Tapes and the art of noise

The commercial tape recorder halfway through the 20th century made possible the creation of electronically generated sound and last night's tripartite Prom brought together works from that period and the present day demonstrating that composers still find the interaction of "natural" and technologically produced sound fruitful.

Jonathan Harvey's Speakings for orchestra and live electronics, a world premiere by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, was a joint commission by the BBC and IRCAM/Radio France. Forming the third part of his trilogy devoted to "the Buddhist purification of body, mind and speech", Speakings explores the interface of orchestral music and human speech. The wailing, shrieking, ululating sounds emanating from the stage represent the struggle of the orchestra to articulate an intelligible language.

But Harvey deploys the resources of the 21st-century equivalent of Russolo's noise intoners - in the shape of sound projection generated by IRCAM - to infuse and enhance those primitive sounds, making something infinitely richer and more eloquent. In the third movement a grand elegy on trombones gives way to a shimmering wash of sound combining the live orchestra and electronics that reverberated round the hall to splendid effect.

It was good to hear it juxtaposed with Edgard Varèse's Déserts of 1950-54, which similarly deploys live instruments and tape, though never together, in order to portray the sterile, forbidding aspects of vast natural spaces. Volkov's shaping of this rebarbative assemblage of fragmentary noises was masterly.

A shorter work each by Varèse and Harvey also pointed up their contrasting sensibilities. Varèse's Poème Electronique builds a collage of disembodied sounds, humorous as well as alienating, from an initial tolling bell. Harvey, in Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco for eight-channel tape, transmutes the resonant tones of the huge tenor bell in Winchester Cathedral into those of a boy treble. Determined not to let technological wizardry overwhelm the human spirit, Harvey produces a work of subtle expressivity.

www.bbc.co.uk/proms.

BBC Scottish SO/Volkov
Royal Albert Hall