Pioneers Of Electronic Music

Chronique

New World Records' Pioneers of Electronic Music is a repackaging of the CRI title of the same name and centers around the activity of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center founded by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. The designation "pioneers" in this case is a particularly apt one -- these are not pioneers of techno or some other latter-day popular music involving the use of electronics, but pioneers of electronic music itself. At the Museum of Modern Art, the earliest four of these Ussachevsky and Luening pieces -- Sonic Contours, Low Speed, Invention in Twelve Notes, and Fantasy in Space -- were presented on October 26, 1952, in what is now adjudged as the second-ever concert of electronic music in American history. Add Incantation and you have the contents of a 10" LP called Tape Recorder Music, released in 1955 on the Innovations label, the first commercially issued record of American electronic music and an extremely scarce item in its original form. Before finally landing on this New World CD, some or all of these selections have been released in a variety of forms, even at one point in "fake stereo." It is good that they now have a permanent home -- by right they should not ever be out of print.
Listening to the early monophonic Ussachevsky and Luening tape recorder music and it is easy to underestimate what they achieved; in order for this primitive system to do its thing, one needed to have a trigger, which was generally either Ussachevsky's piano or Luening's flute. The flute, as it turns out, was an excellent choice, as its purity of tone was closest to the sound of a sine wave, later the basic seed of most electronic music in its next historical phase. Some may feel that Luening's plainly Native American-derived melody in Fantasy in Space is a little cheesy; at the time, it was a good handle for those listeners who could barely consider this music. Nevertheless, the impact of these early pieces was both enormous and universal -- the opening of Kraftwerk's 1977 piece The Hall of Mirrors from the album Trans Europe Express directly references the opening of Incantation; it just so happens that Florian Schneider is also a flute player, and has designed his own equipment based on its capabilities.
Although Luening's Moonflight and Ussachevsky's Piece for Tape Recorder originate elsewhere, the balance of the disc is taken from the two-LP CRI set Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Tenth Anniversary. This was a very popular electronic music album in the 1970s, and those who owned the original may have a nostalgic flashback in listening to pieces like Bülent Arel's Stereo Electronic Music No. 2 or Pril Smiley's Kolyosa. Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 5 has actually managed to gain some currency as a standard repertoire item, along with several of his other Synchronisms, but none of the works was created with the intention of becoming part of the larger discipline of Western art music. These were teaching pieces and had the exploratory purpose of expanding the capabilities of the limited, not very user-friendly equipment then in development. The popular reaction to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Tenth Anniversary was enjoyed at the time among those listeners who favored this music as a kind of spacey, freaked-out experience.
New World's Pioneers of Electronic Music is an improvement on the CRI CD in every way -- annotation, cover art, and sound quality. A copy of this should be in every American library that takes its sound recordings collection seriously, and to listeners, especially musicians in the ever-expanding field of electronics, this is essential, a veritable Urtext of where electronic music begins in America.

© TiVo