History of art- The Electronic age

             The wonder of electricity - which could supply power of the production, transmission, and recording of sound- opened of new world for the 21^st century musician. Instruments were developed to produce sound electrically: the vacuum tube to intensify sounds, and oscillator to generate sound electrically.

As new inventions appeared on the panorama, composer like Verse called for new instruments, “the composer and electrician,” he said, “Will have to labor together.”

             To the general public, newly invented tape recorder was marvelous machine. But to composers- man like Verses, and Otto Luening and Valdmir Ussachevsky at Colombia University- the tape recorder was a totally new pleasant-sounding instrument. It could be used to collect and transform sounds in ways never before possible. Tape could be used to alter the shape and speed of a sound, to play a sound backward, or to layer it with other sound in complex combinations.

              In Paris, Composer Pierre Schaffer created a piece made from the record sound of railroad trains. He called this type of composition “Musique concrete”, to differentiate it from traditional composition, which begins as a written score ends in sound. Schaffer’s music began with concentrate sounds that could be transformed through tape into a composition.