Mark Zaki
Visual, Médias, and Performing Arts
Rutgers University
314 Linden Street
Camden, New Jersey 08102, Etats-Unis
markzaki@rutgers.edu
Fundamental Sound:
A Conversation with
Hubert Howe
Hubert Howe (voir la figure 1) received AB, MFA, et
PhD degrees from Princeton University, où il
studied with J. K. (“Jim”) Randall, Godfrey Winham,
and Milton Babbitt. As one of the early researchers
in computer music, he was a principal contributor
to the development of the Music 4B and Music
4BF programs. Dans 1968, he joined the faculty of
Queens College of the City University of New York
(CUNY), where he became a professor of music and
director of the electronic music studios. He also
taught computer music at the Juilliard School in
Manhattan for 20 années.
Howe has been a member of the American
Composers Alliance since 1974 and has served
as its President from 2002 à 2011. He is also a
member of the New York Composers Circle and
has served as Executive Director since 2013. He is
currently active as Director of the New York City
Electroacoustic Music Festival, which he founded
dans 2009. Recordings of his music have been released
on the labels Capstone and Centaur, entre autres.
This conversation took place over Zoom during
March and April 2022. It begins with a look at
Howe’s student years at Princeton and traces his
pioneering journey through to his musical activity
aujourd'hui. Aspects of his composition and programming
work are discussed, as well as his thoughts on pitch
structure and timbral approaches to composition.
More information about his music and work can be
found at http://www.huberthowe.org.
Early Days
Mark Zaki: Tell me about your early days; what
initially drew you to music?
Hubert Howe: I grew up in Los Angeles in a
time before television. We used to have a radio
Computer Music Journal, 45:3, pp. 9–19, Fall 2021
est ce que je:10.1162/COMJ_a_00611
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
that I would listen to at night for a program called
Symphony Hall. I had been singing as a child, mais
when I went to play an instrument, I chose the
oboe, because the other kids wanted to play flute or
clarinet, but they needed oboists. I quickly realized
I was getting myself into something a lot more
difficult than what most of the others were doing.
But I liked playing oboe, and I started studying with
a teacher and became pretty good at it.
When you play an instrument like the oboe, ils
always need you. My teacher was a freelance musi-
cian, and he would take me along as a second oboist.
I got to play in several community symphonies from
Orange County to the San Fernando Valley.
When I was a senior in high school, I started
playing with the UCLA orchestra. I got to play
English horn on works like Debussy’s Pelléas et
Mélisande and the West Coast premiere of Samuel
Barber’s Vanessa. These were great experiences, comme
they were big, long pieces that took an awful lot
of work, and there were several performances of
eux.
Zaki: Did you continue to play when you went
on to college?
Howe: Oui, I played in several groups as an
undergraduate when I got to Princeton. Là
were opportunities to play new music by graduate
students. Any time there was a group that needed an
oboist, I would be it. I also played in the orchestra,
which has always been a rather serious thing at
Princeton.
Zaki: It’s a strong organization and they have
always had some great players. Did you know
anything about the Princeton faculty before you got
là?
Howe: When I got to Princeton [dans 1960] là
was a shock of reality. The only person I had heard
of before was Roger Sessions, who was truly one of
the great early 20th-century American composers. je
didn’t know much about him. He turned out to be
rather nice, but Milton Babbitt was the leading light
là. Everybody was interested in him.
Zaki
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Chiffre 1. Hubert Howe.
(Photo by Stefanie Howe.)
compute the number of chords and subcollections
et ainsi de suite. I did several studies with him like that.
I also computed all the possible all-interval sets for
Babbitt, and he was very happy with that. Depuis
that experience, I ultimately wrote my first article,
called “Some Combinational Properties of Pitch
Structures,” which was published in one of the first
issues of the new magazine Perspectives of New
Music (Howe 1965).
Eventually Randall got this idea of going up to
Bell Labs to learn computer music. He wanted to
bring a copy of the program they were using back to
Princeton and run it there. I started going up with
him, and during that time I met Max Mathews and
learned about Music IV. I had no idea how important
a person Max was, but he was always very nice and
generous to me. Joan Miller, who was one of the
programmers there, was exceptional. She was an
acoustic researcher, and when we started studying
her code, we found it was amazingly well written.
Zaki: You were playing and doing some program-
ming. How did you get into composing then?
Howe: I did not compose until I got to Princeton.
When I started composing, it was not professional
travail, and I didn’t see that yet as my life’s work. À
that time, I was writing tonal music. In doing that, je
was trying to be original, in ways that I thought were
in fact original. That was the music I was studying
alors, and that is what they teach you during your
undergraduate years. I started out writing tonal
musique, but I quickly realized that it was not going
to be innovative. I just came to feel that it was not
possible to write tonal music without sounding
like something that had been done before. What’s
plus, I was sitting in this context of people doing all
kinds of original, really new approaches to music,
so I naturally started thinking along those lines. je
started hearing all this other stuff that became much
more interesting to me.
Zaki: And you stayed at Princeton to pursue
graduate work in 1964.
Howe: Oui, I decided to stay because that was
exactly when Princeton was importing Music IV. Comme
I was starting grad school, I developed a very close
relationship with Godfrey Winham and I started
studying composition with him. Godfrey and I later
wrote Music 4B, which kept the basic concepts of
Zaki: Babbitt was certainly an iconic figure. Did
you get to work with him as undergraduate?
Howe: A little bit. The crucial thing for me about
Babbitt initially was that I heard a performance of
“Vision and Prayer” [1961, soprano and synthesized
tape], which just floored me. I started talking to
Babbitt about it in detail. I was interested in the
sounds and the synthesizer and everything about it.
I started studying what I could, although there was
very little available at that point. I eventually came
to see Babbitt as a role model and mentor.
First Compositions, the Computer, and Writing
Music IVB
Zaki: You came to Princeton to study music. Comment
were you introduced to the computer? Was it
through Babbitt?
Howe: Non. I had roommates who were studying
engineering and they were using the mainframe at
school. I was interested in what they were doing,
and I learned how to program. Then Jim Randall got
me involved in a research project to do things like
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Music IV but changed the score format and began
to add numerous new units to the program. [Note:
Whereas Bell Labs used Roman numerals in naming
their music programs, Winham and Howe used
Arabic numerals.]
Godfrey was a very interesting and intelligent
person and was independently wealthy, so he didn’t
have to think about making a living. He basically
devoted his life to thinking about music and writing
some of it. He said to me that he did not think
that he was primarily a composer, and he did not
write very much music; but everything he did write
was outstanding. His best works were his articles.
His senior thesis at Princeton was remarkably well
fait, and of course his dissertation, “Composition
with Arrays,” was highly influential on me.
We would have our composition lessons on
Saturday night for about three hours at a time. Il
would go over everything. I think one of the nicest
comments he made to me about a piece that I wrote
was “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” But when he would
go through it, he would look at every little detail.
To see his insight and the way his mind worked was
illuminating.
Zaki: While you were at Princeton did you have
any connection with the activity at Columbia?
Howe: I was one of the first students to go from
Princeton to Columbia to study electronic music
in the studio there. During my time at Columbia,
I got to know Vladimir Ussachevsky quite well. je
also met Pril Smiley and Alice Shields and was able
to observe how they worked. At the time it was
frustrating, because you could not do something
seemingly simple like take a recording and just
transpose it up. They had procedures where you
might manipulate the sound using tape speed, pour
example, but that would change the durations
as well as the frequencies. Overtones would get
moved into different areas, so it wouldn’t sound the
same.
What I found was that working in the studio
was interesting from the standpoint of learning
about sound. What they were doing then, which is
generally the case with electroacoustic music now,
is that you would hear sounds that you would never
hear in music otherwise. You start thinking about
the musical qualities of these sounds. I began getting
the feeling that I wanted to be able to compose with
those qualities, and of course this is what you can
do with the computer, if you can figure out how to
specify it.
Zaki: Today we walk around with exponentially
more powerful devices in our pockets that can
do all sorts of operations that must have been
unimaginable then.
Howe: Working with mainframes in those days
was a completely different experience than what
you find today with modern computers. Punch cards
were the only interface with the computer, and there
were a lot of problems with them. Cards would get
out of order, and everything would be screwed up.
You put your deck together and submitted it. Hours
later you would get a printout.
To use the computer to generate music you had to
write in assembly language. The rate we were using
était 10,000 samples per second. That meant that you
would be doing a ton of operations just to generate
something like a sine wave. The only way you could
make that work was to have an efficient assembly
language program that would put that all together.
Music 4B, which was a revision of Bell Labs’ Music
IV, was all written in assembly language.
Zaki: Did Princeton have a digital-to-analog
converter, or were you still going up to Bell Labs?
Howe: Originally, we had no converter, but Bell
Labs gave us their old one, ce qui était 10 kHz,
monophonic. If you wanted stereo and wanted a
higher sampling rate, you had to go to Bell Labs.
What I would do is work everything out at 10k
mono, and when I felt that it was ready to go, je
would make a stereo version and take it to Bell Labs
on a digital computer data tape. Then they would
convert it and you would get back an analog audio
tape. The most you could put on one data tape was
about two minutes’ worth of music. If you were
producing a larger piece of music, you would have
to splice the final product together from multiple
audio tapes. If you had a nine-minute piece, that was
a lot of splicing. The data we walk around with on a
flash drive today is so much more than what we had
on the reels in those days.
Zaki: I think one advantage you had, fonctionnement
that way, is that you had time to think about what
you were doing.
Zaki
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Howe: There are advantages, which I later came
to appreciate. For one thing, you really must know
what you are doing. You can’t do anything until you
describe it completely, and in ways that people who
write [conventional] scores don’t think about. You
had to figure out what you wanted, to specify that
in detail, and then put together a computer program
that would work. You had to make sure you had
all the bugs out of it. It was difficult, but it was
worthwhile.
Music 4BF
Zaki: How did you come to develop Music 4BF?
Howe: The IBM 7094 at Princeton was getting
overrun and out of date and just could not keep
up with the demand. Princeton upgraded to the
next level of computers that IBM came out with, le
System/360. That meant that we could no longer use
our assembly language programs. We had to rewrite
everything, and that was when I wrote Music 4BF. je
translated all the resources of Music 4B into Fortran.
We would then have started a new project to
design an assembly language program for the 360;
but then Barry Vercoe moved to Princeton, and he
just wrote the program [Note: Music 360, part of
which was written in 360 assembly language and
part in Fortran].
Vercoe was a fantastic programmer. Music 360
took the score and orchestra resources from Music
IV and Music 4B, and those resources persisted
all the way through Csound. People started using
that from then on. It was a great program and well
thought out, even better than Music 4B.
An Affinity for Atonal Music
Zaki: I imagine that the environment at Princeton
was conducive to exploring nontonal music. Là
certainly was a strong serial influence and presence
there because of Babbitt.
Howe: When I was at Princeton, I would say about
half of the composers were writing tonal music and
the other half were serial composers. But I was not
attracted to serialism. I was more interested in the
kind of atonality where you didn’t have to complete
the aggregate every so often. I was more interested
in the relationships between the smaller groups
of notes. What I did was develop a conception of
music that was based on pitch relationships. Je pense
that is the way people hear music; they hear what’s
happening locally. They only develop a picture of the
larger aspects of the piece upon repeated listening.
When I started thinking about not writing tonal
musique, I got really interested in the atonal music
of Arnold Schoenberg. Particularly things like the
Book of the Hanging Gardens, Three Piano Pieces
(Op. 11), the Five Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 16), et
Five Pieces for Piano (Op. 23). Plus tard, I got into the
music of Bartók, particularly the Mikrokosmos.
Zaki: Not Schoenberg’s serial music?
Howe: Some of it, but mostly his transitional
musique. Cependant, I also read George Perle’s Serial
Composition and Atonality, which is a well written
and insightful book. I read the theories of Allen
Forte, but I was never really convinced that he
understood the music. He once wrote an article that
claimed that Schoenberg’s Op. 11, Non. 1 was a perfect
demonstration of Forte’s atonal theories. I rewrote
some of the Schoenberg passages that were discussed
in the article in a way that I felt did conform more
to the theory Forte was describing. That helped
me work out my thinking as well. As all this was
going on, I began to develop my own great vision for
musical coherence. This is something I ultimately
worked into my dissertation, “Multi-Dimensional
Arrays.”
Thinking about Pitch Structure in Atonal Music
Zaki: You have an interesting way of dealing with
your musical material compositionally.
Howe: One important point I would stress is that
all my music, whether electronic or acoustic, est
based on pitch relations in many different dimen-
sions. My first insight was the idea that to make
sense of music not based on triads, you must have
some meaning and identification attached to any
groups of notes. That led to the concept of pitch
structures, and I think every pitch structure has
a unique identity that is identified by an interval
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structure. We don’t have a name for a structure like
(0, 1, 3), but it’s unique and does not sound like
anything else.
there are two, they can be two that are related by
inversion, two related by identity, or two that are
related by cycle of fourth or fifth equivalence.
My use of pitch structure as a basic concept is not
the same as Allen Forte’s theory of set complexes.
He thinks that the interval content is the defining
chose, regardless of where the intervals occur within
the notes. Par exemple, to Forte, (0, 1, 3) et (0, 2, 3)
are the same. They are not the same for me, ils sont
related by inversion.
Zaki: Is it an ordering issue?
Howe: Non, it’s a structural issue. Forte looks at
(0, 3, 7) et (0, 4, 7) and says they are the same
because the interval content is the same. But one
is a major triad and the other a minor triad. S'il y a
is no difference between those, then we have no
understanding of tonal music.
Zaki: He was just checking off intervals.
Howe: Oui, and I think that is one of the basic
things he got wrong. The basic structure in my
music is an array. These are structures of at least
two dimensions, where you must consider the
structure of both the chords and the voices, like a
series of chords. Most arrays that I use are 3×4, 4×4,
or 5×4.
Another thing I learned from Jim Randall is that
there are four multiplicative operations, each of
which can generate a unique structure when applied
to a set of notes. Everybody is familiar with identity
and inversion, but there is also a cycle of fifths
equivalence and a cycle of fourths equivalence.
These four operations are referred to as M1, M5, M7,
and M11.
[Editor’s note: For further explanation, voir,
Par exemple, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Multiplication_(musique).]
Zaki: Multiplying each pitch class in the set by
the interval number?
Howe: Oui, but not all sets produce four different
intervallic structures. En fait, there are sets that only
have one form—for example, (0, 2, 4). This will be
the same no matter which of the four multiplicative
operations you apply. Many structures have just two
different forms, but there are several that have four
different forms. I classify all the structures that exist
by type, whether they have just one form, or two,
or four, and by the operations that produce them. If
Zaki: Do you see the array as the horizontal being
the temporal ordering and the vertical dimension as
simultaneity?
Howe: That is a simple way of looking at it, mais
they can also be turned on their end where you
can make the voices the chords and vice versa; et
the elements of the array do not always end up
being adjacent in the music. I use groups of notes
that produce four structures and create arrays from
ceux. Donc, you can have arrays that are 3×4, 4×4,
5×4, and 6×4.
It turns out that when you do this, there are
large families of groups that are related by some
basic identity. There are four particularly important
families, which are related by the tetrachords (0,
1, 2, 7), (0, 2, 3, 5), (0, 3, 4, 7), et (0, 3, 6, 9). Le
last of these is the diminished seventh chord, le
complement of which is the octatonic scale. Là
are many other smaller families.
Some arrays produce just eight notes, and some
produce all twelve notes. With a 3×4 array you can
have three collections of four notes that generate
eight pitch classes, and you can have four collections
of three notes that can generate all twelve. The same
is true with tetrachords. There are sets of tetrachords
where two groups of four tetrachords only produce
eight notes, and two of them produce all twelve.
When you get to pentachords and hexachords, ils
always produce all twelve. There is also the concept
of weighted pitch classes, where a particular pitch
class might appear twice in the array.
To give you an example of how this can work, toi
can have a 3×4 array contained within a 4×4 array.
You can also have a 4×4 array contained within a
5×4 array or a 6×4 array. That leads to possibilities
where you can create note successions based on
common tone relations. In some of my pieces I have
entire sections that are related in a manner like that.
Zaki: You are giving it a pivot point, so to speak.
Howe: Something like that. In twelve-tone music,
it’s very often these combinatorial relations that
determine how things go. This is similar, mais c'est un
little more complicated because you must look at
both the chords and the voices.
Zaki
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Queens College and Teaching
Zaki: After you finished your PhD, you were offered
a teaching position at Queen’s College, CUNY.
Howe: Oui, dans 1967. Queens College had a really
distinguished faculty when I started teaching there.
There were twelve composers on the staff. The big
names were George Perle and Hugo Weisgall. I saw
that people like Perle and Weisgall were not writing
what I was writing, but they were clearly very decent
and serious composers. The problem for me was that
nobody there was interested in what I was doing.
A typical response was ”I don’t care about your
computers.” Later, when everybody started using
computers for word processing and such, they were
asking me for recommendations on what computers
they should buy.
Zaki: Nobody was doing electroacoustic music
when you started at Queens?
Howe: Non, nothing. One thing to remember is
that computers were expensive. Few places had the
ability to do this kind of stuff. Bell Labs was ahead
of everybody, and I think that was just because Max
Mathews decided that this is what they were going
to do, and he had the power to do it. They were going
to get there first.
Zaki: What about the facilities at Queens?
Howe: After I had been at Queens for about a
année, I got the chance to set up an electronic music
studio. We got a couple of tape recorders and a Moog
synthesizer. Later we got a Buchla system, but Moog
was the standard.
One of the first challenges was that Queens did
not have a computer. As soon as I got there, I let the
people in the sciences know that I was interested
in using a computer; I got onto a committee that
oversaw deciding what computer to get. I told them
it had to have a converter, and they were very
receptive to that idea. Finalement, they got an XDS
Sigma 7 (originally called Scientific Data Systems,
later taken over by Xerox). It had a digital-to-analog
converter and was a decent mainframe machine.
I wrote an assembly language program like Music
4B for that machine called Music 7, which we used
for several years. I think we got the machine in the
early 1970s and it lasted through the late 1980s.
At that point, CUNY had set up its own computer
center in Manhattan, so we could go in there and
use a big 360 machine. I was able to use Music 360
there and write tapes. That was much faster than
the XDS machine.
Zaki: Were you working with synthesizers at this
point too?
Howe: Actually, J'étais. I never wrote any music
involving the Moog or Buchla synthesizers, but I
learned a lot about sounds from them. Much later, je
did write music for synthesizers, mainly the Yamaha
DX7. One important thing to mention is that Bob
Moog went to Queens College. He was delighted
when we put the studio in, and he came to the
college and opened it up for us.
I found it very interesting to work with the sounds
on the Moog synthesizer, and probably one of the
most interesting things about it was the filter. je
later wrote a piece called “Mosaic” [2001, computer
musique] that used filtering in different ways. Et
I got to play that piece for Moog at a concert. Dans
the introduction, I talked about how his filter had
influenced me in this, even though I hadn’t used his
instrument to make the sounds.
NeXT Steps
Zaki: When did you start moving away from working
with big metal?
Howe: Around 1990 personal computers began to
get more powerful. The NeXT machine was the first
one that had D/A and A/D converters built into it,
and this became much more common. Then there
was a period where you could get sound cards that
you could put into a personal computer that had a
converter on them that were pretty good. Now of
cours, you don’t even need that. The computers
that we have today have everything built right into
eux.
Zaki: Did you work on the NeXT platform?
Howe: I did for a while, yes. When the NeXT came
out it was great, it was way ahead of everything else
at the time. But then Intel came out with its series
of Pentium processors, and each one was better
than what the NeXT processor could do. You could
overclock them, and NeXT just got swamped. Plus,
NeXT computers were always very expensive.
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Zaki: I remember at Princeton in the early 1990s,
you could not turn around without bumping into a
NeXT machine. Paul Lansky was a real fan, et le
whole program was centered around them. I cut my
teeth on the NeXT platform.
Howe: They were great machines. But now your
personal computer is much more powerful and
can run rings around them. Since the 1990s I have
been using personal computers that were powerful
enough to make real computer music.
Spectral Considerations
Zaki: In addition to your computer music, toi
have written a considerable amount of music for
traditional instruments and conventional forces.
Does your compositional approach using pitch
structures and arrays change with respect to the
moyen, or is there crossover between your acoustic
and electroacoustic music?
Howe: All of my music uses the same struc-
tural basis of arrays. While I had written small
instrumental pieces all during this period, I had
a major opportunity to write instrumental music
when I was a visiting professor at the University
of Alabama in 1988–89. I had a smaller teaching
schedule, and I had to give a few lectures and such.
This gave me more time to write music. I wrote
my first symphony there, which is the longest piece
I’ve ever written, over 40 minutes long. Only the
second movement has ever been performed. I’m not
so sure now that I would want the whole thing to be
played.
Both that piece and my second symphony, lequel
was written in 1992, have a kind of 19th century
sense of harmonic prolongation. I came to feel that
that sense of prolongation wastes time, you don’t
want to hear an atonal chord prolonged as long as
you might want to hear a triad.
Donc, I began a new direction with my quintet [1994,
flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano], which I think
is one of my better pieces. À 18 minutes, it might
require too much of an attention span for many
people today. This is my first piece in which I used
the idea of instruments fading in and out together.
I thought that was a very interesting and beautiful
idea, and it became a bigger part of my computer
music where fading can really be controlled more
accurately.
Zaki: That sounds like a precursor to your interest
in spectral merging.
Howe: Possibly, but that was an idea that goes
back to Milton Babbitt, who asserted that you need
three successive partials for the fundamental to be
heard. I found that is not true. When you have a
group of harmonic partials entering individually,
at some point the fundamental jumps out. A lot of
my timbral music plays with that concept. Là
is one level of pitches going on in the overtones
and another in the fundamentals. The fundamentals
don’t often emerge until the sound has been going
for a while.
Timbral Music
Zaki: How did you get interested in timbral music?
Howe: In those early years, I wrote several timbre
études, and one of my early pieces, “Improvisation
on the Overtone Series” [1977, computer music],
was composed of overtones. As you listen to it, toi
realize how all that affects the timbres that go by.
You realize that timbre is much more than what
instruments can produce.
Another thing I had done in my student days
was to study acoustics extensively. I concluded
that nobody really understood musical instruments
particularly well. Acousticians describe the ways
instruments are constructed and talk a little bit
about timbre, but instrumental sounds are much
more complex. There are all kinds of nuances and
things like pitch instability, rhythmic inaccuracies,
vibrato, and intonation deviation, and they are
all mysteries. These are all things that are not
specified in music notation. Early authors of books
on acoustics simply ignored all these ideas, but then
their topic wasn’t really music.
When I was going to Bell Labs, I got to know
people like Jean-Claude Risset. People there were
interested in these things, and they did some early
studies in acoustics. Risset studied trumpet and
violin tones. His study of trumpet sounds is in-
teresting. He did an experiment where he had a
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room full of professional trumpet players and had
a curtain from behind which he played sounds. Il
asked the trumpet players to tell him which sound
was a real trumpet, and which one was a computer-
generated trumpet. They couldn’t tell the difference!
So that says something about how accurate their
understanding of it was.
Zaki: These were samples?
Howe: Non, Risset was synthesizing sounds using
Music V. He did an analysis of the sounds, lequel
revealed things like the envelope for each harmonic.
He used the properties from the analysis to build the
sounds.
Alors, people like John Chowning at Stanford
started analyzing sounds and did similar studies.
The thing about all these guys, and this is true of
Bell Labs as well as Stanford, is that there seemed to
be a real focus on identifying instruments, or voices,
or qualities of sound. We want to say that is a cello.
Or that is a violin.
Zaki: By identify, you mean to label a particular
sound’s signature?
Howe: You have a complex of properties that go
into creating a sound, and the goal is to identify what
it is. There is no idea that you can be creative with
these properties, like vibrato, intonation deviation,
envelopes, timbre, and other things. One example
I sometimes use is that in instrumental music if
you want to have a pizzicato sound you must use
a stringed instrument. In computer music, there is
no reason we can’t think of having a pizzicato on a
clarinet tone. That type of creativity was just beyond
their realm of focus. When Chowning came up with
the idea of spectral fusion—and I think the first
time was in his piece “Phoné” [1980–81, four-track
tape, based on sung-voice synthesis]—he had this
brassy sound that went on for a long time and that
finally morphed into a female voice singing. Je pense
it was important to him that you had two endpoints
along that continuum that were clearly identifi-
capable. To me, what was interesting was what was
going on. . .
Zaki: . . . in the middle, droite.
Howe: Exactly, that’s where you find things that
you do not hear in instrumental music. I am very
interested in using those properties creatively.
Overtones and Undertones
Zaki: Some of those properties you are describ-
ing, like vibrato for instance, are spontaneous and
variable means of injecting humanity into a perfor-
mance. It gives the music a humanizing element.
Howe: You could think of it that way. But the
thing is, when using vibrato in computer music you
are not limited to what musical instruments can
do. You can have vibrato at a much faster speed
than anybody can physically play, and much slower
aussi. You can have it changing in a structural way
between one and the other.
Zaki: Paul Lansky used to talk about the corporeal
aspect of a sound, and how for a listener, if you could
understand the physicality in the sound, you would
have a different relationship to the sound than
if it was purely abstract. If you can imagine the
hamster wheel going around, or it sounded like
something was being struck or plucked for example,
you would have a certain kind of understanding of
that sound. Donc, I wonder if there is a point when
you try to “pluck a clarinet sound” and we do
not understand the mechanism, if that makes it
confusing somehow? Or create a kind of distance?
Howe: If you think about it, with most computer
musique, the listener is constantly wondering what
produced the sound. The computer can take in-
strumental or acoustic sounds and transform them
in ways that you could never have in the physical
monde. I am sure that, when people are listening to
computer music, they are wondering what is produc-
ing it. But I don’t see doing something without that
kind of physicality, or if the listener can’t imagine a
physicality, as invalidating the sound.
Zaki: Oh no, I’m not implying that it is invalid,
I would just suggest that listeners might have a
different kind of relationship to the sound, et
that this could frame their understanding of it. Of
cours, all listeners bring their own baggage and
associations to bear on what they are hearing.
Howe: That is certainly true. One thing about my
computer music is that I use a lot of created sounds,
sounds that are not associated with traditional
instruments. That doesn’t mean that there would
not be parts of them that would remind people of
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those instruments, but I am trying to do something
different, do something new. Originality in sound is
an important point.
One of the main emphases in many of my pieces
concerns overtones, going back to my study of
acoustics. My compositions “Improvisation on
the Overtone Series,” the Timbre Studies, et le
Harmonic Fantasies involve harmonic generator
instruments that are long and complex; I have many
different components in them. Each component
might be devoted to a different overtone and so
forth.
I also use overtones in a different way in my
inharmonic studies. This goes back to a piece I heard
by Risset called “Inharmonique” [1977, soprano and
two-track tape]. It was a piece for voice and computer
dealing with inharmonic sounds, and I thought it
was really interesting. As I explored this idea, je
developed several ways to deal with inharmonic
components of a sound, like pitch compression,
which takes all the notes and compresses or expands
them into a certain interval. There are also frequency
shifting and the undertone series. Another was using
irrational numbers like square roots or pi as the basis
for a spectrum.
We don’t hear low tones very well, at least until
you get up to the range of the piano, and even
there we have problems with the lower notes. À
make realistic undertones, you must start above the
highest note on the piano, so they come down into
an area where you can hear the undertones. I found
if you compress undertones, then instead of going
down to zero they can be compressed down to some
pitch that is audible.
Zaki: You really need a very high fundamental
alors.
Howe: Oui, and the undertone series goes down
from the fundamental.
One of my pieces, “Emergence (Timbre Study No.
8)» [2012, computer music], deals with the idea of
when you hear enough overtones to actually hear
the fundamental. Part of the point of these pieces
is the idea that you are going to hear pitches on
different levels, as overtones and fundamentals.
vowels and so forth. They are all characterized by
having formants in particular areas. Rather than
trying to imitate instruments, when I use filters, je
am usually focusing on pitches, so that you have one
pitch level where you hear the fundamentals, et
alors, a higher level where pitches are brought out
by the filtering, which might be changing as well.
I wrote a piece “Timbre Study No. 6» [1997,
computer music] using both fixed and variable
filters, which sound like you have vowels and
diphthongs going on at the same time, all of which
create some sort of pitch object. The fundamentals
are also creating related pitch objects. The challenge
is that, to make all this work, there must be at
least four octaves between the fundamental and the
overtone. One of the consequences of that is that on
extremely low notes you have a lot of things that
you can do, but on higher notes there is less. One of
the things you will find if you listen to those pieces
is that there are a lot of very low notes that go down
to the bottom of the piano range and even below
que.
Thinking about the differences between funda-
mentals and overtones, I developed an idea that
I called “usable frequencies in music.” You can’t
really hear things accurately below the bottom end
of the piano. Down there, they don’t really make
a pitch, they start to make individual beats, so to
speak. The way you incorporate low frequencies like
that into the music is to use them as vibrato speeds
or for other variable qualities. I have done things
where I will have a note, and the vibrato speed is six
octaves below that. You would never know that, mais
that is a fact of what is happening at that point.
Zaki: So it acts as a low-frequency oscillator.
Howe: Oui, I think of it as a frequency that is
doing something in the music while something
else is happening. At the upper end, you have the
problem that different people have different abilities
to hear the upper limit of their frequencies. As you
get older you lose some of the sensitivity to high
frequencies. En fait, a lot of young people lose the
high end because they are listening to music that is
too loud.
That idea also works into my music based on fil-
tering. When you use filters, you can get things that
are similar to both instrumental and vocal sounds,
Donc, I think that 12 ou 13 kHz is about as high
as you should go in music. That does restrict the
overtones that you can use, but the highest note on
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the piano is a little bit over 4 kHz. 8 kHz is an octave
above that, et 16 kHz is another octave above that.
So somewhere about an octave and a half above the
end of the piano is the limit that you can consider.
That is for everything: overtones, fundamentals, et
everything else.
Zaki: That is still pretty high.
Howe: We’re not used to hearing things that
high in music, but that does not mean that they
do not exist. Live music is very complicated. Dans
instrumental music, it is certainly possible to
produce frequencies go that high. They are not
necessarily heard in and of themselves, mais ils
can create combination tones and beating and other
things like that.
Creating an Electroacoustic Music Festival in New York
Zaki: You mentioned your time in Alabama, où
James Paul Sain was one of your students. There is
a direct lineage there with the establishment of the
New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.
Howe: Oui, he was one of my students and later
got a job at the University of Florida. After he got
là, he started an annual event called the Florida
Electronic Music Festival (FEMF), which I attended
for many years. When James said that he was going
to stop FEMF in 2008, I happened to have a good
group of computer music students in Queens. I asked
them if they would be interested in doing something
in New York, and they agreed. We put a festival
together and presented the first New York City
Electronic Music Festival (NYCEMF) at the CUNY
Graduate Center in 2009. We had nine concerts and
late-night events at Galapagos and the Issue Project
Room in Brooklyn. It was a big success. The next
year we organized a similar kind of festival that was
a bit bigger and was just as much of a success.
Following this, the students all got jobs and left
the university. I wanted to continue NYCEMF, but I
realized it was necessary to take a different approach.
I contacted everybody in the New York City area
who was serious about electroacoustic music, et
we formed a steering committee. The committee’s
members stretch from Rutgers University to Stony
Brook, but otherwise it is centered in New York
City. We also have some exceptional performers on
board like Madeleine Shapiro and Esther Lamneck,
who are mainstays of the festival.
The timing didn’t work in 2012, so we next
presented it in 2013, still at the CUNY Graduate
Centre. After that, I realized that CUNY was too
difficult a place to work. We next moved to the
Abrons Arts Center, which worked out well for
several years. Probably the most significant thing
that happened during that time was that the New
York Philharmonic included us as part of their
biennial. Alan Gilbert was the director at the
temps, and he was quite interested in new music.
Malheureusement, he ended up getting increasingly
frustrated by the reception he was getting for his
efforts to bring new music programming into New
York.
Zaki: Oui, the Philharmonic has always had a
tricky relationship with new music.
Howe: As it turned out, the next director of the
Philharmonic was not interested, so regrettably that
connection fizzled.
Zaki: I have been around NYCEMF since the
début, but I am curious, from your vantage
point as director of a major festival and as a curator,
what changes have you seen in the music and the
approach to electroacoustic music over the years?
Howe: There has been a big expansion of music
coming from Asia. We get many submissions from
Chine, Par exemple. They have a lot of interest
in electroacoustic music. Europe is also very big,
although I get the feeling that European music
is culturally ingrained and compartmentalized in
certain ways. They continue to do what they have
done for many years.
Zaki: Like the acousmatic traditions you see in
the UK, Par exemple.
Howe: Absolutely. But one thing for sure, ceux
places get much better funding.
Zaki: The Covid pandemic has also created a
challenging environment for the arts. How did you
manage that with NYCEMF, and do you see any
changes or adjustments continuing in the long term
once the pandemic shakes out?
Howe: We did virtual festivals the last two years,
and we can leave everything online so people can
revisit the music. I think that has been beneficial,
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and we will be leaving some of the music online
from now on. That brings a kind of persistence to
the festival; it shows that the event happened but is
still there, in a virtual sense.
Looking Forward, Looking Back
Zaki: You are retired from Queens College now, mais
you are not showing any signs of slowing down.
Howe: Bien, the good thing is I have been able
to compose much more and do a lot of other things
I have wanted to do. I have also written several
articles since I retired. I always thought I would
teach forever, and when it came to academic work,
teaching is what I liked the most. That is what I
miss about it, aussi.
Zaki: It is interesting to note that you have come
full circle from your childhood introduction to
music in a sense and have taken up singing again.
Has that influenced your composition at all?
Howe: Non, not yet, anyway. I always had a
thought about writing some choral music, dans lequel
I think I might bring back tonality, if I did. I’ill think
about it as we get into the nitty-gritty. The choir
in which I sing is performing two rather difficult
pieces: Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and
an oratorio by the composer R. Nathaniel Dett
called The Ordering of Moses. That is a rather
interesting, impressionistic piece that has some
strange harmonies that come out of nowhere. Il a
certainly been a worthwhile piece to learn. Donc, nous
will see.
Zaki: Singing is about as fundamental as it gets.
Howe: Oui, that’s for sure.
Hubert Howe: Selected Discography
Mind and Machine Volume III. 2020. Includes “Improvi-
sation on the Undertone Series.” North Hampton, Nouveau
Hampshire: Ravello Records RR8043.
Hubert Howe: Harmonic and Inharmonic Fantasies.
2019. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Centaur Records CRC
3579.
Electronic Masters Volume 2. 2013. Includes “Emer-
gence.” USA: Ablaze Records ar00013.
Hubert Howe: Clusters. 2011. North Hampton, Nouveau
Hampshire: Ravello Records RR 7817.
Hubert Howe: Temperamental Music and Created
Sounds. 2006. New York: Capstone Records CPS-8771.
Hubert Howe: Filtered Music. 2003. New York: Capstone
Records CPS-8719.
Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, Volume 1. 2002.
Includes “Improvisation No. 3.” New York: EMF Media
EMF031.
Hubert Howe: Overtone Music. 2001. New York: Cap-
stone Records CPS-8678.
Reference
Howe, Hubert S. 1965. “Some Combinational Properties
of Pitch Structures.” Perspectives of New Music 4(1):45–
61. 10.2307/832526.
Zaki
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