Electroacoustic music

[James]

The novelty of making music with electronic instruments has long worn off. The
use of electronics to compose, organize, record, mix, color, stretch, randomize,
project, perform, and distribute music is now intimately woven into the fabric of
modern experience. Just as digital visual effects have become so commonplace
in movies that we often don't notice them, so too have we accepted the electronic
seasoning that tenderizes every form of music imaginable.

Music as we know it today-in all of its many-faceted, genre-bending splendor
—would not exist without technology. The explosive development of new
musical ideas and materials during the last hundred years is a direct result of
explorations with electronic instruments and recording technologies.
Composers now think differently about the music they make. Their aural
vocabulary has no bounds, and the structures they impose, or choose to avoid,
are all made possible by technology.

The audience now listens differently to music because recording has changed
the way music is experienced. It can be presented live or through various
communication media or a combination of the two, any variation of which alters
the social context within which music delivers its influence on the human spirit.
All music today is electronic music.

Electronically produced music is part of the mainstream of popular culture.
Musical concepts that were once considered radical—the use of environmental
sounds, ambient music, turntable music, digital sampling, computer music, the
electronic modification of acoustic sounds, and music made from fragments of
speech—have now been subsumed by many kinds of popular music. Recordstore
genres including new age, rap, hip-hop, electronica, techno, jazz, and popular
song all rely heavily on production values and techniques that originated
with classic electronic music.

There was a time not so many years ago when the term "electronic music" had
different connotations. It suggested a music of new and different ideas, never
before-imagined sounds, and creative impulses that were the aural brethren of
abstract painting and dance. Electronic music was new music. It evolved during
the twentieth century in parallel with the growth of industry and technology. It
came into being because of new technology, and, ironically, much technology
now exists because of electronic music.

This book is about new musical ideas and the parallel growth of electronic
music instruments. It is about music that exists because of the use of electronics
rather than music that simply uses electronics. Rock music, pop music, jazz, rap,
movie music, house, techno, drum and bass, rhythm and blues, and other genres
of music use electricity, but they are not the kinds of electronic music discussed
between these covers. Here you will find the work of engineers and composers,
tinkerers and performers, pocket-protector geeks and new music pioneers. These
are people who have always had something different in mind when it comes to
music. They share a desire to disrupt the musical norm and to fiddle with the
expectations of human experience. Their musical space is one in which aural
reality is recontextualized by new sounds, new rules for playing sounds, and new
demands for listening.

If this book were only about the technology, then that would have been the end
of it. I am not interested in writing about music technology for the sake of the
gizmos themselves. As fascinated as I am with soldering and circuits, the real story
of electronic music has always been the symbiosis that develops between the
artist and the inventor, and the imaginative music that flows from these creative
collaborations. This is a book with history, but it is mostly the history of the
artistic desire to create music that has never been imagined before.

I visited Robert Ashley early in this project. His studio is a vast open floor in
an old industrial building in the TriBeca section of New York City. When I
arrived the light was dim except for the lamp on a worktable at the other end of
the space where he had been busy. All around him were boxes of files from his
past, projects arranged in folders, like reams of time through which he had been
sifting.

That was the first time I heard him say that not enough had been written about
contemporary music from the '60s. The '60s "were an incredibly fertile period in
American music," but the music of the times was not documented because
publishers wouldn't produce books about it and record companies wouldn't
release recordings. The true music history of that era, Bob claimed, only "exists
in composer's file cabinets like mine, all over the United States." This is exactly
what I have found in speaking with him and countless other generous composers
who shared their thoughts with me for this book.

What you will find in this book is not intended as an exhaustive history of
every composer and musician who has contributed to the rich history of
electronic music composition; encyclopedias are better suited for that kind of
reading. My intent is to offer insight into the work of key pioneers in the field
whose ideas and methods set the course for many others to follow.

I have tried to write a book combining a rich history of technical invention
with parallel ideas formulated in experimental music. In a world where
technology now infiltrates every nuance of our existence, one must remember
that the arts succeed where computers fail in elevating the human being in us all.
The development of electronic music—itself a by-product of technology—
exemplifies everything about being human that the arts can offer.

(Electronic & Experimental Music, 2nd Edition, Thom Holmes, 2002)

[petrarch]

All but 9 entries, if I counted them correctly. Of course, there is a lot more out there than what the list contains or even suggests and, not knowing exactly what is the rationale for it, it is interesting to note the glaring omissions from the repertoire.

Update -
It was actually 10 entries, but in the meantime I managed to find and listen to 6 of them (marked with * below). Unsuk Chin's Xi was a very good surprise.

*Halim El-Dabh – Leiyla and the Poet (1961)
*Charles Wuorinen - Time's Encomium (1969)
*Easley Blackwood, Jr. - Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media (1980)
Wendy Carlos - Digital Moonscapes (1984)
Wendy Carlos - Beauty in the Beast (1986/2000)
*Jonathan Harvey - Madonna of Winter & Spring (1986)
*George Benjamin - Antara (1985-87)
Harrison Birtwistle - The Mask of Orpheus (1984)
*Unsuk Chin - Xi (1998)
Julian Anderson - Book of Hours (2004)

[petrarch]

4 to go!

I have heard fragments of both of those Carlos works. Not worth spending more time on them .

[petrarch]

What's the wink for ..?

...that I don't consider those two works worthy of further exploration, even though other people are or might be enthusiastic about them.

[petrarch]

Oh, as long as it's just that. You're safe. 

What else did you think it was?