JUNE 2006
I remember during last
year's Sonorities contemporary music festival
(2001) having some serious misgivings about some
of the music I heard. I felt a feeling of
religious reverence surrounding the
electroacoustic music concerts of the Sonic Arts
Network Conference that made up the first few
days of the festival. I got the sense that the
music attracted a very closed audience of
initiates, who were not always prepared to be
critical, more often composers and their
disciples, rather than a regular music audience.
I think that this made me less objective about
the music
As one enters the concert hall one is enveloped in the austere sense of darkness that shrouds the musical event. In the centre of the hall, attention is focused on a large mixing desk and PC, where the composer controls the event by frequently altering the levels of the sliders. On the periphery an impressive array of speakers fan out containing the audience in an enclosed auditory space. Here the audience participate in a complex ceremony, were they pay homage not just to the the composer, but to the technological processes involved and the vast amount of equipment needed for such an event.
Before entering into the
general discussion of electroacoustic music, I
should mention a bit about its origins. The two
main sources of electroacoustic music emerged in
the 1950s, musique concréte started by
Pierre Schaeffer in Paris, and elektronische
musik started at the studios of Nordwestdeutscher
Rundfunk in Cologne under the direction of
Herbert Eimert. 
They were from two
opposed traditions that established two firm
thoughts of aesthetic discipline in a new musical
revolution. Musique Concréte used as
its basic material environmental and everyday
sounds that were then subjected to electronic
processes. Eimert's sounds were in contrast 
entirely artificial and
solely constructed by electroacoustic means. The
sounds of electronic music today continues along
much the same lines as the 1950s, except that
today this distinction has been worn down, and
composers draw freely from both schools of
thought. More recently we have been aided by
computers that are able to sample and process and
combine sounds, which was not possible with old
cut and splice tape methods. The aesthetic
differences have faded and now we have a new
concept and terminology, "sonic arts,"
embracing the wide variety of sounds and
techniques available to the composer.
Electroacoustic music is distinctly different from instrumental music, in that the "note" ceases to be the basic unit of musical discourse and is replaced by a sonic object divorced from causal elements. In this artificially created sound world the relationship between the audience and the outside world is irrevocably altered. There is no score to speak of and the composer is the performer. Music events do not adhere to the traditional elements of music like form, pitch and rhythm and are totally free to occupy a sort of boundless sensual musical space.
This year I went back to
Belfast for my second Sonorities festival and the
first concert I attended was entitled
"Electric voice I". The purpose was to
illustrate the different ways that composers
utilise the human voice in their works. John
Young's "Sju" was based upon the
variable pronunciation of a Swedish word. Young
was more concerned with the sounds of words
rather than semantic meaning. This is difficult
to achieve because sounds can often be
constrained by being tied to the context from
which they derive meaning. Young's piece is
successful because it explores the fascinating
array of varied noises that are derived from this
one very simple piece of vocal material. The
sounds range from the consonant, more
indeterminate high frequency sounds, to pitched
vowel sounds.
In contrast John Lavak Drever's "Butterfly Lovers" engaged in a much more narrative use of text. The sonic material of the work was derived from a recorded voice and two interludes for flute. The use of text was more expansive, as the composer used a recitation of a traditional Chinese story in Cantonese. In addition to the syntax and intonation, the composer focuses on narrative, and in a sense the work is evocative of its implied programme.
Of the two pieces "Sju" was the much more abstract piece, demonstrating the expansiveness of musical composition based on limited material, but entirely more satisfying because it really tries to analyse the many facets of the human voice. I feel that this type of music has such a vast array of technical possibilities, and it is often the case that composers indulge, ending up with a sequence of what can seem like musical clichés. Young was able to avoid this by focusing on one perspective in which I felt able to discover entirely new environmental relationships in his music. For me, as the human ear quickly tries to establish a point of reference, the sounds momentarily become the sea and the wind. There are no constraints and the timbral character of sound can be transformed until it is unrecognisable, becoming recontextualised very quickly.
I left this concert much more excited about the possibilities if electroacoustic music and it certainly reversed the more negative experiences of the year before.
There was a strong
emphasis on live electroacoustic music in this
year's sonorities programme. At the top of the
bill was a concert given by the female vocalist
Steve Halfyard. I got a strong sense that live
electroacoustic music is in much greater favour
than pre-recorded electroacoustic music. There
are obvious reasons for this, as the
electroacoustic music removes the whole spectacle
of the music event. Live electronics solves this
problem, making it easy to identify with the
composer, as performer, and personalising the
music with some live vocal or instrumental
element. Also the audience feel more comfortable
when then can trace sounds back to a perceived
causal element. Simon Emmerson's 
"Sentences" is
a work were the composer and performer work in
tandem. The voice is sustained and transformed
often entering into counterpoint with itself. The
material gradually becomes more fragmented as
isolated elements of text are deconstructed and
reconstructed. Paul Wilson used a more
bewildering array of computers and sampling
equipment in his work "Spiritus." This
work distances itself from the narrative of the
text and focuses on the timbral quality of
sounds. In this emotionally charged work Wilson
uses breathing, screaming and growling sounds.
With these materials, Wilson uses sampling to
build much more sustained sound masses that would
ever be imaginable in the human voice alone. The
electronics aspect expands the voice breaking it
up, allowing sounds to interact, collide and
integrate in a fixed musical space. While one
could call into question the relevance of
programmatic intent, the title and the
hyper-emotionality of the work, one cannot but be
impressed by the expansive sound world and sonic
possibilities, which otherwise, in purely
instrumental music, would remain unexplored.
Another high profile
event of this year Sonorities festival was the
Singcircle concert. Unfortunately for me this was
a rather disappointing event, as it did not live
up to my previous expectations. These are
entirely based on my experience of a remarkable
Singcircle performance of Stockhausen's
"Stimmung" in Dublin during the 1980s.
Michael Alcorn's (Director of Sonic Arts Research Centre) "A Slow Dance" was one of several live electroacoustic pieces played in the concert. However, unlike the other works already mentioned, this piece is more static, a combination of soprano, alto, tenor, bass and taped sounds, which are not open to the same level of "live"
manipulation. With more
extensive settings of texts (by the poet
"John Montague), this work is more
traditional. Alcorn writes that the subject
matter "presented me with an ideal vehicle
for a simpler musical language," and one
gets a sense that the essential decisions
concerning form and sound are taken from a
traditional musical point a view. This aspect is
often entirely lost in electroacoustic music, as
composers often seem to be incapable of moulding
materials into logical musical discourse. Alcorn
has four sections, or "images,"
differentiating the use of material, with the
taped sounds getting more developed towards the
end. Quite a contrast to Emmerson's
"Ophelia's dream," which used no
pre-recorded sounds, and is based on live
manipulation of real-time sound. Comparing 
the two, I felt that the
"live" situation in Emmerson's piece is
at an advantage because Alcorn's tape cannot
communicate the physical element of communication
that occurs in real live electroacoustic music.
The success of this year's event was enhanced by the use of the human voice. I felt that it focussed the festival by limiting its scope, allowing a more complete exploration of a single type of music art form.
Rory Braddell, ©2002, all rights reserved.