The document discusses the history and development of experimental and electronic music from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. It mentions early inventors like Thaddeus Cahill who developed the Telharmonium, an early electronic instrument. It also discusses the Futurist movement in early 20th century Italy and composers like Luigi Russolo who pioneered noise music. The text then covers the development of musique concrète and electronic music in the works of composers like Schönberg, Cage, and Antheil's influential piece Ballet Mécanique.

2. The Spirit of the Age

3. Ferrucio Busoni Sketch of a New Aesthetic for Music (1907) Richard Wagner Gesamkunstwerke (1849) - (total or integrated art form)

4. Arnold Schoenberg [1874-1951]

6. John Cage [The Future of Music: Credo, 1937] I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film, and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored. Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds. The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer who will be faced with the entire field of sound. New methods will be discovered, bearing a definite relation to Schoenberg's twelve-tone system and present methods of writing percussion music and any other methods which are free from the concept of a fundamental tone. The principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past. although the great form of the future will not be as it was in the past, at one time the fugue and at another the sonata, it will be related to these as they are to each other through the principle of organization or man's common ability to think.

7. Percy Grainger [excerpt from Statement on Free Music, 1938] ‘It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying and yet not be able to execute tonal glides and curves—just as absurd as it would be to have to paint a portrait in little squares (as in the case of mosaic) and not be able to use every type of curved lines. If, in the theatre, several actors (on the stage together) had to continually move in a set metrical relation to one another (to be incapable of individualistic, independent movement) we would think it ridiculous; yet this absurd goose-stepping still persists in music. Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching ‘free’ (non-harmonic) combinations of tones; yet we are unable to take up these beauties and expressiveness into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony.’ ‘Personally I have heard free music in my head since I was a boy of eleven or twelve in Auburn, Melbourne. It is my only important contribution to music. My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave-movements in the sea that I first observed as a young child at Brighton, Victoria, and Albert Park, Melbourne.’ ‘Too long has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand, and subject to the interfering interpretations of a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct. Machines (if properly constructed and properly written for) are capable of niceties of emotional expression impossible to a human performer. That is why I write my Free Music for Theremins — the most perfect tonal instruments I know. In the original scores each voice (both on the pitch-staves and on the sound-strength staves) is written in its own specially coloured ink, so that the voices are easily distinguishable, one from the other’.

9. Early Machine Music

10. The Musical Telegraph [Elisha Grey – 1876]

11. The Telharmonium [Thaddeus Cahill – 1897]

14. The Art of Noises

15. Francesco Balilla Pratella Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910) Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911) Bruno Corra Abstract Cinema – Chromatic Music (1912) Luigi Russolo The Art of Noises (1913) Carlo Carrà The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells (1913) Enrico Prampolini Chromophony – the Colours of Sounds (1913)

17. Luigi Russolo - Dynamism of an Automobile

18. The Art of Noise [Russolo - 1913] 1. Roars, Thunders, Explosions, Bursts, Crashes, Booms 2. Whistles, Hisses, Puffs 3. Whispers, Murmurs, Grumbles, Buzzes, Bubblings 4. Screeches, Creaks, Rustles, Hums, Crackles, Rubs 5. Percussion noises using: metal, wood, skin, rock, terra-cotta, etc. 6. Voices of animals and humans: Shouts, Shrieks, Moan, Yells, Howls, Laughs, Groans, Sobs

21. Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) Krzysztof Penderecki

22. George Antheil and Ballet Mécanique

23. George Antheil b Trenton, NJ, 8 July 1900 d New York, 12 Feb 1959

24. My Ballet mécanique is the new FOURTH DIMENSION of music. My Ballet mécanique is the first piece that has been composed OUT OF and FOR machines, ON EARTH… My Ballet mécanique us the first music ON EARTH that has its very germ of life in the new fourth-dimensional phenomena wherein TIME FUNCTIONING IN MUSIC DIFFERS FROM ORDINARY TIME and the series of deductive and also physical phenomena that follow it. My Ballet mécanique is the first TIME-FORM on earth. My Ballet mécanique is neither tonal, nor atonal. In fact it is of no kind of tonality at all. It has nothing to do with tonality. It is made of time and sound…the two materials, FUNDAMENTAL materials, that music is made of…

25. My Ballet mécanique comes out of the first and principal stuff of music…TIME-SPACE… My Ballet mécanique has a closer connection to life than any of the tonal music that preceded it. But it is a musical and not a literary connection. In my Ballet mécanique , I offer you, for the first time, music hard and beautiful as a diamond… The Ballet mécanique is the first piece IN THE WORLD to be conceived in one piece without interruption, like a solid shaft of steel… reprinted from ‘ My Ballet mécanique ,’ De Stijl , vol. 6, no. 12 (1925)

27. Edwin S. Votey (right) with his first production model of piano-player, which was ultimately called the Pianola. This model is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

28. The English pianolist and composer, Easthope Martin, playing the Grieg Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1912. The conductor is Artur Nikisch.

30. Roll editors at work at the Aeolian Company's London factory in 1911

32. MusikFabrik performing Ballet mécanique, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Essen, Germany, 17 August 2002