Break with romanticism
Although the Netherlands was one of the pioneers of electronic music, it never developed into a distinctive movement. While in neighbouring countries the distinction between musique concrète (France) and elektronische Musik (Germany) was made immediately after the Second World War, in the Netherlands Henk Badings and Dick Raaijmakers produced their first electronic pieces which were very different from each other, and in 1954 the first studio of the Nederlandse Radio Unie was fitted out.*  

* This history is recorded in the booklet accompanying the CD set Popular Electronics (Basta 3091412).

During the war young artists started to feel the need to break with romanticism which had dominated the conservative pre-war art world. For had it not been these sentiments that had also fed Nazism? Strict compositional methods such as the twelve tone technique and serialism were to save music from subjectivism. The ultimate symbol of this uncontaminated, objective music was electronic music: now a composer had the possibility to make new sounds in a studio (sound synthesis) or to record everyday sounds and convert them (musique concrète). The future of music lay in electronics, the (international) avant-garde believed.

Other paragraphs:

• Studios
• Different approaches
• Live presentation
• Mixing genres
• Diversification
• Influence

Text: Jacqueline Oskamp, 2007
Translation: Hilary Staples

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