"On Friday, April 27, three movements from Lost Atlantis will be presented in their original quadraphonic (4-channel) format as part of the 2007 Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey. The concert will take place at 8:00 P.M. at the The Neighborhood Unitarian Church at 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena, CA. 91103. For more information, you can click here, or phone 877-358-5813. The sections of Lost Atlantis presented on this program will be: Introduction: The Pillars of Hercules - The Great Harbor; The Temple of Poseidon - The Dance of the Gods; The Destruction of Atlantis - Epilogue: "...and Atlantis Shall Rise." This concert will present a rare opportunity to hear this music as originally composed and with excellent multichannel sound projection."
Lost Atlantis was originally composed with the Buchla Electric Music Box, the Buchla 200. I've listened to it and it is an amazing sonic journey into electro-acoustical sonic landscapes. It is available off of Barry Schrader's Website and I have a permanent link on the right side of this site under the Synth CDs section. You can find reviews for the album at the bottom of Barry's site.
What's not clear regarding the event above is how this will be presented. Will it be an orchestra, a playing of the original recordings or the actual Buchla 200. I can't imagine trying to recreate this live on an original Buchla. If anyone knows, please comment.
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))
Click here for the next installment of my interview with Barry Schrader. As you can probably guess from the image on the life, this one, like all of the interview questions to date, has a great story behind it. :)
Update as of 9:26 PDT: I made a couple of minor updates in case you read it before then. Sorry!
A quick note on posts like this: I hope you enjoy them. If not, just skip them. When I first started the site I used to share my synth dreams but stopped. Personally I get a kick out of them. I won't share every one, just some of the stand outs. The last one stood out for the humor, this one stood out for the design of the instrument. It reminds me of different makers and their approach. As a maker, do you set out to design a synthesizer, an instrument, or both? Are you locked in by the tools, components, and paradigms of what makes a synth? In my dream both the musician and the maker (who never made an appearance BTW) didn't really know what a synth even was. The maker just designed an instrument and the musician just played it. This reminds me of Don Buchla's original designs and specifically the Buchla Music Easel. This was at the birth of synthesis as we know it. What's interesting is his designs weren't meant to be what they are commonly perceived as today. They were meant to be unique instruments, palettes for sound, hence the Music Easel. I heard even his modular systems weren't meant to be complete fixed instruments, they weren't meant to be mixed and matched. Think about that for a bit. They were modular in design, but they weren't meant to be modular in nature. They were meant to be wholly formed instruments. In the following dream the musician reminded me of Marc-Henri and Barry Schrader to an extent. Marc-Henri almost exclusively uses an Access Virus Ti as a music easel for his compositions. Barry Schrader started with Buchla and then moved to FM synthesis for his compositions. You can find an extensive interview with him here.
And the dream...
I had another synth dream last night. In this one I was at an ensemble event held in kind of a classroom/workshop/gym-type of open space at what felt like an old English or New England boarding school - lots of wood, flat tall ceilings, and windows along the length of the far wall. The ensemble consisted of maybe 18 people in a semi-circle with a small audience in front of them, mainly standing, which I was one of. The instructor had each member of the ensemble introduce their instruments. I was in front towards the left of the ensemble and noticed the last two instruments to be electronic desktop boxes sitting on a card table (synth gathering anywone?), both vintage and almost DIY looking in style. I remember thinking, "I know what these boxes are. They are synths! I can't wait to talk shop with the owners and check them out." Well the instructor starts going around the ensemble starting on the opposite side. Each member introduces their instrument and talks a little bit about them and their technique. There were some interesting brass-like instruments. I think there was one based on an alto trombone, but it was just a flat pipe and no horn at the end. Funny side note is my daughter is currently learning to play piccolo. She plays flute in high school band and decided to finally give the piccolo a try as a stretch goal. If you don't know what a piccolo is, it's a tiny flute for super high notes. She said there were tiny versions of most instruments including the trombone. I looked one up and sure enough there is. A tiny trombone not much longer than a foot exists. The instrument in my dream also bore a resemblance to the ribbon controller featured in the Nunomo QUN post, so I'm guessing that's where it came from - some bizarre mix of the two. Anyway, when the instructor/host got around to the last two instruments, it turned out the first was a theremin based synth minus the antennas. It was made of wood and looked vintage. It would have been interesting if not for the next box. That was something. It was black with white and silver sliders, levers, buttons, and knobs. It was a unique instrument custom made for the owner who knew the maker. The interesting thing was the musician wasn't familiar with synths and didn't even see the instrument as a synth. The maker also wasn't into synths. In the dream he was more like a luthier, more of an artist instrument maker than a synth maker. No offense to synth makers! :) Anyway, it was about the size of an EMS SYNTHI and was black with white levers and sliders and had a bunch of esoteric control blocks with non standard names/labels; similar to something like the Hartmann Neuron where controls are familiar but the names are completely different. For some reason it reminded me of a black Lassence uVentury, Modor NF-1, mixed with some MacBeth and Folktek in design, but again completely different. Again, this maker wasn't into synths. This was a unique instrument. After the talk was over the musician gave a little demo. The sound of it. It was like formant analog but the timbers coming out of it were rich and full, not thin or glossy like most formant synthesis. It sounded like nothing I've ever heard before. After the talks were over I walked over to it to check out the controls and design. I wondered if I could touch it and play with it a little and for some reason, as happens in dreams, I knew it was OK so I started playing with it. There was a thin ivory white reed-like lever about an inch and a half long that controlled a female formant timbre. It was amazing. There was an group of lever-type sliders that controlled a multi band formant filter block and I remember thinking, "Oh this is a filter!" There were envelop sliders and other familiar groups that I now forget, but there were a bunch of interesting controls on it that didn't quite match up to common synths. There were additional effects and shaping tools built into the design and everything just flowed like a natural instrument. Again it kind of reminded me in concept to a Hartman Neuron and Modor NF-1, with maybe a bit of Folktek, but it was more vintage and simplistic in design - just a sold black block with white and silver controls. It was definitely designed as a work of art instrument vs. a synth. Similar in concept to the Buchla music Easel as I mentioned in the intro to this dream above. So after checking it out a little and talking to the owner I realized I should take a video of it for the site! I got the OK to film it, pulled out my iPhone, and started trying to capture some of the controls and timbres it was capable of. When I got to that formant female slider it was gone! I couldn't remember what I did to get that sound and I couldn't find the control again. Damn dreams.... And as in many real world sessions I wasn't getting those rich timbres again. I got lost between timbres! I thought my readers would be disappointed in my programming chops for a split second, but then I reminded myself anyone into programming synths will understand and not care, so I kept tweaking. Well, right then, a foster kid boarding at the school distracted me and started talking to me. I hand gestured to him (no I did not flick him off) to hold off for a second because I was in the middle of filming the synth and trying to capture audio. He understood for like five seconds and started talking again. I asked him to give me a sec but he got upset and said I should be there more for people. I felt bad and wasn't getting anywhere with the instrument at that point, so I stopped filming to talk to him before he left.
And that was it! Everything felt right with the kid so that was good, but that instrument! It's gone forever...
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.
Click here for the next installment of my interview with Barry Schrader. This one covers his Lost Atlantis composed in 1977 on a large Buchla 200 system featuring the 204 Quad Spatial Director, and the Fortune modules featured earlier in the interview.
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."
6. How did technology over the years impact your music and creative process? Can you walk us through your albums and what the general process was like for each?
You'll find Barry's answer here. You do not want to miss this. Not only will you hear one of CalArts Buchla 200 systems in 1976, but you'll get some insight into the thought process behind the piece "Trinity".
"In exploring my compositions, I think it’s best to take a few works and deal with them one at a time. The first one I’ll consider is Trinity composed in 1976 using one of CalArts Buchla 200 systems. Beginning with Trinity, all of my pieces done using the Buchla 200 used the same basic patch" [pictured left]
"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."
Hi everyone! As you know Barry Schrader will be giving his farewell concert at CalArts on September 26. The following is the beginning of my interview with him. I opted to post the questions and answers as they come in. New QAs will get a new post so you do not miss them and they will be added to this post so we have one central post for the full interview. This should make it easier for all of us to consume in our busy lives, and it will allow you to send in any questions that may come to mind during the interview process. If you have anything you'd like to ask Barry, feel free to send it in to matrixsynth@gmail.com. This is a rare opportunity for us to get insight on a significant bit of synthesizer history, specifically with early Buchla systems, and I'd like to thank Barry for this opportunity. Thank you Barry!
"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.
Another fascinating bit of synth history. Don't miss the UVI demos below. This is the first time the WaveFrame AudioFrame has been featured on the site. There was a controller for one featured here, and it was used by Barry Schrader and mentioned in my interview with him here and one previous post here.
This one was sent my way via swissdoc: "I just scanned my mega-sized German flyer from 1988/1989 of the WaveFrame Corporation AudioFrame. It is 600x600 dpi an weights in as about 32 megs. You can find it here [or check out the images of the complete pdf in this post - click each to zoom in].
It is similar to Fairlight or Synclavier and was kind of the first DAW. The system is still supported by http://www.waveframe.com
"Back in the 80's the WaveFrame Audioframe was the second generation of mega samplers, in line with the NED Synclavier and Fairlight CMI. A complete 48-voice system would sell for over $100,000, and at the time the feature set was worth it! The Audioframe was used by renowned artists like Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder and by leading sound designers and foley artists.
The UVI WaveFrame Sound Collection isn't a massive library dredged with tens of gigabytes of super high resolution wave files - conversely, it's a lean and mean library expertly crafted after the original, weighing in at just over 350 MB.
As you can hear in the demos, size isn't a factor for this library. The collection contains a multitude of very useful and organic sounds such as keyboards, guitars, basses, solo strings, string sections, upper brass, lower brass, brass sections, woodwinds, synths, pacific rim, percussion, drums, effects and test tones.
WaveFrame Sound Collection brings you an excellent library of bread and butter sounds that preserve the character and history of this milestone in music tech history."
"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."
"On Friday, April 27, three movements from Lost Atlantis will be presented in their original quadraphonic (4-channel) format as part of the 2007 Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey. The concert will take place at 8:00 P.M. at the The Neighborhood Unitarian Church at 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena, CA. 91103. For more information, you can click here, or phone 877-358-5813. The sections of Lost Atlantis presented on this program will be: Introduction: The Pillars of Hercules - The Great Harbor; The Temple of Poseidon - The Dance of the Gods; The Destruction of Atlantis - Epilogue: "...and Atlantis Shall Rise." This concert will present a rare opportunity to hear this music as originally composed and with excellent multichannel sound projection."
and 
