Henk Badings - Cain & Abel

The exact date of this episode is unknown. We've filled in the date above with a placeholder. What we actually have on record is: 195u-12-07.

In 1956, Dutch composer Henk Badings created an electronic soundtrack to the Netherlands Ballet's production of Cain and Abel which was performed at the Holland Festival that same year. Badings' music consisted of non-traditional sources like the "electronic clavichord" and "multivibrator" as well as electronic tone and noise generators. But for all of its sonic innovation, Canby found Badings' work to be "conventional" and "rather conservative" in its execution, especially in comparison to Edgard Varese's Poeme Electronique played the previous week.

Canby notes that even in its twenty-year odd infancy, electronic music already had already developed its own set of cliches. For example, there's the ever-present tricks of speeding-up, reversing, or adding tape echo to the original recording on tape. In Canby's words, these are all "platitudes of tapery" that have reduced what was once revolutionary and disorienting to something ordinary and expected.

To demonstrate the way in which these sounds were created in Badings' composition, Canby plays side two of the record, which was originally included in an 1957 issue of the Philips Technical Review dedicated to new advances in electronic music making.

WNYC archives id: 58692