Subject: Re: early perceptions of electronic music
From: Rick (ricknance@gmail.com)
Date: Sun May 20 2007 - 11:53:49 EDT
Hi guys,
Maybe it would be better to push the revision even further back to
about 1948. If Schaeffer had named what he was doing plastic music and
plastic sound, something he evidently considered, then the field would
have been connected to a longer history of the arts. Instead he named
it _against_ 'abstract' or what he thought of as over formalized
music.
How would the language have changed then? Who would have gotten involved?
rick
On 5/19/37, larryaustin <larryaustin@grandecom.net> wrote:
> Kevin:
>
> No one in the late '50's or '60's would have known what you
> meant by "sonic design". We did know what "electronic music"
> meant, hence the use of that term. Basart's book is quite good
> for the time, actually. UC Berkeldy was, at that time, a hot-bed
> of 12-tone practice but not of electronic music until the last
> 15 years. It was quite natural for Ann, as a music historian, to
> concentrate on 12-tone technique et al. I wouldn't fault anyone
> who referenced her book in an ea/cm history. There was an
> early linkage between 12-tone technique and the new, experimental
> explorations into electric sound...particularly at the San Fracisco
> Tape Music Center, founded in the late '50's by then 12-tone
> experimenter Morton Subotnick.
>
> Larry Austin
>
>
> Kevin Austin wrote:
> Discussions of the "language of electronic music" seem to have their
> (confused?) roots in the early sixties with books such as:
> Ann Phillips Basart (1961), Serial Music: A Classified Bibliography of
> Writings on Twelve-Tone and Electronic Music (Berkeley: University of
> California Press). (A pioneering bibliographic work in the field.)
> If I were a young composer growing up in the 60s or 70s, my music teachers
> would probably have lived in this atmospheric condition. I wonder what the
> 'musicology' of ea would look like today had the first book been:
> John A Basart (1960), Sounding Designs: A Classified Bibliography of the
> Writings on Processes in Electronic Sound Design and Sonic Arts
> Such a text would have (1) not used the word music; (2) not connected the
> field with twentieth century formalism; (3) noted that 'ea' is the sounding
> of designs; (4) proposed that ea is not a language structure but a process;
> (5) introduced 'ea' as "sound design", and "sonic art". Electroacoustic
> Music would be a subdiscipline of "sonic design". Thoughts?
> Best Kevin
>
>
>
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