ERIC LYON, Electro-Acoustic Master
by Michael Berest
Contributing Editor
To buy Ex Cathedra (2005) click HERE
It would not be an error to think of electronic instrumentation as a part of music along with traditional instruments. Two of the composers previously showcased, Soren Nils Eichberg, and Johnny Reinhard, have done so. The thing to note is for both Eichberg and Reinhard it is but one color in the spectrum. The composer Eric Lyon also writes music for traditional instruments integrated with the electronic ones, but he differs from Eichberg and Reinhard in that he uses electro-acoustic music as his entire spectrum, too. But why does he differ?
In a video interview done with Lyon recently, I noted his love of 20th Century music, how it was his "rock and roll" in high school (it didn't become that for me until college). If that's the "why," he's not alone. In Eichberg's Qilaatsorneq, the music that represents the wild ritual dance owes something to Stravinski, and the String Quartet, something to Schoenberg. Reinhard's choice of percussion reflects the influence of Lou Harrison.
The motivation of these two composers, however, involves further explorations of sound. That is what really separates 20th Century music from what preceded it. We have the winds imitating birds in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, but until traditional harmony was broken out of, music had to be about dominant 9th's and diminished 7th's. We, therefore, start to see people like John Cage, George Antheil, and Erik Satie trying to hear the music in everything.
Electro-acoustic music does not seem to be about that. In Lyon's Sacred Amnesia we hear a brief recording of a woman's voice become more and more fragmented, the fragments becoming denser and denser counterpoint, until they sound like the "white noise" so much electro-acoustic music seems like. This music reverses what would normally be done, using music to portray, instead, using sound to portray music, or, at least, the sounds of a computer and not of the real world.
This raises more issues than it answers. Is the mission of EA music is to better encompass what music really is, i.e., non-musical sounds, or to express the non-sounds of the microchip and programming language?
Of course, not all musical representation has been about sound. If Mahler portrays his wife Alma in his 6th Symphony (or Berg, Alma's daughter, Manon, in his Violin Concerto), that isn't music imitating a sound. If Schoenberg wants to show what ripples on the water of a lake are like in his Five Pieces for Orchestra that also isn't a sound. Even if Gershwin wants to portray the pace of life in 1920's New York City in the Rhapsody in Blue, that isn't really just a sound, either.
In those instances, however, there is still a connection to humanity and nature. If EA music differs in that regard, are its underpinnings viable? Can a musical esthetic be about something that seems disconnected from humanity and nature?
In Lyon's interview, he spoke of capturing world events, certainly something that has connection to the reality external to computers. Yet, he also spoke about going beyond genres, the explosion of different musical options becoming available, and, most notably, creating or using software. A large part of his interview didn't have to be about music. It could have been about anything that involved software and programming.
Is this the musical small talk of the future? That composers will talk about the ability of a single laptop to do today what seven mainframes couldn't do twenty-five years ago? And is this analogous to my discussions of Reinhard's work with different tuning schemes? Will what Lyon discusses take the place of the things Reinhard, Eichberg, and I speak of today?
When I write about someone's music, I have to get the backstory of his motivation. One example of this is what Charles Ives said in his "Essays Before a Sonata," that he wanted an Emersonian vision for music.
I contradict myself by pointing with clear understanding to one composer being influenced by extra-musical ideas, and while pointing questioningly to another doing the same, not with Emerson, but with 1's and 0's. But it seems that everything is merging together toward the same source-programming-an act which can, considered alone, be an art form, but which begins to erase the distinctions between all the other art forms.
It’s not so much a faulty esthetic that causes my uncertainty as it is electronic music has not yet found its voice. It is an outgrowth of the esthetic of composers coming between Neoclassicism and Minimalism.
Of course, it’s not exactly the same as the music of those composers. There are different timbres available than what the orchestra can produce, and there is easier access to microtonality. Rhythms and tempos are possible fingers will likely never accomplish. Still, it seems a stone’s throw away from Boulez or Stockhausen.
What needs to happen is to view the computer, in its capacity as a “musical instrument cum musician,” as a new musical instrument, but one with huge possibilities, like the piano. Before the 18th century, there was no piano music, and harpsichords weren’t capable of what pianos could do. When the piano came along, however, the first pieces written for the instrument were really just harpsichord music. It took Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and Ives to expand how one could write for the piano, and to make sure it was more than just a glorified harpsichord.
A piano is only one instrument, but it varies from things like the violin or oboe in that it can play something just shy of orchestral music. A piano concerto offers more opportunities for expression than a violin concerto (Beethoven and Tschaikovski only wrote one, but each did multiple piano concertos).
The computer as instrument is just as revolutionary as the piano was in its first years. Its potential is limitless, but largely undefined. It’s still largely just a glorified orchestra. I think we’re still waiting for the person who’ll see what it can uniquely do. That person may be Eric Lyon.
When that is discovered, the computer will give us humanity, nature and the sounds of the world. Technology alone cannot and EA music is still at the point of primarily being about technology. Nonetheless, technology once gave us the piano, and it has already given us its modern equivalent, the computer. Ultimately, though, its success will still only come from the vision of a human mind. That is the esthetic implicit in the music of Eric Lyon and other EA composers.
Video Interviews
Darmouth College
August 2005
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four