[ index | 1970 ]

Gordon Mumma (1935-*)

¬ American composer and performer, born 30 March 1935 (Framingham, Massachusetts).

¬ Unobstrusive compared to his fellow-composers Morton Subotnik, Pauline Oliveros or Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma has nevertheless influenced the development of electronic music in the United States. He studied piano and horn in Chicago and in Detroit began his career as a horn player in the city's symphonic orchestra. In 1953 he co-founded with Robert Ashley the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music and the now-historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music.

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Important Landmarks:

¬ Megaton for Wm Burroughs (1963)

¬ The Dresden Interleaf 13 February 1945 (1965) 12:40
This piece, written in 1965, was released on a Lovely Music vinyl in 1979 with the intense Megaton for Wm Burroughs. An interesting work in several ways, it evokes simultaneously a battle and extreme abstraction.

¬ Conspiracy 8, (1970)
When the piece was presented at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a remote data-link was established to a computer in Boston which received information about the performance in progress.

¬ His design for an electronic music live-performance system at EXPO-70 (Osaka, Japan) in collaboration with David Tudor.

-- an anthology of noise & electronic music, SUB ROSA SR190

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EXPO-70, Osaka

One of the participants in Expo 70, Gordon Mumma, describes the immense complexity and sophistication that mixed-media presentations had evolved into by that time:

“The most remarkable of all multi-media collaborations was probably the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion for Expo 70 in Osaka. This project included many ideas distilled from previous multi-media activities, and significantly advanced both the art and technology by numer-ous innovations. The Expo 70 pavilion was remarkable for several reasons. It was an international collaboration of dozens of artists, as many engineers, and numerous industries, all coordinated by Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. From several hundred proposals, the projects of twenty-eight artists and musicians were selected for presentation in the pavilion.

The outside of the pavilion was a 120-foot-diameter geodesic dome of white plastic and steel, enshrouded by an ever-changing, artificially generated water-vapor cloud. The public plaza in front of the pavilion contained seven man-sized, sound-emitting floats, that moved slowly and changed direction when touched. A thirty-foot polar heliostat sculpture tracked the sun and reflected a ten-foot-diameter sun-beam from its elliptical mirror through the cloud onto the pavilion.

The inside of the pavilion consisted of two large spaces, one black-walled and clam-shaped, the other a ninety-foot high hemispherical mirror dome. The sound and light environment of these spaces was achieved by an innovative audio and optical system consisting of state-of-the-art analog audio circuitry, with krypton-laser, tungston, quartz-iodide, and xenon lighting, all controlled by a specially designed digital computer programming facility.

The sound, light, and control systems, and their integration with the unique hemispherical acoustics and optics of the pavilion, were controlled from a movable console. On this console the lighting and sound had separate panels from which the intensities, colors, and directions of the lighting, pitches, loudness, timbre, and directions of the sound could be controlled by live performers. The sound-moving capabilities of the dome were achieved with a rhombic grid of 37 loudspeakers surrounding the dome, and were designed to allow the movement of sounds from point, straight line, curved, and field types of sources. The speed of movement could vary from extremely slow to fast enough to lose the sense of motion. The sounds to be heard could be from any live, taped, or synthesized source, and up to 32 different inputs could be controlled at one time.

Furthermore, it was possible to electronically modify these inputs by using eight channels of modification circuitry that could change the pitch, loudness, and timbre in a vast number of combinations. Another console panel contained digital circuitry that could be programmed to automatically control aspects of the light and sound. By their programming of this control panel, the performers could delegate any amount of the light and sound functions to the digital circuitry.

Thus, at one extreme the pavilion could be entirely a live-performance instrument, and at the other, an automated environment. The most important design concept of the pavilion was that it was a live-performance, multi-media instrument. Between the extremes of manual and automatic control of so many aspects of environment, the artist could establish all sorts of sophisticated man-machine performance interactions.”

-- David Dunn: A HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC PIONEERS, in: Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt, 1992 (p.59-60)

src: http://artscilab.org/eigenwelt/pdf/021-062.pdf

[ index | 1969 ]