A Guide to Electronic Music

Paul Griffiths A Guide to Electronic Music (1979)
Back in 1981, I won the school art prize for drawing pictures good. They asked me what I wanted and I said this book, which I'd noticed in the book shop at Warwick University. I'd discovered Throbbing Gristle through raids on Graham's older brother's record collection, and had somehow come across the suggestion of electronic music having been originated by Stockhausen and others associated with the classical tradition. Unfortunately, Griffiths' guide struck me as a bit dry back in 1981 even before factoring in the absence of pictures, and I never got around to reading it.

Forty years later, having discovered a couple of Stockhausen discs in a local record store, it seemed like time to make the effort.

Actually, it is kind of dry, if reasonably informative in terms of the history of electronic music as it stood in 1979, and the stuff about Pierre Schaeffer and the subsequent artistic division between musique concrète and pure electronic sound; but it's also a tad limited in scope, with no mention of Russolo - who should surely count at least as a precedent for non-musical sound repurposed in a musical context - and a certain classical bias revealed in the token section on rock music. While I didn't really expect entire chapters devoted to either Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, both of whom were very much on the radar by 1979, a greater page count than would seem warranted is devoted to Switched on fucking Bach and those bands apparently legitimised by sheer technical achievement such as Yes and their ilk. Punk rock, for example, is dismissed as a reaction to technological sophistication. This seems to present a contradiction given the enthusiastic focus on avant garde classical pieces dispensing with tradition by embracing chance and improvisation as legitimate methods of composition and performance; and once we're done with the historical testimony, the remainder of the guide mostly provides descriptions of pieces I haven't heard by composers with whom I'm only vaguely familiar, the value of which is probably subjective.

Classical music isn't really my territory, and although there are pieces I appreciate, my appreciation is intuitive and emotional, so neither the mathematics nor the ingenuity of the composition make much difference to me. While I find the factors informing the composition of certain pieces by Stockhausen interesting, for example, the last word for me is whether the piece works when you listen to it. Unfortunately I get the impression that the historical and artistic value of classical music tends to be inextricably tied to technical concerns rather than whatever we may feel when we hear it, and this applies as much to avant garde classical despite it being additionally associated with modernism as the musical counterpart to painting, writing and so on. This constitutes something of a contradiction given the shift of creative emphasis introduced with Cubism, for example, in contrast to traditional nineteenth century painting. If an equivalent shift occurred in classical music, the hegemony of structural and compositional sophistication as indicative of value remained as it ever was, hence innovation within any other field, particularly rock, garnering an indulgent pat on the head for having succeeded despite the patronage of chavs, teddy boys, and other unwashed types. In other words, if one is allowed a simple emotional response to the paintings of Pollock or Rothko, appreciation of Stockhausen and his colleagues remains an exclusive club. I suspect this may have been what Cornelius Cardew was getting at, although writing condescending songs in honour of all his cloth-capped pals down t't pit probably wasn't the greatest solution.

Griffiths' book works well enough as a guide and an introduction, having furnished me with the titles of at least a few things I feel I should hear, but is otherwise hampered by its tone and general criteria being so deeply embedded within the academic tradition it discusses with all the usual biases of class, high art, and people who went to proper schools. Just this week I listened to a CD of works by Schaeffer, Stockhausen and the rest followed immediately by Smell & Quim's Nativity Colostomy, and they all sounded like different expressions of the exact same tradition with the transition from one disc to the other barely even registering as such. Admittedly, Griffiths' book was written well before pretty much all music counted as electronic music, but I feel there really should have been something in here which allows for the existence of Smell & Quim, amongst others.