Technology and the Composer

Between 1877 and 1896 Edison and Berliner developed their cylindrical and disc phonograph systems, providing us with the new ability to store audio signals and to retrieve them from storage by electro-mechanical means. About half a century later, and nearly 30 years after Lee DeForest had initiated electronics with the first vacuum tube (the triode audion), the phonograph disc was joined by magnetic tape and the phonograph by the tape recorder. During the last 15 years great progress has been made in learning how the computer can assist the musician towards achieving ever higher degrees of precision in storing and retrieving audio information. The emergence of electronics, vacuum tubes, transistors, and all kinds of increasingly sophisticated circuitries supplied the impetus to delve anew into the still only vaguely answered questions about the physical nature of sound, the possibilities of analyzing and of synthesizing any desired sound, the problems of psycho-acoustical phenomenology. It also led to a vast arsenal of electronic sound sources, sound modifiers, devices for control and amplification of sound, to microphones and loudspeakers, but most important of all: it led to an improved concept of storage, to the concept of simulated memory, to the programmable studio and to the even more programmable digital and analogue computer system. Although composers became aware of these developments rather early—although Busoni, Schoenberg, Varese, Schillinger, Stokowski, Chavez, and many others wrote and talked about the promising influence of science and technology on composers in their search for new compositional procedures— it was not until rather late in the game that some notable connections between technology and composition were established. Most of the time since 1906, when Dr. Thaddeus Cahil demonstrated his Telharmonium or Dynamophone, has been dedicated to the invention and enormous improvement of techniques for the production, manipulation, and performance of sound. In 1916 Edgar Varese asked for new musical instruments and enrichment of our musical alphabet, and a few years later, for the cooperation between electrician and composer. From 1927 till 1936 he tried to get financial support for the development of an electronic instrument for composition at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Harvey Fletcher and René Bertrand would have collaborated with him on the project. He could neither get a Guggenheim Fellowship nor any help from sound studios in Hollywood. In the meantime Hammond had produced his organ, the Novachord, the Solovox, and one can follow this instrumentoriented trend through the years up to the present. In the United States composers began work with tape and tape recorders in about 1950. The next ten years saw the establishment of various studios and laboratories, where composers, musicians, and technicians could collaborate in furthering all kinds of projects pertaining to the relationships between electronics and music. In North America almost all such studios are located at and affiliated with universities. Major examples are the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the studios at the Universities of Illinois and Toronto.12Now there are hundreds of such installations to be found in the