Williams [re]Mix[er]: An Interactive
I Ching Composing Program
Larry Austin
Professor Emeritus, University of North Texas
[email protected]
Michael Thompson
Composer-programmer, University of North Texas
[email protected]
Abstract
Demonstrated here is the operational phase of the
composer/presenter's project to design the protocols and
implement, with the co-presenter/programmer, an interactive, octophonic, I Ching composing program, the Williams
[re]Mix[er] (WRM). Its functionality is modeled on the
compositional processes invoked by American composer
John Cage (1912-92) to create his Williams Mix (1951-53)
(WM), the first octophonic, surround-sound, tape composition. These processes were extrapolated and applied from
years-long analyses by the composer/presenter of Cage's
192-page score, his sketches, and the eight monaural tapes
for WM. What took Cage and his collaborators nine
months of recordings, coin-tosses, score notation, and
thousands of small pieces of tape measured, cut, and
spliced together to complete the first realization of the WM
score and tapes is accomplished--after collecting the requisite library of recorded soundfiles--in only a few minutes of
computation time. Indeed, the default settings used in operating the WRM are Cage's own parameters, derived from
the analyses. With the program's graphic user interface,
the default values for the parameters may be changed by the
user to experiment and substitute alternative, weighted distribution values to achieve a variety of compositional results.
1. Background
The process of creating John Cage's first realization of his
octophonic tape piece, Williams Mix, involved the precise
cutting/splicing of tape recorded sounds to create eight separate, reel-to-reel, monaural, 15-ips magnetic tape masters for
the 4-minute, 15-second piece. The work's score is, as Cage
referred to it, a kind of "dressmaker's pattern--it literally
shows where the tape shall be cut, and you lay the tape on
the score itself." Cage explained further in a published transcript of a 1985 recorded conversation with author Richard
Kostelanetz that "...someone else could follow that recipe,
so to speak, with other sources than I had to make another
mix." Later in the conversation Kostelanetz observed,
"But, as you pointed out, even though you made for posterity a score of Williams Mix for others to realize, no one's
ever done it," to which Cage replied, "But it's because the
manuscript is so big and so little known." (Kostelanetz
1996)
Intrigued by Cage's implicit invitation to "follow that
recipe" the composer/presenter embarked on a project in
summer, 1997, to create just such a new realization of and
variations on the score of WM. Presignifying the development of algorithmic composition, granular synthesis, and
sound diffusion, WM was the third of five pieces completed
in the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape (1951-54), established in New York City by Cage and funded by architect Paul Williams. (Chadabe 1997) (Note: The other tape
pieces were, in order of completion, Imaginary Landscape
No. 5 (Jan., 1952) by John Cage; For Magnetic Tape
(1952) by Christian Wolff; Octet (1953) by Earle Brown;
and Intersection (1953, withdrawn) by Morton Feldman.)
Involved as ongoing collaborators were, first, pianist David
Tudor, then electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron, and finally composer Earle Brown, among several others. The score for WM was completed in October, 1952, as
well as much of the realization itself for the eight magnetic
tapes, those finally completed by Cage and Brown on January 16, 1953.
1.1. Analysis, restoration, and sound collection
In early 1998 the John Cage Trust provided the
composer/presenter with a color-xerographic copy of the
score of WM, as well as associated sketches and commentary by Cage on the compositional process involved in the
original realization for eight magnetic tapes. The original
manuscripts are housed in the American Music Section of
the Lincoln Center Library branch of the New York City
Public Library. The Trust subsequently provided digital
audio tape copies of the eight earliest, extant-generation,
reel-to-reel masters of the piece from the Trust's archive of
Cage's works. With the score and tapes the analysis could
begin of the precise relation of the recorded sound events
with their I Ching-determined parameters in the score. Out
