Charles Rosen opens his magnificent book, The Romantic Generation, with a meditation on “inaudible music.” What could this possibly mean? Rosen explains that when we listen to music, we purify and enhance it, eliminating “extraneous” noise such as coughing, traffic, or snoring. We ignore the rattling of a clarinet’s keys, the scraping of a violin’s bow, the characteristic “decay” of a note on the piano, and construct an idealized sound in our head. Thus, musical details that are literally inaudible or unperformable — a crescendo on a single held note on the piano, for instance — can still be perceived by our musical imagination.
Rosen argues that the limitations of musical instruments often enhance their expressiveness, since a listener’s musical imagination must fill in the blanks, as it were. He calls this the “pathos of the gap between idea and realization,” a gap cunningly exploited by composers. If you can follow a musical score, even a little, you should read a few pages from the first chapter yourself; it’s well worth it. (Popular musicians regularly exploit this same gap for pathos. Think of Miles Davis’s cracking trumpet on “My Funny Valentine.†Or Joe Cocker leaping an octave in the final notes of “You Are So Beautiful,†only to end up with a strangled whimper.)
Which brings us to Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesizer, who died last Sunday. As is widely known, Moog was inspired in his researches by the work of Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, whose eponymous instrument became a 1950s horror-movie staple. It’s important to note that the impetus for Theremin — and for his electronic-music successors — was to eliminate this “gap between idea and realization.” As Theremin once told an interviewer, he was intent on proving that electricity was a “means for man to control the finest nuances of musical sound.” A Soviet newspaper review of a Theremin concert encapsulated this ideology perfectly. The Theremin was “the solution to the problem of the ideal instrument,” the newspaper enthused. “Sounds have been liberated from material ‘adulterations.’”
This is a beautiful expression of the cruel ideology of early Soviet communism. Material “adulterations” — including the imperfections of human beings — must be eliminated. Liberation to follow. Stay tuned.
But I digress. Electronic music does not usher in the Communist apocalypse, but it does change the way we create music and listen to music. It has vastly expanded the universe of sound, and given a power to composers previously undreamed-of. But it has, by necessity, severely restricted the power, the imagination, and – dare I say? – the intelligence of the audience, who are no longer asked to assist the composer in perceiving musical nuances. This is the root, I think, of the “coldness” that many people perceive in electronic music. By asserting absolute control over every aspect of his music, the composer has unwittingly disposed of one of the most powerful tools of expression — the audience’s own imagination.
I hope you don’t mind that I’m responding to this post a couple of months late. I came upon a reference to it on Terry Teachout’s blog. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother to respond to a blog post that was so old, but what you’ve written here is so wrong-headed in almost every way that it really doesn’t make sense to let it stand without comment.
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 communismâ€. 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.
Herb Levy
November 2nd, 2005
Herb –
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.
Paul Mitchinson
November 8th, 2005