New halls for listening must be built to meet with demands for spatial music. My idea would be to have a spherical chamber, fitted all round with loudspeakers. In the middle of this spherical chamber, a platform, transparent to both light and sound, would be hung for the listeners. They could hear music, composed for such adapted halls, coming from above, from below and from all directions. [Stockhausen, 1975b]
One of the high points of avant-garde electronic music was undoubtedly the extravagant international expositions of the late 1950s and 60s which featured
multimedia art works and music and performances by such prominent composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse and Iannis Xenakis. An elaborate
multimedia environment was commissioned by Philips for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair to showcase their new advances in audio and visual technology. The pavilion (see Figure 8.9) was designed by the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis in the form of an “electronic poem” [Zvonar, 2004]. It contained within its unusual hyperbolic paraboloid structure a long unbroken projection surface with elaborate lighting and projection equipment and an eleven channel multi-track tape system which could be routed to over four hundred loudspeakers. The main musical element of the program consisted of Edgard Varèse' tape piece Poème Electronique, which was synchronized to the visual effects and dynamically distributed through the space in nine different “sound routes” using a switching system controlled with an
additional tape track.
The architect and designer of the Philips Pavilion, Iannis Xenakis, was also a composer and his tape piece Concrète PH was played as an interlude between shows. Xenakis had moved to Paris from his native Greece in 1947 and took a position as an assistant to the architect Le Corbusier. In his spare time, Xenakis studied composition and produced his first major work, Metastasis in 1954 after studying with Olivier Messiaen. An architectural influence is evident in the score for this work which features massed string glissandi in which each individually notated instrument is arranged according to the large scale, deterministic structure (see Figure 8.10). In a 1954 article, Xenakis describes this approach as follows, "the sonorities of the
orchestra are building materials, like brick, stone and wood. . . the subtle structures of orchestral sound masses represent a reality that promises much [Hoffman, 2001] “. Xenakis went on to use the structural design of Metastasis as the basis for the wall
curvature of the Philips Pavilion and a similar hyperbolic paraboloid structure is evident in both the Pavilion (Figure 8.9) and the score (Figure 8.10).
Fig. 8.9 The Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Worlds Fair in Brussels
Many of Xenakis’ compositions make use of abstract mathematical theories such as probability theory, game theory or the kinetic theory of gases. These
mathematical functions were used to structure individual elements within the overall design, which Xenakis often considered in spatial, almost architectural terms. Xenakis rejected serialism as a compositional principle, but his mathematically formalized organization of pitch, duration, timbre, dynamic and spatial location into a unifying overall structure [Xenakis, 2008] is reminiscent of total serialism. However, his use of formalized mathematical techniques to design large-scale geometrical sound masses is very different from the moment to moment form of serialist
composers like Stockhausen. Xenakis’s geometrical conception of spatial music was perhaps influenced by his collaborator at the 1958 Worlds Fair, Edgard Varèse, who made the following comment about the future of spatial music in 1936;
“When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows [Varèse, 1998]. “
Xenakis continued to create large-scale multimedia art works after the Brussels Worlds Fair and he referred to this new form of multimedia art as the polytype, from the Greek polys (many, numerous) and topos (place, space, location) [Harley, 1998b]. The polytype therefore refers to the many small elements of light and sound which create and articulate a larger space such as the elaborate audiovisual system in the Philips Pavilion. Xenakis also suggested that geometrical shapes could be created through the sonic projection of sounds in defined trajectories around a loudspeaker array. So for example, a single sound played successively and with a slight overlap through a circular array of loudspeakers would produce a circle, while many short impulses played through a group of loudspeakers would produce a sonic surface. Xenakis utilized Peirre Schaefer’s concept of spatial relief and divided the spatial distribution between stereophonie statique (sound emanating from numerous static points in space) and stereophonie cinematique (sounds produced by multiple, mobile sources) [Harley, 1998b]. The composer suggested that the different spatial patterns and distributions could then be structured and related to create a form of
Xenakis attempted to implement these spatial designs in the orchestral work Terretektorh (1965-66). In this work, the musicians are divided into eight groups and arranged in six concentric circles (as shown in Figure 8.11 [Hoffman, 2001]) while the audience is unusually distributed amongst the musicians. Various geometrical patterns and movements are implemented within the five main spatial distributions which are used to structure the piece, namely;
• stochastically distributed points • sound-planes with internal movement • static sounds
• densely woven individual lines • continuous glissandi
Fig. 8.11 Orchestral disposition of Terretektorh
Xenakis would go on to compose numerous large scale multimedia works in which abstract geometrical designs are used to control the distribution of both
for multi-channel tape was composed for the 1970 Worlds Fair in Osaka and was performed in the Japanese pavilion through eight hundred loudspeakers arranged above, around and under the audience. Stockhausen was also present at Osaka 70 and his music was performed twice a day for 183 days in the German Pavilion by twenty instrumentalists and singers (see Figure 8.12). The composer himself controlled the sound projection from a position in the centre of the spherical venue which contained fifty-five loudspeakers arranged in seven rings, and six small balconies for the
musicians. The design of the auditorium was largely based on Stockhausen’s specifications, which are clearly expressed in the quote at the beginning of this section. As with his earlier works, Stockhausen again used spatial trajectories to articulate different musical events. However, the spatial distribution was now implemented in real-time. This approach is somewhat similar to the live spatial diffusion practised by Pierre Schaefer, albeit with a greater emphasis on geometrical paths. Stockhausen describes the experience as follows:
“I can create with my hand – up to six or seven revolutions a second. And you can draw a polyphony of two different movements, or let one layer of sound stay at the left side, then slowly move up to the centre of the room, and then all of a sudden another layer of sound will start revolving like mad around you in a diagonal circle. And the third spatially polyphonic layer will just be an alteration between front-right and back-left, or below me and above me, above me and below me, alternating. This polyphony of spatial movements and the speed of the sound become as important as the pitch of the sound, the duration of the sound, or the timbre of the sound. ”[Cott, 1973].
Although Stockhausen would continue to argue for the construction of concert halls specifically for the performance of spatial music, such as the pavilion in Osaka, the general trend from the seventies onwards was toward more generalized
multichannel solutions such as Quadraphonics and Ambisonics. Stockhausen was one of the first composers to adopt an arrangement of eight loudspeakers and he used this arrangement extensively for the rest of his career. His first composition for this arrangement, Sirius (1975-77) utilized manual diffusion of electronic sounds, live instrumentation in the form of trumpet, soprano, bass clarinet, and bass, and an eight- channel version of the rotational table used in Kontakte. In an interview after the premiere of Sirius, the composer described the use of rotational effects in this work.
“Sirius is based entirely on a new concept of spatial movement. The sound
moves so fast in rotations and slopes and all sorts of spatial movements that it seems to stand still, but it vibrates. It is [an] entirely different kind of sound experience, because you are no longer aware of speakers, of sources of sound – the sound is
changes color, because different distances occur between the sound sources. ” [Felder, 1977]
Fig. 8.12 Karlheinz Stockhausen performing at OSAKA 70