Music and the Laboratory
From John Redfield to John Cage
As has been mentioned in previous articles, John Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo was not a 1937 Seattle lecture but a document pieced together - possibly as late as the 1950s before first publication - that was ‘[a] summary rather than a prophecy’ representing the collation of ‘a series of research projects and proposals Cage had assembled between 1938 and 1940 in anticipation of establishing a center for experimental music.’ (Richard Brown p.102) In this Centre applied music and sound research would allow the new music he envisaged to emerge. In the Credo he outlined how ‘the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means of amplifying small sounds [and] film phonographs’ would be available with composers ‘at work using twentieth-century means for making music’ and ‘organizing sound for extra-musical purposes (theatre, dance, radio, film)’.
Like other aspects of the Credo there were precursors who wrote about the need for such centres or musical laboratories, beginning with John Redfield (in 1928), Edgard Varèse from the late 1920s onwards (who was influenced by Redfield’s ideas) and the example of Leopold Stokowski who Cage mentioned in a letter to Peter Yates as one of his sources of inspiration. This article will outline Redfield and Varèse’s ideas, Stokowski’s laboratory work and look in more detail at what Cage had in mind for his own ‘Center of Experimental Music’.
John Redfield’s Music: A Science And An Art (1928)
The American composer, writer and critic Marion Bauer in a Modern Music review wrote that John Redfield’s Music: A Science And An Art was ‘to say the least, provocative. Whether or not one agrees with his theses and speculations, they undeniably set many ideas in motion’. ‘Provocative’ seems the correct assessment - reading the book almost a century later it is a strange mixture of punk-like system smashing and elements of musical traditionalism. In the Foreword, Redfield - a former Lecturer in the Physics of Music at Columbia University - describes the fundamental purpose of the book;
That there is a scientific approach to music is quite ignored. It is as an urgent invitation to cultivate the scientific approach to music that the book has been written. If it shall establish that there is a scientific aspect to music, and shall persuade of the advisability of approaching music from the scientific as well as from the artistic side, it will have accomplished its purpose.
Redfield’s ‘manifesto’ is put clearly and forcefully in the first chapter, stating
Music is not something on a sheet of paper. Nor is it even the manipulation of a musical instrument by the interpretative artist. To the production of music three … individuals must contribute: the composer, the instrument maker, and the interpretative musician … Not until all three have been brought into intimate collaboration, and the air between the instrument and the listener’s ear is disturbed by the actual playing of the instrument, is music produced. That disturbance of the air is music … That there is an art of music will be readily conceded. That there is a science of music as well is not quite so obvious; yet such is undoubtedly the case. And that music as an art can not attain the full growth of which it is capable unless fostered and nurtured by science, is equally true.
After then discussing the materiality of music - that is the materials from which composers and instrumentalists ‘move the air’ - and stating that they are quite properly subjects for laboratory investigation, he then attacks the art of music as it had developed by the late 1920s.
Musicians are too short sighted. They are unable to see beyond the symbols on the music score and the machines they manipulate to express those symbols. What lies between the instrument and the ear of the listener, and what in that mysterious realm behind the composer, is all a deep secret to them, of whose existence even they are hardly aware. Music is not something on a sheet of paper. What we find on the paper is only a set of symbols designed to represent music - and sadly inadequate symbols they are. An instrumentalist speaks of studying music when he is as a matter of fact only learning the management of a musical machine designed to give expression to certain symbols on a sheet of paper. A student of composition imagines he is studying music when he is only learning to juggle musical symbols with sufficient skill to write running orders for the engineers of those machines. Strictly speaking, neither of them is studying music itself. If instrumentalists and composers realized how entirely inadequate these symbols are to represent the things that happen in musically active air, if they knew how small a portion of the atmospheric phenomena constituting music can be recorded in the staff notation and be produced by our musical machines, if in short they were aware that they are only dabbling tentatively and fearsomely in the beach ripples of a whole ocean of music that lies all uncharted and unsailed before them, they would begin to peer behind and beyond the symbols of music and courageously undertake a study of music itself rather than of its lame and halting hieroglyphics.
Like Cage also later outlined in the Credo, Redfield articulated how inadequate the ‘lame and halting hieroglyphics’ of Western musical notation are for dealing with the fullness and complexity of the sound events of music as revealed through scientific research. Cage portrayed the situation even more radically, where western notation fails a composer who is faced with the seemingly unlimited possibilities of organizing the entire ‘field of sound’ in compositions - though experimenting with this field would also require the kind of research Redfield proposed in 1928. In fact later in the book when discussing the musical laboratory, Redfield comes close to Cageian ideas on sound and music when he observed
The central feature of a school of music should be the musical laboratory. There is no other means or instrumentality by which music can be so quickly, so effectively, or so economically advanced, and so surely placed upon a solid and enduring foundation. Sound is the raw material out of which the musician fashions the finished product called music, and his efforts would be much more effective if he thoroughly understood the material with which he works. [The composer, instrument maker and instrumentalist] are indispensable to the production of music, each works with sound as the raw material which he turns into music, and each could greatly profit by a thorough understanding of that raw material.
However, sound research for Redfield would ultimately enhance ‘the beauty of music’ whereas for Cage sound would become material for music making - beauty was not an objective.
Redfield lamented the lack of interest in scientific research on the part of composers and musicians and argued
The fact is that there is not now in existence any considerable stock of knowledge about sound … The situation may perhaps be made appreciable by calling attention to the fact that there are today scores of periodicals devoted to electricity and electrical engineering, but not even one journal devoted to acoustics or acoustical engineering. And yet it is probably true that sound touches human beings as often, and at as many and as vital points daily, as does electricity.
When considering how a musical laboratory should be organised, he suggested three areas of research:
the general study of sound
applications of sound
investigation of hearing
He particularly argued that ‘[o]ne of the most important tasks of this division of the musical laboratory would be a study of the theory and design of musical instruments’, as he viewed existing instruments as compromised and technologically defective. Redfield stated ‘for the music of any age depends upon the kind of musical instruments which that age possesses. Composers can go no further than the possibilities of the instruments for which they write.’ After discussing how traditional instruments can be improved, he proposes that ‘the next task of the musical laboratory’ was
the design of musical instruments utilizing entirely new methods of tone production. It is not reasonable to suppose that a laboratory could give continuous and serious attention to the study of sound as a general physical phenomenon without occasionally discovering new methods of producing sound; and some of these new methods could undoubtedly be utilized for the construction of musical instruments. As an illustration of what is here meant by new methods of tone production, attention may be called to the vacuum tube oscillator which has come into use in recent years as a means of producing a musical tone from electricity … It seems hardly possible that there are not other methods [than traditional ones] of producing tones that could be utilized musically, and that the systematic study of sound would not lead to the discovery of some of them.
Redfield would have been aware of the Theremin, Gernsback’s Staccatone and Pianorad and possibly other vacuum tube oscillator instruments in 1927/28 when writing his book, and was keen to emphasise that improving existing instruments was not the only task to be pursued.
In the final section of the book, ‘The Future of Music’, Redfield speculates on ‘Harmonic Possibilities’, ‘Improving Orchestral Instruments’, ‘Developing New Instruments’ and a number of other topics. In the section on ‘Rhythms of Tomorrow’ he discusses ‘rhythmic counterpoint’ and the possibilities of percussion music for dance and absolute music, stating ‘percussion is the most neglected section of the orchestra; and that section, together with the woodwinds, it is to be hoped, will show the greatest future development’ - again an interesting thematic parallel to Cage’s Credo where he viewed percussion music as an important transitional stage to ‘an all-sound music of the future’.
Redfield’s final appeal is that
There should be at least one laboratory in the world where the fundamental facts of music could be investigated under conditions reasonably conducive to success. The interest in music is so widespread and intense, its appeal so intimate and poignant, and its significance for mankind so potent and profound, that it becomes unwise not to devote some portion of the enormous outlay for music to research in its fundamental questions.
Edgard Varèse and the Musical Laboratory
We know that Edgard Varèse was directly inspired by John Redfield’s ideas as in 1936 in a lecture, ‘New Instruments and New Music’, at Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, he quoted the above text in support of his argument that
The emotional impulse that moves a composer to write his scores contains the same element of poetry that incites the scientist to his discoveries. There is solidarity between scientific development and the progress of music. Throwing new light on nature, science permits music to progress - or rather to grow and change with changing times - by revealing to our senses harmonies and sensations before unfelt. On the threshold of beauty science and art collaborate.
It is probable that Varèse’s formulation that music was an ‘art-science’ - a term Cage also later used - was directly drawn from Redfield’s influence. In the same lecture Varèse outlined
The new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings that is, their oxygenation. Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. The never-before-thought-of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound!
Benjamin Steege (2003) indicates how Varèse’s efforts to develop new instruments and explore compositional sound materials were key ideas in his efforts in the 1930s when approaching existing research laboratories to help establish a new musical laboratory. Steege notes that in a later 1955 interview with George Charbonnier, Varèse’s ideas were close to Redfield’s; Varèse suggested that a composer’s ‘raw material is sound’ and that they should understand not only the mechanism and the possibilities of different sound machines [machines sonores] that make his music live’ but also familiarize themselves with the ‘laws of acoustics’. Steege indicates how Varèse unsuccessfully approached the Guggenheim Foundation and applied for a fellowship in September 1932, before later contacting Harvey Fletcher at the Bell Laboratories and later NBC. For the Guggenheim application he proposed a project collaboration with electronic music pioneer Rene Bertrand in France. This focused on improving and developing Bertrand’s Dynaphone instrument to create ‘a new instrument which will be adequate to the needs both of the creative musicians and of the musicologist.’ However, neither this application or correspondence with Bell Labs gave Varèse access to musical laboratory resources in the 1930s. It was not until the 1950s that he finally gained access to the kind of space and resources he envisioned. As Steege notes, this earlier failure did not dissuade Varèse from his belief that
composers, at least, would profit from a space, indeed an actual place, where acoustic materials were no longer perceived as floating around willy-nilly in the world at large, or in that awkward netherworld between compositional aspirations and disappointing realizations at the hands of fallible performers. In the laboratory space, the very scale of sound would be variable, so that not only could instrumental capabilities be extended, but sounds could be repeated and sustained freely, with minimal exertion and with license to make mistakes, technical, compositional, perceptual.
Leopold Stokowski, Electronic Music and the Laboratory
Leopold Stokowski in the 1920s and 30s was a well-known ‘celebrity’ conductor, supporter of modernist and ultramodernist music, a science and electronic music enthusiast and unlike Varèse had access to a workshop/laboratory where alongside inventors, engineers and technicians he experimented with developments in recording music, sound reproduction and the creation of new instruments. Between 1925 and 1927 Stokowski had conducted the premieres of Varèse’s Intégrales [1st March 1925, New York], Amériques [9th April 1926, Philadelphia] and Arcana [8th April, Philadelphia]. In 1932 he appeared at a meeting of The Acoustical Society of America where he delivered a lecture, subsequently published as ‘New Horizons in Music’, and in 1935 wrote an article ‘New Vistas in Radio’ in The Atlantic Monthly; both articles were cited by John Cage as important in the development of his ideas.
Stokowski’s interest in electronic (music) technology was clear, even if this is largely sidelined in books and articles about his activities in the 1930s. In 1926 he included the Clavilux in a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade; the instrument, invented and operated by Thomas Wilfred, projected light art onto a screen during the performance. In 1928 in an Associated Press article that appeared in many US newspapers, ‘Wonderful New Music Promised By Electrical Tone Production’, he wrote
I think great changes are coming in our western music. It is only a question of a few years before we will have entirely new methods of tone production by electrical means. Some of these new possibilities have been demonstrated by the Russian Theremin; and two American scientists, Charles Weyl of the University of Pennsylvania and John Hays Hammond, Jr., have shown me other methods of electric tone reproduction. I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music … only the music of the future will be played on the new electric instruments.
Although Stokowski’s enthusiasm ultimately proved premature, he was keen to force change through his conducting activities. In 1929 at a New York performance he created a powerful and sonorous bass sound for the Philadelphia Orchestra through using a finger board Theremin instrument, played by a Cellist, to enhance the orchestral basses. A 1929 Philadelphia Inquirer article [30th March p.2] suggested the orchestra had already used this instrument for several months. Stokowski commented
For a long period Mr. Theremin and I have been discussing and experimenting with electrical means of producing tone with the idea of introducing these instruments in the orchestra … it is our idea to develop a group of these instruments so that this group can be added to the orchestra and so add new tone colors to the orchestra, just as if a painter could add entirely new colors to his palette … The first instrument we have experimented with corresponds in tessitura to a point midway between the cello and double bass. The reason we began with such a deep instrument is, that as the orchestra has been growing in variety of color and richness of tone, it has not been growing equally … in the bass part, which supports the harmonies above it and which corresponds somewhat to the foundations of the house.
On 17th December 1930 Stokowski then introduced Maurice Martenot’s ‘Ondes Musicales’ instrument during a New York Philadelphia Orchestra performance. The instrument appeared during Buxtehude’s ‘Sarabande’ and ‘Courante’ and Mozart’s ‘Larghetto’, and then in Dimitrios Levidis’s Poeme Symphonique, pour solo d'Ondes Musicales et Orchestre, op.43-B (1928) written specifically for Martenot’s instrument. In February 1932 electronics magazine reported that Stokowski had added further to the electrical musical resources of his Philadelphia Orchestra by introducing a 5 octave keyboard Theremin designed at Leon Theremin’s New York laboratory that appeared in New York, Washington and Philadelphia concerts in January 1932.
Also in January 1932 electronics reported that the radio station WCAU Philadelphia would be moving to a new building with several studios, and notably, a special workshop or laboratory for Stokowski who had ‘become intensely interested in radio broadcasting from the reception viewpoint, and many experiments will be carried on in his special workshop.’ In May 1932 he gave his lecture ‘New Horizons in Music’ in New York. By August some preliminary laboratory findings were reported in electronics. The magazine reported on a Stokowski talk given to The Society of Motion Picture Engineers in New York.
Experiments which he has carried out with acoustic and radio experts have shown that the range of pitch necessary for the different instruments of an orchestra is greater than has been believed. Some of the needed higher pitches are not transmitted by ordinary radio apparatus or recorded on phonograph records. Hence the music sounds weak and imperfect.
By May 1934 Stokowski was working with Ivan Eremeef who designed and engineered the Syntronic Organ at the WCAU building that used optically generated tones using film as a ‘tone-wheel’ or source of audible vibrations. In 1935, also at the WCAU laboratory, the Photona electro-optical instrument was developed by Eremeef. Later in 1945 Stokowski conducted Anis Fuleihan’s Concerto for Theremin and Orchestra with the New York Symphony Orchestra in New York, featuring Clara Rockmore as the solo Thereminist.
Alongside his conducting and electronic musical instrument interests and activities, in 1931 Stokowski began working with Bell Laboratories on high fidelity orchestral recording experiments, with recordings taking place in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia - the experimental recording equipment was installed in the Academy basement. As Huffman (2002) indicates
From December 1931 through May 1932, thousands of experimental recordings were made, first in monaural sound and, then, beginning in March 1932, recordings of the Philadelphia Orchestra were made in binaural or stereophonic sound … Using this stereophonic equipment, the Bell Laboratories engineers recorded Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a Russian program on March 12, 1932 ... They recorded the “Poem of Fire” opus 60 by Alexander Scriabin and the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition” in this format. These recordings are the earliest surviving examples of stereophonic recording.
Stokowski’s commitment to the technological exploration of sound production, recording and reproduction came by embracing science in the way that John Redfield had argued must happen to allow music to progress into the future - to better understand musical materials, instruments and ultimately the transmission of music to ears and audiences. In a talk in 1932 at a luncheon for the Matinee Musical Club, Stokowski underlined this, declaring
that this era already is entering the threshold where there will be a new alliance between music, art and science. … “A lot of people think that because we are building up standardized machinery, the world will be harder, more steely and less beautiful … I do not agree with them. I think we are going into an age of new romanticism that will be more vivid than ever before. There will be one great unity between music, art and science. They are growing much alike each day.” [Victoria Advocate, 27th November p.3]
However it must be noted that Stokowski’s future music rhetoric was often reined back in his application of new electronic instruments in orchestral settings; although he premiered new compositions for both the Theremin and Martenot’s ‘Ondes Musicales’, these were in no way ‘new music’ comparable in progressive ambition to the work of Varèse and later Cage. Nevertheless, Stokowski’s status in the 1920s and 30s ensured that his thoughts on future music technologies reached a wide audience across the United States, and through him many would have been made aware of the future potential of electronic music. His collaborative Bell Labs and WCAU ‘laboratory’ work did achieve some of the aims that Redfield set out in his book, but not necessarily in a systematic manner - even so his efforts contributed to longer term work in high quality sound recording and reproduction, and to work on electronic musical instrument development in the 1930s. His thoughts and ideas also reached and influenced those of John Cage.
John Cage’s Center for Experimental Music
John Cage had been aware of Varèse and Stokowski’s efforts in attempting to draw science and music closer together, to enhance understanding on both sides of what Redfield had viewed as a damaging divide. We do know what Cage had in mind for his laboratory experiments through his 1940 Guggenheim grant application, and it is worth looking at this in detail.
Cage wrote that the function and purpose of his Center of Experimental Music was to
‘research the field of sounds and rhythms’ that until that point had been viewed as not musical
develop new electronic musical instruments that had capabilities beyond existing musical means
to explore methods of composition and performance arising from this work.
What is notable in the application is that the suggested membership of the center was dominated by women - Xenia Cage, former Cornish faculty members Doris Dennison and Margaret Jensen, Renata Garve and Marion Constable. The only man represented was Cage himself. Strangely no technicians or acoustical engineers are mentioned who would clearly be crucial in aiding electronic instrument development. His ‘statement of belief’ supporting his application appears to be one of the key sources of The Future of Music: Credo, and the brief history of the field specifically mentions Cage’s key precursors and influences; Luigi Russolo, Henry Cowell, Leon Theremin, Joseph Schillinger, Edgard Varèse, Carlos Chavez, the physicist John Mills and his book A Fugue in Cycles and Bels, acoustical physicist Dr. Vern O. Knudsen and Leopold Stokowski. Cage adds that
in continuing my work, I have become, as Russolo and Varèse did before me, convinced that percusssion and the use of mechanical instruments are a transition to the electrical music of the future. With electrical and film means composers will have the entire field of sound available for musical purposes.
It is then in this document that we see Cage’s criticisms of existing electronic musical instruments that also eventually found their way into the published Credo. For example, he writes
For the Novachord and Solovox, one can only write piano music or music as we have had it, giving it, through performance on these instruments a novel and cheap effect. Similarly with film means, the use of film-sound libraries confined to the production of sound-effects in the film and radio industries has precluded the use of these means for serious musical purposes … On the other hand, certain electric instruments intended not for musical purposes but for testing or other purposes prove the existence of the electrical musical future which has been prophecied. I refer to the square-wave generator used to test amplifiers …
Cage (following Chavez, and in fact many reviewers of Theremin performances in Europe and the USA) had also criticised the use of Leon Theremin’s instruments for the performance of traditional classical and popular music, and yet in the Guggenheim application he lists these instruments as part of the possible inventory that he wished to assemble for the centre. Alongside an extensive list of his existing collection of percussion instruments he also mentioned the requirement for electric sirens (previously a feature of some of Varèse’s experiments), Henry Cowell’s Rhythmicon designed in conjunction with Leon Theremin, square-wave generators, audio frequency oscillators, amplifiers, loudspeakers and a film-sound library ‘and machines for its use’.
Drawing from these resources Cage envisaged that compositions by himself and other composers would emerge from the centre. Performers would be trained including those beyond the nucleus of himself, Xenia Cage, Doris Dennison and Margaret Jansen. Performances and lectures would occur at the Centre and on tour, with articles, lectures and teaching disseminating findings and techniques developed.
Finally Cage stated that the ultimate purpose of his work and that of the Experimental Music Center was to
make available and use sound and rhythms which are either not yet available or not yet used; that is, I intend to push forward the frontiers of music.
In both the Credo and the Guggenheim application, although we can see how John Cage was forging a new path forward for his own work, there is no doubt that his ideas were drawn from a number of research sources, and it is telling that there are clear parallels between John Redfield’s outline of how he envisaged a musical laboratory proceeding and the projected activities of Cage’s Experimental Music Center. Redfield’s discussion of the potential for experimental research on ‘Harmonic Possibilities’, ‘Improving Orchestral Instruments’, ‘Developing New Instruments’ and the ‘Rhythms of Tomorrow’ and percussion music all seem to resonate with Varèse, Cowell and Cage’s work. The lines of transmission of these ideas (that were also held and discussed by many others in the period) may not have travelled directly to Cage from Redfield, but their mediation via Varèse and others may well have impacted Cage’s thinking about the future of music as much as his other acknowledged influences.
One final thought - it must be noted that though Varèse and Cage struggled to gain funding and interest in their ideas for ‘musical laboratories’ in the USA until the 1950s, there had been such laboratories elsewhere. For example, two important institutions were established in Weimar era Germany
The Rundfunkversuchstelle (Radio Research Centre) at the Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin (Berlin University of Music) - established in May 1928, the Centre was an experimental institution that was considered a ‘laboratory for new sounds’, but was also as a research institution dealing with sound film technology and sound recording. Friedrich Trautwein’s pioneering Trautonium instrument was largely financed by the Centre and the composers Oskar Sala and Paul Hindemith, who taught at the Hochschule für Musik composed ‘Seven Pieces for Three Trautoniums’ in 1930.
The Heinrich Hertz Institut was founded by the Technischen Hochschule Berlin (Technical University of Berlin) beginning in August 1927 for the research of electrical and acoustic vibrations, and was formally established as the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut für Schwingungsforschung in February 1928. Professor Dr. Gustav Leithäuser was chosen by Professor Willy Wagner to head the High-Frequency Technology department that became involved in developing electronic musical instruments based on Leon Theremin’s original Theremin instrument.
Both of these institutions explored the implications of new radio and electronic technologies for sound and music, and arrived as John Redfield was calling for similar work to be undertaken in the USA. Their aim, however, was not to ‘remake music’ in the mould of Varese or Cage. How far Redfield looked to Germany as an example is not known, but clearly these German institutions, supported by government funding, were ahead of US counterparts when it came to exploring and experimenting with the future of music.