392 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
As early as 1917 the Franco-American composer Edgard Varèse had proclaimed:
“I dream of instruments obedient to my thought.” In 1936 he envisioned creat-
ing music directly “on a machine that will faithfully transmit the musical con-
tent to the listener.” Despite the invention of early electronic instruments such as
the theremin (1928), progress toward the realization of Varèse’s dream was slow
until the magnetic tape recorder was perfected in the late 1940s, after which
electronic music came into its own.
In 1952 the fi rst American tape music concert took place. The music had been
constructed with equipment entirely different from the standard “hardware”
of music composition: tape recorders, magnetic tape, splicing materials, gen-
erators of sound signals, and devices for fi ltering sound. W hile Western music
making had always involved some acoustical know-how, electronic music posed
different challenges. A new sound palette was available, but to control it required
knowledge and experience that few musicians possessed. Most importantly, by
creating their works directly on tape, composers were bypassing the performer-
interpreter, a key ingredient in earlier music.
Varèse, nearing seventy when the technology he had imagined came into
general use, employed it in Poème électronique (1957–58). Collaborating with the
Swiss architect Le Corbusier, Varèse composed this work for the Philips Pavil-
ion at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. Here he realized his longtime dream of
creating music to exist in space as well as time. The work was tape-recorded and
then played through 425 loudspeakers, arranged so that the sound could sweep
across and around the curves of Le Corbusier’s building.
In the early 1950s a studio was established at Columbia University by Columbia
professors Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening and Princeton professors
Babbitt and Sessions. Originally, the work in the studio involved recording
sounds on tape, rerecording them, and then manually splicing the bits of tape
together to create the music itself. In 1959, however, the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA) installed the Mark II, an advance model of an electronic sound
synthesizer that became the heart of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music
Center. The synthesizer, which constituted and shaped the sounds, reduced
the need to rerecord and to splice tape. Further, an instrument able to con-
trol precisely such elements as rhythm, dynamics, and timbre as well as pitch
proved well suited to Milton Babbitt’s ideal of totally organized music. He used
the Mark II to create his Composition for Synthesizer (1961) and Ensembles for
Synthesizer (1964). He also combined live performance with synthesized sound
in such works as Vision and Prayer (1961) and Philomel (1964). In the meantime,
as synthesizer technology became more widespread and affordable, electronic
music studios sprang up throughout the United States, one of the most impor-
tant being the San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1963.JOHN CAGE
Although Varèse, Babbitt, and others explored the new medium vigorously, John
Cage was the fi rst American to complete a tape composition: Imaginary Landscape
no. 5 (1952), followed later that year by the remarkable Williams Mix. As early as
1937 the young California-born Cage had predicted that the use of noise to makePoème électroniquethe synthesizer172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 392 23/01/13 10:56 AM