ABSTRACT
The golden age of synthesizers offered composers improved control over the shaping of pitch, amplitude, duration, timbre, and envelope. But the synthesizer itself was a changeable beast, was too expensive for most people to own and so was found mostly in institutions, and rapidly became obsolete. In the 1970s and 1980s, while musicologists pondered how the steady influx of electronic sound generation was changing the course of music, tinkering composers such as David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman were hacking together new instruments from early digital components. John Cage and Merce Cunningham began working together in the early 1940s when the two first established their radical approach to developing musical accompaniment for modern dance. Some of the sounds were triggered by movements of the dancers on stage; others were controlled and mixed by the musicians.
