HPSCHD/String Quartet No. 2

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller/Ben Johnston - HPSCHD/String Quartet No. 2

LP released in 1969 or 1970

HPSCHD (1967-1969) for harpsichords & computer-generated sound tapes

composed by John Cage & Lejaren Hiller

performers:

Antoinette Vischer - Neupert Bach-model harpsichord (Solo II)
Neely Bruce - Hubbard double harpsichord with 17% Eltro time compression (Solo VI)
David Tudor - Baldwin solid-body electronic harpsichord (Solo I)

This recording of HPSCHD was made possible through use of facilities of the Experimental Music Studio and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois, Urbana.

The esthetic is what we think in the presence of the object. The artist's means are not esthetic but his thinking on them is; his esthetic thought prevails over the means to make a work of art. The rules of fugue or sonata form prophesy no esthetic consequence, except by the thought and doing of the artist.
The sound object HPSCHD - "harpsichord" reduced to the computer's 6-letter-word limit becomes HPSCHD - may be the most elaborately defined sound composite so far achieved by deliberate formal composition. All "chance" factors occur within limits closely or widely permitted by the makers. Each part includes ideas from both composers; together they shaped it. Their thought, the object, and our thinking responses, in whatever relationship we hear it, decide our reaction to this work as a work of art.
HPSCHD consists of 51 electronic sound tapes and 7 solo compositions for harpsichord. Writing in the avant-garde music magazine Source, Cage explains that the piece can exist as "a performance of one to seven live harpsichords and one to fifty-one tapes." The present record is a composition including 3 "live" solos across a composite of the 51 tapes.
The source work, Introduction to the Composition of Waltzes by Means of Dice, is attributed to Mozart (K. ANH. C 30.01). For each measure of a 32-measure "empty" form (four 8-measure sections) the composer provides 11 alternative "composed" measures, the choice made by throw of dice. Measure 8 is always the same. With each section repeated the final form is 64 measures (AABBAABB), lasting onem inute. This Dice Game repeated 20 times is Solo II. Using now a computer-derived numerical system borrowed from the digital principle of I-ching (an ancient Chinese oracular or wisdom book), assemble another 64 measures of the same pattern, until another 20 successive assemblages fill 20 minutes. Solos III-VI each start with one realization of the Dice Game, progressively replacing the original choice of measures by: Solo III, passages from Mozart piano sonatas, treble and bass together as written; Solo IV, the same, treble and bass dissociated; Solos V & VI, associated and dissociated bass and treble measures from keyboard works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, Cage, and Hiller. Solo I is computer-written in 12-tone equal temperament on the same formulae which are used for the 51 sound tapes. Solo VII is anything of Mozart's chosen by the soloist, played as he wishes.
The 51 sound tapes contain music in equal-tempered scales of, successively, 5 to 56 tones in the octave, each tone deviating over a field of 129 (the half-interval up or down divided by 64 or the equal-tempered tone). Each tape is composed according to a series of programs: e.g., from simple repetitive tones and silences across a field to non-repetitive tones and complexly varies spaces. The patterns are overlaid and continually change, the more redundant being more clearly differentiated, the effect rather like individual trees merging into a forest. Other computer-formalized programs, for note sequence, time (in units), successive events, melodic "goals" (without cadence) and types (diatonic, chromatic, chordal arpeggiation), volume, and dynamics, are similarly intermixed. (Peter Yates)

String Quartet No. 2 (1964)

composed by Ben Johnston

performers:

The Composers Quartet: Matthew Raimondi - violin, Anahid Ajemian - violin, Bernard Zaslov - viola, Seymour Barab - cello

HPSCHD and the Second Quartet of Ben Johnston embody two extremes of esthetic experience. The multiple routines and subroutines of HPSCHD, although resulting from personal choices by the two collaborators, are in effect as impersonal as statistics or the Golden Section. The decisions concerning the intonational and melodic relationships of the Quartet are as personal as a fine handwriting - in many cultures as highly esteemed as any work of art. Neither work is "classic" or "romantic." Each is as free of the conventional indices for analysis as of the customary signals for emotion - the esthetic equivalent of an experiment in pure research. Except the harpsichord solos, the sound medium of each work is composed in an intonation (system or scale of pitches) differing from the 12-note equal temperament of the piano. The macrotonal scales (5 to 11 pitches in the octave) and the microtonal scales (13 to 56 pitches in the octave) of HPSCHD are microtonally varied systems of equal division of the octave, without close relationship to the tones and intervals of the overtone series. They are disparate points of sound lacking acoustical coordination and rich overtone sonority. The melodic scales of Johnston's Quartet are unequal interval systems in just intonation: directly related in some degree to the overtone series and therefore proportionately the more sonorous. The musicians perform these unusual pitch and interval systems with extreme accuracy. If the tones sound "wrong" by our habituated hearing, we must accept the fact that they are "right."
Cage and Hiller made their esthetic decisions by means of computer. Ben Johnston's decisions follow a contrary esthetic philosophy, explained in his paper Three Attacks on a Problem: "What can be grasped with equal alacrity by ear, by mathematics, and by intuitive feeling is the best material for art. And this intelligibility is not a mere matter of conditioning: some relations are naturally more easily understood than others.
"In tacitly accepting as an arbitrary 'given' the 12-tone equal-tempered scale, Schoenberg committed music to the task of exhausting the remaining possibilities in a closed pitch system. Many composers, tired of tonal cliches, have either abandoned pitch or, more accurately, have organized it as if it were noise. [Noise can be defined as the totally random mingling of sounds.] "The use of harmonic intervals tuned 'just' (by eliminating the roughness of beats) provides a better point of departure than any tempered equivalents. To make a just intonation pitch system, you select a small number of generative intervals which you can tune precisely, by ear. The unison, the octave, the perfect fifth and perfect major third will suffice. "I wanted to write a piece in which the players would need to take much greater care than usual in locating the pitches. Each would be dependent upon making precisely the right interval with some other player's note. There are three distinct kinds of interval texture in this quartet." (Peter Yates)

Tracklisting:

Side One

1. John Cage and Lejaren Hiller - HPSCHD {20:50}

Side Two

1. Ben Johnston - String Quartet No. 2: Light and quick {2:42}

2. Ben Johnston - String Quartet No. 2: Intimate, spacious {5:19}

3. Ben Johnston - String Quartet No. 2: Extremely minute and intense {6:35}

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