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

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

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Origins: Creating a Laboratory Chapter 2. Kinship: Cage, Tudor, and the Timbral Utopia Chapter 3. Collaboration: The Science and Culture of Additive Synthesis Chapter 4. Reclaiming Technology: From Information Theory to Statistical Form Chapter 5: Controversy: The Aleatory Debates beyond Darmstadt Chapter 6: Techno-Synthesis: From Vocoder Speech to Electronic Music Epilogue Glossary of Actors Endnotes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Jennifer Iverson is a scholar of twentieth-century music, with a special emphasis on electronic music, avant-gardism, and disability studies. Jennifer's work crosses freely between music theory, musicology, sound studies, and cultural history, drawing together analysis, archival research, and intellectual discourse. Her articles appear in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the American Musicological Society, twentieth-century music, and Music Theory Online. In 2015-16 she was a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and now teaches at the University of Chicago.

Review :
"Electronic Inspirations offers a number of interesting and worthwhile insights into the avant-garde electronic music of the 1950s, both in terms of historical detail and theoretical interpretation, synthesizing a great deal of published and unpublished material." -- Sam Ridout, Transposition "This book is addressed to an audience not only of experts but also of students and music lovers. Iverson's effort to introduce the actors, networks, and music to all kinds of readers in an astute way is very compelling. Anyone interested in electronic music and its networks will find much to enjoy in Iverson's work." -- João Romão, Revue de musicologie "A brilliant book, pulsating with excitement: Iverson makes instant connections faster than an electric circuit, transmits information more accurately than magnetic tape, and creates a network of actors more complex than the Cologne Radio Station." --Alexander Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Harvard University "This fascinating account of the Cologne West German Radio Station and its famous underground electronic music studio traces how international networks, surplus cold war technology, and cybernetic visions and imaginaries shaped and inspired the new genre. Born from repression, the dance of agency between humans and technology, Iverson argues, is the key to understanding how this music developed. Ironically it would eventually transmogrify into today's joyous Electronic Dance Music - capital city: Berlin!" --Trevor Pinch, author of Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer "Taking the studio as an object of scholarly inquiry...helps to make legible a dynamic that is often only dimly discernible." -- Matthew Mendez, Yale University, Society for Music Theory