Tod Dockstader
Tod Dockstader (March 20, 1932 - February 27, 2015) was an American composer and sound engineer: a pioneer in electronic music and musique concrète.
Dockstader was influenced by Edgard Varèse. In the 1950s, he worked in Hollywood as an apprentice film editor and as a sound engineer at Gotham Recording Studios. Dockstader wrote music for Terrytoons cartoons, including the bizarre Tom & Jerry cartoons by Gene Deitch (1961-1962).
Segments of Dockstader's album Eight Electronic Pieces (1960) were later used on the soundtrack of Fellini Satyricon (1969).
Dockstader spent his later career as a sound designer for films. His work was rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s. One of his major fans was Pete Townshend (The Who). [1]
Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa liked Tod Dockstader, though he misremembered him being a DJ from Denver, Colorado:
"There was a guy (Tod Dockstader) who was a disc jockey out of Denver, Colorado. He wasn't a composer in the normal sense of the word. He had a number of releases on an obscure label called Owl. One of them was called Quatermass, and I think I have three of those. He was more of an engineer than a composer, but to me some of those compositions work better than the supposedly serious big shots from Europe." - Frank Zappa in Frank Zappa and His Digital Orchestra, Electronic Musician, September 1985.
When Bill Gubbins visited Zappa in 1969, he remembered him saying that Dockstader influenced him in the field of electronic music.
