Composing Electronic Music

Curtis Roads is a natural person to attempt a compendium of electronic-music composition, as an established composer and author of the authoritative if bulky text The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, Mass., 1996, to be revised 2017; the revision will no doubt remain just as hard to read on a bus). Rather than survey all of electronic music composition across popular and art music practice, Roads accepts a limit to his investigation early on, essentially the territory of electroacoustic art music, and places emphasis on granular techniques covered in his earlier monograph Microsound (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) and most readily applicable to his own compositional practice. A basic nested hierarchy of Roads’s preoccupations might be stereotyped by the categories: electronic music → electroacoustic art music emphasizing timbral transformation and spatialization → the aesthetic of Roads’s own electroacoustic pieces, most likely involving some element of granular mutation over time. Roads is an engaging author, well read, and willing to approach a topic from a number of angles. He makes especial engagement with pioneering composers such as Varèse, Cage, Xenakis, Schaeffer, and Stockhausen, that is, the usual modernist male suspects, which is not to deny their historical role. He perhaps quotes from them to excess, at the expense of more recent theory, though plenty of later composers and ideas do make an appearance, and female composers such as Daphne Oram and Natasha Barrett have contributions acknowledged.

Aesthetics · Art · Compendium · Composition (language) · Electroacoustic music · Electronic music · Hierarchy · Linguistics · Literature · Music education · Music history · Musical composition · Natural (archaeology) · Period (music) · Popular music · Spatialization · Visual arts · History · Music · Music Technology and Sound Studies · Philosophy