ONCE Group - Gordon Mumma

Gordon Mumma

Gordon Mumma (b. 1935), after dropping out of high school, completed one year of composition studies at the University in 1952–53 before dropping out, but he continued to live in Ann Arbor and composed and performed as a horn player and pianist. Among his contributions to the ONCE Festival include:

Sinfonia for 12 Instruments & Magnetic Tape (1958–60) combines an electronic work Mumma created for Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre with a new instrumental composition. In this work, Mumma explores “sound blocks” or musical densities. In the first movement, the sound blocks interact with each other, but the range is restricted to two octaves. Intensified by its small range, the music uses clusters of sound juxtaposed against one another, like a group of people bumping into each other in a space much too small. The second movement reflects most strongly the avant-garde styles Mumma may have learned in his brief studies with Finney in its pointillist and sparse in texture. The third movement begins as a duet, expands to a trio, then a quartet, and gradually expands to form an eight-voice linear contrapuntal texture. The texture changes into a “sound-specified quasi-improvisation”––instrument pitches and motives are specified, but their placement in time is not––with electronic sounds.

Meanwhile, a Twopiece (1961) is for two groups of percussion instruments—including standard and household percussion, one group of which is mounted inside the piano—piano, and one unspecified instrument (in the ONCE performance, Mumma played French horn), and electronic soundtrack. In Generation, Sheff explains that Meanwhile, a Twopiece “provides an opportunity for two performers to make use of determinate sound material with a given choreography in a way that emphasizes continual action and sound.” The ONCE Festival premiere began with Ashley and Mumma running onto the stage, banging percussion instruments as they entered. Four scores—seven pages each—were placed at different locations on the stage and Mumma and Ashley played any of the four parts in any order at any given moment. The performance ended with Ashley and Mumma running offstage.

Gestures II (1958–60) is for two pianos and an electronic soundtrack. According to Mumma, “the composition of Gestures II began in the later 1950s as a grand concept for the diverse virtuosity of the two pianists.” The sections involve a variety of piano manipulations—playing on the keyboard, playing directly on the strings, and on the wood and metal parts inside the piano––and can be performed in any order. “Section X” is one single page, which lists coordinated activities for the pianists with hundreds of possible combinations, none of which can repeat. “Section X” could last anywhere from a few seconds to an hour. Large Size Mograph (1962) for piano Medium Size Mograph (1962) is considered the first cybersonic work, although the idea had been in use for nearly fifteen years. It is one of a series of Mographs Mumma composed based on his work in a seismographic laboratory. The title is a play on the word seismograph and the music is meant to imitate a seismographic event Mumma observed when working in the lab. To make this work cybersonic, Mumma put a microphone on the piano soundboard. The sounds picked up by the microphone were altered—the attack was maintained, but the sustaining part of the sound and the decay were reversed—and then played back to the audience.

Mumma wrote the electroacoustic soundtrack for Scavarda’s abstract film Greys (1963), following an important characteristic of Scavarda’s work: “limiting sound materials and developing them with restricted but complex procedures.” Mumma used very few sound sources for Greys and employed unusual tape-recording techniques such as magnetic-overlapping rather than standard sound mixing.