Gentle Fire: An Early Approach
to Live Electronic Music
Hugh Davies
F
rom the mid-1960s, several initially unrelated
developments brought into being small groups of young mu-
sical performers who were substantially more happy-go-lucky
and self-reliant than previous generations. They traveled
around to play “gigs” like hippies, in secondhand vans filled
with instruments and sound equipment, often for little or no
money. To many people this immediately conjures up the
more adventurous rock music that developed in the heyday
of the Beatles and U.S. West Coast rock groups, but it was also
paralleled in areas of contemporary composed music.
The contributing developments included more affordable
and transportable sound equipment of all kinds, partly due to
the increasing availability of transistorized electronic devices
such as small mixers and power amplifiers. By the end of the
1960s, it had become possible to build simple circuits from
magazines without any detailed knowledge of electronics,
and thus some musicians who lacked such expertise found
themselves able unassisted to adapt existing circuits and de-
vise other simple ones for use in personal electronic music
studios and especially in live electronic music.
Above all, however, it was the freer musical attitudes of that
decade that motivated such developments. At the end of the
1950s composers had begun to explore indeterminate and
mobile forms, unspecified instrumentation and graphic nota-
tion in works that in this article I will describe as “experimen-
tal music” (just as I have retained other terminology from the
time, such as “electronic music”). These elements were emi-
nently suited to live electronic music, for which no standard
method has been devised to notate the operation of oscilla-
tors, filters and other devices; it also requires greater flexibil-
ity from the performers to accommodate imprecisions that
may arise at any stage of the basic chain of sound production,
modification and amplification.
Gentle Fire was one such group. It was founded in 1968
and gave its last concert in 1975. As one of its members, I
have reconstructed much of what we experienced some 30
years ago, aided by feedback from other members of the
group.
BRITISH ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE 1960S
Electronic music in Britain had an unusual early history. My
International Electronic Music Catalog, compiled in the winter of
1966–1967, showed that until then there had been a very low
proportion of concert works in Britain in relation to its posi-
tion as the fourth most prolific producer worldwide; in other
© 2001 ISAST
A B S T R A C T
T he author describes the cir-
cumstances of the formation and
development of the live electronic
music group Gentle Fire, in dis-
cussing aspects affecting elec-
tronic music in general and those
words, nearly all electronic music
particular to the ensemble. He
production was background or stresses Gentle Fire’s distinctive
applied music for radio, televi- approaches toward collaboration
sion, theater and film, either and technology, giving particular
from the BBC’s Radiophonic attention to its unique group com-
positions. Collaborations with con-
Workshop or from private studios temporaries are also discussed.
such as those of Tristram Cary Finally, the author addresses the
and Daphne Oram [1]. factors leading to the dissolution
The only major composer to of the group.
have worked more extensively in
the medium was Roberto
Gerhard, but regrettably he also
produced very little tape music for concerts, apart from the
Symphony No. 3 (Collages) for orchestra and tape (1960). None
of the younger generation of avant-garde composers, either
members of the “Manchester School” of Peter Maxwell
Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr or the Lon-
don-trained Richard Rodney Bennett and Cornelius Cardew,
had produced any serious contribution to the medium up to
then, and, with minor exceptions, only Birtwistle was to do so
subsequently. Live electronic music was nonexistent.
This situation changed radically after 1968, when the first
active university and college studios were set up in London, at
Goldsmiths’ (now Goldsmiths) College and the Royal College
of Music and at York University; the presence of a modular
Moog synthesizer at Manchester University from 1967 did not
lead to any significant creative or pedagogic results.
Following Cardew’s work with Stockhausen around 1960, I
was the latter’s assistant for 2 years in the mid-1960s, which in-
cluded participation in performances of his first live electronic
compositions (Mixtur and Mikrophonie I and II) as a member of
his newly formed live electronic group. This was Stockhausen’s
first contact with the youngest generation of British compos-
ers, consolidated soon afterwards by Tim Souster and Roger
Smalley (the co-founders in 1969 of the Cambridge-based live
electronic group Intermodulation). Among other things this
contact led to the participation in 1971 of all the members of
Gentle Fire and Intermodulation in the earliest performances
of Sternklang, of three members of Gentle Fire in Alphabet für
Liège (1972) and of Michael Robinson from Gentle Fire and
two members of Intermodulation as guests with the London
Sinfonietta in 1973 on a Stockhausen tour in Stop and the
world premiere of Ylem.
Hugh Davies (composer, performer), 25 Albert Road, London, N4 3RR, U.K. E-mail:
<hugh-davies@beeb.net>.
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 11, pp. 53–60, 2001 53
 The influence of Stockhausen’s ap-
proach to live electronics, however, in-
volving his typically detailed composi-
tional control over what was played and
operated, was, in my own work and that
of Gentle Fire, counterbalanced by that
of John Cage and David Tudor, who fea-
tured greater freedoms and more diverse
combinations of sound sources and often
of independent loudspeaker channels.
This was exemplified in a remarkable
concert they gave in London, together
with Gordon Mumma, in November 1966
during a visit by the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company, which for many years
was talked about as a major landmark by
all who were in the audience.
HOW GENTLE FIRE CAME
INTO EXISTENCE
After completing my work with
Stockhausen, followed by the compila-
tion of my International Electronic Music
Catalog in Paris and the United States, I
returned to Britain in the summer of
1967, moving to London in the early au-
tumn. I was invited to set up a small elec-
tronic music studio at Goldsmiths’ Col-
lege, then part of London University,
and began giving evening classes there
for adults in January 1968. Richard
Orton, whom I had met 2 years before at
Cambridge University and had re-
mained in contact with, had recently
been appointed lecturer in the music
department at York University (which
was about to move into a purpose-built
complex and become the most adven-
turous music department in Britain over
the next few years) and installed a simi-
lar studio there a couple of months
later. In the summer of 1968 he and I
formed a live electronic duo, which gave
some 10 concerts in the course of a year
(including the British premiere of
Cage’s Electronic Music for Piano), as well
as performing live electronics in one
work by each of us and in the British
premiere of Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie
II; all of these involved additional per-
formers, using a combination of our
own equipment and a few items tempo-
rarily borrowed from our respective stu-
dios. We were both self-taught on the
technical side, learning as we went
along; in my own evening classes I was
frequently aware that in some areas I
was only a couple of weeks more ad-
vanced than some of my students. The
York University studio was to get its first
permanent technician within the next 2
years, but at Goldsmiths’ College this
did not happen until a decade later, so I
54 Davies, Gentle Fire
was obliged to become more proficient
with the fairly basic studio equipment,
especially in its maintenance.
Early in 1968 Orton began to hold
Saturday morning experimental music
sessions in York for any music students
who were interested; all future mem-
bers of the group (see section below),
apart from myself, took a prominent
part in these. That summer, the future
members of Gentle Fire figured promi-
nently in a series of four concerts of ex-
perimental music at York University [2]
and one at Sheffield University. There-
after, the York-based group members
consulted the I Ching on the best way to
extend their previous activities:
hexagram No. 37, the Family, came
up—the two trigrams of which are Sun
and Li, meaning Gentle Wind and
Clinging Fire respectively—indicating
clearly to the group that they should
continue these activities and supplying
the name Gentle Fire.
Following the first couple of perfor-
mances in York and nearby Hull, as a re-
sult of my existing duo connection with
Orton and my slightly greater experi-
ence with live electronics, I was added to
the group in November 1968; I had al-
ready worked with all the other mem-
bers in other contexts, having included
works by Orton and Richard Bernas in a
concert series I was organizing in Lon-
don, and having performed a group im-
provisation in an open-air concert in
London with three of the York students
in the summer of 1968. The Orton/
Davies live electronic duo overlapped
with the group for another half year, ful-
filling lower-budget invitations. Origi-
nally The Gentle Fire, the group’s name
was later altered to Gentle Fire.
At around that time, I analyzed live
electronic music as the simultaneous
live electronic transformation of sounds
whose sources fall into one or more of
four categories [3], which are here
somewhat expanded: sounds played on
conventional instruments (or quasi-con-
ventional invented instruments); on
found or adapted objects (or equivalent
noise-making invented instruments); on
electronic oscillators or instruments
(which, like synthesizers, may incorpo-
rate their own modification devices);
and sounds replayed from earlier re-
cordings (which more recently would
include samplers). Stockhausen had
concentrated mainly on the first cat-
egory; Cage, Tudor and Mumma on the
three others; between us Orton and I,
individually and in the duo, explored all
four, as did Gentle Fire.
GROUP MEMBERS AND
INSTRUMENTATION
The following were the members of
Gentle Fire during its 1968–1975 exist-
ence:
• Richard Bernas: piano, percussion
(including tabla), voice
• Hugh Davies: invented instruments,
live electronics, clarinet (khène, shêng
[Oriental mouth organs])
• Patrick Harrex: violin, percussion
• Graham Hearn: piano, recorder,
VCS-3 synthesizer, percussion
• Stuart Jones: trumpet, cello (electric
guitar)
• Richard Orton: tenor voice, live elec-
tronics
• Michael Robinson: cello, piano.
One of the original members, Harrex,
decided early in 1970 that his intended
career would conflict with the need to
be flexibly available for group rehearsals
and concerts; he was replaced by
Robinson, who had also participated in
the 1968 Saturday morning sessions in
York. A year later Orton also left, prima-
rily because of similar difficulties with
his teaching commitments. After Orton
left we decided to continue as a quintet
rather than a sextet, since (apart from
Group Composition I) there was nothing
in our current or potential repertoire
for which the additional person was re-
quired. Hearn occasionally was not avail-
able for a concert, requiring us to select
a program for four performers. We also
began to shift the focus of the group
away from York, as Bernas and Robinson
had already moved to London.
Although all of us areÊlisted as playing
more than one instrument, our apparent
abilities as multi-instrumentalists are
partly misleading; with the exception of
Jones, only the first-named instrument in
the list above was a primary one that we
occasionally played outside the group,
usually in more conventional music. In
addition to the instruments listed above,
all or most of us occasionally also played
piano and/or other keyboards, VCS3
(Putney) synthesizers, conventional or
found percussion, invented instruments
and, where required, we also spoke or
sang, in addition to operating electronic
equipment. In certain pieces, in which
an understanding of the composer’s style
and intentions were of crucial impor-
tance, and little or no virtuosity was re-
quired (primarily in works with unspeci-
fied instrumentation), other instruments
were used: for example, Hearn and
Orton played violins and Bernas the
viola in Earle Brown’s Four Systems (Jones
played a conveniently available double
bass instead of cello on an early record-
ing we made of this work, forming a
more conventional string quintet). Occa-
sionally in rehearsal, when we were get-
ting stale and playing too much unneces-
sarily, we would even swap instruments in
order to avoid clichés (e.g. I once played
one of the cellos).
COLLABORATIONS
The group worked with Stockhausen on
many occasions. Although we knew
Cage, Tudor and Mumma, having met
up with them in at least three cities
when we and they were touring Europe
in the summer of 1972, we only per-
formed with them once, in Christian
Wolff’s Burdocks, together with the
Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
on one night that autumn at the Sadler’s
Wells Theatre (now the Coliseum) in
London. We also collaborated several
times with Erhard Grosskopf (who wrote
one work for us and featured us in the
world premieres of two others) and
Wolff and, early on, once with the
painter and composer Tom Phillips. In
1974 Grosskopf and Wolff (who at the
time was also living in West Berlin) per-
formed in their own works with us at
short notice when Hearn was not avail-
able for a concert at a festival in Metz;
Wolff also volunteered to take part in
our per formance of Stockhausen’s
Spektren; we happily accepted. Frederic
Rzewski considered composing an “elec-
tronic symphony” for us, and Earle
Brown was also interested in writing for
the group. Although Alvin Lucier al-
lowed us to give the premiere of his
score Gentle Fire [4], it was not composed
specially for us (because it required so-
phisticated sound processing equipment
for what would now be called sonic
morphing, it was not really suited to the
group, unlike his Chambers, which we
performed several times). Lucier in-
tended the title of Gentle Fire to refer to
the alchemical meaning (i.e. the slow
heating of metals for their transmuta-
tion) and was unaware of our group’s
origin in the I Ching.
Another work in our repertoire that
also referred to the group’s name was
Stockhausen’s 1968 verbal score Setz die
Segel zur Sonne (Set the Sails towards the
Sun). In the version that I originally
made of several of the texts from Aus den
sieben Tagen for British performances, I
translated the last two lines “und der ganze
Klang zu Gold / zu reinem, ruhig
leuchtendem Feuer wird” as “and the whole
sound becomes gold / becomes pure,
calmly burning fire”; but when my efforts
were amalgamated for the published
score with translations by two American
composers living in Cologne, the final
version ended up as “and the whole
sound turns to gold / to pure, gently
shimmering fire” [5]. I don’t remember
who originally suggested this change,
perhaps someone from the group, but,
when Stockhausen very thoroughly
checked the English translation, he ac-
cepted it as an interesting coincidence.
Both Gentle Fire and Intermod-
ulation were recommended by Stock-
hausen on several occasions when a fes-
tival needed other performers for works
by him; between 1971 and 1975, both
groups performed in Sternklang in West
Berlin, Munich (two performances),
Shiraz, La Rochelle, Paris (twice) and
made the commercial recording. For
two further performances in Bonn in
1980, Gentle Fire had its only reunion,
in which Orton returned as a guest. On
some of these occasions we also had the
opportunity to include works by our-
selves or by other composers, or were
subsequently invited back for this pur-
pose. Although Gentle Fire’s interests
and sound world were ver y different
from Stockhausen’s own (more so than
those of Intermodulation), we worked
hard in realizing his music; even in his
intuitive text scores from Aus den sieben
Tagen and Für kommende Zeiten, each of
our performances was clearly recogniz-
able as based on the score in question.
One of the most memorable occasions
was in 1972, when we per formed
Intensität in the presence of the com-
poser in a concert during the
Rencontres Internationales d’Art
Contemporain at La Rochelle; unlike
most interpretations of these intuitive
scores by us and by other groups, in-
stead of the often-occurring situation of
one musician continuing what he was
playing for some time after everyone
else had finished, the music built to a
climax and ended quickly and cleanly;
regrettably, no recording was made.
The widely recognized similarities be-
tween Gentle Fire and Intermodulation
as live electronic composer-performer
groups with a strong Stockhausen con-
nection outweighed the differences that
we ourselves saw. The careers of both
groups were in many ways parallel, as
can be seen by comparing the present
article with a retrospective on
Intermodulation published in 1977 by
Souster [6]. In 1986 Gentle Fire and
Intermodulation were singled out by
Paul Griffiths [7] as the two (European)
live electronic groups that—unlike
AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva—had
specialized in composed music. Inter-
modulation almost always appeared with
a VCS3 for each of the four group mem-
bers, often for the transformation of the
sound of each player’s instrument,
whereas in Gentle Fire there was usually
only one, played by Hearn as an instru-
ment in its own right. The virtuosic ele-
ment that was a feature of Inter-
modulation as performers was much less
prominent with Gentle Fire, as reflected
in the nature of each group’s chosen
repertoire and specially composed
pieces. West Germany was the most fre-
quent destination for both groups, only
partly through the Stockhausen connec-
tion; because of its federal structure,
nine radio stations across the country
had substantial funds for supporting
contemporary music, and one could be
sure of interest from producers in at
least a couple of these—Gentle Fire and
Intermodulation were each invited by
the same four radio stations, either to-
gether or independently.
During a festival at London’s Royal
Court theater in 1970, Gentle Fire put
on the first of three performances of
Stockhausen’s rarely staged theater
piece Oben und Unten, in which the two
adult per formers were Marianne
Faithfull and Ian Hogg, and some mem-
bers of the group worked with a group
of actors from the same theater for a few
days in 1971.
Our contacts with artists from other
media occasionally found us appearing
at the same event as, for example, sound
poets, and included performances at the
festivals organized by the sound poet
Henri Chopin at his home in Essex. In
1970 we commissioned a pentagonal
graphic score from the artist John
Furnival, Ode (A Two-Guinea Ode for the
Gentle Fire, Including, for Good Measure,
The Ballad of Fearless Fred), for which we
paid the modest sum of two guineas (£2-
2s in pre-decimal currency). As a foot-
note, the program for one of the
group’s first major concerts in London
was designed and printed by Brian Eno.
The summer of 1972 was a peak period
for British experimental music, not only
for Gentle Fire, which made four trips
abroad in 5 months, to Cologne and
Essen, Zürich and West Berlin, Munich
and Shiraz (in pre-Khomeini Iran) and
Liège. With the exception of a single con-
cert in Essen, in each city we performed
in two or three concerts and/or partici-
pated in workshops, rehearsals with other
Davies, Gentle Fire 55
musicians or recordings. All the other
British groups were also very busy, espe-
cially performing around Europe. This
level of activity in 1972 has never been
matched since. In the following year the
first oil crisis ended that optimism, and
reduced the foreign invitations to Gentle
Fire (we were still optimistic for the next
year or so, with our LP recording of
American works appearing in 1974; we
even started to plan a possible trip to Aus-
tralia and the Far East); but by 1975 the
changed situation was certainly one of
the reasons for the group’s demise in that
year. The last concert with a typical
Gentle Fire program took place in De-
cember 1974, and in the summer of 1975
we participated in two performances of
Sternklang and the LP recording of it in
Paris, followed by a group improvisation
at a college and the performances of two
pieces by Robinson in a small art gallery
in London, in both cases with one mem-
ber of the group missing.
UNUSUAL PERFORMANCES
AND OTHER PROJECTS
Although we specialized in per for-
mances of concert works, Gentle Fire
enjoyed the challenge of performing in
unusual spaces. In addition to theaters,
art galleries and museums (one was just
a building site) and a church, we per-
formed on several occasions in parks
and streets. At the Shiraz Festival in
1972, we appeared at a roundabout on
the outskirts of the city one morning at
8 A. M. and played one of Stockhausen’s
verbal scores on acoustic instruments;
we were soon surrounded by an in-
trigued audience of passersby—until the
security police arrived to break up the
concert and remove us and our instru-
ments from the scene. In 1971, at the
very first open-air rock festival in
Glastonbury, we gave the premiere of
Group Composition IV (Glastonbury Fair) at
dawn as the last event of a night’s music,
on a stage set high up in the side of a sil-
ver-clad pyramid and, together with
Intermodulation, the Scratch Orchestra
and other British groups, participated in
a multi-room “Wandelkonzert” at the
Goethe Institute in London.
Among the workshops we gave as a
group, we held seminars and workshops
and per formed concerts at the
Dartington Summer School in 1971 (for
1 week) and 1972 (for a fortnight), and
in 1972 also contributed to a course for
composition students in Zürich, which
included adding live performances in a
concert to two tapes that the students
56 Davies, Gentle Fire
had created. In these courses we did not
always concentrate on our personal rep-
ertoire or indeed on live electronic tech-
niques; in workshops, especially for
members of the public, we often used
Robert Ashley’s entirely vocal She Was a
Visitor or Hearn’s Ambulatory Music.
The only scores published under the
name of the group were three that were
printed in 1973 in an issue of Source:
Music of the Avant Garde, edited by Alvin
Lucier. As far as I remember there was
some editorial confusion as a result of
papers being mixed up after a car acci-
dent, which meant that two members of
Gentle Fire were not represented, and
that only one of the three scores that
were printed, my own, was part of our
repertoire! [8]
We had comparably mixed fortunes
with LP recordings (see Discography).
Our first studio recording, featuring
Brown’s Four Systems, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s
Appearance, Stockhausen’s Treffpunkt and
Wolff’s For Jill, was never released. This
was followed by a recording session at
EMI’s prestigious Abbey Road studios of
music by Brown, Cage and Wolff
(supplemented in Loughborough by
Hearn’s performance of three of Cage’s
pieces for solo carillon on one of the
only such instruments in Britain) which
was released in 1974, but only in West
Germany (on Electrola) and Japan (on
Toshiba). Together with Intermodula-
tion we were among the 21 musicians
who recorded Stockhausen’s double LP
of Sternklang, reissued in 1992 as a CD
on his own label. Otherwise, only two
short pieces came out on 17-cm (7")
discs: Orton’s concert music 5 (accompa-
nying a book in an educational series)
and Furnival’s Ode (included in a retro-
spective exhibition catalog [9]). Since
then, a brief excerpt from Group Compo-
sition IV appeared in the 1991 “Live Elec-
tronics” issue of Contemporary Music Re-
view, and one from Group Composition VI
is included on the CD accompanying
this issue of LMJ. (See Discography for
recording details.) We are currently in
negotiation with two small labels over
the possibility of issuing a CD of record-
ings from our archive; some broadcast
recordings probably still survive in the
archives of radio stations.
SPECIAL INSTRUMENTS AND
ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT
We normally took four loudspeakers
with us and set up a quadraphonic
sound system. It is always more satisfac-
tory to use one’s own equipment. Occa-
sionally we needed to supplement it by
hiring one or more VCS3 synthesizers,
with which we were all already familiar.
On one occasion, when at short notice
we had to fly to a festival in France, we
took our own amplifiers, but in spite of
informing the organizer in advance of
the specifications we needed, the loud-
speakers that were supplied for us
proved to be no more than adequate.
There are also advantages in using
homemade equipment, which can al-
most always be repaired quite quickly.
We played a number of “homemade”
invented instruments. I specialized in
doing so, in around 20 pieces, and fea-
tured them in two ensemble works of my
own. Robinson’s gHong, a “gong-tree”
that formed the central part of Group
Compositions III and IV, is described be-
low in connection with those pieces.
Jones constructed a type of tabletop
electric sitar, which incorporated a real
sitar bridge and strings.
The loudspeakers at York University
were specially assembled locally to a de-
sign by the manufacturer of the speaker
units, Tannoy, based on the Monitor
Gold model. In order to fund this
project, a larger quantity was assembled
than the university needed; I bought a
set of four, which were subsequently
used in most of Gentle Fire’s concerts.
Like most other live electronic groups of
the time, we could not afford a sophisti-
cated studio mixer, but used several
Uher mixers (designed primarily for op-
eration with the company’s portable
reel-to-reel tape recorders), which also
function well as contact microphone
preamplifiers; careful adjustment of dif-
ferent volume controls in the amplifica-
tion chain reduces noise to a level unno-
ticeable by an audience. I continue to
use them in all performances on my in-
vented instruments.
In 1972 I built a special stereo pream-
plifier box for each member of the
group, designed originally for use in
Sternklang, incorporating the plug-in ste-
reo input preamplifier circuit board for
the Revox A77 tape recorder. While we
were working in Zürich for 4 days on a
course for music students, we took the
opportunity to drive out to Revox’s head
office nearby and bought the boards di-
rectly from the company.
My transformation equipment used in
the group included simple homemade
and adapted pedals for ring-modulation
and distortion, as well as a two-range
commercial wa-wa (filter) pedal and a
choice of bandpass filters, primarily a
Krohn-Hite model with separate low- and
high-pass control knobs, which could be
operated in a manually jerky manner that
approximated the switched steps of the
unusual filters used in Stockhausen’s live
electronic group. Our realization of
Brown’s early graphic score Four Systems
featured the wa-wa pedal and a modified
telephone dial, which “gated” sounds
routed through two of its terminals when,
after “winding it up,” I slowly let the dial
return to its resting position by maintain-
ing my index finger in it. Five (later four)
bowed strings playing a slowly changing
sustained background chord were ampli-
fied and mixed down to a single channel,
which was fed through the pedal and tele-
phone dial. This enabled me to interpret
the sequence of horizontal rectangles
that make up the score with appropriately
filtered bands extracted from the spec-
trum of the complete string sound.
My homemade passive ring-modula-
tor contained only the basic compo-
nents, as given in various publications
and described in detail in my 1976 ar-
ticle “A Simple Ring-Modulator” [10]:
two center-tapped transformers and a
“bridge” of four diodes. The main prob-
lem with all ring-modulators is the leak-
age of the carrier input, which I discov-
ered was on the earth (ground)
connection, and thus unavoidable with-
out additional circuitry. However, it does
not occur when both inputs are from
sources that are not oscillators, such as
microphones and prerecorded tapes.
When an oscillator was essential, we
managed to disguise the leakage as
much as possible, in whatever way was
appropriate for the piece in question. In
this basic form of ring-modulator the
two inputs are not electrically identical,
since one of them is connected directly
to the center taps of the two transform-
ers; experimentation was necessary to
discover the most appropriate input for
an oscillator, one of which would nor-
mally be better for high frequencies and
the other for low ones. At one point I
tested one of my ring-modulators in
comparison with the ring-modulator in
a VCS3, and found that the damping re-
quired to reduce or eliminate leakage
also affected the output sound, making
it blander. The rougher quality pro-
duced by my own ring-modulator could,
if desired, be smoothed by passing it
through a filter, but the reverse was im-
possible with the blander sound pro-
duced by the one in the VCS3. We all
had a love/hate relationship with the
VCS3 synthesizer. It was primarily played
by Graham Hearn in several works; oth-
erwise, unlike some other groups (such
as Intermodulation), we possessed the
alternative electronic resources that bet-
ter matched our musical approach, fa-
voring timbre over pitch.
Although most of the instrumental
players in Sternklang—apart from Bernas
as the central percussionist—used a
VCS3 (or the suitcase Synthi A/AKS ver-
sion) to process their sounds, this was
mainly necessary because their low-pass
filters could be set to a high resonance,
so that, controlled by a pedal, they oscil-
lated as a sine wave at the cutoff fre-
quency, to match the whistle-like over-
tones produced by the singers (as first
introduced in Stockhausen’s Stimmung).
After the first performance in 1971, we
commissioned a friend of mine to de-
sign and construct a set of similar filters,
so that Jones, Robinson and I did not
need to borrow or hire a synthesizer.
Jones’s realization of Stockhausen’s
Spiral on the trumpet in 1971 empha-
sized how we became increasingly able
to mimic or replace many types of live
electronic treatment with our own type
of extended performance techniques—
not so much in a virtuosic direction (as
exemplified subsequently by woodwind
multiphonics), but by simpler methods
such as more subtle timbre control or
Jones blowing his trumpet into a bucket
containing water for a bubbling modula-
tion effect; air or contact microphones
were usually necessary, but it would have
been possible to dispense with them in a
small room.
What we managed to achieve with
mostly homemade devices for live elec-
tronic transformation by around 1970
was mirrored 15 years later by the first
attempts at using high-end digital equip-
ment like the DMX-1000. All the trans-
formation techniques that I heard in a
couple of live electronic works in the
mid-1980s by young composers (who
were no doubt unaware of this) could
have been produced with our simple
equipment.
REPERTOIRE
Over the 7 years of the group’s existence
we gave 245 performances of 100 works
by 28 composers; 41 of these were
Gentle Fire’s collective compositions
and pieces by members of the group.
Thirty-two performances were recorded
for radio and seven for television broad-
casts (several works were recorded but
never performed live). Gentle Fire’s first
performances as a group were primarily
group improvisations, but from 1969 we
concentrated mainly on compositions by
a range of living composers, from solos
to quintets (originally sextets), that of-
fered considerable freedom to the per-
formers, often notated verbally and oc-
casionally graphically, and frequently
without precise instrumentation; we sub-
sequently only programmed an improvi-
sation about once every 2 years. Al-
though we specialized in live
electronics, some pieces that we per-
formed were entirely acoustic, including
works by Ashley, Cage, Cardew,
Feldman, Wolff and Hearn. Around half
of the works in our repertoire are listed
in Simon Emmerson’s brief survey, “Live
Electronic Music in Britain” [11], which
naturally excludes the acoustic pieces.
We played more works by Stockhausen
than by any other composer, including
nine pieces from his two sets of intuitive
verbal scores and four works in which in-
dividual realizations with improvisational
elements needed to be made. Two
(Kurzwellen and Spiral) are based on
shortwave radio sounds, and the other
two (Sternklang and Alphabet für Liège) in-
volve larger groups of performers. In ad-
dition to our Group Compositions and
nearly all of the group members’ indi-
vidual works in our repertoire, we gave
the world premieres of Stockhausen’s
verbal scores Annäherung (Approxima-
tion, later retitled Übereinstimmung [Una-
nimity]) in 1970 and Spektren (Spectra)
in 1972, and participated in the world
premieres of Sternklang (1971) and Al-
phabet für Liège (1972), as well as
Grosskopf’s Sun (1972) and Looping (spe-
cially written for us, 1973), Furnival’s Ode
(the only work we commissioned, 1971),
Tom Phillips’ graphic score Op. X No. 6
(together with the composer, 1968) and
Lucier’s Gentle Fire (1972). Among a
dozen British premieres were Cage’s Car-
tridge Music, Mauricio Kagel’s Transición
II, Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen, Oben und
Unten, Richtige Dauern and Setz die Segel zur
Sonne and Wolff’s Edges and For Jill, as well
as works by Ashley, David Behrman and
Ichiyanagi. The compositions we per-
formed most frequently were Cartridge
Music, Brown’s Four Systems, Grosskopf’s
Looping, Stockhausen’s Intensität, Spektren,
Spiral, Sternklang, Tref fpunkt and
Verbindung, Wolff’s Burdocks, Edges and For
Jill, our Group Compositions III–VI and
some of our own compositions.
The composer whose work perhaps
most typifies the spirit of Gentle Fire is
Graham Hearn. His scores imposed no
virtuosic elements, created a unique
sound world, left considerable interpre-
tive freedom and often required an al-
most ritualistic approach to the perfor-
Davies, Gentle Fire 57
 To Liz
GRAHAM HEARN: ART MUST BE FED (1972)
PIANO AND INSTRUMENTS

PIANO

(With pedal; notation in space-time, overall tempo slow; quiet; legato)

ACCOMPANIMENT
WHAT TO DO DURATIONS
(CHANCE MACHINE/ DIE I) (CHANCE MACHINE/ DIE II)
______________________ ______________________

1. Single note 1. Simultaneously with one piano sound.

2. Chord/cluster 2. In between two consecutive piano sounds.
3. Melodic phrase 3. Exact length of piano phrase, beginning to end.
4. Noise 4. Somewhat longer than piano phrase.
5. Mixed bag 5. Longer than one sound, shorter than whole phrase.
6. Free reminiscence 6. Simultaneously with another player’s sound (excl. pianist).

Fig. 1. Graham Hearn, Art Must Be Fed, score of a composition for Gentle Fire, 1972. Hearn’s compositions typified the spirit of Gentle
Fire. (© Graham Hearn)

mance (in, for example, Art Must be Fed)
(Fig. 1).
GROUP COMPOSITIONS
AND OTHER SPECIALLY
COMPOSED WORKS
As Simon Emmerson has pointed out
[12], Gentle Fire was “a welcome excep-
tion” in pioneering group compositions,
which warrant a more detailed discussion.
Apart from a few compositions that in-
volved additional performers, group com-
positions were the most substantial works
in our repertoire, and together form the
most representative encapsulation of the
group’s music. We explored three differ-
ent approaches: detailed live electronic
treatments, specially created instruments
and a circular structure in which each per-
son composed the part for the next per-
son in the cycle. In comparison, the col-
laborative work of other live electronic
groups in that period largely focused on
other aspects. Stockhausen’s group only
performed his music; the Sonic Arts
Union and Composers Inside Electronics
concentrated on performing composi-
tions by their individual members; Cage,
Tudor and Mumma (later replaced by
Takehisa Kosugi) performed their own
works as well as others specially commis-
sioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company. Intermodulation’s three collec-
tive compositions were much less signifi-
cant for that group. AMM, and increas-
ingly Musica Elettronica Viva, only
performed group improvisations. The Ca-
nadian Electronic Ensemble (founded in
1971) created group compositions in
which each member composed a separate
section, while from 1978 in the U.S. works
by the members of the League of Auto-
matic Music Composers (the forerunner
of The Hub) utilized networked micro-
computers.
In an introduction to the Group Compo-
sitions that Robinson wrote for a broad-
cast by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in
Cologne in 1973, he identified the simi-
larities between pairs of these works, as
discussed below, and analyzed our musi-
cal motivations: “the idea of making situ-
ations which select sound from the en-
tire possible range without employing
conscious decision before or during the
performance is one which now seems to
be established with us” [13]. Such an ap-
proach can only be successful when the
situation is well matched to the sound
sources and allows them to shape and
define the music.
Group Composition I (1970) was scored
for tenor voice, cello, two VCS3 synthe-
sizers and other live electronics. The
VCS3s were used for detailed live elec-
tronic treatments, and the “patches” for
these were carefully worked out and
written down. Comparable live elec-
tronic treatments of a freer nature were
featured in Group Composition VI.
Group Composition II (1971) was origi-
nally a sextet that included Richard
Orton; after he left the group we de-
cided to revise it as a quintet under the
title Group Composition V (1972), for two
cellos, piano (interior), electronic organ
and live electronics. In practice this was
a fairly simple alteration, as in both ver-
sions each person in the group com-
posed a part for the next person in a
predetermined circle; for the revision
one of the original six layers was omitted
and only Hearn was affected: he took
over the part previously played by
Orton. The individual parts were com-
posed as separate layers, without any of

58 Davies, Gentle Fire

Procedure

Pianist
Repeat the phrase without change for the entire length of the performance. If you are reminded of other
pieces, moods, styles etc., you may make the memory audible by humming, whistling, singing etc. for
short periods (cf. free reminiscence). The phrase may be transposed a fraction from one performance to
another.

Accompaniment
Use two dice to decide what you do for an event and when you do it. Perform events when you feel ready—
take your time—use silence.
Dynamics are equal to or softer than piano level; occasionally the piano can be drowned. You can relate
what you play to the sounds of the pianist and other players if you wish. Free reminiscences are snatches
of music familiar to you—they may be sung, played, hummed or whistled.
If the sum of the two numbers obtained from the dice is odd, make a change in the sound with respect to
any parameter (excl. duration). Otherwise play the events straight. If the two numbers obtained are
identical, that total number of succeeding events is to be performed badly. Further identical numbers
obtained before such a series of events is completed may be ignored or added to the previous number(s).
You must decide what constitutes, relative to your own capabilities, a badly performed event. Exaggeration
may be required. Ensure that there is sufficient distinction between these and the other events.

us knowing what the other layers would
consist of, but taking them into consid-
eration. Two parts required tape loops;
one of these, created by Robinson, was
more than 10 seconds in duration. It
contained the sounds of a clock ticking
and its alarm sounding, and ring-modu-
lated whatever Jones played. Hearn’s
part for me consisted of five large dice-
like wooden pentagons, five faces of
which contained note values or rests,
plus a tape loop containing five differ-
ently filtered telephone rings that from
time to time I was to make briefly au-
dible (one pentagon and one telephone
ring was assigned to each of the players;
this created a slowly evolving rhythmic
cycle of electronic transformations (pri-
marily filtering and ring-modulation) of
what was played by the musicians. My
part for Robinson was a single page on
which the player followed a sequence of
instructions in the border surrounding a
graphic score, part of which was derived
from Furnival’s Ode graphic.
Two further Group Compositions were
interrelated: Group Composition III (1971)
used only the quadraphonic gHong
“gong-tree” instrument as a sound source
(Fig. 2), while the more substantial Group
Composition IV (Glastonbury Fair) (1971)
was given an additional dimension
through each performer adding one or
two instruments of his choice. A wooden
base and central column supported cross
beams from which were suspended three
very large metal oven-like grills, each
about 5 ´ 4 feet in size. The grills were
specially constructed to Robinson’s speci-
fications, and he designed and built the
framework for them. On the fourth side
we added a wooden crossbar from which
four large springs were suspended. On
each grill and on the crossbar we
mounted at least two different contact
microphones; for each side of the gHong
a good quality contact microphone (such
as a stethoscope microphone or the
transducer from a vibration exciter) was
combined with a cheap microphone or
microphone insert that had a poor fre-
quency response, with only a middle or
high frequency range. Simply by varying
the levels on a mixer for each pair of mi-
crophones we were able to obtain sub-
stantial filtering effects.
Group Composition VI (Unfixed Parities)
(1972) concentrated on an electronic
sound-processing system, as in Group
Composition I, this time for modifying
speech. (This homemade system is de-
scribed in the CD Contributors’ Notes
section of this issue of LMJ.)
Before the group came to an end we
had begun to plan Group Composition VII,
which was to have been a meal, per-
formed/eaten on the stage. Among the
ideas that offered live electronic possi-
bilities were the insertion of two
“probes” (connected to a voltage-con-
trol input on a VCS3) into a cake, which
altered a complex sound on the synthe-
sizer as the size of the cake was reduced
by successive slices and one probe
needed to be resited (originally carried
out by us in the interval of an afternoon
rehearsal, using a large cheesecake); a
“beer input” for other control voltages;
and interconnections to be switched
whenever a knife and fork touched. A
second project for a future group com-
position would have involved a live elec-
tronic part operated entirely on the mix-
ing desk in a recording studio.
Two further group compositions were
created. We worked on River Concer t
(Dart River Environment) as a project with

Davies, Gentle Fire 59


Fig. 2. Gentle Fire playing the gHong (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1972), here suspended
from a low ceiling rather than on its own stand; from left to right: Richard Bernas, Graham
Hearn, Michael Robinson (back to camera), Stuart Jones, Hugh Davies. (Photo © Petra
Grosskopf)
our students at the Dartington Summer
School in 1972, in which each musician
performed in response to one of several
tape loops selected randomly from re-
cordings we had made at different loca-
tions along the nearby River Dart. Piano
Concert (1973) involved several perform-
ers operating inside a piano and with
live electronic treatments.
CONCLUSION
All creative organizations seem to have a
natural life of around 7 years, after
which substantial renewal is needed if
they are to continue. Gentle Fire man-
aged to evolve during the first 5 years of
its existence, but a variety of factors,
mostly mentioned or implied above,
caused the group’s gradual demise. Af-
ter 1972 our earnings from concerts fell
sharply, and, due to the decreasing avail-
ability of money in the arts, invitations
were less common. Hearn and I had al-
ready established the principal elements
of our careers, but the three other mem-
bers had not, and needed to explore dif-
ferent potential sources of income [14].
The York members had started out in
the group while they were still students,
but skill in Gentle Fire’s repertoire was
not an appropriate qualification for
more conventional musical activities at
the time. Rehearsals were often awkward
to schedule, with two members (later
one) living in Yorkshire and the others
in London. Finally, none of us had a
60 Davies, Gentle Fire
vested interest as a composer in making
the group central to future composi-
tions, and indeed the cooperative na-
ture of the group would have prevented
any member from trying to do so.
I have long believed that the future of
electronic music would be in live perfor-
mance, with certain works produced on
tape (or digital storage) in a studio be-
cause they could not be created in real
time. It seems to me, however, that there
was a lull in the development of live
electronic music after the early 1970s,
and the medium only began to revive a
decade later, with the introduction of
new commercial devices such as digital
delays, harmonizers and vocoders (and,
later on, samplers) as well as, in certain
areas, the early use of microcomputers.
Today, of course, live electronic tech-
niques have become widespread in all
types and styles of music.
References and Notes
1. Hugh Davies, Répertoire international des musiques
électroacoustiques/International Electronic Music Catalog
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); Electronic Music
Review 2–3 (April–July 1967) (special double issue).
2. In the festival at York University I also appeared
in the Orton/Davies live electronic duo per for-
mance of Cage’s Electronic Music for Piano.
3. Hugh Davies, “Electronic Music: History and De-
velopment,” in John Vinton, ed., Dictionary of Con-
temporary Music (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974) p.
215 (published in U.K. as Dictionary of 20th Century
Music (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974).
4. Alvin Lucier, “Gentle Fire,” Source: Music of the
Avant Garde 10, Alvin Lucier, special issue ed.,
(1973) pp. 46–49 (score).
5. Karlheinz Stockhausen, From the Seven Days/Aus
den sieben Tagen (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1970)
(score collection).
6. Tim Souster, “Intermodulation: a Short History,”
Contact 17 (Summer 1977) pp. 3–6.
7. Paul Griffiths, The Thames and Hudson
Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Music (London/New
York: Thames & Hudson, 1986) p. 90 (reprinted in
1996 as Dictionary of 20th Century Music).
8. Stuart Jones, Graham Hearn and Hugh Davies,
“Gentle Fire,” in Lucier, ed. [4] pp. 84–87 (scores
of Graham Hearn, Drencher; Stuart Jones, Leave to
Lean To; Hugh Davies, Quintet).
9. John Furnival, Ode, Ceolfrith Press 17-cm LP CPR
1 (included with exh. cat.) (1971).
10. Hugh Davies, “A Simple Ring-Modulator,” Mu-
sics 6 (February–March 1976) pp. 3–5.
11. Simon Emmerson, “Live Electronic Music in
Britain: Three Case Studies,” Contemporary Music
Review 6, No. 1, 179–195 (1991) (includes a list of
about half of the works in Gentle Fire’s repertoire).
12. Emmerson [11].
13. Michael Robinson, “Gentle Fire: the Group
Compositions,” unpublished talk broadcast by
Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, 1973.
14. Richard Bernas is an orchestral conductor and
pianist. I am a freelance composer, performer (of-
ten solo), instrument inventor and researcher.
Patrick Harrex is active again as a composer and
violinist, having retired from his financial career.
Graham Hearn is a college lecturer in jazz and con-
temporary music and a freelance pianist (jazz and
related music). Stuart Jones is a freelance com-
poser and performer, collaborator with visual artists
producing linear and interactive work, head of New
Media Design at Central St. Martins College in Lon-
don. Richard Orton is a composer and university
lecturer (appointed Emeritus Reader after early re-
tirement in 1998), founder member of the York-
based Composers Desktop Project and author of
the algorithmic composition software Tabula
Vigilans. Michael Robinson is a journalist working
mostly in television current affairs.
Discography
Furnival, John. Ode, Ceolfrith Press 17-cm CPR 1
(incl. with exh. cat. John Furnival) (1971).
Gentle Fire. Earle Brown, Four Systems; John Cage,
Music for Amplified Toy Pianos and Music for Carillon
Nos. 1–3 (performer: Graham Hearn); Christian
Wolff, Edges. Electrola LP 1C 065-02 469 and
Toshiba LP EAC-80295 (1974).
Gentle Fire. Group Composition IV (excerpt) “Live
Electronics,” Contemporary Music Review 6, No. 1
(cassette incl. with journal) (1991).
Orton, Richard. concert music 5, 17-cm LP included
in book Approach to Music, Vol. 3 (Oxford, U.K.:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Sternklang, Polydor LP
2612031 and DGG LP 2707 123 (2 LPs) (1976); re-
issued on Stockhausen Gesamtausgabe CD 18A-B
(2CDs) (1992) (with 16 other performers).
Manuscript received 6 February 2001.
Since 1999, Hugh Davies has been a part-time
Researcher in Sonic Art at the Centre for Elec-
tronic Arts, Middlesex University, London. His
researches concentrate on twentieth-century mu-
sical instruments and electronic music, includ-
ing chapters in 20 books and exhibition cata-
logues and contributions to nine dictionaries.