Page 278 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 16.7
Composer Danny Elfman, seen here in an electronic recording studio, blends electronic music and traditional, acoustical sounds in his film scores, among them Good Will Hunting, Milk, Termi- nator, Batman, Men in Black (I, II, and III), Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.
tronic music. One musician of the time defined electronic music as “a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” The father of elec- tronic music was Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), a Frenchman transplanted to New York. In his Poème électronique (1958), Varèse used snippets of tape recorded sounds—both musical and from the everyday world—spliced them togeth- er and played them back at varying speeds to produce strange, otherworldly sounds. But tape recorder–manipulated electronic music quickly gave way to computer-produced sound and the computer synthesizer. A synthesizer takes audio signals and transforms them into digital information to be stored and re- worked; the overtones (see Chapter 1, “Your Musical Template”) of a pitch can be instantly analyzed and transformed—the sound of an electric keyboard can be changed into that of a trumpet, or a clarinet, or an entire 110-piece orchestra.
What began as lab experiments by a few scientists/musicians in the 1950s ultimately revolutionized the world of popular entertainment. By the 1980s, microprocessors had become small enough to place a keyboard within the computer—an all in one synthesizer. Now any aspiring composer or rock musi- cian could own the hardware required to produce his own CDs. Haydn, Brahms, and Stravinsky—indeed most “pre-electronic” composers—had gone to the
piano to compose. Nowadays a composer is more likely to go to a home electronic recording studio. Martin O’Donnell, the creator of the music of the Halo video games series, says that he works with “keyboards, synths, and samplers as well as digital recording equipment controlled by computers.” Indeed, video music of all sorts—for video games, TV dramas, and films—is overwhelmingly electronic or acoustic music manipulated digitally. For example, the opening theme of the pe- rennially popular Desperate Housewives, written by Danny Elfman (b. 1953; see Figure 16.7), is electronically based com- puter music, but makes use of interpolat- ed acoustic string sounds as well. For all of these video idioms, electronic music has been a game changer. Ironically, esoteric art music transformed today’s video experience.
Likewise with pop music, new processes have made possible new sounds. In the 1980s, rap and hip-hop artists began using a technique called sampling whereby the rapper or producer extracts a small portion of prerecorded music and then mechanically repeats it over and over as a musical backdrop to the text that he or she raps. And in scratching, something of a retro technique popular in rap and hip-hop, a creative DJ with one or more turntables manipulates the needles, scratching on the vinyl of the record while other prerecorded sounds loop continually in the background.
256 chapter sixteen american modernism and postmodernism
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