Electronic Music

Thaddeus Cahill (1867 – 1934) is widely credited with the invention of the first electromechanical musical instrument in 1902, which he dubbed the telharmonium.

Telharmonium console by Thaddeus Cahill 1897.

At a starting weight of 7 tons and a price tag of $200,000 (approx. $5,514,000 today), only three telharmoniums were ever built.

Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni's 1907 essay Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music was perhaps the earliest prediction of the development of electronic music. In it he asserted that music should distill the essence of music of the past to make something new.

An early electronic instrument was the Etherophone, created by Léon Theremin between 1919 and 1920 in Leningrad. It was eventually renamed the theremin.

In 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed his Elektronische Studie II—the first electronic piece to be published as a score.

The Moog synthesizer was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The commercial breakthrough of a Moog recording was made by Wendy Carlos in the 1968 record Switched-On Bach, which became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era.

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