''Williams Mix'' (1951–1953) is a 4'16" electroacoustic composition by

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...

for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch

magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...

s. The first piece of octophonic music, the piece was created by Cage with the assistance of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Bebe and Louis Barron (who would later create the first all-electronic feature film soundtrack for '' Forbidden Planet'') using many recorded sound sources on tape and a graphic score by the composer. "Presignifying the development of algorithmic composition, granular synthesis, and sound diffusion," it was the third of five pieces completed in the ''Project for Music for Magnetic Tape'' (1951–1954), funded by dedicatee architect Paul F Williams Jr.Hall, Patricia and Sallis, Friedemann (2004). ''A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches'', p. 189. . Richard Kostelanetz of '' Stereo Review'' described ''Williams Mix'' as a " tape collage composed ... by chance procedures" which, similar to Cage's earlier works (but not many subsequent ones), was "offered to the world in a permanent form." The material recorded by the Barrons was organized into six categories: city, country, electronic, manually produced, wind, and "small" sounds. These sounds were then "subjected...to '' I Ching'' manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scrambled textures of up to sixteen simultaneous layers." The 193-page score, "a full-size drawing of the tape fragments, which served as a 'score' for the splicing," is described by Cage as similar to "a dressmaker's

pattern A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated l ...

– it literally shows where the tape shall be cut, and you lay the tape on the score itself." Thus, like a recipe, the piece may be recreated using different tapes and the score. The work was premiered March 23, 1953 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as part of an evening that Cage programmed of music for magnetic tape during the Festival of Contemporary Arts. The piece was also played at the 25th Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage on May 15, 1958, and was recorded by Columbia Records producer George Avakian. Avakian released this recording of the concert on a three-LP set with a booklet including extensive notes and illustrations of scores. Larry Austin later created a computer program, the "Williams (re)Mix(er)", based on an analysis of "Williams Mix", which could "yield ever-new Williams Mix scores." With this software, Austin created ''Williams (re)Mix d' (1997–2000), an octophonic variation of ''Williams Mix'' using different sound sources. In 2012,

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

electronic music professor Tom Erbe became the first person to recreate "Williams Mix" from the original score, creating performance software in Pure Data carefully following the score and Cage's notes. Erbe's debut performance of "Williams Mix" was on Cage's 100th birthday, September 5, 2012, at Fresh Sound in San Diego. Bobby Bray
"Random Music Box", San Diego Reader, April 29, 2012
. Erbe also created a version of "Williams Mix" for clipping.'s 2014 album '' CLPPNG'', using samples of the band's music as the sound material.

Discography

* John Cage (1994). ''The 25 Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage''. Wergo 247 * (2000/2005). ''OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music''. Ellipsis Arts 690 * Larry Austin (2001).
Octo-Mixes, Larry Austin, Octophonic Computer Music, 1996–2001
'. EMF CD 039. * John Cage (2010). ''Fontana Mix''. Él. * clipping. and Tom Erbe (2014). Last track on '' CLPPNG''.

Sub Pop Sub Pop is an independent record label founded in 1986 by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. Sub Pop achieved fame in the early 1990s for signing Seattle bands such as Nirvana (band), Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney, central players in the gru ...

SP1071.

Discography

References

Further reading