Over the course of the 20th century, composers started using magnetic tape as part of their composition techniques. Musique concrete emerged during WWII before evolving into electroacoustic music production (electroacoustic).
Egypt’s Halim El-Dabh became famous for his Leiyla and the Poet series of electroacoustic tape music which combined traditional musical sounds with electronics. Additionally, in 1953 NWDR Cologne established what became one of the first studios for electronic music production.
The birth of musique concrete
Pierre Schaeffer may be best-known as an experimentalist composer, yet he wasn’t the only one exploring sound as an art form. Experiments were taking place all around the globe at this time; music makers began using everyday sounds as material for composition – known as musique concrete.
French musicians pioneering this technique were Pierre Henry and Jacques Pollin, two students of Schaeffer. These two composers developed concrete sound collages using recordings from everyday life such as traffic noise or wind as well as sounds gathered directly by them on location (for instance by gathering up leaves to generate wind sounds) rerecorded or collected themselves onsite; often this resulted in multiple loops featuring voices or instruments or radio recordings.
Schaeffer’s debut composition, Symphonie pour un homme seul, sought to strip ordinary sounds of their dramatic connotations so they could be analysed for their sonic characteristics. His theory suggested that such noises might better lend themselves to composition than traditional musical elements as they didn’t come with as much cultural baggage and thus could be considered pure musical material.
However, musique concrete as a technique for defamiliarizing sound was always problematic. Composers who practiced musique concrete often drew inspiration from mass cultural sources that informed radio art at that time: advertisements, comic strips, music and film. Recognizability often provided inspiration for compositions derived from such sources – much as Pop-art painters used realistic images to craft their pieces.
Although musique concrete pioneers used unconventional techniques, their techniques paved a key foundation for contemporary electronic music. Their methods influenced everything from Four Tet’s sonic manipulations to Burial’s field recording atmospherics.
Indeed, musique concrete has come to represent the process of creating compositions from recorded sounds – be they natural (such as birdsong) or human-made (such as traffic noise or an instrument’s stringed bassline). This form is still the cornerstone of much synthesized music today and increasingly blurs between musique concrete and synthesized music.
The invention of the synthesizer
In Europe during the 1950s and 60s, technological developments led to a proliferation of electronic music studios. Karlheinz Stockhausen explored this medium with Mikrophonie I (composed in 1954 for hand-held microphones with potentiometers and filters) as well as Elektronische Studie II for choir, Hammond organ, four sine wave generators – two important landmarks in electronic music history.
The synthesizer’s introduction revolutionized musical composition. Robert Moog’s modular Moog synthesizer of 1964 was among the first synths that allowed musicians and producers to combine sounds without recording onto analog tape; and explore sonic elements ranging from pitch and rhythm, such as timbre without regard to pitch or rhythm – also drawing influence from John Cage’s aleatoric idea of short circuits and ring modulators as chance short circuits and modulators.
At first, the synthesizer was used merely as an imitation instrument by musicians like Percy Grainger and Joseph Schillinger who utilized these electronic instruments as an extension to their limited harmonic resources. Avant-garde composers Edgard Varese and Dimitrios Levidis however did not feel satisfied using these conventionally. Synths offered composers an opportunity to expand beyond normal tuning scale and were particularly valuable tools in microtonal composition.
As progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd, Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer popularized synthesizers in European music, more musicians began experimenting with keyboard synthesizers as well as electronic equipment like Theremins and Mellotrons to add another dimension to their sound.
By the 1970s, synthesizers had become more mainstream among popular musicians in genres such as disco and new wave. In the 1980s they helped establish genres such as krautrock, synthpop and trance; computer technology in the 2000s saw the introduction of digital audio workstations (DAWs), such as Ableton Live and studio emulation Reason software which allowed music makers to compose and perform high quality electronic music directly on their home computers or laptops – leading to the emergence of dance and house music techno and acid house music genres among others.
The first algorithmic composition
The 1950s witnessed the initial attempts at automating composition using computers. In 1957, a commercially available synthesizer was unveiled, while the MIDI interface allowed musicians to control multiple electronic instruments with one central computer using conditions set up by composers as parameters for control of each device.
The MIDI interface enabled musicians to use one keystroke, control wheel movement or pedal press to activate all instruments in their studio and perform complex sets of commands remotely and synchronously. Miller Puckette’s graphic signal-processing software for 4X called Max (named after Miller Mathews) and Dave Zicarelli’s Macintosh Opcode made algorithmic composition accessible to anyone, even those without prior computer programming knowledge could utilize its technology effectively.
However, instrumental composition has long used algorithmic principles as its cornerstone. Therefore, its formalization into software algorithms was inevitable as technology progressed and became more accessible.
Early attempts focused on producing variations on themes, mimicking the creative process of human composers and musicians. Unfortunately, creativity is difficult to capture within algorithms; thus they produced variations only vaguely related.
Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented with combining electronically generated sounds with more conventional orchestral scores to produce two works that fuse traditional music and electronic sounds: Mixtur (1964) and Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester (1967). Other early experiments include Edgard Varese’s Poeme Electronique for chamber orchestra and tape (played over four hundred loudspeakers at the Brussels World Fair of 1958), Pauline Oliveros of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center’s work and Edgard Varese’s Poeme Electronique for chamber orchestra and tape (also played over four hundred loudspeakers at Brussels World Fair), Edgard Varese’s Poeme Electronique for chamber orchestra and tape.) Pauline Oliveros’ early work included Poeme Electronique for chamber orchestra and tape (also played over four hundred loudspeakers at Brussels World Fair of 1958), Edgar Varese’s Poeme Electronique for chamber orchestra and tape played over four hundred loudspeakers during Brussels World Fair58 as well as Pauline Oliveros’ Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center).
Gyorgy Ligeti had a profound influence on many musicians, particularly rock bands like Kraftwerk and Brian Eno whose synthesiser-heavy “krautrock” helped popularise this genre.
Ideas developed during this decade – such as aleatory and atonal styles, serialism, musique concrete, jazz and ethnic folk music – helped influence many subsequent musical genres. Perhaps most significant was Delia Derbyshire’s 1963 electronic realisation of the iconic Doctor Who theme at BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The first live electronics
Electronic music refers to any composition or performance that uses electric and electromechanical instruments, digital electronics and circuitry-based music technology for its composition or performance. Instruments used can range from an oscillator to a theremin, Hammond organ or electric guitar – used either alone or combined with musical instruments to produce compositions heard over loudspeakers. Electronic dance music (EDM) was one of many major subgenres to emerge during this era.
As soon as the mechanical phonograph was introduced in late 19th-century, composers began experimenting with record players to play short recordings during performances. By 1925, this technology had progressed sufficiently for composers to incorporate it into pieces by changing its speed or layering different sound sources; Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch were two composers to explore this technique first-hand.
In 1949, Werner Meyer-Eppler, a phoneticist and linguist, introduced the term Elektronische Musik to refer to music created from electronically produced signals, distinguishing it from French musique concrete which employed recorded sounds recorded acoustically. At around this same time Maurice Martenot invented an instrument similar to theremin called Ondes Martenot which operates by manipulating frequencies on a voltage oscillator.
In the 1950s, several experimental and electronic studios emerged. Notable among these was Cologne’s NWDR studio founded by Werner Meyer-Eppler and Robert beyer, with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig among its staff of composers; Stockhausen played an especially influential role in furthering electroacoustic music’s development with its emphasis on spatialization, serial composition and aleatory/atonal practices; his Studie I and Elektronische Studie II are prime examples.
Pietro Grossi played an important role during this era. He founded Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Radio Milano in 1957 and helped found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; which became particularly renowned for implementing Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme electronicization project in 1963.
In the 1960s, the Moog modular synthesizer first made an impactful impact in electronic music productions. For instance, Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach album caused quite an upheaval at that time, while Milton Babbitt composed Composition for Synthesizer that year – creating another major electronic sensation at that time.