Eight Electronic pieces :: sleeve notes for the Locust CD issue [2003]
Tod Dockstader's Eight Electronic Pieces is an unqualified masterpiece of Musique Concrète, a transmission from a reality that is strangely familiar yet completely removed from everyday experience. It is chaotic yet surgically precise, otherworldly in its sound and scope yet unmistakably the product of human innovation and discovery. It is most of all a challenge to the musical form - Dockstader eschews traditional melody, harmony and rhythm - but in cutting, pasting and manipulating recorded sounds he evokes genuine drama and emotion, properties that distinguish the finest music regardless of its origins and elemental makeup.
Born March 20th, I932 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Dockstader worked for animation production houses UPA and TerryToons before accepting a job at New York City's Gotham Recording Studios. There he created Eight Electronic Pieces, first privately issued and later picked up by Moe Asch's Folkways Records in I96I. Subsequent efforts including Luna Park, Apocalypse and the epic Quatermass, followed. Dockstader operated, in large part, outside the sphere of the music world record labels commonly rejected his efforts, and his attempts to join the famed Columbia-Princeton Canter for Electronic Music were summarily dismissed. In the wake of the agonizing Omniphony project he stopped making music altogether.
Tod Dockstader effectively disappeared from music several decades before his recordings were rediscovered and celebrated by successive generations. On May 7, 2003, I spoke with Tod about his life before, during and after the creation of Eight Electronic Pieces.
Jason Ankeny, May 2003
Peeps and Beeps: Open Ears in Gotham City
I had a regular Depression-era childhood. It was very ordinary. My only experience with music was the radio, because in those days, there was a lot of music on the radio. Classical music. Serious music. That's where I started to listen. I was interested in radios-how they worked and magic like that. It was an odd combination: I was fascinated by the electronics of the radio, and I liked serious music. When I was 12 or 13, I got a federal license, and I was a radio amateur for a while. So I learned electronics that way - it was all tubes and all very primitive.
I went to public school, and then I went to the University of Minnesota, so I was exposed to a lot of good live music because of the Minneapolis Symphony. It was a quiet time - we went right from the Depression into the war. I had three majors: I was majoring in Art, English Lit and Psychology, particularly Abnormal Psychology. I was interested in thought and the brain, and Abnormal Psychology was a great way to study it because of the extremes - what goes wrong tells you a lot about the process of thought. I almost got nabbed for Korea, but I managed to weasel out. I got a psychiatric 4-F. I'd had allergies all my life, so I went to the guy who had treated me most of my life and he had saved all my records and he was very much against the war so he wrote up a sealed document that I presented to the inspectors at the exam. The Army would have driven me nuts if I hadn't already been nuts.
After I left the university, my wife and I went out to L.A. We just got in an old car and drove. My wife taught school, and in a way, I supported us by doing cartooning for all kinds of trade publications. Whatever they wanted illustrated, I would illustrate. Then I decided I wanted to make movies. Everybody does, out there. The way it is now, you can major in film and get real experience, but in those days there wasn't any of that. I had a portfolio of my cartoons, and I carried that around with me, so I went to Disney Studios and they were looking for somebody to work in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement, filing ancient film cels: the celluloid stuff that cartoons are based on. They said, 'Leave your book here with the secretary, and it will be here when you come back.' When I came back, my book was gone, and it turned out some animators came by and they said, 'Who is this? Send him to our place when he comes back.' So I talked to them and they said I should go to UPA, that I'd die at Disney. There was a director at UPA called T. Hee and he was doing the 'Mr. Magoo' stuff. I went over and he looked at my book and said, 'I'll tell the manager to hire you.' UPA had a little ad in The Hollywood Reporter looking for editors, and that's what I wanted to do - I thought if I could get into editing, that was the way to get to be a director. I had already made an appointment to apply for an apprentice editor job, and the manager said 'Wait a minute, you're supposed to be here tomorrow for the editor's job, and here you are now and you're an animator.' I said, 'I'd rather be an editor,' so I edited film.
I was at UPA for about a year and a half. The studio went upside-down: They went into television and failed miserably. The only thing that happened out of all that is I learned to edit film, and part of that in those days was optical tracks - the sound was optical. As it turned out, learning to edit film and to mix soundtracks was the first training I had in sound. From there I went to TerryToons in New York. The guy who ran TerryToons, Gene Deitch, wanted to save money on soundtracks, which were costing him a lot of dough, so he asked if anyone knew how to run a tape recorder. I started doing tracks for him, and that was the first time I worked professionally in sound. I had to teach myself, because no one there knew how to do it. By day I did storyboards, and at night I did soundtracks.
I saved up some money, and I decided I'd write a play, write a novel, that sort of thing: Greenwich Village aspirations. I took time off and stayed home and wrote. Nothing went anywhere, and I said, 'Well, I'll go back to work.' But there was a recession, so I was living on unemployment for a long time. In order to get unemployment, you have to keep a log that you're looking for work, and I had nowhere to look-the animation had dried up. So I remembered my experience with tape at TerryToons, and I landed a job at Gotham Recording in New York City as an apprentice sound engineer. That's where the music started.
I really enjoyed sound. There were a lot of funny sounds in radio that always fascinated me - squeals and peeps and beeps, all kinds of mysteries. I don't know why it fascinated me - it just did. Gotham wasn't a big music studio - it was really a medium sized factory. Very small studios and editing rooms. We were doing all kinds of taping for radio and commercials, training films, plays, whatever. We used a lot of sound-effects, and I just started saving sounds. I could store them, and with tape editing, I could do all kinds of things to them. It happened that at that time appeared the first Musique Concrète - the Schaeffer "Etudes," the little Toonerville Trolley train things, the saucepan songs. It was very modest and monaural, the things he was doing. That really interested me, but I thought the music was kind of ... dull. Extremely simple. And I never did like repetitive loops. But the fact that it was being taken seriously interested me, and so I thought, 'Maybe I can do something.' A composer, all he needs is a paper and pencil - you just write. But in this world that I was interested in, you needed some pretty heavy equipment - very expensive. I was lucky because I had this engineering job, and I was always willing to work at night, so they finally gave me a master key to the whole place. I would do the paying job as fast as I could, and then I would start wailing - doing my own stuff.
So that's where the Eight Electronic Pieces came from. I'd record some sounds - water, wind, whatever made a noise - and then I'd go play with them in the editing rooms. At home, I'd put a microphone out the window when the wild cats were calling to each other, or, as I used to do in the apartment that I lived in, I would climb up into the elevator shafts and record the motors. You find sounds, you see. And that's your raw material. It's more or less random - it's a matter of luck finding sounds, and walking around with your ears open. From doing the work, then you get selective, and you know 'No, that's no good, that's not going to work, but that's a good sound, and I can use it.' It's from doing it and failing, and then remembering the color the sounds have in them for what I needed to make a piece. It's a matter of going around and tapping on things. I remember I'd spend time at dimestore toy counters, because they had little noisemakers. Halloween was a great time to find stuff, too. I'd listen to it and I'd imagine because I knew what I could do with it. In my mind I could pitch it down or pitch it up or imagine running it backwards - I'd done so much of it that I had kind of a cerebral circuit, like a preview. I'd just collect all these things, and I'd get favorites, and then I'd look for sounds that would go with those favorites. And that's when the piece would start to form- when I started to get judgmental.
Why I chose the sounds I did, I really do not know. I liked dramatic music - I liked modern as opposed to classic. I liked jazz, and I liked eccentric music. I don't remember thinking this at the time - it's all in retrospect - but I went for dramatic sounds, dark sounds, something with some theater in it. To me it was all finding out - I had no preconceived ideas. I was working intuitively. I just wanted to make some music that I liked, and this was the only way I knew how to do it because I happened to have a background in the technology of recording. In those days, there were no synthesizers - it was just tape recording. I'd just start things going and see what happened. I'd wait for something good, and I cannot tell you why I decided something was good or something was bad. I was in it, but I was not predetermining anything. I had no goal. I just wanted to make something I liked. I just listened, and if it seemed to work and seemed to move and the tempos were good and there were good surprises and it had an atmosphere, then I kept it. A lot of times it just wouldn't work, but it worked enough.
The first seven pieces were on 7 - and - 1/2 IPS tape, and it seemed to be working, so I took it seriously and did 15 IPS, which is the professional speed, and I think that was on Number Seven or Eight. In New York at that time, FM radio was much more adventurous than it is now - even staid stations like WQXR, which is the New York Times station, would play some pretty adventurous music, and some of this musique concrète was appearing on the air. I knew how to make lacquer masters, so I made 50 pressings - I could do it cheaply, because I was an engineer so I got discounts. I sold them door - to - door and sent them to every record company in New York or anywhere, and the only one who responded was Moe Asch at Folkways.
I did want people to hear it. I wasn't in a cave someplace. I wanted them to hear what I was doing because I liked it, and I thought maybe somebody else would too, just as I liked other people's music. I did everything could, but nobody took it. I was outside the circles. I didn't know anybody in music at all. I had no correspondence with anyone. I was considered a primitive, you know, kind of a joke - somebody who just did this stuff. And then I just quit - I just disappeared. There was an orchestral work called 'Omniphony' It was an expensive thing to do: I don't know how many people played - 25 musicians or something like that. Owl Records was a hobby of a wealthy fellow in Colorado. He funded the recording, and I had this collaborator - he transcribed some of my sounds. That was the whole idea. It was a lousy experience, and I stopped making music after that. I said, 'I don't want anything to do with music.' I just walked away I guess I'd done what I wanted to do.
I worked for an industrial design company specializing in exhibits. For that kind of work you use everything - film, sound... it's a kind of Theater in that way. From that I went into business with another fellow from the Gotham days, and we started up a company, Westport Communications Group, and we did a lot of educational audio-visual work, starting out with filmstrips. We went from that into doing videos - I did a lot of American history videos for American Heritage. I wrote them and found the pictures - it was all archival material. It was a great job. I did that for years, and did very well in it.
I had built a studio for the purpose of producing these audio-visuals. It was a mixing studio. So I had this equipment - a couple Ampexes, a mixing board, this, that and the other thing. The business went bankrupt, so instead of getting money, I just took the equipment as the liquidation, and I brought it home and put it in a little room. I still liked to do the work - I loved to put my hands on the tools. But I didn't have any of my original source materials because I destroyed them all in the bankruptcy - there was no place to store it all. I had hundreds of thousands of feet of tape, but I didn't want to do that kind of thing anymore, so I just started out from scratch. I thought, 'What can I use for an idea source?' I always need something. Sometimes it was a balloon, or a toy, or a faucet - there was some germinal thing that would start me thinking.
In this case it was shortwave radio. One of the pieces of equipment that I had saved was an old analogue shortwave radio that I had used in one of the educational audio-visuals that I did - communications was the subject. So I turned on the radio and went back a million years to when I was very young and I became fascinated again with the potential of not the broadcast, but the atmospheric sound. In between the broadcasts or the signals there is sound - it's kind of electronic. It can sound like cosmic breathing. I remembered it from my days as a radio amateur - I was always interested not particularly in the broadcasts but some of the odd things between the broadcasts. You tune across and there are really miraculous sounds in the silence. I thought, 'I think I can do something with that.' It took me about ten years to do it, and now I've got about three CDs worth of stuff. I call it 'Aerial' - I always had to have a name first, because you pile up a lot of tape, and you've got to have a project name or everything gets lost.
Tod Dockstader
as told to Jason Ankeny, May 7, 2003
Tod Dockstader: Eight Electronic Pieces, 1960
This is not "pure" electronic music in the German use of the term - not oscillator-music, synthetic music, laboratory music. It is not pure concrète music - natural sound, transmuted by re-recording. It is a combination of both. The American term "tape music" covers it, but poorly. "Tape music" suggests any piece of music recorded on tape, the traditional use of tape. Here, there is no performance to preserve; the recording is the performance. These pieces can only be played by a phonograph or tape recorder. Without electronics, the electronics of tape recording, they would not exist. So they are electronic music in the technical sense that Varèse's "Poeme Electronique" is electronic music: a piece combining concrète and electronic sources, dependent upon electronics for its realization. Although the Germans insist on the purity of their electronic music, Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" is a combination of concrete children's voices with oscillator-generated sounds - a combination that gives this piece a range of ideas his "pure" pieces do not have. This and the Varèse piece are the two major works so far produced (and available in disc release) in the medium, and both are combinations.
Why combination? Each pure source has its limits and advantages: pure electronic sounds are often dry, harsh, sharp, limited in timbre, without much harmonic complexity. Concrete sound, while having a range of timbre as great as natural sound itself, tend, for reasons of the extensive re-recording they must go through, to lack cleanness and impact - the presence of pure electronic sound. Music must have both range and definition; in electronic music, a sustained piece calls for this combination. I use electronic sources for percussion, tempo, accent, and concrete sources for thematic and "full orchestra" passages. For instance, the eighth piece begins with a series of sustained bell-like sounds, over which a sharp snare-like tempo is laid. The bell sound is concrete; the drum, electronic. The source of the bells was a single hit on a saucepan; the drum was a single switch arc, reverberated into tempo by tape-echo. In the case of the arc, prolonged reverberation turns it into a flute-like flutter and this flutter is used, in various pitches and tempos, in several of these pieces. This is a simple example; in most places it is impossible, and pointless, to sort out the sources as concrete or electronic. It is the use of them, the composition, on which the success of these pieces a music depends.
In composing these pieces, I used a library of tape cells (sound units, such as a single pitched vibration, a piece of concretized wind, a passage of voice vibration) that grew to 12,000 feet of tape before the first composition was tried. In the early, exploratory pieces (numbered one to six), I simply started two reels of tape cells going and waited for a happy accident of combination. From the first "happened" theme, I proceeded to build the piece with more control, trying to keep it related to the first accident. Still, accident was responsible for much in these first pieces. In a medium as wide and unruly as this, where anything is possible, control becomes a major struggle, and a piece is not so much built as torn down into form. Some of these early pieces ran half-an-hour originally. As I went along, a gradual disenchantment with the cells set in; a cell had to work into the piece under way or it would be excluded, no matter how interesting it was as a sound by itself. This necessary familiarity with my cells is a continuing labor that goes on between compositions, as the collection of cells goes on between compositions, too. In electronic music, the composer is also not only conductor and performer - he is the musical director as well, charged with collecting an orchestra of thousands of instruments, remembering where each one is and how it sounds, and keeping each of these virtuosi under control.
The new listener to this music will run into a major difficulty right away: identification. For instance, the listener whose first experience in electronic music was "Forbidden Planet" will have a hard time keeping science-fiction images from coming to mind. Along with this, he will probably be identifying some of the sounds he is hearing: "That's a jet; that sounds like someone with a bad heart"; or "that sounds like my icebox." These associations take control of the piece, and put it into the realm of sound effects for the mind's eye, or, at best, program music like "Peter and the Wolf." There is nothing wrong in this, as long as the listener can progress beyond it. In this apparent wilderness of strange sounds, such identifications will often be the only way the listener can begin to know the piece, or even stand it. However, if the novelty of a jet plane in a piece of music continues to be its chief interest for the listener, the piece has certainly failed him as music, that would be like playing the "Pines of Rome" only for the nightingale in it. This problem of "significative noises" (Stravinsky's term) will become less as electronic music is heard more, and as composers naturally come to use fewer such sounds.
For me, the best use of electronic music is not in concerts, which are usually harrowing to sit all the way through, - nor with orchestras, where it suffers from the "live" vs. "canned" comparison - but in performance on the listener's own playback equipment. These pieces are meant for that use, are meant to be listened to close up. As with any recording, the better this equipment is, the more will emerge from the piece played. This is particularly true of electronic music, since the techniques of concretization often produce harmonies in the sub and supersonic frequencies - sounds that are more felt as a presence in the room than heard. The basic structure, however, is in the middle frequencies, and so these pieces can be explored on the simplest phonograph. The test of a small speaker playback is a good way for the composer, too, to explore the ideas of his piece; it's like writing out a quartet reduction of a symphony, to find out if there is a real structure to it, or if it's all just orchestration. This contention between the natural chaos of the sources-the anarchy of noiseand the realization of their order in a piece of music, is the tension and excitement of electronic music.
Jason Ankeny, May 2003