live wires parallel or other to what is still referred to as classical music. Although I have generally avoided the academic debates associated with a

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1 This book tries to catch the exciting synergy between new and still emerging musical forms and rapidly changing technologies. To address the challenges of representing one of the significant cultural shifts of the last century and into our own, while at the same time doing justice to the open-endedness and potentialities of a new audio culture, has meant accepting and embracing the discontinuities of discovery, reflection and materiality that would constitute a new electronic music history. Walter Benjamin famously argued in his essay on art and technology that mechanical reproduction changed the relationship between the work of art and cultural value.1 For him, the mechanical reproduction of works of art caused a certain loss of their aura and meaningfulness. Nowhere is this problem more crucial than in the reproduction and creation of sound. Nearly a century later, the debates around what is art and especially what is music are still unresolved. What is undeniable is that the astounding contributions and collaborations of musicians and engineers have made room for a much more inclusive and democratic approach to producing and hearing electronic music one that Benjamin might not have imagined. Because music criticism is often wedded to ideas of the beautiful, it has always made writing about electronic music a 7

2 live wires parallel or other to what is still referred to as classical music. Although I have generally avoided the academic debates associated with aesthetics, this book leans into Edmund Burke s notion of the sublime as unfamiliar, astonishing and discontinuous, not surprisingly aligning it in the mid-twentieth century with the controversial, dissonant qualities of new music. Theoretically, the work of Gilles Deleuze on repetition and networks has been indispensable in understanding how technologies like tape loops, feedback loops and generative systems continue to challenge musical thinking. The protagonists of this book musicians and engineers have not generally worked from philosophical or aesthetic ideals, but instead have proceeded from more pragmatic, experimental and material premises. The outcomes of these collaborative efforts have, nonetheless, led to more nuanced and complex thinking about music, culture and society. Electronic music is no longer elite. Arguably, most of the sonic signals of our daily lives are electronic. What began as the otherworldly sounds of Bebe and Louis Barron s film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen s Kontakte a few years later, are now a common part of our soundscape. Even electro-sonic debris glitches, bursts of amplitude and frequency modulated radio transmissions, fragments of media speech and noise have found their way into our lives. The rise of a new audio culture has granted free admission to previously excluded technologies of sound production and listening, and has revolutionized musical thought.2 Increasingly we are listening to electronic sounds, thinking about them, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them and re-hearing them as listeners and makers. What is at stake here is huge, and I am guided by Jacques Attali s brilliant axiom that Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. 3 8

3 The chapters in this book are organized around specific technologies that emerged in the twentieth century: the tape recorder, tube and transistor circuitry, the turntable and the phonograph recording, the microphone and the computer. These material objects were not simply invented and then put to use musically. Each of these technologies followed its own course, weaving between the logic and potentialities of engineering and musical thinking. Often, composers and musicians have imagined how electronic music might sound before the actual technology was in place to realize it. Edgard Varèse famously described electronic instruments in his lectures and writing well before they were actually developed. Possible music sometimes preceded the actual appearance of the material instrument that could bring it into sensory existence. This is not to say that electronic music has always existed like a Platonic form. More often, the thing itself was designed with one purpose in mind, only to be rediscovered in the real time of musical practice as a very different entity. In general terms, there is always an important distinction to be made between the design and original purpose of a technology and its cultural application. Often, the very word technology is associated with modernity, but it is worth recalling that technologies have existed throughout human history, expanding the reach of the body and mind. The shovel is a technology. The book is a technology, a perfect one, I d say. Most technologies reach their point of perfection at some stage. The violin reached its perfection in Italy in the early eighteenth century. The Hammond organ reached its pinnacle in 1954 with the model b-3. The tube amplifier, a technology that is over one hundred years old, is still considered the sine qua non of a rock guitarist s sound. The original discrete-circuit, transformer-balanced Trident and Neve recording consoles of the 1970s are still considered the best sounding, and command astronomical prices. 9

4 live wires However, few technologies are static in their use. The violin and piano, for example, have been played more or less conventionally for centuries, although electronic technology has afforded them a new musical life through amplification and other kinds of processing. All electronic musicians understand that analogue technology is alive and well. The most highly capitalized studios in the world will often have a two-inch, 24-track analogue tape recorder available as a tracking tool, since many musicians still hear the analogue recording as superior to the digital recording. This unsettled relationship of analogue and digital technology is one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of the ongoing history of electronic music. Although this book is organized around specific technologies, it privileges the moments of creative disruption when the mind and hand invent and reinvent cultural artefacts. I have tried to include direct accounts of composers, engineers and musicians as often as possible to bring these sonic inventions and human encounters to life. I have drawn upon memoirs, interviews, liner notes and personal communications to suggest the vast network of interactions that comprise the cultural history of this field. The following chapters are filled with anecdotes and reflections on musical practices and processes with an emphasis on how electronic music has transformed musical thought and vice versa. The innovators who shaped the technology and music range widely from isolated experimenters to classical musicians, jazz musicians, rock musicians, sound artists, recording engineers and the newer generations of electronic musicians doing hip-hop, house, techno, ambient and electronica. Some advances are epiphanies, some happy accidents, many others the result of years of experimentation and dedication. Although discontinuities and interruptions figure importantly in this account of electronic music, I follow a fairly 10

5 standard chronology in describing how musical thought and compositional practice has intersected with music technology from around There are some interesting earlier examples of course, but I locate its beginnings with Pierre Schaeffer s work in 1948 and the recorded sound pieces that he called musique concrète. Subsequently, Herbert Eimert s studio at the wdr radio station in Cologne, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening s formation of a studio at Columbia University in New York, and Princeton composer Milton Babbitt s work with the rca synthesizer marked the next stage, creating highly structured music by primarily electronic means. This body of work became known as classical electronic music. At the same time, American composers on the West Coast such as Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick began to refer to their work as tape music, which tended to be more freewheeling and improvisational. I tend to use the term electronic music to refer generally to all of the electronic genres we encounter today, regardless of their sources, materials and techniques. The sonic materials of electronic music are, and have always been, vast and generally uncodifiable. Composer Barney Child s outline of the aesthetics of indeterminacy have always seemed useful to me when thinking about approaching electronic music, because the composer s search for, generation of and organization of electronic sounds has often involved the use of techniques of indeterminacy, found sound, improvisation, unorthodox signal flow and unorthodox electronic settings. Taking the aesthetic assumptions of indeterminacy to a logical end, Any sound or no sound at all is as valid, as good as any other sound... each sound is a separate event... It need carry no implication of what has preceded it or will follow it... Any assemblage of sounds is as valid as any other... Any means of generating an assemblage of sounds is as valid as any other.4 11

6 live wires This is not to say that any musical composition is as good as any other, but rather to recognize the boundless potentiality of electronic sound. The search for new sounds has led composers to create their own electronic music instruments. It has been said, for instance, that Karlheinz Stockhausen was the first dub mixer because he wanted to do live mixing of his electronic pieces in the concert hall and asked his technicians at the wdr to design and build a compact mixer/controller. In another musical domain, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp invented what is now the rock guitarist s ubiquitous pedalboard, a collection of various individual effects (or stompboxes ) mounted together and interconnected by short patch cords. The pedalboard has become the primary design space for the present-day guitarist s sound. Often, an electronic technology has directly influenced musical performance practice, both playing techniques and the actual sound of the music. Elvis Presley s guitarist Scotty Moore purchased a Ray Butts EchoSonic a guitar amplifier with a built-in tape delay system because the band s live performances sounded so empty to him. Sun Records producer Sam Phillips had been adding slapback tape echo to many of Presley s recordings during this time and it had become a characteristic part of the band s recorded sound.5 In effect, it was a technical connection of hardware that required Moore to imagine a new rhythmic relationship to Presley s music and actualize it by a combination of live playing and tape delay. Music technology facilitated the practice of studio composition. This is most apparent in rock music, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present-day bedroom composer. Rather than use the recording studio in its traditionally neutral role, Frank Zappa composed in the studio, using overdubs, tape splices and other effects to create collages 12

7 of improvisation, impromptu weird conversations, atonal musical fragments and eccentric rock songs. Brian Eno, when working with Talking Heads on the album Fear of Music or with David Bowie on his album Low, creatively staked out a liminal area between the roles of composer and producer. Like Zappa, the studio for him was a compositional sketchpad. Eno, who has often said with undue modesty that he is not really a musician, listed electronic treatments as a creative credit for himself on Fear of Music. The idea was clear: Eno saw his role of electronically generating and processing musical material as a compositional act. Serendipitously, when I happened to come into possession of an ems vcs-3 analogue synthesizer the very kind that Eno himself used I found that the signal processing section of the patchbay (ring modulation, reverberation and so on) was labelled treatments. This, for me, was a striking example of the crosstalk between technology and musical practice that animates this book. It would be hard to overemphasize the material and cultural importance of the analogue synthesizer, developed in the 1960s, in expanding and defining what and especially how musicians and composers made their music. Its portability allowed composers and musicians to begin to do live performances, and its relatively lower cost also meant that electronic music was no longer relegated to established studios. As the tape recorder itself became more available to musicians, electronic music and tape composition began to flourish in pop, rock and jazz. Similarly, the advent of the digital synthesizer, drum machine, digital recorder, effects processors and guitar pedals completely transformed popular music. diy culture has given us circuit bending, the practice of tearing apart and rewiring electronic toys and devices as sound-making devices. These days composers and musicians are almost as likely to arrive at a gig with a laptop as a traditional musical instrument. 13

8 live wires So, there exist these various technologies of electronic music, old and new, a continuum from which musicians and composers cycle, recycle and remix. What is missing from this description and what completes this musical circuitry is, of course, the listener. The varieties of electronic music require and have, in fact, developed in tandem with new ways of hearing music. It is not simply that younger or more practised listeners are uniquely suited to experimentation through their openness and experience with new media, but that electronic music, insomuch as it is a cultural as well as a technical apparatus, is situated differently from how earlier music was in its time. As musicologist Zofia Lissa points out, many important musical shifts in Western music (for instance, the transition from Gregorian chant to early tenth-century polyphony) have been accompanied by concurrent shifts in listening practices. In terms of listening backwards, historically speaking, Lissa invokes the example of Western monophonic music Gregorian chant to the beginnings of polyphony about ad 900 to point out that Monodic music sounds differently today from what it must have sounded in the ear of the listener who saw the nascence of monody and subsequently was familiar with the various phases in its development. Listening to monodic music today, we are unable to extricate ourselves from what to us sounds like its harmonic content; we infuse melodic structures with a harmonic content which emerges from our own musical thinking.6 How this is the case has been an issue of extended debate beyond the scope of this book. However, the obvious attachment to ear buds and headphones suggests a kind of cybernetic model that has altered the acoustical space of listening. Again, 14

9 this different ear, enhanced by an electronic prosthesis, feeds back into the psycho-acoustic spaces of our lives thus we hear everything differently. In trying to understand this shift, Ola Stockfelt s theory of adequate modes of listening is ultimately the most inclusive and democratic. Stockfelt sees the current musical landscape as one in which Each hearing person who listens to the radio, watches tv, goes to the movies, goes dancing... has built up, has been forced (in order to be able to handle her or his perceptions of the sound) to build up an appreciable competence in translating and using the music impressions that stream in from loudspeakers in almost every living space... Thus, to listen adequately hence does not mean any particular, better, or more musical, more intellectual, or culturally superior way of listening. It means that one masters and develops the ability to listen for what is relevant to the genre in the music.7 Finally, a book about technology is necessarily technical. Technical terminology and sometimes close descriptions of the electronic and psycho-acoustic processes are essential. Ultimately, it is all in the details. As a composer, and the son of an aeronautical engineer, I have been repeatedly convinced that small imprecisions in parts can bring down the whole plane or project. While I have tried to be meticulous in describing technological developments, it is the interplay among composers, performers and machines that motivates my writing and powers the trajectory of this book. Electronic music understood as a material, social and artistic dynamic has not only changed the modes of musical production but has, in its wide-ranging effects, transformed the very terms of musical thought. 15