New technology, new techniques: The aesthetics of electronic music in the 1950's1
Gianmario Borio · Interface · 1993
The appearance of electronic music at the beginning of the 1950s presented a challenge for musicology: it showed the need for a new evaluation of the role played by techniques and technologies in the creative process. Traditionalists, like Riezler and Blume, considered technology as something alien to art and the electronic composition as a dehumanization of music. Opposite points of view were expressed by Adorno and Rognoni. Adorno distinguished between the banal use of technology in film industry, entertainment and radio, and the creative possibilities of the new instruments. Rognoni, influenced by Heidegger, understood technology as a means for investigating the nature of sound. The Darmstadt Ferienkurse gave plenty of space to discussions around the aesthetics of electronic music: in 1950 with lectures of Beyer and Meyer‐Eppler, in 1951 with a conference on music and technology, in 1956 with a round‐table about compositional possibilities of electronic music. Problems of electronic music were close by connected with those of serial techniques. The history of these debates is the history itself of the artistical legitimization of electronic sounds in music.