Are Electroacoustic Composers Our Friends?
Electroacoustic composers have a long way to go before they can become friends with audiences and performers (and this is coming from a composer with some success in this medium). Last week, I guest-lectured to college sophomore music majors and found out that only two of them knew any electroacoustic music (one was a composer, the other recently heard my Eastern Pinnacle for Clarinet and CD). This is even more surprising considering they had just had a unit in electroacoustic music in their Music History/Literature course.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between audiences when college music students have troubles naming one piece. The Kronos quartet is a needle in the haystack of mainstream ensembles that has bridged the gap with performances of recent works such as Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic and Clint Mansell’s music for Requiem for a Dream.
Audiences also do not care to purchase recordings of electroacoustic music, particularly early ventures. This is made obvious by record industry sales. Amazon’s library includes a mere 82 hits on a search for the word “electroacoustic” in their music department. Of these, only half are “classical“.
For performers’ sake, composers need to understand that they are generally not trained to work with electronics. Perhaps it is the most difficult task of electroacoustic composers to make an easy coordination between performer and electronics. For example, a recent premier of an electroacoustic piece by an experienced composer took a great deal of extra rehearsal due to the previously unperceived difficulty of coordination with the recorded electronics despite the fact that the composer was one of the two performers on stage. The piece was an incredibly interesting exploration of tuning systems and timbre, but I can only imagine how much less work could have been required had the coordination been easy.
Clearly, there is also no longer a need for cumbersome inventions such as the Sequential Resonation Machine. I think perhaps composers would be better served by pushing professionalism on established instruments, such as the Theremin.
Steps are, however, being made to make friends with these composers. A recent book, A Life of Sound Ideas chronicles the life of Leo Beranek, a pioneer in electroacoustics. It would not hurt classical composers to also start taking cues from musicians such as jazz guitarist Elliott Sharp in his use of electronics in a medium that already works. But as long as composers such as Paul Rudy can continue to win such awards as the Guggenheim for his electroacoustic work, I think we still have hope to one day make friends and have fun together.
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