The Apres-garde: A History of

Avantgarde Music
[Concrete, Dadaism, Post-chamber, Electronic, Minimalism, World-music,
Ambient, New-age, Post-jazz]

Preface - Art Music in the the 20th Century

In preparation. This section will contain essays defining the scope of the book.
Art Music (or Sound Art) differs from Commercial Music the way a Monet
painting differs from IKEA furniture. Although the border is frequently fuzzy,
there are obvious differences in the lifestyles and careers of the practitioners.
Given that Art Music represents (at best) 3% of all music revenues, the question
is why anyone would want to be an art musician at all. It is like asking why
anyone would want to be a scientist instead of joining a technology startup.
There are pros that are not obvious if one only looks at the macroscopic
numbers. To start with, not many commercial musicians benefit from that
potentially very lucrative market. In fact, the vast majority live a rather
miserable existence. Secondly, commercial music frequently implies a lifestyle
of time-consuming gigs in unattractive establishments. But fundamentally being
an art musician is a different kind of job, more similar to the job of the scientific
laboratory researcher (and of the old-fashioned inventor) than to the job of the
popular entertainer. The art musician is pursuing a research program that will be
appreciated mainly by his peers and by the "critics" (who function as historians
of music), not by the public. The art musician is not a product to be sold in
supermarkets but an auteur. The goal of an art musician is, first and foremost, to
do what s/he feels is important and, secondly, to secure a place in the history of
human civilization. Commercial musicians live to earn a good life. Art
musicians live to earn immortality. (Ironically, now that we entered the age of
the mass market, a pop star may be more likely to earn immortality than the next
Beethoven, but that's another story). Art music knows no stylistic boundaries:
the division in classical, jazz, rock, hip hop and so forth still makes sense for
commercial music (it basically identifies the sales channel) but ever less sense
for art music whose production, distribution and appreciation methods are
roughly the same regardless of whether the musician studied in a Conservatory,
practiced in a loft or recorded at home using a laptop.

The birth of the soundscape aesthetics

TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Wagner's symphonic and choral extravaganzas had signaled a crisis of tonal
music, the music that had been composed in Europe for four centuries. Western
tonal music had the implicit purpose of building structures that were
fundamentally narrative and emotional. Its "purposeful" nature made it
predictable to the human cognitive system: one could anticipate how a motif
would eventually reach closure, since it revolved around a tonal center.
Wagner's intuition that the tonal center could be expanded or disposed of
altogether was seized upon by Gustav Mahler (Germany, 1860), the last of the
great Wagnerian composers, in the metaphysical eloquence of Symphony 8
(1907), Das Lied von der Erde (1908), and Symphony 9 (1910); by Richard
Strauss (Germany, 1864) in the titanic romanticism of Also Sprach Zarathustra
(1896) and the expressionist opera Elektra (1909); by Claude Debussy (France,
1862) in the total art of Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien (1911) and the free-form
harmony of Jeux (1912); by Jan Sibelius (Finland, 1865) in the harrowing
Symphony 4 (1911); by Leos Janacek (Czech, 1854) in the violent Glagolitic
Mass (1926); by Aleksander Skryabin (Russia, 1872) in the blurring of demonic,
hedonistic and spiritual dimension of Prometheus (1910) that featured an
instrument projecting light instead of playing sound; by Erik Satie (France,
1866) in the low-key, unassuming suites Parade (1917), Socrate (1920) and
Relache (1924), the prodromes of "furniture music" ("musique d'ameublement")
played to be ignored.
Even the more traditional composers at the beginning of the 20th century
displayed a post-tonal sensibility: Maurice Ravel (France, 1875) with the Piano
concerto in G (1931), Manuel de Falla (Spain, 1876) with the Harpsichord
Concerto (1926), Albert Roussel (France, 1869) with the exotic extravaganza
Padmavati (1918), Gustav Holst (Britain, 1874) with the visionary The Planets
(1916), Ferruccio Busoni (Italy, 1866) with the tormented opera Doktor Faust
(1924), Alexander von Zemlinsky (Austria, 1871) with the Lyrische Symphonie
(1923), Franz Schmidt (Austria, 1874) with Das Buch mit dem Sieben Siegeln
(1938), Ralph Vaughan Williams (Britain, 1872) with the Symphony 7 (1952)
and Symphony 8 (1955), etc.
The next wave of innovators was even more radical. Led By Charles Ives (USA,
1874), with his exuberant, urban, industrial Symphony 4 (1916), it included Bela
Bartok (Hungary, 1881), who explored the dialectics between chromatic and
diatonic structures, thus redefining the nature and role of scales and rhythms in
western harmony in works such as Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
(1936), Violin concerto 2 (1938), Quartet 6 (1939), Concerto for Orchestra

(1943); and Igor Stravinskij (Russia, 1882), whose polytonal textures and
rhythmic outbursts in Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), and
even the baroque oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), reflected a growing impatience
with the classical stereotypes. Arnold Schoenberg (Austria, 1874) upped the ante
with the atonal music of his Second String Quartet (1908) and with the song
cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912), each song scored for a different ensemble and
sung in "Sprechgesang" (between singing and speaking). These composers
fostered a transition away from diatonic melody and towards chromatic freedom
that weakened the tonal center and amounted to flirting with atonality.
At the same time, the impact of exotic music (mostly based on modal scales), as
well as of jazz (not only improvised, but also microtonal due to the "blue
notes"), was beginning to be felt in Europe.
A scale is an ascending or descending series of notes or pitches. The diatonic
scale (seven tones per octave) was rapidly becoming obsolete and being
increasingly replaced by the chromatic scale (twelve tones per octave: C C# D
D# E F F# G G# A A# B), and later by the whole-tone scale (C D E F# G# A#),
by modal scales (the seven scales used in medieval music, which can be seen as
slight variations on the major and minor scales of tonal music, plus scales from
other continents, which downplay the role of the dominant note), by pentatonic
scales (which mix whole intervals and larger intervals), and by microtonal scales
(that use intervals smaller than a semitone).
Not only elements of folk music, but even styles borrowed from the music-hall
and the circus began to infiltrate classical music.
At the same time, classical music was under pressure to change its own rules.
For example, in 1906 Thaddeus Cahill built the first electronic instrument. In
1907 Ferruccio Busoni published "Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der
Tonkunst", predicting the use of dissonant and electric sound in musical
composition. In 1913 the Italian "futurist" Luigi Russolo published "L'Arte dei
Rumori", in which he proclaimed noise to be the sound of the 20th century, and
especially noise produced by machines, such as his own "Intonarumori". In 1920
Eric Satie composed music not to be listened to ("musique d'ameublement",
furniture music), the first form of "ambient music". In 1922 Laszlo MoholyNagy advocated the use of phonograph records to produce music, not only to
reproduce it. In 1923 Arnold Schoenberg completed his 12-tone system of
composition (the first form of "serialism"). In 1928 Maurice Martenot invented a
new electronic instrument, the Ondes-Martenot. In 1927 the Russian composer
Leon Termen performed the first concerto with his "theremin". In 1930 Leon
Termen invented the first rhythm machine, the "Rhythmicon". All of these
people were considered little more (or less) than eccentric characters, and widely
ignored by the musical establishment.

It wasn't only classical music that was feeling the pressure. The early decades of
the century witnessed a general rejection of the traditional codes of artistic
behaviors, a rejection that started from Paris (homeland of the "Bohemian"
lifestyle) and spread to the other European capitals. In 1908, Cubism was the
new fad in Paris. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his "Futurist
Manifest" in Paris. In 1909, Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev revived ballet
in Paris with the establishment of the "Ballets Russes". In 1915, Tristan Tzara
founded the Dada movement in Zurich, which soon moved its headquarters to
Paris. Painting, music, literature and (soon) cinema were tightly integrated
because artists shared the same neighborhoods. The German world was no less
restless. In fact, it created a wider network of "rebels". Expressionism was born
in at least three cities: Dresden in 1905, with the group "Die Bruecke", Vienna
in 1907 with the group "Fledermaus", and Munich in 1911 with the group "Der
Blaue Reiter". Again, different arts influenced each other, coexisted, coevolved,
cross-pollinated. This phenomenon fueled the Wagnerian myth of
"Gesamtkunstwerk" (total art), that no artist was capable of realizing, but that
became a sort of collective subconscious of the international scene.
Arnold Schoenberg (Austria, 1874) shattered the harmonic certainty centered on
the melody by introducing "dodekaphonie" (twelve-tone, or "dodecaphonic",
method of composition), a system (completed in 1923) to create permutations of
a series of notes taken from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The
resulting compositions were atonal but allowed the composer much greater
freedom than the tonal system. He kept developing his new grammar of music
until the large-scale achievements of String Trio (1946) and Moses und Aron
(1951). Anton Webern (Austria, 1883) used the method to create a "pointillistic"
style in which each individual element in a musical piece is carefully crafted and
placed in relation to the others, each sound is important per se even before being
part of a whole. His compositions, such as Symphonie (1928) and the Concerto
for nine instruments (1934), were concise, austere and essential. Alban Berg
(Austria, 1885) bridged the aesthetic and the emotional dimensions in the cryptic
but evocative Chamber Concerto (1925), the Violin Concerto (1935) and the
opera Wozzeck (1921). It was not only form over content, because such freed
form soon came to symbolize a new kind of content, mostly aligned with the
disturbing atmosphere of expressionism.
The revolutionary value of serialism, that began with "dodekaphonie" (whose
idea was later extended to other musical "parameters" such as timbre, pitch,
duration, register), was to usher in a methodic deconstruction of tonality.
Atonal composers of the following decades include Roberto Gerhard (Spain,
1896), with his Violin Concerto (1943), Ernst Krenek (Germany 1900), with the

opera Karl V (1933), Nikos Skalkottas (Greece, 1904), with the Double
Concerto (1943).
This development (basically, refocusing music on its internal mechanisms rather
than on structuring content for narrative/emotional purposes) was actually
paralleled in the visual arts, which liberated the individual components of
painting (color, border, shape) from the "purpose" of representing nature.
Paradoxically, the artist was gaining more freedom while her art was losing
meaning.
This process led to an almost manic exploration of texture, mostly through
timbre and juxtaposing of timbres and overlapping of timbres. Notes were, in a
sense, less important than the timbre of the instrument that produced them. The
"sequence" of notes itself was, in a sense, no more a temporal sequence than a
spatial "choreography" of sounds. The composer was no longer creating a
narrative but exploring a space, a soundscape. The relationship between
background and foreground was turned upside down: the emphasis shifted
towards the background, whereas the foreground became irrelevant.
A by-product of the "soundscape" aesthetic was the extension of the orchestra
beyond the traditional western instruments. Not only eastern instruments, but
also percussion, natural sounds and generic objects became valid "instruments"
in sculpting the artist's soundscape.
Edgar Varese (France, 1883) was the first visionary of this new aesthetics,
introducing percussion and noise (and, later, electronics) into the orchestra,
particularly in the futuristic landscape of Hyperprism (1923) and in Ionisation
(1931) for percussion alone. Alois Haba (Czech, 1893) experimented with
microtoned in the opera Mother (1929).
Percy Grainger (Australia, 1882), an ethno-musicologist who had been
collecting English folk songs, devised "beatless music" whose time signature
changes at every bar, simulating the irregular patterns of speech (The Song of
Solomon, 1899), used "chance" for compositions such as the proto-aleatory
music of Random Round (1912) or The Immovable Do (1933), composed The
Warriors (1913), "democratic polyphony" for two conductors, dissonance,
polyrhythms and tuned percussion, conceived "unplayable" music for player
piano, The Immovable Do (1933), conceived "unplayable" music for player
piano, and built (1951) machines out of industrial junk and waste to create "free
music" not limited by time or pitch intervals (gliding tones outside the scale that
are impossible with acoustic instruments), the forerunners of the electronic
synthesiser. Another brilliant eccentric, George Antheil (USA, 1900), pioneered
the use of jazz and noise in chamber music and adopted the aesthetics of Cubism
and Futurism in the Ballet Mecanique (1925). Harry Partch (USA, 1901)

favored "just intonation" and a "corporeal" music, the precursor to

compositions-happenings such as his Revelation (1960); but he also built his
own acoustic instruments, sometimes of colossal dimensions.
In 1933 Henry Cowell (USA, 1897), a bisexual composer who in 1930 had
commissioned the Russian instrument builder Leon Theremin to create the first
electronic rhythm machine (the "Rhythmicon"), started the influential course
"Music of the Peoples of the World" at the New School for Social Research in
New York, promoting atonality, non-Western modes and percussion ensembles.
Cowell also pioneered chance composition with the "Mosaic Quartet" (1935),
whose score left the players to decide the order of movements, and was probably
the first classical composer to live a parallel life as a successful pop songwriter.
"Quartet Romantic" (1915) and "Quartet Euphometric" (1916) used
combinations of rhythms and overtones that were impossible to play by humans.
Cowell had also required pianists to play with the entire palm in Tides of
Manaunaum (1917), that introduced ragtime's tone clusters into classical music,
or to pluck the strings of the piano. In San Francisco his pupil Lou Harrison took
advantage of the Bay Area's ethnic Babel and incorporated Chinese opera,
Native-American folk, jazz and later the gamelan music of Indonesia into
Western classical music. In New York his other pupil John Cage became famous
by expanding on several of his master's intuitions.
Far from being abstracted from society, the soundscape aesthetics largely
reflected the disorientation, alienation and neurosis of the urban and industrial
world. The loss of identity was reflected in a loss of tonal center. The moral and
material chaos were reflected in looser and looser structures.
Even the neoclassics couldn't escape the new vitalism, drifting towards a form of
chamber music that was more "pictorial" than narrative: Karol Szymanowski
(Poland, 1882), with the Symphony 3 (1916), Paul Hindemith (Germany, 1895),
with the opera Mathis der Maler (1935) and the Violin Concerto (1939),
Matthijs Vermeulen (Holland, 1888), with the Symphony 2 (1919), Frank Martin
(Switzerland, 1890), with the Petite Symphonie Concertante (1945), Bohuslav
Martinu (Czech, 1890), with the Symphony 6 (1953), Carl Orff (Germany,
1895), with the Carmina Burana (1937), Erich Korngold (Austria, 1897), with
the Piano concerto (1923), Ervin Schulhoff (Czech, 1894), with the Symphony 5
(1938), Francis Poulenc (France, 1899), with the Organ Concerto (1938), and
the ultimate neoclassic, Sergej Prokofev (Russia, 1891), with the Piano
Concerto 2 (1913) and the Symphony 6 (1947).
Jazz infiltrated Concerto 2 (1923) by Ervin Schulhoff (Czech, 1894), La
Creation du Monde (1924) by Darius Milhaud (France, 1892), Symphonie
Marine (1931) by Jacques Ibert (France, 1890), Porgy And Bess (1935) by
George Gershwin (USA, 1898), and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

(1930) by Kurt Weill (Germany, 1900). Jazz music was more than an exotic
novelty. Jazz had been the first musical genre to fully take advantage of the
three fundamental inventions of the first three decades of the century: the record,
the radio and the talking movies. The inertia of the classical-music establishment
(in the case of the record, also the limitation of the 78 RPM format) gave jazz a
head-start of one or two decades.
In between the experimental composers and the neoclassic composers stood the
giant personality of Dmitrij Shostakovic (Russia, 1906). At least five orchestral
masterpieces, Symphony 5 (1937), Symphony 8 (1943), Symphony 10 (1953),
Symphony 15 (1971) and Piano Concerto 2 (1957), and five quartets, Quartet 11
(1966), Quartet 12 (1968), Quartet 13 (1970), Quartet 14 (1973) and Quartet 15
(1974), marked a monumental synthesis of western music.
Classicism didn't die, but sort of migrated elsewhere, mainly north and east.
Suddenly, Scandinavia became the homeland of a lively school of prolific
"Nordic" symphonists. Notable examples are: the Symphony 3 (1947) by Gosta
Nystroem (Sweden, 1890), the Symphony 6 (1951) by Hilding Rosenberg
(Sweden, 1892), the Symphony 9 (1965) by Harald Saeverud (Norway, 1897),
the Saga Symphony (1942) by Jon Leifs (Iceland, 1899), the Symphony 1 (1938)
by Uuno Klami (Finland, 1900), the Symphony 10 (1973) by Eduard Tubin
(Estonia, 1905), the Symphony 8 (1952) by Vagn Holmboe (Denmark, 1909),
the Symphony 16 (1979) by Allan Pettersson (Sweden, 1911), the Symphony 3
(1950) by Karl-Birger Blomdahl (Sweden, 1916) , the Symphony 8 (1986) by
Talivaldis Kenins (Latvia, 1919), the Symphony 3 (1976) by Torbjorn Lundquist
(Sweden, 1920), the Symphony 1 (1967) by Ake Hermanson (Sweden, 1923).
Among the "nordic" composers the innovators were Rued Langgaard (Denmark,
1893), with Music Of The Spheres (1918), Josip Stolcer-Slavenski (Croatia,
1896), with Sinfonija Orijenta (1934), Geirr Tveitt (Norway, 1908), with Piano
Concerto 4 (1947).
German classicists included Stefan Wolpe (Germany, 1902), with the Symphony
(1956), Berthold Goldschmidt (Germany, 1903), with the Violin concerto
(1955), Karl Hartmann (Germany, 1905), with the Symphony 8 (1963),
Wolfgang Fortner (Germany, 1907), with the Symphony (1947).
Orchestral music was also popular in the periphery of the empire, as proven by
the Symphony 2 Minneapolitana (1952) by Sandor Veress (Hungary, 1907), the
Symphony 3 (1960) by Ahmet Adnan Saygun (Turkey, 1907), the Byzantine
Concerto (1959) by Ljubica Maric (Serbia, 1909), the Symphony 3 "Symfonia
1945" (1974) by Jan Cikker (Slovakia, 1911), the Symphony 6 (1966) by Stjepan
Sulek (Croatia, 1914), the Symphony 2 Lesta (1965) by Rudolf Bruci (Serbia,
1917), the Concerto for Orchestra (1986) by Karel Husa (Czech, 1921), the
Sinfonia Appassionata (1948) by Zvonimir Ciglic (Slovenia, 1921), the

Symphony 4 (1968) by Primoz Ramovs (Slovenia, 1921), the Symphony for

Timpani and Strings (1962) by Edvard Mirzoyan (Armenia, 1921), the
Symphony 5 (1979) by Vasilije Mokranjac (Serbia, 1923).
Chromatic visionaries multiplied, as the new freedom allowed spiritual and
political latitude.
Three Italian composers well represented the quest for the perfect timbric
amalgam: Luigi DallaPiccola (Italy, 1904), with the opera Prigioniero (1948),
Goffredo Petrassi (Italy, 1904), with the Concerto 8 (1972), and especially
Giacinto Scelsi (Italy, 1905), who developed a highly personal and spiritual
language of sustained tones, clusters of tones as well as simple stillness, for
example in the Quattro Pezzi per Una Nota Sola (1959) and String Quartet No.
4 (1964).
Britain produced works of inferior timbric sophistication but grander scope:
Belshazzar's Feast (1931) by William Walton (Britain, 1902), A Child Of Our
Time (1941) by Michael Tippett (Britain, 1905), culminating with the Requiem
Symphony (1941) and the War Requiem (1961) by Benjamin Britten (Britain,
1913).
Music is immanent in the works of Olivier Messiaen (France, 1908), both in his
large-scale orchestral works, such as Turangalila Symphonie (1948) and La
Transfiguration (1969), in his ghostly, surreal chamber works, such as Quatuor
Pour La Fin Du Temps (1940), and in puzzles of arcane symbols such as
Harawi (1945). His harmony made of color and hypnosis, permeated by an
underlying theme of human humility amid the surrounding grandeur and
mystery, seemed to coin the language of eternity.
Alan Hovhaness (USA, 1911) fused Eastern and Medieval mysticism in the
Concerto 7 (1953) and the Symphony 2 (1955).
New instruments and sounds entered the orchestra, as proven by Andre` Jolivet
(France, 1905) with the Concerto pour Ondes Martenot (1947), Conlon
Nancarrow (USA, 1912) with the Concerto for Player Piano and Orchestra
(1989), and by Lou Harrison (USA, 1917) with the Concerto in Slendro (1961)
and La Koro-sutro (1972), influenced by Indonesian gamelan.
The Avantgarde
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
If Schoenberg had freed the composer from the tradition, John Cage (USA,
1912), a pupil of Henry Cowell, freed the composition from the composer. Cage

blurred the distinction between what is music and what is not music. First, he
promoted silence, altered instruments (1940), sounds of nature (1941), found
sounds (1951), the very movements of the performer (1952), the collage of
random noises (1952), and even the background noise of the auditorium (1952)
to the status of music, preferring the narrow range of percussion instruments
while pioneering electronic music in Imaginary Landscape no.1 (1939), and
composing Sonatas and Interludes (1948) for "prepared piano", a technique that
paradoxically scaled down the piano's expressive power and basically turned it
into a polyrhythmic percussion instrument (the equivalent of a percussion
ensemble), an expedient later transposed to the String Quartet (1950). Not
content, in 1951 Cage also introduced indeterminacy and randomness in the
process of making music, as demonstrated in the Piano Concerto (1958). Thus
Cage's music could be the random ("aleatoric") outcome of "events" that were
foreign to traditional music making (in which the only events are the musicians
playing their instruments based on the composer's score). Like in Zen
meditation, Cage's pieces highlighted a higher dimension, which was not to be
found in the minute details of the piece but in the experience of it. While Cage
did not attempt to bridge the gap between performer and listener, he downplayed
the composer (who specifies only the actions, not the music itself), increased the
degrees of freedom of the performer (who produce the music), and, indirectly,
demanded that the listener began to "listen" in a different way, more integrated
with the act of making music. In 1952 he organized an event at Black Mountain
College around his Theater Piece No 1 with dancer Merce Cunningham, pianist
David Tudor and painter Robert Rauschenberg; and in 1958 Allan Kaprow gave
these events a name: "happening". Cage extended the scope of Dadaism beyond
mere provocation and turned it into a new perception of the artistic event; which
is, after all, just that: an event. He removed both form and content from art, and
left only the process. But, more than an artist, Cage was a creator of genres. He
wrote the history of avantgarde genres for the following 50 years (and counting),
even though he didn't give it any masterpiece.
Another pioneer of the caliber of Cage, Boris Blacher (Germany, 1903), penned
the abstract opera Abstrakte Oper 1 (1953), which has no words and no action.
Brion Gysin (Britain, 1916) was the true inventor of the "cut-up" technique
made popular by his friend William Burroughs. The two experimented with it
while in Paris during the 1950s, Burroughs focusing on fiction while Gyson
applied it to just about any art, including "music" (audio cut-up).
The end of World War II marked a new period of aesthetic revolution that built
upon the most radical ideas of the previous decades while adopting new
technologies that had become available.

John Cage had already composed Imaginary Landscape N.1 for magnetic tape in
1939. When (1946) the city of Damstadt in Germany set up a school for
avantgarde composers, the magnetic tape became one of their "instruments".
In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer (France, 1910) created a laboratory in Paris for
"musique concrete" (music made of noises, not notes), basically the practical
implementation of Luigi Russolo's theories. Pieces such as Symphonie Pour Un
Homme Seul (1950) used technology to alter the original ("concrete") sound.
The instrument was no longer a piece of the orchestra but a piece of a recording
studio. Schaeffer pioneered the use of "found sounds" to compose original
music.
Pierre Schaeffer's disciple Pierre Henry (France, 1927), who had already
collaborated to the Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (1949) and to the opera
Orphee' (1953), continued his masters program in a more populistic vein with:
Concerto Des Ambiguite' (1950), a noisy dialogue for two pianos that seems
reminiscent of French absurdist theater; Le Voyage (1962), a sinister electroacoustic suite for electronically processed sounds of the orchestra; the
Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir (1963) for found sounds (a door and a
sigh); Reine Verte (1963), a theatrical soundtrack for found sounds, sound
effects, voices and electronic imitations of popular music (such as Rock
Electronique); Messe Pour Le Temp Present (1967), mostly a rock mass that
harks back to psychedelic music (with the electrifying Psyche' Rock).
Rune Lindblad (Sweden, 1923) employed damaged film to automatically
produce the sounds of Optica 1 (1959).
Joseph Schillinger published "A Mathematical Basis of the Arts" (1949), in
which he proposed that popular music could be composed by combining
snippets of existing popular music. Basically, he had envisioned "sampling"
before the invention of the sampler.
In 1951, Karlheinz Stockhausen joined the school of music at Darmstadt, and
began composing "elektronische musik".
In the same year, the French national radio set up a studio to record electronic
music in Paris, and the West Deutsche Radio opened a similar studio in Cologne
(the NWDR).
In 1952, across the ocean, electronic engineers Harry Olsen and Hebert Belar
built the first synthesizer at RCA's Princeton Laboratories, the "Mark I".
It was just a matter of time before new genres based on electronic instruments
appeared. Musica su Due Dimensioni (1957) by Bruno Maderna (Italy, 1920)

was the first "electro-acoustic" composition, mixing traditional instruments and

electronic tape. A computer composed the Illiac Suite (1957), using software
created by Lejaren Hiller.
At the other end of the spectrum, Schoenberg's ambition to invent a new logic of
musical composition was adopted by composers who tried to "serialize"
(prescribe) the entire dynamics of a piece (not only the notes). Elliott Carter
(USA, 1908) conceived atonality as a disjointed choir of voices in the Quartet 1
(1951) and the Quartet 2 (1959). The instruments simulated actors in a drama,
and counterpoint became a dialogue between different characters. In his Double
Concerto (1961) the two solo instruments are basically playing two different
concertos. The culmination of this program was the hectic and effervescent
rhetoric of the Concerto for orchestra (1969) and of the Symphony for Three
Orchestras (1977). Milton Babbitt (USA, 1916) indulged in the intricate
mechanisms of his String Quartet 2 (1954) and Ensembles For Synthesizer
(1964). George Perle (USA, 1915) followed suit with the Quartet 5 (1960).
Pierre Boulez (France, 1925) achieved the rigorous science of Structures (1951)
and delved into the disorienting percussive patterns of Le Marteau Sans Maitre
(1954) before turning to an aleatory format inspired by the poet Mallarme' with
Sonata piano 3 (1957) and Pli Selon Pli (1962). Jean Barraque (France, 1928)
with La Mort de Virgil (1968), and Karel Goeyvaerts (Belgium, 1923) with
Litanies (1982) were other serialists.
Electronic music owed much to Karlheinz Stockhausen (Germany, 1928), who
contributed to popularize all the main techniques. The first major artifacts of
"tape music" (invented a few years earlier by Edgar Varese) were his
experiments with electronics and voice, namely Gesang der Junglinge (1956),
and with electronics and "samples", namely Hymnen (1967). His serialist
orchestral work Gruppen (1957), on the other hand, was concerned with spatial
location and movement of sound, another influential theme of the avantgarde.
Returning to electronic music, Stockhausen pioneered two more subgenres:
"electro-acoustic" chamber music (1958), which mixes tape music and
traditional instruments; and "live electronic music" (1964) which uses the
electronic instrument "like" a traditional instrument (save that, obviously, the
electronic instrument can play the sounds of all instruments as well as sounds
that no acoustic instrument can play).
Concrete music was pursued by Luigi Nono (Italy, 1924) in La Fabbrica
Illuminata (1964).
Iannis Xenakis (Greece, 1922) ventured beyond serialism and indeterminacy:
the complexity and density of labyrinthine scores such as Metastasis (1954) led
him to employ mathematics (and, in particular, stochastic methods), for example
in the electronic poems Orient Occident (1960) and Kraanerg (1969).

The three revolutionary schools of the time had changed the rules. Cologne
(Stockhausen) introduced purely electronic music. New York (Cage) introduced
music of gestures not only sounds. Paris (Schaeffer) introduced music of nonmusical sounds.
New forms of music quickly proliferated. In 1957, Max Mathews began
composing computer music at Bell Laboratories. Edgar Varese inaugurated tape
music with Deserts (1954) and premiered his Poeme Electronique (1958) in a
special pavilion designed by architect Le Corbusier, where the music was
reacting with the environment. In 1958 the Columbia-Princeton studio for
avantgarde composers opened in New York, and was featuring an RCA Mark II,
the "synthesizer", and the following year Raymond Scott invented the first
sequencer, the "Wall of Sound". In 1959 John Cage performed "live electronic
music". Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and others founded the
"Tape Music Center" near San Francisco in 1959. In 1961 Robert Ashley and
Gordon Mumma organized Ann Arbor's ONCE festival, entirely devoted to
avantgarde music. Together, these events marked the end of avantgarde music as
an exclusive of seasoned (and mostly European) composers and the beginning of
avantgarde music as a relatively grass-roots (and mostly American)
phenomenon. Sure, the composers were still educated at the most prestigious
schools of music: but their stance towards composition/performance was
moving away from the concert hall and towards the praxis of jazz music. The
musicians of this generation tried many (and wildly different) avenues of
experimentation, from musique concrete to electro-acoustic synthesis, but they
shared a fundamental aesthetic belief in the power of "sound", as opposed to the
traditional emphasis on harmony and melody.
Lucia Dlugoszewski (USA, 1925) started out with pieces in the tradition of
Pierre SChaeffer's "acousmatic" music, such as Orchestra Structure For The
Poetry Of Everyday Sounds (1952), in the tradition of John Cage's prepared
piano, such as Archaic Aggregates (1961) for self-built percussions and timbre
piano, and in the tradition of Edgar Varese's percussion music, such as Suchness
Concerto (1958), but she also perfected a surreal style for chamber music with
pieces such as Concert Of Man Rooms And Moving Space (1960) and Tender
Theatre Flight Nageire (1978) for brass sextet and non-pitched percussion.
Louis "Moondog" Hardin (USA, 1916) was one of the greatest and most bizarre
geniuses of the 20th century. A New York street performer who dressed up like
a Viking, he composed string quartets, symphonies and operas, but mainly
surreal vignettes for orchestra and home-made instruments. His works
encompass everything that was known and a lot of what was still unknown. He
virtually invented every single future genre of rock, electronic and world music.

For example, the neoclassical quartet Surf Session (1953) borrowed the rhythm
of Middle-eastern folk dancing and employed ocean waves.
Hans Otte (Germany, 1926) was perhaps the first visionary of "deep listening"
music, music whose emotional core is as distant from the surface as it can be,
basically the exact opposite of German romantic/symphonic music. The peaks
(or, better, bottoms) of his minimal art were brief piano sonatas in which very
little happens, inspired by Eastern calligraphy and philosophy: Das Buch der
Klaenge (1982), documented on The Book of Sounds (1992), and Stundenbuch
(1998).
Post-modernism
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While some were indulging in ever more abstract sounds and techniques, others
returned to the past. The prevailing postmodernist aesthetic fostered the use of
"quotation" from the past in the composition of new works. Shostakovich
himself was among the practitioners of quotation. George Rochberg (USA,
1918) with Contra Mortem Et Tempus (1965), Berndt Zimmermann (Germany,
1918) with Die Soldaten (1964), and George Crumb (USA, 1929) with Ancient
Voices of Children (1970) achieved significant results. Fascinated with madness
and isolation, Peter Maxwell Davies (Britain, 1934) seemed to reflect on the
avantgarde itself with the stylistic pastiches of St Thomas Wake (1969) and
Worldes Blis (1969), which would be expressionistic if not for the strong doses
of self-parody. The work of Luciano Berio (Italy, 1925) went beyond mere
quotation, and stood as a semiotic study of human language at several levels, for
example in the Sinfonia (1968).
The nostalgics could also find solace in the opera, which remained mostly
anchored to traditional harmony: The Consul (1950) by Giancarlo Menotti
(Italy, 1911), Don Rodrigo (1964) by Alberto Ginastera (Argentina, 1916),
Bassarids (1965) by Hans Henze (Germany, 1926), Ghosts of Versailles (1991)
by John Corigliano (USA, 1938), The Death of a Composer (1994) by Louis
Andriessen (Holland, 1939), Florencia en el Amazonas (1996) by Daniel Catan
(Mexico, 1941), Waking in New York (1998) by Elodie Lauten (USA, 1951),
Valis (1987) by Tod Machover (USA, 1953), Emmeline (1996) by Tobias Picker
(USA, 1954), Weather (1999) by Michael Gordon (USA, 1956), Ghost Opera
(1994) by Tan Dun (China, 1957), Powder Her Face (1995) by Thomas Ades
(Britain, 1971), Nanking! Nanking! (1999) by Bright Sheng (China, 1955), etc.
Event Music
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

Cage's dadaism survived in different forms. Morton Feldman (USA, 1926) drew
inspiration from abstract painting for Rothko Chapel (1971) and the four-hour
String Quartet 2 (1983). Henri Pousseur (Belgium, 1929) introduced aleatory
elements in Votre Faust (1963). But Cage's legacy was perhaps stronger on
"event music", music whose score depends on the gestures/movements/actions
of the performers, and sometimes "is" those actions.
The Fluxus movement first realized the interdisciplinary implications of that
concept. A group of musicians, painters and writers, organized in New York by
Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas in 1961, they organized chance events
bordering on theater, visual art and music. Their works of art were sets of rules
that specified the process by which the performers had to produce the music and
the audience had to consume it. These happenings demystified the apparatus of
western classical music while reintroducing a ritualistic element. TV Bra for
Living Sculptures (1969) by Nam June Paik (Korea, 1932) was a typical Fluxus
"composition".
Dieter Schnebel (Germany, 1930) scored the third part of Abfaelle (1962) for
conductor alone (with no musicians). Franco Donatoni (Italy, 1927) mixed
intricate strategies of event and chance in Zrcadlo (1963). Lukas Foss (USA,
1922) was among the composers to employ improvisation, for example in Echoi
(1963).
Eventually there emerged a new form of musical theater, as in La Passion Selon
Sade (1965) by Sylvano Bussotti (Italy, 1931), and Sur Scene (1960) by
Mauricio Kagel (Argentina, 1931).
The first technical director of the Tape Music Center, Michael Callahan, was
still a teenager when he helped poet Gerd Stern create the multimedia show
"Verbal American Landscape". The duo then moved to New York where in
1964 they helped Steve Durkee form USCO, whose first mentor was a luminary
like Marshall McLuhan at the University of Rochester. Their multimedia
performance "Who R U" shocked San Francisco in 1964. In 1966 their show
"Shrine" at New York's Riverside Museum coined the term "be-in".
Christian Revival
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Eastern and northern Europeans developed a "sacred" version of minimalism
that used Christian (not Indian) spirituality as a source of inspiration. Arvo Part
(Estonia, 1935) with Tabula Rasa (1977) and De Profundis (1980), and Henryk
Gorecki (Poland, 1933) with the Symphony 3 (1976), which is basically a
requiem in disguise, and the Concerto for Harpsichord (1980), were the most

influential. Per Norgard (Denmark, 1932) with his Symphony 2 (1970) and John
Tavener (Britain, 1944) with Ikon Of Light (1984) and The Protecting Veil
(1987) pursued similar endeavors.
Eastern Europeans also took atonal music to new heights. It eventually
developed into a new language, tailored for monumental dimensions and
emphatic masses of sound. Thus Witold Lutoslawski (Poland, 1913) with the
Cello concerto (1970), the Symphony 3 (1983), the Symphony 4 (1992).
Serialism was downplayed in the "continuum" favored by Gyorgy Ligeti
(Hungary, 1923) who studied at Cologne: Atmospheres (1961), the Requiem
(1965), the Quartet 2 (1968), the Double Concerto (1972) and the opera Le
Grand Macabre (1977) toyed with slowly-moving masses of sound. His was an
art of intricate textures built out of meaningless elements. Atmospheres (1961)
and the Requiem (1965) examples of almost total chromaticism, with little or no
regard for melody and harmony.
Thus Krysztof Penderecki (Poland, 1933) with the Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima (1960), San Luke Passion (1965), the Polish Requiem (1983). Thus
Alfred Schnittke (Russia, 1934) with the Requiem (1975) and the Concerto
grosso 3 (1981).
Minimalism 1961-70
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Minimalism was both a compromise and a rejection of serialism and
indeterminacy. It had no narrative/emotional development, but it was mostly
tonal. It managed this feat by using repetition of minimal tonal units. It
overcame the inherent limitation of those simple units by letting gradual
variations alter the composition slowly over time. By their nature, minimalist
compositions emphasized trance instead of reasoning. They emanated
spirituality instead of irreverence. La Monte Young (USA, 1935), a pupil of
John Cage, composed his first music for sustained tones in 1957. Two years
later he would found the "Fluxus" movement of musicians and artists. The term
"minimalism" originally referred to his "dream house", a New York loft in
which Young and his Theater Of Eternal Music (comprising violinist Tony
Conrad, viola player John Cale, trumpet player Jon Hassell, keyboardist Terry
Riley and others) developed a music made of semi-stationary waves, of slowly
evolving amorphous sound. Music became a living organism. Colossal pieces
such as The Tortoise His Dreams And Journeys (1964) and A Well Tuned Piano
(1964) offered little or no respite for western harmony, and created a bold bridge
between John Cage's "alea", Buddhist meditation and psychedelia. The former

was the prototype for a special case of minimalism: droning minimalism, relying
on extended (and apparently eternal) tones.
One of his disciples, Terry Riley (USA, 1935), became the guru of minimalist
repetition with the pulse-based ensemble work In C (1965), that centered on the
iteration of simple patterns (almost a human-based imitation of tape loops), and
explored the raga-psychedelic connection with the solo electronic improvisation
Rainbow in Curved Air (1968), that employed tape loop delays. These works
clearly introduced repetition as a main compositional technique in western
music, with (Rainbow In Curved Air) or without (In C) melody. This conceptual
revolution mirrored the sociopolitical revolution of the time (the era of the
"hippies"), when communal and improvised concerts prevailed over the formal
presentation of classical music. Riley was emblematic of a generation of
musicians who were looking for a new tonal vocabulary to express a sense of
wonder. The spiritual fervor of his Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972) marked
the end of the hippy-inspired era. Riley would turn to more conventional
formats, but still retain the titanic urge of his minimalist years, particularly in the
monumental quartets Cadenza On The Night Plain (1985) and Salome Dances
For Peace (1989), and in the Requiem For Adam (1998).
The master of "slow motion music" was Steve Reich (USA, 1936), who
gradually came to employ chamber ensembles and small orchestras for his
masterpieces Drumming (1971), Music For 18 Musicians (1976), Music For
Large Ensemble (1978), the large-scale Desert Music (1984) and the opera The
Cave (1993). His vocabulary, too, expanded over the years, as he came to favor
dense textures.
Philip Glass (USA, 1937) began from similar premises but shunned Reich's
austere science, and moved closer to popular music than to classical music. He
moved away from the arduous repetitive patterns of Music In Twelve Parts
(1974), rediscovered melody and approached the format of the opera from a
different perspective with Einstein On The Beach (1976). Movie soundtracks
such as Koyaanisqatsi (1983), stage operas and collaborations with pop/rock
musicians became his preferred media, while his technique moved towards
polytonality starting with the opera Akhnaten (1984). His most ambitious
works were actually the least popular, the String Quartet 3 (1985), String
Quartet 4 (1988) and String Quartet 5 (1991).
Folke Rabe (Sweden, 1935) crafted the Terry Riley-ian geometric pulsing drone
music of What?? (1974).
LaMonte Young's associate Tony Conrad (USA, 1940) composed long tone
pieces in just intonation for bowed strings such as Four Violins (1964).

Michael Harrison, another LaMonte Young associate, expanded Young's "welltempered piano" to the "harmonically-tuned piano"," a customized grand piano
that can alternate between two different tunings.
Starting in 1963, Stan Shaff (USA, 1929) and electrical engineer Doug
McEachern crafted public three-dimensional sound events in San Francisco. In
1967 they established the sound theatre Audium, which in 1975 would move to
a new location and begin offering weekly performances in complete darkness.
By the end of the 1960s a number of new musical genres and practices had
pretty much developed outside and/or against the recording format. The random
and indeterminate music of John Cage, the endless minimalism of LaMonte
Young, the open format of free jazz, and even the live aspect of rock music were
not meant to be recorded, i.e. remembered forever as performed in that one
recording. Their music was a reaction to the idea of an immanence. It was meant
to be transient or, at best, emergent, evolving, never completed.
Droning minimalism
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Alvin Lucier (USA, 1931), instead, returned to LaMonte Young's stationary
waves but from an austere, mathematical, scientific point of view in works such
as Music For Solo Performer (1965), that used the performer's brainwaves, I Am
Sitting In A Room (1970), that progressively degraded speech while
progressively amplifying the background noise of the environment, Still And
Moving Lines Of Silence (1974), an eight-part work for classical instruments and
electronic devices, Music On A Long Thin Wire (1977), that used the vibrations
of a metallic wire, and Clocker (1978), live electronics for performer with
galvanic skin response sensor, digital delay system and amplified clock.
A rarely-recorded pioneer of minimalism, Phill Niblock (USA, 1933), tried,
fundamentally, to create music without rhythm or melody, by slow accumulation
of microtones. Niblock's droning soundscapes originated from the
superimposition and juxtaposition of sustained sounds which were, in turn,
obtained from reprocessing acoustic instruments. Niblock deliberately chose to
limit the number of his recordings, believing that his real composition was the
live performances and his real instrument was the tape. One can play a tape
anywhere, but, like any instrument, the way it is played (back) depends on the
player. Ideally, Niblock's tape should be played back by Niblock himself in an
environment of his choice. When they finally appeared on compact disc, pieces
such as Early Winter (1993) and Pan Fried 70 (2003) proved his stature.

Accordionist Pauline Oliveros (USA, 1932), the most significant purveyor of

"deep listening" music, explored the psychological effects of sound in works
such as: Horse Sings From Cloud (1975), a sequence of "om" for voice and
accordion; Rattlesnake Mountain (1982), a Buddhist-influenced piece in which
the sitar-like accordion weaves hypnotic patterns a` la Terry Riley's Rainbow In
Curved Air; Wanderer (1985), a polyrhythmic symphony for an orchestra of 22
accordionists and five percussionists; The Roots Of The Moment (1988), a
chromatic improvisation driven by digital delay; and finally Deep Listening
(1988) for voice, accordion, trombone, didjeridu and found sounds, recorded in
an underground cistern. These works virtually invented a new form of chamber
music. The exception to the rule was Primordial Lift (2000), an electric
improvisation for voice, accordion, violin, cello, electronics and harmonium,
whose drones represented soundscaped to be populated, explored, colonized.
Maryanne Amacher (USA, 1943) created huge site-specific installations and
sonic sculptures that radiated either colossal drones or subliminal ones to elicit
music inside the brain ("third ear music").
Electronic music 1963-70
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. The first ever
concert of electronic music was held in may 1952 in New York, and featured
works by the organizer, Vladimir Ussachevsky (USA, 1911). In october 1952, a
live concert by Otto Luening (USA, 1900) and Ussachevsky of electronic music
at New York's Museum Of Modern Art was broadcasted live, and caused a
sensation. It included Ussachevsky's Sonic Contours (1952), that electronically
modified the sound of a piano. Other works that Ussachevsky composed in this
period were A Poem In Cycles And Bells (1954) for tape and orchestra (one of
the earliest electro-acoustic pieces), which was based on Otto Luening's Fantasy
In Space (1952) and his own A Poem In Cycles And Bells (1954), and Piece for
Tape Recorder (1956). In 1955, Luening began experimenting with the
synthesizer invented by Harry Olson and Herbert Belar at RCA's Princeton
Labs. In 1959, Ussachevsky and Luening founded the Columbia-Princeton
Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first studio for electronic music (then
called "tape music") in the USA, which featured the synthesizer "Mark II". Their
Concerted Piece (1960) was another milestone in the development of electronic
music. Luening's Synthesis (1962) for orchestra and tape opened new horizons
for electro-acoustic music.
Live electronic music was also pioneered by David Tudor (USA, 1926), notably
with Rainforest (1973).
Bernard Parmegiani (France, 1927), another pupil of Pierre Schaeffer, created
De Natura Sonorum (1975), that combined the droning sounds emitted by live

instruments with the dense and wild textures spun by electronic machines, and
La Creation Du Monde (1984), a phantasmagoric mythological suite of
electronic collage.
The chaotic tornadoes of Morton Subotnick (USA, 1933) such as Silver Apples
Of The Moon (1967), The Wild Bull (1967) and Touch (1968), no matter how
naive, took Edgar Varese's "electronic poem" to another dimension, a dimension
that blurred the distance between primitivism and futurism, between tribal and
binary percussion, between ancestral sound and alien noise. Their dense textures
and hectic counterpoint, approaching the intensity and cacophony of rock'n'roll,
completely redesigned the landscape of western music. His "chamber music",
such as the harsh and stormy The Key To Songs (1985), created even more
surreal and nightmarish soundscapes, this time directly related to the human
condition.
Tod Dockstader (USA, 1932), a self-taught sound engineer and sound-effect
specialist who scored soundtracks for Hollywood cartoons, influenced by both
Pierre Schaeffer and Edgar Varese, produced tapes such as Eight Electronic
Pieces (1960), Apocalypse (1966) and especially Quatermass (1966), visionary
works with a narrative and dramatic emphasis.
The recordings by Jon Appleton (USA, 1939), such as Syntonic Menagerie
(1969) and Human Music (1970), with Don Cherry, introduced electronic
instruments to a wider audience.
Their equivalent in Britain were Desmond Leslie (Britain, 1921) with his album
Music of the Future (1960), Basil Kirchin (Britain, 1927) with Worlds Within
Worlds (1971), Trevor Wishart (Britain, 1946) with his double-album with
urney Into Space (1973) and Denis Smalley (New Zealand, 1946), whose
Pentes (1974) was perhaps the crowning achievement of that national school.
Ralph Lundsten (Sweden, 1936) was one of the first European composers to
experiment with the new medium, as documented on Elektron (1966).
Igor Wakhevitch (France), a student of Pierre Schaeffer, blended electronic
music, psychedelic rock and classical opera on his intimidating albums Logos
(1970), Docteur Faust (1971) and Hathor (1973).
Ilhan Mimaroglu (Turkey, 1926), a student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Edgar
Varese, gave electronic music a political agenda with La Ruche (1968) for
electronics, cello, harpsichord and piano, and the 35-minute electronic collage
Tract (1972), a "composition of agitprop music for electromagnetic tape".

These works were emblematic of the way electronics was being used to produce
maximum emotional impact.
Computer music
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
In 1976 a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer, Barry Vercoe,
who had studied digital audio processing at the University of Michigan and cofounded the MIT Media Lab (1974), hosted the first International Conference
for Computer Music. In 1986 the same Vercoe introduced "C-Sound", the first
interactive music software.
James Tenney (USA, 1934) was probably the first composer to craft an aesthetic
for computer music. Tenney realized that electronic and digital music almost
forced the composer to accept noise as "music" and to abandon the idea of
absolute control over a composition. While employing and developing
compositional algorithms (initially Max Mathews's "digital synthesis" software),
he thus came to accept John Cage's passion for indeterminacy, although from a
different angle: computer music can be "unpredictable" (rather than "random").
Furthermore, the composer of computer music could better achieve her or his
artistic vision by focusing on "stochastic" quantities, the elements that define the
overall structure (the "gestalt"), rather than trying to specify each single element
of each single second of music. Thus the Dialogue (1963) between pure noise
and pure tones, the abstract dissonant soundscape of Phases (1963), For Ann
(1969), a mathematical piece of superimposed glissandi.
Charles Dodge (1942) used a computer in Earth's Magnetic Field (1970) to
translate astrophysical data into electronic sounds.
One of the early pioneers to investigate the revolutionary role that computers
could have on music performance and composition was sound engineer David
Behrman (USA, 1937). His Cloud Music (1978), for example, completely
removed humans (both composers and performers) from the process: the music
was generated by digital machines based on the light in the sky, each cloud
causing a variation in the sound. Experiments with interactive computer music
such as On The Other Ocean (1977), in which the performers improvise based
on the sounds created by the computer, which in turn creates sound based on
what the performers play, peaked with the computer-interactive opera My Dear
Siegfried (2004).
As If (1982) by Paul Lansky (USA, 1944), for string trio and computersynthesised sound, seemed a manifesto meant to deliberately contradict every
assumption taken for granted by western classical music.

Laurie Spiegel (USA, 1945) reacted to the futurism and dadaism of the early
pioneers by developing an original aesthetic borrowed from folk music, creating
relatively atmospheric and melodic music via arcane mathematical algorithms.
The floating drones of The Expanding Universe (1975) evoke the same aweinspiring eternity of Klaus Schulze's cosmic music, with masses of static
"melodies" (stillborn melodies, that never grow to be one) endlessly repeating
their distant wail, echoed from galaxy to galaxy, the same way that Brian Eno's
ambient music does not conclude.
Richard Teitelbaum (USA, 1939), who introduced the synthesizer in Europe
while playing in Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran, and partnered with
jazz improvisors such as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis and Leroy Jenkins,
found his mission at the intersection between chamber music, free jazz and
electronic/digital music through works such as Blends (1977) for synthesizer,
shakuhachi flute, tablas and percussion, Concerto Grosso (1985) for saxophone,
trombone, electronics and robotic orchestra (computer-controlled pianos),
Concerto Grosso 2 (1988) for piano, robotic piano, trombone, synthesizers and
interactive computer systems, the interactive opera Golem (1995), recorded with
Shelley Hirsch on vocals, David Moss on vocals and percussion, Carlos Zingaro
on violin, George Lewis on trombone and electronics, and Teitelbaum on
keyboards, computer and sampler.
David Rosenboom (USA, 1947) focused on computer-enhanced chamber music:
Future Travel (1981) for computer, electronics and acoustic instruments was
one of the first albums composed almost entirely with a digital synthesizer;
Zones Of Influence (1985), inspired to Rene Thom's catastrophe theory, was
scored for computer and percussion instruments with the aim of testing the
border between chaos and order; and the electronic dance piece Systems of
Judgement (1987) was created with interactive software. At the same time, he
wed computer music with the improvisation of free-jazz. Emblematic of his ever
more complex processes of composition/performance was the piano sonata Bell
Solaris (1998), in which the pianist's playing triggers a piano played by the
computer.
Neil Rolnick (USA, 1947) employed digital equipment to enter a different world
of sound, for example in Macedonian AirDrumming (1992), that processed
samples of folk music into rhythmic patterns, and in Screen Scenes (1996), a
computer-processed improvisation for violin, woodwinds, synthesizer, bass and
percussion.
John Bischoff (USA, 1949) pioneered interactive electronic and computer music
in the 1970s and formed the world's first computer network band (League of
Automatic Music Composers). the Hub, an ensemble of six digital improvisors
(John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Mark

Trayle, Phil Stone) coined Computer Network Music (1989), performed on

computers that are interconnected, thus interacting at the software level. The
Hub pioneered the idea of network music ensembles.
Warren Burt (1949) designed "composing machines" and then used them to
create pieces such as the Piano Quintet (1983) for piano and string quartet,
Voices, Tuning Forks And Accordion (1986) and String Quartet No 4 (1987). He
focused on random composition, just intonation and environmental interaction,
sometimes all at the same time. He also followed LaMonte Young' lead in
exploring drones (often in multimedia settings): the four-part The Animation of
Lists and the four-part The Archytan Transpositions (originally devised in 2002),
each based on the other one, amounted to a massive exercise in microtonal
tuning, with pitches chosen and sequenced by a mathematical process.
Michael McNabb (USA, 1952) was a virtuoso of computer synthesis, crafting a
dance piece, Invisible Cities (1985), that continuously referenced the history of
western classical music.
Tod Machover (USA, 1953) was one of the early adopters of computer music
within the format of chamber music: Light (1979) for chamber orchestra and
computer electronics; Fusione Fugace (1982) for live solo computer (the first
such composition in history); Valis (1987), an opera for six voices and
computer-controlled keyboards and percussion; Hyperstring Trilogy (1993) for
hypercello, hyperviola, hyperviolin, and chamber orchestra (the "hyper"
instruments are enhanced with the computer); although his best work might be
in more traditional formats, such as Nature's Breath (1989) for chamber
orchestra.
Event Music in the electronic age
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Influenced by John Cage's principles of indeterminacy, Cornelius Cardew
(Britain, 1936) organized monumental works that defied the logic of
composition, such as Great Learning (1971), a four-hour composition, based
on the eponymous Confucian classic, scored for non-singers producing random
vocal noises or Treatise (1967), whose score is a 193-page manual of
instructions.
AMM was one of the early ensembles of live electronic music, first documented
in the free improvised pieces of AMMusic (1966), featuring Cornelius Cardew
on piano and cello, Lou Gare on tenor saxophone and violin, Eddie Prevost on
percussion, Keith Rowe on guitar, Lawrence Sheaff on cello, accordion and
clarinet (and three of them also on transistor radio).

Another ensemble of live electronic music, Musica Elettronica Viva, formed in

1966 in Rome by Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum,
recorded Rzewski's monumental Spacecraft (1967).
Italy was also the land of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza,
formed by composer Franco Evangelisti and featuring the young Ennio
Morricone, another ensemble devoted to group improvisation in a classicalmusic setting.
The aesthetics of Frederic Rzewski (1938) bridged compositional indeterminacy
and jazz improvisation, for example in the lively agit-prop variations of The
People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975), a stochastic exercise on a
touching Chilean theme, and in the colossal, seven-hour The Road (2002), a
summation of all possible piano techniques, including mouth noises produced by
the performer.
Robert Ashley (1930), active between Ann Arbor (site of the "ONCE" festival)
and the Mills College, coined a new form of opera, that relied on layers of trivial
verbal events to create meaning. It was more "sound verite`" than "stream of
consciousness", because its source was the accidents of life, not the organic
working of a particular psyche. Ashley's operas are garbage cans full of debris,
but "revealing" debris, debris that contain clues about people's lives. Melancholy
conversational operas for voice and electronics such as Automatic Writing
(1979) and Perfect Lives (1983) seems obsessive analyses of urban alienation.
The music is a sophisticated flow of unassuming melodies that borrow from
centuries of musical repertory. The atmosphere retains something of the angst of
expressionist drama, but the prevailing feeling of spleen and resignation are
almost antithetic to the "shout" of expressionism.
A similar project was attempted by Ashley's collaborator Robert "Gene
Tyranny" Sheff (USA, 1945) with the "cantata" A Letter From Home (1976) for
voice and electronics. Sheff mostly experimented with new forms of
composition. For example, How To Discover Music In The Sounds Of Your
Daily Life (1992) electronically processed found sounds to create "transforms"
that were then used to compose orchestral pieces. The Invention of Memory
(2003) for baritone, string ensemble, guitar and piano, was a set of variations on
a "reference song" that is subjected to several different methods of processing
(similar to the way a past memory is recalled differently over time).
Gordon Mumma (USA, 1935), co-founder of Ann Arbor's ONCE festival with
Ashley, crafted the dense and apocalyptic sonic masses of his electro-acoustic
sculptures Megaton (1963), a mixture of improvised action-music and tape
collage, the pioneering multimedia show Space Theatre (1964), and another
angst-ridden experiment with collage and electronics, Dresden Interleaf (1965).

The audience is part of the score in Cybersonic Cantilevers (1973) because it

"offers" sounds to a machine that regurgitates them according to its own
algorithm.
Another ONCE pioneer, Roger Reynolds (USA, 1934), toyed with live
electronic music in pieces such as Ping (1969), but mainly composed the five
vocal symphonies titled Voicespace (1986) for electronically warped voices.
Gavin Bryars (Britain, 1943) experimented with different styles, notably in
Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), "symphonic" variations obtained by
electronically processing a tramp's song, and in the Hommages (1981), aleatory
pieces derived from other composer's music.
Other composers influenced by the Fluxus aesthetic included Philip Corner
(USA, 1933), who even composed sonatas for pianist cleaning the dirty keys of
the keyboard, Jackson Mac Low (USA, 1922), whose instructions to the
performers often included notes to "listen" not just to play, Walter Marchetti
(Italy, 1931), whose eccentric ideas were documented on La Caccia (1974),
Yasunao Tone (Japan, 1935), famous for his "concrete" collages of damaged
discs such as Music for Two CD Players (1982), Tom Johnson (USA, 1939),
composer of the Four Note Opera (1972), built, literally, around four notes only,
Nicolas Collins, with Devil's Music (1985), an electronically-processed collage
of random radio sounds, Fast Forward (Britain), whose Simultaneous Music
(1992) has a score that consists of instructions to performers who have been
forbidden to rehearse together and are forbidden to listen to each other.
Pierre Bastien (France, 1953) built his own mechanical orchestra, an ensemble
of musical automata capable of playing traditional instruments, documented on
Mecanium (1988) and Pop (2005).
In 2010 Christian Marclay (USA, 1955) created a large-scale installation at the
Whitney Museum in which some 50 avantgarde performers (including Joan
LaBarbara, Elliott Sharp, Alan Licht, Zeena Parkins) performed according to
"scores" that were nothing else than piles of three-dimensional objects, while
pianists such as Robin Holcomb improvised based on the "score" of a
chalkboard on which the audience was invited to scribble or draw at will. Cage
thought that all sounds are music. Marclay expanded that notion to every object:
all images are possible notations for music. The interaction between visual and
audio realms is pushed to the extreme of recusion: Screem Play (2005) was a 29minute collage of videos that becomes the score based on which improvisers
play music, and that performance becomes in turn the film of which it is the
soundtrack. Graffiti Composition (originally conceived in 1996) was recorded
by an ensemble of improvisers "conducted" by Elliott Sharp. It is debatable who
the author is: Marclay had the idea of posting blank posters around a city;

random passers-by scribbled on the posters; Sharp used the posters as the score
for the composition; and the performers, using their idiosyncratic languages at
the instrument, are the ones who actually turned those meaningless signs into the
music of the album.
The second generation of Minimalists
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Minimalism had changed the classical western view of music. A composition
could evolve like an organism, rather than being designed to stretch over a
predetermined narrative or emotional path. The listener, in turn, was required to
listen more carefully, to enter into a sort of union with the piece of music; which
was, of course, an idea derived from eastern music. Minimalism had introduced
improvisation and meditation into western music.
These intuitions were further developed in various directions by the second
generation of minimalist composers.
One of the most powerful innovations in minimalist music had come from
rocker Brian Eno, who had bridged the sensibility of rock and avantgarde music
on the manifestos of "ambient music". Following his lead, Harold Budd (USA,
1936) crafted sugary, velvety, tinkling cartilages such as Bismillahi Prahmani
Brahim (1978), Children On The Hill (1981), Abandoned Cities (1984), Dark
Star (1984), Gypsy Violin (1987), that emphasized the hypnotic quality of
droning and repetition. TM, , Copyright 2006 Piero Scaruffi All rights
reserved.
David Borden (USA, 1938), founder (1969) of the electronic combo Mother
Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, created The Continuing Story Of
Counterpoint (1987) for keyboards, horns, guitar and voice, one of the most
monumental studies on counterpoint of the century. Borden's "counterpoint"
relies on the same basic technique of Terry Riley's In C (a set of independent
motifs played in different meters and for different periods of time), but Borden
downplays the pulsing effect and employs more than one keys, with an emphasis
on fast moving notes, fast developing blocks, fast changing meters. TM, ,
Copyright 2006 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Sound sculptor Annea Lockwood (New Zealand, 1939) composed sublime
exercises in slo-motion subliminal glissandi and microtones: the concerto
Western Spaces (1995) for flutes, zoomoozoophone and percussion, the chorale
Tongues Of Fire Tongues of Silk (1997) for eight sopranos and percussion, the
electroacoustic piece Floating World (1999), created in studio from "spiritual"
field recordings by her friends, and the four-movement suite Thousand Year

Dreaming (1991) for conch shell, trombone, multiple didjeridus, oboe, English
horn, vocals, clarinet and percussion.

North Carolina's violinist Henry Flynt (1940) launched an ambitious project to

found a "new American ethnic music" that fused avantgarde music (particularly
the hypnotic aspects of minimalism and free-jazz) and hillbilly/country music,
best represented by S&M Delerium (1970s), Jive Deceleration, You Are My
Everlovin' (1980), Celestial Power (1981), Purified by the Fire (december
1981). Flynt stopped playing music in 1984, but most of his music was released
"after" he had stopped playing. TM, , Copyright 2006 Piero Scaruffi All
rights reserved.
The elegant pulsing scores of Michael Nyman (Britain, 1944), such as Water
Dances (1984) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1986), were a
post-modernist version of neoclassical music. The orchestral miniatures of the
film soundtrack A Zed And Two Naughts (1989) capitalized on retro-catchy
melodies and tempos that mocked everything from cabaret to baroque adagios.
John Adams (USA, 1947) pioneered the fusion of minimalist pulse and romantic
rhetoric in Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982) and Harmonielehre
(1985); reiventing the symphony with his Chamber Symphony (1993) and the
Naive and Sentimental Music (1999), and reinventing opera with Nixon In China
(1987).
Daniel Lentz (USA, 1942) injected stereotypes of the past into the minimalist
skeleton, for example in Point Conception (1984) and Missa Umbrarum (1973).
Other mimalist composers (mostly based in New York) included: Jon Gibson
(USA, 1940), more famous as a performer than as a composer, Ingram Marshall
(USA, 1942), who applied minimalism to ethnic music in compositions such as
Gradual Requiem (1979), Stephen Scott (USA, 1944), who composed for
"bowed piano", for example Minerva's Web (1985), Charles "Charlemagne
Palestine" Martin (USA, 1945), whose Strumming Music (1974) turned
"strumming" (a tremolo style) into an avantgarde technique, and minimalism
into highly dynamic (and noisy) music, and whose colossal church-organ drones
of Schlingen-Blaengen (1979) did exactly the opposite. In 1981 Japanese-born
performance artist Yoshi Wada (1943) recorded a solo voice invocation (a` la
Pandit Pran Nath) and a duet for voice and loudly-droning Partch-like sound-

making sculptures for Lament For The Rise and Fall of Elephantine
Crocodile.
Ukrainian (German-born) composer Lubomyr Melnyk (Germany, 1948) devised
"continuous music" for his piano compositions that is closely related to
minimalist repetition: a continuous flow of rapid arpeggios that generates
overtones melting into each other. This translated in a very fast playing
technique, up to a dozen note per second, as demonstrated with KMH (1979),
The Lund-St Petri Symphony (1979) for organ, Legend and Song of Galadriel
(1984), Wave-Lox (1985), The Voice Of Trees (1983) for three tubas and two
pianos.
The generation of composers born after World War II continued to experiment
with minimalist techniques. In fact, interest in the music of LaMonte Young and
the other pioneers resumed and peaked towards the end of the century.
Somei Satoh (Japan, 1947) employed the repetitive techniques developed in the
1960s by USA minimalists to create music that was, first and foremost, a
spiritual experience, for example in Litania (1973), Mantra (1986) and Stabat
Mater (1987). While Indian religion had been the scaffolding of much of
LaMonte Young's and Terry Riley's work, Satoh harked back to both Christian
liturgy and Japanese zen.
The massive guitar ensembles lined up by Glenn Branca (USA, 1948), for
example in Ascention (1981), Symphony 3 (1983) and Symphony 5 (1984), used
repetition, but were better described by the word "maximalism" than
minimalism. A similar avenue was pursued by Rhys Chatham (USA, 1952), also
fond of just intonation and the overtone series, with his compositions for large
ensembles of guitars, for example Die Donnergotter (1986), An Angel Moves
Too Fast To See (1989) and A Crimson Grail (2005), but also in Two Gongs
(1971) for two gongs or Massacre On MacDougal Street (1982) for brass
instruments. David Bedford (Britain, 1937) had predated both with Nurses
Songs With Elephants (1972).
The minimalist dogma was bent to more pragmatic (melodic) needs by Belgian
composer Wim Mertens (Belgium, 1953), whose Close Cover (1983), Whisper
Me (1985), Lir (1985) and Educes Me (1986) attempted to reinvent chamber
music and lieder.
The angelic minimalism of Mary Jane Leach (USA, 1949) was built from her
manipulations of sonic events (such as human chanting), was more focused on
the acoustic properties of sound than on its structural development, for example
in Bruckstueck (1989),

Lois Vierk (USA, 1951) employed an "exponential" method to build up dense

and intense sonic architectures out of rather simple sounds, as in the chaotic
Simoom (1986) for eight cellos.
Other notable minimalists included: Arnold Dreyblatt (USA, 1953), founder of
the Orchestra Of Excited Strings (1980) and composer of the Who's Who Opera
(1991), who also toyed with intonation, as in Animal Magnetism (1995) and
Resonant Relations (2005), and musique concrete, as in Turntable History
(2011); Piero Milesi (Italy, 1953), with the sophisticated Modi (1982), Michael
Byron (USA, 1954), composer of Tidal (1982) for small orchestra, Mikel Rouse
(USA, 1957), composer of the percussion piece Quorum (1984), Dan Plonsey
(USA, 1958), whose Moving About (2001) straddles the border between
minimalism, jazz, pop and folk, Rod Poole (Britain, 1962), who exported
Young's hypnotic music for just intonation to the tabletop guitar with The Death
Adder (1996), etc.
Arthur Russell (1952), a cellist who composed chamber music inspired to Indian
ragas (or "Buddhist bubblegum music") and a disc-jockey who crafted disco
hits, composed the neoclassical seven-movement suite Tower Of Meaning
(1983) in the minimalist vein.
Oliveros' deep-listening music was well-represented by the improvisations of
trombonist Stuart Dempster (1936), documented on In The Great Abbey Of
Clement VI (1979), by the music for the extended tones generated by long
vibrating wires of Ellen Fullman (USA, 1957), as documented by Long String
Instrument (1985), by the music for steel-metal sculptures played with a bow
of Robert Rutman (1931), first documented on 1939 (1990), by Paul Panhuysen
(Holland, 1934), specialized in installations of "long strings", such as Partitas
for Long Strings (1999), by the music based on field recordings of Scott
Smallwood, such as Desert Winds (2002), and even by the guitar drones of
Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral on Wave Field (1995).
Gordon Mumma's electronic nightmares were evoked by Richard Lainhart's
Cities Of Light (1980); while LaMonte Young's lesson lived on in radical
experiments such as the massive drones of James "Jliat" Whitehead (Britain), a
purveyor of absolute quiescence in the massive electronic drones of Hilbert's
Hotel (1998), and those of the eclectic David First (USA, 1953), notably
Pipeline Witness Apologies to Dennis (2008); while If Bwana, the project of Al
Margolis (1955), indulged in the frantic and brutal Clara Nostra (1999), scored
for 106,476 clarinets.
British-born but Berlin-based tuba player Robin Hayward (1969) delivered
carefully choreographed solos of symphonic gravity on two lengthy drone pieces
of Nouveau Saxhorn Nouveau Basse (2014).

Klaus Lang exported Alvin Lucier's ideas into chamber music, thereby
producing the equivalent of melody and harmony with drones instead of notes as
the fundamental elements.
The voice
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
The intellectual curiosity that led to rediscover other musical cultures and
alternative compositional techniques also led to explore the human voice as an
emotional medium and musical instrument.
Meredith Monk (USA, 1942) coined a vocabulary of vocal sounds that she used
to create theatrical performances. The Key (1970), Education Of The Girlchild
(1973), Tablet (1977), Turtle Dreams (1983), Dolmem Music (1979), Atlas
(1991) focus on acrobatic and schizophrenic mutations that run the gamut from
child to witch. They populate the music of characters, moods and states of mind.
In 1970 Gloria Coates began experimenting with vocal extensions and creating
multiphonics. That idea was pursued by Joan LaBarbara (USA, 1947), a
collaborator of John Cage and other composers. She stunned the world of music
with the hallucinated vocal symphonies of Vocal Extensions (1976), Klee Alex
(1979), Berliner Traume (1983), Twelvesong (1984) and Rothko (1986).
Yoko Ono (USA, 1933), a student of John Cage, practiced a mixture of
dissonant western music, Japanese kabuki recitation and visceral screeching that
projected her stream of consciousness, a technique documented on the album
Yoko Ono/ Plastic Ono Band (1970).
From the jazz world came the wordless, electronically-processed scat of Urszula
Dudziak (Poland, 1943), who debuted as a leader with the album Newborn
Light (1972), and Jeanne Lee (USA, 1939), whose album Conspiracy (1974)
expanded the jazz vocabulary with elements borrowed from Tibet and India,
inspired by Yma Sumac, taking advantage not only of the "voice" but also of lip
and throat sounds.
Laurie Anderson (USA, 1947) bridged those experiments on the human voice
with the pop sensibility, the dance rhythms and the creative spirit of the new
wave, particularly in her multimedia opera United States I-IV (1982).
Diamanda Galas (USA, 1955) was the most extreme vocalist of the time. The
atrocious free-form hysteria of Litanies Of Satan (1982), Panoptikon (1983) and
Deliver Me (1986) invented a new form of lieder for voice and electronics, one

that references ancient Greek choirs, medieval "danses macabres", the French
"poets maudits", expressionist theater and, ultimately, sheer terror.
Percussionist and vocalist David Moss (USA, 1949) recorded the chaotic and
cacophonic tour de force of Terrain (1980).
David Hykes (USA, 1953)'s Harmonic Choir was inspired by Mongolia's
"hoomi" style on the hypnotic Hearing Solar Winds (1983) and Harmonic
Meetings (1986).
Thomas Buckner was "the" voice of avantgarde music during the 1990s,
especially in improvised and live electronic contexts. In abstract pieces such as
Evocation (2002) and Totem (2005) he was capable of coining a highly personal
(and psychological) language, a mournful mixture of mantra, shaman invocation
and stream of consciousness. His improvisations spanned a broad range of
mooods, techniques and structures, but maintained an underlying sense of unity
due to Buckner's persona, an unlikely fusion of Alfred Jarry's Pere Ubu,
expressionist theater and John Cage's silence.
Other contributions came from Shelley Hirsch (USA, 1952), with the symphony
for voices and electronics Haiku Lingo (1990), and Robert Een with his "songs"
for extended vocal techniques and cello.
Anna Homler (USA, 1948) invented her own language, both a vocal language
and an instrumental language, to simulate international timeless folk music. Do
Ya Sa' Di Do (1992) and Piewacket (2001), by the project Puppetina, a
collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Stepanie Payne, were in some way the
vocal equivalent of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
A synthesis of sort was offered by Pamela "Z" Brooks (USA, 1956) in projects
such as Echolocation (1988): the operatic vocal acrobatics was reminiscent of
Meredith Monk while the setting within the context of live electronic music
followed Diamanda Galas' example, although extended to sampling and found
percussion.
Miya Masaoka (USA, 1958) erected one of the most complex post-minimalist
structures in While I Was Walking I Heard A Sound (2003) for mixed choir of
100-150 voices.
Collage and Field recordings in the electronic age
The early musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry expressed a
futuristic ideology. The following generation of concrete musicians instead
became fascinated with "field recordings", with the sounds of ordinary lives or

environments. A field recording could be used as a background for electronic or

acoustic music, or could be "reorganized" (via electronic equipment or
computers) in an electronic poem.
Unlike poetry or the visual arts, that can incorporate explicit references to their
object, music is not a representational art. For centuries it was not possible to
incorporate or simulate everyday's sounds, only to simulate them with the
instruments of the orchestra. The recording technology made it possible, but it
took decades for an aesthetic of music as a representational art to emerge.
Alvin Curran (USA, 1938), a co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome,
crafted intensely-spiritual works that mixed natural sounds, live electronics,
improvised voice and keyboard patterns: Canti E Vedute Del Giardino
Magnetico (1974), his most lyrical collage, scored for for tape, voice,
flugelhorn, synthesizer and tape of natural sounds (wind, high-tension wires,
frogs, beach waves, etc); Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri (1975) for or ocarina, voice,
piano, toy piano, synthesizer, and tape; Libri D'armonia (1976) for conch shell,
zither, voice, piano, synthi, and tape; and especially Canti Illuminati (1977), a
vast sonic montage based on the human voice. Inner Cities (2003) was, instead,
a colossal piano piece (more than four hours long) that related to the minimalist
and ambient schools.
In 1963, Czech artist Milan Knizak (Czech, 1940) began to create music (the socalled "Destroyed Music" series) out of scratched, warped, defective and
damaged records. The idea of playing "glitches" was going to remain confined
to the realm of pure folly until the end of the century.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the urban sound documentaries of Philip
Perkins, barely processed electronically, provided vast frescoes of modern life
such as Apartment Life (1980).
The collage of sounds World Rhythms (1975), devised by Annea Lockwood
(New Zealand, 1939), spanned the dimensions of the human experience, from
volcanic eruptions to human breathing. Her "deep-listening" aesthetic was stated
by Thousand Year Dreaming (1991) for conch shell, trombone, multiple
didjeridus, oboe, English horn, vocals, clarinet and percussion, an exercise in
slo-motion subliminal glissandi and microtones bordering on both post-classical
chamber music and creative jazz music.
Qubais Reed Ghazala (USA, 1953), who specialized in self-built "musical
instruments" (mostly electronic devices conceived for audio exploration),
recorded Requiem For A Radio (1985), constructed out of the sounds made by a
transistor radio while it was being methodically destroyed, and the Threnody To
The New Victims Of Hiroshima (1995) for "insect voice synthesizer".

British improviser Peter Cusack mixed abstract soundscapes of four kinds

(instrumental, electronic, vocal and field recordings), as demonstrated for
example on Where is the Green Parrot? (2000).
Noah Creshevsky (USA, 1945) used collage as the fundamental medium for
pieces, such as the "hyperdrama" Ossi di Morte (1997), that are rapid-fire
assemblies of snippets of (human and instrumental) sounds, with an emphasis on
maintaining the "musical" quality of the collage. He also specialized in the
creation of "hypervirtuoso" music, music performed by electronic instruments
simulating acoustic instruments played in a way that no human virtuoso could
possibly match: Memento Mori (1989) focused on the dialogue between live
human performers and electronic "superhuman" performers.
Innovative concepts in the arts of field recording and of collage were introduced
during the 1990s.
Sam Auinger (Austria, 1956) in collaboration with Bruce Odland made music
out of city noise with installations in several countries since 1990, partially
documented on Resonance (1995), with the goal of sculpting and transforming
the environment to reveal hidden meanings.
Heir to the glorious French traditions of musique concrete and sound collage,
French sound-sculptor Christian Renou, aka Brume, specialized in the dense,
rapid-fire sonic montage that culminated with the concrete symphony
Fragments and Articulations (2002).
Stefan Weisser (USA, 1951), aka Z'ev created brutal and barbaric music for
found percussion, such as on Elemental Music (1984), that was reminiscent of
the aesthetic of punk and industrial music.
French vocalist and electronic musician Ghedalia Tazartes assembled Diasporas
(1979) and Transports (1980), collages of layers of vocals (often lifted from
ethnic folk music) and musique concrete ordeals.
Gen Ken Montgomery (USA, 1957) assembled the environmental noise
symphony Father Demo Swears (1989), a terror-inducing wall of noise for
amplified violin, voice, street noise and (massive) feedback.
By electronically and digitally processing the sounds of objects and places,
Steve Roden (USA, 1964) created "possible landscapes", such as Humming
Endlessly in the Hush (1996), credited to In Be Tween Noise, that require
"deep listening" to appreciate the subtlety of slight variations in the mostly silent
wasteland; while Four Possible Landscapes (1999) bordered on the glitch
aesthetic of Bernhard Guenter.

Marc Behrens (Germany) used a computer and feedback-based devices to

organize the collage of field recordings of Elapsed Time (2001).
The early recordings of Janek Schaefer (Britain, 1970) focused on two elements:
studio manipulation of field recordings, and his self-built twin and triple armed
varispeed turntables. The resulting collage is unusually dense and dynamic,
culminating with the concrete symphony Cold Storage (2004), Songs For
Europe (2004), a collaboration with Philip Jeck that builds ambient
soundscapes from old Greek and Turkish records as well as radio broadcasts, the
dance soundtrack Migration (2006), concocted out of manipulated field
recordings, and In The Last Hour (2006), a piece in four movements that
leveraged the combination of live instrumentation and turntable-derived textures
to create an electronic poem that was both lugubrious and romantic.
One of the most diligent disciples of musique concrete at the turn of the
millenium was Aube, i.e. Japanese electronic composer Akifumi Nakajima, an
extremely prolific maniac of studio manipulation of field recordings (water,
light bulbs, stones, brain waves, steel wires, heartbeats, book pages, etc). Metal
de Metal (1997) was perhaps his main work for metal.
Francisco Lopez (Spain, 1962) was representative of the trend of collage music
away from (noisy) concrete music and towards subsonic ambient music, or at
least towards the coexistence of the two, as in Untitled Music For Geography
(1997), that cycles from silence to extreme loudness and back.
John Duncan (USA, 1953) specialized in electronic meditations for shortwave
radio signals such as River in Flames (1994), Nav-Flex (2001) and Phantom
Broadcast (2002), but also in turbulent evocative "symphonies" such as The
Crackling (1996) for digital manipulation of the noise of elementary particles
speeding through the Stanford Linear Accelerator and The Nazca Transmissions
(2009), inspired by the "sounds" emitted by the Nazca lines in Peru.
Ellen Band (Canada, 1952) bridged musique concrete and deep-listening music
with collages such as Radiatore (1998) in which apparently harmless (and
lifeless) sounds collected in the streets are scrutinized, repeated, amplified,
deformed, enhanced until they become very much alive. The mundane becomes
extraordinary: "no sound is ordinary".
Scott Johnson (USA, 1952) not only bridged rock music and chamber music
with John Somebody (1983) for electric guitar, woodwinds, percussion, and
tape, but, more importantly, used speech patterns as building blocks of the
composition.

The electronic processing of microscopic bodily noises by Daniel Menche

(USA, 1969) yielded the monstrous intensity of Screaming Caress (1997).
The compositions of John Hudak (USA, 1958) employ minimalist and subsonic
repetition of electronically-processed found sounds, as in Pond (1998), that uses
underwater insects as its main source.
The hyper-realistic field recordings of Toshiya Tsunoda (Japan, 1964) consist in
capturing the sound of inert matter. Each object has a "sound": it is just a matter
of finding a way to render that sound so that it can be appreciated by the human
ear. The music of Pieces Of Air (2001), literally recordings of air vibrations, is
thus one of minimal subsonic vibrations.
More traditional collages of field recordings survived in the work of composers
such as Eric La Casa (France), whose L'Empreinte de L'Ivresse (1999) is an
ambitious fresco of human life. La Casa was also a member of the musique
concrete ensemble Afflux with Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric Cordier: they
recorded improvisations with environmental sounds as they occurred in an open
landscape.
Simon Wickham-Smith (Britain, 1968) used the computer on Extreme Bukake
(2002) to create a collage inspired by Buddhist and Catholic religious music.
Seth Nehil (USA, 1973) sculpted the quiet blurred pieces of Tracing the Skins
of Clouds (1998) for found objects and instruments.
Compositional rigor highlighted the fusion of acoustic chamber music, droning
minimalism, glitch music, electronic soundscaping and computer-manipulated
field recordings propounded by Olivia Block (USA, 1970) in her trilogy of Pure
Gaze (1998), Mobius Fuse (2001) and Change Ringing (2005). All three
constructed dramatic symphonies of reverbs, pulses, drones and glitches.
The idea of "the microphone as an extended ear" propounded by Loren Chasse
(USA) was best expressed in ambient minimalist works that manipulated field
recordings: albums such as Siphon Glimmers (1997) and Hedge Of Nerves
(2002) they basically documented sound sculptures of musique concrete and
interactive electronic/digital music. Coelacanth, a collaboartion with Jim
Haynes, manipulated and layered sounds of rocks, sand, leaves, electrical
devices and waves to obtain a viscous tapestry of ambient music, as on Mud
Wall (2004).
Thuja's discs documented the collective improvisations of guitarists Steven
Smith and Glenn Donaldson (both of psychedelic-rock band Mirza), sound
sculptor Loren Chasse and pianist Rob Reger. They devoted the ambient

vignettes of Suns (2002) and the abstract frescoes of Pine Cone Temples
(2005) to a study on the psychological properties of natural sounds, exorcizing
urban life and trying to recapture the essence of the human condition on Planet
Earth while retaining the high-tech world that humans have erected. Ultimately,
all Thuja albums were duets between the human brain and the human
environment.
Under the moniker Crawling with Tarts, the San Francisco-based duo of
composer Michael Gendreau (1961) and Suzanne Dycus have concocted
Operas (1993), or, better, "surface noise operas" (operas composed out of field
recordings and studio manipulations) via "transcription discs", a program refined
on Grand Surface Noise Opera Nrs 3 (Indian Ocean Ship) and 4 (Drum
Totem) (Realization, 1994), the former scored for four turntables and the latter
scored for turntables and percussion. Michael Gendreau's 55 Pas de la Ligne au
n3 (2002) was devoted to the excruciating sound of a rotating disk on a
modified turntable. Grand Surface Noise Opera Nr 7 - The Decadent Opera Rococo (1995) first assembled voices (taken from various sources) and then
injected all sorts of musical snippets into the process, each grotesquely
deformed, as in a collaboration between Frank Zappa and Karlheinz
Stockhausen.
Fueled by Dadaistic eccentricity, the Argentinean trio Reynols (drummer Miguel
Tomasin and guitarists Roberto Conlazo and Anla Courtis) released all sorts of
sarcastic musique-concrete symphonies, from Gordura Vegetal Hidrogenada
(1995) to 10.000 Chickens Symphony (1999) for chicken sounds ("the only
record in the world where all the participants were killed and eaten afterwards")
to Blank Tapes (Trente Oiseaux, 2000) for amplified blank tapes. In parallel,
Anla Courtis continued to use the tape as his main instrument in a series of
extremely chaotic works, especially the 16-minute expressionist nightmare of
Encas de Viento (1996).
Canadian electroacoustic composer Paul Dolden (2) specialized in "maximalist"
music for a computer-generated orchestra of instrumental and vocal snippets, a
technique that yielded the monumental collages of Below The Walls Of Jericho,
off The Threshold Of Deafening Silence (1990), and L'Ivresse De La Vitesse,
off L'Ivresse de la Vitesse (1999), whose chamber cacophonies rise to
hurricane dimension with industrial/punk ferocity, as well as Entropic Twilights
(2002), off Delires De Plaisirs (2005). His "cut and paste" audio art diverged
significantly from traditional musique concrete because it embraces the whole
instead of dissecting the parts. Where early scholars of sound manipulation
favored an agonizing analysis of sound properties, Dolden did the exact opposite
creating catastrophic hyper-percussive hyper-kinetic music according to a
principle of endless apotheosis.

Computer music in the age of the laptop

While the pioneers of computer music (basically from the 1950s to the 1980s)
were mostly fascinated by a tool that challenged the pillars of western music
(i.e., the relationship between performer and composer, and even the very
notions of composer and performer), the wide diffusion of software for
composing music on relatively cheap and portable computers (or "laptops")
made it possible for a new generation of musicians to simply use the
compositional algorithms and the synthesized sounds of a laptop in broader
contexts. Fundamentally, computers had contributed to the breakdown of the
traditional concept and role of harmony. The new generation exploited that very
breakdown to create a kind of music directly referencing "sound". Basically,
computers helped musicians focus more on the "sound" that they wanted to
produce and less on the process to obtain it.
The eclectic Ikue Mori (Japan, 1953) went through several stages before arriving
at computer music: first as a drummer for the experimental rock band Mars, then
as a free-jazz improvisor, then as the electronic composer of the five long
meditations for drum machines and samplers of Garden (1996), and finally as
the laptop soundpainter of Labyrinth (2000) and Myrninerest (2005). Thus she
was ideally suited to bridge the aesthetics of dissonance, improvisation and
machine music.
David Dunn (USA, 1953) used computers to assemble "environmental sound
works", works that manipulate field recordings, such as Chaos And The
Emergent Mind of the Pond (1992).
Achim Wollscheid (Germany) used household objects as percussion instruments
"played" according to a computer algorithm for Moves (1997).
Lutz Glandien (Germany, 1954) composed the wildly dissonant music of The
5th Elephant (2002) assisted by a computer in selecting and assembling
"samples" from recordings of acoustic instruments.
The installations of Michael Schumacher (USA, 1961) often started with field
recordings or accidental events that were then processed at the computer to
produce long spatial tones, as documented in the Four Stills (2002). A complex
computer algorithm generates the sparse sounds that populate Room Pieces
(2003).
The "live" laptop manipulations of Kaffe Matthews (Britain, 1961), such as the
theremin-based Cd Eb And Flo (2003), yielded droning compositions that are
layered to the point of becoming dense mobile textures.

Dimitri Voudouris (Greece, 1961), based in South Africa, crafted the free-form
tone poems ONTA (2005) and A Alpha Theta= Phi (2008) during which the
narrative, pictorial and emotional elements coalesce in chromatic swamps of
digital sounds.
Helmut Schafer (Austria, 1969), who committed suicide in 2007, crafted
expressionist nightmares of digital and electronic processing such as
Environment Soundscapes (2000), Isolated Irritation (2002) and Noise As A
Language (posthumously released in 2009) that followed a quiet but determined
logic, the flow remaining very close to an emotional center of mass, and rarely
exceeding in either noise or silence.
In 2001 Matt Rogalsky (Canada, 1966) developed his "Kash" software to
interact with live performers on traditional instruments. The resulting live
performances are subtle and subliminal works, in which Rogalsky toys with
fictitious microtonal sounds in a very sparse and desolate soundscape. Another
kind of software, "Sprawl", allows Rogalsky to operate on densely layered
structures, that yield floating clusters similar to the ones that fuel ambient and
cosmic music.
Koji Asano (Japan, 1974) engineered the monumental The Last Shade of
Evening Falls (2000), in which a computer processed violin and contrabass,
resulting in a nightmarish exercise that runs the gamut from chaotic and wildly
atonal to densely droning.
Sound Of Meditation Within the Body (2001) by Fan Wang (China, 1970)
blended the Western and Eastern ways of music via musique-concrete collages
of subterranean currents and otherworldly noises that slowly grow into om-like
cosmic drones, that oscillate between the internal and the external soundscape.
Jun Yan (China, 1973) is one of the artists of the laptop generation who explores
the convergence of the noise-sculpting techniques that come from musique
concrete and the improvised techniques that come from jazz. His pieces are
lengthy creative sequences of artificial sounds, concrete symphonies that can
range from quasi-silence to ear-splitting cacophony.
Toronto-based turntablist Mike Hansen (Canada, 1958) used the turntable as one
of the inputs to digital improvisation and composition. His abstract soundscapes
were driven by the quality of the sounds that he assembled through the turntable
as well as other instruments.
Basically, the laptop generation was reenacting the "live electronic music" of the
1960s using a simpler, cheaper and more versatile instrument.

Collage music in the age of the sampler

As technology allowed more sophisticated manipulation of sound in the studio,
musique concrete evolved towards cut-up, collage and montage techniques that
mixed found sounds and electronic sounds (and sometimes conventional
instruments). The musical score did not disappear, but became the music itself.
Musique concrete moved, de facto, closer to the aesthetics of jazz and rock
music, in which the composer "is" the performer.
The invention of the sampler even enabled musicians to compose music out of
other people's music. In 1984 Ensoniq introduced the synthesizer "Mirage", that
included a built-in sampler, making it cheap to create samples-based music.
John Oswald (Canada, 1953), originally a free-jazz improvisor on alto
saxophone, crafted the Mystery Tapes, aural collages of music, voices, and
found sounds credited to Mystery Laboratory. In the 1980s, the "mystery tape"
aesthetics evolved into the "plunderphonics" aesthetics. A "plunderphone" is
basically a "quote" of a famous piece of music, typically from popular music. In
a sense, it is the musical equivalent of Andy Warhol's pop icons. A
plunderphonic composition is a sonic montage of many plunderphones. Unlike
Plunderphonics (1988), that sounded like a collection of practical jokes by a
merry studio prankster, the ambitious plunderphonic symphony Plexure (1993),
that collated more than one thousand musical quotes, was a full-fledged
"classical" composition, except that it uses quotes rather than notes as its
building blocks.
A few pseudo-rock groups engaged in chaotic collages that harked back to
abstract, dadaistic art. The Colorado-based ensemble Mnemonists, formed by
William Sharp and others, and later renamed Biota, assembled wild assortments
of sonic events on albums such as the monumental Mnemonist Orchestra
(1979), Biota (1982) and Rackabones (1985) that ran the gamut from classical
music to sheer noise. Their production technique bordered on free-jazz
improvisation, but at the same time was surgically designed in the studio. Their
audio collage was the equivalent of a descent into hell. In their reincarnations as
Biota, that initially continued the Mnemonists' mission with the hybrid of free
jazz and musique concrete of Tinct (1988), they eventually moved towards a
highly musical "anti-concrete" approach that employed even more sophisticated
collage techniques but resulted in user-friendly structures driven by recognizable
acoustic instruments (accordion, flugelhorn, guitar) and even vocals. Invisible
Map (2001) secreted pop music and at times Half A True Day (2007) sounded
like a remix of psychedelic music from the 1960s.
San Francisco-based Negativland (Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, David Willis,
Don Joyce) opted for a satirical urban documentary on Negativland (1980) and

Points (1981), breakneck-speed parades of sonic fragments (found sounds as

well as radio broadcasts, conversations, musical pieces) that also stood as
grotesque celebrations of the consumer society. Their audio collage was the
equivalent of a hike in a junkyard.
The Climax Golden Twins, the Seattle-based duo of Rob Millis and Jeffery
Taylor, crafted surreal lo-fi collages of field recordings, electronic noise and
sampled voices organized as madcap free-form pseudo-psychedelic jams on
albums such as Imperial Household Orchestra (1996), Locations (1998),
Session 9 (2001),
The 1990s, as the sampler became ubiquitous in popular music, witnessed a
generation of sound sculptors who toyed with samples of the musical repertory,
field recordings and acoustic instruments, for example John Wall (England),
notably on Fractuur (1998), and Lorenzo "Timet" Brusci (Italy).
Carl Stone (USA, 1953) manipulated sources to slowly transform it into an
apocalyptic maze of mirrors. Thus the concrete symphony Woo Lae Oak (1981)
for the tremolo of a rubbed string and the tone of a blown bottle electronically
processed, the evening-length collage Kamiya Bar (1992), based on sounds of
Tokyo's city life, and the four-movement collage symphony Nyala (1995).
Bob Ostertag (USA, 1957) pioneered electronic improvisation when he played
tape manipulation in a trio with rock guitarist Fred Frith and jazz drummer
Charles Noyes on In Tundra (1980), one of the master essays in the fusion of
musique concrete and free-jazz improvisation, and when he invented sampling
(before the sampler was introduced) on Voice Of America (1981). As a musiqueconcrete artist, he sculpted Sooner or Later (1990), an ambitious set of
variations on the crying of a Salvadorean boy, and the string quartet All The
Rage (1992), that employs popular music, sounds of a riot and string instruments
as sources. Say No More (1993) inaugurated a virtual jazz quartet with drummer
Joey Baron, bassist Mark Dresser and percussionist Gerry Hemingway whose
music was actually composed by a computer and sampler from separate
individual performances. Like A Melody No Bitterness (1997) was a rare case of
solo improvised music for sampler. The Book of Hours (2012) is a digital
symphony for voice (featuring vocalists Theo Bleckmann, Shelley Hirsch and
Phil Minton), rhythm (indirectly created by the computer manipulations) and
improvisation (including saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's contributions); a
carefully assembled (and dis-assembled) stream of consciousness that manages
to concoct humane melodrama out of machine music.
Jay Cloidt (USA, 1949) integrated concrete music and classical music in Life is
Good And People Are Basically Decent (1995) and Eleven Windows (1998),

with a chamber ensemble wittily alternating between quasi-classical passages,

emulations of ordinary sounds and counterpoint to processed found sounds.
David Shea (USA, 1965), who had already established his reputation as one of
the first turntablists (mainly in John Zorn's ensembles), further legitimized the
sampler as an instrument with his works, both the ones for ensemble, such as
Shock Corridor (1992) for Samples and instruments (Anthony Coleman on
piano and organ, Shelley Hirsch on voice and electronics, Ikue Mori on drummachine, Zeena Parkins on electric harp, Jim Staley on trombone and didjeridoo,
Jim Pugliese on percussion), a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of stylistic
detours, and those for solo sampler, such as Alpha (1995), a real-time collage of
record snippets, Satyricon (1997), a sophisticated survey of the collective
unconscious, Sita's Walk Of Fire (2001), a demented study in frenzy and
contrast.
Irr. App. (Ext.), the project of San Francisco-based composer Matt Waldron
(USA, 1969), applied musique concrete to the anarchic, provocative aesthetic of
surrealism, perfecting the fusion of field recordings, event music and electronic
soundsculpting with the two lengthy suites of Ozeanische Gefuhle (Helen
Scarsdale Agency, 2004), originally recorded in 2001.
Multimedia artist Alfredo Costa-Monteiro (Portugal, 1964) produced organic
flows of sound by processing paper noises in Allotropie (2005) and by
employing pickups and turntables in Z = 78 (2006). His digital symphony
Epicycle (2008) for processed voice mixed techniques of "deep listening" (long
slowly-evolving drones) and of musique concrete (bursts of abstract sound).
Danish-born German-resident sound sculptor Jacob Kirkegaard (1975) devoted
his audio experiments to rediscover the "secret sounds" of the environment.
Eldfjall (2005) used the sounds of the Earth itself (captured through
microphones buried underground in a region of geothermal activity) to construct
calmly dissonant music. 4 Rooms (2006) was an exercise in "deep listening"
with a technique borrowed from Alvin Lucier and implemented in four
abandoned rooms in the region of Chernobyl's nuclear disaster. Labyrinthitis
(2008) was basically an exercise into paradoxically listening to the artist's ear,
while musically producing a cascading stream of drones and overtones.
Lionel Marchetti (France, 1967) continued to pursue old-fashioned "musique
concrete" (as in "tape collage") in the age of the laptop, but under the influence
of ambient music: La Grande Vallee (1996), Train de Nuit (1999), Knud Un
Nom du Serpent (1999), Portrait d'un Glacier (2000).
Turntables

The turntablist as an instrumentalist was an artistic figure that migrated from

hip-hop music into avantgarde, rock and jazz music during the 1990s. The
turntable allowed musicians to achieve two goals (that were frequently
overlapped): 1. "quote" from a musical source by another musician (and
therefore create collages of quotations), and 2. produce sequences of extreme
noise. Since the turntable is inherently an instrument that plays recorded music,
whatever turntablists played was, in theory, an audio montage of found sounds,
but, in practice, the sources were rarely intelligible.
Christian Marclay (USA, 1955) spearheaded the new trend towards
"composing", performing and improvising using phonographic records. De
facto, he applied John Cage's indeterminism and, in general, Dadaism's
provocative principles of aesthetic demystification, to the civilization of
recorded music. His specialty was to devise mechanisms for letting a record
evolve a sound over time, typically by having people somehow degrade its
sound (as in Record Without a Cover of 1985, a record sold with no cover and
no jacket so that it keeps deteriorating after every playing, or Footsteps of 1990,
a totally random composition resulting from hundreds of people walking on a
record).
Turntablist, sampling engineer and sound sculptor Philip Jeck (Britain, 1952)
fused the turntable creativity of Christian Marclay and David Shea with the
sampling terrorism of John Oswald and Negativland. Obsessed with vintage
vinyl, with the noises that the "performer" can extract from the process and with
the "sounds" that the records contain, Jeck created the chaotic cacophony of
Vinyl Requiem (1993) for 180 turntables and the solo improvisations titled Vinyl
Coda (2000) in which snippets of old records are mixed with a jungle of
turntable noises. His excursions into abstract art, such as 7 (2003), Songs For
Europe (2004) and Sand (2008), eventually abandoned the discontinuous,
glitchy format and turned crystalline, slowly-revolving, quasi-ambient
soundscapes.
Otomo Yoshihide (Japan, 1959), Ground Zero's guitarist, reinvented himself as a
turntablist and engaged in duets between the turntable and the laptop, such as
Nobukazu Takemura's laptop on Turntables and Computers (2003), the
turntable and the sampler, such as Sachiko M's sampler on Filament 1 (1998),
or the turntable and another turntable, such as Martin Tetreault's turntable on
Grrr (2004).
Post-jazz music
The Japanese scene for free improvisers boomed in the 1970s thanks to a group
of futuristic musicians. Motoharu Yoshizawa recorded solo acoustic bass
improvisations on Cracked Mirrors (1975) but then developed a cacophonous

five-string bass for more disjointed works such as Empty Hats (1994). The
elegant style of percussionist Masahiko Togashi is documented on Rings
(1975), on which he also played vibraphone and celesta. The most influential
musician of this generation was probably guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, who
became one of the earliest noise guitar improvisers, recording extremely
cacophonous works such as Free Form Suite (1972), with his New Directions
combo, and the brutal solo improvisations of Action Direct (1985), Inanimate
Nature (1991) and Three Improvised Variations on a Theme of Quadhafi
(1991), recorded just before he died. Saxophonist Kaoru Abe (who died at 29)
emerged through three galactic duets with Takayanagi: Kaitaiteki Koukan/
Deconstructive Communication (1970), Gradually Projection (1970) and
Mass Projection (1970).
London in the 1970s was a strange place for jazz music. The influence of Derek
Bailey (Britain's premier improviser) was gigantic, but somehow London
developed a surreal and almost self-parodistic take on the whole "creative"
scene. The works of some of the most austere improvisers were actually British
humour at its best. Lol Coxhill, a saxophonist of the Canterbury school of
progressive-rock (a member of Kevin Ayers's group) penned Ear Of The
Beholder (1971), a chaotic mosaic of fragments in the British tradition of the
nonsense, inspired by the musichall, nursery rhymes, dancehalls as well as freejazz. An even more explicit tribute to street music, Welfare State (1975), was
his political and aesthetic manifesto: avantgarde music for ordinary people.
Coxhill's humane and poetic approach surfaced even in his most reckless
improvisations: the Duet For Soprano Saxophone And Guitar off Fleas In
Custard (1975), Wakefield Capers off Joy Of Paranoia (1978), 11/5/78 off
Digswell Duets (1979). Steve Beresford debuted with The Bath Of Surprise
(1977), which included pieces scored for toy instruments, bath water, whistles,
tubes, euphonium and ukelele (besides piano, guitar and trumpet), and delivered
the atonal duets of Double Indemnity (1980) with cellist Triston Honsinger.
The British improvisers of this generation often flirted with folk, pop and rock
music, emphasizing irony at the same time that they were embracing the most
hostile techniques.
British guitarist Keith Rowe, a member of AMM, was one of the improvisers
who most contributed to the definition of a new vocabulary for the guitar; or,
better, for the "tabletop" guitar, a guitar plugged into the cacophony of the
"perfectly ordinary reality" (usually, a barrage of radios and electronic devices).
Starting with the chaotic, cryptic and apparently meaningless "guitar solos" of A
Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality (1990), Rowe played the guitar
virtually in every possible manner and with every possible tool, to the point that
the guitar became a mere object that could be used to produce unusual sounds.
His body of work, that referenced abstract painting, Dada, Edgar Varese and

John Cage, was the quintessence of "noise" guitar music. He updated his
concepts to the digital age via the ensemble of of electronic improvisers Music
In Movement Electronic Orchestra and their albums MIMEO (1998), Queue
(1999) and Electric Chair + Table (2000), plus Rabbit Run (2002), a colossal
jam with synthesizers and computers, and the Duos for Doris (2003) with
AMM's pianist John Tilbury.
British violinist Jon Rose, debuting with two volumes of Solo Violin
Improvisations (1978), experimented with numerous instruments, mostly solo,
on Towards a Relative Music (1980), for electronics, vibes, gongs and even
furniture, Relative String Music (1980) for solo violin or sarangi, Devils and
Angels (1984) for amplified violin or cello. Then Paganini's Last Testimony
(1988) for voice and violin marked the beginning of his mock neoclassical
phase, continued with Die Beethoven Konversationen (1990) and 2 Real
Violin Stories (1992). His surrealistic phase was highlighted by The Virtual
Violin (1993), a comic "opera" relying on a rapid fire of samples triggered by
more or less random sounds of the violin, and a series of radio works (that often
sounded like Dada making fun of Dada making fun of humankind). The Fence
(1998) was the first recording of the "Fence" series, suites for giant string
installations. It all seemed to come together (John Cage-derived aleatory music,
sense of humour, and free improvisation) on The Hyperstring Project (2000), a
study on counterpoint for violin and interactive software.
British progressive-rock hero and Keith Rowe's disciple Fred Frith developed a
technique of brief vignettes that straddled the border between dissonant and folk
music on Gravity (1980) and Speechless (1981). In the meantime, starting with
Guitar Solos (1974), he had joined the ranks of the improvisers. Through
collaborations with guitarist Henry Kaiser, cellist Tom Cora, notably the folkneoclassical-atonal fusion of Skeleton Crew's Learn To Talk (1984), harpist
Zeena Parkins, saxophonist Lol Coxhill and keyboardist Bob Ostertag,
percussionist Charles Noyes, as well as fellow Henry Cow member Chris Cutler,
Frith perfected a collage-style art that juxtaposed improvised jams and cells of
composed music. The compositional aspect also led him to compose chamber
music such as Quartets (1993) and The Previous Evening (1998) that paid
tribute to the American avantgarde of the previous decades (such as John Cage
and Morton Feldman). The 56-minute suite Impur (may 1996) was performed
and improvised by 100 musicians in a large building for an audience that was
encouraged to wonder around. He also founded the trio Maybe Monday with
Miya Masaoka on koto and electronics and with saxophonist Larry Ochs of the
Rova Saxophone Quartet. Their Saturn's Finger (1999) was perhaps his most
mature venture into creative jazz, containing three lengthy improvisations that
sample ambient, industrial and exotic overtones. Another synthesis of sort was
represented by the dance piece The Happy End Problem (2003).

New-age jazz
See also New-age jazz music (Darling, Horn, Shadowfax, Montreaux, Turtle
Island String Quartet, Isham)
In the USA, the baroque wing of jazz-rock was the ruling paradigm for a whole
generation raised in the post-Miles Davis world. By insisting on the timbres of
the instruments and on spiritual atmospheres, they created a music of pure
insinuation. It was the American equivalent of ECM's school in Europe. Paul
Winter can be considered the catalyst of the movement.
Oregon were an offshoot of Paul Winter's Consort, featuring four of Winter's
best discoveries: guitarist Ralph Towner, bassist Glen Moore, percussionist
Collin Walcott, oboe player Paul Mc Candless. Their sophisticated interplay of
improvisation and composition, jazz and classical music, world an folk music
secreted the impressionist vignettes of Music Of Another Present Era (1972)
and the complex spiritual journeys of Distant Hills (1973). Oregon continued to
refine its baroque calligraphy and lyrical longing on Winter Light (1974) and
Out Of The Woods (1978). A touch of electronics and jazzier overtones
accounted for the more introspective and hermetic sound of Oregon (1983) and
Crossing (1985). Solo works were no less seductive: Glen Moore's May 24,
1976 (1976), Collin Walcott's Grazing Dreams (1977), Paul McCandless'
Navigator (1981). and especially Ralph Towner's Diary (1974) and Matchbook
(1975), with Gary Burton on vibraphone.
Contrabassist David Friesen ran back and forth between mellow ethnic jazzrock, such as on Star Dance (1976) or Waterfall Rainbow (1977), featuring
Ralph Towner's acoustic guitar, John Stowell's electric guitar, Paul McCandless'
oboe and Nick Brignola's flute, and spiritual new-age music, such as on Paths
Beyond Tracing (1980).
Minnesota guitarist Steve Tibbetts crafted a dreamy, intimate version of jazzrock, occasionally bordering on new-age music's spirituality, with Yr (1980) for
overdubbed guitars and exotic percussion. On the other hand, Safe Journey
(1984) and Exploded View (1986) bordered on psychedelic rock and heavy
metal.
Canadian percussion ensemble Nexus launched a new genre for western music,
ensemble percussion music, with Music of Nexus (1978).
Brazilian-born percussionist Nana Vasconcelos mixed the berimbau and the
symphony orchestra on Saudades (1979), and used percussive sounds of the
human body and voice for Zumbi (1983).

Noise jazz

The white San Francisco-based Rova Saxophone Quartet was the alternative,
experimental alter-ego of the more famous World Saxophone Quartet. Formed
in 1977 by Jon Raskin (1954), Larry Ochs (1949), Andrew Voigt and Bruce
Ackley, on respectively baritone, tenor, alto and soprano saxophone it straddled
the border between free jazz and classical music of the 20th century. Raskin had
already founded several multimedia projects and worked with composer John
Adams. Their first concert became also their first album, Cinema Rovate'
(august 1978), highlighted by Raskin's chaotic and cacophonous 21-minute Ride
Upon the Belly of the Waters After The Bay (december 1978) with Italian
percussionist Andrea Centazzo, the noise strategy of the group was perfected on
The Removal of Secrecy (february 1979), particularly Ochs' 19-minute That's
How Strong. There was method in their madness, but it was not easily detected
within the dense structures of their scores. After Daredevils (february 1979)
with guitarist Henry Kaiser, and the transitional This This This This (august
1979), with Raskin's eleven-minute Flamingo Horizons, Invisible Frames
(october 1981) boasted another peak of their expressionist art, Voigt's 22-minute
Narrow Are the Vessels. Ochs' 19-minute Paint Another Take of the Shootpop,
off As Was (april 1981), was dedicated to both classical composer Olivier
Messiaen and soul vocalist Otis Redding. Rova's style was becoming more
accessible while still being abstract, absurd and atonal. After the live double-LP
Saxophone Diplomacy (june 1983), with a 24-minute Detente or Detroit, and
the Steve Lacy tribute of Favorite Street (november 1983), the Rova
Saxophone Quartet sculpted the titanic jams of Crowd (june 1985), such as the
19-minute The Crowd, Ochs' 29-minute Knife In the Times and Raskin's 16minute Terrains. TM, , Copyright 2006 Piero Scaruffi. All rights reserved.
New York's trio Borbetomagus produced hurricanes of free-jazz music for two
saxophones (Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich), guitar (Donald Miller) and electronic
distortion. Their delirious improvised bacchanals constituted a sort of "baroque"
style of the ugly and the noisy. The devastating early "concordats" of
Borbetomagus (1980) and Work On What Has Been Spoiled (1981), the
cacophonous symphony Barbet Wire Maggot (1983), perhaps their most
extreme statement, the abstract and grotesque soundpainting of Borbeto Jam
(1985), that seemed to exhaust the expressive power of the "concordats", and
Fish That Sparkling Bubble (1987), a ferocious collaboration with noisemeister Voice Crack (Norbert Moeslang and Andy Guhl), had little in common

with the traditional quest for "sound" in jazz, a quest for an atmospheric,
romantic and, ultimately, pleasant sound.
Voice Crack, the duo of Swiss musicians Andy Guhl (percussion and bass) and
Norbert Moeslang (reeds), made music with broken objects found in garbage
cans and adopted the extreme improvisation of free-jazz. Albums such as Knack
On (1982) and Concerto for Cracked Everyday-Electronics and Chamber
Orchestra (1994) were Dadaist acts of musical rebellion.
Post-jazz creativity in New York
New York experienced a "new wave" of musical creativity around the mid
1970s. Rock music was reborn thanks to a multitude of independent musicians
who avoided the mainstream cliches. Jazz and avantgarde music felt the effects
of the revolution.
New York-based saxophonist John Zorn emerged from the milieu of the solo
improvisers, but his concept of "improvisation" was closer to John Cage's
aleatory music than to Ornette Coleman's free-jazz. Game-pieces such as
Archery (1979) and Pool (1980) were partially composed improvisations that
defined rules within which a cast of improvisers could improvise (improvisation
being bound more by mathematical than emotional constraints, as in Anthony
Braxton). True to Cage's indeterminate aesthetics, Zorn composed uncomposed
music and conducted unrepeatable performances. Zorn embraced the aesthetic of
the new wave and punk-rock with the hysterical and laconic fragments of Locus
Solus (1983), that employed both jazz and rock musicians plus turntablists. His
demented saxophone playing stood out as a major and shocking stylitic
innovation. Cobra (1987), originally conceived in 1984, marked another zenith
of Zorn's chaotic and abrasive vision, a dadaist symphony that, despite the
pretentious premises, was rather the musical equivalent of a Marx Brothers'
slapstick. The studio version, a ten-movement suite with neoclassical titles,
featured Jim Staley on trombone, Carol Emanuel and Zeena Parkins on harps,
Bill Frisell, Elliott Sharp and Arto Lindsay on guitars, Anthony Coleman and
Wayne Horvitz on organ, piano, harpsichord and celeste, David Weinstein on
sampling keyboards, Guy Klucevsek on accordion, Bob James on tapes,
Christian Marclay on turntables, Bobby Previte on percussion. Vestiges of
popular music, from Jimi Hendrix's glissandos to cajun accordion, kept
surfacing with frantic exuberance from the shroud of random dissonace, perhaps
a metaphor for the post-modernist conflict between nostalgia and futurism, amid
a concrete collage of power-drills and electronic oscillations, jackhammer
rhythms and expressionist overtones. A series of hyper-kinetic collages and
Spillane (1986), a melodic fantasia that paid homage to the atmospheres of film
noir, announced the new Zorn: the post-modernist (or, better, cubist) artist who
"quoted", deconstructed and reconstructed musical stereotypes while injecting

the cacophony, frenzy and violence of the 20th century. That artist moved closer
to the world of rock music with Naked City (1989), an enterprise with guitarists
Bill Frisell and Fred Frith, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz and drummer Joey Baron
offering irriverent jazz-surf-punk fusion music that referenced a broad spectrum
of musical stereotypes, albeit drenched in urban neurosis. Zorn's works now
fully revealed the influnce of the epileptic discontinuity of Carl Stalling's
cartoon soundtracks, literally applied on Cynical Hysterie Hour (1990), one of
his most ambitious attempts at deconstructing the western musical civilization.
Even more uncompromising, Naked City's Torture Garden (1990) and Heretic
(1992), that added the Boredoms's psychotic vocalist Yamatsuka Eye to the
original quintet, as well as Pain Killer's The Guts Of A Virgin (1991) and
especially Buried Secrets (1992), for a "jazzcore" trio with bassist Bill Laswell
and drummer Mick Harris, were kaleidoscopic frescoes of unfulfilled semiotic
events. Zorn's combinatorial exercises and cut-up techniques were rather
pursued in his chamber music, which yielded large-scale works such as
Kristallnacht (1993), Redbird (1995), Aporias (1998) and Chimeras (2001), as
well as several string quartets.
Hyper-active New York-based guitarist Elliott Sharp was perhaps the most
incoherent experimentalist of his age, almost adopting a different technique for
each recording, but his wildly multiform activity came to symbolize the ultimate
synthesis of dissonance, repetition and improvisation, the three cardinal points
of the classical, rock and jazz avantgarde. Sharp emerged from the sociomusical
revolution of the new wave of rock music and entered a jazz world that was still
recovering from the destructive process of the creative improvisers. His early
groups, such as Ism (1981), with Bill Laswell on bass and Charles Noyes on
drums, Carbon (1984), with Lesli Dalaba on trumpet and Charles Noyes on
percussion, and Semantics (1985), with Sam Bennett on drums and Ned
Rothenberg on saxophone, applied cacophony and deconstruction to funk, blues
and rock. Soon he was toying with string quartets, notably in Tessalation Row
(1986), the computer and the sampler in Virtual Stance (1986) ethnic music in
Larynx (1987), and, last but not least, Mathematics, notably in Marco Polo's
Argali (1985). By the end of the decade Sharp had returned to his rock roots
with the new Carbon, featuring Zeena Parkins on harp and frequent ventures
into punk-rock and heavy-metal, as documented on Datacide (1990) and Tocsin
(1991). At the same time, he continued to score works for chamber ensembles
(particularly string quartets) and digital equipment, such as the wildly dissonant
Cryptid Fragments (1993) for cello, violin and computer. Few composers
roamed a broader spectrum of the musical universe.
While drawing from a kaleidoscope of rock and jazz guitar techniques as well as
from the chaotic structures of Charles Ives' symphonies and Frank Zappa's
dadaistic pieces, Eugene Chadbourne was a free improviser whose roots were in

rural white music, the kind espoused and expanded by John Fahey's avantgarde
folk program. But his demented sense of humour gave Solo Acoustic Guitar
(1975) and especially the Collected Symphonies (1985) for guitar, not to
mention his pieces for home-made instruments and his covers of rock and folk
classics, a tone of punk irreverence. The same tone permeated the piece for
orchestra 2000 Statues and the English Channel (1979), featuring an all-star
cast of improvisers (Lesli Dalaba on trumpet, Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, John
Zorn on saxophone, Bob Ostertag on synthesizer, Steve Beresford on toy
instruments, Fred Frith on guitar, LaDonna Smith on violin, Tom Cora on cello,
Wayne Horvitz on piano, Andrea Centazzo on drums, etc), the country &
western opera Jesse Helms Busted for Pornography (1996), and assorted
compositions for musique concrete, chamber jazz ensemble, symphony
orchestra, gamelan ensemble, etc.
San Francisco-based guitarist Henry Kaiser adopted Derek Bailey's approach to
solo improvisation but ever since Aloha (1981), that includes a remix antelitteram, showed the difference that the American tradition stemming from John
Cage could make: it resulted in virtuoso and irreverent cacophony. Ditto for the
shamanic music of Invite The Spirit (1984), ostensibly chamber music for
percussion, harp and guitar. His ventures into rock music, such as Marrying
For Money (1986), Devil In The Drain (1987) and Crazy-backwards
Alphabet (1987), sounded like bizarre revisitations of the history of the genre.
Cellist Tom Cora formed the original Curlew line-up with bassist Bill Laswell,
guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, drummer Bill Bacon and reedman George Cartwright,
that recorded Curlew (1981), and joined Nimal (1987), a combo formed by
Swiss multi-instrumentalist Jean "Momo" Rossel that straddled the line between
jazz, folk and progressive-rock. Cora continued to roam a broad horizon, from
Third Person, the trio of Cora, percussionist Samm Bennett and saxophonist
Umezu Kazutoki that recorded Lucky Water (1995), to the abstract punk-noise
experiment Roof, that recorded The Untraceable Cigar (1996).
William Hooker was a drummer who remained fundamentally faithful to the
aesthetic of free-jazz, starting with Is Eternal Life (1978), a set of
collaborations with other improvisers, and maturing via the solo tours de force
of Subconscious (1992) and Radiation (1994).
Percussionist Charles Noyes conceived some of the more cerebral improvised
music on Free Mammals (1980), for guitar and percussion, and The World
And The Raw People (1983), featuring John Zorn and Henry Kaiser.
Alto saxophonist Tim Berne coined a neurotic language that mixed composition
and improvisation. Songs And Rituals In Real Time (1982) sounded like a
compromise between melodic tunesmith and cerimonial music of primitive

civilizations. It was the prelude to the captivating balance of complex structure

and anarchic solos achieved on Fulton Street Maul (1987), featuring Hank
Roberts on cello, Bill Frisell on electric guitar and Alex Cline on percussion, a
pastiche of pieces that could be both wildly dissonant, melancholy romantic and
frantically tribal. Berne's musical chaos increased on Sanctified Dreams (1987),
for a sax-trumpet-cello quintet, and reached a zenith on Fractured Fairy Tales
(1989), recorded by a sextet of sax, trumpet (Herb Robertson), cello (Hank
Roberts), percussion (Joey Baron), contrabass (Mark Dresser) and violin (Mark
Feldmann), and containing Evolution Of A Pearl. Here the music transformed
into a devilish, cartoonish, clownish post-modernist exercise in the grotesque
vein of Frank Zappa. Berne then proceeded to apply the same twisted and
schizophrenic logic to different combinations of musicians and styles: Caos
Totale, a sextet or septet including bassist Mark Dresser, trombonist Steve
Swell, trumpet and flute player Herb Robertson, drummer Bobby Previte and
guitarist Marc Ducret, was devoted to lengthy and convoluted compositions on
Pace Yourself (1991), with Legend of P1, and Nice View (1994), with It Could
Have Been A Lot Worse and Impacted Wisdom; while Miniature, i.e. the trio of
Berne, Joey Baron on drums and Hank Roberts on cello, veered towards
futuristic ethno-jazz-funk music on Miniature (1988) and I Can't Put My
Finger On It (1991); and finally the Science Friction Band (a sax-guitarkeyboards-drums quartet) documented the most abstract aspect of Berne's art on
Science Friction (2002) and The Sublime And (2003), with The Shell Game.
Berne's intriguing game of composition and improvisation was further expanded
on The Shell Game (2002), with the colossal Thin Ice, and The Sevens (2002),
with the colossal Quicksand.
Despite keeping a low profile, Lesli Dalaba (a member of Wayne Horvitz's,
Elliott Sharp's and La Monte Young's ensembles) contributed to renovate the
vocabulary of the instrument with a style that made the cerebral sound lyrical.
Her own compositions surfaced much later on albums such as Core Samples
(1992) and Timelines (2004), featuring a quintet of veteran female musicians
(Zeena Parkins on harp, Amy Denio on vocals, Ikue Mori on keyboards, Carla
Kihlstedt on violin).

Jewish drummer Joey Baron, who played with Bill Frisell (1988), Tim Berne
(1989) and John Zorn (1989), debuted as a leader on Tongue in Groove (may
1991) and Raised Pleasure Dot (february 1993), both in a bizarre trio
(Barondown) with trombonist Steve Swell and tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin
performing sets of brief unpredictable sketches. Having proven how little he

cared for the conventions of rhythm, Baron proceeded to form Down Home, a
much more orthodox quartet with alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, guitarist Bill
Frisell and bassist Ron Carter whose Down Home (april 1997) featured longer
pieces such as Little Boy, Wide Load and What that straddled the border between
free jazz and rhythm'n'blues. In the meantime, Barondown also changed format,
delivering two lengthy and convoluted skits, Games On A Train and Sittin' On A
Cornflake on Crackshot (august 1995). Down Home, instead, crafted We'll
Soon Find Out (april 2000), in an even more conventional vein (either a
postmodernist take on bebop or a melodic detour). TM, , Copyright 2006
Piero Scaruffi. All rights reserved.
Post-jazz soloists and hyper-fusion
Percussionist Kip Hanrahan came to prominence with a project of
"neighborhood music" which looked like the urban, American equivalent of Lol
Coxhill's "welfare state" project. Coup De Tete (1981) and Vertical Currency
(1985), relying on Latin rhythms and melodies, offered orchestral exotic jazzrock performed by an all-star cast.
Violinist Henry Flynt launched an ambitious project to found a "new american
ethnic music" that fused avantgarde music (particularly the hypnotic aspects of
minimalism and free-jazz) and hillbilly/country music, best represented by You
Are My Everlovin' (1980) and Celestial Power (1981).
California contrabassist Bob Wasserman borrowed from David Grisman's
progressive country, acid-rock and free jazz to pen his first album Solo (1983)
and the Trios (1994) that featured rock, jazz, folk and blues musicians.
Violinist Malcolm Goldstein bridged generations and techniques with The
Seasons - Vermont (1983), a collage for natural sounds and improvising
dissonant ensemble.
The career of drummer Sam Bennett bridged the solo percussion album
Metafunctional (1984), and the abstract soundpainting of Skist, a duo with
Haruna Ito that wed percussions with sampling and electronics, via the newwave groups he co-founded with guitarist Elliott Sharp and saxophonist Ned
Rothenberg, such as Semantics.
Trombonist Jim Staley tested different trios of musicians on Mumbo Jumbo
(1986), with keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, guitarist Elliott Sharp, vocalist Shelley
Hirsch, drummer Samm Bennett, guitarist Bill Frisell, percussionist Ikue Mori,
guitarist Fred Frith and saxophonist John Zorn.

Reed player Ned Rothenberg specialized in an art of demonic solos and duets,
best documented by Trespass (1986), but his crowning achievement was a bigband effort, Power Lines (1995), that explored dense, unpredictable structures
replete with his favorite rhythmic experiments.
New York-born accordionist Guy Klucevsek deligthed the avantgarde world
with a combination of austere compositions, such as The Flying Pipe Organ for
multiple accordions, off Scenes From a Mirage (1987), and the eightmovement Citrus My Love for accordion and chamber ensemble, off Citrus My
Love (1995), and surreal folk dance scores such as Union Hall, off Flying
Vegetables of the Apocalypse (1991).
As removed as possible from the austere tone of the solo creative music,
guitarist Bill Frisell, a veteran of Paul Motian's ensemble, assimilated rock and
jazz innovations while harking back to old-time church and folk music, and
sometimes to marching bands and cafe orchestras, on In Line (1983), a
collection of guitar solos and duets with bassist Arild Andersen, and Rambler
(1985), that featured trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, tuba player Bob Stewart, bassist
Jerome Harris and drummer Paul Motian. The heavy-metal jazz trio Power
Tools, with Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums and Melvin Gibbs on bass, that
debuted on Strange Meeting (1987), highlighted Frisell's vast vocabulary of
guitar techniques and ambient cacophony. In the meantime, Frisell's
postmodernist art peaked with the unstable chamber music of Lookout For
Hope (1988), featuring Hank Roberts on cello and Joey Baron on drums, and
especially Before We Were Born (1989), featuring a multitude of distinguished
guests (guitarist Arto Lindsay, drummer Joey Baron, keyboardist Peter Scherer,
saxophonists Julius Hemphill and Doug Wieselman, cellist Hank Roberts) and
offering a broad range of stylistic experiments, from bluegrass to noise. Is That
You (1990), featuring Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Joey Baron on drums, and
Dave Hofstra on tuba and bass, and especially Where in the World (1991),
virtually a continuation of Lookout For Hope, were calmer works that sounded
like nostalgic tributes to his civilization, albeit distorted by evergreen strains of
neurosis.
Guitarist David Torn, a former member of the Everyman Band (with Martin
Fogel on saxophones) bridged Jimi Hendrix and Sonny Sharrock when he
coined the space and psychedelic jazz-rock style of Best Laid Plans (1985) and
the baroque, oneiric and cerebral style of Cloud About Mercury (1987),
featuring Bill Bruford on drums, Tony Levin on bass and Mark Isham on
trumpet. He left behind the last vestiges of progressive-rock and jazz-rock on
Tripping Over God (1995), an electroacoustic post-rock industrial ambient
blues raga crafted by augmenting the guitar with all sorts of sound effects and

overdubs, and What Means Solid Traveller? (1996), with stronger elements of
electronics, world-music, heavy-metal and noise.
The music of cellist Hank Roberts was mainly influenced by free-jazz but also
incorporated elements of soul, blues and classical music. His technique at the
cello often mimicked other instruments, both western (harp), rock (guitar) and
eastern (sarod, kora), while his falsetto indulged in metaphysical croons a` la
Robert Wyatt. Roberts' output ranged from the experimental Black Pastels
(1988), featuring guitarist Bill Frisell, saxophonist Tim Berne, drummer Joey
Baron and three trombonists, to Arcado (1989), a string trio with Mark Dresser
and Mark Feldman, to the compositions for large ensemble of The Truth and
Reconciliation Show (2002), but perhaps his zenith was Saturday Sunday, off
Little Motor People (1993), a veritable collage of musical styles of the
American heartland in the tradition of Aaron Copland and Charles Ives.
New York-based steel-pans virtuoso Andy Narell introduced Trinidad's national
instrument to jazz music with the exuberant, melodic pan-ethnic sonatas of The
Hammer (1987) and Little Secrets (1989).
Former Santana's drummer Michael Shrieve built a unique repertory that
focused on percussion. Energetic and creative albums such as In Suspect
Terrain (1986), Stiletto (1989), featuring Mark Isham on trumpet and Andy
Sumners and David Torn on guitars, and Big Picture (1989), which is virtually
a concerto for an orchestra of percussion instruments, relied on oneiric jazz-rock
tours de force. Octave Of The Holy Innocents (1993), featuring Jonas Hellborg
on bass and Buckethead on guitar, and Fascination (1995), featuring Bill Frisell
and Wayne Horvitz, lent him a new life in avantgarde jazz.

Classically-trained clarinetist Don Byron erupted on the scene of New York's

avantgarde in 1991 thanks to a series of collaborations with the established
protagonists (such as Bobby Previte) and to his own Tuskegee Experiments
(july 1991), a set of colorful and passionate pieces for various configurations
that even featured poet Sadiq (Tuskegee Strutter's Ball, Next Love, Diego
Rivera). Anchored to a relatively traditional sextet (cornet, clarinet, piano, bass,
drums and congas), Music for Six Musicians (1995) delved into Byron's
obsession with Latin music, adding strong political overtones (Ross Perot,
Rodney King, Al Sharpton). Even more conventional was the live No-Vibe Zone
(january 1996) for a quintet with guitar and piano (Sex/Work, Next Love, The
Allure of Entanglement). After a lightweight tribute to the swing era, Bug Music

(may 1996), Byron lampooned funk music on Nu Blaxploitation (january

1998), again ruined by spoken-word segments. The more serious Romance
With The Unseen (march 1999), by a quartet with guitarist Bill Frisell and
drummer Jack DeJohnette, aimed for a romantic mood (the eleven-minute
Homegoing). After toying with classical and soul music on A Fine Line (2000),
and reenacting the Latin-tinged Music for Six Musicians on You Are #6
(october 2001), with Dark Room, Byron switched to tenor saxophone on IveyDivey (september 2004) in order to deconstruct the era of Lester Young.
Eric Glick-Rieman is a virtuoso of the prepared electric piano, as documented
on the solo improvisations of Ten To The Googolplex (2001), and coined a
sophisticated language and vocabulary of multifaceted impressionistic chamber
music on the Trilogy From The Outside, composed between 2002 and 2009, a
three-part colossus for prepared piano, acoustic piano, toy piano, celeste,
melodica, a self-made bowed instrument and found objects (the objects being
used to elicit unorthodox timbres from the instruments).
Post-jazz big bands
But the second half of the 1990s saw a resurgence of music for largest
ensembles, away from the solo creative music of the 1970s/1980s.
Trumpet player Butch (Lawrence Douglas) Morris was perhaps the most
revolutionary conductor of big bands of the post-swing era. An alumnus in Los
Angeles of Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, itself an outgrowth
of the Underground Musicians' Association (UGMA), formed in 1961, Morris
relocated to New York in 1976. The aim of multimedia events such as Current
Trends In Racism (1986) was to transform the performance of an orchestral
work into an improvised duet between the conductor (Morris) and the orchestra
(Frank Lowe on tenor sax, John Zorn on alto sax, Zeena Parkins on harp, Tom
Cora on cello, Christian Marclay on turntables, and others on vibraphone, piano,
guitar, percussion, voice). The conductor expressed himself through gestures
and the orchestra expressed itself through sounds. Both contributed creatively to
defining the result. Thus the concepts of improvisation, composition and
performance get blurred to the point that the composer is an improviser, the
improvisers are as much in charge as the conductor, etc. This album contained
Conduction 1, where "conduction" means "conducted improvisation" (the
conductor uses both signs and gestures to direct the development of the
composition). The music was as "un-orchestral" as it could be. The instruments
were basically playing against each other rather than together. There was little or
no sense of synchronicity, harmony or coherence. The sheer amount of
instruments made it virtually impossible to achieve any degree of organic
improvisation. Morris' orchestra redefined counterpoint as a chaotic eruption of
timbres, and Morris' counterpoint redefined the orchestra as a loose assembly of

individual urges. The focus was in finding a balance between the conductor's
stream of consciousness and the collective stream of consciousness of the
players. That goal entailed developing a common vocabulary of musical blocks,
and most of the piece was just that: the slow, painful development of a new
language of piano clusters, guttural moans, sax squeals, etc. The idea of
conducting a big band of improvisers was further developed on Dust To Dust
(november 1990), that toyed with every aspect of musical presentation, and
Testament (1995), whose "conductions" experimented with different
combinations of instruments.
Wayne Horvitz was "the" composer of his generation. While everybody else
seemed more and more fascinated by freer and freer improvisation, in 1986
Wayne Horvitz formed with his wife Robin Holcomb the New York Composers'
Orchestra to perform compositions for jazz orchestra. But his main achievement
might be the President, formed in 1985 with Bobby Previte, Elliot Sharp, Bill
Frisell and David Hofstra, who released two seminal albums, Bring Yr Camera
(1989) and Miracle Mile (1992), offering cohesive songs built out of twisted
rhythms and melodies, with frequent detours into psychedelic rock, blues and
ethnic music. Horvitz then continued to explore sampled-laden progressive-rock
with Pigpen, as on V As In Victim (1994), trip-hop and acid-jazz with Zony
Mash, as on Brand Spankin' New (1998), eerie soundscapes for piano,
violin/viola (Eyvind Kang), trombone, drum-machine and electronics with the
4+1 Ensemble on From a Window (2001), etc.
Drummer Bobby Previte found a bizarre compromise between ECM's baroque
jazz and Frank Zappa's nonsense rock on Bump The Renaissance (1986), for a
jazz quintet (Lenny Pickett on saxophone and clarinet, David Hofstra on bass,
Richard Schulman on piano, Tom Varner on French horn) and running the
gamut from avantgarde to jazz to rock to blues to ragtime music, and on
Pushing The Envelope (1987), featuring Hofstra, Varner, Wayne Horvitz on
keyboards and Marty Ehrlich on tenor sax. The more electronic and "industrial"
Dull Bang, Gushing Sound, Human Shriek (1987), entirely played by Previte
on keyboards and percussion, displayed his skills as an oneiric and apocalyptic
arranger. His eclectic and iconoclastic imagination was in full bloom on
Claude's Late Morning (1988), featuring Horvitz, Bill Frisell on guitar, Joey
Baron on drums, Ray Anderson on tuba, Guy Klucevsek on accordion (plus
banjo, steel guitar, harp, sampler), and especially Empty Suits (1990), a
cauldron that reached back to his chaotic beginnings with much expanded
orchestration (Robin Eubanks on trombone, Marty Ehrlich on alto sax, Elliott
Sharp on guitar, David Shea on turntables, plus electronic keyboards, harp,
guitar, vocals, steel guitar). His knack for assembling creative ensembles was
responsible also for the calmer, more complex and more melodic Weather
Clear Track Fast (1991), featuring Anthony Davis on piano, Robin Eubanks on

trombone, Anthony Cox on bass, Graham Haynes on cornet, Don Byron and
Marty Ehrlich on clarinets and saxophones. His skills as a composer, on the
other hand, emerged from the four lengthy compositions of Slay The Suitors
(1994), credited to the Empty Suits (Eubanks, Horvitz, Steve Gaboury on
keyboards, bass and percussion) the keyboards-heavy incursions into melodic
jazz of Hue And Cry (1994), credited to Weather Clear Track Fast (Byron,
Cox, Davis, Ehrlich, Eubanks, Haynes, and Larry Goldings on organ), and many
other projects with different names (Latin For Travelers, Ponga, Bump), each
devoted to a different style (progressive-rock, funk music, New Orleans' band
music). Previte's progressive embracing of neoclassical structures peaked with
The 23 Constellations of Joan Miro (2002), a suite of 23 lyrical chamber
vignettes performed by an all-star cast.
Multi-instrumentalist Marty Ehrlich (mainly clarinet, saxophone, and flute)
bridged the worlds of traditional jazz, creative improvisation, melodic music and
avantgarde classical music on Pliant Plaint (1988), with Bobby Previte on
drums, Anthony Cox on bass and Stan Strickland on sax, and especially
Traveller's Tale (1990), with a similar quartet, elegant and eccentric, linear and
imaginative, and Side by Side (1991), played by Horvitz on piano, Cox on bass,
Frank Lacy on trombone and Andrew Cyrille on drums. His proximity to
chamber music was emphasized by the Dark Woods Ensemble on Emergency
Peace (1991), Can You Hear a Motion (1994), performed by Stan Strickland
on sax and flute, Michael Formaniek on bass and Bobby Previte on drums, and
Just Before the Dawn (1995), both highlighted by lyrical cello-tinged "songs".
That program was continued by the Traveler's Tales, a quartet of two horns and
rhythm section, on Malinke's Dance (2000), given an almost baroque format on
The Long View (2002), a seven-movement suite that managed to display both
neoclassical and jazz overtones, and stretched to the limit on News On The Rail
(2005), one of his most erudite studies on timbral counterpoint (for a sextet with
three horns, piano, bass and drums).
Chicago-based saxophone and clarinet player Ken Vandermark formed a quartet
that indulged in the ambiguity of playing progressive-rock for a jazz audience on
albums such as Big Head Eddie (1993) and Solid Action (1994). Vandermark
5, instead, played visceral free-jazz at neurotic speed on Single Piece Flow
(1997), Target Dr Flag (1998), Simpatico (1999) and Burn The Incline
(2000). Vandermark's wild sax style became a classic on Sound In Action Trio's
Design In Time (1999). Vandermark then embraced the trend towards chamber
jazz and big-band jazz with the Territory Band, whose spectacular line-ups
created music that was both accessible and unpredictable on Transatlantic
Bridge (2001), Atlas (2003) and Map Theory (2005).

British reed player Paul Dunmall, a member of Keith Tippett's Mujician, also led
his own octet, that recorded the five-part suite Bebop Starburst (1999), and
toyed with the big-band format on I Wish You Peace (Cuneiform, 2004), both
milestones of revisionist avant-garde jazz that run the gamut from soulful
melodies to abrasive solo, from dissonant counterpoint to noir ambience, from
fanfares to litanies.
Denman Maroney introduced a new kind of prepared piano with the three solo
piano sonatas of Hyperpiano (1998) and then employed it for the six-part
chamber concerto Fluxations (2001), mixing improvisation and "pulse field", a
polyrhythmic sequence denoted as a rhythmic relationship between instruments.
Chicago-based saxophonist, flutist and clarinetist Scott Rosenberg, a pupil of
Anthony Braxton, expanded the vocabulary of jazz music with an anarchic
polyphony of extended techniques and illicit sounds, best represented by V Solo Improvisations (2001) and by the Skronktet West's El (2003), that
documented an art straddling the border between tradition and insanity,
rationality and randomness, semiotics and psychoanalysis, sense and nonsense.
His works for large ensembles, such as the ones on IE (1999) and Creative
Orchestra Music - Chicago 2001 (2003), ran the gamut from dramatic,
apocalyptic dissonance, reminiscent of Schoenberg's and Webern's chamber
music, to slow, requiem-like multi-drone gradually-ascending fanfares,
reminiscent of Gorecki and Part.
Yugoslavian-born pianist Stevan Tickmayer, a composer of chamber music in
various settings, co-founded the Science Group with percussionist Chris Cutler,
bassist Bob Drake and assorted guests. Their A Mere Coincidence (1999) and
Spoors (2003) are yet another take on the fusion of chamber and improvised
music.
The return of the jazz improviser
New York-based saxophonist and clarinetist Marty Fogel penned Many
Bobbing Heads At Once (1989), featuring David Torn on guitar, Michael
Shrieve on drums and Dean Johnson on bass, a lyrical work incorporating and
mixing elements of funk, pop, samba, Africa, reggae and bebop music.
Latvian collective ZGA specialized in playing found, self-made and traditional
instruments in a percussive way, starting with ZGA (1989).
The Necks, an Australian combo formed by three veteran session-men (pianist
Chris Abrahams, drummer Tony Buck, bassist Lloyd Swanton), specialized in
lengthy, trancey jams anchored to simple melodic lines and sometimes propelled
by swinging, funky grooves: Sex (1989), the archetype of how cascading piano

notes coalesced in hypnotic streams of casual tones, Hanging Gardens (1999),

a sublime realization of a bridge between minimalist repetition and jazz
improvisation, Aether (2001), perhaps the most "ambient" of their hour-long
pieces, See Through (2005), a showcase of piano jazz soliloquy.
New York-based Zeena Parkins, a veteran of several progressive-rock outfits,
was the harpist who introduced the instrument in the context of improvised
music. She was also the closest thing to a composer of chamber music within
New York's "creative" milieu. Something Out There (1987) collected solos,
duos and trios with the likes of drummer Ikue Mori, cellist Tom Cora, turntablist
Christian Marclay, percussionist Samm Bennett, etc. The prototype for her
lenghty compositions was Ursa's Door (1992), scored for chamber trio (harp,
violin, cello), guitar and percussion, with Ikue Mori's computer-generated
"concrete" sounds haunting Parkins' alien harp-based soundscapes. The tenmovement suite Isabelle (1995), the nine-movement suite Maul (1995) and the
six-movement suite Blue Mirror (1996), all scored for small chamber ensembles
(usually harp, piano, cello, violin, percussion), displayed her skills at
counterpoint and conducting improvisers, while the three suites of PanAcousticon (1999) for found sounds, strings and percussion, as well as the
impressionistic/futuristic vignettes of Phantom Orchard (2004), a collaboration
with Ikue Mori, moved her art towards more and more abstract and looser
structures. Persuasion for string quartet and electronic processing and the threemovement Visible/Invisible for string quartet, off Necklace (2006), were stoic
exploration of the sonic space, from sharp drones to percussive dissonance.
The style of Japanese trumpet player Toshinori Kondo evolved from jazz
improvisation, best represented by Die Like a Dog (1994), a quartet with
saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid
Drake, towards solo electronic trumpet meditations such as the six-movement
suite Panta Rhei (1994).
Russian pianist Sergey Kuryokhin offered a dadaistic, hysterical and acrobatic
fusion of avantgarde classical, jazz and rock music with his satirical multimedia
events of "pop mechanics" and on solo-piano albums such as The Ways of
Freedom (april 1981) Some Combinations Of Fingers And Passion (june
1991). His Pop Mekhanika Orchestra pioneered a cultural fusion of the arts
("total performance").
The second life of Love Child's, Blue Humans' and Run On's prog-rock guitarist
Alan Licht concentrated on anarchic and dadaistic noise with the lengthy
improvisations of Betty Page, off Sink The Aging Process (1994), Rabbi Sky,
off Rabbi Sky (1999), and Remington Khan, off Plays Well (2001).

Los Angeles-based guitarist Nels Cline formed a trio to bridge rock and jazz in a
fashion similar to what done by Bill Frisell on albums such as Chest (1996), but
it was The Inkling (2000), recorded by a quartet (with Zena Parkins on harp),
that showed how to redefine fusion in the age of post-rock.
New York-based trombonist Peter Zummo coined a deviant fusion of chamber
music and free-jazz on Experimenting with Household Chemicals (1995).
Argentinean clarinetist and alto saxophonist Guillermo Gregorio basically
played classical avantgarde in a jazz context, such as on Approximately (1996)
and Ellipsis (1997), both for small ensemble.
Boston-based trumpet player Greg Kelley unleashed the improvised noise of
Trumpet (2000) and If I Never Meet You In This Life (2002), besides
attempting a fusion of concrete music and free-jazz on Field Recordings
(2000). Nmperign, the duo of Greg Kelley on trumpet and Bhob Rainey on
saxophone, developed a program of absurd, cacophonous, irrational duets from
Nmperign (1998) to We Devote Every Effort To Offer You The Best That
You Deserve To Have For Your Enjoyment (2003).
American-Korean violinist Eyvind Kang, based in Seattle, was one of the most
eclectic musicians of his generation, playing in both rock, jazz and classical
contexts, as documented by the suite The Story Of Iceland (2000), by the
collection of chamber works Virginal Co-ordinates (2003) and by the cantata
Athlantis (2007).
The digital improviser
Chicago-based tabletop guitarist and synthesizer player Kevin Drumm
developed a style that stands as the guitar equivalent of digital/glitch electronica:
an art of static soundscapes roamed by sporadic, arctic, minimal events. The
result is often a psychoacoustic study on flow of time. Sonic odysseys such as
the seven untitled tracks of Kevin Drumm (1997), Cynicism, off Second
(1999), and Organ, off Comedy (2000), took the ideas of Keith Rowe and Fred
Frith and relocated them to another era and another planet. On the other hand,
the brutal orgies of Sheer Hellish Miasma (2002) and Land of Lurches (2003)
seemed to renege on Drumm's aesthetic of silence.
Swiss percussionist Guenter Mueller (Gnter Mller) established his credentials
as an electro-acoustic improviser via a series of duets, trios and quartets beyond
the conventions of (classical, jazz, rock) traditions, blending naturally into the
soundscapes created by his collaborators (Christian Marclay, Jim O'Rourke,
Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide, Voice Crack, Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto,

Oren Ambarchi). Different kinds of "noise" fueled his Eight Landscapes

(2003).
The eclectic San Francisco-based composer Miya Masaoka expanded the
techniques of the improvisers with Compositions/Improvisations (1993) for
solo koto and While I Was Walking I Heard A Sound (MM, 2003) for mixed
choir of 100-150 voices. while straddling the border between jazz, classical,
electronic and Japanese music on What is the Difference Between Stripping
and Playing the Violin? (1998), and mixed solo improvisation and field
recordings on For Birds, Planes & Cello (2005).
Ben Neill played the "mutantrumpet" (an electro-acoustic instrument producing
a Jon Hassell-ian tone) both in LaMonte Young's ensemble and on his own
Green Machine (1995).
Japanese guitarist and cellist Taku Sugimoto learned the importance of silence
on his Unaccompanied Violoncello Solo (1994) and Fragments of Paradise
(1997) and Opposite (1998) for solo guitar. He then applied those lessons to
post-rock and digital-noise settings. By the same token, his austere Chamber
Music (2003) mixed western timbric exploration and eastern rarefied
meditation. Both his solo, group and chamber music was based around silence,
not sound, and thus each piece tended to be an incredibly slow and sparse flow
of tones. Silence prevailed over sound. In a sense, his works were pauses
interrupted by sounds, rather than sounds with long pauses. He often let
background noise take center stage, his guitar occasionally interrupting the
coughing, the footsteps and the raindrops with a distant strum. The improvising
guitarist seemed to meditate on the sounds that he heard, and only every now
and then did he emit a sign of life.
Tyondai Braxton improvised the digital/electronic tours de force of The Grow
Gauge (1999) and especially History That Has No Effect (2002), that display
his art of "orchestrated loops" manipulating voice and guitar.
French sound sculptor and jazz saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, a member of the
musique concrete ensemble Afflux with Eric LaCasa and Eric Cordier,
conceived Synapses I & IV (1999), a collaboration with Cordier, in which
plucking the strings of a stringed instrument caused a chain reaction of sounds
from another set of instruments.
Los Angeles-based guitarist Greg Headley proceeded from the solo tabletop
guitar meditations of Adhesives (2000) to the abstract manipulation of guitar
sounds of A Table of Opposites (2001) to the noisy, frantic electronic
soundscapes of Similis (2002).

Los Angeles-based virtuoso saxophonist Earl Howard (1951) concentrated on

superimposing electronic/manipulated sounds to live improvised performances,
such as in the five-movement Strong Force (1999) for synthesizer, piano,
percussion, harp and cello, or ILEX (2004) for vocals, electronics, percussion
and pipa. These cold, disjointed, loose, open-ended streams end up sounding
like summaries of 20th-century chamber music. His Five Saxophone Solos
(2005) are complex sequences built out of simple units, cascades of primal
speech units not meant to create abstract sound patterns but to deliver primal
emotions (like a child who is just beginning to utter the rudiments of language).
Japanese guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, a former member of the experimental
ensembles First Edition, Altered States and Ground Zero, recorded several
albums of solo guitar improvisations and formed Phantasmagoria (2000), a sixpiece unit of guitar, sampler, sax, trumpet and rhythm section.
Zanana (the New York-based duo of vocalist Kristin Norderval and trombonist
Monique Buzzarte') blended improvisation, acoustic instruments, electronics,
samples, field recordings and live processing to create the spectral landscapes of
Holding Patterns (2005).
Australian improvising trio Triosk (Adrian Klumpes on keyboards, Laurence
Pike on drums, Ben Waples on double bass) diluted jazz music into a maze of
postprocessing techniques on Moment Returns (2004).
Alien to both the digital and the big-band turmoils, Yeah No (clarinetist and
saxophonist Chris Speed, Vietnamese-born trumpeter Cuong Vu, Icelandic-born
bassist Skuli Sverrisson, drummer Jim Black) were jazz musicians playing
Eastern European folk melodies and dance rhythms, starting with Yeah No
(1997), a concept similar to Lol Coxhill's Welfare State.
The New York-based instrumental Claudia Quintet, formed in 1997 by drummer
John Hollenbeck and featuring Yeah No's clarinetist and saxophonist Chris
Speed, merged chamber music, jazz improvisation and minimalist repetition on I
Claudia (2003).
Post-chamber music
Chamber music for unusual combination of acoustic instruments was popular
among composers interested in exploring timbres and counterpoint. Most of this
generation of composers were active in different styles of avantgarde music:
concrete, minimalism, electroacoustic, etc. When they approached chamber
music, they did so with a mindset that was influenced by the harmonic freedom
they had been used to. Their interest for chamber music (music scored for small
sets of instruments) was in sharp contrast with the past preeminence of

symphonic music: this generation was clearly more interested in subtleties than
in grand emotions.
Astor Piazzolla (Argentina, 1921) mixed tango with classical music to compose
works for bandoneon and orchestra, such as Buenos Aires (1951) for symphonic
orchestra and two bandoneons, the Concerto For Bandoneon (1979) and the
suite La Camorra (1988), a tango opera, Maria de Buenos Aires (1967), the
Suite for Vibraphone and New Tango Quintet (1986) with jazz vibraphonist
Gary Burton, etc.
Toru Takemitsu (Japan, 1930) wed the western aesthetics of impressionism and
expressionism with the eastern aesthetic of meditation and contemplation. The
resulting synthesis was an elegant exploration of musical chromatism, with little
or no interest for dynamics: Requiem for Strings (1959), Eclipse (1966) for biwa
and shakuhachi, November Steps (1967) for biwa, shakuhachi and orchestra,
Cassiopeia (1971) for orchestra and percussionist, Autumn (1973) for biwa,
shakuhachi and orchestra, A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden
(1977) for orchestra, To The Edge Of Dream (1983) for guitar and orchestra,
Nostalgia (1987) for violin and orchestra, Tree-line (1988) for chamber
orchestra, From Me Flows What You Call Time (1990) for percussion quintet
and orchestra.
Daniel Goode (USA, 1936), composed works for solo clarinet, such as Circular
Thoughts (1973), and for gamelan ensemble such as Eine Kleine Gamelan Music
(1980).
Malcolm Goldstein (USA, 1936) bridged generations and techniques with The
Seasons - Vermont (1983), a collage for natural sounds and improvising
dissonant ensemble.
Enfant prodige Charles Wuorinen (USA, 1938) was the traditionalist among the
pioneers of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He was still very
young when he composed works that were traditional in concept but very
unusual in practice such as the Concertone for brass quintet and orchestra
(1960), the Symphonia Sacra for small orchestra (1961), the Chamber Concerto
for cello and small orchestra (1963), that borrowed bits and pieces from
Stravinsky's stormy style, Varese's harmonic anarchy and Schonberg's
claustrophobic atmospheres, mediated via American revolutionaries such as
Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. Wuorinen refined his art by trying his hand at
just every possible genre, from the electronic poem Time's Encomium (1969), in
the vein of Morton Subotnick, to the opera Whore of Babylon (1975) to the
Symphony of Percussions (1976). His synthesis reached the zenith with the most
ambitious works of his career, notably the Piano Concerto 3 (1983) and the
Piano Concerto 4 (2005), the melodramatic and manically intense String Sextet

(1989), and the "Dante Trilogy" for chamber orchestra and percussion that
comprises The Mission Of Virgil (1993), The Great Procession (1995) and The
River of Light (1996).
In the era of the soundscape, composers such as Edgard Varese, John Cage,
Harry Partch and Steve Reich turned to percussion ensembles the way that
romantic composers used to turn to the symphony orchestra.
Canadian percussion ensemble Nexus pioneered a new genre for western music:
ensemble percussion music, with Music of Nexus (1978), although their
improvised sound collages, such as, Origins (1992) extended well beyond the
usual definition of "percussion".
Another Canadian outfit, the Glass Orchestra, was a quintet of musicians that
improvised with a number of instruments made of glass. The Glass Orchestra
(1977) focused on a cascade of long hypnotic drones, reminiscent of Indian and
Tibetan vocal music.
Daniel Schell (Belgium, 1944) composed the Ishango Oratorio (2003) for
guitar, saxophone, bass, choir and African percussion, that mixed jazz, classical
and ethnic music,
David Rosenbloom (USA, 1949), whose work straddles the border between
classical and popular music, composed the metaphysical suite Departure (1981)
for eight voices, three flutes, two oboes, two violins, cello, two doublebasses,
soprano sax, French horn, organ, percussion.
Paul Dresher (post-chamber) (USA, 1951) applied the lessons (but not the
praxis) of minimalism and of live electronic music to the string quartet Casa
Vecchia (1982), the chamber septet Channels Passing (1982) and to Re:act:ion
(1984) for symphony orchestra.
Wendy Mae Chambers (post-chamber) (USA, 1953) devoted herself to largescale neoclassical compositions such as Symphony Of The Universe (1989) for
100 timpani, metal percussion, horn soloist, jazz band, choir, organ, and tape,
and A Mass for Mass Trombones (1993), a nine-movement requiem for 77
trombones.
Bun-Ching Lam (China, 1954) incorporated Chinese instruments such as the
pipa (four-stringed lute) into the format of Western chamber music. as in Omi
Hakkei (2000) for harp, flute, viola (the classic Debussy trio) plus dizi, erhu,
xiao and zheng, Song of the Pipa (2001) for pipa, harp, percussion and strings,
and Atlas (2004) for Chinese, Middle East and Western instruments. However,
the percussion sonata Lu (1983) and the sonata Like Water (1995) for viola,

piano and percussion were rarefied pieces that sculpted naked soundscape
visited by sporadic tones, but mostly silent.
Jin Hi Kim (Korea, 1957), also a jazz improviser, mixed Korean traditional
music (mostly for the komungo zither) and Western chamber music in
compositions inspired to the idea that "each tone is alive", such as Nong Rock
(1992) for string quartet and komungo.
The chamber music of Allison Cameron (Canada, 1963) emphasized the colors
while maintaining a delicate balance of tones and rhythms. A sense of macabre
and claustrophobic surfaces from scores such as A Blank Sheet Of Metal (1987)
and Gibbons Moon (1991).
Nikola Kodjabashia (Macedonia, 1970) incorporated folk, expressionist and
minimalist elements in Bildbeschreibung (2001).
Even veterans of event music returned to the classical formats of large-scale
orchestral music, for example: Roger Reynolds' Whispers Out of Time (1988),
Frederic Rzewski's The Triumph of Death (1988), Alvin Curran's trio Schtyx
(1991) for violin, piano and percussion. Gavin Bryars' Cadman Requiem (1989)
and Cello Concerto "Farewell to Philosophy" (1994), James Tenney' In a Large
Open Space (1994) and In a Large Reverberant Space (1995) for variable
orchestra; etc.
Alaska resident John Luther Adams (1953) composed static music in the
minimalist tradition but scored for chamber orchestras. Thus his colossal In The
White Silence (1998), The Light That Fills the World (2000) and The
Immeasurable Space of Tones (2001) for violin, vibraphone, piano, keyboard
and contrabass.
The minimalist tradition was revived in the new century by Dan Joseph (USA,
1966), whose music absorbed influences from folk music from around the
world. The exuberant, propulsive, Michael Nyman-esque Percussion and
Strings (2004) was performed by a neo-baroque ensemble of violin, cello,
harpsichord, hammered dulcimer, clarinet and percussion; whereas Tonalization
(2009) was a requiem scored for flute, violin, cello, marimba, harpsichord and
hammer dulcimer.
Jazz trumpeter Nate Wooley (USA, 1974) reinvented droning minimalism from
the perspective of the free improviser and digital composer with The Almond
(2011), a 70-minute "solo" of overdubbed pure-pitched trumpet.
Electroacoustic music

There was live electronic music. There was improvised music. There was
computer interactive music. But there were also composers who merely
incorporated electronic instruments into the orchestra and remained relatively
faithful to the traditional composer/performer paradigm. Electroacoustic music
was only apparently revolutionary. What was revolutionary was the virtually
infinite repertory of timbres that the electronic instrument could produce, and
thus the possibilities for counterpoint and harmony. But the fundamental
approach to composing and performing was much closer to the western rational
approach of previous centuries than the composers wanted to admit.
trevor wishart's "journey into space" & "red bird", desmond leslie's "music of
the future", and basil kirchin's "worlds within worlds" Pentes (1974), the Denis
Smalley (New Zealand, 1946)
Trombone player James Fulkerson (USA, 1945) created oneiric soundscapes for
his trombone playing, such as Stationary Fields Moving Fields (1979) for
amplified trombone, amplified cello and tape delay, and Force Fields and
Spaces (1981) for trombone and electronics.
Ekkehard Ehlers (Germany, 1974), an electronic producer operating at the
crossroad of post-classical chamber music and digital soundsculpting, was
perhaps the first conscious purveyor of digital chamber music on albums such as
Politik Braucht Keinen Feind (2003).
Eric Glick-Rieman (USA, 1962) composed Trilogy From The Outside (2008)
for prepared piano, acoustic piano, toy piano, celeste, melodica, a self-made
bowed instrument and found objects.
Improvised electroacoustic music
The influence of the jazz and rock avantgarde led to a laptop-mediated marriage
of electroacoustic music and free improvisation (basically a continuation of live
electronic music of the 1960s and 1970s).

William Ackerman (new age)

John Adams (minimalism)
John Luther Adams (minimalism)
Alio Die (ambient)
Marcus Allen (new age)
Alquimia (world-music)
Maryanne Amacher (droning minimalism)
Oren Ambarchi (glitch)
AMM (event music)
Ancient Future (world-music)

M'lumbo (post-jazz)
Jackson MacLow (event music)
Pierre-Yves Mace (collage)
Tod Machover (post-chamber)
Val Magyar (new age)
Keeril Makan (post-chamber)
Michael Manring (post-jazz)
Lionel Marchetti (concrete)
Walter Marchetti (event music)
Christian Marclay (turntablist)

Laurie Anderson (vocals)

Darol Anger (post-jazz)
Jorge Antunes (post-chamber)
Mark Applebaum (event music)
Jon Appleton (concrete)
Luigi Archetti (post-chamber)
David Arkenstone (new age)
Koji Asano (computer)
James Asher (new age)
Robert Ashley (event music)
Aube (concrete)
William Aura (new age)
Paul Avgerinos (new age)
Stephen Bacchus (new age)
Ellen Band (concrete)
Bang On A Can All-Stars (post-chamber)
Tom Barabas (new age)
Marc Baron (concrete)
William Basinski (ambient)
Anton Batagov (ambient)
Pierre Bastien (event music)
Peter Batchelor (concrete)
Rashad Becker (ambient)
Bruce Becvar (new age)
David Bedford (event music)
Marc Behrens (concrete)
David Behrman (computer)
Teja Bell (new age)
Sam Bennett (post-jazz)
Steve Beresford (post-jazz)
Tim Berne (post-jazz)
Patrick Bernard (new age)
Jay Scott Berry (new age)
Pierre Berthet (ambient)
Antoine Beuger (isolationism)
Maurizio Bianchi (concrete)
Phillip Bimstein (post-chamber)
Biota (concrete)
John Bischoff (computer)
Olivia Block (electroacoustic)
Ian Boddy (new age)
Cesar Bolanos (electroacoustic)
Richard Bone (ambient)
Ron Boots (new age)
Borbetomagus (post-jazz)
David Borden (post-chamber)
Ascanio Borga (ambient)
John Boswell (new age)
Graham Bowers (post-chamber)

Denman Maroney (post-jazz)

Ingram Marshall (minimalism)
Mike Marshall (post-jazz)
Miya Masaoka (post-jazz)
Stephan Mathieu (concrete)
Kaffe Matthews (concrete)
Peter Maunu (post-jazz)
Susan Mazer (new age)
Paul McCandless (post-jazz)
Michael McNabb (computer music)
Lubomyr Melnyk (minimalism)
Daniel Menche (concrete)
Wim Mertens (minimalism)
Stephen Micus (world-music)
Piero Milesi (minimalism)
Robert Millis (concrete)
Mnemonists (concrete)
Mnortham (electroacoustic)
Mokave (post-jazz)
Jar Moff (sound collage)
Meredith Monk (vocals)
Montage (new age)
Alfredo Costa Monteiro (droning minimalism)
Gen Ken Montgomery (concrete)
Montreux (post-jazz)
Moondog (post-chamber)
Stephan Moore (deep listening)
Monos (droning minimalism)
Glen Moore (post-jazz)
Ikue Mori (post-jazz)
Butch Morris (post-jazz)
Charlie Morrow (post-chamber)
David Moss (vocals)
Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece (electronic
rock)
Guenter Mueller (post-jazz)
Nico Muhly (minimalism)
Gordon Mumma (event music)
Brendan Murray (ambient)
Musica Elettronica Viva (event music)
Mythos (world-music)
Wu Na (world music)
Carlos Nakai (new age)
Toshimaru Nakamura (glitch)
Pete Namlook (ambient)
Andy Narell (post-jazz)
Mark Nauseef (post-jazz)
Necks (post-jazz)
Negativland (collage)

Jonas Braasch (post-jazz)

Paul Bradley (droning minimalism)
Kevin Braheny (new age)
Glenn Branca (minimalism)
Tyondai Braxton (post-jazz)
Thom Brennan (new age)
Martin Bresnick (chamber)
Spencer Brewer (new age)
Michael Brook (ambient)
Chris Brown (world)
Brume (concrete)
Gavin Bryars (event music)
Thomas Buckner (vocals)
Harold Budd (ambient)
Nils Bultmann (post-chamber)
Richard Burmer (new age)
Warren Burt (droning minimalism)
Michael Byron (minimalism)
Roberto Cacciapaglia (event music)
Francois Cambuzat (post-jazz)
Allison Cameron (post-chamber)
Doug Cameron (new age)
Nuno Canavarro (ambient)
Cornelius Cardew (event music)
Walter Carlos (new age)
Robert Carty (new age)
Tim Catlin (droning minimalism)
John Catney (new age)
Eugene Chadbourne (post-jazz)
Andrew Chalk (droning minimalism)
Wendy Mae Chambers (post-chamber)
Jim Chappell (new age)
Richard Chartier (glitch)
Loren Chasse (concrete)
Rhys Chatham (minimalism)
Checkfield (new age)
Mary Ellen Childs (post-chamber)
Suzanne Ciani (new age)
Claudia Quintet (post-jazz)
Tim Clement (new age)
Jay Cloidt (collage)
Climax Golden Twins (concrete)
Alex Cline (post-jazz)
Nels Cline (post-jazz)
Cloaks (post-minimalism)
Tony Coe (post-jazz)
Lou Cohen (computer music)
John Coleclough (ambient)
Nicolas Collins (event music)

Seth Nehil (electroacoustic)

Ben Neill (post-jazz)
Neina (glitch)
Kenneth Newby (new age)
Nexus (post-jazz)
Phill Niblock (minimalism)
Night Ark (new age)
Nightcrawlers (new age)
Nightnoise (new age)
Nimal (post-jazz)
Nmperign (post-jazz)
Kristin Norderval (vocals)
Michael Northam (electroacoustic)
Alva Noto (glitch)
Charles Noyes (post-jazz)
Michael Nyman (minimalism)
Patrick O'Hearn (post-jazz)
Oblivion Ensemble (electroacoustic)
Yoko Ono (vocals)
Opafire (world-music)
Oregon (post-jazz)
Hans Otte (post-chamber)
Oval (glitch)
Pauline Oliveros (droning minimalism)
Ora (droning minimalism)
Bob Ostertag (collage)
John Oswald (collage)
Dino Pacifici (new age)
Charlemagne Palestine (minimalism)
Claudio Parodi (droning minimalism)
Harry Partch (in progress)
Pan Sonic (glitch)
Paul Panhuysen (deep listening)
Zeena Parkins (post-jazz)
Bernard Parmegiani (concrete)
David Parsons (world-music)
Maggie Payne (electroacoustic)
Christopher Peacock (new age)
Jeff Pearce (ambient)
Robert Pearson (new age)
Tristan Perich (digital)
Frank Perry (new age)
Philip Perkins (concrete)
Astor Piazzolla (post-chamber)
Lenny Pickett (post-jazz)
Dan Plonsey (minimalism)
Michael Pisaro (post-chamber)
Michael Pluznick (world-music)
Larry Polansky (computer music)

Pascal Comelade (post-jazz)

Loren Mazzacane Connors (post-jazz)
Tony Conrad (minimalism)
Jesse Cook (new age)
Tom Cora (post-jazz)
Eric Cordier (concrete)
Philip Corner (event music)
Scott Cossu (new age)
Anla Courtis (concrete)
Ben Cox (ambient)
Rick Cox (ambient)
Lol Coxhill (post-jazz)
Coyote Oldman (new age)
Noah Creshevsky (concrete)
Curlew (post-jazz)
Alvin Curran (concrete)
Peter Cusack (concrete)
Cusco (world-music)
Cyrnai (event music)
D'Rachael (new age)
Anders Dahl (concrete)
Lesli Dalaba (post-jazz)
Malcolm Dalglish (new age)
Mychael Danna (new age)
David Darling (new age)
Dik Darnell (new age)
Darshan Ambient (ambient)
Date Palms (ambient)
Peter Davison (new age)
Deca (cosmic)
Jacques De Koninck (new age)
Deep Forest (world)
Vladislav Delay (glitch)
Paul DeMarinis (concrete)
Constance Demby (new age)
Stuart Dempster (droning minimalism)
Taylor Deupree (glitch)
Andrew Raffo Dewar (droning minimalism)
Nick Didkovsky (computer music)
Raymond Dijkstra (concrete)
Thomas Dimuzio (concrete)
Dirty Knobs (ambient)
Dither (minimalism)
Lucia Dlugoszewsky (post-chamber)
Do'Ah (world-music)
Tod Dockstader (concrete)
Charles Dodge (concrete)
Dogon (new age)
Paul Dolden (electroacoustic)

Jocelyn Pook (new age)

Rod Poole (minimalism)
Colin Potter (droning minimalism)
Conrad Praetzel (world-music)
Bobby Previte (post-jazz)
Eddie Prevost (post-jazz)
Kate Price (new age)
Radiance (new age)
Akira Rabelais (minimalism)
Eliane Radigue (droning minimalism)
Bhob Rainey (post-jazz)
Raphael (ambient)
Giles Reaves (new age)
Jose Luis Redondo (post-jazz)
Rick Reed (ambient)
Steve Reich (minimalism)
Christian Renou (concrete)
Jorge Reyes (world-music)
Roger Reynolds (event music)
Reynols (concrete)
Rhythm And Noise (concrete)
Robert Rich (new age)
Vicki Richards (new age)
Max Richter (post-chamber)
Eric Glick-Rieman (post-jazz)
Kurt Riemann (new age)
Terry Riley (minimalism)
RM74 (electroacoustic)
Steve Roach (new age)
Hank Roberts (post-jazz)
Kim Robertson (new age)
Steve Roden (concrete)
Matt Rogalsky (droning minimalism)
Neil Rolnick (electroacoustic)
Randy Roos (new age)
Jon Rose (post-jazz)
Scott Rosenberg (post-jazz)
David Rosenbloom (post-chamber)
David Rosenboom (computer music)
Marina Rosenfeld (turntablist, aleatory)
Don Ross (new age)
Gabrielle Roth (new age)
Ned Rothenberg (post-jazz)
Mikel Rouse (minimalism)
Keith Rowe (post-jazz)
Adam Rudolph (world-music)
Nancy Rumbel (new age)
Arthur Russell (minimalism)
Robert Rutman (droning minimalism)

Christy Doran (post-jazz)

Bill Douglas (new age)
Steve Douglas (post-jazz)
Paul Dresher (post-chamber)
Arnold Dreyblatt (minimalism)
Kevin Drumm (post-jazz)
Olivier Dumont (concrete)
Urszula Dudziak (vocals)
John Duncan (concrete)
Stephan Dunkelman (post-chamber)
Paul Dunmall (post-jazz)
David Dunn (computer)
John Dyson (new age)
Robert Een (minimalism)
Ekkehard Ehlers (post-chamber)
Marty Ehrlich (post-jazz)
Eko (new age)
William Ellwood (new age)
Emerald Web (new age)
Enigma (world)
Brian Eno (ambient)
Roger Eno (post-chamber)
Enya (world)
Eternal Wind (world-music)
Dean Evenson (new age)
Evidence (concrete)
Fan Wang (computer)
Ferran Fages (post-jazz)
Forrest Fang (world-music)
Farfield (ambient)
Christian Fennesz (ambient)
David First (droning)
Luca Formentini (ambient)
Fast Forward (event music)
Reinhard Flatischler (post-jazz)
JB Floyd (post-jazz)
Henry Flynt (post-jazz)
Marty Fogel (post-jazz)
Gyjho Frank (new age)
David Friesen (post-jazz)
Bill Frisell (post-jazz)
Eloy Fritsch (new age)
Fred Frith (post-jazz)
James Fulkerson (post-chamber)
Ellen Fullman (droning minimalism)
Furt (concrete)
G*Park (concrete)
Kenneth Gaburo (compositional linguistics)
Diamanda Galas (vocals)

Frederic Rzewski (event music)

Sachiko M (post-jazz)
Tadamitsu Saito (new age)
Suso Saiz (ambient)
Philip Samartzis (glitch)
Somei Satoh (minimalism)
Paul Sauvanet (new age)
Helmut Schafer (musique concrete)
Janek Schaefer (musique concrete)
Daniel Schell (post-chamber)
Klaus Schonning (cosmic)
Michael Schumacher (concrete)
Klaus Schulze (cosmic)
Paul Schutze (ambient)
Stephen Scott (minimalism)
Secluded Bronte (concrete)
Jonn Serrie (new age)
Shadowfax (new age)
Shahin & Sepehr (new age)
Lakshminarayana Shankar (world-music)
Elliott Sharp (post-jazz)
David Shea (turntablist, collage)
Colin Andrew Sheffield (musique concrete)
John Shiurba (post-jazz)
Matt Shoemaker (musique concrete)
Mark Shreeve (new age)
Michael Shrieve (post-jazz)
Budi Siebert (new age)
16-17 (post-jazz)
Richard Skelton (post-chamber)
Don Slepian (new age)
Scott Smallwood (droning minimalism)
Software (new age)
Solitaire (new age)
Laetitia Sonami (live electronic music)
Chris Speed (post-jazz)
Paul Speer (new age)
Chris Spheeris (new age)
Laurie Spiegel (computer music)
Robin Spielberg (new age)
Bruce Stark (new age)
Jim Staley (post-jazz)
Michael Stearns (new age)
Ira Stein & Russel Walder (new age)
Carl Stone (collage)
Liz Story (new age)
Tim Story (new age)
Strotter Inst (turntablist)
Taku Sugimoto (post-jazz)

Ruben Garcia (ambient)

Kay Gardner (new age)
Richard Garet (ambient)
Guillaume Gargaud (ambient)
Peter Garland (post-chamber)
Robert Gass (new age)
Gandalf (new age)
Ron Geesin (event music)
Michael Gendreau (collage)
Michel Genest (new age)
Tony Gerber (new age)
Michael Gettel (new age)
Qubais Reed Ghazala (concrete)
Jon Gibson (minimalism)
Michael Gilbert (world music)
Brian Gingrich (new age)
Lutz Glandien (electroacoustic)
Philip Glass (minimalism)
Glass Orchestra (post-jazz)
Heiner Goebbels (post-jazz)
Malcolm Goldstein (post-jazz)
Daniel Goode (post-chamber)
Jean-Philippe Goude (new age)
Mathias Grassow (cosmic)
Wayne Gratz (new age)
Guillermo Gregorio (post-jazz)
Randy Greif (concrete)
Jeff Greinke (ambient)
Group 87 (post-jazz)
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
(event music)
John Grzinich (electroacoustic)
Hildur Gudnadottir (post-chamber)
Jean-Luc Guionnet (concrete)
Cheryl Gunn (new age)
Bernhard Guenter (glitch)
Trilok Gurtu (post-jazz)
Brent Gutzeit (laptop)
Brion Gysin (event music)
Steven Halpern (new age)
Tom Hamilton (electroacoustic)
Joyce Handler (new age)
Kip Hanrahan (post-jazz)
Mike Hansen (turntablist)
Don Harriss (new age)
Mickey Hart (world-music)
Jon Hassell (world-music)
Curtis Hasselbring (post-jazz)
Hauschka (post-chamber)

Morton Subotnick (concrete)

Nicholas Szczepanik (droning minimalism)
So Takahashi (ambient noise)
Masayuki Takayanagi (post-jazz)
Toru Takemitsu (post-chamber)
Nobukazu Takemura (minimalism)
Tarab (electroacoustic)
Darren Tate (droning minimalism)
Richard Teitelbaum (post-jazz)
James Tenney (computer music)
Terra Ambient (ambient)
Robert Scott Thompson (ambient)
Steve Tibbetts (post-jazz)
Stevan Tickmayer (post-jazz)
Asmus Tietchens (new age)
John Tilbury (event music)
Timet (collage)
Viktor Timofeev (ambient)
Eric Tingstad (new age)
Yasunao Tone (event music)
David Toop (ambient)
Rafael Toral (droning minimalism)
Toshiya Tsunoda (concrete)
Tonto's Head Band (electronic rock)
David Torn (post-jazz)
Ralph Towner (post-jazz)
Turtle Island String Quartet (post-jazz)
Artie Traum (post-jazz)
Stephen Travis Pope (computer)
Valerio Tricoli (concrete)
Triosk (post-jazz)
Tulku (world-music)
Gene Tyranny (event music)
Kazuhisa Uchihashi (post-jazz)
Jakob Ullmann (post-chamber)
Vladimir Ussachevsky (concrete)
Jai Uttal (world-music)
Michael Uyttebroek (new age)
Mika Vainio (glitch)
Josef Van Wissem
Chuck Van Zyl (new age)
Ken Vandermark (post-jazz)
Vangelis (new age)
David VanTieghem (post-jazz)
Christina Vantzou
Vas (world-music)
Nana Vasconcelos (post-jazz)
Glen Velez (post-jazz)
Giovanni Venosta (concrete)

Robin Hayward (droning minimalism)

Greg Headley (post-jazz)
Tom Heasley (ambient)
Michael Hedges (new age)
Erdem Helvacioglu (ambient)
Pierre Henry (concrete)
Jean-Luc Herelle (concrete)
Barbara Higbie (post-jazz)
Shelley Hirsch (vocals)
Ian Holloway (ambient)
Bob Holroyd (world-music)
Anna Homler (vocals)
Michael Harrison (minimalism)
Fritz Hauser (post-jazz)
Paul Horn (post-jazz)
William Hooker (post-jazz)
Wayne Horvitz (post-jazz)
Earl Howard (post-jazz)
Hub (computer music)
John Hudak (concrete)
Naut Humon (concrete)
Brannon Hungness (electroacoustic)
Jerry Hunt (event music)
Lucia Hwong (world-music)
David Hykes (vocals)
Iasos (new age)
If Bwana (concrete)
Giuseppe Ielasi (concrete)
Ryoji Ikeda (minimal noise)
Ilaiyaraaja (world-music)
Illusion Of Safety (concrete)
Tetsu Inoue (ambient)
Robert Iolini (concrete)
Irr. App. (Ext.) (concrete)
Mark Isham (post-jazz)
Terje Isungset (post-jazz)
Vikki Jackman (ambient)
Mia Jang (new age)
Jean-Michele Jarre (new age)
Philip Jeck (turntablist)
Scott Johnson (concrete)
Jliat (droning minimalism)
Tom Johnson (event music)
James Johnson (ambient)
Steve Jolliffe (new age)
Michael Jones (new age)
Jun Yan (computer)
Jason Kahn (post-jazz)
Henry Kaiser (post-jazz)

Vidna Obmana (ambient)

Lois Vierk (minimalism)
Robert Vincs (post-jazz)
Voice Crack (event music)
Andreas Vollenweider (new age)
Carl Michael von Hausswolff (glitch)
Dimitri Voudouris (electroacoustic)
Yoshi Wada (minimalism)
Collin Walcott (post-jazz)
John Wall (collage)
Richard Warner (new age)
Tom Wasinger (new age)
Bob Wasserman (post-jazz)
Kit Watkins (ambient)
Chris Watson (musique concrete)
David Watson (droning minimalism)
Wavestar (new age)
Stuart Weber (new age)
Carl Weingarten (new age)
Tim Weisberg (new age)
Stefan Weisser (concrete)
Johannes Welsch (droning)
Michael Whalen (new age)
Tim Wheater (new age)
Frances White (post-chamber)
Keith Whitman (droning minimalism)
Anne Williams (new age)
Wind Machine (new age)
Simon Wickham-Smith (concrete)
George Winston (new age)
Paul Winter (post-jazz)
Wolff & Hennings (world-music)
Erling Wold (multimedia opera)
Achim Wollscheid (computer)
Nat Wooley (post-jazz)
Danny Wright (new age)
Peter Wright (droning minimalism)
Charles Wuorinen (post-chamber)
Igor Wakhevitch (electronic rock)
Bernard Xolotl (new age)
Stomu Yamashta (post-jazz)
Yanni (new age)
Yas-Kaz (new age)
Otomo Yoshihide (turntablist)
LaMonte Young (minimalism)
Yulara (world)
Pamela Z (vocals)
Zanana (post-jazz)
Frank Zappa (post-jazz)

Eyvind Kang (post-jazz)

Karunesh (new age)
Peter Kater (new age)
Keeler (new age)
Kevin Keller (ambient)
Greg Kelley (post-jazz)
Georgia Kelly (new age)
Jin Hi Kim (post-chamber)
Mari Kimura (post-chamber)
Steve Kindler (new age)
Ben Tavera King (new age)
Leyland Kirby (ambient)
Jacob Kirkegaard (concrete)
Bernd Kistenmacher (cosmic)
Osamu Kitajima (new age)
Kitaro (new age)
Phil Kline (post-chamber)
Guy Klucevsek (post-jazz)
Milan Knizak (collage)
Daniel Kobialka (new age)
Nikola Kodjabashia (post-chamber)
Kol Simcha (world music)
Toshinori Kondo (post-jazz)
Thomas Koner (ambient)
Gregg Kowalsky (ambient)
Tomasz Krakowiak (concrete)
Beaver & Krause (electronic rock)
Bernie Krause (collage)
Lothar Krell (new age)
Christina Kubisch (electroacoustic)
Larry Kucharz (ambient)
Leo Kupper (vocals)
Sergey Kuryokhin (post-jazz)
Joan La Barbara (vocals)
Eric La Casa (concrete)
Richard Lainhart (droning minimalism)
Bun-Ching Lam (post-chamber)
Alan Lamb (droning minimalism)
Paul Lansky (computer music)
Klaus Lang (post-chamber)
David Lanz (new age)
Jean-Francois Laporte (deep listening)
Sergio Lara e Joe Reyes (new age)
Laraaji (ambient)
Bill Laswell (ambient)
Mary Jane Leach (minimalism)
Iury Lech (ambient)
Jeanne Lee (vocals)
Riley Lee (world-music)

Hector Zazou (post-chamber)

Marc Zeier (concrete)
Zero (glitch)
Zeus Faber (new age)
Zev (concrete)
ZGA (post-jazz)
Mariolina Zitta (concrete)
John Zorn (post-jazz)
Peter Zumm

Kerry Leimer (new age)

Daniel Lentz (minimalism)
Cheryl Leonard (concrete)
Jason Lescalleet (laptop)
Lethe (droning minimalism)
Benjamin Lew (post-chamber)
Alan Licht (post-jazz)
Ottmar Liebert (new age)
Rune Lindblad (electroacoustic)
Enzo Minarelli (vocals)
Liquid Mind (ambient)
Mind-Flux (new age)
Lngtche (ambient)
Annea Lockwood (concrete)
Logos Duo (concrete)
Fred Lonberg-Holm (post-jazz)
Francisco Lopez (concrete)
Joe Colley (concrete)
Alvin Lucier (droning minimalism)
Otto Luening (concrete)
Ralph Lundsten (concrete)
Ray Lynch (new age)