Palaces of Memory: American Composer Diane Thome on Her Life and Music
by Diane Thome (Music 780.92 Thome)
Diane Thome is an early pioneer of
electronic music, and the 1st woman to make computer-based electroacoustic
music. She published her autobiography, Palaces of Memory, in 2016, and you can borrow it
from Polley.
Palaces of Memory is a short book, coming in just
under 100 pages even with appendices included, and I think most folks will be
able to get through it in one sitting. One thing I find interesting about the
book, having read through what seems like a zillion musician and composer
biographies and autobiographies at this point, is how smoothly she handles
balancing her work and her life throughout the book. And it’s not a technical
book at all: if you like her music but aren’t a trained musician yourself, you
won’t have any trouble understanding everything Thome presents here. It’s a
very personable, conversational read throughout.
Like most biographies, the first
couple of chapters cover Thome’s family background, growing up in a musical
family, and the beginnings of her musical education. In addition to studying
composition, we learn that she was also an excellent piano player, and received
a Performer’s Certificate in Piano along with her Bachelor of Music in Composition
with Distinction from the Eastman School of Music. Her description of the
Eastman School of Music around this time (the early 1960s) find it to be a
fairly conservative conservatory, but that she really enjoyed her time there
and the cultural community around the school. Interestingly, she also mentions
studying with Darius Milhaud at a summer program in Aspen, with classmates like
Philip Glass and Joan Tower, but left early because she wasn’t feeling good
about her music at the time. This conflict led her to explore attending the
University of Rochester instead of finishing at Eastman, though she ultimately
decided to return to the Eastman program. But at the end of her time at
Eastman, she mentions an interaction with the school’s director that stuck with
her: he congratulated her and said, “I hope you won’t write any of that
terrible electronic music!” That director was Nebraska Native and composer
Howard Hanson, to mention an interesting Nebraska connection!
At the time, Thome hadn’t expressed
any interest in electronic music, and there wasn’t a program or any facilities
at Eastman to pursue that path, anyway. But by the time she was pursuing a
doctorate, she found herself at Princeton, which was one of only two
universities in the late 60s that had the beginnings of research programs into
computer synthesis for music. Ultimately she left Princeton as their first PhD
graduate in music, and was the first woman pursuing computer-generated music
through their program.
We’re going to skip ahead toward
the end of the book for a moment to get into more of the details of what it
meant to make music with computers in that era, because I think it’s hard for
those of us who have lived in a world where home computers and powerful gadgets
like smartphones and tablets have always existed to imagine what this was like.
Chapter 8 is a fantastic description of how complex the process was. Thome was
using the computer music facilities at Princeton in the time range of ’68-’73,
and at that time, the process was literally programming on mainframe computers.
As a composer, you would be programming in Fortran, entered a bunch of punch
cards in the mainframe, and your end product would be a digital tape full of
numbers that represent your audio. So you still couldn’t hear anything: for
that, you’d have to make a three-hour round trip to Bell Labs in New Jersey
where they had a digital to analog converter, or DAC, that could turn your
numbers into audio. That’s a lot of work to hear what may be only a few minutes
or seconds of audio! Remember, this is before streaming audio, mp3s, before
iphones, ipods, before CDs, all modern devices which have inexpensive DACs
built in that turn the digital numbers into sound at our speakers. Thome
reflects that although this process was obviously kind of frustrating, it gave
her totally new insights into the compositional process, resulting in new kinds
of music. Timbre, the sounds themselves, could be invented almost from scratch,
something that can’t be done working with the limited palette of acoustic
instruments. But around this time, working on the edge of technology really
made this kind of music feel like research, and Thome mentions feeling like she
could understand the experiences of scientists working in labs.
Speaking of Bell Labs, where that
DAC was located that Princeton composers had to use, it was just a few years
later, starting around the time that Thome graduated, that another composer was
working at Bell Labs herself: Laurie Spiegel. Her album “The Expanding
Universe,” which was originally released in 1980, has been enjoying a bit of a
renewed interest in recent years, having been reissued and expanded. Spiegel
too had to work with the Bell Labs DAC at times, but she was making another
unique kind of computer music unique to that facility using what they called
the GROOVE system, which was a mainframe computer being used to control analog
synthesizer equipment.
Thinking of Laurie Spiegel and
Thome leads us back toward the middle of Thome’s autobiography, where she
includes a chapter called “The Gender Issue (Yes, It Was an Issue).” We
sometimes forget just how far women have been able to advance professionally
and artistically in just a few decades. Reading
about Thome’s many horrible experiences in the 60s and 70s that were caused by
sexism on the part of the almost entirely male faculty of institutions of the
time is a harsh reminder about how terrible things were. She was kicked out of
the graduate program at Penn by its director George Rochberg, for example, for
“unsatisfactory academic performance,” despite having a high GPA and winning
numerous awards. She protested and was reinstated by the full faculty two
months later. At the first national computer music conference, there were 200
men and 2 women, and the men ignored the women at the reception. She had often
been the only woman in her music classes, and she went on to usually be the
only woman among her faculty peers. And she has observed that women had to work
harder and produce better work than men to be included on concert programs.
This struggle remains a reality for
many women in the music industry, including those involved in concert music or
contemporary classical music, but it is because of the hard-won efforts and
unstoppable talents of composers like Thone, Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros, Suzanne
Ciani, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Elaine Radigue, and many more, that there
are now more women in those classrooms and on faculty. Where the kinds of
electroacoustic music that many of these women created are concerned, I have noticed
that many women have continued to rise to the top of that field. Looking at the
catalog of a record label like empreientes DIGITALes, for example, a Canadian
label that specializes in curating the best of electroacoustic music and has
been around since 1990, several dozen women’s works have been released by the
label. A few of my favorites on the label, for example, include Hildegard
Westerkamp, Elaine Lillios, Roxanne Turcotte, Manuella Blackburn, and Annette
Vande Gorne. It’s not 50/50 representation yet, but the change just a few
decades after the women pioneers of electronic music is striking.
In the rest of Diane Thome’s book,
she devotes a chapter to her relationships and friendships over time, and how
they often intertwined with musical interests, and there is a great chapter
where she discusses her own creative process, and contrasts it with some of the
popular musical movements in contemporary classical music during her time, such
as serialism. Spiritual practices have also been important to her life, and of
course such things inevitably have an effect on creative practices. I found
that reading those two chapters together—and
indeed they’re placed side by side in the book—paints an evocative picture of
how to approach this still somewhat mysterious force that is electroacoustic
music.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try In Search of a Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer or Sonic Art: An Introduction to Electroacoustic Music Composition
by Adrian Moore.)
( official Palaces
of Memory page on the official Diane Thome web
site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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