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The Birth of Electronic Music
fm6 writes "NPR has a story up about the first musicians to compose electronic music. In 1947, Louis and Bebe Barron received an early tape recorder as a wedding present. About the same time, Louis Barron became interested in Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics and its thesis of common elements in living and artificial systems. This led the Barrons to create a new kind of music using electronic circuits and painstakingly edited magnetic tapes. The Barrons music was featured in various avant-garde records and movies, and finally reached a mass audience in the Science Fiction classic Forbidden Planet."
The claim that electronic music is all post-war seems a little hard to sustain. Theremin?
Ondes Martineau?
ian
When people first used electronics to make noises they certainly made some fucked up ones (Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 - 1990)
I bet they'd be pissed to learn that the fruit of their endeavors would be making backing tracks for "pop stars" (though I reckon they'd be stoked about SquarePusher)
Leo Theremin is often cited as a godfather of electronic music. He was responsible for creating for one of the earliest electronic instruments back in 1917.
You can read about him here
listen a little closer. electronic music is a vast, complex maze of styles.
here are some names to check out (many of whom will NEVER hit the big time):
-fabrice lig
-thomas brinkmann
-drexciya
-underground resistance
-larvae
-matthew dear
-ricardo villalobos
-akufen
-needle sharing
-mkb
I am not conversant with theremin's musical literature, but any original compositions for this instrument would predate the composers mentioned in the article by several decades.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleharmonium
who fact checks for NPR? someone from CBS?
.cig
I was thinking the same thing. The Theramin was invented before 1921.
People in the Dada movement were creating mechanical music (or rather, un-music and noisy stuff) before 1920. Dada has had a pretty heavy influence on the modern industrial scene...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Can't find much information skimming through that link. Are you sure you don't mean the futurists? Luigi Russolo for example.
-mkb
And do not forget that HP started when Hewlett and Packard built an electronic sound generator for Disney in '39
Paul B.
Some other groups definately worth mentioning that have been around since around the 60's:
Tangerine Dream
Kraftwerk
Isao Tomita
Vangelis
BIG BULL SH**.
Electronic music was invented with the Thereminvox or Theremin on 1919.
Just check Wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin
Moment of terror is the beginning of life !!!
Let's not forget "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys and every horror movie ever made. There's a great documentary about Theremin.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
What are the new movements going on in the electronic music world that the mainstream has yet to become aware of?
Forget the "Hi NRG European Techno" and the crud they play in movies. The repetative beats got old real quick.
For electronic music that is different, here are a couple places to check out. These may not be to your taste, but they definately different then your "unS unS unS unS unS unS unS unS WooooooooOOOOOT WoooooooooOOOOOT! 'Smack my Bitch Up!' unS unS unS unS unS unS unS unS":
Warp Records has released their entire catalog online. I recommend Plaid, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher
Here a couple nice stations playing a range of electronic music:
http://www.live365.com/stations/after_party
http://www.live365.com/stations/mrs_emma_peel
http://somafm.com/listen/
Oh, how I miss MusicForHackers!
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
some other stuff (some of it FOR FREE mind you)
-another mp3 store
-ANOTHER mp3 store
-unfound sound, netlabel
-thinnerism/autoplate, TWO netlabels
-Archive.org's netlabel page, more techno than you could possibly consume in a lifetime!
-313 discussion list
-who is what and who
-mkb
There are numerous fan pages for her, which is truly remarkable for a person who barely got any mention before her death from cancer in her early 60s. Of course, now she's dead and can't enjoy her fame, she's a celebrity. There was even a play written with her as the focus.
I think it fair to say that electronic music has been born and reborn many times, but has yet to really reach the heights the true visionaries expected of it. Like NASA, electronic music has been mostly promise and far too little creative genius.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oliver Messiaen recorded 'Oraison" in 1937, 10 years before these guys. It's quite nice, actually.
They were important and all, but they were hardly the first.
Heck, Lev Termin patented the Theremin in 1927, when the Barrons were little kids.
You can find a lot of this stuff on a 3-disc set called "OHM" variously "Early Gurus of Electronic Music" or "History of Electronic Music" but always OHM, afaik.
Here's a shameless plug for EAR-Rational Music, the guys i bought my copy from. google for 'em.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
John Cage {1912-1995) was another pioneer of electronic music. Interestingly his estate sued another composer, Mike Batt, claiming that his piece, one minutes silence, infringed on John Cages copyright for 4'33", another totally silent track.
...the first electronic music experiment was done by Lev Sergeivitch Termen and his famus Theremin.
Also not true - the link you point to lists electronic instruments going back to 1876, forty years before the theremin. The Telharmonium (1897) was a pretty sophisticated instrument, but it weighed 200 tons, and vacuum-tube amplifiers hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't very practical.
The Beach Boys didn't use a theremin. In fact, there's some hilarious footage of Brian Wilson exhibiting how entirely incompetent he is at playing one in that documentary. He makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't know how it works.
The Beach Boys used an instrument that's referred to variously as a Tannerin, Electro-Theremin, or Slide-Theremin. It's nothing like a Theremin because it requires actual electrical contact to function, where a Theremin doesn't work if you touch it.
Read about it here:
http://www.tompolk.com/Tannerin/Tannerin.html
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
...be aware that the linked-to NPR story says nothing about the Barrons being 'the first' or any such nonsense; it only calls them 'pioneers', which seems a fair claim. They do say that Forbidden Planet was the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score, which is a more plausible and defensible claim, but the line about the Barrons being first is strictly the submitter's and not NPR's.
I believe the "first" that Louis and Bebe Barron hold is that they composed the first completely electronic film score. The theremin was widely used in film previously, probably most notably in The Lost Weekend, but the biggest sensation Forbidden Planet caused, was on Vine at the AFofM offices. Bebe told us this story several years ago, and its a fascinating chapter in how the unions stifled progress and ultimately won an agreement that exclusively electronic music would be a "one time only" exception. It is wonderful to see her referred to. She was battling cancer when we last saw her about 5 years ago. Looks like she won!
Ishkur's guide to electronic music recently added a funny but informative little section about the history of electronic music.
The page has samples from dozens of different genres, so if you've ever wondered about the difference between goa and psy-trance, it'll help you figure it out too.
-S
http://www.shitkatapult.com/
http://www.areal-records.com/
http://www.mego.at/
http://www.kompakt-net.de/
etc.,etc.,....
There's so much good electronic music out there, it's silly to make such a statement. Not all of these labels will necessarily be your cup of tea, but these are the first five or so that popped in to my head without looking on the back of any CD's. Check out some record store sites like:
http://aquariusrecords.org/
http://forcedexposure.com/
or a site like http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/
for new music releases from several genres. It's all out there for the listening!
Sorry, you're way off. If you bothered to research (or weren't so young) you'd see "synth" music as it was called then, was more than plenty full in the 70s, and bands were charting with pure electronic music very regularly. The Detroit garbage techno was mainly cheap gear from the early 80s, not even decent machines. The black kids of which you speak could nowhere near afford a keyboard costing over $10k, let alone an arsenal of them, or even hire studio time. Hence why they started with the cheap gear that was being dumped for the new digital MIDI gear.
Europe was already having fun with electronic dance music long before Saunderson and Co picked up their first shitty Roland Jupiter 3, and banged up 808 drum machines. Of course, it wasn't called "techno" then, it was just dance music.
The work of Jacob Markowitz at Allen Organ Company in 1939, the first electronic organ. See here for more. I always liked how they were using digital sampled sounds back in 1971.
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
As others have, and will continue to point out, electronic music is as old as electronics itself.
(Of course, determining what you call "music" is still very subjective...)
http://www.zu33.com/moog/ This is a good movie to see if your interested in the birth of electronic music, old analog synths, theramins and such is a movie called 'Moog' which is all about Robert Moog one of the pioneer inventors in electronic instruments .. although robert wasnt the first, he was a key figure in the development of electronic music.
That was electric music, not electronic.
:))
As there were no valves or transistors involved, there were no electronic devices.
The machine was essentially a huge generator with many rotors that outputed ac at many different frequencies. Connect those outputs to a keyboard and mix the result you have an organ.
It gave out some power too, enough to breakthrough over everyones telephone calls when tested (they used the telephone lines to distribute the signal), so eventually they had so many complaints they stopped it.
The bigger toothed drums (bass notes) were about four feet tall.
Anyone who's interested in a sampling from the history of electronic music should check out a CD set called Ohm: The early gurus of electronic music.
. html
Well worth the price, I think.
Review here: http://www.classical-music-review.org/reviews/OHM
The sibling posts are a bit confused.
Sure the Theremin from the early 1920's (1919 on) was influential, but it was not the birth of electronic music. Electronic music was around long before the vacuum tube and radio electronics (which were the technologies of the Theremin era).
In some senses, the real birth of electronic music could be seen as Thomas Edison's invention of the "talking tinfoil device" in 1877 which he called the phonograph.
If you are talking synthesis for music instruments you could cite Elisha Grey's "musical telegraph" created in 1887. It had a one octave keyboard and was designed to play music directly to peoples homes over the telegraph lines. That is over 30 years before the Theremin, and 60 years before "the Barrons" (RTFA) recieved their first tape recorder!
I'm sure the Barrons were influential, especially if they were working with Cage, but this wasn't the birth of electronic music. Maybe "the birth of sampling" would have been more appropriate.
Read "Electronic and Experimental Music" (Thomas B. Holmes) if you want more information.
Ah, but it's not dead anymore...
http://www.intelligentdancemusic.com/
Look familiar?
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole