Allen and Patricia Strange have been making nontraditional music for more than 30 years.

Electric Company

By Mary Ann Cook
Photographs by Paul Myers

Patricia and Allen Strange get a charge out of making cutting-edge music

Nothing new under the sun? What about alternative music? Even though computer-enhanced music has been around for decades, to the untrained ear it still sounds totally new. A far cry from mainstream, this genre has two local practitioners at the very forefront of the movement and they have been so for more than 30 years.

Los Gatans Patricia and Allen Strange have been composing and performing such music for decades. He's the composer; she's the performer, a concert violinist. They are the authors of a new book called The Contemporary Violin: Extended Performance Techniques.

The book is an extension of Patricia's master's thesis, brought up to date. This music is so different from established forms that it doesn't appear on traditional music notation scales. Its graphics look more like an earthquake tremor printout than a musical score.

In composing computer acoustic music, "the sky's the limit: the combinations of sounds are infinite," Allen says.

The minute the sound of a violin (or any instrument) could be played electronically, the music world changed drastically. A field of endless possibilities was opened up to composers: "We can redefine instruments or compose new ones," he says.

Parts of alternative music may sound like they were recorded underwater. Parts may remind one of a field full of insects buzzing, or a cacophony of street noises. Parts may sound like the heavens are opening up to the fury of a storm. Hence, they are sometimes called "environmental sounds."

Portions of these sounds can be amplified to whatever degree the composer chooses. They can be moved up and down the octave scale--modified, magnified. They can be cut and pasted around other, more traditional musical themes.

And the computer makes the arrangements that can be formed from the myriad of sounds limitless. Synthesizers became the software for the new sounds created. Allen Strange has taught the components of electro-acoustic music at San Jose State University for the past 32 years and is the founder of that section of the music department.

So few people were attuned to this new way of composing at that time that he was literally "hired over the phone," he says.

But he's fed up to his craw now with the education scene and has retired at age 58 to devote himself to composing. "The quality of education is an embarrassment. I don't want to be associated with it anymore," he says, speaking of its emphasis on the bottom line.

"Education can't be expected to pay for itself," he says.

"He's an amazing, teacher," says Kerstin Stone, a Saratoga piano teacher who took a class in 20th-century counterpoint from him. "The way he was able to relate early counterpoint (Gregorian chants) to 20th-century minimalism (Philip Glass compositions) was electrifying, incredible."

Allen's wife, Pat, also taught at SJSU and was the four-string coordinator there. She taught privately for some 10 years, as well, but in recent years she's devoted more of her time to performing. She has been a concert violinist for nearly every orchestral group in the valley.

She plays principle second violin for San Jose Symphony and San Jose Ballet Silicon Valley. She is concertmaster for American Musical Theater and first violin for Opera San Jose. At holiday time she's caught up in one Nutcracker after another.

What with all the groups she's part of, she says, she has lots of options--playing everything from musical comedy to her husband's alternative compositions. She's also bookkeeper/accountant at Stevens Violin Shop in Willow Glen. Pat's master's thesis, earned nearly 30 years ago, became the basis of the couple's book .

"Fifty percent of it was virtually unchanged," Allen says. "We wanted to get new, expanded examples. And we wanted to use examples only from published literature, so people could get at it." It had already been used as a reference throughout the decades since it had been written. "I used it as a reference in my teaching," says Allen.

"Oddly enough, I was about to turn [the thesis] into an electronic document and put it on the Internet when we got the request from UC. It was published by the University of California Press in Berkeley, part of an ongoing series. One book for each instrument is expected to be produced eventually."

But the first in the series was published more than 30 years ago by Bertram Turitzky. Why the delay and why the resurgence of interest? The economics of printing has changed, Allen conjectures. "I think it became more cost effective."

"It's very expensive to reproduce these unusual notations. And we said we'd deliver it camera-ready." Reproducing notational systems is so painstaking that a magnifying glass is used to make sure the lines connect exactly.

Playing right into their hands, someone who could put the musical examples into the right form--into book format--was close at hand. She's Los Gatan Gabriela Martinez. Martinez, a graphic designer, combines the two worlds of music and technology.

With a degree in music, she renders this specialized musical formatting into reproducible form. She says about working with the Stranges: "It was a wonderful match--an exciting, fun project.

"They're very talented people. It's a tremendously useful book, a valuable resource for those writing and performing contemporary music."


Allen Strange is the composer; his wife, Patricia, is a concert violinist.




Of the eight chapters in The Contemporary Violin, a surprising six of them have nothing to do with computers. Expanding the sounds a violin can make isn't just dependent on what can be done via the computer.

For example, the first chapter is about bowing, the second about fingering, the third about percussion. Fourth is harmonics, fifth is the tuning system. The sixth chapter is about physical variations, such as putting a mute on the violin.

Seventh is amplification and signal processing (tone controls, or "audio meat grinding," as Allen puts it). And the eighth chapter covers computers and the violin. So the book shows the progression of tools that can be used by the violin player--a progression from its beginnings up until today.

The next tool in the progression would be mental processes, such as ESP and telepathy, says Allen. Some work using those newest tools has already been explored by others.

Now that they're retired from teaching, the Stranges will be concentrating on composing and performing. As performers they are a threesome: The third member of the group is saxophonist William Trimble of Santa Cruz, who also taught at SJSU, and is also retired. "He is as knowledgeable about extended technique on the saxophone as Patricia is on the violin," Allen attests.

Besides composing, Allen also plays the guitar and the computer during performances. "Actually, I baby-sit the computer," he says.

"The notes are there, all programmed in. I just have to make sure they're struck at exactly the right point, that the synchronization is exactly on target."

Those who draw the musical map have to notate it in such a way that those who follow it will truly be able to find their way on the journey the composer intended. "You have to invent your own notational system and you have to have it make sense. Someone else will be using it, too, so it has to do what it purports to do."

The Stranges were on the cutting edge of this new music--or beyond. In the '70s, shortly after they were married, they formed a group called the Biomes with another couple, Boots and Frank McCarty. The work they did then was called "brain wave music."

Four different biorhythms were recorded from each of the four performers--brain waves, heart rate, body temperature, skin tension--and a composition was created from these four body rhythms. The group performed in '72 at the International Carnival of Electronic Sound.

The term biome refers to "a cadre of sound, a biological independent collective," as Allen puts it.

He was the first to produce a comprehensive work on analog music synthesis, called Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques and Control. Published in 1972, it is considered a classic reference work. One of his most recent works is on a CD called The Composer in the Computer Age.

It's an anthology of the work of five different composers besides Allen. Most of the labels his work is on are an anthology from different composers. He is the author of perhaps 200 compositions. "Go to Amazon [.com]," he suggests, when asked to name some representative CDs.

"My music isn't for everyone," he readily concedes. "Composers compose for themselves, not for others, unless it's a commercial piece for advertising or movies. When people listen to new music if they don't know what they're listening for (such as music traveling around a room), they'll miss the point."

Did the duo know early on that avant- garde music would be their forte? "I always knew my life would be about performing music," Patricia says. Her father was a high school band director. She took piano in third grade, clarinet in fourth and violin in fifth, a steady progression up the scale of difficulty.

Though her father has died, her mother, Evelyn Shafer, lives in Los Gatos.

Allen's background is far different: There had never been a musician in the family. "My parents were cowboys and their idea of music meant playing for coins or beer in a bar. Which I did," he says, "from the age of 13. Still do," he adds, chortling.

And he knew he'd have to go to college, though that too was not the family pattern. Most of his family hadn't gone to high school, he says, but he knew he needed college to learn to do what he wanted--composing and performing alternative music. He worked his way through, starting with community colleges.

The Stranges met at UC-Fullerton. He earned his master's there. Hers is from UC-San Diego. Allen did graduate work at San Diego and Stanford. The couple has two daughters--Erin, a junior at Los Gatos High School, and Robin, who lives in Seattle with Doug Morse and son Donovan, 7.

As soon as they sell their Los Gatos house, the Stranges will be off for Seattle. There the climate for alternative music is very supportive--one of the few places in the world where this can be said.

"It's tuned into the experimental, like Paris in the '40s," Allen says. That kind of acceptance is true of the Bay Area, too, but there are so many demands on their time here that they can't concentrate on their own work.

The realm of computer-enhanced music was a tight little world when Allen was hired at SJSU. And, to a large extent, it still is. But gradually, what is first viewed as avant garde, becomes accepted, indeed becomes the classic.

"Anything new is considered avant- garde--Beethoven, Bach--they were avant-garde in their own time," Allen points out. Whether or not it is his music that will achieve a lasting status, some contemporary music will gain acceptance as the years pass, he is convinced.

When asked what he thought, as a child, he'd become, he replies without hesitation, "A criminal." Well, that answer is not as preposterous as it may sound: He is something of a musical outlaw, a composer who creates outside the traditional bounds of music making.

The Stranges' wry take on life is exemplified in their license plate, which reads, "Real Musicians Have a Day Job."

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