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File:Intonarumori-veduta.jpg

Luigi Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti with their Intonarumori, 1913.

File:Leon Theremin Playing Theremin.jpg

The young Léon Theremin playing a theremin, 1919.

Electronic music refers to music that emphasizes the use of electronic musical instruments or electronic music technology as a central aspect of the sound of the music.^[1] Historically, electronic music was considered to be any music created with the use of electronic musical instruments or electronic processing, but in modern times, that distinction has been lost because almost all recorded music today, and the majority of live music performances, depend on extensive use of electronics.^[2] Today, the term electronic music serves to differentiate music that uses electronics as its focal point or inspiration, from music that uses electronics mainly in service of creating an intended production that may have some electronic elements in the sound but does not focus upon them.^[3]

Contemporary electronic music expresses both art music forms including electronic art music, experimental music, musique concrète, and others; and popular music forms including multiple styles of dance music such as techno, house, trance, electro, breakbeat, drum and bass, synth pop, etc.

A distinction can be made between instruments that produce sound through electromechanical means as opposed to instruments that produce sound using electronic components.^[4]

Examples of electromechanical instruments are the telharmonium, Hammond organ , and the electric guitar, whereas examples of electronic instruments are a Theremin, synthesizer, and a computer.^[5]

History

File:Musica electronica jpereira.jpg

A live performance with electronic instruments.

Late 19th century to early 20th century

Before electronic music, there was a growing desire for composers to use emerging technologies for musical purposes. Several instruments were created that employed electromechanical designs and they paved the way for the later emergence of electronic instruments. An electromechanical instrument called the Teleharmonium (or Telharmonium) was developed by Thaddeus Cahill in the years 1898-1912. However, simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Teleharmonium, due to its immense size. The first electronic instrument is often viewed to be the Theremin, invented by Professor Leon Theremin circa 1919–1920.^{[citation needed]} Another early electronic instrument was the Ondes Martenot, which was most famously used in the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen as well as other works by him. It was also used by other, primarily French, composers such as Andre Jolivet.^{[citation needed]}

Post-war years: 1940s to 1950s

The tape recorder had been developed in Germany during the early 1930s. Whereas Wire recorders had been in use since 1898, the first practical tape recorder was called the Magnetophon (Angus 1984.)^{[citation needed]} It wasn't long before composers used the tape recorder to develop a new technique for composition called Musique concrète. This technique involved editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds.^[6] The first pieces of musique concrète were written by Pierre Schaeffer, who later worked together with Pierre Henry. Karlheinz Stockhausen worked briefly in Schaeffer's studio in 1952, and afterward for many years at the WDR Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music,^[7] on two occasions combining electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional orchestras—in Mixtur (1964) and Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester (1967).^[8] Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his electronic music gave them an experience of "outer space," sensations of flying, or being in a "fantastic dream world"^[9] More recently, Stockhausen turned to producing electronic music in his own studio in Kürten, his last work in the genre being Cosmic Pulses (2007). The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe Barron in 1950.^{[citation needed]}

The score for Forbidden Planet, by Louis and Bebe Barron,^[10] was entirely composed using custom built electronic circuits in 1956.

Two new electronic instruments made their debut in 1957. Unlike the earlier Theremin and Ondes Martenot, these instruments were hard to use, required extensive programming, and neither could be played in real time. The first of these electronic instruments was the computer when Max Mathews used a program called Music 1, later users were Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis. The other electronic instrument that appeared that year was the first electronic synthesizer. Called the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, it used vacuum tube oscillators and incorporated the first electronic music sequencer. It was designed by RCA and installed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where it remains to this day.^{[citation needed]}

In 1957, MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, was created by Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories.

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, now known as the Computer Music Center, is the oldest center for electronic and computer music research in the United States. It was founded in 1958 by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening who had been working with magnetic tape manipulation since the early 1950s. A studio was built there with the help of engineer Peter Mauzey (Luening 1968, 48) and it became the hub of American electronic music production until about 1980. Robert Moog developed voltage controlled oscillators and envelope generators while there, and these were later used as the heart of the Moog synthesizer.^{[citation needed]}

1960s to late 1970s

One of the first major public demonstrations of computer music was a pre-recorded national radio broadcast on the NBC radio network program Monitor on February 10, 1962. In 1961, LaFarr Stuart programmed Iowa State University's CYCLONE computer (a derivative of the Illiac) to play simple, recognizable tunes through an amplified speaker that had been attached to the system originally for administrative and diagnostic purposes. An interview with Mr. Stuart accompanied his computer music.

File:Electronium.jpg

Raymond Scott's Electronium, an "instantaneous composition-performance machine", ca. 1971.

The first of these synthesizers to appear was the Buchla. Appearing in 1963, it was the product of an effort spearheaded by musique concrète composer Morton Subotnick. In 1962, working with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Subotnick and business partner Ramon Sender hired electrical engineer Don Buchla to build a "black box" for composition.^{[citation needed]}

The theremin, an exceedingly difficult instrument to play, was even used in some popular music.^{[citation needed]}

One notable artist in this period was Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophone Workshop.

Late 1970s to late 1980s

According to a biography of the folk rock band Crosby, Stills & Nash, a number of early experimental electronic music works were recorded throughout the early 1970s out of a collaboration between David Crosby, Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart, and composer Ned Lagin. These included the Lagin album Seastones, first released in 1975.^[11] In 1980, UK recording artist Gary Numan helped to bring to electronic music into the wider marketplace of pop music with his hit "Cars" from the album The Pleasure Principle.^{[citation needed]}

Recent developments: 1980s to early 2000s

In the early 2000s, the indie pop world has seen a rush of artists that can be described as electronic music.^{[citation needed]} Included amongst these artists are Four Tet, The Postal Service, Caribou, Dntel, and Psapp. These artists use a variety of tools to make music, usually drum machines and laptops.^{[citation needed]} One particular movement of the indie electronic music scene is the folktronica movement, which combines, as the name suggests, styles of folk music with the styles of electronic.^{[citation needed]} This particular sub genre consists of bands such as Four Tet and Black Moth Super Rainbow.^{[citation needed]} Of these electronic groups the one that has accumulated the most fame has been The Postal Service, whose album Give Up reached #114 on the US Billboard 200 Album chart.^{[citation needed]} Although the Postal Service's fame could be rooted to Ben Gibbard, of Death Cab for Cutie fame, the group's success shows a possibility of future mainstream popularity in electronic music.^{[citation needed]} Also such bands as Owl City, Breathe Carolina, Scenes and Sirens, Finish This Now, and Play! Radio Play! all incorporate mostly electronic-like elements in making their songs. Such new programs such as Reason or Garageband are in the forefront in electronic music developement or in general solo project development.

Circuit Bending

Probing for "bends" using a jeweler's screwdriver and alligator clips.

Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children's toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.^{[citation needed]} Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments.^{[citation needed]}

Overview

Genres

Electronic music, especially in the late 1990s fractured into many genres, styles and sub-styles, too many to list here, and most of which are included in the main list. Although there are no hard and fast boundaries, broadly speaking we can identify the experimental and classical styles: electronic art music, musique concrète, acousmatic music from approximately 1945 to the present; the industrial music and synth pop styles of the 1980s; styles that are primarily intended for dance such as italo disco, techno, house, trance, electro, breakbeat, drum and bass (aka jungle), electronic jazz (aka Nujazz) and styles that are intended more as experimental styles or for home listening such as electronica, glitch, Breakcore and trip hop.^{[citation needed]} There is also another genre known as minimal, as a result there is a fusion of minimal and techno defined as minimal techno.^{[citation needed]} Minimal techno is a minimalist sub-genre of techno music, is characterized by a stripped-down, glitchy sound, a fairly steady rhythm (usually around 120-135 BPM), repetition of short loops, and subtle changes.^{[citation needed]} This kind of electronic music is frequently listened at clubs and electronic partyes all over the world.^{[citation needed]} The proliferation of personal computers and the MIDI interface beginning in the 1980s brought about a new genre of electronic music, known loosely as chip music or bitpop. These styles, produced initially using specialized sound chips in PCs such as the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST among others, grew primarily out of the demoscene.^{[citation needed]}

Notable record labels

Until 1978 and the formation of Mute Records, there were virtually no record labels that dealt with exclusively electronic music.^{[citation needed]} Because of this dearth of outlets, many of the early techno pioneers started their own.^{[citation needed]} For example, Juan Atkins started Metroplex Records a Detroit-based label, and Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva started their hugely influential Plus 8 imprint. In the United Kingdom, Warp Records emerged in the 1990s as one of the pre-eminent sources of home-listening and experimental music.^{[citation needed]}

References

Holmes, Thomas B. 2002. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. Second edition. London: Routledge Music/Songbooks. ISBN 0415936438 (cloth) ISBN 0415936446 (pbk)
Lebrecht, Norman. 1996. The Companion to 20th-Century Music. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306807343 (pbk)
Norman, Katharine. 2004. Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 0754604268
Zimmer, Dave. 2000. Crosby, Stills, and Nash: The Authorized Biography. Photography by Henry Diltz. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80974-5

Footnotes

^ "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" (Holmes 2002, 1).
^ "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. Record store 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" (Holmes 2002, 1). "By the 1990s, electronic music had penetrated every corner of musical life. It extended from ethereal sound-waves played by esoteric experimenters to the thumping syncopation that accompanies every pop record" (Lebrecht 1996, 106).
^ "Purely electronic music is created through the generation of sound waves by electrical means. This is done without the use of traditional musical instruments or of sounds found in nature, and is the domain of computers, synthesizers and other technologies" (Holmes 2002, 6).
^ "The stuff of electronic music is electrically produced or modified sounds. ... two basic definitions will help put some of the historical discussion in its place: purely electronic music versus electroacoustic music" (Holmes 2002, 6).
^ "Electroacoustic music uses electronics to modify sounds from the natural world. The entire spectrum of worldly sounds provides the source material for this music. This is the domain of microphones, tape recorders and digital samplers... can be associated with live or recorded music. During live performances, natural sounds are modified in real time using electronics. The source of the sound can be anything from ambient noise to live musicians playing conventional instruments" (Holmes 2002, 8).
^ "Musique Concrete was created in Paris in 1948 from edited collages of everyday noise" (Lebrecht 1996, 107).
^ "The Rhineside cathedral city was the first to build an electronic music studio in 1953. With Stockhausen and Kagel in residence, it became a year-round hive of charismatic avante-gardism [sic]" (Lebrecht 1996, 75). "... at Northwest German Radio in Cologne (1953), where the term 'electronic music' was coined to distinguish their pure experiments from musique concrete..." (Lebrecht 1996, 107).
^ Stockhausen 1978, 73–76, 78–79.
^ "In 1967, just following the world premiere of Hymnen, Stockhausen said this about the electronic music experience: '... Many listeners have projected that strange new music which they experienced—especially in the realm of electronic music—into extraterrestrial space. Even though they are not familiar with it through human experience, they identify it with the fantastic dream world. Several have commented that my electronic music sounds "like on a different star," or "like in outer space." Many have said that when hearing this music, they have sensations as if flying at an infinitely high speed, and then again, as if immobile in an immense space. Thus, extreme words are employed to describe such experience, which are not "objectively" communicable in the sense of an object description, but rather which exist in the subjective fantasy and which are projected into the extraterrestrial space'" (Holmes 2002, 145).
^ "From at least Louis and Bebbe Barron's soundtrack for 'The Forbidden Planet" onwards, electronic music - in particular synthetic timbre - has impersonated alien worlds in film" (Norman 2004, 32).
^ Zimmer 2000, 179.

External links

History of electronic musical instruments
pHinnWeb/history - Long list of links relating to electronic music history.
Art of the States: electronic - Small collection of electronic works by American composers

[1] "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" (Holmes 2002, 1).

[2] "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. Record store 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" (Holmes 2002, 1). "By the 1990s, electronic music had penetrated every corner of musical life. It extended from ethereal sound-waves played by esoteric experimenters to the thumping syncopation that accompanies every pop record" (Lebrecht 1996, 106).

[holmes2-3] "Purely electronic music is created through the generation of sound waves by electrical means. This is done without the use of traditional musical instruments or of sounds found in nature, and is the domain of computers, synthesizers and other technologies" (Holmes 2002, 6).

[holmes3-4] "The stuff of electronic music is electrically produced or modified sounds. ... two basic definitions will help put some of the historical discussion in its place: purely electronic music versus electroacoustic music" (Holmes 2002, 6).

[holmes1-5] "Electroacoustic music uses electronics to modify sounds from the natural world. The entire spectrum of worldly sounds provides the source material for this music. This is the domain of microphones, tape recorders and digital samplers... can be associated with live or recorded music. During live performances, natural sounds are modified in real time using electronics. The source of the sound can be anything from ambient noise to live musicians playing conventional instruments" (Holmes 2002, 8).

[lebrecht1-6] "Musique Concrete was created in Paris in 1948 from edited collages of everyday noise" (Lebrecht 1996, 107).

[7] "The Rhineside cathedral city was the first to build an electronic music studio in 1953. With Stockhausen and Kagel in residence, it became a year-round hive of charismatic avante-gardism [sic]" (Lebrecht 1996, 75). "... at Northwest German Radio in Cologne (1953), where the term 'electronic music' was coined to distinguish their pure experiments from musique concrete..." (Lebrecht 1996, 107).

[8] Stockhausen 1978, 73–76, 78–79.

[9] "In 1967, just following the world premiere of Hymnen, Stockhausen said this about the electronic music experience: '... Many listeners have projected that strange new music which they experienced—especially in the realm of electronic music—into extraterrestrial space. Even though they are not familiar with it through human experience, they identify it with the fantastic dream world. Several have commented that my electronic music sounds "like on a different star," or "like in outer space." Many have said that when hearing this music, they have sensations as if flying at an infinitely high speed, and then again, as if immobile in an immense space. Thus, extreme words are employed to describe such experience, which are not "objectively" communicable in the sense of an object description, but rather which exist in the subjective fantasy and which are projected into the extraterrestrial space'" (Holmes 2002, 145).

[norman2-10] "From at least Louis and Bebbe Barron's soundtrack for 'The Forbidden Planet" onwards, electronic music - in particular synthetic timbre - has impersonated alien worlds in film" (Norman 2004, 32).

[11] Zimmer 2000, 179.

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@@ Line 46: / Line 46: @@
 The [[theremin]], an exceedingly difficult instrument to play, was even used in some popular music.{{Fact|date=April 2008}}
+One notable artist in this period was Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophone Workshop.
 ===Late 1970s to late 1980s===