John Rahn, Charts, and AKU Part 1 - 1980 1981

AKU (1981) 

In the Fall of 1980 the University of Washington Department of Systematic Musicology acquired a Synclavier, which they housed in a small room on one of the lower floors of the School of Music, somewhere down below Brechemin Auditorium. I had just started studying with John Rahn and he had just completed and shared a piece of his that featured sounds synthesized thereon. Through his good offices I was allowed quite a lot of time with it during Winter Quarter, but in preparation I had to write a piece for it, which occupied my time through Winter break.

The Synclavier could play back eight lines simultaneously, and allowed eight instruments to be played during any single output file. These instruments could be designed with digital controls for various parameters, such as timbre and envelope. One of its features was that, unlike analog synthesizers of the day, once a setting was set it didn't drift, and could be adjusted in some detail. Specifics escape me, but I'm sure the specs can be found on-line.

your blogger, circa 1980

I figured that I would try to use its full potential, so I wrote a piece with eight instruments. Some of the instruments played more than one note at a time, so I had to do some fancy charting to be certain that no more than eight sounds were occurring at any one time. I started with an ordered set of eight numbers (I forget the order, but my criteria were similar to those used in KCBOL) and designed eight instruments in increasing complexity of timbre (wholly subjective) - the simplest being a sine wave, and with eight different envelope lengths. Each instrument was allowed a certain number of notes to play during its active time, and the amount of active time each instrument had was proportioned with eight distinct durations. The amount of time between the end of each duration and the end of the piece was divvied out among the eight instruments using the same ordered set of numbers. I probably also gave each instrument a unique size of total range. There may have been even more to it than that, but whew! I filled in the notes from various sources, among them some lines from the 25th Goldberg Variation, and a tune from my Habitabit. Charting this all out, as I say, took a lot of my time that December. I had pages all over my bed trying to get it all together when my brother came in to inform me that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

Each line had to be sequenced individually, by hand, in real time. In order to be sure each line was entered accurately (the rhythms are thorny) I had to scale the tempo down for most of the lines. this might involve sitting around for 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the part to begin. My friend Christopher Mehrens bravely volunteered to assist in this tedium and probably played some of the lines.

Once it was completed I had a floppy disk with the data and a reel-to-reel tape of the finished piece. I promptly had the folks at the Listening Library dub a copy to cassette so that I could listen at home. It is fortunate I did so, as later events proved, but that is a story for another day. I shared the piece at our weekly seminar late the next Spring. It kept getting put off because, as it seems, a good portion of the composition faculty at the time were not especially eager to listen to a 30 minute synthesizer piece, and I gathered some of them were not pleased with the direction I was heading. A few of them hung around to hear the whole thing. For all I know mine was among the first synthesized musics ever made by a student there, and possibly the first electronic music promulgated by an undergrad under their auspices. It was all pretty new at the time and it was a significantly stuffier department then than it is currently.

The title, in a tip of my hat to the Listening Library, consists of three index letters seen on a drawer of one of their card catalogs: A-KU. At the time I quipped that it stood for "Aaron Keyt, Undertaker". Many years later my wife picked "Aku" as the name of a volcanic mountain that plays a significant part in her Daughter of Magic "Deep River" fantasy series.

Recordings:

February 26, 1981 (from cassette dub of master tape)

Keith Eisenbrey · Aku 810226