A 1-day symposium on electronic and computer music

Includes an evening concert celebrating the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Dr Peter Zinovieff.

Date: Saturday 11 May 2013
Times: Registration 9:15; Papers 10:00 - 18:00; concert 19:30 - 21:30 (Full programme available shortly)
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Confirmed invited speakers:

Professor Monty Adkins (University of Huddersfield), Dr Till Bovermann (Media Lab Helsinki), Professor Simon Emmerson (De Montfort University), Dr Mick Grierson (Goldsmiths), Professor Peter Manning (Durham University), Dr James Mooney (University of Leeds) and Dr Peter Zinovieff.

Electronic and computer music relies on the materiality of its associated hardware and equipment variously for its realisation, transmission, storage and restoration. Archives of contemporary music, for example, tend still to focus on traditional musical manuscripts over the increasing number of other forms of possible musical representations. Musicologists, composers and technologists working in the fields of electronic and computer music arguably are faced with a much more complex situation regarding the archiving and representation of this music compared to those dealing solely with musical manuscripts. This one day symposium will focus on these issues and related issues from a variety of perspectives, especially related to the material traces of this music: scores, and other objects and physical representations of storage and transmission, hardware - real or virtual. In doing so, we examine the possible futures of electronic and computer music of the past and present from the perspectives of musicologist, archivist, music technologist, composer and performer.

The symposium concludes with an evening concert celebrating the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Dr Peter Zinovieff, co-founder in the late 1960s of Electronic Music Studios, London, and collaborator with such composers as Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werne Henze. Now enjoying a blossoming of compositional activity, this concert will include examples of Zinovieff's early work, as well as his most recent work in computer music.

Papers will include the following themes:

• The materiality of early electronic, tape and computer music
• Restoration and archiving of music involving technology
• Modes of representation of electronic and computer music (objects, scores, code?)
• Constraints, affordances and the idiomatic in electronic, tape and computer music
• The DIY aesthetic in electronic music hardware of the 20th century
• Hardware and virtual hardware for electronic music (re)creation
• Collaborations between composers and music technologists in the 20th century
• Electronic Music Studios (EMS) hardware for 21st-century electronic music performance
• Spatialisation techniques in early tape, electronic and computer music
• Music technology hardware as a bridge between modernist and popular music

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