Electronic music is music that employs
electronic musical instruments
and
electronic music technology in its production. In
general a distinction can be made between sound produced using
electromechanical means and that produced using electronic
technology. Examples of electromechanical sound producing devices
include the
telharmonium,
Hammond organ, and the
electric guitar. Purely electronic sound
production can be achieved using devices such as the
Theremin,
sound
synthesizer, and
computer.
Electronic music was once associated almost exclusively with
Western
art music but from the late 1960s
on the availability of affordable music technology meant that music
produced using electronic means became increasingly common in the
popular domain. Today electronic music includes many varieties and
ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as
electronic dance music.
History
Late 19th century to early 20th century
The ability to record sounds is often connected to the production
of electronic music, but not absolutely necessary for it. The
earliest known sound recording device was the
phonautograph, patented in 1857 by
Édouard-Léon Scott
de Martinville. It could record sounds visually, but was not
meant to play them back.
In 1878,
Thomas A. Edison patented the phonograph, which used
cylinders similar to
Scott's device.
Although cylinders continued in use for some time,
Emile Berliner developed the disc phonograph
in 1887.A significant invention, which was later to have a profound
effect on electronic music, was
Lee
DeForest's triode
audion. This was
the first thermionic valve, or
vacuum
tube, invented in 1906, which led to the generation and
amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and
electronic computation, amongst other things.
Before electronic music, there was a growing desire for
composers to use emerging technologies for musical
purposes. Several instruments were created that employed
electromechanical designs and they paved the way for the later
emergence of electronic instruments. An electromechanical
instrument called the
Telharmonium
(sometimes Teleharmonium or Dynamophone) was developed by
Thaddeus Cahill in the years 1898-1912.
However, simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the
Telharmonium, due to its immense size. The first electronic
instrument is often viewed to be the
Theremin, invented by Professor
Léon Theremin circa 1919–1920. Another
early electronic instrument was the
Ondes
Martenot, which was most famously used in the
Turangalîla-Symphonie by
Olivier Messiaen as well as other
works by him. It was also used by other, primarily French,
composers such as
Andre Jolivet.
"New Aesthetic of Music"
In 1907, just a year later after the invention of the triode
audion,
Ferruccio Busoni published
Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, which discussed the use
of electrical and other new sound sources in future music. He wrote
of the future of microtonal scales in music, made possible by
Cahill's Dynamophone: "Only a long and careful series of
experiments, and a continued training of the ear, can render this
unfamiliar material approachable and plastic for the coming
generation, and for Art."
Also in the
Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, Busoni
states:
Music as an art, our so-called occidental music, is
hardly four hundred years old; its state is one of development,
perhaps the very first stage of a development beyond present
conception, and we—we talk of "classics" and "hallowed
traditions"!
And we have talked of them for a long
time!
We have formulated rules, stated principles, laid down laws;—we
apply laws made for maturity to a child that knows nothing of
responsibility!
Young as it is, this child, we already recognize that it possesses
one radiant attribute which signalizes it beyond all its elder
sisters. And the lawgivers will not see this marvelous attribute,
lest their laws should be thrown to the winds. This child—it
floats on air! It touches not the earth with its feet. It
knows no law of gravitation. It is well nigh incorporeal. Its
material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature
herself. It is—free!
But freedom is something that mankind have never wholly
comprehended, never realized to the full. They can neither
recognize or acknowledge it.
They disavow the mission of this child; they hang weights upon it.
This buoyant creature must walk decently, like anybody else. It may
scarcely be allowed to leap—when it were its joy to follow the line
of the rainbow, and to break sunbeams with the clouds.
Through this writing, as well as personal contact, Busoni had a
profound effect on many musicians and composers, perhaps most
notably on his pupil,
Edgard
Varèse, who said:
Together we used to discuss what direction the music of
the future would, or rather, should take and could not take as long
as the straitjacket of the tempered system.
He deplored that his own keyboard instrument had
conditioned our ears to accept only an infinitesimal part of the
infinite gradations of sounds in nature.
He was very much interested in the electrical
instruments we began to hear about, and I remember particularly one
he had read of called the Dynamophone.
All through his writings one finds over and over again
predictions about the music of the future which have since come
true.
In fact, there is hardly a development that he did not
foresee, as for instance in this extraordinary prophecy: 'I almost
think that in the new great music, machines will also be necessary
and will be assigned a share in it.
Perhaps industry, too, will bring forth her share in
the artistic ascent.
Futurists
In
Italy
, the Futurist
approached the changing musical aesthetic from a different
angle. A major thrust of the Futurist philosophy was to
value "noise," and to place artistic and expressive value on sounds
that had previously not been considered even remotely musical.
Balilla Pratella's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music" (1911)
states that their credo is: "To present the musical soul of the
masses, of the great factories, of the railways, of the
transatlantic liners, of the battleships, of the automobiles and
airplanes. To add to the great central themes of the musical poem
the domain of the machine and the victorious kingdom of
Electricity."
On 11 March 1913, futurist
Luigi
Russolo published his manifesto "
The Art of Noises". In 1914, he held the
first "art-of-noises" concert in Milan on April 21. This used his
Intonarumori, described by Russolo as "acoustical
noise-instruments, whose sounds (howls, roars, shuffles, gurgles,
etc.) were hand-activated and projected by horns and megaphones."In
June, similar concerts were held in Paris.
The 1920–1930s
This decade brought a wealth of early electronic instruments and
the first compositions for electronic instruments. The first
instrument, the Etherophone, was created by Leon Theremin (actually
Lev Termen) between 1919 and 1920 in
Leningrad, though it was eventually renamed the Theremin. This led
to the first compositions for electronic instruments, as opposed to
noisemakers and re-purposed machines. In 1929,
Joseph Schillinger composed
First
Airphonic Suite for Theremin and Orchestra, premièred with the
Cleveland Orchestra with
Leon Theremin as soloist.
In addition to the Theremin, the
Ondes
Martenot was invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, who debuted
it in Paris.
The following year,
Antheil first composed
for mechanical devices, electrical noisemakers, motors and
amplifiers in his unfinished opera,
Mr. Bloom.
Recording of sounds made a leap in 1927, when American inventor J.
A. O'Neill developed a recording device that used magnetically
coated ribbon. However, this was a commercial failure. Two years
later,
Laurens Hammond established
his company for the manufacture of electronic instruments. He went
on to produce the
Hammond organ, which
was based on the principles of the
Telharmonium, along with other developments
including early reverberation units.
The method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography
made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well
as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an
artificially drawn sound wave.
Developments from 1945 to 1960
Musique concrète
Low-fidelity magnetic
wire recorders
had been in use since around 1900 and in the early 1930s the movie
industry began to convert to the new optical sound-on-film
recording systems based on the
photoelectric cell. It was around this
time that the German electronics company
AEG
developed the first practical audio
tape
recorder, the "
Magnetophon" K-1,
which was unveiled at the
Berlin Radio
Show in August 1935 During
World War
II Walter Weber rediscovered and
applied the
AC biasing technique, which
dramatically improved the fidelity of magnetic recording by adding
an inaudible high-frequency tone, giving the 1941 'K4'
Magnetophones a bandwidth of 10 Hz and improving the
signal-to-noise ratio up to 60 dB,
surpassing all known recording systems at that time, and as early
as 1942 AEG was making test recordings in
stereo. However these devices and techniques remained
a secret outside Germany until the end of WWII, when captured
Magnetophon recorders and reels of
Farben ferric-oxide recording tape were brought
back to the United States by
Jack Mullin
and others. These captured recorders and tapes were the basis for
the development of America's first commercially-made professional
tape recorder, the Model 200, manufactured by the American
Ampex company (Angus 1984) with support from
entertainer
Bing Crosby, who became one
of the first performers to record radio broadcasts and studio
master recordings on tape.
Magnetic audio tape opened up a vast new range of sonic
possibilities to musicians, composers, producers and engineers.
Audio tape was relatively cheap and very reliable, and its fidelity
of reproduction was better than any audio medium to date. Most
importantly, unlike discs, it offered the same plasticity of use as
film. Tape can be slowed down, sped up or even run backwards during
recording or playback, with often startling effect. It can be
physically edited in much the same way as film, allowing for
unwanted sections of a recording to be seamlessly removed or
replaced; likewise, segments of tape from other sources can be
edited in. Tape can also be joined to form endless loops that
continually play repeated patterns of pre-recorded material. Audio
amplification and mixing equipment further expanded tape's
capabilities as a production medium, allowing multiple pre-taped
recordings (and/or live sounds, speech or music) to be mixed
together and simultaneously recorded onto another tape with
relatively little loss of fidelity. Another unforeseen windfall was
that tape recorders can be relatively easily modified to become
echo machines that produce complex,
controllable, high-quality
echo and
reverberation effects (most of which would be
practically impossible to achieve by mechanical means).
It wasn't long before composers began using the tape recorder to
develop a new technique for composition called
Musique concrète. This technique
involved editing together recorded fragments of natural and
industrial sounds. The first pieces of
musique concrète
were assembled by
Pierre Schaeffer,
who went on to collaborate with
Pierre
Henry.
On 5 October 1948,
Radiodiffusion
Française (RDF) broadcast composer
Pierre Schaeffer's
Etude aux chemins de
fer. This was the first "
movement" of
Cinq études de
bruits, and marked the beginning of studio realizations and
musique concrète (or
acousmatic
music). Schaeffer employed a disk-cutting
lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters,
an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit.
Not long after this, Henry began collaborating with Schaeffer, a
partnership that would have profound and lasting effects on the
direction of electronic music. Another associate of Schaeffer,
Edgard Varèse, began work on
Déserts, a work for chamber orchestra and tape. The tape
parts were created at Pierre Schaeffer's studio, and were later
revised at Columbia University.
In 1950,
Schaeffer gave the first public (non-broadcast) concert of musique
concrète at the Ecole Normale de Musique de
Paris
. "Schaeffer used a PA system, several
turntables, and mixers. The performance did not go well, as
creating live montages with turntables had never been done before."
Later that same year, Pierre Henry collaborated with Schaeffer on
Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) the first major work
of musique concrete. In Paris in 1951, in what was to become an
important worldwide trend, RTF established the first studio for the
production of electronic music. Also in 1951, Schaeffer and Henry
produced an opera,
Orpheus, for concrete sounds and
voices.
Elektronische Musik

Karlheinz Stockhausen in the
Electronic Music Studio of WDR, Cologne, in 1991
Karlheinz Stockhausen worked
briefly in Schaeffer's studio in 1952, and afterward for many years
at the
WDR Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music.
In Cologne, what would become the most famous electronic music
studio in the world was officially opened at the radio studios of
the
NWDR in 1953, though it had been in the
planning stages as early as 1950 and early compositions were made
and broadcast in 1951. The brain child of
Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and
Herbert Eimert (who became its first
director), the studio was soon joined by
Karlheinz Stockhausen and
Gottfried Michael Koenig. In his
1949 thesis
Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik
und Synthetische Sprache, Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to
synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals; in
this way,
elektronische Musik was sharply differentiated
from French
musique concrète, which used sounds recorded
from acoustical sources.
With Stockhausen and
Mauricio Kagel
in residence, it became a year-round hive of charismatic
avante-gardism [
sic]" on two occasions combining
electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional
orchestras—in
Mixtur (1964) and
Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester
(1967). Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his
electronic music gave them an experience of "outer space,"
sensations of flying, or being in a "fantastic dream
world"
More
recently, Stockhausen turned to producing electronic music in his
own studio in Kürten
, his last
work in the genre being Cosmic Pulses (2007).
American electronic music
In the United States, sounds were being created electronically and
used in composition, as exemplified in a piece by
Morton Feldman called
Marginal
Intersection. This piece is scored for winds, brass,
percussion, strings, 2 oscillators, and sound effects of riveting,
and the score uses Feldman's graph notation.
The Music for Magnetic Tape Project was formed by members of the
New York School (
John Cage,
Earle Brown,
Christian Wolff,
David Tudor, and
Morton Feldman), and lasted three years until
1954. Cage wrote of this collaboration: "In this social darkness,
therefore, the work of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian
Wolff continues to present a brilliant light, for the reason that
at the several points of notation, performance, and audition,
action is provocative.
Cage completed
Williams Mix in 1953 while working with the
Music for Magnetic Tape Project. The group had no permanent
facility, and had to rely on borrowed time in commercial sound
studios, including the studio of
Louis and Bebe Barron.
Columbia-Princeton
In the same year
Columbia
University purchased its first
tape
recorder—a professional
Ampex machine—for
the purpose of recording concerts.
Vladimir Ussachevsky, who was
on the music faculty of Columbia University, was placed in charge
of the device, and almost immediately began experimenting with
it.
Herbert Russcol writes: "Soon he was intrigued with the new
sonorities he could achieve by recording musical instruments and
then superimposing them on one another."
Ussachevsky said later: "I suddenly realized that the tape recorder
could be treated as an instrument of sound transformation."
On Thursday, May 8, 1952, Ussachevsky presented several
demonstrations of tape music/effects that he created at his
Composers Forum, in the McMillin Theatre at Columbia University.
These included
Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment,
Composition, and
Underwater Valse. In an interview,
he stated: "I presented a few examples of my discovery in a public
concert in New York together with other compositions I had written
for conventional instruments."
Otto
Luening, who had attended this concert, remarked: "The
equipment at his disposal consisted of an Ampex tape recorder . . .
and a simple box-like device designed by the brilliant young
engineer, Peter Mauzey, to create feedback, a form of mechanical
reverberation. Other equipment was borrowed or purchased with
personal funds."
Just three months later, in August 1952, Ussachevsky traveled to
Bennington, Vermont at Luening's invitation to present his
experiments. There, the two collaborated on various pieces. Luening
described the event: "Equipped with earphones and a flute, I began
developing my first tape-recorder composition. Both of us were
fluent improvisors and the medium fired our imaginations."They
played some early pieces informally at a party, where "a number of
composers almost solemnly congratulated us saying, 'This is it'
('it' meaning the music of the future)."
Word quickly reached New York City. Oliver Daniel telephoned and
invited the pair to "produce a group of short compositions for the
October concert sponsored by the American Composers Alliance and
Broadcast Music, Inc., under the direction of
Leopold Stokowski at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. After some hesitation, we agreed. . . .
Henry Cowell placed his home and studio in
Woodstock, New York, at our disposal. With the borrowed equipment
in the back of Ussachevsky's car, we left Bennington for Woodstock
and stayed two weeks. . . . In late September, 1952, the travelling
laboratory reached Ussachevsky's living room in New York, where we
eventually completed the compositions."
Two months later, on October 28, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto
Luening presented the first Tape Music concert in the United
States. The concert included Luening's
Fantasy in Space
(1952)—"an impressionistic
virtuoso piece"
using manipulated recordings of flute—and
Low Speed
(1952), an "exotic composition that took the flute far below its
natural range." Both pieces were created at the home of Henry
Cowell in Woodstock, NY. After several concerts caused a sensation
in New York City, Ussachevsky and Luening were invited onto a live
broadcast of NBC's Today Show to do an interview demonstration—the
first televised electroacoustic performance. Luening described the
event: "I improvised some [flute] sequences for the tape recorder.
Ussachevsky then and there put them through electronic
transformations."
1954 saw the advent of what would now be considered authentic
electric plus acoustic compositions—acoustic instrumentation
augmented/accompanied by recordings of manipulated and/or
electronically generated sound. Three major works were premiered
that year: Varèse's
Déserts, for chamber ensemble and tape
sounds, and two works by Luening and Ussachevsky:
Rhapsodic
Variations for the Louisville Symphony and
A Poem in
Cycles and Bells, both for orchestra and tape. Because he had
been working at Schaeffer's studio, the tape part for Varèse's work
contains much more concrete sounds than electronic. "A group made
up of wind instruments, percussion and piano alternates with
mutated sounds of factory noises and ship sirens and motors, coming
from two loudspeakers."
Déserts was premiered in Paris in the first
stereo broadcast on French Radio.
At the German premiere
in Hamburg
, which was
conducted by Bruno Maderna, the tape
controls were operated by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The
title
Déserts, suggested to Varèse not only, "all physical
deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty streets), but
also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped
aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness,
but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man
is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness."
Stochastic music
An important new development was the advent of computers for the
purpose of composing music, as opposed to manipulating or creating
sounds.
Iannis Xenakis began what is
called "musique stochastique," or "
stochastic music," which is a method of
composing that employs mathematical probability systems. Different
probability algorithms were used to create a piece under a set of
parameters. Xenakis used graph paper and a ruler to aid in
calculating the velocity trajectories of
glissandi for his orchestral composition
Metastasis (1953–54), but later turned to the use of
computers to compose pieces like
ST/4 for string quartet
and
ST/48 for orchestra (both 1962).
Mid to late 1950s
In 1954, Stockhausen composed his
Elektronische Studie
II—the first electronic piece to be published as a
score.
In 1955, more experimental and electronic studios began to appear.
Notable
were the creation of the Studio de Fonologia (already mentioned), a
studio at the NHK
in Tokyo
founded by
Toshiro Mayuzumi, and the Phillips
studio at Eindhoven
, the Netherlands
, which moved to the University of Utrecht as the Institute
of Sonology in 1960.
The score for
Forbidden
Planet, by
Louis and Bebe
Barron, was entirely composed using custom built electronic
circuits and tape recorders in 1956.
The world's first computer to play music was
CSIRAC which was designed and built by
Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard.
Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIRAC to play popular
musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1951 it publicly
played the
Colonel Bogey March
of which no known recordings exist. However,
CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to
extend musical thinking or composition practice which is current
computer music practice. CSIRAC was never recorded, but the music
played was accurately reconstructed (reference 12). The oldest
known recordings of computer generated music were played by the
Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a
commercial version of the
Baby Machine
from the
University of
Manchester in the autumn of 1951. The music program was written
by
Christopher Strachey.
The impact of computers continued in 1956.
Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson composed
Iliac Suite for
string
quartet, the first complete work of computer-assisted
composition using
algorithmic composition.
"... Hiller postulated that a computer could be taught the rules of
a particular style and then called on to compose accordingly."
Later developments included the work of
Max
Mathews at Bell Laboratories, who developed the influential
MUSIC I program.
Vocoder technology was also a major development in
this early era.
In 1956, Stockhausen composed
Gesang der Jünglinge, the
first major work of the
Cologne studio,
based on a text from the
Book of
Daniel. An important technological development of that
year was the invention of the
Clavivox
synthesizer by
Raymond Scott with subassembly by
Robert Moog.
The
RCA Mark II Sound
Synthesizer made its debut in 1957. Unlike the earlier Theremin
and Ondes Martenot, it was difficult to use, required extensive
programming, and could not be played in real time. Sometimes called
the first electronic synthesizer, the
RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer
used
vacuum tube oscillators and
incorporated the first electronic
music
sequencer driven by two punched-paper tapes. It was designed by
RCA and installed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
where it remains to this day.
In 1957,
MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to
play electronic music, was created by Max
Mathews at Bell
Laboratories
.
Later,
Milton Babbitt, influenced in
his student years by Schoenberg's "revolution in musical thought"
began applying serial techniques to electronic music. :
From 1950 to 1960 the vocabulary of tape music shifted
from the fairly pure experimental works which characterized the
classic Paris and Cologne schools to more complex and expressive
works which explored a wide range of compositional
styles.
More and more works began to appear by the mid-1950s
which addressed the concept of combining taped sounds with live
instruments and voices.
There was also a tentative interest, and a few
attempts, at incorporating taped electronic sounds into theatrical
works.
The public remained interested in the new sounds being created
around the world, as can be deduced by the inclusion of Varèse's
Poeme Electronique, which was played over four hundred
loudspeakers at the Phillips Pavilion of the 1958
Brussels World Fair.
That same year,
Mauricio Kagel, an Argentine
composer, composed Transición II.
The work was realized at the WDR studio in Cologne. Two musicians
perform on a piano, one in the traditional manner, the other
playing on the strings, frame, and case. Two other performers use
tape to unite the presentation of live sounds with the future of
prerecorded materials from later on and its past of recordings made
earlier in the performance.
The 1960s
These were fertile years for electronic music—not just for
academia, but for independent artists as
synthesizer technology became more accessible.
By this time, a strong community of composers and musicians working
with new sounds and instruments was established and growing. 1960
witnessed the composition of Luening's
Gargoyles for violin and tape as well as the
premiere of Stockhausen's
Kontakte for electronic sounds,
piano, and percussion. This piece existed in two versions—one for
4-channel tape, and the other for tape with human performers. "In
Kontakte, Stockhausen abandoned traditional musical form
based on linear development and dramatic climax. This new approach,
which he termed 'moment form,' resembles the 'cinematic splice'
techniques in early twentieth century film."
The first of these synthesizers to appear was the
Buchla. Appearing in 1963, it was the product of an
effort spearheaded by
musique concrète composer
Morton Subotnick. In 1962, working with a
grant from the
Rockefeller
Foundation, Subotnick and business partner
Ramon Sender hired electrical engineer
Don Buchla to build a "black box" for
composition.
The
theremin had been in use since the
1920s but it attained a degree of popular recognition through its
use in science-fiction film
soundtrack
music in the 1950s (e.g.,
Bernard
Herrmann's classic score for
The Day the Earth
Stood Still). During the 1960s the theremin made
occasional appearances in popular music.
In the UK in this period, the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop
(established in 1958) emerged one of the most productive and widely
known electronic music studios in the world, thanks in large
measure to their work on the BBC science-fiction series
Doctor Who. One of the most
influential British electronic artists in this period was Workshop
staffer
Delia Derbyshire, who added
a keen musical ear to her great technical prowess she is famous for
her landmark 1963 electronic realisation of the iconic
Doctor
Who theme, composed by
Ron Grainer,
arguably the most widely known piece of electronic music in the
world. Derbyshire and her colleagues including
Dick Mills,
Brian
Hodgson (creator of the
TARDIS sound
effect),
David Cain,
John Baker,
Paddy Kingsland and
Peter Howell collectively created a large and
very varied body of work that includes station ID stings, program
jingles, soundtracks, atmospheres and sound effects for BBC TV and
radio stations and programs.

Josef Tal at the Electronic Music
Studio (~1965)
In 1961
Josef Tal established the Centre for
Electronic Music in Israel at The Hebrew University
, and in 1962 Hugh Le
Caine arrived in Jerusalem to install his Creative Tape
Recorder in the centre. In the 1990s Tal conducted in cooperation
with the Technion – Israel Institute of
Technology
, and VolkswagenStiftung a research project
(Talmark) aimed at the development of a novel musical notation
system for electronic music.
Milton Babbitt composed his first electronic work using the
synthesizer—his
Composition for Synthesizer—which he
created using the RCA synthesizer at CPEMC.
For Babbitt, the RCA synthesizer was a dream come true
for three reasons.
First, the ability to pinpoint and control every
musical element precisely.
Second, the time needed to realize his elaborate serial
structures were brought within practical reach.
Third, the question was no longer "What are the limits
of the human performer?" but rather "What are the limits of human
hearing?
The collaborations also occurred across oceans and continents. In
1961, Ussachevsky invited Varèse to the Columbia-Princeton Studio
(CPEMC). Upon arrival, Varese embarked upon a revision of
Déserts. He was assisted by
Mario Davidovsky and
Bülent Arel.
The intense activity occurring at CPEMC and elsewhere inspired the
establishment of the San Francisco
Tape Music Center in 1963 by
Morton Subotnick, with additional
members
Pauline Oliveros, Ramon
Sender,
Terry Riley, and Anthony Martin.
The center soon incorporated a voltage-controlled synthesizer based
around automated sequencing by
Don
Buchla, and used in album-length Subotnick pieces such as
Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and
The Wild
Bull (1968).
Later,
the Center moved to Mills
College
, directed by Pauline
Oliveros, where it is today known as the Center for
Contemporary Music.
Back
across the Atlantic, in Czechoslovakia
, 1964, the First Seminar of Electronic Music was
held at the Radio Broadcast Station in Plzen. Four
government-sanctioned electroacoustic music studios were later
established in the 1960s under the auspices of extant radio and
television stations.
New instruments continued to develop. One of the most significant
breakthroughs came in 1964, when
Robert
Moog introduced the
Moog
synthesizer, the first integrated modular
voltage controlled analog synthesiser
system.
Moog Music later introduced a
smaller synthesizer with a built-in keyboard and hardwired signal
path called
The Minimoog, which was
introduced to many composers and universities and beacme widely
used by popular musicians.
A well-known example of the use of Moog's full-sized
Moog Modular synthesizer is the
Switched-On Bach album by
Wendy Carlos, which triggered a craze for
synthesiser music.
Pietro Grossi was an italian pioneer
of computer composition and tape music, who first experimented with
electronic techniques in the early sixties. Grossi was a cellist
and composer, born in Venice in 1917. He founded the S 2F M (Studio
de Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) in 1963 in order to experiment
with electronic sound and composition.
Computer music
CSIRAC, the first computer to play music, did
so publicly in August 1951 (reference 12). One of the first
large-scale public demonstrations of
computer music was a pre-recorded national
radio broadcast on the
NBC radio network program
Monitor on February 10, 1962.
In 1961,
LaFarr Stuart programmed Iowa State
University
's CYCLONE computer (a
derivative of the Illiac) to play simple,
recognizable tunes through an amplified speaker that had been
attached to the system originally for administrative and diagnostic
purposes. An interview with Mr. Stuart accompanied his
computer music.
The late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s also saw the development of large
mainframe computer synthesis. Starting in 1957, Max Mathews of Bell
Labs developed the MUSIC programs, culminating in
MUSIC V, a direct digital synthesis language (Mattis
2001).
Live electronics
In
America, live electronics were pioneered in the early 1960s by
members of Milton Cohen's Space Theater in Ann Arbor,
Michigan
, including Gordon Mumma
and Robert Ashley, by individuals such
as David Tudor around 1965, and The
Sonic Arts Union, founded in 1966 by Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley,
Alvin Lucier, and David Behrman. ONCE Festivals,
featuring multimedia theater music, were organized by Robert Ashley
and Gordon Mumma in Ann Arbor between 1958 and 1969. In 1960,
John Cage composed
Cartridge
Music, one of the earliest live-electronic works.
In Europe in 1964, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed
Mikrophonie I for
tam-tam, hand-held microphones, filters, and
potentiometers, and
Mixtur for orchestra, four
sine-wave generators, and four
ring modulators. In 1965 he composed
Mikrophonie II
for choir, Hammond organ, and ring modulators.
In 1966-67,
Reed Ghazala discovered and
began to teach "
circuit bending"—the
application of the creative short circuit, a process of chance
short-circuiting, creating experimental electronic instruments,
exploring sonic elements mainly of timbre and with less regard to
pitch or rhythm, and influenced by
John
Cage’s
aleatoric music
concept.
1970s to mid-80s
In 1970,
Charles Wuorinen composed
Time's Encomium, the first
Pulitzer Prize winner for an entirely
electronic composition. The 1970s also saw the use of synthesisers
in mainstream rock music with examples including
Pink Floyd,
Tangerine
Dream,
Yes and
Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Synthesizers
Released in 1970 by
Moog Music the
Mini-Moog was among the first widely
available, portable and relatively affordable synthesizers. It
became the most widely used synthesizer in both popular and
electronic art music. In 1974 the WDR studio in Cologne acquired an
EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer which was
used by a number of composers in the production of notable
electronic works—amongst others,
Rolf
Gehlhaar's
Fünf deutsche Tänze (1975), Karlheinz
Stockhausen's
Sirius
(1975–76), and
John
McGuire's
Pulse Music III (1978).
IRCAM
IRCAM
in Paris
became a major center for computer music research and realization
and development of the Sogitec 4X
computer system, featuring then revolutionary real-time digital
signal processing. Pierre
Boulez's
Répons (1981) for 24 musicians and 6 soloists
used the 4X to transform and route soloists to a loudspeaker
system.
Rise of popular electronic music
Throughout the seventies bands such as
The
Residents and
Can spearheaded an
experimental music movement that incorporated electronic sounds.
Can were one of the first bands to use tape loops for rhythm
sections and The Residents created their own custom built drum
machine. The German band
Kraftwerk took a
more purely electronic approach on records such as 1974's
Autobahn. Other artists in the 1970s who
composed primarily electronic instrumental music and managed to
reach beyond the academic sphere and into the popular realm, were
Jean Michel Jarre,
Tangerine Dream,
Klaus Schulze, and
Vangelis. Also in the 1970s, rock bands from
Genesis to
The
Cars began incorporating synthesizers into traditional rock
arrangements. Notably, British synthesist
Brian Eno collaborated with rock performers such
as
David Bowie and
Roxy Music.
In 1979, UK recording artist
Gary Numan
helped to bring electronic music into the wider marketplace of pop
music with his hit "
Cars" from the album
The Pleasure Principle. Other successful hit electronic
singles in the early 1980s included "Just Can't Get Enough" by
Depeche Mode, "Don't You Want Me" by
The Human League, "Whip It!" by
Devo, and finally 1983's "
Blue Monday" by
New Order, which became the best-selling 12-inch
single of all time. The Swiss duo
Yello,
Trevor Horn's
Art of Noise,
Naked Eyes,
Prince,
Kate
Bush,
Peter Gabriel, and
Depeche Mode further incorporated early
samplers like the
Synclavier,
Fairlight CMI, and
E-mu Emulator into their hit records. By 1984,
synthesizers and samplers were prominently featured in much popular
music.
Birth of MIDI
In 1980, a group of musicians and music merchants met to
standardize an interface by which new instruments could communicate
control instructions with other instruments and the prevalent
microcomputer. This standard was dubbed MIDI (
Musical Instrument Digital
Interface). A paper was authored by
Dave Smith of
Sequential Circuits and proposed to the
Audio Engineering Society
in 1981. Then, in August 1983, the MIDI Specification 1.0 was
finalized.
The advent of MIDI technology allows a single keystroke, control
wheel motion, pedal movement, or command from a microcomputer to
activate every device in the studio remotely and in synchrony, with
each device responding according to conditions predetermined by the
composer.
MIDI instruments and software made powerful control of
sophisticated instruments easily affordable by many studios and
individuals. Acoustic sounds became reintegrated into studios via
sampling and sampled-ROM-based
instruments.
Miller Puckette developed graphic
signal-processing software for 4X called
Max (after
Max
Mathews) and later ported it to
Macintosh (with Dave Zicarelli extending it
for
Opcode) for real-time MIDI
control, bringing algorithmic composition availability to most
composers with modest computer programming background.
Digital synthesis
In 1979 the Australian
Fairlight company
released the
Fairlight CMI (Computer
Musical Instrument) the first practical polyphonic digital
synthesiser/sampler system. In 1983,
Yamaha introduced the first stand-alone
digital synthesizer, the
DX-7. It used
frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis), first experimented
with by
John Chowning at Stanford
during the late sixties.
Barry Vercoe describes one of his
experiences with early computer sounds:
At IRCAM in Paris in 1982, flutist Larry Beauregard had
connected his flute to DiGiugno's 4X audio processor, enabling
real-time pitch-following.
On a Guggenheim at
the time, I extended this concept to real-time score-following with
automatic synchronized accompaniment, and over the next two years
Larry and I gave numerous demonstrations of the computer as a
chamber musician, playing Handel flute
sonatas, Boulez's Sonatine for flute
and piano and by 1984 my own Synapse II for flute and
computer—the first piece ever composed expressly for such a
setup.
A major challenge was finding the right software
constructs to support highly sensitive and responsive
accompaniment.
All of this was pre-MIDI, but the results were
impressive even though heavy doses of tempo rubato would
continually surprise my Synthetic
Performer.
In 1985 we solved the tempo rubato problem by
incorporating learning from rehearsals (each time you
played this way the machine would get better).
We were also now tracking violin, since our brilliant,
young flautist had contracted a fatal cancer.
Moreover, this version used a new standard called MIDI,
and here I was ably assisted by former student Miller Puckette,
whose initial concepts for this task he later expanded into a
program called MAX.
Late 1980s to 90s
Rise of dance music
In the late 1980s, dance music records made using only electronic
instruments became increasingly popular. The trend has continued to
the present day with modern nightclubs worldwide regularly playing
electronic dance music.
Advancements
In the 1990s, interactive computer-assisted performance started to
become possible, with one example described as follows:
Automated Harmonization of Melody in Real Time: An
interactive computer system, developed in collaboration with
flutist/composer Pedro Eustache, for
realtime melodic analysis and harmonic accompaniment.
Based on a novel scheme of harmonization devised by
Eustache, the software analyzes the tonal melodic function of
incoming notes, and instantaneously performs an orchestrated
harmonization of the melody.
The software was originally designed for
performance by Eustache on Yamaha WX7 wind controller, and was used
in his composition Tetelestai, premiered in Irvine,
California
in March 1999.
Other recent developments included the
Tod
Machover (MIT and IRCAM) composition
Begin Again Again
for "
hypercello", an interactive system
of sensors measuring physical movements of the cellist. Max Mathews
developed the "Conductor" program for real-time tempo, dynamic and
timbre control of a pre-input electronic score. Morton Subotnick
released a multimedia CD-ROM
All My Hummingbirds Have
Alibis.
The 2000s
In recent years, as computer technology has become more accessible
and
music software has advanced,
interacting with music production technology is now possible using
means that bear no relationship to traditional
musical performance practices: for instance,
laptop performance (
laptronica) and
live
coding.
In the last decade, a number of software-based virtual studio
environments have emerged, with products such as Propellerhead's
Reason and
Ableton Live finding popular appeal.Such tools
provide viable and cost-effective alternatives to typical
hardware-based production studios, and thanks to advances in
microprocessor technology, it is now
possible to create high quality music using little more than a
single laptop computer. Such advances have, for better or for
worse, democratized music creation, leading to a massive increase
in the amount of home-produced electronic music available to the
general public via the internet.
Artists can now also individuate their production practice by
creating personalized software synthesizers, effects modules, and
various composition environments. Devices that once existed
exclusively in the hardware domain can easily have virtual
counterparts. Some of the more popular software tools for achieving
such ends are commercial releases such as
Max/Msp and
Reaktor and
freeware packages such as
Pure Data,
SuperCollider, and
ChucK.
Circuit bending

Probing for "bends" using a jeweler's
screwdriver and alligator clips.
A practice originally pioneered by
Reed
Ghazala in the 1960s; it has recently found significant popular
appeal.
Circuit bending is the
creative
short-circuiting of low
voltage, battery-powered
electronic audio devices such
as
guitar effects, children's
toys and small
synthesizers to create new musical instruments
and sound generators. Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the
techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with
noise music, though many more
conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been
known to experiment with "bent" instruments.
See also
Footnotes
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Further reading
- Bogdanov, Vladimir, Chris Woodstra, Stephen Thomas Erlewine,
and John Bush (editors). 2001. The All Music Guide to
Electronica: The Definitive Guide to Electronic Music. AMG
Allmusic Series. San Francisco: Backbeat Books. ISBN
0-87930-628-9
- Cummins, James. 2008. Ambrosia: About a Culture - An
Investigation of Electronica Music and Party Culture. Toronto,
ON: Clark-Nova Books. ISBN 978-0-978489-21-2
- Heifetz, Robin J. (ed.). 1989. "On The Wires of Our Nerves: The
Art of Electroacoustic Music". Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses. ISBN 0838751555
- Kahn Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound
in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0262112434 New
edition 2001, ISBN 0262611724
- Kettlewell, Ben. 2001. Electronic Music Pioneers.
[N.p.]: Course Technology, Inc. ISBN 1-931140-17-0
- Licata, Thomas (ed.). 2002. Electroacoustic Music:
Analytical Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN
0313314209
- Manning, Peter. 2004. Electronic and Computer Music.
Revised and expanded edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0195144848 (cloth) ISBN 0195170857
(pbk)
- Prendergast, Mark. 2001. The Ambient Century: From Mahler
to Trance: The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age.
Forward [sic] by Brian Eno. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN
0-7475-4213-9, ISBN 1-58234-134-6 (hardcover eds.) ISBN
1-58234-323-3 (paper)
- Reynolds, Simon. 1998. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave
Music and Dance Culture. London: Pan Macmillan. ISBN
0-330-35056-0 (US title, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of
Techno and Rave Culture. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998 ISBN
0316741116; New York: Routledge, 1999 ISBN 0-415-92373-5)
- Schaefer, John. 1987. New Sounds: A Listener's Guide to New
Music. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-097081-2
- Shapiro, Peter (editor). 2000. Modulations: a History of
Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound. New York:
Caipirinha Productions ISBN 1-891024-06-X
- Sicko, Dan. 1999. Techno Rebels: The Renegades of
Electronic Funk. New York: Billboard Books. ISBN
0-8230-8428-0
- Edward A. Shanken, Art and Electronic
Media. London: Phaidon, 2009. ISBN 9780714847825
External links