Ingram Marshall, composer who used electronics
Ingram Marshall, an influential American composer who used combinations of electronic sound and standard orchestral instruments to create deeply moving, atmospheric and often melancholic soundscapes, died May 31 at a hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 80.
He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Veronica Tomasic.
Marshall’s music drew on a wealth of styles, from 18th-century hymnody and lush Romanticism to mid20th century electronic composition and minimalism — a breadth of influences that made his music almost impossible to classify. He was sometimes called a post-minimalist, but he disliked the term, suggesting postmodernist as an alternative. But his music also embraced a time-expanding element — a sense of slowly unfolding — born of his fascination with the Indonesian gamelan, a traditional percussion ensemble that he discovered as a college student in the late 1960s.
Trained in the use of computers to produce musical sounds, first at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and later at the California Institute of the Arts, he created some pieces with purely electronic timbres — “blip and bloop and bleep” textures, as he once called them — but generally preferred collecting the sounds of the real world and modifying them with digital delays, looping and other techniques, often adding live instruments or vocals, which would be electronically processed as well.
His best-known work, “Fog Tropes” (1981), used sounds he recorded near San Francisco Bay, including fog horns at different pitches, ringing buoys, seagulls and wind. Looped and processed, the recordings became a dark-hued, hauntingly atmospheric score, to which he added music for a live brass sextet. In 2010, director Martin Scorsese used a section of the piece in his film “Shutter Island.”
“I never worship technology for itself,” Marshall told the online music website Perfect Sound Forever in 2003. “It’s only a tool and one must avoid the pitfall of always wanting the newest, most up to date technology in order to realize one’s music, because that perfect technology will never exist. It is better to use what you have, what you find at your disposal and make the best of it — then you are in charge.”