Notes

Although Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan declare in the opening sentence of their introduction that "electronic music is the mainstream" (p. 1), the institutional support for electronic music is now under tighter examination than at any point in the past. At a time when one of the world's leading centers for electronic music, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), is coming under serious governmental scrutiny for being "closed and only appealing to a niche audience" (see STEIM's Web site, www.steim.org, for more information [accessed 20 August 2008]), a volume which demystifies the theory and practice of electronic music is urgently needed. This certainly is one of the key aims of Collins' and d'Escrivan's Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, and is a goal in which it succeeds, at least in part.

The first section of the volume deals with the contexts of electronic music and is, in essence, a survey of the historical terrain, covering "The origins of electronic music" (Andrew Hugill), "Electronic Music and the studio" (Margaret Schedel), "Live electronic music" (Nicolas Collins) and "A history of programming and music" (Ge Wang). It is here that the difficulties with attempting a historical approach of this sort within a multi-author volume are at their most apparent. The same matter is covered several times in a number of the contributions here, despite ostensibly different focuses. The sound-houses of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis recur in Hugill's (p. 7) and Schedel's (p. 32) accounts; the story of Babbage's "Difference Engine" is recounted by Hugill (p. 12) and Wang (p. 56); considerations of Cage's "Credo" (1937) appear in the contributions of Hugill (p. 20), Schedel (p. 32) and Collins (p. 40). Though entirely germane to each of the discussions individually, the level of repetition caused this reader, at least, to have a sense that many of the chapters, in part, go over the same territory, especially with only four essays in this section.

This criticism ought not to devalue the genuine strengths of these contributions, however. Hugill's essay is an adept—and admirably concise—account of a vast welter of trends which developed into the electronic music of the late twentieth century, taking in Bacon, Vincentino, Pythagoras, automata, Balzac's "Gambara," Babbage, Benjamin, microphones and phonographs, Busoni, Skryabin, Russolo, Cage, Grainger and Varèse in a mere seventeen pages. Schedel, though hardly ignoring more "mainstream" aspects of the history of the electronic studio (including GRM's musique concrète and WDR's elektronische Musik), ensures that coverage is given, too, to trends in Japan (kotatsutop music) and South African Kwaito, as well as to such initiatives as Trent Reznor's release of the digital [End Page 316] tracks from Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand that Feeds" in Garage Band format, such that users can create their own (re-)mixes. Collins, too, covers familiar ground: live electronic music is mainly represented through a chronological history following Cage, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich and David Tudor. Nevertheless, DJs such as Grand master Flash and Kool Herc are present, as are Yasunao Tone's experiments with "wounded" compact discs and brief coverage of circuit bending, which, though hardly subverting Collins' primary historical trends, certainly demonstrates that there are alternatives to them. Finally, Wang's account of programming and music is certainly the least exciting read of the four historical essays, yet, since it covers what is probably the most unfamiliar area, there is doubtless something to be gained as well. The account runs from the various versions of Max Mathews MUSIC program and their descendent, Csound, to graphical programs like Max/MSP, Pure Data, Super Collider and ChucK. As a very general, and quite superficial, introduction to the history of programming and music (as well as the various contemporary options for musicians involved with creative technologies), it is hard to imagine it...