Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad (b. 1940) was among the earliest "minimal" composer/performers; his "Day of Niagara" (1965, with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela) is at last being released this summer. He was also among the first "structural" filmmakers ("The Flicker", 1966). He has exhibited widely in video, film, sound, and performance, and teaches in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.

THE CLANDESTINE NAUTICAL CARNALITY OF SHORT I
The idea that musical harmony and scales are the mysterious product of a hidden mathematical order in the cosmos has served the pompous and invidious interests of idealists, priests, scientists, and the ruling elite since the time of Pythagoras. In all honesty, there are indeed specific number ratios that accompany the pitches in the scale, but these relationships are not founded in-and-of Number, any more than our ten fingers and ten toes. -- If the connection between music and Number is incidental, then where does our fascination with the particular notes of the scale arise? The answer should be (and is) obvious; its invisibility today is the product of our cultural conditioning by 2500 years of exposure to the Western idealist tradition of music theory. That it will be difficult for me now to describe the way music depends on speech is only an indication of how thicketed music has become, overlain as it is with a tangled underbrush of instrumental technologies, numerical calculations, and invocations of divine guidance. -- People's fascination with the pitches of the scale is actually a product of the most subtle and valuable auditory perception humans possess - our unique capacity to hear and decipher spoken language. When you talk to your dog or cat, you see that consonants are pretty easy for them to follow. "Sssss!" is very different from "mmmmmmm," for example. But our human ability to understand the subtle differences among the various vowel sounds goes way beyond the hearing discrimination of more than a bare handful of other species. We easily follow minute and very rapid vowel fluctuations, too, as in diphthong sounds such as "ear." -- All of the "voiced" sounds of speech, among which the vowels are paradigmatic, are powered by a rude flapping of the vocal cords in the larynx. The sound the vocal cords make has a very irregular waveform with an extremely high content of upper harmonics. When we speak, we use the two resonant cavities of the throat and nose to "filter" this waveform so as to produce each of the needed vowels and other voiced sounds. And when another person hears you, they follow the rapidly-modulating filter pattern among the upper harmonics of your laryngal buzz. -- As we listen to each other talk we are continuously and unconsciously receiving information from a hearing mechanism that is specifically responsive to fluctuating combinations of various harmonics above a fundamental tone - and this is exactly the same thing that can be said of musical harmony and scales. -- The fact that numbers are a convenient tool for structuring our understanding of the harmonic series is incidental; people enjoy music because they can hear and understand it in the same way they can hear and understand speech, not because of any hidden order in a numerological Cosmos. -- Just as music starts from one tone, the key note, this piece started from a single voiced sound, short i. Characteristically the short i has a lot of filtered harmonic content present around 2200 and 2700 cycles per second (approximately c# and e, three octaves above middle c). In relation to a laryngal buzz at 165 per second, the short i sound will foreground the 13th, 15th, and 17th harmonics. -- By deciding that the words in this song should have no voiced sounds other than short i, I pretty much limited my choice of consonants to c, f, h, k, p, s, and t. Every common English word made with these sounds went into the text. I allowed the three shortest words, 'if', 'it', and 'its', to be repeated. -- It was a complete surprise to me that so many vulgarities and intimate bodily functions emerged in the list. Why should this be? What is it about the simple sound of short i that has sucked it into this semantic orbit? And is it completely coincidental that boats and water appear so thematically? -- Before these collations are brushed off too quickly, it would be pretty smart to compare them carefully to the discoveries of a hidden numerical order in music that were so effectively exploited by Pythagoras, with the consequence that we have been haunted by a patrician interpretation of the world for the duration of "Western civilization."