Karlheinz Stockhausen
Gesang der Jünglinge

Essential History of Electronic Music

I. From the Theremin to Gesang

It is widely accepted that every creative process finds its raison d'être in invention. What does it owe its course to? It is the genius that shapes the idea: the archetype is molded through personal speculation or on behalf of an already acquired general trend. This latter case, not uncommon in many great historical inventions, characterizes what is considered from a sonic point of view the most forward-thinking invention of the twentieth century: electronic music tout court, the rational renewal of pre-20th-century acoustic music.

The creative process of electronics, therefore, has its roots in an inventive path characterized by a notable array of valuable structural interventions: no one has “invented” electronic music or can claim the right to have dictated its definitive style; the search for new alternatives to the relatively limited variety of sounds and timbres provided by traditional music is now felt, in the first half of the twentieth century, as a peculiar trend of the new musical avant-garde. The most interesting experiment is the one that gives birth to the legendary theremin, considered one of the first actual electronic instruments: its inventor, Lev Termen, could only witness its actual use many years later, when it became the sacrificial victim of authors like Robert Moog. The 1920s thus become a rich stage for fundamental instrumental inventions for the continuation of twentieth-century sound research; indeed, the first decades of the century will provide inspiration for what will appear as the decisive musical laboratory for the affirmation of twentieth-century electronic music: the “Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète” by Pierre Schaeffer, a cultural circle in which the primordial form of electronics, that “concrete music” created through the recording of sounds from any real object, comes to light. The electronic musical instruments of the preceding decades are soon recovered: the theremin and the martenot come back in vogue, finally appearing in the first actual instrumental compositions.

The two most fervent minds in the compositional field are Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgar Varèse. They are credited with the first electronic works tout court of the new musical course, the first well-structured snippets of the latest sonic trend: between Paris and Cologne, in the cultural whirlwind involving authors like Henry and Boulez, the two composers reinvent electronics. Varèse’s symphonic poem Désserts sees the light in the first half of the 1950s, positioning itself as one of the first “concrete” works of the French school: the instrumental ensemble, an evolution of the orchestration of the previous Symphonie pour un homme seul by Schaeffer and Henry, is composed of winds, percussion, and tape recordings. It is the most representative symphonic archetype of the first true electronic work of all time: the childlike round dance of Gesang der Jünglinge by Karlheinz Stockhausen, an essential work where a children's song blends with an electronic synthesis operation that takes its cue from the traditional tape recordings of the Group de Recherche. Through the study of oscillators, Stockhausen crafts twelve minutes of complex electroacoustic babel characterized by quarrels and recompositions of vocal and electric elements: the musical textures are rooted in the apparent contrast between noise and aspiration to sing. Filled with the charm every novelty brings along, the Gesang der Jünglinge rises to a masterpiece in the chronological sense, appearing as the first chapter of a foretold new musical era. With it, Stockhausen evolves Schaeffer's concrete music, overcoming the limitations provided by the scarce range of sounds reproducible by a concrete object: through electronic synthesis, sound is explored in its multiformity.

For now, it is a search that deals with defining the synthesis of mere sound through electronics: in the Gesang, as in previous works of concrete music, electronic music does not replace the traditional orchestra but sits alongside it, presenting itself as a filler or noisy counterpoint: the experimentation deals with the use of electronics, not its supposed orchestral guise. Noisy vortices, steep scales, atonal downpours. Not a melodic guise, not a rhythmic function: electronic experimentation appears in the finished work, but it is not a central element.

But for the new evolutions, mind you, there is still much time...

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