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To create Canadian Chemical Industry's Kaleidoscope, Film Maker Morley Markson and Composer Murray Schafer worked together from the beginning. "In some places the film was done first," says Schafer, "and in other places the sound track." The result is a spectacle in which abstract images on a screen, mirrored in four sides to create an endless pattern, are mirrored again in a complex panorama of synthesized sound; the musical impulses seem to take on a visual shape, and abstract color patterns become a kind of lyrical outpouring. Says Schafer, who teaches far-out musical techniques at British Columbia's new Simon Fraser University: "All the arts are beginning to invade each other's territories. You get kinetic sculpture, sculpture in time, and musical compositions in which the pictorial aspect is so beautiful you could almost hang it in an art gallery."
Unsentimental Alp. Sometimes electronic music also works in more representational films. Switzerland's handsome travelogue derives much of its wit and vitality from the score by Rolf Liebermann, whose only other film score, produced in Basel 20 years ago, was an orchestral ode to DDT. For the new score, Liebermann combined lab-made sounds with conventional percussion, shaping a sound portrait of his country that seems to abstract the essence of Alp, the distillation of cow. "I wanted to get away from the kitsch postcard. I used electronic devices to de-sentimentalize the theme."
Not all of Expo's music is out of the lab, but even the good old symphonic sound connects successfully with the image. In Czechoslovakia's multiscreen paean to technology, Composer Jiří Šust's light and airy fantasy of woodwind and percussion twines around images and even makes a steel mill appear graceful. For the U.S. pavilion's delightful fantasy on children's games, Mark Bucci contrived a perky tone poem on the youthful vision.
But it is the electronic composer whose place has been emphatically justified in the wealth of Expo's experimentation. Whether or not his music has any place in the concert hall, Expo has shown it to be an integral part of contemporary artistic language.