Dockstader on Dockstader (cont.)
By 1960, in addition to Varèse's Poeme, I'd heard tape music pieces by Berio, Leuning, Ussachevsky, and Stockhausen. Also, I had always listened to instrumental music. From the start, I had preferred 20th century music, or at least what there was of it that was dramatic, colorful, and adventurous - everything from Stravinsky's Firebird to Messiaen's Turangulila Symphony to Boulez's Le Marteau sans maitre (three that pop into mind). Of all I heard, the three electronic pieces I can hum are Varèse's Poeme, Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge.
As I went, the sound got easier but the organization got harder, and I entered into a struggle I hadn't anticipated. John Cage (in Silence) tells of the effort it took him to overcome his musical training and become a Listener to sound again. There came a struggle to resist forcing the sounds too far into Music and away from a true art of sound, This, I think, is the continuing struggle in electronic music of all kinds. It's very hard to stay a Listener. I think I was aided, in my time and circumstances, by not having a synthesizer of any kind: no keyboards, no pre-set voices.
My "synthesizer" for everything on this CD was one or two sine-wave test generators ("oscillators" in those days) which were "played" by turning a dial. I forced them to produce harmonics (square waves) by amplifying them into distortion, and got the pulse-trains out of them by temporarily rewiring them into instability (temporarily, because they had to resume life the next day as stable test generators). The "notes" they produced were achieved by editing tape, not by note (by note by note...). For Quatermass, I acquired a Heathkit test generator of my own, which I built to allow me to "switch" tones instead of having to "tune" them (like a radio). Also, when turned on or off, it made marvellous shrieks and groans.
Some composers who worked in what's been called the "glorious junkshop" of the now-classic tape studios have looked back in awe and dismay at the amount of hard, physical work it took to make a piece. But easier isn't necessarily better. I enjoyed it: I found it was like the best part of painting - standing on your feet all day, moving around, working with your hands , sometimes very fast, more often very slowly, mixing, cutting, stitching it together with the sound in your ears. It had a muscular joy to it. I think a lot of us had fun up on that singin high wire, teetering between control and chaos, trying to push the sound a little farther forward toward Something we hadn't heard before, working in it... Listening.