THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC: "The Prehistory 1874 - 1968" Before I start, the history of electronic dance music is complicated and consists of many paths and connections I could tell you about. But it's a hard history to tell because the complete picture contains so many connections and paths, of which many are hard to find and follow. The way I tell you this history isn't the only way. My focus will be more onto the not so danceable electronic dance music, rather than the hedonistic kind people usually don't think about, but just dance to. I found that the biggest innovations and changes were usually in the former kind, while the latter used the most tasty elements out of the experiments of the former and incorporate it into a much more fashionable affair. But not to worry, I just want to show you that the electronic dance music wich is now such a big part of popular music has a long and interesting history, with many people playing a key role as founders of the enormous musical landscape it has become. It may come as a surprise, but electronic music has been invented just a few years after Edison and Bell discovered the many uses of electronic current. In 1874, Elisha Gray a friend of Graham Bell discovered that his nephew had found a way of using electromagnetic fields to make a switch vibrate. This princible Gray turned into a musical instrument, a harmonic telegraph. Although Gray's invention was a novelty, the true electronic instruments were build after the turn of the century. The most important of these were Thaddeus Cahill's huge Tellharmonium which was later made into a small version now known as a Hammond Organ a much more easy to move instrument and one that got very popular with many rockbands, the other was the Theremin invented by the Russian scientist Leon Theremin. This instrument is usually a small box with two antennas sticking out and is controlled by waving the hands near the antenna's. This results in a eerie violin sound that is so distinctive that the Theremin is used as a sound effect in many Horror movies. Right after the creation of the instrument, some composers did write music for the instrument, but the most success it got was when The Beach Boys used it in their hit Good Vibrations. The Theremin The Beach Boys used could have been build by another important instrument maker. Robert Moog started his career making Theremin kits for money to get him through university, but he started to think seriously about making instruments after meeting a musician named Herbert Deutsch. Together with him started to create a modular synthesizer, build of many basic elements such a oscillators, filters and amplifiers. In 1964 they were the only ones doing that in the world. Many universities and experimental musicians got interested. One of these experimental musicians was Wendy Carlos, who back then was still known as Walter Carlos. Together with Robert she designed a synthesizer which abled her to recreate the works of Bach with electronic sounds. The name of the album she made is Switched on Bach and in 1968 this record had a big impact on the music world. For many people it was the first time they heard this kind of music played with all analogue electronic sounds. But Wendy Carlos wasn't the only one to do that at that time. Especially many modern day classical composers were busy experimenting with electronic instruments. In San Fransisco a composer called Terry Riley experimented with delays and his self build time lag accumulator. In combination with normal instruments Terry was able to make strange sounding compositions such as Poppy no good and the phantom band and his most famous A rainbow in curved air, which is a piece of music many people see as a blueprint for a musical genre called ambient, which became big in the early nineties. On the other side of United States of America in New York, composer Steve Reich also experimented with delays and repetitive structures in works like Violin Phase and Drumming, like many of his contempories such as Philip Glass and John Cage he also incorporated a lot of Indian and African influences into his music. Also in Europe there was a lot experimentation. Since the early fifties Paris was the center of a musical trend called Musique Concrète with people like Pierre Henry, Pierre Shaeffer and Luc Ferrari, making music with just anyday noises. And in the studios of the German radio, Karlheinz Stockhausen made his music by using the studio to the fullest mixing every sort of sound into a musical collage. Stockhausen was also a teacher at the Düsseldorf Conservatory where he teached students about composition. Among the students there were Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben. When they met each other in 1968 they didn't know their collaboration was to have an enormous impact on popular music. More in the next episode "Building blocks 1968 - 1980": About Krautrock, Dub, Electro, Hiphop and Disco.