The Grainger Museum was at the heart of electronic music experimentation in Melbourne in the 1960s and early ’70s, when composer Keith Humble, recently returned from a decade of cutting-edge musical experimentation in Paris, transformed the Museum into the ‘Grainger Centre’: an electronic experimentation studio for students and composers.
Humble equipped the Grainger Centre with the latest analogue synthesizers made by the experimental music company, Electronic Music Studios, Ltd, (EMS), London. The powerful, but compact and modestly priced EMS VCS1 and VCS3, and the extraordinary Synthi 100, were developed by the small EMS team as a way of bringing electronic synthesis of sounds into the reach of musicians outside of large commercial studios and radio stations. The EMS synthesizers allowed composers to create entirely new sounds to incorporate into their experimental music and processes. For a brief period of less than a decade, the Grainger Museum resonated with this ‘sound of the future’…
Evoking the ethos of vibrant period of musical creativity in Melbourne, the exhibition features video art created by electronic artist David Chesworth on the EMS Spectre video synthesizer circa 1980.
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