Born in Croydon in 1939, Martin Bartlett was adopted as a baby, and later moved with his family to Canada. He did a short stint in the Navy and completed a music degree at the University of British Columbia, studying under Barbara Pentland, before going on to study composition at Mills College in the late '60s. In 1973, Bartlett and seven others founded the Western Front in Vancouver -- a cultural cooperative, gallery and performance space that still exists today, housed in the old meeting hall of the Knights of Pythias (a mason-like fraternity). Key influences were Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and David Tudor, all whom he studied under. Like many of his generation, he became interested in non-Western compositional and philosophical practices, and in 1981 he traveled to India to study Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras and then on to Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia where he studied shadow theater. He studied South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro, and closely collaborated with Don Buchla on live performances and synthesizer design. He founded the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986. On his travels to Indonesia he made hours of field recordings, many of which are accompanied by vivid narrations on the rituals and ceremonies he was documenting. He continued with his research and teaching, and in 1982 was made professor at Simon Fraser University where he remained for the rest of his life.
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ALE 009LP
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Martin Bartlett was an inspiring and original thinker, composer, writer, performer, and organizer. His preoccupation with building aleatoric elements into electronic music distinguishes his work. He devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers which included building his own electronic devices and extensive work on the Buchla 400. He worked with or studied under Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, and David Tudor, and collaborated extensively with Don Buchla, and some of their live performances are included on the LP Anecdotal Electronics. He also studied Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras, South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, and gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro. He founded the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986. His performances were often collaborative -- for the Western Front's second anniversary in 1975, he devised the four-channel piece "One Piece for Everyone", where he prepared and cooked a cauliflower curry on a table connected to a self-built synthesizer, while reading from texts on food. When the curry was cooked, the piece ended, and everyone was fed. Bartlett was a prolific writer, and he expresses himself in fresh, lucid, and wonderfully descriptive prose, offering clear thinking on social aspects of electronic music performance; on the barriers between the performer and the "black box" and on possibilities for organic systems in electronic music. He also wrote the incandescent manifesto-like piece "Electronic Recalcitrant" (which forms the cover artwork for Anecdotal Electronics), in which he hoped that electronic music would be imbued with "organic codes of growth and metamorphosis" so that he could "pluck elegant and fleshy electronic sound fish from the frothy algorithmic sea of possibilities". It is unclear why Bartlett's work remains unknown. Perhaps it is because it remained largely inside the academy. Perhaps his commitment to live performance and community activity means it was more transient than the work of others. Perhaps his openness about his sexuality played a part in his music not receiving much recognition -- one can only speculate. But correspondence in his archive shows that rejection from labels was a source of great personal discontent, leading to Bartlett working with the Western Front to release his final opus "Pythagoras' Ghost" shortly before his death. Bartlett died young, of AIDS-related causes, in 1993, but his music is characterized by an irresistible and unselfconscious charm that renders his sound unique.
Arc Light Editions releases an LP "sketchbook" of live recordings, experiments, and spoken word titled Anecdotal Electronics, and a CD of Bartlett's longer electroacoustic and orchestral works, titled Ankle On (ALE 010CD). Compiled and edited by Luke Fowler with Jennifer Lucy Allan. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. "Three Songs" features Dan Shiedt + Doug Collinge.
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ALE 010CD
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Martin Bartlett was an inspiring and original thinker, composer, writer, performer, and organizer. His preoccupation with building aleatoric elements into electronic music distinguishes his work. He devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers which included building his own electronic devices and extensive work on the Buchla 400. He worked with or studied under Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, and David Tudor, and collaborated extensively with Don Buchla, and some of their live performances are included on the LP Anecdotal Electronics (ALE 009LP). He also studied Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras, South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, and gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro. He founded the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986. His performances were often collaborative -- for the Western Front's second anniversary in 1975, he devised the four-channel piece "One Piece for Everyone", where he prepared and cooked a cauliflower curry on a table connected to a self-built synthesizer, while reading from texts on food. When the curry was cooked, the piece ended, and everyone was fed. Bartlett was a prolific writer, and he expresses himself in fresh, lucid, and wonderfully descriptive prose, offering clear thinking on social aspects of electronic music performance; on the barriers between the performer and the "black box" and on possibilities for organic systems in electronic music. He also wrote the incandescent manifesto-like piece "Electronic Recalcitrant" (which forms the cover artwork for Anecdotal Electronics), in which he hoped that electronic music would be imbued with "organic codes of growth and metamorphosis" so that he could "pluck elegant and fleshy electronic sound fish from the frothy algorithmic sea of possibilities". It is unclear why Bartlett's work remains unknown. Perhaps it is because it remained largely inside the academy. Perhaps his commitment to live performance and community activity means it was more transient than the work of others. Perhaps his openness about his sexuality played a part in his music not receiving much recognition -- one can only speculate. But correspondence in his archive shows that rejection from labels was a source of great personal discontent, leading to Bartlett working with the Western Front to release his final opus "Pythagoras' Ghost" shortly before his death. Bartlett died young, of AIDS-related causes, in 1993, but his music is characterized by an irresistible and unselfconscious charm that renders his sound unique.
Arc Light Editions releases an LP "sketchbook" of live recordings, experiments, and spoken word titled Anecdotal Electronics (ALE 009LP), and a CD of Bartlett's longer electroacoustic and orchestral works, titled Ankle On. Compiled and edited by Luke Fowler with Jennifer Lucy Allan. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
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