Chapter 14Classical and Experimental Music

Contents•Perspectives on Electronic Music•Varèse and the Listener’s Experiment•Composing Electronic Music•Stockhausen: Vibrations of His Universe•Wendy Carlos: In a More Classical Tradition•The Art of Drones and Minimalism•Process Music•The San Francisco Tape Music Center

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• The aesthetic clash over approaches to electronic music between the French and Germans during the 1950s was short-lived due to the refusal of artists to be contained by any single school of thought or dogmatic approach to organizing such sounds.

• Because electronic music was reliant on technology, the music itself was going to become a testing ground for new aesthetic ideas about the art of musical sound.

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• Three cultural perspectives on electronic music assume that technology naturally leads to experimentation, the acceptance of electronic music will succeed by comparing it to other forms of music, and composing and listening to electronic music requires new skills.

• Poème électronique was perhaps the first work of electronic music to be so thoroughly integrated into a performance space and implemented on such a grand, immersive scale.

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• Techniques for composing electronic music include sound crafting/montage, the use of a technical score, the combining of electronics with other instruments, and instructional composition that follows a set of directions written in text.

• Among his many contributions to electronic music, Stockhausen pioneered the orchestration of live electronic musicians accompanied by recorded passages.

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• Wendy Carlos pioneered the synthesizing of orchestral sounds using both analog synthesis and digital algorithms of her own design.

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• Elements of minimalism include a tendency to repeat lines of notes many times, greatly reducing the motion and tension of a piece of music so that it does not appear to change or progress.

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• Process music involves rules established by a composer that govern the way that a piece unfolds, sometimes with a minimum of human intervention. A piece of process music lasts as long as it takes to complete the predefined process.

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