From Telharmonium demos to Stockhausen’s tape studios
Electronic music covers genres built with circuitry, software, or computers—whether pure oscillators and synthesizers or electromechanical hybrids like the Hammond organ and electric guitar. Late-nineteenth-century gadgets led to 1940s tape collage and 1950s generator music that later flooded pop via synths, MIDI, and dance floors.
Pure electronic instruments generate sound wholly in circuitry (oscillator, theremin, synthesizer); electromechanical ones start with strings or hammers then amplify. Early devices at the turn of the twentieth century were demonstration pieces—Telharmonium streamed orchestral-like tones over phone lines. Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music cheered microtones and machines; Futurists Pratella and Russolo’s 1913 Art of Noises imagined noise as material. Vacuum tubes shrank and amplified instruments; by the early 1930s theremin, ondes Martenot, and trautonium were commercial.
Recording experiments raced ahead: electrical recording arrived in 1925; Hindemith and Toch layered speed-altered discs in 1930; Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) spun recorded tones. Practical tape recorders appeared in 1935; stereo tests by 1942; U.S. commercial machines after World War II (1948). In Cairo in 1944, student Halim El-Dabh processed a zaar ceremony on wire—The Expression of Zaar—often cited as the earliest tape piece. Pierre Schaeffer launched musique concrète in Paris; RDF broadcast Étude aux chemins de fer on 5 October 1948, and 1950 brought Symphonie pour un homme seul with Pierre Henry.
RTF founded a dedicated electronic studio in Paris in 1951. Karlheinz Stockhausen worked briefly with Schaeffer in 1952, then for years at Cologne’s WDR Studio; Germany in 1953 heard music made solely from electronic generators. The same decade brought Japanese and American studios and early computer algorithmic composition. 1960s live electronics and Japanese instruments shaped industry; early-1970s Moogs and drum machines popularized synth sound; disco, krautrock, new wave, synth-pop, hip-hop, and EDM spread the vocabulary. Early-1980s Yamaha DX7 and MIDI, then cheaper 1990s gear, made electronic production everyday culture—Berlin’s Love Parade from 1989 drew over a million celebrants.
Today the field spans experimental art music to Middle Eastern fusions of traditional instruments with ambient and techno.
Source: Electronic music
