Electronics in Music: Preliminary Stages

Abstract

With a first recorded appearance dating around the 1950s, electronic music – the fruit of rigorous and tenacious labour by acoustician-researchers and composers who tried and succeeded in imposing a new sound-universe – channelled the evolution of the art of sounds as nothing before it. Prominent composers of the orientation – Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Edgar Varèse, Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Luigi Nono – had a determinant role in the way music expanded. The literature mentions as early as the beginning of the 20th century the existence of creators with a true calling for identifying original solutions to permanently transform music, breaking its barriers and thus allowing it to develop, expression-wise, in a variety of directions.