Tectonics to celebrate electronic music pioneer Janet Beat’s work
It’s tempting to label Janet Beat a veteran composer. But that’s to overlook the wily perspicacity of this Lanark-based octogenarian and the fact she released her first exclusive album only last year, on the NMC label, at the age of 83.
It’s called Pioneering Knob Twiddler, a title that sums up the mischievous streak of Beat, who emerged in the late 1950s as a trailblazing composer. “I wrote my first musique concrète piece [a style utilising recorded sound as the raw compositional material] in 1958. I was only the second woman in the UK to compose using technology,” she claims.
The first was Daphne Oram, co-founder of the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop that inspired groundbreaking theme tunes and sound effects to such series as the original Dr Who and The Goon Show. “I did meet Daphne and was thrilled to bits that she took such an interest in me,” says Beat, who was later to visit Oram at her studio in Kent.
Sixty-four years on, Tectonics Glasgow, the annual contemporary music festival operating under the aegis of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and co-curated by the its principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov and the sound producer Alasdair Campbell, is showcasing Beat in two dedicated programmes.
The first of these, The Beat Goes On, on 30 April includes her 1989/90 piece for soprano (Juliet Fraser), gong and electronics, Puspawarna, also featuring performances by experimental artists Andie Brown, Sharon Gal and Ailie Ormston.
The following day’s Portrait concert includes Apollo and Marsyas for clarinet synthesised sound (soloist Yann Giro), Piangam for piano and tape (pianist James Clapperton) and the sole acoustic work, Circe, for unaccompanied viola, performed by Scott Dickinson. The odds are we’ll all come away asking why such deserved exposure hasn’t happened till now.
That neither surprises nor bothers Beat, whose catalogue of works, both electronic and acoustic, amounts to
over 100 compositions. When she first started out, having graduating from Birmingham University and used her 21st birthday money to buy a professional quality tape recorder, the real obstacle was being a woman. “The attitude at the time was that women don’t know about technology,” she recalls.
But she had been consumed by the science of sound from an early age, holding her ear close to the piano in the family’s Staffordshire home to experience “the rainbow tones”. As a student she discovered the sound poems of founding Concrète-ists Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. She bought a second tape recorder “in order to record tape loops and play things backwards”.
“My father, who wasn’t the least bit interested in the arts, asked his workmen to make a little capstan to support the equipment,” she fondly remembers as she attempted to create her own home studio. But he also used her precious tapes to string
up the sweet peas and raspberry plants in his garden.
She taught at Worcester College of Education, before settling in Scotland in 1972 as a lecturer at the RSAMD, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In both cases her quest to adopt progressive ideas needled the establishment, mainly men.
“I’m a person of curiosity,” she says. “Whenever I join a staff I tend to split them between the ones who have always done things a certain way, and others who are into new ideas.” Beat persisted and finally established the RSAMD’S first electronic and recording studio in the late 1970s. “Many students loved what I was doing, not so much their teachers.”
These days faltering health confines her more to home, though it didn’t stop her writing a Violin Concerto for the Glasgow Barons Orchestra. “The body’s giving up, but the brain’s still intact,” she admits. Astonishingly, her first album is notching up considerable radio airtime in America. “It’s gone viral there.”
Not before time, it seems, Tectonics is recognising a prophet in her own land.
“The attitude at the time was that women don’t know about technology”
Janet Beat’s features within Tectonics Glasgow 2022, 30 April-1 May are at City Halls and Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, www.tectonicsfestival.com