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The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music.

Article Excerpt
The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Edited by Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan. (Cambridge Companion in Music.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. [xxi, 287 p. ISBN-13: 9780521688659. $95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

Although Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan declare in the opening sentence of their introduction that "electronic music is the mainstream" (p. 1), the institutional support for electronic music is now under tighter examination than at any point in the past. At a time when one of the world's leading centers for electronic music, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), is coming under serious governmental scrutiny for being "closed and only appealing to a niche audience" (see STEIM's Web site, www.steim.org, for more information [accessed 20 August '2008]), a volume which demystifies the theory and practice of electronic music is urgently needed. This certainly is one of the key aims of Collins' and d'Escrivan's Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, and is a goal in which it succeeds, at least in part.

The first section of the volume deals with the contexts of electronic music and is, in essence, a survey of the historical terrain, covering "The origins of electronic music" (Andrew Hugill), "Electronic Music and the studio" (Margaret Schedel), "Live electronic music" (Nicolas Collins) and "A history of programming and music" (Ge Wang). It is here that the difficulties with attempting a historical approach of this sort within a multi-author volume are at their most apparent. The same matter is covered several times in a number of the contributions here, despite ostensibly different focuses. The sound-houses of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis recur in Hugill's (p. 7) and Schedel's (p. 32) accounts; the story of Babbage's "Difference Engine" is recounted by Hugill (p. 12) and Wang (p. 56); considerations of...

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