Pynchon Music: Tim Souster

A hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning

Tim Souster (1943–1994)

Tim Souster was a British composer who specialized in electronics. After studying under teachers influenced by Schönberg and Boulez, he became a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, attending summer courses in Darmstadt in 1964. Returning to England, Souster was employed as a producer for the BBC. Working under the progressive “Controller of Music” Sir William Glock, Souster used his position to expose audiences to the musical avant-garde, from the thorny pieces of the Darmstadt School to the repetitive rhythms of American Minimalism. A fan of progressive rock, Souster saw numerous connections between “pop music” and “art music,” and he sought to bridge the two worlds through innovative programming and personal practice. In 1969 Souster invited Soft Machine to the BBC Proms, and his own avant-garde group, Intermodulation, worked with The Who. He also wrote articles and academic papers on musicians such as the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, and the Grateful Dead.

In 1969, Souster produced his first electronic composition, Titus Groan Music. Inspired by the baroque fantasy of Mervyn Peake, the piece was scored for wind quintet, ring modulator, amplifiers, and tape. A few years later, Souster accepted a position as Stockhausen’s teaching assistant in Cologne. Returning to England in 1975, he continued his career as a composer at Keele University in Staffordshire. In 1978, Souster spent six months in California, working at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, usually pronounced “Karma.”) In the 1980s Souster worked with the BBC again, scoring numerous films, documentaries, and television programs, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Green Man. In 1994, Tim Souster died of a “sudden, brief illness.” At the time of his death, he was composing a song cycle based on the poetry of Baudelaire.

Pynchon Connection

In 1983 Tim Souster composed The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus, a work for flugelhorn and electronics inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. While he wasn’t the first musician to be inspired by the novel, Souster had a pretty compelling claim to the book, as Pynchon mentions his mentor by name:

The Scope proved to be a haunt for electronics assembly people from Yoyodyne. The green neon sign outside ingeniously depicted the face of an oscilloscope tube, over which flowed an ever-changing dance of Lissajous figures… A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke box at the far end of the room. Everybody quit talking. The bartender tiptoed back, with the drinks.

“What’s happening?” Oedipa whispered.

“That’s by Stockhausen,” the hip graybeard informed her, “the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we really swing. We’re the only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy. Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that’s a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego—”

“Live?” Metzger said, “electronic music, live?”

“They put it on the tape, here, live, fella. We got a whole back room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man. That’s for if you didn’t bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats, there’s always something available.”

One of the figures included on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was something of a cult figure, a musical and cultural iconoclast who was never shy of publicity—or controversy. While his music pushed the avant-garde as far as it could go (extreme electronic distortion, punishingly long durations, using helicopters as musical instruments) it was Stockhausen’s personal life that drew the most attention. He created his own musical utopia in the German countryside, an isolated compound where he led a polygamous life and worked obsessively on Licht, a week-long opera. He also claimed to have extraterrestrial origins, and famously described the 911 terrorist attack as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos,” despite its “criminal” failure to inform the audience they’d be “dispatched into eternity.”

Stockhausen doing his thing

Musically, Stockhausen was best known for incorporating modern technology into contemporary “classical” music. While he had the same fondness for dissonance, aleatory composition, and musical spatialization as his Darmstadt colleagues Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, Stockhausen developed a passion for electronics that lasted until his death in 2007, and most of his best-known pieces contain electronic elements and electroacoustic manipulations. It’s this embrace of technology that most informs the work of his students, disciples, and admirers, and that includes Tim Souster and The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus.

Review: The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus

Electronic music is always a dicey proposition. A cutting-edge piece can become hopelessly outdated overnight, and the public has a low tolerance for technological obsolescence. Many pieces of “avant-garde” electronics have not aged well, especially to ears long accustomed to rock, where pioneers like Pink Floyd and Brian Eno—themselves influenced by Stockhausen—pushed the medium forward. While Luciano Berio’s tape manipulations were innovative in the 1950s, today they’re only mildly interesting, even a touch silly. On the other hand, Steve Reich’s tape loops maintain their original power. Even more unpredictably, sometimes a piece of electronic music endures precisely because it’s dated, its former novelty alchemized by nostalgia into naïve charm: think of Pierre Henry’s “Psyché Rock,” Ron Grainer’s original Doctor Who theme, or even Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon.

But every so often an electronic composition just works. Despite the dated medium and evolving musical expectations, the piece still evokes the sense of mystery, of otherworldliness, that first intrigued contemporary listeners. Perhaps it’s because our subconscious registers synthetic sounds as alien, creating a sense of disorientation in our lizard brains; or perhaps it’s a brush with the technological sublime. Or, to borrow a term from the 70s, maybe we feel a tingle of “future shock.” For whatever reason, electronic music can be vaguely unsettling; but also numinous and curiously alluring—there’s a reason it’s often described as “spooky,” “spacey,” “celestial,” or “hypnotic.”

The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus is such a piece; a vintage slice of 1983 that still retains its original power. While not a complete success, it works more often than not, and is surprisingly accessible for music so intentionally disorienting—to compare it to Stockhausen, it has more in common with the intriguing soundscapes of Freitag than the unlistenable “Strukturs” of Kontakte. Like most avant-garde electronics, St Narcissus rewards a close listen, and is best played at high volumes. The electronic textures demand a tangible sense of presence, and the extreme ranges in frequency and dynamics work best when filling a room.

Lasting 24 minutes with no divisions, The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus is appropriately scored for a flugelhorn and live electronics. (Sadly, a postal horn has less range!) While not program music per se, the piece was inspired by Oedipa Maas’ near-epiphany upon seeing San Narciso spread out like the circuit-board of a transistor radio:

She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, on to a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth, and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang to her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narcisco, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

St Narcissus begins with a blaring hiss of distortion, a tearing sound like the sky ripping open. Electronics twitter like startled birds, while a synthesized organ beams a sustained chord down from on high. After this dramatic introduction, the piece settles into a more contemplative mood, with eerie electronic swells and subterranean rumbles that bring to mind Vangelis’ opening to Blade Runner. It’s not an unwarranted comparison, as both works hover above a sprawling cityscape, and the mood borders on the apocalyptic. Three years prior to composing St Narcissus, Souster himself visited California. It’s reasonable to wonder how much of his own experience is reflected here; flying into San Francisco or Los Angeles can certainly provoke feelings not unlike Oedipa’s “odd, religious instant.”

The flugelhorn becomes recognizable two minutes in, beginning its extended duet with the electronics: long, plaintive notes drift through a shimmering field of twinkling chimes, staccato fanfares are submerged in reverb, and glissandos flutter like hovering rotors. According to Souster’s notes, a Fairlight CMI is used to create mirror images of the flugelhorn’s “matrix chords.” Meant to evoke the similarity between San Narciso’s cityscape and a radio’s circuit board, this doubling provides some structure to the piece, but it’s frankly too arcane to be immediately apparent. (Typical of the Darmstadt school, Souster’s notes for St Narcissus read something like a math puzzle.) What’s more comprehensible, however, is the sense of impending revelation expressed by Oedipa, “As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.” The music seems continually poised to reveal something; an opening up, an unexpected melody, a satisfying resolution. Some kind of answer to this restless musical questioning.

Our answer comes 17½ minutes into the work, but it’s quiet, almost whispered. After pressing through a cascade of rippling brass, we find ourselves in the tranquil eye of the whirlwind. The flugelhorn unveils a simple seven-note melody, quietly repeated and developed over an undulating drone. Beautiful, mysterious, and delicate, it’s all-too brief. In the most striking moment of the piece, the understated melody drops away, the sudden silence filled by the sound of the player breathing through dead brass—a potent reminder of the “soft machine” behind the electronics.

The coda begins in a swirl of hissing static and chirping electrons, a walking bassline building suspense as we depart the serenity of the eye. The flugelhorn reappears, hesitant at first, unwilling to return to the maelstrom: but soon it’s back to its old tricks, with fluttering glissandos and peals of brass echoing off the staggering electronics. Sporadic drumbeats appear, and the synthesized bassline escorts the piece to its conclusion—a curt dismissal by a sharp downstroke.

Unfortunately, this four-minute coda prevents St Narcissus from achieving greatness. Much of the blame falls on the keyboards, which sound more dated here than anywhere else in the piece—the coda wouldn’t feel out of place in an early-80s Doctor Who episode. But this is superficial compared to the deeper problem, which is Souster’s need to resolve St Narcissus at all. Upon beholding San Narciso, Oedipa felt that a revelation “trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.” A better ending—or at least, a truer ending—would have forsaken the coda, allowing the horn to fall silent and the sound of beathing to fill the void.

Despite this quibble, The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus remains a wonderful piece of electroacoustic invention, and deserves a wider audience. Unfortunately, the only recorded version is on the now-deleted Michael’s Farewell CD (Deux-Elles, 2002). For those listeners unwilling to dig through used record bins or enjoy the dubious pleasures of eBay, digital versions are available at Classical Archives and at John Wallace’s homepage.

Program Notes

The following program notes for have been borrowed from Souster’s official homepage:
The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus
For flugelhorn, live electronics and tape

The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus was commissioned by John Wallace with funds made available by the Arts Council of Great Britain, and first performed on the Arts Council Contemporary Music Network Tour undertaken by Electronic Music Now early in 1983. It was awarded first prize in the mixed music category of the Bourges Electro-acoustic Awards in 1984. The piece requires two performers, one playing flugelhorn, the other operating the tape and live electronics, and balancing the sound.
The idea of using the flugelhorn came partly from the experience of recording some arrangements with Equale Brass for Nimbus Records the previous year, and partly from a long-standing fascination with the rich and languorous sound of many of Miles Davis’s early recordings where the flugelhorn is featured. Its lyrical fullness of tone is matched by an extraordinary range, from the lowest pedal tone on the B flat below the bass stave to the F sharp or so above the treble stave. First experiments involved recording lip glissandi on six fundamental tones, yielding six series of overtones. From these series four basic ‘matrix’ chords were derived, each of which comprises eleven to thirteen notes stretched out like an overtone series. Mirror images of the ‘matrix chords’ extending below the range of the flugelhorn were created using the Fairlight CMI. These new ‘synthetic spectra’ provide the harmonic framework as well as the timbre-world of the work. The idea of the mirror image either in pitch or time dominates the work, relating to the title which refers to a passage in Thomas Pynchon’s book The Crying of Lot 49. The heroine is reminded of her first sight of a printed circuit-board by the layout of a new housing development in San Narcisco, Southern California.
Moments of ‘revelation’ or heightened understanding occur at nodal points in the work where different sets of frequencies interlock to form some larger structure. The key nodal point lies at about 19 minutes, where the tape falls silent just before the coda. Here the flugelhorn melody is derived from cyphers in Pynchon’s book. The bass line is a mirror of the melody, and the harmony is created by live digital transposition of the melody. It is the performer who triggers these events, enhancing and extending electronically the resources of his instrument.
The shape of the work also reflects the idea of revelation in a process of changing focuses on a journey down through the layers of the sound spectrum. It starts with the noisiest distortions of the flugelhorn, concentrating on the upper reaches of the spectrum. The work moves down through the simple and more complex sound mixtures of the middle regions, to the euphony, consonant harmony, and regular rhythm of the lowest region in the coda which is a microcosm of the whole work. The sound of a transistor radio being tuned in, the emergence of the four ‘matrix chords’ out of the static, morse signals, bass line and percussion, and finally the flugelhorn melody lead to the point of arrival, a perfect cadence based on the flugelhorn’s B flat fundamental tone.
The tape for The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus was produced at the Clockhouse Studio, Keele University, with the assistance of Cliff Bradbury, and at the composer’s studio in Cambridge, OdB Sound.
The following equipment was used in the realisation of the tape part.
  • Fairlight CMI
  • Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer
  • Roland MC4B micro-computer
  • Roland Vocoder Plus
  • Serge Modular System analogue synthesizer
  • Lexicon Prime Time digital delay line
  • MXR pitch transposer
In the original live performances, the digital delay line, pitch transposer and Serge Modular System were used.

Additional Information

Stockhausen: Michael’s Farewell
John Wallace & Andrew Powell
Deux-Elles, 2002
Track Listing
1. Andrew Powell: Plasmogeny II (9:46)
2. Roger Smalley: Echo III (10:48)
3. Tim Souster: The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus (24:08)
4. Michaels-Abschied (12:47)
Musicians
Andrew Powell—electronics.
John Wallace—trumpet.
Listen to The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus — You can hear Souster’s piece on Spotify.
Michael’s Farewell WAV— You can purchase Michael’s Farewell in WAV form at John Wallace’s homepage. You can also buy Souster’s track individually.
Michael’s Farewell MP3 — You can listen to/purchase the MP3 for Michael’s Farewell at Classical Archives.
The Transistor Radio of St Narcissus Score — Composers Edition has the score available for purchase.
Tim Souster Homepage — The official Web site of Tim Souster.
Tim Souster Wikipedia Page — You can read more about Tim Souster on Wikipedia.
Tim Souster Discog Page — Collects album covers and information on Tim Souster’s releases.
Contact Journal: Tim Souster — Contact No. 27, Autumn 1983. David Jefferies on Tim Souster and his compositions.
Gramophone Review — Arnold Whittall on St Narcissus: “a virtuoso exercise…it derives a well-nigh mythic power from its basic, elemental images.
4barsrest Review — 4barsrest, 2002 November 22. A site devoted to brass music, 4barsrest calls the entire CD “beguiling.”
KPFA-FM Interview — 11 October 1978. Tim Souster is interviewed on American radio.
Tim Souster: Obituary — Independent, 7 March 1994. Souster’s obituary, penned by his friend Adrian Jack.

Pynchon on Record
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Authors: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 23 November 2020
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