Call for Submissions – Volume 29, Number 2
Issue thematic title: Radical Education in Electronic Music, Past and Present
Date of Publication: August 2024
Publishers: Cambridge University Press
Issue co-ordinators: Christopher Haworth (c.p.haworth@bham.ac.uk) and Jake Williams (JXW1241@student.bham.ac.uk)

Deadline for submission: 15 September 2023

The social and political upheavals of the first two decades after World War II catalysed a wave of new initiatives seeking to reform education and democratise its access. From the critical collective education and ‘deschooling’ practices of community institutions like the AACM (Lewis 2008), to the art schools, polytechnics, post-secondary, anti-universities and other informal institutions that nurtured genres like punk, post-punk and new wave (Frith and Horne 1987; Butt, Eshun and Fisher 2017; Butt 2022), education emerged as a key battleground in the struggle to realise the world—and music—anew. Electroacoustic music’s role in such initiatives is more ambivalent, however, and our understanding is less clear. From one perspective, interdisciplines like acoustic ecology clearly aligned with progressive attempts to explode the university beyond institutional walls and overturn teacher-pupil hierarchies (Schafer 1967). More generally, the introduction of recording media and computers into the classroom in the 1960s and 70s–from Hugh Davies’s evening classes at Goldsmiths to Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC–carried the aspiration to democratise education by cultivating skills and literacies that were not gatekept by elite institutions and professions (Orton 1981; Mooney 2015; Palermo 2015; Valiquet 2018; Simon 2020). Yet electroacoustic music’s institutionalised form has long been criticised for upholding the boundary between elite and popular culture that radical education sought to dismantle (cf Born 1995). By the late 1990s, radical education in electronic music was increasingly being framed in terms of internet-aided self-study and creative entrepreneurialism taking place independently of institutions (Eshun 1999; Cascone 2000; Haworth 2016).  

Escalating crises within higher education have seen many contemporary educators turn their attention back to earlier radicalisms so as to reclaim the university and reanimate radical critical pedagogies (cf Mattern 2022). They align with post-BLM calls to ground education in anti-racist, feminist, and abolitionist principles, which themselves revive and rejuvenate the stalled attempt to reckon with the legacies of colonialism and racism in compulsory and voluntary education. Within the world of electronic music, popular and dance music communities have led the way in reviving and rethinking radical education. Inclusion-oriented grassroots projects such as Mick Huckaby’s Detroit-based Youthville project and Dweller Forever have done important work preserving and reproducing Black electronic music practices and histories for the coming generation of musicians and researchers, while initiatives like King Britt’s influential Blacktronica module continue to exert a pedagogical influence far beyond the UCSD computer music programme where it was developed. Closer to electroacoustic music studies, we might see radical education in the para-academic communities that have coalesced around live coding and DIY electronics, or in artist–led mentoring projects directed at diversifying and decolonising particular communities of practice or technologies (Roberts and McLean 2021; Allami 2021). Whatever their differences, these projects align with what education theorist Eli Meyehoff describes as a ‘fanatical political approach’ that ‘commits oneself as a partisan to particular sides in the many struggles’ in order to build ‘alternative modes of world-making’ (Meyerhoff 2019, 5). 

This call seeks historical and contemporary studies considering radical education in relation to the genres and practices of electroacoustic music studies. Potential themes include (but are not limited to):

• Deeper histories of the role of listening and the cultivation of aural skills in radical and progressive education (e.g., Black Mountain College and John Dewey’s holistic education, c.f. Turner 2013)
• Reports on para-sites, under-universities and other alternative educational institutions in relation to electronic music
• Historical and contemporary studies of radical education in electronic music, e.g., sound in art schools, adult education, community music and art centres
• Soundscape, field recording, and acoustic ecology as radical environmental education
• Contending with Black cultural history in relation to electroacoustic music’s negotiations of art and popular
• Archiving, preservation and memory work in relation to electroacoustic music pedagogy
• Critical perspectives on ‘democratisation’ narratives in relation to music, technology, and schooling

Submission format:

Notes for Contributors including how to submit on Scholar One and further details can be obtained from the inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/organised-sound/information/instructions-contributors (and download the pdf).

General queries should be sent to: os@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.

Accepted articles will be published online via FirstView after copy editing prior to the paper version of the journal’s publication.

Editor: Leigh Landy; Associate Editor: James Andean Founding Editors: Ross Kirk, Tony Myatt and Richard Orton† Regional

Editors: Ricardo Dal Farra, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry Truax, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse International

Editorial Board: Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Alessandro Cipriani, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil Fischman, Eduardo Miranda, Rosemary Mountain, Garth Paine, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Terugg

References: 

Allami, K. (2021). Apotome. https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2021/programme/artists/k/khyam-allami

Born, G. (1995). Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. University of California Press. 

Butt, G., Eshun, K., and Fisher, M. (Eds.). (2016). Post Punk Then and Now. Duncan Baird Publishers.

Butt, G. (2022). No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk. Duke University Press. 

Britt, K. (2021). ‘Blacktronica Part 1’. Google Arts and Culture.
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/blacktronika-part-1-moogseum/EAWBV8wSttrp6g?hl=en

Cascone, K. (2000). “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post- digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary
Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24(4): 12–18.

Dweller Forever. (2021). Techno is Black, Tekkno is German. 
https://dwellerforever.blog/2021/01/techno-is-black-tekkno-is-german

Eshun, K. (1999). ‘Music from the Bedroom Studios’, Ars Electronica Archive:
http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/prix_archive/prixjuryStatement.asp?iProjectID=2598

Haworth, C. (2016). ‘All the Musics Which Computers Make Possible’: 1 Questions of genre at the Prix Ars Electronica. Organised Sound, 21(1), 15-29.

Lewis, G. E. (2008). A power stronger than itself. University of Chicago Press.

Matthern, S. (2022). Redesigning The Academy. Course Curriculum.
https://redesigningacademy.wordsinspace.net/spring2022/

Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. U of Minnesota Press.

Mooney, J. (2015). Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–1968. Organised Sound, 20(1), 111-121. doi:10.1017/S1355771814000521

Orton, R. (1981). Electronic music for schools. Cambridge University Press.

Palermo, S., 2015. The Work of Hugh Davies in the Context of Experimental Electronic Music in Britain. PhD. Middlesex University.

Roberts A, & A. McLean. (2021). Afro | Algo Futures. https://algo-afro-futures.lurk.org/

Schafer, R. M. (1967). Ear Cleaning: Notes Towards an Experimental Music Course. 

Simon, V. (2020). “Democratizing Touch: Xenakis’s UPIC, Disability, and Avant-Gardism”. Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. https://amodern.net/article/democratizing-touch/

Turner, F. (2013). The democratic surround: Multimedia and American liberalism from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. University of Chicago Press.

Valiquet, P. (2018). “All Sounds Are Created Equal”: Mediating Democracy in Acousmatic Education. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound, 123-137.