Live Wires: A History of Electronic Music

by Dan Warner

We live in an electronic world, saturated with electronic sounds. Yet, electronic sounds aren’t a new phenomenon; they have long permeated our sonic landscape. What began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen’s Kontakte a few years later, is now a common soundscape in technology, media, and an array of musical genres and subgenres. More people than ever before can produce and listen to electronic music, from isolated experimenters, classical and jazz musicians, to rock musicians, sound recordists, and the newer generations of electronic musicians making hip-hop, house, techno, and ambient music. Increasingly we are listening to electronic sounds, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them, and rehearing them as listeners and makers.

Live Wires explores how five key electronic technologies—the tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone, and turntable—revolutionized musical thought. Featuring the work of major figures in electronic music—including everyone from Schaeffer, Varèse, Xenakis, Babbitt, and Oliveros to Eno, Keith Emerson, Grandmaster Flash, Juan Atkins, and Holly Herndon— Live Wires is an arresting discussion of the powerful musical ideas that are being recycled, rethought, and remixed by the most interesting electronic composers and musicians today.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

224 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2017

Reviews

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book that purports to elucidate a history of electronic music through the framing device of 5 emblematic inventions - the tape recorder, the circuit, the turntable, the microphone and the computer.

The choice of these devices makes sense - although I would assume that the tape recorder implies the turntable. The author uses the device being discussed to detail the account of its invention, and how that invention was taken up by artists of an experimental bent ; oftentimes landing up in areas far removed from the inventor's original intent.

This is a thematic approach that the author does well - he insists that the adoption of the tape recorder, for example, not only led to the creation of music that would not have been possible without the tape recorder, but also significantly altered how we think about music. Repetition and recontextualization were not unknown to classical music composers, who were not averse to including bawdy folk melodies in their stately pieces, or recontextualizing a rival's hook in inappropriate places ; but the tape recorder dramatically expanded the scope of such things. The record becomes no longer a recording of a performance of straight-composed music i.e. the classical definition of music ; but instead, becomes raw material for assemblage ; a still-evolving definition of the new music.

As a side-note, I think this is a theme that people like Mark Fisher took and ran with ; irony is no longer constrained by formal restraint, but breaks its bonds.

In any case, repetition loosens reference, and can quite quickly sink into absurdity unless rescued in an aesthetic package. This is what sampling, and the early hip-hop culture did ; and the author attempts to make the point that this culture cocked a snook at the traditional hierarchy of musical thinking, before it too was commercialized. Revolutions have a limited sell-by date after all.

There are technical details regarding the backstory of each invention that leads me to believe that this book was written for an audience that are already well-immersed in the experimental scene, and to whom, therefore, the paradigmatic instruments featured in this book are close friends. Unfortunately, to a novice expecting a straight-forward history with just enough technical detail to illustrate the main point (a book like, say, Perfecting Sound Forever : An Aural History of Recorded Music) this particular book overshoots the mark.

Additionally, in many instances, the technical details are not well-integrated with what the body of the text is attempting to argue ; it is like the book is torn between trying to write a technical history of electronic musical instruments, and a socio-aesthetic thesis regarding the impact of such instruments on how we usually think about music. Both aspects are addressed adequately, but the integration is lacking, and the book becomes rather a slog to get through.

This is my main criticism - it is simply not well written. Alarm bells started ringing when, within the first couple of paragraphs in the Introduction, the author mentions Walter Benjamin's thesis on the value of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. This famous thesis is mentioned in passing, before the author insinuates that Benjamin might have concluded he had missed the mark, if only he could have seen what modern electronic music had become. While I am sure that he could have, this treatment is the very definition of name-dropping ; and it irritated me quite profoundly, especially as the hard yards of argument, exposition and elucidation had not been performed yet.

This tone of awkward pretentiousness is carried through the entire text, and is served quite well by the writing itself, which is a ill-formed chunk of clause-upon-clause monstrosities of poorly-constructed sentences. I would imagine that the author is one of those academics who are much more comfortable speaking in a lecture hall, rather than writing.

Unfortunately, this style of writing also highlights the poor choice of title for this work - it is a history of electronic music, but only if the definition of the word 'history' is stretched to breaking point. As it stands, it reads more like a thesis, and a convoluted one at that, arguing for the impact upon musical thinking occasioned by the innovations of a post-industrial society.

I did not enjoy this book at all - in fact, while reading this book, I came up with a working definition of pretentiousness : 'a borrowed depth of language in service of an original, shallow point.'

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the few books I am aware of that adequately tracks how various analog and digital technologies were developed, obsoleted each other, and then were resurrected from obscurity by composers who re-purposed supposedly arcane technologies for new applications. How many people observing the vinyl renaissance in turntables are aware this story has been re-told with modular synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, samplers, ad infinitum, and that if we did not observe the re-invention of obsolete technology, we would not get such subgenres as acid house? The reason Warner is the perfect person for this is that he understands the equanimity of all sounds, the ways that great electronic music pulls together melody and noise. He is a classical composer who understands rock, hip-hop, pop, EDM, and subgenres perfectly. The only reason he does not score a perfect five stars from me is that this book should have been three times as long as it is. And I have a funny feeling that was the fault of Warner's editors, not the author.

We certainly can't fault the author's arrangement of the material. The chapters of the book are organized according to medium - magnetic tape, circuits, turntables, microphone, and computers - with each chapter taking history back occasionally as far as World War II. Warner is concerned with the turntable or the microphone as instrument, so those chapters only go back to the 1970s or 1980s. But with tapes, circuits, and computers, one must go back to pre-computing days to understand such elements of musical history as the battle between the French musique concrete school and the Cologne Stockhausen school of oscillators. Warner wants to start his final computer chapter with the MIDI era in which the laptop becomes a primary musical instrument, but he first must take us back to mainframe eras, when computer music was composed on punch cards or even the equivalent of piano rolls.

And here's the problem: If you're going to talk about oscillation in the digtal or analog domain, you need at least a rudimentary coverage of basic electronic circuit theory, which I'm sure Warner knows well, and wants to include in this book. If you're going to talk about random stochastic processes like Monte Carlo analysis and hidden Markov modeling, you have to talk about the application of randomness to musical composition. I had to stretch to grasp everything Warner was saying, but I've had several years of chip architecture and computer science education. There needs to be a few more life preservers thrown to musicians without such a background. Also, we need more anecdotal stories from people in the trenches. We've got great material from Keith Emerson and Pauline Oliveros, but I'd like to hear more from the likes of Brian Eno, Sun Ra, and Donna Summer's band.

Warner is one of the few people anywhere that gets that the advent of streaming as the primary way to deliver music, and the demise of the traditional music industry, need not spell doomsday for the independent musician. The rise of MIDI interfaces and programming environments like MAX and Ableton Live means that every musician IS a studio. That not only means a great equalization is under way for music production and creation, it means the soft-studio will itself become a musical instrument in the near future (in many senses, it already has), and that this will not work to the benefit of any of the big music production or live-music presentation giant corporations. Warner subscribes to the same philosophy David Byrne adheres to in How Music Works: all sounds are created equal, and there is no distinction between amateur and professional sounds, melodic or dissonant sounds, "high art" and "low art", etc. (Warner uses a quote from Iannis Xenakis that encapsulates a lot: "'Beautiful' or 'ugly' makes no sense for sound, nor for the music that derives from it; the quantity of intelligence carried by the sounds must be the true criterion of the validity of a particular music.")

Warner happily understands this because he is quite the visionary (what else can you say about an author who would precede two successive chapters with pictures of Laurie Anderson and Holly Herndon?). Maybe in another few years when his prophecies are recognized, Warner will be given the leeway to write the 600-page book this should have been to begin with, and at that time, I'm sure I'll be able to give it a full five stars.

[Aaron Schuman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good examination of 20th century academic and popular music through the lens of 5 objects. I was somewhat disappointed in the short and somewhat distracted (by analog drum machines?!) treatment of computer music. However, the section on the microphone was interesting and illuminating. Good read, recommended.

[Michael Dear · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book an informative and useful introduction to the technological and compositional developments of electronic music. Being a complete novice in this field, I have appreciated the extensive references to artists and their works, many of which can be accessed online. Although the topic has the potential to be technically and philosophically complex, Warner has produced a text which is erudite but still easy to read.

I've been developing a playlist on YouTube (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC...) to accompany the book. The tracks and artists follow approximately the order in which they appear in the text, with the addition of some extra artists that I've discovered along the way.