New Music in the Light of Nobleness is a highly personal and insightful perspective on Clark’s engagement with contemporary music, from his early experiences in his native United States during the 1960s to his subsequent discovery of developments in Europe, leading in turn to his extensive involvement in developments in Norway during the 1970s. His experiences in the latter context provided innovative foundations to his subsequent career as both a composer and a critical commentator on the evolution of the medium to the present day.
The development of contemporary music in the context of creative engagement with the expanding possibilities of music technology during these two decades is a fascinating area of historical study and this opportunity to study so directly the experiences of a pioneering composer during these important formative years is invaluable for a number of cogent reasons. First, as the years advance, access both to the technologies that thus emerged and to such a direct and deeply researched pathway to those involved in their evolution and practical application is of increasing significance to informing and sustaining our understanding of these important developments. Second, Clark’s perspective is unique and of particular significance in contextualising the many and often neglected contributions made by both composers and technical innovators in Scandinavia.
The focus on Norway, in particular the evolution of the Norwegian Studio for Electronic Music (NSEM), not only reflects on Clark’s own direct involvement with developments in this country at this time, but also provides valuable links to other distinctive advances in this context within the wider subcontinent. In turn this facilitates an important and expanded perspective on the evolution of such compositional techniques within Europe as a whole. His account of the various influences that fuelled his early engagement with Scandinavian composers and their associated aesthetics during the latter part of the 1960s is revealing not only on a personal level but also in terms of the resulting insights thus provided into the creativity of key practitioners during these formative years of his musical studies at California State University.
His decision to concentrate on developments in Norway, leading in turn to his decision to emigrate to this country for a complete decade, was significantly influenced by his interactions with Arne Nordheim who was engaged as a visiting resident composer by the music college in 1969. Arne’s engagement with the creative possibilities of sound spatialisation via multiple loudspeaker arrays was of particular interest to Clark, and his growing awareness of the possibilities of exploring such innovative aspects of music technology materially influenced his choice of Oslo as the primary focus for his creative activities during the 1970s.
The processes of transition from the American influences that shaped his early years to his extended interactions with developments in a context that was not only distinctive but also arguably unique within the wider perspective of contemporary music in Europe adds important new dimensions to our knowledge and understanding of these major advances in evolution of sound and music. Here such direct access to personal experiences elevates what otherwise might be a purely historical record of the key characteristics of the associated technologies and the activities of the associated creative practitioners to a deeply informative and materially insightful commentary on the direct experiences of the author himself.
His own engagement not only with the practicalities of composing and performing with these technologies but also the circumstances that have shaped their evolution adds significantly to the authority and depth of the resulting perspective. As the years advance, access to the resources that shaped these developments becomes progressively harder for those who wish to understand their evolution and most importantly the ways in which such pioneering artists were thus to engage with such rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse environments for music production.
Whereas there are now a number of detailed and usefully informative accounts of the key features of these important advances in music and technology, there are few that offer the additional benefits of a personally acquired and first-hand insight into the functional characteristics of these multidimensional composing and performing resources with the added advantage of opportunities for direct feedback from those responsible for both their design and creative use in a historical context.
It is important to understand that all these developments materially pre-date the era of the Internet and the associated opportunities today for acquiring and exploring all manner of digital resources for music production. Whereas the first steps in producing such resources date back to the mid-1960s and the birth of the first commercially manufactured analogue synthesisers, pioneered by Robert Moog and Donald Buchla in the United States and Peter Zinovieff in London, their impact more generally on studio development was largely incremental in the first instance, in many circumstances providing additional resources to existing studios that were essentially hand-built from first principles, using either combinations of laboratory audio test equipment or in some instances custom-designed circuits.
The birth and development of digital resources up until the end of the 1970s was altogether more complex and diverse, so again the main focus of Clark on the birth and early development of what was essentially the pioneering electronic studio in Norway which he personally directed powerfully draws together key developments elsewhere in Europe that pre-dated this important initiative, at the same time establishing important connections with parallel activities in the United States and subsequently Canada. The resulting perspective is thus significantly greater than the sum of its parts, the Norwegian dimension being underpinned by deeply informative accounts of the evolution of the medium elsewhere in Europe and perhaps uniquely the wider Scandinavian perspective that hitherto has not received the attention it deserves.
