1980 LP text:
The concept of "electronic music" emerged in the mid-20th century. Like most creations of our century, electronic music has sparked heated debates between enthusiastic supporters and staunch opponents of its "right to exist." It may still be premature to make a definitive judgment about what electronic music is, its place in our lives, and its place in the history of music, but it is impossible to understand the state of contemporary musical art without considering its existence.
The history of music is not only a history of changing styles, genres, and moods but also a history of the search for new sounds and new acoustic conditions. Each historical era offers its solution to this quest, creating various musical instruments, musical-technical means, combinations, and ensembles of instruments. People of each era reproduce their worldview in unique sounds.
Thus, the worldview of the 17th-18th centuries brought the harpsichord and the string orchestra to life, while the rebellious 19th century and the revolutionary beginning of the 20th century gave birth to the modern piano and the large symphony orchestra. What instruments and means are brought to life by the worldview of the contemporary person, the conqueror of space, the creator of complex computing machines, the witness, and participant of the scientific and technical revolution? These new means and new instruments, born of our turbulent times, are numerous electric musical instruments, including various electronic devices – from simple electronic instruments to the most complex synthesizers.
Today, the average listener encounters music primarily through electronic and electric devices: radio, television, records, tape recordings, etc. Electronics not only provide the transmission and storage of sound but also increasingly improve its reproduction quality, up to recreating spatial sensations (stereophony, quadraphony). Even in live concert practice, the assistance of electronic amplification equipment is increasingly sought due to the ever-growing size of halls. However, the possibilities of electronics are not limited to just reproducing, storing, and transmitting existing sounds. It can produce sounds and subject them to countless transformations. It is in this capacity that electronics have become an object of attention for musicians and composers.
As early as the first half of the 20th century, the first electronic instruments appeared, whose number and quality increased sharply by the 1960s-70s. But the true birth of electronics as a field of musical creativity is associated with the emergence of electronic sound synthesizers. In short, the difference between an electronic synthesizer and an electronic instrument is that while an instrument has a specific timbre or a set of initially predefined stable timbres, a synthesizer has the fundamentally limitless capability of synthesizing timbres, attacks, decays, and other sound parameters. Synthesizers can be studio or concert, polyphonic or monophonic, with a greater or lesser range of capabilities, but they all share the initial undefined characteristic of the sound, which is created only in the process of interaction between the person and the synthesizer.
Electronic synthesizers have given rise to a new type of musical creativity, where neither a musical score nor a performer stands between the composer and the realization of his idea. There is complete immediacy and spontaneity of music-making, which, on the other hand, turns into a labor-intensive and meticulous creative process. The musical fabric is composed of individual, carefully selected elements, which are fixed with the help of a multi-channel tape recorder, to take on their final form during mixing. Naturally, such an expansion of creative situations creates a multitude of problems and challenges for the musician. This record attempts to address some of them.
The record is composed according to the principle of a kaleidoscope: it intersperses pieces of various styles, genres, and epochs. Through these pieces, the authors wanted to show the diversity of ways of using the synthesizer, ranging from direct imitation of existing or once-existing instruments to the creation of new, previously unknown sound complexes. Thus, the record represents a small musical journey through time, made possible by the Synthy-100 synthesizer.
Vladimir Martynov
