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For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Collaborating with scientists and technicians, the studio's composers coaxed music from oscillators, generators, filters, and magnetic tape, reclaiming and repurposing military machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of mid-century electronic music. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical
Avant-Garde traces the development of this music into a quintessential Cold War innovation-one that reverberated as much with anxiety as with the promise of a new age.
Info autore
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.
Riassunto
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.
Testo aggiuntivo
The greatest achievement in Iverson's book is that she documents and brings into focus the collaborative spirit of larger networks of actors and institutions, with regards both to the activities in WDR and the discourse between composers internationally...This makes her book a very worthwhile read for all interested in the early foundations of electronic music and for all engaged in the contemporary development of a plurality of new electronic music dialects.
