Electronic Music's Search for Its Beethoven's Fifth

Kraftwerk, Luis Cobos and the Impossible Canon of Electronic Music

Does electronic music have masterpieces? The question has gone decades without being settled, and the close-quarters debate remains open. Someone puts forward a maximalist thesis —electronic music as metamusic, capable of encompassing all others by pure abstraction— and immediately gets the textbook objection: masterpieces are Beethoven's Fifth or Sibelius's Fifth, pieces that break form and leave the listener knocked out. Applying that label to a synthesizer track, skeptics say, is a risky license.

From there, proposals keep coming. No one has closed the canon. Given a genre that, according to its defenders, will always be infinite, that shouldn't be surprising either.

Why Is It Hard to Call an Electronic Track a Masterpiece?

Because it is measured against a standard that the genre deliberately breaks. The classical current demands structures that explode, surprise, and an emotional charge capable of turning the listener upside down. By that yardstick, half of electronic music is out of contention. Defenders' answer is simple: value lies not in inherited form, but in rhythm, hypnotism and textures, and in the ability to evoke worlds impossible to represent any other way.

Mind the nuance, because not everyone who venerates the genre accepts the term. Some treat it as the language of the future and still refuse to pin the masterpiece medal on it. Vocabulary is the battlefield.

The Metamusic Thesis and the Multisensory Future

The opening is not lukewarm. It is argued that electronic music is metamusic, the one that encompasses all others in terms of abstraction, and that is why styles are becoming subordinate to it. The argument has a grandiose streak: it is in its infancy, its evolution is tied to technology, and that is why it will always be a world to discover.

The most striking part is the promise. The day electronic music is not only heard but can be touched, tasted and physically felt, drugs will become obsolete. It is a hypothesis with no date, no data and no way to be tested today, but it sums up well the aura the sector carries: that of always being one technological advance away from the next revolution.

The Canon Built on Proposals

Between one thesis and another, the matter fills with concrete names. The usual suspects from any serious conversation about electronic music appear: Kraftwerk, cited among New Order's influences; Aphex Twin, with a Nine Inch Nails remix described as a marvel; Burial, described without qualification as the crème de la crème; Yello and its 1980s sound effects; or The Age of Love, dated to 1990.

A curious fact circulating: according to what is attributed to Liam Howlett of The Prodigy, the first track composed entirely with synthesizers was credited to a rock band. Until then, the same intervention recalls, those tinkering with those devices were classical musicians like Berio. The claim is dropped, with no source to back it, and there it stays.

An illustration of the axis running through everything: someone posts a pogre rock track and the response is blunt. “Mind-blowing, but this isn't electronic music.” The genre's border is as disputed as its own canon.

The 1995 Case and the Masterpiece Nobody Saw Coming

The most singular contribution breaks the pattern. One single piece deserves, for the person proposing it, the title of masterpiece, and it is neither techno nor ambient. It is a piece from 1995, with Latin verses from the Gospel of Luke sung by the treble voices of the Escolanía de San Lorenzo del Guanol, credited to Luis Cobos. The choice leaves floating the question of what must have gone through its author's head to get there.

That the most emphatic candidate is precisely the one that breaks every cliché of the genre says a lot about the difficulty of fixing the concept. The list of proposals surprises by its variety.

From Vinyl to the CD Almost Nobody Could Hear

Nostalgic memory occupies much of the matter. People recall how a track like Pop Corn sounded on Spanish radio in the early seventies, and how that sound, more than the melody, hooked more than one listener. From there to Walter Carlos, Pink Floyd and, by the late eighties, New Age. A journey that explains why several of the reclaimed pieces are not mass hits but cult rarities.

The material detail also surfaces: synthpop bands that released CDs when almost nobody had a player and that, according to a forum user, sold none. The anecdote, told with doubts by the person bringing it up, suggests that electronic music arrived before the device to hear it.

All in all, a genre that aspires to subordinate all others has spent decades without agreeing even on what its first track was. It almost seems like a virtue.