Electronic music was once associated almost exclusively with Western art music but from the late 1960s on the availability of affordable music technology meant that music produced using electronic means became increasingly common in the popular domain. Today electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music.
In 1878, Thomas A. Edison patented the phonograph, which used cylinders similar to Scott's device. Although cylinders continued in use for some time, Emile Berliner developed the disc phonograph in 1887. A significant invention, which was later to have a profound effect on electronic music, was Lee DeForest's triode audion. This was the first thermionic valve, or vacuum tube, invented in 1906, which led to the generation and amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and electronic computation, amongst other things.
Before electronic music, there was a growing desire for composers to use emerging technologies for musical purposes. Several instruments were created that employed electromechanical designs and they paved the way for the later emergence of electronic instruments. An electromechanical instrument called the Telharmonium (sometimes Teleharmonium or Dynamophone) was developed by Thaddeus Cahill in the years 1898-1912. However, simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Telharmonium, due to its immense size. The first electronic instrument is often viewed to be the Theremin, invented by Professor Léon Theremin circa 1919–1920. Other early electronic instruments include the ''Croix Sonore'', invented in 1926 by Nikolai Obukhov, and the Ondes Martenot, which was most famously used in the ''Turangalîla-Symphonie'' by Olivier Messiaen as well as other works by him. The Ondes Martenot was also used by other, primarily French, composers such as Andre Jolivet.
Also in the ''Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music'', Busoni states:
Music as an art, our so-called occidental music, is hardly four hundred years old; its state is one of development, perhaps the very first stage of a development beyond present conception, and we—we talk of "classics" and "hallowed traditions"! And we have talked of them for a long time!We have formulated rules, stated principles, laid down laws;—we apply laws made for maturity to a child that knows nothing of responsibility!
Young as it is, this child, we already recognize that it possesses one radiant attribute which signalizes it beyond all its elder sisters. And the lawgivers will not see this marvelous attribute, lest their laws should be thrown to the winds. This child—it ''floats on air''! It touches not the earth with its feet. It knows no law of gravitation. It is well nigh incorporeal. Its material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature herself. It is—free!
But freedom is something that mankind have never wholly comprehended, never realized to the full. They can neither recognize or acknowledge it.
They disavow the mission of this child; they hang weights upon it. This buoyant creature must walk decently, like anybody else. It may scarcely be allowed to leap—when it were its joy to follow the line of the rainbow, and to break sunbeams with the clouds.
Through this writing, as well as personal contact, Busoni had a profound effect on many musicians and composers, perhaps most notably on his pupil, Edgard Varèse, who said:
Together we used to discuss what direction the music of the future would, or rather, should take and could not take as long as the straitjacket of the tempered system. He deplored that his own keyboard instrument had conditioned our ears to accept only an infinitesimal part of the infinite gradations of sounds in nature. He was very much interested in the electrical instruments we began to hear about, and I remember particularly one he had read of called the Dynamophone. All through his writings one finds over and over again predictions about the music of the future which have since come true. In fact, there is hardly a development that he did not foresee, as for instance in this extraordinary prophecy: 'I almost think that in the new great music, machines will also be necessary and will be assigned a share in it. Perhaps industry, too, will bring forth her share in the artistic ascent.
On 11 March 1913, futurist Luigi Russolo published his manifesto "The Art of Noises". In 1914, he held the first "art-of-noises" concert in Milan on April 21. This used his Intonarumori, described by Russolo as "acoustical noise-instruments, whose sounds (howls, roars, shuffles, gurgles, etc.) were hand-activated and projected by horns and megaphones." In June, similar concerts were held in Paris.
In addition to the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot was invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot, who debuted it in Paris.
The following year, Antheil first composed for mechanical devices, electrical noisemakers, motors and amplifiers in his unfinished opera, ''Mr. Bloom''.
Recording of sounds made a leap in 1927, when American inventor J. A. O'Neill developed a recording device that used magnetically coated ribbon. However, this was a commercial failure. Two years later, Laurens Hammond established his company for the manufacture of electronic instruments. He went on to produce the Hammond organ, which was based on the principles of the Telharmonium, along with other developments including early reverberation units. Hammond (along with John Hanert and C. N. Williams) would also go onto invent another electronic instrument, the Novachord, which Hammond's company manufactured from 1939–1942.
The method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.
In this same period, experiments began with sound art, early practitioners of which include Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and others.
Low-fidelity magnetic wire recorders had been in use since around 1900 and in the early 1930s the movie industry began to convert to the new optical sound-on-film recording systems based on the photoelectric cell. It was around this time that the German electronics company AEG developed the first practical audio tape recorder, the "Magnetophon" K-1, which was unveiled at the Berlin Radio Show in August 1935.
During World War II, Walter Weber rediscovered and applied the AC biasing technique, which dramatically improved the fidelity of magnetic recording by adding an inaudible high-frequency tone. It extended the 1941 'K4' Magnetophone frequency curve to 10 kHz and improved the dynamic range up to 60 dB, surpassing all known recording systems at that time.
As early as 1942 AEG was making test recordings in stereo. However these devices and techniques remained a secret outside Germany until the end of WWII, when captured Magnetophon recorders and reels of Farben ferric-oxide recording tape were brought back to the United States by Jack Mullin and others. These captured recorders and tapes were the basis for the development of America's first commercially made professional tape recorder, the Model 200, manufactured by the American Ampex company with support from entertainer Bing Crosby, who became one of the first performers to record radio broadcasts and studio master recordings on tape.
Magnetic audio tape opened up a vast new range of sonic possibilities to musicians, composers, producers and engineers. Audio tape was relatively cheap and very reliable, and its fidelity of reproduction was better than any audio medium to date. Most importantly, unlike discs, it offered the same plasticity of use as film. Tape can be slowed down, sped up or even run backwards during recording or playback, with often startling effect. It can be physically edited in much the same way as film, allowing for unwanted sections of a recording to be seamlessly removed or replaced; likewise, segments of tape from other sources can be edited in. Tape can also be joined to form endless loops that continually play repeated patterns of pre-recorded material. Audio amplification and mixing equipment further expanded tape's capabilities as a production medium, allowing multiple pre-taped recordings (and/or live sounds, speech or music) to be mixed together and simultaneously recorded onto another tape with relatively little loss of fidelity. Another unforeseen windfall was that tape recorders can be relatively easily modified to become echo machines that produce complex, controllable, high-quality echo and reverberation effects (most of which would be practically impossible to achieve by mechanical means).
The spread of tape recorders eventually led to the development of electroacoustic tape music. The first known example was composed in 1944 by Halim El-Dabh, a student at Cairo, Egypt. Using a method later known as ''musique concrete'', he captured the sounds of an ancient ''zaar'' ceremony and electronically manipulated those sounds to create a piece of tape music called ''The Expression of Zaar'', presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. While his initial experiments in electronic tape music were not widely known outside of Egypt at the time, El-Dabh would eventually gain more fame for his influential work in electronic music at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s.
It wasn't long before composers in Paris also began using the tape recorder to develop a new technique for composition called Musique concrète. This technique involved editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. The first pieces of ''musique concrète'' in Paris were assembled by Pierre Schaeffer, who went on to collaborate with Pierre Henry.
On 5 October 1948, Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) broadcast composer Pierre Schaeffer's ''Etude aux chemins de fer''. This was the first "movement" of ''Cinq études de bruits'', and marked the beginning of studio realizations and musique concrète (or acousmatic art). Schaeffer employed a disk-cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit. Not long after this, Henry began collaborating with Schaeffer, a partnership that would have profound and lasting effects on the direction of electronic music. Another associate of Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse, began work on ''Déserts'', a work for chamber orchestra and tape. The tape parts were created at Pierre Schaeffer's studio, and were later revised at Columbia University.
In 1950, Schaeffer gave the first public (non-broadcast) concert of musique concrète at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. "Schaeffer used a PA system, several turntables, and mixers. The performance did not go well, as creating live montages with turntables had never been done before." Later that same year, Pierre Henry collaborated with Schaeffer on ''Symphonie pour un homme seul'' (1950) the first major work of musique concrete. In Paris in 1951, in what was to become an important worldwide trend, RTF established the first studio for the production of electronic music. Also in 1951, Schaeffer and Henry produced an opera, ''Orpheus'', for concrete sounds and voices.
In Cologne, what would become the most famous electronic music studio in the world was officially opened at the radio studios of the NWDR in 1953, though it had been in the planning stages as early as 1950 and early compositions were made and broadcast in 1951. The brain child of Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert (who became its first director), the studio was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. In his 1949 thesis ''Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache'', Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals; in this way, ''elektronische Musik'' was sharply differentiated from French ''musique concrète'', which used sounds recorded from acoustical sources.
With Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in residence, it became a year-round hive of charismatic avante-gardism [''sic'']" on two occasions combining electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional orchestras—in ''Mixtur'' (1964) and ''Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester'' (1967). Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his electronic music gave them an experience of "outer space," sensations of flying, or being in a "fantastic dream world" More recently, Stockhausen turned to producing electronic music in his own studio in Kürten, his last work in the genre being ''Cosmic Pulses'' (2007).
Following the foundation of electronics company Sony (then called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K.) in 1946, two Japanese composers, Toru Takemitsu and Minao Shibata, independently wrote about the possible use of electronic technology to produce music during the late 1940s. In 1948, Takemitsu conceived of a technology that would "bring noise into tempered musical tones inside a busy small tube," an idea similar to Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète the same year, which Takemitsu was unaware of until several years later. In 1949, Shibata wrote about his concept of "a musical instrument with very high performance" that can "synthesize any kind of sound waves" and is "operated very easily," predicting that with such an instrument, "the music scene will be changed drastically." The same year, Sony developed the magnetic tape recorder G-Type, which became a popular recording device for use in courtrooms and government offices, leading to Sony releasing the H-Type for home use by 1951.
In 1950, the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) electronic music studio would be founded by a group of musicians in order to produce experimental electronic music using Sony tape recorders. It included musicians such as Toru Takemitsu, Kuniharu Akiyama, and Joji Yuasa, and was supported by Sony, which offered them access to the latest audio technology, hired Takemitsu to compose electronic tape music to demonstrate their tape recorders, and sponsored concerts. The first electronic tape music from the group were "Toraware no Onna" ("Imprisoned Woman") and "Piece B", completed in 1951 by Kuniharu Akiyama. Many of the electroacoustic tape pieces they produced were usually used as incidental music for radio, film, and theatre. They also held concerts such as 1953's ''Experimental Workshop, 5th Exhibition'', which employed an 'auto-slide', a machine developed by Sony that made it possible to synchronize a slide show with a soundtrack recorded on tape; they used the same device to produce the concert's tape music at the Sony studio. The concert, along with the experimental electroacoustic tape music they produced, anticipated the introduction of musique concrète in Japan later that year. Beyond the Jikken Kobo, several other composers such as Yasushi Akutagawa, Saburo Tominaga and Shiro Fukai were also experimenting with producing radiophonic tape music between 1952 and 1953.
Japan was introduced to musique concrète through Toshiro Mayuzumi, who in 1952 attended a Schaeffer concert in Paris. On his return to Japan, he experimented with a short tape music piece for the 1952 comedy film ''Carmen Jyunjyosu'' (''Carmen With Pure Heart'') and then produced "X, Y, Z for Musique Concrète" which was broadcast by the JOQR radio station in 1953. Mayuzumi also composed another musique concrète piece for Yukio Mishima's 1954 radio drama ''Boxing''. Schaeffer's French concept of ''objet sonore'' (''sound object''), however, was not influential among Japanese composers, whose main interest in music technology was instead to, according to Mayuzumi, overcome the restrictions of "the materials or the boundary of human performance." This led to several Japanese electroacoustic musicians making use of serialism and twelve-tone techniques, evident in Yoshiro Irino's 1951 dodecaphonic piece "Concerto da Camera", in the organization of electronic sounds in Mayuzumi's "X, Y, Z for Musique Concrète", and later in Shibata's electronic music by 1956.
Following the lead of the Cologne studio established in 1953, Japan's NHK company established one of the world's leading electronic music facilities in Tokyo, the NHK Studio, in 1954, equipping it with technologies such as tone-generating and audio processing equipment, recording and radiophonic equipment, ''Ondes Martenot'', Monochord and Melochord, sine wave oscillators, tape recorders, ring modulators, band-pass filters, and four & eight channel mixers. Musicians associated with the studio included Toshiro Mayuzumi, Minao Shibata, Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toru Takemitsu. The studio's first electronic compositions were complete in 1955, including Mayuzumi's 5-minute pieces "Studie I: Music for Sine Wave by Proportion of Prime Number", "Music for Modulated Wave by Proportion of Prime Number" and "Invention for Square Wave and Sawtooth Wave" produced using the studio's various tone-generating capabilities, and Shibata's 20-minute stereo piece "Musique Concrète for Stereophonic Broadcast".
Ikutaro Kakehashi founded a repair shop called Kakehashi Watch Shop in the late 1940s repairing watches and radios, and then in 1954 founded Kakehashi Musen ("Kakehashi Radio"), which eventually grew into the company Ace Tone by 1960 and later the Roland Corporation by 1972. Kakehashi began producing electronic musical instruments since 1955, with the aim of creating ones capable of producing monophonic melodies. During the late 1950s, he produced theramins, Ondes Martenots, and electronic keyboards, and by 1959, a Hawaiian guitar amplifier and electronic organs.
The Music for Magnetic Tape Project was formed by members of the New York School (John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman), and lasted three years until 1954. Cage wrote of this collaboration: "In this social darkness, therefore, the work of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff continues to present a brilliant light, for the reason that at the several points of notation, performance, and audition, action is provocative.
Cage completed ''Williams Mix'' in 1953 while working with the Music for Magnetic Tape Project. The group had no permanent facility, and had to rely on borrowed time in commercial sound studios, including the studio of Louis and Bebe Barron.
In the same year Columbia University purchased its first tape recorder—a professional Ampex machine—for the purpose of recording concerts. Vladimir Ussachevsky, who was on the music faculty of Columbia University, was placed in charge of the device, and almost immediately began experimenting with it.
Herbert Russcol writes: "Soon he was intrigued with the new sonorities he could achieve by recording musical instruments and then superimposing them on one another." Ussachevsky said later: "I suddenly realized that the tape recorder could be treated as an instrument of sound transformation." On Thursday, May 8, 1952, Ussachevsky presented several demonstrations of tape music/effects that he created at his Composers Forum, in the McMillin Theatre at Columbia University. These included ''Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition'', and ''Underwater Valse''. In an interview, he stated: "I presented a few examples of my discovery in a public concert in New York together with other compositions I had written for conventional instruments." Otto Luening, who had attended this concert, remarked: "The equipment at his disposal consisted of an Ampex tape recorder . . . and a simple box-like device designed by the brilliant young engineer, Peter Mauzey, to create feedback, a form of mechanical reverberation. Other equipment was borrowed or purchased with personal funds."
Just three months later, in August 1952, Ussachevsky traveled to Bennington, Vermont at Luening's invitation to present his experiments. There, the two collaborated on various pieces. Luening described the event: "Equipped with earphones and a flute, I began developing my first tape-recorder composition. Both of us were fluent improvisors and the medium fired our imaginations." They played some early pieces informally at a party, where "a number of composers almost solemnly congratulated us saying, 'This is it' ('it' meaning the music of the future)."
Word quickly reached New York City. Oliver Daniel telephoned and invited the pair to "produce a group of short compositions for the October concert sponsored by the American Composers Alliance and Broadcast Music, Inc., under the direction of Leopold Stokowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After some hesitation, we agreed. . . . Henry Cowell placed his home and studio in Woodstock, New York, at our disposal. With the borrowed equipment in the back of Ussachevsky's car, we left Bennington for Woodstock and stayed two weeks. . . . In late September, 1952, the travelling laboratory reached Ussachevsky's living room in New York, where we eventually completed the compositions."
Two months later, on October 28, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening presented the first Tape Music concert in the United States. The concert included Luening's ''Fantasy in Space'' (1952)—"an impressionistic virtuoso piece" using manipulated recordings of flute—and ''Low Speed'' (1952), an "exotic composition that took the flute far below its natural range." Both pieces were created at the home of Henry Cowell in Woodstock, NY. After several concerts caused a sensation in New York City, Ussachevsky and Luening were invited onto a live broadcast of NBC's Today Show to do an interview demonstration—the first televised electroacoustic performance. Luening described the event: "I improvised some [flute] sequences for the tape recorder. Ussachevsky then and there put them through electronic transformations."
1954 saw the advent of what would now be considered authentic electric plus acoustic compositions—acoustic instrumentation augmented/accompanied by recordings of manipulated and/or electronically generated sound. Three major works were premiered that year: Varèse's ''Déserts'', for chamber ensemble and tape sounds, and two works by Luening and Ussachevsky: ''Rhapsodic Variations for the Louisville Symphony'' and ''A Poem in Cycles and Bells'', both for orchestra and tape. Because he had been working at Schaeffer's studio, the tape part for Varèse's work contains much more concrete sounds than electronic. "A group made up of wind instruments, percussion and piano alternates with the mutated sounds of factory noises and ship sirens and motors, coming from two loudspeakers."
''Déserts'' was premiered in Paris in the first stereo broadcast on French Radio. At the German premiere in Hamburg, which was conducted by Bruno Maderna, the tape controls were operated by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The title ''Déserts'', suggested to Varèse not only, "all physical deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty streets), but also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness, but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness."
In 1958, Columbia-Princeton developed the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, the first programmable synthesizer. Prominent composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Halim El-Dabh, Bülent Arel and Mario Davidovsky used the RCA Synthesizer extensively in various compositions. One of the most influential composers associated with the early years of the studio was Egypt's Halim El-Dabh who, after having developed the earliest known electronic tape music in 1944, became more famous for ''Leiyla and the Poet'', a 1959 series of electronic compositions which stood out for its immersion and seamless fusion of electronic and folk music, in contrast to the more mathematical approach used by serial composers such as Babbitt at the time. El-Dabh's ''Leiyla and the Poet'', released as part of the album ''Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center'' in 1961, would be cited as a strong influence by a number of musicians, ranging from Neil Rolnick, Charles Amirkhanian and Alice Shields to rock musicians Frank Zappa and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.
The score for ''Forbidden Planet'', by Louis and Bebe Barron, was entirely composed using custom built electronic circuits and tape recorders in 1956.
The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIRAC to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1951 it publicly played the Colonel Bogey March of which no known recordings exist. However, CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice which is current computer music practice. CSIRAC was never recorded, but the music played was accurately reconstructed (reference 12). The oldest known recordings of computer generated music were played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine from the University of Manchester in the autumn of 1951. The music program was written by Christopher Strachey.
The impact of computers continued in 1956. Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson composed ''Iliac Suite'' for string quartet, the first complete work of computer-assisted composition using algorithmic composition. "... Hiller postulated that a computer could be taught the rules of a particular style and then called on to compose accordingly." Later developments included the work of Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories, who developed the influential MUSIC I program. Vocoder technology was also a major development in this early era. In 1956, Stockhausen composed ''Gesang der Jünglinge'', the first major work of the Cologne studio, based on a text from the ''Book of Daniel''. An important technological development of that year was the invention of the Clavivox synthesizer by Raymond Scott with subassembly by Robert Moog. In 1957, MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, was created by Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories.
Also in 1957, Kid Baltan (Dick Raaymakers) and Tom Dissevelt released their debut album, Song Of The Second Moon, recorded at the Phillips studio. The public remained interested in the new sounds being created around the world, as can be deduced by the inclusion of Varèse's ''Poème électronique'', which was played over four hundred loudspeakers at the Phillips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. That same year, Mauricio Kagel, an Argentine composer, composed ''Transición II''. The work was realized at the WDR studio in Cologne. Two musicians perform on a piano, one in the traditional manner, the other playing on the strings, frame, and case. Two other performers use tape to unite the presentation of live sounds with the future of prerecorded materials from later on and its past of recordings made earlier in the performance.
The first of these synthesizers to appear was the Buchla. Appearing in 1963, it was the product of an effort spearheaded by ''musique concrète'' composer Morton Subotnick.
The theremin had been in use since the 1920s but it attained a degree of popular recognition through its use in science-fiction film soundtrack music in the 1950s (e.g., Bernard Herrmann's classic score for ''The Day the Earth Stood Still'').
In the UK in this period, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (established in 1958) emerged one of the most productive and widely known electronic music studios in the world, thanks in large measure to their work on the BBC science-fiction series ''Doctor Who''. One of the most influential British electronic artists in this period was Workshop staffer Delia Derbyshire, who is now famous for her 1963 electronic realisation of the iconic ''Doctor Who'' theme, composed by Ron Grainer.
In 1961 Josef Tal established the ''Centre for Electronic Music in Israel'' at The Hebrew University, and in 1962 Hugh Le Caine arrived in Jerusalem to install his ''Creative Tape Recorder'' in the centre. In the 1990s Tal conducted, together with Dr Shlomo Markel, in cooperation with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and VolkswagenStiftung a research project (Talmark) aimed at the development of a novel musical notation system for electronic music.
Milton Babbitt composed his first electronic work using the synthesizer—his ''Composition for Synthesizer''—which he created using the RCA synthesizer at CPEMC.
For Babbitt, the RCA synthesizer was a dream come true for three reasons. First, the ability to pinpoint and control every musical element precisely. Second, the time needed to realize his elaborate serial structures were brought within practical reach. Third, the question was no longer "What are the limits of the human performer?" but rather "What are the limits of human hearing?
The collaborations also occurred across oceans and continents. In 1961, Ussachevsky invited Varèse to the Columbia-Princeton Studio (CPEMC). Upon arrival, Varese embarked upon a revision of ''Déserts''. He was assisted by Mario Davidovsky and Bülent Arel.
The intense activity occurring at CPEMC and elsewhere inspired the establishment of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1963 by Morton Subotnick, with additional members Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Anthony Martin, and Terry Riley. Riley's overdubbed recording ''A Rainbow in Curved Air'' (1967) employed various electronic keyboard instruments, all played by the composer-improviser.
Later, the Center moved to Mills College, directed by Pauline Oliveros, where it is today known as the Center for Contemporary Music.
Simultaneously in San Francisco, composer Stan Shaff and equipment designer Doug McEachern, presented the first “Audium” concert at San Francisco State College (1962), followed by a work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1963), conceived of as in time, controlled movement of sound in space. Twelve speakers surrounded the audience, four speakers were mounted on a rotating, mobile-like construction above. In an SFMOMA performance the following year (1964), ''San Francisco Chronicle'' music critic Alfred Frankenstein commented, "the possibilities of the space-sound continuum have seldom been so extensively explored". In 1967, the first Audium, a “sound-space continuum” opened, holding weekly performances through 1970. In 1975, enabled by seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts, a new Audium opened, designed floor to ceiling for spatial sound composition and performance. “There are composers who manipulate sound space by locating multiple speakers at various locations in a performance space and then switching or panning the sound between the sources. In this approach, the composition of spatial manipulation is dependent on the location of the speakers and usually exploits the acoustical properties of the enclosure. Examples include Varese’s Poem Electronique (tape music performed in the Phillips Pavilion of the 1958 World Fair, Brussels) and Stanley Schaff’s Audium installation, currently active in San Francisco.” Through weekly programs (over 4,500 in 40 years), Shaff “sculpts” sound, performing now-digitized spatial works live through 176 speakers.
A well-known example of the use of Moog's full-sized Moog modular synthesizer is the ''Switched-On Bach'' album by Wendy Carlos, which triggered a craze for synthesizer music.
Pietro Grossi was an Italian pioneer of computer composition and tape music, who first experimented with electronic techniques in the early sixties. Grossi was a cellist and composer, born in Venice in 1917. He founded the S 2F M (Studio de Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) in 1963 in order to experiment with electronic sound and composition.
The late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s also saw the development of large mainframe computer synthesis. Starting in 1957, Max Mathews of Bell Labs developed the MUSIC programs, culminating in MUSIC V, a direct digital synthesis language
In Europe in 1964, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed ''Mikrophonie I'' for tam-tam, hand-held microphones, filters, and potentiometers, and ''Mixtur'' for orchestra, four sine-wave generators, and four ring modulators. In 1965 he composed ''Mikrophonie II'' for choir, Hammond organ, and ring modulators.
The Jazz composers and musicians Paul Bley and Annette Peacock performed some of the first live concerts in the late 1960s using Moog synthesizers. Peacock made regular use of a customised Moog synthesizer to process her voice on stage and in studio recordings.
In 1966–67, Reed Ghazala discovered and began to teach "circuit bending"—the application of the creative short circuit, a process of chance short-circuiting, creating experimental electronic instruments, exploring sonic elements mainly of timbre and with less regard to pitch or rhythm, and influenced by John Cage’s aleatoric music [''sic''] concept.
The early 1980s saw the rise of bass synthesizers, the most influential being the Roland TB-303, a bass synthesizer and sequencer released in late 1981 that would later become synonymous with electronic dance music, particularly acid house. One of the first to utilize it was Charanjit Singh in 1982, though it wouldn't be popularized until Phuture's "Acid Tracks" in 1987.
After the arrival of punk rock, a form of basic synth rock emerged, increasingly using new digital technology to replace other instruments. Pioneering bands included Ultravox with their 1977 single "Hiroshima Mon Amour", Yellow Magic Orchestra from Japan, The Human League and Tubeway Army from the UK, and Devo from the US. Yellow Magic Orchestra in particular helped pioneer synthpop with their self-titled album (1978) and ''Solid State Survivor'' (1979). The definition of MIDI and the development of digital audio made the development of purely electronic sounds much easier. These developments led to the growth of synth pop, which after it was adopted by the New Romantic movement, allowed synthesizers to dominate the pop and rock music of the early 80s. Key acts included Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, Talk Talk, Japan and the Eurythmics. Synthpop sometimes used synthesizers to replace all other instruments, until the style began to fall from popularity in the mid-1980s.
Drum machines, also known as rhythm machines, also began being used around the mid-1970s, with an early example being Osamu Kitajima's progressive rock album ''Benzaiten'' (1974), which used a rhythm machine along with electronic drums and a synthesizer. In 1977, Ultravox's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" was one of the first singles to use the metronome-like percussion of a Roland TR-77 drum machine. In 1980, Roland Corporation released the TR-808, one of the first and most popular programmable drum machines. The first band to use it was Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1980, and it would later gain widespread popularity with the release of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" and Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" in 1982, after which the TR-808 would remain in continued use until at least 2008.
The advent of MIDI technology allows a single keystroke, control wheel motion, pedal movement, or command from a microcomputer to activate every device in the studio remotely and in synchrony, with each device responding according to conditions predetermined by the composer.
MIDI instruments and software made powerful control of sophisticated instruments easily affordable by many studios and individuals. Acoustic sounds became reintegrated into studios via sampling and sampled-ROM-based instruments.
Miller Puckette developed graphic signal-processing software for 4X called Max (after Max Mathews) and later ported it to Macintosh (with Dave Zicarelli extending it for Opcode) for real-time MIDI control, bringing algorithmic composition availability to most composers with modest computer programming background.
In 1975, the Japanese company Yamaha licensed the algorithms for frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis) from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971. Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the "key scaling" method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation. However, the first commercial digital synthesizer to be released would be the Australian Fairlight company's Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) in 1979, as the first practical polyphonic digital synthesizer/sampler system.
In 1980, Yamaha eventually released the first FM digital synthesizer, the Yamaha GS-1, but at an expensive price. In 1983, Yamaha introduced the first stand-alone digital synthesizer, the DX-7, which also used FM synthesis and would become one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. The DX-7 was known for its recognizable bright tonalities that was partly due to an overachieving sampling rate of 57 kHz.
Barry Vercoe describes one of his experiences with early computer sounds:
At IRCAM in Paris in 1982, flutist Larry Beauregard had connected his flute to DiGiugno's 4X audio processor, enabling real-time pitch-following. On a Guggenheim at the time, I extended this concept to real-time score-following with automatic synchronized accompaniment, and over the next two years Larry and I gave numerous demonstrations of the computer as a chamber musician, playing Handel flute sonatas, Boulez's ''Sonatine'' for flute and piano and by 1984 my own ''Synapse II'' for flute and computer—the first piece ever composed expressly for such a setup. A major challenge was finding the right software constructs to support highly sensitive and responsive accompaniment. All of this was pre-MIDI, but the results were impressive even though heavy doses of tempo rubato would continually surprise my Synthetic Performer. In 1985 we solved the tempo rubato problem by incorporating ''learning from rehearsals'' (each time you played this way the machine would get better). We were also now tracking violin, since our brilliant, young flautist had contracted a fatal cancer. Moreover, this version used a new standard called MIDI, and here I was ably assisted by former student Miller Puckette, whose initial concepts for this task he later expanded into a program called MAX.
Automated Harmonization of Melody in Real Time: An interactive computer system, developed in collaboration with flutist/composer Pedro Eustache, for realtime melodic analysis and harmonic accompaniment. Based on a novel scheme of harmonization devised by Eustache, the software analyzes the tonal melodic function of incoming notes, and instantaneously performs an orchestrated harmonization of the melody. The software was originally designed for performance by Eustache on Yamaha WX7 wind controller, and was used in his composition ''Tetelestai'', premiered in Irvine, California in March 1999.
Other recent developments included the Tod Machover (MIT and IRCAM) composition ''Begin Again Again'' for "hypercello", an interactive system of sensors measuring physical movements of the cellist. Max Mathews developed the "Conductor" program for real-time tempo, dynamic and timbre control of a pre-input electronic score. Morton Subotnick released a multimedia CD-ROM ''All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis''.
In the last decade, a number of software-based virtual studio environments have emerged, with products such as Propellerhead's Reason and Ableton Live finding popular appeal. Such tools provide viable and cost-effective alternatives to typical hardware-based production studios, and thanks to advances in microprocessor technology, it is now possible to create high quality music using little more than a single laptop computer. Such advances have democratized music creation, leading to a massive increase in the amount of home-produced electronic music available to the general public via the internet.
Artists such as Fluker from Australia, can now also individuate their production practice by creating personalized software synthesizers, effects modules, and various composition environments. Devices that once existed exclusively in the hardware domain can easily have virtual counterparts. Some of the more popular software tools for achieving such ends are commercial releases such as Max/Msp and Reaktor and open source packages such as Pure Data, SuperCollider, and ChucK.
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Coordinates | 28°36′36″N77°13′48″N |
---|---|
name | David Letterman |
pseudonym | Earl Hofert |
birth date | April 12, 1947 |
birth place | Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
medium | Stand-up, talk show |
nationality | American |
genre | Observational comedy, surreal humor, deadpan |
subject | Self-deprecation, everyday life |
influences | Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, Paul Dixon |
influenced | |
website | CBS.com/latenight/lateshow |
active | 1974–present |
domesticpartner | Regina Lasko (1986-2009) |
spouse | Michelle Cook (1969–1977)Regina Lasko (2009–present) |
Religion | Lutheran |
notable work | Host of ''Late Night with David Letterman'' (NBC)Host of ''Late Show with David Letterman'' (CBS) |
signature | David Letterman Autograph.svg |
Letterman is also a television and film producer. His company Worldwide Pants produces his show as well as its network follow-up ''The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson''. Worldwide Pants has also produced several prime-time comedies, the most successful of which was ''Everybody Loves Raymond'', currently in syndication.
In 1996, David Letterman was ranked #45 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Letterman lived on the north side of Indianapolis (Broad Ripple area), not far from Speedway, IN, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and he enjoyed collecting model cars, including racers. In 2000, he told an interviewer for ''Esquire'' that, while growing up, he admired his father's ability to tell jokes and be the life of the party. Harry Joseph Letterman survived a heart attack at age 36, when David was a young boy. The fear of losing his father was constantly with Letterman as he grew up. The elder Letterman died of a second heart attack at age 57.
Letterman attended his hometown's Broad Ripple High School at the same time as Marilyn Tucker Quayle (wife of the former Vice President) and worked as a stock boy at the local Atlas supermarket. According to the ''Ball State Daily News'', he originally had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades weren't good enough, so he decided to attend Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. He is a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity, and he graduated from what was then the Department of Radio and Television, in 1969. A self-described average student, Letterman endowed a scholarship for what he called "C students" at Ball State.
Though he registered for the draft and passed his physical after graduating from college, he was not drafted for service in Vietnam due to receiving a draft lottery number of 352 (out of 365).
Letterman began his broadcasting career as an announcer and newscaster at the college's student-run radio station—WBST—a 10-watt campus station which now is part of Indiana Public Radio. He was fired for treating classical music with irreverence.
Letterman then became involved with the founding of another campus station—WAGO-AM 570 (now WWHI, 91.3).
Letterman credits Paul Dixon—host of the ''Paul Dixon Show'', a Cincinnati-based talk show also shown in Indianapolis while Letterman was growing up—for inspiring his choice of career: :"I was just out of college [in 1969], and I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And then all of a sudden I saw him doing it [on TV]. And I thought: That's really what I want to do!"
In 1971, Letterman appeared as a pit road reporter for ABC Sports' tape-delayed coverage of the Indianapolis 500. David is initially introduced as Chris Economaki in his job as a corner reporter. He interviews Mario Andretti who has just crashed out of the race and asks him a question about traffic on the course.
Letterman appeared in the summer of 1977 on the short-lived ''Starland Vocal Band Show''. He has since joked about how fortunate he was that nobody would ever see his performance on the program (due to its low ratings).
Letterman had a stint as a cast member on Mary Tyler Moore's variety show, ''Mary''; a guest appearance on ''Mork & Mindy'' (as a parody of EST leader Werner Erhard); and appearances on game shows such as ''The $20,000 Pyramid'', ''The Gong Show'', ''Password Plus'' and ''Liar's Club''. He also hosted a 1977 pilot for a game show entitled ''The Riddlers'' that was never picked up. He was also screen tested for the lead role in ''Airplane!'', a role that eventually went to Robert Hays.
His dry, sarcastic humor caught the attention of scouts for ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson'', and Letterman was soon a regular guest on the show. Letterman became a favorite of Carson's and was a regular guest host for the show beginning in 1978. Letterman credits Carson as the person who influenced his career the most.
The show often featured quirky, genre-mocking regular features, including "Stupid Pet Tricks", dropping various objects off the roof of a five-story building, demonstrations of unorthodox clothing (such as suits made of Alka-Seltzer, Velcro and suet), a recurring Top 10 list, the Monkey-Cam (and the Audience Cam), and a facetious letter-answering segment. The Top 10 list, several "Film[s] by My Dog Bob" in which a camera was mounted on Letterman's own dog (often with comic results), Stupid Human Tricks, Small Town News, and Stupid Pet Tricks (which had its origins on Letterman's morning show) all eventually moved with Letterman to CBS.
Other memorable moments included Letterman using a bullhorn to interrupt a live interview on ''The Today Show'', announcing that he was the NBC president while not wearing any pants; interrupting Al Roker on WNBC-TV's broadcast of ''Live at Five'' by walking into their studio (which occupied the same floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza as Letterman's studio); and staging "elevator races", complete with commentary by NBC Sports' Bob Costas. In one infamous appearance, in 1982, Andy Kaufman (who was already wearing a neck brace) appeared to be slapped and knocked to the ground by professional wrestler Jerry Lawler (though Lawler and Kaufman's friend Bob Zmuda later revealed that the event was staged.) In another memorable exchange, sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer included cucumbers in a list of handy sex objects that women could find at home. The following night, guest Ted Koppel asked Letterman "May I insert something here?" and Dave responded "OK, as long as it's not a cucumber."
But while the expectation was that Letterman would retain his unique style and sense of humor with the move, ''Late Show'' was not an exact replica of his old NBC program. Recognizing the more formal mood (and wider audience) of his new time slot and studio, Letterman eschewed his trademark blazer with khaki pants and white sneakers wardrobe combination in favor of expensive shoes, tailored suits and light-colored socks. The monologue was lengthened and Paul Shaffer and the "World's Most Dangerous Band" followed Letterman to CBS, but they added a brass section and were rebranded the "CBS Orchestra" as a short monologue and a small band were mandated by Carson while Letterman occupied the 12:30 slot. Additionally, because of intellectual property disagreements, Letterman was unable to import many of his ''Late Night'' segments verbatim, but he sidestepped this problem by simply renaming them (the "Top Ten List" became the "Late Show Top Ten", "Viewer Mail" became the "CBS Mailbag", etc.)
Following Leno's return to ''The Tonight Show'', however, Leno has regained his lead.
Letterman's shows have garnered both critical and industry praise, receiving 67 Emmy Award nominations, winning 12 times in his first 20 years in late night television. From 1993–2009, Letterman ranked higher than Leno in the annual Harris Poll of ''Nation's Favorite TV Personality'' 12 times. For example, in 2003 and 2004 Letterman ranked second in that poll, behind only Oprah Winfrey, a year that Leno was ranked fifth. Leno was higher than Letterman on that poll three times during the same period, in 1998, 2007, and 2008.
Letterman recycled the apparent debacle into a long-running gag. On his first show after the Oscars, he joked, "Looking back, I had no idea that thing was being televised." He lampooned his stint two years later, during Billy Crystal's opening Oscar skit, which also parodied the plane-crashing scenes from that year's chief nominated film, ''The English Patient''.
For years afterward, Letterman recounted his hosting the Oscars, although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continued to hold Letterman in high regard and they had invited him to host the Oscars again. On September 7, 2010, he made an appearance on the premiere of the 14th season of ''The View'', and confirmed that he had been considered for hosting again.
During the initial weeks of his recovery, reruns of the ''Late Show'' were shown and introduced by friends of Letterman including Drew Barrymore, including Dr. O. Wayne Isom and physician Louis Aronne, who frequently appears on the show. In a show of emotion, Letterman was nearly in tears as he thanked the health care team with the words "These are the people who saved my life!" The episode earned an Emmy nomination. For a number of episodes, Letterman continued to crack jokes about his bypass, including saying, "Bypass surgery: it's when doctors surgically create new blood flow to your heart. A bypass is what happened to me when I didn't get ''The Tonight Show!'' It's a whole different thing." In a later running gag he lobbied his home state of Indiana to rename the freeway circling Indianapolis (I-465) "The David Letterman Bypass." He also featured a montage of faux news coverage of his bypass surgery, which included a clip of Dave's heart for sale on the Home Shopping Network. Letterman became friends with his doctors and nurses. In 2008, a ''Rolling Stone'' interview stated "he hosted a doctor and nurse who'd helped perform the emergency quintuple-bypass heart surgery that saved his life in 2000. 'These are people who were complete strangers when they opened my chest,' he says. 'And now, eight years later, they're among my best friends.' "
Additionally, Letterman invited the band Foo Fighters to play "Everlong", introducing them as "my favorite band, playing my favorite song." During a later Foo Fighters appearance, Letterman said that Foo Fighters had been in the middle of a South American tour which they canceled to come play on his comeback episode.
Letterman again handed over the reins of the show to several guest hosts (including Bill Cosby, Brad Garrett, Elvis Costello, John McEnroe, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Bonnie Hunt, Luke Wilson and bandleader Paul Shaffer) in February 2003, when he was diagnosed with a severe case of shingles. Later that year, Letterman made regular use of guest hosts—including Tom Arnold and Kelsey Grammer—for new shows broadcast on Fridays. In March 2007, Adam Sandler—who had been scheduled to be the lead guest—served as a guest host while Letterman was ill with a stomach virus.
On December 4, 2006, CBS revealed that Letterman signed a new contract to host ''The Late Show with David Letterman'' through the fall of 2010. "I'm thrilled to be continuing on at CBS," said Letterman. "At my age you really don't want to have to learn a new commute." Letterman further joked about the subject by pulling up his right pants leg, revealing a tattoo, presumably temporary, of the ABC logo.
"Thirteen years ago, David Letterman put CBS late night on the map and in the process became one of the defining icons of our network," said Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation. "His presence on our air is an ongoing source of pride, and the creativity and imagination that the ''Late Show'' puts forth every night is an ongoing display of the highest quality entertainment. We are truly honored that one of the most revered and talented entertainers of our time will continue to call CBS 'home.'"
According to a 2007 article in ''Forbes'' magazine, Letterman earned $40 million a year. A 2009 article in ''The New York Times'', however, said his salary was estimated at $32 million per year. In June 2009, Letterman's Worldwide Pants and CBS reached agreement to continue the ''Late Show'' until at least August 2012. The previous contract had been set to expire in 2010, and the two-year extension is shorter than the typical three-year contract period negotiated in the past. Worldwide Pants agreed to lower its fee for the show, though it had remained a "solid moneymaker for CBS" under the previous contract.
On the February 3, 2011, edition of the ''Late Show'', during an interview with Howard Stern, Letterman said he would continue to do his talk show for "maybe two years, I think."
Carson later made a few cameo appearances as a guest on Letterman's show. Carson's final television appearance came May 13, 1994, on a ''Late Show'' episode taped in Los Angeles, when he made a surprise appearance during a 'Top 10 list' segment. The audience went wild as Letterman stood up and proudly invited Carson to sit at his desk. The applause was so protracted that Carson was unable to say anything, and he finally returned backstage as the applause continued (it was later explained that Carson had laryngitis, though Carson can be heard talking to Letterman during his appearance).
In early 2005, it was revealed that Carson still kept up with current events and late-night TV right up to his death that year, and that he occasionally sent jokes to Letterman, who used these jokes in his monologue; according to CBS senior vice president Peter Lassally (a onetime producer for both men), Carson got "a big kick out of it." Letterman would do a characteristic Johnny Carson golf swing after delivering one of Carson's jokes. In a tribute to Carson, all of the opening monologue jokes during the first show following Carson's death were written by Carson.
Lassally also claimed that Carson had always believed Letterman, not Leno, to be his "rightful successor." Letterman also frequently employs some of Carson's trademark bits on his show, including "Carnac the Magnificent" (with Paul Shaffer as Carnac), "Stump the Band" and the "Week in Review."
Winfrey and Letterman also appeared together in a Late Show promo that aired during CBS's coverage of Super Bowl XLI in February 2007, with the two sitting next to each other on the couch watching the game. Since the game was played between the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears, the Indianapolis-born Letterman wears a Peyton Manning jersey, while Winfrey—who tapes her show in Chicago—is in a Brian Urlacher jersey. Three years later, during CBS's coverage of Super Bowl XLIV, the two appeared again, this time with Winfrey sitting on a couch between Letterman and Jay Leno. The appearance was Letterman's idea: Leno flew to New York City in an NBC corporate jet, sneaking into the Ed Sullivan Theater during the ''Late Show'''s February 4 taping wearing a disguise, meeting Winfrey and Letterman at a living room set created in the theater's balcony where they taped their promo.
Letterman appeared in the pilot episode of the short-lived 1986 series "Coach Toast", and he appears with a bag over his head as a guest on Bonnie Hunt's ca. 1993 sitcom ''The Building''. He also appears in The Simpsons, as himself in a couch gag when The Simpsons find themselves (and the couch) in "Late Night with David Letterman." He had a cameo in the feature film ''Cabin Boy'', with Chris Elliott, who worked as a writer on Letterman's show. In this and other appearances, Letterman is listed in the credits as "Earl Hofert", the name of Letterman's maternal grandfather. He also appeared as himself in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts as well as the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic ''Man on the Moon'', in a few episodes of Garry Shandling's 1990s TV series ''The Larry Sanders Show'' and in "The Abstinence", a 1996 episode of the sitcom ''Seinfeld''. Letterman also made an uncredited appearance in the first episode of the third season of the sitcom The Nanny.
Letterman provided vocals for the Warren Zevon song "Hit Somebody" from ''My Ride's Here'', and provided the voice for Butt-head's father in the 1996 animated film ''Beavis and Butt-head Do America''.
In 2010, a documentary ''Dying to Do Letterman'' was released directed by Joke Fincioen and Biagio Messina featuring Steve Mazan, a stand up comic, who has cancer and wants to appear on the Letterman Show. The film won Best Documentary and Jury Awards at the Cinequest Film Festival. Steve Mazan published a same-titled book (full title, ''Dying to Do Letterman: Turning Someday into Today'' about his own saga.
In 2005, Worldwide Pants produced its first feature film, ''Strangers with Candy'', which was a prequel to the Comedy Central TV series of the same title. In 2007, Worldwide Pants produced the ABC comedy series, ''Knights of Prosperity''.
Worldwide Pants made significant news in December 2007 when it was announced that Letterman's company had independently negotiated its own contract with the Writers Guild of America, East, thus allowing Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and their writers to return to work, while the union continued its strike against production companies, networks and studios who had not reached an agreement.
Letterman has a son, Harry Joseph Letterman (born on November 3, 2003), with Regina Lasko. Harry is named after Letterman's father. In 2005, police discovered a plot to kidnap Harry Letterman and ransom him for $5 million. Kelly Frank, a house painter who had worked for Letterman, was charged in the conspiracy.
Letterman and Lasko, who had been together since 1986, wed on March 19, 2009, during a quiet courthouse civil ceremony in Choteau, Montana, where he purchased a ranch in 1999. Letterman announced the marriage during the taping of his March 23 show, shortly after congratulating Bruce Willis for getting married the previous week. Letterman told the audience he nearly missed the ceremony because his truck became stuck in mud two miles from their house. The family resides in North Salem, New York, on a estate.
A central figure in the case and one of the women Letterman had had a sexual relationship with was his longtime personal assistant Stephanie Birkitt who often appeared with him in his show. She had also worked for ''48 Hours''. Until a month prior to the revelations she had shared a residence with Halderman, who allegedly had copied her personal diary and used it, along with private emails, in the blackmail package.
On October 3, 2009, a former CBS employee, Holly Hester, announced that she and Letterman had engaged in a year-long "secret" affair in the early 1990s while she was his intern and a student at New York University.
In the days following the initial announcement of the affairs and the arrest, several prominent women, including Kathie Lee Gifford, co-host of NBC's ''Today Show'', and NBC news anchor Ann Curry questioned whether Letterman's affairs with subordinates created an unfair working environment. A spokesman for Worldwide Pants said that the company's sexual harassment policy did not prohibit sexual relationships between managers and employees. According to business news reporter Eve Tahmincioglu, "CBS suppliers are supposed to follow the company's business conduct policies" and the CBS 2008 Business Conduct Statement states that "If a consenting romantic or sexual relationship between a supervisor and a direct or indirect subordinate should develop, CBS requires the supervisor to disclose this information to his or her Company's Human Resources Department..."
On October 5, 2009, Letterman devoted a segment of his show to a public apology to his wife and staff. Three days later, Worldwide Pants announced that Birkitt had been placed on a "paid leave of absence" from the ''Late Show''. On October 15, CBS News announced that the company's Chief Investigative Correspondent, Armen Keteyian, had been assigned to conduct an "in-depth investigation" into Halderman's blackmail of Letterman.
In his capacities as either a writer, producer, performer, or as part of a writing team, Letterman is among the most nominated people in Emmy Award history with 52 nominations, winning two Daytime Emmys and five Primetime Emmys since 1981. His nomination record is second only to producer Jac Venza, who holds the record for the most Emmy nominations for an individual (57). Letterman has been nominated every year since 1984, when he first appeared on late night television as the host of ''Late Night with David Letterman.'' Additionally, he has won four American Comedy Awards. Letterman was the first recipient of the Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence at The Comedy Awards in 2011.
At the same time, Letterman also received a Sagamore of the Wabash award given by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, which recognizes distinguished service to the state of Indiana.
Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:American entertainment industry businesspeople Category:American people of German descent Category:American television talk show hosts Category:Ball State University alumni Category:Daytime Emmy Award winners Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Indianapolis, Indiana television anchors Category:Indy Racing League owners Category:People from Indianapolis, Indiana Category:Weather presenters Category:American people of British descent
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