A six-part series – first broadcast in 2013 – in which James Gardner traces a personal path through the evolving world of electronic music and interviews some of the pioneers who made it happen. Over 100 years of recording techniques, electronic instruments and gizmos … their use in popular music, art music and their position in Western culture.
The series was co-produced with Tim Dodd.
Episode 1 – Everything Audible in the World Becomes Material
We start at the Brussels World’s Fair, Expo ’58 where a number of threads in the story were to converge and thence to radiate.
Then we go back in time to Rabelais who wrote presciently about frozen sounds back in the 16th Century.
We look at a variety of very early technologies and concepts that were to play an important role in the development of electronic music: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph; Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone; John Cage’s CREDO manifesto; Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori – mechanical noise instruments; Percy Grainger’s and Conlon Nancarrow’s work with player pianos; early electronic instruments the Theremin and Ondes Martenot; the mind-boggling work done by Russian film-makers, laboriously piecing together optical soundtracks; and much more.