Bülent Arel was one of the composers working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center during the formative years of American electronic music. Columbia University’s archive still contains tapes, work materials and fragments connected with his electronic compositions, including material associated with Stereo Electronic Music No. 1 and other experiments from the 1960s.
Arel is exactly the kind of figure who makes electronic music history feel incomplete.
The usual story quickly settles around a few famous studios and names. Yet institutions contain shelves of tapes made by composers whose work helped establish the language everybody else later inherited.
Tape music was laborious.
Sound had to be generated, recorded, cut, copied, filtered and physically organised. A twenty-second passage could represent hours of construction.
An archive changes how I hear that history.
The reel is not simply an old recording.
It is evidence of a process in which editing was literally an action performed on material.
Digital production made those gestures invisible.
The tape still shows where the decisions happened.
https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/catalog/10.7916/d8-z89r-xx75
