[HN Gopher] The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937-...
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The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937-2001)
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 109 points
Date : 2025-07-02 22:28 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Raymond Scott was left off of the list:
| https://youtu.be/s87cYlMInwE?feature=shared
| rzzzt wrote:
| My addition would be Jean Jacques Perrey:
| https://youtu.be/P8AKP4Tw9sE
| gizajob wrote:
| An even simpler addition would be "Strawberry Fields
| Forever".
|
| https://youtu.be/44GB53rnI3c?si=v7Uw3By6LwkE7w-F
| gizajob wrote:
| A list more notable for its glaring omissions than what it
| includes.
| hecanjog wrote:
| > my college is a kind of a kind of a center of the most
| tradicional, western avant-gard electronic music, so certainly
| I agree that it leaves a lot of outside
|
| Let's list some of the outside.
|
| Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Clarence
| Barlow, Bebe and Louis Barron... I'm brain-farting so many,
| keep going!
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| >Bebe
|
| Awesome shout-out.
|
| Missing: Cabaret Voltaire, Art of Noise, Yes ..
| derbOac wrote:
| Delia Derbyshire
|
| Laurie Spiegel
|
| It's a bit fuzzy in where the boundaries are for the category
| represented by the list.
| sramsay wrote:
| Actually, what's amazing is that many of the people being
| mentioned fit within any coherent statement of the
| boundaries. Schaeffer is on it but not Radigue? When it
| said, "There's few women," I didn't think they meant it
| leaves off Oliveros!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Isao Tomita, Alan Parsons, Vangelis, Keith Emerson, Rick
| Wakeman probably deserved a mention as well.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Related:
|
| Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
|
| https://music.ishkur.com/
|
| Previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470331
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919241
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083516
| amiga386 wrote:
| I'd not heard of UbuWeb before, but it sounds likr an interesting
| project for curating a cross-media avant-garde art collection
| (although it has now finished?)
|
| "Electronic Music" is a bit of a misnomer. I think most people
| would think of Electronic Music as genres like rave, acid,
| techno, house, trance, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, and so on.
| For _that_ , you want Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
| (https://music.ishkur.com/) and its branching history for how all
| these genres influenced and evolved from eaxh other
|
| But this collection is just the _avant-garde_ parts - the roots
| of Ishkur 's tree. It's the musique concrete and theremins and
| radiophonic workshop type music. Those early genres only get a
| brief look in Ishkur, but here they are in detail.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is what electronic music was before it became
| commercialised and mainstream as "music with synthesizers."
|
| Most of it is pre-synth, with early experiments with tape, and
| sometimes analog synthesis and computer DSP.
|
| It's ended up in a strange space culturally - lurking in modern
| music's attic like an ageing mad uncle whom everyone agrees was
| a genius, but hardly anyone still listens to. (Outside of
| academia, which is its own world.)
| mycall wrote:
| It still exists under the moniker 'new music' and even has
| shows happening (e.g.
| https://www.bayimproviser.com/calendar.aspx)
| fipar wrote:
| As late as in 2000 it was still common to refer to electronic
| music to what this article uses the term for, and what you
| refer to as "dance music" instead.
|
| See this great compilation (with a lovely booklet that's more
| of a mini book) for example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm:_The_Early_Gurus_of_Electr...
|
| I got lots of late-night listening pleasure out of that one,
| except for the first theremin track; I just found that one
| unbearable...
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I have this set, bought it in a museum near Legoland San
| Diego.
|
| They had a great collection of early synths. Can't remember
| the name.
| eimrine wrote:
| This collection was an opener in my interest to really old
| electronic sound, it is called musique concrete. There are some
| of it on torrents, Pauline Oliveros and others are common guests
| in my playlist now.
| mycall wrote:
| There are tons more to discover on archive.org
|
| https://archive.org/search?query=musique+concrete
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| A bit snobbish isn't it? No computer singing "Daisy Daisy". No
| Doctor Who theme. No Wendy Carlos. No Jean Michel Jarre, just to
| name a few.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Is it? Why do you feel that excluding those particular pieces
| and people make the list snobbish?
| marchingkazoo wrote:
| I don't mean to speak for the parent poster. But FTA:
| "Spanning the years 1937-2001, the collection should
| especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or
| musicological bent." The tracks cited by the parent are not
| avant-garde nor musicological, but popular. I think the point
| is valid and all but admitted.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Delia Derbyshire's groundbreaking work at the BBC Radiophonic
| Workshop deserves special mention here - her realization of the
| Doctor Who theme and pieces like "Blue Veils and Golden Sands"
| represent a crucial bridge between academic electroacoustic
| experimentation and more accessible electronic music.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Been listening to it for the last four hours - definitely good
| for focussing.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| This is a bit incorrectly titled, as the source denotes that the
| tracks are "Electroacoustic" music, not general "Electronic".
|
| The collection is clearly aimed at presenting music where
| electronic triggers and some synthesis is used in concert with
| acoustic instruments or spaces, and is super biased towards
| "Musique concrete", and concert-hall, classical compositions for
| what I can hear, ala Luc Ferrari.
|
| You're not going to see an appearance of Kraftwerk, Suzanne
| Ciani, Wendy Carlos, or Model 500.
|
| This is less a "history", and more an "eclectic subgenre list by
| date".
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Yes, very disappointing. I thought it'll be something similar
| to this YouTube video "Evolution of Electronic Music (1929 -
| 2019)", which btw I like very much but it's severely lacking
| due to being only =~ 20 minutes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqukyEC3qWM
|
| I don't know how accurate the YouTube list is but I never heard
| of anything prior to Jean Michelle Jarre's Oxygene (about 6
| minutes in the list). If It were to compare the list with
| geological history, before 1976 it's weird Ediacaran biota. And
| afterwards, suddenly, it's like the Cambrian explosion :)
| o0-0o wrote:
| If there is no Juan Atkins on this list, it's surely mis-
| titled.
| mycall wrote:
| Raymond Scott and Desmond Leslie were missing from their
| collection but worth seeking out.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The list is missing a handful of true pioneers in electro-
| acoustic and electronic music. I'm not thinking about composers
| of popular synthesizer music, which don't really fit this
| specific list, but people like Henk Badings, Tom Dissevelt, Jean-
| Jacques Perrey, Kid Baltan and Morton Subotnick.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is second openculture list I've seen on HN recently, and
| when I visit the link, I may be dumb but I cannot see a list,
| playlist or anything corresponding the actual title of the post.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Then what is it that you _do_ see? Because I see references to
| specific releases like this, with an audio embed following them
| right after:
|
| > Hear below Stockhausen's "Kontact," Henry's "Astrologie," and
| Bayle's spare "Theatre d'Ombres" further down.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are 3 embedded audio widgets, with a total playing time
| of about 55 mins.
|
| That seems unlikely to contain 476 tracks ... and nowhere do
| I see any actual list of tracks (other than the mention of 3
| that you quoted).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Aha, the actual list is here:
| https://ubu.com/sound/electronic.html
| o0-0o wrote:
| No Plastikman? Sigh
| louthy wrote:
| If you ignore Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos,
| Kraftwerk, or any of the genre defining moments/movements (like
| Brian Eno, The Normal, Laurie Anderson, The Belleville Three,
| Frankie Knuckles, LTJ Bukem, Aphex Twin, ...) then the list is at
| best incomplete.
| aimeric wrote:
| Sadly, no mention of Louis and Bebe Barron, who together created
| the first all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 movie "Forbidden
| Planet".
|
| This was _before_ the invention of the synthesizer a few years
| later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which
| apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while
| Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.
|
| And, to this day, no one knows exactly _how_ they created their
| music... ( _Almost_ no one, that is - it 's my PhD topic ;-)
| quakeguy wrote:
| Now we need to know more!
| aimeric wrote:
| A substantial mythology has formed around the soundtrack's
| creation. One of the prevailing notions is that the sounds
| were generated by torturing and electrically overloading the
| "cybernetic circuits". There's evidence that this is simply
| artistic misdirection.
|
| In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed -
| with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events
| and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a
| completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
|
| It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own
| compositional technique and creative input in order to
| bolster this mythology.
|
| The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons'
| cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these
| circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only
| the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the
| 1950s.
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