Course: English Electronic Music: Delve into the Digital Archives

Tape manipulation There was probably no technology more essential to the evolution of electronic music than the medium of magnetic tape. Tape introduced the portability and malleability needed to record, …

Listening exercise And now the Americans! There’s so much more to be said for the American work within the field of electronic music than what we’ve covered here. In particular, …

Congratulations on completing the first week! I hope you’ve found the discussions and listening exercises engaging and that we’ve helped to illustrate the roots of electronic music. We’ve looked at …

There’s a lot more to listen to in terms of historical electronic music. The Sub Rosa label released multiple volumes of compilation records entitled An Anthology of Noise & Electronic …

Listening exercise No, not Pierre Schaeffer but rather Polish composer Boguslaw Schaeffer. No relation (as far as I’m aware). It’s a longer piece, around 17 and-a-half minutes, but considering the …

Listening exercise Here’s something for fans of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses! Thema – Omaggio a Joyce is a relatively short listen, at six-and-a-bit minutes. This is an additional video, hosted …

Listening exercise A polish composer now! Throughout the 20th century, the WDR was a focal point throughout Europe for composers wanting to learn about and make electronic music. György Ligeti …

Listening exercise Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge is around thirteen minutes in duration but it is a very dense listen. Some of you might be a bit put off at …

Listening exercise This one’s a short listen! Herbert Eimert’s Klangstudie I comes in at just under four minutes in duration – so have a few listens and see what you …

Listening exercise Beatriz Ferreyra’s piece Echoes comes from the record Echoes+, which was released by the Room40 label in 2020. It comes in at around eight-and-a-half minutes. As an aside, …

Listening exercise The Symphony pour un humme seul consists of 12 movements and a duration of around 22 minutes. If you don’t have time to listen to the full work …

Listening Exercise The Cinq études de bruits consists of five individual studies, and has a duration of just over 16 minutes. If you can, we recommend you engage with all …

Classifying sounds The GRM was synonymous with this interest in audio recording and the manipulation of recorded sound as the central material for music composition. In 1952, Schaeffer published a …

The course is designed so that you can work through it independently and at your own pace. We have designed each week to take around 3-4 hours to study in …

Electronic music is a huge and ever-changing area of music, and we can’t possibly cover every aspect in a four-week course. Instead, in this course we’re going to look at …