| Biography | Dr. Richard Orton (19402013) was a composer, performer and Music Educator. In 1968 he co-founded the electronic music ensemble Gentle Fire along with Hugh Davies.
Orton worked at the Department of Music at the University of York from 1967 to 1996. He established the Universitys Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in 1968, the first in a university in the North of England. The studio began as a classical tape studio, but later adopted the technologies of the voltage-controlled synthesizer and digital systems. He proposed the Project teaching system which is still the basis of teaching at York and which has been emulated by many University Music departments around the world. He established the Mediamix series of concerts, which combined performances of electro-acoustic compositions with film, dance and other performance media. He was a co-founder of the Composers Desktop Project, which placed affordable sound technologies on the individual composers desk, and developed musical composition software, which formed part of the CDP system. In the early 1980s, with his colleague Dr. Ross Kirk from the Department of Electronics at York, he started work on the concept of Music Technology as an academic discipline. This led to the establishment of the world's first postgraduate course in Music Technology in 1986. |