A History of Electronic Music

They all worked, and nobody knew what to do with them.

Two postwar European schools made electronic music from opposite starting points, and they turned out to be the two halves of every studio since.

The purity argument did not last. Stockhausen mixed a recorded boy's voice into electronic tone in "Gesang der Jünglinge" in 1955 and 1956, and after that there were two toolboxes instead of two camps.

For fifteen years you could only make electronic music if an institution let you in, because tape machines, oscillators and mixing desks cost as much as a house. Almost every studio belonged to a broadcaster or a university: Paris, Cologne, Milan, Tokyo, Columbia-Princeton in New York from 1958, and the Philips lab in Eindhoven, where Edgard Varèse built "Poème électronique" for hundreds of loudspeakers at the 1958 world fair.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, founded on 1 April 1958, matters most for what came later, because it made themes and effects for television. Electronic sound reached millions of homes without a modern music label on it. Delia Derbyshire realized the Doctor Who theme in 1963 with test oscillators and hand-cut tape, every note sliced to length, without a single synthesizer.

The idea that changed everything sounds dull written down: let voltage set the controls instead of your hand. Put a voltage on the oscillator and the pitch changes. Put it on the filter and the filter opens. Modules can drive each other, and one volt came to mean one octave, an agreement between makers that made their machines compatible.

Robert Moog showed his first modules in 1964 and put a piano keyboard on them, so a musician understood the thing immediately. Don Buchla, designing from 1963 in San Francisco, refused the keyboard on principle and built touch plates and sequencers instead. That split runs to this day.

A sequencer plays a row of notes without anyone pressing anything. That is more far-reaching than it sounds. It repeats a figure without tiring, so repetition turns from a limit into a method, and because it keeps running while you turn the knobs, playing shifts from what sounds to how it sounds. That is the core of techno, invented twenty years earlier.

Three Roland machines decide the rest of this story, and they are constantly mixed up:

The most important step here is social. David Mancuso started private loft parties in New York in 1970 for an audience that was largely Black, Latino and gay, with no stage and no band. Francis Grasso had worked out beatmatching around the same time, so the music never had to stop, and that is a formal principle.

The four-on-the-floor kick came from a drummer, not a machine. Earl Young played a kick on every beat on "The Love I Lost" by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1973, with a hi-hat opening on the offbeat above it. The machines copied it later. The twelve-inch single, first sold for the dance floor in May 1976, forced the form we still use: long intro, extended instrumental, breakdown, build. And in 1977 Giorgio Moroder, Pete Bellotte and Donna Summer made "I Feel Love" with a Moog modular, a sequencer, one real kick and the vocal, where disco records had been played by orchestras until then.

After disco was dropped by the labels in 1979, Chicago clubs stopped receiving records that fit. Frankie Knuckles, resident at the Warehouse from 1977, started rebuilding existing records with a tape machine and a drum machine underneath. The name came from the record shop, where customers asked for the music from the Warehouse, which makes it a rare genre name that came from the scene instead of a marketing department. Jesse Saunders's "On and On" from 1984 usually gets called the first house production, and Phuture's "Acid Tracks" followed in 1987, made on a 303 whose manual nobody had read. See house and EDM.

Techno started in Detroit and is not a European invention. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson knew each other from school in Belleville, and Eddie Fowlkes was there from the start. Atkins took the word from Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave", which describes techno rebels who take technology back for their own community. Their own labels, Metroplex, Transmat and KMS, kept them owners of their work. The 1988 British compilation was going to be called "The New House Sound Of Detroit" and came out as "Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit", which is when the word went international. See techno.

British djs heard house at Amnesia on Ibiza in September 1987 and started their own nights in London that autumn, which became the second summer of love in 1988 and 1989. When the clubs closed too early the parties moved to warehouses and fields, with locations announced at the last minute.

In 1990 a new law raised the maximum fine for an unlicensed party from two thousand to twenty thousand pounds. After tens of thousands of people gathered at Castlemorton Common in May 1992, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 gave police powers over outdoor night-time gatherings of a hundred or more, and defined the music as sound wholly or predominantly characterised by a succession of repetitive beats. A parliament defining a genre by its rhythm.

British hardcore responded by speeding up and swapping the four-on-the-floor for accelerated breakbeats from old funk records, which became jungle and then drum and bass. UK garage and dubstep came out of the same ground, and that is why British dance music runs on breakbeats.

The next turning point is the one where the machine disappears, and it happened in four steps:

In twenty years the threshold went from a broadcast studio to a secondhand laptop, and composer, engineer, musician and producer became one person at one screen.

There is no single main line any more, and that is the characteristic. Around 2010 the American industry marketed existing dance music as EDM, which is a sales category and not a genre. Clubs went the other way and got stricter, with Berlin door policies and camera bans that protect the same kind of room house and techno came out of. Hardware came back too, through a 1995 German standard for small interchangeable modules that grew into a market of hundreds of makers.

The most important development of the last decade came from neither Europe nor America. Amapiano grew from the mid 2010s in Gauteng in South Africa, with a low tempo, jazzy piano chords, wide pads and the log drum in the place of the kick. It spread exactly the way this article keeps describing: made on secondhand laptops with pirated software, passed around by bluetooth, WhatsApp and usb sticks.

Seven times the same story. Tape was for broadcasters and became the first tool for composing with sound. The voltage-controlled synthesizer was for universities and ended up in music shops. The 303 was a practice bass and became acid house. The 808 was panned for not sounding like drums and became hip-hop. The 909 lasted a year and became house and techno. The home computer was for word processing and became the studio. The laptop was office equipment and became a stage instrument. Underneath all of it sits the same social fact: the people who used the machine wrong usually had no access to the good gear.