When did recorded performance detach from live performance?

This Tod Dockstader piece has some interesting info; post-Henry, pre-'60s, and "untutored."
Tod Dockstader: Biography

 

I was going to suggest that Conlon Nancarrow's pieces for player piano which could not be played manually due to their speed and complexity had a claim here but it seems that Gershwin's "overdubbed" piano roll had him beat.

 

But who 'stretched and challenged the boundaries of what could be done technically more?' I'd say Nancarrow...

 

What about tape music for performance? Kinda turns the question of electronics and performance on it's ear. John Cage was doing that early on, starting with live electronics and live acoustic/electronic music in the late '30s. Thinking about the example of "Tomorrow Never Knows" for multiple tape loops, Cage's Williams Mix (1953) was for eight performers in a circle each manipulating a different tape. The tapes featured a mixture of found sounds and electronically generated sounds. But the piece was performed live, not an electronic realization. I don't know actually if it was ever performed the way Cage intended. I think he did a realization montage on tape himself (This from the Cage 25th anniversary concert but I think they may have just been playing back the Cage realization.)

 

Nancarrow began releasing his compositions for player piano in 1948 - and he was not the first to do so.
Studies for Player Piano (Nancarrow) - Wikipedia

 

I would agree. As @Rfreeman rightly says, he was not the first but he certainly went beyond the perceived limitations to create something could not be reproduced as a live piano performance.

 

Of course the Chipmunks later became a Beatles cover act

 

For that matter, that reminds me of reading of Zappa 'covering' 4:33...
The "official" version from Cage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9QeEzk6iac

 

Earliest I can find is Igor Stravinsky and Alfredo Casella both composed specifically for player piano in 1921

 

I think searching for a first is a bit reductive on this occasion - the equipment required was only available either to the wealthy or within academia. We don't really see the flourishing of the possibilities until the late 70's, brought about by relative affordability and the bulging imaginations of the post-punk generations. Consider This Heat's "24 Track Loop" from their 1979 debut album - this wouldn't have been possible 10 years previously as there was no 24 track tape and even 16 track was new and expensive. In 1979, it could be done and it was done. There's a sense in which "24 Track Loop" (aka Repeat) is more important than any Cage piece because it signalled to so many people that this approach was actually available to them.

 

Don't we all? It's a fate very few of us avoid.

 

The equipment came from radio stations and phone companies, often salvaged oscillators and filters at the like. Halim El Dabh borrowed a wire recorder from Radio Cairo. He was in academia at the time -- a student, not faculty. But a lot of the early work in electronics and music was done by home tinkerers like Les Paul.

 

For Beatles fans, George Martin was doing his thing (making unperformable hit records using "found sounds") before he met the Beatles- this is one of the recordings he is most proud of:



But as others have said, the BBC radiophonic workshop had form for this in the 50's

 

Interestingly the record you posted, Right Said Fred, was only just before the Beatles, recorded two weeks before The Beatles first EMI session in 1962!

 

Perhaps but history recalls those who were able to have their work recorded (either in the traditional sense of a record being made of the work or as a tape/disc recording). Who knows what we lost because someone tinkering away in a shed with similarly salvaged components had no-one to whom they could take their work. History, winners, etc.

 

Sure, that's always the way it is with history. Though of course we also have history of the period in music very much involving music that was not recorded -- not an electronic piece but something like La Monte Young's, which somehow has managed to be a very famous and influential piece of music without any recordings having ever been released or without a score ever having being published. (And we know about Buddy Bolden and the role he played in the development of jazz despite not having any record of him performing.) And electronic music of the sort we're talking about -- not so much performed electronic music a la, say, Cage's Imaginary Landscapes series, but electronic music realized on a medium, by definition does require recording.

Were there folks in circa 1952 tinkering around in a shed with electronic music making great works no one else ever heard? Maybe. But it was a time of tinkers and hobbyists and originals in music -- not just electronic music -- I'm thinking about, say Moondog. I doubt there's a substantial universe of breakthrough music of the era that no one ever heard or heard about. It was an field full of eccentrics, and people who found their way to make their art -- like Sun Ra who's Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, were self made in the early '60s. The DIY technology wasn't inaccessible. People who wanted to managed to get access to wire recorders and tape recorders and gear and make music. And we know about the works of all kinds of avant gardists of the era who weren't heavily or professionally recorded -- La Monte Young and Henry Flynt and the like. There were probably people doing stuff on radio that has been lost -- lots of music, drama, and media tech was happening live in real time on radio that didn't necessarily get saved.

Of course, we never know what we don't know. But we're not for the most part now talking about ancient history, we're talking about living memory and the era of mass media and obsessive discovery of the once obscure.

 

I'd imagine this isn't 'news' here, but I couldn't help but think of it in the context of "obsessive discovery of the once obscure."

Connie Converse: The mystery of the original singer-songwriter

 

Fascinating of course. But, here's the analog realm, right?:

So, if you're saying there was audio "performed", that you could hear, during that point in the process? That right there, would make the difference.

 

And yet every single song on Revolver and Pet Sounds has been performed live by somebody at some point, so you're going to have to move the goalposts much further before the answer becomes "The Beatles, of course!"

 

I appreciate that last sentence especially; the history being discussed here is of much contemporary interest.

Octophone brought up a separate but related discipline from the music history we have been discussing: philosophy of music history. There is plenty of material there and it would likely make for a deep and informative thread of its own. However, as Chervokas said above, in history we never know what we don’t know. Also, history is a study of public events. The private side of human experience is of course fascinating, but it is more the domain of philosophy and psychology than history.

I am by no means intending to depreciate any of Octophone’s posts. I just want to preserve the historical focus of this thread.

 

Right, I don't think "The Beatles stopped touring in 1966" really has anything to do with this topic. Special cases like "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Revolution 9", sure, but clearly those are not even close to being the first instance of a composition not intended for live performance.

 

Pioneering animator and all-around genius Oskar Fischinger created completely synthetic sound / music in the 1930s by 'drawing' a soundtrack onto optical film, then running it through a projector / sound system. One of his collaborators at the time was quite affected by the revelation, and later wrote a poem about it.

The collaborator? John Cage. Fischinger also discussed his discoveries with Edgard Varese.

 

Audio wasn't performed. It was programed by perforations on paper and then output by the synth onto a disk (later tape I think), and then, when the sequence was done outputing, you had to play back the shellac to hear the audio. Same think with tape music before the synthesizer where people recorded a sine tone generated by an oscillator, maybe controlled by some envelope generator, then record another one, then record another one, and piece it all together. It took hours and days to create minutes of music. It was all realized electronically. Not performed.

 

I included that *literally yesterday* in a pile of seven discs I assembled of early and experimental stereo recordings.

Why don’t we take this stereo thing back 120 years, to 1901 China?

 

Thanks for the listen.
When you say "assembled" do you mean for here, or elsewhere? If the former, I must have missed it earlier.