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Topic ClosedEvolution of Music

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Egg Head View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Evolution of Music
    Posted: February 28 2017 at 22:58
Hey everybody. I have a bit of a tricky petition here. Ever since i first got into Bowie last year, the realms of art rock and electronic music and everything around and in between have interested me so i was wondering if anyone could recommend a resource where i can see how one thing led to the other and what it all really means.

I want to know how Art-rock and electronic music came about and how their roads have led to post-punk, new-wave, alternative rock, post-rock, etc and all the what-not going on today. 

If i could go from the 60's to the present and listen to albums from acts like The Velvet Underground, Phillip Glass, John Cage, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Cluster, and see how the most innovative in Rock and Electronic music have progressively evolved and crossed paths, that would be awesome.



Edited by Egg Head - February 28 2017 at 23:06
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Dean View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 10 2017 at 05:02
I doubt there is such a resource for what you are looking for. 

Several people have written "History of..." books but they are all one-dimensional views of multidimensional effects drawn from singular perspectives. Bias obviously plays a major part in forming that point-perspective, either as cultural bias or by way of confirmation-bias of a preconceived supposition. Simplistically, a history of Popular Music written by an American Journalist would be significantly different from one written by a British Journalist or an American Musicologist, and the variance between all three would paint a radically different picture of how a specific subgenre of music within that timeline was formed and would possibly present conflicting views on the status of that subgenre in the grand scheme of things. Since every history is a retrospective and largely subjective view, it is unlikely that any two observers would agree on anything. My personal view is they are all simultaneously correct and incorrect, this apparent dichotomy resolves itself when we dispense with our own firmly held beliefs and take a more broader view - prefixing every statement of presented fact therein with "maybe".

This multidimensional nature of [popular] music evolution is due to how influence and inspiration leads to new developments in popular music along parallel and unrelated paths. These paths meander, converge and diverge, sometimes crossing and sometimes running asymptotic. At various points along these paths new paths splinter and bifurcate to form nodes that we identify as artists, and when several of these nodes are sufficiently similar in substance or style we group them together as a subgenre. While initially these subgenres are artificial constructs, as time progresses a synergism is created that gels them into something more tangible and self-referential. No subgenre of music was ever created as a deliberate and planned intent but once identified it becomes a stand-alone entity that propagates on a circular path within itself where newer artists exist solely within that subgenre without reference to the earlier subgenres and influences that spawned it. While we take great pleasure in pointing to a moment in time and proclaiming that as the birth of something new, the reality is less concrete and certain.

For example if we reverse-engineer the evolution of electronic music we can trace its lineage back in time along numerous converging paths. Since electronic music is extensively a technology-driven form of music that is wholly dependant upon electronics these paths begin with the advent (i.e., invention) of sound creation using electronic circuit elements being used by musicians to create music. We can credit inventors such as Leon Theremin and Robert Moog as the creators of specific electronic instruments but it was musicians such as Clara Rockmore and Wendy Carlos who instigated some of those evolutionary development paths using those instruments. However, those hardware inventions were themselves triggered by creative people using existing non-musical electronic systems to produce music that we regard as Electronic or Electroacoustic Music. That said, there is a school of thought that does not regard Electroacoustic Music as music and another that does not see it as Electronic Music. However it is impossible to discuss the evolution of electronic music without mention of it, or Musique Concrète and Tape Music come to that, as they are all formative on the genre in some respect. The role-call of such pioneering musicians would be too long to list here but keeping to some of the notable female pioneers of the genre (as this is the week of World Woman's Day) names such as Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire spring immediately to mind. [With this I should point out that unlike those electronic pioneers (and others) neither Rockmore nor Carlos created new forms of music, they merely interpreted existing non-electronic music forms on electronic instruments, but again it is imprudent to discuss this topic without mention of them].
As a side-note: while predating electronic music by almost a century, Ada Lovelace was one of the first people to appreciate that analytical devices (computers) could be used to marry the mathematics of sound with the creation of music, as in 1845 she wrote: "Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Yet few (if any) of the artists filed under the broad category of Electronic Music would cite any of those early pioneers as an influence, nor would we be able to plot a direct path between them. In fact since Electronic Music can just be any music played on electronic instruments we cannot categorically say that any artist or piece of electronic music is dependant upon prior electronic compositions in any way, even if there is a stylistic similarity between them because that could be simply coincidental happenstance.

The other thing we have to be wary of when charting the development and evolution of popular music is the things that musicians say and the influences they claim, for they are a pretentious (and precocious) lot at best, and often misreported at worse. I recall that in the mid-1970s Elton John labelled David Bowie as a pseudo-intellectual because of some of the things he'd come out with in interviews, (but then on the face of it, aren't we all a little pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, I know I am and for that I'm quite unrepentant LOL).




Edited by Dean - March 10 2017 at 05:18
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 10 2017 at 07:38
Basicly the first two Roxy Music albums are a must and gem. Also the albums after are innovative and broadening in scope and style
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 11 2017 at 11:41
I'm finding it very interesting to listen to the musical evolution of the three original members of Tangerine Dream - Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, and the groups Cluster and Harmonia that grew from Schnitzler's Kluster. Although all three went on to use mainly synthesizers and electronics, their first few albums were all about producing new sounds and atmospheres through experimentation with the instruments and effects they had to hand, perhaps more like musique concrete than electronic. This also went for Kraftwerk and their precursor Organisation.

What might have influenced and preceded them is also a worthwhile subject to investigate - the booklet for TDs Alpha Centauri says they had been inspired by Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres as used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and also albums like King Crimson's In The Wake Of Poseidon - played at 16 rpm LOL.


Edited by 2dogs - March 11 2017 at 11:50
"There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 11 2017 at 12:05
Although the 1950s electronic works of the avant-garde composer Karlkeinz Stockhausen are often mentioned with regard to Krautrock and Electronic music, Klaus Schulze - http://www.klaus-schulze.com/interv/in9704.htm - says these were not an influence on him. They did however have an effect, along with musique concrete type sound manipulation, on the Beatles 1966 Tomorrow Never Knows - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Knows - a radically different sound for the end of their Revolver album Shocked.


Edited by 2dogs - March 11 2017 at 12:07
"There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" - Marie Antoinette
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