The Shackle Stick

Music, at its best, is a mystery for the listener. A dose of uncertainty about exactly what is happening on stage can turn an average performance into a sublime listening experience.  These days, high technology can be used to intensify this aura of musical mystique better than just about anything.

Electronic music technology abounds in the form of portable sound processing equipment (as represented by laptops, tablets and even smartphones). Composers and performers are using these digital tools to create and explore as yet unknown musical worlds.  They produce new sounds, new textures and new ways of playing together.  A listener may not be able to identify exactly how the music is created, but it is clear that the performers are doing it ... somehow.

One such group - a duet called Shackle, Anne LaBerge and Robert van Heumen - is on the cutting edge of such music voyages of discovery.   Here's their self-description.

Shackle is a band.  We make improvised music and use a computer system to structure our improvisations.

They describe their electronics as as

a cutting-edge digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member

and

a computerized communication system that proposes various compositional elements to each player, they can then choose whether or not to cooperate with the proposed material.

In other words, they're not telling us much.  What is clear is that it is some sort of "system".  The flute is played.  Sounds are modified electronically and also sampled for further modification.  We are told that there is improvisation - but it seems impossible to know what is planned and what is spontaneous.  A joystick is moved as if in some sort of game.  We watch as pedals are pushed and buttons poked.  We hear the sound change.

But we cannot predict the sounds we hear from the actions we see.  It is hard, even impossible, to find an answer when we wonder "How did they do that?"  Failing to find an answer for how the technology works opens up a possibility for a listener to seek out the mystery in the music.

Here's a short excerpt:

You can hear longer tracks of Shackle at Soundcloud or at the Shackle website.

Shackle is trying to raise a modest amount of money via Kickstarter to fund the distribution of their music.

They want to use a unique new medium - the USB stick.  The little beastie,  called The Shackle Stick, will contain video and photographs as well as an hour of music.  In an era when storing and listening to music on computer is increasingly the norm, someday sticks may well become a common format for sharing music.  But for now, it's a new idea.

Here's another video of Anne and Robert self consciously trying to stay relaxed on camera as they explain who they are, describe what their project is and ask for your support.

I signed up to support The Shackle Stick via Kickstarter. If you want to help these intrepid musical explorers go where no musician has gone before, then you too should consider supporting them.

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A quarter century ago Anne and I played in an improvisation group, the Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio.  (There are three short improvs available for listening.)

Anne has already gone where no flutist has gone before.  Here's her website.  You can listen to her mysterious talents as flute soloist.  Mixed Meters recommends her recent album Speak on which she also tells stories.

Once Anne visited L.A. and was presented to a class of music students at CalArts by Vinny Golia.  You can watch event that here.

System Tags: Shackle. . . Shackle Stick. . . Anne LaBerge. . . Robert van Heumen. . . musical improvisation. . . live electronic music

Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring Cycle in One Second

Today is the first performance of L.A. Opera's complete production of Richard Wagner's endless four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung.

Yesterday L.A. Opera announced that ticket sales for the Ring cycles are not meeting expectations. Their overall budget is falling another million dollars short.  Maybe a million and a half.  Their excuses include the volcano in Iceland.  Personally I think the Gods must be angry.  (Read the financial story at the L.A. Times)

The Opera is also holding Ring Festival L.A., a favorite topic at Mixed Meters. You can read about it here and here and here and here and here.  Or not.

This post is my contribution to Ring Festival L.A.  They're not likely to be thrilled.  It is inspired by the work of one California composer who, almost 50 years ago, dealt conceptually with the problem of Wagner's Ring.  I gather that his idea was never completely realized in sound. Maybe this is the first time.

BACKGROUND

From 1962 through 1966 there was a flowering of avant garde music right here in California at a place called the San Francisco Tape Music Center.   It was a labor of love by a small group of young composers who existed in the vortex of counter-culture energy and revolution which, only a few years later, would give us Flower Power, the Summer of Love and the Grateful Dead.

One of the founders of the SFTMC was Ramon Sender.  As a student I remember reading how Sender had used a tape recorder to reduce all of Wagner's Ring to four short clicks.  I assumed he would have done this by recording at a very slow speed and playing the tape back very fast.  Unfortunately, I don't remember where I read this; it was just a short reference.  Clearly the idea stuck in my brain.  (Update: See note from Sept. 2012 below.)

Recently I discovered a fascinating book called The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde edited by David W. Bernstein.  It includes interviews with the principals of SFTMC:  composers, performers, equipment designers, dancers and light show artists.  Here's part of the interview with Ramon Sender.  He is discussing a very early three-head Ampex tape recorder:

I discovered that there was a tension adjustment on the reels.  You could actually put it in "record" mode, not turn on the track to travel, but just put on the tension adjustment, and the tape would creep very slowly.  That was when I started doing things like putting all of a Wagner opera on an eighth of an inch of tape.  I thought, wow I could sell this to conservatory students to help them do their assignments.  You want to listen to the Ring of the Nibelung?  Here, you can do it in a quarter of a second.

Fascinating!  Of course it's not as simple as he makes it seem.    First of all, tape moving that slowly on an analog tape recorder, the equivalent of 1 inch per day, would have no usable signal recorded on it.  When playing it back there would be all noise, a signal to noise ratio of zero.

Given the limited frequency response of his equipment, Sender's comment about helping students is an obvious joke.  In my mind, however, it is an admirable goal.  The students probably didn't really want to listen to the Ring in the first place.  I say hooray for audio Cliff's notes. 

Sender is also careful to say he did this only with "a Wagner opera" not with the entire Ring.   My best guess is that reducing the Ring of the Nibelung to four clicks, as reported in that book I read, was always a concept.  Sender's conceptual piece is easy to imagine and very communicative artistically, but at that time it was probably not worth the energy to turn it into actual audio.

As you can well imagine, I really like Ramon Sender's idea of compressing the Ring until it simply evaporates into a whiff of meaningless noise.  The problem of Wagner's excessively long music is solved.

THE ENTIRE RING IN FOUR CLICKS

In the sixties creative forward-looking musicians worked with early analog tape recorders and even earlier analog synthesizers and dreamed of an entirely new type of music.  In nearly every respect the music they dreamed up was completely unlike Wagner.

They were inspired by the new electronic tools at their disposal.  Maybe in their wildest, wildest dreams they imagined analog equipment would someday be supplanted by digital devices.   Could they have imagined that digital technology would become so ubiquitous and so portable and so powerful that anyone could accomplish the most complex audio editing almost anywhere.  If they did imagine that, then they probably didn't believe they'd live to see the day.  Turns out, they did.

In 2010 speeding up the entire Ring until it becomes four quick clicks is a rather trivial exercise.  I did it - and so could you - using the free program Audacity (highly recommended).  I repeatedly doubled the speed of each opera.  Just as with an analog tape machine, each doubling halves the length of the music and doubles the frequency, raising the pitch by one octave.  After about six octaves all resemblance to the original music disappears and only noise created by the inherent limitations of the equipment remains. 

I repeated this process sixteen times.  The final length is 1/1024th of the original.  Each opera lasts about a quarter of a second.  You'll be able to hear all four clicks in one second.  Theoretically the notes are sixteen octaves higher than the original.  With perfect fidelity the lowest audible frequency would have been transformed to over a half million cycles per second.  That is in the range of AM radio.  In reality nothing of Wagner  remains.  Instead of a time-saving subliminal way listen to Wagner, this process has simply removed all the content from his music.  Another problem solved.

Click here once to hear the entire Ring cycle as four clicks.  It'll only take a second.

THE ENTIRE RING, AT PITCH, IN SEVEN MINUTES

Recreating the tricks of old analog tape equipment is far from the only use for digital audio.  You can also manipulate sounds in ways which were inconceivable with analog equipment.  For instance, with digital audio you can change the pitch of music without changing the duration.  A good example of this, from pop music, would be AutoTune.  You can also change speed without changing pitch.  Making music slower is the idea behind 9 Beet Stretch which turns a seemingly interminable piece into an unbearably interminable one.

And, by making music faster, you can compress all of Wagner's Ring into a few minutes leaving mere hints of the original content.   That's what I've done.  Naturally a tremendous amount of musical information has been lost but you can still hear Wagner in there somewhere. 

For this realization I did seven halvings of the length of the Ring, making it 1/128th the length, keeping the pitches unchanged.  The result remains well within the frequency response of modern technology.  You can identify the occasional tonality, distinguish voices and instruments, hear loud and soft sections and generally get a feel for the flow of the music.   But it remains gobbelty-gook.  No way to solve that problem.

Click here to listen to the entire Ring cycle in seven minutes.

THE PROBLEM OF WAGNER'S RING 

Wagner's Ring is not a "problem" for opera queens and ring nerds.  More power to them.  But it can be a huge issue for an avant garde composer trying to face the unknown future of music who resents being pursued from behind by the continuing popularity and influence of this massive and vicious Romantic era monster.  Not all composers acknowledge the problem; not all composers are interested in the future.  Many are happy to imitate Wagner as best they can in hopes of getting their own operas performed.  Or of getting work writing movie scores.

Actually, I suspect most composers are simply oblivious.  They don't care about Wagner at all.  Much more power to them.

I'd like to end with a quote about Wagner's excessive influence as expressed by a composer who lived much closer to Wagner's time and is now regarded as one of the all-time greatest creative musical minds.  It was a time when Wagner was at the peak of his musical importance and the problem of finding a new non-Wagnerian future was most acute. 

The thing, then, is to find what comes after Wagner's time but not after Wagner's manner. 

Claude Debussy said this in his letters.  I found it quoted in Peter Yates' 1967 book Twentieth Century Music.

=-=-=-=-

After Leslie listened to the four clicks she remarked that some people might find even this version too long.

The transformational idea behind multiple octave changes reminds me of Frank Zappa's Big Note.

My own deconstruction of Wagner - or at least his one and only real contribution to pop culture - is called Wagner and Schubert Have Intercourse. 

Read about Burlesque of Nibelung which apparently happened a little over a month ago in downtown L.A.  Billed as "a naughty night of mythology, opera and high-brow burlesque hi-jinks", I suspect it's another unauthorized Ring Festival L.A. celebration.

ADDENDUM: I confess, the "Four Clicks" are not so much clicks as bursts of white noise.  But I distinctly remember that early book reference called the sounds "clicks" and I have kept the term.

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September, 2012 ADDENDUM:  Thanks to Tom Service of the Guardian for linking to this post.

My original encounter with the idea of reducing Wagner, including the word clicks, is now available online.  It was from an article by Pauline Oliveros entitled Some Sound Observations, published originally in issue 3 of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 (page 136 of a 2011 reprint by UC Press and readable on Google.)  Here's what she wrote:

One's ideas about music can change radically after listening to recorded works at fast forward or rewind on a tape recorder. Ramon Sender arranged Wagner's Ring Cycle by a series of re-recordings at fast forward to four successive clicks.

3-Head Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Ring of the Nibelung. . . LA Opera. . . Ring Festival LA. . . Ramon Sender. . . San Francisco Tape Music Center. . . analog tape recorder

A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles

No musician admits it out loud and a few probably don't even admit it to themselves, but every musician wants to get into the history books. I've seen composers open a new book from the back just to look for their name in the index. I do that myself sometimes.

I'm very proud that I got mentioned even once in Frank Zappa's autobiography. (On page 175 in case you run across a copy because Frank didn't believe in indices.)

Recently I was contacted by Charles Sharp (also known as C. Sharp). He wanted to interview me for his doctoral dissertation. Here's how he described it:

[It is] ostensibly about avant-garde jazz in Los Angeles but it has become increasingly about the intersection of various different genres of experimental music in Los Angeles.

One of those intersections involved the ICA, the Independent Composers Association, a group in which I was active in the early 1980s. You can read several Mixed Meters articles about ICA. (MM is the only place on the Internet you can read anything about ICA, alas.)

I answered Charles' questions as best my memory would allow. A year passed. Charles finished his dissertation, charmingly entitled "Improvisation, identity, and tradition: Experimental music communities in Los Angeles". He has since defended it against all comers and earned some letters after his name which entitle him to a chance of being hired for menial college teaching positions.

The dissertation is 500 pages long! I immediately searched it for my name and found a gratifying number of mentions. Thankfully the quotes Charles picked didn't make me look like a complete idiot. It's not online at the moment but if you want to read it you should contact him. Charles created a blog to accept comments here which might be a good place to leave him a message.

The story Charles tells is important. It's about creative music right here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, in experimental music, what happens in L.A. stays in L.A. This telling should help delineate a historical tradition few people know much about. Even those of us who witnessed parts of it don't know the whole story. People from elsewhere will be surprised.

After an academical introductory chapter (in which the word hermeneutics confused me repeatedly) it's a pretty easy read. Charles starts off with Ornette Coleman, not often thought of as an L.A. musician. He left here for New York in 1959 after recording The Shape of Jazz to Come. Three Los Angeles jazz musicians, pianist Horace Tapscott, cornetist Bobby Bradford and clarinetist John Carter are the backbone of the story.

I was acquainted with John Carter, heard him play a bunch of times and even got to play with him once, if only in private. He was a nice and genuine person. His cycle of 5 albums, Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, is the centerpiece of Charles' story. I could have learned a lot from John - had I thought to pay more attention.

Sharp discusses the music of Tapscott, Bradford and Carter :

...these musicians had preunderstandings, which were informed by bebop and also the developing music of free jazz. Their music suggested different realities and possibilities. If racism, which was a systemic part of urban planning, policing, and public policy, was a reminder that black people were not fully valued as individuals, the music was a reminder of the importance of individuals and the power of community. ... Their music was supposed to sound unique, different every time, and challenge the listeners; aspects that seldom result in broad mass appeal. ... As their music was understood, it expanded the horizons of the listeners and new communities would emerge. (p.126-7)

Charles writes a lot about communities - little groups of like-minded people within which music could take on some meaning. Telling how these groups arose and interacted with each other and eventually disappeared makes the story interesting.

For example, I found the early histories, starting in high school, of drummer Alex Cline, guitarist Nels Cline and synthesist Lee Kaplan (who ran an important concert series at a little dump pretentiously called the Century City Playhouse) fascinating. My buddy Vinny Golia gets a lot of space. (You can hear ancient recordings by an improv trio of myself, Vinny & flutist Anne LaBerge in this MM article.) Others (like Bill Roper, James Grigsby, Titus Levi, Kraig Grady, Lynn Johnston, Will Salmon) who I know or worked with get space as well.

Charles puts a lot of different things into his narrative. A chapter about punk rock. A chapter about the various Los Angeles city-wide arts festivals (which I alluded to in my recent post about opera.) Dr. Sharp takes the story right up to the present - long after I dropped out.

Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly 35 years, first as an active participant in the local experimental music scene and then an observer of same, I think this dissertation deserves to be widely read. Creative musicians, non-creative musicians, music fans of all kinds and even music critics will find it interesting. And they might just realize that Los Angeles is not quite the creative wasteland we pretend to be.


To accompany this post I've gone through the chaos of my archives and selected some flyers, newspaper clippings and concert programs which relate one way or another to Charles' subject matter. All of them mention my name somewhere - why else would I have kept them? But most are more interesting because of the others involved.

The material is in two formats. One is a 16 meg. PDF of scans of each item - get it here. The other is the same material only converted to searchable text. Read that one here.

Here's a list of the items included:

• Promotional Articles - Ornette Coleman and Golia/LaBerge/Ocker (LA Herald Examiner September 1984)
• Postcard Ocker/Golia/LaBerge TRIO and Peet/Fumo DUO (Galeria Ocaso August 1985)
• Flyer - An ORT FESTIVAL (Oranges & Sardines, March 1985)
• Promotional Article - Lee Kaplan with Golia/Ocker (LA Weekly, no date)
• Program ....INTO MUSIC (LACE May 1985)
• Flyer - SEVEN NIGHTS FOR LOCAL COMPOSERS (Nov/Dec 1984)
• Postcard - L.A. Festival: Jazz & the New Thing and Golia/Ocker (Sept 1990)
• Review - Carter Compositions Featured (Los Angeles Times Sept. 6 1990)
• Review - Clarinet concert like fine conversation (Daily News, Sept. 17, 1990)
• Program - The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble (Harbor College, Oct. 1991)