Francis Ford Coppola was apparently influenced by Tomita’s use of Quadraphonic sound when asking him to originally do the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now, wanted a synthesiser rendition of Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’. Instantly I am reminded of Wendy Carlos’ work with Kubrick and the heavy use of synthesiser renditions of classical music in their collaborations.
Here is an interesting article that claims that Tomita’s music is supposed to be heard in quadraphonic (which as he’s a name I am familiar with, I was never aware of his relationship with this medium, nor have I heard any of his music mixed for 4 channel, in 4 channels. This is something I would love to change. Ingrid played us some pieces by Suzanne Ciani in quadraphonic stereo. Again, an artist I was familiar with but unaware of their heavy ties to this format.
Tomita In Quadrophonic: Surround Sound Was Made For This Music
This piece was rereleased for quadraphonic, it has an interesting use of stereo but I would like to experience a few quadraphonic recordings before the term is through as it was quite hard to really understand what I was hearing in our introductory spatialisation class due to the sheer number of us who chose the module.
I am thinking about asking the staff whether it would be possible to have a dedicated library of quadraphonic resources, if they do not already exist in the university. As there are currently no records of it in the library, it means it doesn’t exist. If I wanted to listen to these I would have to find some power converters.
Whilst Isao Tomita’s excavations into quadraphonic sound are quite preoccupied in classical music and almost like transferring these very popular pieces of classical music into electronic music. Ciani’s Buchla Concerts (which I believe were written for quadraphonic sound system due to Buchla pioneering quad-modular [had to..] but cannot find any proof of this.) A similarity with Isao Tomita however, is that they both are responsible in part for very corny covers of the Star Wars theme.
I am still leaning towards seeing modular as perhaps the most intuitive way to utilise quadraphonic sound, due to spatial modulation, the possibility for spatial effect is infinitely greater.
In our second Spatialisation, we explored spatial improvisation. With a demonstration of an Alvin Lucier’s “Lullaby for Amanda Stokes”, in which Ingrid performs around the listener mimicking the sounds of birds and insects, whilst the listener is sat with their eyes closed.
We spoke about the unlimited power of scores. A mmemonic device or a transmission of information. I spoke briefly in a previous post about how I felt the visual score was an interesting concept to me as it puts the onus on the performer to be more creative. This was reinforced for me in a recent talk with Richard Pheonix, who talked about how the London Symphony Orchestra collaborating with Heart N Soul, an arts organisation working with learning disabilities. He spoke about how the LSO musicians found it tricky to interpret the visual scores, and fears and anxieties as neuro-typical people in fact prohibit us and lock us out of parts of our unexpressed creativity. I thought about how this related to scores, and how we fear being wrong. A visual score is more an invitation to invent or create.
Composer > Performer > Listener > Composer > Performer > Listener…………………
