history of electronic music

Hollow Sun has announced plans for a new virtual instrument based on the rare and amazing Hammond Novachord – a polyphonic analog synthesizer released in 1939!

The Novachord is sort of the B3 of synthesizers – a huge, unwieldy beast that sounds like nothing else.

Unlike the B3, though, the Hammond Novachord has largely been forgotten. They were expensive, few were made, and few have survived because of their complexity.

The Novachord features divide-down oscillators and individual envelopes and LFO for each note. Yeah – this thing could do 72-voice polyphony in 1939!

Here’s an example of what this 70 year-old monster synth can sound like:

 

 Hammond Novachord [7:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Imagine if this technology had taken off!

Read more…

John Cage is the subject of a new museum exhibition in Barcelona. The exhibit looks at Cage’s works in various media and his impact on all forms of contemporary art.

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross shares his thoughts on the highlights of the exhibit – but also raises this conundrum:

The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan.

The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.

It is striking that someone as influential as Cage – as a composer, author, electronic music pioneer and artist – hasn’t found an audience that reflects his influence.

Ross is right. Many people that might appreciate Rauschenberg or Pollock would cringe at the idea of sitting through a concert of Cage’s works.

Maybe the answer to Ross’s conundrum is as simple as this: you can’t close your ears.

If you see a painting that’s confrontational, ugly or incomprehensible, you can close your eyes or walk away. You are in control of the experience.

At a concert of music by an artist like Cage, you can’t close your ears or move on to the next thing. You aren’t in control of your experience – you can just react to it.

This seems to be a fundamental challenge of electronic music (and to a certain degree, music in general); when anything is possible, how do you create music that is original, yet still has the power to seduce someone’s ear?

via disquiet; Image: fallwithme

What The Future Sounded Like is a documentary about the the people of EMS (Electronic Music Studios) a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who utilized technology and experimentation to compose a futuristic electronic sound-scape for the New Britain.

Comprising of pioneering electronic musicians Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary (famed for his work on the Dr Who series) and genius engineer David Cockerell, EMS studio was one of the most advanced computer-music facilities in the world.

EMS’s great legacy is the VCS3, Britain’s first synthesizer and rival of the American Moog. The VCS3 changed the sounds of some of the most popular artists of this period including Brian Eno, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd.

via bananimalistic:

Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil appeared on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965, when he was 17 years old, demonstrating his music-composing computer.

This excellent documentary looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.

Featured musicians include Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze and Faust.

You can view the first part above. See the rest on YouTube – while you can. Read more…