Name Janet Beat | Role Composer | |
 | ||
Books String quartet no. 1: 1992-1999 ; for two violins, viola and violoncello ... | ||
Janet Beat (born 17 December 1937) is a Scottish composer, music educator and music writer. She was born in Streetly, Staffordshire, England and studied piano privately and horn at the Birmingham Conservatoire (formerly the Birmingham School of Music) before reading music at Birmingham University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1960.
After completing her studies, she took a position teaching music with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She won the Cunningham Award in 1962. Her music has been performed internationally.
She is one of the women pioneers in electronic music composition in Great Britain for her earliest musique concrete pieces belong to the late 1950s. Daphne Oram was helpful and encouraging here. The influences on her music are diverse and include non-European music as well as the sounds of nature and industry. The use of music technology allowed her to make sonic explorations and the use of microtonality. These influences also enriched her writing for acoustic instruments as in "Study of the Object no V" (1970) for unaccompanied voices, a graphic score she calls sound sculpture, "Mestra" (1979–80) for solo flutes and "Hunting Horns are Memories" (1977) for horn and tape for which she worked out quarter tone fingerings for the F/B flat double horn. How time passes is also intrigues her and she has experimented with polymetric and polytempi music.
Works
Beat composes for instruments, electronic music for tape alone and also for acoustic instruments with tape or computer. She has written for orchestra, chamber ensemble, theatre and film. Selected works include:
These pieces are published by Furore Verlag, Kassel, Germany.
Unpublished music and recordings are available from The Scottish Music Centre.
She has written professional articles including: