Richard Lainhart: CEMS, Theremin, and Ondes Martenot Lecture, BEAF 2011

YouTube Uploaded by matrixsynth on Jun 1, 2011

First three parts of Richard Lainhart's lecture at the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival on Friday, May 6, 2011, 2PM PST. These cover the CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio - see the CEMS label below for more), theremin, and ondes Martenot. The audio on these are a little on the low side so remember to turn your speakers back down after listening. You can find a full transcript for each part below in case you can't quite make things out. You can catch Richard Lainhart's lecture on the Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum, followed by a performance, in this previous post.

Transcripts for the above three videos:

RICHARD LAINHART: CEMS, THEREMIN, AND ONDES MARTENOT LECTURE, BEAF PART 1

Speaker: Richard Lainhart
Lecture Date: May 6, 2011
Lecture Time: 2:00 p.m. PST
Location: Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival 2011 (BEAF)
Length: Digital AVI recording; 4 minutes 39 seconds

[Beginning of recorded material]

Richard Lainhart: That system's called the CEMS, the "Coordinated Electronic Music System" [Studio], and at the time, not only was it a large system, but you'll also notice this doesn't have any keyboards. This was not a keyboard system. It was a system that was designed for multiple levels of control. And that's something that we'll be talking about here as well.

But essentially the, that stuff that's on the near, in the near cabinet there, is, is actually a digital clocking system, a very early digital clocking system. One of the, one of the, perhaps, might have been the first, that was integrated into an analog system that would allow you to work with up to eight different sets of digital signal trains, clocking trains, that would then control those eight sequencers that are part of the system there. And so you could have those sequencers all controlled together, so that they can be in unison, or simultaneously, or independently, or any combination of that on all these different time pieces.

So the, the reason that this thing doesn't have any keyboards, I mean this, of course, was at a time when, when electronic music was, was basically avant-garde music and keyboards were kind of disdained. The idea of doing tonality stuff on electronic music was really, was frowned on I'll say. But, the other thing is that the, Joel's, Joel's -- isn't Chadabe's the same thing -- Joel's idea was that a keyboard, particularly those keyboards which were, those keyboards at the time, which were essentially just triggers, essentially, you get a pitch and a trigger on them, without any kind of expression, they didn't have velocity or anything like that, is a very low level of control. And Joel was much more interested in multiple levels of control. When you have a keyboard like that, and you hit the key, and those were of course, also monophonic keyboards, and they would do one thing when you hit the key, you were exerting a very low level of control. You were directly controlling the pitch and the, well the fact that the note turned on and off, the actual shaping of the note is like an envelope generator, but the initiation of the note and the pitch of the note was what you were controlling. You didn't really have any direct control over timbre or amplitude or any of that stuff. All of that had to happen somewhere else.

So you were working at a very level, a low level of control, and a, and a varies kind of non-powerful level of control. It's, it's, if you're a keyboard virtuoso and you want to play a lot of fast lines that's great, but if you're trying to do something more complex with more density, the, you really need higher levels of control. You need a system in which some of that control is, is taken care of somewhere else, where the machine itself does some of that control, and you control control.

And that's what he meant by 'higher levels of control,' where you would, and you would set up systems or processes, and a lot of times we would set up things in this system that were essentially self playing, that would generate their own sounds, and then we would interact with that system to change the way that the system was controlling itself. But you were able to then do a much higher level of control. You weren't necessarily intimately connected with the individual note, the individual pitch, but you were able to control many different levels of, of activity in the system itself, including multiple lines, multiple voices, multiple different types of timbre control, both of wave shaping, of wave control, but of also opening and closing filters and so forth. So with a system like this, you were able to work at a higher level than the individual note, and that's really what, that's really what this was designed to do.

And this of course, was pre-desktop computers, I mean this was still in the mainframe era, so there really weren't, there was experimentation being done, but there really were no commercially available products that would give you any kind of computer control. Now of course where, where laptops, I mean, basically my iPad does more than that mainframe did, but (laughter) to bring the whole school back in 1970, you have, you have the ability to do, to do many, many different levels of control, the very high levels and very low levels can simultaneously by letting the computer mediate some of that control. And of course we're all familiar with that now, of course you can do a complete performance piece with just a laptop and turning it on essentially and letting it run, or interacting with it in various ways that you're familiar with.

So the idea being here that this machine would allow for multiple levels of control. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to do with this system, is reproduce some of that idea, that concept of multiple levels of control.

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RICHARD LAINHART: CEMS, THEREMIN, AND ONDES MARTENOT LECTURE, BEAF PART 2

Speaker: Richard Lainhart
Lecture Date: May 6, 2011
Lecture Time: 2:00 p.m. PST
Location: Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival 2011 (BEAF)
Length: Digital AVI recording; 9 minutes 58 seconds

[Beginning of recorded material]

Richard Lainhart: That system was really what I learned on, and that idea of the multiple levels of control was, was a significant one. That influenced a lot of my later, my later work. However, the, again this was really, you could perform with this in the studio, but you couldn't take this thing anywhere, I mean this was like, each of those cabinets was like seven feet tall, so this was not something that was really moveable, it never left the studio really.

So, the, my own interests, I started out playing electric bass in rock bands when I was in high school, and, I, I always like enjoyed the idea of performance and of particularly of improvisation. You know I played in, the kind of music that I was interested in, which was like prog rock and stuff like that, was always, there was a lot of improvisation going on. And the fact that, that music could have a, a spontaneity like that, was something that I, I always was very attracted to. I always liked the idea of being able to perform.

And very early on, I, I and my other student colleagues tried, tried our best to make, you know do electronic music performances. We used long tape loop systems, we would take, you know, modules out of the thing and put them in a portable cabinet and try to work with them that way. And, and try to be able to do things that were live performance oriented, not only so that there would be an improvisatory aspect, so that there would be, the music would change from performance to performance, but also so that there could be interaction with the audience. And when that works, which of course often times it doesn't, but when it does work it's a really beautiful thing. It's, in my opinion it's really the highest form of music making when you can spontaneously generate music that, that reaches your audience and do so in, in a, in a completely, a completely free way. I think that that's really a special, a special music situation. But it, it's not, well you know it's hard to do conservatively. And certainly with those systems, like I said, it's not, it's not really viable.

The, the other thing about a system like this is that there's really, you know back, actually before, before moving on, you know the performance, when I was doing this, when I was working with this system, essentially we were making tape pieces, which is stuff that was multi-tracked and recorded to tape. And a concert would be playing back the tape -- a couple speakers on stage and a guy in the pit, a person who'd hit the 'play' button and you'd sort of listen to the tape and that was okay certainly, but it was not, you know it wasn't a really dynamic musical performance situation. So dress it up as you might, with light shows and slides and lots of speakers and lots of other stuff, you were still playing a tape. And it was always the same, other than whatever the variations of the space might be, you know, but those were essentially minor variations.

So in order to have a, my own feeling at least, is that in order to have a, a performance system you need something that allows you to do these multiple levels of control so you're not just concerned with simply getting the notes out, but also you can, you can control many different things at once, but also to have a way to be able to expressively shape those sounds that you're making. And, and that to me really is kind of the most important aspect of my own practice of electronic music is, is trying to make expressive performances. Which is really the reason that I use this instrument.

So the first, the first electronic music instruments were actually extremely expressive instruments in their way. The very first one, as we mentioned, was the theremin, and that's Clara Rockmore, who's probably the greatest theremin virtuoso ever, and the person who developed the fingering system that people are likely to be using and so forth. And the, that's like a fiendishly difficult instrument to play well. It's really easy to play a theremin badly and it's really hard to play it well. (laughter) And, and badly in the sense of not in tune. It's really easy, if you're trying to do tuned stuff, it's very, very hard. And the people who can play the theremin in tune, you can, there's like three of them basically, you know. (laughter) And so, but the other thing is that it, when it is played well it's an extremely expressive instrument because you have direct manual control over both the pitch and the amplitude.

Now for those of you who don't know what the theremin is, you have a pitch antenna and you have an amplitude antenna and you directly control both of those factors by moving your hand in space nearer or in closer to the antennas. So as you're playing you have direct control, direct manual control in space of the amplitude and volume of what you're playing, but also of the pitch. And you can do glissandos, you can do vibrato, you can do very expressive vibrato with the theremin. So, as such, it, it is a very expressive instrument and, and it's encouraging, or I'm, I'm gratified that the first real electronic music instrument was something that was dedicated to expression. Something that was intended to try to get at least some of the expression of the human voice, which is really kind of the most expressive instrument there is really. And by expression I don't mean emotion as such, I mean the ability to, to intimately and, and directly control pitch, pitch and amplitude and timbre -- pitch, volume, and timbre -- and those are really the three components of any kind of musical sound. And if you have the ability to control those in an expressive way, I think you really have, you really have the, the essence of what music making is about is that kind of expressive control. So the theremin itself, "timbrely" it's a little bit limited certainly, but it's, it's really a great start in terms of the ability to control pitch and amplitude in an expressive way.

Another similar instrument, actually the first that was very similar, was the ondes Martenot, invented by Maurice Martenot. And this actually was about, this version which was his very first prototype was about 1920 so it's very close to the theremin. And you may be able to see that what he's doing there, he has a string that is attached to that box there on the right, it's in front of the pianist, and he's pulling that string back and forth. The string is kind of on a pulley. And his pitch control is that he's moving this string back and forth. And he's standing at a distance from the thing as you see, and in his left hand he has a, a, basically is kind of a button, a large button that controls the amplitude. So he's able to control the amplitude very expressively, again it's a very sensitive button, and doesn't just switch on and off, but it controls all levels of amplitude. And then he is able to, I haven't heard a recording of this, but I suspect that it was probably pretty tough to play that thing in tune. Here he is kind of moving this string and, you know, kind of pulling on this string, so that is a start at least.

Now the, the next development of that, and the thing that, that is, became what we know as the ondes Martenot, is this instrument here. And that was a keyboard, as you see this, this again is a monophonic instrument -- polyphonic electronic music, music instruments didn't come until much later really -- but, but this is a monophonic instrument that has both a keyboard and a continuous pitch control. Underneath that keyboard that you see here, there's a, there's a string, essentially the string that is a similar string that he was using originally, that moves along a pulley and there's a ring on that string that controls the pitch. You have underneath that keyboard, there's little knots or little, or little notches on that keyboard underneath the actual black and white keyboard that indicate the pitch positions. And so there was a way to be able to actually play it pretty much in tune and, but still be able to directly control the pitch so you could get a very expressive vibrato. And then if you needed to play fast passages, you could just switch to the upper keyboard and that would allow you to play fast passages. It was a kind of reduced-size keyboard, the keys were smaller than normal. But also had the ability to do a vibrato. You could generate a vibrato by directly sort of wiggling the keyboard, it could move a little bit. So you could play a note and then wiggle the keyboard and be able to get a pitch change. And if you needed to get a wider pitch change, a glissando or if you wanted to try to get something that was more violin-like or voice-like, you could switch to the, to the string underneath, the string and ring thing, and do it that way.

So he had, he developed a, a method to generate very expressive amplitude and pitch control and took it another step further, by the use of these things here that he called diffusers, which are those different speakers there. So the, the, unlike the theremin which had basically kind of one tone, one timbre, not a particularly expressive tone, sort of a modified square wave essentially. This would also produce an electronic tone, but you could route that tone through those different speakers, the diffusers, and those were actually acoustic, acoustic audio processors. Here's a little bit closer shot of that. The one on the right is a straight speaker, the one in the middle, called a 'fan' has strings that are tuned, stretched across the speaker that would resonate. So it was a kind of a, sort of something similar to playing into a piano, essentially to get that kind of piano, that sort of tuned reverb sound, where individual pitches would resonate as they were played through there. It was actually a very cool sound. And the one on the left is a, a cymbal in front of this, this is a cymbal suspended in front of that speaker, so you get that kind of metallic reverberation sound as well. And then there was in fact a fourth one that's not shown here that had springs stretched across the speaker as well. That actually was kind of a spring reverb sort of sound. So these would not only

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RICHARD LAINHART: CEMS, THEREMIN, AND ONDES MARTENOT LECTURE, BEAF PART 3

Speaker: Richard Lainhart
Lecture Date: May 6, 2011
Lecture Time: 2:00 p.m. PST
Location: Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival 2011 (BEAF)
Length: Digital AVI recording; 1 minute 51 seconds

[Abrupt beginning of recorded material]

Richard Lainhart: ...reverberating them into these reverberators, but also would rapidly change the timbre, especially the ones that were, like the, the cymbal diffuser there, would give you that really kind of metallic sort of sound.

And if you listen to some ondes Martenot recordings, especially by Olivier Messiaen, who was really one of the, one of the great composers for the instrument, he really exploits that sound. And is able to get quite a wide range of timbre. 'Cause you could mix these things as well, you could mix between the original straight tone through that speaker and mix into those other things. So you had, and this is all acoustic, too, I mean these are all like I said, these are acoustic resonators, so you had the ability to, in the space, kind of control not only the, the timbre processing, but you could do some spatial processing as well, because these things were physically separated into space. And by mixing between them, you could actually move the things around a bit. So, and all that was controlled by the left hand in this panel that's on the left hand side. So the, this to my mind was really the first real expressive electronic music instrument. It was still monophonic, you know, it was still meant to be a lead instrument as such, although Messiaen was one of the very first to use, in fact he may have been the first to use an ensemble of ondes Martenot, that he wrote some pieces for up to six of these, and, and so, in fact I'm going to play something, play something that he wrote a little bit later on. That, got around that obviously, he had to have an ensemble of course, but essentially he was able to, to have a polyphonic electronic music instrument, the very first one, or a polyphonic electronic music ensemble as it would have been. So, okay, so that's it for the show and tell part.

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