Richard Orton - Richard Orton - Hemlock Stone - 1CD

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Persistence of Sound celebrates the composer Richard Orton (1940–2013) with a selection of electroacoustic and computer music from across his career.

As a composer, performer, educator, programmer, and author, the contribution of Richard Orton (1940– 2013) to the development of electroacoustic tape and computer music in Great Britain cannot be overstated.

Orton is known for developing early electronic music in the UK, establishing the country’s first university-based electronic music studio, writing seminal texts on tape composition, then overseeing the transition from analogue tape to computer-aided composition.

The earliest piece here is Kiss from 1968, using open reel tape machines and contact microphones, often pulling the recordings through the tape heads manually at varying speeds.

The most recent work on this album is its near title track, Three Monoliths: No.1 The Hemlock Stone, from 2004. This is the only piece on this collection to use tools developed by the CDP – a composers’ collective responsible for generating a vast collection of non-real time signal processing software.

Orton was at the vanguard of the home-computing democratisation of electronic music in the mid-1980s, authoring software as a co-founder of the Composers Desktop Project in 1986, and introducing Music Technology as a discipline to the University that same year. A founding member of Electroacoustic Music Society of Great Britain (EMAS; later Sonic Arts Network), he contributed to the working party attempting to establish a national studio for electroacoustic music, and served as a founding editor of the music technology journal, Organised Sound in the 1990s.