CD YGM-07
Published by Yank Gulch Music
Copyright © 2009. All rights reserved.
The sound materials in MUCH include “found objects”: an orchestral march, spoken aphorisms, place names, samples of recordings, television programs, etc. Other sounds---often forming background strands---were made with the ARP synthesizer that the studio acquired in the summer of 1970. Many of the individual sounds in MUCH were synthesized using a computer program designed to produce speech-derived sounds—a precursor of SYNTAL.
In addition to the ARP, the studio included Scully tape machines—four two-track and one four-track, a four-in/four-out matrix mixing panel, a reverberation plate, and various other sound modules, such as bandpass filters, a pitch-to-voltage converter, an electronic switch, a device to control tape-recorder speeds, and the like.
We take up here the five sections of MUCH in order.
One of the ways I got to know Wayne Slawson was by auditing his course in Computer Synthesis of Electronic Music in 1969-70. During the second semester the members of the course decided to compose jointly a large electronic work using our computer-generated music as source material. The five composers involved each had a specific portion of the piece to work on, each with its own characteristic gesture.
My instructions were to produce a long decay of activity and tension. With the aid of Humphrey Evans, I improvised my computer examples within this structure and later added a concluding section based on “found objects” from radio, television, my own record collection, and selections from my list of over 1000 clichés (compiled in August, 1966). The result was one of the strangest pieces I had ever written---a long continuous “tunnel” of sound, which forms the basis of the section Hex.
Since no one could agree on a title, the completed four-track composition was named by consulting a dictionary at random. MUCH was performed with lights (by Ben Slotznick) under a dome of Woolsey Hall on May 20, 21, and 22 (not without technical difficulties). All of us felt that our work had severe musical shortcomings, but we were equally attracted to the epic quality of the whole.
The next fall Wayne told me that he was going to Sweden in January and thought that perhaps he and I should revise MUCH so it could be performed in Stockholm. Since the other composers had left Yale or declined to help us, we decided to improve our own contributions and compose the three other sections anew. I had mixed feelings about doing so much work in so short a time, but I became more optimistic when the Yale Electronic Music Studio acquired an Arp Synthesizer.
We worked on the piece from December through January, changing the conception of the whole as we went. I remember the cold, windy evenings during which we discussed the pros and cons of this or that technique, idea, or aesthetics. Sometimes we recorded these conversations in order to get more out of them. At any rate, we finished the new MUCH two days before Wayne left, but this time we felt secure about the work's quality. This version was performed in Stockholm on April 23, 1971.
After Wayne returned, we talked over dinner about a performance in New Haven. He felt that the piece would be enhanced by some traditional instrumental/vocal musical functioning as a commentary on the progress of the piece. I agreed and suggested that we write these inserts ourselves, rather than choose music from the literature. At first we didn't know why we were attracted to this idea, but, as they always do, the reasons became obvious as we worked. We had already explored almost all the means of putting music on tape (recorded sounds and speech, electronic music synthesizer, computer, plus the standard techniques of tape manipulation). Instrumental music was the only medium we had not used. These moments-from-the-past-as-seen-through-the-present are conceived to relieve, periodically, the listener from a total present not vice versa, which, ultimately, is all the past can do.
The reactions MUCH has engendered vary from sheer musical appreciation to
“a vision of apocalypse” or “a musical commentary
on the ecological crisis of our times”.
What do you hear?
1973 Notes by Wayne Slawson
We certainly didn't always agree at first on everything in MUCH.
But the fact that both of us are pleased with the piece as a whole
suggests that we managed to resolve those disagreements.
I don't think we compromised in the usual sense of that term.
We just kept working, independently and together,
until one of us liked a result enough to talk the other into liking---or
perhaps simply “hearing”---it too.
Hex, the section composed by Bob Morris alone, was completed first, quite early in the spring of 1970. I got a good start on Brew fairly early too, but it was April before I mixed the final crescendo. By that time I had gotten over my initial impression of the harshness of Hex, and I began to hear the tremendous richness of detail. Having heard Hex repeatedly, I felt challenged in a way to match that complexity within the entirely different formal gesture of Brew. It was only after they were finished that we decided to place the two sections symmetrically on either side of the center of the work. In retrospect, though, I can see the placement as inevitable. During our rewriting of MUCH early in 1971, we both revised our own sections, but the general shape and direction and most of the details were retained. That left us with just about three-fifths of the piece to recompose completely in one month!
What helped us in that final rush was our decision to preserve, in a general sense at least, the functions or gestures from the earlier version of each of the to-be-composed sections. The first was to be more-or-less flat in overall shape, and was to anticipate portions of the rest of the piece. The orchestration of the Prokovief march was to be the glue. I helped produce a good bit of the material and started the section, but Bob actually composed a good bit of Augury himself.
The middle portion of the first version of MUCH was actually funny, so we started out with comedy in mind. I forget who got to the idea for the stories, but Bob and I each supplied a few plot outlines or situations. Then he and I and four friends improvised the stories. The recording session was indeed hilarious. Its results---modified and added to by the synthesizer---make up Middle Earth. The masterfully wandering, pointless old man's tale told by Paul Severtson---he even looked about 80 while he was recording it---is the organizing thread upon which we hung an astronomical allegory, a bit of women's lib, an unbelievable baseball story, etc. While each of its components was quite funny, I don't think people will find Middle Earth, taken as a whole a bit funny. Its strangeness serves as well as the humor did from the earlier version to disperse the tension of the end of Brew and to form a plateau between Brew and Hex.
There were a few moments near the end of January, while I was frantically trying to get ready to leave for a seven month's stay in Sweden, when the quiet ending of Hex seemed to me good enough. I'm glad that circumstances didn't trump our artistic judgment. It is not a matter of balance, although symmetry is posited by the positions of Brew and Hex. Hope's Dreams is necessary to expend a reservoir of energy accumulated, not from any specific section or gesture in the piece, but from the work as a whole. Starting about 11 o'clock on absolutely the last night we could spend working, we argued a bit angrily---we were angry more at the piece than at each other---about what to do. Our ultimate solution---fragmentary recollections from the rest of the work---seemed too pat, and was actually rejected once. But when nothing else suggested itself, we finally set to work rather reluctantly only to find that what sounded pat in the discussion stage became surprising and quite unanticipated in its musical fruition. The very end was still unresolved that night, but Bob found the quotation from Severtson's story along with some of the previously generated material and the piece was complete.
All of the foregoing is, in a sense, a discussion of how we resolved disagreements. But let me say a word about that more directly. Bob is avant-garde, very prolific, and he has a practical approach to composition. I'm rather conservative, meager in my production, and I lean toward the theoretical side of composition. A more unlikely collaboration seems hard to imagine. That we resolved disagreements, that the bogus issue of taste never came up, that a 47--minute collaborative piece was composed at all, suggest to me that the cult of personality among composers ---“my music expresses my ego”---is a dying myth from the Nineteenth Century. Of course, our music does express our personalities to a degree; ours is not a collective composition. It is more accurate, I believe, to conceive of the collaboration you will hear this evening as a result of basic musicality shared by at least two composers. And it may be that we have tapped a much broader musicality. I hope you enjoy MUCH.
Robert Morris has composed over 160 pieces of concert, computer, and outdoor music. He is presently (2009) Chair of the Composition Department of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester and is a leading theorist of atonal music. Further biographical data are available here.
Wayne Slawson specializes in the composition of “color music” made with speech-derived sound. Retired from the faculty of the University of California at Davis, he now lives in southern Oregon. Further biographical information is available here.
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