Notes for Tracks 1, 2, 3, and 4:

CD 2 of EMERGENT MUSIC AND VISUAL MUSIC: INSIDE STUDIES is called Italian-American Electronic Music Dramas because it features the music synthesizer duets of Ron Pellegrino and Sal Martirano (no surprise, two Italian-Americans); the duets are filled with sort of dramatic music that can be expected from the play of boys basking in being bad. The tracks were recorded at three separate times and places—in 1973 during a live performance at the University of Illinois Phoenix ’73 Festival of New Music, in 1974 during evenings of play in Sal’s University of Illinois studio, and in 1975 at Sal’s personal facility located on his property.

We did several public performances during the Phoenix '73 Festival but we also spent a number of days and nights just exploring and playing in one amazing sound world after another (and archiving periodically). Those ’73 sessions set the stage for our meetings in 1974 and 1975 when I was periodically driving back and forth between a home in the San Francisco Bay Area and a faculty gig at Oberlin.

On all the tracks, Sal, a giant of a musician and electronic music pioneer, performed on his own one-of-a-kind hybrid synthesizer creation, the SalMar Construction, and I played a just-configured portable road show set of synthesizers that included an ARP 2600, two Synthi AKSs, and a boxed collection of Buchla 200 Series modules, (I cross-patched all my synthesizers to behave like a single complex instrument in many ways similar conceptually to the SalMar Construction).

The Sal Mar Construction


My road set

The track titles are mine. They reflect my memory of the psychological range we explored in our play, a world in which there were no musical restrictions. Sal was 13 years my senior but he was one of those people with a twinkle in his eye like a grade school kid at recess. In addition to being a very serious classical composer and jazz pianist, he loved the world of wild sound and the freedom it engendered. We never exchanged words about what we were about to do in our sessions—no explicit plans; rather it was the actual sounds of our instruments that were the only form of communication for our duets.

Sometimes Sal led, sometimes I did. Because his hybrid instrument required a certain amount of programming (an occasional built-in time lag) I remember that when it was my turn to follow, I often adapted my sounds to fit Sal’s world. I was not absolutely sure I needed to do that but it felt right at the time. Making such adjustments was a new synthesizer experience for me and I enjoyed it immensely because it was a realtime test of adaptability, at that time a test best suited to analog synthesizers. We let the flow and the shape of our music decide how long we would explore compositional notions; there never seemed to be any doubt that we would end up on the same page. Both Sal and I were serious composers steeped in the classical tradition so if you listen closely to all four tracks you will hear every last formal and structural element that has come down to us through the ages of musical development; of course it was our unstated intention to create a few new elements of our own.

I’ve championed Sal’s musical work since our first meeting in 1969 at a composer’s gathering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From the outset it was clear that he was the complete musician who balanced intelligence, vision, and a work ethic with a dramatic passion about free play, a rare combination. During my tenure at the Oberlin Conservatory I was part of group of composers who organized the New Directions Concert Series, a series that featured leading American new music composers; and of course in the early 1970s Sal was invited to make a show of his SalMar Construction. In 1977/78 I had a one year visiting professorship at Miami University and once again I hosted Sal as the featured composer on our new music festival. In addition to our 1973-75 recording sessions, throughout the 1970s we shared and performed on the same stages including the University of South Florida, University of Illinois, University of Tampa, and UC-Berkeley. That sort of activity ended in the early 1980s when I eased out of the full time academic world to focus on solo performances on the road and the composition of media bands with local artists that I met at my gigs on the road. I made a lot of performance pals on the road but after all these years Sal remains my favorite; from the first four tracks on this CD it should be easy to hear why.

Track 1 - Phoenix Rising (1973) 3:48. Audio sample

Track 2 - Free Electrons (1974) 10:36. Audio sample

Track 3 - Brotherly Breezing (1975) 11:15. Audio sample

Track 4 - Boys Being Bad (1975) 7:47. Audio sample

Track 5 - Markings for Dena Madole (1968/69) 25:55 was composed in 1968/69 during the first year of a faculty gig at The Ohio State University where I was directing the electronic music studio and an experimental music group, teaching composition, and collaborating on integrated arts projects with other arts faculty (computer graphics pioneer Charles Csuri, extraordinary dancers and choreographers, other musicians, filmmakers, light artists, theatre artists, etc.) as well as graduate students from departments all over the campus in an integrated media context replicated many years later in the institutionalized form of MIT's Media Lab. The OSU grass roots version of integrated media in the late 60s/early 70s predated MIT's version (the Media Lab) by 17 years, although if you believe MIT's promotional literature they would have you to believe that they discovered what's called multimedia all by themselves in 1985.

When I arrived at OSU in the fall of 1968 I discovered I had inherited a room full of analog electronic gear that seemed begged, borrowed, or stolen—all the makings of a "classical" electronic music studio which meant it originally came from physics labs, radio stations, and surplus electronics warehouses—gear definitely not originally designed to make music. It was the sort of electronic music facility commonly found in European radio stations in the late 40s through the early 60s, a facility populated by electronic gear such as function generators, switches, filters, tape recorders, oscilloscopes, and patch bays. And to put it simply, that room full of gear at OSU showed no organizing principle beyond proximity, and that didn't make much sense either. The first job I gave myself was to find a suitable space for the equipment and to tie it together into a functioning system capable of making music and teaching electronic composition. I had just spent a year working with the latest Moog synthesizer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison so I had to work through a bit of culture shock before I could appreciate the potential of a “classical” studio for making one think differently.

Nevertheless, what I loved about that studio was that it was compositionally biased toward sculpting the flow of electrons rather than electronically simulating acoustic instruments. My approach to working in that environment was first to design instruments that behaved like conversational electronic creatures and then second to figure out how to play with those creatures and to organize them into a band for my music. Listening to this piece in 2010 I’m struck by how European the music sounds, although it does have a bit of an American accent.

Dena Madole, a striking figure critically acclaimed for her beauty and grace, was an Erick Hawkins Dance Company principal dancer in New York City during the 1960s. In 1968 she commissioned Markings when she decided to embark on a solo career. The first performances were programmed on an NYU dance festival in the spring of 1969. For years following those performances she featured the piece on her cross-country tours. Originally the score included a timpani part (played by a great timpanist in New York City) but when I learned that Dena intended to tour nationally with the piece I redid that part electronically and that version is what you hear on this track. The vocalist for this performance is Ann Chase, a lucky find on the OSU campus because 40 years later I can not imagine anyone doing a better realization. Audio sample

Track 6 - Great Wails for Herbert Blau (1972) 13.59 was composed in the spring of 1972 when Blau, an experimental theatre director and theorist, asked me to compose music for a Vietnam antiwar protest media event that he was organizing at Oberlin College. I was slow to warm to the idea because a few years earlier (1970) I left Ohio State where I found it difficult to function given the 5,000 national guard troops on campus, the helicopters hovering over the Oval, and daily experiences of moving through check points all over campus—all difficulties inspired by local Vietnam protests. (That was the year of the Kent State spring shooting.) I moved to Oberlin partly because it felt like an island of sanity and balance, a great escape for someone with my perspective on the arts. Nevertheless I composed the piece and in the process all I could feel was sorrow—consequently the Great Wails.

The plan was to compose this piece in realtime so I configured the entire main studio of the Oberlin Electronic Music Facility (see below) into one large extended music synthesizer, an early form of the orchestral designs I pursued with greater and greater intensity through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The thinking, though not hybrid, is related to what went into designing the SalMar Construction in the sense of distributing the functionality via constructing subsystem sets for control, generation, modification, processing, and distribution. Comparatively an important difference is that the SalMar is a general purpose instrument whereas my large designs usually targeted a single composition. To create another composition I simply (or not so simply) reconfigured the entire studio to meet the requirements of the new piece. The key to making such complex instruments function musically is to design multiple addressable subsystems that can be combined into pyramids that are musically combinable and performable from the tops of the pyramids. Parallel computing is a digital translation of this design principle.

The outdoor media event was scheduled for late April on Oberlin's Tappan Square, perfect timing for the arrival of storms blowing in off Lake Erie. So it was not much of a surprise when an exciting spring windstorm joined our performance and blew my wails every which way. It also created havoc with Blau's beautiful giant masks but it all seemed made to order to delight the international media crowd in attendance. Too bad this audio track does not carry the wind's wacky way of generating location modulation. I miss it too but I knew at the time that it was a once in a lifetime happening. I'm sure your imagination will fill in what's missing. Audio sample

The Oberlin main studio in the early 70s

To view selected sections of Emergent Music And Visual Music: Inside Studies, Part 1: The Book, click on one of the following:
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1, Emergent Music
Chapter 15, Visual Music Flavors
Acknowledgments
Index

Information on Part 2: The DVDs.

Pellegrino's projects available for purchase.

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