![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) composed and performed music with live electronics alone or in collaboration with such central figures as John Cage, David Tudor, or Robert Ashley. This activity, closely linked to the American experimentalist tradition, grew out of his first youthful electronic essays on the University of Michigan campus, his work in Milton Cohen’s Space Theater beginning in 1957, and then at the ONCE festival from 1961. It was in Ann Arbor, Michigan that Mumma set up his first electronic music home studio, a pioneering effort that was so innovative that Mumma would publish an article on home studio building in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society in 1964. This paper traces Mumma’s studio heuristic by reporting on the results of a digital recreation project by the author, in collaboration with Francis Lecavalier (programming) and Ofer Pelz (electronic performance), of one of Mumma’s iconic live electronic works, Mesa (1966), for bandoneon and live electronics. By synthesising information culled from an electronics schematic diagram, two recordings of the work, the composer’s contemporaneous writings and published interviews, but most importantly, an email correspondence stretching over the two years that preceded the performance of Mesa at the Montreal New Musics Festival on 27 February 2017, the ‘DIY’ practices of this early live electronic creation come into focus. Mesa’s apparatus involves the following essential elements: 1) ring modulation 2) a gate matrix that only sends signals beyond a given threshold to the effects modules 3) four input channels consisting of two piezo microphones on either side of the bandoneon as well as 4) a corresponding quadraphonic output to four speakers. The author contends that in an open-ended creation like Mesa, the work’s ontology is coeval with the scope of its technical apparatus.
Acknowledgments
This article reports on a research collaboration with Francis Lecavalier and Ofer Pelz, and the author wishes to thank them for their insights and comments on an earlier version.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Jonathan Goldman is Professor of Musicology at the Université de Montréal. His research focusses on the postwar avant-garde. His book The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez (CUP, 2011) won an Opus Prize. He also co-edited and authored the preface of a translation of Boulez's writings (University of Chicago Press, 2019), in addition to editing several multiauthored volumes on Quebec composers, creative process and musical semiology. Goldman was editor of the new music journal Circuit (2006–2016).
Notes
1 An earlier version of this paper was published in French in the Revue musicale de l’OICRM (http://revuemusicaleoicrm.org). The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewer of that article. The author also wishes to thank his project collaborators Ofer Pelz and Francis Lecavalier for their contributions to the project and their feedback on this paper. In particular, he thanks Lecavalier for supplying the technical specifications of the application presented in section 3.
2 The research directors of this project explain their objectives by noting that ‘the preservation of existing works is made possible by porting the original technology–usually hardware-dependent–onto a software-based environment, and storing all the performance data on a database available online’. Accessed in 2015, www.integra.io.
3 The significance of the bandoneon's ‘bi-instrumentality’ is explored more extensively in Goldman (Citation2012, 50–52).
4 Patrick McCray has noted that Mumma designed the electronics in the Pepsi pavilion to have controls analogous to those of a large pipe organ (McCray, unpublished manuscript). Cf. Nakai Citation2017.
5 In March 1954, the not yet 19-year-old Mumma produced electronic music for a student production presented by University of Michigan's Department of Speech (programme provided by Gordon Mumma).
6 In this paragraph, we are following the biographical account given by Michelle Fillion in her preamble to the volume of Gordon Mumma's writings (Mumma Citation2015, p. xxix–xxx).
7 Gordon Mumma in the liner notes for the CD Gordon Mumma, Gordon Mumma: Live Electronic Music (Tzadik Records, Citation2002).
8 Interview with Gordon Mumma by Jonathan Goldman, 25 October 2008 in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada).
9 Mumma's Do-it-yourself approach, as well as Cage's and Tudor's, is explored in a recent dissertation on the subject (see Hartman Citation2019).
10 The following four paragraphs detailing the code used in the Mesa app were written in collaboration with Francis Lecavalier.