I'm cleaning up my "office" and found this, from the 1971 KPFA Folio program guide. A bit of ancient history. Now, if I could only find the tape of El Ojo de Gringa. It was for taped voice and live chimes. Charles A. played the chimes.

Those were the days.

Taking some time off to clean up my office studio. Started yesterday pulling all the computers apart, cleaning things off and vacuuming out a couple of years worth of dust. Above is what it looked like in progress. The computer table is now clean and all the wires reconnected in a more rational way.

What DOES one do with old Zip drives, routers, ethernet switches, dead disk drives? I have four dead many-GigaByte internal disk drives that I can't just drop in the trash. And a couple of no-longer-in-use SCSI boards and the like. They could make nice paperweights. Does anyone need a paperweight? Or a doorstop?

Next I need to tackle the boxes that were under the desk, and all the paper on the desk. Everything has gotten totally out of hand. Extreme overload of stuff. Stay tuned.

Went off to Pt Reyes yesterday. It was beautiful... but cold and windy, so we didn't get much of a hike. Managed a sandy lunch at a protected spot on McClure's beach. The surf was wild from a storm out in the Pacific. (I have another image on my photo blog.)

New Year's Resolution #2: Gotta get out more often...and to places like this. It's only 1 1/2 hours from home. (New Year's Resolution #1? ... gotta floss more often.)

Last year's was so successful that we're doing it again in February. Another othermindly Séance! Saturday, February 24, 2007.

Pianist Sarah Cahill and the Stenberg-Zimmermann Duo play spiritualist music, lullabies, and meditations in three concerts in this all-day musical marathon in the candlelit surroundings of Bernard Maybeck's Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco.

The program this year is even more impressive than last. From Antheil to Ziporyn! Click on the "Continue" link below to see how impressive it really is.

The Other Minds New Music Séance marathon will be three distinct concerts on Saturday, February 24, 2007—Concert I, “Nature Vivante” at 2pm; Concert II, “The Immovable Do” at 5:30pm; and Concert III, “Sleepwalker’s Shuffle” at 8pm—at Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco. Tickets for individual concerts are $20-$35-$50 (sliding scale); a series pass for all three concerts is available for $50, $100, or $150. Last year's Séance sold out, and seating is limited to 110 persons per show, so early ticket purchase is recommended. Tickets are on sale now, at www.BrownPaperTickets.com or by calling 1-800-838-3006. For information, visit otherminds.org or call (415) 934-8134.

(For a report on last year's, go here.)

I've discovered this wonderful website of early radio history. It contains a fascinating collection of early magazine articles and papers chronicling the early history of the development of wireless communication in the U.S. And it also highlights the development of the amateur radio service in this country. The site is the work of a Mr. Thomas H. White, who otherwise goes unidentified.

Radio captured the imagination of thousands of ordinary persons who wanted to experiment with this amazing new technology. Until late 1912 there was no licencing or regulation of radio transmitters in the United States, so amateurs -- known informally as "hams" -- were free to set up stations wherever they wished. But with the adoption of licencing, amateur operators faced a crisis, as most were now restricted to transmitting on a wavelength of 200 meters (1500 kilohertz), which had a limited sending range. They successfully organized to overcome this limitation, only to face a second hurdle in April, 1917, when the U.S. government shut down all amateur stations, as the country entered World War One.

There are many hours worth of interesting reading here. Something we so much take for granted today was the result of years of work by both professional and amateur scientists and engineers. For example:

Electrical Review, June 29, 1901, page 820:
Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy. [Ayrton prediction]
After the reading of Mr. Marconi's paper, which was published in full in the ELECTRICAL REVIEW for June 15 and 22, before the Society of Arts, in London, Professor W. E. Ayrton being in the chair, the following discussion took place...
The chairman: Although still far away, he thought they were gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, of a time when if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a loud, electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. "Where are you?" he would say. A small reply would come, "I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific." Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Let them think of what that meant, of the calling which went on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole; not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wanted to hear and absolutely silent to him who did not, it was almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland of the heated imagination cultivated by the Psychical Society, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws. On seeing the young faces of so many present he was filled with green envy that they, and not he, might very likely live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

And, from 1901:

Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1901, page 6.
THE WIRELESS AGE.
Commenting upon the experiments recently made with the Armstrong and Orling systems of wireless telegraphy, a correspondent of the London Spectator waxes prophetic, and forecasts all sorts of wonderful things to come to pass in the future. He says:

"Some day men and women will carry wireless telephones as today we carry a card case or camera. We shall switch ourselves on to the underground radiations through the medium of our walking sticks or boots, and then tune up our receiver to say tone No. 39,451, and tone No. 39,451 will go about his business undisturbed by other tones. For military purposes it soon will be no longer necessary to carry cumbrous coils of wire, which are always at the mercy of an enemy. The staff officer and the scout each will drive a wireless apparatus into the ground and await the magic touch of the sympathetic tone. Thanks to the Morse code, it will not even be necessary to await perfection in the conveyance of the human voice. A kindred apparatus will magnify the telephonic sound, and some day the mouse for which we shall set a telephonic trap, will be able to roar like a bull. A ship will proclaim her name loudly through the fog and Calais and Dover, in hazy weather, will announce themselves to approaching packets. Wireless torpedoes, probably, will provide the best solution of the difficulties of coast defense, and when a force of watchful and highly-expert electricians is sufficient to supply the torpedoes with guiding machines, how many expensive fortifications might not we do without?"

Perhaps all this may come about "some day." But the achievements of wireless telegraphy, thus far, though they are indeed wonderful, have been considerably more prolific in promises than in fulfillment. Still, it will not do, in this age of strenuousness and progress, to say that anything is impossible. "For we are ancients of the earth, and in the morning of the times."

The current Music From Other Minds programs features THINKING by Maria de Alvear. You can hear it again this week by following this link with iTunes or any mp3 player.

Next week's program will feature music by Olivier Messiaen and Toru Takemitsu.

Music From Other Minds is heard each Friday night at 11p Pacific Time on KALW, 91.7 FM, or streaming live via http://kalw.org/

For more information, check the Music From Other Minds website.

Tonight's Music From Other Minds program features three large orchestral works by the late Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu: Quotation of Dream, Twill by Twilight, and Dream/Window, all from the late 1980's to early '90s.

But the program begins with an early work by Olivier Messiaen - his Theme and Variations for violin and piano from 1932, when the composer was 24. A very remarkable piece for such a young age.

The Messiaen<=>Takemitsu affinity is a strong one. And while Messiaen never really founded a "school" in the sense of the Viennese school of Schoenberg/Berg/Webern, his influence was quite far and wide.

Even to Tokyo, apparently.

You can hear this program again all week by clicking here.

Not sure what the next MFOM program will be yet, and I have a few days to decide.

So you may (or may not) be wondering why I've been neglecting my blogging duties lately. Reason is because I've been studying over the past 3 weeks. I've been preparing to take the Amateur Extra Class radio operator's license.

And, I took the exam (50 questions, multiple choice) this morning in Oakland.

AND PASSED!

So? So big deal? Well, you have to realize that back when I was in high school I got my first ham radio license, then called the Novice Class. But unfortunately I could never convince my Dad to help me buy any equipment... and setting up an antenna was problematic. So even tho I had the license in 1955, I never used it (but I still remember the call sign: WA2INV .. and it's now owned by someone else.) I was pretty proud to have that license. And I dreamed of one day getting the top grade license, the EXTRA class, which, at that time, seemed to me beyond even a Ph. D.!

So, some fifty years later, guess what? I'm now an Extra Class operator!

That and fifty cents won't get me on BART, but still I've earned some bragging rights.

And it was the first of two goals I set for myself this year. The other, which I've blogged about earlier, is to bring my Morse code abilities up to speed (literally) and get comfortable with some Morse contacts.

We'll start work on that one next week.

73 de KG6EMF/AE

This weekend the SFSOUND organization returned to the ODC theater in San Francisco with its annual SF Tape Music Festival. And tonight's concert was devoted to a complete, and very rare, audition of Karlheinz Stockhausen's HYMNEN -- one of the true classic masterpieces of tape music from 1967.

Hearing HYMNEN in multichannel sound with great speakers in near-total darkness was spectacular. Extreme kudos go to Matt Ingalls, Cliff Caruthers, and the SFSound team for putting this event together!

For me, hearing HYMNEN again after nearly 30 years was like discovering an old friend. This was a very important work for many of us in the late 60's. It showed what could be done in with tape music, almost to the extreme.

HYMNEN is a complex work. And a lot has been written about it since it first appeared. (One good source on the web is this guide by Albrecht Moritz.) It's nearly 2 hours long, in four sections or regions. Dream or nightmare, it contains both electronic and concrete sounds, some from shortwave broadcasts, many national anthems, whole and dissected, voices, distorted noises, and pure tones.

When it arrived on a two-record set from DGG nearly 40 years ago, no one quite knew what to make of it. Looking back now it's very clear that this piece was a major breakthrough in electronic music. It set the bar high for everything that came later.

Considering that this was all done with tape and special analog devices for mixing and transforming sound, without the help of computers or the digital techniques we have today, only serves to enhance the achievement.

Aside from the technical aspects, HYMNEN also has a "spiritual" aspect, common with much that came out of the late '60's, and Stockhausen's reading of the Urantia Book, deep consciousness, and world peace. It all gets mixed up in there somehow.

It's a powerful journey, worth taking every now and then .. a refresher course in what could have been. And, quite a masterpiece.

Alex Ross has a great article about Toru Takemitsu in the New Yorker.

We must have been thinking the same things when I put last week's Music From Other Minds program together. (Scroll down).