Havin’ It Made,

but

“Made in – ”?  “Made by – ”?

Iverson’s Electronic Inspirations distills the complex network of individuals and machines in music studios, expanding and thus further blurring hard-and-fast distinctions between human-made and man-made electronic music. The book contributes to an ever-growing literature that raises questions about how electronic music is categorized by throwing light on the complex chain of labor involved in making the music, while also examining why electronic music is made and for whom—for what purposes.

Chapter 4 examines long-accepted parallels between electronic music’s emergence alongside “Information Theory,” exploring analytically and historically just how information theory became fodder for aesthetic outcomes, and showing how mid-century German-made technology, wholly embedded in musical outcomes, allows us to understand electronic music as a kind of functional music. Though not generally a term associated with electronic music, “functional” is a useful concept through which to envision Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, in the way it could “transform messages” by intentionally “masking or revealing meaning” (Fulcher 2011). Whereas the French-German national(ist) divide in electronic music historiography tends to paint the French lineage (and its Canadian successor) as overly concerned with source-cause relations, the German emphasis on sound synthesis seemingly severs such entanglements with meaning altogether (Andean 2018). The Object-ness of Schaeffer’s theory thus “underdetermined” (Kane 2014, 153, 165, 195) in favor of the “stochastic” (looking to Xenakis) or “statistical,” in the sense examined in Iverson’s investigation into this music’s links with Information Theory. Iverson determines that composers like Stockhausen deliberately obscured such real-world connections, employing abstract language to describe their music—indeed, even the term “information theory,” from which Stockhausen recoiled, is ill-defined—to secure the work as being born of a singular creator and simultaneously substituting vagueness as an aesthetic stance. In other words, composers in the 1950s and 60s made their music harder to understand (McClary 1989), such that the music’s aesthetic came to obscure the many influences of those who had an equal or greater hand in making this music—Iverson points to studio engineers and military figures, but we might equally interrogate the increasingly narrow definitions of electronic music subsequently emerging from this time, which in effect draw the origins of electronic music to either France or Germany or America (Schedel 2017), as Iverson does for the most part. These points are summarized succinctly by Iverson’s term “boundary work”: “Boundary work attempts to control or shape the dissemination of something (scholarship, research, creative practice, etc.) by policing demarcations within and between fields” (Iverson 2019, 106). Controlling the narrative in this way becomes a form of hierarchy shaping and prestige building, “For instance, when scientists claim their work is ‘science’ while disparaging others’ as ‘pseudo-science,’ they bolster their authority, as well as their access to resources like federal funding, peer review, and academic positions” (Ibid.). If true, there is great incentive for controlling narratives that favor elevating majority electronic music practitioners as “homogeneous in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation…populated in the majority by white European men” (17).

In declaring the homogeneity of demographics alongside an historiographical contextualization of electronic music’s provenance, Iverson accomplishes two important tasks: (1) to establish a firm connection with discourses in non-musical disciplines on histories of technology that determine the ongoing systematic erasure of women and people of color (for example, Nakamura 2014; Wajcman 2000), (2) to provide further groundwork for claims about current genre policing within electronic music and its gendered and raced consequences (Rodgers 2015; Morgan 2017; Vágnerová 2017; Sofer 2018). Illuminating the boundary work of electronic music practices makes its continuously moving boundaries more visible in ways that allow us to expand currently exclusionary definitions and foster greater connections across forms of electronic music practice, whether emerging in the European “avant-garde,” Jamaican Dub (Veal 2013), American Rhythm and Blues (Ramsey 2004), and giving serious attention to these simultaneous developments in their historical links to more recent Reggaeton, hip-hop, and EDM, not as redundant reproductions of white European practice, but as a broad and global electronic musical movement.

For example, Iverson hones in on Stockhausen’s attention to “Statistical Form” in Debussy’s Jeux, and his particular attraction to “horizontal density,” duration, and “textural continuums” (Iverson 2019, 109). The concept of a “Game,” plays directly into electronic music’s philosophical underpinnings – electronic music of every kind plays with overt and severed associations, whether simulated and synthesized or concretely captured. Canadian composer Robert Normandeau, who rose to prominence in the 1990s, embraces the supposedly French lineage, often relying on sampling and production in his works (Woloshyn 2010). However, his composition Jeu (1990), the title of which he explained to me in an interview does not easily translate to English, plays with notions of sonic origin, sampling Perotin’s Viderunt Omnes and Stockhausen’s own Hymnen, by manipulating the panning as well as a the speed of the samples, such that we might be able to trace a line of influence between Stockhausen’s notions of density on the elektronische side of the divide and Normandeau’s concrète influences. In a later composition of a similar title, Jeu de langues (2009) Normandeau doubles down on gendered and sexualized interpretations of these sounds.

In Jeu de langues we hear fragments of breath—breathing by women performers, which we may be able to determine by timbral qualities listeners attribute to the intonation and inflection of the breaths. Jeu de langues uses three distinct sources, two previously composed pieces, for flute and saxophone respectively, and a third in-studio recording made specially for this work. Each source has its own correlation to intimacy based in an acutal sexual encounter experienced by the composer. Jeu Blanc is the first piece incorporated in Jeu de langues. Premiered by flutist Claire Marchand in the late 1990s, Jeu Blanc is an improvisation with extended techniques and, like Normandeau’s earlier Jeu, the work receives its title from a common turn in gambling, meaning to break the bank or to lose all of one’s money—a strategic failure that perhaps foretells of the work’s eventual fate: Jeu Blanc has since been withdrawn from the composer’s catalogue. The second sample incorporated in Jeu de langues is Pluie Noire (2008), a work premiered by baritone saxophone player Ida Toninato at the 2008 Música Viva Festival. For the Jeu de langues recording sessions held specially in 2009, Normandeau invited Terri Hron into the studio, a flutist he met at the Música Viva Festival the prior year. Hron is Normandeau’s current romantic partner and she was the only performer who knew of the composer’s intentions for her in the piece. Given this contextual history, the composer’s intended reception of the work is conveniently situated within the compositional history of its three sources.

The piece was commissioned by the organizers of the Portuguese Música Viva Music Festival held annually by the Lisbon-based Miso Music Portugal, an organization dedicated to the preservation and support of electroacoustic music. In 2009 electroacoustic composers and musicians involved in Miso Music Portugal gathered to discuss why eroticism was supposedly absent from canonical electroacoustic music as a genre. While perhaps some representative examples existed previously, those gathered observed that, compared to acoustic music and the other arts, theater, the plastic arts, or opera (which elides many arts), eroticism seemed not at all present in electroacoustic music.[1] The organizers of Miso Music Portugal hoped to resolve this gap by commissioning a concert of electroacoustic works under the heading, “Cinema Dos Sons Ficções Sonoras Eróticas” (or Cinema of Sounds, Erotic Sonic Fictions). Commissioned works came from five composers, Cândido de Lima, Robert Normandeau, Beatriz Ferreyra, António de Sousa Dias, and José Luís Ferreira for a concert held on 19 September, 2009, and another commission from the festival’s co-organizer, Miguel Azguime’s L…(2010) was later added to the archived materials. The 2009 concert was prefaced by a roundtable, “Debate Música e Erotismo,” with presentations by Delfim Sardo, Vasco Tavares dos Santos, Pedro Amaral, António de Sousa Dias, Monika Streitová.[2] Given its popularity, the concert program was repeated under the title, “Erotic Sound Stories” and broadcast on the Arte Eletroacústica radio program of Antena 2 on 2 March, 2013, rebroadcast again in August 2014.[3] This was one of many “new music” concerts to thematize eroticism and sex, as I learned from being contacted by organizers of such events, including the “new music & erotica” event Série Rose, performed at the Darmstadt Summer Courses 2018 and Warsaw Autumn 2017.

Unlike Stockhausen, Normandeau is more open with his desire to obscure his influences—just as he does not tell his flautists that he re-composes them sexually, he also practically shouts about the anxiety of influence he shares with his peers. He writes that analog composers like Stockhausen in the 60s were mere “visitors” because they had too much help from outside and did not nearly understand the technology very well, whereas today the digital sphere grants composers the facility, flexibility and command over their work: today’s composers are “residents” (Normandeau 2010). As he explains, given the 21st-century “democratization of technology,” there is no reason this should not be the case (61). And yet, historians of technology know this not to be the case—technology’s ubiquity does not translate to equal access (as we read a few months ago in (Philip, Irani, and Dourish 2012)). Indeed, though Normandeau criticizes his predecessors, he invokes the same “pioneering” narrative to undermine their authority, reaffirming the “boundary work” laid by Stockhausen, but shifting the boundaries ever so slightly so that they begin not with Stockhausen, but with Normandeau himself. Iverson takes such bold proclamations to task, stopping in its tracks an elevation of aesthetics that simultaneously brings about a recurring extinction of history among electronic music practitioners. She makes clear that, rather than infuse clarity, scientific terminology obscures when this is the intention of the people who invoke such terms.

Works Cited

Andean, James. 2018. ““Electroacoustic Mythmaking.” In National Grand Narratives in Electroacoustic Music.” In Confronting the National in the Musical Past, edited by Elaine Kelly, Markus Mantere, and and Derek Scott, 138–50. New York: Rutledge.

Fulcher, Jane F. 2011. “From ‘the Voice of the Maréchal’ to Musique Concrète: Pierre Schaeffer and the Case for Cultural History.” The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, August. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195341867.013.0016.

Iverson, Jennifer. 2019. Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde. New Cultural History of Music. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McClary, Susan. 1989. “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition.” Cultural Critique, 57–81.

Morgan, Frances. 2017. “Pioneer Spirits: New Media Representations of Women in Electronic Music History.” Organised Sound 22 (02): 238–49. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000140.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2014. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly 66 (4): 919–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2014.0070.

Normandeau, Robert. 2010. “The Visitors and the Residents.” Musica/Tecnologia 4: 59–xx.

Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. 2012. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910389594.

Rodgers, Tara. 2015. “Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography.” Feminist Media Histories 1 (4): 5–30. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5.

Schedel, Margaret. 2017. “Electronic Music and the Studio.” In The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, edited by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan, 2nd ed., 25–39. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459874.004.

Sofer, Danielle. 2018. “Breaking Silence, Breaching Censorship: ‘Ongoing Interculturality’ in Alice Shields’s Electronic Opera Apocalypse.” American Music 36 (2): 135–62. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.2.0135.

Vágnerová, Lucie. 2017. “‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking Sound through Neo-Colonial Labour.” Organised Sound; Cambridge 22 (2): 250–58. http://dx.doi.org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/10.1017/S1355771817000152.

Veal, Michael. 2013. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Wesleyan University Press.

Wajcman, Judy. 2000. “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies: In What State Is the Art?” Social Studies of Science 30 (3): 447–64.

Woloshyn, Alexa. 2010. “Interview with Robert Normandeau.” In . http://econtact.ca/13_3/woloshyn_normandeau_2011.html.

[1] E-mail correspondence with Paula Azguime, co-founder of the Miso Ensemble and its institution the Música Viva Festival, October 24, 2013.

[2] A video-recording of the roundtable, held in Portuguese, is available from Música Viva. Materials from the Música Viva Festival are archived by the Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre, last accessed 26 March, 2015, http://www.mic.pt/index.html.

[3] I am indebted to Piero Guimaraes for his transliteration and translation of this broadcast.