Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in ... - Aaaaarg

Chapter 12
ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE
MAINSTREAM: A LOSS OF HISTORY
There has been a quiet transition taking place in the world of electronic music.
After several decades of rapid technological evolution—from vacuum tubes to
transistors to integrated circuits to microprocessors to software—we seem to
have landed on the hospitable terrain of a digital world. The technological
obstacles that once limited composers—processing speed, computer memory,
and permanent electronic storage—have been overcome. For the most part,
memory is cheap, processing power is fast enough, and digital storage (CDs,
minidiscs, DVDs) is adequate to allow composers and musicians the flexibility
they need to create music. What does this do to the music? What does this do to
the listener?
The digital transition has transformed the field of popular music. Techniques
that were once considered radical and experimental are now a part of the
common sound kit of the digital composer. With this transition comes a loss of
history. It is a time of opening new doors on the future of music and closing a
few doors on the past. Thurston Moore, of the band Sonic Youth, explains:
“Musicians working records, turntables, mixers, and various effects do not
employ anything desirably ‘nostalgic’ to their art. In fact, they see and hear what
they do as a sort of future-music.” 1
I wrote this book largely to document the history of ideas and techniques that
made so much of today’s music possible. Until recently, one could trace the
influences of new composers back to the lines of experimentation begun by Cage,
Stockhausen, Oliveros, Ashley, and others. Nicolas Collins, one of the direct
descendants of the post-Cagian school, senses that we are experiencing an
“endgame of postmodernism,” the close of an era:
It is at an end with us. The emerging musics in Europe and America at the
moment are not a continuation of that tradition. They’re coming out of
pop. They are obviously embracing the same technology that we are using.
And the same sound palette and a lot of the same ideas. Ambient music and
electronica owe a lot to everything from early La Monte Young and Steve
Reich and James Tenney [b.1934] and Behrman and Niblock [b.1933] as it
does to turning on a circuit and just letting it run. DJ technology goes back