Department of Music Lecture: "The Advent of Electronic Technologies in Television Music"

Timothy D. Taylor, Professor, Departments of Ethnomusicology, Anthropology, and Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles

Title:
"The Advent of Electronic Technologies in Television Music"

Abstract:
This presentation offers a history of the early days of electronic technologies in the composition of music for television, considering how early adopters learned these new technologies (particularly the Moog synthesizer) and taught them to others, how they attempted to convince producers to use them,  and how they coped with them in the studio. The larger project that this presentation comes from is concerned with the creation a new bureaucracy to manage television production, including background music, and how the emergence of a new technological infrastructure of production was accommodated by the bureaucracy.

Biography:
Timothy D. Taylor is a professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology, Anthropology, and Musicology at UCLA, and is the author of many articles and chapters and many books, most recently, Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production (Duke, 2023), and Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social (Duke, 2024).