Sound Artist

(b Santiago de Chile, June 22, 1922; d Santiago, Feb 3, 1999). Chilean composer and writer. Introduced to music by his father, a cellist, he studied theory and the piano at the Catholic Conservatory from 1935 to 1939. After graduating in civil engineering from the University of Chile (1945), he pursued work in composition with Jorge Urrutia Blondel at the National Conservatory (1948–52). He made his first experiments in electronic music when he was planning music programmes for Chilean Radio (1953–6), and in 1956 created the Experimental Sound Workshop at the Catholic University of Santiago. He taught both at the Catholic University and on the arts faculty of the University of Chile.

Amenábar wrote for the voice, chamber groups, solo instruments, and ensembles, and he composed incidental music for the cinema and theatre. His electro-acoustic music carries special importance: such works as ...

(Marian )

(b Oshawa, ON, April 11, 1934). Canadian composer and radio producer. She studied composition with Weinzweig in Toronto, Foss and Copland at Tanglewood, and Maderna and Petrassi in Europe. Her early compositions tend towards neo-classicism, but, a pioneer in Canadian electro-acoustic music, she went on to compose post-serial, improvisational and collage works. Both her attention to timbre and her formal structures demonstrate the influence of Debussy and Xenakis.

Beecroft’s broadcasting career began in television (1954–9). She became a radio producer in 1963, originating numerous CBC-FM music series. In 1969 she began to produce freelance documentaries on Canadian composers and music technologies. Her programme The Computer in Music won the Major Armstrong Award for excellence in FM broadcasting (1976). From 1984 to 1987 she taught electronic music and composition at York University (Toronto), which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1996. She has served as the president of Canadian Music Associates and Ten Centuries Concerts, and co-founded, with Robert Aiken, the New Music Concerts. Her numerous composition prizes include two Lynch-Staunton Awards from the Canada Council....

(b Stockholm, July 15, 1935). Swedish composer and administrator. He studied composition with L. Wenström (1956–60), but he is self-taught in his principal field of electro-acoustic music, in which he is one of the most important composers, teachers and administrators in Sweden. His background as a jazz musician, pictorial artist (including computer-generated images) and biochemist has contributed to a characteristic openness and enthusiasm for the crossing of the boundaries between different artistic genres which he has passed on to a younger generation of electro-acoustic composers. Following his début in the concert organization Fylkingen in 1962, he became one of the driving forces in creating a small electronic music studio there. Together with Bengt Emil Johnson he directed the text and sound festivals initiated in Stockholm in 1967; Bodin was also Fylkingen’s chairman from 1969 to 1972. He became a pioneer of instrumental theatre, organized now legendary happenings at the Modern Museum in Stockholm and brought John Cage and other leading modernists to Sweden. In ...

(Peter George St John Le Baptiste de la Salle )

(b Woodbridge, UK, May 15, 1948). English composer, singer, keyboard player, sound artist, and producer. He attended art school in Ipswich and Winchester, during which time he was inspired by John Cage’s Silence to develop an interest in experimental music. He later joined the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. He first worked professionally from 1970 to 1973 with the seminal art-rock band Roxy Music, playing keyboard on their first two albums Roxy Music (Island, 1972) and For your Pleasure (Island, 1973). By treating the group’s live sound electronically with a tape recorder and VCS 3 synthesizer, he defined a role for himself as an “aural collagist.” After leaving Roxy Music, Eno developed this interest in the timbral quality of music further with the albums No Pussy Footing (Island, 1973; with Robert Fripp) and Another Green World (Island, 1975), the latter a brilliant combination of quirky songs and pastoral instrumentals. In ...

(b Vienna, April 22, 1941). Austrian composer, conductor and stage director. He studied at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik (teaching diploma, 1965) with Schiske, von Einem and others and at the Paris Conservatoire (1967–9), where his teachers included Messiaen and Leibowitz; he also studied electro-acoustics with François Bayle and Pierre Schaeffer. He has worked as a freelance composer for Austrian Radio (from 1966) and taught at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik (from 1970, professor 1990). A founding member of the Groupe International de Musique Electroacoustique de Paris (1969), he also co-founded the K & K Experimentalstudio, Vienna (1975), which has staged many productions of his works, and the Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik (1984, chair 1988–91). He has served as chair (1988–91) of the Austrian section of the ISCM and as a committee member for Austro Mechana (from ...

(Joseph)

(b Los Angeles, CA, Feb 10, 1953). American composer and radio producer. He studied composition with Tenney and Subotnick at the California Institue of the Arts (BFA 1975), where he became involved with experimental and electro-acoustic music. From 1974 he resided in Los Angeles, working for the Independent Composers Association and as director of KPFA radio, for which he produced numerous concerts of experimental and contemporary music. He has also served as president of the AMC.

In the 1980s he developed a reputation as an innovative and avant-garde performer of live electronic and computer music. Most of his compositions are performed in real time and involve processing devices. He has travelled and performed widely, especially in Japan where his work is particularly esteemed; a grant from the Asian Cultural Council took him to Japan for six months in 1989 for research purposes, and while there he also performed and lectured in several cities. Many of his works describe a gradually unfolding process, but often in reverse of the expected. The opening passage of ...