Because the world is round

I'm not sure why my ear is particularly out of tune with the combination of contemporary classical and electronics. I once sat right behind Milton Babbitt in a recital hall, and shook his hand when a mutual friend introduced us, and I had to lie through my teeth saying I enjoyed his piece.

I've always admired how tastefully the Beatles used a synthesizer on Abbey Road. The Beatles knew as much about sound as a thing as anyone ever has. When they got famous, they used their money and access well. Paul became close friends with John Cage. George started circling the globe with Philip Glass, looking for music on other continents. Yoko had been Cage's assistant. These were people interested in the truth of sound and music.When you hear a Moog synthesizer on Because and elsewhere on Abbey Road, it blends with the familiar instruments that we think of as more human somehow, or is played intentionally to stay close to what is known to charm and move us. I can't think of anything that makes traditional instruments intrinsically more natural. But we think of them that way, probably because we're so familiar with them.

Maybe it's because electronic music comes without built-in structures and history that it seems to encourage experimentation at the fringe of comfort. I'm not talking about dance music -- electronica and its descendants -- which retain a highly familiar structure. What did Ezra Pound say? "Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music." For a modernist, Pound was not just inconsistent, but awfully conservative.

Along comes Edmund Campion, who professes to build hybrid compositions -- electronics mixed with familiar instruments -- that find a way to blend the two. By being frugal with the electronics, the Beatles succeeded in doing that. I'm not sure Campion does.  While the Kronos Quartet and Santa Rosa Symphony sounded heartfelt, energetic and kept my interest, the more electronics in the piece Sunday night in Sonoma, the less my ears heard. I think that's my fault, though. I do like much of Campion's work. But I think I don't know how to listen to modern electronics well. Ambient music, sure. Electronica, sure. But without that rooting in 4/4 dance and a pentatonic scale, I find the electronics start going random.

Here's a selection from another piece by Campion; the one performed Sunday, The Last Internal Combustion Engine, isn't online:

Here's the Beatles using a Moog synthesizer:

And here's a lovely live version of Because I heard once:

Some of the most moving music has come to me through choirs. There's something about the human voice -- its resonance with my own body, I think is a lot of the movement -- that can bring rapture faster than other instruments, even the most traditional ones.