by Thom Holmes
from Electronic & Experimental Music : Pioneers in Technology & Composition (2002)
(download 2nd edition PDF)
The sound resources available to electronic music are unlimited and can be constructed from scratch. One of the key differences between electronic music and music composed for traditional instruments is that its sonic vistas are limitless and undefined. The composer not only creates the music, but composes the very sounds themselves. Herbert Eimert (1897–1972), one of the founders of the Studio für Elektronische Musik in Cologne, expressed the innate potential of electronic music this way:
The composer, in view of the fact that he is no longer operating within a strictly ordained tonal system, finds himself confronting a completely new situation. He sees himself commanding a realm of sound in which the musical material appears for the first time as a malleable continuum of every known and unknown, every conceivable and possible sound. This demands a way of thinking in new dimensions, a kind of mental adjustment to the thinking proper to the materials of electronic sound.
Any imaginable sound is fair game. The composer can invent sounds that do not exist in nature or radically transform natural sounds into new instruments. For Thema-Omaggio a Joyce (1958), Luciano Berio (b. 1925) used tape manipulation to transform the spoken voice into a myriad of sound patterns eerily laced with the tonalities of human communication. In the piece Luna (from Digital Moonscapes, 1984), Wendy Carlos modeled a digital instrument whose voice could be modified in real time as it played a theme, metamorphosing from the sound of a violin to a clarinet to a trumpet and ending with a cello sound. This sound wasn’t possible in the world outside of the computer, but became possible with her library of “real-world orchestral replicas” that the GDS and Synergy synthesizers allowed. For Beauty in the Beast (1986), she took this experimentation a step further by “designing instrumental timbres that can’t exist at all, extrapolated from the ones that do exist.”
Electronic music expands our perception of tonality. The accepted palette of musical sounds was extended in two directions. On one hand, the invention of new pitch systems became easier with electronic musical instruments. Microtonal music is more easily engineered by a composer who can subdivide an octave using software and a digital music keyboard than by a piano builder. On the other hand, electronic music stretched the concept of pitch in the opposite direction, toward less and less tonality and into the realm of noise. All sounds became equal, just another increment on the electromagnetic spectrum. Varèse sensed this early on and introduced controlled instances of noise in his instrumental and electronic music. Cage accepted the value of all sounds without question and let them be themselves:
Noises are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve expressed as seven plus five), nor with consonance and dissonance, but rather with Edgard Varèse (1885–1965) who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music. But it is clear that ways must be discovered that allow noises and tones to be just noises and tones, not exponents subservient to Varèse’ s imagination.
Electronic music only exists in a state of actualization [oh mon dieu! yes yes yes! theory boner alert!]. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) wrote that “it is necessary to distinguish two moments, or rather two states of music: potential music and actual music…. It exists as a score, unrealized, and as a performance.” You will rarely find an electronic work that can be accurately transcribed and reproduced from sheet music. It does not exist as “potential music” except in the form of notes, instructions, and ideas made by the composer. Conventional musical notation is not practical for electronic music. You cannot study it as you would a piece of scored music. Experiencing electronic music is, by its nature, a part of its actualization. The term “realization” was aptly adopted by electronic music pioneers to describe the act of assembling a finished work. Even those works that are transcriptions of conventionally composed chromatic music cannot be fully described on paper, because the elements of electronic instrumentation, sound processing, and performance defy standardization. A work of electronic music is not real, does not exist, until a performance is realized, or played in real time.
Electronic music has a special relationship with the temporal nature of music. “Music presupposes before all else a certain organization in time, a chronomony.” The plastic nature of electronic music allows the composer to record all of the values associated with a sound (e.g., pitch, timbre, envelope) in a form that can be shifted and reorganized in time. The ability to modify the time or duration of a sound is one of its most fundamental characteristics. Traditional instrumental music, once recorded, benefits from a similar control over the manipulation of a real-time performance. The equivalency between space and time that Cage attributed to the coming of magnetic tape recording—and which can be extended to any form of analog or digital sound recording or even MIDI control signals—has the liberating effect of allowing the composer to place a sound at any point in time at any tempo.
In electronic music, sound itself becomes a theme of composition. The ability to get inside the physics of a sound and directly manipulate its characteristics provides an entirely new resource for composing music. The unifying physics behind all sounds—pitched and unpitched alike—allow a composer to treat all sounds as being materially equal.
Electronic music does not breathe: it is not affected by the limitations of human performance. As Robert Ashley learned about electronic music early on, “It can go on as long as the electricity comes out of the wall.” The arc and structure of the music is tolerant of extremes in the duration and flow of sounds. The ability to sustain or repeat sounds for long periods of time—much longer than would be practical for live instrumentalists—is a natural resource of electronic music. In addition to its sustainability, electronic music can play rhythms too complex and rapid for any person to perform. It can play with more than two hands at the same time. The composer is freed of the physical limitations of human performance and can construct new sounds and performances of an intricacy that can only exist as a product of the machine.
Electronic music springs from the imagination. The essence of electronic music is its disassociation with the natural world. Hearing is a“distance” sense, as opposed to the “proximal” senses of touch and taste. Listening engages the intellect and imagination to interpret what is heard, providing “only indirect knowledge of what matters—requiring interpretations from knowledge and assumptions, so you can read meaning into the object world.” Having little basis in the object world, electronic music becomes the pulse of an intimate and personal reality for the listener. Its source is mysterious. “It is thought, imagined and engraved in memory. It’s a music of memory.” In these ways, the human being becomes the living modulator of the machine product, the circuitry dissolves into the spirit of humanness that envelops it.
