Chapter 9 - Continuing the classical?

Summary

While recent chapters have dealt with aspects of popular culture and electronic music technology, in this one we'll return to some continuing lines of development from the golden age of experimentation in the 1950s described in Chapter 4. But before we dig in, let's pause to spend a moment on the ever-thorny problem of definitions.

Who says we have no class?

What do we mean by the word “classical” in relation to electronic music? It's certainly not a term in common use and seems as if it might allude to the sort of early experimental work we looked at in Chapter 4. However, as the title of the chapter suggests, we'll use the term “classical” here to refer in loose terms to some lines of musical development that can be traced back (perhaps along a somewhat bumpy path) to the traditions of Western art music. As we've seen, much electronic music development has and continues to take place in universities and conservatories associated with classical music, and many important electronic music composers and musicians were trained in such institutions.

That said, as a distinction the term “classical” is not unproblematic. Under its overarching umbrella, a huge variety of styles and approaches can be found; there is also considerable overlap between what we’ll discuss here and material in other chapters. Aspects such as multimedia, sound art, digital sampling, etc., all find their place within the conservatoire electronic music world, itself just one area within a ubiquity of electronic music in the world today. As such, we should keep in mind that we’ll be making only a few stops with in a rough and heterogeneous geographical area, with rather indistinct borders that blur into other domains in surprising ways.