James Mooney

Hugh Davies’s Electronic Music Documentation 1961–1968

In this paper I provide an account of certain key aspects of Hugh Davies’s electronic music research and documentation in the 1960s. By presenting evidence from a range of Davies’s published and unpublished writings I aim to show how Davies sought to document the development of the electronic music phenomenon up to 1967. In his writings from this period, Davies commented upon the fragmented nature of the electronic idiom, as evidenced—for example—in multiple parallel nomenclatures (elektronische Musik, musique concrete, Cage’s ‘Music for Tape-Recorder’ group, Varese’s ‘organised sound,’etc.). ‘This proliferation of different names for what is basically the same kind of music,’ Davies wrote in 1963, ‘shows that a considerable number of composers in different countries are all trying to find a workable idiom.’ I aim to provide an account of some of the ways that Davies described the idiom’s maturation as an international, interdisciplinary praxis, conveying—perhaps for the first time—a sense of the various international, aesthetic, and disciplinary threads coalescing into an apparently coherent whole, a process driven by the exchange of ideas across international and disciplinary boundaries. Even in his earliest unpublished writings on the subject (dating from 1961), Davies drew attention to the presence of ‘a large group of international composers’ at the WDR studio in Cologne, and also indicated the existence of studios in various different countries throughout the world. Davies’s tendency to classify by nation was not merely an organisational device, since he went on to emphasise the role of internationalisation as a potent source of musical innovation, both in the fledgling idiom of electronic music in particular and in avant-garde music more generally. Specifically, he pointed to the developmental avenues opened up via the hybridisation of already-developed international musical traditions—a phenomenon that he contrasted with the ‘on-the-spot’ invention of new musical forms, syntaxes, etc., which he referred to as ‘parlour games.’ He also drew attention to the exchange of ideas mediated by visits to electronic music studios by composers with different international and disciplinary backgrounds, and to the catalytic effect this had on the development and maturation of the electronic idiom in the late 1950s and early 60s. He sought to convey a sense of the interdisciplinary nature of electronic music by drawing parallels with the techniques of painting, sculpture and other musical traditions such as jazz in his earlier writings, and via the provision of several appendices in his International Electronic Music Catalog, each of which focussed on the use of electronic music techniques in a different interdisciplinary area. All the while, Davies was working toward the production of a comprehensive inventory of electronic music, beginning in earnest with his ‘Discography,’ which listed recordings available commercially on records or for hire on magnetic tape. This endeavour reached its pinnacle with the publication of the Catalog in 1968, which Davies estimated (quite accurately, as far as anybody can tell) accounted for ‘probably about 90% of all electronic music ever composed.’ (Davies made this suggestion in unpublished promotional materials dating from 1967.) The Catalog remains, to this day, the most complete record of international electronic music activity up to the end of 1967. A broader aim of this research is to work towards an evaluation of the implications of this, historiographically speaking. To what extent, and with what consequences, do subsequent published histories of electronic music rely upon data provided in the Catalog, for instance? In what ways might Davies’s model of electronic music as an international, interdisciplinary praxis be criticised, and what might be the implications of such criticism for the field of electroacoustic music studies?

Editorial: Alternative histories of electroacoustic music

In the more than twenty years of its existence, Organised Sound has rarely focused on issues of history and historiography in electroacoustic music research. Although some articles have adopted an explicitly historic perspective – often as the only such article within a given issue – many more have focused upon the documentation of current or recent creative practice and scientific research, the latest tools, techniques and software, or the development of new aesthetics, theory and analysis. Perhaps this should not be surprising given electroacoustic music’s close links with music technology, which like many technical disciplines is underpinned by an essentially modernist agenda of progress through technological innovation. There are, naturally, a few significant exceptions to this generalisation. Issue 9.1, marking ‘a century of innovation involving sound and technology’ (and roughly coinciding with the establishment of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network), included several articles that directly addressed an important historiographic issue, namely, developing and maintaining source materials for musicologists (Atkinson and Landy 2004; Battier 2004; Ramel 2004; Teruggi 2004). This theme was taken further in volume 11, which foregrounded such issues as archiving (Chasalow 2006; Dal Farra 2006; Waters 2006), preservation (Emmerson 2006), approaches to technological obsolescence (Bullock and Coccioli 2006; Polfreman, Sheppard, and Dearden 2006; Wetzel 2006; Yong 2006) and the study of tools and techniques as a method in historical musicology (Manning 2006). Issue 18.3 – ‘Re-wiring Electronic Music’ – included a few articles documenting recent creative practice that implicitly adopts a historiographic or media archaeological perspective (Paiuk 2013; Parker 2013; Riis 2013). Finally, issue 20.1, marking ‘20 Years of Organised Sound’, had an explicitly retrospective emphasis, and included a range of personal reflections on electroacoustic music’s history, as well as an article on canon formation in its literary history (Mooney 2015). However, these articles represent a comparatively small proportion of Organised Sound’s total output, and many of them engage with history only from the perspective of its relevance to, or incorporation within, present-day creative practice. Manuella Blackburn’s editorial observation that ‘all this contemplation appears very current and future focused’ (Blackburn 2014) could quite reasonably be applied, then, to the majority of discourse within this journal. There is, of course, a large body of literature beyond Organised Sound that directly addresses electroacoustic music’s history. The first substantial secondary accounts and surveys began to appear in the 1960s (Prieberg 1960; Moles 1960; ORTF 1962; Davies 1968). These focused on composers, studios and technologies, and were often geographically organised, a gambit extended by many key sources that followed (Appleton and Perera 1975; Ernst 1977; Griffiths 1979; Schrader 1982; Holmes 1985; Manning 1985; Chadabe 1997). From the 1990s, disciplinary and methodological horizons broadened, with substantial contributions from the fields of anthropology (Born 1995), sound studies (Kahn 1999; Cox and Warner 2004; Sterne 2012), history of science and technology (Braun 2002; Wittje 2016), science and technology studies (Pinch and Trocco 2004), gender studies (Rodgers 2010), material culture (Weium and Boon 2013), and critical organology (Patteson 2016) to name a few. Focused studies have spotlighted individuals, institutions, and locales that had been omitted or scantily treated in earlier accounts (Kuljuntausta 2008; Niebur 2010; Adkins and Russ 2013; Tazelaar 2013; Helliwell 2016). Reprints and new editions of iconic primary sources ensure that these texts remain important also (Cage 2011; Austin and Kahn 2011; Schaeffer 2012). Any brief survey must necessarily be partial, of course. Why, then, is there a relative lack of historic perspective within Organised Sound? One possible explanation stems from the demographic of Organised Sound’s reader/authorship. As Leigh Landy has recently noted:

The Hugh Davies Collection

The Hugh Davies Collection (HDC) at the Science Museum in London comprises 42 items of electronic sound apparatus owned by English experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005), including self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments and modified sound production and manipulation hardware. An early proponent of ‘live electronic music’ (performed live on stage rather than constructed on magnetic tape in a studio), Davies’s DIY approach shaped the development of experimental and improvised musics from the late 1960s onwards. However, his practice has not been widely reported in the literature, hence little information is readily available about the material artefacts that constituted and enabled it. This article provides the first account of the development of Davies’s practice in relation to the objects in the HDC: from the modified electronic sound apparatus used in his early live electronic compositions (among the first of their kind by a British composer); through the ‘instrumental turn’ represented by his first self-built instrument, Shozyg I (1968); to his mature practice, where self-built instruments like Springboard Mk. XI (1974) replaced electronic transformation as the primary means by which Davies explored new and novel sound-worlds. As well as advancing knowledge of Davies’s pioneering work in live electronics and instrument-building and enhancing understanding of the objects in the HDC, this article shows how object biographic and archival methodologies can be combined to provide insight into the ways in which objects (instruments, technologies) and practices shape each other over time.