Chapter 14 - Conclusions

Summary

We hope you've found much to engage you in this introduction to electronic music. We could hardly explore every path, but have pointed out a few routes; the further reading and listening suggestions in the chapters will lead you on many interesting musical journeys. The final suggestions for this chapter are a collection of some further alternative histories, theories, ideas, and music to pursue. We'd like to take the opportunity in the paragraphs remaining to us to point to a few further trends and movements in electronic music, perhaps because they were given less attention elsewhere in the book or are worth acknowledging as ongoing sites of scholarship and musical activity.

There is certainly a mass interest in electronic music history, evidenced by articles and programs on electronic music in popular media, and often associated with the avid technology-rich cultures of the present. Retro movements pore over the inspiring examples, and missed opportunities, of the past, spending more time with, say, 8-bit music, than the accelerating technology curve allowed in the 1980s. Enthusiasts collect and restore old equipment; Phil Cirocco describes in great detail a loving restoration of a 1940 Novachord, a romantic adventure in electronics, metal, and wood, set against a peril of “black tar” contamination of the unit by old capacitors. There is a continuing use of legacy equipment, such as in the analog studio room at The Hague's Institute of Sonology, amongst many other institutions keeping alive tape and analog synthesizer tradition. Long-term maintenance is an active issue in the fast-paced technology world, especially for software; open source software has a potentially greater chance of survival, as seen by the long existence of the Music 1 descendant Csound. Propellerheads’ proprietary Rebirth software, originally released in 1997, has been discontinued and is now given tribute in an online museum (www.rebirthmuseum.com), though it has also recently re-appeared in the form of an iPhone app.