electronic music 
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contents:
1. Premonitions (8:27)
2. Cirrus I (9:23)
3. Maximum Entropy (13:18)
4. Fragment Q306 (1:45)
5-8. Four Moons:
Phobos (1:21)
Deimos (2:37)
Pan (2:12)
Charon (4:34)
Notes:
The electronic music that most influenced me was
created in the electronic studios of Europe and the U.S. in the fifties
and sixties. I immersed myself in works such as those of Varèse,
Stockhausen, Berio, Arel, Davidovsky, Subotnick, Dockstader, and not least
the electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron for the 1956 film Forbidden
Planet. These pieces and others inspired me to work with electronic sounds
myself during my undergraduate years at Ventura College and the University
of California, San Diego. After working several long summer months in 1972
on an electronic study using tape splicing techniques, however, I must
confess I began to look for more efficient ways to create electronic musicóand
found myself turning to improvisatory techniques. All the works on this
CD (and, in fact, all my electronic works to date) involve improvisation
to varying degrees. With the exception of Maximum Entropy, the works from
the period 1970?74 are also highly dependent on tape echo. I was especially
encouraged in these pursuits by the excellent I†of†IV†(1966) by Pauline
Oliveros, which uses both improvisation and tape echo. I was fortunate
to have had several classes with her at UCSD; the second and third pieces
on this CD were in fact composed during this time.
Premonitions
My most technically sophisticated work from this
period, Premonitions was created using a Moog IIIP synthesizer, a sine-wave
oscillator (in one section), and three stereo tape machines. (It was my
first chance to record entirely on professional machines at 15†ips.) I
composed the overall outline of Premonitions first, then used layered improvisations
to generate the details. It was designed from the outset to be mixed down
from two stereo tapes running in sync. Most of the time the two tapes had
contrasting material, and only two points required accurate alignmentóso
even though the tapes had to run for over eight minutes in this fashion,
a good mix was accomplished in a few takes. The title refers not only to
the workís general atmosphere of foreboding, but to a compositional technique
where certain prominent events occurring later in the piece are first heard
in a subdued, disguised form in the opening minutes.
Cirrus I
This work is a live studio improvisation on a Buchla
100-series synthesizer, recorded in real time with no overdubs or editing.
The recorder, a Revox G36, had to be operated at 71/2 ips to obtain the
desired echo rate. The piece takes advantage of the Buchlaís unique keyboard,
where the keys can be independently adjusted in any sequence; the resulting
pitches tend to be microtonal. Cirrus I invokes the experience of watching
slowly passing cloudsóand, in its opening and closing minutes, the sensation
of an intriguing unknown music heard at a great distance.
Maximum Entropy
Here is another live, unedited Buchla synthesizer
performance, this time without tape echo. Using almost every available
module, I organized the synthesizer into six distinct ìinstruments,î each
of which was under keyboard control. Some I played directly, while others
used random voltage generators or sequencers to create strings of events
that I could start and stop as needed. The title is a term that describes
a possible future state of the universe in which all energy potentials
are depleted; this work thus depicts the final moments of the universe
as it approaches complete stasis.
Fragment Q306
A tape on which I had recorded a long multiple-feedback
experiment was eventually reused for other things, leaving only this fragment
of retrograde Buchla synthesizer sounds. Its sense of urgency and mystery
seems only intensified by its terseness.
Four Moons
Made with two monaural tape machines, a homemade
mixer, and a sine/square wave oscillator, these were among my first electronic
explorations. Each piece has six layers of oscillator sounds, plus tape
echo added both normally and in reverse (a technique featured in Forbidden
Planet). They convey a kind of lost, wandering quality, and, due to the
build-up of tape noise, distortion, and bias interference caused by the
semiprofessional equipment used, sound strangely old and remote.
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