Fanfare
Apocalypse is the second Tod Dockstader CD to appear on the Starkland label of Boulder, Colorado. I recommended the first, Quatermass, with enthusiasm and am delighted to report that the present disc, which completes the collection of a neglected master's major works in the electronic medium called musique concrete, supports one's view of these resurrections - electronic music of the early to mid 60s is very old indeed - as thoroughly worth effort; as, in fact, so good as to rank at the very least as a missing link. In mentioning the music's age vis-a-vis the state of the art, I may appear to condescend. It's unintentional. As I said in the first review, sound freaks will adore this stuff unqualifiedly, particularly if they've wide-range systems capable of playing loud.
In addition to knowing how to dazzle the ears, Dockstader knew how to keep them engaged. The most hard-bitten audiophile, if he has a shred of taste to his name, soon tires of sonic thrills and chills. Never mind that the opening work, Traveling Music, rattles the dishes at my digs' far side: one cannot but hear in these Dockstader pieces flat-out quality if, that is, we accept music as organized sound and good music as sound organized in such a way as to seem larger (more meaningful, touching, or thrilling) than the sum of its parts. The high drama one perceives throughout this program is anything but serendipitous. Dockstader painstakingly assembled his sounds from sometimes unlikely materials: a cat-cry toy, for example, provides Apocalypse's baleful motif. As the reader probably knows, musique concrete consists for the most part of tape-recorded sounds processed, again for the most part, beyond recognition, the processing itself consisting of laborious operations replaced in time by software-driven computers. And yet, one is hard put in Dockstader's case to distinguish primitive handiwork from technologically swifter means.
I rank these pieces among the least dated I've heard as well as among the more engaging. Their freshness stems from Dockstader's understanding that electronic music, rather than ape nature and acoustic music's architecture and sonorities, must work at achieving its own voice and shape; at this Dockstader succeeds with flying colors, and the cliche I insist be taken as literal. Colors indeed fly in an obviously ordered but in no way fussed-over fashion. As annotator Craig Anderton observes, "Well-executed craft always has a timeless quality." I propose in my review in this issue of two electronic works by Roger Reynolds that composers who work in purely electronic and electro-acoustic media ought to begin thinking seriously about making available to sympathetic discophiles CDs capable of multi-channel playback. Dockstader's obvious grasp of possibilities seems to me ideal for multi-channel presentation. Which brings us to - well, scarcely tragic, but a sad story certainly.
As I mentioned in my first Dockstader review, because he had no electronic-studio affiliations, in academe Dockstader was and remained a non-starter, i.e., a non-recipient of grants. After a stint at animated cartoons, he went to work for Gotham Recording in 1958 and there began collecting sounds on tape to experiment with. In 1960, having gained the use of a stereo Ampex deck, Dockstader revised an earlier work in mono, retitling it Traveling Music. His final Gotham after-hours production is Four Telemetry Tapes of 1965. And then he went on to other things. It's not that the man lies drunk and neglected in an alley next to E.A.Poe; he flourishes, the notes tell us, on the audio-visual side of the education business. It's clear to me, however, that had he institutional support, electronic music would be the richer for Dockstader's having stuck to his marvelous-sounding guns. I say so not from sentiment or sense of nostalgia. Luna Park, named after the Coney Island amusement park that burned in the early 40s, with its maniac-cackle motifs, is the disc's most instantly riveting work. The departing (and non-concrete) Four Telemetry Tapes, however, strike me as marvels of sophistication, subtlety, and energy. They're certainly among the small handful of electronic pieces I'd single out as masterworks.
And this, as I say, is where Dockstader had climbed when the chance to make music vanished with the job. Ah well. What we have I recommend heartily.