Dr. Val Stephen, a ‘Gentleman Amateur’ in Australian Electronic Music Experiment of the 1960s

Abstract

This article uses the example of Dr. Val Stephen, a Melbourne anaesthetist believed to be the first Australia-based composer to have a record of electronic music released overseas, to discuss an unexplored category woven into the tapestry of Australian electronic music experiment of the 1960s; namely, that of the ‘hobby experimentalist’. The article shows that while Stephen might be conveniently categorized as a ‘hobby experimentalist’ who tapped into various do-it-yourself sources available in Australia by the 1960s, his music was inspired by much more unconventional influences, including the primitivist art of his sculptor father, Dr. Clive Stephen. The article examines the rapidly shifting 1960s Australian context for electronic music experiment, Stephen's background, influences and the resources he used to learn about and create electronic music, and the music itself, as preserved in several boxes of reel-to-reel tape that have remained untouched since his death.

Notes

 1 Val Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, in The State of the Art of Electronic Music in Australia, Seminar Proceedings, University of Melbourne, 9–13 August 1971 (University of Melbourne, Faculty of Music 1971), 53.

 2 Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12–18.

 3 F.H. Shera, The Amateur in Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1939); and Thérèse Radic, ‘Aspects of Organised Amateur Music in Melbourne 1836–1890’ (MMus Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1968).

 4 Val's grandfather was a barrister following a remarkable Stephen family line of judges and lawyers tracing back to eighteenth-century Britain. It included a Master in Chancery, Secretary of State for the Colonies and, in colonial Australia, Solicitor General of NSW and Supreme Court Judge, John Stephen and his son, Chief Justice of NSW, Sir Alfred Stephen. The Stephens also contributed the literary figures Sir Leslie Stephen and his daughter, Virginia Woolf. Sir Leslie's other daughter was the English painter, Vanessa Bell. See, for example, Ruth Bedford, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954).

 5 ABC programme on electronic music called 12 Bars Rest (20 September 1968), Stephen Tape 15.

 6 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 53.

 7 Fred Judd, Electronic Music and Musique Concrète (London: Neville Spearman, 1961), 12.

 8 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1974).

 9 John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), xv–xvi.

10 Judd, Electronic Music, 64.

11 Percy Grainger, ‘Free Music’ (6 December 1938), in John Bird, Percy Grainger (South Melbourne: Sun Books, 1982), 283–4.

12 Illustrated sales pamphlet promoting ‘The Latest Invention in Radio, The Electronde’, Whiteoak Research Collection.

13 For a history of the CSIR, seehttp://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/music/introduction.html (accessed 25 February 2009).

14 Even before the Jingle Workshop was established, Bean built a rudimentary valve synthesizer that he and Clarke used to create a ten-second jingle for Carlisle Filter Cigarettes. Email correspondence with Dallas Clarke, 12 May 2009.

15 Val Stephen interviewed by Warren Burt and Ron Nagorka, Radio 3CR, 31 March 1978.

16 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 53.

17 Mary Allen, unpublished biography of Clive Travers Stephen held by the Stephen family, undated typescript (c.1960), 8. Allen was an artist colleague of Clive from 1936.

18 Ibid, 12.

19 Robert Russell, Papers and Addresses in Surgery Selected and Revised by Robert Hamilton Russell (Melbourne: Grant, 1923).

20 Interview with Gwen Stephen, 27 March 2009.

21 Bird, Percy Grainger, 19.

23 Clive Stephen, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, in Norman Macgeorge, The Arts in Australia (London: F.W. Cheshire, 1948), 27.

22 Sculpture and Paintings by Clive Stephen Exhibition (anonymous catalogue notes, Gryphon Gallery, Melbourne State College, 20 June−8 July 1977), 2.

24 Interview with Gwen Stephen, 27 March 2009.

26 Allen, unpublished biography of Clive Stephen, 16.

25 Sally White, ‘Diversity Dominates’, The Age (Arts and Entertainments section) (29 June 1977), 2.

27 Stephen, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, 25.

28 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 54.

29 Judd, Electronic Music and Musique Concrète, 69.

30 Burt and Nagorka, interview with Val Stephen, 1978.

31 For discussion of improvising as a meditative or dream-like state, see the primary source quotations in Ernest Ferand, Improvisation in Nine Centuries of Western Music: An Anthology with a Historical Introduction (Cologne, Arno Volk Verlag, 1938), 21.

32 Interview with Gwen Stephen, 27 March 2009.

33 Clive Stephen, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, 25.

34 ABC pilot programme for Beyond the Fringe of Music, 1969, Stephen Tape 23.

35 For example, Val Stephen, ‘Progress in Electrical Anaesthesia: a Critical Review: 1902–1958’, The Medical Journal of Australia (20 June 1958), 831–3.

36 Burt and Nagorka, interview with Val Stephen, 1978.

37 From Val's typed translation of the spoken German.

38 Judd, Electronic Music and Musique Concrète, 46.

39 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 53.

40 Stephen Tapes 33–34, broadcast dates unknown.

41 Columbia Records, MS 7194.

43 Burt and Nagorka, interview with Val Stephen, 1978.

42 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 54.

44 Music for Pleasure programme, undated (probably 1968), Stephen Tape 15.

45 The Age TV and Radio Guide (8–14 May 1970), 5.

46 Presented weekly from 30 April 1970.

47 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 53–5.

48 Burt and Nagorka, interview with Val Stephen, 1978.

49 Copy of the one-page printed ‘Obituary for Val Stephen’, written and read by Dr. Geoffrey Greenbaum at the funeral, 22 June 1998.

50 Gwen Stephen is uncertain about when these works were created but suggests it was probably around 1980.

51 Except for the abstracted image of a television set at the opening and closing of the work.

52 The authors are grateful to Senior Discipline Librarian, Georgina Binns, for facilitating access to these recordings.

53 The annotation ‘no name yet’ on several works by Val indicates that his pieces sometimes came into being before their titles.

54 A similar rhythmic pattern underlies Val's Footsteps in the Sands of Time from the same era (Stephen Tape 61), although that piece is overlaid by electronic keyboard phrases.

55 Herbert Eimert, ‘What is Electronic Music?’Die Reihe 1 (1957), 2.

56 Stephen, ‘The Birth of a Private Electronic Music Studio’, 54.