Uploaded March 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Victor Szabo discusses Stephen Hill's late-night radio program 'Music from the Hearts of Space' as part of ambient music's American roots, at Ambient@40, a two-day conference appraising ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release
"Music Beyond Airports", edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, available now in hardcopy and free PDF download via Huddersfield University Press: unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/19
ambientat40.wordpress.com
archives.electricspring.co.uk/Seasons/2017-2018/Electric-Spring-2018
This presentation took place as part of the Ambient@40 conference, conveyed by Monty Adkins, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, and Kristina Wolfe.
In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference was to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.
The conference took place at the University of Huddersfield from Friday 23 to Saturday 24 February 2018, running alongside the Electric Spring Festival (www.electricspring.co.uk).
/// CREDITS
Video camera operator: Andie Brown, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Sam Gillies
Video edited by Sam Gillies
Title music: Music for Airports (1/1), Brian Eno. Performed by Decibel New Music Ensemble. decibelnewmusic.com
/// ABSTRACT
In 1973, freelance sound engineer Stephen Hill started hosting a late-night radio program on KPFA-FM Berkeley titled Music from the Hearts of Space. Soon co-hosted by Anna Turner, Hearts offered listeners a steady stream of what its producers called “spacemusic”: a freeform flow of rock, electronic, folk, jazz, classical, and sacred musics from around the world. Hearts received national syndication in the U.S. through National Public Radio (NPR) in 1983, and reached over 200 radio stations at its peak in the late ‘80s. Still airing terrestrially and streaming online, Hearts is presently regarded as the longest-running ambient music radio program to date.
This paper presents gatherings from tapes, notebooks, and interviews from Hearts’s archives in San Rafael, California. These materials illuminate aesthetic and ideological continuities linking the grassroots new age technoculture of the 1970s and ’80s California Bay Area to the emergent ambient and new age record markets of the ’80s and ’90s. They also expose some fissures. In the show’s first decade, Hill conceived spacemusic as a “psychotechnology” of spiritual introspection, transpersonal communion, and connection to nature. Hearts’s transcultural ethos developed alongside the new age community’s whole-earth holism and appetite for esoteric wisdom, while the show’s atmospheric aesthetic emerged from a psychedelic conception of music as experiential medium. Hearts of Space modeled the commodification of these ideas in the new age and ambient music markets, yet eluded (and gives the lie to) the split of atmospheric music into these two seemingly separate genre categories. Hill and Turner’s “spacemusic,” I ultimately argue, presents a challenge to ambient music historiography, which typically disavows the genre’s roots in U.S. American new age countercultures in favor of its European and avant-garde genealogies.
// BIOGRAPHY
Victor Szabo is assistant professor of music at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Music (Critical & Comparative Studies) from the University of Virginia in 2015. His current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, explores the confluence of minimalist aesthetics, countercultural praxis, and lifestyle marketing in the formation of the ambient genre of recorded music during the late 20th century. His writing on the aesthetics of ambient music also appears in Twentieth-Century Music. In addition, he has published an essay on rock singer Jamie Stewart’s queer performances of abjection in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Victor Szabo discusses Stephen Hill's late-night radio program 'Music from the Hearts of Space' as part of ambient music's American roots, at Ambient@40, a two-day conference appraising ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release
"Music Beyond Airports", edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, available now in hardcopy and free PDF download via Huddersfield University Press: unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/19
ambientat40.wordpress.com
archives.electricspring.co.uk/Seasons/2017-2018/Electric-Spring-2018
This presentation took place as part of the Ambient@40 conference, conveyed by Monty Adkins, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, and Kristina Wolfe.
In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference was to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.
The conference took place at the University of Huddersfield from Friday 23 to Saturday 24 February 2018, running alongside the Electric Spring Festival (www.electricspring.co.uk).
/// CREDITS
Video camera operator: Andie Brown, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Sam Gillies
Video edited by Sam Gillies
Title music: Music for Airports (1/1), Brian Eno. Performed by Decibel New Music Ensemble. decibelnewmusic.com
/// ABSTRACT
In 1973, freelance sound engineer Stephen Hill started hosting a late-night radio program on KPFA-FM Berkeley titled Music from the Hearts of Space. Soon co-hosted by Anna Turner, Hearts offered listeners a steady stream of what its producers called “spacemusic”: a freeform flow of rock, electronic, folk, jazz, classical, and sacred musics from around the world. Hearts received national syndication in the U.S. through National Public Radio (NPR) in 1983, and reached over 200 radio stations at its peak in the late ‘80s. Still airing terrestrially and streaming online, Hearts is presently regarded as the longest-running ambient music radio program to date.
This paper presents gatherings from tapes, notebooks, and interviews from Hearts’s archives in San Rafael, California. These materials illuminate aesthetic and ideological continuities linking the grassroots new age technoculture of the 1970s and ’80s California Bay Area to the emergent ambient and new age record markets of the ’80s and ’90s. They also expose some fissures. In the show’s first decade, Hill conceived spacemusic as a “psychotechnology” of spiritual introspection, transpersonal communion, and connection to nature. Hearts’s transcultural ethos developed alongside the new age community’s whole-earth holism and appetite for esoteric wisdom, while the show’s atmospheric aesthetic emerged from a psychedelic conception of music as experiential medium. Hearts of Space modeled the commodification of these ideas in the new age and ambient music markets, yet eluded (and gives the lie to) the split of atmospheric music into these two seemingly separate genre categories. Hill and Turner’s “spacemusic,” I ultimately argue, presents a challenge to ambient music historiography, which typically disavows the genre’s roots in U.S. American new age countercultures in favor of its European and avant-garde genealogies.
// BIOGRAPHY
Victor Szabo is assistant professor of music at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Music (Critical & Comparative Studies) from the University of Virginia in 2015. His current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, explores the confluence of minimalist aesthetics, countercultural praxis, and lifestyle marketing in the formation of the ambient genre of recorded music during the late 20th century. His writing on the aesthetics of ambient music also appears in Twentieth-Century Music. In addition, he has published an essay on rock singer Jamie Stewart’s queer performances of abjection in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
![Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 [24.11.2017]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hU0C1K96mv8/mqdefault.jpg "Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 [24.11.2017]
Music journalist and critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson discusses his acclaimed book Music After The Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989. Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall.
Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.
Presented as part of hcmf// 2017.
https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/
https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520283152
http://www.cerenem.org/")
![Miller Puckette: Designing electronic music instruments [28.03.2017]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jzSDCwfeC2E/mqdefault.jpg "Miller Puckette: Designing electronic music instruments [28.03.2017]
Visiting Researcher Miller Puckette discusses his approach to designing electronic music instruments, and modelling instrumental behaviour, in Pure Data at CeReNeMs Creative Coding Lab.
http://msp.ucsd.edu/
https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cerenem/projects/creativecodinglab/
http://www.cerenem.org/
Of the many roles that computer and electronic technology can play in music making (production tool, composers assistant, improvising partner, and so on), the one that I think is giving rise to the most interesting new music today is that of the musical instrument. This could encompass both the use of electronics to enhance the sonic or other possibilities afforded by an existing instrument or developing a new musical interface (and starting from scratch learning to play the thing). Its instrumental behaviour could take the form of directly mapping performance gestures into parameters of sound generation or, alternatively, affect the fate of an existing sound stream. Using two recent instrument designs of my own as examples, in this talk Ill try to shed light on where I see new possibilities to explore and what design principles Ive arrived at in my own attempts.")
