Delia Who?

I was recently sent this link to an article which I thought some people may find interesting; the recent discovery of 267 recordings by electronic sound pioneer Delia Derbyshire. Apparently these as of yet unheard recordings were found in her attic 30 years after their production. Delia Derbyshire is probably best known for her work in the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop during the 60’s, which through its staff’s resourceful endeavours produced many of the sounds effects and themes on shows such as Dr Who, The Goon Show, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Blake’s Seven.
One of her most popular and widely recognised works was her treatment of Ron Grainer’s Dr Who Theme in 1963 (a year before the invention of the Moog synthesizer). Rendering it almost unrecognisable from the original score with her inventive techniques she provoked Grainer into questioning if this was in fact the score he had composed.
“Most of it”, was her response.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF2x5IKxmAQ&feature=related]

Derbyshire also contributed to the album ‘An Electric Storm’ released by the electronic band ‘The White Noise’, formed by bassist David Vorhaus and featuring Derbyshire’s Radiophonic colleague Brian Hodgson. It used many of the tape manipulation techniques employed by Derbyshire in her work for the Radiophonic Workshop. The track ‘Love without Sound’ used tape edits of a double bass sped up to raise the pitch and ‘Here come the Fleas’ contains countless samples tumbling over each other.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6pTdzt7BiI]

Delia Derbyshire (although the most frequently referenced) wasn’t the only pioneering musician labouring behind the scenes in the BBC though and I think it’s worth quickly mentioning a few others while we’re on the subject.

Daphne Oram, who began working there at the age of 18 was the person whose determined petitioning convinced the BBC to open the Radiophonic Workshop in the first place. Although she eventually left the workshop to pursue her own projects her enthusiasm for electronic music was by no means curbed and she is renowned for developing a system for changing ‘pictures into sounds’. This involved drawing on 10 strips of 35mm film, which were then converted into different sounds, a technique referred to as Oramics.

Another composer, Brian Hodgson is credited with creating the sound of the Tardis by scraping his keys along an old piano wire. In fact most of the sounds that they produced were the result of various domestic objects being distorted into something more fantastic to the ear. Champagne corks being popped and doors creaking were among these. Delia Derbyshire is noted for her particular affinity for a green metal lampshade and counted air raid sirens which she heard growing up in Coventry during World War II among her influences. These sounds would then have been inducted into a painstaking process of manipulation (speeding up or slowing down) and then cut at specific parts with razor blades and then finally pieced back together.

Dick Mills, a member of the workshop highlighted the tedious nature of the process in his description of his work on the Dr. Who theme with Derbyshire. When describing how she made the bassline of the theme out of two or three lines of tape he remarked how he would be “scrabbling around the floor saying ‘Where’s that half-inch of tape I wanted to play on the foot of that note”.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDX_CS3NsTk]

Another member of the radiophonic team was Maddalena Fagandini who provided many of the sounds to the production of Cocteau’s ‘Orphee’. Commenting on the lengths that they went through to get the right sounds she described how for a track called ‘Going through the mirror’ they used the sound of breaking glass playing backwards which they obtained from her crashing against it.

It’s a shame that a lot of these significant talents who created new ways to portray musical scores through electronic techniques remain predominantly unheard of, perhaps due to an unfair dismissal of their input as ‘mere’ technicians rather than artists.
Bebe Barron’s death earlier this year went largely unnoticed although she along with her husband Louis are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape and first entirely electronic film score for the movie Forbidden Planet in 1956, before the convenience of samplers and synthesizers was around.