Fidget’s co-director Peter Price has been invited to give a paper at International Conference: Alternative Histories of Electronic Music at The Science Museum Research Centre in Queen’s Gate, London.

 For the past four years, Price has been given unprecedented access to electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack’s archive, housed in the basement of Ted Pandel, a lifelong promoter of Haack’s odd genius and protector of his fragile personality. Price has uncovered an enormous body of work that as yet has been unheard. In informal listening sessions throughout 2015 (in Philadelphia, Vienna, Poznan Poland, and Berlin), Price shared tapes and spoke at length about Bruce Haack’s unique contributions to the field of electronic music. Price’s invitation to this prestigious conference in London signals a great opportunity for a more formal sharing of his research in an environment where this research has potential to directly impact the field of music studies.

This conference is being staged as part of an AHRC-funded project exploring the work of the English musician and musicologist Hugh Davies (1943-2005). 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.