Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911-1990), then a junior faculty member, had the job of looking after the department's equipment, including the tape recorder. He became curious about how sound might be manipulated, rather than simply reproduced, through tape manipulations. He began experimenting with techniques such as using its speed control to change the pitch of recorded sounds. Peter Mauzey, an engineer at the campus radio station, showed him how to use tape feedback, (also called tape echo) whereby the signal from the playback head was sent to the record head. Since it takes a fraction of a second for the tape to pass from the record head to the playback head, the result was that a delayed version of what had just been recorded was constantly being superimposed onto the tape. If this were done with a tape loop, a continual set of delayed inputs could build up over repeated passes, creating a reverberation. By using the radio station's tape recorder as a second instrument, they could then transfer the material from tape loops or variable-speed manipulations to another tape.

In 1952, at the end of the academic year, Ussachevsky gave a concert of five tape works at Columbia University. Ussachevsky's instrument was the piano, so the pieces consisted of manipulations of piano recordings.

Otto Luening	Vladimir Ussachevsky

A colleague, Otto Luening (1900-1996), took particular interest. Luening had studied with Busoni in Zurich from 1918 to 1920, where he acquired an interest in musical acoustics and instrumental design. Luening was about to leave for a summer program he directed for composers in Bennington, VT. He asked Ussachevsky to bring the equipment there so that they could work with it together. Luening, a flutist as well as a composer, was interested in doing experiments with flute, vocals, and tape manipulations. They experimented with a variety of instrumental tones, and played some short pieces for the resident composers, who responded enthusiastically.

Their work featured tape echo, splicing, tape speed manipulation, and overdubs. Their pieces had a more traditional musical focus than the works being produced in Paris in that they worked with materials consisting of musical notes and melodies. The tape recorder was thus a way to explore new areas of traditional musical form.

Ussachevsky and Luening were invited to play that fall as part of a series of new music produced by Leopold Stokowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Though somewhat put off by the sudden attention, they accepted. Composer Henry Cowell invited them to spend the rest of the summer at his farm in upstate New York, where they produced four more pieces. In the fall, they moved the equipment into Ussachevsky's apartment in New York, and continued working.

Cowell had been one of America's most innovative composers of the 1920s and 1930s. Among his innovations were pieces that involved plucking and scraping the strings of a piano directly, innovative ideas on rhythm, and a focus on the harmonic series. His interest in the potential of tape music, then, was understandable -- it is easy to see how he would be enthused with ideas such as recording a piano and lowering the speed so that the fundamental pitch was below the audible frequency range, leaving only the harmonics audible. Sonic Contours, which Ussachevsky created when they had returned to New York, likely shows some of Cowell's influence: it is based primarily in piano manipulations, some of which sound as though they are derived from plucking or scraping piano strings. [Thanks to student Jason Fick for noting this connection.]

The Museum of Modern Art concert took place on October 28, 1952, and represented the first concert of electroacoustic music in the United States. The term "tape music" was coined to describe the production of music meant to be reproduced, rather than performed. It was a less stringent definition than the dogmas that governed the aesthetics of the European studios in Paris and Cologne. Their work aroused great critical interest. The concert was rebroadcast on many radio stations, the pair were invited to be guests on a television talk show demonstrating their equipment. They received a grant in 1953 that allowed them to purchase two more tape recorders, a filter, an oscillator, and parts for Mauzey to build a mixer. They then went to Europe, had their work played at RF in Paris, and were the first Americans to visit the studio in Cologne, which was being assembled at the time. The United States was now part of the new movement in electronic music.