What is Electronic Music

What is electronic music?

That’s not the beginning of my post, that’s a legitimate question: what actually is Electronic Music? It’s music by at the same time it’s not. Music is the manipulation of sound to form definite pitches and make something your own out of it. By all accounts, it seems to get the “manipulation of sound” part down. I mean, take Pauline Oliveros’ Bye Bye Butterfly, for instance. Based on, as the name suggests, part of Puchini’s Madame Butterfly, it can only be described in one word: indescribable.

The first half of the piece consists of static and white noise, while the second half consists of an unknown part of the opera (I have no idea which one.) Oliveros said it was supposed to be a feminist statement of the for the period, but I’m personally at a loss of how it was intending to emit that.

Then we have an earlier work, Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples on the Moon, which sounds less like music and more like the main titles to the SpongeBob episode SB-129.

You're hearing it right now, aren't you?

It was a collaboration between him and electronic instrument designer, Don Buchla (the first of many for the latter player.) Since this was written during the earlier period of electronic music, more emphasis was put on pitch and timbre, though there is a sense of pitch and rhythm toward the second half of the piece, something against the Avant-Garde norm of the period.

Subotnick is the Charles Ives of the Electronic Music world: he did things completely out of the norm, but did so with a mainstream audience in mind. Consequently, it’s my personal favorite piece out of the bunch this week. Still, if there was any method behind this piece’s madness toward its first half, then I fail to see it.

Unfortunately, that’s how I feel with all of these compositions. There was clearly a lot of thought put into these pieces, as there is all great pieces. But I’m afraid I fail to recognize any of it. If only I can step into one of the composer’s minds to see what he may have been thinking. Fortunately, I can.

Alvin Lucier composed Music on a Long Thin Wire in 1977. He was going to use a shorter wire, but said a longer one (as in one roughly half the size of a football field) to give a more artistic feel to the presentation. Both ends are connected to amplifiers, which are in turn connected to a sine wave oscillator. One end’s connected to a magnet, which produces the vibrations that provide the bulk of the work. Though it doesn’t sound like much, the finished product can be something to behold:

But what was the spark for something of this nature? What is the method behind the madness of a man who once wrote a piece for oboe, a chest drawer, the Atlantic Ocean, and the FBI (AllMusic’s words, not mine)? Lucier says it’s a statement that science is a form of art. I stated earlier that the titular wire was originally to be much shorter than what it is today: 3-4 feet as opposed to something only a convention center or a mall could fit. I guess, in a way, this piece is a statement that Science and Art can be one and the same.

He’s not the only person to have that theory. James Tenney, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, composed out of Bell Laboratories, out of 1950s computers. Not to mention this is hardly Lucier’s first use of scientific devices in music. He, for instance, turned soundwaves into art in his I Am Sitting in a Room.

And perhaps that’s the intrigue of these electronic compositions. It’s that it takes something that is scientific and turns it into something worth listening to. They’re like miniature science projects: they take scientific theories and shape them to their wills, turning the theorems into sound, speculations into symphonies, the experiments themselves into the compositions.

Maybe I’ll never truly understand how Electronic compositions work, but this experiment seems to be a success for someone.