120 Years Of Electronic Music
A really fascinating website has come to my Awareness:
A few photos:
120 Years of Electronic Music* is a project that outlines and analyses the history and development of electronic musical instruments from around 1880 onwards. This project defines ‘Electronic Musical Instrument’ as an instruments that generate sounds from a purely electronic source rather than electro-mechanically or electro-acoustically (However the boundaries of this definition do become blurred with, say, Tone Wheel Generators and tape manipulation of the Musique Concrète era). . . . .
A few photos:
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Sounds from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio
Frank Zappa and the Synclavier.
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Christine Ott - Chimères (pour ondes Martenot)
Developed at RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center (near Princeton, NJ), it was the brainchild of Harry Olson (standing), and Herbert Belar. Olson was also the designer of a number of RCA's microphones.
This huge and unwieldy system was controlled by a punched paper roll, similar to a player piano roll. A keyboard was used to punch the roll (Olson has his finger on it). Each note had to be individually described by a number of parameters (frequency, volume, envelope, etc.) The output was fed to disk recording machines, which stored the results on lacquer-coated disks. One of these can be seen at the left in the above photo.
Programming this machine must have been a laborious and time consuming process, but it caught the attention of electronic music pioneers such as Milton Babbit. A more advanced version of this system became the basis of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1957, located at Princeton University. . . .
Happy International Women's Day 2021:
To the question of who created electronic music, there can be no one answer. The form’s emergence took decades, beginning with the earliest electronic instruments in the late 19th century, developing toward the first music produced solely from electronic sources in the early 1950s, and arriving at such artistic destinations as Wendy Carlos’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach. Driving this evolutionary process were artists of a variety of nationalities and musical sensibilities, a group including several especially unignorable figures. Take, for instance, Daphne Oram, the composer and co-founder of BBC’s storied Radiophonic Workshop who created the very first piece of electronic music ever commissioned by the network.
Oram composed that music in 1957, the year before the establishment of the Radiophonic Workshop. She did it to score a BBC production of Jean Giraudoux’s play Amphitryon 38, using an electronic sine wave oscillator, a tape recorder, and a few filters — a synthesizer, in other words, of her own creation.
Experience had positioned her well to design and compose with such a device and the processes it demanded: she grew up studying the piano, organ, and composition, and as a teenager she’d taken a job as a studio engineer at the BBC, an environment that gave her access to all the latest technologies for creating and recording sound. Despite having rejected Still Point, an acoustic-electronic piece she composed for turntables, five microphones, and a “double orchestra,” the BBC aired Amphitryon 38 with her score full of “sounds unlike any ever heard before.”
That’s how Oram’s music is described in the 1950s television clip above, a visit to the “country studio in Kent” where, “unlike the traditional composer, she uses no musical instruments and no musicians.” And indeed, “she needs no concert hall or opera house to put on a performance: she can do it on a tape recorder.” As outlandish as Oram’s setup might have looked to BBC viewers at home back then, the narrator informs them that “already, electronic music is being used in films, television, and the theater,” and that some people even think her collages of unnatural sounds will be “the music of the future.” Vindicating that notion is the odd familiarity every electronic musician today will feel when they watch Oram at work among the devices of her studio, surrounded as they themselves happily are by those devices’ technological descendants.