VA: Currents - Electronic Music by Various Composers, 1968-2018
ACA

Currents provides a magnificent survey of the electroacoustic field, not only because works by thirteen different ACA-affiliated composers are featured but for the fact that the pieces presented span fifty years. As such, the release brings into focus changes in production methodology that have transpired, from tape pieces in the ‘60s to recent works that take full advantage of current technological possibilities. Curated by Scott Miller, Daria Semegen, and Harvey Sollberger (works by all three appear on the collection), the compilation offers an exceptional portrait of this experimental field as well as an ideal entry-point for the listener wanting to become familiar with it. Certainly there is overlap between these fixed media works, but the release also accentuates how creatively limitless the field is for those operating within it.

To be clear, though the title suggests a balanced presentation of works spanning five decades, three selections were created in the late ‘60s, one in 1992, and the rest between 2014 and 2018. That makes Currents less a historical account than an account of contemporary approaches. A number of the composers hold university positions that have enabled them to pursue research in the field without the burden of economic pressure (Robert Scott Thompson, for example, is at Georgia State University in Atlanta, whereas Miller is at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota). That sense of security has also had a creatively liberating impact, as evidenced by the works on the collection.

Let's consider the earliest pieces first, two of them by Preston Trombly, 1969's Kinetics I and Kinetics II, and one by Harvey Sollberger, 1968's Fanfare Mix Transpose. Likening the electronic music studio at Yale's School of Music to an ‘instrument' much as the piano was for Beethoven, Trombly created these works by recording electronic sounds onto magnetic tape and then manipulating the results by speeding up, slowing down, and reversing, in the process creating material marked by motion and direction. The spatial distribution of sounds in his pair makes for engrossing listening; monitoring the careen of its electronic elements as they flutter across the stereo field also makes the experience a whole lot more fun. Sollberger, whose published discography exceeds 130 items, caps the release with one of its most restless and noisiest pieces, a nine-minute setting he created using classic cut-and-splice methods at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

Following Trombly's pieces, the collection jumps to the present with Thompson's 2018 acousmatic composition, Nullius in Verba. The nine-minute piece offers a solid representation of his style, with this rather spectral, mutating “song without words” (his description) assembled from transformed field and studio recordings and vocal, percussion, flute, and cello sound sources. His self-professed aesthetic focuses on creating self-contained phantasmagorias that encourage immersive engagement in the listener. Currents then time-travels again, this time for Semegen's Arabesque, a 1992 analog studio electronic music composition that, similar to the Kinetics pieces, exploits to maximum advantage spatial distribution; her sounds, some of them generated using the Buchla 200 Electric Music Box synthesizer, exemplify a refreshing playfulness as they warble and flutter unpredictably for eight minutes.

Of all the settings, Miller's SonAR [Sonic Augmented Reality] Study I (2018) perhaps best illustrates how those working in the electroacoustic field integrate current technologies into their practice. Designed to explore the potential of smartphone-based music connected to the environment and its location within it, his twelve-minute setting is composed of eleven different audio tracks, each inspired by actual ambient sounds collected during soundwalks at the St. Cloud State University campus. In sonic terms, the version on the release (merely one possible iteration, given that a downloaded app in conjunction with GPS tracking allows for any number of treatments to be generated when different routes through the campus trigger different sounds) is less busy and frenetic than others on Currents, Miller's presenting itself as a sustained ambient drone more inclined to lull than jar the listener. SonAR Study I is hardly static, however: sprinkled with acoustic piano and electronic textures of various kinds, the material holds the attention as it wends its slow route patiently.

Each piece individuates itself from others in fascinating ways. To create Transcendental Assembly (2016-2018), Matthew Greenbaum drew from an earlier chamber work arranged for soprano and five instruments and based on text by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Of course the original elements were transformed radically, yet vestiges of their originating character remain, the vocal element now heard as a ghostly choir whose rather strangulated expressions are sometimes indistinguishable from the instrumental timbres. Hubert Howe's Quarter Tone Fantasy (2018), on the other hand, consists of quarter tones, notes between the half steps of the twelve-tone tempered scale, that fade in and out for nine minutes. Naturally, no other piece on the release includes pitches like Howe's, and as a result this “inharmonic fantasy” (his term) stands apart from the rest. All audio for John Gibson's sparkling, somewhat pastoral setting, Almost an Island (2018), originated from water recordings, with spectral audio analysis applied to generate streams of notes suggesting the movement of small waves lapping ashore.

One standout is Alice Shields' White Heron Dance (2017), at fourteen minutes the longest of the album's settings. This totally captivating work (created using ProTools and Csound, among other things) advances through four sections (Entrance, Song, Union, Exit) and, unlike the other works on the release, is daringly programmatic. She conceived the piece as a “ritual in sound in which a human being experiences a moment of union with nature in the form of a Great White Heron.” In the opening minutes, sounds suggestive of a creature's cry emerge alongside staccato chords and wavering, pitch-shifting warbles. Five minutes along, samples of heron vocalizations appear, as do soft, human utterances entreating the heron to communicate. Advancing into the third section, the soundfield broadens to include hawks, eagles, songbirds, frogs, and crickets until the heron flies away, the nature sounds vanish, and the reappearance of the staccato chords signals the return to the piece's beginnings.

March 2019