Sonic Seasonings - Walter Carlos

 

Winter

Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Inc. Present

Walter Carlos

Sonic Seasonsings

A Tempi Production

Produced by Rachel Elkins

Mixed by Walter Carlos

Mastering: Cliff Morris

Cover Design: Ed Lee

Cover Art: Islands Of Matsushima - accession number: 11.4584 / Fund: Fenollosa / Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Columbia KG 31234

1972

From the inside cover: Walter Carlos: Then, Now And In-Between

I can't actually remember my first meeting with Walter Carlos., though it must have been late in 1962 at Columbia University in New York where, at the time, we were both graduate students in musical composition. Possibly if occurred in one of those interminable music history lectures through which I used to doze so contentedly, but it escapes me as to whether it was during one of Professor Lang's Baroque fantasies or during a session of Professor Lenin's reminiscences about life with Ferruccio Busoni.

But no matter, it soon became a ritual for us to settle into one of the nearby pubs favored by Columbia stints and to spend hours grombling about fusty academics and arguing about music. Walter loved Hoist's The Planets – I loathed it. I had a strange passion for Miaskovsky's Seventeenth Symphony – Walter could see nothing good in it. Occasionally, we even agreed in our enthusiasms and dislikes: the Bartok string quartets, the Berg Violin Concerto, the Prokofiev piano concertos were splendid, while Richard Strauss' tone-poems, most of Schonberg, and all of Delius, were abominable.

Thought he was also writing music for conventional instruments, Walter's great interest, even then, was the electronic medium. In fact, since his early youth (born 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) he had displayed a strong concern with both music and scientific technology: at the age of 10, he composed a Trio for Clarinet., Accordion and Piano and, four years later, he designed and constructed a small computer. When he was 17, he achieved a symbiosis between music and science by assembling an electronic music studio and producing there his first electronic composition, which utilized sounds created and manipulated on tape-recorders. As a student at Brown University from 1958-62, Walter studied music and physics, also teaching electronic music at informal sessions. Then, in 1962, he enrolled at Columbia University to work and study at the renowned Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Among other activities during this Columbia period (1962-65) was a concert of electronic music at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, in which he assisted Leonard Bernstein.

One of my most vivid recollection of those years is of countless night session in the Electronic Music Center, and of Walter and myself emerging onto the campus in the early morning, blinking dazedly in the sunlight and staggering across Broadway to the local "Chock Full o' Nuts' for coffee. Vladimir Ussachevsky had kindly allowed  Walter the run of the electronic music laboratory after midnight and it turned out to be a good arrangement for both of us – though I  was illegal. The lab was backstage at McMillin Theater, and while Walter was manically involved with the tape machines, I would invade the stage and commandeer the concert grand piano for composing purposes. There was only one catch to an otherwise ideal situation, and that was the fact that each of us worked in constant dread of marauding janitors who seemed unaware of the Ussachevsky-Carlos compact and had the habit of appearing at unexpected moments to express their considerable outrage at our presence. I recall that the custodial corps was particularly vigilant one night when I recorded Walter's Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers for commercial release: one take was interrupted by a sudden bellow from the balcony of "Hey, Buddy – what the hell d'ya think you're doin' with that piano?" while still another was graced with a colorful clash of fortissimo brooms and pails. Somehow, we managed.

Now and then, I used to sit amidst the laboratory equipment and, being incorrigibly unscientific, watch and listen to what Walter was up to with more than a little amazement. A distinct feeling of being left out would occasionally inspire taught pronouncements to the effect that michelins must never be allowed to supersede man, especially in the area of musical composition. Poor Walter, looking harried, would counter with lenghty technical explanations as to why the human element remained all-important in the electron medium. His aspiration, even then, was to have a synthesizer at his disposal so versatile as to allow him to perform on it as expressively as, for instance, on a piano. It seemed a far-fetched idea at the to,ebit that. pf course. was in the pre-Moog era when Columbia-Rpinceton's unwieldy RDCA Mark II Synthesizer (which Walter did not have access to anyway) was the most sophisticated device of its kind.

It was natural that Walter should have been attracted to the composition of works for traditional instruments in combination with electronically generate sounds, for he was much disturbed by the fact that a piece  conceived on tape would, of necessity, be exactly the same each time it was played – a total negation of the performance factor. So, besides the previously mentioned Dialogues (1963), he produced Variations for Flute and Electronic Sounds (1964). Episodes for Piano and Tape (1964), and Pomposities for Narrator and Tape (1965). In addition, his opera  Noah (1965) contains sections where electronic sounds augment the conventional orchestra.

Following graduation from Columbia in 1965, Walter spent three years as a recording engineer at Gotham Recording Studios in mid-Manhattan. In 1966, he began a collaboration with engineer Robert Moog, hoping to develop an electronic sound producer that could Bailey be termed a musical instrument. Walter has observed that he desires "to try to maintain a continuity in music. The synthesizer grows out of what went before, just as the piano grew out of the harpsichord." With the completion of the first version of his Moog Syntezier, he began to seek continuity by turning to the music of the past and making arrangements of writs of Johann Sebastian Bach. He chose Bach because he felt that the Moog was capable of bringing an ideal clarity to such intensely linear music.

The rest is history. With the appearance of Walter's Switched-On Bach, in the fall of 1968, audiences around the world were introduced to an entirely new instrument and, as a result, became generally more aware of the electronic music medium. The album itself, hailed as "the record of the decade" by no less a Bach authority than pianist Glenn Gould, achieved the status of one of the best-selling classical records of all time. It was followed, in 1969, by The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, containing more Bach, plus works of Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Handel.

Switched-On Bach's success made it possible for Walter to abandon his tiny Moog-dominated apartment on New York City's West Side and to move into a roomy brownstone. This has been almost completely remodeled, with the basement transformed into a superb 16-track recording studio and perhaps the most elaborate and complete electronic music laboratory anywhere.

In 1971, utilizing his vastly amplified and improved Moog Synthesizer, Water produced a lengthily serious electronic composition entitled Timesteps and also his brilliant score to Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. 1972 has seen the creation off the present album, Sonic Seasonings. For both Clockwork Orange and Sonic Seasonings, Walter had the sensitive collaboration and direction of his long-time producer, Rachel Elkins.

As to future projects, Walter Carlos has, as usual, several ideas joggling for position in his restless mind. And, just as usual, they range from the improbable to the wildly improbable. Or maybe not. Once upon a time, I thought the same about his electronic Bach. And, when he described plans for Sonic Seasonings, I told him that they were amusing to talk about but that the entire concept was quite outlandish. "You'll never actually do it, you know," I declared – perceptively. – Phillip Ramey

___

One of the most fascinating – and least explored  – areas of scientific investigation is that of psychoacoustics, the manner in which the ear and brain interact to sounds. In reality, any sound that we hear is subject to interpretation by our individual experience and the circumstance surrounding that sound. For example, a loud sound will register on the ear as either louder or softer, depending on the sound that precedes and follows it. Similarly, a quiet tone gains in intensity by the degree of loudness surrounding it. When these qualities of sound, or music, are deliberately "mixed" or manipulated, the result can be a fascinating perceptual "illusion" that enriches today's musical palette almost beyond imagination.

All this is simply to explain what SONIC SEASONINGS is all about: It is an aural tapestry, created by the imagination and expertise of Walter Carlos, from impressionistic and expressionistic experiences of Nature. It contains natural sounds, recorded in Quad as realistically as possible and subtly mixed with electronic and instrumental sounds in an effort to creat four evolving, undulating cycles evocative of the moods of earth's seasons. We have manipulated these sounds – electronically orchestrated them, so to speak – into an amalgam of the natural and the synthetic.

To produce this record, an entirely new technique and methodology had to be created. Queipment had to be designed and built, engineering technology had to be developed – we were "winging it" from the first inch of tape to the end. A great deal of what you will hear is illusory: Some sounds appear louder or softer than are measurable end some emanate from directions that are virtually inexplicable by customary "norm" perceptions. While the quadraphonic master is particually an ear-fooler in these  and other ways, Walter conceived a unique system to make the stereo version "almost quad." (in fact, it was frequently impossible for its to believe that we were listening to the stereo version.)

The sounds and music in this album represent, then, a painstaking synchronization, re-ordering, and blending of as many as 48 Dolbyized tracks at a time, and, we hope, suggest a third, viable alternative to acoustic and musical environmental presentations. 

But on the level of pure enjoyment, these records were designed to be a part of the decor, so to speak – a sonic ambience that enhances the listener's total environment. On still another level, SONIC SEASONINGS take the listener out of his environment and into the countryside of his fantasy: The weary urbanite can eavesdrop on the conversation of chattering birds; the mountain dweller can lave his soul with a sound of the surf, and so on.

We ask, however, that the listener supply on element that we could not possibly blend into the final mix – his own imagination and his remembrance of Nature's blessing. – Rachel Elkins.

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