PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC: Music by Vladimir...

PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC: Music by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Bulent Arel, Mario Davidovsky, Pril Smiley, Alice Shields. CRI CD 611. By no means is this stroll through the CRI and Desto back catalogues a comprehensive history of early electronic music. But it does give us some of the earliest, ghostly examples of Ussachevsky’s electronically manipulated piano and Luening’s flute of the early 1950s before jumping way ahead to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s for some spectacular spatial pieces from electronic sources. Probably the most exciting piece to our synthed-out ears today is the overwhelming attack of the killer oscillators in Smiley’s “Kolyosa” (1970).