"Music is frozen architecture", Goethe

The Philips Pavillon, Brussels, Expo 1958.

Philips approached Le Corbusier who replied:
"I will not make a pavilion for you but an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; light, color image, rhythm and sound joined together in an organic synthesis."



At initial meetings, Le Corbusier gave a rough outline of the look and function of the event.

* The interior was to be shaped in a manner similar to the stomach of a cow, with the concept that audience members would enter in groups of 500 at ten-minute intervals.
* For two minutes, as the audience filed in through a curved passageway, they would hear a short transition piece. Then the room would go into darkness, and spectators, who remained standing, would then be subject to the interior music and lights for eight minutes.
* Colored lights, images, and film would be shown all around them. Music (organized sound) would be played over a huge array of speakers, surrounding and traversing the audience. At the close of the eight-minute piece, the spectators would exit, "digested," through another exit while the next group filed in.
* In this way, 20,000 visitors a day would be able to visit the pavilion over the five months of the fair. The project was to be managed by Le Corbusier's protege designer Iannis Xenakis, who would also create the transition music.
* Le Corbusier would provide the images to be projected during a 480 second multi-media event.
* No attempt would be made to synchronize the visuals with the music. Any correspondences that did occur would happy accidents, except for a specified moment of silence six minutes into the work.

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Raymond Scott, New York, 1908-1994

"What can you say about a man who inspired cartoon melodies and bebop, invented Frank Zappa and electronic music, and still found time to work for-Motown?"
- Andy Partridge, songwriter & leader of XTC

"Raymond Scott was like an audio version of Andy Warhol; he preceded Pop-Art sensibilities, and he played with that line between commercial art and fine art, mixing elements of both worlds together. I love and respect Raymond Scott's work, and it influenced me a lot. I'm a big fan.''
- Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO

"Raymond Scott's music gets better as it gets older. When it first appeared, it was so bizarre it could not be categorized. Now, it is no less innovative and comic, but it begins to occupy a serious role in our total music-appreciation."
- Dick Hyman, musician

In 1946 Raymond scott founded the Manhattan research inc., one of the very first studios of electronic music in the world.

He also created The Talking Alarm Clock and fascinating musical instruments like The Orchestra Machine, The Karloff, The Bassline Generator, The Circle Machine, The Clavivox , The Videola, The Rhythm Synthesizer, The Pitch Sequencer, The Juxtaposition Matrix, The Synthesized Gong, The Melody Maker, The Rhythm Guitar Simulator or The Electronium-Scott plus a large number of patents used by the musical industry. That's a boy!

There is numerous websites referencing his work and audio simples are fairly easy to find as well. Just take a plunge!

Rahul Dev Burman

Last summer, Jamie turned up in Ostend as he was invited to participate to some flemish tv show. After some beers in town, we started to feel starvation then we went at mine with his agent and promoter for some night cooking action. Probably we talked crap for a bit but I remember we talked about India and Jamie said he was totally amazed by a couple of people playing on the roof of his hotel in order to welcome him and his band. It brought him much inspiration that he went to a music store down the street and asked for the craziest indian composer. He came back with R D Burman. We downwloaded some straight away and had a good laugh. It stayed in my player for weeks and I reckon mister Burman deserves to be known by everyone. It sounds like a curry of cha cha, country, exotica, espionage with a touch of musical comedy. All in once. How serious is that! You'll have to find your way in the thousands tracks he made though... Good luck!

Following a heart attack in 1988, R D Burman underwent a bypass surgery abroad the next year. While recuperating he is said to have composed over 2,000 tunes which he kept in his memory bank. He often said that his best tunes came to him in his dreams and that he had to be in happy frame of mind even while composing sad tunes. "When I am down, I end up making a mess of things," he is reported to have said.

Much much more on the interweb...

Oskar Sala, 1910-2002, Germany

"For the first time in music history, it was possible to execute sounds which had been known in theory since the Middle Ages but weren't playable on classical instruments."

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