Symposium Recordings: 'New Media Old Archives'

Jean-Baptiste Masson (Université Rennes-2): The Sound Art of Amateur Sound Hobbyists in the 1950s and 1960s, in France and Britain

Sound hunters were amateur sound hobbyists who, from the 1950s, started to form clubs, national and international organisations, to produce radio programmes, and to organise national and international contests. Such hobbyists were active since the beginning of sound recording technologies, but it was with the advent of tape recorders that the movement grew to a large scale. This paper presents an alternative history of electroacoustic music and field recording, showing, through written and sonic archives, that musique concrète and electronic music were practised beyond state-subsided studios, while field recording was practised beyond academic ethnographers and ornithologists.

John Gabriel (University of Melbourne): New Audiences, New Challenges: Radio Music Theatre in Weimar Republic Germany

The introduction of radio in Weimar Republic Germany offered contemporary composers the tantalizing potential to reach a larger audience than ever before, but music theatre posed a particular challenge: how to transfer theatre’s visual component from the physical stage to the listener’s imagination. To the discourse and experimentation of radio practitioners, avantgarde composers brought musical and theatrical techniques. Some composers felt this new medium required a new kind of music theatre, one whose music and dramaturgy worked together to create and fill this imagined space without relying on narration to fill in the gaps.

Martin Elek (University of Cambridge): Wilhelm Furtwangler and Sound Recording

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954) was a dominant figure of German musical life in the early twentieth century. Featuring the leading European orchestras of the time, Furtwängler’s performances were regularly recorded both in the concert hall and the studio. Despite his general aversion to sound recording, he produced a vast and wide-ranging discography, and he witnessed first-hand the emergence of magnetic tape recording, which was used to capture his philharmonic concerts from the early 1940s onwards. This paper examines Furtwängler’s relationship to sound recording, the characteristics of his live and studio recordings, and the problems with the modern reissues of these recordings, providing an overview of Furtwängler’s recordings of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, op. 98 and insights into the variability of his performance conceptions.

Michelle Ziegler (ETH Zürich): Recording Realities: Edgard Varèse as a Tape and Film Music Composer

The creative process of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) is traditionally understood along the lines of traditional authorship: a composer working alone at his desk on his mostly handwritten scores. However, when Varèse received an Ampex 401 tape recorder in 1953 and started creating his first tape compositions for the interpolations of his instrumental piece Déserts (1952–54) and for the film Around and about Miró (1955) by Thomas Bouchard, this framework fails to reflect reality. This paper inquiries into the working practices with recorded sound for Varèse’s tape and film music—thereby reinterpreting the creative process as a prolific engagement with new media.

Credits:
Edgard Varèse, Audio Tapes, Edgard Varèse Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung

Thomas Bouchard, Around and About Miró (1955), Thomas Bouchard Collection, Harvard Archive

Monica Lim (University of Melbourne): Music, Technology and Living Archives at the Grainger Museum

This paper describes the processes and outcomes of a Creative and Research Residency at the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne. As part of the Residency, resident researcher Monica Lim worked with students across multiple faculties to engage with the Grainger Museum Collection to investigate and speculate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Creative Arts. Archival material such as physical mannequins, scores and music instructional language became living artefacts which were transformed and re-used in multiple ways to create a multi-faceted exhibition addressing contemporary concerns about technology in a form of ‘archival performativity’.

Paul Jackson (Independent): Lines of Beauty: The Development of Graphic Notation in the Music of Percy Grainger

The 1935 composition, Free Music No. 1, originally written for string quartet, but adapted in 1937 for four theremins, is notable not just as an early and striking example of Grainger’s Free Music, but also because it introduced a form of graphic notation quite unlike anything the composer had previously employed. Grainger’s notational experiments did not quite appear out of thin air, however, and this paper explores his work in the context of the development of parallel notation systems in the field of ethnomusicological transcription and psychological studies in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Credits:

Free Music No. 1 performed by Laura Hamilton and Sarah Crocker (violins), Vincent Lionti (viola), Lawrence Zoernig (cello)