Janet Beat: Interview

Janet Beat is one of the pioneering women of British electronic music - a genuine original. Born in 1937, she made her first musique concrète recordings back in the late 1950s and resolutely battled through years of misogynistic hostility and discrimination to forge a career in the genre.

In our interview, she spoke to me about her early interest in sound metamorphosis, her parents’ disapproval of her chosen career and how her father destroyed her early tape experiments, her struggles with sexist adversaries, and how she achieved wider recognition as a composer with her first album release when she was in her eighties.

You became interested in making music at a very young age - three years old?

Well, yes, it just happened. I mean, I don’t know whether it was anything to do with the fact I was born prematurely. And my mother told me, she said that she went to the theatre to a musical when she was pregnant and she swears I was kicking in time to the music. So I’ve always been very sensitive to sound and intrigued by it as a small child.

I grew up in the countryside. And there were no children for me to play with except three boys. Two of them were in their teens and didn't want to be bothered with a toddler so I played with the other one, otherwise I was on my own. And what I used to do was listen to the sounds around me, I would put my ear against the bark of trees particularly in high wind and hear them creak deliciously. I did get an ant in my ear once from doing that and it had to be washed out. I used to sit inside the big rhododendron bush in the woods. and listen to the seeds popping and the rabbit stomping. I still listen to the wind in the trees because different leaves have different edges, different sizes and so they make pink noise, white noise. You can hear the difference.

Was it was radio very important to you at this time?

Oh yes. Because, you see, there was no television, only two radio stations, the [BBC] Home Service and the Light Programme. So mother very much liked classical music and we would search the airwaves to pick up foreign stations. And the dial on the radio said Oslo, Hilversum, Moscow, Luxembourg, Paris. But of course, I got a distorted view of it, because sometimes the frequency response was wrong and then there would be crackles, and then other radio stations would butt in. So I got the idea of collage - but aural collage.

I don’t think people now realise how important radio was to people’s lives  in this period of the wartime and post-war period.

Yes. And my mother and father could play the piano, so I saw music-making in the home. We had a very tall, upright piano. I used to go and sit under the it and put my ear to what would be the soundboard. And then I would hear what I didn’t know was the overtones. I called them the rainbow sounds. Because when you moved away you didn’t hear them, but if you pressed your ear right against the piano, sitting under the keyboard, you could hear the harmonics.

I heard my mother once saying to my father: “I don’t think that child is quite right in the head. We’ll have to put her in a [children’s care] home to knock the music out of her.”

How did you first hear musique concrète?

Well, that was in the 1950s. I used to go to a shop that sold secondhand LPs and I thought, “Oh, this looks interesting.” And it was an LP of [French musique concrète composer] Pierre Henry that intrigued me.

That music must have sounded very strange in those days.

Oh yes. Yes. But you see, I was always interested in sound metamorphosis. I would climb on the armchair which was next to the piano, put a stool on the arm and then climb up, open the top of the piano, and drop knives and forks and spoons inside. And then they would jingle-jangle when you played piano. Mum never caught me doing it. But it changed the sound of the piano. I suppose I was always interested in metamorphosis - although as a small child I didn’t know anything about John Cage, of course, this would be in the early 1940s, before I started school.

That’s very impressive.

Well, you don't know - you see, I was born in 1937. The attitudes to women were so different then. Your job was to get married off. We were supposed to be baby machines and look after the household for a man. So my parents didn’t want me to have a career in music: “Women don’t write music. What would the neighbours say?”’

I remember my first piece of music, I’d written it for a Children’s Hour [BBC] radio programme. There was a competition for children composers. So I wrote this little piece for tenor recorder and asked my mother for a stamp to put on the envelope. “What are you writing to the BBC for?” she asked. I told her and she said: “We're not having that!” And she threw it on the fire. That was the attitude - women don’t write music, women exist to be a helpmeet to a man.

At what point did you realise that you were on a different path in life?

Well, it was when I went to school. I was always digging up the garden, hoping I'd find a Roman mosaic. And I always thought everybody had what I called ‘concerts in the head’. An adult would come in and say, “What are you doing, Janet?”, and I would say, “I'm having a concert in my head.” I always had a very vivid imagination for sound.

How did you start making music with with a tape recorder?

I went to Birmingham University [to study music]. They were very hostile to musique concrète and they made fun of composers like Stockhausen, so I didn’t dare let them know I was fascinated by all this new music or I’d have been thrown off the course.

When I was 21, I used my 21st birthday money or what was left of it to buy my first tape recorder, a Brenell Mark 5, which was mono. And I started experimenting with that, because you could  play a sound backwards. Then a new member of staff joined the department and he was interested in all the things I was interested in, so then I got some support.

A lot of people at that time were quite hostile to this new music.

Oh, yes. Stockhausen, Boulez - they were made fun of. But I thought they were fascinating. I mean, I bought the first 10-inch LP of Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, and I still think it’s a masterpiece of electronic music. And then I bought another recording of his Mikrophonies with ring modulators.

By that time I'd left university I bought a second stereo tape recorder and I got my dad, who had his own manufacturing business, I got the his workmen to make me a capstan with a tape guide mounted on a clamp I could do long tape loops, things like that.

And I found that slowing sounds down you heard aspects of the sound which you didn't notice. The reed warbler makes a high-pitched warble, but when you slow it down, you find it’s not just a long whistle, it’s separate strikes. So I used the slowed-down version of this fantastic little bird in a piece called ‘Piangam’ for piano and tape. I was experimenting.

Tell me about your first piece that you made in 1958.

I had a pair of antique cymbols which played a very interesting sound. And I recorded that and manipulated it. That was the first piece. I was interested in what happened if you clash a cymbal and play it in reverse. Sometimes I even recorded sneezes and played them in reverse.

Sadly, all those tapes and my early synthesizer tapes got destroyed. I don't think my father destroyed them deliberately. I came home to visit my parents in the holidays and I found my father had used the tapes in the kitchen garden. He used them to tie up his raspberry canes and other fruits and flowers in the kitchen garden. He just referred to them as “Janet’s junk”.

You must have been devastated.

Well, we had a blazing row. He had no interest in the arts whatsoever. His elder brother and his father were exactly the same, the creative people all have come down the female line of my paternal and maternal ancestors. And of course, most of them weren't allowed to follow a career.

It was very difficult for a woman to be accepted as a composer in those days – and not just as a composer but as a professional in general.

Oh yes, quite so. When I was at university, I was also told I admired the wrong composers. Because I liked Berg. Berg was just about acceptable because you could read tonality into his tone poems, but as for Webern and Schoenberg... I liked all the offbeat composers because I found them more interesting. I was drawn to people who were outsiders, because they experimented.

After university you then went into education.

I eventually worked at Wooster College of Education, and had a head of department who was very supportive. His attitude was to bring in young people into the department to bring in fresh new ideas. So he was interested in my more advanced techniques. I asked the physics lecturers what a ring modulator was and they told me and built one for me, then we bought for the department an oscilloscope, so you could get the sine waves and squares. And then they built me some filters, and I introduced the students to that.

In fact, what I'd done was take a correspondence course in electronics, one summer holiday, where you had to build an oscilloscope. It gave me a lot of sounds - sine waves, square waves, triangular waves. And so I got into electronic music that way. And like a lot of the other younger women who came along, you started to build a bit of your own equipment.

Then, of course, Robert Moog came along with his Moog synthesizer, but I couldn't possibly afford one and when they first came out. So eventually, I saved up, did some correspondence tutoring and a couple of summer schools for the university and saved up enough money to find buy my first EMS synthesizer.

In the 1960s, did you feel you were part of some kind of community of electronic music-makers or did you feel you were on your own?

I felt I was completely on my own. Because the university I was at was disapproving. I was writing atonal music. Whereas my fellow students, who wrote imitation Benjamin Britten and middle-period Stravinsky, were regarded as being composers.

What are you aware of what people like Daphne Oram were doing?

Yes I was. I met her. She was absolutely delighted that another woman was taking an interest in electronic music. And she invited me down to visit her her studio. And she gave me a lot of good advice. She'd left the BBC by then and was fed up with them because they didn't regard her as a composer, just as a maker of sound effects.

You set up your own studio...

And I also started an electronic recording studio for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in the 1970s, against great opposition from some quarters. Some of the staff were interested, they weren’t all anti, but there was a misogynistic group who actually tried to sabotage concerts.

It was the time when women weren’t supposed to write music, or only just to write a wee hymn tune. You were allowed to do that. But you certainly had to have nothing to do with technology.

There's a greater interest in pioneering female composers now, unlike a few decades ago.

I'm having something of a renaissance now [after the release of her first album by Trunk Records in 2021]. It's marvellous. I’ve become a sort of historic monument. The second woman electronic music composer in the UK, Daphne Oram being the first of course. I’m getting the sort of attention that you usually get just after you die – and I must admit, I’m enjoying having it while I’m still alive.

And you’re still working...

I'm still writing, I've got a commission for 15-minute violin concerto. And I've had some pieces done as broadcasts to stream through YouTube. So I'm still getting performances. But I gave away my electronic music studio about 12 years ago, because I knew I was going to have to downsize at one time. I knew if I had to go into sheltered housing, I wouldn't have room for the studio. Most of it was analog. It was still working. I gave it away and it’s now in Nuremberg and it's still being used.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, May 12, 2021.

Photo: Janet Beat in her studio in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Janet Beat.