Technology, Process and Musical Personality in the Music of Stockhausen, Hugh Davies and Gentle Fire

Hugh Davies, an English composer, instrument-builder, improviser and musicologist, was personal assistant to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1964-66. Gentle Fire is the name of Davies's experimental music ensemble, active from 1968-75, which performed Stockhausen's works as well as works by other avant-garde and experimental composers, and the group's own distinctive Group Compositions. The purpose of this essay is to examine a number of Stockhausen’s works from the period 1964 to 1968, and a number of Davies’s and Gentle Fire’s from 1967 to 1974, highlighting points of similarity and difference between them. Particular attention is paid to Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964–5), Kurzwellen (1968), and Aus den Sieben Tagen (1968), Davies’s Quintet and Galactic Interfaces (both 1967–8), and his self-built instruments, and Gentle Fire’s Group Compositions (1970–4). Discussion focuses upon three areas: firstly, technology, and the microphone in particular; secondly, the ways in which process-based systems are used to shape musical material; and thirdly, the role in the selection of musical material of what members of Gentle Fire have termed ‘musical personality’.