Vangelis’s qualification as a genius is not an opinion, it is an indisputable fact. And maybe once again we need to distinguish between what we like and what we don’t, given what deserves to be labeled good, normal, average, or bad. Vangelis may or may not like it, and that’s the most normal thing in the world, but all you have to do is listen to some of his most important songs, such as the unbeatable Blade Runner soundtrack, and leave little room for discussion about his undeniable talent.

A talent that unfortunately faded. And this is how we can read in the media, social networks, etc. Vangelis (79) died last Tuesday in France, (although the report was released today) due to complications of COVID-19. Another name was added to the monstrous list of lives interrupted by the damned coronavirus, just a few months after the release of their latest album Juno to Jupiter last September.

And why talk about Vangelis in a technology medium like MuyComputer? To explain this, we have to get into the time machine and travel to the 1970s, which sounds like something more distant every day. A period of fascinating murmur in what concerns us, electronic technology and information technology. The days when some young people named Wozniak, Gates, Jobs, Dell, Grove, Ellison, etc., began to build on the foundations laid in Mountain View by those known as the “Eight Traitors,” Blank, Grinich, Kleiner, Last , Moore, Noyce, Roberts and Hoerni. The revolution began.

Wozniak and Jobs have taken Apple’s first steps in consolidating electronics in music.

In a more or less parallel way, electronics have also begun to gain more weight in the music field. From the predecessor of Telharmonia to the hugely popular Theremin (I’ve always wanted it), electricity and then electronics were introduced into music composition, first as an experiment and at the same time with more commercial designs or at least something more. more affordable than many of the decades of the 1940s and 1950s.

in the sixties Artists and bands are beginning to emerge that integrate electronic sounds and instruments into songs aimed at the general public with greater or lesser success.. Perhaps the most important of these are Kraftwerk, the creators of some well-known and well-remembered songs at the time, such as The Robots, Autobahn, The Man Machine and the Tour de France. Kraftwerk not only used intensively (and still, because the band is still active) intensively electronics, but also showed their fascination with technology in many of their compositions.

The treacherous eight laid the groundwork for the technological revolution of the 1970s, while more or less experimental musicians of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for a generation of musicians, including Vangelis, Brian Eno, Jean Michelle Jarre, Giorgio Moroder, Mike Oldfield and many others. dIn the music world, he somehow replicated the information technology and technology revolution it should have changed our lives so much in the coming decades.

Vangelis and the computer soundtrack

To claim that Vangelis was the main author of the soundtrack to the explosion of computer technology would be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the sound of many of his compositions, in which the presence of electronics was crucial, contributed decisively, thanks to the auditory path, to normalize the presence of electronics in our lives. This is a characteristic of his musical style, which began to consolidate in his career in the mid-1970s and for which he reaped multiple and very sweet fruits in the early 1980s.

Chronologically, we can place the first major milestone in 1980, when some of his compositions are used in the documentary series Cosmos by Carl Sagan. This collaboration will mark the beginning of Vangelis’s space-related compositions and exploration, with moments as symbolically remarkable as NASA ordered the composition for the Mars Odyssey mission in 2001. Vangelis went on to compose the entire disk, Mythodea, dedicated to mapping the surface of the red planet.

Another milestone in Vangelis was the composition of the soundtrack, which was burned into our memories by millions of people born between the 1940s and 1970s. I mean, of course, the job that led him to win his first Oscar, Soundtrack to Chariots of Firein 1982. If his participation in the Cosmos soundtrack gave Vangelis great prestige, then Chariots of Fire became one of the most respected (for his style) and respected artists of his generation.

Synthesizers from the late 1960s and mid-1970s are essential to the work of Vangelis and his generation.

And the third milestone, probably the one that makes him remember the most, even though it didn’t look like it back then, was another soundtrack. The year was 1984, and the brave director filmed a futuristic dystopia that had a fairly average response, with quite negative reviews and quite bad box office numbers. Surely you already imagined it, the director was none other than Ridley Scott and methe film, later raised to the threshold of cult cinema, was Blade Runner.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not so much, they agreed in the same year, 1984, the premiere of Blade Runner and an Apple commercial on the Superbowl it all changed, and so did Ridley Scott, coinciding with his collaboration with Vangelis.

It all happened musically when words like computer, operating system, client-server, machine code, bits and bytes, BASIC, memory addresses and long, etc. they began to creep into our lives whether it was children or adolescents whose brain sponging made them soak them to make them something basic in their lives, or young people and adults who saw the enormous potential of what was happening and joined the revolution without hesitation. .

In 1975, in my year of birth, if you were interested, Vangelis begins to consolidate his electronics-supported musical style, Microsoft is founded (Apple will do it a year later) and the fascinating Isao Tomita (another space lover and his explorer) released Snowflakes are Dancing, an album with versions of Debussy’s songs that have gone through a fair amount of electronic instruments (an experiment that William Orbit recreated decades later with his hypnotic Pieces in a modern style). It may seem like a coincidence, but I think it’s pure and simple causality.

The fascination with the generation of computer boom and musicians of electronics and technology is not accidental, for both groups the space race of the 60’s was a milestone that marked their lives.

The 1970s brought perhaps the last major countercultural trend in history, with technology and culture going hand in hand. a union that Steve Jobs did not hesitate to emphasize for decadesand in which artists like Vangelis, who became the forerunner of musical genres such as symphonic rock (in which the musician himself wrote his beginnings), followed a path that first converged and later persisted to this day.

Music by Vangelis, Tomita, Jarre, Moroder, etc. he was inspired by the technological revolution, but he fed it again by adding an exceptional soundtrack. To this day, the heritage of the event and its reaction is still very present due to its development. In those years, information technology made us perceive a surprising future. Music by composers like Vangelis has helped many of us project this future with our eyes closed. And as if that weren’t enough, it also took us into space just as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched the most distant journey of a human being.

That’s why, in my opinion, Vangelis’ death is so relevant and deserves to be grasped by a technology medium like MuyComputer. Because along with other geniuses of his generation he represented and musically sounded a movement that changed everything.

Pictures: Piano Piano! / Vintage Synth Explorer / NASA