Death of a daring electronics pioneer
mainThe sound engineer and avant-garde composer Eugeniusz Rudnik, one of the first electronic exerimentalists in Eastern Europe, has died at 83.
As a sound engineer at Polish Radio, he began to produce atmospheric background music for programmes in the late 1950s. This led to more daring tapes, some of which could not be played in his own country. Rudnik worked with leading composers, including Penderecki and Nordheim, creating electronic versions of their score. He also collaborated with the Stockhausen studio in Cologne.
Illustrative sounds from Aldabaran. Many of them can be realized by a normal orchestra with living players and physical instruments, led by a human conductor following a score with music notation. The spirit is impressionistic, not so much electronic.
Those 1950s electronic bings and bongs were too influential.
In the 80s I made the mistake of going to study at a university where the composition teachers were still making these electronic bings and bongs and imagined themselves to be terribly daring and cutting-edge for adding a guy in black tights to it.