Richard Orton (2)

British electronic music composer, computer scientist, prolific researcher and educator (1 January 1940, Derby — 12 February 2013, Nottingham). Richard Orton established the University Of York Electronic Music Studios in 1968, the first academic facility of the kind in North England, and served at the University Of York's Department of Music from 1967 to 1996. He created the Gentle Fire improvisational group, active between 1968 and 75, with Hugh Davies and several York colleagues and operated Unique Music private imprint in the 2000s. Orton was a founding editor of "Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology," regularly presented at Audio Engineering Society conventions and International Computer Music Conference, and contributed teaching materials for the Open University. Orton learned piano and class teaching at the Birmingham School of Music. He won a Cambridge choral scholarship to St John's College, studying as a tenor vocalist and graduating with Bachelor's degrees in Arts and Music. In 1967, Richard Orton began improvising with his friend Hugh Davies, playing shortwave radios, "amplified fireguard," and toy piano. With Davies on DIY instruments made of various household items with contact microphones, they toured across Great Britain as one of the nation's first "live electronic music" duos, giving ten concerts. In November 1968, Richard Orton invited Davies to join his newly-formed Gentle Fire ensemble. He remained prolific as a composer, writing numerous works commissioned by notable musicians, festivals and ensembles. Some of Orton's compositions include Icarus for violinist Christopher Rowland of the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Ambience for trombonist James Fulkerson, Scatter for Fulkerson and Stephen Montague, Ennead premiered at Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary Music, "Mythos for solo alto saxophone" by Jan Steele, and Stellations for the European Community Chamber Orchestra. During his tenure at the University of York, Richard Orton gradually developed EMS from a "classic" tape studio to a cutting-edge facility equipped with voltage-controlled synthesizers and digital systems. In the early 1980s, with his colleague Ross Kirk from the Department of Electronics, Orton developed a groundbreaking "Music Technology" curriculum, which became the blueprint for other British universities and institutions. Richard Orton wrote his first software on Sharp MZ-80A in March 1983, including programs to create sub-harmonic series, various forms of controlled glissandi, and even Partch's 43-note scales. In 1986, he established the Composers Desktop Project (CDP), choosing Atari ST/MIDI as the group's platform. In the early '90s, Orton worked with Ross Kirk on the ambitious Musical Instrument Digital Array Signal Processor (MIDAS) project. He was interested in a visual representation of sound, developing several programs for CDP Atari Systems that rendered audio input from freehand screen drawings. In 1992, Orton presented his original algorithmic composition programming language, Tabula Vigilans, designed for real-time performance. When he retired in 1996, the University of York awarded Orton a lifetime honorary Emeritus Readership. Richard continued working on CDP software until later years, authoring ScoreBuilder for creating algorithmically-generated scores and printing them via Sibelius and ProcessPack software in collaboration with Archer (Tom) Endrich.