Holmes — Electronic and Experimental Music

Author: Thom Holmes
Title: Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture
Year: 1985
Type: Academic book (Scribner; Routledge from 2002; sixth edition 2020)

The field’s reference book began as a collector’s habit. Holmes, a composer and historian who studied with Paul Epstein and worked with John Cage, published the magazine Recordings of Experimental Music from 1979 to 1985 and maintained the only discography of Cage’s music authorized by the composer — the cataloguer’s instinct that became a textbook.¹ The survey runs the whole territory in one continuous story, “from Edgard Varèse to Brian Eno; musique concrète to turntablism,” treating the technology and the composition as a single history: the instruments, the studios, the techniques, and the people who put them to use.²

Each edition absorbed a decade. The 1985 Scribner original was a beginner’s introduction to sound production and the earliest experiments in instrument building; Routledge took it over in 2002, and by the sixth edition (2020, at nearly six hundred fifty pages) it carried Listening Guides — step-by-step annotations of key works — and a companion website built for the classroom.³ The fifth edition’s revisions are the telling ones for this shelf: 2015 added expanded coverage of the jazz-electronic experiments, the roots of electronic rock, and “additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field.” The survey was absorbing the correctives while the trade books were still arguing about them.⁴

The standing is real and strangely undocumented. No formal review in the academic journals surfaced in any archive searched, Computer Music Journal and Organised Sound included, and the book’s authority rests instead on adoption: forty years in print, six editions, Routledge’s claim that it is among the most comprehensive references for teaching the field, and a place in the ACM’s own catalog.⁵ It has no thesis to fight over, which is precisely its role here: the spine of record behind the two argued books, the place a reader checks what a Buchla is and who touched it first.

Key contributions

• The standard classroom survey of electronic music: technology, composers, and technique in one continuous account, 1985 to the present.
• The Listening Guides: key works annotated step by step, the survey doubling as an ear-training course.
• The revision record itself — jazz-electronic experiments, electronic rock, and women composers folded in edition by edition — as a live document of the field correcting its own coverage.
• The cataloguer’s authority: the author’s Cage-authorized discography and experimental-music magazine behind the book’s completeness.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — the listening meditation this reference underwrites
• Energy Flash — the narrative history; this book holds the decades that one skips
• Pink Noises — the corrective the fifth edition began absorbing
• Electronic — the family whose technical spine runs on this book

Footnotes

1. The magazine (1979–85) and the Cage-authorized discography per the publisher-carried author bio (accessed July 17, 2026); his site is thomholmes.com. ↩

2. The Varèse-to-Eno span per Routledge’s sixth-edition catalog page (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩

3. The 1985 first edition (Scribner, 278 pp.) per the AbeBooks record; the sixth edition (Routledge, March 2020, 648 pp.) per the catalog page (both accessed July 17, 2026). ↩

4. The fifth edition’s additions, quoted verbatim, per the Routledge 2015 edition description (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩

5. The absence is a finding, honestly reported: searches of the academic indexes (July 2026) surfaced no formal journal review of any edition; the teaching claim per Routledge’s catalog page (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩