# Do you consider electroacoustic music to be part of classical music?



## norstick (May 18, 2020)

Hey, I'm curious to see how the community feels about this. In scholarly research and journals, electroacoustic music is generally considered to be an off-shoot of art music starting with Schaeffer and then extending into different directions. However, even when studying music at universities, today art music and electroacoustic music are often quite separate except for so-called mixed music. I don't think it's uncommon to see rather disparaging comments on electroacoustic music from a large part of the general art music audience either. 

Therefore, my question arises: does most of the community see EA as part of classical music?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Well, the composers of it think it is -- but they have produced very little of it that strikes me as something that will last.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

norstick said:


> Hey, I'm curious to see how the community feels about this. In scholarly research and journals, electroacoustic music is generally considered to be an off-shoot of art music starting with Schaeffer and then extending into different directions. However, even when studying music at universities, today art music and electroacoustic music are often quite separate except for so-called mixed music. I don't think it's uncommon to see rather disparaging comments on electroacoustic music from a large part of the general art music audience either.
> 
> Therefore, my question arises: does most of the community see EA as part of classical music?


What is classical music? Is it different from art music?

Basically I'm having a problem making sense of your question.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

MarkW said:


> Well, the composers of it think it is --.


You may just be wrong about that.


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

If it takes inspiration from the traditional forms of the art music tradition - like Boulez's _Repons_ - then I would say yes. But then, that still features acoustic instruments. Compositions like Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room," and a lot of Stockhausen - really all tape music and musique concrete - do not strike me as being affiliated with the classical music tradition, and seems to belong to the realm of "sound art" or "sonic experimentation" rather than music. So I voted "some of it."


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I do. Maybe it's the era I grew up in and some of the music I listened to. Morton Subotnik was a huge influence. In recent years, I picked up a book by the late Samuel Pellman, and then two of his CDs. It's not music in the sense that you think of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but very ethereal, haunting, and strangely moving. Not for everyone, to be sure.


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## Simplicissimus (Feb 3, 2020)

One of my music professors in college was a composer of electroacoustic music and he was brilliant at explaining what he was doing with it in terms of musical concepts that he also applied to classical music. He was also the director of our collegium musicum and conducted from the harpsichord. Weird, huh? Well, Los Angeles in the 1970s. I don’t know a lot about electroacoustic music, but I voted “yes” based on my experiences. I am also intrigued by the idea of a whole other creative category of “sound art.”


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

Simplicissimus said:


> One of my music professors in college was a composer of electroacoustic music and he was brilliant at explaining what he was doing with it in terms of musical concepts that he also applied to classical music. He was also the director of our collegium musicum and conducted from the harpsichord. Weird, huh? Well, Los Angeles in the 1970s. I don't know a lot about electroacoustic music, but I voted "yes" based on my experiences. I am also intrigued by the idea of a whole other creative category of "sound art."


Wikipedia may be of some interest re: sound art: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_art


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## norstick (May 18, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> What is classical music? Is it different from art music?
> 
> Basically I'm having a problem making sense of your question.


Just used it as a synonym, sorry for any uncertainty.

Interesting answers so far. There's no doubt that for composers like Parmegiani, Stockhausen, etc they weren't working in "sound art" but in contemporary music. There's been a bit of a shift in more recent years, hence the thread.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Id like to see an argument these are not classical music, it may help me understand the idea better.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

'Normal' classical music is concerned with sustained pitches and rhythmic phrasing, and those traditional elements of music.

Music concrete is not, usually; it concerns sound only. *This separates it from 'classical' music,* but still keeps it in the field of contemporary music, which may not be concerned with sustained pitches and rhythmic phrasing, and traditional elements of music, either, like Ferneyhough, etc.

One distinguishing aspect of music concrete is that it is constructed from (in early days) mixtures of recorded sounds (phono discs or tape), not instruments. Nowadays this is done with digital files and samples.

In this respect, music concrete is closer to being conceptual art, since it involves no performers.


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## Guest (May 19, 2020)

norstick said:


> Therefore, my question arises: does most of the community see EA as part of classical music?


Hello *norstick*, thanks for your post.
I can't speak for the community but to answer your OP personally: emphatically, *yes*.
As you rightly say, it all more or less kicked off with Schaeffer, maybe Varèse a little bit before. 
I would like to make a distinction between the "Cologne school" (electronic, Stockhausen _et al_) and the Paris "GRM school" (concrète, Schaeffer, _et al_).
As for the reported disparaging comments from the general art music audience, well, that's their problem.
Me? I'm a big fan of electroacoustic music but that may well be linked to the fact that I studied it at University as well as the more "traditional" courses. Luckily for me, my teacher was a student of Olivier Messiaen and a graduate of the GRM. I had the best of both worlds!


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> 'Normal' classical music is concerned with sustained pitches and rhythmic phrasing, and those traditional elements of music.
> 
> Music concrete is not, usually; it concerns sound only. *This separates it from 'classical' music,* but still keeps it in the field of contemporary music, which may not be concerned with sustained pitches and rhythmic phrasing, and traditional elements of music, either, like Ferneyhough, etc.


So you want to say that the Reich isn't classical because it's got a train sound in it, but Pacific 231 is classical? I can't help think of this



> "When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less. ' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all."


By the way, the more I listen to that piece by Chowning, the more I like it.


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## Guest (May 19, 2020)

For anyone interested, a seminal study on electroacoustic music is:
https://books.google.fr/books/about...p_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I voted sometimes. There is too much variety to either say yes or no. Revolution 9 by the Beatles could very well have been called Classical if it was released by a different artist. This one by Stockhausen is downright funky to me, and less "Classical" in a pretentious sort of way than Revolution 9.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

All recordings are electro-non-classical . Classical music is alive and responsive to the listener .
It is touchable .


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> All recordings are electro-non-classical . Classical music is alive and responsive to the listener .
> It is touchable .


Why isn't a performance of Stockhausen's Microphonie even more alive and responsive than a performance of something by (for example) Ravel? The score seems to me to give greater scope for responsiveness.

In fact mainstream classical music, with its cult of the score and the composer's intentions, seems to me less responsive than music post Cage. I mean generally, not just electro-acoustic. These days the lines between improvisation and performance of a musical work are more blurred than they were before.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Recorded music is unresponsive . It is an object . If , Listener , you are responsive , well , hallucinate freely . That can be fun .


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Recorded music is unresponsive . It is an object . If , Listener , you are responsive , well , hallucinate freely . That can be fun .


The point of mikrophonie is that the musicians use electronics responsively, like an instrument. Have a look at the "score"


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## Guest (May 19, 2020)

All this is so old hat. No offense to you, Mandryka.


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## Guest (May 19, 2020)

What is a bit worrying is that I'm translating academic articles from French into English and thinking where the hell have these Frennch acadmeics been the last 30 years or so? As my department head told me recently, the leading musicologists are the Anglos, the Italians and the Germans.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> The point of mikrophonie is that the musicians use electronics responsively, like an instrument. Have a look at the "score"


That's all fine . I hope you could be there in attendance and causing the flutter of a stir midst the mind of music-making . A recording of the event is unresponsive to the listener .


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## norstick (May 18, 2020)

TalkingHead said:


> What is a bit worrying is that I'm translating academic articles from French into English and thinking where the hell have these Frennch acadmeics been the last 30 years or so? As my department head told me recently, the leading musicologists are the Anglos, the Italians and the Germans.


It depends a lot on the field though. I'd still say that in a lot of electroacoustic and mixed stuff, the French are far far far ahead of the English world. Hell, Schaeffer's books have really only recently been translated to English my John Dack. Also, I personally never liked as much the English musicology from Landy, Emmerson & co.

@TikooTuba Annette Vande Gorne would definitely disagree with you on that. You can still play around a lot with a finished recording such as in the diffusion tradition for example. Also, there's a lot of stuff being done in real-time or altered in different ways in real-time as well. Is it less alive than acoustic music because of that? I think it's just different in a sense.


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## Guest (May 20, 2020)

norstick said:


> It depends a lot on the field though. I'd still say that in a lot of electroacoustic and mixed stuff, the French are far far far ahead of the English world. Hell, Schaeffer's books have really only recently been translated to English my John Dack. Also, I personally never liked as much the English musicology from Landy, Emmerson & co.


That's true about John Dack and his recent translation of Schaeffer's _Solfège de l'objet sonore_. But in terms of who's at the cutting edge of electroacoustic music, I really don't think it's happening in France (where I live and work).
Personally, I'm very much for the musicological work of Simon Emmerson, Denis Smalley and Jonty Harrison. I believe their work has been translated into French and is gaining much interest.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I hope you’ve all seen Trevor Wishart’s lectures on YouTube,


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## Guest (May 20, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I hope you've all seen Trevor Wishart's lectures on YouTube,


Very much required reading is Wishart's _*On Sonic Art*_. (Please Google it.)


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## eljr (Aug 8, 2015)

norstick said:


> Hey, I'm curious to see how the community feels about this. In scholarly research and journals, electroacoustic music is generally considered to be an off-shoot of art music starting with Schaeffer and then extending into different directions. However, even when studying music at universities, today art music and electroacoustic music are often quite separate except for so-called mixed music. I don't think it's uncommon to see rather disparaging comments on electroacoustic music from a large part of the general art music audience either.
> 
> Therefore, my question arises: does most of the community see EA as part of classical music?


Electroacoustic music IS used in many genres of music. Classical and rock being it's birthed genres.

Your question, as worded is confusing.


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## norstick (May 18, 2020)

TalkingHead said:


> That's true about John Dack and his recent translation of Schaeffer's _Solfège de l'objet sonore_. But in terms of who's at the cutting edge of electroacoustic music, I really don't think it's happening in France (where I live and work).
> Personally, I'm very much for the musicological work of Simon Emmerson, Denis Smalley and Jonty Harrison. I believe their work has been translated into French and is gaining much interest.


If we're talking purely from a composition stand point I agree. I haven't heard a lot of great stuff from France in some time except for mixed music. Harrison and Smalley are excellent but often I find Emmerson to be a bit lacking although he's a fantastic guy and it's always a pleasure to meet up with him.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Re French, what do you make of this? The Occam pieces seem to have been really enthusiastically received.


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## Guest (May 21, 2020)

norstick said:


> If we're talking purely from a composition stand point I agree. I haven't heard a lot of great stuff from France in some time except for *mixed music*. Harrison and Smalley are excellent but often I find Emmerson to be a bit lacking although he's a fantastic guy and it's always a pleasure to meet up with him.


Hello again *norstick*. May I ask you what you mean by "mixed music"? I had to translate an article that used this term and it's not one that I normally use. _A propos_, this is a term used by the composer *Eric Maestri*. Have you heard any of his works?


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## norstick (May 18, 2020)

TalkingHead said:


> Hello again *norstick*. May I ask you what you mean by "mixed music"? I had to translate an article that used this term and it's not one that I normally use. _A propos_, this is a term used by the composer *Eric Maestri*. Have you heard any of his works?


Mixed music is musique mixte in French, it just means acoustic instruments and electroacoustics such as a lot of Kaija Saariaho pieces and most stuff from IRCAM. I've heard a few works of Maestri which I've enjoyed. I got to meet him a few years ago as well at a conference which is how I became aware of his music (and papers!).


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

See what you think of this


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Electro-acoustic music (on tape) takes the "performance" aspect out. It therefore becomes like visual art or a painting or film, detached from a performer, existing on its own. This is probably why conservatives don't like it; it's too much like modern painting.

When you really think about it, we are doing the same thing when we listen to any classical recording. However, we are aware that we are listening to a recording of a performance by real people.

This is another reinforcing point in my assertion that "music can't be objectified." Your awareness that a recording of Beethoven's fifth is _a recording of a performance_ is an aspect that is not "in" the music, and determines how we approach the music.

With musique concrete, we are listening to sounds directly from the composer, as if we were "listening to a score."


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Mandryka said:


> See what you think of this


I like it as far as it goes; at least it's not all smoothed-out and "ambient" like some of the stuff out there. But I like electro-acoustic music to follow more classic parameters, part of which are due to cut-tape edits. This should be easy to do in the digital age; just chop off the file. But this piece sounds too much like we are listening to a recording of sounds in an environment, not "sonic events." I think more attention to microphone placement could be used, miking things close-up. I think a wider variety of sound sources could have been used.

Of course, this all might be due to some sort of "recording a place" aesthetic, where the recording admits to being "just a recording," like some of Henri Pousseur's "city scape" pieces of the streets, people talking, eating dinner, etc. This aesthetic approach is like portraiture or landscape painting, or even plain old photography. Charming, but not radical.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> I like it as far as it goes; at least it's not all smoothed-out and "ambient" like some of the stuff out there. But I like electro-acoustic music to follow more classic parameters, part of which are due to cut-tape edits. This should be easy to do in the digital age; just chop off the file. But this piece sounds too much like we are listening to a recording of sounds in an environment, not "sonic events." I think more attention to microphone placement could be used, miking things close-up. I think a wider variety of sound sources could have been used.
> 
> Of course, this all might be due to some sort of "recording a place" aesthetic, where the recording admits to being "just a recording," like some of Henri Pousseur's "city scape" pieces of the streets, people talking, eating dinner, etc. This aesthetic approach is like portraiture or landscape painting, or even plain old photography. Charming, but not radical.


He's a composer who I'm starting to explore, I just came across this today, and yes, it did remind me of Wishart's Red Bird, gun shots etc.

The piece which really really impressed me by Mahnkopf is called Hommage à Kurtag.

The ambient trend is very real in contemporary music. I've been listening to a very strange ambient quartet this week - you'll find it on YouTube if you're interested - by Klaus Lang called Sei Jaku , Arditti recorded it. No electroacoustics in it as far as I know, maybe I missed them!


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