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I would like to know when facility with a tape deck became a musical skill.
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depends what you understand by a musical skill, doesnt it? if you are talking about the ability to arrange sonic elements in a particular space, then why would manipulation of recordings not be every bit the musical skill as playing a conventional instrument? this shift from consumption of recordings to production is not obvious: it requires a fairly complex remapping of your relation to sound--it is a skill. it is a form of composition--it can be a form of improvisation.
in the group i work with, we use a shortwave radio and some electronic processing boxes as a basic element of our sound. we juxtapose it with piano, which i approach using extended techniques in order to make a space that you cannot simply think about from either angle. there is considerable technique involved with processing the radio, but it does not rely on years of finger exercizes to get to it. at the level of the sonic spaces that get made, the electronics converges with the outer edge of straight instrumental technique, if you let it--it you position it that way--and i think there is a really strong argument for doing it.
the usual way i suggest that folk disabuse themselves of the old school prejudices about what is and is not a "musical skill" is to tell the person making the objection to try it for him or herself. you can make basic sounds with a turntablist set-up quite easily, but it is really not easy to be any good at it. you can manipulate recorded material pretty easily, but it is not at all obvious that what you made by doing it would be interesting. what you have here is a version of the usual objection to conceptual art--i could have done that--to which the only response is--why didnt you?
and if protools or audition give possibilities for organizing sound to people who do not have "proper" musical training, so what? i do not see any argument that would equate this is a bad thing, with a deterioration of "real music" at all--you could argue the opposite in fact--that in some cases, the ways in which sound is organized by folk who come to it acrosss these software platforms is more radically other than anything you would encounter made by folk who come to it through convetional channels,
folk who organize sound across software platforms might open other ways of thinking sound, thinking the spaces within which sound can be placed..that might well transform how players with more convetional techniques work themselves.
further, these platforms undermine the arbitrary distinctions that enable some people to imagine that they hold some kind of monopoly on the production of "legitimate" music. i do not see the problem with that either.
all this is not to say that everything that is produced in these ways is equally interesting, equally important--there is a skill dimension to it. but it seems really limiting to simply exclude entire regions of musical production because you do not recignize the skills that are involved with it.
on another note, tape music has been one of the primariy drivers in the development of contemporary classical music from the late 1940s onward. i could give you a long long list of composers who work in/with the medium--james tenney, xenakis, elaine radigue, morton subotnik, on and on--much of the earlier tape/electronic music is doubly interesting because it was being made before assumptions that electronic music had to imitate convetional instruments was developed.
all this said, i am not particularly a techno fan because of the restricted set of beats that are used in most dance-oriented version of the form. i quite like hip hop when there is a significant role played by the turntablists. drum and bass is a seperate matter--i am something of an idiot fan.