Raymond Scott was left off of the list: https://youtu.be/s87cYlMInwE?feature=shared
replies(1):
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470331
Let's list some of the outside.
Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Clarence Barlow, Bebe and Louis Barron... I'm brain-farting so many, keep going!
"Electronic Music" is a bit of a misnomer. I think most people would think of Electronic Music as genres like rave, acid, techno, house, trance, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, and so on. For that, you want Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com/) and its branching history for how all these genres influenced and evolved from eaxh other
But this collection is just the avant-garde parts - the roots of Ishkur's tree. It's the musique concrete and theremins and radiophonic workshop type music. Those early genres only get a brief look in Ishkur, but here they are in detail.
Most of it is pre-synth, with early experiments with tape, and sometimes analog synthesis and computer DSP.
It's ended up in a strange space culturally - lurking in modern music's attic like an ageing mad uncle whom everyone agrees was a genius, but hardly anyone still listens to. (Outside of academia, which is its own world.)
Awesome shout-out.
Missing: Cabaret Voltaire, Art of Noise, Yes ..
See this great compilation (with a lovely booklet that’s more of a mini book) for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm:_The_Early_Gurus_of_Electr...
I got lots of late-night listening pleasure out of that one, except for the first theremin track; I just found that one unbearable…
The collection is clearly aimed at presenting music where electronic triggers and some synthesis is used in concert with acoustic instruments or spaces, and is super biased towards "Musique concrète", and concert-hall, classical compositions for what I can hear, ala Luc Ferrari.
You're not going to see an appearance of Kraftwerk, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, or Model 500.
This is less a "history", and more an "eclectic subgenre list by date".
They had a great collection of early synths. Can’t remember the name.
I don't know how accurate the YouTube list is but I never heard of anything prior to Jean Michelle Jarre's Oxygene (about 6 minutes in the list). If It were to compare the list with geological history, before 1976 it's weird Ediacaran biota. And afterwards, suddenly, it's like the Cambrian explosion :)
> Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kontact,” Henry’s “Astrologie,” and Bayle’s spare “Theatre d’Ombres” further down.
That seems unlikely to contain 476 tracks ... and nowhere do I see any actual list of tracks (other than the mention of 3 that you quoted).
This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.
And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)
In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.
The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.
For example you won't call a recording of a a busy café, a thunderstorm, a jungle or a conversation "music". Foley and sound effect artists are not making music either.
These tracks felt to me more like a movie, but without the image, dialogue, and score, leaving only the ambiance sounds and effects.
Edit - wow no Raymond Scott or Tomita either?
I am actually bummed to see ubuweb referenced on HN. Musical taste is a very emotional topic for those that haven't made a formal study of it. Publicizing this to an audience of armchair music historians who think this tame list is "eclectic" likely won't take the time to understand that it is the bedrock of research that created pop electronic music.
There is plenty of electronic music from before 2001 but this list is extremely focused on a handful of composers of academic electroacoustic recordings.
While it has plenty of interesting entries, I think that linking site with the renaming is really bad at giving context, even where they try:
> Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.
Even where they try to give context, the cambrian explosion of what most people now consider electronic music from the 70s, but mostly 80s and 90s is completely ignored, and that's not just techno and dance music.
The original name "electroacoustic" seems much better, but even then, I don't feel this to be a very meaningful curation with e.g. all the Stockhausen recordings just dumped in with each of their parts counted as one "track" each (this terminology clearly alludes to the electronic music more usually listened to).
To be honest, find this type of music interesting, but calling the blog post misnamed is almost too charitable, given it links the other list, changes the title and even hints at how limited its perspective is.
In the 20th century, there were musicologists who insisted on the difference between "E-Musik" (Ernste Musik, "serious music") and "U-Musik (Unterhaltungsmusik, "Entertainment music").
The problem was that this distinction was indeed meant to be snobby and completely ignored how interesting new music, including experimental music, was created before and then came to real fruition in the 20th century.
Stockhausen et al are interesting, but this seems like a "selection of 476 pieces of E-Musik / electroacoustic music / musique concrete" more than a "history of electronic music".
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik
This distinction apparently only existed in Germany, so no English Wilipedia article.
Most of the "music" made by these people originates in publicly funded institutions and academia. Fine, but it's really the "black square on black canvas" type art academia in a way.
It is interesting and was certainly influential, but there is a level of unfounded snobbery to many of these artists and their listeners when it comes to other electronic music.
The main critique is repetition (obviously, in all dance-adjacent genres), and lack of radical departure from harmonics and rhythm. Also regarding electronic music that is not only dance-oriented.
There seems to be very little overlap of people who even know less commercial -more experimental- "regular" electronic music and come from this electroacoustic movement.
Although there are some artists who cite this movement and musique concrete as inspirations, especially Noise and Ambient artists.
It's like making a "history of 20th-century" music that is half twelve-tone music and half experimental organ music with no Western scale or harmonics, all by obscure academic artists.
Still interesting, but also kind of... meh. Limited.