Description
A ten-inch record of computer-composed music from 1960 — contemporary with Hiller and Isaacson's Illiac Suite, and the earliest algorithmic music in this collection. The four untitled tracks carry the score Barbaud wrote with Roger Blanchard for Frédéric Rossif's 14-minute short Imprévisibles Nouveautés (Les Films de la Pléiade / Pierre Braunberger, 1959); the record was produced by Roland Douatte and issued on his Critère label in France as CRD 430.
Barbaud had turned to automatic composition two years earlier, running his programs on Bull's machines in Paris; he was the pioneering French figure in algorithmic music and one of the very first composers anywhere to use computers systematically in composition (Viel, 1895, no. 58, 2009). That a record of it exists at all in 1960, and that the music was made for a film about industrial novelty, is the whole period in one object. The sleeve makes the point typographically: its cover reproduces a genuine Compagnie Bull punched card, stamped B MUSIQUE. The film was commissioned by the Chambre syndicale des pétroles for the centenary of the first oil well drilled in the United States, and the disc was recorded by the Société Nouvelle Pathé-Cinéma at Studio Marignan in Paris — all per the sleeve and booklet.
The twelve-page booklet holds three texts. Producer Roland Douatte's one-page preface reflects that in the moments when one searches one's past for the beacons that light it, this record guarantees him at least one — the hatching of a new art form he thanks Barbaud and Blanchard for letting him join. The gallerist Myriam Prévot's introduction (dated 23 March 1960) argues that the marvel of this music is precisely its lack of visible marvel: unlike the furious debates around electronic and concrete music, it sounds like the tonal and serial music everyone knows — audiences at the cinema never reacted — and yet it was composed by no human: "une machine a créé une œuvre d'art." She casts Barbaud as the man who dared subject 'divine' music to human intelligence, feeding mathematical laws to the tireless robot, and closes by thanking Barbaud, Blanchard, Rossif, and Douatte for daring to publish a non-commercial record.
Barbaud and Blanchard's own essay, 'imprévisibles nouveautés', explains the method with a toy language: three letters (a, b, l), phonetic rules — no doubled letters, at most three consonants in a row, the group b-l-b forbidden, no word over ten letters — and a printed circuit diagram whose numbered branches generate the entire dictionary, from a and ab out to lblalblalb; walk branches 5, 9, 12, 9, 15 and the machine writes blablabla. Set a = ut, b = mi, l = sol and the dictionary becomes a list of military bugle calls. The record's music, they write, comes from the same method without the extreme simplification: twelve 'letters' (the tones) plus a blank (silence), thirteen objects ordered in rows (time) and columns (simultaneity) under acoustic constraints, with musically null solutions defined and eliminated, and the choice of operations aleatory. A 'machine', in their definition, is simply the blind execution of a pre-established program — the algorithm — whether carried out with paper and pencil or entrusted to an electronic calculator; the engineer-composer's pride lies in renouncing revision, changing not a single sound of whatever the circuits deliver. The booklet ends with Critère's catalogue — musique concrète for Béjart's Orphée two numbers earlier — and the imprint of the Imprimerie du Compagnonnage, Paris.
He is also the man who got Vera Molnár into the computing centre at Orsay in 1968 — see the note on her Tango 74.
