New Historics

Two developments in music that we learned about this week changed my impression of historical "electronic" music.

The first was Arnold Schoenburg's break with Tonality in 1907 and the continuation of this in 1913 with the "emancipation of dissonance." I played trumpet and piano as a child and I know play guitar, so thinking of music outside of the traditional scale system seems difficult to comprehend for me. However, I can definitely understand how limiting the scale system is. Music and tone are truly a spectrum, going from 15Hz to 20,000Hz for humans. Any division we overlay upon this spectrum is arbitrary, and it is amazing that one system of divisions by 7 has been maintained as the only system by which we can write or transcode music. It is also incredibly limiting, that a middle "c" for example always has to be 440Hz, and is used to tune every orchestra in the world, without variation.

The other was the music device called the teleharmonium. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, now that we have complex electronic circuits that allow for an amplifier to exist in the palm of my hand. But to imagine a 60 foot wide, 200 ton organ is difficult, but is a good example of what it meant to look forward a century ago.