2003 JULY 16 #197
Henk Badings - Dialogue for Man and Machine
"The Midnight Special" is a legendary Chicago radio program, which features, in the hosts' words ""Folk music and farce, show tunes and satire, madness and escape". I believe It celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, although I consider it to be a shadow of its former self.
The show was founded as a live folk music show, founded of (by all people) future film director Mike Nichols, and quickly evolved into the show described above, which was hosted by two of the top people at WFMT. For over 35 years, it was hosted by these two men. In the mid-'50s, one could hear such relatively rarely heard personalities as Pete Seeger (during the blacklist) and Tom Lehrer (before he became better known in the '60's), among hundreds of others. Only in recent years, under a new host, has it devolved into the singer-songwriter pap that tends to make up what is called "folk music" these days.
When I am looking through used reel-to-reel tapes, I always keep an eye out for tapes of The Midnight Special, especially those from the '50's and early '60's. I found a batch of them one year at the ALS sale, all recorded around 1960. I was in heaven, but even that discovery did not prepare me for what one of the tapes contained. All I know about the piece heard here, Henk Badings' "Dialogue for Man and Machine", is what was said about it by the host of the show, Norm Pellegrini, before and after he played the track
Here are the initial comments, made after the airing of a typical arrangement of "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly":
Burl Ives, from one of his Decca records, singing "I know an old lady". Well, about the last thing that I know I would have expected to happen to this song has happened. Namely, a composer of electronic music has gotten a hold of it, and though he's left off the music, he includes the text. This is one voice, heard in many dialects, guises and tape speeds, and it's kind of a weird thing. Let's hear part of it...
And after the piece airs:
That's a portion of "Dialogue for Man and Machine", by the Dutch composer Henk Badings. Not available on a recording, that's a tape from Radio Diffusion Francais. Strange thing, isn't it?
- Bob Purse
TT-2:35 / 2.4MB / 128kbps 44.1khz
Markus Lloyd writes:
Bob Purse has unearthed an example of seeming whimsy by
Henk Badings, but Badings was in all earnest – he
was one of the daddies of serious electronic composition.
Like many of his generation (1907-1987) he was delighted
by the lyrical simplicity and musical complexity of Folk
music – hence, There was an Old Lady Who... This
Dutch modernist (who dabbled in visual media too) was
one of those tonal/atonal composers that would have influenced
the John Cage, John Cale and Lou Reed etc. If you take
Reed"s Metal Machine Music as more than a knee-in-the-crotch
of his record label, than it"s Badings and his ilk
we have to thank – or to bill for all extra-strength
paracetamol you took after listening to MMM. BUT where
the f*@k did Badings find that English accent, it belongs
to another era – to some Public School toff after
one too many colonic irrigations: I"d like to assume
that Henk was taking the piss, but I very much doubt it
– the comedy arises from ‘the importance of
being earnest", not from a few tokes and a slice
of Spacecake outside an Amsterdam hash café. I
can"t date Dialogue for Man and Machine to its first
performance, but it would have been circa 1955-6. It was
performed at San Francisco's Vortex 5 in January 1959
– perhaps this is where it entered the consciousness
that led to its inclusion on the Chicago"s The Midnight
Special. I"d love to hear the whole recording that
Norm Pellegrini lifted the extract from, anyone out there?