THE SOUNDS OF MUSIC

I used to have a sort of slogan for this column which went, "The business of audio is music." If we are talking about entertainment for the everlasting consumer, who keeps us in business, music is surely still the king of audio. True, we have entertainment sidelines that are not strictly music--the "songs" of whales in water, birds in air, steam locomotives in clouds of smoke. Also, of course, the spoken word, with or without music attached.

But all these are a sonic trickle; music in all its familiar aspects obviously dominates us.

This is curious, because we are seldom able to agree as to what is music.

In his radical works of the 1920s and onwards, Edgard Varèse neatly dodged this issue by referring to his creations as "organized sound." Audio engineers, veering onto a side track, distinguish merely between "signal" and "noise," an entirely practical approach to the basic audio problem, which is to make output reproduce input. Paradoxically, an excellent source of audio signal is noise, sometimes white, sometimes pink. No properly trained engineer would be fazed by that contradiction! But to decide what is music is another story.

As a matter of fact, or at least of probability, the audio that really dominates the world today is that of the electronic voice in communication. In terms of what I like to call "amplitime"--amplitude, or maybe sheer power, versus time elapsed--the practical spoken word in audio would measure as man's principal audible noise and our main business. But is this really audio, as most of us think of it? Not really. Our business is based on entertainment. And the nature of that depends for us on such subtleties as sonic color, pitch, and rhythm, not to mention transients, phasing, mood production, personality projection, and other non-engineering factors. Almost any kind of sound, organized or no, may be music to at least some audio ears. But not an airport plane announcement.

The great Edgard Varèse is now revered as a pioneer in electronic music, even though most of his works are strictly "live" and only his last output originates, at least in performance, from tape. To my mind, Varèse omitted a lot in his term "organized sound" because he took for granted in his live sonics the very thing that occupies us he most, the shape and color and clarity of the sound involved. It is a paradox that in his big "Déserts," alternating taped and "live" segments, the recorded parts, which were made be ore noise reduction and too often coped in the editing, could not at all match the colorful live sounds of the orchestra. And this even though the two sounds were ideally very much alike, he orchestra made to sound astonishingly like the tape--given the right "fi." Reworking of the "Déserts" tapes has already improved the sonic clarity of he prerecorded parts, and the most recent digital enhancement techniques should eventually do even better. Nevertheless, the "fi" that is so much our concern was, in Varèse's ear, strictly out of live sound. He was no audio buff. Yet, astonishingly, he understood the very nature of sound as few of us do, propelling music-or whatever--into far wider sonic areas.

One of the most exciting events in y early leanings toward audio was he modest assistance (and the willing audience) I gave Varèse in the first roductions of this very same "Déserts," with a considerable live orchestra for half the sound and a two-track Ampex plus two absolutely enormous Altec Voice of the Theatre speaker systems as the sound emitters for the taped segments. This was in early 1956, when these systems were the brand of choice for just about any entertainment involving enormous public sounds. They may be a far cry from today's monstrous sound-producing equipment. But I can assure you, a few seconds standing in front of one of those Altecs going full blast could put a quick end to your hearing.

I never got to see the amplifiers for this speaker array; perhaps their rating was nothing much, even by today's audio equipment standards for cars (the smallest conceivable audio space outside of headphones!). Nevertheless, the Altec volume, out of an efficient horn-type configuration, as I remember, was easily lethal.

Varèse was the most genial, kindly, unassuming Frenchman ever to migrate to America-until you got yourself in the way of his sound. His live music, as you may know, is the most horrendously dissonant, the most fiendishly cutting and slicing and blasting live sound you will ever hear. Do you think, then, that the amiable Varèse would think twice about his listeners' precious ears when it came to sonic reproductions from tape? (And remember, these were factory noises!) When I came on the scene at the first performance, in a large space in Bennington, Vt. as part of some species of contemporary music festival (the equally dissonant Roger Sessions, once my unwilling teacher, was also there), the speaker systems were somehow mercifully set back from nearby ears, probably through some irrelevant circumstance, not intention.

The music, even so, was loud enough to assault, but nobody was mowed down, or maybe only momentarily. Varèse was blissfully unaware of all that, as he would be. His task was two-fold--to whip the live musicians into producing their utmost in controlled dissonance (a thing that most performers still do not enjoy unless there is mayhem in their souls) and to cue in the most incredible, impossible cues for an agreeable young lady named Ann McMillan, who had been his editing assistant in Paris and knew all his tricks. At a certain precise point in the orchestral sound (which was as precisely "organized" as any work by Debussy or Ravel in Varese's early years), Ann was supposed to kick the Ampex "Play" button. I watched, fascinated, as the orchestra went over and over its music while Ann's face, screwed up in utter concentration, showed every detail of the sound's progress as she listened, Ampex waiting. For the life of me, I could not remember even an inkling of the cue music. But she got it.

Needless to say, Varèse was much too busy with his orchestra to send out a hand signal like a good audio or TV producer. Ann was on her own.

Soon after, the Varèse "Déserts" was produced in New York and I was there, this time in a more active role, if merely in the sonic setup. Was it Town Hall? I think so. With utter insouciance in that relatively cramped space, Varèse had his big speakers set up, in his easygoing fashion, where they would do the most good-right at the front edge of the elevated concert stage, one on each side and, of course, facing forward. The nearest audience would be about five feet away, right in the middle of the sonic beams. I was ranging around the hall during that rehearsal and happened to park myself near those lethal sound beams, or one of them, when the music on tape began. In seconds I was on my feet practically screaming and waving for a stop. "You can't! You can't put those speakers out there!!" Whole rows of agonized listeners, swathes of casualties, would be inevitable. As I remember, Varèse was mildly surprised, but accommodating, as ever. In perfect good humor, he asked me what I suggested he do.

Well, for a moment I was, so to speak, floored, down there on the floor of the hall. But this was still in the days, out of mono, when the best sound dispersion for living rooms and other musical places with loudspeakers was reflection, from varied sources, the more varied the better. So, I almost stuttered, why not turn those speakers around and face each to the rear? Fortunately, the hall was a good one for music, with a useful stage that had semi-smooth paneling angled forward on each side, with decorative irregularities of a helpful sort. So the two Altec Voice of the Theatre units were back aimed at a partial diagonal in the general direction of those side panels, to give a fairly precise but adequately diffused reflection for each channel, quite widely separated. There was room for the orchestra in between and the conductor in the middle. That, I hold, was my contribution to the aural health of the Varèse audience.

After this and many another experience with audio over the years, you may guess that my personal interest in sound per se is pretty much on the lines of Varese's thinking. Yes, I know in detail what seems to me to be music and what doesn't, but I can be quite objective in the comparison. Beethoven has more organization than bird song, if not more color, but I still can find the songs of some birds really fascinating, on their own plane. Also the music of the old steam-engine whistle, the subject of folklore for a century, and even the less vivid sounds of the modern diesel locomotive. Without a second's thought, when I first heard an Amtrak train go by, I said, "Of course! That's 'Frankie and Johnny,' all the notes played at once." Listen and you will hear. I am bemused, horrified, and sometimes delighted by the extraordinary cheeps and twirps and whoops of New York City's electronic sirens, at unbearable volume levels. The same goes for the dismal, out-of-tune decay of the "heehaw" two-note signal built into many such sirens and derived from the acoustic air-horn signals of emergency vehicles throughout Europe and much of the rest of the pre-electronic world.

(The two notes are traditionally a fourth apart, a ratio of 3:4. In New York they sometimes are no more than a squeak and a squawk, dismally out of any sort of tune. Who cares? I do.) At a recent lecture and concert at the annual Oregon Bach Festival, the big cheese himself, German conductor and teacher Helmut Rilling, was going over Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto with short illustrations from the music played by the orchestra. At one point the players finished on a chord--G major, I think. Rilling was about to continue speaking when it became apparent that one of the notes of the chord-I figure it as the middle note, B-was still being sounded, while all the other musicians had stopped on time. An absent-minded player, or one in a trance? Rilling looked up in surprise, then his face turned quizzical as it dawned on all of us that the note came from outside, not from the orchestra. After a considerable pause, the note sounding away quite loudly, Rilling remarked, "Right in tune, eh!" Whereupon there was a clunk and it stopped. Sixty cps, no doubt some kind of electronic machine, accidentally set off.

The moral is clear enough. More and more 20th-century sounds are being integrated into, or are approaching, the realm of strictly official "organized sound" that we call music. More and more, too, we all listen to such sounds for their intrinsic interest, whatever they may be-which is, of course, the way all music began. Human interest. Organization. Shapes and patterns. So in a much more real way than you might imagine, the business of audio continues to be music, and what we might call proto-music. There is no dividing line! From the engineering point of view there is no distinction at all.

One might say that even those familiar words, "testing, testing" are a form of music, neatly organized and very useful.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Oct. 1987)

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