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Electronic music has certainly had a stigma attached to it, even though much of the music we hear on television and especially commercials is electronic music and we no longer think twice about it.
Electronic music, rightly speaking, is music where the sound of an instrument is reproduced by an electronic synthesizer, however that might be managed. The synthesizer could be played from a keyboard and, in that respect we've been living with electronic music for a very long time, hearing it mixed with live instruments in bands like Yes or Rush. I think this is electronic music's most interesting application; being mixed with live instruments.
The notion of electronic music upsets the purists, who cite the day when all live music would be replaced by someone pushing a button. It's not that simple, anyway. The closest making electronic music comes to just pushing a button is using loops. Loops are prerecorded snatches of music and, admittedly one must be very skillful in the use of loops or they grow old very fast.
A music professor I had at Cal State Fullerton railed against computer music as having a detrimental effect on the way composers wrote music. If you've listened to much minimalism, you can see that he had a case.
The idea of electronic music ever replacing live music is simply absurd, however. Nothing can ever replace the excitement and enjoyment of a live musical performance. I believe we have moved past this notion of replacing live music with electronic music and can begin to enjoy it in its proper application; that of supplementing and enhancing live or acoustic music with ambience and sounds that regular instruments don't have.
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