~ICMC 2015 - Sept. 25 - Oct. 1, 2015 - CEMI, University of North Texas
Antony: A Reimagining
John MacCallum Matthew Goodheart Adrian Freed
CNMAT CNMAT CNMAT
Department of Music Department of Music Department of Music
University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley
john@cnmat.berkeley.edu matthew@matthewgoodheart.com adrian@cnmat.berkeley.edu
lny, used for the Wergo[l] recording, is a 2-channel stereo
ABSTRACT
piece. The possibility of playing the piece "as is" over the
We present a re-realization of David Wessel's Antony system, or attempting to spatialize it in some way, seemed
(1977). Antony was originally composed using a novel set of to miss an essential element of Wessel's work. Our feeling
additive synthesis techniques developed for the 4A and the was that the process through which the original Antony had
PDP 11/40. Those techniques continued to play a role been realized, and even more so the techniques that had
throughout Wessel's life as an improviser, and inspired emerged from that process and found future realization in
many of his students and colleagues. Our re-realization of improvisation, real-time synthesis, and instrumental interAntony involves using those same techniques to reinterpret face design, was a focus on engagement with the present.
and perform the very piece that they were used to create. Antony is one of the few fixed-media pieces Wessel had
ever created-his work was not focused on generating
1. MOTIVATION works fixed in time that would be played again and again,
unchanged. Rather, it was about fluidity, change, and temDavid Wessel (1942-2014) was an influential pioneer in poral immediacy. He seemed well aware of how electronic
computer music and psychoacoustics as well as a perform- music, while possibly still being a great work of art, is aning artist, whose interests and influence spanned multiple chored in the technologies and perspectives of the time of its
disciplines ranging from music perception and cognition to creation in a very apparent way. So we began to search for a
audio signal processing to instrument design and pedagogy. way to pay tribute to Wessel and to the fixed nature of AnHe was the director of research and software development at tony in a way that also pursued this engagement with the
IRCAM from 1976-1988, after which he joined the faculty present.
of UC Berkeley, serving as the director to CNMAT until his
death. Well known for his enthusiastic and infectious per- We were conscious, all during this undertaking, that this
sonality, he served as mentor and collaborator to countless version we were creating was not to try to make Antony
artists and researchers in a great variety of practices and "better," (or worse!) but simply to speak to the "now," to the
disciplines. He passed away suddenly on Oct. 13 of 2014. circumstances of its performance. We decided the only way
to keep the aesthetic richness, complexity, and identity of
Immediately following Wessel's death, several colleagues the original piece while allowing a way in for our own parand admirers posted the YouTube video of his 1977 elec- ticipation was to use those tools and techniques that Wessel
tronic work Antony on their Facebook page in memoriam. It had passed down to us to reinterpret the original material
began a discussion about the piece between MacCallum, itself; tools for which Anthony itself had been seminal. In
Freed, and Goodheart, all of whom saw it as a foundational this way, both Wessel's original work, the technical and
work-both to the future direction of Wessel's research and aesthetic legacy of that work, and our own creative processcreative interests, but also to our own. The idea arose to do es inspired by that legacy, could all coexist.
something involving the piece as a tribute to our lost colleague and mentor, and to this end approached the San 2. HISTORY OF ANTONY
Francisco Tape Music Festival. We were immediately given
a spot on the festival. Shortly after Wessel's arrival at IRCAM in July of 1976 he
began working with Giuseppe Di Giugno, who brought the
Upon being given the technical specifications for the 4A synthesizer from Italy, a digital oscillator bank. This was
SFTMF, a 16-speaker array installed at the Victoria Theater the first machine of a series developed in subsequent years
in San Francisco, the question of how to fit the piece to that at IRCAM, the 4B, 4C, and finally the 4X. At a sampling
space came to the forefront. The extant realization of Anto- rate of 32kHz, the 4A synthesized 128 wave table oscillators
in real-time. It was interfaced to the Unibus of a PDP 11/40
Copyright: ~ 2015 J. MacCallum et al. This is an open-access article dis- 16-bit laboratory computer that ran the RT-11 real-time OS.
tributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 Fortran programs sent control parameter values to the 4A.
Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in The frequency, amplitude, and phase of each oscillator were
any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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