Talk:Electronic music/Archive 1

Merge from Electronic Music
about half of this text comes from the "Electronic Music" page (2 leading caps instead of one); I've combined that info with the text here. However, the two articles claimed two different people to have produced the "earliest" electronic music; I've removed that claim for the phrase "early" instead; if someone can clarify the timeline in paragraph 2 a bit, please do so. --KQ

I added the reference hint for record labels and DJs as in some cases these can be more well known than the artists. -- PJL 202.37.101.xxx|202.37.101.xxx 16:26, July 25 2001

Created the topic Electronic music/Art music (aka Electronic art music), for a detailed discussion of the more academic stuff (ie work by Reich, Stockhausen etc.) I hate the term "art" music, but it's better than "contemporary" (as I've heard some people call it.) --Dachshund 22:37, September 27 2001

Dust Brothers/Chemical Brothers
Is the Dust Brothers the producers or should the Chemical Brothers be added? --202.37.101.xxx 01:20, February 15, 2002


 * Dust Brothers are a seperate group. I believe they and the Chemical Brothers shared the same record label for some time, which was Astralwerks. (included it!) I think these artists need to be classified with their genres, and seperating out Artists/DJ's is redundant. I'm going to change it so undiff if you don't like the result.

Someone who knows should add something about Detroit in the history of electronic music as well as the current Electronic Music Festival. --57.68.144.2 12:25, June 18 2002

Lux Aeterna
Wasn't Lux Aeterna a choral, not an electronic piece? (Although I believe some electronic distortion may have been added to the version on the 2001 soundtrack). -- The Anome

Ishkur's Guide
Added the Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music link unobtrusively at the top of Genres. Although the descriptions of each genre on the link are definitely not from a NPOV, the samples and links from subgenre to subgenre are fantastic and more than make up for it. This is a necessity to the article; check it out and you'll see why. :)

Dr Who theme
To state that Ron Grainer "created" the Dr Who theme is a serious (but long perpetrated) error. Grainer composed it, but it was "realised" (according to the credits) by Delia Derbyshire with little or no input from Grainer. Upon hearing the finished piece he asked "Did I really write this?!" to which Derbyshire replied "Most of it..." In fact, he was so impressed that he wanted Derbyshire to have a co-writing credit, but petty BBC beurocracy vetoed this...

Can anyone integrate this info into the piece? I can't find a succinct way to word it! Silver plane 22:50, March 8 2003


 * I changed the sentence to read "Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire". Please feel free to reverse the order.  I don't think the rest of the story is relevant to the article; it should be included in the Dr. Who article, the articles on the two musicians, or in a new as-yet-unwritten article. Dachshund 00:10, March 9 2003

Klaus Schulze
Klaus Schulze contribution to electronic music is rather important. Do we have to add him in the History ? --AlexandreDulaunoy 12:52, July 24, 2004

Tape music
I don't know what to do with the following, which was sitting at the top of the article. What does it mean? Why is it there? The article it links to is extremely vague, as well:


 * Compare with Tape music

Dachshund 23:58 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes, better off without it and no, I don't really follow the article it refers to either...Silver plane 04:39, March 9 2003


 * I'd suggest merging tape music with this article and redirecting it to here. It's so short anyway, and arguably tapes are a subset of electronics. --Lexor 09:56, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

alternative electronic
This page seems to be mainly focused on a certain cultural sort of electronic music -- the sort you'd find at a rave, or spun by DJs at a club (trance, jungle, goa, idm, etc.). In the vast range of electronic music there are several other major subgenres that are either not covered or only covered briefly here. Electronic art music I can see already has its own article, which leaves us with two somewhat related groups of genres, which for lack of a better term I'll call harsh electronic music and dark electronic music. Harsh electronic music includes a broad range of stuff, such as noise music (Merzbow, Organum), rhythmic noise (Tarmvred, ...) power noise (which I know little about), EBM (Front 242, Wumpscut, Funker Vogt), and others. Dark electronic music starts among some of these groups (Wumpscut, Bio-Tek), and goes all the way to electro-goth, which is basically goth with synthesizers (The Crüxshadows, ...). There is also futurepop (VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk, Covenant), a fairly recent term describing bands that sound essentially like trance, but generally are somewhat darker, and nearly always have vocals; they're also more related in heritage to harsh electronic music than to trance, as most of them used to be EBM bands at some point. And finally there's synthpop, which is closely related, but more along the lines of Depeche Mode, and more recently bands like Mesh and to some extent Wolfsheim.

In any case, my main point is that all of this is also electronic music, but is very different musically and culturally from most of the music in this article. Anyone have any ideas on how or where it should be fit in? It's a somewhat ill-defined genre grouping, but they're all definitely related, and definitely distinct from trance/goa/jungle/house/etc. The best definition I can think of at the moment is "basically anyone who plays at the annual Wave Gotik Treffen in Germany." --Delirium 04:03 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Kraftwerk
Wot ! no mention of Kraftwerk, without whom half of bands mentioned would never have developed. The Norwikian 62.253.32.7 09:41, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * You can't be reading too carefully, it's there in the 5th paragraph:


 * As technology developed, and synthesizers became cheaper, more robust and portable, they were adopted by many rock bands. Examples of relatively early adopters in this field are bands like the United States of America, The Silver Apples and Pink Floyd, and although not all of their music was primarily electronic (with the notable exception of The Silver Apples), much of the resulting sound was dependent upon the synthesised element. In the 1970s, this style was mainly popularised by Kraftwerk, who used electronics and robotics to symbolise and sometime gleefully celebrate the alienation of the modern technological world; to this day their music remains uncompromisingly electronic.


 * --Lexor 10:02, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Old entries
We should not neglect the historical facts.

We have the fact that in english language we see the term "electronic music" quite early, and quite naturally. This need not be in other languages. E.g. in German we find "elektrische Musik", i.e. electrical music only up to the year 1949.

We have also the fact that real avantgarde music (which I'm going to explain later) is rarely happening in the early years in the USA or GB. This sometimes leads to some misinterpretation which I try to counter here.

As the article says "electronic music" does not say very much about the music behind the word, it is in fact all and nothing. The omnipresence of electronic apparatus leads to the simple fact, that any music today is in some way electronic, even a classical orchester played via radio, TV or CD is somehow electronic.

So, in the broader sense the term "electronic music" is void, it has lost any specific meaning. This should be reflected somehow in a encyclopedia article (well, it is reflected implicitly now, in that a lot of confusion appears).

We can now ask for electronic music in the narrower sense. It seems to me that this term is very precisely defined. In 1949 we see that three people in Germany (Meyer-Eppler, Eimert and Beyer) think about "electronic music" in CONTRAST and as a way to escape from the stagnation of existing music. This implies a radical cut with the existing music practise. In this time the term "Elektronische Musik" is coined the first time in German language. And subsequently early works of this kind emerge (1953).

So in 1953 elektronische musik has a very specific meaning: tape recordings and edited tape recordings of sine wave sounds (single as well as clusters) in order to embody seriall music, the fashionable composition technique of that post war time in Europe.

All sources seem to imply that e. m. in the narrow sense is a German invention, a good deal of the literature is therefore in German language, even today, perhaps not that good accessible to other people. This may add to the stated confusion. But I must say that a lot of English language academic text do reflect these facts, nevertheless.

In the 1956s this narrow definition is widened a bit in that concrete sound (see musique concrete of Paris) is also permitted and that the strict serialism is softened, leading to compositorial inventions ad hoc (both are Stockhausens great contributions in "Gesang der Juenglinge") and also random processes (aleatoric), the later beeing the contribution of the great John Cage.

Summary: The characteristics of electronic music in the narrow meaning are:

-the piece is prepared in the studio, and played back via loudspeaker during performance -it is not life, since this would restrict the complexity of the work -it has no performer or conductor, e.m. is thus autonomous -e. m. makes a clear cut with old musical practise, e.g. no mechanical instruments, less stage perfromance -since serialism was allready the starting point, it clearly leaves the road of western classical music (this means also pop or jazz music), scales, rythm, harmony do not exist in e.m. -sound is more important than structure or form -sound becomes a dimension of compositorical work -space becomes a dimension of compositorical work

In this sense, all the examples of theremin music, DJ music, house, techno etc. etc. are clearly NOT e.m.

The present article totally neglects this historical development that established very sharp criteria of what is e.m. and what is not e.m. as early as 1950.

The fact that many people do not know about this historical development (and perhaps think that e.m. was defined in 1990 with rising popularity of techno) makes no difference to the facts.

m.c. / 2. June 2004 --213.160.22.50

Genrebox
My plan had been to not put a genrebox here because "electronic music" is awfully vague, but it doesn't look as bad as I had thought. The footer (e.g. at industrial music) crams a lot of links in though. Would look better if the top-level genres were industrial, techno, house, etc instead of "electronic music", I think. Tuf-Kat 15:47, Apr 16, 2004 (UTC)~


 * I'm not opposed to splitting it up into some top-level genres, more or less along the lines they are broken up into now and having genreboxes for each. In fact, it would certainly slim down the footer, which somebody already complained about having display problems in IE (see MediaWiki talk:Electronic music-footer).  However, it would also be nice if we could invent a short summary "meta"-genrebox for things like electronic music.  Perhaps we could do something similar with other meta-styles like you sort of already did with American roots music (blues, jazz etc.) so it isn't so arbitrary.  Why don't we develop the genrebox/footers as subpages off this page, Talk:Electronic music/Techno music, Talk:Electronic music/House etc. --Lexor|Talk 16:58, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Great work on the techno footer, Lexor! Here's a plan:
 * Put the seriesbox (the vertical one on the right at Talk:Electronic music/footer) at the top of electronic music
 * Put the genrebox at Talk:Electronic music/Techno music-footer at [[techno music, and the footer at the bottom of all the subgenres linked within that box.
 * I like duplicating the broad "electronic music" footer within the electronic genres footers themselves -- I may try the same thing with American roots music... Tuf-Kat 21:33, Apr 16, 2004 (UTC)

Footers/genreboxes I'm working on:


 * Talk:Electronic music/Techno music: Template:Techno music-footer (footer) Techno music (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/House: Template:House music-footer (footer) House music (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Breakbeat: Template:Breakbeat-footer (footer) Breakbeat (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Trance: Template:Trance music-footer (footer) Trance music (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Industrial: Template:Industrial music-footer (footer) Industrial music (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Electronica: Template:Electronica-footer (footer) Electronica (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Synthpop: Template:Synth pop-footer (footer) Synth pop (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Ambient: Template:Ambient music-footer (footer) Ambient music (article with genrebox)
 * Talk:Electronic music/Electronic art music: Template:Electronic art music-footer (footer) Electronic art music (article with genrebox)

Rendering of footer
Lexor requested a screen shot of the problem with how the Electronic Music footer displayed in IE. My apologies for not cropping it -- I don't have a good set of image editing tools. This is of the footer before recent adjustments to it. It displays the same when included in articles. --Bkonrad

image has been deleted

The small tags (and font sizing) look awful in Firefox with blue champagne. I don't really see a need for them. Bold and nonbold are enough, no? - Omegatron 00:35, Apr 17, 2004 (UTC)


 * With the recent slimming down of the footers, shouldn't be a problem anymore. --Lexor|Talk 14:55, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)