New Electronic Music - Cage, Pousseur & Babbit

 

Trios Visages de Liege

New Electronic Music From Leaders Of The Avant-Garde
John Cage: Variations II
Henri Pousseur: Trois Visages de Liege
Milton Babbitt: Ensembles For Synthesizer
Produced by David Behrman
Engineer: Frank Laico & Ed Michaiski
Cover Art: Richard Mantel
Music Of Our Time
Columbia STEREO MS 7051
1967

From the back cover: John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied with Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg and D. T. Suzuki. In addition to his activities as composer and performer, Cage has written and lectured extensively. The impact of Cage's work on composers and artists throughout the world is inestimable. The noted author and critic Peter Yates calls him "the most influential composer, worldwide, of his generation." Through his interest in Oriental thought (particularly Zen) and his employment of such ideas in his work, Cage has been a significant catalyst in the drawing together of East and West. This is increasingly apparent.

For more than thirty years it has been Cage's consistent concern to expand our consciousness and enhance our appreciation of the sounds – intended or accidental – that are always around us. To these ends he has composed work for conventional and unconventional instruments alike, believing all sounds to be acceptable musical materials. In 1952, Cage "opened the doors of music to the sounds which happen to be in the environment" with his 4' 33", "a piece in three movements, during all of which no sounds are intentionally produced."

Milton Babbitt was born in Philadelphia in 1916 and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He received his B.A. from New York University and his M.A. from Princeton, where he studied with Roger Sessions and where he is currently Professor of Music. He has been a frequent contributor to leading music periodicals and has lectured in the United States and abroad.

Babbit is one of the first American composers to employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, and he has continued to extend and elaborate that method into a complex system of serial composition. His Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948) were the first totally serialized works written for this country. Since then, employing such mathematical concepts as set and group theory, Professor Babbitt has continued his systematization of serial composition and in recent years has carried over these structural principles and techniques into his electronic works. He has composed four works in this medium, all created at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, of which Mr. Babbitt is a director. In the 1950's, then the most advanced device for the production of electronic tape music. Mr. Babbitt has made it his unique province, employing in to realize all his electronic music.

Henri Pousseur was born in Malmedy, Belgium, in 1929. He was educated at the Royal Conservatory of Liege and at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, where he received first prizes in harmony, solfege, organ and fugue. He is presently Sleeping Professor of Composition at the University of New York at Buffalo and is also director of the Electronic Music Studio in Brussels.

Pousseur was a leading member of the generation of composer that came to prominence after the war, a group that also include Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio. For these composers, the works of Anton Webern served as a kind of Corpus Juris Canonici, and the serial organization and pointillist textures of Pousseur's early works (Trois chants sacred, 1951; Quintet in Memory of Webern, 1955) reflect that influence. Pousseur soon realized that the arbitrary application of the series to all parameters of the music that characterized "total organization" produced a "statistical" effect not unlike the similar use of chance determinants. He has written: "A pitiless regimentation would appear to rule over this music, controlling the course of event even in its most intimate details. But, if one goes beyond a simple analysis of such music and beyond a dissection of its notations, if one relies primarily on concrete hearing... it often happens that one perceives just the contrary of such regimentation. Precisely where the most abstract constructions have been applied, it is not seldom that one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of consequences of an aleatory free play. If the charm of the music is undeniable nonetheless, that is less of the more mysterious charm to be found in our awareness of the many distributive forms found in nature; the unhurried dispersion of passing clouds, the twinkle of pebbles in the bed of a mountain stream, or the breaking of surf against a rocky coast." Thus, in works such as Mobile For Two Pianos (1957-58) and Repons (which is dedicated to John Cage), Pousseur has introduced elements of chance or indeterminacy. In his most recent work, Notre Faust, an opera written in collaboration with the French author Michael Butor, the course of events taken by the opera is determined by the responses of the audience at each performance.

From Billboard - November 25, 1967: The avant-garde at its weirdest is offered in this electronic music disk. Babbitt's "Ensemble For Synthesizer" is a tour-de-force for the electronic tape machine, while Pousseur's "Trioz Visages de Liege" uses voices along with electronic sounds for dramatic effect. Tudor's association with Cage has produced in "Variations II" an interesting perplexing piece.

John Cage: Variations II - David Tudor, Piano

Milton Babbitt: Ensembles For Synthesizer

Henri Pousser: Trois Visaged de Liege
I – L'Air et I'eau
II – Vois de la ville
III – Forges