Wiardgroup

I'm with ingo on this, and completely disagree with the "Electric Sound"
reviewer.  He/she seems to have fit their impinged their own philosophy on
Chadabe's book and used that as reasoning to slam the entire experimental or
electronic music scene.

Some specific points:

Agreed, the Chadabe book is overpriced, but I have not seen a better
overview on the subject.  The Kettlewell book is useless and filled with
errors.

The Chadabe book does offer a strange mix of equipment information and
history of electronic (mostly electro-acoustic) music.  This seems to
disturb the reviewer that the technology should take any emphasis at all.

Barry Schrader's "Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music" was published in
1982, not the early 1970s where the reviewer claims the last overview was
published.

Yes, there exist many intellectual exercises in the academic music world,
but your appreciation may vary.  I find many of the academic pieces tiring,
certain composers not worth listening to, but there are also many gems in
there, just as in any "style" or form of music.

There are also many artists who work outside of the traditional scene, but
are overlooked due to lack of distribution and airplay.  The internet is
changing this.

For some samples of superlative Electro-Acoustic music, check out the
snippets of Rick Petersen's works at the following location:
http://www.wavemakers-synth.com/wm_music.html. These get kudos from many
visitors to my web site.

If you want to talk about "over-intellectualized," I would put the review
into that classification.  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

Grant, is that you trolling... :-)

John Loffink
The Microtonal Synthesis Web Site
http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com
The Wavemakers Synthesizer Web Site
http://www.wavemakers-synth.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ingo Zobel [mailto:synaptic_music@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 2:01 AM
> To: wiardgroup@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [wiardgroup] Review of "Electric Sound" by Joel Chadabe
> 
> 
> hello grant,
> 
> a really interesting post.
> i believe that the modern times allow people to do their own
> style of music, which doesn't have to fit into categories.
> lots of people do music for themselves and they don't have
> other listeners in their mind, they don't have to make a living
> with their music. for me that means 'freedom'. maybe the biggest
> achievement of all the electronic instruments is that we can do
> complex music at home, with timbres which are impossible on
> other instruments, and it doesn't have to sound like crappy
> homerecording. this also means that the music is less uniformed,
> maybe less understandable and for sure less marketable.
> i also believe that there are real masterpieces of electronic
> music out there, but there is simply too much music, so nobody
> takes notice of it. it also depends on the preferred style of
> music to be able to recognize a masterpiece.
> 
> the author of the review stated that makers of electronic
> music may be arrogant because their concepts are
> over-intellectualized. reading such a statement makes me
> understand why so many women were burned as witches a long
> time ago.
> 
> best wishes
> 
> ingo
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --- grantrichter2001 <grichter@asapnet.net> schrieb: > I found this on
> Amazon.com in a reader's review.
> >
> > Pretty tough stuff. An interesting observation about the
> > technology being more lively than the users...
> >
> > "Although there was a spate of published historical surveys of
> > electronic music during the early-to-mid 1970's, with the
> > exception of Peter Manning's *Electronic & Computer Music*,
> > there have been almost no synoptic overviews of the subject
> > since then. Now comes Joel Chadabe's *Electric Sound*. One
> > must admit that Chadabe's book does fill a void in the historical
> > consideration of electronic music, and, for that reason alone, I
> > wish that I could be more enthusiastic about it. The focus of this
> > extremely overpriced paperbound book, however, is less on the
> > significant achievements of composers of electronic music than
> > it is on the technological means of creating it. One is hard
> > pressed, indeed, to find references to more than a handful of
> > significant compositions. Such an attitude is typical of the
> > Post-Modern mentality (and, yes, there is such a thing, I'm sorry
> > to say), in which artists of all stripes arrogantly offer
> > over-intellectualized concepts and elaborate compositional and
> > performance processes as justification for whatever results they
> > achieve, no matter how nugatory these results may be. Here,
> > one finds an inadvertent confirmation of that most basic critique
> > of electronic music: That it is ultimately the soundtrack to a
> > futuristic, technocratic nightmare in which the technology itself
> > has become more vibrant and alive than those who create and
> > ostensibly manipulate it. If one were to go by this book, then one
> > would be justified in believing that, with perhaps the exception of
> > Stockhausen's works, there have been no masterpieces of
> > electronic music whatsoever. There has, however, been a lot of
> > interesting hardware and software created for it. Could there be
> > a more damning indictment of any artistic field of endeavor?"
> >
> >
> >
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