In February of this year there was a concert curated by Ph.D. student, Felipe Otondo at the Rymer auditorium, here in our very own music department. This concert featured the work of renowned York-based composer Trevor Wishart. In this article I shall try to give some insight into the work of this composer and the importance of electronic music.
Being a composer in the diverse field of electronic music myself, I was eager to experience the work of this highly esteemed composer first hand. Wishart is about to celebrate his 60th birthday and has had a career spanning many of the technological breakthroughs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1969 he began experimenting with recorded sound and did extensive research into the human voice. He began advancing complex ways of analysing and morphing sounds and later began to develop a large amount of sound transformation software instruments through his work on the “Composers Desktop Project”. He has also written two books: On Sonic Art and Audible Design, dedicated to the analysis of various components of sound. Through his research and experimentation he has managed to compose extremely complex and epic pieces. But let me give you a little background on the origins and importance of electronic music before I elaborate on Wishart’s genius.
Contemporary music, in general, is a highly controversial field. We no longer have the safety net of harmonic rules and structure. Like modern artists, we are free as composers to express ourselves in a very original manner and to explore the realms of sound that have, and always will be, influenced by our environment. This environment has grown into a society which is recognised, in the western world at least, as being fast paced, stressful, frustrating, incredibly timetabled and noisy, as well as exciting and stimulating among other things. Time plays an important role in our lives; it is certainly experienced very differently in modern society in comparison to how it was experienced in the lives of our classical predecessors. Music, therefore, being a reflection of environment and emotion, has very much moved with the times. Instead of one particular style or genre, music now covers every avenue of taste and individual expression. These forms of expression are easily communicated through the various forms of media available to satisfy our own personal demands.
One of the largest advances in music during the twentieth century was, of course, the development of electronic devices. Recorded sound opened up the flood-gates for potential experimentation and a whole new musical ideal. Wax cylinder and vinyl recordings became widespread at the beginning of the century, but the real dawn of experimentation arrived with the magnetic tape recorder. Essentially, the tape recorder allowed not only the easy recording of music, but also the recording of sound in general. During the 1950s pioneering studios popped up around the world with the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri pushing the concept of musique concrète; the use of found sounds as source material for musical composition. Before the advent of recording, western music was largely pitch based. There were a few attempts made to incorporate mechanical sounds into compositions, the composer Luigi Russolo even attempted to emulate the sounds of machinery with his invented instruments: intonarumori. Tape brought these ideas further and enabled the composer to chop up material and splice it together in various different ways in order to take these recorded sounds out of their original context and to organise them in such a way as to create a musical composition.
The importance of the use of found sounds in composition cannot be taken lightly. Advances in computer technology have made it possible to delve deep down inside a sound, rip it to pieces, pull out the tiniest particle of interesting timbre and expand it, through various processes and manipulations, into a complex piece of music. The possibilities are endless and as technology becomes ever more advanced, who knows how much further it can take us.
This idea brings me back to Trevor Wishart, a master in the field of sonic art. The pieces performed in February using a system of diffusion (playing the sound through multiple speakers) were Imago and Globalalia. Both pieces are approximately half an hour long and take the listener on an extensive journey into the world of complex sound. Imago involved a single “clink’” of two glasses (taken from Jonty Harrison’s “et ainsi de suite”). Although less than a second long, this sound provided the source material for the whole piece. The detail, time, and continual metamorphosis that the piece entails is astounding. Through a system of analysis and complex processing, Wishart provided a wealth of new sound from this one tiny clink and managed to evoke images of the sea, human voices and gong-like material as well as many other incredible and unique sounds. The development of intricate new timbres is Wishart’s speciality. In Globalalia he took syllables from 26 different languages to, “create a set of variations on the sounds of language itself”. These were recorded from various sources, many of which came from satellite television channels. Again, the masterful use of sound manipulation was astonishing.
How we listen plays a very important role in our appreciation of such music. For the average listener it is perhaps not easy to sit through half hour compositions without feeling restless and thinking about what else they could, or should, be doing. This harps back to my earlier discussion on time and how our concept and use of time has altered considerably due to environmental and social factors. We have developed a shorter attention span due to the amount we have to pack into each and every day. What I like about this music is that you get to escape from this stressful, fast-paced world for a while if you allow yourself to be immersed in the sound for the duration. The music gives you a sense of timelessness. One loses the ability to judge how much time has passed. We should all learn to relax and forget about time for just an hour or so while visiting an important place called the imagination.
To conclude, music is expanding rapidly through the use of technology and we should embrace the possibilities and results of such experimentation by, perhaps, taking the time to listen and appreciate the phenomenal wealth of sonic explosions being created by such composers as Trevor Wishart.