Electronic Music

Electronic  Music

Where are we going in the history of music? Music of the future will surely have dispensed of all the old musical instruments that were employed in the days of the classical symphony. How long will it be before the cello, the oboe, the pianoforte etc. are things of the past consigned to the history books?  Already today they are seeming just slightly old-fashioned, even passe. I can see that in maybe two or three hundred years time they will have disappeared completely. For now the future would seem to be in electronic music.

The earliest origins of electronic music before it actually became so began with electromechanical instruments such as the Teleharmonium or Dynamophone, which was developed by Thaddeus Cahill from 1898 onwards. Then came the theremin (1919) and the Audion Piano invented by Lee de Forest, then in 1926 the Croix Sonore and also the ondes Martenot. The most famous use of the ondes Martenot was in Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila symphony.

With the advent of the tape recorder a new way of composing music became possible. It was called musique concrete and started in Paris. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were trailblazers in this new art. Edgard Varese composed ‘Deserts’ which was a musical composition for chamber orchestra and tape. ‘Symphonie pour un homme seul’ (1950) was the first important work of musique concrete by Schaeffer. It was but a small step to recognizable electronic music and the first stirrings in this field were by Lejaten Hiller with his Illiac Suite for string quartet. He used a computer to compose it and followers included the German Fischinger. Further work was done by Eimert (‘Funf Stucke’), Stockhausen and John Cage.

As technical developments have moved forward so has the development of the new music. In the 1960’s Robert Moog invented the synthesizer and this has been used much in commercial films and also in the field of popular music. The creation of electronic music is a completely different art form to the old manner of composition; notation is superceded by representational scores which depict pitch etc. Berio, Boulez, Takemitsu and Xenakis have all written serious works in the electronic field. Waldo de los Rios in the 1970’s decided to ‘soup up’ Mozart and it was a great hit and sign of things to come.

The way ahead lies in electronics. Music of the twenty second century I should think will be completely electronic, and the sound of the oboe, the clarinet, the double bass and violin , a sound from a bygone age, listened to by specialists and musicologists. The history of music is an illustrious and profoundly moving one: its future seems to be inextricably linked to the computer and electronics. Let’s just hope that artistic excellence, beauty of sound, invention and imagination, romance and excitement, are not lost in the onward push of progress. For in the words of the song music was my first love and it will be my last, music of the future and music of the past.