Contributor Max Alper looks at Olly Wilson and the TIMARA music program that which pioneered electronic music education in the US.
There is no denying the significant role that electronic music has played in the professional music and audio industries since its inception. From the invention of the theremin in 1928, the Minimoog in 1970, to the development of Pro Tools in 1991, each of these historic moments proved not only to be pivotal for artists and engineers, but for the industries that employed them as a whole. Our contemporary musical landscape is one in which our film scores, orchestral or not, are composed and produced almost exclusively with computers, DJs earn significantly more on average per performance than any live musical act, and professional quality albums can be recorded on a smartphone. The industry is fully techified.
And still as the tech-driven music industry landscape continues to change rapidly each year, many music schools have yet to make updates to their curricula that reflect these radical industry changes. Why aren’t composition students required en masse to learn how to compose within the DAW? Why aren’t performance students learning how to record and mix themselves from home and save tuition money by avoiding pricey studios? When learning under quarantine became the norm in 2020, these questions rose to the surface of music education discourse, and certainly not for the first time. The covid era has shined a light on music learning institutions’ preparedness to integrate technology into their curriculum, the wide disparity between the music classrooms that thrived and those that barely survived proves that there must be advocacy for music technology literacy as a standard curricular component for all conservatories and college music departments.
Computer Music Center at Columbia University (Source)
This argument is nothing new. While Columbia and Princeton Universities collaborated on the creation of the Computer Music Center in 1959, the first of its kind in an American university setting, their programs were only available to a select number of graduate researchers and composers and certainly not their entire music student community as a whole. What was necessary was not only advocacy for music technology research, but providing access to these cutting edge tools for more student demographics.
One of the earliest advocates of accessible music technology education was composer and musicologist Olly Wilson (1937-2018), whose brief 1960s residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music proved to be one of the most pivotal moments in the history of music technology education. A composer of both acoustic and electronic avant-garde concert music himself, Olly Wilson received his earliest musical grounding in both the Black Baptist churches and Jazz and Blues venues of 1950s St. Louis, MO, where he would thrive in his youth as a choir tenor and club pianist. One of the first black music students to attend the recently desegregated Washington University, Wilson decided by his sophomore year that he wanted to dedicate his life to composing and teaching experimental music. By 1964 he would have earned his PhD in composition with a concentration in 12-tone serialism and electronic music, allowing him to apply for tenured positions throughout music academia.
Olly Wilson (Source)
In 1965, Wilson joined the Conservatory faculty at Oberlin College, where he would teach composition and theory as an associate professor. It was during this time that there was not only a serious interest amongst Oberlin students in learning the electroacoustic tape music and synthesis techniques of the earliest electronic music pioneers, such as Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage, but an emergence of electronic instrumentation within more commercial popular music culture and counterculture as well.
In 1968, Wilson applied for a $100,000 grant with the National Science Foundation to fund the purchasing of the first electronic music equipment at Oberlin Conservatory. This included a Moog modular system, a set of Scully tape recorders, and an IBM 360/44 computer built for music processing. This seemingly small shopping list allowed for Oberlin students to program, compose, record electronic music with some of the earliest in music tech hardware and software, as well as bounce their work directly from computer to tape machine, an integration of Digital to Analog (DAC) audio technologies that wouldn’t be mass adopted by commercial studios until the late 1970s.
By 1973, what started as a single music lab in the basement of Bibbins Hall had blossomed into what would be called the Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) program. For the first time in American history, music students as young as 18 would be able to get a hands-on education in electronic music as Bachelors of Music candidates, rather than having to wait until graduate school. And while many other institutions were quick to follow in TIMARA’s footsteps, such as Cal Arts and Brooklyn College, there is clearly much work to be done in the field of higher music education. Olly Wilson’s legacy continues today, it’s our responsibility as artists and educators to strive for all to have access to cutting edge sonic tools to guarantee the creation of futuristic sounds for years to come.
