With tape music the history of electronic music in the narrower sense begins. This history seems split into three main periods: an early (by now classical) period lasting from the commercial introduction of the tape recorder immediately following World War II until about 1960; a second period that featured the introduction of electronic music synthesizers and the acceptance of the electronic medium as a legitimate compositional activity; and the third period, in which computer technology is rapidly becoming both the dominant resource and the dominant concern.

The invention of the tape recorder gave composers of the 1950s an exciting new musical instrument to use for new musical experiences. Fascination with the thing itself was the dominant motivation for composing electronic tape music. Musically, the 1950s, in contrast to the 1960s, were relatively introverted years: in all kinds of music, the focus of interest was technique and style, especially with the avant-garde. In time, the medium became fairly well understood, the techniques for handling it became increasingly standardized, and a repertory of characteristic and historically important compositions came into being. The burning issues were whether tape would replace live musicians; whether the composer was at last freed from the humiliations so often endured to get his music into the concert hall; and whether a new medium of expression had been created, quite different from and independent of instrumental music, analogous, say, to photography as opposed to traditional painting.

It became increasingly evident, however, that there was no reason to think that the electronic tape medium would eliminate instrumental performance by live musicians. Tape was increasingly regarded as something that could be—but did not need to be—treated as a unique medium. Thus the notion that the tape recorder could function as one instrument in an ensemble grew more and more popular. This conception obviated the visual monotony of an evening in an auditorium with nothing to look at but a loudspeaker. To this has been added a further stage of evolution, namely, live electronic music, in which the tape recorder and its tape is eliminated or greatly restricted in function, and transformations of the sounds of musical instruments are effected at the concert with electronic equipment. Not infrequently, this kind of performance environment also involves scores in which aleatory (chance, or random), improvisatory, or quasi-improvisatory musical guidelines for the manipulation of such equipment are supplied by a composer who prefers to let what happens just happen. Actually, it is open to question whether live electronic music is really an advance or a reversion to an earlier state of the art, in the sense that it is the enhancement of the timbres of familiar instruments, rather than music conceived totally in terms of electronic media per se.

Establishment of electronic studios

The first period of development was certainly one into which Europeans put the most consistent work. Tape music quickly gained recognition and financial support, and, before long, a number of well-equipped electronic music studios were established, primarily in government-supported broadcast facilities. Some important work was also done in the United States, but this was much more fragmentary, and not until after 1958 did Americans begin to catch up, either technically or artistically.

In 1948 two French composers, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and their associates at Radiodiffusion et Télévision Française in Paris began to produce tape collages (analogous to collages in the visual arts), which they called musique concrète. All the materials they processed on tape were recorded sounds—sound effects, musical fragments, vocalizings, and other sounds and noises produced by man, his environment, and his artifacts. Such sounds were considered “concrete,” hence the term musique concrète. To this Paris group certainly belongs the credit both for originating the concept of tape music as such and for demonstrating how effective certain types of tape manipulation can be in transforming sounds. These transformations included speed alteration, variable speed control, playing tapes backward, and signal feedback loops. Schaeffer however, opposed the use of electronic oscillators as sound sources, claiming that these were not “concrete” sound sources, not “real,” and hence artificial and anti-humanistic.

Two of the most successful and best known musique concrète compositions of this early period are Schaeffer and Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; Symphony for One Man Only) and Henry’s Orphée (1953), a ballet score written for the Belgian dancer Maurice Béjart. These and similar works created a sensation when first presented to the public. Symphonie pour un homme seul, a descriptive suite about man and his activities, is an extended composition in 11 movements. Orphée is concerned with the descent of Orpheus into Hades.

The second event of significance was the formation of an electronic music studio in Cologne by Herbert Eimert, a composer working for Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (now Westdeutscher Rundfunk), who was advised in turn by Werner Meyer-Eppler, an acoustician from the University of Bonn. Eimert was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen, who composed the first really important tape composition from this studio, the now-famous Gesang der Jünglinge (1956; Song of Youth). The Cologne studio soon became a focal point of the reemergence of Germany as a dominant force in new music.

At Cologne emphasis was immediately placed on electronically generated sounds rather than concrete sounds and on electronic sound modifications such as filtering and modulating rather than tape manipulation. Eimert and Stockhausen also published a journal, Die Reihe (“The Row”), in which appeared articles emphasizing the “purity” of electronic sounds and the necessity of coupling electronic music to serial composing (using ordered groups of pitches, rhythms, and other musical elements as compositional bases), which made no more sense than the Paris group’s insistence on using only nonelectronic, nonserial material. This activity was part of the campaign of the 1950s that brought about the collapse of Neoclassicism (a style that drew equally on 20th-century musical idioms and earlier, formal types); the emergence of the Austrian composer Anton von Webern as the father figure of the new music; the development of total serialism, pointillism (a style making use of individual tones placed in a very sparse texture), and intellectualism; and an emphasis on technique. The examples set by these two studios were soon widely imitated in Europe. This trend continued in the 1960s, with many more studios, from modest to elaborate, being set up in almost every major urban centre in Europe. As time passed, the techniques and equipment in the newer studios became more standardized and reliable, and the rather peculiar issue of concrete versus electronic sounds ceased to concern anyone.

In the United States the production of electronic music, until 1958, was much more sporadic. The only continuing effort of this sort was the project undertaken by two composers at Columbia University, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, to create a professional tape studio and to compose music illustrating the musical possibilities of the tape medium. Luening and Ussachevsky often collaborated on joint compositions. They gained particular attention for the composition of several concerto-like works for tape recorder and orchestra. In 1959 Luening and Ussachevsky joined with another U.S. composer, Milton Babbitt, to organize, on a much larger scale, the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center, in which an impressive number of composers of professional repute have worked.

Other tape compositions in the early 1950s in the United States were largely those of individual composers working as best they could under improvised circumstances. One major composer who did so was Varèse, who completed Déserts, for tape and instrumental ensemble, in 1954, and Poème électronique, for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Another was John Cage, who completed Williams Mix in 1952 and Fontana Mix in 1958. Both Varèse and Cage had anticipated the electronic medium; Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for RCA test records and percussion can well be regarded as a forerunner of current live electronic music.

With the establishment of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois in 1958 by Lejaren Hiller and the University of Toronto studio in 1959 by Myron Schaeffer, the formation of facilities for both production and teaching began to move forward. The number of studios in university music departments grew rapidly, and they soon became established as essential in teaching as well as composing.

The individual components may vary in a well-designed “classic” studio, but basically the equipment may be divided into five categories: sound sources (sine-wave, square-wave, sawtooth-wave, and white-noise generators; and microphones for picking up concrete sounds); routing and control circuitry (patch panels, switching boards, and mixers for coupling components together; amplifiers; and output connections); signal modifiers (modulators, frequency shifters, artificial reverberators, filters, variable-speed tape recorders, and time compression–expansion devices); monitors and quality-control equipment (frequency counter, spectrum analyzer, VU metres that monitor recording levels, oscilloscope, power amplifiers with loudspeakers and headsets, and workshop facilities); and recording and playback equipment, including high-quality tape recorders.

With this equipment, composers record sounds, both electronic and microphoned; modify them singly or in montages by operations such as modulation, reverberation, and filtering; and finally re-record them in increasingly complex patterns. Inevitably, a major part of composers’ efforts is tape editing, unless they are satisfied with the crudest string of effects merely linked together in sequence. As in any other kind of music, the aesthetic merits of electronic music compositions seem to depend not only on musical ideas as such but also on the way in which they relate to one another and how they are used to build up a musical structure.

The integration of the tape has become a rather popular form of chamber music, if not of symphonic music. Varèse’s Déserts is an early example of this. It is scored for a group of 15 musicians and a two-channel tape and consists of four instrumental episodes interrupted by three tape interludes. In other works the tape recorder is “performed” together with the remaining instruments rather than merely in contrast to them. The problems of coordination, however, can become overriding, for it is difficult for a group of performers to follow a tape exactly. Obviously, the tape dominates the situation, remorselessly moving along no matter what happens in the rest of the group.

Thousands of electronic tape compositions were in existence by the early 1970s, many of ephemeral interest. It is relatively rare for a composer to have established a reputation solely as a composer of tape music. Pierre Henry perhaps is an example, but, in general, the important names in instrumental music of the 1950s and 1960s are the significant contributors in electronic music too.

Stockhausen remained in the forefront of electronic music composers with several important pieces following Gesang der Jünglinge. These included Kontakte (1959–60; Contacts), for tape, piano, and percussion, and Telemusik (1966), for tape alone. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, both Italians, worked for a while at the Radio Audizioni Italia (now Radiotelevisione Italiana) studio in Milan. Besides Différences (1958–60), a composition for tape and chamber group, Berio’s tape pieces include Thema-Omaggio a Joyce (1958; Homage to Joyce) and Visage (1961), which exploited the unusual voice of the American singer Cathy Berberian.

In the United States the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center has had the greatest output, a long list of composers besides Luening and Ussachevsky having used its facilities. Tape music from the University of Illinois studio includes Salvatore Martirano’s L’s GA (1967), a savage political satire for tape, films, helium bomb, and gas-masked politico. The University of Toronto studio, in spite of its technical excellence, has not been well represented on discs. One Canadian piece that is very amusing, however, is Hugh LeCaine’s Dripsody (1955), all the sounds of which are derived from the splash of a single drop of water.