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TAPE LEADERS: EXCAVATING EARLY BRITISH ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2017

Ian Helliwell
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Abstract

This article questions the narrow representation of the history of much early British electronic music, and challenges the way historians and writers have tended to cherry-pick and lionize certain individuals, while ignoring all the others that fall outside of the limited and regularly repeated version of events. It is an extension of the research presented in my compendium Tape Leaders, conceived during 2010 with the aspiration to catalogue all the early British electronic music composers who became active before 1970, presenting a biographical entry for as many experimenters as I could trace and documenting more than 100 individuals, including hobbyist tape activists, who have never before received recognition. Tape Leaders presents a completely different picture to the consensus that positions the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a handful of others, at the centre of electronic activity in Britain, with allegedly very little else happening until universities caught on at the end of the 1960s and began to offer courses and studio facilities.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 71 , Issue 282 , October 2017 , pp. 41 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Helliwell, Ian, Tape Leaders, A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music Composers (Cambridge: Sound On Sound, 2016)Google Scholar, available at www.soundonsound.co/shop/books/tape-leaders-book.

2 Tristram Cary, Audio Annual (1971), pp. 42–9.

3 Peter Zinovieff, Queen Elizabeth Hall concert programme (10 February 1969), unpaginated.

4 Brend, Mark, Shindig! no. 59 (2016), p. 68 Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, the anthology CD Roberto Gerhard - Electronic explorations from his studio + the BBC Radiophonic Workshop 1958–1967, Sub Rosa, 2014.

6 Tape Recording (September 1958), p. 44.

7 Davies, Hugh, International Electronic Music Catalog (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

8 Judd, F.C., ‘Effects with a Tape Recorder’, Radio Constructor 9/12 (1956), pp. 763–5Google Scholar.

9 Judd, F.C., ‘How to Make Modern Music with a Tape Recorder’, Amateur Tape Recording 2/4 (1960), pp. 14–15 Google Scholar.

10 Brindle, Reginald Smith, The New Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 104 Google Scholar.

11 Judd, F.C., ‘Electronics in Third Stage Music’, Radio Constructor 16/5 (1962), pp. 329–31Google Scholar.

12 Judd, F.C., Electronics in Music (London: Neville Spearman, 1972)Google Scholar.

13 Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage and beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974)Google Scholar.

14 Berk, Cary and Oram are also absent from A Guide to Electronic Music by Griffiths, Paul (Thames and Hudson, 1979)Google Scholar, and Electronic and Experimental Music by Holmes, Thom (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.