Teaching Electronic Music

Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives

Blake Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000417272
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives offers innovative and practical techniques for teaching electronic music in a wide range of classroom settings. Across a dozen essays, an array of contributors—including practitioners in musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, and composition—reflect on the challenges of teaching electronic music, highlighting pedagogical strategies while addressing questions such as:

• What can instructors do to expand and diversify musical knowledge?
• Can the study of electronic music foster critical reflection on technology?
• What are the implications of a digital culture that allows so many to be producers of music?
• How can instructors engage students in creative experimentation with sound?

Electronic music presents unique possibilities and challenges to instructors of music history courses, calling for careful attention to creative curricula, historiographies, repertoires, and practices. Teaching Electronic Music features practical models of instruction as well as paths for further inquiry, identifying untapped methodological directions with broad interest and wide applicability.

Introduction

Narrative Histories, “Real” Music, and the Digital Vernacular

Blake Stevens

Electronic music presents unique creative possibilities and challenges to instructors of music history courses. Having initiated profound transformations in twentieth-century musical culture, musicians working with electronic and digital media continue to remap our conceptions of sound, spatial experience, identity, and agency as transformed through algorithmic and distributed processes. Traditional frameworks of musical production and knowledge have been destabilized through new forms of creative participation in digital culture. Modes of listening as well as analysis must, therefore, adapt to changing contexts and aesthetic aims. Probing into technologies of production may introduce forbidding levels of technical complexity and specialized languages—moving targets of study in a domain often characterized by radical experimentation—yet it will likely uncover opportunities for creative exploration in the classroom. The virtual archive of this media environment, itself a critical object of study for music in digital culture, is expanding into proportions that are difficult to map. Defining the field and its related terminology is itself a core, persistent challenge, given the diversity of its forms.

The adoption of “electronic music” in the title of this volume is meant to keep these issues mobile across various practices and to convey their interdisciplinary scope. A single volume cannot comprehensively treat so large a topic: the past decade alone has seen a staggering profusion of research guides, companions, handbooks, and monographs on electronic music, sound art, new media art, mobile music studies, digital culture, philosophy of education, and technology in education. This volume offers a sampling of current perspectives from practitioners in musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, and composition. The contributors reflect on instructional strategies from their disciplinary backgrounds and pedagogical experience, speaking to issues such as curricular challenges, historiography, repertoires, analytical techniques, and the search for new or largely untapped methodological directions. The topics addressed are applicable to multiple settings, from specialized courses on electronic music and surveys of twentieth- and twenty-first–century music to courses for general student populations. The chapters balance a focus on specific practices and traditions with an interest in wide applicability.

One of the concerns shared by these contributions is exploring how the material affordances of working environments, media, instruments, and other tools inform musical production and analysis. Reflecting this premise is a set of recurring questions and themes: How can instructors expand and diversify students’ knowledge of the field? How can the study of electronic music foster critical reflection on technology and digital culture more broadly? What are the implications of a musical culture whose technologies allow so many to be producers of music? How can music history instructors engage students in creative experimentation with sound? These questions—and the wide range of possible answers explored here—position music history courses as powerful sites of critical and creative engagement with the evolving intersection of electronic music, technology, and digital culture. This volume is directed toward this potential, offering both practical models of instruction and paths for further inquiry.

Narrative Ends

A well-traveled path into electronic music is the traditional survey course. The closing chapters of survey textbooks may inspire a particular fascination in readers interested in the subject, given that the entanglements of electronic music with technological innovation make it a potent marker of the fugitive “present moment.” Amid the flux of genres, techniques, and instruments that seem primed for continuous evolution and thus obsolescence in their current forms, which are representative? And representative of what, precisely? Historical origins, norms, breakthroughs, institutional prestige and influence, market positioning, everyday experience, or other forces? Which aesthetic and critical discourses are necessary to understand these processes? Who are the most significant figures (and types of figures) currently active in the field? What exactly is this field or domain?

As the “present” draws near in Richard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs’s The Oxford History of Western Music: College Edition and J. Peter Burkholder’s A History of Western Music, the compressions and omissions required to extend their narratives from prehistory and antiquity into the 2010s become more pronounced, especially as they involve electronic and digital media.¹ Selectivity is obviously required to navigate through the past several decades of an increasingly globalized and digitally mediated musical culture, whose aural practices, inaugurated by recording and electronic media, are increasingly supplanting the dominance of traditional musical literacy. These transformations involve musical production, material preservation, and dissemination as well as learning practices and standards of competency. Originating within narrative frameworks largely defined by live performance and literacy, technologies such as records, magnetic tape, synthesizers, digital sampling, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) connectivity, and mp3s have created new sonic cultures that shift outside these frames. In this regard, Taruskin and Gibbs maintain a particularly sharp historiographical focus on literacy. Although the impact of these technologies has been decisive and widespread, the agents and forms of expression involved—musicians, composers, producers, inventors, institutions, genres, works, recordings—gradually recede in prominence as their narrative advances from the origins of innovative practices into the present. Postliterate ontologies withdraw from view, in part, because they would require analytical and descriptive methods distinct from those cultivated for literate art music. By contrast, Burkholder sketches the pluralistic range of these transformations from the 1970s into the early 2000s in considerable detail, giving particular attention to popular music and media; like Taruskin and Gibbs, however, he brings instrumental concert music and opera into the foreground in his close readings, along with analytical vocabulary and forms of mediation principally defined through literacy.

Students may wonder about their place within these maps of contemporary musical culture. Heirs of the “digital revolution” and, by and large, “digital natives,” they are navigating through a process whose broad historical implications are profoundly disruptive yet whose local inflections are perhaps now commonplace. Some degree of tension or estrangement may nonetheless characterize their experience of this environment and their formal studies, particularly for students focusing on performance in Western art music. Having only roughly sketched the endpoints of these surveys so far, I next examine the rise of participatory digital culture as focalized through these accounts and in dialogue with the work of Christopher Small, Georgina Born, and Thor Magnussun. The resulting perspective suggests both the desirability and the necessity of pedagogies of sonic “making.” These pedagogies reflect and embrace forms of participatory creativity that have become increasingly common in digital media, opening spaces for student experimentation, expression, and collaboration, as well as critical reflection on their enabling technologies.

Splices and Relays

Despite their differences in historiographical priorities and narrative voice, Taruskin-Gibbs and Burkholder position the origins and development of electronic music in broadly similar ways. Their accounts emphasize the period from the late 1940s to the 1970s and the emergence of pivotal practices within institutional frameworks: the founding of musique concrète and elektronische Musik in the Paris and Cologne studios at mid-century, followed by innovations at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Bell Telephone Laboratories (in Taruskin-Gibbs), The San Francisco Tape Music Center (more directly discussed by Burkholder), and, finally, IRCAM. This last is the only such institution discussed at length after the 1960s. It is presented as the site of salient developments in acoustic research and electronic music from its opening in 1977 to the present. With varying degrees of detail, each text treats Karlheinz Stock-hausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) and Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique (1957–58) as key works in this early period. The latter is included in the accompanying Norton anthology of scores, along with Section I of Milton Babbitt’s Philomel (1964), for live voice and fixed medium (tape), and Steve Reich’s tape piece Come Out (1966).² In the absence of notated scores, Poème électronique and Come Out are represented in the anthology through sound recording and descriptive commentary.³

The internal histories of specific practices and traditions are typically set aside once their origins have been established. What is crucial, instead, is the launching of techniques and conceptions of sound production into other domains. The initial focus on studios and research universities privileges “institutional electroacoustic music,” to invoke one of the three metagenres Joanna Demers has introduced to define the field of electronic music, along with “electronica” and “electronic sound art.”⁴ Composers associated with fixed-medium electroacoustic music are nearly absent after the 1970s, as are representative works in the medium. For instance, neither text remains within the institutional framework in which musique concrète emerged to follow subsequent developments at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) after the early 1950s. This later history includes disputes over abstraction and mimesis that echo aesthetic controversies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that are presented earlier in each survey, the pivot to “acousmatic music” as a generic descriptor, the exploration of sound diffusion techniques with the Acousmonium, and experiments in electronic and digital sound processing.⁵

Instead, the surveys track the influence of electronic music on instrumental concert music and eventually opera. The key figures in this process are Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki in the 1950s–60s and Gérard Grisey and other composers associated with Spectralism beginning in the 1970s. The continuing influence of Spectralism on Kaija Saariaho via IRCAM serves as a connecting thread in each account, with Burkholder also linking Ligeti’s piano étude Vertige (1990) to Jean-Claude Risset’s work at the institute. Without a perspective of musique concrète or the GRM after the 1950s, however, Burkholder’s references to “musique concrète” in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for The Last Emperor (1987) and Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears,” 2003–5) raise the question of whether the relevant context for these composers’ understanding of such techniques was indeed the work of Schaeffer and Henry in the 1950s or more recent practices developing out of it that would be described as “acousmatic music” or, more generally, “electroacoustic music.”⁶

Just as experimental practices radiate from electronic studios into concert music, they are also absorbed into and transformed by vernacular practices. In Taruskin-Gibbs, this process is exemplified by The Beatles, who drew upon musique concrète techniques in their turn to studio composition with Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Narrative Histories, “Real” Music, and the Digital Vernacular
• Part II Unifying the Curriculum
• Part III Critical Interventions and Methods
• Contributors
• Index