The story of Edmund Campion, born in Dallas, complements that of Fineberg by providing both parallels and counter-examples. Like Fineberg, Campion is a rare American who studied with the first-generation spectral composers in Paris, participated in the early courses for composition and technology at IRCAM, and developed a decidedly spectral attitude that, upon his return to the States, distinguished him from his contemporaries, who included John Zorn (b. 1953), Larry Polansky (b. 1954), Paul Moravec (b. 1957), and the Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon (b. 1956) and Julia Wolfe (b. 1958). Both Fineberg and Campion were appointed to posi- tions at important centers for new music and technology: Fineberg at Boston University’s electronic music studios and newly established Center for New Music, and Campion at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley. Yet Campion’s work more overtly focuses on technology and its ramifications for performers and listeners, exploring the challenges faced by composers seeking to cre- ate meaningful music in a medium and performance arena dramatically altered by technological advances.
As a child, Campion was interested in music yet found no satisfying out- let or release in the traditional repertoire. He was given standard music lessons and acquired basic skills at the piano but was more familiar with rock music. He had some knowledge of electronic music, acquired primar- ily through casual exposure to experimental cross-over works such as the Beatles’ Revolution no. 9 (1968). Early on, he was aware that his interests in musical sound did not connect with the repertoire available to him. “I was
into sound and had no idea how that intersected with traditional music,” he recalled. “I was terrible at what people called music, and I could not fit my notions of sound into that mold …” (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012).
In 1969, Campion’s relationship to music was forever altered when he received a curious package in the mail. Sent by his older brother, then serving in the Vietnam War, it held a high-quality AKAI tape recorder. Campion began to experiment with the machine, which was capable of shifting speeds and multi-tracking, creating his own electronic and concrète works. The tape recorder (and, later, the computer) became his instrument, his playground, and his teacher. As a passionate amateur composer and hobbyist, he composed tape pieces throughout his teenage years, spending his savings on high-end audio equipment and developing a personal con- ception of sound mediated by neither the constraints of live performers nor the limitations of traditional western notation.
Working with sound in the way that Schaeffer and other electronic music pioneers did in 40’s and 50’s was my childhood musical experience – all the music coming to me as I entered my teens (the 70’s) confirmed for me what music was about – it was audio and everything you do with it! … It was frequency material and timbre, it was noise, it was semiotic associations.
(Campion, personal correspondence, 2012) In high school, hoping to secure the reported benefits of a more trad- itional musical education, Campion sought out the pianist David Heimer. A former prodigy and student of Moriz Rosenthal, Heimer represented a tie to the classical tradition, Lisztian virtuosity, and aesthetic legitimacy. By the time he came to work with him, Heimer had turned away from classical musical performance, finding regional success as a jazz pianist; Heimer had also begun to suffer delusions, harbingers of a clinical insanity (not unlike Hugo Wolf’s) from which he never recovered. Yet even in his diminished state, he recognized something in Campion’s raw musicality and instilled in him the belief that music was a special calling, a mission. He encouraged Campion to seek out other mentors. After minoring in piano performance at the University of Texas while exploring the connec- tions between composition and electronics, Campion moved to New York to study with Davidovsky at Columbia University. In 1960, Davidovsky, a student of Babbitt and Aaron Copland, as well as Varèse’s personal tech- nician, had been appointed director of the CPEMC. His Synchronisms
no. 6 (1970), for piano and tape, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning interactive
composition, and his work over the next decade had established him as a pioneer in electroacoustic performance. In a roundabout way, Campion’s
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idiosyncratic self-education had brought him to apprentice with a fore- father of American computer music.
Davidovsky was a charismatic, brilliant teacher. Considered by many of his colleagues “the most elegant of all the electronic music composers,” his electroacoustic compositions reflected a “truly messianic feeling concern- ing the promise of this new medium” and represented those “euphoric days of intense experimentation, [in which] some composers felt that electronic music, because of its seemingly unlimited possibilities, would eventu- ally replace conventional music” (Crumb, 1980). He and Campion, how- ever, had inherently different, irreconcilable views of music. At Columbia, viewed as a bastion of the “uptown” avant-garde, Campion was grounded in post-tonal theory, the set-theoretical methodologies of Allen Forte (b. 1926), and the post-Bergian repertoire. His teachers, devoted to the craft of atonal composition, conveyed to him a valuable sense of artistic discip- line and the love of a modernist heritage, which they considered in danger of being forgotten, or at least supplanted in the cultural consciousness by the forces of neo-tonality and minimalism. Like Fineberg, Campion was frustrated by the pessimistic attitude and cultural isolation they seemed to share, and even cherish. “The many brilliant, academically-housed com- posers I worked with and learned from,” he recalled, “saw themselves as musical masters existing in a cultural space that did not comprehend their musical practices” (Campion, personal correspondence, 2012). Unable to see his own creative work as that “special music in an alien and inapposite world,” Campion refused to believe that composers must choose either to create serious music and forfeit an audience, or to bow to the buzzword of accessibility and cater to the masses. He felt that there were more interest- ing musical issues to explore.
When and how to pursue these issues became clear in 1988, when the thirty-one-year-old composer attended a concert at New York’s Symphony Space. There, in a struggling theater on the city’s then ungen- trified, drug-addled Upper West Side, he heard Grisey’s music – the quintet Talea (1986) – for the first time. Immediately, Campion felt an affinity for this composer. He recognized something of his own com- positional concerns in the aesthetic of renewal and change that Grisey proposed. To Campion, it was irresistible; the following day, he wrote to Grisey and begged him to accept him as a student. The next year, he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Grisey at the Conservatoire.
Acclimating himself to the various factions and camps of the new music scene in 1980s Paris, Campion discovered an ideological drama far removed from the cabals of uptown and downtown Manhattan. He was witness to
an aesthetic revolution-in-progress, precipitated by the collision of four schools of thought, each associated with an institution: the Conservatoire; the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, which had stood as the model of a center for new music and technology from its founding in 1958 until the rise of IRCAM; IRCAM itself; and the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), established by Xenakis as an inter- disciplinary research center at the Sorbonne in 1966. Each of the four approaches prioritized different aspects of the processes of composers and performers; each of the four proposed a unique way of conceiving the nature of sound itself, the role of the score, and the responsibilities of those who created the musical experience. The Conservatoire was committed to preserving the art of écriture: a craft closely tied to the language of nota- tion, wed to a compositional and pedagogical system that embraced a trad- ition of symbolic reasoning. The Conservatoire composers were trained to think of music in terms of the elegant play of abstract and discrete symbols (Bonnet, 1987: 209), and their écriture-based attitude distinguished them from the composers who adopted the stance of the GRM, dedicated to the tenets of musique concrète and a conception of sound uncolored by the constraints of western notation. Associated with Xenakis, a third approach was exemplified by Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC). Developed in 1977, UPIC was a tool for computer-assisted composition that allowed composers to manipulate waveforms on a tablet, “drawing” compositions based on images of sound itself: images of sound that could be created and manipulated, stretched in duration, transposed, inverted, transformed through the use of algorithms, and, stunningly, performed in real time without requiring any conversion to symbolic notation. A fourth approach was represented by IRCAM, which, in the 1980s, was undergo- ing its greatest period of technological and cultural change. Increased work with commercial microcomputers was leading to creative projects designed with greater public appeal and profitability in mind. The research agenda of IRCAM was being driven forwards, as never before, with an eye towards the music industry. Unlike the GRM, UPIC, and the Conservatoire, IRCAM was becoming more of a corporation, its artistic agenda swayed by “the seductions of the market” (Born, 1999: 330). In 1988, for example, the soft- ware program Max was developed at IRCAM by American Miller Puckett. Designed for the Macintosh computer, Max’s user-friendly, prêt-à-porter software package offered a first authoring program for designing inter- active works, using a clear graphic interface familiar to and easily grasped by most computer users. (The first composition written using Max was Manoury’s Pluton, scored for computer and piano.) David Wessel recalls the horror with which some of his colleagues viewed the Macintosh 512s,
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referring to them as “vulgar machines coming in, machines that people might have access to” (Taylor, 2005). Relations among the institutions were cool. Composers at IRCAM were “reputed to snipe at Henry and Schaeffer like they were doddering old tinkerers … [and] for their part, Henry and Schaeffer take any opportunity to lampoon the high-tech computer music of IRCAM” (Dilberto, 1986). The tools with which composers chose to cre- ate their works – of which UPIC, Max, and the five-line staff were only a few options – were not only indicative of aesthetic leanings but also emblematic of paradigmatic shift.
While many American composers felt the need to endorse “uptown” or “downtown” platforms to gain legitimacy and court tactical alliances, many composers in Paris aligned themselves with one position or another for purposes relating to professional identity and self-preservation. Campion, as an outsider, felt freer to move among the various camps, recognizing their strengths as well as their shortcomings.
Rue de Madrid was écriture and GRM was concrète and the two were in divorce … one based in the tradition of instrumental writing and one based in the 20th-century tape recorder. For rue de Madrid, the GRM people did not “know” music, and, for the GRM folks, the rue de Madridites did not “know” sound.
How amazing it was for me to be in Paris at that particular moment – I arrived there with a lifetime pedigree in the area of electronic music combined with a post-teen quality education in traditional conservatory-style education. I was not hindered by traditional training because it came after I was already formed in the domain of musique concrète and audio culture. I was the figure that very naturally crossed through these borders, existed in all these realms … For most French, and most visitors, it was not the case, as you either belonged to one side or the other.
(Campion, personal correspondence, 2012) Campion explored the communities of the Conservatoire, GRM, IRCAM, and Les Ateliers UPIC, trying to grasp technology’s implications for composition, computer music, and real-time acoustic performance, while relating these to the history and valuation of écriture. He understood the conflicting perspectives these institutions represented and ultimately described the spectral attitude of L’Itinéraire as resulting from the efforts of the Conservatoire composers to confront and reconcile the ascendancy of GRM, UPIC, and IRCAM. In his eyes, the spectralism of the first-generation composers was an attempt to recapture and reclaim those musical investi- gations – trying to account for the frequency domain, as well as aspects of noise and time – from the point of view of an inherently écriture-based tradition. The spectralists sought to learn and borrow from technology
while continuing to explore the intricate, multivalent semiotic webs spun among composer, performer, and listener, to which much of the depth and dimensionality of the “traditional” musical experience could be attributed. To Campion, a nuanced exploration of computer-assisted composition and real-time interactive performance could still be meaningfully related to the acts of reading and realizing a musical script, in the context of a disciplined musical action richly conceived to unite both art and science.
Four years later, Campion was selected to work at IRCAM as part of the newly established composition courses. In 1996, he joined the composition faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a dir- ector of CNMAT and, in 2011, founded the Eco-Ensemble. Salient aspects of his approach to the piano, which he developed during his time with Grisey and which continues to evolve, are revealed in his four keyboard- based works: the duo-piano work A Complete Wealth of Time (1989–1990);
Natural Selection (1996), for interactive electronics and MIDI grand piano; Flow-Debris-Falls (2010), a piano concerto that reworks ideas first explored
in Natural Selection; and Outside Music (2012), for keyboard and chamber ensemble. Works like these reveal some of the melodic, rhythmic, and for- mal consequences of the spectral adventure.
Campion worked on A Complete Wealth of Time with Grisey during his Fulbright year. At the time, Grisey was formulating his ideas about the piano, manifested a few years later in Vortex temporum, which exhibits his most sophisticated, virtuosic writing for the instrument. There are con- nections between Campion’s writing for the piano in A Complete Wealth of
Time and Grisey’s later work. While it is not desirable to assert anything too
specific regarding the mutual influence of the composers, we can note tell- ing similarities: specifically, the use of archetypal neutral elements and the simultaneous exploitation of the piano as an instrument whose distinctive timbre itself remains undeniably rich with historical reference.
Basic compositional elements upon which Grisey drew in Vortex tem-
porum include the four tones of the diminished seventh chord, simple
arpeggiations and modulations thereof (in his notes to the work, Grisey described it as “a history of the arpeggio in time and space”), pure tones (sine waves), attacks articulated without resonance, and held sounds sus- tained with or without crescendo. As discussed earlier, Grisey composed with three spectra (harmonic, stretched, and compressed) and three differ- ent tempi, and he manipulated these basic elements to construct an intri- cate universe, growing the larger environment from the interaction of the smallest musical organisms. But Grisey was aware of how the sound itself gestured beyond the work, and that even the most neutral materials trig- ger associations, inferences, and memories in the mind of the listener: “I
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personally start more with the physical aspect of things, the physical aspect of sounds, of different spectrums, the quality of spectrums. And I leave the rest – it might be most important – but I leave the cultural aspect to the audience. To the listener” (Grisey, 1996).
A contradiction is inherent in the desire to conceive the piano both as an instrument acoustically confined to the present instant and as a histor- ical object, like a time capsule, carrying the potential of its past within it. The contradiction is not exclusive to the spectral attitude but unique when viewed in relation to the history and ideals of the spectral composers. Those dedicated like Grisey to the exploration of le devenir des sons acknowledged this conflict. How could one perceive the musical environment in all its multidimensional acoustic richness, ex nihilo, but also acknowledge the profound significance of certain timbres and their historical weight and meaning? For even when one seeks to eliminate all traces of stylistic ref- erentiality, it seems that the piano’s distinctive harmonic-timbral profile evokes something of its storied past.
Campion’s piano concerto Flow-Debris-Falls (2010), scored for AvantGrand electronic keyboard and nineteen musicians, confronted this issue head-on. The work evokes various acoustic clichés as a means of reimagining the repertoire of historical pianisms, styles, and affections. In so doing, Campion establishes a “spectral” piano-space in the para- normal sense: a ghost space of the piano resounding with the echoes of performances past. Eerie in performance, Flow-Debris-Falls features a playerless grand piano at center stage, which responds to notes played by a live pianist within the larger ensemble. Outside Music (2005), a concerto for sample-based keyboard instrument and chamber ensemble, similarly mines the totality of the instrument, not just for its acoustic potential but for its living legacy, and that scent of a fabled yesteryear only released in live performance.
Campion based A Complete Wealth of Time, like Grisey’s Vortex tem-
porum, on a four-note motive (D–G–F–C), which reappears in different
guises throughout. The motive serves as a skeletal feature, an essentially harmonic element that remains without specific character or distinctive presentation. The metaphor of a skeleton is apt, as the work was inspired in part by the botanical garden at Paris’s Museum of Natural History, whose “Grande Galerie de l’Evolution” (Great Hall of Time) features a parade of skeletons charting the course of human evolution. A Complete Wealth of
Time metaphorically presents a sonic evolution, over the course of which
we hear Campion’s attempt to reconcile his American, post-serial harmonic training with Grisey’s ideas on harmonic spectra and timbral color.
The work begins furiously (Example 5.4). Both pianists attack the instru- ment with fiercely rhythmic, aggressive chordal playing. All is fortissimo. Immediately, the listener senses the chromatic field saturated and the full registral domain of the piano conquered. The onslaught of the opening measures only accelerates and intensifies in the first minutes of the work, until both pianists arrive at a quadruple fortissimo chord on the score’s third page (m. 40). The work comes to a standstill, with a dense sonority allowed to vibrate under a fermata. In absorbing the decay, the listener is resensi- tized to the instrument’s capacity for resonance. As the sound fades, indi- vidual frequencies seem to approach the ear and, as the brief yet violent exposition comes to an end, noise is heard becoming sound, then becom- ing silence. This first cadential moment defines the extremes of the work, suggesting the peaks and valleys of a sonic landscape to be traversed and bridging the note-to-noise continuum.
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After this point, A Complete Wealth of Time begins anew with single notes quietly released into a depressed pedal. Gradually, over the course of calm minutes, new pitches are introduced. Through flurries of fleeting ornamental figures, grace-notes, and arpeggiations, added tones delicately coalesce into what are heard as suspended harmonies or harmonic-timbral