Venue: Bathway Theatre
Date: Wednesday 26 March 2025
Time: 7pm
Entry: £5, booking is required
In collabration with CeReNeM (University of Huddersfield)
Ernest Berk: A Musical Outsider is a multichannel concert showcasing the work of pioneering electronic music composer Ernest Berk. As part of the AHRC-funded project “Ernest Berk: An Expressionist Outsider” the project team have meticulously restored Berk’s lost recordings made between 1957 and 1983. The performance crafts a unique experience of England’s unsung electronic music history.
Ernest Berk was one of the most prolific composers of early electronic music in England, creating over 220 pieces across a career spanning three decades. Yet his contribution to electronic music is all but forgotten today. After fleeing Germany in the 1930s, Berk opened a dance and electronic music studio in Camden, London and dedicated himself to the composition of electronic music and musique concrète. His synthesis of musique concrète and contemporary dance made him one of the most visionary practitioners in a wave of pioneering English electronic music composers throughout the 1960s and 1970s that saw him working alongside Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, and Tristram Cary. Despite far-reaching influence within music and dance scenes of the time, Berk never achieved lasting recognition and his legacy as a composer, performer, and pedagogue has now all but slipped from the public consciousness. When he died in Berlin in 1993, he was destitute.