Welcome to Song of the Atom: Electronic Music before 1945, where I’ll be excavating and sharing stories from the early history of electronic music.
I’m a recovering academic, writer & editor and musician, and completed a PhD - ‘Songs of Future Past: the Poetics of Electronica’ - in 2013. After finishing this, over the last 10 years or so I’ve been researching the early history of the application of electricity to music making by ransacking digital archives from across the world. In the process I have found omissions and untold stories relating to the early days of electronic music in Europe and elsewhere. I intend to dig into this material and share what I’ve found here.
You can find some of my academic writing on electronic and popular music, including studies on the newly unearthed story of the Theremin in Europe 1928-1945, here
Why ‘Song of the Atom’? The earliest published usage of the term ‘electronic music’ that I have found is in a 1925 newspaper article with this title - relating to a scientific experiment in the USA, where the amplified sound of electrons - electronic music - was first presented to a public audience.
