Wendy Carlos: Veil of Orpheus

[Part I of an ongoing series on the musician Wendy Carlos]

During a recent staff meeting, we realized that we all shared a fascination with the work of Wendy Carlos, and were enthusiastic to look into her life, her work, and her influences.

Veil of Orpheus

As faithful readers of WLBOTT will recall, we’ve talked about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice several times (here and here). Interestingly, a major early influence of Wendy Carlos was an experimental soundscape based on this myth.

Eurydice, from the film **Black Orpheus**

From Wendy Carlos’ Official Website

An Interview with Wendy Carlos
by Alan Baker, American Public Media, Jan. 2003

ALAN BAKER: And that is something you’ve been interested in, and so you drew the distinction between the early electronic music that didn’t have melody and those other items that lend themselves to drama.

WENDY CARLOS: Right. Well, in this case, the piece in question was called “Veil of Orpheus” by Pierre Henry. I didn’t check recently, but I think he’s still around. He did the piece when he was fairly young. He and Pierre Schaefer were part of the French electronic acoustic lab. This was a dramatic reading of sections from the actual Orpheus legend, done in actual Greek.
WendyCarlos.com

Musique Concrète

Pierre Henry and the concept of musique concrète are excellent starting points for understanding Wendy Carlos’s influences. Musique concrète, with its focus on manipulating recorded sound, surely laid a foundation for Carlos’s innovative approach to the Moog synthesizer and her pioneering compositions.

The Veil of Orpheus is an example of what is called musique concrète, a primarily French genre of postwar electronic music in which composers manipulated existing recorded (concrete) sounds.
[…]
Years later, she told an interviewer that [Pierre] Henry was the greatest influence on her electronic music compositions. She was moved by the drama of Henry’s telling of the Greek tragic myth of Orpheus, and she was stunned by the kinds of sounds she heard in that piece.
Wendy Carlos: A Biography (Cultural Biographies)
by Amanda Sewell
Page 11

Pierre Henry

Pierre Georges Albert François Henry (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ ɑ̃ʁi]; 9 December 1927 – 5 July 2017) was a French composer known for his significant contributions to musique concrète.

Biography
Henry was born in Paris, France, and began experimenting at the age of 15 with sounds produced by various objects. He became fascinated with the integration of noise into music, now called noise music. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, and Félix Passerone at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1938 to 1948.
Wikipedia

One can’t help but notice the similarities between Pierre Henry’s Veil of Orpheus and The Beatles’ Revolution Number 9.

In the NPR obituary “Remembering Pierre Henry, A Composer Who Made The Everyday Extraordinary”, Anastasia Tsioulcas writes:

In his early 20s, he helped usher in a musical revolution with a style called musique concrète — “concrete music” — collages of prerecorded and manipulated sounds from both electronic and acoustic sources.

Though musique concrète was born in rather rarefied air, it soon found its way into pop music: Just think of The Beatles’ “Revolution 9.”
NPR

Musique concrète (French pronunciation: [myzik kɔ̃kʁɛt]; lit. ’concrete music’) is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage.

It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using sound synthesis and computer-based digital signal processing.

Compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre. The technique exploits acousmatic sound, such that sound identities can often be intentionally obscured or appear unconnected to their source cause.

In the 1960s, as popular music began to increase in cultural importance and question its role as commercial entertainment, many popular musicians began taking influence from the post-war avant-garde,

including the Beatles, who incorporated techniques such as tape loops, speed manipulation, and reverse playback in their song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966). Bernard Gendron describes the Beatles’ musique concrète experimentation as helping popularise avant-garde art in the era, alongside Jimi Hendrix’s use of noise and feedback, Bob Dylan’s surreal lyricism and Frank Zappa’s “ironic detachment”.

The Beatles continued their use of concrète on songs such as “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “I Am the Walrus” (all 1967), before the approach climaxed with the pure musique concrète piece “Revolution 9” (1968).
Wikipedia / Images by Elder G

Pierre Henry collaborated with the UK rock band Spooky Tooth to create the album Ceremony. It is a challenging album to listen to.

Ceremony is a 1969 album by progressive UK rock band Spooky Tooth in collaboration with French experimental composer Pierre Henry.

History and critical reception
The album takes the form of a mass.

Despite the project being instigated by Gary Wright, the album is considered by him to have ended the band’s career. The album is described by another as being “one of the great screw-ups in rock history”.

Wikipedia

For Reference Purposes Only

Yes, the Beatles Revolution 9 does have lyrics. Elder G helped us create images using verbatim lyrics.

[Spoken Intro: Alistair Taylor & George Martin]
...bottle of claret for you if I'd realised
I'd forgotten all about it, George, I'm sorry
Well do next time
Will you forgive me?
Mmmyes
Cheeky bitch

[Chorus]

(Number nine) Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number (Number, number nine, number nine)

[Verse 1]
Then there's this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants
About the shortage of grain in Hertfordshire
Everyone of them knew that as time went by
They'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower but
It's all the same thing, in this case manufactured by someone who's always
Umpteen time your father's giving it diddly-i-dee
District was leaving, intended to pay for

[Chorus]
Number nine, number nine

Who's to know?
Who was to know?

[Chorus]