Hugh Davies (1943-2005) - R.I.P.

[Frisco]

Not sure if this has been posted yet. Just received a message on Chi-Improv list from Eric Leonardson who got word from David Toop on the passing of Hugh Davies. Hugh passed on New Years Day. I'm not familiar with a lot of Hugh's work, but know him from the Stockhausen projects (when he was Karlheniz' assistant) and some of the free improv work that he did including the Music Improvisation Co. Hopefully somebody can submit a better recollection and perhaps an obit.

[Ron Thorne]

I'm a bit perplexed as to why someone hasn't posted any response to you here yet, but here's a connection on the same forum, millimeters apart on the same page.

Condolences~

[Frisco]

Sorry. I've not read the eai posts so I didn't see it posted. Thanks Jon and Ron!

[Jesse]

The London 2003 concert with Davies, et al, is reviewed on the January Paris Transatlantic Review, though sparsely.
Just heard Davies' Grob release, which is worth your time.

[Jon Abbey]

I'm not an expert on Hugh's music, I never saw him perform and only met him once, a few years ago in Cologne. I talked to him briefly about doing a record for Erst, a trio disc with Phil Wachsmann and Mark Wastell, but it didn't end up working out. Martin probably knows more about him than me, but he didn't ever record that much, maybe he felt his music worked better in a live context. his first solo record, titled Shozyg/Music for Invented Instruments, on FMP in 1981, is supposed to be his best disc, I've never heard that.

here's a brief bio I found on my hard drive, not sure where (or when) it's from. I don't know if the book mentioned at the end ever came out, I don't think it did:

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Hugh Davies is a composer primarily concerned with 20th century instruments and sound sources. He is an inventor of instruments, a performer (principally specialising in presentations with his own instruments) and researcher.

In 1967 he founded the Electronic Music Studio at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. He directed the studio until 1986 and was Research Consultant there from 1986 to '91. He also holds positions in other institutions' music departments. Between 1986 and 1993 he was also a part-time consultant on electronic instruments to the Music Department of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, Holland. Since 1999 he has been a part-time Researcher in Sonic Art at the Centre for Electronic Arts of Middlesex University, London.

As a composer, apart from more or less traditionally notated music for conventional instruments, he has concentrated primarily on electronic music (live and on tape) and music theatre, as well as - since 1967 - works for his invented amplified instruments, playing them not only in his own solo concerts but also in group improvisations with musicians from many other countries. Since 1971 he has specialised in presenting concerts of composed and improvised music performed entirely on invented instruments and found objects, both as a soloist and in ensembles.

His sound sculptures and installations involve the participation of the exhibition visitors, often with a degree of remote control that partly limits the performance possibilities; other features include tactile elements and interactions between the participating members of the public.

Davies has published extensively. A book - with accompanying CD - of his creative writings, including environmental music projects and sound documentation, is planned for later this year.

[Jesse]

Apparently on the London Emanem disc, Davies was "waving sticks around" that "directed the energy of the other players." Heard this from someone on stage with him. No idea what invention this was, though it's utility would be welcome in my house.

[Nate Dorward]

I'm very sorry to hear this. When I ran into Hugh a few years ago at Freedom of the City he was full of the book he was working on. My impression was that the emphasis was on encouraging kids to get into experimental musics, with how-to pieces on making your own instruments, &c. I know it did come out--I saw at least one review of it, in The Wire--but I haven't laid eyes on it. -- I bought the Grob solo disc off him at the time. Time for me to give it another spin.

[Jesse]

His daughter was involved in helping him clarify the relationship between Fascism & the Futurist movement, in preparation for an article published in The Wire, while she was still in school. His affinity for kids, & their creativity, was clear.

[Martin]

Originally Posted by Jon Abbey

here's a brief bio I found on my hard drive, not sure where (or when) it's from. I don't know if the book mentioned at the end ever came out, I don't think it did:

The book was published in 2002 by Soundworld, its title is "Sounds Heard - A Potpourri of Environmental Projects and Documentation, Projects with Children, Simple Musical Instruments, Sound Installations, Verbal Scores, and Historical Perspectives." The accompanying CD was released on the Soundworld-affiliated Future Music label (FMR CD 104) and has tracks from the late 1960s up to 2002. The book also features a publication history and a discography/tapeography.

Hugh Davies appears on around 15 CDs/LPs in my collection.

[Brian Olewnick]

Was "Warming Up with the Iceman", on Grob, Davies' most recent release? A very good disc, in any case.

[Jesse]

Yes.
And yes.

[michaelr]

There is a good essay by Davies in the Leonardo Music Journal that was accompanied by the Not Necessarily English Music CD. I'll have to dig it out and re-read it but I remember him talking about the early use of electronics in improvisation.

Davies was always one of those players who I would have liked to have heard more of. It would be great if the FMP got reissued.

[Martin]

A photo of Hugh Davies, from the back cover of Sounds Heard (copyright British Alcan and Trevor Taylor):

[Jon Abbey]

http://news.independent.co.uk/people...p?story=598389

Hugh Davies
Iconoclastic innovator in electronic music

07 January 2005


Hugh Seymour Davies, composer, instrument maker and musicologist: born Exmouth, Devon 23 April 1943; Director, Electronic Music Studio, Goldsmiths College, London University 1968-86; Researcher in Sonic Art, Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University 1999-2005; married 1981 Pamela Bailey (one daughter); died London 1 January 2005.

Diffident, yet obsessive; in several respects unassuming but consistently meticulous in every task he took on: Hugh Davies was probably always going to seem one of the British new-music scene's backroom boys.

My initial memory of him is at the Dartington Summer School in the early 1970s, when he taught there as part of the live-electronics group Gentle Fire, a pioneering outfit that was among the first to tackle Karlheinz Stockhausen's then brand-new, controversial text pieces, and much more besides.

In true Sixties style, staff and students sat about, and eventually dreamed up some rather nice, but as I recall terribly vague, ideas about a taped soundscape to act as a backing track to our own instrumental improvisations for the concert that night. Then we all drifted off to indulge in yet more frivolous summer-school pursuits, leaving Davies to spend a long, hot afternoon laboriously montaging the sounds of water to turn our nebulous musings into something interesting. After all, he was an acknowledged master of cut-and-splice in the old, pre-computerised days, when you had to take up a razor blade to compose with your original material on reel-to-reel tape.

Davies already had a sizeable reputation, and not only as a technological enabler. After studying music at Oxford University in 1961-64, and initiation into the early mysteries of electronic music via the composer Daphne Oram, he had somehow managed to persuade Stockhausen - then at the height of his powers and fame - to take him on in Cologne, at the age of just 21, as his composing assistant and a member of his live-electronics group. The two years or so he spent in Germany put Davies right at the heart of the European avant-garde at a particularly exciting time, and he continued to do important editing work for Stockhausen, some of which remains unpublished to this day.

Notated compositions, especially for conventional forces, and even tape pieces, became only a minor part of Davies's activities, especially after the early 1980s (though there are several music-theatre works that would pay reinvestigation some day). This was due to the diversity of interests that he developed, most of them distinctly at variance to the approach of his German mentor. The liberation of electronic music from the tape recorder was already an important part of Stockhausen's agenda. But Davies took this and ran with it in directions which took advantage of live electronics, to carve out much more creative space for the performers themselves. This led naturally to new approaches to improvisation.

To turn penury into a virtue, he began to make his own instruments, many of them constructed, following exemplary ecological principles, out of materials other people might have thrown away, and often amplifying their sounds with contact or magnetic microphones: household objects - everything from egg-slicers and springs to breadbins and tailor's dummies - were a recurrent resource. Allowed to inspire their own sorts of music, essentially simple but in fact often cunningly rich and alluring, these instruments freed Davies's music from the shackles of compositional personalities and systems, and helped him to create an identity all his own.

Many of his inventions went by delightful names: the "shozyg", for example - in fact a generic name - is any instrument (usually an amplified one) built inside an unusual container. The name derived from the packaging devised for the oddments assembled inside the first two shozygs, amplified through two contact microphones: this was the final volume of an encyclopaedia which covered everything from "shoal" to "zygote" and hence had "SHO-ZYG" on its spine.

"Feelie boxes", built with John Furnival, introduced a tactile element and were often exhibited in art galleries. Davies's instruments seemed very much at home in exhibitions, and as parts of sound sculptures and specially devised sound environments, as they did in education work; children loved them, and their inventor had a natural empathy with young people.

With these home-made instruments, Davies could proceed, with a natural integrity in which he clearly delighted, to construct a whole world of sounds: sometimes tiny ones (springs, for instance) amplified, but also purely acoustic sound sources, such as toys. Even the shopping basket on wheels in which he transported his creations could, subject to the right conditions (the broken paving stones outside New Cross railway station, for instance) become an instrument in its own right.

As this might imply, Davies was frugal almost to a fault, at least certainly until he got married. He was a vegan, never drank alcohol or smoked and, so far as I'm aware, never drove a car.

Though easily self-sufficient as one-man band, Davies also collaborated with many other musicians throughout his life, mostly free improvisers who, like himself, operated on the fringes of more mainstream musical enterprises. From long since defunct groups such as Music Improvisation Company (including Derek Bailey and Evan Parker), to Dutch musicians such as Han Bennink (Davies joined a Dutch group that played a famous concert with the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry), right up to recent work with Hans-Karsten Raecke, Davies played all over Europe and occasionally elsewhere; a substantial discography attests to this career.

Meanwhile, he also made important contributions to documenting new-music activities, beginning with his International Electronic Music Catalog (1968), which sought to list and describe every piece of electronic music that had been composed in the world at just about the last moment in history when such a project could have been even conceivable. Later labours of love in this area include the 305 entries he contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (1984), and a recent, far too little distributed book of his own creative writings, Sounds Heard (2002).

Davies was the founder-director of the Electronic Music Studio at Goldsmiths College, London (1968-86), and subsequently a research consultant there until 1991; more recently he had a position as a visiting lecturer and part-time Researcher in Sonic Art at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University. But his resolutely freelance mentality and lack of sympathy with the more mundane requirements of academic life kept him apart from some of its rewards as well as its frustrations.

His work has seemed dated at some periods, especially, perhaps, during the 1980s when large computer systems and a different kind of professionalism in the fast-expanding international world of electroacoustic and computer music were all the rage. Yet, in the 21st century, it seems that Hugh Davies's innovatory, do-it- yourself, lo-fi approach - which in several respects prefigured present laptop culture - is finding favour with a younger generation to whom this remarkable and iconoclastic innovator now appears as a significant father figure.

Keith Potter

[Jon Abbey]

Hal Rammel obit, from Peter Stubley's Euro Free Improv site:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/

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Listening to Hugh Davies

My introduction to the work of Hugh Davies arrived at the urging of improvising guitarist Davey Williams, whose first letter to me in the late 70s amounted to a much-reread listener’s guide to European free improvisation. As a dedicated listener to the freely improvised and radically composed music of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) from the mid 60s on, I had asked Davey to recommend a few LPs and specific musicians in whose work I might find equally rewarding listening experiences. Davey sent me directly to the Music Improvisation Company recordings on ECM and Incus and, knowing my interest in unusual instruments and sound sources, called my attention to Hugh Davies. That name rang a bell with an earlier DGG recording of Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie, more than enough incentive to send me off in an entirely new direction in listening and reading.

A few years later, after Bart Hopkins had begun publishing his California-based journal Experimental Musical Instruments, I realized Hugh’s interests as a writer and archivist as well as inventor/improviser, ran parallel to my own fascination with the astounding breadth of musical exploration existing far outside the too frequently narrowed sights of modern experimentalism. Hugh’s appreciation for the musical inventions of music hall, vaudeville, and radio and theater sound effects departments echoed my own fascination with the musical arsenal of Spike Jones and his City Slickers and the rare, but no less inspiring, addition of quills and bones to the recorded legacies of Henry ‘Ragtime Texas’ Thomas and Blind Blake. When I began to write about the lineage of these marvels, Hugh’s work as an archivist was a singly significant model for how to proceed in a thorough and scholarly fashion all the while communicating the excitement and shared enthusiasm of such ephemeral discoveries. In broader terms, Hugh’s articles and essays, as he wrote in the catalog for a 1989 touring exhibition called Making Music: New and Unusual Instruments, “obliged academics to take seriously research areas that previously they had largely managed to ignore.”

In the early 80s I first wrote to Hugh explaining that I had an opportunity to direct some workshops on instrument invention in Chicago, that I wanted to talk about his work as an inventor and as an historian. His prompt response included slides of his own work, along with a number of images of the work of Hans-Karsten Raecke (an instrument inventor unknown to me at the time), of the percussion instruments of Lucia Dlugoszewski (whose work he had included in his entries in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments), and names and addresses of further contacts. All offered fruitful new avenues of correspondence and exchange. It was an uncommonly generous reply and a boost to my own confidence that I could present an informed survey of such sparsely recorded histories under the high standards I felt Hugh had already set for any of us following similar opportunities.

As an improviser, Hugh worked with a curious assemblage of sounds, ready at hand in an equally unique collection of instruments. Many of these instruments were folded into the newly self-invented category of ‘shozyg,’ a name taken from the spine of the hollowed-out final volume of an encyclopedia that housed the little sounding objects he amplified and played. However it wasn’t only the range of these sounds that impressed me. The structure of his improvisations and compositions with them sounded equally original. His SAJ record from 1982 is a masterful collection of works for springboards and shozygs. Certainly his studies with Daphne Oram, his experiences with Stockhausen and the performance of Mikrophonie were vital first steps in the directions he took as a musician for there are seemingly few models for the course he took in his solo improvisations. His statement in a 1996 essay for Rubberneck titled “My Invented Instruments and Improvisations” is deceptively modest: “Usually I need to forget everything in order to avoid clichés and come as freshly as possible to the next performance.” ‘Forgetting everything’ is no small task as an artist or musician. Harry Partch took equally decisive steps as he set about to invent a new music and the imperative Partch details in his earliest efforts to ‘start over’ musically are called to mind in Hugh’s phrase. For Hugh Davies this garden of forgetting bore exceptional fruit. There are passages of “Shozyg Sequence No. 1’ on the SAJ record, recorded at the Workshop Freie Musik in Berlin in 1979, that sound out as “certain small shafts of intense life,” quoting a description that Partch uses in his preface to Genesis of a Music as he recalls the most liberating musical experiences of his early years.

Hugh and I missed crossing paths at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium by just a year in the mid 90s, and, again, a second missed opportunity passed for me a few years later in Amsterdam when I was unable to join him in an egg-slicer ensemble being organized by Johannes Bergmark. We met, finally, in Chicago just a few years ago. The Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Festival for 2002 presented Hugh performing solo and in a trio with Carlos Zingaro and Richard Teitelbaum. His solo pieces overflowed with delicate detail alongside broader gestures that gave these careful assemblages the formidable presence of a bullfiddle. Joining the scattered history of instruments played without being touched (the theremin, electronically, and the k’longput, by the force of hands clapped near a bamboo tube’s open-end), he breathed sonic life into a cymbal stand-mounted shozyg by blowing against thin reeds with soda straws. Soon after, as counterpoint, scrapes and rasps were fiercely generated with simple feathers. Later in the evening Hugh joined the more orchestrally-minded duo of Carlos Zingaro and Richard Teitelbaum, enriching the ensemble with his characteristically drier, more textural batterie, but, making stunningly organic and fluid contributions to the improvisation in defiance of his sounds’ origins in cast-off diminutive metallic shards.

Hugh Davies’ studied and substantial contributions to our shared musical experience manifest in the far corners of the modern musicking. If you want to learn about the history of electronic musical instruments and their application to composition and improvisation in the 20th century, or the history of recording sound, or even the transformation of the nail violins in the 1700s into the toy pianos of the 1950s, the essays of Hugh Davies are the place to begin. If you want to teach musical instrument exploration as as a mode of basic music education and share with children the unusual and simple acoustic delights of larchcones, lid clickers and Chinese fans, Hugh Davies’ book Sounds Heard is essential and rewarding reading. If you want insight into the history of musical improvisation over the past 40 years and the intersection of sound art, instrument invention, and the pursuit of what has come to be called extended technique, the recordings of Hugh Davies are essential listening.

I will be forever grateful for the dedication to all these roads taken by Hugh Davies in his pursuit for new musical discovery. These are remarkable and inspiring accomplishments which never stray far from their source in his fascination with the wonders and mysteries of every single sound he heard.

- Hal Rammel, January 2005