Hard semester so far

Well it's Monday, September 20th and so far it has been a horrible beginning to another horrible week of school.  In MPA 334, we had a test on the first chapter of our book and the beginnings of electronic music....failed miserably.  I hate it when I know what the answers to the questions are, but my brain shuts off and I can't answer it. So I ended up with blank answers for all of the questions, except the 2nd question, which was about Theremin, his life, and his electronic instrument... except I spelled Theremin's name wrong as well. Been talking about the man for two weeks and making notes on him, but I get his name wrong today. Then to make it worse, I actually forgot to write out my blog for last week as to the life of Leon Theremin and how he invented the Theremin instrument, as well as some of his other inventions.

So back to the class and the notes from both class and book, here you are:
Chapter 2- Early Electronic Music in Europe

Recording before the Tape Recorder, there were:

• Disks, which was more popular than the other two, partly due to the fact that disk recordings were "less expensive, widely available, and more amenable to a trial and error process". Some of the disadvantages, however, were that the playback time for disc recordings were limited to a few minutes at a speed of 78 rpm, and there was no sound editing or mixing capability.
• Wire Recorders
• Phonofilm, also known as the De Forest Process, named after its inventor, Lee de Forest who was known for also coming up with the Audiom vacuum tube.

The De Forest process:

• First introduced 1919
• It worked by converting audio signals to electrical waveforms and photographically recorded on the edge of motion picture film:
• "Soundtracks were made audible by using a photoelectric call to convert the track during the playback of the motion picture"

Turntablism- the idea of exploiting a device and using it the way its not supposed to be used.
Turntables were often used onstage as part of the performances at this time; however Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) and Ernst Toch (1887-1964), who were both (inspired by the common gramophone), were able to find other applications for the turntable.  They decided to experiment with record players as an instrument rather than using them to record the performance.

• Grammophonmusik
• The roots of turntablism
• Originalwerke fur Schallplatten
• Hindemith's and Toch's short program consisting of 5 works that lasted only a few minutes each
• Hindemith's 2 works were titled Trickaufnahmen ("trick recordings")
• Toch's 3 works were titled Gesprochene Music ("spoken music")
• For all 5 records, the men exploited the effects of using pre-recording and playing them back at the wrong speed.

Musique Concrete:

Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995)- a radio engineer, broadcaster, writer, and biographer.

Pierre Henry (b. 1927)- a classically trained composer.

Schaeffer and Henry decided to collaborate together to form what would later come Musique Concrete, a term originally coined by Schaeffer in 1948. Their compositions referred to real world sounds or audibles or other naturally occurring sounds that didn't include instruments or human interface.  Musique Concrete embodied new sensibilities of music expression and re-conceptualized the abstraction of notation.  Schaeffer's first idea was to use any and all sounds except traditional instruments.

Listening: Etudes de Bruits ("studies of noise") (1948) used:

• A disc-cutting lathe
• 4 turntables
• 4 channel mixers
• Microphone
• Audio filters
• Reverb chamber
• Previously recorded sounds.

Side note: Schaeffer also found a way to repeat sounds in his Etudes by creating lock grooves, or endless loops, with the disc cutter.

Four principles that the second era of electronic music rest on are:

1. Composing through technology means dealing with actual sounds
2. Sounds organic coming from mon musical sources
3. Replayed identically each time using mechanical means
4. Presentation of the work did not require human performers

This is what I have so far, but I plan on updating this when I gather more notes on Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007).