Music: B-z-z! Br-a-ang! Br-a-ack!

B-z-z-! Br-a-ang! Br-a-ack

Venice was also host last week to the world's most avant-garde explosion of pure sound—the first International Congress of Experimental Music. At daylong sessions, the audience settled down amid a welter of wires, loudspeakers and amplifiers to listen to the booms, moans, zips and roars that to some ears constitute the musical language of the future.

In general, the future can be heard in our categories: 1) the musique concrète of French Composer Pierre Schaeffer and his followers, consisting of natural sounds taped and glued together in unnatural order; 2) the electronic music favored by German composers, which abandons natural sounds for electronically manufactured yowls and bleeps; 3) a combination of the two techniques, to explore all "structural, nonaccidental and engineered sound"; and 4) a technique for breaking down and reassembling the human voice—"kontinuierliche Klangjarbenübergänge."

Until five years ago, electronic composers usually achieved their effects with a single speaker; now they have four-track tapes, permitting the use of multiple speakers. Says Cologne's Otto Tomek: "We recently installed 30 speakers around four walls, which gave the impression of a firmament of sound like stars in the sky. It was like being inside a big bell. There is so much to explore with music in space that we will be busy for years."

What matters more than the number of speakers, of course, is what comes out of them. Says Luigi Dallapiccola, the patriarch of the Italian twelve-tone school: "They already have vast technique. What they lack is ideas. Technical equipment is not important. When Beethoven wrote his piano sonatas, he anticipated the Steinway piano." Certainly the public still seems to appreciate the human touch. The biggest personal hit at Venice was U.S. Composer William Smith, a member of the original Dave Brubeck Octet. While his eight-minute electronic Improvisation, replete with amplified clarinet key clicks, breath noises, and echo chamber effects, boomed over the loudspeakers, Clarinetist Smith stood by improvising. For the only time in the entire congress, the audience was moved to applause.