Seeing Sounds

It may be a long while before listeners accept electronic music with any comfort, at least as part of the standard concert-hall experience. The chief complaint is that there is nothing musical about the production of those unique and sometimes eerie timbres and rhythms that the avant-garde composers draw from oscillators and magnetic tape. Now, however, there is enough evidence to suggest that the electronic composers have at last found the ideal setting for their work. They have formed a partnership with the abstract visual arts, to the point where their sounds at last make musical sense.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at Expo 67, which is plugged almost everywhere into an array of far-out, ear-frazzling electronic music. Rather than standing on its own, it functions as an element in a mind-blowing fantasy of give-and-take with visual phenomena; the eerie amplified sounds absorb logic from their surroundings, lend drama to the enveloping space, and force the observer to fuse eye and ear into one receptive organ.

Music on the Move. At the Quebec pavilion, for example, a series of almost blank abstractions--freestanding blocks representing water, forests, industry--is bathed in an electronic score, by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Staff Composer Gilles Tremblay, in which lab-produced whir, twitter and roar complement the visual suggestions. High overhead the individual sound tracks collide and coalesce into a contrapuntal aural landscape.

At the British pavilion, flickering images of medieval pomp and ceremony are flashed on rough stone walls, as a multichannel instrument-plus-electronic score by Guy Wolfenden, equally blurred at first, moves on from muttered chaos to an idealized, magisterial fanfare. France has at its axis an abstract structure of curved interlocking planes and flashing lights, designed by Sculptor-Composer Yannis Xenakis, who also provided a flickering musical score that mirrors the visual shapes.

Actually, much of this medium-mixing has been going on for several years, but Expo has presented these experiments to their first mass audience. According to Professor Istvan Anhalt, director of the electronic studio at Montreal's McGill University, where some of Expo's music was created, Expo's relationship to electronic music is comparable to the partnership between medieval cathedrals and the music that was created for them. The novelty today, says Anhalt, is that the audience can walk around and "be enveloped by the sound."

Music on the Wall. What works well for the buildings works even better in Expo's experimental films. In the best of them, composer and film maker have worked out a new approach in which the musical scheme is elevated beyond its usual background function.

To create Canadian Chemical Industry's Kaleidoscope, Film Maker Morley Markson and Composer Murray Schafer worked together from the beginning. "In some places the film was done first," says Schafer, "and in other places the sound track." The result is a spectacle in which abstract images on a screen, mirrored in four sides to create an endless pattern, are mirrored again in a complex panorama of synthesized sound; the musical impulses seem to take on a visual shape, and abstract color patterns become a kind of lyrical outpouring. Says Schafer, who teaches far-out musical techniques at British Columbia's new Simon Fraser University: "All the arts are beginning to invade each other's territories. You get kinetic sculpture, sculpture in time, and musical compositions in which the pictorial aspect is so beautiful you could almost hang it in an art gallery."

Unsentimental Alp. Sometimes electronic music also works in more representational films. Switzerland's handsome travelogue derives much of its wit and vitality from the score by Rolf Liebermann, whose only other film score, produced in Basel 20 years ago, was an orchestral ode to DDT. For the new score, Liebermann combined lab-made sounds with conventional percussion, shaping a sound portrait of his country that seems to abstract the essence of Alp, the distillation of cow. "I wanted to get away from the kitsch postcard. I used electronic devices to de-sentimentalize the theme."

Not all of Expo's music is out of the lab, but even the good old symphonic sound connects successfully with the image. In Czechoslovakia's multiscreen paean to technology, Composer Jiri Sust's light and airy fantasy of woodwind and percussion twines around images and even makes a steel mill appear graceful. For the U.S. pavilion's delightful fantasy on children's games, Mark Bucci contrived a perky tone poem on the youthful vision.

But it is the electronic composer whose place has been emphatically justified in the wealth of Expo's experimentation. Whether or not his music has any place in the concert hall, Expo has shown it to be an integral part of contemporary artistic language.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.