Gerhard Revealed

The Gerhard Revealed project is timely as it will coincide with celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's death in 1970. The impact project aims to produce a user-friendly web-based version of the electronic music contained within Gerhard Audio Archive, the magnetic tape archive containing the composer's original electronic music as well as recordings of his instrumental works and broadcasts. The interactive website will enable professionals, composers, educators, students and electronic music enthusiasts within an interest in electronic music, early music technology and the history of electronic music in Britain to understand the work and thinking of Roberto Gerhard in this context.The Gerhard Revealed project builds on a previous project 'The Electronic Music of Roberto Gerhard' which digitised the tape collection and to produce an initial study of this work. Although a CD of six works has been produced by Adkins (PI) as well as chapter contributions to edited books and conference papers, current methods of accessing the archive are unfortunately rather inflexible and require considerable levels of knowledge of the music technology expertise to access the materials via unedited ProTools files. Gerhard Revealed will make the electronic music within the tape archive freely available to listen to with annotated extracts from Gerhard's notebooks about electronic music, as well as photographs of the tapes, boxes and other ephemera contained within them. This easy-to-use resource will have bespoke visualisation tools for searching the archive and giving an immediately relational view of the materials contained within it for non-expert users. The audio archive comprises 634 digitised tapes of which 417 contain electronic music. As such it is a hugely rich resource.

The project team based at the University of Huddersfield will be led by Professor Monty Adkins and will include a Programmer and an Audio Technician. They are joined by Anna Pensaert (Head of Music at the Cambridge University Library) and Tuan Pham (Head of Digital Innovation and Development) who will advise on Cambridge University Library formats, policies and technical infrastructure to ensure that the site can be integrated into the Cambridge University Digital Library. The project team will work with representative end users to develop a responsive, interactive and stimulating tool, which will meet real world professional and education needs. The project will thus depend on a series of consultations with these end-users. An initial consulation over two months will assess the requirements of end-users in different contexts (educational - July 2020) and a variety of professionals (July - August 2020). Following this consultation, two workshops workshops will take place, and invited feedback between these will be fed into further iterations of the website resource. The programming and design of the website will respond to this collecting of responses in order to best match the needs of future users of the site.

During the project, the team will aim to widen the group of end-users to include more and different types of end-user. This community will be developed in two ways at the start of the project - a blog (by the PI) on the project and its development will be promoted via social media and online fora. A further community of users will be developed through workshops aimed at A-level students and global professionals. In addition, the conventional, print and social media publicity of the site, will aim not only to celebrate the outcome of the project, but also to broaden the public awareness of the website and of Gerhard's tape archive and the rich work contained within it.

Gerhard's tape archive offers a transformative resource for anyone wishing to learn about a key, but under-recognised figure in the history of electronic music and its development. Currently the resource, digitised as part of the PI's 'The Electronic Music of Roberto Gerhard' is stored on hard-disk at the Cambridge University Library as unedited ProTools files. The remit of the initial project was to research the electronic music, not to make it available. During the course of the project and subsequent work with the archive, it is clear that this resource, currently severely restricted in its use, needs to be made widely available. Gerhard Revealed will do this by creating a new interactive user-friendly web interface for the archive which will allow users to listen to the electronic music materials in the archive and understand their connection to other works in the archive. The following is the initial list of end-users and the reasons they are likely to be interested in the site:
1) journalists and writers - working in the area of twentieth century music history and the development of recording technology in music. This resource will challenge the accepted history of electronic music in England by demonstrating Gerhard's work pre-BBC Radiophonic Workshop and his role as an independent composer and thinker;
2) Concert curators and radio broadcasters - Gerhard's instrumental music is becoming more widely played - and will feature specifically in many programmes in 2020 celebrating the 50th anniversary of his death. At present his known electronic music is known only via the CD of works the PI curated as part of the previous AHRC project. This website will be a means of stimulating further performances and a wider understanding of his radio, theatre and film works.
3) Educators - the site will contain resources particularly targeted at A-level students. Specific areas of the curriculum this project addresses are the study of the development of recording and production technology, direct to tape and mono recording (c.1950-1963) and early multitrack technology (c.1964-1969). The annotated resources on the website will address key curriculum aims through inclusion of materials from Gerhard's own notebooks and the PI's contextual annotation of these.
4) Composers - the interactive site will offer a rich wealth of information about Gerhard's unique thinking about electronic music and how it offered something fundamentally different to instrumental music. His notebooks demonstrate that his thinking was radically different to that of Pierre Schaeffer and pre-figures the ideas of Denis Smalley by some 25 years. As such, these ideas have the potential to impact on the creative thinking of a new generation of practitioners.
5) Electronic music enthusiasts - this non-academic group is substantial in number (many hundreds of 1000s globally - as illustrated by The Wire's 117.4k Twitter followers) and diverse in its demographic. The resource will allow them to develop a new understanding of Gerhard's work. Through such users we expect connections to be made to community electronic music organisations.
The development of a broad and diverse end-user community for this website is the driving aim of the project. The initial stages of development will include a blog promoted via social media as well as specific target groups to provide feedback on the site - four cohorts of Music Technology A-level students based in Huddersfield and Cambridge, and professional electronic musicians from around the world recruited via the online CECdiscuss forum (to which the PI belongs). We aim to ensure that references to the website are promoted through user's websites, social media and print publication. It is hoped that Gerhard Revealed will become a key resource for a broad range of users, and help reshape their understanding of Gerhard's role in electronic music.