Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (The New Cultural History of Music Series)

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For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation. c580c687_Cover(full permission) Title_Pages (1) Dedication ffa44a20_vii(full permission) Epigraph Introduction OriginsCreating_a_Laboratory KinshipCage_Tudor_and_the_New_Timbral_Utopia CollaborationThe_Science_and_Culture_of_Additive_Synthesis Reclaiming_TechnologyFrom_Information_Theory_to_Statistical_Form ControversyThe_Aleatory_Debates_Beyond_Darmstadt TechnosynthesisFrom_Vocoder_Speech_to_Electronic_Music Epilogue Notes Glossary_of_Actors Bibliography Index Пустая страница