If the advent of electronic music has brought any great paradigm cultural shift, it's that physical dexterity is no longer a requirement to the making of music. Reed and brass instruments demand determined mouth control, percussion and stringed instruments require a high order of muscular coordination, as do traditional keyboards. By opening up vast new areas of expression to people who previously felt unqualified to enter the usual musical disciplines, in a small way these electronic music pioneers have leveled the playing field of creativity for everyone.
Music is no longer strictly about ability and training - it's about the sheer generation of ideas.
The most influential American experimental composer of the 20th century, John Cage was the father of indeterminism , an aesthetic that expelled all notions of choice from the creative process and rejected the most compositional principles of the past. It's suggested that he did to music what Karl Marx did to government - he leveled it. It asks the performer to sit at his instrument but play nothing, the sounds instead produced by an uncomfortable audience. Composer Wendy Carlos spurred electronic music to new commercial heights during the late '60s, popularizing the synthesizer with the enormously successful Switched-On Bach album. Following her graduation at Columbia, she moved to Manhattan where she met Dr. Robert Moog and began playing the Moog synthesizer.