for voice and synthesizer(s).
Two persons design a musical performance in which one of them, the synthesist, uses an electronic music synthesizer or equivalent configuration of electronic equipment to alter the vocal identity of the other, the vocalist, who selects and orders any number of songs, speeches, arias, passages from books, films, television, poems, or plays, or any other vocal utterances including those of non-human intelligences, in ways determined by his or her relationship to the synthesist and the particular purpose of the performance.
Performances may be used to strengthen personal ties, make friends with strangers, or uncover clues to hidden families and past identities.
In strengthening personal ties, one, with the help of the other, selects examples that either or both have known and remembered since childhood, arranging them in the order of their emergence in their awarenesses. In making friends with strangers, the vocalist selects examples that the synthesist might have known and remembered, based on assumptions as to race, color, date and place of birth, manner of speech, dress, hair style, or any other outward sign, arranging them in the order that they might have emerged in the synthesist’s awareness. In uncovering clues to hidden families and past identities, vocal examples of any kind may be arranged in any order or in temporal or geographical clusters. Examples may be taken from letters, diaries, memoirs, musical works, or biographies of real or fictitious persons.
The vocalist sings, speaks or utters the examples to the synthesist through a microphone and amplifier system. He or she may read from script or score, memorize, or listen through headphones to a record player or tape recorder upon which are stored the examples in their chosen order. Separations between examples are determined either by the length of time it takes to change each record or by the natural spaces that are formed by turning pages, splicing, or collecting and recording examples.
The vocalist learns to mimic recorded examples as perfectly as he or she can, without interpretation or improvisation, in order to partake of and communicate to the synthesist as fully as possible the vocal identity of the recording artist represented by each example. All aspects of the sound images including those produced by recording techniques and other special effects should be regarded by both performers as much a part of the remembered or imagined identities as such vocal considerations as inflection, articulation, timbre, breath control, projection, and vibrato. During those parts of examples in which the recording artists rest or where it is impossible to follow, the vocalist either imitates the accompanying parts or leaves gaps. Whole examples, not parts of examples, should be used.
In cases of vocal identities for which there are no recorded examples, the vocalist tries to imitate the vocal identities as he or she imagines them to be.
The synthesist alters the vocal examples as they arrive from the vocalist, trying to make them sound as much as possible like the originals as he or she remembers or imagines them to be. Any disparities that arise between either performer’s remembrance of original examples, their imitation, re-recording, or cover versions, should be regarded as inherent discontinuities in space or time. In uncovering clues to hidden families or past identities, the synthesist composes a set of examples designed to sketch biographies of persons other than those sketched by the vocalist. The separate sets of examples are then performed simultaneously.
Within each example, the synthesist makes one or more alterations of any aspect of sound including pitch, timbre, range, envelope, vibrato, and amount of echo. Alterations, once made, may not be lessened but may be increased from example to example to produce a continually changing composite vocal identity made up of many layers of partial identities.
In performances involving more than two persons, the synthesizers may be played separately or linked together.
Sounds made by the synthesizer itself should be considered its attempt to establish continuity or to express its inability to cope with the situation.
The Duke of York seems to me to deal with adjustments to memories . . .
Yes.
. . . and the reinterpretation of material as it relates to memory experiences. The person operating the synthesizer seems to try to re-create past experiences by making sense of the data she’s receiving. The piece also has to do with transmitting meanings and assuming roles.
Well . . . a long time ago, I wanted to make a jukebox for an art exhibit. I thought of recording or collecting sounds on a batch of 45 r.p.m. records. People could then put nickels in and mix four or five sounds at the same time; I could also make some money. Then . . . no, I won’t tell you how I got to the title because it’s a pun and I like to keep puns to myself. I didn’t invent the pun, Bob Ashley did, but I don’t think he remembers it. I started thinking about the singers that are so powerful in our society. To tell the truth, my wife is something of an expert on popular music; she knows all the singers and all the songs and who sang the original versions and who sang imitations of them, and in that regard, I’m an ignoramus. But we were married. So I thought, “Well, if Mary loves that kind of music and those singers, she must have stored in her mind a very complex composite personality made up of partial personalities of all these people.” So I decided to compose a piece in which I would imitate those singers whose vocal identities were so strong in Mary’s mind; I would try to sing their songs as well as I could, to steal—really steal—their vocal identities and to communicate to her, to try to strengthen our relationship. Now, as a sympathetic idea, I thought that she could try to help me fulfill this task by changing the sound of my voice with a synthesizer. In a crude way, she could try to make me sound like those singers, based on her remembrance of what they sounded like. It would be complicated because what she would remember of their vocal identities might be changed by the passage of time. It’s an impossible idea.
Then I expanded the idea to include not only popular songs but any vocal utterances taken from poems, plays, operas, or any real or fictitious written material that might serve as a connector between two people. Theoretically, you could imagine that you had something to do with all the vocal utterances that were ever made and that you might bring yourself back to another place and time. You could try to imitate all those sounds and communicate with another person who would have them in her background someplace. Then I thought that if you made constructions of historical events that occurred before tape recording, an historical play for example, you might treat that as being as authentic as what that play represented. For example, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar could be thought of as a supplement, or a superimposition, or a correction of the original, the only difference being that it’s separated in space and time. If you could push space and time around, you could superimpose that play so that when Shakespeare was stabbed—excuse me, when Caesar was stabbed—the difference between the original event and Shakespeare’s event would be an interesting place to be, between those little discrepancies. You could superimpose all of these, which is what I’m doing in the piece. You see, it’s a way to exploit recording; it’s as if it’s a gift from God to us to preserve things and then to re-create them.
But mainly to re-create them. You can’t just rely on the fact that they’re stored.
Right.
It’s an attempt to make them as immediate as possible.
Right. If you make a movie that is a remake of another movie, it is as authentic as the original, and the original is as authentic as the original event on which that movie is based.
Is it possible that a performance of The Duke of York, dealing as it does with serious questions of the reconstruction of information, is as authentic as those processes as they occur in the day-to-day lives of the audience? There’s also a connection to be made there because the audience is privy to these serious questions between two people, and in the more expansive form of the piece you talked about, the entire race has to deal with it. The same processes are happening in each member of the audience as well.
I imagine that would happen.
Is the synthesizer the complete technical facility for this piece, or can you conceive of something that could do a better job?
Well, I composed The Duke of York specifically for synthesizer for a number of reasons. One was that it had become the American idea of what electronic music is, a small, portable performing instrument for popular consumption. There are a lot of them around these days—the Moogs, the Arps, the Buchlas—and a lot of people to play them. You see, when I first made electronic music in the RAI Studio in Milan in 1960, I worked in what has become the classical electronic music studio, consisting of a large configuration of test equipment—audio oscillators, amplifiers, noise generators, things of that sort. You either had access or didn’t have access to an official studio; it was an elite situation, but the American idea is that electronic music should be accessible to everyone. Secondly, a synthesizer is a real-time instrument. Voltage control has eliminated the need for splicing. The classical European studio depended on splicing techniques; there was no way to make real-time pieces, so most of the works were collages of some sort. The Duke of York is not a collage piece; I didn’t want any editing. The vocalist is responsible for whole songs, not parts of songs, and the synthesist has to react quickly without too much time to think. So the synthesizer was good for that. But I think the real reason I used it was that it was called a synthesizer, probably from the old RCA synthesizer that was designed to imitate the sounds of musical instruments. I had always hated that idea. It had seemed to me a waste of time to try to synthesize the sounds of perfectly good acoustical instruments with a new technology. But since The Duke of York has to do with the layering of one identity on another to make a composite image, I thought that the notion of synthesis was justified. I gave the synthesist a non-musical task; she doesn’t make changes according to ideas of musical timbre, for example, she makes choices according to ideas of identity. In doing so, she really creates something synthetic, a composite identity of a real or imaginary person. I guess I thought that’s really what a synthesizer should do.
Actually, I gave the synthesizer a task it can’t do; it begins to break down. One of the rules is that an alteration can be made and added to but not reduced. For instance, if you add reverb to an example, you can’t bring the pot back down for the next example except by control once removed, that is, by altering a component that alters that first component. For the first song you might change the timbre in some way, for the second you might add reverb, and for the third you might do something else. Finally, you’ve had so many planes, one identity over another identity over another one, that pretty soon the situation gets so saturated that the person operating the synthesizer can’t handle it very well. Also, the synthesizer itself begins to do all sorts of insane things because it is not designed to deal with that, and I wanted that situation also.
There’s a nice contrast, as in most of your pieces. The vocalist presents his material in whole parts, but they follow one another. The synthesist’s contribution is to make layer upon layer. It’s a different idea.
It’s another formal idea, yes.
And even though it’s a duet, the players are in series instead of parallel. The vocalist’s material comes through the work of another player.
May I ask you a specific question about your own performance of the piece? I’ve seen it twice and both times there’s been a Latin text. Now, where does that come from?
Well, most of my pieces are built on physical or acoustical principles that you can talk about—alpha waves, echoes, resonances, things of that kind. But they become interesting, for me anyway, when you can’t talk about them anymore. This piece is a probe into the remembrances of a person or a number of persons, into their own past or personalities. That’s an internal thing, isn’t it, all those flashing, fleeting thoughts you have when you’re alone as to who you are or what your image of the world can be. It’s either that personal or internal investigation or a probing into what other cultures regard as religion, specifically reincarnation. We have psychological ideas but other cultures don’t; they have religious ideas. And even if these probes are not true, even if they’re absurd and off the track, still, for me, they’re a more interesting way of getting material than by using musical judgments. So to answer your question more precisely, for particular reasons, or particular memories, it comes to me that the reason I went to Rome on a Fulbright was not only the attraction of Italy for an artist, but the idea that perhaps I had unfinished business there. Now, it’s confusing in my mind as to what that means, but if I believed in reincarnation, and if I had the desire to go to Rome, then I might assume that I had been a Roman at some other time. And even if I weren’t, it’s still a beautiful source of imagery out of which to make a piece.
Now, to be still more specific, when I was in Rome, I lived in a single room on the Vicolo della Campana, and if you looked through the window, you could see the Tomb of Augustus. I regarded that as a sort of pun because my middle name is Augustus. Somewhere in my family that name came up; my grandmother named my father that and he, in turn, named me that, but you can’t ignore the fact that an Augustus was a Roman emperor, or if not a Roman emperor, then somebody in Rome. Later on, I happened to find a letter from the Emperor Augustus to his wife Livia about her grandson Claudius. The text had empty spots in it; it was incomplete and I liked that because it spaced it very nicely. The fact that I have a speech impediment matches that because sometimes I have to stop talking and let a word empty out. So, I wanted to use that letter as a time delay and I thought it would be a beautiful text. Also Latin is a dead language; I didn’t think that anyone in the audience would understand it, at least not all of it. It was beautiful source material, it seemed to me. Also the gap, the time spanned, the whole idea that you’re reprocessing that in the present seemed right.
I often follow the Latin text with an aria from a Berlioz opera, and you know my connection to Berlioz: he went to Rome too. Then I might use an old Johnny Ray song that I thought the synthesist might have an idea about, and follow that with the sounds of the whales. Everything in the piece has to do with distance; the whales are in the ocean and send sounds such a long way, the Johnny Ray song uses that artificial reverberation to achieve a spatial effect. I even think of the synthesizer as a geographical place.
Where these things could come together.
Where these things could come together, yes.
And yet the piece is no more about reincarnation than, for example, Vespers is about echolocation. You’ve mentioned the “musical realm,” that point at which simple ideas suddenly start giving rise to their own ideas and their own meanings; reincarnation is the simple idea. What happens when there is more than one synthesist?
Then it’s like a divining rod with two prongs on it, a double-branched thing. One synthesist could be processing the vocal sounds in one way and the other in another way. I made the stipulation that they could be linked together so that they could cross and interweave with one another, but we’ve never done it like that.
I thought of it as an opera. You know, in an opera, there’s so much disguise and terrible mistakes are made when a person doesn’t realize it’s the other person. Sometimes the whole conflict of an opera is based on an error like that. I had the idea in my mind that if you imitate someone else, you want to partake of his or her identity, and this piece seeks an identity connection between at least two people. I also had it in mind that there’s a single source of life, the idea of the single cell splitting into two and then four and then eight, geometrically. This piece, however, would work back the other way. If you could do it infinitely, everyone would process that sound according to every memory they ever had, thereby going back . . .
To where they had a connection.
. . . to where they had a connection; it’s a grandiose idea. But in its simplest form, with a single vocalist and one synthesist, it’s personal; it’s communication between two people that the audience can share. If you look at the score of The Duke of York and think of the imaginary ways in which the piece could be done, it could include everybody who’s ever lived on the earth.
It has kind of a therapeutic aspect also. You know the story about the woman who had amnesia. They played every popular song they could think of for her, based on her looks, age, and who they thought she was. They went back into her past starting with children’s songs, and slowly but surely, they connected with her. She would remember a song and it would give her memories, you know how a song can bring you back to a particular time and place, and so they finally got her out of that state. There’s another story that Bob Ashley used to tell about a totally paralyzed man who couldn’t respond to anything. Well, one night he was watching television or listening to the radio, and all of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, he began to sing! And he sang along with the song that was going on and when it was over, he just stopped and went back to the paralytic state. And every so often, after long periods of time, a song would come on and he’d just begin to sing that song, but that’s all he could do. His wife spent years playing the piano for him, hoping that as a song that he recognized would start he might sing and perhaps recover his memory. It was a touching story. I don’t know how it came out, but it was an idea in the piece. I’ve only done it with people I know pretty well, and my idea is that there’s an underground current in that piece that connects people in ways that they never would otherwise.
It’s not just a matter of establishing common ground, but that the ground that is common is the most powerful.
Theoretically, you could imagine that you had something to do with all the vocal utterances that were ever made and that you might bring yourself back through time to when you were a small animal. I was thinking that this piece could be a symbol of that, that you could learn to imitate all those vocal utterances and try to communicate them to another person who might have those in her background somewhere. When Mary and I do the piece, she says it scares her a little because I try so hard.