Fontana Mix - Feed

Editor's note

This CD includes recordings of six realizations of Max Neuhaus' Fontana Mix - Feed which he performed in venues in the US and Europe from 1964 through 1968. With these performances, Neuhaus introduced the idea that acoustic feedback, previously always abhorred, could be a useful technique for generating sound. This later spawned its use by others in both modern music and rock'n'roll.

If you wish to come close to replicating these performances, move your loudspeakers to opposite sides of the listening room and turn the volume of your system up as high as you can stand it...but watch out for your ears.

Notes on the technique

Feed is my title of the score I made with the chance operations specified in John Cage's Fontana Mix, thus the complete title: Fontana Mix - Feed.

In 1963, while exploring ways of changing the timbre of percussion instruments through amplification, I had discovered a means of generating sound which I found fascinating – the creation of an acoustic feedback loop with a percussion instrument inserted inside it. Instead of the usual single screeching tones of acoustic feedback, this created a complex multi-timbred system of oscillation.

At this time 'electronic music' had not quite been invented. True, there were endeavors. In the speech research department of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Max Mathews had gotten their computer to sing Bicycle Built for Two in a nasal 'voice'. Luening and Ussachevsky at Columbia University commissioned RCA build a folly called the Mark II which generated combinations of wave forms designed for scientific experiments. It was also the beginning the never-ending quest to avoid the rigors of creation by trying to freeze-dry Schoenberg's muse (his twelve tone method) into a computer algorithm.

Electronic music-making was, in fact, confined to a studio where tape recordings were made and manipulated. These were then supposed to be played back to an audience sitting in a concert hall watching two loudspeakers. Except for Cage's performances with phonograph cartridges, live electronic music did not yet exist. What I had found was something of quite a different order than the endeavors with recording tape in the studio.

Here, beginning with the pickup of room sound by a contact microphone touching a percussion instrument, a loop is quickly created when the loudspeaker projects the amplified result back on the percussion instrument causing it to vibrate anew. I decided to create a realization with the mixture and interaction of four channels of these loops. The loops were created by resting contact microphones on various percussion instruments standing in front of loudspeakers. Using four loops multiplied the level of complexity enormously as each loop would, of course, interact with each of the others. It created an oscillating system which encompassed the whole room and everything in it including the audience.

The score I made from the Fontana Mix materials controls gradual changes in the amount of amplification of each of the channels. Although the execution of the score is identical in each of these performances, the actual sounds that make up each realization are completely different as they are determined by which percussion instruments are used, the acoustics of the room and the position of the mikes in relation to the loudspeakers and the instruments at each specific moment (the vibrations sometimes cause the mikes to move around).

In spite of this, one might still expect the overall structure of these realizations to be similar as the score determines the amplification contour of each feedback channel over time. This is also not the case. The loudness of the work at any specific moment is determined by which channels are oscillating and how. As the amplification controls are gradually changed, the feedback channels suddenly break into different modes of oscillation; sound seems to swing through the room.

The factors here are so complex that even if the piece were to be performed twice in the same room with the same audience, the same instruments, and the same loudspeakers, it would have completely different sound and structures each time. It seems something alive.

These realizations end not with gradual fadeouts, but by switching off the power amplifier directly, causing the feedback loops to collapse, disintegrate and die out.

Review Excerpts

"The Cage-Neuhaus Feed - Fontana Mix was the evening's tour de force. Two timpani were set up, with contact microphones on top of each and huge loudspeakers in front of them. Mr. Neuhaus sat to one side and manipulated an electronic mixer.

"There are no sounds designed to begin with so Mr. Neuhaus, with the use of feedback, started sympathetic vibrations in the timpani, which in turn caused more feedback into the speaker, causing more vibrations, and so on. He manipulated the intensity and quality of these on the mixer dials.

"What came out was a wildly tearing, threatening series of shrieks and hisses of bloodcurdling intensity that rose again and again to the point of terror and then receded.

"This piece was not the kind of electronic music that emanates distantly from the speakers. It felt as though one's own head were part of the feedback circuit."

Theodore Strongin, New York Times,
December 2, 1966

"For a finale, Neuhaus realized the classic ambition of the Dada composer by creating a sound that was a scandal. The noise was literally painful and, for many in the audience, unbearable in volume, pitch and duration. Entitled Feed, and based on Cage's Fontana Mix this gem of musical ideation involved putting small mikes on top of tympanis and letting the loudspeakers excite them into noise by means of feedback. It was like the soundtrack from World War II, with original cast. The whole night was great, High-Camp fun, but Mr. Cage's Silence can be more sincerely recommended."

Donald J. Henahan, Chicago Tribune,
April 14, 1965

"An impetuous torrent which either exasperates or enchants, but whose great importance can not be ignored". This is the best description of Max Neuhaus, the American avant-garde percussionist who, at 26, holds an important position in the world panorama of his specialty and who has opened, with a resounding concert in Madrid that aroused considerable interest, the first festival of the most experimental group in Spanish music: "Zaj" (…)

Clip from Spanish newsreel including Neuhaus' concert inaugurating the first Zaj Festival, Madrid, November 27, 1965.

"The range of existing percussion instruments was too limited and not difficult enough for Max Neuhaus who has invented and even more complex sphere of electronic percussion. Masses of cables, amplifiers, mixer and contact microphones have taken the place, in the Madrid concert, of most of the percussion instruments (…)

"Max Neuhaus demonstrated how it is possible to produce electronic music without the need of recording and manipulation in a studio, but live and in concert, and with all the possibilities of the aleatoric (…)

"It was during the performance of Fontana Mix - Feed of John Cage that the concert reached its sonic climax and the new percussion means showed their full potentials (…)

"A gigantic mass of re-amplification, increasing at each new cycle, producing a stronger and stronger sound continuum, with ever-changing sound quality, a really impressive acoustic paroxysm. Max Neuhaus manipulated the sound channels through his mixer, modifying the stereophonic directions and achieving a work that emphasized an absolute control of the new and challenging dimension of the electronic percussionist. When the performance was over, all the composers who knew it (some of them disciples of Cage himself) agreed that "We've never heard such an impressive version of Fontana Mix before".

"Soon after the concert Max Neuhaus collected all his many instruments; Barcelona, Munich and Amsterdam were waiting for him in the following days of his European tour, in which Madrid was included thanks to Zaj and the Colegio Mayor Menéndez Pelayo."

Excerpt from a review of the Neuhaus concert inaugurating the first Zaj Festival, Madrid, November 27, 1965.

These texts were published as liner notes for the CD Max Neuhaus, Fontana Mix - Feed (six realizations of John Cage), Alga Marghen (plana-N 18NMN.44), released in 2003.