Neptune The Mystic
Beyond The Sun
An Electronic Portrait Of Holst's
The Planets
Patrick Gleeson, Eu Polyphonic Synthesizer
Produced and Programmed by Patrick Gleeson
Additional Performances by Julian Priester
Phonogram/Mercury A&R: Denny Rosencrantz and M. Scott Mampe
Cover Photo: Paco North
Cover Design: Carl S. Barile
Recorded and mixed at Different Fun Music, San Francisco
Engineers: Neil Schwartz, Seth Dworken, Skip Shimmin
Mercury STEREP SRI-8000
1976
The music on this album was performed entirely on an Eu Systems Synthesizer designed by David Rossum and Scott Wedge. No other instruments were used.
This album is dedicated with affection to Robert Moog and W. Carlos.
From the back cover: In 1964 Patrick Glee- son was a successful scholar of 18th century English literature, a department head at San Francisco State University, and an amateur pianist. As a secondary interest, he began to make taped electronic music through the facilities at the Mills College Tape Music Center in Oakland, using a Buchla and various electronic devices. He was stimulated musically by some early synthesizer recordings and tape music being made by Steve Reich and Terry Riley. After hearing Walter Carlos' Switched - On Bach, he dropped out of the teaching profession, bought a Moog synthesizer, and began to make synthesized music professionally. By 1970 he performed locally in San Francisco, and built a recording studio that was oriented toward electronic music. He recorded with the Jefferson Airplane during this time, and in 1971, after successfully recording synthesizer on Herbie Hancock's Crossings, he joined Herbie's band, touring and recording with them until the summer of 1973. He then sold his Moog system and began assembling the Eu Polyphonic System he now uses for all studio work. He continues to record with jazz musicians including Lenny White, Freddy Hubbard, Charles Earland, Joe Henderson, Julian Priester, and Eddy Henderson. He has also worked as a session player on many pop albums. In 1976 he was awarded a grant in composition by the National Endow- ment for the Arts to write a concerto for orchestra and guitar. He lives in San Francisco, where he has a 24-track studio, writes and records his music, and produces other artists.
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The Planets" by Gustav Holst was one of my first orchestral experiences during my early teens, a time when it was a popular "hi-fi" demonstration piece. Although I thought my romance with "The Planets" had long since been put to rest, Patrick Gleeson's electronic realization of this same piece is the first performance which satisfies my own admittedly egocentric standards so that I no longer have to feel guilty that the many requests that my collaborator and producer Rachel Elkind and I have had will go unanswered. Patrick Gleeson has provided a brilliant realization. Our eight-year wait for someone else to explore electronic music realization with what we judge to be appropriate technical standards and musical taste has ended.
Perhaps the most gratifying result to us can now be discussed. Up to now, they have been clouded by trivial pseudo-issues of "electronic music vs. traditional instruments", or, even more absurd, "Is this new medium even music?". We are looking forward to discussing with Gleeson and others at long last the issue of methodology: humanized live keyboard performance vs. automated sequencer-control of pitch and duration. We strongly favor the former approach while Gleeson now employs the latter. But while the accurately rigid translation of the written score via Gleeson's system has undeniable merits, it does lead to a subtly mechanized feel to the music, and thus represents the only major area of disagreement between us. That we can recognize and respond favorably to each other's realizations and still maintain our differences is truly as it ought to be. This healthy situation is found throughout music, and it is about time that it applied to electronic music as well.
That Gleeson's technical standards are extremely high is evident to us on many levels: his awareness of the need for subtly complex sounds makes his tutti sound appropriately BIG, not just thick and muddled as "three - patchcord-only" synthesized elements would be. He is unafraid to put in the extra hours necessary for numbers of parts in, say, string ensembles, when less would satisfy all but the most demanding ear. The thought of reading from a typical orchestral score (with all the necessary different clefs and transpositions) doesn't phase him-no piano transcriptions for Gleeson!
Patrick Gleeson's grasp of color – orchestral, textural, infinitely elastic shades of subtle greys and contrasts between families of timbre – is simply stunning. The discretion he exercises and the perfect pitch control and timing of special effects he weaves into the original orchestral fabric is especially noteworthy. And we suspect that he now holds the "record" for numbers of parts overdubbed and mixed together (all, incidentally, without loss of ensemble or clarity). In short, one hears the ears of a gifted musician at work, in a field where one must exercise unprecedented discipline and self-control. Patrick Gleeson exhibits all of these qualities on every page of Holst's complex score.
While all the above is true, and by all means significant, to leave it at that would be doing a disservice to Patrick Gleeson. For what he is about, and indeed what all electronic music ought to be about, is how this record stands in comparison to all other performances. Our medium, after all, is only a vehicle. It is the re- sult as music which in the end must count. And in the case of Patrick Gleeson's debut album, the values which make it an important album are as old as music itself. – Walter Carlos
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THE EU POLYPHONIC SYNTHESIZER
Robert Moog and Donald Buchla, working independently, developed the forerunners of all current voltage-controlled synthesizers. For various reasons Robert Moog's instrument, completed in the mid-1960s, has been far more influential than Buchla's (which has been used, however, with much success by Morton Subotnik). The Moog III, which I used for several years, is the direct inspiration for my instrument, the Eu Systems Polyphonic Synthesizer.
The Eu, developed by David Rossum and Scott Wedge, is, like Moogs, Arps and Oberheims (the other three "serious" contemporary synthesizers), a highly specialized collection of fairly common audio devices: oscillators, filters, amplifiers, etc. Its specialization is largely in the area of voltage control. Instead of having an amplifier activated and gain-controlled manually, the voltage-controlled amplifiers of contemporary synthesizers are controlled by other programmable devices. The musician initiates a complex of events with a single instruction, provided, of course, that he has previously adjusted the various controls to achieve a desired effect. It is part of the skill of playing a synthesizer, therefore, to be able to achieve these effects, and there is as much difference between what the average synthesist can achieve with a given instrument and what a virtuoso can achieve as there is between, for example, the average pianist and a great master.
The Eu differs from earlier synthesizers in two significant ways: it is polyphonic-it plays several notes simultaneously with complete independence (in contrast with the Moog III, which plays one note at a time), and it is partially not an analog instrument but a digital instrument, controlled with binary language. In this sense it is "computerized", but it is not a computer. Rather, it uses a few computer-like controls and one micro-computer to make possible a wider range of simultaneous instructions. This way it is, paradoxically, a more flexible and consequently a more human instrument than its predecessors. – Patrick Gleeson
Mars, The Bringer Of War
Venus, The Bringer Of Peace
Mercury, The Winged Messenger
The Bringer Of Jollity
Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age
Uranus, The Magician
Neptune, The Mystic
