13th

Music On a Long Thin Wire, Alvin Lucier

As seen in the first Q&A, describing electronic music isn't easy. What do we mean when we say electronic music? Purely electronic generated sounds? Sounds diffused by electronic means? If it's the latter, it means all music is, in fact, electronic, all it takes is ear-buds. I think, however, this is over-simplifying things. Surely that without electronic experimentation, most of Beatles albums wouldn't sound as good, but should we call it electronic music? It's pop, nevertheless, but music, foremost, and apart from Tomorrow Never Knows, A Day in The Life and Revolution 9 there aren't many Beatles songs we could rightly call "electronic".

Musique concrète was born under the sign of tape manipulation, that is, looping, distortion of recorded sounds, and what Schaeffer, as Henry or Varèse, were interested in, was not being faithfull to those recorded sounds, but changing them by all means possible and creating something completely new, the New Atlantis of Music, if you will. Achieving this by technical and electronic inovation.

After the proliferation and establishment of these technics in the music industry, electronic music became mainstream. But that doesn't mean, again, we shouldn't call Kraftwerk or Air, for instance, electronic music, their music is generated by sounds you cannot hear from any known acoustic instrument.

Is electronic music, then, somewhere around the place where acoustic music ceases to be acoustic?

Maybe, maybe not. Don't expect me to answer...