Hugh Davies's Electronic Music Documentation 1961–8

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 By presenting evidence from a range of Davies’s published and unpublished writings I aim to show how Davies sought to document the development of the electronic music phenomenon up to 1967.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 concrète, Cage’s ‘Music for Tape-Recorder’ group, Varèse’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 Even in his earliest unpublished writings on the subject (dating from 1961), Davies drew attention to the presence of ‘a large group of international composers’ at the WDR studio in Cologne,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?