Volume 1: Electronic Music by Canadian Composers

The Melbourne Records compilation pictured above is a 1980 reissue of an album released just a few years earlier. Volume 1 of Electronic Music by Canadian Composers contains astounding works by noted women composers Ann Southam and Violet Archer. Together, Southam’s “Boat, River, Moon” and Archer’s “Episodes” provide thirty-some minutes of transformative sonic escape. This is electronic music made in Canada.

BOAT, RIVER, MOON was composed in 1972 at the Electronic Music Studios of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. It was commissioned for a modern dance, choreographed by David Earle of the Toronto Dance Theatre and was first performed in September of that year. The general format of the music – divided into four sections – follows the narrative of the dance, but the rhythm within each of the sections, that is to say the change in flow of tension and energy in the sound, is not meant to parallel or duplicate the movement of the dancers, but rather to explore the drama of the dance in its own time. The dance itself is constructed in Noh Theatre form and presents the allegory that three aspects of ourselves – the warrior (mind), the woman (senses), and the priest (spirit) – are at war with each other and where one is weakened the whole is vulnerable and oblivion reclaims us.

Equipment used for the realization of the music involved two small Putney synthesizers with keyboards, six additional sine-square oscillators, three two-channel Revox tape recorders and two four-input, single-output mixers. (Taken from the album’s liner notes.)

“boat – river – moon”

EPISODES was realized in a studio which housed two Putney Synthesizers, a mixer, a total of ten oscillators, a keyboard, an oscilloscope and two Revox tape recorders. Use was made of the two synthesizers, with the sounds being channeled through the mixer. The piece is in the nature of a rondo. The refrain takes a sawtooth audio signal, controlled by two square-wave oscillators, through a variety of shape and frequency changes. The contrasting sections explore the use of noise, putting it through various treatments such as reverberation, ring modulation, a filter and an envelope shaper. (Taken from the album’s liner notes.)

“episodes”