History of Electronic Music
... Schoto Wrote "Magiae Universalis" -- an early text on the subject of acoustics 1660 Athanasius Kircher Invented the Arca Musarithmica -- a mechanical, water-driven device to compose music based upon numeric and arithmetic-number relationships to represent the scale. ... Bach Finished the "Well Tempered Clavier" where he introduced and proved the then novel concept of tempered tuning which since has become the basis for most Western music through the 20th century. 1700s Mozart, CPE Bach, Hayden All were interested in "automatic music" and wrote music for mechanical instruments. ... 1895 Percy Grainger Proposed "Free Music" -- Eight tones with complete rhythmic freedom for each voice, notated on graph paper, and played by machines built for the purpose. ... 1905-1923 Arnold Schoenberg Experimeted during this period with atonal music. In 1923 he began working with 12 tone music (sets, series, and rows). ... 1928 Maurice Martenot Invented the Ondes Martenot -- a microtonal electronic instrument -- and demonstrated it in Paris. ... 1949 Werner Meyer Eppler Wrote " Electronic Tone Generation, Electronic Music and Synthetic Speech". He was instrumental in working with Bell Labs on the development of the Vocoder -- an electronic speech synthesizer and may have been the first to utilize the term "electronic music". He would also be instrumental in starting the German electronic music center in Cologne at NWDR. ... Scaeffer was instrumental, along with Pierre Henry in starting the French Electronic music center at ORF. ... 1951 John Cage Composed "Imaginary Landscape # 4" for 12 radios and 24 performers -- brought electronic music to the stage for live performance.