Reviewing the musicology of electroacoustic music: a plea for greater triangulation

Abstract

Both electroacoustic music and its associated musicology subjects based on personal experience or of a more are a half century old. Although the number of relevant general nature. technological developments during this time could be said to Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of be extremely high, its music has known relatively few scholarship emanates from within the community heroes, at least within contemporary art music, and written might not be an ideal situation. The terms emic and scholarship demonstrates a bias towards formalism and etic, which are used in ethnomusicology and fields therefore much less of one towards the contextual, having an association with anthropology, come to aesthetic, reception, etc. The previous sentence implies an mind. The former approach refers to 'an analysis that imbalance worthy of addressing. This article is less a survey reflects the viewpoint of native informants' (Nattiez of what exists in the area of electroacoustic music 1990: 61); the latter, 'an analysis accomplished only scholarship than one looking into delineating the area and suggesting where the 'holes in the market' might be and by means of the methodological tools and categories how they might be filled. Are the fields of sonic art and its of the researcher' (ibid., my own emphasis). As you musicology intentionally avoiding coherence? And why do can see, the latter need not necessarily imply an outmusicologists of the music of notes continue to avoid the sider, but does suggest detachment. The only 'outmusicology of the music of sounds? Finally, triangulation, siders' generally writing about the subject are i.e. the use of feedback and evaluation so rarely applied in journalists and the occasional musicologist. 2 The forelectroacoustic music(ologogical) contexts, is promoted as a mer group is useful for providing general contextual means to greater cohesion and understanding, avoiding what feedback, but not much more normally. The latter is is called an 'island mentality' demonstrated by many so unusual that these people are more or less autoindividuals working in all areas of the sonic arts. matically taken into the electroacoustic practitioners community, perhaps reducing the detachment referred to above.

Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–1968

“…Such examples point to the Catalog ’s totemic status as a unique record of historical activities in electronic music. Landy, in an article on the musicology of electroacoustic music, goes so far as to use a single footnote reference to the Catalog as a general pointer to the entire ‘history of [electroacoustic] music (and its pre-history)’ (Landy 1999: 64).…”

On Style in Electroacoustic Music

“…As electroacoustic music has steadily moved from a marginal position as a form of hybrid practice somewhere between elektronische Musik and musique concrète (Manning 2013: 203 et seq .) to incorporate ‘any music in which electricity has had some involvement in sound registration and/or production’ (Landy 1999: 61), so genres have begun to appear everywhere, like fake Georgian facades in the remnants of a 1960s concrete jungle. In flagrant contradiction of Simon Emmerson’s opening premise in The Language of Electroacoustic Music , genres nowadays tend to form and dissolve at a dizzying rate 1 .…”

20 Years of Organised Sound: Looking back and forward

“…This could emphasise the ‘why’ of the project or at least contextualise it,the use of an action research model or at least the inclusion of some sort(s) of triangulation as part of any project, andapplicability/linkage with regard to any outcomes. (Landy 1999: 66)…”