Electronic music: history, techniques, and cultural influence

In electronic music, two opposing spheres of human creativity meet: the artistic-aesthetic one of music and the scientific one of physics and electrical engineering. For this reason, the development of its preconditions must be considered from the perspective of the history of ideas and from a technical point of view. In the course of the radical musical changes that have made the 20th century the century of New Music, electronic music has played an important role. Of fundamental importance are first of all those concepts that presupposed the possibilities of electronic music even before they were actually (technically) available:

The first musical instrument to use electricity was the clavecin électrique by Jean-Baptiste Delaborde. The often-mentioned Denis d'or by the Czech inventor Father Prokop Diviš from the early 1750s was capable of giving the player small electric shocks for fun, but probably did not use electricity in the production of sound. In 1867, Hipp, the director of the Neuchâtel telegraph factory, constructed an electromechanical piano. A first patent in the field of electronic sound generation was granted to E. Lorenz from Frankfurt am Main on 12 March 1885.

An unusual invention in electronic instrument making was the teleharmonium or dynamophone developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. It worked on the principle of a gear generator, weighed 200 tons and was as large as a freight car. Cahill used a huge steam-driven multiple current generator for each semitone, which provided him with the sinusoidal output voltages. In his 1907 Draft of a New Aesthetic of the Art of Sound, Ferruccio Busoni developed his theory of third tones, finding the dynamophone most suitable for its tonal implementation.

Leon Theremin, as head of the Laboratory of Electrical Oscillations of the State Physical-Technical Institute in Leningrad from 1920 to 1928, constructed the sensational instrument Etherophone, which was later named Theremin after him. The instrument was technically a beat buzzer construction, i.e. the production of an audible tone was achieved by superimposing two high-frequency tones that were no longer audible. This characteristic of sound production inspired some composers to write works specifically for the theremin. The composer Anis Fuleihan created a concerto for theremin and orchestra in this way, which was premiered in 1945 with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and the soloist Clara Rockmore on theremin.

At about the same time, the German elementary school teacher and organist Jörg Mager was concerned with the exact generation of microintervals and introduced inventions such as the electrophone (1921) and the spherophone (1928). Mager was a follower of the Czech composer Alois Hába, who, encouraged by Ferruccio Busoni, was already practically concerned with microintervals. In addition, Mager derived his interest in microintervals from the observation of the acoustician and ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel that the melody always appears as one and the same shape when the pitch, as well as the note length, is changed. This is how his Sphärophon II, his Kaleidosphon and his Elektrotonorgel were later completed.

The Ondes Martenot was also a floating buzzer that produced tone frequencies, with the difference that it also pulled on a rope, which made it possible to change pitches. Olivier Messiaen used this instrument in his Turangalîla Symphony, and the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger used it in the oratorio Johanna auf dem Scheiterhaufen. As early as 1907, Busoni had pointed out possible lines of development in his visionary and influential writing Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Draft of a New Aesthetic of the Art of Sound), which could only be realized with the means of electronic music from the 1950s onwards. In it, he took up, among other things, the idea of timbral melody, first introduced by Arnold Schoenberg in his Harmonielehre (1911) and repeatedly addressed in the following years, of relevance to the musical concept of early electronic music. Furthermore, Edgar Varèse's compositional conception, with its noisiness influenced equally by Busoni and the Italian Futurists, can be seen as an anticipation of purely electronic possibilities of sound design.

The importance of radio as a medium, first for political objectives and later for entertainment, paved the way for broadcasts of music.

The same period saw the development of the trautonium by Friedrich Trautwein in 1930, which was later further developed by Oskar Sala. The first trautonium pieces by Paul Hindemith also date from this year: Seven Pieces for Three Trautoniums with the subtitle Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge.

In 1935, the Hammond organ and the light-tone organ competed, with the former gaining the upper hand.

The history of electronic music is closely linked to the history of electronic sound generation (instruments, apparatus). In general, until about 1940, one speaks of electric music and of electric musical instruments. From the beginning of the 1950s, a certain compositional technique realized with electronic devices was called electronic music.

Musique concrète from Paris

In 1943, the engineer Pierre Schaeffer set up a research centre for radiophonic art in Paris, the Club d'Essai, which soon attracted artists such as Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Olivier Messiaen and, in the early 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen. On October 5, 1948, Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits went over the airwaves on Paris radio in a radio program entitled Concert des Bruits, marking the birth of musique concrète. Then, on March 18, 1950, the first public concert of concrete music took place at the École Normale de Musique. Since tape recorders were not yet available outside Germany in the early days of the Club d'Essai, the sounds were recorded on records and mixed in one operation from up to eight records simultaneously. The processing of these sounds, which were simple everyday noises, involved their transformation and collage-like combination. Aesthetically, early musique concrète thus proves to be a precursor of radio play and radiophonic collage. The term "concrete music", which Schaeffer proposed in 1949, on the one hand takes into account the use of found sounds - so-called "sound objects" - but should also be understood as a demarcation from composed and thus "abstract" music (serialism). With this radical (bruitist) approach, Schaeffer also caused some irritation in his own camp. In the 1950s, sound recording on magnetic tape also allowed the introduction of further editing techniques in Paris, such as editing possibilities, speed transformations and thus changes in pitch. These possibilities gave rise at this time to the phonogen, a kind of Mellotron with sound transposition possibilities, and the morphophone, comparable to a tape loop delay device.

In Britain, Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneer with her musique concrète. Inspired by Schaeffer and by a visit to the RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) in Paris, she built, despite opposition, a similar studio for the BBC from 1958 - the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The process she referred to as Oramics is a technique of graphic sound production that involves drawing directly onto 35mm film stock. In 1962 she developed a machine based on it.

In the consciousness of the interested public, musique concrète was thus in direct rivalry with the "electronic music" from Cologne that was appearing at the same time. At the beginning of the 1950s, the work of Schaeffer and his collaborator Pierre Henry became embroiled in a kind of ideological and partly chauvinistically motivated dispute. A debaculous performance of their collaborative composition Orphée 53, which took place on the occasion of the Donaueschingen Music Days on 10 October 1953, sealed their "defeat" and damaged the international reputation of musique concrète for years to come. The composers who were close to the Groupe de Recherches de Musique concrète (which had emerged from the Club d'Essai in 1951) in the early 1950s certainly attempted to introduce compositional principles of order into musique concrète, but were initially unable to assert themselves against Schaeffer's conception of noise. In 1954 Edgar Varèse realized the tapes for his composition Déserts as a guest. It was not until 1956/57 that works by Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, François Bayle, and others emerged that placed much greater emphasis on compositional considerations and later even on serial principles. Consequently, Schaeffer now abandoned the term musique concrète in favor of "electroacoustic music" and also renamed his Groupe de Recherches de Musique concrète in 1958 to Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Electronic music from Cologne

When Werner Meyer-Eppler proposed the term "electronic music" for a certain kind of composing with technical aids, he was primarily concerned with distinguishing it from the previous developments of electrical sound production, electrical music, to which he also included musique concrète and music for tape (see below).

The physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler, the sound engineer Robert Beyer, the technician Fritz Enkel and the composer Herbert Eimert founded the Cologne Studio for Electronic Music in 1951 with the help of the NWDR. The first public concert then took place on 26 May 1953 at the Cologne "New Music Festival 1953". In contrast to musique concrète, an attempt was made here to scientifically record electronically generated sounds according to physical rules such as Fourier analysis. The timbre, as the result of the superimposition of several sine tones, and the parameters of frequency, amplitude and duration were analysed in detail.

At first, Eimert and Beyer were (only) concerned with the differentiated shaping of timbres. Only a second generation of young composers, among them Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen, then worked from 1953 onwards, primarily on the consistent implementation of serial compositional methods with electronic means. Significant for this early musical conception of the Cologne studio is the exclusive use of "synthetically" produced sounds as well as their direct processing and storage on magnetic tape and finally their playback via loudspeakers. This achieved (at least theoretically) two music-historically revolutionary things: first, complete control over the parameter of timbre, which had hitherto always remained imponderable for composers and could now also be subjected to the serial method of organization. Secondly, the interpreter was eliminated as a mediating - and thus potentially distorting - instance of compositional intent. For the first time in the history of Western music, works such as Stockhausen's Studie II seemed to allow composers to communicate their ideas "unmediated" to the listener. The centuries-old attempts to fix musical intention ever more precisely by notation were thus obsolete.

However, since the sonic results of these early works clearly fell short of the expectations placed in them, new paths were taken in the technology of sound synthesis and the original sinusoidal tone concept was abandoned again as early as 1954. As the complexity of the production process increased, the sound quality decreased on the one hand, and on the other, the sound components became increasingly beyond the composer's control. Stockhausen drew a first consequence from this in his composition Gesang der Jünglinge (1955/56), which conceptually mediates between electronic sounds and phonemes and applies statistical principles of order (aleatorics) through groups of loudspeakers distributed in space.

The idea of sonic mediation between heterogeneous source materials then leads consistently to the design of live electronics and also to the transformation of sounds of any origin, with which the development of electronic music of the Cologne variety has made its greatest rapprochement with the former "hereditary enemy musique concète". The Cologne studio was not the only place where technicians and musicians collaborated in the creation of electronic music. Influential were the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich from 1956 under the artistic direction of Orff student Josef Anton Riedl and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. A year earlier, on 1 March 1955, the Studio for Electronic Composition Darmstadt was inaugurated, with composer Hermann Heiß as its director. In 1957 Hermann Heiß privatized the studio under the name Studio for Electronic Composition Hermann Heiß Darmstadt. In 1977 the IRCAM in Pierre Boulez's Centre Pompidou in Paris was added. The Electronic Studio Basel and the Studio for Electronic Music in Dresden were not established until the 1980s. Other electronic music studios were or are located in Milan, Stockholm and Utrecht.

Music for Tape

In the so-called Tape Music Studio at Columbia-Princeton University in New York, Vladimir Ussachevski and Otto Luening taught students a special way of dealing with sounds recorded on tape. They assumed that the wide range of possible electronic manipulation would make the origin of the sound fade more and more into the background. The first known studies of Music for Tape came from the New York couple Louis and Bebe Barron, who had been exploring expanded possibilities of tape for music production in their own professional recording studio since 1948. In the Barrons' studio, John Cage realized the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape in 1951, together with the composers Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff.

In Music for Tape, versatility in the selection and processing of sound sources was of primary importance for musical realization. In America, the distinction between controllable (electronic) and "uncontrollable" (mechanical) sounds was not considered meaningful.

Another significant pioneer of electronic music in the United States was Richard Maxfield, who worked independently of the university studios that were being established.

The Canadian physicist Hugh Le Caine made decisive experiments in the touch dynamics of a keyboard between 1945 and 1948. With the Sackbut, which he invented, the player could even enable subtle changes in pitch, volume and timbre by alternately pressing the key sideways, and additionally control expressive features such as vibrato, intensity and transient processes. In 1955, he invented the Special Purpose Tape Recorder, which was a synthesis of a multi-channel tape machine and Mellotron that opened up unimagined possibilities when working with concrete sounds. Composed by Le Caine in 1955, Dripsody is just over a minute long and consists of the sound of a drop of water recorded on the recorder, copied many times and arranged at different speeds in a pentatonic scale, resulting in different pitches. Beginning with the original drop, the intensity and density increase through further tape loops to a climax, up to twelve-tone arpeggios, all derived from the sound material of the drop.

Computer Music

Lejaren Hiller founded the second US electronic music studio, the Experimental Music Studio, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1958. He experimented there alongside other researchers with the ILLIAC computer and later the IBM 7090 computer.

In addition to their use in studio equipment, three major musical areas of application for computers can be identified today, outlined by the keywords composition (score synthesis), sound generation (through simulation), and sound control.

At the "Grand Price Of Ars Electronica" in 1979, the Fairlight music computer developed by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel in Australia was presented to a larger international audience for the first time. This elaborate (8-bit) calculating machine brought forth the sampling method as an essential innovation: It made it possible for the first time to both store all the sounds of our world in a computer and to be able to not only simply call them up at any time by means of the keyboard, but also to be able to bring them to any desired pitch and, moreover, to make them malleable.

This opened up completely new musical and conceptual dimensions for composers and producers. In January 1982, for example, the album "Erdenklang Computerakustische Klangsinfonie" appeared on a label and publishing house founded by Ulrich Rützel in Hamburg specifically for this kind of music. It was the first available sound carrier with this new production technology. In her liner notes to this album, Wendy Carlos noted: "Erdenklang must no longer be regarded exclusively as a technical achievement, but largely as a musical one. Something electronic music has been struggling to achieve since it came into existence."

Hubert Bognermayr and Ulrich Rützel introduced the term computer acoustic music for this genre of music. The "Sermon on the Mount - Oratorio for Music Computer and Voices", published in 1983, consolidated this music-historical development and still represents a milestone in computer music today.

At the "Million Bits In Concert" concert organized by WDR on April 25, 1987 with the electronic musicians Hubert Bognermayr, Harald Zuschrader, Johannes Schmoelling, Kristian Schultze and Matthias Thurow, various computer systems (such as the Fairlight) were also used in a live concert for the first time. Mike Oldfield had Bognermayr and Zuschrader introduce him to this technology and went on tour with the Fairlight and Harald Zuschrader.

In the meantime, computer music is also used sporadically for technically controlled theatre and open-air productions, e.g. as switching music for fireworks.