Abstract
Performance practice with lost technologies.

Godfried-Willem Raes
post-doctoral researcher
Orpheus Institute & Logos Foundation
2015

Landed in the second decennium of the 21th century we can start to look back on the 20th century as part of history. As usual long known problems are encountered. A fundamental question will always be what to preserve. Selections have to be made and criteria justified. Even if we dont do anything, leaving things as they are, entropy will guarantee a form of selection. Think about electronic music made on analog tape. We know that preserving those tapes poses a manifold of problems. Not only the carriers deteriorate, but also the machines to play them and to make copies to other media are more and more difficult to find and to maintain in full professional operating condition. The technology of the pre-digital era is no longer commonly available to electronic engineers. Repairman are by now all retired or no longer capable to properly do maintenance and repair. Moreover, even if important tapes from the archives were transfered to CD's, we now observe that these CD's are rapidly becoming unplayable as well. Some people seem to believe that storage in 'the cloud' is the way to go now but nobody can guarantee that the digital black hole will not happen. Entropy cannot be circumvented it seems, at the most we can slow it down.

Looking at the music of the 20th century, the problems we encounter can be of very different nature:

1. Music that was composed and conceived for technological tools that at the time of the conception of their use just couldn't meet the promisses.
Some examples: 
From the first half of the 20th century:
Georges Antheil, 'Ballet Mechanique' (player piano synchronisation and polyphony problems, propellers, sirens...)
Igor Strawinsky 'Les Noces' (player piano synchronisation)
Kurt Weill 'Dreigrosschenoper' (unavailable barrelorgans)

From the second half of the 20th century:
Karlheinz Stockhausen 'Solo mit Rueckkopplung'
Alvin Lucier, pieces involving brainwaves

In these cases musicologists are often tempted to consider the work eventually revised later by the composer, as the definitive work. Here we can raise the question whether it wouldn't do more justice to the composer to get back to his original concepts and try to realize them with what technology permits us to do today. In this line of thinking at Logos we did a version of Les Noces using only automated instruments, we realized 'Ballet Mecanique' with real airplane propellers, modern player pianos, automated sirens and industrial bells and we just finished a version of the 'Beggars Opera' using our complete robot orchestra.
Other people have realised 'Solo mit Rueckkopplung' using digital technology, thus not plagued by the inherent instability of long analog tape loops on stage.

2. Music making use of technology that is no longer available or in need of maintenance and repair.
The crucial question here is in how far the technology used is an essential part of the rhetoric of the performance.

Some examples: 
Alvin Lucier's pieces using slow sweep sine wave oscilators. 
Pieces involving live manipulation of audio tape: Dick Raaymakers, Michel Waisvisz, Gordon Mumma...
Pieces involving manual handling of electronic circuitry and components: John Cage, David Behrman, Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz, Takehisa Kosugi, Nam Yun Paik
In these cases it appears to us to be pointless to replace the technology used with modern alternatives. A laptop just cannot replace a vacuum tube oscilator for it would ruin the act of performing the piece on stage. It undermines the rhetoric and thus the intrinsic value and magic of such compositions.

Obviously there are quite many cases were the technology is not as such at the focus of the work. The many pieces composed in live electronics using samplers for instance, can easily be performed using nowadays technology. However one has to be carefull, as many composers have used equipment at or just over the border of their capabilities in which case the use of the original equipment is mandatory.

3. Music calling for musical instruments that are no longer on the market.
Synthesizers (Synket, Buchla, Moog, Serge, EMS, Yamaha, Arp, Roland...), 
vocoders, ringmodulators, delay lines, pitch shifters...
It seems that emulators in software appear to be the nowadays solution in performance practice. However, such emulators are most often based on what the written score calls for and rarely on the way the original instruments were functioning. Thus emulation is certainly not lossless.



dr.Godfried-Willem Raes