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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
Amazon referrer ID is still in that address - somebody's going to become very rich tonight...
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
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)
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 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...
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This is hardly the first electronic music. That honour goes to some American chaps in the late 1890's, who devised a giant machine that played the Victorian equivalent of lift music. The concept was to pipe this music over wires into restaurants and clubs all over town, to save the venues the cost of maintaining house bands.
They even had a successful rollout, with mellow, unoffensive tinkelings broadcast citywide. However, the exercise was doomed to failure because it was extremely costly to keep running. Ultimately, it shut down.
Electronic Musician ran an article on this a few years back. I'd quote you reference but I am currently around 14 hours flight from my home.
Some other groups definately worth mentioning that have been around since around the 60's:
Tangerine Dream
Kraftwerk
Isao Tomita
Vangelis
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
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.
...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.
An IBM 7094 sang "Daisy" in 1961. Google.
And the Theremin was patented in 1929. Wiki.
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.
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...)
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.
I interviewed Bob Moog, the man who invented the Moog Synthesizer and currently revitalizing the Theremin, a few years ago. He's the one who really kicked things off IMHO.
As for the first electronic musical instruments, they go way back to 1874 when Elisha Gray invented the Harmonic Telegraph, and I'm betting the "music" that it produced was ultimately the first Electronic Music.
There's a concise history here.