Electronic and Experimental Music

Technology, Music, and Culture

Thom Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429758430
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, Sixth Edition, presents an extensive history of electronic music—from its historical beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its everchanging present—recounting the musical ideas that arose in parallel with technological progress. In four parts, the author details the fundamentals of electronic music, its history, the major synthesizer innovators, and contemporary practices. This examination of the music's experimental roots covers the key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis, including both art and popular music, Western and non-Western.

New to this edition:

• A reorganized and revised chapter structure places technological advances within a historical framework.
• Shorter chapters offer greater modularity and flexibility for instructors.
• Discussions on the elements of sound, listening to electronic music, electronic music in the mainstream, Eurorack, and more.
• An appendix of historically important electronic music studios around the globe.

Listening Guides throughout the book provide step-by-step annotations of key musical works, focusing the development of student listening skills. Featuring extensive revisions and expanded coverage, this sixth edition of Electronic and Experimental Music represents an comprehensive accounting of the technology, musical styles, and figures associated with electronic music, highlighting the music's deep cultural impact.

PART 1

Electronic Music Fundamentals

CHAPTER 1

What is Electronic Music?

Perspectives on Electronic Music

The Debate over Terminology

How is Electronic Music Different than Other Music?

“What we are doing now is not important for itself, but one day someone might be interested enough to carry things and create something wonderful on these foundations.”

—Delia Derbyshire (circa 1965)¹

Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Source: © BBC Picture Library.

Electronic and Experimental Music is the story of where electronic music came from and how it has evolved with changing technology. It is also the story of musical ideas that arose in parallel with the technology, sometimes inspired by the machine but just as frequently leading to the invention of new technology to fulfill these ideas.

Many questions about electronic music can only be answered historically. What qualities are inherently unique to electronic music? When did we first play sounds in reverse? How did the concept of a sound’s envelope become part of the composer’s toolkit? Why was the music of early practitioners, such as Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Tudor, and Varèse, viewed as distinctly different approaches to the medium? The answers to these and other questions have been obscured by many years of established practice in the field and a cavalcade of changing products and technologies. There is a foundation for the art of electronic music that infiltrates its entire history. Techniques first attempted in the 1930s are still practiced today even though the underlying technology has been completely transformed. With each new generation of technology also come new techniques that are added to the repertoire of electronic music practices. Still, understanding the history of such developments remains essential for today’s composers and listeners if we are to fully appreciate and comprehend the beauty, complexity, and scope of this thing we call electronic music.

The title of this book invites some discussion. Why “electronic and experimental music?” Why not electroacoustic, electronica, acousmatic, organized sound, computer music, or musique concrète? For the purposes of this book, I have long adopted the term electronic music because it is categorically broad and self-explanatory. I use the word “experimental” to underscore that the book is primarily about historical beginnings in the art of electronic music, both technologically and musically. These beginnings span a broad range of years and developments, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Such beginnings are always built on what has come before but can be considered new and experimental in their time. The conversation of this book is about such times, before a new idea or technique in electronic music became mainstream or old hat.

Perspectives on Electronic Music

Because its nature is that of a music using a new medium, the composing and performing of electronic music naturally leads to new sounds, techniques, and styles of music. During its formative years, however, the acceptance of electronic sound as music was not universal. There were several different schools of thought in the 1950s that resulted in a surprising amount of friction between the leading thinkers in the practice of electronic music. Then there were the naysayers who thought that it was not a lasting contribution at all, merely a musical drop in the pond that would eventually ripple away.

Of the initial “schools” of electronic music, the French and Germans occupied most of the headlines over aesthetics. Both were working in what we would call institutional or government-supported establishments.

Despite the fact that electronic music is the outcome of decades of technical development, it is only in most recent times that it has reached a stage at which it may be considered as part of the legitimate musical sphere.²

These were the thoughts of Herbert Eimert, one of the founding scholars of electronic music. He wrote this in 1955, just 4 years after establishing the electronic music studio of West German Radio (WDR). By “legitimate musical sphere,” Eimert meant that he intended purely electronic tones to become the new raw material for realizing serialist works in the operational style of Anton Webern. The German studio was in fact launched into prominence on the reputation of several serialist-inspired pieces consisting of purely electronic signals, recorded and edited on magnetic tape. In stark contrast were the pioneering tape works of musique concrète created at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) studio in Paris under the guidance of Pierre Schaffer. The French composed more freely, modifying and recontextualizing naturally occurring sounds into montages that defied any stylistic precedent. The aesthetic clash between the French and Germans was short-lived due to the refusal of electronic music to be contained by any single school of thought, quickly expanding beyond the French and German “schools” by composers who made rules of their own. In 1955, French composer Pierre Boulez offered a cautionary tale of composers losing their way in the electronic music studio, their once-fixed audio limitations having become unlimited, leading to the “negative cliché” of special effects gone mad.³ The underlying message? The taste that governs the writing of traditional music can well serve the composer of electronic music.

In 1969, looking back at the decade of the Sixties, twentieth century musical icon Igor Stravinsky commented that the most telling index of musical progress in the 1960s was,

[. . .] not in the work of any composer [. . .] but in the status of electronic music [. . .] the young musician takes his degree in computer technology now, and settles down to his Moog or his mini-synthesizer as routinely as in my day he would have taken it in counterpoint and harmony and gone to work at the piano.⁴

For many in the mainstream, Stravinsky had reinforced the legitimacy of electronic music and its continued evolution within all musical circles.

By 1970, after 20 years of experimentation, the field of electronic music established a niche for itself founded on three cultural perspectives (see Figure 1.1):

•Technology naturally leads to experimentation and eventual acceptance of new sounds, styles, and techniques for making music.

•The acceptance of electronic music will succeed by comparing it to other forms of music, even if that comparison is unnecessary to accept electronic music as a musical form of its own.

•Composing and listening to electronic music requires new skills.

Figure 1.1Perspectives and traits of electronic music.

Electronic music is a music of continuity and non-continuity. Boulez characterized this aesthetic as “the concept of continuity which faces the composer in all directions.”⁵ Looking back at the extensive work of David Tudor, composer Forrest Warthman wrote that Tudor’s approach was to “shape sound in all its dimensions, without limitation.”⁶ So it seems that we have developed a continuously expanding universe of sounds in which pitch, timbre, amplitude, duration, and envelope comprise the elemental particles with which the composer works.

The Debate over Terminology

The evolution of electronic music technology has always been shadowed by a debate over what to call the music. This debate is important in that it refers to specific approaches to making the music or to a stylistic tendency for which there is an existing body of works. The debate over what to call electronic music can also serve as a kind of lightning rod for discussion about the nature and goals of composing with technologically produced sounds. The background information on terminology that follows may help readers who have encountered this debate.

When viewed from the standpoint of history, it is possible to understand each term within the context of its own time and place, but oftentimes they do not translate to the present day in a meaningful way. Take Pierre Schaeffer’s term musique concrète. For Schaeffer, this was a work conceived with the recording medium in mind that was composed directly on that medium and was played through that medium as a finished work. In musique concrète, therefore, one worked directly with the modification of sound material, often obscuring beyond recognition the identity of the original source. The use of untreated, natural sounds in a composition was generally una...