In 1960, IBM Italy received an order for several digital computers from the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), to be delivered to its principal research site, then under construction in the small town of Ispra, northern Italy.98 There, the Joint Research Center (JRC) would become the home
of several experimental nuclear reactors, operational until the 1980s, and the workplace of 2,300 staff at the peak of employment at the site in 1968.99 One of those employees was a young French engineer,
André Riotte. Riotte joined the JRC in 1961 and worked for four years at the center’s data-processing division, known as CETIS (Centre Européen de Traitement de l’Information Scientifique).100 As a
result, Riotte had access to a number of analog and digital computers at CETIS that were primarily designed to support research activities at the JRC in nuclear physics and engineering. Analog computers, which used bespoke electronic circuits to realize computations of models of physical processes, were still in use at the JRC, alongside their newer, more flexible digital counterparts.
Analog computers were generally purpose-built for specific, predetermined computational applications. Example applications include: the prediction of tides, the computation of the trajectories of ballistic missiles, the solution of differential equations in a fixed number of variables. These
machines would be specified, designed, and constructed for a relatively narrow class of problems. If a new kind of problem arose, a new computer was commissioned to solve it. Thus, computing machines from the pre-digital era reflect the precise needs of the institutions that could afford to commission and maintain them. An analog computer purpose-built to enumerate the all-interval series was out of the question. Digital computers, on the other hand, represented their operands using discrete symbols from a fixed vocabulary, usually the binary number system. The development of this abstraction facilitated a number of novel paradigms of computing, including the idea that computer applications could be modeled, not as the fixed specification of some (electro)mechanical computing machine
98. IBM, “IBM Archives: Italy Chronology 1950 - 1969,” January 23, 2003, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ exhibits/italy/italy_ch2.html.
99. European Commission and Joint Research Centre, JRC Ispra: A 50 Years Pictorial History (Luxembourg: EUR-OP, 2009), 13.
100. André Riotte, “Computer Music: A New Meeting-Point of Art and Science,” Euro Spectra: Scientific and Technical Review of the Commission of the European Communities, March 1974, 2.
designed a priori, but as a series of fundamental operations that could be composed, stored, and retrieved ad hoc. This property of digital computers from this period—programmability—greatly improved the chances that the all-interval series problem would be solved computationally, because pre-existing computer facilities could be used. What once required the design and construction of bespoke machines could be completed commissioning and executing of a program—the intellectual labor of symbol manipulation, by now familiar to the diligent twelve-tone student—on a programmable digital computer to which the inquisitive composer had access. While he was employed at the JRC, Riotte worked on a project to connect analog and digital computers so that the digital computers could be used to improve the effectiveness of analog modeling by using the digital computer to check the analog model specification for errors before it was programmed and run, effectively playing the strengths of both computing paradigms off each other.101
Ensuring that an algorithm performs as expected is a core competency of programming in general. In particular, it is a skill necessary to design a demonstrably correct algorithm for the generation of the all-interval series catalog. Riotte’s work on this project positions him at the meeting-point of the analog-digital divide, and he was tasked with bridging this divide at CETIS. Riotte had other interests and expertises, which positioned him at the intersection of two other domains: music and the sciences. As a one-time student of composition, Riotte had studied under Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messaien and Jean Barraqué.102 Riotte’s dual formation served him well
both before and after his tenure at the JRC. He sustained a professional career as a data processing engineer while enjoying a healthy number of performances as a composer, until he ultimately dedicated himself to music in 1982. Riotte attributed his interest in serial composition to his studies with Barraqué, and this interest found its expression not only in Riotte’s compositions but in his use of computer time in Ispra to develop new musical resources. In 1963, Euratom published a short internal report by Riotte entitled “Génération des cycles équilibrés,” in which Riotte defines the concept
101. André Riotte, “CANDIDE: Overall Plan for Possible Developments of Linked of the CETIS Analog and Digital Computers,” Translation of CETIS Report No. 33, 1963 “CANDIDE - Plan d’ensemble sur les dévelopements possibles du couplage des calculateurs analogiques et digitaux du CETIS” (Washington, D.C: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, January 1964)
of a “balanced cycle” (cycle équilibré).103 “A balanced cycle is a series of twelve tones, which is
also a series of eleven intervals, all different,” writes Riotte, effectively describing the criteria for an all-interval series, though he did not use this term.104 Riotte goes on to accurately report the total
number of all-interval series, up to transposition and inversion: 1,928. Unlike the earlier Vienna solution, or the later New York solution, Riotte published very few of his examples, and so we cannot say for sure that his catalog was accurate—but, as agreement on the total figure suggests, it was very likely to have been comprehensive.
When and how did Riotte achieve this enumeration? Riotte remarks that a computer program was written to determine the total number of “balanced cycles” by the programmer–analyst André Debroux, Riotte’s colleague at CETIS, who also worked on analog-digital coupling projects at the computer center.105 A later publication by Riotte suggests that he had developed the “balanced cycles”
concept by 1962; elsewhere, it is suggested by Riotte’s report that the investigations of balanced cycles were written in FORTRAN II, and executed on an IBM 7090.106 The IBM 7090 at Ispra was
part of the 1960 order placed with IBM Italy, and we know that it arrived sometime in late 1961.107
This suggests Riotte and Debroux completed the calculations some time between late 1961 and the publication of the Euratom report in 1963, at least two years before Bauer-Mengelberg and Ferentz’s publication.
Riotte’s access to the computer was in part guaranteed by his employment in a service-providing role that saw him mediate other researchers’ access to the computing installation at CETIS. But his access was also facilitated by the fact that the computer was not so heavily used that it could not be used for his extra-curricular calculation—research into serial music was hardly a priority at Euratom, but it seemed that there was little demand on the machine that Riotte used to produce his catalog.
103. André Riotte, “Génération des cycles équilibrés,” Internal report (Ispra, Italy: Euratom, 1963), 139. 104. Riotte, 139.
105. Riotte, 139.
106. Riotte, “Computer Music: A New Meeting-Point of Art and Science,” March 1974, 2; André Riotte, “Il nanosecondo ben temperato,” Rivista IBM 5, no. 2 (1969): 40–45, 44.
107. W. John Hutchins, ed., Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science Series 3, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 97 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000), 132.
One reason that the IBM 7090 was purchased by Euratom was that this hardware supported a revised version of the translation software known as Georgetown Automatic Translation (GAT). At that time, machine translation was relatively rudimentary, but nevertheless supported the translation of short texts between widely-spoken language pairs that dealt with a relatively constrained conceptual vocabulary. The Georgetown system sufficed, for example, to provide legible translations into English of abstracts of Russian research, which were enthusiastically consumed by users of the system at Ispra until GAT was retired in 1976.108 In the first months of operation of the 7090, it was reportedly so
underused that machine translation experts were induced to travel to Italy to work on the system, in exchange for their free use of the computer.109
Riotte’s use of the IBM 7090 exemplifies how computational resources, when they are surplus to institutional requirements, can be appropriated by technically skilled users for their own ends, with little or no retribution. In a later article from 1974, reviewing developments in computer music for a wider—if scientifically literate—audience, Riotte shows a sensitivity to such practical impediments to pursuing computer research about music. Riotte writes:
Of course, the computer is still a costly tool for the composer. With few exceptions, computer music is not yet counted among the interdisciplinary studies in Europe, and it suffers from a lack of information and research. It meets with the usual difficult difficulties—confidential research, justifications for access to facilities, non-transferable programs, inadequate attempts at programming.110
The necessity of negotiating computer access to pursue musical research remained an issue. Even in the early 70s, as less-expensive minicomputers provided a commercial alternative to the mainframe computer installation, Riotte’s comments suggest that securing computer time for musical ends required justification to supervisors of computer utilities. Part of Riotte’s solution to this problem of access is a systemic one: to include the “development and reform of music teaching, putting stress on the new means of formalization and processing of data.”111 Resembling Zemanek’s comments cited
108. Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 261.
109. Hutchins, Early Years in Machine Translation, 132.
110. Riotte, “Computer Music: A New Meeting-Point of Art and Science,” March 1974, 14. 111. Riotte, 14.
above, Riotte’s speculative plan also develops the idea of music as a species of data processing as the solution to an apparent lack of computational attention.
Though Riotte wastes little ink explaining the implementation of his computer program, he does indulge in extensive discussion of its relevance to contemporary musical thought. Riotte writes transparently about the continuity in which he situates his work: “it may be noted that an algorithmic awareness had already surfaced in music, in particular in the person of Olivier Messiaen.”112 Riotte
describes the composer’s imperative to respect new fundamental musical objects not as compositional determinants but as conditions of possibility:
Il est clair que le matériau des sons dans lequel on va puiser, s’il ne garantit en aucune façon l’expression et la qualité des œvures musicales qui l’utiliseront, oriente au moins, par ses virtualités plus ou moins riches, l’éventail des réalisations possibles.
It is evident that the sonic material upon which we will draw, if it does not guarantee in any way the expression and the quality of the musical works that make use of it, will by way of its more or less rich virtualities, does at least orient the wide range of possible realizations of these works.113
Accordingly, though the data processing techniques at the heart of the all-interval series generation algorithm are robustly deterministic, composition remains a negotiation of the “rich virtualities” that a catalog of the balanced cycles (or, indeed, any musical material) provides. On Riotte’s view, the special property of the all-interval series, its maximal diversity of melodic interval content, exerts no more influence over how a composition goes than could any other of its properties.114 Riotte’s talk
of “virtualities” and “possible realizations” demonstrates his sensitivity to traditional compositional processes, speaking to the unpredictability of musical creation. Reading of the co-option of high technology by twelve-tone composers as a symptom of a broader depersonalized musical aesthetic
112. “[O]n peut remarquer qu’une conscience algorithmique s’était déjà fait jour dans la musique, en particulier chez Olivier Messiaen.” Riotte, “Génération des cycles équilibrés,” 1963, 141.
113. Riotte, 135.
114. Compare this with Krenek’s view, expressed in “Musik und Mathematik,” that use of such a maximally diverse series would free the composer from latent tonal allusions in such a series.
is questionable, when Riotte can assert—explicitly—the provisional status of the results of his computational investigations.
Years later, in 1982, Riotte was invited to address a colloquium funded by the European Commission, on the topic of “the civilization of the microprocessor and microelectronics,” Riotte, who for several decades programmed computers used in experimental nuclear research for a living, was not exaggerating when he claimed that “[a]ny technique that extends our capacities implies potential dangers. The resources that can be tapped in microelectronics are immense. […] Shall we be able to meet the challenge? Yes, if we are convinced that the future of our civilization is at stake.”115 In context of this discussion of his “balanced cycles” program, such talk seems hyperbolic.
But an important lesson lies behind this irony. The juxtaposition of the banal and the life-threatening applications of the computer is facilitated by the flexibility of the programmable digital computer. Unlike its analog predecessors the same device, at the hands of the same programmer, at the same institution, can be switched from musical to non-musical use at a moment’s notice. Riotte’s work demonstrates how access to computer platforms maintained by powerful institutions can determine where innovative computational work is done. Often, that work is easily aligned with the goals of thsoe institutions; the case of Riotte shows that this not always the case.