Barry Schrader, who's upcoming farewell performance is set for Saturday, September 24, will be sharing a selection of his works on KXLU's Trilogy program this coming Wednesday, September 16. Two electronic works featuring the Buchla 200 Electric Music Box will be featured.
Details follow:
Time: Wednesday, September 16 at 9:00 PM PDT (Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 4:00 AM UTC (GMT))
For this show, I’ve selected a variety of works of mine spanning a 45-year period, most of which are not commercially available. The first will be a student work from 1968 for soprano and piano, Signature for Tempo, based on the poem cycle of the same name by Archibald MacLeish, with Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh, soprano, and the late Leonid Hambro on piano.
"Next will be two electronic works composed on the Buchla 200 (Electric Music Box) system."
"The first of these analog works will be the complete Death of the Red Planet Suite, featuring music from the 1973 film and second will be Moon-Wings from Moon-Whales and other Moon-Songs (1982-1983) based on poems by Ted Hughes."
"The second movement, Jig, from Dance Suite for Harp and Computer (1987), composed for and performed by Susan Allen will follow. This is presented as a tribute to Susie, who passed this September 7th."
"Finally, I’ll present two more recent computer music works, Monkey’s Magic Dance - Jumping Buddha’s Palm from Monkey King (2005-2007) [see this post here on MATRIXSYNTH for some details on the initial release], and Chinese Kaleidoscopes, from The Barnum Museum (2009-2012) [see this post], based on the short story by Steven Millhauser."
Time: Wednesday, September 16 at 9:00 PM PDT (Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 4:00 AM UTC (GMT))
Barry Schrader, one of the founders of the early electronic music scene at CalArts School of Music is retiring after 45 years. Many of you will remember him from previous posts here on MATRIXSYNTH. Here he is with a Buchla 500 in CalArts' studio B-304, along with Morton Subotnick and John Payne. If you are in the area, you do not want to miss this event. This is a chance to see one of the founders of our scene perform live. For those not in the area, the concert will be available on the live ROD Webcast. I hope to have an extensive interview with Barry Schrader in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that as well.
"Active in the promotion of electro-acoustic music, Schrader is the founder and the first president of SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States). He has been involved with the inauguration and operation of several performance series such as SCREAM (Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music), the Currents concert series at Theatre Vanguard (the first ongoing series of electro-acoustic music concerts in the U.S.), and the CalArts Electro-Acoustic Music Marathon. He has written for several publications including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Grolier’s Encyclopedia, Contemporary Music Review, and Journal SEAMUS, and is the author of the book Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music."
"After what will have been 45 years on the faculty of the CalArts School of Music, I've decided to retire at the end of this academic year. Starting as a graduate student at CalArts in 1970, I was hired on the faculty by Mel Powell, then the Dean of the School of Music, in 1971. It’s been an incredible adventure to have experienced the evolution of the school from its beginnings at the temporary Burbank Villa Cabrini campus to its current incarnation as The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts. Along the way I’ve been fortunate to have had superb composers and performers as colleagues and friends, a host of talented students, and also to have met and worked with many brilliant people in various areas of the arts throughout the world.
To mark my retirement from CalArts, I’ve decided to present a farewell concert containing a variety of works from a forty-year period. This program will be held on Saturday, September 26, at 8:00 pm in CalArts’ Roy O. Disney Hall. Admission is free, and there will be a reception following the concert. I’ll also be giving away a limited number of my CDs to those that attend the event.
The concert will feature Mark Menzies on violin playing Fallen Sparrow, and Vicki Ray on piano performing Ravel. Also on the concert will be the original quadraphonic version of Trinity, along with short sections of Monkey King and The Barnum Museum. Adam Beckett’s groundbreaking 1973 film Heavy-Light will be shown, along with Michael Scroggins’ early computer video, 1921>1989.
For those that wish to hear and view the concert online, it will be available live on the live ROD Webcast."
"Originally broadcast on April 27, 2013, the London Resonance FM O.S.T. show with host Jonny Trunk is a fascinating discussion on the Barron's pioneering work in electronic music. This show is now available on SoundCloud. Featured guests on this program include myself and Peter McKerrow. This is a lively, entertaining, and informative discussion on the Barron's music, especially on the score for the film Forbidden Planet."
via Barry Schrader who has an interview on UNDAE Radio from Madrid. Embeds don't work for them, so click through below. Barry also received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement award from SEAMUS. Details below.
"From UNDAE Radio in Madrid comes this two-part broadcast on my music and compositional philosophy. Presented in Spanish and English, these programs are hosted by Antony Maubert, Hertz Volta, and Antonio Sánchez, and are a production of Campo de Interferencias, broadcast on Radio Circulo de Bellas Artes. Recorded live in the radio studio in Madrid, Part 1 was originally broadcast on March 10, 2014, and part 2 on March 17. Included in the broadcasts are several of my works. The podcasts for these shows can also be found here, as UNDÆ! Radio nº 46 and UNDÆ! Radio nº 47."
"I am very pleased to announce that I have been selected to receive the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from SEAMUS, The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. This award will be presented at the 2014 SEAMUS National Conference at Wesleyan University on Saturday, March 29. On the same evening, at the 8:00 concert in Crowell Hall, the final movement of The Barnum Museum (The Chamber of False Things) will be presented.
Speaking of The Barnum Museum, the CD has received several very positive reviews. Some of the more notable reviews available online can be found at Chain D.L.K., The Computer Music Journal, and Bop-N-Jazz."
"It gives me great pleasure - for the first time, ever and with the permission of the composers involved to upload the audio files from the live performance ANALOGLIVE, realized and recorded at the Redcat Theater - downtown Los Angeles November 16th, 2007.
In 2007, in what composer Barry Schrader termed an historic event, the annual SCREAM EAM festival hosted Analoglive!, an ensemble conglomerate of live analog electronic music with film composer Gary Chang, Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, Richard Devine, composer and instrument designer Chas Smith, Thighpaulsandra (of Coil and Spiritualized), Peter Grenader and video artist Paul Tzanetopoulos. Analoglive exists as the only sold out show of the SCREAM Festival's 36 year run.
This is a follow-up to this previous post. The release is now available.
"The Barnum Museum is now on sale in both CD and electronic download formats. The CD is available on the CD Baby and Innova sites, and will be on sale at all other major sites on September 25. MP3 files of the tracks are already on major download sites such as iTunes andon Amazon.
Sample tracks of all eight movements of The Barnum Museum are now available on the website.
This one-hour, eight-movement work is inspired by Steven Millhauser’s short story, The Barnum Museum, and is a journey into the imagination of the fantastic:
1. The Romanesque and Gothic Entranceways 2. The Hall of Mermaids 3. The Caged Griffin 4. The Subterranean Levels 5. The Flying Carpet 6. The Homunculus in a Jar 7. Chinese Kaleidoscopes 8. The Chamber of False Things: Porphyry Figurines from Atlantis Golden Cups from El Dorado Water from the Fountain of Youth."
"After four years of composing and mastering, The Barnum Museum CD is now in production and will be released on the Innova label on September 25, 2012. This one-hour, eight-movement work is inspired by Steven Millhauser’s short story, The Barnum Museum, and is a journey into the imagination of the fantastic. There’s a new page on my site for The Barnum Museum CD, with excerpts from the notes and music from the first two tracks. I’ll be putting up samples from the other movements throughout the next two months.
On Wednesday, July 25, at 8:00 pm BST (UTC/GMT +1 hour) (3:00 pm EDT; 12:00 noon PDT), London Resonance FM will present a special one-hour program of my music from the past 35 years. This program presents the rarely-heard Moon-Wings from Moon-Whales and other Moon Songs (1982-1983), composed on the Buchla 200 analog synthesizer, and also features the premiere presentation of a ten-minute sampler from my latest work, The Barnum Museum (2009-2012). I've recorded special commentary for this program, and you can listen to this show by streaming with the link and information given here.
My recent article on John Cage, Caged, is available online onGlasschord. While the piece largely deals with Cage's work from my own perspective, it contains some interesting facts about Cage's background and influences. Glasschord is an excellent and important online magazine that covers contemporary culture and art. The complete program notes for The Barnum Museum will be presented in the October issue of Glasschord, along with a special Barnum Museum Sampler mp3 file."
"After years of work by the Iota Center, Pamela Turner, and Mark Toscano and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the experimental animation work of Adam Beckett (1950-1979) has been remastered and released on a new DVD. Included in this DVD is Heavy-Light (1973), Adam's most abstract work. I was fortunate to be able score Heavy-Light, using one of CalArts' Buchla 200 systems, and it's great to see Adam's work restored and made available to the public. Also on this DVD is Evolution of the Red Star, with music by Carl Stone."
CEC eContact! has a post up on a 1973 article from American Cinematographer on the film Death of the Red Planet. The film was by Dale Allan Pelton and featured music from Barry Schrader on the Buchla 200. From Dale in the page pictured to the left:
"At last I heard Celebration, a work by Barry Schrader, a young teacher of electronic music at Cal-Arts. I immediately knew he was the one to score the film. He had a unique ability to generate startling high-energy music. Barry's final quadraphonic mix was produced in the space of two months after many all-night sessions with the Buchla 200 electronic music synthesizer. Using complex timbres and as many as twenty layered tracks, Barry achieved incredible sound densities (sound events per unit time). The Buchla sound is quite different from that of the Moog synthesizer which we have become famiiliar with in pop music. The Buchla does not use a keyboard. The various sound events and dialogues amongst its modules are initiated internally, and externally controlled by touch sensitive tabs."
"This is the second of two collaborations between Michael Scroggins and Barry Schrader in the late 1980s. For more information, and an explanation of the title, go to barryschrader.com ➔ video"
via Barry Schrader:
"This was a relatively early computer video work, the second of two that Michael Scroggins and I collaborated on in the late 1980s.
The music was done with a Yamaha TX816.
1921 > 1989 Notes
In beginning my first work in 3-D computer video, I found that the basic spatial parameters of the computer were described by the Cartesian coordinates of X, Y, & Z (width, height, and depth). The symmetry of this lattice structure reminded me of the right angle orientation of Neoplasticism, especially the three dimensional constructions of Theo van Doesburg. The correspondence between the spatial model of the computer and the elegant simplicity of the reductivist formal devices of De Stijl suggested an interesting discipline for my first experiments with computer animation.
In researching the theories of De Stijl in order that I might be true to their ideal, I discovered that in the search for universal and immutable principles of art, Van Doesburg's thinking was in constant revolution, and that each edition of the journal De Stijl brought forth new definitions. In 1926, Van Doesburg found it necessary to supersede Neoplasticism with Elementarism declaring:
"As a result of a new orientation relative to the earlier attempts at renewal in life and art (including Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism, etc.), Elementarism has assimilated all truly modern elements (often ignored through one-sidedness).
"Elementarism is to be regarded, therefore, as the synthesis of the new plastic consciousness of the age. The "isms" of the last decades have mostly perished, either because of their one-sided, dogmatic limitations, or because of compromise or chauvinistic tendencies. They no longer have any force or value for renewal."
As a result of a new orientation relative to the earlier attempts at renewal in life and art (including Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism, etc.), Elementarism has assimilated all truly modern elements (often ignored through one-sidedness).
In order to work within the limits of De Stijl, it became useful to fix a particular date as a reference, and so the piece became 1921 > 1989.
Michael Scroggins
__________________
When Michael Scoggins first came to me with quite detailed plans for his computer video work 1921 > 1989, I was struck by the overriding importance of structure in the piece. While it was obviously in three large sections, the intricacies of the details of each section were such that they not only displayed specific characteristics which gave each sections its unique character, they also seemed to exhibit in visual terms the musical qualities of exposition, development, and expanded recapitulation, something akin to the classical sonata form. In addition, the precision of the timing of the movements called for composing a score that would catch the specific “hits” of the action. At the same time, I realized that constantly “stinging” the images would quickly grow tedious; some sort of deflection from the obviously expected was occasionally necessary in this regard. Finally I saw that the limitations of images and colors, which were explored in great detail of variation, demanded a similar approach in the musical materials.
I decided to employ these observations in composing the music, and also to take the attitude of scoring to a preexistent choreography. I saw 1921 > 1989 as a dance, not of human dancers, but of plastic geometric entities, constantly reorganizing themselves in different ways. The music, then, was arrived at by considering the score as if I were composing music to a dance already created. The resulting work reflects these attitudes, moving from accompaniment to counterpoint and back again to a more synchronous style of scoring, thus reflecting the overall structure and plasticity of the piece and creating a unified whole.
Barry Schrader wrote in to let us know his site has been updated with new content and more will follow.
"Of particular interest to your readers will probably be the excerpt from the music for the film Death of the Red Planet (1973), composed on the Buchla 200, and found in the "Free Audio Tracks" section of the site. This music has rarely been heard in the last 38 years, and I've mixed down a portion from the original quad tracks. As far as I know, this was the first quadraphonic electronic music track composed for a commercial film. It toured nationally and internationally with the concert film by the group Yes, Yessongs. There's also a link to the full American Cinematographer article on the film in pdf form."
Update: added image of Death of The Red Planet & updated the title. This post originally went up at 10:13. See below for a few posts since then. Bottom pic is Barry and the 200 in 1973.
"This video is from a 1985 concert at CalArts that dealt with real-time video processing of live performances. This is the final movement of Schrader's "Moon-Whales and Other Moon Songs" (1982-83), based on poems by Ted Huges. Performers include Maurita Phillips-Thormburgh, soprano, and Michael Scroggins, live video processing. The electronic music was created on a Buchla 200 system (Electric Music Box)." http://www.barryschrader.com/
via Barry Schrader:
"Moon-Whales is the seventh and final movement of my work Moon-Whales and Other Moon-Songs composed in 1982-83, and based on children's poems by the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. It was originally composed for the soprano Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh, who performs in this video. The work was performed several times throughout the U.S. as well as in Europe. The final performance was at the funeral of my friend and colleague, vocalist/composer Frank Royon Le Mée in Marseilles in 1993, at his request. Moon-Whales and Other Moon-Songs was my final non-improvised work with the Buchla 200. Unfortunately, the master tapes, being on Ampex 456, are no longer playable due to the binder problems with that tape formulation. As the masters are, therefore, lost, there will probably never be any more performances of this work. I did do a digital transfer of one of the solo electronic movements, Moon-Wings, for some dance groups many years ago, but, unfortunately, not the other movements of the work. I recently came across this video tape, and although both the video and audio quality are poor, I thought it might be interesting to some people as a documentation of the final movement of the work."
Update: some additional info from Barry Schrader in response to a question from the Buchla 200e list:
"All of the electronic music in Moon-Whales was done on the Buchla 200. The Fairlight referred to is the Fairlight CVI, an early hybrid video processor. The "thanks" is because the CalArts School of Film/Video had one on loan from Fairlight at the time.
[Regarding] the '…melodic 12-tone scale…', the electronic music here, as in all of my works involving live performers, has an "orchestral" accompaniment function. Thus, here, it must support the vocal line, and, yes, it is tonal, in a 20th century, abstracted sort of way. Not all of my music created on the Buchla 200 uses a tempered scale. Then, as now, I use a variety of tunings, some of which are invented for a specific piece or section of a piece. "Monkey King", for example, is entirely pentatonic.
Like most things, the limitations of the Buchla 200 depend on the person using it. Some of the ideas that are important to me in the electronic music I create are the development of new timbres, having a high degree of control over what I'm doing, and trying to go beyond what's been done (both by myself and others) in the past. While little of my analog work is commercially available, the "Lost Atlantis CD" contains music that was entirely done on the Buchla 200 in 1976-77. The booklet that comes with the CD has some technical information. I didn't find it difficult to create any particular type of scale with this synth, as I developed procedures for insuring precise control. For example, with "Moon-Whales", I measured voltage data to 2 decimal places with a VOM, and, using this and other means of notating patch data, I usually was able to faithfully recreate a given patch.
The original version of "Moon-Whales" was quadraphonic, and, on this video, everything is really crushed together. Still, you can get an idea of what it sounds like."
via Barry Schrader "Shout Factory has just released a remastered version of Galaxy of Terror (1981) as part of their Roger Corman collection on both blu-ray and regular DVD. I did the music for this movie entirely on the Buchla 200, with the exceptions of the use of a soprano voice and a sitar in a few places. (Michael Hoenig is credited as "performer: synthesizer" on this film, but I can assure you that I did 100% of the music myself. Michael's credit may refer to sound effects, however, which were done separately; I honestly don't know.) This was one of several films I scored in the 70s and 80s, and, perhaps, the most unusual. Working with the Buchla Electric Music Box for scoring a commercial film wasn't easy as there was no traditional keyboard, and as all of the music is multitracked, sometimes using as many as sixteen tracks mixed down to the final master. Of course, there was neither computer-control nor digital recording of anything in those days, and the fact that everything had to be done within a roughly three-week time span make working very difficult. There was no way that I could compose in the manner I was used to, which is rather slowly, as every day was a deadline for something. The music was composed in CalArts' studio B303, watching the work prints of the film on a 35mm moviola as I got them from the studio. The synth setup I used was essentially the same as for Lost Atlantis, with a large Buchla 200 system and the Fortune Modules. The film hasn't been available in the U.S. for many years, but, even so, it's achieved a sort of cult status, partially for some truly outrageous scenes which almost got the film an MPAA "X" rating. I've been asked several times about releasing the music from the film, but, of course, this is impossible for me to do: I don't own the music, and all of the original masters were delivered to the studio for transfer. When they were cleaning up the film for this new release, Shout Factory contacted me and I gave them all of the copies of cues that I had left, and, now, I have no copies of any music from this film. Perhaps that's best, though, as I never thought of any of the music I did for Galaxy of Terror as having much relevance away from the film. The new release includes a documentary on the making of Galaxy of Terror which has new interviews with myself and other cast and crew members."
Update: You can find Galaxy of Terror on Amazonand eBay.
Be sure to see the notes from Barry on the synths used further below.
"Barry Schrader’s Monkey King CD has been released by Innova Recordings on Innova 703. The CD contains music inspired by the five elements of ancient Chinese tradition in Wu Xing – Cycle of Destruction, and by stories from the great Chinese classic Journey to the West.
Wu Xing - Cycle of Destruction deals with the Chinese concept of Wu Xing, the five elements in ancient Chinese tradition: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. These are important in Chinese astrology, medicine, and BaGua, a system of trigrams used in Fengshui and other areas of Chinese life and culture. The five elements are often arranged in one of two cycles: the cycle of birth, ending with earth, or, as in this work, the cycle of destruction: metal, wood, earth, water, fire. Wu Xing - Cycle of Destruction explores these elements in transcendent ways. The Metal and Wood sections are aural depictions of the elemental density of the mediums, while Earth considers the metaphysics of planetary rotation and revolution. Water reflects on the conceptual aspects of the world's oceans at various depths, voyaging from the darkest abyss to the light of distant shores. Finally, in Fire, there are the physical and spiritual effects of all-engulfing flames.
Monkey King is based on scenes from the classic Chinese book Journey to the West, written around 1550 by Wu Cheng-en. Considered one of the great classics of Chinese literature, the book chronicles the adventures of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, one of the most fascinating fictional characters ever created. Barry Schrader has taken some of the most famous scenes from this book and created Monkey King, a new electronic music journey into the imagined past of Chinese legend. In the tradition of Schrader's Lost Atlantis, Monkey King explores an immense imaginary aural landscape.
"Monkey King is a colorful combination of Schrader's recognizably arousing orchestral maneuvers with an immediate melodic appeal, gentle harmonic textures, and electronic echoes of traditional Chinese instruments. While individual elements sound strangely familiar, the resulting entity is without direct reference, a style which is as timeless as it is futuristic and which revels an ancient mythology with the tools of today. Without a single doubt, this piece is the most accessible in Schrader's oeuvre."
Some of the scenes depicted in Schrader's Monkey King are the birth of Monkey, his underwater journey to visit the palace of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea where Monkey takes possession of the Staff of the Milky Way, Monkey's attempt to jump over Buddha's palm, and Monkey's apotheosis in becoming the Buddha Victorious in Strife.
Barry Schrader has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as "a composer born to the electronic medium," named "a seminal composer of electro-acoustic music" by Journal SEAMUS, and described by Gramophone as a composer of "approachable electronic music with a distinctive individual voice to reward the adventurous." "There's a great sweep to Schrader's work that puts it more in line with ambitious large-scale electronic works by the likes of Stockhausen (Hymnen), Eloy (Shanti) and Henry (take your pick), a line that can be traced backwards to Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven." writes Dan Warburton of the Paris Transatlantic Magazine. Computer Music Journal states that Schrader’s "music withstands the test of time and stands uniquely in the American electronic music genre." Schrader's compositions for electronics, dance, film, video, mixed media, live/electro-acoustic music combinations, and real-time computer performance have been presented throughout the world. He has been a member of the Composition Faculty of the California Institute of the Arts School of Music since 1971, and has also taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the California State University at Los Angeles. His music is recorded on the Innova label. His web site is barryschrader.com."
I asked Barry what he used on the CD:
"As to what I used to compose 'Monkey King' and 'Wu Xing - Cycle of Destruction,' the only hardware I used (other than my Mac) was a Yamaha TX816. Here's a list of the software: Digital Performer, Unisyn, Peak, Rocket Science, and Cycling 74 Pluggo. The last two, of course, are bundles, and have multiple plugins, too many to name. DP also has a lot of plugins.
"As for synthesis techniques, I used additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis (including granular), amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and transfer functions, which, of course, involve the use of wavetable synthesis. So everything, including all of the sound sources, is digital. I know most of the people who visit your site love analog. I composed with analog equipment for many years, and I still enjoy hearing music created on analog systems. But I'm so used to working with computers now, that I don't think I could go back to analog, and I also don't think I could get the degree of control I need to compose the way I want.
"I work mainly in event lists so that I can specify data. All of the timbres for 'Monkey King' and 'Wu Xing - Cycle of Destruction' were designed specifically for these works. This is a general practice of mine and relates to my compositional point of view. (There's some information on this on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Schrader.) As a result of these practices, I compose very slowly, and I average about 20 hours of work for 1 minute of music. There were times with 'Monkey King,' particularly Part 2, where the work was so strenuous that I had to quit composing for several weeks in order to maintain my equilibrium. The composition of that movement alone stretched out over 6 months.
"I think these may be the last works that I compose with the TX816. I've bought Native Instruments Complete 5 package and have been porting my timbral designs into FM8, which allows for more possibilities than the Yamaha 6-operator design. I'm also learning other programs in the NI package, mainly those that allow me to create electronic material directly. I remain rather uninterested in dealing with concrete (acoustic) sound files. Everything on the 'Monkey King' CD, by the way, as is true of almost all of my music, is electronic. The only computer concrete piece that I did was 'Beyond,' and that was done on the old WaveFrame workstation at UCSB. I'm also going to get additional software for my next big work, which I'll probably begin in January, as I have a sabbatical from CalArts next year. I have a need to keep pushing myself to create new things in new ways. It may be difficult to top some aspects of the music on the 'Monkey King' CD, which, I think is some of my best, but I'm not going to worry about it. For me, each new work is its own universe."
"In 2000, Curtis Roads, composer, director of the of the electronic music department at UCSB and ex-editor of The Computer Music Journal commissioned his friend Bebe Barron to compose a piece of music at UCSB's CREATE studios.
At first Bebe was hesitant to do this, but at the arguing of Barry Schrader, over a six week period with the technical assistance of composer Jane Brokman, Bebe did in fact compose what was to be her last body of work, aptly entitled 'Mixed Emotions'
Although digital, it has a remarkable analog quality to it, akin to the timbres we would expect from the Barrons. You can hear Bebe speaking about these similarities in a taped audio interview which is still accessible at npr.org (search Barron once on the site, you'll see the link).
Until recently Mixed Emotions was heard only by those who attended it's premier at UCSB and at the 2001 SCREAM Festival at CalArts. Earlier this year however, Leonard Newbauer (Bebe's husband) commissioned a gentleman by the name of Mario Salinas to tape and produce a video of her memorial. In it they included Mixed Emotions, which is accompanied by some really interesting video graphics. The presentation is great. Without hesitation I can say that Bebe would be very pleased.
After some discussion, I have received approval from Leonard to release the Mixed Emotions section of the memorial DVD to the internet. It will be officially premiered on Matrixsynth in the next few days and will take permanent residence on my You Tube space:
"Hollywood, however, had already been utilizing instruments such as the theremin in movie scores for many years, and the first widespread American public exposure to the possibilities of the electronic medium occurred with the 1956 release of MGM's feature film Forbidden Planet. In addition to its elaborate space sets and advanced visual effects, Forbidden Planet featured an exclusively electronic musical score composed by Bebe Barron (b. 1927) and her husband Louis (1920-1989)....
Once they decided on the characters' moods and situations, the couple completed a series of electrical circuits which functioned electronically in ways analogous to the human nervous system. Decisions about the circuitry were strongly influenced by their studies of the science of cybernetics which proposes that certain natural laws of behavior are applicable to both animals and more complex modern machinary. The composers employed their noise-producing circuits to emulate such needed characterizations as serenity, anger, and love....
Bebe and Louis' success signaled the beginning of the effective use of electroacoustic music by the modern movie industry."
via Peter Grenader of Plan b:
"We have lost a bright little little light and a dear friend. Bebe Barron has passed. She has captivated us with her charm, her modesty and her enchanting smile and her memory will remain in our hearts, our art and our spiritforever."
It is with great sadness that I report the death of Bebe Barron on April 20, 2008 at the age of 82, of natural causes. Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady.
Bebe Barron was born Charlotte Wind in Minneapolis, on June 16, 1925. She received an MA in political science from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Roque Cordero, and she also spent a year studying composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Mexico. In 1947 she moved to New York and, while working as a researcher for Time-Life, studied composition with Wallingford Reigger and Henry Cowell. That same year, she met and married Louis Barron (1920 - 1989). Shortly thereafter, the Barrons began their experiments with the recording and manipulation of sound material by means of a tape recorder that they received as a wedding gift. They created a private studio in New York and, in 1955, composed the first electronic music score for a commercial film, Forbidden Planet. In 1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles; they divorced in 1970. In 1973, Bebe married Leonard Neubauer, a screen writer. Bebe became the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in 1985, and also served on the Board of Directors. In 1997 Bebe was presented the SEAMUS Award for the Barrons life work in the field of electro-acoustic music. She is survived by her husband, Leonard, and her son, Adam.
Bebe’s last public appearance was on January 12, 2008, at an event held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, celebrating the work of her good friend, Anais Nin. Bebe was too ill to speak in public at this point, but she agreed to be interviewed for a video piece that was shown at the event. This is her final interview, and you can see it on YouTube.
Bebe’s final composition, Mixed Emotions (2000) was composed in the CREATE studios of the University of California at Santa Barbara. I'll be putting this work up on the Downloads 2 page of my website, along with some photos of Bebe and myself taken in 2005 at her home on the Photos page within the next week.
I first met Bebe Barron in the middle 1970s; I don't remember exactly when, but I think it was around 1975. I had asked Bebe and her former husband and composing partner Louis to attend a showing of Forbidden Planet that I had arranged as part of a class at CalArts. They agreed to do it, and I quickly became good friends with Bebe and we remained close over the years.
In writing about Bebe Barron, it's impossible not to focus on the pioneering work that she and Louis did in electronic music. They began their experiments in 1948, shortly after they were married. This early work was done using a tape recorder, preceding the work of Luening and Ussachevsky and the switch from disks to tape by Pierre Schaeffer and the GRM. But, to my knowledge, the Barrons' early experiments did not result in any completed works, a state of affairs not uncommon with early pioneers in the field. In 1949 they set up one of the earliest private electro-acoustic music studios and began their experiments with electronically generated sounds. They built their own circuits which they viewed as cybernetic organisms, having been influenced by Norbert Weiner's work on cybernetics. The circuits, built with vacuum tubes, would exhibit characteristic qualities of pitch, timbre, and rhythm, and had a sort of life cycle from their beginnings until they burned out.
The Barrons recorded the sounds from the amplification of these circuits and this formed the basis of their working library. They also employed tape manipulation techniques as part of their compositional procedures. The sound qualities of these various amplified tube circuits and the tape manipulations that they underwent formed the musical language that the Barrons created in their studio. Unlike some of the work being done elsewhere, the Barrons' music reveals long phrases, often stated in tape-delayed rhythms, with the stark finesse of the tube circuit timbres. They created a style that was uniquely their own yet married to the technology they were using.
The Barrons earliest finished work, Heavenly Menagerie (1951) does not seem to have survived in a complete form. But their score for Ian Hugo's film Bells of Atlantis (1952), based on a poem by Anais Nin, who appears on screen, does exist on the film sound track. This may be the earliest extant work of the Barrons and presages what was to come with Forbidden Planet, the music for which was composed in 1955, the film being released the
next year.
The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes are composed and perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between music and sound effects since the Barrons' electronic material is used for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it's actually impossible to say whether or not what you're hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.
The Barrons composed many other works for tape, film, and the theater in the 1950s. Their studio became the home for John Cage's Project of Music for Magnetic Tape, and they assisted in the creation of Cage's first chance piece Williams Mix (1951-52), as well as works by other members of the group such as Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. As a studio for the creation of their own and other composers' works, the Barrons' studio served as a functioning center for electro-acoustic music at a time when there was no institutional support of the medium in the United States. It's curious, then, that, for many years, the Barrons, their studio, and their works were largely overlooked by composers and historians in the field. Fortunately, that injustice has since been corrected, and, in 1997, it was my great honor to present to Bebe and, posthumously, to Louis, the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award. Bebe was involved with SEAMUS from the very beginning of the organization. She was one of the ten original members who responded to my organizational call and met at CalArts in November of 1984 to form the group, and she was SEAMUS's first secretary. There may have been a little strong-arming on my part to get her to be involved so actively, but Bebe was always ready to support the cause of electro-acoustic music in whatever way she could.
Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one's work is to be judged in any regard by it's influence, acceptance, longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an enormous success. It remains the most widely known electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music." Update: BTW, if you have Netflix, you can watch Forbidden Planet online in IE here.
"Peter Grenader will be teaching a six-class course at California Institute of the Arts during the upcoming 2008 Winter Interim in room B-305. Schedule as follows:
Week 1: M/W/F 4:00–6:00 Week 2: TH/F 4:00–6:00
Credit Hours: 15
This class is limited to CalArts student body. Alumni may contact the CalArts School of Music to determine if you are eligible.
Curriculum will include a detailed overview on the operation of CalArts' new Plan B system, as well as in-depth instruction on the principles and practices of additive and subtractive analog synthesis which will include both theory and analysis of various electronic works which utilize analog technology.
Please note that Morton Subotnick will be returning to CalArts during the interim to teach two multi-session classes. One is 'Creating with New Media', and another entitled 'What Music really Is" which is also in B-305 and precedes the Plan B classes the first week. As well, Barry Schrader will be teaching an electro-acoustic flavored single session class which runs after mine next Friday
Photos the new CalArts system wil be posted here next week. It's nice, we think you'll like what you see!."
"There are three Peter Grenaders. The first one is a renowned composer, whose works have secured wins at several festivals all over the world and whose artistic friends include some of the greatest names from the field of electronic music: Morton Subotnick, Steve Roach, Barry Schrader and many others. The second one is an instrument designer and Head of Plan B, a company producing modular analogue synthesizers. This Peter Grenader enjoys the immediate interaction between these machines and the performing musician, the way in which they allow a composer to have his instruments really do what he wants them to. Customers of his have included Nine Inch Nails and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers - again among many others. The third and final Peter Grenader is a former student at CalArts, now, retrospectively, probably considered the most important faculty of experimental media in the USA at the time. With stars like Harold Budd and John Cage working closely together with students, this was an exciting era of departure, of fresh beginnings and of discovering new technologies, timbres and tools. As a CD project and a string of new Plan B products are approaching, the first and second Peter Grenader are sure to make headlines soon. But until then, we're sitting down for a chat with the last one, talking about the "good old times" and life as a student at CalArts in the 70s."
The following is just an excerpt of some of what Barry has updated his site with. Note he will be performing "I've added a second page of Downloads on my web site. The first page, crammed as it is, remains the same, and I'll be adding new files to the Downloads 2 page. I'm starting off this month with a new download of the first part of an interview I did with the noted music radio host Martin Perlich. Part 1 deals with the work Ravel for piano and electronic sounds, and you can access this file by clicking here."
For this show, I’ve selected a variety of works of mine spanning a 45-year period, most of which are not commercially available. The first will be a student work from 1968 for soprano and piano, Signature for Tempo, based on the poem cycle of the same name by Archibald MacLeish, with Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh, soprano, and the late Leonid Hambro on piano.
Time: Wednesday, September 16 at 9:00 PM PDT (Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 4:00 AM UTC (GMT))
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