Roberto Gerhard's Audiovisual Works

Description

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Roberto Gerhard experimented with magnetic tape. This exploration led him to a unique manner of approaching the medium that was not as dogmatic as the European Elektronische Musik or Musique Concrète approaches. Throughout the 1950s Gerhard produced electronic music for theatre and radio culminating in a series of autonomous electronic works – Audiomobiles and the large-scale Symphony No. 3 “Collages” for orchestra and tape. In addition, Gerhard also had unique ideas about the way in which this emerging genre could be integrated into other areas of activity. Whilst radio and theatre are the most well-known use of Gerhard’s experiments in electronic music, he also composed a number of works for screen. The notebooks demonstrate a number of concepts that pre-date Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision. Gerhard’s notebooks will be used as a primary source to expound upon his ideas about electronic music and the screen. Three works will be discussed Audiomobiles II (DNA in Reflection) from 1963 with a film made by Anand Sorabhai and Hans Boye (from the Cambridge Molecular Lab) and two hitherto almost unknown earlier works from 1958 All Aboard and Your Skin. The latter of these two works was recently discovered in the UniLever archive and is unavailable commercially.

Period	9 Sep 2019
Held at	11th Biennial International Conference on Music Since 1900
Event type	Conference
Location	Huddersfield , United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International