In Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde Jennifer Iverson brings a new dimension to the well-worn territory of the post-war Western avant-garde. The book focuses primarily on the role of electronic music and the studio at the Westdeutcher Rundfunk (WDR) in German cultural reconstruction after the Second World War. By identifying complex webs of connection among composers, scientists, technology, literature, intellectual and aesthetic discourses, and military technologies, Iverson revises common narratives about sole authorship, influence, and conflict among composers of early electronic music in Western Europe and the United States.

Throughout Electronic Inspirations, Iverson traces three main themes. First, how the WDR was central to a Cold War musical ecosystem, developing the techniques and sounds that became emblematic of Cold War aesthetics. Iverson examines how WDR affiliates steered the intellectual and aesthetic developments in the West through their use of novel technologies, formalist aesthetics, and scientific concepts in search of new sounds and compositional paradigms. Second, the WDR studio propagated a heterogeneous, laboratory-like environment that brought together musical, aesthetic, scientific, administrative, political, economic, and intellectual resources contributing to the success of the studio. Iverson highlights how this heterogeneity facilitated interdisciplinary collaboration, often by ‘invisible collaborators’ in the form of humans, machines, and discourses, that are often glossed over or left out of discussions of the WDR and associated composers. Third, the WDR contributed to a cultural process of reclamation in which composers repurposed military technologies for aesthetic purposes, as Iverson explains, ‘to embrace midcentury electronic music was to implicitly reckon with past traumas and threats of future violence’ (3). These themes are studied throughout the book's six chapters, which operate as intersecting case studies. Chapters one, three and six focus on the intellectual, aesthetic and cultural milieu of the WDR with an emphasis on collaborations between technologists, scientists – mainly WDR co-founder Werner Meyer-Eppler – and composers. In chapters two and five, Iverson discusses the relationship between the New York School – primarily John Cage and David Tudor – with the European serialists. In chapter four, Iverson investigates the proliferation and influence of information theory in the Western post-war avant-garde; and the focus of chapter five is the debate surrounding aleatoric approaches to composition. Taken as a whole, Electronic Inspirations provides an in-depth, if partial snapshot of the development of new musical aesthetics during a pivotal era in Western history.

As part of a growing trend in studies of electronic music, Iverson employs a hybrid interdisciplinary methodology that seamlessly blends more traditional approaches such as archival research and detailed musical analysis with newer techniques from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor Network Theory (ANT). Drawing from STS and ANT enables Iverson to address how facilities such as the laboratory-like studio repurposed military and radio equipment, and how technological discourses shaped musical practices at the WDR and cultural production more broadly. According to Iverson: ‘Taking technologies seriously as agents sharpens our focus on the heterogeneity of the studio, in which technologies both afford and limit certain moves’ (15). Such insights inform musical and cultural analysis as Iverson traces the moves of specific composers, techniques and discourses.

Different forms of collaboration are foregrounded in Electronic Inspirations as integral to the success of electronic music studios and their creative products. Iverson indicates how, even though it led to great innovation, collaboration at the WDR and other studios was born out of necessity since composers were generally unfamiliar with equipment such as tape machines, oscillators and filters. A hierarchy of labour was quickly established in studios: composers tended to sit atop the scheme, gaining sole recognition for the creative studio products that relied on the physical and intellectual labour of technicians, scientists, engineers, and administrators. Iverson explains, ‘technicians created the studio's sonic palette but offered it up as common property, apparently expecting that the more visible or trained composers would freely use the materials’ (47). For example, the relationship between technician Heinz Schütz with studio founders Werner Meyer-Eppler and Herbert Eimert exemplified this hierarchy of labour. However, some technician-composer affiliations were more peer-to-peer relationships, for instance between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur. The focus on collaboration suggests that the WDR operated as more of a cooperative than is often acknowledged by associated composers, critics and historians.

In connection with in-studio collaboration, Electronic Inspirations presents an international new music scene characterized by mutual influence and cross-pollination. Institutions such as electronic music studios (including the WDR, Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the Radiodiffusion Française (Rdf), the Studio di Fonologia at the Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI) in Milan, and Louis and Bebe Barron's studio in New York City), universities, the Darmstadt summer courses, and more informal salons and social gatherings throughout Western Europe and the United States served as the nexuses of this scene. Iverson stresses that such ‘multifaceted networks, which include performers, administrators, promoters, impresarios, critics, and composers, can reshape our understanding of the intellectual dimensions, aesthetic concerns, and power dynamics of the Cold War new music scene’ (73). Performers such as David Tudor and Cathy Berberian, radio programmes such as Herbert Eimert's Musikalisches Nachtprogramm, journals such as Die Reihe, and other literature including Abraham André Moles's Information Theory and Esthetic Perception and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake acted as translators and shared reference points for composers and studio affiliates across the West. The attention paid to such shared resources among international networks underlines the general affinity among new music composers in the 1950s.

In addition, Iverson's focus on affinity among the post-war new music scene offers a productive lens through which to consider historical disputes: studying controversy as a sign of shared investment. As Iverson posits: ‘Instead of viewing controversy as evidence of fundamental difference, it's helpful to consider the way debate makes the stakes visible, helping actors on both sides to clarify their own positions, investments, and next moves’ (164). With this in mind, Iverson re-examines the notoriously contentious relationship between the New York School and European serialists as typically encapsulated in the controversy surrounding John Cage's 1958 visit to Darmstadt. Chapter two focuses on the earliest encounters between Cage, Tudor and the WDR composers, starting with Cage's visit to Paris in 1949 and West Germany in 1952, which was marked by sincere interest in Cage's prepared piano works and novel compositional procedures. Culturally, the music of the New York school symbolized democratic freedom, carrying significant cachet for the impresarios and institutions who programmed their work. Aesthetically, the New York School represented a move towards unifying content and structure outside of conventional serialist approaches. In chapter five, Iverson employs thorough musical analysis to demonstrate the affinities and similarities among the compositions of the New York School and European serialists, especially Cage's proportional square root form and the serialists’ statistical form. Iverson also draws from archival research that illuminates the well-formed social and intellectual networks across Europe and the United States to demonstrate how composers throughout the West engaged in similar discourses – including information theory, compositional techniques such as statistical form, chance and aleatoric techniques – and listened to each other's work. The tension between these groups was less the result of significant difference, and rather a consequence of the use of a multiplicity of terms (indeterminacy, chance, aleatoric, statistical form). Therefore, the conflict among mid-century composers indicates shared investment in similar compositional approaches and commitment to advancing musical aesthetics. Moreover, by reassessing this controversy, Iverson centres frequent invisible collaborator Tudor, whose relationship to the European avant-garde as a performer and valuable conceptual contributor lingered long after their initial enchantment with Cage faded, further affirming the connections among the post-war international avant-garde.

Iverson's investigation into how information theory and experimental phonetics informed the development of avant-garde compositions in general and statistical form in particular is one of the significant contributions of Electronic Inspirations. The examination of this disciplinary boundary traversal, between music composition and scientific research, is yet another example of methodological benefits of studying controversy. Throughout chapter four, Iverson highlights Meyer-Eppler's substantial influence at the WDR through his role in educating composers in the adapted industrial-military techniques of information theory. Iverson traces the direct spread of information theory from Claude Shannon at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States, to Meyer-Eppler's engagement as a Nazi physicist in which he researched encryption and transmission among other topics, to his post-war career as a phoneticist after intensive denazification, to the composers associated with the WDR. The focus moves beyond West Germany to how information theory proliferated throughout the West, across disciplines including telephony and broadcasting, and into the general cultural consciousness during the 1950s.

Iverson proposes that composers found information theory particularly useful because it addressed the ‘receiving end of the communication channel’, the listener, as well as practical considerations of working in the studio. Information theory introduced issues of perception and cognition into deliberations surrounding the creation of electronic music, which crucially attended to audience reception: audiences had difficulty discerning the formal serial compositional designs of WDR composers’ pieces. Information theory provided tools for composers to construct new formal compositional paradigms that more accurately accommodated human perception. In other words, ‘an information-theoretic perspective helped the composers further understand why music conceived in such different terms [serial and chance techniques] could sound so similar’ (116). For example, Iverson suggests that the shift in focus to textural density in Stockhausen's Gruppen (1955–57) or György Ligeti's Artikulation (1958) indicates that the composers accepted – based on their newly acquired perceptual and acoustic knowledge – that listeners could not comprehend the fine details in their previous work. Gottfried Michael Koenig's Essay (1957), Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Ligeti's ‘sound mass’ works also suggest the interpolation of the sampling theorem from information theory into compositional procedures. Iverson's quarry into the influence of information theory is important because it reveals how Meyer-Eppler's military engineering expertise was ‘simultaneously veiled and put to scientific and aesthetic uses’, as composers such as Stockhausen and Koenig tended to downplay the central role of information theory in their work (107). Information theory is also central to the development of electronic and computer music, especially, as Iverson points out, as it represents a shift from analogue to digital thinking.

One of the great strengths of Electronic Inspirations is Iverson's use of musical analysis to demonstrate how concepts borrowed from studio technologies and scientific concepts became evident in composers’ musical output. Tape machines, oscillators and filters served as more than tools for composers to create new sounds, such equipment also influenced how composers conceived of musical composition. For instance, Pousseur's Scambi (1957) exploited the unique characteristics of the equipment at Studio de Fonologia at the RAI where the piece was composed. Iverson details how RAI engineer technician Alfredo Lietti (another former military physicist) constructed one-of-a-kind oscillators and filters recovered from discarded radio equipment. A type of ‘dynamic filter’ proved especially attractive to Pousseur while composing Scambi, leading him to employ a subtractive synthesis method that would not have been possible at the WDR or any other studio at the time. With its use of a statistical manipulation of the aforementioned filter within a mobile form, Scambi also exemplifies the integration of multi-disciplinary discourses including Cagean chance, experimental phonetics, statistical controls, information theory and structural linguistics. Iverson's skill at leveraging musical analysis to synthesize the arguments and themes of the book is notable in her discussion of how approaches to making electronic music influenced the acoustic compositions of post-war composers. For example, in Atmosphères (1961), Ligeti translated additive synthesis techniques to the acoustic sphere after reaching the possible limits of timbre control through additive synthesis in the studio using tape synchronization and tape noise. By comparing sketches and charts for Atmosphères to that of Ligeti's unfinished Pièce électronique No. 3, Iverson demonstrates how Ligeti transferred the composition from hertz to pitch, treating each orchestral instrument as a sine tone oscillator contributing to a larger sonic cluster. Furthermore, through comparative analysis, Iverson shows how the acoustic compositions of WDR and other avant-garde composers were shaped by the same musical, scientific and cultural discourses as post-war electronic works.

The project of cultural reclamation and the inclusion of artistic scenarios as part of the ‘military industrial complex’ is Iverson's primary focus. In positioning electronic music as a ‘safe’ outlet for recovered military technologies, Iverson examines how the employment of equipment such as oscillators, filters and tape machines, as well as discourses, especially encryption, information theory, and experimental phonetics, ‘neutralized’ or masked military and Nazi associations, enabling artists to make aesthetic progress in pursuit of a technological utopia. Chapter six surveys how the use of the human voice in particular served to domesticate and ‘neutralize’ abstract, machine-mediated, electronic music. The WDR studio participated in imperfect and selective reclamations, and Iverson is careful not to overstate the impact of the avant-garde in part by distinguishing between the cultural cachet of embracing innovation and the realities of audience reception – often marked by confusion, dislike and anxiety – and how the reception of electronic music evolved over the 1950s.

Iverson eloquently argues for the recognition of contributions of ‘invisible collaborators’ and demonstrates their importance as a category; however in Electronic Inspirations, these collaborators remain largely in the shadows of well-known composers. Based on Iverson's implementation of the concept to the post-war European milieu, several questions linger including: what did the hierarchy of visible/invisible actors look like and how did it function? What were the networks of invisible collaborators for specific pieces? How did they operate? What, specifically, did being a technician or engineer entail from piece to piece? How could a collaborator be visible in one context and invisible in another? However, in coining the term ‘invisible collaborators’ and beginning to trace their role in the creation of electronic music, Iverson provides a useful device for complicating sole authorship and understanding the collective nature of electronic music composition.

Although Iverson points to the homogeneity of the WDR in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, the overwhelming focus of the book on white, male composers was nonetheless disappointing. The international networks Iverson begins to trace extend beyond the boundaries of Europe and the United States. For instance, composers and technologists in Japan, Chile and Argentina were very much a part of the conversation. Notable women technologists and composers including Annea Lockwood, Éliane Radigue, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire and others also had direct connections to the actors, studios and aesthetics of the book during the time period discussed. In addition, while Iverson examines how the female voice domesticized and neutralized technology, she fails to fully address how the association of women's voices with technology, (e.g., studio technicians’ labelling Cathy Berberian the RAI's ‘tenth oscillator’), can objectify women's voices and bodies in ways that can complicate or deny their agency. The discussion of gender could have been extended to more thoroughly consider how the WDR and other electronic music studios proved inhospitable environments for women and people of colour. However, this book lays a solid groundwork for future studies to continue to expand post-war new music networks demographically, geographically, temporally and in terms of genre in order to understand how electronic music practices and cultures were shaped by similar actors and discourses.

Ultimately, with Electronic Inspirations, Iverson contributes a great deal to scholarship on the post-war European avant-garde. By tracing the common discursive and technological threads that characterized the international and interdisciplinary networks, Iverson carves out a nuanced context in which early electronic music was created. The book also moves scholarship towards an understanding of how electronic music in particular is collaborative, complicating accepted narratives of sole authorship and influence. By considering conflict among actors as a sign of shared investment, Iverson offers a constructive framework for examining historical disagreements. Lastly, Iverson provides fruitful additions to approaches to analysing electronic music and music theorists’ discussions of chance and statistical form.