A shorter session today, as everyone but Roy and I were away! Our topic for this session was Music that Features Electronics. Alessandro sent through these pieces which he had been listening to:
This Messiaen piece is for six Ondes Martenot, an early electronic keyboard which sounds like a cross between a theremin, an organ and the human voice. Unlike most pieces this afternoon, this was pleasant to listen to and a good exploration of the different possibilities of timbre of this rarely-heard instrument.
This less-palatable Berio piece is composed with 93 different sine waves appearing at different times; an example of Musique Electronik, made entirely with electronic sounds – similar to this next piece, by Stockhausen:
A mammoth collection of recordings, Hymnen features several different national anthems played back on radios, interspersed with white noise, speech and recordings of public events from the countries whose anthems featured. This inclusion of sound recordings is a type of musique concrete, demonstrated more clearly in the next piece by Pierre Schaeffer:
Musique Concrete uses a mix of sound recordings, usually from industrial environments, to create a ‘piece’ (though as Roy pointed out this is more of a soundscape than music).
Roy began with music from the video game DOOM, composed using almost entirely electronic methods, including techniques popular with 20th Century classical composers such as recording feedback from a speaker. The first video is the DOOM soundtrack, the second is a lecture from the composer about how he created the sounds he used – I highly recommend giving it a watch.
The final piece is in the more popular electronica style, though it does sound similar to the Berio we listened to, but with the element of repetition that gives it its musicality.
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