Electronic music

• 1. Introduction

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  Electronic music is a category so wide it contains multitudes: the eerily bowed theremin of a 1950s science-fiction film, the clicking drum machines behind Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," the four hundred loudspeakers that filled the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair with Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique. What holds all of it together is a single principle: sound made, shaped, or transformed through circuitry. That principle was already being tested at the turn of the 20th century, and the questions it raised have never stopped multiplying. How do you compose for a machine that can generate any frequency, any timbre, any duration without a human hand guiding it? Who owns the act of music-making when software does the playing? And when electronic sound finally collided with popular culture, how did the world respond? The story that follows moves across Cairo recording studios, a Cologne radio tower, a living room in Woodstock, New York, and a Berlin street party that drew over a million people. It is a story of composers and engineers working together and occasionally arguing fiercely, of tools invented in one country that transformed music in another, and of a sound world that was once considered noise becoming the texture of everyday life.

• 2. Early Instruments and Ideas

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  Ferruccio Busoni's 1907 pamphlet Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music called for microtonal composition that only machines could deliver, and his prediction proved accurate within a generation. At the turn of the 20th century the first electronic musical instruments were built not for sale but for demonstration; audiences heard them reproduce existing orchestral music rather than anything written specifically for the new devices. The Telharmonium was the exception that proved the rule: it synthesized multiple orchestral voices with enough precision to win commercial backing and even attempted to stream music over telephone networks. The futurist Luigi Russolo and Francesco Balilla Pratella pushed further still. Their 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises argued that the sounds of industry and machinery deserved a place in composition, a position that would look prophetic by mid-century. Vacuum-tube technology changed the scale of possibility. The theremin, the ondes Martenot, and the trautonium all reached commercial production by the early 1930s, and composers such as Joseph Schillinger and Maria Schuppel began writing for them within orchestral settings. Most of that writing was conservative, treating the new instruments as substitutes for strings. A smaller group pushed harder: Charles Ives, Dimitrios Levidis, Olivier Messiaen, and Edgard Varèse used the instruments' pitch resources to explore microtonality, while Percy Grainger used the theremin to abandon fixed tonation entirely. The gap between what these instruments could do and what composers were asking them to do would not close until magnetic tape gave composers a new material to cut, splice, and reverse.

• 3. Tape, Cairo, and Paris

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  In 1944, a student in Cairo named Halim El-Dabh carried a wire recorder to an ancient zaar ceremony, captured the sound, and then processed it at the Middle East Radio studios using reverberation, echo, voltage controls, and re-recording. The resulting piece, The Expression of Zaar, was presented at an art gallery in Cairo that same year and is now believed to be the earliest tape music composition. It would be more than a decade before the world caught up with what El-Dabh had done in Egypt. Across the Mediterranean, Pierre Schaeffer at Radiodiffusion Française was conducting his own experiments with shellac record players in the late 1940s. On the 5th of October 1948, RDF broadcast his Etude aux chemins de fer, the first movement of Cinq études de bruits, assembled from recorded railway sounds using a disc cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit. Schaeffer called the approach musique concrète, and when he gave its first public, non-broadcast concert at the École Normale de Musique de Paris in 1950, the live montage with turntables had never been attempted before and did not go well. Pierre Henry joined Schaeffer shortly after, and together they produced Symphonie pour un homme seul in 1950, the first major work of the form. By 1951 the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète had received official recognition at RTF in Paris, and the studio there became the first in the world dedicated to producing electronic music. El-Dabh's own later work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center would produce Leiyla and the Poet in 1959, a series of compositions that blended electronic and folk music and was later cited as a direct influence by Frank Zappa and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

• 4. Cologne and the Electronic Pure

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  Werner Meyer-Eppler's 1949 thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache contained a proposition that set German electronic music on a different course from the French: music synthesized entirely from electronically produced signals, with no recorded acoustic source at all. The studio built around this idea opened officially at the NWDR radio studios in Cologne in 1953, though compositions had been made and broadcast as early as 1951. Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert were its architects; Eimert became its first director. Karlheinz Stockhausen arrived shortly after. Stockhausen had spent time in Schaeffer's Paris studio in 1952, and at Cologne he composed Studie I in 1953 and Elektronische Studie II in 1954, the first electronic piece published as a score. He described his listeners reporting experiences of outer space, flying, or inhabiting a fantastic dream world. In 1956, Stockhausen composed Gesang der Jünglinge at Cologne, drawing on a text from the Book of Daniel. Gottfried Michael Koenig also joined the studio, and the Cologne facility became, in the words of one observer, "a year-round hive of charismatic avant-gardism." The year 1954 was particularly dense with premieres: Varèse's Déserts for chamber ensemble and tape, and two works by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, Rhapsodic Variations for the Louisville Symphony and A Poem in Cycles and Bells, both combining orchestra with tape. At the German premiere of Déserts in Hamburg, Stockhausen himself operated the tape controls while Bruno Maderna conducted. Varèse described the title as evoking not only physical deserts of sand and snow and outer space but also the deserts in the mind of man, remote inner space where no telescope can reach.

• 5. Tape Music in America

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  Columbia University acquired its first professional tape recorder, an Ampex machine, and placed Vladimir Ussachevsky in charge of it. His reaction was immediate. He began layering recordings of instruments on top of one another, and on the 8th of May 1952 he presented demonstrations at his Composers Forum in the McMillin Theatre at Columbia, playing pieces he called Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition, and Underwater Valse. Otto Luening attended that concert. Three months later, Luening invited Ussachevsky to Bennington, Vermont, where the two collaborated using borrowed equipment. They informally played early pieces at a party and composers in the room told them, with some solemnity, "This is it." Word reached New York. Oliver Daniel telephoned with an invitation to produce short works for an October concert at the Museum of Modern Art under Leopold Stokowski. Henry Cowell lent them his home and studio in Woodstock, New York, and the traveling laboratory eventually moved into Ussachevsky's living room. On the 28th of October 1952, the two gave the first tape music concert in the United States. Luening's Fantasy in Space, an impressionistic piece using manipulated flute recordings, and Low Speed, which took the flute far below its natural range, were both produced at Cowell's Woodstock home. The NBC Today Show then invited them to demonstrate their work live on television, making it the first televised electroacoustic performance. The Music for Magnetic Tape Project, gathering John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman, had no permanent studio and worked in borrowed commercial time, including the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron. Cage completed Williams Mix in 1953 using that setup and performed it at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1954 with eight loudspeakers, where it made a strong impression. The Barrons went on to compose the entirely circuit-built score for Forbidden Planet in 1956.

• 6. Japan and the Global Spread

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  Following the foundation of Sony in 1946, composers Toru Takemitsu and Minao Shibata independently began investigating what electronic technology might contribute to music. Shibata foresaw the development of synthesizers and predicted a drastic change in music. Takemitsu arrived at ideas parallel to musique concrète without knowing the French work existed. The avant-garde collective Jikken Kōbō, founded in 1950, was offered access to Sony's emerging audio technology, and the company hired Takemitsu to demonstrate tape recorders through composition. The group's first electronic tape pieces, Toraware no Onna and Piece B, were composed by Kuniharu Akiyama in 1951. Toshiro Mayuzumi brought musique concrète to Japan after attending a Pierre Schaeffer concert in Paris. Modelling the NWDR studio in Cologne, Mayuzumi established an NHK electronic music studio in Tokyo in 1954, equipped with sine-wave oscillators, tape recorders, ring modulators, band-pass filters, and four- and eight-channel mixers. Its first compositions appeared in 1955, including Shibata's 20-minute stereo piece Musique Concrète for Stereophonic Broadcast. Japanese electronic musical instruments soon began moving in the other direction, outward into the world. Ikutaro Kakehashi founded Ace Tone in 1960 and developed electronic percussion devices; his 1967 FR-1 Rhythm Ace offered 16 preset patterns and four buttons for manual playing. Korg released the Donca-Matic DA-20 in 1963 and the Donca-Matic DC-11 electronic drum machine in 1966. In 1969, engineer Shuichi Obata at Matsushita in Osaka invented the first direct-drive turntable, which Matsushita released as the SP-10 in 1969. Its successors, the Technics SL-1100 and SL-1200, were widely adopted by hip-hop musicians, and the SL-1200 remained the most widely used turntable in DJ culture for several decades. Kakehashi later left Ace Tone and founded Roland Corporation in 1972.

• 7. Synthesizers, MIDI, and the Popular Turn

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  In 1975, Yamaha licensed John Chowning's frequency modulation synthesis algorithms from Stanford University, where Chowning had been experimenting with FM synthesis since 1971. Eight years of engineering followed before Yamaha released the DX7 in 1983, a stand-alone digital synthesizer with a sampling rate of 57 kHz that became one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. The year before, in 1983, Korg had released the Poly-800, the first fully programmable synthesizer to sell for less than $1,000, with an initial list price of $795. These instruments arrived alongside a new communication protocol. A group of musicians and manufacturers had met in 1980 to standardize an interface for instrument-to-instrument communication. Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits authored a paper proposing it to the Audio Engineering Society in 1981, and in August 1983 the MIDI Specification 1.0 was finalized, resulting from collaboration between Sequential Circuits, Oberheim, Roland, Yamaha, Korg, and Kawai. MIDI allowed a single keystroke or pedal movement to activate every device in a studio simultaneously. Roland's TR-808 drum machine, released in 1980, had already demonstrated what was coming. Yellow Magic Orchestra were the first band to use it in 1980. The TR-808 later anchored both Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing and Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock in 1982, and it became the drum machine of choice for Detroit techno producers Derrick May and Juan Atkins in the late 1980s. Roland's TB-303 bass synthesizer and sequencer, released in late 1981, became a fixture in acid house after Phuture's Acid Tracks in 1987. The synth-pop movement translated all of this hardware into chart success, with The Human League's Don't You Want Me from the album Dare reaching mainstream audiences in 1981 alongside Depeche Mode's debut album Speak and Spell and Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle from 1979.

• 8. Dance Culture and the Present

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  Berlin in 1989 supplied the clearest image of where electronic music had traveled. The Love Parade began that year as a street party and grew to draw over a million visitors, becoming the largest such celebration of electronic music in the world and inspiring similar events across continents. Giorgio Moroder's score for Midnight Express had won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1979, and Vangelis won the same award in 1981 for Chariots of Fire, marking the moment when electronic composition had moved from radio experiments to the highest recognized venues in film. The EDM umbrella that emerged in the 1990s gathered dance-pop, house, techno, electro, and trance beneath it, while festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival, Tomorrowland, and Ultra Music Festival brought large-scale commercial raves to North America. Jamaican dub music, pioneered by King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry, Errol Thompson, and Sylvan Morris from the 1960s onward, had quietly supplied many of the techniques that electonic dance music later claimed: remixing, turntablism, emphasis on repetitive rhythmic structures, and the electronic manipulation of space. DJ Kool Herc carried Jamaica's sound system culture to America in the early 1970s, and the turntable went on to become the most visible electronic musical instrument of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, electronic music reaches audiences in the Middle East, with artists from Iran and Turkey blending traditional instruments with ambient and techno influences. Pop electronic music in its 4/4 form connects broadly with mainstream audiences worldwide. The publication Mixmag, dedicated entirely to the genre, reflects how far the distance has grown from Schaeffer's first difficult concert in Paris in 1950, when live montage with turntables had never been done before and the performance, by his own account, did not go well.