Many thanks for your reply, bruising though it is. I’m preparing a proper response to it, but first of all I must take issue with your remark that you ordinarily “wouldn’t bother to respond to a blog post that was so old.”

Old??? Young man, maybe out there in the blogosphere, two months is considered “old,” but here on this site, that’s about as fresh as things get. Sheesh! It just about kills me to write something every few days, then some smarty-pants comes around and decries these painfully extracted prose masterpieces as “old.”

Seriously, though, I will get around to writing more — preferably before another two months passes by.

I’d guess that you don’t like much, if any, of the electronic music you’ve heard; which is, of course, your perogative. You also don’t seem to know much about the music’s history. Given your apparent dislike of the music, this too is understandable. Unfortunately, your limited knowledge and lack of interest in the field have resulted in misinterpretation and distortion of the facts that you cite. By further conflating this misinformation with your own political opinions, you’ve arrived at a post that may be very reassuring to readers who share your aesthetics and/or your political beliefs, but it’s just about entirely wrong.

From the end of World War 2 until the late 1960s or early 1970s, most electronic music was created as unchanging pieces of audiotape, handcrafted by a composer working in an electronic music studio at a university/college or at a large government-funded radio station. Prior to this period, any electronic instruments were designed for live performance, because there was no simple way to create static electronic works without reel to reel tape recorders. After the mid-1970s, with the rise of personal computers and certain hardware and software developments, electronic music once again became more focused on performance rather than the creation of static recordings.

In the short period following WW2, almost every developed nation, and many developing nations, had at least one electronic studio, though they were most common in the United States and Western Europe. The quotations that you cite regarding electronic music were so pervasive that there is no useful way to consider them being “a beautiful expression of the cruel ideology of early Soviet communism”. Similar statements, made by composers and critics alike, were quite common in any all countries that had electronic studios. To think that these concepts were somehow unique to or particularly indicative of the situation of the Soviet Union is simply uninformed. In fact, because of the actual history of the field, there were comparatively few composers and/or instrument builders focusing on electronic music in the Soviet Union. Soviet cultural tsars were far more interested in the musical equivalent of “social realism” than the avant garde clicks and squeaks of electronic music.

Moreover, this attitude belies the nature of the particular instruments designed and built by Theremin and Moog. These instruments were created for performance rather than to be used in isolated studios by monomaniacal composers creating music that would exist solely as an unchanging piece of pre-recorded tape or, these days, as a static digital file. I’m not in love with the various recordings I’ve heard of Clara Rockmore performing light classics on theremin, but these recordings obviously document a particular performance by an instrumentalist open to the vagaries of performance practice as any trained cellist or pianist might be.

The potential for performer interpretation was one of the aspects of Theremin’s instrument that inspired Moog in the construction of his own instruments, who was unhappy with the lack of performance subtleties available in the unchanging taped music that electronic music had become following http://WWw. The various Moog synthezsizer he created over the years were among the earliest modern synthesizers that used keyboards modeled on pianos or organs to be played in real time, rather than to be controlled by a series of automated sequencers. Everything about them was designed to be used in live performance situations. While Moog’s instruments were used in many electronic studios to make some of the static works on tape that were central to electronic music in the early post-WW2 period, they were just as often played in concerts in ways not unlike more traditional acoustic instruments. That is, these instruments were played by a performer responding to other instrumentalists in an ensemble, to the audience feel, and to their own abilities to recreate the score of the work at hand.

This is already quite long, perhaps as long as your original post, so I won’t go on with further details. But despite your personal taste and your political bent, what you’ve written here about the work of both Leon Theremin and Robert Moog is just ignorant and naive.