Catalogue description Roberto Gerhard Digital Collection

This archive is a digital collection of audio, text and images. The archive materials are arranged by tape, with each tape entry comprising edited audio, original audio, transcriptions (where appropriate), and images of the tapes, boxes and other ephemera contained within them.

Gerhard's output can also be found in other Heritage Quay collections, including the British Music Collection [BMC],the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival [HCMF] and Early Music Collection [EMC].

Gerhard; Roberto (1896-1970); Composer; Musical scholar; Writer

The Roberto Gerhard Tape Archive was left to his widow Poldi Gerhard following his death in 1970. The Gerhard Tape Archive was subsequently donated to Cambridge University Library by Poldi Gerhard in 1994. All original copies of Archive materials belong to and are stored at the Cambridge University Library.

Cataloguing, archiving and restoring the Gerhard Tape Collection was undertaken as part of a 2011-2012 AHRC funded project “The Electronic Music of Roberto Gerhard” by Prof Monty Adkins, supported by Carlos Duque and Gregorio García Karman, at the University of Huddersfield.

Creation of the digital archive of Gerhard’s tape collection was undertaken as part of a 2020-2022 AHRC funded project “Gerhard Revealed” by Prof Monty Adkins, supported by Sam Gillies and Heritage Quay, at the University of Huddersfield.

Roberto Gerhard was born in 1896 in Valls, Spain. Initially he studied piano with Granados and composition with Felipe Pedrell. When Pedrell died in 1922, Gerhard moved to Vienna as a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. Returning to Barcelona in 1928 he became a central figure in the Catalonian avant-garde, befriending such figures as Pablo Casals and Joan Miró. Identified with the Republican cause throughout the Spanish Civil War, Gerhard was forced to flee to France in 1939 and later that year settled in Cambridge, England. Once in England, Gerhard worked as a freelance composer, producing a series of orchestral and stage works that would establish his international reputation. The Symphony (in memory of Pedrell), the ballet Don Quixote, First String Quartet, and the opera The Duenna followed in quick succession. In the 1950s Gerhard developed his musical style, synthesizing Schoenbergian serialism with catalan folksong. These years also marked him out as the first composer in England to engage seriously with electronic music. Gerhard established one of the first private studios in England producing a series of abstract electronic works as well as electronic music for stage – most notably his score for the 1955 Royal Shakespeare Production of King Lear. From 1959 Gerhard worked extensively at the newly formed BBC Radiophonic Workshop, producing the tape part to his Symphony No. 3 ‘Collages’ and the Prix Italia winning The Anger of Achilles (working with Delia Derbyshire as his assistant). The last decade of his life saw Gerhard’s musical language evolve still further and the composition of late masterpieces such as the the Concerto for Orchestra, Symphony No. 4 “New York”, and the final chamber works, Libra, Leo and Gemini. A Fifth Symphony and Third String Quartet were left incomplete on his death in 1970.