Course: English Electronic Music: Delve into the Digital Archives

Here’s a short listening exercise, probably the most well-known musical product from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the Dr Who main theme. Listen on UbuWeb The Dr Who Theme itself was …

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 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 …

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …