The 20th century saw an evolution in electronic music production. Once exclusive to avant-garde composers, electronic technology became widely utilized within popular music.
Wendy Carlos made headlines in 1968 for composing Bach keyboard works using a Moog synthesizer – sparking debate over whether synthetic sounds sapped their musicality.
The Hammond Organ
The Hammond Organ was an immensely popular instrument during the 50’s and 60’s when keyboardists became enamored of it. If you have heard any popular R&B or rock song since, chances are someone was banging away on an Hammond B-3 organ! As one of the first truly portable electronic instruments it became an integral component in many genres of music.
The invention of the Hammond organ was an eventful milestone, for many reasons. It was the first musical instrument that allowed its user to manipulate harmonics and timbre via drawbars; also featuring modulation controls like two Leslie speeds as well as adjustable tremolo, chorus and vibrato settings – two features later used by Robert Moog on the East Coast and Don Buchla in California when designing synthesizers.
Hammond organs were popular because their players could reproduce the sounds of pipe organs with them, while their complex construction required 30 boxcars to move and an elaborate multi-floor building to house. At that time, this represented an immense accomplishment by inventors.
The Hammond was an iconic instrument with many musical capabilities; today its legacy lives on through modern technology that enables musicians to recreate its sound. Suzuki Music of Hamamatsu Japan, an educational instrument manufacturer since 1897, took up the challenge of revitalizing this legendary brand with their XK-5 and B-3 stage models, featuring 108 virtual tone wheels that can be voiced individually allowing musicians to recreate classic Hammond techniques such as glissandos, rake-ups, squabbles, fast repeat and glissandos.
The Theremin
Since 1928, when first invented in 1928 by Leon Theremin (German for “little theremin”) it has been one of the earliest electronic instruments played without touching it directly. Consisting of two metal antennas that create electromagnetic fields when neared by hands in proximity of antennas, when moved closer the Thereminist can control oscillators’ frequency and amplitude by changing capacitance between oscillators using hands movement in close proximity with antennas to form capacitors which control oscillators’ frequency/amplitude oscillator oscillation. Finally interpreting their hands using their electromagnetic field which turns into musical signals sent directly into loudspeakers for playback via loudspeakers! Although often associated with movies and stereotypical horror music compositions composed specifically for its unique sound.
Theremin was an instrument widely employed in avant-garde concert music from the 20th and 21st centuries, with composers like Bohuslav Martinu, Clara Rockmore and Moritz Eggert writing pieces dedicated to it. Additionally, its use made an impressionful statement in sci-fi movies of its black-and-white era; providing haunting sound effects. Clara Rockmore refused to participate on movie soundtracks out of respect for her instrument.
After World War II, various developments contributed directly to modern electronic music. Audio frequency technology advanced so that sine waves, square waves and sawtooth waves became possible; mechanical acoustical recording was replaced with electrical recordings; Halim El-Dabh from Egypt began developing synthesizers which combined musical and electronic components; his 1959 series Leiyla and the Poet was particularly influential for its exploration into this realm of electronic music.
Robert Moog built his first theremin using plans from a magazine four years before its export from Russia to America, sparking his interest in electronic engineering and leading him towards creating his iconic modular synthesizer.
The Ondes Martenot
Ondes Martenot or ondes musicales (“musical waves”) is a French instrument. The ondes Martenot’s haunting, atmospheric sound can be heard in Olivier Messiaen’s modernist symphonies as well as in the soundtrack for the 1960s British TV series Thunderbirds and Edith Piaf recordings; Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead also used an ondes Martenot for their album Random Access Memories’ track “Touch”.
Maurice Martenot, a sergeant in the wireless service during World War I, observed and created an instrument to manipulate electro-magnetic waves in 1928. Drawing inspiration from heterodyning (combining various radio frequencies to form new ones) this instrument called “Ondes Martenot” allowed physical manipulation rather than invisible hand gestures to control its wave effects.
Years were required to perfect the device that resembled an amalgam of organ and theremin features. Musicians controlled its sound by moving their hands over a metal loop for volume control or around an antenna for pitch, while two oscillators combined into an ideal frequency by way of triggers on May 3, 1928 at Paris Opera – marking its inaugural concert featuring electronic musical instrument technology.
Messiaen, Edgard Varese and Pierre Boulez all utilized the Ondes Martenot as part of their work and it featured heavily in film scores by Jean-Michel Jarre and Hollywood composer Danny Elfman during its heyday during the 1970s. However, after synthesizers became more prominent during that decade, its use dropped considerably until more devoted ondists such as Montreal-based ensemble d’Ondes Martenot created an innovative new model called Ondea – both faithful reproduction and extrapolation of design features from its design – while one such as Jeanloup Dierstein dedicates much time working in his small workshop to repair and modify instruments and keep up its history.
The RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer
The RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer was the world’s first programmable electronic musical instrument when introduced in 1957. This large and complicated machine provided composers with additional pitch resources not available through traditional orchestral instruments; particularly useful to advocates of microtonal music such as Charles Ives, Dimitrios Levidis and Olivier Messiaen as well as Percy Grainger who used this machine to explore sound manipulation instead of fixed tonation.
This machine cost $250,000; it stood seven feet tall, took up an entire room and could take up to 12 hours for any mistake to re-calibrate after any changes were made. Users would use a typewriter-esque hole puncher to punch holes into paper scripts for sequencing synthesizer. It was an intensive laborious process which required plenty of practice in order to become adept and was extremely intolerant of mistakes.
Milton Babbitt was one of the foremost devotees and developers of this expensive, complex machine; he played an instrumental role in its evolution. Working closely with RCA, he worked to produce the Mark II model with twice as many tone oscillators and increased compositional flexibility; Princeton and Columbia Universities received this second generation synthesizer and installed it at their Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center for use by students studying music composition and performance.
Babbitt not only wrote music for the RCA Mark II himself, but he was a passionate proponent of its use in concert halls as well. This passion inspired composers at Sweden’s Electroacoustic Musikstudion to design what has since been termed the Buchla Box–an advance over earlier electroacoustic instruments which simply recreated sounds seen live performances; unlike its predecessors which simply allowed composers to reproduce such sounds as heard during live performances, but this revolutionary advance allowed for composers to control note-to-note relationships as well as pitch-to-time relationships, giving composers full control over such relationships as well.
The Turntable
The turntable was an essential piece of equipment in making electronic music possible. By employing this device, musicians were able to use it create montages of sounds that could then be played back during live performances for the first time ever. This technique became the hallmark of musique concrete which used industrial, natural and musical sounds in its compositions; its development being led by Pierre Schaeffer before later being further refined by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Schaeffer was responsible for creating the first ever recorded pieces of musique concrete in 1950. Soon thereafter, Cologne radio station NWDR opened what later became known as The Studio for Electronic Music – similar studios were then set up in Japan and America.
At that time, there was much debate surrounding the role of electronics in musical sound. Some felt that their introduction removed human element essential for music while others saw electronics simply as a means of modernizing sound production.
Hi-fi systems were initially adopted by the public in the late 1960s when hi-fi music systems were first made available to them. These usually consisted of separate components like record player, radio tuner, amplifier and cassette deck; later these would be replaced with all-in-one units such as boomboxes that included their own turntable.
Tangerine Dream and Can were pioneering synth-pop bands of the early 1980s that included synthesizers as part of their line-up alongside guitars and drums, opening the way for Dusseldorf band Kraftwerk to use synthesizers to represent (or celebrate) alienation of modern technological society – this sound became widely adopted among rock bands of this period until 1999 when synth-pop started its gradual decline.