One of the leading female electroacoustic composers of the generation born with “musique concrète” (“discovered” in 1948 by Pierre Schaeffer), Annette Vande Gorne has illustrated herself not only through her works, but also as a teacher, theoretician, animator, and promoter of electroacoustics in Europe, especially in her native Belgium. Her major works from the 1980s and 1990s have been published by the Quebec label empreintes DIGITALes on two CDs, Tao (1993) and Le Gingko(1995, reissued in 1998 as Impalpables).

Annette Vande Gorne had already completed her classical music studies at the Mons and Brussels Royal Conservatories when she first came in contact with electroacoustic music. She was in France for a brief stay at the time. The works of Pierre Henry and François Bayle made her see in acousmatics an uncharted territory. She took training courses with Henry, François Delalande, and at the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges, and studied electroacoustic composition with Schaeffer.

By 1980 she was active as a composer while teaching classical music history. In 1982 she founded the Musiques & Recherche center and the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio, two of the earliest electroacoustic institutions in Belgium. She organized the first festival L’Espace du Son (Brussels, Mons) in 1984 and published the review Liens while putting together a documentation center on acousmatic art. Starting in 1986 she was appointed professor of electroacoustic composition at the Royal Conservatories in Liège, Brussels and Mons.

Vande Gorne is often drawn to metaphysical subjects. Her cycle Tao is a reflection on the four basic elements of taoism. Her relation with words is also crucial to her work. Following Francis Dhomont’s example, she forays into text-music relations. Her collaborations with poet Werner Lambersy are particularly successful.