scholarly journals Loudspeakers Optional: A history of non-loudspeaker-based electroacoustic music

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Long ◽  
Jim Murphy ◽  
Dale Carnegie ◽  
Ajay Kapur
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Alternative Technologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Electronic Performance ◽  
Sound Objects ◽  
Musical Robotics

The discipline of electroacoustic music is most commonly associated with acousmatic musical forms such as tape-music and musique concrète, and the electroacoustic historical canon primarily centres around the mid-twentieth-century works of Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and related artists. As the march of technology progressed in the latter half of the twentieth century, alternative technologies opened up new areas within the electroacoustic discipline such as computer music, hyper-instrument performance and live electronic performance. In addition, the areas of electromagnetic actuation and musical robotics also allowed electroacoustic artists to actualise their works with real-world acoustic sound-objects instead of or along side loudspeakers. While these works owe much to the oft-cited pioneers mentioned above, there exists another equally significant alternative history of artists who utilised electric, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic and other sources of power to create what is essentially electroacoustic music without loudspeakers. This article uncovers this ‘missing history’ and traces it to its earliest roots over a thousand years ago to shed light on often-neglected technological and artistic developments that have shaped and continue to shape electronic music today.

Electronic Music

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musique Concrete

With the end of World War II came the rebirth of European radio. Government stations in both France and Germany established experimental studios for research, from which arose a new kind of music, “electronic music.” The station in France, Office de Radiodiffusion Télevision Française (ORTF), was directed by the engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer and his partner, Pierre Henry, who called their musical creations musique concrète. In Germany the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio produced music through the process of “synthesis.” This chapter will explain the difference between the two approaches used to create electronic music with examples from the percussion solo and ensemble repertoire. Early experiments using wire recorders, test records, and tape recorders by composers Halim El-Dabh, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse precede the major electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mario Davidovsky, and the American composer Stephen Everett, whose use of computers in “real time” brings the reader into the next century.

Schaeffer's Values, Henry's Monsters and Orchestral Noise Reduction

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Jeffrey DeThorne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noise Reduction ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Reduction Process ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Historical Tradition

If nineteenth-century aesthetics distinguish between distinct, colourful French instrumentation and doubled, equalised German orchestration, this distinction softens when the ‘New German’ orchestration of Wagner and Strauss exploits individual instrumental colours before dissolving them into massive orchestral sonorities. Similarly, if early French electroacoustic music counteracts the meta-serialism of early twentieth-century German electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux combines his early anecdotal Noise Studies with a noise-reduction process into a new, rather German aesthetic of electroacoustics. In search of musical objects through a reductive, analytical listening (entendre), Schaeffer's neutralisation of anecdotal noises into musical objects is analogous to New German orchestration's neutralisation of individual orchestral colours in order to synthesise new orchestral combinations. Although this orchestral synthesis is different from the analytical probe for new valeurs involved in entendre, the separation of the noise from its residual signification are fundamental processes within both nineteenth-century orchestrational and twentieth-century electroacoustic musical aesthetics. If our current understanding of electronic music aligns Schaeffer and Pierre Henry wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with Berlioz, Brahms and historical tradition, this article suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them.

The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran

Leonardo ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gluck
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Theater Directors

Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy.

scholarly journals The Forgotten History of Repetitive Audio Technologies

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
Christophe Levaux
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Audio Technologies

In the literature dedicated to twentieth-century music, the early history of electronic music is regularly presented hand in hand with the development of technical repetitive devices such as closed grooves and magnetic tape loops. Consequently, the idea that such devices were ‘invented’ in the studios of the first great representatives of electronic music tends to appear as an implicit consequence. However, re-examination of the long history of musical technology, from the ninth-century Banu Musa automatic flute to the Hammond organ of the 1930s, reveals that repetitive devices not only go right back to the earliest days of musical automation, but also evolved in a wide variety of contexts wholly unconnected from any form of musical institution. This article aims to shed light on this other, forgotten, history of repetitive audio technologies.

scholarly journals Krótki wykład o muzyce XX wieku. Kompendium dydaktyczne / A Short Lecture on Twentieth-Century Music. A Teaching Compendium

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Jasiński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Concrete Music

AbstractThe article is a comprehensive presentation of the history of music in the twentieth century, taking into account the main trends and phenomena of this period, inter alia impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, dodecaphony, punctualism, and total serialism, then avant-garde solutions and pluralism after World War Two (inter alia electronic music, concrete music (musique concrète), graphic music, aleatoric music, open forms, instrumental theater, minimal music), and finally the most recent trends (e.g. spectral music, new complexity, polystylistics), including a clearly marked return to the Romantic tradition. The chronologically presented discourse includes opinions that concisely explain some compositional solutions, as well as the list of composers and the titles of their works that exemplifi ed the problems discussed. The paper ends with the thoughts on the future of music in the new, twenty-first century.The article is meant as teaching material for the arts and humanities programs.

Reminded by the Instruments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
You Nakai
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Electronic Circuits ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Live Electronic Music

David Tudor (1926–1996) is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of postwar avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, influencing the development of graphic notation and indeterminacy; and as a spirited pioneer of live-electronic music who realized idiosyncratic performances based on the interaction of homemade modular instruments, inspiring an entire generation of musicians. However, the fact that Tudor himself did not talk or write much about what he was doing, combined with the esoteric nature of electronic circuits and schematics (for musicologists), has prevented any comprehensive approach to the entirety of his output which actually began with the organ and ended in visual art. As a result, Tudor has remained a puzzle of sorts in spite of his profound influence—perhaps a pertinent status for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles. This book sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor as a puzzle that David Tudor made, applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching other people’s materials to the unusually large number of materials that he himself left behind. Patching together instruments, circuits, sketches, notes, diagrams, recordings, receipts, letters, custom declaration forms, testimonies, and recollections like modular pieces of a giant puzzle, the narrative skips over the misleading binary of performer/composer to present a lively portrait of Tudor as a multi-instrumentalist who always realized his music from the nature of specific instruments.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document