Four decades later, his pioneering compositions are appealing in part because they evoke an earlier era: a time when electronic music sounded, well, electronic; when the future was all blips and gurgles.
The "masterpieces" ranged from pioneering compositions of the postwar avant-garde — Varese's "Poeme Electronique," Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge," and Xenakis's "Bohor" — to newish pieces by Jean-Baptiste Bandiere, Dennis Smalley, and Paul Lansky.
Most important, she delved into electronic pop, which traced its technique, if not its content, to Stockhausen's pioneering synthesizer compositions of the early nineteen-fifties.
As artistic inspirations, they mention Jackson Pollock, who pioneered overall composition, or works that lack a single focus; Eva Hesse, who often used rope; Louise Nevelson, who structured many works as wooden grids; and Joseph Cornell, who processed his wooden boxes to look decayed.
While she is knowledgeable about sound arts' heritage — including the pioneering electronic compositions of John Cage in the 1950s and '60s — and is grateful that it is has become more accepted among established art forms, Ms. Philipsz said she actually identified more with visual artists.
Pioneered by composition luminaries like John Cage, aleatoric compositions introduce an element of chance into the writing process, rolling dice to determine the next note on a 12-tone scale, or consulting the iChing to generate notes.
And Morton Subotnick's "Until Spring Revisited," at the end of the festival, sent everyone home happy: the chief pioneer of synthesizer composition tapped madly on a laptop, generating swarms of pointillistic sound that coalesced into shining major triads.
Reich pioneered a style of composition that's inspired everyone from the Orb to Sufjan Stevens.
He was an inventor of new systems of composition, a pioneer of electronic music, and, in later decades, a visionary with a touch of megalomania.
She went on to study music and physics at Brown University and music composition with pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the first electronic music center in the U.S.A.
