Percy Grainger: a Pioneer of Electronic Music
Chapter 14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music Andrew Hugill From the vantage-point of today’s era of hardware hacking1 and circuit-bending,2 of infra- instruments3 and ‘dirty’ electronics,4 the case for Percy Grainger as a pioneer of electronic music is relatively easy to make. He foresaw that bricolage, often using fairly cheap and readily available technologies, would become central to what he called a ‘democratic’ approach to music-making. The revolution that the personal computer has wrought in contemporary musical culture has been to place supposedly ‘high end’ performance and production tools in the hands of everyone. No longer are synthesizers or sequencers the preserve of a few university music departments or specialist electronic music centres. Instead, they are the standard media of a host of digital musicians whose creativity blurs the distinctions between performance, composition and listening in ways of which Grainger would have approved. This revolution has affected all aspects of musical culture, from creation to consumption. 1 Hardware hacking involves the creative transformation of consumer electronics. See Nic Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 Circuit-bending is the creative customization of electronic circuitry within low voltage devices. See Reed Ghazala, Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005). 3 ‘In contrast to hyper-, meta- and virtual instruments, we propose infra-instruments as devices of restricted interactive potential, with little sensor enhancement, which engender simple musics with scarce opportunity for conventional virtuosity’. John Bowers and Phil Archer, ‘Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber, but Infra-Instruments’, in Proceedings of the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Conference (Vancouver: NIME, 2005), 5; http://www.nime.org/archive/?mode=ylist&y=2005 (accessed 14 October 2013).
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