“We didn’t have melody or pulse, we just had sound,” says Michael Robinson, recalling his experience of playing in the group Gentle Fire. “It was like Caliban’s island full of noises, in The Tempest, you never knew quite where the next sound was coming from, or what it would be.” So at dawn, one morning in June 1971, visitors to the Glastonbury Fayre free festival awoke to hear unfamiliar and mysterious music in the air. Attracted to that site in rural Somerset by the prospect of performances by Hawkwind, Traffic, Joan Baez, Fairport Convention or David Bowie, those early risers caught the first rays of the sun illuminating a raised stage, set within a silver pyramid, and found themselves entering the singular soundworld of Gentle Fire.

An enigmatic structure was visible on the platform. Suspended from a wooden frame were three metal grills, each around five feet high and four feet wide. A set of large springs dangled from the fourth side. Five figures gathered around this unique musical instrument, designed and constructed by Robinson, who had chosen to call it the gHong. Then the group started to draw from it a stream of spellbinding sounds, ethereal and iridescent. Amplified by contact microphones the inner vibration of those resonant grills and springs, their molecular agitation, was projected across the Glastonbury arena. Gradually the musicians introduced the sounds of other instruments.

“Oh, it’s gadget time, is it?” quipped a member of the Glastonbury stage crew as the gHong was being set up. That remark lingers in the memory of Graham Hearn, another member of Gentle Fire. Yet, far from being just an eye-catching gimmick, this unconventional instrument was integral to any realisation of this groundbreaking live electronics ensemble’s Group Composition IV. It served, in effect, as both score and means for that music to be made. “We used the gHong as a sound source and then tried to dovetail our instruments to it,” Robinson explains. “That piece really did respond to its environment. It changed significantly in its various performances – which I loved. On that beautiful morning, people emerged from their tents saying, what is this? It was magical.” The following year, one evening in August, the gHong once again took centre stage, spotlit in the middle of London’s Roundhouse, where Gentle Fire had been engaged to play in the context of Harvey Matusow’s ambitious International Carnival Of Experimental Sound (ICES). Fortunately at this concert, another incarnation of Group Composition IV was recorded by John Lifton (a founder of the New Arts Lab, in nearby Camden). That recording has now resurfaced on Explorations 1970–1973 (Paradigm Discs), a substantial and long overdue dip into the archive of this important, yet scantily documented experimental ensemble.

It seemed to be a flourish typical of Matusow’s exuberant programming that Gentle Fire’s delicate yet intense performance, on that August evening in 1972, was followed by a vibrant display of polyrhythmic virtuosity by Oboade, a group led by master drummer Mustapha Tettey Addy. In fact, however, Michael Robinson, who had grown up in Cape Town and took a lively interest in African music, was responsible for bringing that group from Ghana to enthral the audience at ICES. Gentle Fire’s initial encounter with Matusow occurred during a visit to Ingatestone, Essex, where they participated in one of the domestic festivals hosted by his neighbour, sound poet Henri Chopin. Richard Bernas, another core member of the ensemble, actually helped to raise the public profile of ICES. “I got Harvey to talk to some of the more visionary people I knew at the BBC. That’s how the first night of ICES, the premiere of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD, got to be part of the Proms, relayed live from the Roundhouse.” Bernas was one of the seven harpsichord players involved in that multimedia tour de force. A month earlier he had also contributed to its performance at Berlin’s Philharmonie. “That was absolute sensory overload – not in a bad way,” he recalls. “Frederic Rzewski, who was also playing in that one, said to me, ‘This is just like being in Mozart’s brain!’”

By the time Michael Robinson joined, in 1970, Gentle Fire had already established a distinctive group identity, fostered within the unusually open-minded Department of Music at York University. Composer Richard Orton had taken up a teaching post there, and had set up a small electronic music studio. Early in 1968, he initiated Saturday morning experimental music sessions, eagerly attended by Robinson, Bernas and fellow undergraduate Stuart Jones. Graham Hearn, then studying for a PhD in composition, was also a keen participant. They came primed. All had previously encountered the music and insights of John Cage, and had found that experience transformative.

In December 1966 Stuart Jones, then in his mid-teens and already an accomplished trumpet player, had witnessed Cage performing at London’s Saville Theatre with David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. “That really amazed me,” Jones remembers. “Then I bought Cage’s book Silence, and it blew my mind. I was ready for it, ripe for its effect.” On leaving school, Jones secured a place to study theoretical physics at Liverpool University, but then had a change of heart. “At that time, I was a member of The European Youth Orchestra. One of the bass players asked why I wasn’t planning to study music. He was at York and told me that being able to play piano wasn’t a requirement there, as I had assumed it would be for a music degree course. Also, the Department was really into jazz... and John Cage. I walked away from that conversation, found a phone, called Liverpool and said, I’m not coming.”

Richard Bernas grew up in New York. During his teenage years his family relocated to England, where his first piano teacher, “by no planning but pure happenstance”, was John Tilbury who steered him through Beethoven, but also encouraged engagement with recently composed music and lent him scores. So Bernas was already well equipped, before he had even enrolled at York, to present a solo recital in Canterbury of compositions by Cage, Morton Feldman and Terry Jennings.

Growing up in Cape Town, Michael Robinson learned to play piano. He also conducted some choral works, in a conservative context where staging Benjamin Britten’s Missa Brevis was regarded as a radical gesture. Robinson’s family moved to London, where he took A-level music at Chiswick Polytechnic. Through Sam Richards, a fellow student who would later become a jazz pianist and avid collector of folk music, he discovered Cage and Feldman. The exhilaration of this sudden expansion of his horizons has stayed with him. “I moved away from the ‘let me tell you how I feel, and how I want you to feel’ music that I’d grown up with. I didn’t want to tell anyone how I felt; I just wanted to give them something.”

Graham Hearn, after completing his first degree at London’s Trinity College of Music, taught in a comprehensive school in Leeds. A colleague named Bill Kinghorn was deeply interested in Cage’s musical thinking, and in the possibility of introducing some of his approaches into the classroom. “I just felt so much in tune with all of that,” Hearn acknowledges. “It really galvanised me.” Soon after his arrival in York ,as a postgraduate student, this dramatic change of compositional outlook was recognised by his supervisor, Wilfrid Mellers, who judiciously reassigned him to Richard Orton. In 1971, Earle Brown, Cage and Feldman’s close associate, would act as external examiner for Hearn’s doctorate.

During the first year in which these future members of Gentle Fire came to know one another in York, Christian Wolff, fourth member of the so-called New York School, had visited to meet informally with students. He talked them through some of his graphic scores. A few months later, York’s Music Department hosted a weekend-long festival. Earle Brown and Morton Feldman attended in person, and some of their scores were performed. “Michael and I played a Feldman cello and piano piece,” Bernas recalls, and adds with suitable relish, “Morty actually said to us, ‘That’s a little too quiet!’ We were doing that late teenage super-introvert thing.” Naturally, Cage’s music featured too. Bernas played his Concert For Piano while, at the same time, Orton sang one of the Solos For Voice. And Orton, in a duo he had recently formed with Hugh Davies, a live electronics specialist from London, performed Cage’s Electronic Music For Piano.

Hearn remembers showing Feldman a piece he himself had written. “I remarked that you could almost play it without a score. His response was, ‘No man, you’ve always got to use a score.’ That stayed with me. I’m also a devoted jazz musician, but when it came to Gentle Fire we weren’t particularly interested in improvisation. It was more a matter of exploring sound through the repertoire, Cage and others.” Featured prominently among those others were members of the Sonic Arts Union. At the start of May 1969 Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier flew from the US to perform in London.

“Richard Bernas and I were very much into organising,” says Stuart Jones. “We liked to make things happen. So we invited the Sonic Arts Union to York, and that was a revelatory experience. All the pieces they performed were really good, but hearing Alvin Lucier’s Vespers, which uses echo locators, was so exciting!”

“We took a lot of inspiration from them,” Bernas concurs. “There was in their work a strong feeling of unity between notation and means. Gordon Mumma would devise a circuit, and the articulation of that circuit was both score and performance, indivisible. We really were influenced by that in our own Group Composition series. The gHong, for example, taught us how to play it, and it was also the score.” “I thought the Sonic Arts Union were kindred spirits,” Hearn reflects. “Lucier, in particular, was on our wavelength.”

Hearn casts his mind back to a Gentle Fire performance in Harrogate of Lucier’s Chambers, a textual score which invites performers to select resonant environments and then to explore ways to make them sound. “Part of my own interpretation was to use Frank Sinatra as a sound source. I put on one of his LPs, and immediately put the speaker inside a suitcase, shutting him up. Richard Orton thought that was hilarious, even though it probably wasn’t quite what Alvin had in mind. That kind of slightly off-beat, tongue-in-cheek humour was part of what Gentle Fire did.” The word fun, a sense of real enjoyment, does indeed arise frequently in conversations with these musicians.

A few months after Brown and Feldman’s visit to York, enterprising organisers of a festival at Sheffield University invited Orton and his students to present a similar concert there. That event was well received, so on their return to York the performers discussed their future and took the Cage-inspired decision to consult the I Ching. “It seemed to be saying we should become a group and stay together,” Hearn recalls. It was the appearance of the hexagram associated with Family that swayed their decision. One of its trigrams means Gentle Wind, the other Clinging Fire. So a name became attached to the group, and Gentle Fire came into being.

Richard Orton would remain a member until 1971, when heavy teaching commitments hampered his involvement. That conflict of interests and obligations was something Hearn also experienced, once he had become a teacher at Harrogate College of Art. Hearn remained with Gentle Fire until the group eventually called it a day in 1975, but there were occasions when he was obliged to miss a concert. At such times a programme was selected to suit a quartet of musicians. There were also a few concerts where Christian Wolff stood in for him. “Christian was an absolute natural for us,” Stuart Jones suggests. “We had a similar kind of playfulness, I would say.”

Wolff’s compositions Edges, Pairs, Play, Stones and Burdocks all entered Gentle Fire’s repertoire, and their interpretation of his piece For Jill can be heard on Explorations. A more fundamental alliance was forged in November 1968, when Richard Orton invited Hugh Davies to join the group. Already in the duo they had formed that summer Orton and Davies were exploring what live electronic music might involve in terms of practical techniques and theoretical aspirations. On occasion they had asked students to join them, and Jones recalls travelling to London with Bernas, before Gentle Fire existed, in order to perform music by Cage and Wolff at Drury Lane Arts Lab. In October 1969, Davies was centrally involved in setting up the New Arts Lab in Camden, a catalytic hub for experimentation, also known as the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. By that point he had already established himself as a pivotal presence in Gentle Fire.

Davies (who passed away on the first day of 2005) was then in his mid-twenties and he already had a wealth of knowledge and experience. He had set up an electronic music studio at Goldsmith’s College, London shortly before Orton established the one in York. Davies had also compiled, and published through MIT Press, an International Electronic Music Catalog, characteristically thorough in its listing. Crucially, after graduating from Oxford, he had spent two years in Cologne, working as assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen, while also performing in the composer’s newly formed live electronics group. Along with first-hand insights into how such a group might operate, Davies brought to Gentle Fire an idiosyncratic passion for constructing quirky, ingenious homemade instruments. Looking back in 1989, Davies wrote: “An inherited do-it-yourself approach and tendency to get my hands ‘dirty’ led me unwittingly in 1967 to divert half of my compositional creativity into inventing and building new amplified instruments for me to perform on, both in specially devised compositions and in collective improvisations. Previously I had little idea that I might become a performer, and especially not that I would often appear as a soloist.”

During the early years of Gentle Fire’s existence, Davies was concurrently a member of Music Improvisation Company, playing alongside Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, percussionist Jamie Muir and voice artist Christine Jeffrey. In his book Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music, Bailey quotes Parker’s insight that “Hugh’s virtuosity was expressed more in the building of an instrument than in the playing. Playing most of his instruments was often a matter of letting them speak but at the right time and at the right dynamic level.” Into the collective sound of both groups Davies introduced unorthodox instrumental sources such as the SHOZYG (the original was housed inside the empty binding of an encyclopaedia, volume SHO to ZYG). Fretsaw blades, ball-bearing castors, springs, machine heads from a guitar were fixed in place, rubbed with a toothbrush, tapped with a screwdriver or made to yield sound in whatever way seemed appropriate, amplified via contact microphones.

“Hugh was nicely eccentric and a very creative force because of it,” Michael Robinson observes. “His style of making instruments led me to create the gHong, and he suggested adding springs to its fourth side. There’s no fixed technique for playing his SHOZYG. It comes with no history. You just ease sounds out of it, and quite often you are surprised.” Gentle Fire embraced not only the specific textures and timbres produced by such newly invented instruments, but also the investigative orientation to sources of sound which they both implied and embodied.

“We all came from quite different musical backgrounds,” Robinson continues. “But we melded and found this place in the middle where we could resonate off one another in a way that I found extremely energising. Pieces were scored, we had that framework, but the body of the sounds was actually made from very intense listening. My fingers had grown up with the keyboard, so it was hard to avoid cliche, those things your fingers want to do. So I ended up playing cello, using it as a sort of found or homemade instrument. I had studied cello a little, but in no way was I competent in the conventional sense, and that was a real strength because I had to use it as a sound source, rather than a way of telling a predetermined story. It became a wonderful instrument for me, with a huge range of potential sounds and a capacity to react back and forth.”

Stuart Jones was a highly competent trumpeter in a conventional sense, trained by a leading orchestral player. But one of Gentle Fire’s profound attractions for him was the freedom to avoid that kind of virtuosity. “I could do what I was really interested in, making sounds with a trumpet that had never been made, starting out from those growls and noises that jazz musicians historically have made. I’ve always been interested in what is typically categorised as noise. To me, it’s not.” Bernas was sympathetic and valued Jones as “a very exploratory, dirty trumpet player”.

Use of contact microphones was another practical input from Davies that had far broader implications for Gentle Fire’s approach to making music. “We had these wonderful microscopes into the resonant nature of instruments, and that was just terrific,” Bernas observes. “Being in an ensemble like that and refining your reaction times, your awareness of them, while you are using contact microphones which really magnify the detail of the sound, makes you very sensitive. I think it has made me very aware of balances within articulation.”

In an article published in Leonardo Music Journal in 2001 (reproduced as notes to accompany Explorations) Hugh Davies remarked: “The composer whose work perhaps most typifies the spirit of Gentle Fire is Graham Hearn. His scores imposed no virtuosic elements, created a unique sound world, left considerable interpretive freedom and often required an almost ritualistic approach to the performance.” Jones still speaks of Hearn as a special musician. Hearn himself prefers to shift emphasis onto the collective achievement. “Gentle Fire wasn’t an ego thing at all,” he says. “We were at the cutting edge of experimental music, but at the time we were just concentrating on doing our thing and enjoying it. There was no real strategy apart from playing together. Sound for its own sake. We kept getting invitations to play. Recording it didn’t occur to me.”

“I wasn’t keen on recording,” Michael Robinson firmly asserts. “My personal aesthetic was that a very important part of what we were doing was that you never quite knew what was coming next.” He valued the tingle of anticipation experienced while performing in such a situation, but also the bond of trust it engendered within the group. “Playing together was like being in a sound environment. Everyone knows what a woodland sounds like, but once you start to listen intently you suddenly find it’s different and has depth.”

After Gentle Fire ceased to exist, Robinson opted to turn his back on making music and became a broadcast journalist. Yet his deep interest in how sound is experienced has never left him. He recalls working, during the early 70s, with performance artists Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller, contributing environmental field recordings to their Landscapes And Living Spaces project. “I did a piece of my own for the Lucy Milton Gallery, in Notting Hill, called Roving Reporter – ironically because it was long before I became a journalist. I gathered street sound, looped it on eight or ten tape recorders, and devised a random system where the volumes and so on would change. A wonderful sound; an environment rather than a developing narrative. Working in galleries, there was no beginning, middle or end. People could just walk in and out. I made several pieces that had that nature.”

Until the release of Explorations, recorded documentation of Gentle Fire has been tantalisingly sparse and hard to find. An album featuring realisations of Cage’s Music For Amplified Toy Pianos and Music For Carillon, Brown’s Four Systems and Wolff’s Edges was issued by Electrola, a German subsidiary of EMI, in 1974. More obscure traces exist, including a limited edition flexidisc which preserves a performance of Ode, a score created specifically for the group by visual artist and concrete poet John Furnival. Gentle Fire did, however, find their way into the catalogue of Stockhausen Verlag, the authorised edition of the composer’s works. In 1975 they travelled to Studio des Dames in Paris to take part in the recording of Sternklang.

The presence of Hugh Davies in the group ensured that Stockhausen, his music and especially his textual scores, loomed large in their shared history. “Our performances of Aufwärts and Treffpunkt, the two Stockhausen pieces on Explorations, were informed by the fact that we were listening to a lot of his music, and we had already performed Kurzwellen and various other things,” Bernas notes. “We did have some idea of what the collective sound was going to be, so they do have a flavour, and might even be identifiable as his pieces. Karlheinz enjoyed our rendering of those text pieces; perhaps because we gave him things he didn’t expect from his own ensemble. Wonderful players though they are, Aloys Kontarsky and Harald Bojé and even the percussionist Cristoph Caskel were playing notes, while we were playing sounds. We wanted to expand the definition of music to include the widest number of sounds.”

During the summer of 1969, at the fourth Harrogate International Festival, Gentle Fire gave the UK premiere of Kurzwellen, scored for six shortwave radio receivers and live electronics. Jones recalls vividly the process of studying that score, learning how to read its unconventional yet highly specific notation, and then rehearsing. In 1971, Jones took a solo trumpet role in the UK premiere of Stockhausen’s Spiral, another piece that makes use of material drawn from shortwave radio broadcasts. The nature of his performance led Hugh Davies to remark that it “emphasised how we became increasingly able to mimic or replace many types of live electronic treatment with our own type of extended performance techniques”. Davies added that this tended to involve the trumpet being blown into a bucket of water, rather than a virtuosic display of multiphonics.

For a few days in advance of that premiere, Jones stayed and worked at Stockhausen’s hilltop home in the Rhineland. “He was a charming man and a magnificent musician really. But deeply into master/servant relationships. Actually, he didn’t mind which role he himself undertook. He had a monstrous ego and liked to boss people around. We all felt that was fairly intolerable. But we found that if we bossed him around he was happy. At one point, recording Sternklang in Paris, he told us we were out of time. I said, no we aren’t; it’s everyone else. As musicians who play jazz, Graham and I knew exactly what was happening. Eventually Karlheinz acknowledged that we were right. He was able to do that.”

All four members of Gentle Fire have strong memories of Stockhausen’s personal charm and professional rigour. “In rehearsal with him, you would go over and polish a phrase an unforeseeable number of times,” Bernas confirms. “That was really tough, almost intimidating, but stimulating too. It was another sort of standard.” Hearn found Stockhausen helpful but recognised that his egotism was antithetical to Gentle Fire’s ethos. “He invited us to take part in the first performance of Sternklang and came to our rehearsals at a farmhouse where Stuart was living, on the edge of York. Stockhausen stayed in the local pub. I remember using a recorder, which wasn’t really suitable for that piece because it didn’t have the complete harmonic series. Eventually I gravitated towards using synthesizer with a foot pedal, which was much better. But Karlheinz didn’t say, you can’t play recorder because it’s not doing the job, which is strange because he was very particular about everything. Basically, he was forming the Stockhausen museum while he was alive – everything he touched and used he signed, and it became an artefact.”

A remarkable feature of Gentle Fire’s musical life was their capacity to make seamless transitions between the cosmos according to Stockhausen and the very different vista of musical possibilities opened up by Cage and his associates. “One of Gentle Fire’s strengths was that we all were very different from one another,” Jones suggests. “But we were able to hang together and enjoy the difference. If you enjoy difference, and not just what you actually like, you can flourish in those situations. What attracted me to Cage is that he absolutely loved difference. We were flexible, adaptable in relation to the situation we found ourselves in. Although I’d say that our natural bent was towards the Americans.”

“For me, Stockhausen’s approach didn’t have much to do with what we were trying to achieve,” Michael Robinson asserts. “Sternklang is a fun piece. Stockhausen would have hated anyone saying that – he was very serious about these things. I found him perfectly OK, but it was more like being a session musician. I didn’t want to continue doing that.” Robinson speaks of John Cage, on the other hand, with an audible glow of delight. In 1972 they happened to coincide in Germany. On several occasions, Cage approached Robinson to request a lift in Gentle Fire’s transit van to a place where he could buy ice cream. “He was refreshing, he was exciting, he was fun. I was driving back once, in a bit of a rush because we had spent too long on the ice cream. There was a big wheel brace in the back of the van. It fell with a terrible crash. Hmmm, Cage beamed, now that’s what I call music!”

Despite his own friendship with Stockhausen, Hugh Davies recognised that the German composer’s interests and soundworld has less inherent affinity with Gentle Fire than with Intermodulation, another group in the vanguard of live electronics, formed in Cambridge in August 1969 by Tim Souster and Roger Smalley. “One of the ways we defined ourselves, in so far as we did, was that we were not like Intermodulation,” Jones relates with smile. “It was a joke but there was some truth in it. They used VCS3 synthesizers relentlessly, I would say.” Hearn, who played VCS3 in Gentle Fire, agrees. “We realised that they were quite different from us. I wasn’t as virtuosic in the way Tim and Roger were. I didn’t regard it as a thing you could show off on, like Keith Emerson, treating it like a piano or organ. It was there to produce subtle colours and textures, to blend in with the other instruments. Sometimes you couldn’t really tell it was there.”

During one rehearsal period Gentle Fire were attempting to bring another of their group compositions into existence. “Michael popped out and came back with some cheesecake,” Jones recalls. “We decided to plug the VCS3 into that. Immediately it responded with a burble and it was clear what we needed to do: have a meal, with circuitry connected to the food, just to see what happened. In the end we never did that, but it’s an example of our rehearsal process. A lot of what we did was about unearthing ideas, listening to stuff bubble up, and we would chuck in stimuli that could be quite random.”

The premiere performance of Sternklang (which translates as Star Sound) took place one evening in June 1971, in Berlin’s Englischer Garten. It lasted around three hours. Along with an expanded version of Stockhausen’s own touring ensemble, the performers were Cologne’s Collegium Vocale, Intermodulation and Gentle Fire. Stockhausen conceived this piece as “park music”, to be performed outdoors at night by five groups, separated spatially. At certain junctures musical models, a range of which are outlined in the score, are carried from one group to another by a musician/runner. Each go-between is accompanied through the darkness by a torchbearer. At ten points in the performance a percussionist, stationed in the centre, beats a tam-tam to synchronise the groups. In August 1972, in Munich, there were two further presentations of Sternklang, staged to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games.

Involvement in those performances led to Gentle Fire’s participation in a week-long arts festival in Shiraz. This event, initiated in 1967 by Farah Pahlavi, then married to the Shah, was hosted annually by that Iranian city for the next decade. In 1972, Stockhausen was guest of honour and the programme gave pride of place to his music. Early in the week Gentle Fire appeared in Seraye Moshir, performing the textual scores Spektren (from Für kommende Zeiten) and Treffpunkt (from Aus Den sieben Tagen). All members of the group were struck by the spectacular beauty of the venue, the courtyard garden of a teahouse, converted from a former harem. Hearn still remembers a praying mantis, which alighted on his microphone lead and settled there attentively. “We played on a platform built over the central pool of the garden,” Bernas recalls, adding with a smile, “I personally worked very hard at trying to get the water spirits to come out and converse with us – I failed. It was a very intense performance, nonetheless.”

Jones too has vivid memories of the balconied building, the square pool and fountain, and the inspiring acoustic of that space. “We gave a breathtaking performance; even we were impressed, and Karlheinz loved it,” he remembers. John Cage and Merce Cunningham happened to be there for that performance. They too were impressed and invited Gentle Fire, there and then, to join them during a forthcoming residency at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.

Back in Munich a tragic series of events was unfolding. Members of the Israeli Olympic squad lost their lives; so did those who had killed them. Whether on account of that situation, or because of rising domestic tensions, there was heightened security in Shiraz. “Our performance in Seraye Moshir was one of the best we ever did,” Robinson confirms. “But every now and then, up on the roofline, I noticed guys with AK-47 rifles, silhouetted against the sky. Then, performing Sternklang in an orange grove, we were accompanied by a guy with a pistol in his hand. There was a certain... dynamic. It was lovely to be in Shiraz, but very odd.”

Between those two programmed performances, Gentle Fire headed out from the city centre and made music in other places. Jones has firm memories of a magical improvisation at dawn, near the tomb of the poet Hafez. The group also played on a traffic island, competing with the rush hour. “I think we wanted to play for the people of Shiraz, not just the festival public,” Bernas suggests. “But it would be have been difficult to have found a worse acoustic.”

Sternklang, the festival’s closing event, took place in Delgosha Garden. The five groups were located in different corners, linked by paths that converged in the shape of a star. A crowd of thousands thronged into the park. Some clambered onto loudspeaker scaffolding, and the Festival organisers grew anxious. After a while, however, Stockhausen’s unswerving confidence that his music would bring calm to the proceedings proved to be justified.

On their return to Europe, Gentle Fire (minus Hearn) headed for Belgium, where they took part in the premiere of Stockhausen’s Alphabet, a series of musical scenarios exploring physical effects of sonic vibrations. The performance space in Liège was the basement of an unfinished building. Its white-washed concrete and breeze-block surfaces were a far cry from the gardens of Shiraz. Less than a week later, towards the end of September 1972, Gentle Fire headed to Sadler’s Wells and seized their opportunity to perform alongside John Cage in a realisation of Christian Wolff’s Burdocks.

And while the musicians played Burdocks, Merce Cunningham was on stage with his company, dancing his piece Borst Park. Whereas Stockhausen’s “park music” drew inspiration from star systems, Cunningham’s choreography was fuelled by recollection of picnics and outdoor games. “Sternklang was intensive and rigorous, very exacting, a strain,” Graham Hearn now reflects. “Three hours of concentration, and doing crazy things like running between the groups. Then we went to Sadler’s Wells and we were the pit band along with Cage, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma. Cage was so laid back. He and Stockhausen were at completely opposite ends of the spectrum.”

Yet although Gentle Fire felt closer in temperament to the American way of doing experimental music, they were genuinely grateful for opportunities to play in Germany, not least because a constellation of enlightened radio stations offered well funded support for contemporary music. The version of Michael Robinson’s 2 Pianos Piece which appears on Explorations was retrieved from the archive at Radio Bremen. It was recorded in a state of the art studio which Stuart Jones describes as “radio heaven”. Richard Bernas suggests that if Gentle Fire hadn’t been able to perform in Germany on a regular basis, the group would not have lasted so long as it did.

“We all came with something,” says Jones. “Everything got thrown into the pot and then we saw what came out of it. We weren’t strategic at all. We just enjoyed doing it. Towards the end it became less fun. The last concert, in Metz, France was in an indoor stadium, before a large crowd. We were running a bit dry by then.”

In a sense, Gentle Fire had become too aware of playing for an audience. Listening intently to one other had been such a consistent priority that factoring in audience expectations proved to be destabilising, to a degree. “When we succeeded as an ensemble we were working together and listening to each other, more than we were aware of the effect that we were having on the audience,” Bernas acknowledges. “We all had such a strong sense of exploration through instruments.”

When Gentle Fire called it a day Bernas headed for Warsaw, where he studied to become a conductor, specialising in contemporary music. Jones found alternative musical accommodation in the groups Kahondo Style and British Summer Time Ends, and he has continued to explore fresh avenues through music and sound art. Hearn, now Emeritus Professor at Leeds College of Music, has remained a dedicated jazz pianist and arranger. Robinson opted for a clean break from performing music, and became an acclaimed investigative journalist. Between 1968–75 none of these strong-minded individuals were especially concerned to document their activities. Today they view the release of Explorations as a welcome bonus, a caringly prepared footnote to an exhilarating phase of their lives. All agree that the music retains a certain vitality and distinctiveness. As pioneers of live electronics, Gentle Fire formed a bridge between Cage and Stockhausen, between music’s history and a newly emerging world of sound. “We wanted to find things out by doing them,” says Stuart Jones, encapsulating the group’s outlook. “That really was the driver. We were true experimenters.”

Gentle Fire’s Explorations is released by Paradigm Discs

Philip Clark reviews their triple CD box set in The Wire 444. Subscribers can also search The Wire’s digital archives for more about Gentle Fire members Michael Robinson, Graham Hearn, Richard Orton, Stuart Jones, Richard Bernas and the late Hugh Davies. They can also read Julian Cowley’s piece about the 1972 ICES Festival in The Wire 336, February 2012.