Chapter 6 - Into the mainstream

Summary

What are the most important landmarks in the popularization of electronic music? Thom Holmes argues that the Philips Pavilion at the World's Fair of 1958 provided the first mass exposure for electronic music, while Andrew Hugill sees this as the apotheosis of Varèse's search through his life for new sound resources. A footfall of two million spectators visited the immersive stomach of the pavilion, hearing Varèse's multimedia work Poème électronique and Xenakis’ filler piece, Concret pH, spread over 350 loudspeakers. Yet, Forbidden Planet (1956), with its “electronic tonalities” created by Louis and Bebe Barron, might lay claim to reaching more people; though a relative box office failure, only making $1.5 million, at 50 cents a ticket, this converts to three million attendees. If we credit theremin-laden B-movies earlier in the 1950s as also stirring some consciousness of electronic music (and the Pavilion experience after all was also a film and light show alongside the music), it seems that we should more widely review the various media in which electronic music technology was appearing, rather than conferring all credit on the Pavilion alone.

There are earlier precedents to electronic music reaching public consciousness, through early electrical instruments, as detailed in Chapter 3. Though the Telharmonium had few listeners in its failed pre-radio restaurant music business, the theremin stirred up headlines and audiences, at least in the heyday of the 1920s. At the close of 1927, reporters clamored to get the first interviews with Lev Termen as his ship approached New York from Europe. The healthy success of the Hammond organ from the 1930s, with its innards of tone wheels and valves rather than traditional air, could be seen as a pre-Second World War watershed of adoption. Nonetheless, the Hammond sound is not so hard to accommodate within existing musical practice, and on this basis of an organ replacement, it was sold to many churches in the US.