 |
|
 |
|
History
• Genres
•
Notable artists and DJs
•
Notable record labels
 Electronic music is
defined as a loose term for music created using electronic
equipment. Any sound produced by the means of an electrical signal may
reasonably be called electronic, and the term is sometimes used in that
way. In music where acoustic performance is the norm, even the
introduction of electronic amplifiers may touch off discussions of
electronic music (jazz and folk music, for example, have gone through a
good deal of argument about the topic).
As a category of criticism and marketing, however, electronic music
refers to music produced largely by electronic components, such as
synthesizers, samplers, computers, and drum machines. Theoretically,
the music could include any of an array of other instruments.
Electronic music may also be referred to as computer music because
software has allowed manipulated sounds to be processed and sequenced
digitally and conveniently, in contrast to analog synthesizers that use
electrical hardware to manipulate signals.
History
Late 19th century early 20th century
The earliest purely electronic instrument was the Teleharmonium or
Telharmonium, developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. Simple
inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Teleharmonium: the
instrument weighed seven tons and was the size of a boxcar. The first
practical electronic instrument is often viewed to be the Theremin,
invented by Professor Leon Theremin circa 1919 - 1920. Another early
electronic instrument was the Ondes Martenot, which was used in the
Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen and also by other, primarily
French, composers, such and Andre Jolivet.
Post-war years: 1940s to 1950s
In the years following World War II, Electronic music was embraced by
progressive composers, and was hailed as a way to exceed the limits of
traditional instruments. Modern Electronic composition is considered to
have begun in force with the development of musique concrète and tape
recorders in 1948, only to rapidly evolve with the creation of early
analog synthesizers. The first pieces of musique concrète were written
by Pierre Schaeffer, who later worked alongside such avant-garde
classical composers as Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz
Stockhausen. Stockhausen has worked for many years as part of Cologne's
Studio for Electronic Music combining electronically generated sounds
with conventional orchestras. The first electronic music for magnetic
tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe Barron in
1950.
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City (now
the Computer Music Center) was founded in 1959 by Vladimir Ussachevsky
and Otto Luening. They had been working with magnetic tape manipulation
since the early 1950s, and a studio was built there with the help of
engineer Peter Mauzey. RCA contributed the RCA Mark II Sound
Synthesizer which used vacuum tube oscillators and incorporated the
first electronic music sequencer. This became the center for American
electronic music until about 1980. Robert Moog developed voltage
controlled oscillators and envelope generators while there, which
became the heart of the Moog synthesizer.
Max Mathews began using computers to create music at Bell Laboratories
in 1957. Other well-known composers in this field include Edgar Varèse
and Steve Reich.
1960s to late 1970s
At the Radiophonic Workshop, the sound special effects unit of the BBC,
Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire created one of the first electronic
signature tunes for television as the theme music for Doctor Who in
1963. A short OGG file sample of this can be found here.
Although electronic music began in the world of classical (or "art")
composition, within a few years it had been adopted into popular
culture with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the 1960s, Wendy Carlos
popularized early synthesizer music with two notable albums Switched-On
Bach and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which took pieces of baroque
classical music and reproduced them on Moog synthesizers. The Moog
generated only a single note at a time, so that producing a
multilayered piece, such as Carlos did, required many hours of studio
time. The early machines were notoriously unstable, and went out of
tune easily. Still, some musicians, notably Keith Emerson of Emerson
Lake and Palmer did take them on the road. The Theremin, an exceedingly
difficult instrument to play, was even used in some popular music, most
notably in "Good Vibrations" by The Beach Boys. There was also the
Mellotron which appeared in the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever, and
the volume tone pedal was uniquely used as a backing instrument in Yes
It Is.
Moog was not the only early synthesizer developer. On the West Coast,
Donald Buchla developed synthesizers that, unlike the Moog, were not
keyboard-based.
As technology developed, and synthesizers became cheaper, more robust
and portable, they were adopted by many rock bands. Examples of
relatively early adopters in this field are bands like The United
States of America, The Silver Apples and Pink Floyd, and although not
all of their music was electronic (with the notable exception of The
Silver Apples), much of the resulting sound was dependent upon the
synthesizer. In the 1970s, this style was mainly popularized by
Kraftwerk, who used electronics and robotics to symbolize and sometimes
gleefully celebrate the alienation of the modern technological world.
To this day their music remains uncompromisingly electronic. In Germany
particularly electronic sounds were incorporated into popular music by
bands such as Tangerine Dream, Can, and others.
In jazz, amplified acoustic instruments and synthesizers were combined
in a series of influential recordings by Weather Report. Joe Zawinul,
the synthesizer artist in that group, has continued to field ensembles
of the same kind. The noted jazz pianist Herbie Hancock with his band
The Headhunters in the 1970s also introduced jazz listeners to a wider
palette of electronic sounds including the synthesizer, which he
further explored with even more enthusiasm on the Future Shock album, a
collaboration with producer Bill Laswell in the 1980s, which spawned a
pop hit "Rockit" in 1983.
Musicians such as Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, Vangelis, Jean Michel
Jarre, Ray Buttigieg, the Japanese composers Isao Tomita, Kitaro also
popularized the sound of electronic music. The film industry also began
to make extensive use of electronic music in soundtracks. An example is
the Wendy Carlos' score for A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's film
of the Anthony Burgess novel .
The score for Forbidden Planet, by Louis and Bebe Barron, had used
electronic sound, although not synthesizers per se, in 1956. Once
electronic sounds became more common in popular recordings, other
science fiction films such as Blade Runner and the Alien series of
movies began to depend heavily for mood and ambience upon the use of
electronic music and electronically derived effects. Electronic groups
were also hired to produce entire soundtracks, just like other popular
music stars.
Late 1970s to late 1980s
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a great deal of innovation
around the development of electronic music instruments. Analogue
synthesizers largely gave way to digital synthesizers and samplers.
Early samplers, like early synthesizers, were large and expensive
pieces of gear -- companies like Fairlight and New England Digital sold
instruments that cost upwards of $100,000. In the mid 1980s, this
changed with the development of low cost samplers. From the late 1970s
onward, much popular music was developed on these machines. Groups like
Heaven 17, Severed Heads, The Human League, Yazoo, The Art of Noise,
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Depeche Mode and New Order developed
entirely new ways of making popular music by electronic means. Fad
Gadget is cited by some as a father to the use of electronics in New
Wave.
The natural ability for music machines to make stochastic,
non-harmonic, stat icky noises led to a genre of music known as
industrial music led by pioneering groups such as Throbbing Gristle
(which commenced operation in 1975) Wavestar and Cabaret Voltaire. Some
artists, like Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, and Severed Heads, took some of
the adventurous innovations of musique concrète and applied them to
mechanical dance beats. Others, such as Test Department, Einstürzende
Neubauten, took this new sound at face value and created hellish
electronic compositions. Meanwhile, other groups (Robert Rich, :zoviet*france:,
rapoon) took these harsh sounds and melded them into evocative
soundscapes. Still others (Front 242, Skinny Puppy) combined this
harshness with the earlier, more pop-oriented sounds, forming
electronic body music (EBM).
Allied with the growing interest in electronic and industrial music
were artists working in the realm of dub music. Notable in this area
was producer Adrian Sherwood whose On-U Sound record label in the 1980s
was responsible for integrating the industrial and noise aesthetic with
tape and dub production with artists such as the industrial-funk outfit
Tackhead, vocalist Mark Stewart and others. This paved the way for much
of the 1990s interest in dub, first through bands such as Meat Beat
Manifesto and later downtempo and triphop producers such as Kruder &
Dorfmeister.
Recent developments: 1980s to early 2000s
 The development of the techno sound in Detroit, Michigan and house
music in Chicago, Illinois in the early to late 1980s, and the later
UK-based acid house movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s all
fuelled the development and acceptance of electronic music into the
mainstream and to introduce electronic dance music to nightclubs.
Electronic composition can create rhythms faster and more precise than
is possible using traditional percussion. The sound of electronic dance
music often features electronically altered sounds (samples) of
traditional instruments and vocals. See dance music.
The falling price of suitable equipment has meant that popular music
has increasingly been made electronically. Artists such as Björk and
Moby have further popularized variants of this form of music within the
mainstream.
Go up
Genres
Electronic music, especially in the late 1990s fractured into many
genres, styles and sub-styles, too many to list here, and most of which
are included in the main list. Although there are no hard and fast
boundaries, broadly speaking we can identify the experimental and
classical styles: electronic art music, musique concrète; the
industrial music and synth pop styles of the 1980s; styles that are
primarily intended for dance such as techno, house, trance, electro,
breakbeat, drum and bass and styles that are intended more as
experimental styles or for home listening such as IDM, glitch and
trip-hop. The proliferation of personal computers beginning in the
1980s brought about a new genre of electronic music, known loosely as
chip music or bitpop. These styles, produced initially using
specialized sound chips in PCs such as the Commodore 64, grew primarily
out of the demoscene. The latter categories such as IDM, glitch and
chip music share much in common with the art and musique concrète
styles which predate it by several decades.
Contemporary electronic music includes many different styles or musical
genres, such as:
Ambient Ambient Dub, Ambient Goa,
Ambient House, Chillout, Dark ambient, Illbient, Lowercase, New Age,
Psybient.
Breakbeat: Big Beat, Breaks,
Brokenbeat, Cut & Paste, Electro, Florida Breaks, Grime, Miami Bass, Nu
Skool Breaks, Progressive Breaks, Turntablism .
Downtempo/IDM: Acid Jazz, Balearic
Beat, Bitpop, Chiptune, Electroclash, Electropop, Laptronica, Minimal,
Electronica/Glitch, Nu Jazz, Trip Hop (The Bristol Sound).
Hardcore: 4-beat, Bouncy Techno,
Breakbeat, Hardcore, Breakcore, Digital Hardcore, Gabba, Happy
Hardcore, Hardcore Trance, Hardstyle, New Beat, Nu Style, Gabber,
Speedcore, Terrorcore.
House: 2Step, Acid House, Chicago
House, Deep House, Disco, Eurodance, French House, Freestyle, House
Funky, House Garage, Ghetto, House Hard House, Hi-NRG, Hip House, Italo
Disco, Italo House, Minimal House/Microhouse, Pumpin' House,
Progressive House/Tribal house, Spacesynth, Tech House.
Industrial: Aggrotech, EBM Futurepop,
Noise music, Old-school, EBM Power noise.
Jungle/Drum and Bass: Clownstep,
Darkcore, Drill n bass, Jump-Up, Liquid funk, Neurofunk, Ragga,
Techstep.
Techno: Acid techno, Detroit
Techno/U.S. Techno, Electroclash, Freetekno, Ghettotech, Minimal
Techno/Glitch Techno, Nortec Rave music Schranz, U.K. Techno/Euro
Techno, Yorkshire Bleeps and Bass
Trance: Acid Trance, Minimalist Trance, Nu-NRG, Progressive
trance, Psychedelic Trance/Goa Trance, Vocal Trance.
Go up
Notable artists and DJs
 With the explosive growth of computers music technology and consequent
reduction in the cost of equipment in the late 1990s, the number of
artists and DJs working within electronic music is overwhelming. With
the advent of hard disk recording systems, it is possible for any home
computer user to become a musician, and hence the rise in the number of
"bedroom bands", often consisting of a single person. Nevertheless
notable artists can still be identified. Within the experimental and
classical or "art" traditions still working today are Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Ariaphonics, Pierre Boulez and Steve Reich. Influential
musicians in industrial and later synth pop styles include Throbbing
Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire (both now defunct), Tangerine Dream, the
Human League and Kraftwerk who released their first album in over a
decade in 2003. In house, techno and drum and bass pioneers such as
Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald and LTJ Bukem are
still active as of 2003. Commercially successful artists working under
the "electronica" rubric such as Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers,
The Crystal Method, Massive Attack, The Prodigy, Underworld and Moby
continue to release albums and perform regularly (sometimes in
stadium-sized arenas, such has the popularity of electronic dance music
grown). Some DJs such as Paul Oakenfold and John Digweed have reached
true superstar status and can command five-figure salaries for a single
performance. The critically acclaimed Autechre and Aphex Twin continue
to put out challenging records of (mostly) home-listening music.
Go up
Notable record labels
Until the 1980s, there were virtually no record labels that deal with
exclusively electronic music. Because of this dearth of outlets, many
of the early techno pioneers started their own. For example, Juan
Atkins started Metroplex Records a Detroit-based label, and Richie
Hawtin started his hugely influential Plus8 imprint. In the United
Kingdom Warp Records emerged in the 1990s as one of the pre-eminent
sources of home-listening and experimental music. Later arrivals
include Astralwerks, Cykxincorp and Oakenfold's Perfecto Record label.
Go up
Links between music and space
(source of the article is
Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia on-line) |
