When I started studying the history of electronic music there were few secondary sources as thorough or as focused as Jennifer Iverson’s recent monograph describing the craft of electronic composition established at the pioneering radio studio in British-occupied Cologne in 1951. As a Master’s student at the Institute of Sonology in 2008, I was still able to meet composers who had been there in the beginning. Gear from the early years was either on display or kept in working order for students to access in the studio. Original reports and manuals were available in the library for borrowing. The place was full of evidence of a past that, in a sense, had not yet become fully historical. Consensus among the faculty was that electronic music was essentially still new. If it could yet be said to have a history at all, then it was one of permanent, progressive novelty.

The Institute also housed a vast collection of historical documentation waiting to be put into sensible order for the first time, the condition of which seemed to belie this novelty. I was attracted by the ease of finding new details in the archive that would upset conventional genealogical wisdom. The general histories of electronic music available to me were either insider accounts based on extremely limited bases of archival evidence, or celebrations by journalists committed to expanding the audience for serious music. The popular surveys by Manning (Reference Manning2013), Chadabe (Reference Chadabe1997) and Holmes (Reference Holmes2015), for example, took at face value claims that, under closer examination, often amounted to pure fabulation: the competitive banter of young composers, journalists’ accounts of technological sophistication and musical risk-taking, petty rivalries stoked by managers eager to establish a pecking order of studios, schools and festivals. As Andrew Pickering has explained, histories written by the practitioners themselves are typically limited to a ‘retrospective’ view, looking backward from a set of canonical practices that they seek primarily to conserve and justify (Pickering Reference Pickering1995: 3). These narratives function a bit like the ‘background’ section of an engineering article, providing little more than a kind of Whiggish lore celebrating progress achieved, promises yet to be fulfilled and obstacles easily surmounted in the currently acceptable fashion by the currently appointed experts. As Pickering goes on to point out, however, the writer of this kind of history is placed in a conflict of interest, between endorsing already accepted practices and objectively examining their emergence in all its complexity. Ultimately, the insider historian has to presume a realist metaphysics, in which facts are waiting in advance to be unveiled and eternal truths correspond exactly with current scholarship.

By the mid-1990s the historiographical mood had begun to change, but not in the way Pickering imagined. Whiggish celebrations were gradually exchanged for profoundly suspicious critiques of avant-garde tyranny. The failed additive synthesis experiments by Stockhausen and Goeyvaerts, for example, became ‘an extreme expression of the scientistic and technological rationalism of the time’ (Born Reference Born1995: 52), signs of a totalising modernist hegemony that had subjugated sounds, bodies and instruments to its dream of a ‘single, unifying compositional logic’ (Théberge Reference Théberge1997: 158). The avant-garde and its ‘technoscientific imaginary’ were reduced to tokens of residual prestige traded for clout by cynical critics and record executives (Taylor Reference Taylor2001). These studies simply gave their retrospection the opposite valence. Moreover, they still relied mainly on secondary sources in English to affirm their suspicions.

In this regard, Iverson’s book makes significant progress, providing exemplary coverage of German-language archives, press and scholarship. I was particularly impressed with its close attention to the conjuncture of early electronic music and Hörspiel production, highlighting exactly the kind of mundane mediality that critics of modernist ideology tended to overlook. Rather than dismiss structuralist thinking out of hand as a tool of intellectual oppression, Iverson traces the partial and personal connections through which composers cultivated their fascination with language and linguistic sound. Her treatment of theory privileges accessibility over accuracy – see, for example, the worrying conflation of ‘message’ and ‘signal’ in the definition of information theory (p. 111) – but at least she has moved past the deeply unhelpful fear of ‘theoreticism’.

In close connection with his theorisation of scientific research as a ‘mangle of practice’, a notion with which Iverson claims strong affinity (p. 15), Pickering argues that we can avoid the naïve teleological hackery of both practitioners and critics by restricting our pool of evidence to the ideas, instruments and events that the agents themselves experienced in ‘real time’. Pickering thinks, that is, that proper historiography should follow the same rules as knowledge practices in general and adopt an orientation that is ‘performative’ rather than ‘representational’, exploring ‘open-ended transformations of science and society … understood as having no determinate destination in advance of practice’ (Reference Pickering1995: 232). The motivation behind the resulting methodology, which Pickering picks up from the strong program for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is ‘to build up a description of knowledge as a natural phenomenon’ (Barnes, Bloor and Henry Reference Barnes, Bloor and Henry1996: 1). A performative history, then, should simply draw attention to what happens (or rather, what happens to have happened); it cannot rationally discern correct from incorrect, and thus must avoid interpretation at all costs. It should fold knowledge into life, such that, instead of improving or progressing, it contingently and indeterminately ‘develops’ by virtue of its usefulness for the immediate project under way at the time in the primary attention of present actors. There are no longer any hidden motives or meanings. Even more, there is in fact nothing there to know because what matters is simply the processual practice of knowing in its florid unfolding. Instead of criticising, Pickering suggests, we should learn what we can for present purposes by observing the aesthetics of knowing in different ways. A history of electronic music in this mode would be devoted to showing simply how electronic music became possible and flourished at a particular time under particular conditions.

The problem is that this historiography quickly twists itself into a double bind (Collin Reference Collin2011). If our claim is to be that knowledge is an aimless ‘dance’ of adaptive sense-making, then the same condition must also apply to our knowledge about knowledge, and by extension we must resign ourselves to a radically contingent short-term perspective on the world. The strong program way of solving this impasse was to admit that the historical gaze is only partial and thus does not exclude the possibility that knowledge improves or accumulates in ways that may be useful at higher orders of abstraction than immediate adaptation. Acknowledging partiality also helps us deal with the implicit positivism of reducing knowledge to ‘natural’ performances, the operation of which is transparent to empirical inquiry. If viewing science as a mangle boils down to tracing human and non-human agencies in direct experience as it unfolds, then it is a task which puts tremendous pressure on the historian’s powers of observation. Transparency becomes all important – as Iverson herself seems to recognise (p. 109). Even with the most perfect evidence available, however, a mangle-orientated historian should also be obligated to give an account of her own experience of the evidence, with its internal orientations, propensities and constraints. Indeed, feminist science studies has long taught that it is not enough to demonstrate contingency; we must also insist upon a better account of the world and try to correct the errors of the past (Haraway Reference Haraway1988; Bauchspies and Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Bauchspies and Puig de la Bellacasa2009). And if we are to decide upon a better course of practice – as Iverson hopes to be able to do in contrast with historians of electronic music past – then we must first be able to understand our abstract goals and representations as, at some point in the knowledge-making process, transcending the mangle.

Having struggled in my own way to revise and update electronic music historiography, I can only express support for Iverson’s apparent drive to favour more inclusive and nuanced engagements with primary evidence, more and more of which is now becoming available as what were once closed personal archives pass into public stewardship. I especially support her emphasis on the gendering of the work involved in electronic music production, and in the hidden work of reproduction that makes the superficial novelty and futurity of the idiom possible (pp. 17–19). I also agree with the need to thematise science and technology in the history of this music, both as it was ‘translated’ into studio practice (p. 14) and as the work of avant-garde composers helped to ‘domesticate’ it for Cold War audiences (p. 21). I have used Iverson’s work before to teach the history of electronic music to undergraduates, and I would continue to do so with portions of this book. Like Pickering, however, I think that a performative orientation towards the history of science and technology should have profound implications for knowledge in general, including the kind of knowledge that historians construct about electronic music.

I was disappointed, then, by how little discussion Iverson devotes to the epistemological consequences of her theoretical and methodological claims. Following the convention established by authors such as Benjamin Piekut (Reference Piekut2011) and Eric Drott (Reference Drott2013) around the beginning of the last decade, Iverson cautiously adopts only a few of the tools of science studies to repair the standard music historical lens. Thus, rather than explain why things happened as they did, the book promises to provide a straightforward empirical account of how they happened. All at once Iverson transplants the dusty WDR into a world where musical objects and facts are produced in ‘laboratories’ as effects of ‘disagreements, controversies, frustrations, and hierarchies’, and agency must be ascribed ‘symmetrically’ to both ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ actors (pp. 15–17). She seems to understand the turn to science studies as flowing seamlessly from her empirical findings, which conveniently highlight the themes of ‘heterogeneous’ social collaboration, the studio itself as the ‘ecosystem’ taking shape in the dynamic flux of such collaboration, and ‘repurposing’ as practical engagement with early Cold War knowledge, whether in discursive or technological form (p. 13). By bootstrapping herself in this way – presenting her orientation as the natural justification for a methodology which, in turn, naturalises her orientation – she avoids having to provide reasons for pointing her history away from critique and towards a set of claims that make the composers and technicians of the Cologne studio sound suspiciously similar to contemporary tech entrepreneurs. Her position is that differences and dissent must be resolved into ever stronger alliances:

Even if we ignore the implicit neoliberalism in thinking that we can resolve historiographical debates about the modernist avant-garde by reinventing it as a pragmatic strategy for ‘creative validation and career advancement’ (p. 73), we are still left with the problem of explaining why this should be our resolution. Pickering’s mangle of practice does not permit us to do so. All would be fine if we could accept, as I gather Iverson does, that it is simply more natural to relate to Stockhausen and company as free agents living in the moment than it is to form judgements about their work and its legacy. (Students of electronic music today are certainly more likely to end up in ‘collaborative’ technical support positions than they are as world-famous composers.) If this relational outlook were truly natural, though, then it should apply to our understanding of what Iverson has done as well. But that would only be possible if this were not a book tacitly steeped in the conventions of American academic music theory. It assumes a potted periodization in which artists rush in to help audiences ‘heal’ in the aftermath of war (p. 21). Each chapter is structured around conventional close readings of composers’ sketch material, with responses to broader political and social questions dismissed as ‘speculative’ (p. 192). Rather than paying off in new networks and unacknowledged actors, Iverson’s declared interest in gendered labour and marginalised voices is used only to justify the inclusion of completely canonical male figures such as David Tudor, Iannis Xenakis and Gottfried Michael Koenig. Cathy Berberian appears unironically as ‘human simulacrum of the studio equipment’ (p. 189). The list of ‘popular’ musicians whose work was ‘inspired’ by mid-century electronic music includes no one younger than Kraftwerk and not a single Black musician (p. 199). In other words, this book offers exactly the same set of protagonists and styles as the Whiggish and critical histories. What is new is that now we can be certain that the only reason for the decontextualised, teleological, homosocial and Eurocentric interpretations is that these are the features thrown into starkest relief by the musicologist’s lens.