How To Win At Sonic Arts

How To Win At Sonic Arts
Opinion Piece by Robin Maconie

Conspiracies of influence to advance academic careers in music education are not unknown. State schools of music initially arose in late eighteenth-century European municipalities as instruments of diplomacy and the military, and even today remain committed to classical objectives of social discipline and hierarchy. In more recent history the emergence of electronic, tape, and computer music as a field of creative inquiry has revived and extended old habits of influence and preferment against a perceived threat of contamination of the arts by science and technology. Such a reaction took root in the early 1960s, partly in response to the pincer movement inflicted on classical practice from Paris by modernist students of Olivier Messiaen, and in New York by disciples of John Cage and an aesthetic of chance, stimulated by new arts of tape montage and electronically synthesized music. The rise of new media for which no formal degree programmes existed provoked division in the music profession and vocal resistance in university music departments not only unprepared in a professional and practical sense to incorporate instruction in music science and technology in the curriculum, but philosophically in denial of the contributions and values of working class audio engineering expertise and practices.

Among non-traditional centres of learning, on the other hand, a postwar expansion of higher education investment awakened a sense of opportunity. Cold War rivalry between the humanities and sciences in academia came to a head with the Two Cultures debate initiated by scientist and author C. P. Snow’s Cambridge University Rede Lecture in 1959, attacking the humanities for their failure to recognize the values of a science and technology based education. Snow’s dour jeremiad drew a withering rebuttal by F. R. Leavis on behalf of Matthew Arnold, the arts, and literature, igniting a polarizing debate I recall being animatedly discussed among a predominantly Leavisite faction of academic staff and students over scalding cups of instant coffee at the Victoria University of Wellington refectory in the early 1960s.

The challenge of how to manage the introduction of electroacoustic technology to university studies in music previously unused to acknowledging, let alone studying the nuts and bolts of audio engineering, had emerged in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report recommendation of renewal and expansion of higher education, championed in the United Kingdom by a Labour administration and involving the elevation and rebranding of former technical training colleges as universities. The former Battersea Polytechnic in London relocated to new redbrick premises at Surrey University, Guildford, along with an established Tonmeister degree programme in sound recording and classical music production designed and advocated by composer Arnold Schoenberg, certified and supported by British audio and movie professional institutions in various ways including the donation of equipment, and directed by John Borwick, the noted technical editor of The Gramophone magazine and a former instructor for the BBC. In 1975, about to publish the first instalment of a lifelong study of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I joined the Surrey University music department as a part-time lecturer, from 1979 developing course materials in the history of music and technology at the request of senior Tonmeister students.

The previous year at the invitation of Malcolm Troup I had assisted at the newly established Music Department at The City University, London as a part-time lecturer and concert organizer. Having more to gain from the company of recording professionals at Surrey University, I decided not to renew the City University contract, declining a similar offer by Donald Mitchell of a part-time teaching position at the University of Sussex, another new university.

In the United Kingdom, the prospect of new funding becoming freely available to institutions offering degree and diploma courses in music technology up to PhD level, without requiring industry authorized professional or technical certification, encouraged a number of second tier technical colleges to hire course leaders from among the ranks of professional musicians with public artistic credentials but little academic research or administrative experience. An established concert pianist, Malcolm Troup (1930–2021) prepared himself for an academic career by completing a doctorate in philosophy in Messiaen studies in 1968 under Wilfrid Mellers at the University of York, a ‘plate-glass’ campus inaugurated in 1963. A Beatles fan, purportedly the inspiration of ‘Nowhere Man’ in the cartoon movie Yellow Submarine, Mellers actively promoted academic recognition of music composition in experimental and modernist idioms outside the classical canon as equivalent to scholarly research. In 1970, Troup had become Music Director at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, resigning in 1974 to head a new Music Department and electroacoustic studio at The City University established with funds provided by The Worshipful Company of Musicians.

After gaining a DipMus in performance in 1967 and a MusB in 1970 at the University of Canterbury, New Zealander Denis Smalley (1947–), an organist with an aptitude for Messiaen and Ligeti, relocated from conservative Christchurch to a livelier Wellington environment where senior composer Douglas Lilburn (1915–2001) was engaged in developing an electronic music studio and tape idiom consistent with his ideological commitment to an aesthetic of national identity based on sounds of the New Zealand landscape. Encouraged by Victoria University professor Jenny McLeod (BMus, 1964) to specialize in composition, Smalley obtained a French government bursary to study in Paris during 1971–72, attending the composition class of Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, and on alternate days joining the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris as an observer, striking up a friendship with composer François Bayle while formulating a theory of timbre manipulation based on the writings of Pierre Schaeffer. After completing the normally two-year Diplôme de Musique Electroacoustique et de Recherche Musicale in one year, Smalley moved to London in 1972 to study for a DPhil in electroacoustic composition under Richard Orton, a junior colleague of Wilfrid Mellers at York University. During this time he was also informally coaching doctoral candidates Simon Emmerson and Jonty Harrison in the theory and practice of electroacoustic music at The City University. Engaged as a lecturer in music and director of the newly-inaugurated Electronic Music studio at the University of East Anglia in the early 1980s, he became a senior lecturer in 1989, in 1994 joining the City University Department of Music, to become professor and head of the Department of Music in 2000.

Smalley’s reputation as a theorist of tape montage is expressed in a typically Francophone rhetoric applied to a popular culture of radio drama and movie sound effects: an intuitive sonic aesthetic based on values of tactile immediacy and instant recognition of narrative audio cues intended to establish mood, environments, and emotional situations. Unlike the American art of Spike Jones, whose wartime radiophonic humour relied on visible execution, live on cue at the microphone, of noises parodying popular classical idioms, the primitive art of musique concrète under Pierre Schaeffer delighted in wilful disintegration and reassembly of disc and tape recorded images without regard to reason or logic. Smalley’s mentor at the GRM was François Bayle, whose composition Oiseau-chanteur (1963), a montage of wind instruments and tape recorded sounds, is echoed today in the amiable gibberish of the Minion characters in the movie series Despicable me.

To the spirit of comic invention attending Pierre Schaeffer’s early studies Bidule en ut (‘Thingummyjig in C’) (and Etude aux casseroles ‘Study in pots and pans’) Smalley attempted to bring an intellectual seriousness and philosophical gravitas associated in Paris with cultural critic Claude Lévi-Strauss and philosopher and structuralist Roland Barthes, the author of Image, Music, Text. In today’s advanced digital programming envronment, Smalley’s reputation as an analogue theorist has continued to rely on the authority of that initial attempt to rewrite Schaefferian theory in terms acceptable to a primarily non-technical, English language readership.

Spectromorphology (Smalley’s term for the art of ‘tone colour identity transformation’ of prerecorded materials) is a uniquely grandiose term for a fundamental conceptual issue affecting every aspect of Schaefferian theory from its origins in A la recherche d’une musique concrète (1952) to the author’s legacy of Traité des objets musicaux (1967). It is perhaps best described as a theory of auditory perception reimagined in terms of a musical architecture of contrasting volumes and spaces, experienced acoustically as it were in a succession of imaginary encounters. The accidental nature of such an aesthetic is distantly related in turn to John Cage’s American approach to a music of chance, or sleight of hand, in which composing decisions are assigned to fate, in the throw of a pair of dice or turn of a card, in order to preserve the appearance of purity of action from unwanted contamination by reason, calculation, or aesthetic prejudice. In another sense the chance procedure embodies a Cageian goal of rhetorical authority according to which, like a gambler or present-day politician, the composer or executant is obliged to discover, invent, or merely feign significance in the hand one is dealt by fate: a juxtaposition of materials one has had no expressive investment or purpose in selecting. Such conceptual demands, while routine in the secular world of character acting and sound effects production, remain philosophically challenging in a musical sense for composers of musique concrète, especially in the extreme case of having to draw meaning from a chance combination of tape recorded sound objects.

Even so, for composers of electroacoustic music in general to claim to legislate or assign aesthetic value to synthesized or reproduced natural sounds or sound characteristics without regard to acoustics, let alone the standards of audio equipment and inherent biases of human physiology, is a practice open to objection from a trades guild perspective as unreliable and unprofessional, as well as profoundly ignorant. Readers may approve Smalley’s virtuous intentions in seeking to bring greater firmness to Schaeffer’s aesthetic strictures, even while recognizing that in attempting to ratchet up the terms of reference of musique concrète to a higher and more acceptable degree of intellectual rigour, Smalley was simply exposing the practical and theoretical nakedness of musique concrète practice to a wider professional readership.

Among today’s digital generation, Smalley’s reputation remains tethered to the conundrum of a philosophy of sound manipulation seeking to account for the internal evolution of pre-recorded sounds one has had no hand in creating. Acousmatic theory, as it is known, strives to establish a cognitive framework for recorded sound without reference to acoustical realities, the physiology of hearing, the distinct types and situation of microphones, instrument measurements, loudspeakers, or recording media.

‘Spectromorphology is not a compositional theory or method but a descriptive tool based on aural perception’ writes Joanna Demers in Listening through the noise (2010: p.34). ‘Spectromorphology is a theory developed by the British [sic] composer Denis Smalley (1986, 1997) for categorizing various types of sound shapes and structural functions. ... [It] serves as an analytical catalog of possible compositional processes in electroacoustic music’. (Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic [2015, p.306].)

‘Denis Smalley’s article ‘Space-form and the acousmatic image’ (Smalley, 2007) runs to definitions of some 50 different types of space. It is the definitive text for discovering the spaces of electroacoustic music’ (Adrian Moore, Sonic Art: An Introduction [2016, p.134].)

‘The whole point of acousmatic music, expressed in the meaning of the word acousmatic, is that there is nothing to watch: no observable activity to confirm how the sounds are made, and often no certainty about where the sounds originate’. (Smalley himself, in Collins and Escrivain [eds.], The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music [2007, p.78].)

As I noted in a Tempo review of Collins and Escrivain (October 2009, pp. 63–69), the underlying message of the Greek akousmatikoi, a class of auditory purists who listened to intervals played on the monochord from behind a screen, is that, seeing nothing, they understood nothing of what was going on behind the curtain: for example that the harmony of proportions associated with the 3 : 4 : 5 triangle and other mysterious geometrical relations corresponded to the order of natural frequency ratios of octave, fifth, third etc., relations equivalent to relative length or tension of vibrating strings.

Taking note of the aesthetic consequences of production choices of equipment and location on the quality of a music transmission has been a requirement of a competent music reviewer from the birth of radio and foundation of The Gramophone magazine by editor Compton Mackenzie a full century ago. As technology advanced into the 1950s realm of wrap-around sound field reproduction in movies, and eventually computer games, it has become second nature to the average listener, as well as obligatory for a professional executant, to be mindful of the types and categories of aural experience addressed in Schaeffer’s protocols, and to recognize that Smalley’s 50-fold derived classifications are necessarily influenced to a greater or lesser degree by microphones, recording media, and methods of sound generation and reproduction ranging from personal earpieces and headphones to elaborate speaker systems set up in enclosed spaces of particular shape and internal cladding. By ignoring the implications of radio and audio technology, acousmatics strives wanly to defend an aesthetic of incontinent anarchy in defiance of the real physical constraints of human physiology, audio engineering, and sound propagation.

Having graduated BA in Music and Physics and Certificate in Sciences and Music Education at Cambridge (1968–72), Simon Emmerson (1950–) joined The City University in 1974 as a research student on a two-year Electronic Music Studentship funded by the Worshipful Company of Musicians. Appointed junior lecturer in 1975 while officially under the supervision of Malcolm Troup, from 1976 Emmerson was informally coached by Denis Smalley in preparation of a PhD thesis titled ‘The Analysis and composition of electro-acoustic music’, awarded in 1982. Smalley’s essay ‘Spectromorphology and structuring processes’ duly appeared in the anthology The Language of Electro-acoustic Music edited by Emmerson and published in 1986.

In 1974 I joined City as a research student on a [two-year] PhD Electronic Music Scholarship funded by the Worshipful Company of Musicians. I was supervised by Malcolm Troup who founded the Music Department in 1975. ... The Music Department expanded its numbers and degree courses over its first twenty years. The studio took on postgraduates from about 1979 [the year the Electroacoustic Music Association, later Sonic Arts, was founded]. There were no special rules for PhDs by practice – we improvised our balance of creative folio and reflective writing that I believe survives to the present day. (Emmerson interview, City University blog, 2020/04/16)

In 1992, the year of its rebranding as De Montfort University, Emmerson joined the Music Department founded in 1986 at the former Leicester Polytechnic by Gavin Bryars and Christopher Hobbs, a member of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. In 1999 Emmerson was joined at De Montfort by Leigh Landy, the author of a Routledge textbook titled Making Music with Sounds.

I am a composer, primarily of multichannel acousmatic electroacoustic music, with a particular interest in the use of real-world sounds. (Jonty Harrison, University of Birmingham personal web page)

According to his online biography, in 1976–80 while living in London and working at the National Theatre, Jonty Harrison (1952–) was ‘teaching electroacoustic music’ at The City University, at the same time ‘studying at York with Bernard Rands, Elisabeth Lutyens, and David Blake’. Graduating in 1980 with a DPhil in composition, he joined the University of Birmingham as Professor of Composition and electroacoustic music, and Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios. Alternative sources note that Harrison himself was tutored in electroacoustic music in London by Denis Smalley at The City University while registered for a DPhil at the University of York under composer in residence Bernard Rands.

Bernard Rands was a member of faculty and composer in residence at York 1969–75; composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83) was in declining health; and composer David Blake, a cofounder with Wilfrid Mellers of the University of York Music Department, like Rands was technically inexperienced in electroacoustic music. How much specialist input any of the above would been able to give absentee DPhil candidate Harrison is unexplained. How Rands, untrained in electroacoustics, may even have been capable of undertaking Harrison’s doctorate supervision remains unclear. Indeed, since Rands had already departed York University for California in 1975, it would appear that an agreement may have been reached to have Harrison unofficially tutored in electroacoustic music by Smalley at The City University while having Rands officially registered as his supervisor at York. Such arrangements presumably would require the approval of Malcolm Troup, who had previously obtained his DPhil at York, and Mellers, who had been Troup’s doctorate supervisor. Recall that at the time, Denis Smalley was also tutoring Simon Emmerson, a period in which presumably all three young men were tempering their mettle in the fiery furnace of a newly appointed electroacoustic music studio.

The practice of studying in a specialist subject at The City University (or any university) with a private tutor who is not a registered member of the faculty, and thereafter submitting a thesis or portfolio of works to another university for approval as supervised by faculty who are unqualified in the topic area calls into question the integrity of an arrangement allowing for the certification by rubber stamp of candidates for teaching posts elsewhere in new subject areas for which there is a perceived demand and government funds but where musically qualified personnel are lacking.

In 1989 John Young, a MusB (honours) graduate in music from the University of Canterbury, arrived in the United Kingdom on a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council study grant, and was tutored unofficially by Denis Smalley at the University of East Anglia in preparation of a doctoral thesis titled ‘Source recognition of environmental sounds in the composition of sonic art with field recordings: a New Zealand viewpoint’. Returning to New Zealand in 1990, Young acquired a PhD in Musicology from the University of Canterbury on the strength of his 1989 thesis supervised by Smalley at the University of East Anglia, and was appointed lecturer in music at Victoria University. From 1995 Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at Victoria University, in 2000 Young relocated to De Montfort University to become Head of Research for the Faculty of Humanities alongside Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy.

Young’s successor as Head of the Victoria University Lilburn Studios, Dugal McKinnon (1972–) obtained a BA in literary studies in 1995, and a BMus in composition at Victoria University in 1996. Encouraged by senior lecturers Jack Body and Ross Harris to specialize in electronic music, in 1997 McKinnon travelled abroad on a three-year research scholarship, obtaining a PhD in composition in 2001 at the University of Birmingham supervised by Jonty Harrison.

As a composer McKinnon is fascinated aesthetically with the loudspeaker as a paradoxical dis-embodimenter of sound enabling the observer to experience without distraction the inner sensational workings of concrete or abstract audio events in the moment, unthreatened by the visual theatre of physical gestures and associated indications of intention and direction, a world of internalized sensation described by Milton Babbitt as ‘performance theater’ and in cognitive psychology as anal retentive.

The liveness of loudspeaker music, particularly in immersive sonic environments, emerges in the interaction of sound, space and the somatic, affective, and interpretative activity of the listener. This can happen only in the [physical] absence of performer and performance, and in the presence of the loudspeaker. (‘Broken Magic: the Liveness of Loudspeakers’. Dugal McKinnon, in Reason and Lindelhof eds., Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives [New York: Routledge, 2017].)

After graduating BMus (Hons) in composition at Victoria University, Dunedin born Michael Norris (1973–) travelled to London in 1997 to study with Denis Smalley at The City University, acquiring an MA in electroacoustic composition. Returning to New Zealand in 2001, in 2002 he was Mozart Fellow in composition at Otago University, and is currently Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington. A talented orchestrator, he is also a software designer.

You can’t beat free, and for starters we suggest downloading the rather odd and intense set of plug-ins from New Zealand composer Michael Norris. SoundMagic Spectral is a set of 23 plug-ins with minimalist interfaces and maximum audio shredding and mangling potential, all primarily focused on altering the way sounds play out over time and frequency. (David Bliedny, in MacLife No. 9, August 2008, p.32)

Most of the bare education and career information of individuals cited above is currently omitted from their respective university website cvs, and has been compiled from open source interviews, articles, and contributor notes in scholarly anthologies. A collective absence of candour is open to interpretation as symptomatic of a conscious intention to conceal information and/or mislead readers – including potential students contemplating taking on serious debt in order to acquire qualifications and a career in music. Aspiring students deserve to know whether their potential mentors are genuinely expert in their field. Again, the same few names of personalities and locations are cited as qualifications by persons in positions of influence and authority in academic life. A reader may be disposed to regard even the appearance of such mutual cooperation as unethical and self-serving, as well as intellectually sterile.

In decoding the theoretical complexities of Pierre Schaeffer’s original texts from 1952 and 1967 on which Denis Smalley’s reputation has been built, (texts which have appeared in translation only in the last decade, albeit in a species of English that defies rational explanation), a reader is surprised to discover the extent to which Denis Smalley has retained their author’s original inattention to academic values and intellectual clarity. Equally regrettable, if unsurprising, is the collective repudiation by the protégés of acousmatics of a significant tranche of influential twentieth-century composers of the period, including Boulez, Stockhausen, and the twelve-tone school of Arnold Schoenberg: iconic influences championed by Fred Page at Victoria University of Wellington in the early sixties, and studiously ignored in New Zealand music schools ever since.

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