Incredible Sonovox - Kay Kyser - 1940 film
Amazing device that gives voice to musical instruments. The Sonovox consists of one or two louspeakers placed on the throat that play the source sound. The performer whispers the words while the speakers stand in for the voice box. Used for the talking train in Disney's Dumbo, uncountable radio promos, a tube-in-the-mouth version "Talk Box" was used by Frampton to make his guitar sing, and all-electronic "Vocoder" versions are still used in current pop music.
A Week of Electronic Music Documentaries
We here at Rhizome have been busy assembling an entire week's worth of documentaries about the history of electronic music. We've tried to keep the subject matter diverse -- with documentaries covering the technology behind the music to the emergence of a number of different genres, from krautrock to jungle. We hope you enjoy the selection. If you would like to submit your recommendations, feel free to use the comments section to make additions or you can email suggestions to tips [at] rhizome.org. Please keep in mind that the videos must be available online in their entirety and, ideally, embeddable.
Interview with Carey Lovelace and Sharon Kanach
I had the chance this week to speak with Carey Lovelace and Sharon Kanach, the co-curators behind a new exhibition of composer Iannis Xenakis’s sketches, drawings, scores and plans spanning from 1953 -1984 titled “Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary.” The show opens at the Drawing Center on Friday January 15th and it will run through April 8th. To coincide with the exhibition, a number of arts organizations in New York City organized public programs on Xenakis’s work in collaboration with the Drawing Center, including a virtual reality rendering of Poème Électronique, a three-day colloquium bringing together Xenakis scholars from the Americas, and much more. Please check the full schedule here (scroll to the bottom).
Based in Paris, Sharon Kanach worked very closely Xenakis for two decades, as a translator of his works, as a scholar and as Vice-President of Centre Iannis Xenakis (formerly CCMIX) in France. Carey is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Both are former students of Xenakis.
Interview with Iannis Xenakis, 1967
retrouver ce média sur www.ina.fr
In this short clip, which aired on French television on November 12, 1967, Xenakis discusses his work and his influences.
"Mikka, For Solo Violin" by Iannis Xenakis
Mikka ("small," also named for Mica Salabert, Xenakis's publisher), was completed in 1971 and premiered at the 1972 Festival d'Automne in Paris, soon after the opening of the Polytope de Cluny. The piece's most immediately striking aspect is the solo line that unfolds in continuous fashion from beginning to end. It consists entirely of a single glissando, snaking its way along the registral compass of the violin in a perpetually varying contour. The banishment of vibrato from the music lends a metallic edge to the sound, although Xenakis does vary the timbre through ponticello and tremolo effects. Dynamics, too, play an important role in adding depth to the singular sonority of the glissando, even if quite different from the constantly varying markings of Nomos alpha. After the relatively neutral mf opening, the rest of the score consists of shifts between extreme dynamic levels, usually linked to changes from ponticello (soft) to normal mode (loud).
-- EXCERPT FROM "XENAKIS: HIS LIFE IN MUSIC" BY JAMES HURLEY (PG 76)
"Psappha" by Iannis Xenakis
Psappha is a score for solo percussion, and it originally premiered at the London Bach Festival in 1976. Here it is performed by Steven Schick.
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Edwin VanGorder