“Deus Ex Machina”

Although music we presented until now was both innovative and popular, it was not quite in the line with what was done in academic cricles. It was looking that more popular electronic experiment and academic experiment are two distinct fields. This image of division of music, and electronic music in particular, between pop and academic music was very well sold at the time.

But something was wrong with that image. There was a poweful drive among musicians to prove that this outlook is basically flawed; that music can be in the same time popular and releveant in the terms of academic concerns.

However, accademic modernist music made after 1960s did very little to prove this. These circles failed to produce next generation of important composers or theoreticians; for the first time, the academic musical line seemed cut. With mid-1970s, original modernistic dreams seemed doomed on failure, and many were claiming that electro-acoustic music and modernist experiment were dead.

Mike Oldfield

By encyclopedia definition, Deus Ex Machina is “a super-natural force that appears as from nowhere and solves an impossible situation”. This is pretty much how modernist music finally lifted off. In 1973, a 19 years old English multi-instrumental musician, coming from progressive rock/folk, Mike Oldfield, composed and recorded instrumental music album Tubular Bells. This record used electric guitar and followed progressive rock logic in many ways, but the fragile, subtly-distracting introduction was something that people didn't experience before. It couldn’t be considered rock or any form of pop, since being too subtle, but wasn’t traditional neither. It was unmistakably contemporary, yet too likable to be compared with established academic experiment, even minimalistic. Musically it was middle-leveled, something in between pop and serious musical worlds. This made it being seen as progressive rock; but it was the first time someone to play widely listened music that sounds unmistakably modern, and that has nothing to do with XX century pop, while having a lot to do with classical music.

This was a clear indication that something strange is beginning to happen. However, none of the established musical circles could take this music as theirs own. Among progressive rockers it was even scornfully nicknamed “tubercular bells”. A few academic composers, especially those who were into what will later be called minimalism, were interested, but Tubular Bells was quite alone out there.

Mike Oldfield will in the future produce more pieces of electronic ingeniosity, albeit having many traditional features; these include Ommadawn from 1975 and Incantations from 1978. We will however not bother trying to offer any comprehensive coverage of Mike Oldfield on this place, since his opus is too vast and diverse for something like that. We will just point out that of all the vastly popular composers of the generation, Oldfield will remain the musicaly most sophisticated and melodicaly prolific one.

Yet since most of the Tubular Bells album was close to prog-rock sound and logic, it will soon be quite accepted as such, and could not have been felt as a modernist beak-through. Rather, it was a premonition.

Vangelis

In 1975 another individual musician with progressive rock/ethno roots came to the front – Vangelis. This musician was a true natural-born: he dealt with music on his own way since his early childhood, and with album Heaven & Hell brought together elements of ethno, classical, jazz and progressive rock melted down into an original synthesizer-based form of his own devision. The orgiastic, archetypal mythical overture Bacchanale immediately shows the complex and ingenious orchestration that Vangelis was able to achieve, that is also evident in the most popular piece from the album, 12 o'clock.

Vangelis almost was what synthesizer music wanted to be: it was symphonic, it was original, it was unusual. This latter is especially true for the beginning of the B side of Heaven & Hell: a striking impressionistic passage, concentraing not on melody in traditional sense but on the texture and rhythm, and still achieving high level of effectivenes and musical exactness, which set it apart from comparable accademic efforts. Vangelis seemingly showed that he can do just whatever with his instruments. So after Mike Oldfield showed that popularity and experiment interesting enough for academic musicians can be weddded, Vangelis also showed that it can last for more than a few minutes. In the future, Vangelis will produce a varied output that includes solo electronic albums, movie music, pop and classical music, and we simply can not present on this place all these works as they deserve. Instead, they will be mentioned later throughout the book.

Many today regard Vangelis for a prime electronic composer of XX century. Certainly, his electronic orchestration is unmatched in the degree of musicality and sophistication. However, for a reason not easy to phantom, his work still did not quite strike in the heart of the target. Was it too similar to classical music? Or was it, when it went abstract, too far from it? It may be. Anyway, in the subconciousness of musical audience there was that precious place, that musicians were trying to conquer, but just still couldn't quite. Will it happen soon? Can it happen at all?

The answer was the best gift that lover of synthesizer music could have wished for.

Jean-Michel Jarre

It was 1976 when a miracle finally happened. A young French composer Jean Michel Jarre made a purely electronic recording with scientific-sounding name “Oxygene” (30 years later JMJ testified that his mother asked him, “why are you giving your album a name of a gas?”). The album was simply fascinating. In the way of originality and enigmatic quality, it was second to none, but in comparison with the rest of experimental music, what a change it brought! Similarly to Odlfield and Vangelis, there was actually true melodic music inside. But unlike the rest of melodic music, this album was concentrating on texture, polyphony and pointillist note riffs, much subduing traditionally dominating elements – melody in usual sense and rhythm. While so being somewhat deviant in nature, it exposed, with a previously unknown clarity and effectiveness, most of the aspects of musical art that were not - that could have not - been explored without a synthesizer.

The impact and the importance of Oxygene can not be understood without a closer analysis. This analysis shows that what Oxygene was basically about, is modernist dreams coming to life - not completely, of course, but mostly. With its opening, Oxygene brought the modernistic concept of deep polyphony to a natural fulfillment. Oxygene 2 was bringing an extremely pointed-out style tunes, known from Stockhausens theories, too fast and unusual to be considered melodies in traditional sense, but still sounding as true melodies, grasped by the edge of consciousness. In many moments with both Oxygene 1 & 2 there was a sense of melody & structure, yet not in traditional sense of tune we are accustomed with – the dream of athematic music, music that is melodic yet not based on melody in traditional sense, coming to life. What is more, these arpeggios also sounded both articulated and somewhat randomized - John Cage and Xenakis indeterminacy theories, incredibly, becoming music again. Minimalistic obsessions with simplicity were also there – this music was simple enough, but also sounding symphonic. And before all, the dream of totally organized music, built from basic elements of sound, was on the brink of being there: Oxygene used completely electronic sounds that didn’t imitate known acoustic sounds. Oxygene sounds were geometrized, yet they sounded humanly sensible, put in context that gives them musical character. All of this was used in impressionistic purposes, on the line with Debussys impressionistic ideas - evoking underwater and scientific sights. It was also music of subtly background character, able to blend into the surroundings on an ethereal way, best communicating when heard when not expected – what Eric Satie was into. And while many modernists were mathematically trained and brilliantly focused minds, dreaming of writing 'mathematical' music, they turned out not brilliant enough to produce music that would quite capture that spirit. Jean Michel Jarre didn’t have the degree in mathematics, but Oxygene sounded very mathematical, scientific, precise, like being born through scientific analysis and synthesis. It also had certain previously unheard emotional coolness to it; but it was in the same time memorable and exciting. So incredibly, all those murky concepts of electro-acoustic music, even those seemingly contradicted, were finding themselves inside of a simple enough several compositions, of a natural, effortless flow. With this album, it was clear that modernism was not a mere dream and that it is just a question of time before everything that modernists were dreaming about will become true.

And what was regarded impossible before, happened – music that was close to what academic experiment of the time had striven for captured attention of wide audiences. Vast audiences, that were thought to react only on “ordinary” music, became passionate with this mysterious science-based music. This enigmatic album with an unusual cover and with tracks that were numerated instead of having names, sold in millions of copies (over 10 millions to date), defeating the stereotype that unusual music can not be relevant in terms of popularity. Oxygene was a proof that if “experimental music” possesses what people feel as imaginative and noble, it will sell as well as any other record, if not better.

But the main wonder of Oxygene (and a few subsequent Jarre albums) weren't sales, but the fact that they made modernist concepts work for ordinary, musically uninitiated listeners, audiences who knew nothing about XX century modernism or theories. In the time when Oxygene impressed me, I knew nothing about electronic music, but like in a flash JM Jarre's work drawn that world in front of me. I first experienced things that modernists were talking about through JM Jarre's music before I knew how to speak about them. Much of this book was made from my scratches and writings that I made for myself trying to describe those ideas and experiences with my own words. Only later I found out that, basically, the talk had already been done before. But, not the walk.

Jean Michel Jarre's music was bringing images of a world looming in the future, somewhat imaginary, yet convincing. What it was saying, for the first time in XX century music, is unambiguous, uncompromising, yes to the future. Taking that Oxygene, together with 1978 follow up Equinoxe, sounds unusual and disturbing even today, it is not difficult to imagine cultural shock listening to them back then in 1970s. One would wonder, how could something like that appear in anyones head? It sounded like music “plopped from outer space”, as Brian Eno had put it.

What one couldn’t know, is that it didn’t plopped from nowhere, but exactly vice-versa: it was an explosion of birth and achievement after delivery pains of experimental XX century; that is why these pieces sounded enlightened, naive and optimistic. Musically it was, again, middle-leveled; it was a mixture of depth and elegance of classical, rawness and experimentality of modernist, and amateurism and freedom of pop music. JM Jarre had experience with all these three main musical worlds back then – classical, pop and modernist, and in that order, but the core progenies of Oxygene were academic electro-acoustic experiments, from where JM Jarre learned about synthesizers. JM Jarre was the child of the most idealistic ones, the dreamers, who seemed bound never to become popular.

Pierre Schaeffer is really the man who invented electro-acoustic music. He is the father of musique concrete. They started the Center in 1945 or so, long before electronics became the fashion in pop music, and composers such as John Cage, Stockhausen, and Xenakis came there to study. I worked with them for three years, which gave me the opportunity to work with what was at that time one of the biggest synthesizers in the world. Jean Michel Jarre

A young apprentice of theirs, JM Jarre was alas bothered with the lack of results of experimental music. After working with Schaeffer in GRM for a time, and also sometime in Berlin with Stockhausen, the lack of results of these circles bothered him more and more and he finally abandoned them.

I left because they didn't do music. They did philosophy applied to music, mathematics applied to music, but no music. Jean Michel Jarre

This was the beginning of the true original success in what so many musicians were after -- in wedding popularity, academic relevance, and experimentality.

What made JM Jarre specifically important among other musicians of the generation is that, more than any other musician, he offered breath and forms of the new era in functional form, yet pure enough -- essentially concentrating on new possibilities while systematically ignoring out-dated elements of traditional musicianship, and additionally affirming and refining what is universal and still actual of traditional achievements. JM Jarre's work was a credible snapshot of what music of the future is about; it made sure that the essence, with all its facets, is made clear and free from obtrusive additions, from out-dated parts of classical & traditional idioms, as well as from inartistic parts of jazz&pop idioms.

Compared to his peers, JM Jarre was most close to Vangelis. He was not so satisfied with the aproach taken by, until then, most succesful experimental musicians Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. In one interview, he argues that these musicians were too obsessed with theirs instruments, rather than just music, and that they also expected listeners obsessed with electronic instruments. Indeed, a piece such as Fauni Gena of Tangerine Dream, from Atem album from 1973, was more interesting as the sonic experiment with electronic instruments of the time, that imitates brirds song, than just as music. Only a listener interested in syhtesizers could find it interesting. What JM Jarre wanted, however, is to create music that communicates without the listener being interested in the means and techniques used to produce it; that communicates just as music, on the same way on which the best traditional music does. It could be argued that JM Jarre was more devoted to this aim than any other electronic musician of the time.

He also didn't want to glorify the machine the Kraftwerk way, ending up as the "musical surgeon", aproaching his instruments on a very intelecualized, detached way. He insisted that music must speak to heart.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg realized that they needed something more than traditional music. But what did they do? They just made another intellectual system, a system so complex that after awhile you are obliged to be a doctor of philosophy and mathematics in order to understand the music, in order to read the 200-page book that explains the concepts. It became more and more for the head and less and less for the sensitivity. Jean Michel Jarre

In the pursue of these aims, he went for a lonely path of his own, making a private small musical studio in his flat:

And because I am mainly a composer and not a scientist, I decided to put together my own studio little by little, in my flat. Jean Michel Jarre

How exactly this putting together proceeded, is not well known. His collaborator Michael Geiss described this home studio as “a very small studio, with only minimal equipment; a small mixing desk, and only a few synthesizers. It was the very beginning”.

It is funny on the end that in the time when classical creativity has dried up and was losing the battle from popular music, and academic modernist circles reached new levels of vanity, the musician who finaly developed a working prototype of what everyone was after, was primarily formed in classical and modernist circles.

Alas, this will not lead to celebrations inside of modernist circles, nor will it bring JM Jarre the status of a modernist hero.