Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music (1971-1990)
Contact’s basic intentions – set out fully in the first issue, dated Spring 1971 – were to promote informed discussion of 20th century music in general and the music of the time in particular. The magazine was founded by Chris Villars, a philosophy student, and Keith Potter, at the time a second-year music undergraduate (both at Birmingham University). Over the years, Contact featured many of the leading protagonists in contemporary music. Amongst many others these included La Monte Young, R Murray Schafer, Philip Glass, John Cage, Brian Ferneyhough and a series of in depth studies of Electronic Music Studios in Britain (this includes an article by Hugh Davies detailing the founding of the EMS at Goldsmiths). Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music was active from 1971–1990, and was independently published by its editors. As with many independent print publications of that era, this has meant that for readers and researchers operating in a contemporary digital landscape, the richness of its resource has been all but inaccessible. In recognition of this issue, from 2016–2019 the entire journal was digitised and made available over the course of a three-year research project led by Dr James Bulley, Research Associate in the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, in collaboration with former editor and co-founder of Contact, Professor Keith Potter, with the assistance of Dr Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo and Gregory White. The project included developing best practice techniques for the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on each article of Contact (creating a searchable, accessible and machine-readable database), aggregation of digitised articles across contemporary research search engines, digital preservation to the highest global standards, and the creation of metadata, licensing and digital object identifiers for each issue and article within the archive. Funding and support for the project was provided by the Graduate School, Department of Music and Library at Goldsmiths, University of London. Particular thanks are owed to Dr Tom Perchard, Andrew Gray, Rebecca Randall and Dr John Lely for their invaluable advice and support for this project.
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Schoenberg Today: the Views of some Contemporary Composers
Review of 1974/02/02 Concert at Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Music Digest: The Music of Edgard Varèse. Saar Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Zender, Stephen Roberts (bass)
A Constant State of Surprise: Gerald Barry and The Intelligence Park
Copyright (c) 1987 Kevin Volans https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Orchestration for the 20th-Century Musician
Towards the Spiritual — The Electroacoustic Music of Jonathan Harvey
Lectures on Anarchy: John Cage at Wesleyan
Electro-Acoustic Music: Towards the Fifth Decade
Controversies Incorporated: Complexity, Capitulationism, and the Language of Criticism
The Hespos Phenomenon: A Performer’s Point of View
Improvised Music: Some Answers to Some Questions
Controversies Incorporated: Accepting Androgyny; Women Composers Today: A Personal View; View from the Industrial North; Performance, Notation, Time