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Ron Goldberg
I first came across Richard Lainhart's music in 1986, while researching artists for a new CD label dedicated to electronic music. For that still-emerging medium, the mid-1980s were a genuinely exciting time. Not yet mainstream, much less ubiquitous than they are today, synthesizers, sampled audio and MIDI were opening windows onto sonic worlds, made of seemingly infinite possibilities.
Those were still the early days of what we now take for granted as the digital age. The confluence of cultural, scientific, commercial and geopolitical interests that created (and still create) our microchip universe were only beginning to take shape. Utopianism was in the air. The new technology might bring about new ways of communicating, new modes of expression, perhaps even new thinking. Among the many new creative figures emerging from this technological crucible, one type caught my interest in particular as a new spin on an already established idea— the electronic musician.
Composers in the vanguard of new music at that opportune moment were well aware that electronic music wasn't new at all. Some, like Richard, might have studied in an academic context, and would be familiar with a half-century of literature from Koln, Paris and Columbia/Princeton. Others of his generation and Zeitgeist would also be familiar with the rock experiments of the 1960s and 70s, many of which have not only stood the test of time but sound increasingly vital as years go by. But in the early 1980s, and particularly 1983, with the adoption of the MIDI standard, the tools to create electronic music arrived to the masses. Soon, these would join PCs and other digital devices in the technological shell games of Moore's Law and bigger/faster/cheaper, as they still do today. In these early times, many musicians, both real and imagined, regarded their music as hardware, a box to be upgraded, rather than an instrument to be mastered.
For many of these virtual composers, in enviable possession of unheard new tone colors and musical structures, the reference point remained deadeningly familiar—tonic in nature, grounded in traditional equal temperament, often slaved to the robotic, dictatorial rhythms of the sequencer—a music as literal as the 5-octave plastic keyboards being stamped on a seemingly endless array of new and increasingly powerful MIDI substitutions for genuine music. Nowadays entire popular genres spring up around the paste and loop aesthetics of sequencers and samplers, some lasting no longer than the marketing cycle of the latest-sounding digital boxes. Back then, few 'serious' composers stuck with electronics as a first language. Fewer still stayed true to their vision.
Richard's music rings true to the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, It brings with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. It's a music that is beholden to no one, yet informed by a diverse sphere of appreciations, rich in both intellectual and emotional interest, at once distant and interior, actual and implied.
It's a music that stems from a remarkable fascination with dimensionality, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Taken from a structural standpoint, Richard's work often sees time and space as elastic, even transparent, the sonic equivalent of still water that runs unknowingly deep, and on closer view, reveals a microscopic world of prismatic, infinite movement. Even his broadest brushstrokes, ambiguous in their regard for traditional temporal and spatial boundaries, are densely textured with a shifting, interior essence. The extended studies of Bronze Cloud Disk and Two Mirrors Face One Another both frame this fascination in literal terms. As tones and parts of tones flow in and out of each other, the static tableaux are rendered kinetic, while within the motion, further subdivisions of harmony endlessly recombine amongst themselves. In the first piece, the shifting is defined in sharper relief by the opacity of the tone colors. The resulting sonic hues, crisp and definable (while they exist), are rendered into a fluid medium by addition and subtraction over time. In the latter piece, the effect is even more holographic. Using the hollowness of square waves as the base palette, the two mirrors not only reflect each other, but also mirror images of each other and their own mirror images in turn, in endless, kaleidoscopic succession.
But what is a mirror other than what we see in it? Asking this question brings us to the other side of Richard's fascination with dimension, which operates on a level beyond words and perhaps even understanding. Far from mere structural play, Richard's experiments with time, space and texture evoke deeply-resonant responses that hover ambiguously between the cardinal points of human emotion. In Cities of Light, the shifting soundscape becomes ironic, occasionally unsettling. An ominous drone introduces the piece, joined at first by overlapping layers of partials that seem to reinforce the opening mood. But as the piece progresses, the response to the reference point becomes less certain. The uncertainty evolves into realization, realization becomes curiosity, curiosity reaches out for knowledge, which in turn folds back to anxiety. Or vice versa. In this piece, Richard's interest in emotional texture begins to emerge as a more fully realized strategy, while still managing to sound completely organic.
In the aptly named Ten Thousand Shades of Blue, Richard extends the scale of the interior dimensions that define his music, while at the same time contracting the temporal scale used to express them. Rather than microscopic movements of sound, we begin to hear the glistening partials and translucent harmonies in broader, more definable strokes, sometimes going so far as to imply melody, but only just. Here the emotional calls border on the conspicuous, they begin to enjoin.
But as in much of Richard's music, the emotion cannot be held, much less scrutinized. In the earlier pieces, the minimalist spirit is an integral part of the fabric—musical substance might be altered by a head movement or a walk around the listening space. In this piece, the emotional substance itself is what's rendered malleable. Tone groupings arrive and depart in commentary on the sounds they melt over and supersede, agreeing and disagreeing, voices of concord and discord conducting respectful and occasionally reverent dialog on separate shoulders of a perceptual body. Sometimes their presentation evokes a clearly definable response, our associations toward tonality indulged, if only for the moment. But those moments invariably transfigure themselves, along with we, the listeners, nudging us gently toward yet another long-overlooked corridor of our own personal interiors. Whether these are places of doubt or enlightenment is up to our own individual sensibilities to dictate. In Richard's music, beauty is a collaborative process.
The more recent pieces of this retrospective showcase Richard's interest in actual musical performance, a rarity for electronic music of most kinds. While a multi-instrumentalist by nature, his favorite instruments are in the mallet percussion family, no doubt for their rich palette of overtones. In Staring at the Moon, the vibraphone is used percussively for melodic punctuation, but also extended acoustically via a bowing technique. The bowed vibraphone yields a sound that's artificial yet completely unaffected, 'electronic' music by physical and mechanical means. In Walking Slowly Backwards, the electronics are dispensed with almost entirely; the vibraphone's only accompaniment being a warm reverberation. Though performed with traditional mallet techniques and virtually no processing, the piece stands in remarkably close kinship with the electronic studies. Overtones multiply and divide into each other through trilled intervals, the ghosts of preceding harmonies serving as both memory and direction. Again we are led to a place where an emotional response is never what it seems to be for very long. We are asked to examine the response as part of a multi-dimensional walkthrough, and in the process, examine the why, as opposed to the what, of our own feelings.
Perhaps the understanding that emotion can be as elastic as time is what gives Richard's music its unique and immediately identifiable character. In his world there is clarity and radiance, but as in the outside world, they rarely exist in an unalloyed state. The contemplation that his music inspires has no beginning, no end, no resolution, only moods shaped liked cumulus clouds that both hide and expose the colors of the sun and the moon. It is a music that is nameable and yet nameless.
Ron Go/dberg is a new media producer based in New York City.
Joel Chadabe
I first met Richard Lainhart during the 1970s, when electronic music was still a new medium and when everyone was thinking about what its potential was. In those days, we were all asking ourselves, what were the special musical things you could do with electronics? Richard's answer through the years has encompassed both sound and process. As he recently told me, "I've always been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames, and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines. I use these as compositional methods to present sounds that are as beautiful as I can make them."
But I can take that a lot further. Lainhart's idea has been and still is to make very special, unique sounds that derive in one way or another from the structures and textures of natural processes. He has invented a new kind of constructivism based on sounds that are only about themselves and their transformations. There are no meditative states in his thinking, nothing that relates to human states of being. In fact, although he thinks about natural models, the models don't generate his music -they simply illustrate what he has in mind. "The sounds that I try to create in those pieces is a sound in which there is a great deal of detail but relatively little surface change. The analogy I think of is that these sounds are kinds of abstractions of natural processes like flowing water or wind in the trees which is ongoing but varies in the detail..." So to Lainhart, a sound is an entity with internal shadings and lighting, and our attention should focus on that entity and its nuance.
Lainhart's sounds change slowly in their overall shapes. But the changes are slow to keep us aware of the processes of transition that the sounds contain. As Lainhart says it, "The natural processes that I tend to like and observe are slow processes, that bear up under active listening... and that active listening at a level of greater detail, so my sounds are sufficiently complex so that they can be listened to in depth."
So how does he do it? In the first group of pieces, from the 1970s, composed and recorded at the Electronic Music Studio at State University of New York at Albany, he performs and processes his sounds with electronics. Actually, Lainhart has long been interested in performance. He has a strong jazz background, particularly vibraphone, and there's always some element of the music that he performs in an improvisational way. As he puts it, "I see this music as similar to jazz in the sense that jazz is structured improvisation ..." In Bronze Cloud Disk (1975), he bows a tam-tam. In Two Mirrors Face One Another (1976), he bows Japanese temple bowls. In Cities of Light (1980), he sings. But the performances are not public. For Lainhart, performance is a way of getting the sounds to flow, but his interest remains the sounds themselves. These are strictly tape pieces, intended to be heard as recordings only.
The second group of three pieces consists of digital recordings of live performances. The sounds in Ten Thousand Shades of Blue (1985) are performed with a Macintosh computer running M, a program developed during the 1980s at Intelligent Music. Lainhart is stopping and starting sounds, changing parameters, choosing different presets, and so on. As he explained, "In this piece, it's about harmonics changing, and so I can precisely shape how each harmonic is going to change over time..." He also uses a Macintosh and M in Staring at the Moon (1987), but in this case the improvisational character of the music that M produces gives him cues for performing on a vibraphone. So M is controlling several synthesizers and Lainhart is reacting to what he hears. He's using M to provide him with cues for improvisation. "M," as he put it, "is the leader."
Walking Slowly Backwards (1989) is a vibraphone performance. He describes the piece as "a structured improvisation after a mental score ... it evolves from looser improvisations. None of these pieces are notated, they're in my head. I have a memory of how it's supposed to go. Certain events happen in certain places and beyond that it's pretty open. It's a straight recording."
In short, Lainhart's methods of working are performance oriented and often improvisational, but it is the sound that is the real point of his music. As he said, "I'm not trying to imitate anything. My main concern in these pieces is to present sounds that have never been heard. I'm interested in making sounds that are intrinsically interesting. And beautiful on their own."
Joel Chadabe is a composer, author, and currently president of Electronic Music Foundation.
lan Nagoski
The year the earliest of these pieces was made, 1975, was the year I was born. Terrible year for music, too. The eye in the hurricane of the late twentieth century. The rush and bluster of the sixties was completely dead, and most of the culture had either gone radically extroverted (disco) with an intense adoration of surface and style, or else radically introverted (New Age, self-help, and escapist domesticity). Horrible period. It's still sort of like that.
Back in 75, Lainhart was doing big, lush sound-fields. Bowing metal, focusing intently on the sound itself, the reverberations in his mind and body. But even with its intensity, the sound had a playfulness and quality of good-natured sharing. ("Check it out!" as they used to say.) And it was still raw and gestural, "organic" as the bag of granola my mom brought home from the grocery store.
Gradually, the throbbing body-sounds evaporated into a headier, more rarified music of sweetened swirling clouds. The bombast and sensory overload of the sixties which pummeled listeners (as in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's conceptually similar, but effectively distant bowed-metal piece Studies for the Bowed Disc) had evaporated by the time of Lainhart's Two Mirrors Face One Another (1976). The message to "listen within" was not as urgent. An audience (somebody, at least) was prepared, no bludgeoning necessary. Lainhart moved away from physicality and became a perfumist, allowing sounds to seep into the senses as chemical reactions.
The exact quality of the pulsing and throbbing in Cities of Light (1980), the relationship of it to the body - its feeling of stilled time - is carefully constructed, deftly executed, and follows no logic or system that I can surmise. Lainhart's listening-studies had yielded ghost-sounds, threshold experiences, manifest echoes of thought. Pretty impressive stuff, partially because it fulfills the loftiest present thinking about music (in my experience), but also for its directness and sincerity.
By the mid-eighties, Lainhart had stripped away the external, the physical, in the sound and brought out what had always existed in his earlier sounds—what he had been trying to show you in the first place. The two electronic works on these discs are nearly-tensionless, billowing clouds of shining, synthetic helium. By the time of the vibes piece, Walking Slowly Backwards, Lainhart has drawn out the material from his own gray-area experiences with sound and stated it, flat out, in the language of ye olde composers.
I was entering high school when Walking Slowly Backwards was composed, and I have had to work consciously to disassociate its even pulsations and wide-open consonance with the bland nonsense that public radio was spinning at the time. But no, thankfully, it is no more George Winston, or even Steve Reich, than the eighties electronic pieces are Michael Jackson's shiny red jacket. It is too clever to be left in the bucket of its era, too well thought-out for the Space Music section of the record store.
Now, as I see composers a generation younger than Lainhart working with the same primary concerns for attention-quality and the poetry of timbre, and as sound-fields become harder to ignore as part of the spirit of the times, I'm grateful, actually, for Lainhart's uncontrived dreaminess. It is a genuine, unassailable experience, like colors no one has yet had reason to name.
/an Nagoski is a music/an, organizer, and writer living in Baltimore, Maryland.
Richard Lainhart
My ears were first opened to the possibilities of sound when, in high school, I plugged an electric bass guitar into an amp and hit the low E string. At that point, i realized that I not only wanted to make my own music, but I wanted to make my own sounds too. Shortly after, my father gave me his Ampex two-track reel-to-reel recorder, which had two speeds and separate record and playback heads, so I could use it as a tape echo machine. Not only that, I soon discovered that 1 could overdub myself by recording and bouncing parts between the tracks. My first real attempts at my own music and sounds were a direct result of working with that deck, the electric bass, and an early Sixties model Moog Theremin that I had lucked into.
Eventually, I wanted to be able to work with sounds beyond what the bass and Theremin were capable of producing. This was around the time that the first console synthesizers started to become available, although of course they were beyond the reach of most individuals. Happily, the local state college, the State University of New York at Binghamton, purchased a large Moog synthesizer system and installed it in a well-equipped multi-track tape studio, and I studied there for two years, learning the gear and creating tape pieces. Although the studio was top-notch, the music faculty was not particularly supportive of the studio and of the kind of music that came out of it, and I soon felt that I needed more direction as a composer than I was getting.
That was when I decided to transfer to SUMY Albany, which had a well-known and respected electronic music studio under the direction of Joel Chadabe, who became my teacher and the greatest single influence on me as a composer. The fact that the studio contained perhaps the largest Moog synthesizer system ever assembled was rather attractive as well.
As a composer, Joel's main focus has always been on music as a process. He had designed the Moog system, with Bob Moog's help and with some additional custom control hardware built to his specifications by John Roy, to pursue the possibilities of creating music by directly interacting with the system itself. Joel's interests were in a higher level of machine interaction than simply twisting knobs and hitting keys, and so many of the students who came through the studio were shocked and dismayed to find that this giant synthesizer, which filled four floor-to-ceiling racks and covered one entire wall of the studio, had no standard black-and-white keyboard controllers.
I felt, though, that the lack of conventional keyboards allowed me the freedom to forget about notes and concentrate on sound. This Moog system was a wonderful engine for directly creating and manipulating the fabric of sound, and I composed some tape pieces with the Moog and the studio's complement of Scully multitrack decks that I think are still listenable. Ultimately, though, the richness of acoustic timbres led me to write a number of pieces that used natural instrumental and vocal material instead of oscillators as source material.
Bronze Cloud Disk was the first of these. The sound source here is a 28 inch Zildjian tam-tam, played with a bass bow, overdubbed eight times, and processed with analog filtering and pitch-shifting. The lovely resonance and dense, complex harmonic structure of the tam-tam sound still thrills me after all these years.
Two Mirrors Face One Another is actually excerpted from the original version, which was an hour long. The source here is a set of 6 Japanese temple bells, which rest on cushions and are usually played with a hard wooden striker. I played them with a bow, though, and recorded a total of eight tracks which were then further processed using the same techniques as Bronze Cloud Disk. While the temple bells are aren't as harmonically rich as the tam-tam, they have their own sonic charm.
Cities of Light is another multitrack tape piece, this time with my own voice as the source. I use a multiphonic vocal technique, which I first heard in recordings by Tibetan Buddhist monks, in which the voice produces both a low subharmonic fundamental and a higher overtone. By adjusting the vocal chamber resonance, the singer can emphasize different overtones above the fundamental and even sing harmonic melodies above the lower tone. I eventually learned how to produce several different overtones above a fundamental, and I wrote Cities of Light by multitracking and pitch-shifting eight voice tracks created with that technique.
Composing for tape has one great limitation, though, which is that the format doesn't allow for any spontaneity in performance—listening to a tape piece in concert is always pretty much the same experience. The appearance of MIDI and personal computers in the early eighties finally allowed for a way to perform complex electronic music with spontaneity. The first MIDI applications for personal computers were synth librarians, followed shortly by MIDI sequencers, which allowed the composer to record MIDI instrumental parts by multitracking, much like a multitrack tape deck, although with much more refined editing capabilities. None of these new MIDI programs offered much more than simple recording and playback or library management, and certainly none of them provided the higher level of control that Joel Chadabe had always advocated in his composition classes. Joel felt that there was a market for interactive music software, and so Intelligent Music was born.
Intelligent Computer Music Systems' ultimate goal was to create an interactive musical instrument that non-musicians could play in a musically convincing and satisfying manner. To that end, Intelligent Music started out by developing a series of innovative MIDI and audio programs for Macintosh, Atari ST, and the Amiga. These included Jam Factory, M, UpBeat, RealTime, OvalTune, and MidiDraw, among others. All of these programs, to varying degrees, allowed for realtime interactive performance using the personal computer as the performance interface, providing the ability to control many instruments and parameters simultaneously.
Around the same time Intelligent Music was getting started, I was listening to and performing jazz, with a focus on the small-group jazz of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. I still composed and performed my own music, but became more and more influenced by jazz harmonies, especially in the music of the more advanced composers like Duke Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke, and by the idea of structured improvisation, to my mind the most important aspect of jazz.
I began working for Joel at Intelligent Music around 1987, eventually becoming Technical Director of the company, and started working with the Macintosh computer and Intelligent Music's software at the same time. Eventually I focused on Intelligent Music's M interactive MIDI composition application as a way to incorporate structured improvisation in the performance of electronic music. Since then, nearly all the music I've composed for myself has been intended for live performance with a computer-based interactive music system of some sort.
Ten Thousand Shades of Blue is a recording of a real time performance with the computer music system I was using at the time. The system used a Macintosh (at first a Mac Plus, later a llci, finally a Quadra 900) running M and driving a collection of E-Mu hardware samplers. M is analogous to a small ensemble of four players, each of which has a collection of pitches and rhythms it can play. With M, I can control the performance on many different levels, from playing pitches directly on a virtual keyboard to controlling the density of the rhythms of each player and the instruments each plays. I can also create presets that let me change many groups of settings and parameters at once. Because M is allowed to make many of its own choices of pitch and rhythm, every performance is unique, within the structures of the piece itself.
I created the sounds for Ten Thousand Shades of Blue witha wonderful audio synthesis program from Digidesign called SoftSynth, which as far as I can tell is no longer available. SoftSynth was an additive synthesis program that let you create sound by directly specifying the frequency and amplitudes of up to 128 sine waves, which combined to create the final sound. While a little tedious to work with, SoftSynth provided total control of the very fundamentals of sound itself, especially in the manipulation of harmonic tones and rich evolving timbres. It's really too bad it isn't around any more.
Staring at the Moon is another recording of a realtime performance, this time adding vibes to the ensemble. In this case, M is controlling an array of samplers directly, while I improvise to M's improvised accompaniment. M is set to choose from a series of pitches in and around a single tonality; by choosing those and related pitches as I play, I can further color M's pitch choices and to some extent control the overall tonality. Like Ten Thousand Shades of Blue, every performance of Staring at the Moon is unique.
Walking Slowly Backwards is, unlike all the other pieces in this collection, a live recording of a single instrument. There are no electronics other than the mild processing used in recording. Walking Slowly Backwards is dedicated to the memory of my friend Dan McKenney, who named it.
Richard Lainhart http://www.otownmedia.com
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