Revolutionising Sound - The Emergence of Electronic Music - Essay Example

Revolutionising Sound: The Emergence of Electronic Music Introduction In the latter part of the 19th century many people thought that electronic music was impossible. They were very much accustomed to classical music and other traditional musical selections that they forgot how inventive an artist’s mind can be. Thaddeus Cahill was one of those inventive minds that proved to the world that nothing is impossible by building the first electromechanical musical instrument, the Telharmonium. Although many critics claim that Cahill’s invention indeed failed in its attempt to produce and perform electromechanical music, this essay will prove that his groundbreaking efforts ushered in the revolutionary period that eventually gave birth to electronic music. Electronic music is music produced by means of electronic musical instruments. Examples of instruments that produce electromechanical sounds are the telharmonium, or also known as dynamophone, Hammond organ, and electric guitar. Devices like the sound synthesizer and Theremin can be used to produce electronic sound (Holmes, 2002). The capacity to record sounds is usually associated with electronic music production, but not totally needed for it. The very first documented recording equipment was invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1857, the phonautograph (Manning, 2013). A number of instruments were invented that used electromechanical designs and they encouraged the eventual appearance of electronic instruments. But the technological development that has made the biggest impact on music within the first half of the 20th century is the invention of the Telharmonium. The Telharmonium was invented by Thaddeus Cahill in the early 20th century. The microtonal scales were one of the most important developments in early 20th-century music made possible by the presence of telharmonium (Barela, 1997). As stated by Ferruccio Busoni, “Only a long and careful series of experiments, and a continued training of the ear, can render this unfamiliar material [microtonal scales] approachable and plastic for the coming generation and for Art” (Barela, 1997, p. 31). Telharmonium: The Musical Invention that Electrified the World The vitality of invention which emerged before the advent of the 20th century was simultaneous with a cultural interest in the new technological advancements that was unmatched. Inventors like Edison and Bell became legends who led a philosophy of industrial growth based on the capacity of controlled electricity. Among this group of inventor capitalists was Thaddeus Cahill, creator and designer of the original musical synthesizer, and originator of the electric typewriter (Dunn, n.d.). Although several attempts to create electronic musical equipment were initiated in early 20th century by William Duddell and Elisha Gray, they were somewhat uncertain or merely the consequences of other studies on electrical technology (Holmes, 2008). The invention of Cahill, the Telharmonium, is still the greatest and most determined effort to build an electronic musical instrument ever imagined. Under overwhelming technical challenges, Cahill was able to build the first model of Telharmonium in 1900. This electro-mechanical equipment made up of 145 alternators able to generate five octaves of changeable melodic content similar to orchestral quality. Its main function was composed of what is now called additive synthesis—a sound synthesis method that produces timbre. Because Cahill’s instrument was created prior to the availability of electronic amplification he had to make alternators that generated at least 10,000 watts (Dunn, n.d., pp. 2-4). Even though Cahill’s original purpose was merely to build a genuinely advanced electronic instrument that has the ability to perform classical musical selections, he immediately aimed at its industrial use with the intention of providing music to private settings (e.g. homes) as a way of funding its construction. He built the New York Electric Music Company with this purpose in mind and embarked on providing real-time performances of famous traditional music (Manning, 2013). This revolutionary effort of Cahill to build an electronic musical instrument inspired numerous composers at the advent of the 20th century to look for new electronic technologies that can enhance and heighten the harmonic quality, tunings, and sound of which musical instruments and music itself was then contained in (Nyman, 1999). Their plan was not to apply the developing electronic capability to reproduce current forms, but instead to surpass the usual and traditional. Immediately after Cahill completed the Telharmonium, the musician Ferruccio Busoni published his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music in which he suggested the importance of expanding the chromatic scale and newly developed electrical instruments to accomplish it. Numerous composers agreed to this opinion and started to envision what this form of music should be composed of (Dunn, n.d.). Afterwards, the Australian musician Percy Grainger became strongly certain that his idea of Free Music can only be attained through electromechanical instruments. The Futurist Manifesto was made public by 1908 and the modernist philosophy set off its artists’ movement against the status quo, or existing cultural and social ideologies (Holmes, 2008). Luigi Russolo published his The Art of Noise in 1913, arguing that the “evolution of music is paralleled by the multiplication of the machine” (Holmes, 2008, p. 18). Eventually, Ugo Piatti and Russolo had built an ensemble of electromechanical noise equipment able to accomplish their dream of a musical genre which overthrew the musical status quo. These revolutionary artists dreamt of creating music inspired by the noise of the modern period. For instance, Russolo’s noise musical instruments displayed their range of “howlers, boomers, cracklers, scrapers, exploders, buzzers, gurglers, and whistles” (Nyman, 1999, p. 43). A remarkable level of revolutionary music activity characterised the early part of the 20th century, a great deal of which required consideration of the importance of new instruments able to accomplish the new theories which discarded traditional musical dynamics. Composers like Schoenberg, Cowell, and Ives were promoting the instrumental and structural tools for music. It was during this period, during the cultural transformations caused by the Russian Revolution, that the Theremin, or Aetherophone, was invented by Leon Theremin (Holmes, 2002). The Theremin was a new electronic gadget derived from radio-frequency fluctuations. The astonishing flexibility of the Theremin not merely enabled the performance of classical music but also a broad array of new sounds (Dunn, n.d.). The theatrics of this instrument and the distinctiveness of its melody made it the most revolutionary musical invention of the early 20th century. After the 1920’s a wide array of new electronic musical equipment had been invented. The most popular was the Spharophon, a keyboard instrument based on radio frequency fluctuations. An astonishing growth in new electronic musical instruments eventually emerged in the following years, such as the Partiturophon; the Magnetton; the Melodium; the Emicon; the Pianophon; the Multimonica; the Electronium; the Kaleidophon; the Clavioline; the Electrochord; and the Sonorous Cross (Dunn, n.d., p. 7). Even though majority of these instruments were designed to generate new audiovisual resources, several were designed to imitate popular instrumental music of the pipe organ selection. It is exactly this goal of imitating the popular which formed the other key processes of designing electronic instruments: the broad range of electric pianos and organs that started to surface in the 1930’s (Nyman, 1999). In 1929, Laurens Hammond created his first electronic organ applying the Telharmonium’s tone-wheel mechanism. Although this invention of Hammond was heavily criticised by pipe organ buffs because of its excessive ‘electronic’ sound, he was the first to attain mass production of an electronic musical device and steady modulation via coordinated electromechanical sound producers, creating a pattern for widespread recognition (Manning, 2013). The Warbo Formant Organ introduced in 1937 was considered as one of the earliest polyphonic electronic devices that may be regarded a precursor of modern electronic organs. The German engineer Harald Bode who designed it was one of the most important people in the history of electronic music (Dunn, n.d., p. 9). He contributed to the designing of electronic instruments from the 1930’s onwards and he was one of the main engineers who founded Europe’s classic tape music studios. His efforts and influences encompassed the two most important design processes of new sounds against replication of traditional music. Other instruments which he later created were the Polychord, the Melochord, and the Melodium (Dunn, n.d., p. 9). By the latter part of the 1930’s there was a growth of experimental attempts in the United States and Europe. This period witnessed the development of the ANS Synthesizer and its launching at the Moscow Experimental Music Studio (Barela, 1997). In 1939, John Cage actualised his attraction to sources of electronic sound with the performance of Imaginary Landscape No. 1, a “live performance work whose score includes a part for disc recordings performed on a variable speed phonograph” (Dunn, n.d., p. 9). Several related attempts at using electronic sound and recorded sound sources ensued. Cage had also been a very enthusiastic advocate for electronic music, as were Percy Grainger, Henry Cowell, Joseph Schillinger, and Edgard Varese. Grainger untiringly pursued the creation of technological instruments able to achieve his revolutionary notion of Free Music (Dunn, n.d., pp. 9-10). He composed pieces for an orchestra of Theremins in 1937 and started to work with Burnett Cross to create a sequence of coordinated oscillator devices run by a paper tape roll apparatus. Such devices witnessed several manifestations until the demise of Grainger in 1961 (Dunn, n.d., p. 10). Homer Dudley invented the vocoder and the voder in 1939. These instruments were designed for non-musical uses related to the process of analysing speech (Holmes, 2008). The voder was a “keyboard-operated encoding instrument consisting of bandpass channels for the simulation of resonances in the human voice” (Dunn, n.d., p. 9) whereas the vocoder was “the corresponding decoder which consisted of an analyser and synthesiser for analysing and then reconstituting the same speech” (Dunn, n.d., p. 9). The voder also has noise and tone sources for replicating consonants and vowels. In addition to being one of the original instruments for modifying sound, the vocoder was to play a major part in electronic music as an instrument for voice processing that is still used far and wide (Manning, 2013). The major technological advancements of the 1930’s involved the first key advances in audio recording and television broadcast. Throughout the early 20th century, research into enhancing Valdemar Poulsen’s magnetic wire recorder had progressively continued (Nyman, 1999). Various enhancements had been initiated, most particularly the application of electrical amplification. The subsequent key development was the invention of steel bands to replace the wire. Steel bands are a quite successful instrument that served a crucial part in the Nazi’s secret police. Fritz Pfleumer, a German scientist, had started trying out oxide-coated plastic tape and paper in 1927 and in 1932 the I.G. Farbenindustrie launched the original plastic recording tape (Dunn, n.d., p. 10). The most popular of the original magnetic recording instruments was certainly the AEG Magnetophone launched at the Berlin Radio Fair in 1935. This instrument eventually became the classic magnetic tape recorder and was better than the wire recorders (Dunn, n.d., p. 10). The Magnetophone used oxide-coated paper by 1945. After the Second World War exclusive rights for this technology were granted to the U.S. as war loot and additional enhancements in tape technology took place in the country. By 1950, extensive commercial production and circulation of magnetic tape recorders finally took place (Holmes, 2002; Dunn, n.d.). Thaddeus Cahill’s dream of introducing to the entire world the magic of electronic music has finally became a reality. Conclusions Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium is the technological advancement that has made the biggest impact on music in terms of creation, production, and performance within the first half of the 20th century. Cahill’s remarkable contribution to the development of electronic music is rarely mentioned in the literature. What consistently comes up is that Cahill’s invention was merely a ‘prototype’ of later electromechanical musical instruments. But what the literature does not enunciate is the fact that Cahill’s Telharmonium provoked the revolutionary spirits of the most brilliant composers and inventors of early 20th century, like Theremin, Hammond, and Bode. Cahill’s invention introduced to the world the possibility of producing electronic sounds. What makes Cahill’s invention incomparable and unique is that even without the technical resources needed to produce an electronic musical instrument, he strived to complete his ambitious project. And, fortunately, he succeeded. In essence, Cahill’s Telharmonium ushered in the period of electronic music. References Barela, M. (1997) Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art tape music concert: reflections on the history and future of electroacoustic music. New York: College Music Society. Dunn, D., n.d. A History of Electronic Music Pioneers. [online] Available at: < http://www.davidddunn.com/~david/writings/pioneers.pdf> [Accessed 21 July 2013]. Holmes, T. (2002) Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. London: Routledge. Holmes, T. (2008) Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. London: Routledge. Manning, P. (2013) Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nyman, M. (1999) Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. UK: Cambridge University Press. Appendix Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium *image taken from Google Pictures < https://www.google.com.ph/search?rlz=1C1DVCC_enPH352PH352&q=thaddeus%20cahill%20dynamophone&psj=1&biw=1280&bih=869&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=pv.xjs.s.en_US.MzTIAy2H0K0.O&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=fil&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=Vk7uUZO1CvGjiAeNgIHQCw#facrc=_&imgrc=dqU1hpvutLZteM%3A%3BH5_-SD11ZXa41M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fthumb%252F5%252F56%252FTeleharmonium1897.jpg%252F300px-Teleharmonium1897.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fen.wikipedia.org%252Fwiki%252FTelharmonium%3B300%3B206> Read More