Product Description

From Leon Theremin to software synths, and from Kraftwerk to gangster rap, the electronic music explosion has made an impact on almost every aspect of the music industry. This book tells the exciting stories of the people and inventions that revolutionized the musical sound palette. Electronic Music Pioneers is an expansive title filled with exhaustive research and useful knowledge about the methods and history of electronic music. The book features an extensive timeline, as well as interviews with synth legends like keyboard designer Dr. Robert Moog and artist Klaus Schulze.Composer, musician and journalist Ben Kettlewell has been involved with almost every aspect of the music industry for over three decades. In the early '80s, he hosted a popular public radio program, Imaginary Visions, which was one of the first electronic music series aired in the United States. He has also written scores for various theatrical and film projects, including Jonathan Morrill's 1992 cult film Johnny in Monsterland.He lives in Marina Del Ray, California.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #581612 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 286 pages

From the Author
In the twentieth century, new advancements in technology allowed a much more diverse musical palette for the musician or composer to choose from. The combination of traditional instruments and new breed of musical instruments have opened up exciting new possibilities for interaction between musical cultures.

As a result of these new forms of exploration, by the mid-1970s, music created with synthesizers and other electronic instruments quickly became the most influential development in the modern musical panorama.

Electronic Music Pioneers features interviews with artists and inventors. Together they give the reader a clear picture of the development and incorporation of these instruments in every form of music. It would take many volumes to cover every instrument, every genre, every musician involved in the many facets of electronic music. As in the analogy of many layers of an onion, every time we think we’re really getting a grasp on the history and evolution of music technology, we discover another "layer of reality," and realize we’re just scratching the surface.

Customer Reviews

Dissapointing, for a $21 book........
This book, although comprehensive to be sure, often paints in extremely broad or disconnected brush strokes, leaving me wishing there was more detailat times. This was especially evident in the first section, a seemingly endless series of brief bio's of various figures who are presented as key players in the development of electronic music, with very little indication of how they might actually fit into the historical continuum, or how they might relate to each other.

Also, I'm not an expert, but I noticed some factual errors (for example: 'Whiter Shade of Pale', is by Procol Harum, not the Moody Blues; Stanley Clark is a bassist, not a guitarist; LFO stands for Low Frequency Oscillator, not Low Filter Oscillator). These may seem like minor errors, but in a book intended to give technical or historical information, they throw doubt on the integrity of the rest of the facts presented. Also, the presence of typo's and grammatical errors made me wonder if this was hastily edited, to capitalize on the current craze for all things analog and electronic.

The interview with Klaus Shultz contains an opinion about music downloading that is woefully out of touch (the cost of phone service to download a CD is more than the cost of a CD?), which, granted, is his opinion, but in a book purported to educate those who are unexposed to the technology is also misleading, and also very surprising for a book published in 2002.

Finally, the format/layout is approximately 8.5x11, but the pages are half-empty. Although this may be considered innovative graphic design, it implies that the publisher wished the book to seem more substantial than its content would support, in a book of convential size and layout.

I also have read Frank Trocco's book on the Moog synthesizer (which also covers the Buchla, ARP, and others), and found it to be far superior. I'd recommend anyone just getting into this subject to start there instead.

Magnificent History!
In this scholarly work , Kettlewell discusses the work of composers, inventors and performers who shifted the boundaries of music in regard to sound source, notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. Many rare photographs enrich the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, an exhaustive list of related websites, and a bibliography of publications since 1934. Dr. Joel Paradiso, the Director of the MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The tome is a detailed account of a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.

Comprehensive, ...a perfect read
What is outstanding about Electronic Music Pioneers is the sheer breadth of the work. Kettlewell has an encyclopedic knowledge of musical genres and a refreshing willingness to look beyond traditional classifications. This allows him to find unexpected threads and connections, bringing together apparently unrelated figures such as Morton Feldman and Grandmaster Flash, Klaus Schulze and W.A. Mozart and Orson Welles, Leon Theremin and the Beach Boys. EMP is a big work, not one to be read in a single session. It is comprehensive and detailed, covering every genre of music from classical to rap, techno, anything and everything where electricity and music combine forces. For each of its sections there is an extensive list of recordings/book for the reader to explore further. It is a book to dip into, to read and return to. Inevitably, readers will agree with some of his judgements and disagree with others. Given the comprehensive nature of the work, that is hardly surprising. If your interested in seeing how music and electronic insturments grew up together and what their relationship was, this is a book you won't want to pass up.