Music: Music of the Future

Many modern composers are dissatisfied—or just plain bored—with the sounds of conventional instruments. To rectify this situation, they go to many lengths. New York Composer John Cage doctors his piano tone with bits of hardware. France’s Pierre Schaeffer and his followers in musique concrete create unworldly compositions out of worldly sounds on tape recorders. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, composers are experimenting with a sound source with an unplumbed potential for novelty and expression: electronic sound generators.

American listeners have a chance to feast their ears on their native brand of electronic composition on the sound track of MGM’s science-fiction extravaganza, Forbidden Planet (TIME, April 9). Composed and recorded by Manhattan’s husband-and-wife team, Louis and Bebe Barron, it could hardly sound more appropriate. Its basic elements are a kind of trickling-water sound; a zipping effect, as if somebody were running his thumbnail along a comb; a high, ominous thrumming, something like the sound telegraph wires make when the pole is struck; a frightful, featureless roaring; and an effect that repeatedly swoops up to a point of release and then breaks and starts over.

Infinite Variety. The Barrons achieve their effects by designing electronic circuits that they think express certain emotional characteristics when attached to a loudspeaker, and they tend to call the circuits “characters.” One expresses anger. Another they call Chloe, because it sounds to them like the lost swamp girl. Some express themselves in a kind of melody, or at least in a series of pitch changes. To provide a sound accompaniment to a film scene, the Barrons kept altering circuits until one expressed what they were looking for. Then they combined it with others, recorded the resulting series of sounds on tape, and edited it to fit. They refuse to consider their compositions music, partly because they cannot be sure before the tape is finished just what it will sound like. Their sound track was delivered to MGM at approximately the same price the studio would have paid for a composed and recorded symphonic score.

In Cologne, Germany, an autocratic, absent-minded composer named Karlheinz Stockhausen has fun supplying the state-run West German Radio with electronic music. Many of the sounds he makes resemble those of the Barrons, but his attitude is at the opposite esthetic pole. A conservatory pupil first, then an electronic expert, he composes on paper (his scores suggest a cross between economists’ graphs and architects’ schemes), then reduces his ideas to sound. This involves great concentration and endless experiment.

Little Appeal. Stockhausen’s sound sources are instruments familiar to any radio engineer: a sine-wave generator to produce a pure tone, a pulse generator to control timing of the sounds, a noise generator to produce vague rumbles, whooshes and thunders, and various filters. Once he has created the desired combination of sounds, he records them on tape and snips and joins and re-records until his composition is done. It took him a year and a half to complete a 17-minute composition. The result has many of the qualities of twelve-tone music by the late Anton von Webern, tends to make its listeners giggle at first, but then to be come absorbed in the fantastic world of unheard-of sound.

Is this the music of the future? Stockhausen, who is so immersed that he tends to forget to eat and shave, replies with a shrug: “It has little popular appeal. But that also goes for the conventional music that I compose.”