Tim Souster
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Tim Souster (born Timothy Andrew James Souster on 29 January 1943 in Bletchley, Milton Keynes; died March 1, 1994) was a British composer best known for his electronic music output.
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[edit] Background
Souster was educated at Bedford Modern School (from 1952 through 1961) and New College, Oxford (from 1961 through 1964). His teachers included Bernard Rose, Sir David Lumsden and Egon Wellesz. In 1964, he attended summer courses at Darmstadt taught by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and took composition lessons with Richard Rodney Bennett the following year.
Before the end of 1965, Souster was a producer with the BBC Third Programme, 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 songwriting.
[edit] Foray in electronic music
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, Andrew Powell and Robin Thompson called Intermodulation. As well as compositions by Souster and Smalley, the group performed contemporary music by Cardew, Riley, Rzewski, Stockhausen and Wolff.
[edit] Later years
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, where he resided there for the rest of his life (save a 1978 six-month stint in California). 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.
