Death of Dockstader

Death Dockstader (born March 20, 1932 in Saint Paul , Minnesota , † February 27, 2015 ) was an American composer of electronic music , especially musique concrète .

Musical career

Dockstader studied psychology and art, then painting and film at the University of Minnesota before moving to Hollywood in 1955 to work as an Apprentice Film Editor. He made his living doing cartoons for the local newspapers and magazines. He developed the soundtracks for animated cartoons and eventually also designed stories and storyboards for cartoons. Since 1958 he worked and learned as a sound engineer at Gotham Recording Studios, where he also began to deal with concrete music and to compose.

“ Pierre Schaeffer's original definition was to work with the sound in the ear, directly with the sound, as a contrast to the“ abstract ”music in which sounds were written. Like Schaeffer, a sound engineer at work, I had practice as a “worker with rhythms, frequencies and intensities”. As a non-musician, I couldn't write music, but this “new art of music” didn't need a notation. In the beginning musique concrète was not even recognized as music. Schaeffer's first retrospective was called A Concert of Noises "

- Tod Dockstader : Unofficial website

He also liked the “democratic” orientation of Concrete Music. With reference to Edgar Varèses Poème Électronique , he calls his "music of the space" organized music , the disorganization of the composition takes place through the sounds themselves, the composer "organizes" (or reorganizes) the sounds.

Dockstader's first record, Eight Electronic Pieces , was released in 1960 and was later used on the soundtrack of Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969). The piece Traveling Music was his first stereo composition . In 1966 Owl Records released a series of four albums on which his compositions from the first half of the 1960s were published, and on which he mainly worked with manipulation of band material. After he had achieved some respectable successes and was occasionally played on the radio alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen , Edgard Varèse and John Cage , the Gotham Studios closed and Dockstader had no more possibilities to record his music. He applied to various electronic music institutions, but was rejected due to a lack of academic experience in this field. Instead, he began to work with audiovisual media, producing film strips and videos for general education schools.

In the early 1990s, many of the pieces that appeared on Owl were re- released on two CDs (Starkland) with new unreleased material. In the early 21st century, compositions, now based on computers instead of tapes, continued to appear on Sub Rosa and ReR Megacorp .

Influences

His influences include Luciano Berio , Otto Luening , Vladimir Ussachevski and Karlheinz Stockhausen . In addition, a wide variety of instrumental music, especially the music of the 20th century, "everything that was daramatic, colorful and adventurous - everything from Igor Stravinsky's Firebird to Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla symphony to Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître ".

Discography

• Eight Electronic Pieces (1961) ( Folkways Records , 1968)
• Apocalypse (1961) (Starkland, 1993)
• Luna Park (1961) (Starkland, 1993)
• Drone (1962) (Starkland, 1993)
• Water Music (1963) (Starkland, 1992)
• Quatermass (1964) (Starkland, 1992)
• Two Moons of Quatermass (1964) (Starkland, 1992)
• Four Telemetry Tapes (1965) (Starkland, 1993)
• Omniphony (1966) (ReR Megacorp, 2002)
• Aerial # 1 (2003) ( Sub Rosa , 2005)
• Pond (with David Lee Myers ) (ReR Megacorp, 2004)
• Bijou (with David Lee Myers) (2005) (ReR Megacorp, 2005)
• Aerial # 2 (2003) (Sub Rosa, 2005)
• Aerial # 3 (2003) (Sub Rosa, 2006)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tod Dockstader Dies: Pre-Keyboards Electronic Music Legend
2. ↑ Unofficial website ( Memento of the original dated February 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated February 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ ibid.
5. ↑ http://www.dockstader.info

Web links

• Quatermass at Starkland
• Unofficial Tod-Dockstader website
• Biography and radio interview at UbuWeb Sound