Living Electronic Music. By Simon Emmerson.
Mike J Clarke · Music and Letters · 2009
The way music is composed, performed, and consumed has been radically altered by rapid technological developments in the last sixty years. Even acoustic music from earlier periods is now most frequently mediated by electronic means. For new music the possibilities afforded by the new technology are numerous. It is, for example, possible to construct music from recorded environmental sounds, immerse the audience in sounds from a 3D array of loudspeakers, improvise live on stage with laptops, or use EEG data from performers to shape music. What are the aesthetic implications of these developments? Does the involvement of technology make the music less ‘human’ or less ‘alive’? Are there any relationships between the many different styles of music that now employ very similar technologies? Simon Emmerson is well placed to tackle such issues. His first book, The Language of Electroacoustic Music (London, 1986), an edited collection, played an important role in establishing the study of the aesthetics of electroacoustic music. Twenty-two years on, this publication remains an important text. Emmerson's second edited collection, Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Ashgate, 2000), is notable for the breadth of musical style it embraces and its broader engagement with issues concerning culture and electronic media. In Living Electronic Music, his first monograph, Emmerson continues both the concern to develop the aesthetics of electronic music and to place it in a wider musical and cultural context. The book is virtuosic in its juggling of many different musics and many different interdisciplinary references. As the author has admitted, it ‘proved impossible to construct a straight-through narrative for this book. Each chapter is designed to be a self-sufficient essay, yet all cross-reference and “need” each other to get the bigger picture’ (p. xiv). Many threads (e.g. space, causality, performance) run through the book, reappearing in several chapters in different contexts and each essay is in itself a rich and complex interweaving of materials. This is a distinctive strength of the book but one that makes it difficult to encapsulate in a review.