John Cage (1912-92)
What can one say about Cage? A lunatic or a genius? Have a look at the details of one of his electronic compositions Fontana Mix and decide for yourself!
Jonathan Harvey (1939- ).
He is interested in serialism and religion and has written much music for ordinary (boring?) instruments, as well as some EA works - the most famous of which is Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco.
Max Mathews is more a technician than composer. While he was at Bell Telephone Labs, from 1957 onwards, he pioneered digital sound synthesis with the MUSIC series of programs, and later GROOVE. More recently he has been involved with input systems such as the Radio Baton which allows control of synthesiser parameters from the position of the baton in relation to a control box.
Luigi Nono (1924-90) took over from Berio at Milan when Berio got bored and left. Nono was a highly politically-motivated composer and his socialism was naturally reflected in his works, of which he wrote a vast number for all media.
Bernard Parmegiani (1927- ) is a composer working in the musique concrète tradition. His compositions are generally characterised by a strong emphasis on natural sounds, though these sounds are often extensively processed so that their origin is hidden. The concepts of metamorphosis and the ephemeral feature extensively in his works. His interest in the image has also inspired a number of visual experiments which transpose the ideas he originally developed in the field of sound.
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928- ) is the Wagner of the late 20th Century. His giant compositions evidently reflect his high opinion of himself. He doesn't like his works to be performed unless he's in control. Despite this - or probably because of it - (you can tell I don't care much for him) he has been one of the most influential figures in EA music. He started experimenting with EA music in the early 50s and was determined to subjugate all aspects of it to his serialist principles. His championing of elektronische Musik set him and the Cologne Studio where he worked against musique concrète, but this rift was partially healed within a few years by his Gesang der Jünglinge.
Varèse, Edgard (1883-1965) was always dissatisfied with the music of the past. His (non-EA) works of the 20s and 30s were the most avant-garde of the time, and he looked forward to the facilities that electronic music would make available. In the 50s, on some of the first tape-recorders he produced two of the first masterpieces in that medium - Desérts and Poème Électronique.
Trevor Wishart (1946- ) is a Yorkshireman with a penchant for grungy noises. In a radio interview in 1992 whilst introducing his work Anna's Magic Garden, Ian Dearden said of him:
I respect in Trevor's work the feeling for gritty texture. He's not particularly interested in brightly polished material - it's not in his nature. Some composers are perhaps more interested in the purity of the sound of a bell, whereas Trevor would probably be happier dragging a piece of Yorkshire granite across a limestone pavement.He is extensively involved in new developments in music education, being a founder member of the Composers Desktop Project and presently (1997) Director of Education and Research of Sonic Arts Network.
Iannis Xenakis (1922- ). He is interested in the connection between mathematics, geometry and music and the handling of large numbers of small musical events. This led him into the use of probability theory and thence computers (from 1956), though he has often used the computer as a compositional tool for works for traditional instruments. Since the late '70s he has developed a suite of computer programs under the generic title of UPIC which have developed from compositional tools into tools for live performance.
This is how he envisages granular synthesis in "Formalised Music":
"All sound is an integration of grains, of elementary particles, of sonic quanta. Each of these elementary grains has a threefold nature: duration, frequency, and intensity. All sound, even all continuous sonic variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary grains adequately disposed in time. So every sonic complex can be analysed as a series of pure sinusoidal sounds even if the variations of these sinusoidal sounds are infinitely close, short, and complex. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time...I. Xenakis : Formalised Music (1966), chapter 2, as quoted in the CDP yearbook 1989Hecatombs of pure sounds are necessary for the creation of a complex sound. A complex sound may be imagined as a multi-coloured firework in which each point of light appears and instantaneously disappears against a black sky. But in this firework there would be such a quantity of points of light organized in such a way that their rapid and teeming succession would create forms and spirals, slowly unfolding, or conversely, brief explosions setting the sky aflame. A line of light would be created by a sufficiently large multitude of points appearing and disappearing instantaneously.
.......using all sorts of manipulations with these grain clusters, we can hope to produce not only the sounds of classical instruments and elastic bodies, and those sounds generally preferred in concrete music, but also sonic perturbations with evolutions, unparalleled and unimaginable until now."