The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.
When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.
Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.
This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.
Today we are in a war against war - music is our power.
We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it.
I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap.
The problem with music was always that the sound system often obliterated the words, and words, not music, have always been what I was about.