VOTD 1/11/2023

 Jacob Druckman: Animus II/Nicolas Roussakis: Night Speech, Sonata for Harpsicord (CRI)

Purchased at Jerry's Records, formerly from the Duquesne University collection

I took off a day from my listening diary, but it's not as if anyone noticed. I noticed no hits on my previous post.

I generally collect old electronic music recordings. If I notice an LP and the notes read something to the effect of, "Electronic tape realized at..." I'm usually in. I won't pay outrageous amounts for these records, but it's interesting how many will turn up cheap if you really look.

What do I like about these things? What is it about old tape music that appeals to me? One thing is the sweat on them. Analog and digital production of electronic sound is very easy for us now. Then? Often the composers were involved with the invention or research itself. It took a lot of effort to make these things.

Which is not to say they're all good. The earliest computer-generated works can be pretty rough sometimes. The earliest Pierre Schaeffer works are pretty coarse as well.

Of the three pieces on this record, the side-long Druckman work has the electronic component. It's scored for mezzo, two percussionists, and electronic tape. The tape sounds as though it's largely synthesized sounds, but there are some acoustical sources as well.

I have a few Druckman recordings and have seen some of his music performed, probably by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. I got the impression that he was a little like Debussy, though in a more modern setting. Composing for coloration as much as harmonies. Not as extreme as George Crumb in his search for sounds, or maybe more accurately Crumb's desire to pull out whatever sounds he could specifically from acoustical instruments.

This comes in the era where electronic music performance was especially challenging. I've asked my students to imagine the situation: you have tape music, which starts essentially in the post-WWII era (c.1948+). It was great that composers now had the resources to create studio-based compositions. But how do you deal with the concert setting? Someone playing a tape in front of a live audience is a static performance situation.

One way this was addressed, by some composers, was to create works for tape plus live musicians. This way, you could have the richness of acoustical instruments combined with the expanded sound palette created through technological means. You also had a live performance element. The one of the challenges was how to score for such means, and there are many examples that can be found.

If that seems self-evident to you, it's often difficult to get my students to think through that logic. 

The piece is good, some solid post-war composing. I wonder though, can this work be performed now? Has the medium been preserved, and digitally transferred? And who would take the task of performing such a work? With interactive digital composition, this format has largely been rendered obsolete. This is one of the big problems with technology-based composition.

Nicolas Roussakis' "Night Speech" for choir seems like it might be a strange pairing for this CRI release. (But then what else is new, some of their collections can be odd.) It's a work that I suspect is influenced by electronic music though. It's not very long (under eight minutes) and only a small portion is sung. There is the sound of bubbling water, gongs, gongs and chimes, along other vocal sounds. 

I might have written this before, but Morton Feldman commented on the twenty-minute piece. It was a standard for many post-war era works that he wanted to break through. Druckman's piece definitely fits that category; "Night Speech" could have have gone on longer, in my opinion. 

That leaves remainder of the second LP side for Roussakis' "Sonata for Harpiscord", the most "classical" piece on this LP. I don't mean to say that it sounds like 18th century music, but is the most tightly constructed of the works here to my ears.