Robert Taylor
perspectives
My musical life began, as the Italians say "sul serio", almost immediately
after I had moved to Los Angeles, in 1948; and it began with my first musical love: the
French Horn. I had always coveted that marvelous instrument, with the seemingly endless range from the lower through the
upper registers (cf. Strauß: Der Rosenkavalier, Ein Heldenleben; Beethoven (the 9th)) and a
dynamic range that spanned a spectrum between the
delicacy of a rose petal and the frontal assault on the central nervous system of the fabled horns on the City of Los Angeles passenger
train. At age 12, I had fixed on the trumpet; but
that infatuation was soon eclipsed by the siren-calls of such players as Aubrey and Dennis
Brain, two (related) English virtuosi of such
enormous skill and subtlety that they literally took my breath away.
By the time I reached Los Angeles, I had
already taught myself to play the Horn reasonably well. Fortunately, there were few bad habits to "unlearn" (brute luck) when
I was taken in private study by the man who turned out to be my first mentor; namely, Vernon Leidig. He had developed a remarkable (and
renowned) junior high school symphony
orchestra and was himself a fine player. He auditioned me, as a senior in high
school, for The All Southern California High
School Symphony Orchestra one day in 1949, at 8:00
O'clock in the morning. I played unusually well (after a riotous night spent at a
beach-house during which I had slept not at all) and placed as Principal Horn in that
amazing orchestra, none of whose members could have been over 17 years of age. The
catalyst here was, of course, the enormous pool of virtuosi and composers who had
immigrated to the West Coast from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe; logically, as in
the case of the village of stone-cutters where Michelangelo grew up, this produced an
extraordinary crop of amazing young players. Most of us were carrying Union-cards
(Local 47) and working professionally by the time we were 15 or so. As a result, we
gained important professional experience and poise (I bought a special,
"small-bore" (6D) Conn Horn for the purpose; viz., accuracy, accuracy,
accuracy--once through and tape it, and never mind the "big sound"!) not to mention the
fact that we were paid more money than we had ever seen or imagined possible. I
cannot fail to mention here that Vernon, besides being a superb teacher, sold me his own,
German-made Schmidt French Horn (a "large-bore, concert-Horn") at what could
only be called an extremely reasonable price--because I needed "a real
instrument". Vernon was "a real Mentsh"; bless him, in all
that he may undertake.
When I first played the solo from the slow movement of the Brahms Symphony # 3 on that instrument, it was as if someone had turned on the
lights.
* * *
If you draw a sort of inverted triangle on a map showing the Panhandle of Texas, and part
of Oklahoma, you will find the little towns where Chet Baker, yours truly, and Woody
Guthrie grew up. [ MAP ] Chetty, a dear person and a massively talented
musician, was from Yale, Oklahoma (bless his heart and rest his bones); Woody Guthrie
spent a large stretch of time in Pampa, Texas; and I was indentured for the
first-eleven-years-minus-one of my life (b. Springfield, Missouri) in the diminutive
hamlet of Wellington, Collingsworth County Texas. So. On a "V" from
Wellington, to the Northeast, Chesney Henry Baker, Jr.; at the vertex, Robert F. (no, I'm
not telling you what it stands for) Taylor; and to the Northwest of me, Woodrow
Wilson Guthrie (b. Okemah, Oklahoma).
Some trio.
I mention this because, especially in recent years, some implications of these geographic
and therefore cultural proximities have become more and more interesting to me; and I
suspect that at this late date, I may have begun to understand some of the clockwork that
was set in motion during those times. We will come back to this.
* * *
It's likely that I first heard Schönberg's Fünf
Orchesterstücke and the Stan Kenton Big Band
at just about the same time--around 1950. Although I was only moderately impressed
with Kenton until 1951, I found the Schönberg pieces simply unbelievable on the very
first hearing. The timbral ("sound-color") rates-of-change, the unusual,
masterful, gorgeous voicings in the orchestra and, above all, the stunning musical
content--the ideas--were unlike anything I had ever heard. I had almost the
same reaction to that piece as Roger Sessions told me he had on first hearing Le sacre du printemps
of Stravinsky: he said (I quote from memory) " It was so strange, so
unfamiliar and baffling; but Bob " [ he had a unique way of
pronouncing that name, and would stand very close to me when he wanted to emphasize a
point ], " I knew that there was something going on in
there." Then, having made such an assertion, he would always look around himself in a
rather abstracted way, and slam his pipe into his mouth.
I loved Roger.
Roger Sessions
~ with thanks to Mark DeVoto
My experience with the Five Pieces was slightly different, in
that, I understood this music immediately, and, after two or three hearings, wished
"with my whole heart" that I had written them. What I did, of course, was
what every young composer does in a similar situation: I began trying to make something like
them. (If you're going to steal, steal from the best. Every young composer
imitates; there's no other way to learn. [ Case in point: Haydn, Symphony # 88; Beethoven, Symphony #
1. ]) Soon thereafter, Webern,
Krenek and Berg were to have similar, profound effects on me.
Funny thing was, Schönberg's name was anathema on the west coast at that time; consequently, he was almost universally not regarded as "The Best". The Halsey Stevens-crowd at USC (and seemingly all the other honchos in Los Angeles) were writing what I derisively referred to as "cowboy-music", or at best, warmed-over Bartok (whose music I liked, for the most part, especially the Violin Concerto, the 3rd Piano Concerto and some of the quartets). But "warmed-over" Bartok is not Bartok. And Halsey Stevens was not Arnold Schönberg, or Bela Bartok--not by a long-shot. Schönberg had a handful of supporters: there was the pianist, Leonard Stein, for whom I subsequently wrote an early piece, Composition for Piano. Leonard recorded that piece on a professional tape recorder (with engineer) in Rosemary Clooney's living room, which contained an exquisite Steinway Grand Piano and was acoustically perfect for the purpose. (Don't ask me how he did it. I don't know; but it was extraordinarily generous of Ms. Clooney, whose work (when she was 'allowed' to do "good stuff") I greatly admired. Her voice, I loved, always.) The recording was superbly done, and Leonard was more than patient with my demands for precision. There were Ernst Krenek (more about him presently) and, as I said, a few others. Some of the better musicians, such as Ingolf Dahl, liked Schönberg's music until he began using what he called the "method of composing with twelve tones". Of course, no one could deny his genius, his vast musical knowledge, his experience or his other talents. But, "as for that 12-tone stuff... paper-music "; i.e., looks good on paper, but sounds awful. Of course the Five Orchestral Pieces were not twelve-tone works. But if you listen carefully to his opera Moses und Aron, (part of my PhD Dissertation at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome--a decidedly 12-tone piece) you will hear distant relatives of the Five Pieces all over the place.
At USC, then, having met with a sullen,
hostile environment vis à vis my musical bent, I studied for a while with Ingolf Dahl, a
consummate, if somewhat conservative musician. Aside from the allegation,
indefensible if true, that he may have blocked the performance of my String Quartet at the Monday
Evening Concerts-series in Los Angeles (an
important and prestigious series, attended by the likes of Igor Stravinsky (whom I was
later to meet there) and Aldous Huxley, a champion of Gesualdo) he also did me a huge
favor. I was told of this event, unsolicited, by a disinterested person of
unassailable integrity who was present at the meeting where it took place, and thought
that I "should know about it". According to this person, Ingolf had
sufficient clout there that he was able to quash the performance with a single,
"personal veto" (believable), and, but for that, the piece would have been
accepted for performance. If that is indeed what happened, I will never understand
the motivation behind it. ( Note: The Quartet was
performed by the Parenin Quartet of Paris and others, anyway). The favor was that he suggested that I
study with Ernst Krenek, an accomplished and world-famous composer, who was living in
Tujunga at that time. Apart from the almost mythological fact (to me) that he had
once been married to Anna Mahler, daughter of the great composer Gustav Mahler, whose
music I loved, he had been part of the "Second Viennese School", including
Schönberg, Webern and Berg. He became, in due course, my second mentor, and stuck
with me until the end. (N.b.: Ernst liked the Quartet.)
Odd, that Ingolf, knowing of Krenek's fame and craft, should have blocked a
performance of my music (if, as seems likely--in my opinion--that is what he did) and then
recommended such a "high-falutin'" person to me for study.
He was a complex person, was Ingolf.
* * *
Somewhere in late 1950 or so, I met Chet Baker for the first time. He was playing at
a large hall in Sherman Oaks, California (in "The Valley"). I walked in
quite by accident on my way home from a rehearsal (ax (Horn) tucked securely under my arm,
like the appendage it had almost become--couldn't leave it in the car). When I
entered the large, crowded room, there was this trumpet-player on stage, taking what was
the most musically interesting, swinging--in a word, amazing chorus I had ever
heard. He looked about 13. (He was about 22.) Aside from the small
group he was playing with, you could have heard a pin drop in that large,
standing-room-only auditorium. People's jaws literally dropped. With the
possible exception of Miles Davis (cf. his Nonet pressings of 1949, with Gerry Mulligan et
al.: Move, Jeru...), no one had ever heard Jazz trumpet-playing on anything like
that level. What struck you at first was his astounding sense of
"harmonic-direction", one of the things that I find so compelling in Mahler's
music; that sense of some ineluctable logic whereby you're not completely sure
where you're going (lots of surprises, logical but not obvious) but you can see, with
absolute clarity, where you've been (or rather, where he has been) even though it may have taken a while to get
there. In Mahler, we are talking, per
forza, about much larger time-spans. But
the effect is the same. Thinking again of Roger Sessions. He once said to me
that he thought modulation in tonal music was only, or primarily noticeable "at the
juncture where the shift (key-change) occurs", and that most people, unless they had
perfect pitch, did not hear music "in-the-large" in any other way. I think
he was right. But I digress. (There will be more than a few digressions in
this discourse.) Chet and I met on the way out of that hall in Sherman Oaks, talked
for a few minutes, and thus began a friendship that was all too brief, but always warm and
cordial.
But that was not a true digression; it goes to the point that I was making about Chetty's sense of harmonic- direction. All good musicians, I think, understand this. Stravinsky talked about it at length, and his music is exemplary in this respect. It's simply the idea of making the music go somewhere and come back in intelligent, interesting, and (magari) moving, and/or amusing or exciting ways. It need not "come back" in some obvious, or literal way--or perhaps, not at all; but "go somewhere" it must . (As my friend and composer Paul Glass used to say, "man, it has to get off-the-ground!".) A case in point à-propos of "going somewhere" is certainly modulation (change of key) in tonal music. This has to do with "aiming" at certain critical points in a piece which define the structure-in-the-large, setting off large blocks of material from one another, establishing points of reference and boundaries in the overall layout of the work. On a smaller scale, it happens in the form of motives--brief, identifiable phrases, or perhaps just a few notes that have been made to seem familiar--both in the "background" and in the "foreground" of the layers of a musical structure. All music of excellence, in my opinion, has this quality, whatever the genre. I suppose that may be the main reason why I cannot listen to more than 2 or 3 minutes of most, so-called "minimalist" music. In this regard, I must side with Milton Babbitt, who asserts that he is a "maximalist". So was Bach: that's why you hear something new and are moved anew every time you listen to the St. Mathew Passion or the b-minor Mass, or--name a piece of his you like. So was Michelangelo: just take a look at the Vatican Pietà, or the Mosè--anytime/s.
My encounters with Chet Baker continued to be largely accidental, except when I went to hear him play. We met in the oddest, most unlikely places (really makes you wonder...): on the street in Tucson, Arizona, when he was stationed in the Army at Ft. Huachuca and I was at Davis Monthan Air Force Base; at a session on a Sunday afternoon on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, when I was on leave and he was AWOL (subsequently, thank goodness, discharged) from the hellish desert-moonscape where he had been stationed. "I just put my ax under my arm and walked out", he told me. And I couldn't help thinking, "why didn't I do that?". Apparently, I lacked, thusfar, the determination and single-mindedness required by Musa; but that was remedied in due course. Our meetings, then, were mostly casual, but always cordial. We were just glad to see each other (neither of us knew where the other was from) and had--always--wonderful, funny, sometimes deep conversations about music, about musical tolerance, about how fucked up the world was--especially for persons who wanted nothing more out of life than to make something beautiful--and like that. And even after he became addicted to the foul drugs that killed him, he never once mentioned the subject in my presence, let alone suggested that I try them. Like "Bird" (Charlie Parker) and others, he was a good person, and I believe he wanted to protect his friends from drugs and the disastrous effects that he knew they could cause. Incidentally, Bird had heard Chet play at an audition with 50 other trumpet players and hired him on the spot, thus giving him his first big break (the "winner" was to tour and play with Charlie Parker as a duo). Although hopelessly addicted himself, Bird made every effort to keep Chetty away from drugs, alas, ultimately, without success.
After I was discharged, and back at USC, Chet came to a couple of the USC Symphony Orchestra concerts in which I played Principal Horn. By that time (ca. 1953) in addition to the usual crop of prodigies, there were more mature players, some of them vets from WW II. Very experienced, excellent players. (I will never forget one vet in particular. His name was Ray Weaver, and he played the cadenza (and all the rest) in a Mozart Oboe concerto at such a break-neck pace and with such perfection that I could hardly believe it. You had the impression that he could have played the whole piece from end-to-end without taking a breath; and he always had a burning cigarette stuck somewhere on his ax--except at concerts.) It was one of the best orchestras I have ever played in, including professional ones. Ingolf conducted (he did it well) and we tackled the "tough" literature, no kid's-stuff: Stravinsky, Ravel, Charles Ives, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven--all of it. I had gone to listen to Chet and Mulligan at the Haig in Los Angeles many times; both the Quartet, sans piano, which made them famous practically overnight, and then Chet's group with Hampton Hawes added on piano, after Mulligan was (cough) detained for a time by the Polizei. Subsequent groups comprised the likes of Red Mitchell, one of the greatest bass-players I've ever heard, Russ Freeman (piano), who seemed to listen with exquisite care to everything Chet was doing and play accordingly, and Shelly Manne, drummer par excellence.
And so, along with my colleagues of the classical persuasion, I "grew up" in my teens with these Jazzers-- musicians, some of them self-taught, who were the equals, both technically and musically, of any "legit" players I ever heard (and the superiors of many). Indeed, lots of them crossed-over, playing studio-jobs at Metro and Fox, etc. (Stan Getz, Red Mitchell and many others) and working orchestral jobs. Many friends and acquaintances of my youth were equally at home playing in the orchestra or at a jam-session. Red Mitchell, to take only one example, could play anything, anywhere.
Chet Baker
Additional Pictures of Chet Baker
Credits
* * *
In sum, my work with Ernst Krenek was an inspiration. Ernst seemed to be of a rather reserved, "North-German" cast, outwardly, and was widely regarded as an unfriendly and cold person. (Actually, he was born in Vienna.) I never understood this, because, from the moment I walked in the door of his home in Tujunga, California, I felt at ease. To me, this famous man was likable, modest and unprepossessing. Oh, of course, I was just a tad awe-struck. (I was dumbfounded.) After all, here was one of my heroes, who was friend and colleague to just about every hero I had on the entire planet! (...And heroes, in case you have been living in a phone-booth and haven't noticed, are hard to come by.) Not only that, but he had mixed it up with Professor-Doktor Hitler, and just about got out with his skin intact. (He never referred to his own courage, particularly in the press--he was a good writer--in writing articles in opposition to the Nazi party; but he did tell me some things about those times. They were interesting, at times, hair-raising, but private.) And this man was going to teach ME (!) [ Counter-example: On a sad note, I will never forget visiting poor Boris Blacher, years later, at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin around 9:00 in the morning. Blacher had remained in Germany during the 12-year Hitler-Reich, and apparently, it had done things to him. At 9:00 A.M., on our first meeting, he was "ganz besoffen" (totally inebriated). God knows what he had seen. I liked him. ]
Krenek and I had hit it off, then, from the very beginning. The last time I visited him and his wife, composer Gladys Nordenstrom, was at their home in Palm Springs (he loved the desert, as I do) somewhere around the mid-'80s. He had been there since the mid-'60s, put together an electronic studio, mostly analog then, and was doing most interesting things with it. We had a wonderful visit. What I gained from my work with Ernst was primarily a stance toward art, and a quantum increase in self-confidence. Oh, make no mistake, we worked on my pieces, and he showed me his own works-in-progress; we discussed these, often in a spirited way, but always positively, and in depth. Ernst was a man of broad and deep culture. Sometimes, as with all good teachers, I would not be altogether certain that the all-day (ante-freeway) trip to Tujunga had actually been worth the effort--until later. Sometimes an hour, sometimes a few days, maybe a month: and then it would hit me. Oh! I see! That's what he meant. He was talking about doing that ! And so, with renewed vigor, I would fire up my green, '41 Pontiac two-door sedan that went down the street at a 45-degree angle and cross my fingers that we would make it yet one more time to Tujunga.
Ernst Krenek
* * *
As a child, living in Collingsworth County Texas, I had been exposed to nothing of a
cultural nature more "lofty" than Life Magazine and the Grand Ole Opry, on
Saturday nights. To a "grown-up" composer, with all the fancy training
I've had, this could (and to some, probably does) sound laughable. But this is where
the plot thickens...
I have mentioned a lop-sided "V"
pointing from me to Chet Baker and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, though not an
"advanced" musician in the usual, technical sense, was hugely gifted, and
personifies the genre of American "folk" music (hill-billy, blue-grass--none of
these terms is really accurate or particularly informative; hill-billy probably comes
closest). But the three branches of music that we might be roughly thought of as
representing are, superficially, and in some ways fundamentally, wildly contrasting
genres. I became an orchestral player of classical music and later a composer; Chet
became one of the greatest Jazz trumpet players in history; and Woody, our canonical
troubadour, sang "hill-billy" music and played his git-tar with "This
Machine Kills Fascists" painted on it in large letters to the great delight of most
Americans (including me). I refer you, for example, to Talkin' Dust-Bowl Blues, not to mention such staple-matter as This Land is Your Land. It would be remiss of me not to mention here that the
branch of music we are representing in the person of Woody Guthrie has sub-branches, and
sub-sub-branches, and that it also had (and has) it's share of astoundingly accomplished
players, both technically and musically. In both categories, one need
mention only one name: Doc Watson. Fill in the blanks. It's easy. Of
course I am not for one instant forgetting the great Blues-tradition originated, mostly,
in the Mississippi Delta by the likes of Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Bessie Smith--I could
go on. But that is the subject of an entire shelf of books or three, and it is not
possible here to tackle that very complicated form and all its implications for the
subject at hand, because it simply could not be done in a non-technical context. I
must of necessity focus on a much narrower slice of our musical heritage; the one in which
Chet, Woody and I breathed the same, powder-fine silicone dust into our lungs that came
roaring in, with sudden drops of 40 or 50 degrees in temperature, like a giant, infernal
and God-forsaken freight train, all the way across the plains from Canada to the Panhandle
of Texas and beyond. It's the origin of Woody's song, So Long, It's Been Good to Know You, a phrase spoken among simple folk of those parts who were so
appalled at these great sand-storms that turned blazing Summer days into cold,
frightful nights in the space of a few minutes, that they truly believed the end of the
world had come, and they had best say their goodbyes. It's a part that I know: it's
a part that I lived.
Woody Guthrie
* * *
An odd mixture, to put it mildly; indeed, this begs the question, "is there a mixture
here at all?". But, I have come to the opinion that these musical types have
cross-fertilized and influenced each other in ways that are much deeper and more complex
than I had previously thought. Certainly, there are, as I said, fundamental--one
might almost say, mutually exclusive differences; but then, we are forced to explain, " what
differences? ". I believe that the most important things that can actually be learned
about making music are learned deep in the innermost layers of the cerebral cortex, and,
strictly speaking, cannot be explained on an exclusively cognitive level. In music,
I would proffer Species Counterpoint as the only valid exception to this in the tonal
system and the modal system before it, simply because of its highly generalized attempt to
"make those balky tones behave" (Paul Hindemith) in an abstract, and therefore generalizable,
useful context. In a similar way, Jackson Pollack and some of the other
Action Painters of the '50s succeeded, I think, in generalizing the picture-plane as
simply a two-dimensional object, and the "painting" as the relationships between
and among its elements (not to forget Mondrian--perhaps the most radical in this respect,
although not an "Action Painter"). One could trace this development back
fifty or sixty years prior to this, but that would be a tractatus in
its own right [of which, I just happen to have an example, written when I was much
younger. For those interested in such things, here's a link: 12-Tone Music, Abstract Plastic Art, and the
Relativity Idea
]. (... But Pollack and his colleagues were not called
"abstract-expressionists" for nothing.) Among composers of my
acquaintance, it is a commonplace that the only relatively recent music--say, from Bach
through the present--which has a robust and highly generalized body of theory is
"12-tone" music (in the narrow, "classical" sense of that term).
Whether or not one agrees with this thesis, it seems to me a difficult one to refute.
* * *
The contrast between the "background-pulse" of Jazz (uniform successions of strong and weak accents on defined beats of a defined measure--the "rhythmic sub-structure", with it's accented beats of 2 and 4 in a four-beat measure) and what we are calling hill-billy music--where the accents normally fall on beats 1 and 3 of the measure--is musically axiomatic, and is one of the definitive components that may separate these two musical types. There are, of course, always exceptions, but we oversimplify in order to try to understand. (Watch the tape of Ronald Reagan and entourage in the White House, clapping on 1 and 3 while listening to a swinging Jazz-group who are definitely "whomping" 2 and 4; quite a spectacle. Apples and oranges. Total disconnect. But this is merely a reflection of cultural background (tace ignorance...)). In both modal and tonal music of the "high-art" variety (I dislike that term, but I haven't found a better one; someone may want to supply one) the basic rhythmic structures around which pieces are built vary from a heavy accent on every beat (1-2-3-4, as in a march--and both Schönberg and Mahler wrote them) to a totally unidentifiable pulse (much of 12-tone and some other contemporary music) which seems to--and does--float, suspended, in a different kind of musical time. Some players, even while playing something like one of the great Opus Posthumous piano sonatas of Schubert, become so lost in their own "self-expression"--beating the phrases to death with what is politely called "rubato"--literally It., "stolen", in this case, stolen time--that I lose track of the beat completely, and the piece then makes no sense to me whatever because I can't tell where the hell I am. (If you steal the time here, girls and boys, you must put it back there...) I could name names. You don't know (alas) who you are, and the crickets don't have the balls to tell you because you're too popular with the public and besides, they probably don't know the difference anyway. (But we are watching you ... )
But to continue. These are certainly complicated and, sometimes, baffling issues, and you're taking something of a chance talking about them in a context such as the present forum. In such cases, you run the risk, either of putting people to sleep, or of confusing them even further about matters that are not easily understood by non-musicians (or by many musicians, come to that). A point I would like to make is that composers, all of us, are influenced by all kinds of music in ways that remain, for the most part, obscure. To explain in detail the genre and structure of a piece of music--and thereby, the relationships between and among all of its elements-- would entail a complete understanding, with proofs in the form of mathematical logic, of the entirety of the design and functional specifications of the human brain; a feat which, at least for the present, is impossible: for how could you hope to explain the structure of the object without first knowing, in detail, the structure of the means by which the object was created? It seems to me that here, we run head-on into a brick reductio ad absurdum. It's a bit like those clowns who are trying to sell "Star Wars" to the public (a pork-barrel extravaganza if there ever was one). All the talk about "throw-weight", "decoys", and blah-de-blah is sheer, patent nonsense, for the simple reason that there exists no means on this planet by which such a system could be even theoretically tested. Well, there is one way: you could launch it. (Contrarily: how do you test the "test-driver" which tests each sub-system--not to speak of the entire system? If you use "directed graphs" to map the program-logic, you face a miasma which no human being could possibly comprehend. And so, to paraphrase the great Dutch pioneer in Computer Science, Edsger W. Dijkstra: how do we know that the test-results we obtain are valid, and if we believe them, why do we believe them? Like I said, reductio ad absurdum, ad nauseam, and possibly, ad infinitum...).
( ** End Rant ** )
But fortunately, this does not mean that we can't gossip, which is what all writing about art comes to anyway(!). I can see, for example, the "straightaways" and the "detours" in the development of the music of many of my friends and colleagues. Michael Sahl (cf. link on home-page) for instance, was stricken at an early age with both banjo music and "Romantic" music of a classical flavor. Now he stirs them up into a musical mix that is both, and neither one nor the other; all quite his own, and good stuff it is, too. (I can call it "stuff": we've known each other for 40+ years...)
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Before, and for some time after my work with Milton Babbitt, my music was heavily influenced by that of Schönberg, Krenek, Webern and Berg--and of course that of Babbitt himself in the wake of my study with him. (The most important parts of said study took place on the train between Princeton and New York City during one of the two years I spent at Princeton. How many packs of Picayune cigarettes were immolated toward that end is, for me, a subject too terrible to contemplate. That we are both still alive, in view of that folly, is a wonder and a marvel.) But, folly aside, Milton is the only composer from whom I ever learned anything of real technical substance in the 12-tone idiom. (Although, I should point out that it was non-other than Michael Sahl who first showed me what an "all-combinatorial hexachord" was, in the '50s, in Los Angeles (all-combinatorial hexachord "C)1", by my count.) It was due to the impetus of that seminal knowledge--the work with Babbitt--and the appearance of digital computers such as the CDC7600, announced December, 1968, with much more sophisticated storage-capacities and very fast, peripheral-independent CPUs ( 20.83 MFLOPS ("million floating point operations per second")--Seymour Cray, r.i.p. ) that I continued, at first in Berlin, with my own theoretical work in the Twelve Pitch-Class System, as we called it then, learning as much as I could about abstract algebra and its possible analytical applications to the kinds of musical structures that I lusted after (paraphrasing Jim Randall there).
Delving into the problems that fascinated me required that I become a programmer of some substantial skill. Without those techniques, whether in the realm of electronic music or that of abstract algebra (as applied to musical systems), you are helpless, period. Unless, of course, you are independently wealthy and can afford a live-in professional to see to your massive and bedeviling programming needs. But that too is a less than satisfying arrangement, since computer-geeks (whom I tend to like, by the way) seldom know an A-flat from a fuel-injector, let alone anything about the kinds of things you're interested in, hence involving you in endless conundra of explanation and re-explanation; very time- and energy-consuming. I was lucky. In addition to help from my long-time friend John Rogers, who was a PFortran-PFhreak when I first met him, I had teamed up with a young German mathematician named Schumacher in Berlin who was extremely intelligent, a quick study, a good programmer and (wonder of wonders) actually interested in what I was doing. That he was paid for his work by a grant I obtained from (I think) the Recheninstitut of the Technische Universität, Berlin, doesn't in any way minimize the value of his help. It was difficult, unfamiliar, and he worked hard at it. It cost the Recheninstitut a bundle in system-time, bless them all. As to the going price on a "7600" in those days, I have seen reports ranging from 5.1 to $15,000.000.00 a pop (yes, that's six zeroes before the decimal point, in the early '70s); and that's not counting wear-and-tear, staff, maintenance, air-conditioning (which was horrendously expensive for such a monster), etc. Not to be outdone, the Dutch bought 4 of them; viz., they then possessed 4 separate copies of the fastest machine on the planet, designed and almost hand-built by the undisputed inventor of the supercomputer (the model "6600"), Seymour Cray. I did some research on one (no, two) of those Dutch machines, and I can tell you, you would still have a hard time saturating one, short of modeling weather, aerodynamics or high-energy physics (or running MUSIC_IV).
So much for my initiation into the
wonderful world of computers...
ah, the tinsel and glitter of it all...what I wouldn't give to be a part of it!
Cray-Control Data 7600 (main
processor)
SGI-CRAY T90 SERIES - See an elegant sequel to the 7600...
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