This is what one of my former professors and generally amazing person Barry Wellman called me after I went on shouting MASTER MAGDA MASTER MAGDA from rooftops of the rain-soaked Toronto yesterday. It’s a much more elegant title. Would go really well with my Isabel Marant tweed jacket. Ha! Yesterday, Wednesday August 24, I managed to pull through and defend my thesis project. Then Sara and I went to eat Japanese at Japango. Go there! While walking in Kensington a bird pooped on my head – I didn’t even notice until Sara started squirming. That’s never happened to me before. What a sign! Then in the middle of the thunderstorm Toby came to pick up to take me out to Pizza Libretto right before close and we nearly died in the lighting crashes! Today was lunch with the bff Danielle at Amaya. I’m eating the world! And then this antique shop on Bayview had this free poster amongst their treasures. Whirlwind! What will happen tonight I wonder?
Here is me all magdalena dramatica after I realized receiving the title is nice and all but there’s so much to do on the documentary still.
the cool free poster / will go well with my MoMA one.
Bérangère Maximin is a French electro-acoustic composer. She is a student of Denis Dufour’s (a member of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM)). She is one of the women featured in my upcoming documentary, microfemininewarfare. Please buy her albumTant Que Les heures Passent (As Long As The Hours Go By). It was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label in 2008. I discovered her while staying at my friend’s house in Paris last year while working on the project’s proposal (serendipity yo!) while he was on the typical gone-south, Parisian vacation with his wife and daughters. I think music really defines a person (many people consider this childish of me) and I went through his music collection and this album caught my eye. I liked the name of it, and put it on to listen on his stereo system not too loud because it was a small residential building in Saint-Cloud.
I like when an artist can sweep me up into their world, and she was able to immediately. It is a strange vibration of musique concrete and an aesthetic of a woman filled with darkness. I can’t really say – I don’t appreciate the ‘music critic’ language so I will stop, but maybe you can be surprised by her melodic arrangements too!
It was obvious I would ask her to participate in my project because I was so fascinated by the narrative in her music. Bérangère and I spoke a lot about the music creation process and how difficult and painful it is, but I will leave that for later. One thing that surprised me was her attitude of wishing to bring together groups of electronic and electro-acoustic and jazz musicians together; something she is having difficulty with in Paris, because some people part of these groups are vocally exclusive and dogmatic. It is not surprising after meeting her, and that most of the women in my documentary discussed their desire to merge communities, and to create communities and collaborations of support networks that aren’t based on stylistic aesthetics. I hear many people mention this, but I don’t think as many people go through with it. Music politics; they are overbearing sometimes! OK, I will leave you with some out-takes from the photo shoot. Bérangère was quite generous, and I hope I served her well. The documentary, photos and interviews will be available sometime this year. They have to be.
The sound resources available to electronic music are unlimited and can be constructed from scratch. One of the key differences between electronic music and music composed for traditional instruments is that its sonic vistas are limitless and undefined. The composer not only creates the music, but composes the very sounds themselves. Herbert Eimert (1897–1972), one of the founders of the Studio für Elektronische Musik in Cologne, expressed the innate potential of electronic music this way:
The composer, in view of the fact that he is no longer operating within a strictly ordained tonal system, finds himself confronting a completely new situation. He sees himself commanding a realm of sound in which the musical material appears for the first time as a malleable continuum of every known and unknown, every conceivable and possible sound. This demands a way of thinking in new dimensions, a kind of mental adjustment to the thinking proper to the materials of electronic sound.
Any imaginable sound is fair game. The composer can invent sounds that do not exist in nature or radically transform natural sounds into new instruments. For Thema-Omaggio a Joyce (1958), Luciano Berio (b. 1925) used tape manipulation to transform the spoken voice into a myriad of sound patterns eerily laced with the tonalities of human communication. In the piece Luna (from Digital Moonscapes, 1984), Wendy Carlos modeled a digital instrument whose voice could be modified in real time as it played a theme, metamorphosing from the sound of a violin to a clarinet to a trumpet and ending with a cello sound. This sound wasn’t possible in the world outside of the computer, but became possible with her library of “real-world orchestral replicas” that the GDS and Synergy synthesizers allowed. For Beauty in the Beast (1986), she took this experimentation a step further by “designing instrumental timbres that can’t exist at all, extrapolated from the ones that do exist.”
Electronic music expands our perception of tonality. The accepted palette of musical sounds was extended in two directions. On one hand, the invention of new pitch systems became easier with electronic musical instruments. Microtonal music is more easily engineered by a composer who can subdivide an octave using software and a digital music keyboard than by a piano builder. On the other hand, electronic music stretched the concept of pitch in the opposite direction, toward less and less tonality and into the realm of noise. All sounds became equal, just another increment on the electromagnetic spectrum. Varèse sensed this early on and introduced controlled instances of noise in his instrumental and electronic music. Cage accepted the value of all sounds without question and let them be themselves:
Noises are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve expressed as seven plus five), nor with consonance and dissonance, but rather with Edgard Varèse (1885–1965) who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music. But it is clear that ways must be discovered that allow noises and tones to be just noises and tones, not exponents subservient to Varèse’ s imagination.
Electronic music only exists in a state of actualization [oh mon dieu! yes yes yes! theory boner alert!]. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) wrote that “it is necessary to distinguish two moments, or rather two states of music: potential music and actual music…. It exists as a score, unrealized, and as a performance.” You will rarely find an electronic work that can be accurately transcribed and reproduced from sheet music. It does not exist as “potential music” except in the form of notes, instructions, and ideas made by the composer. Conventional musical notation is not practical for electronic music. You cannot study it as you would a piece of scored music. Experiencing electronic music is, by its nature, a part of its actualization. The term “realization” was aptly adopted by electronic music pioneers to describe the act of assembling a finished work. Even those works that are transcriptions of conventionally composed chromatic music cannot be fully described on paper, because the elements of electronic instrumentation, sound processing, and performance defy standardization. A work of electronic music is not real, does not exist, until a performance is realized, or played in real time.
Electronic music has a special relationship with the temporal nature of music. “Music presupposes before all else a certain organization in time, a chronomony.” The plastic nature of electronic music allows the composer to record all of the values associated with a sound (e.g., pitch, timbre, envelope) in a form that can be shifted and reorganized in time. The ability to modify the time or duration of a sound is one of its most fundamental characteristics. Traditional instrumental music, once recorded, benefits from a similar control over the manipulation of a real-time performance. The equivalency between space and time that Cage attributed to the coming of magnetic tape recording—and which can be extended to any form of analog or digital sound recording or even MIDI control signals—has the liberating effect of allowing the composer to place a sound at any point in time at any tempo.
In electronic music, sound itself becomes a theme of composition. The ability to get inside the physics of a sound and directly manipulate its characteristics provides an entirely new resource for composing music. The unifying physics behind all sounds—pitched and unpitched alike—allow a composer to treat all sounds as being materially equal.
Electronic music does not breathe: it is not affected by the limitations of human performance. As Robert Ashley learned about electronic music early on, “It can go on as long as the electricity comes out of the wall.” The arc and structure of the music is tolerant of extremes in the duration and flow of sounds. The ability to sustain or repeat sounds for long periods of time—much longer than would be practical for live instrumentalists—is a natural resource of electronic music. In addition to its sustainability, electronic music can play rhythms too complex and rapid for any person to perform. It can play with more than two hands at the same time. The composer is freed of the physical limitations of human performance and can construct new sounds and performances of an intricacy that can only exist as a product of the machine.
Electronic music springs from the imagination. The essence of electronic music is its disassociation with the natural world. Hearing is a“distance” sense, as opposed to the “proximal” senses of touch and taste. Listening engages the intellect and imagination to interpret what is heard, providing “only indirect knowledge of what matters—requiring interpretations from knowledge and assumptions, so you can read meaning into the object world.” Having little basis in the object world, electronic music becomes the pulse of an intimate and personal reality for the listener. Its source is mysterious. “It is thought, imagined and engraved in memory. It’s a music of memory.” In these ways, the human being becomes the living modulator of the machine product, the circuitry dissolves into the spirit of humanness that envelops it.
Mileece is a composer, SuperCollider sonic artist and a genius, like, a total holy-fuck-how-?!-genius. I am honoured and grateful to have been able to hang out with her for a couple of days in at her home in West Hollywood before she left for the south of France to start a renewable sustainable sonic commune with her husband Nate (who is starting his PhD in England in some fancy fuel cell research stream, which he plans to do on a boat off the coast). She’s one of the women in my documentary project, microfemininewarfare. You should buy her whole album, released on Lo Recordings, here.
(photo taken from her Tumblr, uncredited)
ps. I won a little bit of money to fund the travel and accommodations for this project. I am very happy that someone on the York University committee thought my work is important and meaningful enough because I know MA-student based experimental, feminist, emerging technology documentaries about women electronic music composers that reside outside of Canada isn’t exactly the highest on their funding radar.
I came back from shooting (for my documentary) in LA and Del Mar, California, a few days ago. There’s a spirit on the West Coast I thought I would hate and putting the East Coast screwface on to protect myself dissipated at every turn. Everyone is so unpretentiously chatty and such a storyteller you can’t help but to listen and exchange ideas – at Jimbo’s, at the train station, or on the plane – unlike Toronto. I’m not suggesting it’s somehow superior, because as a staunch loner, it did overwhelm me, but as a novelty, I welcomed it with a smile (!)
California moved something inside me, I’m not sure what yet, but something was planted. It’s like I had a sneak peak at joy.
These are some photos I took in Del Mar along the Pacific Ocean. On the way from the train station in Solana Beach, Christine surprised me by driving very slowly down the road to show me the street sign that donned my name.
Some of my things are still unpacked from the last trip, making it easier to just pack it all back. That’s what always happens. I never like to unpack the life I have abroad. Tonight I’m going to London for a week, then to Bangface Weekender then on a train to Paris for another week. I haven’t been to London in a while, last year I just stayed in Brighton the whole time. I miss it. It’s so loud and pushy, but totally different than Paris. It feels like the history of drum n bass is all around me. Maybe I’ll get to go to the south of France too. It all depends on my interview subjects and if plans change because I only have two weeks! I’m going to shoot my documentary. I hope I have enough time, I hope I make it happen for them. I want to give all of my love and passion to the women who have agreed to be part of it. I’ve been waiting years to do this. Plus, I’m spending all my student loan money on this – thousands of dollars.
I’m exhausted already and have had a few breakdowns. I can only image what will happen there. Must breathe. At least I got a new lease on life with my new hair! No more red! People are happy and I look like a grad-school nerd more than ever before. Last night I was telling my brother I am finally getting braces this summer, his response: “You are such a goofball Magda.”
So, there’s a bunch of electronic music documentaries out there, anything from the beautiful and generous Delian Mode about Delia Derbyshire or the rough faster-than-light-speed Modulations…. I’m curious what are some themes you wish would be discussed in electronic music documentaries that aren’t? (I have a few ideas but I’d love to see if any missing themes come out). What are some things. visuals, information, etc. that would captivate YOU about an artist and their work? Because you are (hopefully) my target audience!
If you could answer that would be really helpful, as I am in the final stages of piecing together my questions/themes for the documentary I’m shooting featuring women composers and would love your sincere input.
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I sometimes post music links. If you want yours taken down let me know. & for the rest of you, if you don't buy music & just d/l links, you should feel like an asshole.
the cool free poster / will go well with my MoMA one.
