The electronic music movement was born in the computer labs and universities of downtown New York City and Europe in the late 1940’s. Back then, the only people who performed and grooved to its random electonic blips, bleeps and flutters were engineering and philosophy majors.
Their instruments were tape machines, oscillators, dials and knobs. But over 50 years a quiet revolution has taken the music out of the labs and onto the streets. Rock bands like the Beatles, Genesis, and Led Zepplin were the first to borrow these sounds and take them out of the classical avant-garde scene.
Today, DJ’s, producers, and pop musicians have brought the experimental sound works of pioneers like John Cage and Pierre Schaffer into the techno, jungle, house and illbient clubs all over the world.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Tod Machover, Composer and Director of Hyperinstruments/Opera-of-the-Future Group, MIT Media Lab and Morton Subotnick, one of the world’s premier composers of electronic music.