Stephen Oberbeck

Lausanne, Switzerland—“March 4 is a movement, not a day” proclaims one button. “Stop ABM” urges the other. There is something eloquent and immediate about button slogans, whether they are serious or humorous. Often, they are flashes of compressed anger, ironic insight or bald intention. And thereby hangs a tale. Early this month, President Nixon ordered a $10-million increase in the spending ceiling imposed on the National Science Foundation by the previous administration—which had cut NSF’s budget some $40-million below its expectancy. The new President frankly called the Democratic economy, presumably part of a general belt-tightening Congress demanded for passage of LBJ’s income tax surtax, “a serious error.” Why? Because the cut disrupted critically the NSF’s grant structure to institutions engaged in basic research, mostly at universities. In rescinding the cutback even by a quarter, President Nixon underscored the importance of continuing basic research. Such research is the subject of a planned day “stoppage” in major research centers organized for March 4. Initially by 45 professors at M.I.T. The button slogans above indicate the “movement’s” immediate

Lausanne, Switzerland—People ask “what are you doing over here?” I have two answers: 1)Writing about art. 2)Writing about art and technology. Answer number 2 tends to make eyes wander and smiles become transparently blank. “Hmm, that’s very interesting,” is a listener’s likely reply. Or: “Art and what!?” “Oh, you know,” I usually counter, “electronic music and artists who work with lights and motors and electric gear. That kind of stuff.” It suffices. “Hmm, yes, quite right,” one English businessman replied—or, Distorted Feedback Loops in Disarray Worlds. Such reactions are normal. For somewhere, a city is likely to be burning, a university administration building occupied, a border violated, a people starving or a helpless citizen shot or beaten in the street. The week my wife and I sailed to Europe last March, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. One morning months later, we woke up in London to news that a second Kennedy had been shot. We took in the news of riots, burnings, street battles, student uprisings, the explosions in the Middle East, the sorry

Paris—The experience has unfolded numerous times in America, but for Paris it was a first: the curtain goes up to reveal an empty, darkened stage. Then, rising lights the colors of an acid head’s rainbow begin carving out planes of space in the black neutrality. As the stage turns into a shimmering 3-D cube, a brace of loudspeakers emits a sinuous crackling sound of syncopated static, which stereophonically permeates the entire theater. From “Imago,” subtitled “The City Curious.” The cube glows brighter and suddenly figures propelled from some Flash Gordon cartoon strip are sailing airily through its opalescent sectors of crimson and purple. Like motifs blown off of a Miro canvas, bizarre and squiggly, the figures scoot in whirlwinds of color-blurred motion between pockets of darkness and curtains of light, shuttling in and out of existence, disappearing into the smokey blue only to vault a moment later through a wall of peacock green like creatures conjured up from another dimension. No. The audience wasn’t turned on in the usual sense. Nor is the writer. But

This Stockholm composer is making music. Program music, you might say. His orchestra: Computers. The tempo is in real-time, not 4/4. For more input (Yes?No?), go to step two… Stockholm—To the uninitiated ear, electronic music and musique concrete still tend to sound like a mixture of Surrealist train-wreck, avalanching glaciers of glass or the chamber music of spastic chimpanzees. The sonic squawks and howls, whiplash static and celestial twitterings comprise a language as familiar to the average music listener as spoken Sanskrit. Even some people who have nibbled at, say, Webern or Schoenberg shy from progressive compositions that seem to be simulating a complete nervous breakdown of some radio station. But this electronically bent, folded and spindled music was never really meant for the average ear, of course. Synthetic musicians have long played to their own crowd. Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen and Babbit are weathered veterans; the late Edgar VaVarese and Pierre Schaeffer are grand-old-men of musique concrete. Now, composers and groups (LaMonte Young, for example, and Musica Elettronica Viva) are writing compositions of one sustained