Electronic Music History: The Best Modern Proponents Today!

 

Electronic music predates rock and roll by several decades. Many of us weren't even alive when electronic music began to develop. It was often obscure, misunderstood and under-appreciated. This 'other-worldly' sound that began more than a century back may not seem strange or unique to us today, as many new generations are accepting it as mainstream. But it has had a long and bumpy road.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, many musicians who are now proponents for electronic music developed a love of analogue synthesizers. They were inspired by songs such as Gary Numan's 'Are Friends Electric? '. In this period, these devices became more compact, accessible, user-friendly, and affordable for most of us. This article will trace the history of these devices in easy to digest chapters, and provide examples from today's most innovative proponents.

This was, in my opinion, the dawn of a new age. It was no ortigueira longer required to have a large room full of technology, either in a recording studio or on stage, to create electronic music. This was the exclusive domain of Kraftwerk and their arsenal of custom-built gadgets, electronic instruments, and other technology. We could only dream of such a thing, even if you understood the mechanics. While I grew up in the 1960's and 1970's, I had no idea of the level of complexity that was required to reach this point.

Karlheinz stockhausen (1928-2007) is largely responsible for the history of electronic music. Stockhausen, a German Avante Garde Composer and pioneer in electronic music, was influential in the early 1950s. He influenced names like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Brain Eno. Stockhausen's face can be seen on the front cover of "Sgt. The Beatles' 1967 opus, Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, features his face. We'll start by going back a bit further in time.

 

The Turn of the 20th Century

When I first discovered that the earliest documented electronic concerts took place in the 1920s, not the 1970s or 1980s, time stood still for me!

Lev Termen, a Russian cellist and scientist (1896-1993), invented the first purely electronic musical instrument, The Theremin, circa 1919.

The Leningrad Philharmonic performed the first concert with the Theremin in 1924. The theremin generated interest in concerts held across Europe and Britain. Carnegie Hall, New York's prestigious concert hall, hosted a classical performance in 1930 using only ten theremins. It must have been a surreal experience for an audience before the advent of technology to watch a group of musicians play this strange instrument by circling its antennae with their hands.

Clara Rockmore, virtuoso thereminist (1911-1998) has recorded some of her works. Rockmore, a Lithuanian-born woman (Reisenberg), worked in New York with the inventor of the instrument to perfect it during its early days. She became its most acclaimed and brilliant performer throughout her lifetime.

Clara was, in retrospect, the first celebrated "star" of electronic music. There are few classical performances on the Theremin that are as beautiful and eerie. She is definitely one of my favorites!

Electronic Music for Sci-Fi, Cinema and Television

The Theremin was a short-lived musical instrument, mainly due to the difficulty of mastering it. It found a niche as a musical instrument in 1950s Sci-Fi movies. The soundtrack of the 1951 film classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was composed by Bernard Hermann, a prominent American film composer (known for Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho" etc.). The score is a rich 'extraterrestrial,' combining electronic instruments with acoustic instruments.

Maurice Martenot, a French radio telegraphist and cellist (1898-1980), developed the Ondes Martenot in 1928, using the vacuum-tube technology of the Theremin.

Martenot's instrument was more user-friendly than the Theremin because it used a familiar and standard keyboard that musicians could easily master. It was the first electronic instrument that composers and orchestras used from its time to the present.

The song is also featured in the theme of the original 1960s TV show "Star Trek" and on recordings by Radiohead and Brian Ferry.

The Ondes Martenot is the closest instrument I've heard to a modern synthesizer.

The 1956 film "Forbidden planet" was the first commercial studio movie to have an electronic soundtrack... besides introducing Robbie, the Robot, and the gorgeous Anne Francis! Louis and Bebe Barrons, a husband-and-wife team, produced the groundbreaking score. They had established in the late 1940s the first private recording studio in America, where they recorded electronic experimental artists like the legendary John Cage. ).

Barrons are generally recognized for introducing electronic music to cinema. Louis, with a soldering iron, built circuitry that he then manipulated in order to create bizarre effects and motifs. These sounds were not able to be reproduced because the circuit was deliberately overloaded, smoked and burned out in order to achieve the desired sound.

Bebe then edited the reels to select what she thought was usable. She then re-manipulated them with delay, reverberation, and creatively dubbed the final product using multiple decks.

The theme of the British Sci-Fi adventure show "Dr. Who", which aired from 1963 to 1995, is a great example of this method. This was the first Television series to feature a purely electronic theme. The theme for "Dr. Who", created by the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was made using tape loops, test oscillators, and recording effects to tape. They were then re-manipulated and edited by Delia Derbyshire interpreting Ron Grainer's composition.

This is because the use of electronic music in vintage Sci-Fi led to the perception that this music was 'other-worldly' or 'alien-bizarre'. This was the case until at least 1968 when Walter Carlos released the hit album "Switched On Bach", performed exclusively on a Moog modulator synthesizer.

In the 1970s, electronic music was popularized by bands such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. It became more mainstream in the 1980s.

Mid 1900s: Music Concrete

Electronic music did not only consist of electronic circuitry that was manipulated to create sound. In the 1940s, the reel-toreel tape recording device, developed in Germany in the 1930s, became of interest to many Avante Garde European Composers, including the French composer and radio broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer.

The splicing of recorded segments of audio tapes containing "found" sounds (natural, industrial, environmental and human) and manipulation of these sounds with effects like delay, reverb and distortion, as well as speeding up or slowing the tape-speed (varispeed), as well as reversing them, are all part of Musique Concrete.

Stockhausen held concerts using his Musique Concrete recordings as backing tapes. (At this stage, both electronic and "real world" sounds were included on the recordings). On top of these recordings, classical musicians would perform live instruments in response to the moods and themes they heard!

Musique Concrete was influential not only in the Avant-Garde and effect libraries but also in the music of the 1960s and 1970s. Check out the Beatles' groundbreaking tracks such as 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' 'Revolution No. The Beatles' use of this method in groundbreaking tracks like 'Tomorrow Never Knows', 'Revolution No. The mixdowns were often based on home-made loops and tape cut-ups.

Digital sampling allows us to perform this piece with ease, while the heroes of yesterday had to work for hours, days, and sometimes even weeks just to complete a simple four-minute piece. Understanding the history of electronic musical helps us, as contemporary musicians, to appreciate the quantum leaps technology has made in recent years. These early innovators and pioneers – of which there will be many more in the future – and the influential figures that came before us created the revolutionary foundation that is now our electronic musical legacy today. For this, I pay them tribute!

The First Computer Played Music

In 1957, the first computer was introduced to the electronic world. It was not a laptop, but a device that took up a room. User-friendly wasn't a concept. But creative people continued to push the limits. Max Mathews, a Bell Telephone Laboratories employee from New Jersey who was born in 1926, developed Music 1, a music program that was the foundation for all digital synthesis. Mathews was the 'Father of Computer Music,' and the first person to synthesize computer music using an IBM Mainframe.

In the 1968 film '2001: A Space Odyssey,' Stanley Kubrik uses a 1961 Mathews electronic rendition of Daisy Bell from the late 1800s. The mainframe is programmed to perform the music, and a synthesized human voice was used in the early 1960s. As HAL, the computer, goes backwards in the film, "he" reverts to the song as a tribute to his own origins.

The RCA Mk II Sound synthesizer, an improvement over the original 1955 model, was also introduced in 1957. The RCA Mk II Sound Synthesizer also had an electronic sequencer for programming music playback. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York is still home to this massive RCA Synth, which was installed and remains there. This was where Robert Moog, the legendary electronic music pioneer, worked for a time. In the early days, universities and tech laboratories were the primary places where synthesizers and computer music experiments took place.