Percy Grainger with Dr Earle Kent, and ‘Dr Kent’s Electronic Music Box’,
Dublin Core
Title
Percy Grainger with Dr Earle Kent, and ‘Dr Kent’s Electronic Music Box’,
Description
Percy Grainger with Dr Earle Kent, and ‘Dr Kent’s Electronic Music Box’, USA, c.1951
Reproduction from original 35 mm slide
Grainger Museum Archive, 99.6700.1
With his Free Music experiments conducted through the 1940s and 1950s, Grainger had also been searching for ways of producing new sonic environments. He made contact with Dr Earle Kent, an expert in acoustic research who had just completed his PhD in the field at the University of Michigan. Grainger went to Elkhart, Indiana, where Kent ran a Research Engineering Department for the Conn Company, to see Kent’s Electronic Music Box in 1951. Kent’s machine was an analogue ‘beat frequency’ vacuum tube-based synthesizer controlled by a punched paper strip device, similar to the pianola paper reader that Grainger used with his Duo-Art pianola Free Music experiments. Grainger was apparently unsatisfied with the possibilities of Kent’s machine, which was never commercially produced, and went back to his own experimental process.
Grainger didn’t lose interest in composition using the new synthesizers: either Grainger, or Burnett Cross, appears to have attended a demonstration of the RCA Electronic Synthesizer at the Julliard School of Music, New York, in 1957, and Grainger attended a lecture entitled ‘New Instruments and Electronic Music’ given by Karlheinz Stockhausen on 3 November 1959, at Columbia University, USA
Reproduction from original 35 mm slide
Grainger Museum Archive, 99.6700.1
With his Free Music experiments conducted through the 1940s and 1950s, Grainger had also been searching for ways of producing new sonic environments. He made contact with Dr Earle Kent, an expert in acoustic research who had just completed his PhD in the field at the University of Michigan. Grainger went to Elkhart, Indiana, where Kent ran a Research Engineering Department for the Conn Company, to see Kent’s Electronic Music Box in 1951. Kent’s machine was an analogue ‘beat frequency’ vacuum tube-based synthesizer controlled by a punched paper strip device, similar to the pianola paper reader that Grainger used with his Duo-Art pianola Free Music experiments. Grainger was apparently unsatisfied with the possibilities of Kent’s machine, which was never commercially produced, and went back to his own experimental process.
Grainger didn’t lose interest in composition using the new synthesizers: either Grainger, or Burnett Cross, appears to have attended a demonstration of the RCA Electronic Synthesizer at the Julliard School of Music, New York, in 1957, and Grainger attended a lecture entitled ‘New Instruments and Electronic Music’ given by Karlheinz Stockhausen on 3 November 1959, at Columbia University, USA
Date
c.1951
Format
Reproduction from original 35 mm slide
Identifier
Grainger Museum Archive, 99.6700.1