Sylvia Pengilly was born in
London on March 23, 1935. Pengilly's childhood memories include gunfire, rockets, and bombings. Her family would travel to rural
Sussex whenever the bombings would be at their worst, except for her father who was in the army. She attended music class each week while in Sussex. She learned about English
folk music and her teacher would play the piano to accompany the music. Once the war ended, the entire family moved back to London, where her parents taught her how to play the piano. She enjoyed playing so much that she would often need to be forced away from it. At music class in high school, she was first exposed to a
fugue by
Bach. This led to her first composition, a fugue based on the C minor fugue from Book I of
The Well-Tempered Clavier. She attended the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the 1950s and took a degree in music education. Pengilly married Brian Pengilly, a research chemist, in 1956 and they moved to
Stow, Ohio in 1957 when he received a job offer from
Goodyear Research. Pengilly was an elementary school music teacher for a few years until she pursued a composition degree at
Kent State University in 1968. Pengilly became aware of
electronic music while attending the university when she saw the chairman's
Moog 55 and she used it to change how a simple
waveform sounds. She graduated with a Master of Arts in composition in 1971 and joined the faculty at Kent State University as a theory instructor. Pengilly divorced her husband in 1973 and attended the
University of Cincinnati for a doctoral degree during the same year. The University of Cincinnati's Conservatory of Music had an electronic music studio which included an
ARP 2600 and an
ElectroComp. She studied how to compose
acoustic and electronic music. Pengilly became semi-retired in 1995 and moved to California. She continued to perform and lecture at multiple universities. Pengilly also attended electronic music conferences. She collaborated with composer Michael Rhoades to create music video works, with Pengilly creating the video and Rhoades composing the music. == Reception ==