Electronic Music

[Joseph K]

As I've not long posted on the What Classical Music are You Listening to thread, I don't know much (about) electronic music, and would like to know more. I mean, I've checked out some by Xenakis and Stockhausen, some Spectral music, obviously it features in a few other figures music I know, and have read a bit by Paul Griffiths (though not his book dedicated to this topic). Other than that - do people have any suggestions about whose music to check out in this realm? And is Griffith's book any good, is there another book which describes the kind of trajectory this music has taken over the years?

[Bryn]

As I've not long posted on the What Classical Music are You Listening to thread, I don't know much (about) electronic music, and would like to know more. I mean, I've checked out some by Xenakis and Stockhausen, some Spectral music, obviously it features in a few other figures music I know, and have read a bit by Paul Griffiths (though not his book dedicated to this topic). Other than that - do people have any suggestions about whose music to check out in this realm? And is Griffith's book any good, is there another book which describes the kind of trajectory this music has taken over the years?

You might try an obscure Welsh composer with the initials RB.

[Richard Barrett]

Paul G is a very fine and engaging writer but not really an expert in electronic music "from the inside" so to speak. Have a look at Joel Chadabe's book Electric Sound, it's a bit Americocentric and also now 20 years old but covers more ground than any comparable book. I will have a few more recommendations in due course but this evening I'm dropping from exhaustion for some reason so I'll get around to it at the weekend.

Some composers to be getting on with, apart from the ones you know: Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Roland Kayn, Beatriz Ferreyra, Pauline Oliveros, Ivo Malec, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, more to follow...

[Joseph K]

Thanks very much.

[Dave2002]

Is there an issue about what "electronic music" is? There is much music now which is played on electronic instruments, and there is also classical music which inorporates some instrumentation which is clearly electrical or electronic - e.g. Messaien's Turangalila Symphony. There is maybe some other sort of hybrid music, which includes some electronic instruments - with their special characteristics - whatever they are - as well as other more conventional instruments.

Then there is the kind of music which is totally electronic, and often I suspect improvised - a sort of performance art. Here I think of artists like deadmau5 who has synthesiser banks with more knobs on than you could ever count in a couple of secconds -

https://youtu.be/Zw9GBsAH9yI

A lot of the commercial - pop - music is basically electronic - with hardly any non electronic sounds - or so it sounds to me.

You could try experimenting yourself with some simple software synths - there are quite a few around.

[Bryn]

Is there an issue about what "electronic music" is? There is much music now which is played on electronic instruments, and there is also classical music which inorporates some instrumentation which is clearly electrical or electronic - e.g. Messaien's Turangalila Symphony. There is maybe some other sort of hybrid music, which includes some electronic instruments - with their special characteristics - whatever they are - as well as other more conventional instruments.

Then there is the kind of music which is totally electronic, and often I suspect improvised - a sort of performance art. Here I think of artists like deadmau5 who has synthesiser banks with more knobs on than you could ever count in a couple of secconds -

https://youtu.be/Zw9GBsAH9yI

A lot of the commercial - pop - music is basically electronic - with hardly any non electronic sounds - or so it sounds to me.

You could try experimenting yourself with some simple software synths - there are quite a few around.

Dave, checkout the devbate about "electronic music" versus "musique concrète". Varèse's Poem Electronique,was the latter, rather than the former.

[Richard Barrett]

the debate about "electronic music" versus "musique concrète". Varèse's Poem Electronique,was the latter, rather than the former.

Although that was always highly exaggerated in the sense that many of the "classics" of electronic music like Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge involved recorded "concrete" sounds whereas the output of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, epicentre of musique concrète was transformed overnight by the installation in their studios of a synthesizer in the early 1970s. A more relevant indicator of the "ideological" difference between the two streams is that "electronic music" tends to regard the projection of sound in space as an aspect of composition while "musique concrète" regards it as an aspect of performance.

Turangalîla isn't electronic music in any sense, it's instrumental music, involving one electronic instrument modelled on a classical model of what an instrument is and should be capable of doing.

[Dave2002]

Turangalîla isn't electronic music in any sense, it's instrumental music, involving one electronic instrument modelled on a classical model of what an instrument is and should be capable of doing.

It is electronic music in the sense that it uses one electronic instrument.

However, I do otherwise agree with the succinct way the sentence describes the Turangalila symhony.

Trying to put labels on sound "features" could obviously become quite difficult, and there may be some with different ideological differences for different kinds of sounds. Some music (or "merely" sounds) can be generated by synthesisers, while some "music" may include recordings of "real" sounds - an example being Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus. Thus music might refer to some form of conventional music overlaid by recordings of "real world" sounds - nowadays most obviously stored in a digital form. What however do we call music which uses such recordings of "real" sounds, and transforms them, for example by pitch transposition? That might still be recognisable as what we previously called music, but other transformations such as waveform reversal are possible. These produce sounds which could not normally be produced by what many would call "normal" instruments.

Another factor in the electronic music discussion is whether the sounds produced and used are digital or analogue. In the case of digitally produced sounds it is likely or possible that the music is repeatable/reproducible, whereas with analogue systems it is possible that other factors will ensure that no two renderings are exactly alike. This is probably too simplistic, as some analogue systems may be fairly stable and produce repeatable sound patterns, while some digital systems may incoporate randomising features to introduce variety.

Then one can get into more philosophical discussions. If I stick a microphone (or ten) outside and record birdsong and other noises, and give it a title, is that a musical composition? If instead, I write down a prescription "Put ten microphones outside your window and record birdsong and other noises for exactly 43 minutes" is that a composition? I'm giving up at this point and going to bed.

[Bryn]

While the original source of an Ondes Martenod's sound is an oscillator, as Richard points out the instrument is built exploiting traditional musical instrument techniques, including different forms of resonating chambers and sympathetic strings, etc. It is essentially an electro-acoustic instrument. Turangalila is not really any more electronic music than Rock Around the Clock was. On an electric guitar, it's not the strings you hear but the oscillations set up in the electromagnetic pickups.

[Dave2002]

While the original source of an Ondes Martenod's sound is an oscillator, as Richard points out the instrument is built exploiting traditional musical instrument techniques, including different forms of resonating chambers and sympathetic strings, etc. It is essentially an electro-acoustic instrument. Turangalila is not really any more electronic music than Rock Around the Clock was. On an electric guitar, it's not the strings you hear but the oscillations set up in the electromagnetic pickups.

I understand that, but then what is electronic music? Would a solo piece for ondes martenot be electronic? It would be possible to play something very similar on a synthesiser. Does a piece cease to be electronic if it calls for a few conventional instruments?

All audio is composed of oscillations, but some are consistent and linked together- what we might call tones and harmonics. These are often placed together in a sequence by a composer. Does electronic music have to avoid such sounds?

Electronic devices and computers can produce sounds which are very difficult to produce using “natural” means directly - reversing a waveform envelope for example with stored sounds in a sampling synthesiser.

Is the distinction - if there is one - whether there is a composer, who specifies the nature and structure of electronic sounds, or whether “pieces” are improvised by a knob twiddling, slider pushing player of electronic systems? Does the incorporation of “real”recorded sound - as in the Rautavaara piece deny any piece electronic status?

What about the incorporation of aleatoric or other non deterministic elements? Pieces for FM and AM radios - are they electronic?
Are they music?

Are we saying that we “know what electronic music is” - but we can’t actually define it? I’d be happy with a definition which included (perhaps exclusively) sounds which would be virtually impossible by any other means, but once we accept that electronic devices can themselves be considered instruments even that can become an arbitrary decision - made by people who “know”. It’s not obvious at all, IMO.

[Quarky]

My "feel" for the situation, based on limited knowledge, is that it may be best to explore specific composers (RB has already been suggested!), rather than any supposed "electronic" genres. Otherwise the field is wide open as Dave points out, and one might get locked into Donna Summer - no bad thing?

The history of electronic music is interesting, but littered with electronic artefacts, which quickly become museum pieces as electronics technology races on- synthesisers filling a large laboratory, who uses tape splicing these days? Unfortunately, many compositions are tied to the technology in which they were created, and now seem rather quaint.

[Richard Barrett]

I think it isn't a question of style or genre so much as what technology is used and how.

You have music using a mixture of acoustic and electronic instruments like the aforementioned Messiaen example, or Varèse's Ecuatorial, or indeed the surprisingly large repertoire of French light music for ones martenot and piano. And also Messiaen's Fête des belles eaux for six ondes, which, despite not including any acoustic instruments, is still instrumental music first and foremost.

Then, in the postwar years, you have what is now called fixed-media electronic music, which was composed on magnetic tape, a medium that enabled a much more radical reconception of what musical material was: a physical object in the form of a length of tape, which could be "sculpted" into different forms by rerecording it at different speeds, or backwards, or looped on itself, or superimposed on others, or precisely measured in terms of duration and frequency in the context of a serial compositional structure, and so on. In this way it became possible to imagine sounds and structures idiomatic to the electronic medium which simply aren’t conceivable in terms of instruments and voices. Eventually such material was mixed with live instruments, as in Stockhausen's Kontakte or Berio's Différences (I recently took part in a performance of the latter, which will be appearing on a Youtube "virtual concert" next week). Fixed-media music typically involves reproduction systems in concert halls that go some distance beyond domestic systems, using 8 or more channels up to and including Wevefield Synthesis systems with hundreds of identical speakers, or “loudspeaker orchestras” like the Acousmonium of the GRM in Paris or BEAST in Birmingham (both of which I’ve had the opportunity to work with).

Starting in the 1960s, composers both in Europe (Stockhausen in Mikrophonie I) and the USA expanded the range of electronic composition further by inventing systems of "live electronics" where the processes of sound-manipulation and generation previously tied to specialised studios could be carried out by musicians in the "real time" of a performance. At the same time, the invention of the voltage-controlled studio (including that at the Institute of Sonology, then in Utrecht and now in The Hague, which is still operational) led to the industrialisation and mass production of miniature "studios" in the form of synthesizers, by companies such as EMS in England and Moog in the USA. The addition of keyboards to these devices made them amenable to the kind of "instrumental" use that was made of them in such well-known examples as Switched-On Bach and Abbey Road. Modular analogue synthesizers, often with various digital features, are currently enjoying a revival.

Beginning in the 1980s, the advent of digital technology led gradually to the general availability of electronic music resources including new forms of synthesis, recording/editing/mixing, live sound processing and so on, so that the boundaries between electronic, concrete, acoustic and mixed resources are further blurred. Composers such as myself might create compositions involving live and fixed media electronics and acoustic instruments, brought together in new symbioses which are integrated with the poetic/structural identity of the music, in a comparable way to that in which the orchestration and musical structure of Bruckner’s symphonies are integrated. There’s more creative potential in seeing all the resources available to a composer as constituting a field of possibilities which can be freely used and combined (same for notated composition and improvisation, for example) than in imagining hard and fast boundries between what is and isn’t “electronic music”.

At the beginning of the 17th century you have a situation where instrumental music develops a vocabulary of its own independently of vocal music; subsequently, vocal music (JS Bach’s is a good example) is crucially conditioned by that development, and took on aspects that wouldn’t have been thinkable previously. The same is now happening with electronic and digital technology. Having opened up musical thought to new possibilities, it is now reintegrating itself into the way composers can conceive instrumental music - although not, to be sure, in the minds of composers who still cleave to traditional ways of thinking for one reason or another.

[Bryn]

My "feel" for the situation, based on limited knowledge, is that it may be best to explore specific composers (RB has already been suggested!), rather than any supposed "electronic" genres. Otherwise the field is wide open as Dave points out, and one might get locked into Donna Summer - no bad thing?

The history of electronic music is interesting, but littered with electronic artefacts, which quickly become museum pieces as electronics technology races on- synthesisers filling a large laboratory, who uses tape splicing these days? Unfortunately, many compositions are tied to the technology in which they were created, and now seem rather quaint.

Oh, so very true. If anyone feels like searching it out, there was, I think on this forum, a discussion of a recording of Philip Glass's Music in 12 Parts in which modern digital keyboard instruments were employed, rather than the original analogue Farfisas. The loss of their distinctive timbre was much bemoaned. There again, what with the renewed fad of vinyl discs, can a resurection of tape splicing be far behind?

[Joseph K]

Farsifa organ - rings a bell, it was played by Herbie Hancock on 'Right Off' from the album A Tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis.

Thanks for that long post, RB. Dave seems intent on a cast-iron definition of 'Electronic Music' - just like the term 'Classical Music', I'm not sure I could be bothered trying to reach a definitive definition.

[teamsaint]

There is some good stuff available to hear and download on the Avant garde Project.
Of the bits I dabbled in, the Francois Bayle was among the music that I enjoyed the most.

http://dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject/agp75/index.html

He seems to me to have a very direct voice.