Performance Archive

Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve, Percy Grainger’s Electric Eye Tone Tool

Arts and Culture Centre, July 13, 2006
Sound Symposium, St. John’s, Newfoundland

The Sound Symposium in St. John’s Newfoundland is known for its exceptionally eclectic nature: it gives the exotic and arcane a warm welcome. So in 2006 when Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve flew all the way from Australia with their replica of Percy Grainger’s Electric Eye Tone Tool, they must have felt right at home.

Composer, writer, and instrument maker Warren Burt is a Grainger completist who has researched this truly strange composer and inventor’s early revolutions in analog synthesizers. As Burt noted in an Australian Radio Broadcast interview: “Between 1954 and 1961, Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross worked on a machine called the Electric Eye Tone Tool. Years later, I was looking at the diagram of the Electric Eye machine in the Grainger Museum and I said, "That should be fairly easy to rebuild." Well, it turns out it's not fairly easy to rebuild but it was rebuildable. And after much love, much sweat we have, in fact, a reconstruction of Grainger's Electric Eye machine.” Intermedia Artist Catherine Schieve has collaborated with Burt on a number of performance projects. It is she who made the mylar graphic score you see in the video excerpted here.

Check out Warren Burt’s excellent 2007 article “Some Musical and Sociological Aspects of Australian Experimental Music”

Reconstructing the Electric Eye Tone Tool – the first light-controlled synthesizer

Percy Grainger (1882-1961), the famous Australian pianist, composer, inventor might be best known for his early folk song collections and popular arrangements, such as his 1918 arrangement of Country Gardens (an English folk tune collected by Cecil Sharp). But Grainger was also an inveterate experimentalist whose ideas were decidedly ahead of their time: his experiments with uneven time signatures like 2.5 over 5 (1899); indeterminacy (1912); extended piano techniques (1916) predate much better known 20th century examples. During the 1950s he worked with physicist Burnett Cross to invent a number of early electronic synthesizers capable of playing his “free music”. In a 1942 letter, Grainger describe free music thus:

In this music [free music], melody is as free to roam thru tonal space as a painter is free to draw and paint free lines, free curves, create free shapes. (Current music is like trying to do a picture of a landscape, a portrait of a person, in small squares-like a mosaic-or in pre-ordained shapes: straight lines or steps.) in free-music the various tone strands (melodic lines) may each have their own rhythmic pulse (or not), if they like; but one tone-strand is not enslaved to the other (as in current music) by rhythmic same-beatness. In free music there are no scales-the melodic lines may slide and glide from and to any depths and heights (practical) tonal space, just as they may hover around any 'note' without ever alighting upon it. In other words, they have freedom of melodic movement, as a bird has (compared with an airship, which does 'trips' between 'destinations' - just as, in current music melodic lines make trips between destinations). In free music harmony will consist of free combinations (when desired) of all free intervals - not merely concordant or discordant combinations of set intervals (as in current music), but free combinations of all the intervals (but with a gliding state, not need fully in an anchored state) between the present intervals ... for me of course, my free music seems entirely inspired (heard in the inner ear) and that is why I feel so much duty towards it. It seems to me the only type of music that tallies our modern scientific conception of life (our longing to know life as it is, not merely symbolistic interpretations), and clearly the kind of music to which all musical progress of many centuries has been working up. The irregular rhythms of Cyril Scott (adapted by him from 1898 experiments and copied from Scott and almost everybody else) are a half-way house towards free music ... free music, alone, uses all the resources as it stands ... (Grainger).

The Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne houses Grainger and Cross’s most famous early synthesizer:

Commonly known as the “Kangaroo Pouch machine”, it consists of a large wooden frame approximately eight feet tall, housing upright rotating turrets left and right (the "feeder' and "eater" turrets) and between which a large paper roll is wound. This roll consists of three layers: a main paper roll 80 inches high, across which eight smaller horizontal strips of paper (or subsidiary rolls) are attached front and back. The top edges of these subsidiary rolls are cut into curvilinear shapes (the hills and dales) and attached to the main roll at their bottom edges, each forming a type of "pouch". As the turrets are rotated clockwise, the undulating shapes cut into the rolls move from right to left.

Eight valve oscillators are mounted onto the wooden frame, four at the front and four at the back, as are eight amplifiers. The pitch controls of the oscillators are attached to levers, connected at the other ends to circular runners, or spools, which "ride" moving rolls. The volume controls of the amplifiers are operated in the same way. Thus, the pitch of the oscillators, and the volume of the amplifiers, can be accurately controlled by carefully cutting shapes into the paper rolls. The large size of the machine is necessary to maintain accuracy of pitch control. Because the valves changed characteristics as they aged, the machine needed to be recalibrated after around three hours of use.

Grainger’s final machine was perhaps the most sophisticated. It too worked on the principle of a moving roll, but this time made of clear plastic. A row of spotlights projected light beams through the plastic roll and onto an array of photocells, which in turn controlled the pitch of the oscillators. The undulating shapes cut into the paper rolls of the Kangaroo Pouch machine were now simply painted onto the plastic roll with black ink. The circuitry for this machine was transistorised, lending a stability which could not be achieved with the use of valves. The machine was lost in the 1970s while being transported from Grainger's home in White Plains to the Grainger museum in Melbourne. (Wikipedia)

This last machine was the Electric Eye Tone Tool (1960) that Burt and Schieve recreated for their performance at the 2006 Sound Symposium. Alas, the crankshaft was broken in transporting the instrument from Australia, so Burt and Schieve played the score over the photocells using the elegant choreography you see in this excerpt.

For more on the Sound Symposium, please see our video clip and discussion of the Black Auks at http://www.experimentalperformance.ca/archive/Black.html

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve for permission to document their concert and post this excerpt. Thanks also to the Sound Symposium for supporting Sounds Provocative: Experimental Music Performance in Canada.

Works Cited

Letter, Percy Grainger to music critic Olin Downer, 10 September 1942. Quoted in Elinor Wrobel, “Percy Grainger's Art: Da-Da ist or Aussie 'make-do-ist'?”. http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/grainger/pubs/artessay.html#4 1 July 2009.

Percy Grainger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Grainger 1 July 2009.

Percy Grainger, interview with Barry Ould and Warren Burt. Broadcast 6.30pm on 09/02/2004, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Transcript available at http://www.abc.net.au/gnt/history/Transcripts/s1041034.htm 1 July 2009.