Summary

I hope you’ve found the discussions and listening exercises engaging and that we’ve helped to illustrate the roots of electronic music. We’ve looked at the music that emerged from the French GRM studio, and the practice of music concrète, and the music that emerged from the WDR and the German idea of elektronische music.

This is a compelling historical narrative, and the genuine animosity between the two schools of artistic thinking – the first with an interest in recorded sound and the abstraction of sound from its source, and the second with an interest in the scientific construction of sound through physics and the implantation of this control to a serial composition – demonstrates the seriousness to which the creative potential of electronic music was explored. It’s not surprising that these two strong ideologies helped to inspire other electronic music studios around the world, even if these studios were far less dogmatic than the originators.

But, you say, what about England? I thought this was a course on “Electronic Music in 20th Century England”? We’ll be turning our attention to the English experience of electronic music next week. In doing so, it will be interesting to compare the English experience of electronic music to that of the rest of the world – I think you’ll find that England had a pretty unique experience in terms of artists working with electronic music, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a positive way!