The Sound of Tomorrow

How Electronic Music Was Smuggled into the Mainstream

Mark Brend

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781623565299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

London, 1966: Paul McCartney met a group of three electronic musicians called Unit Delta Plus. McCartney was there because he had become fascinated by electronic music, and wanted to know how it was made. He was one of the first rock musicians to grasp its potential, but even he was notably late to the party. For years, composers and technicians had been making electronic music for film and TV. Hitchcock had commissioned a theremin soundtrack for Spellbound (1945); The Forbidden Planet (1956) featured an entirely electronic score; Delia Derbyshire had created the Dr Who theme in 1963; and by the early 1960s, all you had to do was watch commercial TV for a few hours to hear the weird and wonderful sounds of the new world. The Sound of Tomorrow tells the compelling story of the sonic adventurers who first introduced electronic music to the masses. A network of composers, producers, technicians and inventors, they took emerging technology and with it made sound and music that was bracingly new.

1

More music than they ever had before

Electric dreams: 1900–50

‘Be it known that I … have invented a new and useful Art of and Apparatus for Distributing Music Electrically.’ So began an application submitted by Thaddeus Cahill to the United States Patent Office in April 1897. Cahill, born in Iowa in 1867, had graduated from the Columbian Law School in 1892 and was admitted to the bar in 1894, but his true love was electronics. Through the 1890s he worked on several schemes, producing an electric typewriter and nurturing a dream of making and distributing music electrically. The 1897 patent application was actually the second he submitted for his electric music, coming nearly two years after the first. The apparatus both applications describe would, when constructed, become known as the Telharmonium, the first publicly performing electronic musical instrument. ‘The apparatus’, Cahill said ‘is wholly electrical and bears little, if any, real likeness to the instruments now known as ... piano-fortes and organs.’ It was a fair claim. Although the Telharmonium was controlled by an organ-style multiple manual keyboard, any resemblance ended there. Rather, Cahill’s invention realized a new concept in music, harnessing the power of electrical circuits to generate and distribute a type of musical sound that had never been heard before.

By the time Cahill submitted his patent applications, electricity was a part of life in the great urban centres of America. The first street mains were installed in New York in 1881, the same year that the world’s first public electricity supply lit the streets of Godalming, Surrey, in England. The following year September Thomas Edison’s Edison Electric Company opened a generating station in Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan, and within a year had more than 500 customers. In May 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge opened, illuminated by 70 arc lamps operated by the United States Illuminating Company, one of many new traders in power springing up in New York. By 1900, there were over 30 companies generating and distributing electricity throughout the boroughs of New York City and in Westchester County.

Running parallel to the emergence of electricity as a force to power not just light, but also transport, domestic conveniences and industry, was the introduction of the telephone. The first telephone exchange opened in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877. The first exchange outside of the United States was built in London in 1879. The history of the telephone is complex and much disputed, with several inventors – Antonio Meucci, Philip Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell – having what appear to be legitimate grounds for claiming the idea as their own. What happened is what often happens, which is that several people had similar ideas at more or less the same time. It is a phenomenon that surfaces often throughout the history of electronic music. Another is the creative use of technological advances to push forward the music. Indeed, the Telharmonium, the first major event in electronic music, the first performing electronic instrument, fused the then-novel power of electricity and the voice of the telephone.

Cahill’s technology started with the observation that dynamos generating alternating current create a steady pitch. He imagined a whole series of dynamos, each creating different notes, that could be switched on and off in selected orders, thus creating predetermined combinations of pitches – or in other words, music. There was another aspect to Cahill’s prescient dream. The sounds, he found, could be transmitted down a telephone line and heard through the receiver at the other end, wherever it was. Not only would the notes be created by electrical means, but they would be broadcast down the telephone lines. This is where the commercial possibilities became apparent. If you wanted to avail yourself of this miraculous new service you would have to become a paying subscriber. Cahill planned to stream live electronic music into restaurants, theatres and private homes.

After his patent was granted in 1898, Cahill spent three years creating a prototype instrument. Then, with the support of a backer, Oscar T. Crosby, he set about raising further funds by demonstrating this to potential supporters. At the first demonstration, in Baltimore, assembled businessmen and notables gathered around large cones attached to telephone receivers and heard a fluting, whistling rendition of Handel’s ‘Largo’, brought to them by telephone lines from the prototype Telharmonium many miles away in Cahill’s Washington workshop. Crosby formed the New England Electric Music Company, raising sufficient funds to construct a more complex and much larger version of the instrument, which weighed in at 200 tons.²

In 1906 the Telharmonium was dismantled, packed into crates and transported to New York City. It was installed in the Broadway building at Broadway and 39th Street, the control console at ground level, and the monstrous machinery hidden in the basement. The New York Telephone Company laid special lines throughout the city – a network of underground channels to spread the machine’s voice – while speakers were installed in the building itself. On 26 September 1906 the first Telharmonium concert took place. Immediately, it was clear that Cahill was aiming at a mass market. The Telharmonium concerts combined popular orchestral and opera selections with ragtime. This was, above all else, a commercial venture. Many up-market restaurants and hotels of the time employed small orchestras to serenade diners, made up of sometimes twenty or more well-paid musicians. To such as these, the Telharmonium was a direct challenge.

Very soon, the magic music of the Telharmonium was the talk of New York. In December that year The New York Times ran an illustrated feature, the first of several, describing Cahill’s invention in some detail. Telharmonium music was being broadcast to select subscribers – at that stage, a few local restaurants – at the ‘luncheon hour’ (12.30pm to 2pm) and at dinner (6pm to 8pm). Within a month private customers would have special telephone lines installed that would be a conduit for electronic music at 20 cents an hour, opened or closed with a flick of a switch – as simple as turning on electric light.³

For public spaces several strategically placed receivers with speaker cones were used to generate sufficient volume to be heard above the chatter of diners and the clink of cutlery and glasses. Alternatively, listeners could go to the Telharmonium music room at Broadway House, decked out like a hotel lounge with chairs and potted plants, to hear the music at source. Here you could see performers seated at what looked like a massive organ console, depressing keys that gave off a faint click and the occasional blue spark, while from an artfully arranged flower display the sound itself emerged from a concealed horn. Beneath that public space, buried in the basement, was the Telharmonium’s beating heart – 200 hundred tons of cables and dynamos. These inner workings had to be kept apart from the performance room not only on account of their size, but also because they made as much noise as the machine room of a factory, and would have drowned out the music they were generating.

Among the visitors was an aged Mark Twain. He was bewitched, declaring that he would have to postpone his death until he had the chance to hear the new wonder again and again. Twain was a technology enthusiast, an ‘early adopter’ in today’s language, who had a telephone installed in 1877 when he lived in Hartford. Within days he became the first domestic Telharmonium subscriber. As 1906 drew to a close he greeted the New Year with a few friends at his home, grouped around a cone speaker attached to a telephone receiver. The assembly listened to what Twain called his ‘electric music factory’, the Telharmonium, play ‘Auld Lang Syne’. One account reported that:

the first thing he did in 1907 was to glory in the fact that he should be able to rejoice over other dead people when he died in having been the first man to have Telharmonium music turned on in his house – ‘like gas’.⁴

News of this episode crossed the Atlantic, with The Guardian reporting a day later that ‘the room vibrated with chiming bells’.⁵

In January 1907 another New York Times story contained what might well be the first printed expression of an enduring prejudice about electronic music. In this story – which does not have the ring of strictly factual reporting – a pair of Sicilian buskers with a hurdy gurdy pitched their stall near the Broadway home of the Telharmonium, only to be drowned out by the rumblings of what sounded like ‘a great cathedral organ’. The buskers realized that they had no hope of competing with this music, ‘although theirs had the merit of being real’. The piece goes on to describe listeners’ ‘wonderment’ at the ‘electric music’ conveyed by the ‘air itself’. It also remarks on the instrument’s ability to replicate flute, piccolo, bassoon, clarinet and saxophone sounds, combining them into a ‘melodious organ effect’.⁶ This echoed another report published earlier that same year, which breathlessly announced that:

in the new art of telharmony we have the latest gift of electricity to civilization, an art which, while abolishing every musical instrument, from the jew’s-harp to the ’cello, gives everybody cheaply, and everywhere, more music than they ever had before.⁷

These claims have a familiar ring. Indeed, many recurring themes of electronic music history start with the Telharmonium story. The idea that electronics could replace traditional instruments is a refrain that repeats to this day, and one we will encounter throughout this book. It marks a divide between conservatives who think this is a bad thing – that electronic music isn’t real music, and real musicians will be out of their jobs – and enthusiasts, often of a radical bent, who relish the overturning of old orthodoxies and see in electronic music the possibility of democratization of the artistic process. The phrase ‘gives everybody cheaply, and everywhere, more music than they ever had before’ has something of the socialist rallying cry about it. There are also, in many of these early reports, strains of a sort of quasi-mysticism. This is curious and paradoxical, the juxtaposition of the music of technological advance with the otherworldly and the unknown. All the talk of wonderment, of gifts to civilization and of sounds being conjured out of thin air is redolent of the language of spiritualism, then at a peak of popularity and attempting to shape itself as a formal religion. This sort of language is often heard in the early decades of electronic music, not only from commentators, but inventors, composers and musicians too. Indeed, many figures in early electronic music, inventors and performers, had occult leanings.

And then, going right back to Cahill’s patent application, there is the symbiotic relationship between creativity and technology – the art and the apparatus. Electronic music is only a dream or a theory until the apparatus exists to make it real. It evolves through interaction between technology and creativity, to the extent that any understanding of it must include the contributions not only of composers and performers, but also of inventors and technicians. This was particularly true in the first half of the twentieth century and explains why many of the most influential figures in early electronic music – Leon Theremin and Maurice Martenot, for example – were both musicians and inventors. Inventors made instruments that created entirely novel sounds, which then suggested possibilities to composers and musicians. Meanwhile, composers and musicians influenced the inventors to make instruments both practical and useful.

There is a tantalizing poignancy about the accounts of the Telharmonium, because they describe something irretrievably lost. We can never hear this electric music, never share the wonderment. The great Telharmonium experiment failed to transcended novelty status and was beset by difficulties. The broadcasts from Broadway House stopped in February 1908, and although Cahill pressed on, building a third Telharmonium that played from another building for a short while in 1910, the venture was soon mired in debt. The visionary scheme was years ahead of the available technology. Cahill’s monster was greedy for electricity, and when it played there were power surges and interference on the telephone network, with telephone conversations interrupted by the beast’s incongruously sweet and ghostly murmurs. Cahill’s company was bankrupt by the end of 1914, and eventually his instruments were broken up and sold for scrap. Today, all that is left of the Telharmonium are a few grainy photos and those contemporaneous accounts. After the Telharmonium failed Cahill drifted into obscurity. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1934 at the age of 66.

If Cahill’s venture was populist and commercial, much of the early impetus for electronic music came from the avant-garde intellectual fringes. In 1907, a year after the Telharmonium started broadcasting, Italian composer, writer, teacher and conductor Ferruccio Busoni published his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, which aligned electrical sound sources with the future of music by referencing Cahill’s Telharmonium. Then, just as the Telharmonium was in its death throes, the Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo was writing his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). In it he proposed that the industrial urban environment had brought with it a new sound world that required a musical response. Traditional forms of music making had too limited a sonic palette, and composers must open themselves up to using the infinite possibilities of sound, and as technology advanced, machines would be created to make these new noises in the musical context.

These were prophetic texts, which would influence a number of later composers and theorists who helped shaped early electronic music, including Edgard Varèse and Pierre Schaeffer. But the Telharmonium aside, there was no way of making electronic music at the time. And it, that great dinosaur of electronic music, would soon be extinct. The art needed the apparatus, and an invention that coincided with the Telharmonium’s debut would bring closer the possibility of making that apparatus more widely available. In 1906 Lee de Forest invented the audion electronic amplifying vacuum tube, a forerunner of the triode. Tubes (valves) allowed for the processing, amplification or creation of electronic signals in compact form, revolutionizing the development of electronics, and, by extension, electronic music.

Even if the problem of interference on telephone lines had been solved, the Telharmonium would have failed. It was too big and too expensive: figures of 200 tons and $200,000 feature in early descriptions. It was not an instrument that lent itself to duplication, let alone commercial production. If electronic music were to develop there had to be instruments that were affordable, portable and easily reproducible. The first of these came a few years after the demise of the Telharmonium.

Invented around 1919, the theremin was compact and simple and could be run off a domestic electric supply. Of all the early twentieth-century electronic instruments it is the only one to remain in production. Indeed, over the past two decades it has enjoyed a renewed surge of popularity that shows no sign of abating. At first glance, though, it didn’t look like a good bet for long-term survival. A monophonic tone generator with no recognizable controlling mechanism and no features to relate it to any other instrument (no keyboard, no pedals, no valves, no fingerboard, no strings, no reeds), it is devilishly hard to play. Yet its very strangeness has proved to be its strength. It has an elusive, hard-to-pin-down quality, its wobbly tones resisting the geometric structure of neat tonal steps, its relationship to conventional Western music something like that of glossolalia to ordinary speech. It conforms to the tendency amongst early electronic music pioneers to see their endeavours in a mystical light. It sounds like a sound from somewhere else, and it is no surprise that it would be later taken up to soundtrack the imagined other worlds of science fiction.

Lev Sergeyevich Termen was an electrical engineer, cellist and astronomer, born in St Petersburg in 1896. In his remarkable life he lived through the twentieth century’s great convulsions, from the Russian revolution through two World Wars to the falling of the Iron Curtain. He also designed the theremin, initially called either the thereminvox or ethervox or etherphone, which derives its name from an anglicization of his: Leon Theremin. He invented the instrument almost by accident.

In 1919, after the turmoil of the Russian revolution, Theremin found himself, along with many other Russian scientists, working in a State-sponsored laboratory. He was fascinated by the human body’s capacitance – its ability to store a small electric charge – and how that could exert an influence on an electrical circuit if a person was standing close to it. From this observation he developed an electrical burglar alarm, a ‘radio watchman’, which was triggered when a body moved into a field around an electrical device. He then adapted this radio watchman for use in another project for measuring changes in gases under varying temperatures and pressures. During this he noticed that hand movements in the proximity of the circuitry changed the pitch of a sound generated by an oscillator, and from this the idea of the theremin, or etherphone as Theremin first called it, was born. Theremin spent some months developing and perfecting the concept. To increase the instrument’s range he adopted the heterodyning (beating together) principle, in which two inaudible sound waves at different frequencies combine to create another audible frequency. He experimented with the idea of a foot pedal to control volume, and switches too, before alighting on the now-familiar two antennae system. With this, the instrument is played by hand movements in the proximity of the antennae, changing the electro-magnetic fields around them, which in turn controls the oscillators that produce the sound waves. The right-hand antenna is usually a straight vertical aerial controlling pitch, while the left a horizontal loop controlling volume.

It is this, the manner in which it is played, that gives the theremin much of its enduring power to entrance. To coax sound from what looks like a radio, the performer must not touch it at all, but rather move his or her hands around it, as if speaking to it in some obscure sign language. To anyone unfamiliar with the technology it appears miraculous and strange. The performer is a conjuror creating sound from thin air, or a musical spiritualist summoning ghostly voices from the other side. Film exists of Theremin himself demonstrating the instrument in London in 1927. We see his left hand hovering over the volume hoop like a puppet master’s pulling at invisible strings, his right held up in a controlled trembling to make vibrato, like a man struggling to hold back a force he can barely control.

Paradoxically, this entrancing, intriguing aspect of the theremin was also an obstacle to its success. They are limited instruments – monophonic, and generally with a range of up to five octaves – and although in skilled hands the still electronic tone can approximate a bowed stringed instrument like a violin, or a soprano voice, this is a hard skill to attain. In unskilled hands the theremin sounds like malfunctioning radio equipment or the aural squiggles of a child randomly turning the pitch control dial of a test oscillator. All other instruments require some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 More music than they ever had before
• 2 I like music that explodes into space
• 3 The privilege of ignoring conventions
• 4 Out of the ordinary
• 5 Manhattan researchers
• 6 Because a fire was in my head
• 7 Moog men
• 8 White noise
• 9 It rhymes with vogue
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Watch and listen
• Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index