In August 1966, a young working-class student from Leeds attended the International Summer School for New Music at Darmstadt, having switched his course of study from Chemistry to music only months before. A week into his stay, Trevor Wishart confided to his journal that his future lay at the nexus of ‘humanism, the proletariat and electronic music’. This, wrote the 20 year-old composer, was 'inevitable'.
In a career thus far spanning over fifty years, Wishart has been true to his word, and in 2011, having documented his musical life and work in detail, he left his archive to the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.
This exhibition of images and sounds from the composer’s archive, curated by the Institute’s Dr. Nicholas Melia, explores the first remarkable twenty years of Trevor Wishart’s journey into sound.
