About

For information on the conference themes, see the ‘Call for Papers.’

This three-day international conference was staged as part of an AHRC project exploring the work of the English musician and musicologist Hugh Davies (1943-2005). The project was led by Dr James Mooney (University of Leeds) in partnership with Dr Tim Boon (Science Museum). Further information on the project itself can be found on the project website.

In the late 1960s, Davies produced a comprehensive inventory of electronic music compositions, entitled International Electronic Music Catalog (1968), in which he documented the output of 560 studios in 39 countries. This challenged the hegemony of the Paris, Cologne, and New York schools, whose activities dominated the literature of the 1950s and 60s. As such, Davies provided what was perhaps the first alternative version of electronic music’s history.

This conference was not directly ‘about’ Hugh Davies, then; rather, it explored the broader territory of electronic music histories (plural), which was a territory that Davies exposed in his own research and documentation.