Newman commissioned works by Robert Frank, Ken Dewey, Walter de Maria, Yvonne Rainer, Ann Halprin, Julian Beck and the Living Theatre, Robert Nelson, Frank Zappa, Edwin Schlossberg, Terry Riley, and Philip Makanna. The first pieces, televised in the spring and summer of 1969, were unanimously acclaimed. Chiefly responsible for this success was KQED producer-director John Coney, who coordinated, produced, and codirected many of the video projects, working closely with the artists.
Terry Riley: Music With Balls
Rarely has the multiplex structure of any film or videotape been so totally integrated as in the transcendental composition Music With Balls (see color plates), conceived by Terry Riley and commissioned by the Dilexi Foundation in 1968. It was the work of three men whose separate disciplines meshed in synaesthetic alloy: Terry Riley, composer; Arlo Acton, sculptor; John Coney, video mixer. Music With Balls is a dialectical synthesis of nonverbal energies that strikes deep into the inarticulate conscious. It inundates the beholder in megabits of experiential design information, aural, visual, and kinetic. To understand it we must understand its four elements: music, sculpture, cinema, and video.
Riley's music is strongly influenced by the work of LaMonte Young, with whom he is closely associated. Yet it can be said that Riley's music is unique in itself and represents, with the exception of Young, the most vital and refreshing American musical composition of the late twentieth century. While he is seriously involved with the "row"
and "stasis" techniques that inform Young's work at a fundamental level, Riley is able to subsume a wide range of musical structure, combining the climax and directionality of Western music with the stasis of Eastern modalities. The result is cyclic precision and a buoyant mathematical randomness.
For Music With Balls, Riley pre-recorded four tracks of fourteen-cycle beats with a tenor saxophone and a Vox electric organ. Each beat was assigned a pitch, thus forming a tonal "row" that he played back through oscillators. Various levels of tape delay were possible by starting and stopping one or more of the tracks randomly. In the studio Riley sat behind a bright red table, flanked by his tape equipment. Against the recorded, delayed, and oscillated time cycles he played rhythmic variations on his saxophone, effectively generating a static yet melodious macrostructure of cycles containing epicycles within epicycles. The music was alternately tense and relaxing, a shimmering trilling universe of aural bubbles penetrated randomly by syncopated wailing crescendi and diminuendi. The overall effect was magical, soothing, hypnotic.
Two stereo speakers were fitted into two of Arlo Acton's giant black spheres that were swung from the studio ceiling on long wires and revolved around the set in diminishing circles, pushed periodically by black-clad girls at either side. Thus the amplification of the cyclic music was itself heard in a physically cyclic fashion as it swirled about the empty space. A smaller chromed sphere was set in pendular motion, like a giant metronome, just above Riley's head. This had a calming, centering effect.
This auditory/tactile/kinetic environment was then processed through cinema and video on several levels, all corresponding to the cycle/epicycle mode. Tiny ball bearings suspended from threads were filmed in ultraslow motion with a high-speed camera to make them seem heavy. The resulting film of swinging spheres was made into twelve loops that were then superimposed over one another in all the various combinations and as many levels of multiple-exposure as possible on one master print that had been cut into a strip as long as the entire program, twenty-six minutes. This was fed through a film chain as one possible video source.
Two floor cameras shot Riley in wide-angle and close-up, and also focused alternately into a color monitor and a concave mirror. "The mirror gave the entire image a curvature which corresponded to the cyclic nature of the whole piece," Coney explained. "Also it broke the repetition of the circular orbits by making them elliptical. Shooting the color monitor was not done for feedback but simply to achieve an electronified or subaqueous visual patina. A rather blue cast. Also it accentuates the scan-lines which are appropriate to TV, and we used them as a design element. In addition it gave us the ability to have the same picture running synchronously on two different scales. Seeing the image a bit larger on one camera than the other. That produced a very interesting cycle effect, particularly when we dissolved to another image."
The master tape of Music With Balls is a fabulously rich mantra of color, sound, and motion. Huge spheres sweep majestically across the screen trailing comets of shimmering ruby, emerald, and amber. Contrapuntal trajectories intersect, pierce, and collide. Keying, debeaming, wipes, and dissolves result in phantasmagoric convolutions of spatial dimensions as Riley is seen in several perspectives at once, in several colors, alternately obscured and revealed on various planes with each pass of a pendulum. The composition builds from placid serenity to chaotic cacophany to bubbly melodiousness with a mad yet purposive grace. Acoustical space, physical space, and video space become one electronic experience unlike anything the cinema has ever known.
Philip Makanna: The Empire of Things
"I'm supposedly a sculptor," remarks Phil Makanna, "but there's something strange and maybe decaying about making things— things— peopling the overpeopIed world with more junk, not really touching anyone. More than anything I feel the frustration, desperation, of wanting to be able to reach out and hold your heart." With the startling beauty of his synaesthetic composition The Empire of Things (see color plates), Makanna reached out through the videosphere and held the hearts of thousands.
A combination of sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and electronic engineer, Makanna was conducting a creative television course at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland when he was commissioned by the Dilexi Foundation in 1968. At the college, Makanna focused on TV as a medium specifically for such "fine"
artists as sculptors and painters. His approach followed two directions simultaneously: videotape as a self-contained aesthetic experience, and closed-circuit television as an environment for live events of a theatrical nature. These included a collaborative effort with the Mills College Electronic Tape Music center, involving live performers, eight television cameras, twenty monitors, and eight audio recorders functioning simultaneously. In another project, three and four acts of King Lear were presented simultaneously in several modes: actors seen in rear-projected movies, actors in video projections, actors seen through several closed-circuit monitors, and "live" actors on a stage.
But it remained for the medium of broadcast television, and The Empire of Things, to reveal to Makanna a means of reaching out to the hearts of the public. "He has such a powerful conceptual mind," recalls John Coney, "that all I did was guide him into a general technical format, offered suggestions that he could use as a matrix, and explained the capabilities of the color-film chain in painting video color. We processed The Empire of Things entirely by de-beaming the guns of the film chain. We formed the film into loops and practiced over and over again until the balance between form and content was perfect. We had a couple of engineers— Larry Bentley and Wayne McDonald— who were very interested in that piece of equipment as an electronic painting palette."
While Music With Balls wholly nonverbal and concrete, The Empire of Things is that rare combination of words and images often sought but seldom achieved. Makanna miraculously manages to contrast the abstraction of words with the concreteness of images, clarity with ambiguity, alternating between evocation and exposition to produce an overwhelming emotional environment of evocative powers. The title of the piece is the title of a short story by H. L. Mountzoures that appeared in the New Yorker magazine. An offscreen narrator reads the entire story aloud while we see a collection of images shot by Makanna specifically for this purpose, combined with stock footage from old movies, newsreels, and TV commercials.