Stanley Glasser

rdf:langString Stanley Glasser

rdf:langString Stanley 'Spike' Glasser (28 February 1926 – 5 August 2018), was a South African-born British composer and academic who studied with Benjamin Frankel and Mátyás Seiber. His concert music was deeply influenced by his ethnomusicological investigations of native African music. The elder son of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he was forced to flee South Africa's apartheid regime in 1963 due to his relationship with black jazz singer Maud Damons. Glasser was an Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, an institution to which he devoted many years, becoming Head of the Music Department in 1969 and rising to the position of Dean of Humanities in the 1980s. Glasser's visionary interest in all areas of contemporary musical development led to his department being a pioneer in the exploration of electronic music, and the music studio purchased one of the first Fairlight CMI sampling systems to find its way to Britain. The electronic music studio is named in honour of Professor Glasser. Glasser is arguably South Africa's first composer of electronic music thanks to a 1960 performance of the Eugene O'Neill play The Emperor Jones in Johannesburg for which he wrote incidental electronic music. The most popular of his compositions have been recorded by the Kings Singers. His ethnomusicological field research is now held at the British Library.