Synchronisms No. 6 (1970)

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Concerts of early electronic music looked ridiculous. The audience would enter the hall, sit in their seats, and stare intently at an empty stage with wooden speaker boxes for an hour and a half. Without live action, the sound felt dead. Mario Davidovsky of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) decided to add a human to this equation. In the piece "Synchronisms No. 6", he wrote a part for piano and 8-channel magnetic tape, making them equal partners.

Davidovsky's main trick was "tonal transfer". He used the physics of the acoustic instrument: when a pianist plays a chord, the sound reaches a peak and then begins to fade (the decay phase). It was exactly in this second of decay that the tape entered. The electronics literally snatched the note from under the musician's fingers and led it into synthetic noise. To the listener, it sounded as if the piano was suddenly defying the laws of acoustics.

Performing this in 1970 was a challenge. There was no MIDI or hidden click track in an earpiece. The pianist read a score where regular notes were mixed with black rectangles and crosses — this was how Davidovsky indicated electronic noises. The performer had to start and stop the tape recorder themselves at the right moments, adjusting their playing to the strict timing of the tape. The slightest mistake destroyed the illusion of a single instrument. The risk paid off: Davidovsky received the Pulitzer Prize for this work.

Sources

1. Gluck, Robert J. (2007). The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers — Computer Music Journal
2. Heis, Kevin (2009). Fourteen Masterpieces of Electronic Music — History of Electroacoustic Music
3. Manning, Peter (2013). Electronic and Computer Music — Oxford UP

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