The Department of Music and Performing Arts is hosting a one-day conference on Saturday 11 May exploring issues around electronic music and culminating in a 80th birthday concert for electronic music pioneer 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 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.

Invited Speakers include: 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.

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. Included in the concert will be early works such as Agnus Dei (1966) and Zinovieff's recent concerto for violin and electronics, OUR (2010), performed by the composer with Aisha Orazbayeva (violin). Other highlights will be early work rarely heard in public, and Zinovieff's recent Good Morning, Ludwig (2012), for surround-sound multichannel electronics.

For more information and to book for either the conference or the concert, please visit the EMSAR page. For any additional information please contact Dr Tom Hall.

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