The Scene: Solid State University, the students of the Music Appreciation 101 Class are gathering again. Our gray-ponytailed professor enters the room, looking over his wire rim glasses at the students, checking for signs of brain activity. Laying down his lecture materials, he speaks.
Good day students! Today we are going to learn about quite a lot of technology in addition to the actual music. Personally I'm glad, because for once Solid State University will actually be lecturing on solid-state electronics!
The professor waits for a glimmer of shared excitement, but silence hangs in the room like a thick fog.
Too early again? C'mon follow me here, solid-state electronics! That's the printed circuit board technology that replaced the vacuum tubes of the early 2Oth Century. Believe me, if that piece of trivia doesn't get any traction then you're in for some tough sledding today because we're going to talk as much about machines as the men who made music on them. And the women. And one musician in particular who switched from man to woman along the way. Do I finally see a few glimmers of interest here? Ah well, sex always gets people's attention more than anything else. Anyway, we will definitely be talking about Wendy, nee Walter, Carlos in this lecture, but only in regard to her tremendous contribution to electronic music, not her sex change. Remember, the operative word in this course's title is definitely ART.
So, today's lecture concerns pure electronic music. This genre is related to Art Rock only in an oblique way because there's quite a lot more to it than just rock, yet the keyboard drenched sound of the Golden Age of Art Rock would never have happened without these adventurous folks who developed a whole new class of instruments and produced all kinds of new sounds that were completely unprecedented in human history. Trust me, their work will be one of the most enduring legacies of the 20th Century.
Let's talk about some of the early electronic instruments first. Who can name the big instrument that defined the Art Rock sound with the Moody Blues? That was from the first lecture. Anybody? Over here, Nancy is it? Yes, that was the Mellotron.
Now, that wasn't the first electronic instrument by any stretch of the imagination but after its introduction, around 1963 by a guy named Leslie Bradley, it played a pivotal roll in the popularization of other electronic instruments. If you remember it actually was a semi mechanical device that derived its sound from audiotape. It was a huge, cumbersome device that had several dozen tape transports in it, each for a different note. It could sound like a string section or a chorus, depending on how it was set up, but there were lots of other electronic instruments before that. So class, what's generally recognized as the first really successful electronic instrument? In the back there? Yes it's the Theremin, a strange instrument that dates back to the 1920's and took its name from its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin.
The Theremin consists of two antennas that output a weak radio wave and an oscillator that's connected to a speaker. As human hands gets close to the antennas the Theremin produces a sustained warbling tone. The pitch is controlled by one hand and the volume is controlled by the other. It was a very expensive piece of equipment in its earliest days and was used mostly in classical music circles. Several serious pieces of music were written for it and many musicians became quite skilled at playing it, but mostly it was seen as an oddity. It's turned up in lots of unusual places since then, including the soundtracks of many horror and science fiction films, most notably The Day The Earth Stood Still and more recently Tim Burton's wonderful movie Ed Wood, but perhaps its high point came in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." Oh, and one minor hippie group made it a central part of their act in the late 60's. Hands anyone? No pun intended.
I'm not surprised, it was Lothar and the Hand People. What's that Fred, you heard of them, but you thought it was a joke? I'm not surprised, but actually their album Space Hymn is still kind of a guilty pleasure with yours truly.
Anyway, what's the second major electric instrument that arrived on the scene, in the 30's? Over here, Kenji, the tape recorder? Good choice, and we'll talk about that some more later, but that's not really an instrument as such and I'm looking for keyboard instruments. In the back, The Wurlitzer Organ? Hmm, I frankly hadn't considered that, good thinking. It's got kind of a churchy heritage though. Mechanical church organs have a very long history by the way, going back as much as 500 years but anyway I'm not including it here. A Wurlitzer is never used in bands. Anyone else, No? It's not normally thought of as an electronic instrument because it doesn't use synthesized sounds, but it is certainly electric powered. This time I'm talking about the first Hammond Organ, an instrument which is related to all the earlier organs, but developed a unique sound, one that was favored by dozens of major art rock groups decades later. The first was built in 1935 by Laurens Hammond. Hammonds were found in lots of jazz groups all through the 50's and quite a few people became famous for playing it, but touring with such a big piece of equipment was pretty difficult. Its entry into the guitar-dominated world of rock and roll didn't really happen until Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" showed everyone what it could do. A couple artists like Lee Michaels used it extensively and never really took the next step into electronics. I suggest looking for his song called "Spare Change" that's a keyboard tour-de-force in a rock idiom, but doesn't have any synthesizers. And yes, it may be the only rock recording that does include a Wurlitzer.
There're quite a few other electric keyboard instruments from the 30's, 40's and 50's that were less successful than the Hammond, and indeed there're lots of electric tone generators of various stripes going back into the 1800's, but before we get to the history of the real synthesizers I want to mention one more instrument. One that was responsible for the first really modern sounding Top 40 hit with an electric keyboard as the lead instrument. It's the Clavioline, a kind of portable organ that was powered by batteries and came out of France in 1947. So, pop tune quiz time folks, what was the hit?
Silence as the students exchanged puzzled looks and shrugs.
Ok, I'll give you a few more clues. The hit was an instrumental that came out much later, 1962, and was named after the first communications satellite. The satellite was American, but the song came from England.
Nobody? Well this is certainly one to check out in the listening center then. I'm talking about "Telstar," by the Tornados. It was really the producer, Joe Meeks, who made "Telstar" such a unique record. These Tornados by the way are not to be confused with the American surf band of the same name. Doubly confusing, "Telstar" has a driving kind of sound to it that's very similar to a lot of surf instrumentals. Anyway, I'm talking about it now because of its place in the history of electronic music but there are several other interesting facts to remember about it. It was the largest selling instrumental in history up to that point. It was a number one hit in England and also holds the distinction of being the first English single to chart number one in America, a full year before the legendary British Invasion happened.
OK, we're almost ready to talk about the early synthesizers, but first I need to cover some of the bigger names and events that lead up to them. This is where we get back to the subject of the tape recorder as an instrument, Kenji. Anyway, all through the 20th Century there was a strong movement of experimental music and people played around with different systems of tones and alternative instruments. One of the main thrusts of this was the musique concrete movement and its big names include Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varese, John Cage, Morton Subotnik, Terry Riley and others.
Musique concrete is basically found sounds from real life, not instruments, and this is where the tape recorder came in to play. Pun intended. Musique concrete's influence is found in thousands of albums even now, but perhaps the best example of a big hit that uses it is Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, which has all manner of heartbeats, footsteps, alarm bells and other noises all through it. In other words, sound effects. The musique concrete people did some very wonderful and adventurous things with them. They also rigged their tape recorders to play sounds in loops, with echo, and alternate speeds. In a way you can think of it as the earliest form of sampling, which the DJ culture took to new heights over the last twenty years. These and lots of other effects were all explored by these musicians, plus many of this group also experimented with equipment related to the Theremin, things like oscillators and tone generators that were usually self-built, the precursors to the earliest synthesizers.
The 50's saw several important pieces from this school. One very important one came in 1958 and was played outdoors on more than 400 speakers for the World's Fair in Brussels. This was Edgar Varese's "Poeme Electronique." Question over here, yes Fred? Is this the same Varese who was a major influence on Frank Zappa? Yes. And the present day composer still refuses to die-- to paraphrase a Varese quote Frank put on the cover of his second album.
The other major electronic work of this period was from a 1956 science fiction film that was to be the very first successful exposure of electronic music to a mass audience. It wasn't called music at the time however, just "electronic tonalities" and it was put together by the husband and wife team of Louis and Bebe Baron. For five bonus points name the film!
No guesses? After a clue it's only three bonus points. OK then, the movie stars Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pigeon, Anne Francis and Robbie the Robot.
No, it was not one of the Naked Gun movies! Leslie Nielsen was a dramatic actor at the time. Over here? Yes, it was Forbidden Planet, three points for our sci-fi geek, Don. Anyway, it was a rare big budget sci-fi production in its day. In terms of music history, the Barons' soundtrack was the first film score that used no traditional instruments at all. It's composed entirely of synthetic whoops, moans and wails with little if any melody, but it works perfectly in the sci-fi setting. It still sounds avant-garde today. The movie holds up really well also, what with a dash of Disney animation and a story based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. You should check it out if you've never seen it.
Anyway, this brings us up to when the first real synthesizers finally appear. Several different synthesizers were developed in the early 60's. The most successful were the Moog synthesizers developed by, let's say it together now, ROBERT MOOG.
Dr. Robert Moog started off the decade by selling build-it-yourself Theremin kits and his interest in electronic sound led him to develop many kinds of amplifiers and sound producing circuits. Working with two classically trained musicians, Herbert Deutsch and Walter later-to-become-Wendy Carlos, Moog was able to develop a successful electronic instrument by 1964 and after some exhibitions, began to commercially produce the original Moog Synthesizers. These instruments were VCO or voltage control oscillator based. The word "synthesizer" was first associated with the Moogs because there was no mechanical device making a sound in these instruments; the tones were coming from electric circuits and fed directly to a speaker. They were also making sounds analogically, not digitally. Though the term "programming" was used around them there wasn't any computer that controlled the sound, at least not in the way we know it now. Computers in that day were huge affairs that took up entire rooms and programming was done by punch card and paper tape on many systems. Likewise early Moog synthesizers were rather large affairs, with an incredible and confusing array of knobs and controls for volume, pitch and timbre.
So who cares to tell us what the first all-synthesizer album was? Over here, Fred? Switched-On Bach? Good guess, but that was kind of a trick question, since I already mentioned Wendy
Carlos. No, her release on the Columbia Masterworks label holds a place in history as the first hit album of synthesizer music.
The first all synthesizer release was Silver Apples Of The Moon by Morton Subotnik on the tiny Nonesuch label. Subotnik had developed his own set of instruments roughly over the same period as Moog and his record was released in 1967 well ahead of Switched-On Bach. His music owes much more to the Forbidden Planet soundtrack than to classical music and though it has a certain kind of technical appeal, it's really a pretty sterile piece of vinyl all things considered.
Wendy Carlos on the other hand took the mathematically based, but very familiar, melodies of Bach and made a work that is wonderfully pleasing; and in doing so she created a whole new audience for electronic music. Indeed, Switched-On Bach caused a huge musical earthquake and eventually went on to become the first classical album to go platinum. Suddenly all the big musicians wanted synthesizers. Brian Wilson has said the record was a huge influence on Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations." Even The Beatles bought a Moog. You can hear it on George Harrison's solo album Electronic Sounds, released in 1969 with the help of Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, a pair who released several important electronic albums of their own starting with The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music in 1968 and continuing on up into the 70's. Keith Emerson started working with Moogs after leaving The Nice, and made them a central part of Emerson Lake and Palmer's sound in 1970. Many people would call "Lucky Man" the first major rock hit that featured synthesizers, and I agree in large measure. However I have two electronic music milestones that preceded it to put Emerson's achievement in perspective.
So, what was the first rock group that made a synthesizer the featured instrument? Over here? The Yes? No, they were still fooling around with Hammond organs and Leslie speakers at this time. Pink Floyd? Pretty much the same. The Moody Blues? Well, the Mellotron was a central part of their sound and Days Of Future Passed did come out prior to Switched-On Bach, but as I said the Mellotron is not a synthesizer.
OK, don't strain yourselves; this group is kind of obscure. They were The Silver Apples, obviously named after Morton Subotnik's record. And by the way Subotnik pulled his title from the poet Yates. Twenty trivia points if you knew that! The Silver Apples were just two guys, a hippie electronics wizard named Simeon and his drummer, Danny Taylor. The synthesizer they used was Simeon's custom creation, named after himself too, Simeon. It was composed of as many as nine audio oscillators connected to keyboards and other controls that Simeon played with his hands, elbows, knees and feet. Sounds like he'd need a chiropractor after a performance, right? Anyway, they indulged in a kind of pulsing experiential sound, and Simeon would sing suitably mystical, metaphysical lyrics that certainly pleased the LSD crowd, but never got much airplay outside of a track called "Oscillations." Their first self-titled album came out in 1968 and a year later they followed up with a second album called Contact. The first actually had some good tracks that presaged the electronic raves of the 90's, complete with a few repeating spoken word samples, but largely what worked live for them didn't work very well on record.
So another pop quiz, what was the first all-synthesizer hit single, which came out in 1969?
The professor is greeted by utter silence.
Geez, your eyes have more glaze on them than a dozen Krispy Kreme Donuts! Wait, in the back, was it Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"? Nope, that was early 1974, my dear. We'll get to that in a moment. Anyone? Okay, I'll try to keep the trivia torture down to a minimum, but you really should try reading the chapter before the lecture, kids.
The first all-electronic hit single was "The Minotaur" by Dick Hyman, another classically trained musician who got into synthesizer music at a very early stage in its development. Like "Telstar" it was another instrumental and yes, even at a mind-numbing eight minutes "The Minotaur" got played on Top 40 AM radio. It came from another landmark album entitled Moog - The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman that had a much wilder, rock music feel to it compared to the other synthesizer records of the day. It was lots more fun than the Carlos or Subotnik offerings. I think it's because you can tell it's a human musician playing the lead over the more robotic rhythms.
Actually that's been electronic music's main stumbling point all through its history. Human beings never play anything in absolutely perfect rhythm or sing in perfect pitch. A synthesizer will play exactly what it's programmed to do and do it they same way every time. Even though mathematically the differences between man and machine may amount to a couple hundredths of a second or just a microtone, your ears can hear it and recognize what's producing the music. And since the whole point of music is to convey emotion, the human element simply must be present in electronic music somewhere or people won't enjoy it.
All that being said, 1969 was a great year for electronic music: Wendy Carlos released another album of electrified classics, the Well Tempered Synthesizer, and another classical experimentalist, Terry Riley put out A Rainbow In Curved Air. This was another release on Columbia's Masterworks label, but this record was a quantum leap forward in composition. The human element was definitely found in this work and the compositions are downright beautiful, especially the title track. Question over here? Wasn't Curved Air a group? Yep, absolutely, but other than probably taking their named from Riley's album there isn't any other connection. A fine Art Rock outfit, I used to listen to their album, Phantasmagoria. Remind me to work them into a future lecture somewhere. Anyway, to some Riley is more famous for his 1964 work In C, but this album is timeless. It has two side-long pieces - the lighter, more lyrical "A Rainbow In Curved Air," and the other side is "Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band" which is a little more moody, but it has this wonderfully long low synth bass note in the middle that will still bust your subwoofers if you're not careful.
Also deserving of mention in 1969, the group White Noise put out their album An Electric Storm that had a lot of wonderfully bizarre music on it that prominently featured Moogs. Also Frank Zappa put out Uncle Meat which featured all sorts of interesting tweaks on keyboards and recording methods, and of course there was some wonderfully creative electronic work by Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies which we covered some last lecture. All of these avant-garde keyboard works were in a more rock setting with vocals.
As the 70's came in, there was more and more interest in synthesizers. New and better models came out, like the Minimoog, the Arps, the Oberheims and others. Much more rock music was written with the new sounds in mind and much of it became very popular, like the aforementioned Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but Rick Wakeman was now a member of Yes, making waves with the help of Moogs and other instruments built by Larry Fast. On the live album Yessongs there's a Wakeman solo that features Fast's first custom instrument creating an effect like an air raid siren. There were also albums like 1972's Who's Next, where Pete Townshend used synthesizers to great advantage in a rock setting. "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Reilly" are still played almost every day on classic rock stations.
The pure electronic albums were still in the minority. But there were several really good ones from this period. The first mention goes to Wendy Carlos who scored again with the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. Or maybe we should say scored for the first time! C'mon, film score! In addition to electronic versions of Beethoven and The William Tell Overture and introducing a new instrument called the vocoder, which mimics a human voice, she put together a long dark piece called "Timesteps" on that record, a major original composition. "Timesteps" is a challenging piece that still holds up really well, a must listen from that period. After that Carlos presaged the Ambient and New Age movements with a double album called Sonic Seasonings, a mixture of electronic and music concrete that featured one side for each season. It's still a fulfilling experience in an environmental sort of way, a great album to have at low volume in the background, but it reveals some amazing textures if you listen on headphones.
Beaver and Krause released their most important electronic albums in the early 70's, like In A Wild Sanctuary and Ghandarva, but in 1971 came two guys who had also worked with Robert Moog, Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil. These guys put out another major work from a custom synthesizer, the last of the giant synthesizers you could say, called The Original New Timbral Orchestra, or TONTO for short. Their best album was called TONTO's Expanding Headband. It's all instrumentals and quite a delight with good, almost pop melodies that far surpassed earlier efforts by Dick Hyman to create more accessible electronic music. TONTO was impossible to tour with of course but it was used for a lot of studio work in the 70's by Margouleff and Cecil. I've heard TONTO was eventually sold to Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame, who has some electronic ambient work to his credit recently.
I can't resist another pop quiz right now. What major R&B star did a lot of pioneering work with synthesizers in the early 70's and collaborated with Margouleff and Cecil quite a bit? Over here, Shanitra? Stevie Wonder! YES, how did you know that? Oh, your mom played Talking Book and Fullfillingness First Finale a lot? Cool! A lot of love and synth bass went into those. Okay, the pair worked on quite a few R&B records and you might say they helped foster the strong keyboards that showed up in a lot of disco music later in the 70's. By the way there was a major hit late in the 70's that was totally electronic except for Donna Summer's vocals. You should check out "I Feel Love," which was produced by Georgio Moroder. But we are getting too far away from Art Rock.
By 1973 Yes, Pink Floyd, Todd Rundgren and others had all pushed the use of synthesizers in rock music to new heights, but new pure electronic music was a little hard to find. All that changed in 1974 with something we'll call the German invasion. All together now, the name of the band is? KRAFTWERK!
Yes. They had been making albums as early as 1970 in Germany, but their first US release, Autobahn, was a huge smash. The song "Autobahn" on the album took up a whole side, but a single edit received lots of airplay and many people would call that the first number one electronic pop hit. It had a little bit of music concrete influence in some of the opening sound effects, but basically Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider crated something really special, though some downplay it as robot-pop. They followed up with several good albums over the 70's, especially Trans-Europe Express that became a favorite in DJ and club culture.
Close on their heels came another German group, Tangerine Dream, whose album Pheadra was their first US offering, on the Virgin label. Often they had a bass player and a drum kit in addition to the keyboards in their stage performances but no vocals. Their work is far spacier and minimalist than Kraftwerk, but very pleasing to the ear. The Dream never achieved Kraftwerk's level of success, but they did release several great albums, and did quite a lot of soundtrack work right into the 80's. The central member is Edgar Froese who has collaborated with many others musicians in the Dream, including his son Jerome, and others like Klaus Shultz were early members; but the most famous lineup was Froese, Peter Bauman and Christopher Franke. All of them have released a lot of solo electronic work, and in particular I will point out Franke's work on the TV show Babylon 5, which was a big reason why that series was so special.
After the German invasion, it seems like most pure electronic people were coming from overseas and we'll get to more of them in a moment but there were a few prominent Americans I'd like to mention: Roger Powell, Chip Davis and especially Larry Fast. Powell started out as a salesperson in an ARP synthesizer showroom and got to be quite good, eventually joining Todd Rundgren's band Utopia, where he developed a special portable synthesizer called The Powell Probe. Roger's instrument is heard in all its flashiness on "Singring and The Glass Guitar," but he also had a very good all electronic album called Cosmic Furnace, which came out in 1974. Chip Davis is the guy behind the strangely named Mannheim Steamroller and is rightly famous for his album, Fresh Aire, which was originally produced in 1974 as a stereo demonstration record. His later electronic updates of Christmas standards are some of the highest selling instrumental albums in history. He began them in 1984 with A Mannheim Steamroller Christmas and Davis still produces new Christmas albums every couple of years. Larry Fast is known for his work with Peter Gabriel but as Synergy he has several wonderful albums of his own. He's probably most famous for the first Synergy album, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, but personally I like 1977's Chords best which has a more rock feel.
I guess I should mention the pioneering keyboardists of fusion jazz of like George Duke, Jan Hammer and Chick Corea, but they never got into recording any synthesizer-only work that I'm aware of. Frank Zappa did though. He released one entire record of ersatz baroque music for the Synclavier in the mid-80s entitled Francesco Zappa. It's a nice album, vaguely reminiscent of Switched-On Bach and rather easy for the average listener to appreciate. Especially considering it's Frank. He actually wrote quite a lot of work for that instrument, but Francesco is unlike any of his other albums. I need to mention Steven Reich and Phillip Glass here also. They are mainly classical musicians who also started working in the electronics area in this period but frankly I just remembered them and I haven't done that much research on their work. Go rent a copy of Koyaanisqatsi and call me in the morning.
And while we are cleaning up the list of American artists, let's get in a Dis-Honorable Mention for an electronic album by Lou Reed. Anyone know it? Over here? Hi Fred, yep, it's Metal Machine Music. An album so repulsive it's best played when you have to clear a room fast because the cops are coming to bust your party. Seriously, I've never been able to listen to the entire thing. It's about as sonically endearing as a gas-powered leaf blower. Worse really, it sounds more like one of those big saws they use to cut through sidewalk concrete. I can listen it for about 90 seconds tops. And the funny thing is that the album has FOUR SIDES of this noise and a major label, RCA, was somehow talked into releasing it. Next time I'm in salary negotiations I want to use the guy who cut that deal! What's that Fred, it's not synthesizer music? You're right. Though it's subtitled "An Electronic Instrumental Composition," it actually was generated by two guitars and a whole lot of tape recorder processed feedback. Anyway, it's so completely bizarre that it's become a kind of legend. Every couple of years it'll come up in a conversation and I'll drag out my copy to play another 30 seconds for someone who can't believe a talent like Reed ever went that far for Art. Like Marshal McLuhan once said, "Art is anything you can get away with."
But enough of them crazy Americans, let's talk about the more successful electronic artists of the 70's from other countries. From Greece there was Evangelos Odyssey Papathanassiou better known as Vangelis. From Japan there was Isao Tomita, from England Brian Eno and from France there was Jean-Michel Jarre. Let's do a quick run down on each.
Vangelis is best known for his soundtrack work, but he also was a member of a group called Aphrodite's Child in the early 70's. One of their albums on the Vertigo label had a blazing orange cover and "666" emblazoned on it that caused quite a flash in the pan, but we're here for his electronic work aren't we? Vangelis had quite a few electronic albums in the 70's that are mostly somewhere between the very spacey Tangerine Dream and slightly more structured Terry Riley part of the spectrum. There are some lovely melodies there, starting with his album Earth in 1974, and my favorite of the early period is Albedo 0.39 which Carl Sagan used to great effect in his science documentary series Cosmos. Another pleasing one is his Asian themed album China. Of course he later scored a huge soundtrack hit with "Chariots Of Fire," but I think my favorite of all is the soundtrack for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. These last two are more than just synthesizers of course, even on Albedo there is a bit of spoken word, but who cares? They are just plain great.
Meanwhile from Japan there came another artist who updated the classics for synthesizers quite beautifully, Isao Tomita. Tomita was older than most other electronic musicians in this period. He was already famous in Japan for soundtrack and classical work when he got interested in Wendy Carlos's work and started working with synthesizers himself. Starting with his Snowflakes Are Dancing album in 1974, he first electrified Debussy, then Stravinsky and then charted his biggest hit with his version of Holst's The Planets. Unlike Carlos who pretty much transcribed Bach note-for-note, Tomita mutated the source work quite a lot. The original classical melodies are still quite recognizable in all his work, but the music is definitely in orbit and still sounds very modern today.
On the experimental end of the spectrum Brian Eno, who was originally keyboardist for Roxy Music, began to release a hugely interesting and influential body of solo Art Rock in the early 70's. There's a strong keyboard presence through all of his work, but many Eno albums are composed of shorter neo-pop songs. Pleasing stuff, also personal favorites, but sorry, not part of this lecture. On the purely experimental front Eno produced some very unique compositions, especially when he collaborated with Robert Fripp. Unlike Tomita's lush and flashy work, these Englishmen definitely hailed from the less-is-more school of electronic music. The important discs here are 1973's No Pussyfooting and 1975's Evening Star, which are some of the earliest releases that feature the guitar based synthesizers later known as Frippertronics. There is also Eno's solo work, Discreet Music, also from 1975 and the landmark Music For Airports series that debuted in 1978. "Ambient Music," Eno's term for this genre of minimalist music specifically designed as a background, has been with us ever since. During the same period Eno also added synthesizer work and production touches to several David Bowie albums, changing the latter's sound tremendously, also the Talking Heads, U2, the list goes on. For our purposes today however there are the Eno collaborations with several lesser-known electronic musicians such as Laraaji, Moebius, Roedelius, Michael Brook and his brother Roger. The best of these may well be Laraaji's Day Of Radiance, which could be described as two tone poems composed of a single tone each. Almost. It's a beautifully subtle work. Eno continues to release a large amount of interesting electronic work, such as his 90's album, Nerve Net, which is a dance/rave CD that's far from minimalist.
From here we go back to France for Jean-Michel Jarre, the son of famed film musician Maurice Jarre, who scored pure electronic hits with 1978's Oxygene and then Equinox. The sound of his work is much more melodic with flowing, almost hummable passages that are more reminiscent of Autobahn and TONTO's Expanding Headband. These albums are still very popular with a lot of folks who otherwise aren't into electronic music; they are very accessible. Jarre is also famed for huge outdoor electronic music concerts, such as one created for the city of Houston, Rende-Vous, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of NASA in 1986, and broadcast globally. Even bigger, Jarre holds the all-time attendance record for a single concert with an estimated at two and a half million present for his performance in Paris upon the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day in 1990. I'm sure they needed a lot more than Poem Electronique's 400 speakers that day!
I guess we'll have to consider that the high water mark in this history of Electronic Music. Needless to say synthesizers are here to stay. I could run down lists of modern synthesizer artists for another half hour easily, but let me just rattle off a few really quickly. There's Moby, Aphex Twin, Future Sound Of London, Fluke, Air, Delerium, William Orbit, Autechre, 808 State, Bill Nelson, Muslim Gauze, Underworld, Kitaro, Talvin Singh, Crystal Method, The Orb, Orbital, St. Etienne, The Chemical Brothers; plus there're hundreds of local artists making music for clubs with synthesizers all over the world, too. The DJ scene especially continues to be very creative with all sorts of samplers, synthesizers and drum machines. My apologies to dozens of artists I've left out. You guys probably know them better than I do; the list goes on and on. In fact, you could easily say Electronic Music itself is in its Golden Age right now, standing on the shoulders of the pioneers you learned about today, brave explorers who forged into the electronic wilderness all through the last century.
Questions, comments? I'm sure you've got some, but I think the bell rang about a half hour ago, so I'll let you go. Take this handout and email me with your comments. Class dismissed!
A Short List of Landmark Albums in Electronic Music:
Louis and Bebe Barron -- The Forbidden Planet Soundtrack
Wendy Carlos - Clockwork Orange Soundtrack
Wendy Carlos - Switched On Bach
Wendy Carlos - Sonic Seasonings
Brian Eno - Music For Airports
Brian Eno - Discreet Music
Robert Fripp and Brian Eno - Evening Star
Robert Fripp and Brian Eno - No Pussyfooting
Steve Hillage - Rainbow Dome Music
Dick Hyman - Moog The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
Jean Michel Jarre - Equinox
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
Laraajii - Day Of Radiance
Robert Margouleff and Malcom Cecil - Tonto's Expanding Headband
Roger Powell - Cosmic Furnace
Terry Riley - A Rainbow In Curved Air
Silver Apples - Silver Apples
Synergy (Larry Fast) - Electronic Realizations
Synergy (Larry Fast) - Chords
Morton Subotnik - Silver Apples Of The Moon
Tangerine Dream - Pheadra
Isao Tomita - Snowflakes Are Dancing (Debussy)
Isao Tomita - The Planets (Holst)
Vangelis - Albedo 0.39
Vangelis - Chariots Of Fire
Vangelis - Blade Runner Soundtrack
Frank Zappa - Francesco Zappa
Earlier installments of The Golden Age Of Art Rock:
Part One: Making It Last
Part Two: Classical Rock
Part Three: The Canterbury Hippies and Other English Art Rockers
Part Four: Departure from the Gadda-Da-Vida - American Art Rock
