Tim Souster

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Tim Souster (born 29 January 1943 in Bletchley; died 1 March 1994) was a composer best known for his electronic music.

He was educated at Bedford Modern School (1952-61) and New College, Oxford (1961-64). His teachers included Bernard Rose, David Lumsden and Egon Wellesz. In 1964 he attended summer courses at Darmstadt taught by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1965 he took composition lessons with Richard Rodney Bennett. In the same year he joined the BBC Third Programme as a producer, and put on many performances of contemporary music by composers such as Boulez, Berio, Barraqué, Cardew, Feldman, Henze and Stockhausen. After leaving the BBC in 1967, he began to devote more time to composing and writing.

In the late 1960s Souster began experimenting with electronics. His first acknowledged composition involving electronic techniques was Titus Groan Music (1969) for wind quintet, ring modulator, amplifiers and tape. In August of the same year he moved to King's College, Cambridge and formed a live-electronic group with Roger Smalley called Intermodulation. As well as compositions by Souster and Smalley, the group performed contemporary music by Cardew, Riley, Rzewski, Stockhausen and Wolff.

In 1971 Souster became a teaching assistant to Stockhausen in Cologne, and in 1973 he moved to Berlin. He remained in Germany for two more years, subsequently returning to England. Apart from six months in California in 1978, Souster resided there for the rest of his life. In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote music for film and television, as well as a large amount of concert music. His last completed work was La marche (1993), a brass quintet.