I’ve been paddling hard for two years on that Big River called Jazz. It’s time to portage my canoe and take a walk in the field to areas of music not really part of the Jazz world, but still dear to me: field recording and musique concrète….
Sometime in the mid-1970s, my brother Robert got a hold of a portable tape recorder. I’m not sure where it came from or how he got it, but one day it was there. It had a microphone and looked like this:
He loved that thing and carried it around like he was just waiting for something to happen. As it turned out, he was. He was waiting for sounds….
I remember a game he played with us. He’d go out into the world and record sounds. Any odd sound would do, like a hair dryer, bees buzzing, or something as dubious as the garage door opening - manually, as electric door openers didn’t exist back then, at least not in my neighborhood. He’d record ten sounds and play them back to us individually. We had to guess the sound we heard. He kept track of our scores and at dinner reported who won…and who lost.
I liked this game. As I think back about it, it must have taken a lot of his time walking around and listening for things - listening for sounds. In this way, my brother was introducing us to field recording. None of us had any idea what that was and neither did he. It was just fun with a new toy.
When I got my hands on the tape recorder, I taped musicals on TV. Over time, I developed a small collection of cassettes with Fred Astaire musicals. Skating on the edge of genius and crazy, I taped the musical Singing in the Rain and wrote out in a notebook the entire script by playing back the recording. I guess that sounds more like crazy now. But it did put me in touch with the idea of recording sounds, which I tucked away in a small corner of my heart.
Many years later, I learned about field recording and that people, besides my brother, actually did them. As I trace the origins of my field recording journey, I think it all goes back the Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams, recorded in 1976, but not released by the Editions EG label until 1978.
Marion Brown played saxophone on the album. I believe that was my connection from Jazz to field recording. You can read more about him here:
The Pavilion of Dreams was produced by Brian Eno, who in the early 1970s was a member of Roxy Music. In 1973, he collaborated with King Crimson founder Robert Fripp to make experimental, ambient, and drone music. The result was (No Pussyfooting). In 1977, he released an interesting album with the German band Cluster, simply called Cluster & Eno:
Eno’s collaboration with Cluster’s Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius is wonderful. In this context, it’s not difficult to see how Eno in 1978 released his masterpiece Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which in time defined the ambient music genre.
Most of my early learning about field recording came from a 2011 blog by Continuo, who I discovered through a blog he wrote about Paul Bowles. It was there that I first read about Pierre Mariétan.
He was born in Switzerland in 1935. He studied music in Basel’s Musik-Akademie with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1966, he relocated to France and founded GERM. In 1969, he became the sound producer of the legendary Atelier de Création Radiophonique. In 1979, he founded the Laboratoire Acoustique et Musique Urbaine (LAMU), a think tank dedicated to the interaction of urban sound environment and architecture, which he directed until 1990. It was during his time at LAMU that he was contracted to commission Rose Des Vents, which was released in 1987 on an independent label of 300 copies:
I dig the minimalist inner covers:
Pierre Mariétan’s Rose Des Vents was the first field recording I bought and listened to. When I played this incredible sound art for the first time, I was amazed. In particular, the final side, Rose Des Vents – IIB, is wonderful. If you don’t have time for the full 1 hour and 48 minutes, go to the 1:13:30 minute mark and catch the final half hour, “Chevaux. Echo” (Horses. Echo) & “Péniche la nuit. Ecoute” (A barge at night. Listen):
Commissioned by the French government in 1981, Mariétan set out to record the sound environment of urban landscapes in cities and townships located in suburban Paris, including Bezons, Herblay, Montmagny, and l’Isle Adam. In his own words:
The project Rose Des Vents began as a state commission with little direction given as to what information is usually required when accepting a musical composition project. My plan was to create a work shaped on the basis of a close listening of the sonic life [existant sonore] of the site where work would be presented, in such a way that, at a concert, the inhabitants recognize or discover by ear what makes up their environment.
In 2017, Rose Des Vents was reissued on the Mana record label, established in 2017 by Andrea Zarza, curator at the British Library Sound Archive, and Matthew Kent. As part of the reissue project, Zarza shared a conversation he had with Mariétan about how came about the title of this composition:
He (Mariétan) told us about an exercise he had done with a group of schoolchildren in a small village. He would ask them to record the church bells on their walkman for one, two, maybe three minutes. During the next session, they would place their walkmans in a circle and re-play their recordings simultaneously: ‘We then had a floating reconstruction, that nevertheless existed, forming that which we are never able to hear. But it was in fact like a compass rose. If we got closer to the walkman, we were… that’s it... it’s a game, not in order to reproduce, the intention is not to reproduce the place but to incite listening.’
Rose Des Vents was Mana’s first release and, according to Zarza, was their “compass rose, it orients listeners towards the label’s future possible directions.”
Another interesting thing about my discovery of his masterpiece Rose Des Vents is that years earlier I bought one of Pierre Mariétan’s albums, but I just didn’t know it.
Somewhere along the way, I heard Terry Riley’s In C. Listening to it fascinated me, although now I like it more in theory or for historical significance than on my turntable. In C is considered the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the general listening public. It was first performed by Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and others at the San Francisco Tape Music Center and first released in 1968 on CBS Records.
In the course of reading about Riley, I noticed that in 1970 the BYG Actuel label released an album with Riley’s music:
I was a big BYG Actuel fan, although I was collecting mainly their jazz releases. It seemed appropriate to get this one since it had Riley’s composition Keyboard Study 2 performed by GERM (Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicales), a group of musicians and composers interested in exploring new music at the intersection of composition and improvisation. This may be the first European performance of American minimalist music, which is interesting because in 1968, when this album was recorded, Riley was not yet well known. He had only just released In C earlier that year.
A few years later, after reading about Mariétan and GERM, the light bulb went on - I have that album and Mariétan plays French horn on it (that reference is for you Dutch).
The connection between Terry Riley, Harold Budd, and Pierre Mariétan is interesting to me. They were all trained in the Academy under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg. However, they all willingly turned away from the prevailing atonal movement. Instead, they stepped outside the box and created musical worlds of their own: Riley’s minimalism; Budd’s something between minimalism, jazz, and ambient; and Mariétan’s hybrid form of minimalist field recordings.
As the music moves away from the more seductive and repetitive minimalist sound of Riley and Steve Reich toward the ambient worlds of Enos, Budd, and more modern groups like Brian McBride’s Stars of the Lid, it starts to take on a near-cinematic feel that appeals to me. The natural sound, approachability, and listenable quality of field recordings like Rose Des Vents strike closest to home.
I didn’t understand the significance at the time, but when I listened to that first field recording something clicked and the dominoes started to fall. A door opened, and I stepped into a world where the sounds on the record were natural. Listening to the sounds and wondering what they were made me think back to the game my brother played with us in grade school, and it was comforting.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll continue our walk in the fields and explore the work of Chris Watson.
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Until then, keep on walking….