Historical Context

My research about the use of field recordings in concert music has its roots in the tradition of incorporating sounds from daily life (and in the past “secular” life) into musical compositions. Mimesis, quotations, and depictions of scenes of life can be found throughout the centuries; modern recording capability has taken the ability of reproduction, representation, and musical transcription to the next hyper-real level.

Precursors to field recording include vocal imitation of sounds and events from real life. A delightful example is the anonymous secular motet of three voices called On parole/A Paris/Frese nouvele.¹Here, texts about the shining beauty of Mary, the season of love, and a street-vendor's call in the tenor “Fresh strawberries! Ripe blackberries!” are superimposed. These motets were highly complex vocal pieces and vehicles for experimentation of multiple texts and poems in different voices, opening the possibility of sewing commercial street advertisements into a musical quilt of Paris. Because of the lyrics we can clearly recognize the original function of the market call; otherwise it would depend on audience familiarity to understand the source. A contemporary use of street-vendor calls by Mexican composer José Julio Díaz Infante (b. 1973) features an instrumental transcription of tamale sellers in his otherwise avant garde string quartet “Tamales Oaxaqueños” (2011).² When he had a performance of this piece for his home audience, he garnered immediate response of audible chuckles when they recognized this quote. In contrast, non-Mexican audiences needed to hear a field recording of the original to fully appreciate its clever inclusion.

A prime example of contemporary mimesis of human speech is the “Speaking Piano” research of Peter Ablinger (b. 1959). With the aid of the computer and a specially-built machine to depress piano keys (even all 88 simultaneously, which is impossible with other player pianos) Ablinger transcribes human speech with an incredible accuracy that a human could not reproduce with ten fingers. Speech patterns are recognizable, but exact words do need captions for full recognition of the sentences communicated by this special player piano.

Along with the human voice, animal calls are a popular sound source for composition. Much has been written about Olivier Messiaen's (1908-1992) fascination with birdsong,³ and how he incorporated it into his keyboard works. So here we are again dealing with transcription of an outdoor source framed and brought into the concert hall. Of course by the time a piano or organ plays the transcribed birdsong inside a composition it sounds different and has become something else beyond the original. One of my colleagues, Hong-Da Chin (b. 1985) often questioned why Messiaen did not choose a timbrally similar instrument to the bird for his transcriptions, such as flute. Perhaps Messiaen enjoyed learning and studying the birdsong deeply to then make a new piece with it, rather than focusing on creating the closest possible imitation? Chinese traditional instruments such as the dizi flute do not have keys so pitch bends are easier, and on this instrument it is possible to mimic birdsong, and even the whinny of a horse. (Similar to the trumpet effect in the Christmas tune Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson in 1950). Influenced by his Chinese tradition, Chin composed several pieces based on transcriptions of bird song where the flute/dizi and human voice imitate birds. One piece featured a variety of warbler song played on piccolo, Lost Warblers in the Woods (2011), for which he had transcribed by ear the calls of different warblers and added triggered audio samples of natural sound (water, wind, and warbler calls) in Max/MSP.⁴ The realism of the piccolo's imitation is impressive. So Chin had the same approach as Messiaen of meticulously notating the calls and composing with the material, but in the end wanted a much more realistic mimesis of the source, leading him to a different instrumentation choice.5

And what if a composer wants to depict more than a quotation of human or animal calls, but an entire scene or story? Program music to evoke extramusical ideas, a landscape, character, person, or mood is another type of music where mimesis and representation flourish. The narrative that the composer invites the listener to imagine is often very clear from the title. Franz Schubert's (1797-1828) song Der Erlkönig6 creates with the rhythmical piano accompaniment the effect of the galloping horse in the poem, and with the vocalist the two characters: the child and the Erlkönig. Some imagination is still required of the listener, though, since Schubert did not choose to mimic the actual sound of hooves with something like percussion or coconuts. But the representation is clear. In works without text such as Robert Schumann's (1810-1856) Carnaval,7 a piano solo in multiple movements depicting various events related to Fasching, Schumann's friends, love interests, and other scenes, the titles and program notes are crucial to understanding the story as the music is more abstract (or hidden in musical code). A similar case is Hector Berlioz's (1803-1869) Symphonie fantastique whose program reads like a synopsis of an opera. It is doubtful that listeners would have conjured the exact same storyline in their minds from hearing the music alone. Besides fantasy stories, composers often aimed to capture the atmosphere and some key sounds of a known place. The symphonic poem by George Gerschwin (1989-1937), An American in Paris, evokes his impression of the hustle and bustle of early 20th-century Paris with an orchestra. To complete the composition he carried back some Parisian taxi horns for the New York City premiere in 1928. So instead of a field recording Gerschwin was able to bring the desired sound source directly into the concert hall. These taxi horns would be called a soundmark (like landmark),by soundscape expert R. Murray Schafer8 because they were particular to and an integral sonic character of Paris. (As if the Big Apple did not have enough taxi horns of its own.) Unfortunately, the piece is likely to be performed with current car horns of whatever region of performance because of practicality reasons. Also notable is the fact that the Parisian taxi horns are used in the program music tradition, in a rhythmical/ musical way in the percussion section, rather than in a chaotic incidental (soundscape) way.

Having discussed historical overview of program music one can open the discussion into the question of: is program music a direct precursor to soundscape composition? For this matter I would argue that it is not because the focus remains on musical language of harmony, motivic development, rhythm, leitmotifs, emotion or mood, and classical structures, rather than dealing with pure environmental sounds.9 Perhaps program music is more like the film music which grew out of it, than a film's foley (sound effects) that could be captured in a field recording.

Finally we arrive to examples of field recordings played back in a concert setting. An early example of orchestra with a field recording of birdsong originates in Italy in 1924. Ottorino Respighi's third movement of Pines of Rome ends with a pastoral clarinet solo that fades into shimmering strings as a recording of a nightingale plays (originally on a gramophone).10 He had settled in Rome in 1913 and was inspired by his new surroundings to compose works, as he wrote (referring to himself in the third person) in the program note for the New York Philharmonic American premiere in 1926: “While in his preceding work, Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of Nature, in Pines of Rome he uses Nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and vision. The centuries-old trees which so characteristically dominate the Roman landscape become witnesses to the principal events in Roman life.”11 Thus, Respighi clarifies that he did not intend to transcribe or depict nature sounds with Pines of Rome. That said, Respighi did use the newest technology to capture and reproduce a memory (and perhaps its most stereotypically musical part) – the birdsong. If he had been alive today, a hundred years later, perhaps he would have included other noise such as wind rushing through the pines as part of the soundscape to further evoke the memories of the pines, but these types of sounds were not common musical material at the time.

There must be more sources of program music and instrumental music with tape that I have omitted, as well as more electroacoustic composers worth mentioning in a historical context of my research. These were the sources I managed to assemble in the short time-frame of master study, and I hope that they provide a basic introduction worth exploring further.

The previous paragraphs discussed historical classical composers's transcriptions and evocations of sounds, events, and places. With the advances of recording technology, a parallel and at times intersecting genre of tape/electroacoustic music was born. The ability to catch sounds in one place and release them in another fundamentally changed how we listen, to what we can listen, for how long, and what type of music could be created with recording technology. For this research on field recordings as source for instrumental composition it is therefore crucial to mention the electro-acoustic founders who based their work on field recordings and broadcast into the world their compositional approaches and listening philosophies. Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) invented the musique concrète approach of reduced listening: listening to a sound itself rather than a sound in context. He did not want the audience to know or imagine the source of the sound as he created tape pieces. Etude aux chemins du fer (1948) was made from recordings of a train, but Schaeffer wanted the audience to focus on the nature and quality of the sound fragments: the result of his study of tape techniques. This relates to abstract music like the classical sonata (sounding piece), etude, or toccata (touch-piece) in concert music. In contrast, R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) led the World Soundscape Project to observe, record, and catalog the world's sounds, many of which were disappearing due to changes in technology or noise pollution (the sound of the milkman delivering bottles in Canada, or a blacksmith in southern Germany), or simply truly undisturbed nature (no airplanes!), as one can read in his 1977 book. One of his greatest concerns was that humans have become over-focused on the seeing sense, pushing aural perception to the background. His music is highly connected to the sound source and place, history, and social function. He urges humans to consciously preserve the sounds we want (acoustic design), and to compose the world, even orchestrate it.

However, on one point Schaeffer would arguably have agreed with Schafer, namely that since the birth of recording technology everything heard can be part of music:

Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!12 

Since all sound is valid for a composer's palette, it is the treatment and way of listening that creates the difference. Electro-acoustic music can attempt to remove context like abstract music or provide a context like program music. For my research, it was useful to organize these two listening modes on a spectrum: Reduced Listening ↔ Contextual Listening, of according to the contrasting views of Schaeffer and Schafer.

Last but not least in the list of founders, Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was a pioneer in using long unedited recordings of field recordings, people's conversations in various languages, and other material to create realistic and surrealistic soundscapes that envelop the listener. His composition for magnetic tape Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer (1970) was based on recordings from 3:00- 6:00 in the morning of a beach in Yugoslavia. He had placed the microphones on the window-sill facing the Adriatic Sea, and edited down the sound of this intimate time at dawn to a piece of 21 minutes.13 Thus he presented the incidental sounds captured that morning as music: releasing the tape to focused listeners in the concert hall. He had wanted “to be as radical as possible, and take it to the limit in terms of using natural sound, by not including any artificial, sophisticated sound at all.”14 For him, listening to a field recording as a piece changes one's perception of detail.

It was very quiet. At night the silence woke me up-that silence we forget when we live in a city. I heard this silence which, little by little, began to be embellished... It was amazing. I started recording at night, always at the same time when I woke up, about 3 or 4 a.m., and I recorded until about 6 a.m. I had a lot of tapes! And then I hit upon an idea–I recorded those sounds which repeated every day: the first fisherman passing by same time every day with his bicycle, the first hen, the first donkey, and then the lorry which left at 6 a.m. to the port to pick up people arriving on the boat. Events determined by society. And then the composer plays!15 

Ferrari described in an interview how different the electroacoustic approach was from that of electronic music using pure sounds, calibrated and often serialized. By contrast, Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1910-1995) were working like samplers to capture complex sounds, and this caught Ferrari's attention. From Schaeffer's ideology Ferrari learned to get inspiration from the sounds themselves, to “...use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.”16 Although experienced with musique concrète, in other works such as Music Promenade Ferrari did want the listener to recognize causality, though, perhaps through the influence of John Cage whom he had also met.

In delving into this topic I started to notice that many pieces involving field recordings tended to be longer, some thirty minutes to an hour (like Ferrari's pieces), or even some 24-hour pieces. I find interesting to consider why this parameter is lengthened when field sound is added. A likely cause could be that the sound in 'the field' is unending in a human time scale, and it is a difficult choice of where to cut the tape. I discussed this topic with my research coach Yannis Kyriakides, who always asked me to explain my reason for starting or stopping a recording where I had since where to start or end a recording are fundamental decisions. In the several institutions I have studied, six minutes seemed to be a standard time limit for a new composition, or even shorter, often because of factors such as limited rehearsal time, etc. My first composition teacher Timothy A. Kramer used to quip that “people can tolerate anything for about six minutes”. Outside of the concert hall, the Internet has popularized even shorter audio/visual forms, such as six-second looping Vine videos. By contrast, soundscape works of an hour intrinsically demand a different type of attention: field recording requires patient listening, as composer Miya Masaoka contends (see Ch. 2.5). It is a listening to slowly developing (or not developing) events, and in my experience the listener/composer gradually enters into an immersive 'sound world'. Thus one can conclude such pieces tend to be longer than the standard six-minute contemporary piece.

Top

Previous                                                                                                                                    Next

1Published in Montpellier Codex, composed ca. 1250-1300, and was likely compiled ca. 1300.

2Program note of the composer: “An important part of the sounds of México City, are the street calls advertising or selling different kinds of things. This ancient tradition, has adapted to modern times; such is the case of the vendors of Oaxaca-style tamales who ride their bicycles all over the city, but instead of yelling they use a tape recorder and a small speaker, which repeats their call unchanged, over and over again. Tamales Oaxaqueños is inspired by this street call and aims to bring a little taste of México City into the concert hall as well as pay homage to these characters, who keep the tradition alive and add to the identity of such a diverse city.”

3 An interesting discovery through soundscape studies is how human and machine sound has (destructively) affected the frequency bands in which creatures such as birds or insects communicate. Human fascination with these sounds is evident in the existence of onomatopoeia across languages and musical imitations of animals.

4 According to the company website: Cycling74, Max/MSPVisual programming language for media that works on Mac (OS 10.7+) and Windows (7+), and supports a wide variety of hardware.

5 (Another factor is which instruments these composers play themselves: Messiaen, organ, and Chin, flutes.)

6 Composed in 1815 based on the poem by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe in 1782.

7 Composed in 1834-35.

8 Schafer. R.M. “Our Sonic Environment and The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World” Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 1977.

9 Also it is valid to always question whether composers were sound painting or if the title was added after.