Rövid leírás:
For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Collaborating with scientists and technicians, the studio’s composers coaxed music from oscillators, generators, filters, and magnetic tape, reclaiming and repurposing military machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of mid-century electronic music. Jennifer Iverson’s Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the development of this music into a quintessential Cold War innovation-one that reverberated as much with anxiety as with the promise of a new age.
Több
Hosszú leírás:
For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson’s Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio’s composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music-echoing both cultural anxiety and promise-is a quintessential Cold War innovation.
Electronic Inspirations offers a number of interesting and worthwhile insights into the avant-garde electronic music of the 1950s, both in terms of historical detail and theoretical interpretation, synthesizing a great deal of published and unpublished material.
Több
Tartalomjegyzék:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Origins: Creating a Laboratory
Chapter 2. Kinship: Cage, Tudor, and the Timbral Utopia
Chapter 3. Collaboration: The Science and Culture of Additive Synthesis
Chapter 4. Reclaiming Technology: From Information Theory to Statistical Form
Chapter 5: Controversy: The Aleatory Debates beyond Darmstadt
Chapter 6: Techno-Synthesis: From Vocoder Speech to Electronic Music
Epilogue
Glossary of Actors
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
