Electronic music pioneers

[Mr Arkadin]

Not as saucy as Delia, but important as she set up the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and created the wonderful Oramics machine, which I've seen in the the London Science Museum. It's...

Daphne Oram
1925 – 2003

http://daphneoram.org/category/news/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNaqvAH7 ... VytDas9jQ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4tEJz6n ... VytDas9jQ0

http://sparksinelectricaljelly.blogspot ... useum.html

[Roland Kuit]

Thanks! I was planning her in too
https://soundcloud.com/roland-kuit/kiss ... for-daphne

[dante]

Daphne Oram

Wow ! Merryl Streep should play her in an autobiographical movie ! Now that would be something - a big screen hollywood production about a BBC woman doing electronic music.

I'm sure it would be more believable than Michael Douglas trying to play Liberace

[Roland Kuit]

Kaija Saariaho

Born in 1952 in Finland, Kaija Saariaho lived a childhood embedded in music, playing several instruments. In parallel to musical studies, she started art studies, at the Fine Arts School of Helsinki, that she quickly quit to concentrate on music. At the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, she received the composition teachings of Paavo Heininen, before to follow, in Darmstadt then in Fribourg, the courses of Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber.

Characterizing her works of the eighties, her sensual writing, descriptive and lyrical, unfold subtile transformations. Her research of new timbres has stimumlated her study of new technics in the instrumantal as well as the computer domain, for which starting in 1982, she initiated herself at Ircam. This practice constitutes an important element of her compositions.

She confirms her international notoriety with works such as Verblendungen for orchestra and tape(1982-84), Lichtbogen for chamber ensemble and live-electronics (1985-86), Nymphéa (1987) commission of the Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet.
http://www.saariaho.org/

http://youtu.be/nKlcC4YrrY0

Saariaho- Lichtbogen:
http://youtu.be/Z9y1b91uVuA

[Roland Kuit]

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison, France. He first studied mathematics, then music at the Paris Conservatory (CNSM), where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. In 1954, with the support of Jean-Louis Barrault, he founded the Domaine musical in Paris – one of the first concert series dedicated entirely to the performance of modern music – and remained their director until 1967.

Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Baden-Baden, Germany. From 1960 to 1962 he taught composition at the Music Academy in Basel. As a composer, conductor and teacher, Pierre Boulez has made a decisive contribution to the development of music in the 20th century and inspired generations of young musicians with his pioneering spirit. His recordings have earned him a total of 26 Grammys and vast numbers of other prestigious awards.
Director of IRCAM, Paris

Pierre Boulez, "Anthemes 2" (1997) for violin and electronic alterations. Hae-Sun Kang, violin solo:
http://youtu.be/_s_x4cKIXgo

[Roland Kuit]

Ton Bruynèl
(Utrecht January 26th 1934 - May 5th 1998 in Mailly, France) was a Dutch composer of mainly electronic music.

From 1952 to 1956 he studied piano with Wolfgang Wijdeveld at the Utrecht Conservatory of Music. His choice of teacher was motivated both by the fact that Wijdeveld had been a pupil of Béla Bartók and that he was active as a composer at a time when composition was not offered as a course of study in Utrecht.

In defiance of the cold shoulder given to composition, Bruynèl banded together with fellow students Peter Schat and Jan van Vlijmen, rallying round the composer Kees van Baaren. Van Baaren introduced his young disciples to dodecaphony, with which Bruynèl felt little affinity. His attention, rather, was focused enthusiastically on the French musique concrète. He chose his instrumentation with the reproduction of concrete sounds in mind, and oriented himself with the Electronic Music Studio at the universities of Utrecht and Delft , later renamed the Institute for Sonology.

In 1957 he established his own studio in Utrecht - the first private studio in The Netherlands - specializing in writing music which combines electronic and acoustic sounds. In the 1970s and 1980s he taught electronic-composition at the Utrecht Conservatory.

Documentary:
http://dai.ly/x54d4s

Nocturne en Pedraza for flute and tape:
http://youtu.be/ZqC4gi69wnI

[Roland Kuit]

Jean-Claude Risset

Composer Jean-Claude Risset was a pioneer in the field of computer music and recipient of a great many honors for this music and research (especially in the area of sound synthesis). After studying the sciences, in addition to composition and piano with teachers like André Jolivet (Le Jeune France co-founder), Risset went on to work at Bell Labs, with Max Matthews, for a few years in the late '60s, working on applications that would imitate instruments and others sounds. He brought sound synthesis to Orsay in the early '70s, and Marseille and Paris -- to the Institute for Acoustic Music Research and Creation, with Pierre Boulez -- in the mid-'70s. He became IRCAM's computer music director from 1975-1979.



Computer Suite From Little Boy, 1968:

http://youtu.be/RcX0ubvoZUA

[Roland Kuit]

Michel Philippot

2 February 1925 in Verzy – 28 July 1996 in Vincennes) was a French composer, mathematician, acoustician, musicologist, aesthetician, broadcaster, and educator.
In 1959 he became assistant to Pierre Schaeffer in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and later worked under Henri Barraud at France-Culture. From 1964 to 1972 he was in charge of music programs, then became a technical adviser to the Director General of Radio France and to the President of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel. From 1969 to 1976 he also taught musicology and aesthetics at the Universities of Paris I and IV, and from 1970 was Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. In 1976 he moved to Brazil in order to create the department of music at the University of the State of São Paulo, as well as to take up a position as Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Upon returning to France in 1983, he resumed his occupation as technical advisor to INA (until 1989) and his professorship at the Paris Conservatory (until 1990).
Philippot’s compositions are almost exclusively instrumental, in a style indebted in part to Debussy, while his essentially contrapuntal textures adhere to the Schoenbergian principle of continuous variation.
His honors include the Grand Prix national de la musique (1987), and the presidency of the Académie Charles Cros.(Wiki)


Etude III, 1962:
http://youtu.be/q7o2pvpeddI

[Roland Kuit]

Mauricio Kagel
December 24, 1931 – September 18, 2000

He studied music, history of literature, and philosophy in Buenos Aires (Grimshaw 2009). In 1957 he came as a scholar to Cologne, Germany, where he lived until his death.
From 1960–66 and 1972–76, he taught at the International Summer School at Darmstadt (Attinello 2001).
He taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1964 to 1965 as Slee Professor of music theory and at the Berlin Film and Television Academy as a visiting lecturer. He served as director of courses for new music in Gothenburg and Cologne (Attinello 2001). He was professor for new music theatre at the Cologne Conservatory from 1974 to 1997.
Invited by Walter Fink, he was the second composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 1991. In 2000 he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Wiki



Transición I, 1958:

http://youtu.be/bqGobBhbSlg

[Roland Kuit]

Eliane Radigue

Electronic music composer Eliane Radigue (1932), was a pioneer of synthesizer music in the 1960′s and 70′s. Working firstly as an assistant to Pierre Schaeffer, she began to compose her own style of drawn-out, minimal pieces whilst studying at New York University. There she developed her sound predominantly using the ARP 2500 modular system, which was subsequently compared to aspects of Buddhist meditative techniques. Radigue became a follower of Buddhism and it had a profound effect on her work, encouraging the sparse and meditative nature of her compositions.

Islas resonantes:
http://youtu.be/1RrsiGmLp_E

[Roland Kuit]

Bülent Arel
(23 April 1919 – 24 November 1990) was a Turkish-born composer of contemporary classical music and electronic music.

He was born in Istanbul, and studied composition at the Ankara Conservatory and sound engineering in Paris. He later taught at the Ankara Conservatory, established the Helikon Society of Contemporary Arts, and served as the first music director of Radio Ankara from 1951 to 1959. He was also a painter and sculptor, and several of his works are in the permanent collection of the Turkish National Gallery.
In 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 1962, he worked with Edgard Varèse on the electronic sections of Varèse's Déserts.
He also designed and installed the electronic music laboratory at Yale University, where he taught from 1961 to 1970, and he established the electronic music program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught from 1971 until his retirement in 1989. Besides electronic works, Mr. Arel wrote chamber music, vocal works, and symphonic pieces, including a series of works commissioned by the Mimi Garrard Dance Theater.
In the course of his work he invented the 'splicing tape dispenser', as well as other devices for tape handling. He was a pioneer of looping techniques.(Wiki)

Stereo Electronic Music No.1, 1960:
http://youtu.be/rsNGUzYZv5c

[Roland Kuit]

Louis and Bebe Barron

Bebe Barron (16 June 1925 – 20 April 2008) and Louis Barron (23 April 1920 – 1 November 1989) were two American pioneers in the field of electronic music. They are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape, and the first entirely electronic film score for the MGM movie Forbidden Planet (1956). Wiki

Love at the Swimming Hole:
http://youtu.be/dwaaY34OQaM

Excerpt from Geoff Elliot's tribute documentary:
http://youtu.be/YSFoILcyqAU

[Roland Kuit]

Otto Clarence Luening
(June 15, 1900 – September 2, 1996)
was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music.

Luening's 'Tape Music', including A Poem in Cycles & Bells, Gargoyles for Violin & Synthesized Sound, and Sounds of New Music demonstrated the early potential of synthesizers and special editing techniques for electronic music. An October 28, 1952 concert with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City introduced Fantasy in Space, flute recordings manipulated on magnetic tape, and led to an appearance on The Today Show with Dave Garroway. Luening was co-founder, along with Ussachevsky, of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1958. He also co-founded Composers Recordings, Inc. in 1954, with Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel. Wiki

"Low Speed", 1952:
http://youtu.be/Axwf6hVUnoI

[Roland Kuit]

Rune Lindblad
(Born 12 May 1923 in Gothenburg – 5 May 1991) was a Swedish composer of Musique concrète and electronic music, and visual artist.

He first began composing in 1953 and composed over 200 works.
His first piece, "Party", is considered the first electroacoustic work created in Sweden.
For three years he experimented with optics and sound, and produced five works using over 1800 meters of film.
On 14 February 1957, Lindblad, Sven-Eric Johansson, and Bruno Epstein put on the first concert of concrète and electronic music in Sweden at the Folkets hus in Gothenburg. The audience responded poorly and demanded refunds, critics referred to the music as "pure torture".

"Glaciär from Predestination, Proprius", 1975:
http://youtu.be/DMmHPKurz2Y

[Roland Kuit]

Tod Dockstader

Tod Dockstader (born March 20, 1932 in Saint Paul, Minnesota) is an American composer of electronic music, and particularly musique concrète. He studied painting and film while at the University of Minnesota, before moving to Hollywood in 1955, to become an apprentice film editor. He moved into work as a sound engineer in 1958, and apprenticed at Gotham Recording Studios, where he first started composing. Dockstader's first record, Eight Electronic Pieces, was released in 1960, and was later used as the soundtrack to Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969). He continued to create music throughout the first half of that decade, working principally with tape manipulation effects. In 1966 Owl Records released four albums of his work from this period including what many consider to be Dockstader's masterpiece, "Quatermass".

"Apocalypse part II", 1961:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfutkYDP ... A5FC925274

[hubird]

One of the here mentioned pioneers died two days ago at age of 83: Dutch modernist Dick Raaijmakers, pseudonym Kid Baltan.
Worked at Philips' physics laboratoty Natlab in the 50ties, and was lector Electronic and Contemporary Music at the Royal Con till 1995 at the Royal Conservatooire in The Hague.

Check him out here, 'The smallest sound', 1988:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... ykZYy82eGs

Freaks these guys were, you could say investigating the ultimate conditions for music (in relation to technology).
Modern electronic (dance) music partly does the same, but knew to popularise it to the masses, not the least achievement, even without intending the fundamental investigation as such.

an other video about him and his experiments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... I6S6hyV9MY

[Mr Arkadin]

Aw man, I love Kid Baltan. Thanks for the info. Big Dockstader fan here too (and he's still producing albums every so often).

[hubird]

Kid Baltan is an anagram van 'Dik Natlab', his surname with collegues, after his own experimental studio Natlab, as you probably knew already. ('Nat' as abbrevation of natuurkundig, 'physical' in English).

Since years already I ask myself if there would be some connection between the old pioneer style of experimenting and popular modern electronic music.
Probably the latter came to late for that, tho Raaijmakers is said having followed devellopments in electronic music up to 2000.
He composed a lot for avangardistic theatre, film and performancies in many unconventional settings, and also for the prestigious Holland Festival theatre group Hollandia.
But it's a fact that at the same time Musique Concrète got some audiance the vinyl single got popular, made big by the new dance styles of Elvis, Bill Haley and all others.

In Holland we also had some succesful composers of avangardistic music, like Louis Andriessen and the like, but the music of those pioneers and later followers wasn't really appealing to the 'average' music lover, to say the least.
Who doesn't know this classic music piece where at some precise point a big plate with porcelain dinnerware gets smashed into a huge wooden box, as a natural cymbal (enlight me for composer and name).
Ex queen Beatrix, visual artist and painter in her free time between Bilderberger conferences, and known for her sincere interest in art and modern developments, was often present at the Holland festival as well as with this piece of modern music.
This to show the reach of these modern art performances, the whole piece of music is broadcasted on tv here.
But all this appealed for quite specialized or if you want elitist avangarde scenes.

Sure, there's John Cage, and other modern composers who got some audiance in scenes of modern 'pop music', but the line is thin and exclusive, as far as I know.

In fact these pioneers, if still alife, could be very pleased to see electronic and partly very abstract music being so widely popular outside the cultural electronic arts avangarde.
Away from personal musical preferences, If you listen to dance music, you'll notice that the upper layer of dance music is extremely 'abstract', especially in Psy Trance music.
There are hardly real melodical elements, let alone harmonic developments, just like with the experiments and compositions of the pioneers as presented here so nicely by Roland.

Yet tenth's of thousends of people worldwide immerse themselves for more than a week at a time in this music.
The only condition which makes this possible is purely the dance character of the music.
It's a pity we can't ask these pioneers anymore what they'd think about this remarkable phenomenon, isn't it?

A question I also have in mind since at least 20 years is were the old pioneers of the creators of electronic instruments known with the avangardist's music styles?
Did Bob Moog know the early Musique Concrète? Was John Bowen aware of it? Was it kind of an inspiration for them?
I hardly can believe, it looks to me that both devellopments ware totally separate of each other.
Especially in the States, but I'm not knowledged in this regard.
The TB303 got only famous after some weirdos decided to explore the filter of it and chain it to a hard beat on the 606 and other early midi instruments.

I find these questions really interesting, but answers won't be given anymore, as history knows only future.
Still interesting as experiment of thought.

Note: can't find the video posted on Planetz recently, with life experimenting with a few classic synths like a MS20 or something, and I saw a Virus also.
It's quite freaky, but at the very moment a (Psy) beat comes in it all suddenly gets exiting to me and gets really sense to me.
A nice exemple of what a good beat can do to 'experimental' pure electronic sounds

[Roland Kuit]

Terrible news. I was in NY so I didn't get this.
I knew him and till a few years ago I visited him at home sometimes.
I talked about him and his smallest sound on the radio a while ago.
SHOCK!

[Roland Kuit]

Luc Ferrari
(February 5, 1929 – August 22, 2005)

Luc Ferrari was born in Paris, and was trained in music at a very young age, studying the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first works were freely atonal. A case of tuberculosis in his youth interrupted his career as a pianist. From then on he mostly concentrated on musical composition. During this illness he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the radio receiver, with pioneers such as Schönberg, Berg, and Webern.

In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet Edgard Varèse, whose Déserts he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in Déserts serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use magnetic tape in his own music. In 1958 he co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio. By the early 1960, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds to suggest a dramatic narrative. The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language.

Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach and, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of John Cage's idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this. Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.(Wiki)

Etude aux accidents musique concrete tape music:
http://youtu.be/mg4HGRRj00s