OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music is a compilation of early electronic music and excerpts from the period of 1948 to 1980. Many included works are essentially experiments with sound, using a variety of non-traditional instruments including homemade circuits, tape ribbon and early synthesisers.

Artists featured in the compilation include Maryanne Amacher

Maryanne Amacher

Maryanne Amacher was an American composer and installation artist.-Biography:Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania, to an American nurse and a Swiss freight train worker. As the only child, she grew up playing the piano. Amacher left Kane to attend the University of Pennsylvania on a full...

, Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley , is a contemporary American composer, best known for his operas and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics and extended techniques. Along with Gordon Mumma, Ashley was also a major pioneer of audio synthesis.Ashley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan...

, Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt

Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.-Biography:...

, Louis and Bebe Barron, François Bayle

François Bayle

François Bayle is a composer of Musique concrète or acousmatic music.In the 1950s he studied with Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1960 he joined the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, and in 1966 was put in charge of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales...

, David Behrman

David Behrman

David Behrman is a US composer and the producer of Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series. He was also a founding member of the Sonic Arts Union. He toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has worked with Ben Neill. He was a part of Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether...

, John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, John Chowning

John Chowning

John M. Chowning is an American composer, musician, inventor, and professor best known for his work at Stanford University and his invention of FM synthesis while there.-Contribution:...

, Alvin Curran

Alvin Curran

Composer Alvin Curran , is the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran's music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds....

, Holger Czukay

Holger Czukay

Holger Czukay is a German musician, probably best known as a co-founder of the krautrock group Can. Described by critic Jason Ankeny as "successfully bridg[ing] the gap between pop and the avant-garde," Czukay is also notable for creating early important examples of ambient music, for exploring...

, Tod Dockstader

Tod Dockstader

Tod Dockstader is an American composer of electronic music, and particularly musique concrète. He studied painting and film while at the University of Minnesota, before moving to Hollywood in 1955, to become an apprentice film editor...

, Charles Dodge

Charles Dodge (composer)

Charles Dodge is an American composer best known for his electronic music, specifically his computer music. He is a former student of Darius Milhaud and Gunther Schuller.-Education and teaching career:...

, Herbert Eimert

Herbert Eimert

Herbert Eimert was a German music theorist, musicologist, journalist, music critic, editor, radio producer, and composer.-Life:...

 and Robert Beyer, Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

, Luc Ferrari

Luc Ferrari

Luc Ferrari was of an Italian heritage but French born composer, particularly noted for his tape music.-Biography:...

, Jon Hassell

Jon Hassell

Jon Hassell is an American trumpet player and composer. He is known for his influence in the world music scene and his unusual electronic manipulation of the trumpet sound.-Life and career:...

, Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky is an American electronic-music or computer-music composer who has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day .-Biography:...

, Hugh Le Caine

Hugh Le Caine

Hugh Le Caine was a Canadian physicist, composer, and instrument builder.Le Caine was brought up in Port Arthur in northwestern Ontario...

, Alvin Lucier

Alvin Lucier

Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and...

, Otto Luening

Otto Luening

Otto Clarence Luening was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music....

, Richard Maxfield

Richard Maxfield

Richard Maxfield was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music.Born in Seattle, he most likely taught the first University-level course in electronic music in America at the New School for Social Research...

, Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...

, Musica Elettronica Viva

Musica Elettronica Viva

Musica Elettronica Viva is a live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome, Italy, in 1966. Over the years, its members have included Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, Steve Lacy, and Jon Phetteplace.They were early...

 (MEV), Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....

, Bernard Parmegiani

Bernard Parmegiani

Bernard Parmegiani is a composer best known for his electronic or acousmatic music.-Biography:Between 1957 and 1961 he studied mime with Jacques Lecoq, a period he later regarded as important to his work as a composer...

, Steve Reich

Steve Reich

Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...

, Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...

, Jean-Claude Risset

Jean-Claude Risset

Jean-Claude Risset is a French composer, best known for his pioneering contributions to computer music. He is a former student of André Jolivet and former co-worker of Max Mathews at Bell Labs....

, Clara Rockmore

Clara Rockmore

Clara Rockmore was a virtuoso performer of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument.-Biography :Born as Clara Reisenberg in Vilnius, Lithuania, Rockmore was a child prodigy on the violin and entered the Imperial conservatory of Saint Petersburg at the age of five...

, Oskar Sala

Oskar Sala

Oskar Sala was a 20th century German physicist, composer and a pioneer of electronic music born in Greiz. He played an instrument called the Trautonium, a predecessor to the synthesizer.-Studies:...

, Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...

, Klaus Schulze

Klaus Schulze

Klaus Schulze is a German electronic music composer and musician. He also used the alias Richard Wahnfried. He was briefly a member of the electronic bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before launching a solo career consisting of more than 60 albums released across five decades.-1970s:In...

, Raymond Scott

Raymond Scott

Raymond Scott was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor....

, Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic-music compositions and her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse...

, Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

, Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch...

, David Tudor

David Tudor

David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...

, Vladimir Ussachevsky

Vladimir Ussachevsky

Vladimir Kirilovitch Ussachevsky was a composer, particularly known for his work in electronic music.-Biography:...

, Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....

, Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...

, La Monte Young

La Monte Young

La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...

, Joji Yuasa

Joji Yuasa

is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music.-Biography:Born in Kōriyama, Fukushima, he is self-taught as a composer.In 1951 or 1952, together with the composer Tōru Takemitsu and other contemporary artists and musicians, he founded Jikken Kobo , an organization dedicated to the...

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External links

• Interviews and Essays by Jason Gross on Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music