Thus spake Bell Labs scientist John Pierce and “father of computer music” Max Mathews after a piano concert, feeling rather lofty and ambitious — not to mention disdainful of the centuries-old Western Art Music tradition (“INART 55 IRCAM”). But these quirky scientists were on a mission to make computers extend and exceed human musical capabilities.
Max Mathews, from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Mathews260.jpg/220px-Mathews260.jpg
The pioneering research on sound, music, and computers in the 20th century embodied the spirit of bringing “traditional” human and acoustic into conversation with the limitless capabilities of computers. Composers and musicians collaborated with technical experts at institutions such as IRCAM in France. One such composer, Jonathan Harvey, composed “Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco,” a haunting tour de force that melds the sounds of a boy’s voice and the bells at Winchester Cathedral (“Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey”). Despite IRCAM’s reputation as “an esoteric research programme,” the piece was hailed as an effort of IRCAM that actually yielded “music capable of appealing to a wider audience” (Downes 22). And to bring things full circle, the composition was coded in MUSIC V, an innovation of the notorious aforementioned Max Mathews (1926-), as well as CHANT, an invention of IRCAM.
IRCAM: Institute for Musical and Acoustic Research and Coordination
IRCAM, from https://www.ircam.fr/static/src/assets/img/ircam_card_facebook.jpg
In 1970, French president Georges Pompidou invited eminent French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez to head IRCAM, a brand new institute for musical research and creation in three subterranean floors of the Centre Pompidou in Paris (“WWW Ircam: History”). Deep down in the steel building, technicians, designers, and composers labor at their computers in acoustic caves in gray corridors (NPR.org).
Since its opening in 1977, ICRAM has hosted composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley have worked there (NPR.org) and resident groups such as Ensemble Intercontemporain (Ensemble intercontemporain).
Boulez, long interested in electronic music, worked at IRCAM to produce a piece that featured real-time interaction between musicians and computers resulting in a coherent and unified sound. His piece “Répons” (1981), a breakthrough in real-time digital audio processing, fed the sounds produced by six soloists spaced around the concert hall into a computer that recombined them with the sound of the group of 21 musicians on stage. It used IRCAM physicist Giuseppe Di Guigno’s 4X synthesizer, “abstracted the idea of oscillators and interconnection to objects and algorithms that could be linked” and was used as a universal machine for signal processing.
The machine room (1989), from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/IRCAM_machine_room_in_1989.jpg/220px-IRCAM_machine_room_in_1989.jpg
IRCAM researchers created several software programs, including Modalys, for synthesis via physical modeling; Max, for real-time processing of interactions between computer and performer; Spatializater, used for concert hall acoustics, and OpenMusic, a visual programming software program significant in computer-assisted composition (“WWW Ircam: History”); and CHANT, which simulated the vocal tract to synthesize the human voice, based on the formant frequencies of vocalists and extremely intensive computations (“INART 55 IRCAM”).
IRCAM is still going strong. IRCAM sound engineer Olivier Warusfel lists two projects pursued in the 2010’s: augmented instruments that transform the sound of live human playing in real time, and wave field synthesis (WFS), which uses carefully placed loudspeakers to remedy the problem of too-quiet “dead spots” in concert halls (NPR.org).
Jonathan Harvey: the man
Jonathan Harvey, the man himself. From BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/b26315ce71a298d90bf316d9e0538045ff485b2c.jpg
Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was a frequent IRCAM collaborator. He largely shared Boulez’s belief that musical culture had become a conservative “museum” culture in desperate need of development beyond the instruments of the late nineteenth century. Harvey, an Englishman, contrasted the tepid pursuit of electroacoustic music in the UK with the “overdue liberation” he found in Boulez’s government-sanctioned institution (Downes 21).
Perhaps the appeal of Harvey’s computer music lay in his spiritual and humanistic inclinations. He grew up a chorister at St. Michael’s College, Tenbury, where he “came to love the Anglican liturgy and its musical tradition,” and he later found through his reading and meditation on Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts that “ancient prayers and visions [were] completely consonant with electric sound.” He drew inspiration from Britten, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Stockhausen, and spent an academic year at Princeton developing a notion of harmony and modality that evoked unique and non-Western atmospheres. His revelation as a composer came from working at IRCAM and delving into spectral music and computer techniques (Griffiths).
The winchester cathedral bells, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/hilofoz/6281233835/lightbox/
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco: boys ‘n’ bells
Harvey’s masterwork, “Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco” (1980), features eight sections based on the eight lowest partials in the inharmonic series of the Winchester Cathedral Bells, which are developed and intermingled with the voice of Harvey’s son, a chorister at the cathedral. Chords were comprised of the thirty-three partials of the bells. Although the fundamental was C, the note F played prominently in the bells’ inharmonic series, creating an atypical and otherworldly sonority. Between sections, eerie glissandi transition one area of the spectrum to the next (Manning 200).
On this huge black bell is inscribed in beautiful lettering the following text: HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO (I count the feeling hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer). The bell counts time (each section has a differently pitched bell stroke at its beginning): it is itself a ‘dead’ sound for all its richess of sonority: the boy represents the living element. The bell surrounds the audience; they are, as it were, inside it: the boy ‘flies’ around like a free spirit. (“Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey”)
Cover artwork of Schiller’s “Song of the Bell,” from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Liezen_Prachteinband_Schillers_Glocke_01.jpg/338px-Liezen_Prachteinband_Schillers_Glocke_01.jpg
Aiming to enhance the effect of the deadness of the bells and the sprightliness of the boy, Harvey designed the work for an “ideal cube of eight channels” where the listener is immersed within the sound of the bell as the boy’s voice flies around (Emmerson 157-8). At IRCAM, Harvey’s recordings of the bells and of his son were manipulated and “cross-bred with synthetic manipulations of the same sounds.” This digital manipulation allowed for a shift between the bell spectrum and the boy’s voice, and for a harmonic structure based entirely on the bells’ inharmonic series (“Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey”). This approach aligned with Harvey’s aesthetic desire to create an ambiguous musical nether zone: one fitting neither in live-player nor loudspeaker music, but merging the two (Downes 23).
Jonathan Harvey’s analysis of the bell spectra, from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Jonathan_Harvey_-_Winchester_Cathedral_bell_spectrum.png
I will close with Harvey’s inspiring reflection on the deeply humanistic potential of computer music. In short, the power of computer music is that it is both limited and enabled by the imaginations of us humans:
In entering the rather intimidating world of the machine I was determined not to produce a dehumanised work if I could help it, and so kept fairly close to the world of the original sounds. The territory that the new computer technology opens up is unprecedentedly vast: one is humbly aware that it will only be conquered by penetration of the human spirit, however beguiling the exhibits of technical wizardry; and that penetration will neither be rapid or easy. (“Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey”)
Bibliography
Downes, Michael. Jonathan Harvey: Song Offerings and White as Jasmine. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009.
