Elektroakustische Musik (review)

Was 20th-century music more diverse than ever before? It is certainly true that scholarly reflection on music diversified, not least because of the caution now exercised in the face of historical metanarratives. This is both a timely development and a source of recurrent headaches. Even given the scope of a multi-volume project such as the Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert (Handbook of 20th-century Music), some selection has to be made, and some coherence drawn through the diverse strands left.

Elena Ungeheuer has written widely on the early years of electronic composition at the West-deutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and thus has extensive experience in rooting out historical and technical facts from the rhetoric which suffuses much debate on electroacoustic music. She is also keenly aware of the dual necessities of questioning received authority and not succumbing to a pluralist jungle where the woods cannot be seen for the trees. Her introduction to this volume lists some members of the large but generally stable set of polarizations which have shaped discussion on electroacoustic music through the years: "imitation versus innovation, object versus process, analog versus digital, sound meaning versus sound structure" (pp. 11–12).

It is an indication of the reflective approach taken in this volume that these polarizations, however open to debate, do not immediately fall into the usual, self-perpetuating mythologies of elektronische Musik vs. musique concre` te, or Europe vs. America. Nor is there any immediate mention of the German-language polarization between "E-" and "U-Musik," i.e., "high" and "pop" musical cultures. On the other hand, the polarizations Ms. Ungeheur lists reflect debates within the compositional tradition rather than within other forms, such as electronic dance music and industrial rock, the subject of essays by Roger Hoffmann and Frédé ric Claisse, respectively. In an introduction to the chapter containing these essays, Ms. Ungeheuer discusses François Lyotard's definitions of Modernism and Postmodernism as a means of finding common discursive ground, but this attempt at integration is not followed through elsewhere.

However, Mr. Claisse's discussion of industrial rock certainly alerts us early on to the mass production and marketing of music made possible by new technology. The group Throbbing Gristle, his main subject, critically challenged these developments by playing the music industry at its own game, with its own technologies. Elsewhere in this book, tensions related to the impact of standardization and shifts in institutional structures come repeatedly to the surface. Electroacoustic music, its production facilities, its discourses, and above all its practitioners, are not immune to the market forces and accompanying political ideologies currently banging on the doors of ivory towers worldwide. But the "value" of institutionalized electroacoustic music lies not merely in the technological advances which it has initiated—the kind of hard products which economists require and which might justify the survival of university studios. (Like some of the contributors to this volume, I write this from a city particularly intent on shooting itself in the foot in this regard. According to current policy in Berlin, any university discipline which does not translate into hard cash can expect to have its funding withdrawn.) So what are these other benefits, apart, of course, from the music itself? For one thing, electroacoustic music has contributed enormously to our understanding of the nature of sound and our perception of it. But it has also led to other insights: reflections on the relationships between partners in a musical communication (one of these partners might be technical), and on the new social situations necessitated by the complex technology associated with creating electroacoustic music.

This is the main thrust of the fourth chapter of this book, which by itself would vindicate...