported studio of its kind in the United States. Yet she remains virtually unknown to scholarship, despite a growing literature on women pioneers in electronic music. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and the interpretive study of music, this article studies the conditions under which Toyama has found little remembrance to date; and it conceptualizes Toyama's own ideas of modernity formulated over the massive cultural and geographical dislocations of her lifetime. Within an intensely lyrical compositional practice, Toyama thematized hallmarks of traditional modernism studies: self-reflexivity, estrangement, exile, and exoticism. Racist criticism during her lifetime dismissed her music as a belated mimicry of Western models. Yet the modernist qualities and themes of her work emerge as a consequence of her life lived in intercultural contact zones of uprooting – the very conditions that make ideas of the ‘modern’ possible.

The Emergence of Interactive Music: The Vision and Presence of Joel Chadabe

“Joel Chadabe is the only composer I know of who is seriously involved with automatic electronic music,” wrote Tom Johnson back in 1972 in the Village Voice [1]. Of course, there had been many composers who had explored the uncharted territories of musical composition coming out of machines. Their work is well documented, and they have been quite influential: Lejaren Hiller, famous for his string quartet in four movements, the Illiac Suite, composed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1956–1957), opened the way to “serious” musical composition generated by a computer; Hiller went on to compose several works by programming a computer with specific algorithms handling musical operations. On the other side of the ocean, in France, Iannis Xenakis [2] and Pierre Barbaud [3] also engaged with computational music around the early 1960s.The distinction in the Village Voice statement is that these pioneers programmed a machine to generate musical scores, which, in turn, were given to human performers. Soon, however, with the arrival of Max Mathews’s acoustic compilers, such as MUSIC III (1960), MUSIC IV (1963) and MUSIC V (1969), it became feasible to program algorithmic compositions and have computer-generated sound synthesis as the result. The computer seemed a tool well suited to algorithmic music, where the generation of pseudorandom numbers was a particular contribution of the software approach.However, during the 1960s, a number of inventors developed analog circuits for the purpose of creating electronic music: in California, Donald Buchla; in Rome, Paolo Ketoff; and on the East Coast, Robert Moog. Later, individual musicians, not entirely satisfied with the synthesizers available on the market, created their own systems. This was the case with Salvatore Martirano. During the same period when Chadabe was assembling a system of commercial electronic modules around the idea of interactive music, Martirano, starting in 1969, was building the SalMar Construction, a very large synthesizer design for creating music through automated systems reacting to gestural inputs. David Rosenboom, who on occasion collaborated with Martirano, published an excellent description of the architecture and the purpose of the SalMar Construction [4].Chadabe, in a way, did the same, but with the synthesizer modules made by Moog. He was led to this by his first contacts with electronic music. These occurred in Rome, where he was in residence. He became friends with another American composer, John Eaton, who had great hopes for using electronic technology in live performance, a very difficult endeavor at that time. Rome was actually a good place for this project, because the American Academy of Rome had an electronic music studio, which had been set up by Otto Luening, visiting composer and cofounder of the Columbia University electronic music studio, which, in 1959, became the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center [5]. It was also a good location because a brilliant electronic engineer, Ketoff, had just built a synthesizer, the Fonosynth, now at the Deutsche Museum in Munich. Under the guidance of Eaton, he undertook the conception of a small, portable synthesizer he called the Synket, for Synthesizer-Ketoff. Eaton went on to realize the first-ever composition with live synthesizer, Songs for RPB, for Synket, two pianos and voice, in 1965 [6]. Chadabe witnessed all this as he became attracted to electronic music, just before he returned to the United States to be hired that same year by the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany).The school asked Chadabe to set up a studio, and he turned to Moog, who worked in Trumansburg, New York. Progressively, with the help of successive grants, he and Moog built the largest ensemble of Moog modules, which he then called the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio (CEMS) [7]. He described the project as a “new approach to analog-studio design” [8]. The system thus assembled through the collaboration of Chadabe and Moog consisted of a large number of modules, which were divided in three categories: the audio system (oscillators, noise source, filters, random signal source, mixers, amplifiers); the control system (envelope generators, sequencers and other ancillary devices); and the timing system, which provided the clock pulses for the sequencers. It was to be built without keyboard, unlike the instruments made by Moog. Instead, the sound-producing modules were to be placed under the command of control voltages, which, in the CEMS, were mostly a bank of various sequencers. Random generators were used to produce automatic performance controls. This way, music could be programmed by setting the steps of the sequential switches and the speed of the clocks; the random generators controlled pitches and durations, so that when the system was started, music was automatically produced. At the same time, Chadabe, through joysticks attached to the device, would interact with the random processes. This way, he wrote, “the performer, in turn, influences the instrument by performing. A performer and an interactive instrument have a relationship that is conversational” [9].At a time when microcomputers did not exist, this was a major step toward a studio under the control of analog devices. Because Chadabe had added an important function to his setup, the joysticks attached to the sequencers and the clock, a musician could alter and diverge the course of the programming. He inaugurated this approach in the 1971 piece Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing, in which he used the handles to modify the behavior of the system: This was one of the first interactive pieces of electronic music. With Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing, he became an actor in the emergence of interactivity. Thereafter, Chadabe started to investigate all sorts of systems enabling this relation between the composers/performer and the electronics.From this early start, Chadabe saw electronic music composition as a way to place at center stage interaction between the musician and the devices.Chadabe was aware that electronic music was a fragile medium. Technology changed rapidly; it was not easy to connect to a large audience; distribution of recordings was not stable and rather confidential. Furthermore, the history of this music was curiously poorly understood: Composers tended to focus on their work by adopting the latest technology, and scholars did not have the necessary training to understand something that, often, was only produced by loudspeakers [10]. When musicians used real-time techniques, it was even worse for them, because it led to a type of materiality whereby gestures activated sounds without instruments, through mysterious interfaces. Of course, there was also an increasing number of mixed pieces, in which instruments or the voice played with electronic sounds, but even this did not much motivate music scholars. The 1960s and the 1970s saw several attempts to make this music and the technology behind it more accessible, and Chadabe did participate in this effort. He collaborated on the ephemeral journal launched by Moog, the Electronic Music Review [11], and in 1975, he wrote a chapter for a book edited by Jon Appleton and Ronald Perera, The Development and Practice of Electronic Music [12].In fact, the 1970s saw quite a few papers by Chadabe: in Musique en Jeu in Paris, Computer Music Journal, Melos in Germany. … It was as if teaching, programming synthesizers and computers and composing were not enough: He strongly felt the need to communicate and share his knowledge, his ideas and also his interrogations.Chadabe had eclectic tastes in music; he often confessed privately that he was fond of American musicals—from which he would sing songs for his friends—and he made no secret of loving jazz, which he performed effortlessly on the piano. Among his favorite tunes were “Stella by Starlight” and “Misty,” which he enjoyed playing. This may explain his move from serious electronic music in the 1960s—an example would be Blues Mix (1966)—to a somewhat lighter kind of electronic music. This happened around the time when he invented a program that generated music, often melodic, with a steady beat. This software, which he called M, developed from the late 1980s for the Macintosh computer, created a form of light electronic music, the sounds being produced by a Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer. This is when Chadabe ventured into compositions with a strong jazz feeling, such as those gathered on the album After Some Songs (1986–1995) [13]. This development may also have been influenced by his collaboration with percussion player Jan Williams, with whom he toured extensively.Like many other musicians of the late twentieth century, Chadabe approached the climate change crisis from a musician’s perspective. In around 2005, he started a movement he chose to call “Ear to the Earth.” He wanted to use the microphone to capture environmental sounds that our perception was missing because of our built-in way of focusing on some sounds while masking the rest. He was aware that, contrary to human perception, the microphone captured all sounds without discrimination. As Luc Ferrari once said of the microphone recording: “It picks up a straw in the neighbor’s eye and reports a beam” [14]. This had already been observed by Rudolph Arnheim, who in 1936 wrote:The website attached to Ear to the Earth no longer exists, but other initiatives now cover this ground. Ricardo Dal Farra’s Balance-Unbalance series of conferences deal with much more than music but give a large place to artists’ perspectives. In Asia, PerMagnus Lindborg, a longtime Singapore resident now operating from Hong Kong, includes the question of environmental awareness in his compositions and as chair of the Data Art for Climate Action (DACA) dual conference (Hong Kong and Graz, scheduled for 12–15 January 2022). It is also of note that the keynote speaker for DACA, Andrea Polli, is an artist whose work addresses the climate crisis in various ways. One in particular relies on sonification, by which physical phenomena that can hardly be observed visually are transformed into sounds. Artists have long become interested in sonification. One, Leon Theremin, invented his thereminvox around 1920 in a Saint Petersburg laboratory to convert outputs from a gas variation–measurement device into changes in the pitches of an electronic oscillator. From the observation that moving hands in front of the circuit modulated the frequencies emitted by the device, he developed his invention, which he then called the etherphone. It became successful in creating music and sound design for music composition and for films and is still popular today.It was during the 1990s that sonification became a research field. Led by Gregory Kramer and others, the scientific approach was often accompanied by artistic creations [16]. This is because composers took a significant role in making their art a component of social and environmental issues. Ear to the Earth became a part of a larger group of like-minded artists, such as Dal Farra, whose Balance-Unbalance found an echo in Leonardo [17]; Polli, who, as a visual and sound artist, has been at the forefront of creative perspectives in that field; and Will Schrimshaw, creator of an approach to “sonifying the earth” through geophonography [18].In some cases, sonification took a whimsical turn, such as when the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described in 1919 what he called “primal sound.” He associated the lines that can be observed on the surface of a skull with those of a phonograph record and wondered if they could be turned into sounds. As he put it:I consider myself very lucky to have been close to Chadabe. I first met him when I co-organized with Barry Truax a UNESCO-sponsored computer music workshop and conference in Aarhus, Denmark. Chadabe had made the trip from New York, and this was where he presented his piece for two theremin antennas, Solo [20]. He had just acquired the first commercial digital synthesizer, a Synclavier, from a small Vermont company, New England Digital Corporation. At that time, this was a microcomputer driving a bank of 16 sine wave oscillators arranged in a frequency modulation configuration. The device had to be programmed using the XPL language, a derivative from Algol. This particularly suited Chadabe, as he could write programs that generated music. The software for Solo was written by Roger Meyers from his ideas. Because the system operated in real time, Chadabe could interact with the Synclavier. He had long been friends with Moog, who, besides building synthesizers, had been making theremins since the 1950s, so he asked Moog to provide two 6-foot antennae, based on the theremin instruments (which he soon replaced with car radio antennae for ease of transportation; see Fig. 1). With the left-hand one, he acted upon the tempo at which the Synclavier generated events; the right-hand one was used to change the software patches for a variety of timbres—what would be called in MIDI parlance a “program change.” The ability to change the orchestration on the fly has since been a large part of real-time computer music systems, and Chadabe was a pioneer [21].After he retired from SUNY Albany in 1998, Chadabe continued teaching at New England colleges, such as Bennington College; he had already started teaching there in 1971 and was the director of its electronic music studio. He also joined the Manhattan School of Music (in 2001), as director of the electronic music studio, and shortly after, New York University (from 2002), as visiting professor. After he discovered the Kyma system [22], he made sure that those sites were equipped with it, and it became his main teaching and composing tool. His actions as educator have had deep influence on his students. He was always transmitting new ideas on the place of sound, music and the environment in his teaching, as well as in his writings.Chadabe will be remembered as someone who always encouraged others to share information on their activities, undertake new ones and take part in the artistic and social networks he fostered. This is how he envisioned the Electronic Music Foundation (EMF), which was, in his mind, a receptacle for collecting primary information and documents on the history and the current state of electronic music.Its website hosted a number of interviews with living composers, for instance. Following the demise of the site, these precious documents found their way to online journals such as eContact!, thus preserving the work of the foundation. The Ear to the Earth website was also conceived on a similar basis: Musicians, environmentalists and sound artists were to share their production and performances through the platform. Finally, Chadabe’s most recent endeavor was to develop the Intelligent Arts website. In this project, past and upcoming concerts were listed, often with pictures and sound clips. One could also find the various books published by Intelligent Arts. These were mostly small eBooks, which Chadabe called “ebookini.” One can find books by Richard Kostelanetz, Xenakis, Leigh Landy, Ramon Sender and others. He had just published a short one himself, devoted to the technology used to create, store and disseminate music. He called it simply It’s About Sound [23].Much remains from Chadabe’s multiple activities. His music was assembled in a four-record set in 2020; this covers a large portion of his musical output. His book Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, published in 1997, in addition to a full history of the field, presents numerous interviews with composers [24]. To accomplish the task of collecting these testimonies, Chadabe traveled the world, sat down with his colleagues and conducted interviews with well-prepared questions. The book gives a living and exciting view of the development and current practice of composers and sound artists involved in the creation of electronic music, and this makes the publication a priceless one. The Electronic Music Foundation Institute (EMFI) [25] is now, under the guidance of Benjamin Chadabe and several dedicated and passionate friends of Joel, pursuing Chadabe’s dreams. These are but some of his powerful legacies.

Music and the Cybernetic Mundane

Few intellectual movements have been as influential as cybernetics was in the 1950s and ’60s. Fewer still have seen their stock fall so precipitously in the years since. Despite the growing body of literature that has reassessed this postwar “cybernetics moment” (Hayles, Kline, Pickering, Medina, et al.), its far-reaching impact remains curiously underappreciated, especially as regards music. This article seeks to redress this neglect, by focusing not on works and practices that spectacularize cybernetics (the “cybernetic sublime”), but instead on those activities, discourses, and projects that so thoroughly internalized and normalized the cybernetic ethos that it eludes notice (the “cybernetic mundane”). A first case study considers the little-known role played by information theory and cybernetics in the design of the RCA Synthesizer, one of the first instruments of its ilk to be developed. Among other things, I contend that cybernetic thinking pervaded the instrument’s conception to such an extent that it paradoxically contributed to the subsequent erasure of its influence from accounts of the instrument’s development and subsequent implementation as part of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. The second case concerns more recent applications of cybernetic ideals to digital music distribution, exemplified by the platform Spotify, whose routinization of these ideals has ensured not just their persistence, but their persistent misrecognition.

News

[Editor's note: We thank Tae Hong Park, a former student and friend of Jon Appleton's and Editorial Consultant for Computer Music Journal, for writing this obituary.]Jon H. Appleton was a composer, pianist, educator, inventor, and thinker who actively engaged in a musical multiverse of styles spanning avant garde, experimental, folk, popular, computer music, and electroacoustic music. Appleton was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1939 and began to explore music composition with the encouragement of his stepfather Sasha Walden, a double bass player for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He attended Reed College from 1957 to 1961, primarily composing for fellow student musicians, and continued his graduate studies at the University of Oregon, where his primary teachers were Homer Keller, Henri Lazarof, Felix Salzer, and Robert Trotter. Much of his work at Oregon dealt with serial compositional techniques until he was introduced to electronic music by Keller. This led to the creation of a closet studio at the university where he composed his first pair of electronic music etudes, namely, “Study No. 1” (1964) and “Primary Experience” (1964). With his growing interests in this genre, and at the invitation of composer Vladimir Ussachevsky, whom Appleton had met in Eugene, Oregon, he moved to New York in 1966, joining the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center as a musicology graduate student. A year later, he began his tenure at Dartmouth College in 1967, which spanned more than four decades until his retirement in 2009. Soon after joining Dartmouth in 1967, Appleton founded the Bregman Electronic Music Studio with the support of Dartmouth alumnus Gerald Bregman and Dartmouth President John G. Kemeny, who is best known for codeveloping the BASIC computer language. Two decades later, in 1989, he cofounded the Electro-Acoustic Music Master's Program with David E. Jones. Beginning in 1969, Appleton published his first recordings, entitled Syntonic Menagerie (1969) and Human Music (1970), in collaboration with trumpeter Don Cherry. While continuing with his interests in electronic music composition, he further developed ideas for a new musical instrument that he had proposed to the Rockefeller Foundation when he was a graduate student. Although the proposal was rejected, Appleton persisted in pursuing the development of this new digital musical synthesizer with software programmer Sydney Alonso and Dartmouth engineering student Cameron Jones. The Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer, as it was initially called, soon became the commercially available Synclavier in 1973. The Synclavier was used by various popular musicians including Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, and Michael Jackson. Jackson's “Beat It" (1982) is perhaps the best-known song that features the synthesizer—in the song's introduction, seven solo Synclavier notes appear, taken verbatim from the 1981 The Incredible Sounds of Synclavier II recording. While composing electronic music composition and exploring music technologies, Appleton also spent significant effort in promoting and collaborating with like-minded composers, which led to the creation of Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in 1984.Appleton has been awarded many accolades, including the Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships, and the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award. Appleton released more than 20 electronic music albums since writing his first two etudes some 58 years ago; later in life, he focused his energy in writing music for nonelectronic, traditional musical instruments, including two full-length operas for a 1,500-person children's choir. As to why he stopped composing electronic music, his answer, included in his unpublished autobiography Human Music, was threefold: “(1) I don't have the equipment or the computer expertise I once had, (2) I think I have fulfilled my personal expectations in this musical genre, and (3) in the last 20 years I have found composing instrumental music more gratifying while recognizing that is not as original nor ‘groundbreaking’ as my electroacoustic has been.”He spent his last years editing Human Music. His writings, publications, and recordings are archived in the Rauner Library and the Jones Media Library at Dartmouth College. While Jon Appleton's work will remain an important contribution to the fields of electroacoustic music, computer music, and music technology, and his legacy and humanity will also undoubtedly be long celebrated through his daughter Jennifer Appleton and son “J.J.” Appleton, friends, his colleagues, and his many students’ countless memories from the Bregman Studios in Hanover, New Hampshire, and his farmhouse in Hartford, Vermont.Alvin Lucier, an inventive and widely regarded American composer, sound artist, and professor whose creative works frequently dealt with topics of acoustic and physical phenomena and auditory perception, died 1 December 2021. Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, and at the Portsmouth Abbey School. He studied at Yale University with composers Howard Boatwright and Quincy Porter, at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero, and at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss. He then spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship, whereupon attending a concert by John Cage, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham his musical focus turned to more experimental approaches. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. In 1966, along with Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma, he cofounded the Sonic Arts Union. From 1968 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University, where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.Lucier lectured and performed extensively in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He collaborated with the poet John Ashbury (“Theme”) and stage director Robert Wilson (Skin, Meat, Bone). His sound installation Six Resonant Points Along a Curved Wall accompanied Sol DeWitt's enormous sculpture Curved Wall in Graz, Austria, and in the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, in January 2005. In 2013 Lucier was the guest composer at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway, and he gave a portrait concert at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, with cellist Charles Curtis. In 2014 Lucier was honored by a three-day festival of his works at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Lucier's extensive body of work has been performed by groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Alter Ego Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, and Ensemble Pamplemousse.Reflections/Reflexionen, a collection of Lucier's scores, interviews, and writings, was published by MusikTexte in 1995. In 2012 Wesleyan University Press published Lucier's Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music, a survey of works and practitioners of experimental music and sonic art in the 20th century. In 2013 New World Records released a recording of three of Lucier's orchestra works. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England. In 2011 Wesleyan University celebrated Alvin Lucier's retirement with a three-day festival of his works. He is survived by his wife, Wendy Stokes, and their daughter, Amanda.Gottfried Michael Koenig, an influential composer, educator, and theoretical writer working in electronic and instrumental music, died 30 December 2021 at the age of 95. Koenig was born in 1926 in Magdeburg, Germany. His education spanned a number of institutions across Germany, studying church music in Braunschweig; composition, piano, analysis, and acoustics in Detmold; music representation techniques in Cologne; and computer technique in Bonn. He attended the Darmstadt music summer schools for several years, initially as a student and later as a lecturer. From 1954 to 1964 Koenig worked in the electronic music studio of West German Radio in Cologne, assisting other composers—among them Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Franco Evangelisti, György Ligeti, and Herbert Brün—and producing his own electronic compositions (“Klangfiguren,” “Essay,” “Terminus 1”). During this period he also wrote instrumental music for piano, string quartet, and woodwind quintet. From 1958 on he was an assistant in the radio drama department at the Cologne Academy of Music, where he also taught electronic music, composition, and analysis starting in 1962.In 1964 Koenig moved to the Netherlands, where until 1986 he was director and later chairman of the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht University. During this period the Institute expanded its global reputation, particularly through its annual sonology course. Koenig lectured extensively in the Netherlands and other countries. He also developed his computer programs Project 1, Project 2, and SSP, designed to formalize the composition of musical structure and variation. He continued to produce electronic works, including “Terminus 2” and the Funktionen series. These were followed by the application of his computer programs to the computer-assisted composition of chamber and orchestral music. These works included “Übung” for piano, the Segmente series, “3 ASKO Pieces,” “String Quartet 1987,” “60 Blätter” for string trio, and the orchestral works Beitrag and Concerti e Corali.Since 1986, when the Institute of Sonology moved from Utrecht University to the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands, Koenig continued to compose, produce computer graphics and develop musical expert systems. The first three volumes of his theoretical writings were published between 1991 and 1993 as Ästhetische Praxis by Pfau Verlag; an Italian selection appeared under the title Genesi e forma, published by Semar in 1995. The fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes followed in 1999, 2002, and 2007, respectively, with the last containing a thematic index. An English-language selection was published under the title Process and Form by Wolke Verlag in 2018.Koenig received an incentive award from the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1961, the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize from the City of Amsterdam in 1987, and the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Prize in 1991. In 2002 the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Saarbrücken, Germany, awarded Koenig an honorary doctorate. In the winter semester of 2002–2003 he was Visiting Professor for Computer Music at the Technische Universität Berlin. In 2010 Koenig received the Giga-Hertz Prize of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe. In 2016 he was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.The Südwestrundfunk (SWR) Experimental Studio and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) awarded the 2021 Giga-Hertz Award for Electronic Music to German sound artist Christina Kubisch in recognition of her life's work. Beginning with gender-critical works and a Video-Concerts series in collaboration with Italian artist Fabrizio Plessi, Kubisch's work came to include sound installations that engaged sound, space, light, and magnetic induction. Kubisch's Electrical Walks series, beginning in 2003, enabled audience members to listen to the electromagnetic fields around them in public spaces using specially designed headphones. Her works are in permanent collections at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has been awarded numerous grants, residencies, and awards, and various music labels have published her recordings. She taught as Professor of Sculpture and Audiovisual Art at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken, Germany, from 1994–2013 and since 1997 has been a member of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.Additionally, Giga-Hertz Production Awards were given to composer and installation artist Yvette Janine Jackson and artist and researcher André Damião. Honorary mentions were given to Maja S. K. Ratkje, Viola Yip, and Mendi and Keith Obadike. The awards were juried by Ludger Brümmer, Peter Weibel, Detlef Heusinger, Lydia Jeschke, George Lewis, and Kirsten Reese. They were presented during a two-day festival, held virtually, 27–28 November 2021. In addition to an award ceremony, the festival featured a keynote by Christina Kubisch and a portrait concert with works spanning her career. Two other concerts featured works by the other recognized artists as well as works developed in the SWR Experimental Studio.Web: zkm.de/en/event/2021/11/giga-hertz-award-2021The 2021 International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) was held virtually 15–17 December 2021. The conference included panel discussions, research presentations, and concerts related to live-coding-based performance of music and visual media. The theme of the conference was “Convergent Evolutions.” Three panel discussions at ICLC each addressed issues relating to code and semantics, visuality in live coding, and social and anthropological concerns in live coding. Among the research presented at the conference was the live coding of neural networks, collaborative live coding across a distributed computer network, and social practices around live-coded dance music. A long series of live-coding performances capped each evening of the conference. The festival also featured a collection of online-mediated artistic exhibitions and an online virtual reality exhibition interrogating human and machine-learning relationships and the impact of virtual spaces. A companion event, the Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces workshop, was held online prior to ICLC on 22–23 November 2021 and included panel talks on a number of topics related to live coding including software and hardware interfaces, aesthetic and social perspectives, and performance and distribution.Web: iclc.toplap.org/2021The Digital Music Research Network Workshop 2021 took place 21 December 2021, held virtually and organized by Queen Mary University of London, UK. The workshop comprised two keynote talks, oral presentations of research papers, and poster presentations. Keynote talks were given by Sophie Scott of University College London, who discussed imaging and models of primate neuroanatomy in relation to how sound is processed in the human brain, and Gus Xia of New York University Shanghai, who covered the development of intelligent systems to help people learn and compose music. Paper topics at the workshop included symbolic music generation using the GPT-2 machine learning model, the generation of drum loops using transformer neural networks, and the use of neural networks to generate MIDI sequences with specific stylistic constraints. A Neural Audio Synthesis Hackathon companion event was held 18–19 December 2021, which aimed to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration in the use of machine-learning techniques based on neural networks for audio synthesis, with particular interest in interfaces and instruments, novel techniques and models, synthesis control, and creative applications.Web: www.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/dmrn16

Sounds of the Cold War Acropolis: Halim El-Dabh at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Often overlooked in histories of electronic music are the contributions of Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017), who first experimented with wire recorders in Cairo in the late 1940s and extended related projects at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) from 1959 to 1962. The CPEMC was founded in 1958 as a vibrant site for cultural diplomacy, supported by a massive Rockefeller Foundation grant. This event testified to an era when public and private agencies scrambled to invest New York City with a cultural infrastructure befitting its global status as a symbol of ascendant U.S. power. At mid-century, Columbia University's longtime nickname ‘the acropolis’ gained new value in public discourse. This term figured the university in a contradictory way as a cosmopolitan center and fortress, an emblem for U.S. democracy and dominion during the Cold War. Globally the CPEMC attracted visiting and immigrating composers who pursued projects of cultural diplomacy. El-Dabh's own journey followed a path from elite Egyptian emissaryship in 1950 to U.S. citizenship in 1961, enmeshing a story of soft power strategy with one of internal minoritarian experience. Drawing on interviews, archival research, El-Dabh's electronic oeuvre, and reception history, this article examine the CPEMC's contradictions as a lively cultural crossroads and a defensive bastion for restrictive ideas of ‘Western culture’. As such, the CPEMC emerges as more than just an incubator for the ‘uptown’ composition scene, but rather as a sound laboratory at the heart of imperial circulations of labor, expertise, and subjectivity.

Interview with Charles Wuorinen

Dear readers of the journal “Problemy muzykal’noj nauki / Music Scholarship”! The editorial board of the journal “Problemy muzykalnoj nauki / Music Scholarship” is happy to present an interview with the famous American composer Charles Wuorinen. At the present time Wuorinen is the most well-known composer of twelve-tone music in the USA. He was born in New York City in 1938, studied at Columbia University in New York, and subsequently taught at many universities and conservatories in the USA, including Columbia University, Manhattan School of Music (New York), Princeton University and Rutgers University (New Jersey), New England Conservatory (Massachussetts), etc. In 1970 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his electronic composition Time’s Encomium, composed with the use of the RCA Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In his music Wuorinen adheres to the musical traditions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky (especially the latter’s late period), and asserts that he was most influenced in his music by American composers Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt and German emigre to the United States Stefan Wolpe. The composer was also inspired by the fractal theories of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Similar to Babbitt, Wuorinen has incorporated serial rhythm, in many cases projecting the latter onto the formal structures of entire compositions, following his own invented system. From 1962 to the mid-2010s, along with composer and performer Harvey Solberger, he was one of the leaders of the concert series, the Group for Contemporary Music, devoted to performance of works by contemporary composers. In the 1970s Wuorinen wrote an orchestral composition A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, in which he incorporated the last musical sketches of the great master. Wuorinen is the author of a book on serial music, titled Simple Composition, which he characterizes as a manual for composers, meant to teach them how to compose music, and not a music theory book analyzing already composed works. Wuorinen’s music is well-known in the USA and in the countries of Western Europe, where there are frequent premiere performances of his new compositions, among which it becomes proper to name his eight symphonies, his trilogy of ballets based on the theme of Dante’s Divine Comedy, compositions for chorus and orchestra on Biblical themes: Genesis and A Celestial Sphere, music for piano, various chamber ensembles, percussion ensembles and several operas. Music lovers in Russia have yet to discover for itself the music of this intriguing composer (see website www.charleswuorinen.com), and we hope that this interview, which is the first publication about the composer in this country, shall serve as an impetus for further popularization of his music in Russia.

Perspectives at 50

PERSPECTIVES AT 50 STEPHEN PELES OU ASK ABOUT MY INVOLVEMENT with Perspectives, the role the journal has played in my professional life, and my reflections on its history. My official association with PNM is easily told: my first publication appeared in the Fall-Winter 1983/Spring-Summer 1984 issue; I was made an associate editor in 1992; I became a member of the editorial board in 1995, and still serve in that capacity; I served as co-editor from 1995–2001. The rest is more complicated. My sense of Perspectives’ place in the world goes back to my first encounters with it in the early seventies, when I was an undergraduate composer at Rutgers, about twenty minutes from Princeton. In those days the Princeton University bookstore stocked not only copies of PNM (Princeton University Press was still producing it at the time, I believe) but also scores of some of Babbitt’s pieces (I still have the AMP miniature scores of his Woodwind Quartet and String Quartet No. 2, which I bought there) as well as recordings from companies like Y Perspectives at 50 119 CRI, so it was a small but important resource for those of us in the area who were involved with new music. When I first encountered it, then, PNM had already been around for a few years, and surprisingly there still wasn’t anything else quite like it. It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the simple oddity of this. If you think of the common practice era as having ended around 1910, it’s actually quite remarkable that we waited more than half a century for the establishment of a serious English-language journal charged with examining the syntactic bases of the various musics of the uncommon practice era which followed it; the disruptive effect of two world wars on what otherwise would have been normal channels of communication can’t be overestimated, of course, and I have briefly traced some of the relevant history in my contribution to the Cambridge History of American Music. But whatever that history and whatever the reasons, by comparison an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century student composer-in-training would have had a broad choice of Kompositionslehre. We had Perspectives. But the importance of the journal for my generation can’t be wholly, or even mostly, explained by the fact that it was the only game in town. No, Perspectives was also expressing in print the intellectual sophistication and seriousness of purpose to which my generation of young composers and intellectuals aspired (having come of age during the final years of the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, ours was nothing if not a serious generation, having been forced to grow up early, if sometimes inadequately). And more than even that: to us the journal seemed also to be uniquely bearing witness to a period of great intellectual and artistic ferment, capturing the energy and excitement of the time, and conveying to the world our own belief in the importance of the new music and our sense of being involved in a collective enterprise of historical significance. In our minds Perspectives was part of a package which included the Group for Contemporary Music, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the League/ISCM, the American Composers Alliance, and all the other people and groups associated with the vibrant New York new music renaissance of the nineteenseventies . No doubt we read into Perspectives much that went beyond the journal’s original remit as understood by its founders, and in retrospect what seemed at the time to be the dawning of a new era of shared purpose can now be seen as something quite different. Indeed, whatever its original mission, someone today encountering Perspectives for the first time is apt to be struck by the bewildering diversity of the half century of musical practice now recorded in its pages (but surely not foreseeable in 1962)—and by the diversity, too, of those doing the recording. There’s enough of that last sort of diversity evident in hindsight, even in 120 History of Perspectives the very first issue, to make talk of “founders” and “purposes” perhaps seem vaguely quixotic if not...

The Archives of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

This article presents a brief history of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), and an overview of its archives. The Center was one of the earliest and most influential centers of electronic music in the United States, especially during the decade or so after its founding. Established in 1959, assisted by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, it was a joint venture between Columbia and Princeton Universities, directed by composers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky (representing Columbia), and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions (representing Princeton). The Center was active in supporting the work of many domestic and international composers wishing to work in electronic media, and was the locus for the composition of many important and influential works of electronic music. The Center also housed the RCA MKII synthesizer, the first programmable music synthesizer. The archives of the Center consist of roughly 80 percent sound recordings, principally reel-to-reel tapes, including original recordings of the concerts of the Composers' Forum from 1951 to the mid-1970s. The remaining holdings include documents; manuscripts; technical manuals and blueprints, music manuscripts, sketches, and scores; bibliographies and discographies; photographs; slides; a small amount of correspondence; administrative records; and ephemera. The Center is still active today, as the Columbia University Computer Music Center. The archives have been recently deeded to the Columbia University Libraries, and some processing and preservation work has commenced.

Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (review)

Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line. By Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. 301 pp., including discography, bibliography, list of Web sites with access to recorded music, and index of proper names. On my computer desktop is a photo of the faculty and staff of the famous Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, circa 1970. The six individuals posing for the camera are arrayed a kind of hierarchy: Milton Babbitt and Otto Luening occupy the foreground, with Vladimir Ussachevsky just behind them, and Mario Davidovsky occupies the middle ground. In the background, right of center, two young women stand close together, looking formal and modest despite the long hair and short skirts typical of the era. The women are Alice Shields and Pril Smiley, who worked the center as teachers, technicians, experimenters, and collaborators; during the center's most productive period they were two of the four primary instructors electronic music. Both are prolific, accomplished, award-winning composers of electronic music, yet they never received the status and pay their work at the center warranted, and they are seldom mentioned the standard narratives of the history of electronic music the United States, as Joel Chadabe's Electric Sound bears witness. (1) This neglect is hardly surprising: women have worked in the for a common goal so very many roles and fields, yet for historical and cultural reasons men have commanded the and are thus the subjects of history. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner's greatest achievement Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line is to shift background and foreground so that women like Smiley and Shields become the historical subjects and their male colleagues play supporting roles. This perspective shift makes Hinkle-Turner's book more than a compensatory history, adding women to a male narrative; rather, it is a women's narrative, attending to the ways that the particularities of these composers' lives as gendered beings intertwine with their careers, creativity, and community. The volume is the first of a series on women and electroacoustic music Hinkle-Turner plans to write for Ashgate; future volumes will address women Europe, Australasia, and Latin America. No one is better qualified to write such a book: a composer herself, Hinkle-Turner is also a university computing professional and longtime advocate of women music. These conditions give Hinkle-Turner not only the technical savvy and broad knowledge of the field required for this type of study but also awareness of and access to the composers who are the subjects of her research. She draws primarily on her own interviews with living composers and her analyses of electronic music for much of the material of the book. But she also brings to the table her feminist sensibilities and knowledge of feminist musicology, which is particularly evident the book's introduction. Of the six chapters that follow the introduction, three are devoted to women composers academic settings (chapters 2-4), while two are more topical, concerning women and technology popular music (chapter 5) and women multimedia (chapter 6); the final chapter provides a trenchant assessment of the current status of women electroacoustic music. This concluding chapter is the most theoretical of the book, for here Hinkle-Turner grapples with the reality that, after seventy or so years of breaking down barriers, forming alliances, networking, mentoring, and achieving success, women composers of electronic music find that younger generations of women are not following their footsteps. Rather, the numbers of female students university electronic music composition programs have actually decreased recent years (247), and their female predecessors doubt their own influence as role models (253). Hinkle-Turner airs several theories to explain this phenomenon, including cultural constructions of femininity, the aggressive jargon of the computer world, and U. …

Q&A: Electronic music comes of age

The Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York was the first institution of its kind in the United States for experimenters seeking new technology-based sounds. Fifty years after its founding, director of research Doug Repetto explains how electronic music has evolved and how the role of academic music centres is changing.

The Columbia—Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) in New York City was established in 1959 by founding director Vladimir Ussachevsky, along with Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Roger Sessions, as the first educational and creative institution of its kind in the United States. Its central role in training composers hailing from outside the United States is not widely known. Home countries of composers include Turkey, Japan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Spain, Iran, Ghana, and several in Latin America. Using interviews (conducted almost entirely by the author) and documentary sources (largely from the CPEMC archives), this article explores the personal narratives of these composers and their impact on the culture of the CPEMC and on their own future work, both musically and institutionally. Studio logs (see Figure 1) from the archives proved invaluable resources. Quotations without citation are drawn from interviews conducted by the author, detailed in Appendix A.

Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (review)

Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line. By Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [301 p. ISBN 0754604616. $79.95.] Index, bibliography, discography, webliography. As Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner notes in her introductory overview of the history of publishing about women and music, this history contains lacunae regarding avantgarde women composers, particularly of the post-World War II period. Her recent Women Composers and Music Technology in the United Stales makes great headway in filling these gaps and is the most substantial publication to date to investigate the achievements of women composers of electroacoustic music, defined as [music] which uses technology as a tool and gives the composer access to virtually any sound (p. 5). Hinkle-Turner brings her experience as a composer of such music to this project. She received her D.M.A. in music composition from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, served as acting director of the electronic and computer music studios at Florida International University and the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Iowa, and currently teaches twentiethcentury music and multimedia applications in music theory in the University of North Texas, College of Music. Hinkle-Turner builds on earlier, more narrowly focused publications in her survey of approximately 150 electroacoustic works by more than 100 women composers in the United States, including music educators, independent artists, and technological inventors, and covers the period from the 1930s to the present. While most of the composers were born in the United States, a few are included who were born elsewhere, but have worked extensively here and are essential to its history of electroacoustic music, e.g., Annea Lockwood (New Zealand), Thea Musgrave (Scotland) and Jin Hi Kirn, and Insook Choi (South Korea). Discussions include biographical information, particularly as it sheds light on the conception and creation of the composers' music; analyses of works; technical reviews of equipment and construction methods when deemed helpful in understanding a work; and composers' reflections on working as a woman in the world of music technology. Most of HinkleTurner's research draws on the primary sources of interviews, personal correspondence, the composers' writings, and unpublished vitas, biographies, and program notes sent to her by the composers. While Hinkle-Turner focuses on the period from the 1930s onward, she opens her second chapter Precedents and Pioneers with mention of Lady Ada Lovelace (18151852), who contributed to the work of Charles Babbage, inventor of the first calculating machine, the Difference Engine. According to Hinkle-Turner, Lovelace was the first person to suggest that such a machine might write music, thus constituting the earliest known connection between women and electroacoustic music. HinkleTurner moves forward through time with an overview of experimentation with various music machines, observing that GermanAmerican composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) scored one of the first pieces for purely electronic instruments, Music of the Spheres (1938), an interlude piece for Beyer's opera Status Quo. Incorporated into Hinkle-Turner's survey of composers is a discussion of organizations that were crucial to the development of electroacoustic music composition. During the World War II era, technological advances led to the creation of large communication centers such as the Office de radiodiffusion et television francais (Paris) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Cologne, Germany). In United States academia, Columbia and Princeton universities collaborated in 1959 to create the ColumbiaPrinceton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), whose example stimulated the establishment of additional academic studios such as those at the University of Illinois (1959), the University of Toronto (1959), the San Francisco Tape Center (1962), and Mills College (1966). …

Electronic and Computer Music (review)

Electronic and Computer Music. By Peter Manning. Revised and expanded ed. York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [x, 474 p. ISBN 0-19-517085-7. $35.00.] Bibliography, illustrations, discography, index, photos. No other genre of music has experienced such expansion, in terms of both mechanics and craft, as electroacoustic music has in its approximately 100 year history, a history as much about developing technology as it is about music itself. As director of electroacoustic music studio at University of Durham, Peter Manning has background and experience that enables him to provide a thoughtful and thorough account of electroacoustic music, an umbrella term he uses to describe electronic and computer music because it does not attempt to partition medium in terms of techniques by which sound material is generated, processed, and organized. Instead, it focuses attention on very special nature of acoustic results, taking account of fact that these will always be reproduced via loudspeakers or headphones (p. 403). intent of Electronic and Computer Music is not only to provide a chronology of genre, but also to impart technical foundations that magnify of each development in its history; a particularly important aspect, considering nearly one half of this revised and expanded book is new material dedicated to digital audio and its related elements. Admittedly, book does become heavily laden with technical jargon at times for casual reader, but it is clearly necessary in order to fully appreciate innovations that contributed to evolution of modern music synthesis and digital audio techniques. book is divided into eight sections: (1) Developments from 1945-1960; (2) New Horizons in Electronic Design; (3) The Electronic Repertory from 1960; (4) The Revolution to 1980; (5) Digital Audio; (6) MIDI; (7) Desktop Synthesis and Signal Processing, and (8) The Expanding Perspective. Manning precedes first chapter with background information on activities and developments from turn of century to 1945, describing some initial attempts at electronic sound generation, including such exotica as Dynamophone (measuring in at 60 feet and 200 tons) and Givelet (a precursor to Hammond Organ), as well as more familiar and established ondes martenot and theremin. He also explores influence of Italian Futurist movement in poetry on evolving compositional techniques during first decade of twentieth century, an influence that bolstered an assertive call for incorporation of new instruments, larger tonal palettes, and liberal extension of compositional strategies as a whole. This highly experimental period also marked emergence of optical and magnetic recording, as well as introduction of commercial 78 rpm records. French and German musical aesthetics have had a long history of fundamental differences with regard to their respective tenets. With musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer's Radiodiffusion Television Francaise in Paris, and elektronische Musik of Werner Meyer-Eppler's Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, quarrels and disputes were a regular course of action for these two major forces in electronic music. differences were, however, kept at a professional level, as Manning explains it: Intense disagreements developed between studios and these were aired in public on a number of occasions, notably at summer European festivals of contemporary music that were then approaching their zenith in terms of their international significance (p. 19). He clarifies that the reasons for this overt hostility were not merely a matter of patriotism, although understandably this factor played a part. They lay more fundamentally in marked differences of outlook as regards acceptable practices of electronic composition (pp. 19-20). section 2 concentrates on these two camps, as well as Milan school, founded in 1955 by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, and developments in America, represented in work of Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, John Cage, and others, along with Milton Babbitt and seminal developments he made with punched tape control system of RCA synthesizer at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. …

Gayle Young. The Sackbut Blues: Hugh Le Caine, Pioneer in Electronic Music. Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989. xiv, 274 pp. ISBN 0-660- 12006-2

GAYLE YOUNG. The Sackbut Blues: Hugh Le Caine. Pioneer in Electronic Music. Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989. xiv. 274 pp. ISBN 0-66012006-2 Canada has a history of original creative thinkers, and Hugh Le Caine (1914-1977) must be one of tne most remarkable among them. LeCaine was both an experimenter and an inventor. In 1920's, he experimented with aspects of sound recording and processing: John Cage did much same things in late 1940's and early 1950's and almost immediately became a celebrity. In 1940's. Le Caine designed and built a musical (described in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as the earliest instrument that resembles a synthesizer [Davies 1984: 680], whose power and flexibility of control still has not been surpassed by modern digital instruments: Robert Moog built a similar instrument twenty years later and gained no small reputation thereby. While still a child. Le Caine built such futuristic, if rather impractical, devices as an electronic ukulele, a paper-roll-driven autoharp, and a guitar with foot pedals for tuning like those of a harp. He experimented with processing sounds by means of microphones and speakers and by means of modified playback of homemade phonograph recordings. His absolute pitch, remarkable musical memory, and formal and autodidactic study of musical instruments made him particularly suited to musical instrument invention. After first synthesizer, he went on to create first polyphonic synthesizer, an audio playback device that allowed for highly controlled mixing and editing, and ingenious controllers to allow composers to interact with synthesizers and tape recorders. Given his unusual accomplishments, perhaps most remarkable aspect of man was his shyness. Although he was composer of first (and for many years, most famous) tape composition produced in Canada and for more than a decade Canadian composer of electroacoustic music best represented on disc, he never considered himself a real composer. He maintained he was only trying out his instruments in see them from composer's point of view. He tried in various ways to draw attention of composers to what his instruments had to offer, but attempts were so humble that few composers or performers came to know of Le Caine's accomplishments during his lifetime. There were illustrious moments, of course. Arnold Walter seized upon Le Caine's work and, in cooperation with National Research Council (Le Caine's lifelong employer), set up University of Toronto Electronic Music Studios (UTEMS). In 1959, this was but second electronic music studio in North America (the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center having been established preceding year) and for next ten years one of of world's most important centres for art. Le Caine filled UTEMS with his marvellous devices and, a few years later, did same for Istvan Anhalt's facility at McGill University. He also placed equipment in studios of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen's University (Le Caine's alma mater, where School of Music building was named, in part, in his honour in 1974). Le Caine published much of his work in technical journals and occasionally in musical ones, but world was not quite ready at that time to make much use of such information. Moreover, since Le Caine worked for Canadian National Research Council, marketing of his inventions was subject to certain restrictions. Perhaps more importantly, even where commercial production of Le Caine's devices seemed to be on horizon, his modesty and perfectionism made him reluctant to agree that a project was finally ready for manufacture. Robert Moog's name became synonymous with musical synthesizers for more than a decade not because he made a better but because he managed actually to market one (something perhaps easier to accomplish in United States). …

Interview with Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa, and Charles Wuorinen

This interview took place on 9 March 1984 at the University of California, San Diego's Center for Music Experiment (CME). At the time of the interview all three composers were in residence at CME, each completing the computer-generated tape portions of compositions utilizing the resources of the center's Computer Audio Research Lab (CARL). The three compositions were premiered on the New York Philharmonic's Horizons '84 festival. [See the article by Brooke Wentz in this issue-Ed.] During the past two decades each of these three composers has been creatively involved with the electronic medium-with analog electronics in their earlier compositions and with the computer in their recent ones. The first part of the interview focuses on issues that faced the composers in three of their early works-Yuasa's Icon (1966-67: NHK Studio), Wuorinen's Time's Encomium (1968-69: Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center), and Reynolds's Voicespace (1975-80: CME and Stanford University). The second part deals with state of the art issues manifest in their most recent CARL compositions-Yuasa's Beyond the Midnight Sun, Wuorinen's Bamboula Squared, and Reynolds's Transfigured Wind. The underlying questions was: How has the changing technology been reflected in their changing compositional concerns?

A Bit of History and A Salute to Milton

Jacques Barzun's elegance of phrasing which served so well his introduction of electronic music at first concert of ColumbiaPrinceton Electronic Music Center in May of 1961! Scratch Milton (or me) and you will find a strain going back to ancestors who basked in favors of Catherine Great-presumably at closest range that lady allowed. We also share in another farfetched relationship, as members of that tripartite pact of which Otto Luening is also a member, called the Columbia-Princeton Axis. We read about it in newspaper. Now you will remember what original Axis stood for....