Otto Laske
Notes on my Music (1998)
When I started out in music composition in the middle sixties, I came from a background of Darmstadt New Music activities. My heroes were Babbitt, Boulez, Hiller, and Stockhausen, especially the latter. By then, I had studied composition for four years (1960 f.), since 1963 with Konrad Lechner, a composer from a well-known musical family of 16th century Nuremberg. When, in 1964, I heard a lecture by G.M. Koenig, Cologne, on the use of computers in instrumental and vocal composition, I decided that computer music was for me. ("Computer music" in the European sense meant instrumental/vocal, not electroacoustic music.) Between 1964 and 1966, while studying with Hermann Heiss and getting my B. Mus. from the Darmstadt Academy of Music, I decided I wanted to study electronic computer music as well. This meant that I had to change continents, since such studies were not to be found in Europe at the time.
The dominant technology on my arrival in the U.S. was not the classical studio as in Europe, but the synthesizer studio. I became familiar with this kind of studio at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and later at McGill University, Montreal, P.Q., My Boston mentors were Robert Ceely and Alvien Lucier. The only tape composition of that time, Abgesang, got lost in my travels. I had to wait til 1970, the year I went to the Instituut voor sonologie in Utrecht. In what was then the largest, best equipped "electronic music studio," I learned the classical and musique concrète studio from the bottom up, and made my first tape piece (Structure I, 1970). During my stay in Utrecht (1970-75), I composed Structures I to IX, principally for concerts at the Geertekerk, Utrecht, and the Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam.
My Utrecht Structures were of three types: electronic (II,VI), concrète (I, II, VII), and "computer music" (IV, V, VIII, & IX). Of these, Structure VI is the prototypical electronic piece, while Structures VII and IV hold the same place for the other two types. All of the computer music pieces were made with Truax's early POD program, an frequency-modulation based random sound generator that left the composer free to develop his form entirely by ear, taking over only the sound synthesis task. My typical procedure was to generate quadrophonic sound segments later to be mixed by ear. The prototypical electronic piece, Structure VI, is based on a tone row by A. Webern processed by the Utrecht "function generator." The result of working with "voltage control synthesis" is a complex, contrapuntal piece. Musique concrète techniques were used most successfully in Structure VII. From these compositions derives my compositional credo that structural thinking is by itself capable of creating expressive sonic time flows, without a need for externally imposed kinds of expressivity.
When I returned to the U.S. in 1975, the synthesizer studio was still much en vogue. My only piece using this technology is Message to the Messiah, composed at the University of Illinois, Urbana. The composition is a "performance piece in that it consists of a recorded performance on the Buchla synthesizer.
By the middle seventies, the computer gradually came to the fore as the principal electroacoustic music technology. Programs like Music4BF and Music360 were the fashion of the day, but they were very laborious to work with, due to the long computer times and the arduous manual labor in writing and entering musical scores into unwieldy editors. I learned this kind of composition first in Illinois, from John Melby (who tended to mistake instruments for compositions), and later from Barry Vercoe at M.I.T. However, it was Dean Walraff's DMX-1000 sound processor which became the focus of my work, first in Voie Lactée (1983). Prior to that I had tried my hand at Buxton's SSSP in Toronto (Terpsichore, 1981). In both of these pieces, I used scores computed with Koenig's Project 1 program, which is also the principal technical basis of my instrumental and vocal music of the 1980's. Having used Project 1 for composing instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, I find it to be the most congenial tool even today. This is the case, I think, because it leaves the composer a large margin of freedom in "interpreting" computed parameter values, simultaneously providing a systematic framework for such interpretation. The only hindrance to using the program for electroacoustic music is that no automatic transformation from a Project 1 text file to a CSOUND file is available. (I have designed a program for this purpose that honors the composer's freedom in Module D of PRECOMP in 1991, but the design is still waiting for an implementer.) My first CSOUND piece was Forêt Enchantée (1987) commissioned by the G.M.E.B. Bourges; it was followed by In Memory (1988), composed in Oetwil am See, Switzerland. Here again, the underlying score was a Project 1 score. I thus combined a program for instrumental "score synthesis" with a program for "sound synthesis."
I reached a turning point in 1989, when I was invited by the Centre for the Arts, Vancouver, to make a piece using granular synthesis as implemented in the PODX by B. Truax. The result, Furies and Voices NEUMA CD 1998), left behind deterministic score writing for random sound production. While the pieces made in the 1980's were strongly influenced by the instrumental ideal of structural clarity, orchestration being a means for clarifying structure, in this piece sound per se became the issue. However, I did not pursue this path, partly for lack of a good program for granular synthesis. When I acquired my own CSOUND studio, I attempted a translation of my extended DMX-1000 orchestra library into CSOUND, with disappointing results both in terms of time invested and results obtained. Encouraged by Dennis Miller, I settled for the Capybara system and its Kyma language, which is now my principle instrument for composing tape music. I started with Kyma's capability for sampling speech and instrumental sound, and for manipulating them via modulation (pitch shifting, nonlinear synthesis), filtering, and on a higher level, composition by concatenating and mixing sound files. Kyma comprises what I would call a "sonological level" (*.kym files) which are at a higher level than mere sample files. Kym-files form a bridge between thinking/editing at the sample level and the formal level of composition. I made use of this sonological level both in TreeLink (1992, Neuma CD 1996) and TwinSister (1995), the latter sampling sounds from prior compositions of mine as well as speech deriving from my poetry. (If I were younger, I would begin sonological studies à la Utrecht again with this instrument that Pierre Schaeffer would have loved.)
I would say about my electroacoustic music of the seventies that it is highly influenced by the instrumental ideal of clarity and rarely indulges in "tone color" for its own sake, as is true for Koenig's and Brun's music. What strikes me most is the difference between the pieces made according to this esthetic. There is, however, one turning point in regard to an "orchestral" quality of sound, and that is my Structure IV (1973), which opened my ear to dynamic sound flows à la Truax. I reached similar coloristic density only in Forêt Enchantée using CSOUND. In more general terms I would say that probably my instrumental & vocal music has influenced my electroacoustic music more than the other way around.
When looking at my output, it becomes clear that I have written a large body of vocal music that is still entirely unknown, either because it is unperformed or badly performed (e.g., Des Menschen Seele). It is here that most needs to be done in terms of obtaining performances. As to my instrumental chamber music, there is a noticeable difference between the "early" (1965-1979) and the "later" (1980 f.) pieces, beginning with Perturbations (1979). In part, this has to do with the fact that all chamber music of the 1980 was composed with Project 1, i.e., algorithmically, while the earlier pieces are composed "freely." But even these "free" pieces show the influence of computer-formed thinking in their design. My last piece of algorithmic music (composed with Project 2, not 1) is String Quartet No. 3, completed 1997. I am returning to Project 1 for a piece for organ and percussion. In tape music, my present focus is the integration of my lyric poetry, German and or English, with electroacoustic sound largely derived from speech. I cannot not yet make general statements about this kind of work since I am still inventing it as I go along. My goal now is to blend speech and non-speech sound so as to obtain a dynamic sound flow à la Structure IV.
As the reader will conclude, in nearly 35 years of composing I have had to absorb many different technologies--synthesizer, classical studio, musique concrète, computer sound synthesis, algorithmic score synthesis, digital signal processors. Some of these have turned out to be incompatible with each other (I lost a decade of work with the DMX-1000 when I could not adapt my orchestra library to CSOUND after all), and thus have not promoted compositional growth. Nevertheless, on the whole technology has permitted me to "navigate new musical horizons," compositionally as well as theoretically, and has kept me away from fashion as was always my desire. My view has always been that technology has its own challenges for composers, and that it is their task to find out what is congenial for them, and work accordingly. In fact, working technologies "against the grain", i.e., using what they can do only with difficulty, and thus "testing their limits," is probably the way to go.