Electronic music pioneers

[Roland Kuit]

To Borg,

[I want to add Frank Zappa to the list. He beat the Beatles and Brian Wilson in the race to bring us the first pop album where the studio was used as a new way of designing music, had always the most cutting edge technology available for his musicians and himself, and he definately may be given the title of 'academic'...}

I second that.
Here in The Hague, Frank Zappa was honoured by concerts of his music at the Royal Conservatoire.

Max/Msp, I got my first lessons in that on the IRCAM, Paris.
In the composition classes of Philippe Manoury.

ps: I missed Serge Verstockt, before or after my time there. I'm 55 years old.
About the budgets, pop music pays better.

[Roland Kuit]

For Dante, about Arne Nordheim:
This was the only electronic work I could find on youtube.
But....
..forbidden music, public struggles
The congregation at Trinity Church in Oslo took the dramatic step of forbidding the performance of the organ works of Györgi Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. At concerts in the Oslo University Aula, which was then the Norwegian capital's main concert venue, musicians refused to sing or knock on their instruments. Many performers were hostile to the new music. They said that they did not want to bring the Cold War and the problems of the world into the concert halls. During these years, Nordheim was extremely active within the composers' organizations. In his position as chairman of the Norwegian Society of Composers and the organization New Music (ISCM), he fought hard for the new music. He also influenced public opinion as music critic for the daily newspaper Dagbladet, where he used a barbed and articulate pen to ridicule those members of the Norwegian music community who accepted mediocre performances of the standard repertoire and refused to recognize the value of the new music. Nordheim struggled against the conservative press, and had no trouble dealing with contemptuous reviews of his own music. But when a reviewer on one occasion claimed that a commissioned work by one of Nordheim's colleagues was a waste of the taxpayers' money, he went in person to the editor's office and saw to it that this particular reviewer was never allowed to express an opinion on contemporary music again.(..portrait of a composer - by Harald Herresthal)

[Roland Kuit]

[We have a diatonic system and that´s it what´s being used to compose/create music]

Let's have a look into different notations and sounds/music:

Ligeti - Artikulation:
http://youtu.be/71hNl_skTZQ

Penderecki - Threnody:
http://youtu.be/HilGthRhwP8

Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis:
http://youtu.be/SZazYFchLRI
(please read the comments)

I hear people think: is this music? This is 'just' organised sound.

PRECISELY!!!!

It is, like a diatonic system is.
It is JUST about RULES.

[Roland Kuit]

And look what you can do with now-a-days technology and acoustic instruments:
http://vimeo.com/59825472

The Next Music becomes Now Music.

[dante]

For Dante, about Arne Nordheim:
He used a barbed and articulate pen to ridicule those members of the Norwegian music community who accepted mediocre performances of the standard repertoire and refused to recognize the value of the new music.

I agree with that, because there IS value in new and not just old. And vice versa. And innovational value in new and ( even commercial ) not just old.

Zappa's use of Electronics (synclavier ) seems to me to be based on practicality rather than innovation. He tired of live audiences, band issues and then of course had health issues.

I see him as a music pioneer rather than an 'electronic' music pioneer. He had already done his recognised pioneering pre electronics - unless you count amps and effects.

And to me, BT has pioneered more in the use of electronics, and I'm not just talking about Csound but his overall output, recognised industry wide ( including Keyboard magazine and Peter Gabriel - just the start of a long list ) :

From xelon:

BT mounts mesmerizing journeys with his compositions. He is not only a virtuoso programmer, but an extremely gifted musician. – Peter Gabriel speaking to the LA Times.

Given his enviable resume and illustrious fifteen+ year career, it is difficult to imagine that platinum-selling artist, visionary producer, film composer and technologist BT may only now be beginning to create the best work of his career. An internationally-renowned recording artist himself, he is trusted by superstars such as Sting, Britney Spears, Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, Madonna, Seal and Peter Gabriel to produce modernist and memorable hits, with a bleeding-edge electronic flair. He has composed unforgettable scores for films The Fast and the Furious, Go, Stealth and Oscar-award winning Monster. With his latest two-hour, double-disk opus, These Hopeful Machines, BT definitively weaves both the technical prowess and compositional mastery that reminds us all why he’s the composer that all other composers and producers study. On his last full-length LP, This Binary Universe, he created an entirely new genre of evocative electro-acoustic music. As Keyboard Magazine wrote in their review of the album, “In a hundred years, it could well be studied as the first major work of the new millennium. It’s that good.” Throughout his illustrious career, BT has been able to seamlessly weave together complex, groundbreaking musical elements into compositions that resonate with listeners of all types without seeming academic and incomprehensible.From an early age, BT, born Brian Transeau, demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for playing and understanding classical music. He was heavily influenced by avant-garde and romantic composers such as Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy and Rachmaninov. His biggest influences, however, were from everyday sounds that most would take for granted. Growing up in his childhood home in Maryland, BT would notice the meter of the grandfather clock in his foyer, the micro-rhythms of crickets and cicadas and the ambience of passing trains at night.

“When examining my creation process, it makes perfect sense why I am a forced technologist,” he explains. ”I frequently face the fact that the tools I need to compose music simply don’t exist. It is like being an architect without bricks or mortar. I routinely create my own bricks and connective tissue as the diving off point to the compositional process.” The drive to actualize the tools BT envisions has led to his evolution as one of the most cutting-edge programmers and technologists in music today. He has expanded this reach into a visionary software venture, Sonik Architects which launched its critically- and commercially-acclaimed iPhone application, Sonifi™, last fall.

[Roland Kuit]

Frank Zappa's use of the synclavier is out of practical reasons.
I agree on that. It is not cutting edge sound design but design musically.

Frank Zappa - Worms from Hell - Synclavier Music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFFpSVmj ... IsmwvJemiU

And acoustic:

Zappa - 1984 Boulez conducts Zappa: /The perfect stranger:
http://youtu.be/VJWltyCv20o

[scary808]

Thank you for this thread Roland! I recently discovered Dennis Smalley's "Tides".

[Roland Kuit]

Vânia Dantas Leite
(b.13 August 1945) is a Brazilian pianist, conductor, music educator and composer.
Vânia Dantas Leite was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and studied composition with Frederico Egger and piano with Zila de M. Brito at the Escola Nacional de Musica. In 1974 she began to study electronic music and purchased equipment from Electronic Music Studio in London. She established a private laboratory in Rio de Janeiro and began to participate in European and American festivals as a composer of electronic music.(Wiki)

In 1981 she took a teaching position at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She also founded and served as director of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music of the Villa-Lobos Institute (SE-FIR).

Honors and awards:

* 1972-1st place National Composition Contest
* 1973-3rd place International Conducting Competition
* 1996-Rio de Janeiro RJ - Award Scholarship Program



Vânia Dantas Leite: Di-Stances, 1982:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxwWOtW3 ... re&index=2

[Roland Kuit]

İlhan Mimaroğlu
(March 11, 1926 – July 17, 2012) was a musician and electronic music composer. He was born in Istanbul, Turkey, the son of the famous architect Mimar Kemaleddin Bey depicted on the Turkish lira banknotes, denomination 20 lira, of the 2009 E-9 emission. He graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1945 and the Ankara Law School in 1949. He went to study in New York supported by a Rockefeller Scholarship. He studied musicology at Columbia University under Paul Henry Lang and composition under Douglas Moore.

During the 1960s he studied in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center under Vladimir Ussachevsky and on occasions worked with Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe. His notable students included Ingram Marshall.

He worked as a producer for Atlantic Records, where he created his own record label, Finnadar Records, in 1971. In the same year he collaborated with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on a moving anti-war statement, Sing Me a Song of Songmy. He also was the producer for Charles Mingus’ Changes One and Changes Two, as well as Federico Fellini’s Satyricon.

He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1971.(Wiki)

İlhan Mimaroğlu: To Kill a Sunrise, 1974:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWEKfWzO ... e&index=13

[Bud Weiser]

To Bud, after one coffee!

after a few days and lots of coffees ...

Approach to what?

Music and composition, even arranging ...

I´ve met a lot off really skilled composers/arrangers who did excellent work when writing for acoustic instruments but failed when dealing w/ electronic instruments, also included the ones dealing w/ the diatonic system,- lets say the electric guitar incl. it´s FX and amplification as well as synthesizers using standard tuning.

You mentioned:
"New ways in creating sound and creating music (composition)"
"New technologies can bring more possibilities."

and ...

"We can talk about about how electronic music evolves..."

There was the possibility to say "how music envolves .." because you were talking about "music (composition)" before, but now you used the term "electronic music" and to me, electronic music is somewhat different from music because what we normally call music comes w/ the traditions and the RULES from the past,- isn´t it ?

AND, when you say music,- it´s not automatically composed (and/or arranged) but can also be improvised.

Now, when we talk about "new ways creating sound",- to me that´s different than talking about "new ways creating music/composition".
Sound design and composition is 2 different tasks and there are existing different tools for these tasks too and if that weren´t the case, we did not have different terms for these tasks.

I agree on new technologies can bring more possibilities,- as a general statement.
On a individual basis, using of whatever tools, new or old, might shine or fail.

Not for you, that's fine.
I played Bach too, and others(still do).

Please don´t take my statements/post too personal.
My intention was not being offensive.

I just only found it necessary to mention the diatonic system and listening habit of the masses of music consumers.
It does not mean I´m limited to that at all.
And when we go back in time, Bach was still popmusic in the past as is Miley Cyrus´ or Lady Gaga´s stuff today.

That is a matter of opinion.

Yes,- and a matter of intention too.

Talking about composition when using machines:

As a general rule,- you don´t need a machine to compose something.
I hope you agree on that.

Now, when someone programs a machine,- I try to keep it short here,- it can be he´s tinkering w/ that machine as long as there comes out an audible result he might call a composition and consequently music.
To me, that´s the way of trial and error where users fail 99% of the time until something usable comes up.

Not enough, when programming a machine which is some part of sound design for sure and even when someone does it with the intention of a sounddesigner, in these resulting textures there might come up structures the human brain recognizes as some kind of "theme" or "melody",- but it isn´t because it randomly build up and was not the intention of the programmer even he´s now happy w/ that result.

But, when someone is using that machine to demonstrate a idea he already imagined and realized in his head and follows a strategy to come to that target, that is (possibly) a composition using an electronic music tool.

It´s complex and my english is possibly not good enough the talk about that in depth for a longer time,- it would be much easier in german for me though.

Thanks, it's sounding nearly as music we all know. But these were a kind of 'finger exercises' before the disruptness comes in.

Unfortunately I cannot find any translation for the word disruptness ...
http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html# ... wSingle=on

Wrong. A concert pianist uses as much calories as a road worker.

Maybe, but that wasn´t the point.
Instead it was:
When someone creates sound and/or composes using an electronic instrument like a modular synth,- hardware or software using a computer as the host,- it consumates electricity and when you use a pen, a sheet of paper and the piano,- it doesn´t.

A concert pianist is also not consequently a composer, just only a performer/interpreter when thinking about a solo performer or orchestral pianist in the classical music domain p.ex..

I feel free asking why guys like Oscar Peterson or Joey de Francesco were so fat and I rarely see fat roadworkers ...

I totally agree.

thx !

For and by whom?

creator and listener ...

My music is considered as music by my teachers.
Pioneers in their fields.
And nowadays as such by professors world wide.

That´s why I said please don´t take my post(s) too personal.
I´m pretty sure you work intentional, may it be sound design or composition.
In fact, I don´t care if it´s sound design or composition, probably you do.

If yes,- what´s so bad about being a (successful) sound designer over being a composer.
Is it so important to be a composer ?

If you like I can write more about composition.

Feel free doing that,- it might be very interesting.

There is much more than a diatonic system!

Yes, I know !
But not many people in the western world listen to that and/or understand it.

BTW, you can find my MUSIC at:
DONEMUS Publishing House of Dutch Contemporary Music:
https://webshop.donemus.com/action/front/home

thank you for the link,- I´ll have a listen !

best

Bud

[Roland Kuit]

Thank you Bud for your input!

It is a long list you put here and certainly I will come back on some you mentioned here.
I certainly agree with you that the Diatonic system is very important for most western ears and thus in composition.
I think we can agree that composition with sounds of trains and tape will have a different approach.(Pierre Schaeffer)
or/and doors and tape by his assistant Pierre Henry(the Wizard's Apprentice).

Did you know when playing a whole piece of music(from Bach, in this matter) was used to create one(!) single note/sound?

Karlheinz Stockhausen came with the basic idea to create cells. Patterns that formed sounds(actually it was his assistant Werner Kaegi, my teacher). Formalised Music.

Apart from these 2 ways there other rules to compose music.

[Bud Weiser]

Thank you Bud for your input!

It is a long list you put here and certainly I will come back on some you mentioned here.
I certainly agree with you that the Diatonic system is very important for most western ears and thus in composition.
I think we can agree that composition with sounds of trains and tape will have a different approach.(Pierre Schaeffer)
or/and doors and tape by his assistant Pierre Henry(the Wizard's Apprentice).

Did you know when playing a whole piece of music(from Bach, in this matter) was used to create one(!) single note/sound?

Karlheinz Stockhausen came with the basic idea to create cells. Patterns that formed sounds(actually it was his assistant Werner Kaegi, my teacher). Formalised Music.

Apart from these 2 ways there other rules to compose music.

Hi Roland !

I don´t have much time too and just only logged in here for some minutes using the occasion to edit some typos I´ve found in my post above .
More later because I´ll be out of the house ´til wednesday.

´til later

Bud

[Roland Kuit]

Intermezzo


[And when we go back in time, Bach was still popmusic in the past as is Miley Cyrus´ or Lady Gaga´s stuff today.]

or better:

Johann Pachelbel(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Pachelbel)

Pachelbel, Canon in D Major:
http://youtu.be/8Af372EQLck

For instance U2 - With Or Without You;
http://youtu.be/XmSdTa9kaiQ

And many more.....

The Godfather of pop chords

[Roland Kuit]

An other question pops up in mind.

We have heard lots of pioneers in this thread.
Pioneers that had a vision about music, sound and tools.
Because of them we can use our highly sophisticated hard- and software.
They helped to build this enormous arsenal of possibilities.

So where is it all heading to?
Will it bring the music further?
To a higher level?
Lots of people have access to highly sophisticated soft- and hardware nowadays.
Will they use this only to the limits of their scope?
Hightech sentiments?
Our (electronic)instruments are changing rapidly.
What will the future bring us?

[Roland Kuit]

A leap forward in this topic:


Daniel Trueman

Dan Trueman is an American composer, fiddler, and electronic musician. He began studying violin at the age of 4, and decades later, after a chance encounter, fell in love with the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, an instrument and tradition that has deeply affected all of his work, whether as a fiddler, a composer, or musical explorer. With the Hardanger fiddle, and his new 5-string Hardanger-inspired "5x5 fiddle," Dan has performed his music with many groups and musicians, including Trollstilt and QQQ, the American Composers Orchestra, So Percussion, the Brentano and Daedelus string quartets, the Crash Ensemble, many wonderful fiddlers, and others, and has performed across America, Ireland, and Norway. But his explorations of musical instruments have extended beyond the fiddle into new technologies; Dan is the co-founder and Director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, the first ensemble of its size and kind that has led to the formation of similarly inspired ensembles across the world, from Oslo to Dublin, to Stanford and Bangkok. Dan's compositional work reflects this complex and broad range of activities, exploring rhythmic connections between traditional dance music and machines, for instance, or engaging with the unusual phrasing, tuning and ornamentation of the traditional Norwegian music while trying to discover new music that is singularly inspired by, and only possible with, new digital instruments that he designs and constructs. Dan's work has been recognized by grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, among others, and he is Professor of Music at Princeton University. His music is published by Good Child Music.



Daniel Trueman, The Lobster Quadrille:
http://youtu.be/rbf5nZqRjyA

btw: on this video you see a speaker box.
I used such a artificial omni-directional sound sourcer for my research in violin sound at the IRCAM.

[Roland Kuit]

Here few pics of me with such speaker and in the anechoic chamber at the IRCAM(way back):

[Roland Kuit]

I have limited time and I don't have the Xite-1 any more to test the wonderful new things I see here)
With a small group of experts in the Netherlands I will continue this search.
Hereby I would like your collaboration.
Please read this:
http://www.concertzender.nl/il-figlio-di-luigi/

Roland Kuit



Independent researcher, lecturer modular synthesis and composition.
Roland Kuit received his first piano and recorder lessons at the age of six.
Fascinated by the phenomenon 'sound' he made his first improvisations. The tape recorder at home was not only used to record these sessions but also all kinds of noises. He started playing the flute at the age of eleven. One year later he was accepted at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
When electronic music crossed his path, he subscribed at the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands. Roland studied analogue modular sound design and composition under Jaap Vink and Frits Weiland. Roland attended lectures about MIDIM/VOSIM given by Werner Kaegi and Stan Tempelaars as well as Fortran IV music from Gottfried M. Koenig (1981-1985) and Paul Berg's lectures PILE.
Continued his study in interactive composition and acoustics at the IRCAM, Paris. (Kaija Saariaho and Philippe Manoury).
His concepts of sound are used as teaching material at universities worldwide.


Roland Kuit, New Chamber Music, 1996:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ1B3w5 ... hbWTrWZ_oF

[Roland Kuit]

Tera de Marez Oyens
(5 August 1932, Velsen -- 29 August 1996, Hilversum) was a Dutch composer. Her works included chamber music and song cycles, in the sixties she experimented with the tone poem and electronic music.



This track appears on 'Anthology Of Dutch Electronic Tape Music - Volume 2 (1966 - 1977)' on Basta (2008)

http://youtu.be/BaijUopBYqk

[Roland Kuit]

Akos Rozmann

Ákos Rózmann (1939-2005) was a Hungarian-Swedish modernist composer and organist, notable for his epic electroacoustic compositions inspired by Buddhist and Catholic liturgy.

Rózmann discovered electroacoustic music while pursuing a postgraduate degree in composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music and was awarded at the Bourges Concours International de Musique Électroacoustique for his first experiment, Impulsioni, in 1976. The medium would come to define the rest of Rózmann’s life as a composer of evocative, surrealist soundscapes. An uncompromising visionary and devotee to his work process, the existential depth and drama of Rózmann’s long works emerged out of decades of industry at the Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm and his own studio in the basement of the Catholic Cathedral, where he played as the resident organist.

His second piece, the six-hour Tolv stationer (Twelve Stations), was composed over a period of 23 years, integrating acoustic organ into synthetic material and premiered at the Stockholm Culture House. While almost all of his nearly thirty compositions were performed in Sweden in his lifetime, only one was played in public concert in his native country, Hungary. Trumpetmusette was composed for the Budapest Electroacoustic Music Festival of the Hungarian Radio, premiered there in 1994.

Rózmann lived out his later years in the Stockholm suburb of Skogas, where he completed his final work, Orgelstycke nr III/a (Organ Piece Nr. III/a) and saw his biggest concert: Mässa (Mass), composed between 1989 and 2004 and performed over five days at the Stockholm New Music festival. He was diagnosed with and died of pancreatic cancer one year later. A remastered version of Rózmann’s first large-scale masterpiece and dreamscape, Bilder inför drömmen och döden (“Images of Dream and Death”), recorded on a Buchla synthesizer between 1974 and 1977, was released as a triple LP on Editions Mego’s Ideologic Organ imprint in 2013 in an effort to vindicate and share the vision of this electronic music luminary. (CTM Festival)



Akos Rozmann - Images of the Dream and Death Part I & II [Ideologic Organ]:
http://youtu.be/eGB_o5WJrVA

[Roland Kuit]

Pietro Grossi
(Venice 15 April 1917 – Florence 2002) was an Italian composer pioneer of computer music, visual artist and hacker ahead of his time. He began in Italy, experimenting with electronic techniques in the early sixties.

Pietro Grossi was born in Venice, and he studied in Bologna eventually taking a diploma in composition and violoncello. In the sixties Grossi taught at the Conservatory of Florence and began to research and experiment with electroacoustic music. From 1936 to 1966 was the first cellist of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino orchestra. Grossi began to experiment with electroacoustic music in the 1950s. By 1962, he had become the first Italian to carry out successful research in the field of computer music.

In 1963, he turned his interest to electronic music and founded the S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) which made its headquarters in Florence at the Conservatorio, and he also became a lecturer in this subject.

In 1964 he organized events with the association Contemporary Musical Life that introduced in Italy the work of John Cage. In 1965 he obtained the institution of the first professorship of Electronic Music in Italy.

In 1967 he made the first experiences in computer music.

In 1970 he made his first approaches to musical telematics organizing a performance with a link between Rimini (Pio Manzù Foundation) and Pisa (CNUCE). By invitation of lannis Xenakis, he presented another telematic concert between Pisa and Paris in 1974. His contributions to the development of new technological musical instruments and to the creation of software packages for music-processing design have been fundamental.

He has not limited his work to the musical world, but also engaged in contemporary art. In the eighties he was working on new forms of artistic production oriented toward the use of personal computers in the visual arts. Grossi started to develop visual elaborations created on a personal computer with programs provided with "self-decision making" and that works out the concept of HomeArt (1986), by way of the personal computer, raises the artistic aspirations and potential latent in each one of us to the highest level of autonomous decision making conceivable today, and the idea of personal artistic expression: “a piece is not only a work (of art), but also one of the many “works” one can freely transform: everything is temporary, everything can change at any time, ideas are not personal anymore, they are open to every solution, everybody could use them”. Grossi has always been interested in every form of artistic expression. The last step of his HomeArt, is the creation of a series of unicum books, electronically produced and symbolically called HomeBooks (1991): each work is completely different from the others, thanks to the strong flexibility of the digital means. Sergio Maltagliati will continue this project creating autom@tedVisuaL software in 2012, which generates always different graphical variations. It is based on HomeArt’s Q.Basic source code. This first release autom@tedVisuaL 1.0 has produced 45 graphical single samples, which have been sammled and published.

He collaborated in order to experiment with electronic sound and composition with the computer music division of "CNUCE" (Institute of the National Research Council of Pisa).

Grossi’s latest multimedia experiments were with interactive sound and graphics. His later works involved automated and generative visual music software, autom@tedVisualMusiC 1.0 which he extended beyond the realms of music into the interactive work for the Internet, conceiving and collaborating with Sergio Maltagliati in 1997 of the first Italian interactive work for the web netOper@,entertaining in his own house study the first on-line performance.(Wiki)



Studio Di Fonologia Musicale Di Firenze - Mixed Paganini (Pietro Grossi) ,1967:
http://youtu.be/ZQSP_wF7wSY