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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...
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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
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.