Influences: The Radiophonic Workshop

Hearing Tomita’s extraordinary work was the moment I think I realised how powerful and emotive machines and electronic music could be – and just how evocative and expressive synth technologies were in the hands of someone who knew and felt what they were doing. These are electronic renditions of Debussy pieces and are, to my mind, extraordinarily powerful in the electronic manifestations.

In 11 movements, this piece (the title translates as “Very Soft Earthquake”) came out of the influential GRM studio in Paris, which Bayle led from 1966-1997. The principle sound sources are spirals of crystalline electronics, the rolling, shocking and locking of metallic balls, and soft “bellows” of female voices. Entrancing. Electroacoustic or ‘radiophonic’ music began its life heart of public or government sponsored studios. The tradition was established at the end of the 1940’s by the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and became known as the Paris School where electroacoustic compositions were made using early magnetic tape machines and crude signal generators. As it grew new technologies and different ideas about what sound was for and how you could manipulate it emerged and the work of Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Guy Reibel and François Bayle were scene setters for what the Workshop became – although the Workshop’s remit was much more commercially focused. This piece has fantastic atmosphere and great creative use of a ball bearing! They put this out on vinyl originally but there are now clean CD versions around.

Desmond Briscoe was one of the founding directors of the Workshop, an ex-military man who liked to wear sandals whatever the time of year. He brought together and managed the early Workshops personal and was – and remained – very protective of us all. He brought in Delia Derbyshire, a Cambridge maths graduate and composer whose work helped to reinvent what music made from and with – machines could be. Occasionally Desmond would collaborate with people and the two of them worked together to produce this funny little piece in the 60s for a set piece in a film staring entertainer and singer Charlie Drake. It shows such great originality in making and using sounds to enhance what is a comic performance. In that way you can hear how technology started to be used to create new ways of entertaining rather than simply adding background elements. Very inventive.

Back in the pre-Cambrian, sorry, pre-synthesiser era, electronic music was at the cutting edge and a real art. What it was not, according to the American Federation of Musicians, was music, an attitude not helped in the case of “Forbidden Planet” by the Barrons not being members of the Musicians’ Union. So the very first entirely electronic music score for a film was not credited as such; instead, it was “electronic tonalities”. The Barrons were American, working out of their own studio in New York’s Greenwich Village, much as Tristram Cary was working out of his London flat. Like Cary (and, later, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) they built their own devices to create the sounds they imagined – a far cry from adjusting the controls on pre-built, preconfigured circuits. Ground-breaking, and utterly original.

Even those members of the current Workshop who worked with Delia Derbyshire would argue that this represents the high water mark of radiophonics. It is the archetypal electronic theme tune, composed by Ron Grainer (famous for “Maigret” and “Steptoe and Son”) and “realised” (that is how they had to term it in those days when no one really understood what someone like Delia was actually doing with sounds) from hundreds of tiny pieces of magnetic recording tape. Delia was a personal friend and inspiration to many of us in The Radiophonic Workshop and her legacy and ‘way’ in the studio remains something many of us draw on still. She was complex and challenging but ultimately gave us all inspiration to try things out. On this she worked with Dick Mills (who you can see haunting our stage in his “the original Sonic Solution” lab-coat!). This is totally original, unreproducible in any other form and yet remains timeless, expertly conveying the wonders and occasional terrors of free movement in Time and Space. Is there any other piece of sound design ever that has captured the wrenching of time? This sound and the methods used to make it – are the foundation of many composers’ interest in electronic music. It endures because it is and always has been – outside of time.

Tristram Cary was a radar specialist in the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War, and left convinced that there was music in electronic circuits. He spent his demob money on somewhere to live, marriage to Doris, and “the machine”, his music-making laboratory in the corner of the living room in their flat. His first proper electronic commission came in 1955 (one year before “Forbidden Planet” and five years before the opening of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) for radio play “The Japanese Fishermen”, about a fishing boat caught up in the Pacific hydrogen bomb tests of 1954. Underrated to this day (in the view of the Radiophonic Workshop’s Mark Ayres, to whom he was mentor and friend for many years), Tristram combined a successful career and Film and Television (including “Doctor Who”; he composed the music for the very first Dalek story), with concert and art music. “3 4 5” is all about limitations – composed entirely of the frequencies 3Hz, 4Hz, and 5Hz and their multiples by the first four powers of ten, in durations which are drawn from lengths of recording tape of 3, 4, and 5 inches. The tones, incidentally, were created on the EMS VCS3 synthesiser, which Tristram helped create.