* * * * * * * kdm

...dass wir in Bern das Album SEVEN UP aufgenommen haben (Ash Ra Tempel & Timothy Leary). Untergebracht hatte man uns außerhalb auf 'ner Alm; ich erinnere gerne und vor allem den nächtlichen Sternenhimmel (ohne Lichtverschmutzung!) & das mannigfaltige Läuten von Kuhglocken.

Compared to the whizz of the light, the SOUND comes gently along. It is considerably more earthly and closer to us. The auricle has the shape of a funnel and one imagines hearing as if something were poured into us as into a vessel. Music penetrates right into our centre and twitches from there through all our limbs. You can lie down in music like water, drink it like wine, be shaken by it like wind, irradiated by it like light; beat and rhythm drive into your bones and muscles as a moving force, in short: it has body and is in our body. There are people on whom it has the effect of a drug, stimulating to the point of ecstasy, destructive in its after-effects, dissolving and softening; Wagneritis at times certainly had the effect of an alcoholic epidemic, violent wine injected directly into the veins. A very coarse variety is the raucous concert in the beer and coffee house, which drives out all contemplation with its din and numbs the nerves like a thick beer vapour. No art gets into the blood as strongly as music. The physical effect is often stronger than the artistic effect.

I don't make music myself, at least not professionally. I believe that the many music I am listening to is more important to me than the music I would play myself. I can and I do listen to all the music that I like, ...but I could not play what I would like to play, because a musician can only play music that he is able to play.(kdm, The KS Circle # 67, based on an idea of J.L. Borges)

Welcome to the club, Van the Man !

Es ist nicht einzusehen, warum der Hörer so viel weniger üben soll als der Musiker.(Peter Sloterdijk)

Früher haben die Kinder ihre Eltern mit Rock-Musik genervt, heute ist es umgekehrt.

In 1999, a friend wanted to put together a CD-Box for an American label that should include the pioneers of Electronic Music, those who were influential and important for this genre. He asked for my opinion. I answered in length, and my choices were this:
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From the names you give I would select with my well-known strictness :-)
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Stockhausen's "Gesang der Jünglinge" (tell the people that this was it, maily. 96% of what else he did, is NOT electronic or even electric. Besides, this track didn't influence the young people but it only shocked some of the older, "serious" academic people who didn't and never will have any influence on the young music scene. When "Gesang der Jünglinge" came out, the youngsters were listening to Belafonte, Elvis (four No.1 singles and two No.1 albums in the USA in that one year), The Platters, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line", Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Johnny Ray, ...and to a certain Pat Boone.

Eno (an early track. If he ever would have made it without the immense & flashy "Roxy Music" fame?

Tangerine Dream's second or third album. Zeit or Alpha Centauri is a good choice.

Kraftwerk. An earlier track than "Robots".

Edgar Varèse.

Pierre Henry. I saw and heard him recently, also his new CD. He's stuck deeply in the fifties. Each of today's teenage Techo DJ makes better "electronic". But Henry's early collaboration with a pop group were of some influence, at least then. I think the group was "Spooky Tooth".

Walter Carlos of course. In my humble opinions it all started with him in the late sixties. Before, ?electronic music? or ?synthesizers? did not exist in peoples? minds. Try to get his "Timesteps," said KS.

Morton Subotnick "Silver Apples on the Moon".

Ussachevsky. A fifties' title as example for all the academics who did similar experiments at the universities in Princetown, Paris, Utrecht, and Leningrad.

Tonto's Expanding Head Band.

Schulze (an early track, from "Irrlicht" for instance. He was indeed the only one who seriously und totally experimented with electronic sounds since the early seventies and outside & beyond the "serious" academic circles ... who did not stop, and who influenced all those synthesizer one-man-shows who came up in the late seventies, and still :-)

Beaver & Krause.

White Noise. "Electric Storm" (1969) was a widely known and influencial album.

Mort Garson (plenty of popular and strictly electronic albums).

...and that's all that comes spontaneously to my mind. Some of the names from your list are new to me (probably just known in the USA?), some I would place in the eighties, and some are better known for doing this or that, but they were of no "electronic" influence. The "Theremin" or the "Trautonium" come to my mind, they are still (for 60 years now) just novelties, funny inventions that had and still have no influence whatsoever. It's just that journalists mention these strange looking & sounding, unique instruments again and again. After all, it's a headline and a story ...like the sensation of a two-headed dog :-) It doesn't belong into a serious sampler.

»Die einen machen die Musik, die anderen verstehen sie.« (Beda Venerabilis, 672-735)

»... so bewirkt die Musik einen guten Charakter, indem dieser sich gewöhnt, an musikalischer Beschäftigung rechte Freude zu empfinden.«(Albertus Magnus, um 1200-1280)

»Der vollkommene Musikgenuss besteht daher im vollkommenen Musikverstehen.« (Johannes Tinctoris, 1435-1511)


»Das Nachdenken über Musik fördert auch heute noch das Verständnis der Kunst, der Welt, der Menschen. Die Musik betrifft nicht nur den Bereich der Emotionen!« (zeitloser Appell)

»Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on« (a British beat combo,1968)

»Was ist ein Synthesizer?« (fragt ein Radio-Journalist 1975 Klaus Schulze)

»Ich mache elektronische Musik.«(sagt 1998 die Schlagersängerin 'Blümchen', geboren 1980)

Kaiser Franz I. war überhaupt ein sehr leutseliger Herr. Einmal hörte er zu, als Beethoven auf dem Klavier spielte; nach dem Konzert ließ er sich den Künstler kommen, klopfte ihm auf die Schulter und sprach: "Herr Kapellmeister, Sie sind ja ein Tausendsassa!" (Victor Auburtin, 1923)