BACK TO THE FUTURE
It’s 1962 and the University of Adelaide has appointed
its first visiting composer in electronic music at the
Elder Conservatorium of Music.
In order to perform his music to an audience,
composer Henk Badings from The Netherlands uses
only magnetic tape recordings (technology that was
invented in Germany prior to World War II) and a selfconstructed “patch panel”, which enables him to
create and modulate electronic sounds.
To study this new form of music – a radical departure
for one of Australia’s oldest and most distinguished
music schools – students and staff must build
their own versions of what we now describe as
“synthesizers” and basic “computers” from scratch;
these items do not currently exist on store shelves.
Combining the expertise of an electronics technician
with the guiding light of art, Dr Badings and those who
follow – such as the celebrated composer Tristram
Cary – are placing the University of Adelaide at the
forefront of electronic music in Australia.
Half a century later, and the department store shelves
contain numerous keyboards, synthesizers and
computers of all kinds – including mobile phones
and tablets that have four million times the memory
of the Apple II, the first computer ever owned by the
University’s electronic music program.
But in a nod to those pioneering times of the
1960s and ’70s, today’s students undertaking the
University’s Sonic Arts program, as it’s now known,
are again building their own equipment from scratch,
as well as writing their own software.
The Head of Sonic Arts, Stephen Whittington,
explains: “The hands-on approach that used to be
taken here many years ago is st