The stochastic concrete electronic music

From DIMA

The electronic music is a type of music realized with the help of electronic sound generators. It is differentiated from traditional music due to the fact that it is a recorded, unique, and permanently identical with itself; it excludes the interpretation factor and makes non-compulsory the graphic recording. The sounds recorded on magnetic tape are is produced and edited on different sound generators, and the recorded tape is played in concert to the audience through the means of the amplifiers. In this case the composer is also the performer of his own works. The composer of such a type of music must also have IT skills. The advantages of electronic are the range of sounds between frequencies of 50-16 000 vibr./sec (instead of 70-80 traditional sounds) and over 40 intensities (compared to the range of ppp-fff).

The stages in the development of electronic music are: concrete music – the enlargement of electronic components by recoding with the help of microphones of the noises, the addition of voices and the synthethiser music – the automatic production of sounds and of some sonorous structures.

The representative composers who created electronic music are : Stockhausen, Pousseur, Křenek, Berio, Maderna, and of the Romanian ones, Lucian Meţianu, Corneliu Cezar, Liviu Dandara, Adrian Enescu.

Stochastic music, based on the mathematical calculus of probabilities, emerged as a reaction to the limits of polyphony of the integral Serialism and was initiated by Yannis Xenakis. He exposed his theory in the book Musiques formelles, published in 1963 with applications in the compositions: Pithoprakta, Metastasis, Terretektorh.