On the Origins of the Fairlight CMI: The Qasar, Tony Furse, and the Canberra School of Music

Narratives of technological invention, such as those surrounding the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, are often constructed from ‘eureka’ moments, overnight success stories, and utopianistic vision(aries). Often, historical flash points in technological change scaffold broader dialogues of innovation (Lamarque, 2005), which skirts the realities of socially constructed technologies (Pinch, 2012). Based on extensive, unpublished archival, ethnographic, and analytical work, this paper addresses the technological origins of the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument. It first considers the broader context of global digital synthesiser development at the turn of the 1970s, particularly in the UK (EMS) and the US (Moog, Buchla). Secondly, the paper shows how Tony Furse, CEO of Sydney’s Creative Strategies, developed the Qasar I and Qasar II; both hybrid analogue and digital synthesisers. With investment from the Australia Council for the Arts, and support from the Canberra School of Music, Furse went on to develop the Qasar Polyphon 8 (P8), and the Qasar Multimode 8 (M8) Computer Music Instrument. The latter featured a computer main frame with 2 Motorola 6800 processors and 8 channel cards, a sequencer with music notation software, a 4-octave keyboard and a light pen. Thirdly, the paper considers how the Qasar was a socially constructed innovation grounded in Tony Furse’s ‘cottage labour’ (Furse, 1974) and developed relationally through peers working in electronics, music and here at the School of Music. What role did key academic staff at the Canberra School of Music (ANU School of Music) play in the Qasar’s development, visibility, and dissemination? To what extent was the Fairlight CMI–a musically and culturally transformative music technology–based on the Qasar design? And how do historical narratives of invention work to privilege and conceal the specificities and nuances of technological development and labour? More than 50 years since its inception, this paper presents the Qasar as a catalytic technology;
many of its features can be traced in today’s digital audio workstations.