Experiments with electronics stretch back further in time than you might first imagine. Natural human curiosity coupled with the desire to create something unheard of before perhaps sparked the early pioneers into action.
Their music went on to inspire later generations and, in a real sense, facilitate many of the genres of popular (as well as avant-garde classical) music we know today.
There is a small but important distinction to be made. Electronic music that uses analogue or digital electronic circuitry to create sound is not quite the same as electroacoustic music.
While it tends to involve similar processes of sound manipulation, it uses acoustic sound sources too. This is particularly true of the work of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), whose work we will examine in brief later.
Into the bargain are also what are categorized as electromechanical instruments such as the Hammond Organ or the electric guitar, which rely on electronics to produce sound but also use means like tone wheels or vibrating strings.
Early Electronic Music and Classical Crossover
Václav Divíšek (1698-1765) is where our story begins. He was, to say the least, a fascinating and tenacious character who was an ordained Catholic Priest, a Doctor of Theology, and a scientist who was intrigued by electricity.
At this place in history, the concept of electricity was still relatively unexplored. One of his more elaborate experiments was designed to quell thunderstorms by sucking electricity out of the air. The results, whilst not what he intended, were the invention of the lightning conductor.
What is particularly relevant to us is that Václav Divíšek invented a device he called the Denis d’or. This instrument allegedly dates from 1753 and was capable of producing, or rather mimicking, the sounds of acoustic instruments.
It is thought that these sounds were created using electricity; however, the instrument vanished following his death, never to be rediscovered. One wicked little touch embedded into the design of the Denis d’Or was that it could randomly produce electric shock for the unsuspecting performer.
Advancements in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Spinning forward a century or two, we encounter more empirically viable electronic music. Matthaüs Hipp was the inventor of the electro-mechanic piano that cleverly created sound through electric magnets. The instrument was essentially a player-piano with the familiar perforated paper roll supplying the music.
The world of electronic music really got going in the first part of the 20th century. In the 1930s, we discover inventors such as Freidrich Trautwein who developed the Trautonium that was taken one step further by Oskar Sala, post-Second World War, evolving into the Mixturtrautonium.
This instrument closely resembled the characteristics of the synthesizers that would be developed by Moog. It used a sub-harmonic method of generating sound that could then be modified through a series of envelope shapers, frequency changers, and modulators.
Advancements in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Following the ending of the Second World War, discoveries made by the Allies regarding Nazi technological advances opened the doors to recording onto magnetised tape.
This was a very significant expansion in the available technology that directly fed into experiments by the composers of the 1950s onwards.
The development of better-quality microphones allowing for clearer capture of sound prompted composers to explore this area of music more deeply. By the mid-20th Century, we found innovators like French composer Pierre Schaeffer creating a wholly new sound canvas with his Musique Concrete.
What Schaeffer achieved was similar to what Andy Warhol succeeded in doing with his art. They both drew the public’s attention to the everyday sounds and sights that we experience, from soup cans to the noises of train stations.
Schaeffer’s concept was to suggest that everyday sound is just as valid as musical sources of material as a note from a violin or clarinet. He devoted considerable time during his life to capturing natural, often industrial sounds onto tape and editing them into compositions.
Advancements in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Schaeffer’s insights, together with his Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrete, pulled composers like Pierre Boulez, Pierre Henry, and Stockhausen into its gravitational field.
The possibilities that had been demonstrated by Schaeffer’s revolutionary approach to music composition held great appeal. Equally, we find composers such as John Cage taking the concept from one stage in the other direction in his famous piece 4’33”.
Cage also experimented with tape. His 1939 composition Imaginary Landscape No.1 utilized many of the contemporary techniques including tape speed adjustment to create a composition.
Key Figures in Electronic Music
By the 1950s, we hear new music being composed electronically by composers. Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the greatest exponents of the new technologies and worked for a brief time in Schaeffer’s studio.
Stockhausen was a controversial composer who seemed to divide people into avid fans or the complete opposite. Given the highly experimental nature of Stockhausen’s work, it is hardly surprising. Whilst the theoretical, academic principles that underpin his concepts are ground-breaking, the musical results are challenging.
Stockhausen’s work with electronics began in the early 1950s. Many of these compositions included human voices and acoustic instruments but integrated the use of tape, sound synthesis, and other available processors.
His time at the Cologne Radio station WDR, where the Studio for Electronic Music was established, gave birth to Stockhausen’s first completely electronic piece called Studie I. WDR offered Stockhausen the possibility to create sounds that had never been heard before, and this must have been a treasure too delicious to resist.
Studie II continued in a similar vein to Studie I, but in his piece, pure sine waves are produced by tone oscillators that are subjected to large amounts of reverberation. The outcome was a three-minute work full of hissing tones and ringing sounds that are gentle and seem to drift and slide around the landscape.
1955-56 saw the emergence of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, which fused the human voice with electronically produced sound. Biblical texts were sliced up into tiny parts such as phonemes and syllables (sometimes whole phrases) and then combined with sine wave oscillators, noise, and pulse generators. The sounds were filtered into a strangely alluring composition.
Stockhausen’s relationship with electronics never stopped evolving and deepening. In 2006-7, he produced the 13th part of the Klang Cycle called Cosmic Pulses. This was to be Stockhausen’s final electronic work.
It takes its inspiration from the cycle of the 24-hour day and has 24 melodic loops that use from one to twenty-four different pitches over a compass of seven octaves. The loops then are played through and around eight loudspeakers, becoming layered together from the slowest to the fastest, the lowest to the highest.
Perhaps just as provocative a composer as Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez was not only a world-leading contemporary composer, conductor, and author, but always it seemed, at the cutting edge of technological innovation.
Often described as one of Boulez’s most ambitious compositions, his Répons (1981-84) is a masterful piece that elegantly and exotically blends acoustic sounds into electronically processed ones. You can, I believe, hear the influence of his teacher Olivier Messiaen in this work, but it is unmistakably Boulez extending these teachings in his own way.
Two additional works that stand out from the Boulez catalogue are Dialogue de l’ombre double (1982-85), scored for clarinet and electronics, and Anthemes II (1997) for violin and electronics. Both make extensive use of real-time electronic processing.
The natural sounds of the instruments are transformed; in the case of the first piece, through reverberation. This sound is then projected around the concert venue.
Equally, Anthemes adopts a similar approach to using electronic means to alter, even enhance, the violinist’s performance, creating figurines that would be unplayable by a human.