"To varying extents, each of these pieces also suggested a problem that electronic music now faces. Its sounds are either deliberately artificial or alterations of the familiar. In either case, electronic swells and sonic polyps, far from becoming abstract musical tools, tend to seem self-conscious, all too vulnerable to cliched imaginings. The basic electronic vocabulary has become inextricably associated with scores that suggest groundlessness or strange other worlds (as in science fiction, horror and nature films)...."
- Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 1992, reviewing League of Composers/ISCM concert tribute to the late Bulent Arel
Polyps! Ambiguous analogy - they can be beautiful coral thingies on the seabed OR potentially lethal tissue growths in the colon
"Groundlessness" is a good, evocative, hard-to-pin description of electronic abstraction
To the larger point, though ---
cf Mark Fisher on future-capture, the trammeling of the once-unknown by cliches, an encrustation of associations -
"The problem is that the word ‘futuristic’ no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen. In the 70s, ‘futuristic’ meant synthesizers. In the 80s, it meant sequencers and cut and paste montage. In the 90s, it meant the abstract digital sounds opened up by the sampler and its function such as timestretching. In each of these cases, there was a sense that, through sound, we were getting a small but powerful taste of a world that would be completely different from anything we had hitherto experienced. That’s why a film like Terminator, with its idea of the future invading the present, was so crucial for 90s dance music. Now, insofar as ‘futuristic’ has any meaning, it is as a vague but fixed style, a bit like a typographical font. ‘Futuristic’ in music is something like ‘gothic’ in fonts. It points to an already existing set of associations. ‘Futuristic’ means something electronic, just as it did in the 60s and 70s." [my underline]
cf Phil Knight, commenting (earlier on this very blog, I think)
"The Future always has that aura of thrilling trepidation... feeds the Spenglerian hunger for infinity.... The Future marks a further distancing from the natural world, from the tangible, and therefore takes us closer to our destiny, which we expect to be angelic, but know to be alienation. But, the ride to the future in music is not exponential - it just feels that way. The move from acoustic to electric to electronic suggests a teleological progression, but I can't see how you can get any more artificial than synthesized music. Once you are there, you have reached the peak of abstraction.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It is interesting that for the NY Times classical / avant-garde reviewer at the Bulent Arel elegy, electronic music was already in the rear-view mirror in 1992 - even as things like Rufige Cru's "Terminator" and a score of other techno-rave tunes / directions were reigniting a fresh future for electronic dance music.
A little less than a decade earlier, John Rockwell was already voicing a similar sentiment circa 1984- that electronic music, once clearly - and for many alarmingly - the future destiny of serious composition, had now slipped into the passé zone - and was now a backwater of serious music.
"Only a few years ago, electronic music seemed ready to sweep all other music aside. Traditionalists worried nervously about music composed by machines, and predicted a dehumanizing Armageddon. Today, outside a few specialist enclaves, one hears very little about the subject. The odd loudspeaker still pops up at a contemporary-music concert, adding a bit of amplification, synthesized sound or filtering to live instrumentalists. But otherwise, along with their abandonment of serialism, composers seem to have forsaken electronically generated or reproduced sound, as well."
(from All American Music - the chapter on David Behrman, taken to represent a new direction of humanized electronic music - homemade, funky, miniaturized)
