nLog

Can you smell what Delia is cooking?

We have just come down off of the excitement of seeing the BBC documentary Alchemists of Sound which was a timely reminder of just how much modern music owes to the BBC radiophonic workshop.

Most of the music that you hear today either has a large component of completely synthesized instrumentation, or has been reassembled looped riff by looped riff from a one off studio performance. In the heyday of the Radiophonic Workshop, the latter method was used to push music further in a decade than it had moved in centuries.

Working with magnetic tape, sounds were recorded then re-recorded at different speeds (and thus pitches), to produce lengths of tape with all the notes required for that 'instrument' within a particular piece of music. Snippets of these bits of tape were then cut up and assembled into loops to provide each part (melody, percussion etc)of a composition. All the loops were then queued up on bank of tape recorders then all the 'play' switches were hit at once.

The workshop staff had made such a colossal leap in the way that music and sound was cognized that they were an immediate hit with the erm, avant-garde end of the London arts and music scenes. Brian Jones was a frequent visitor. Members of the workshop were close associates of Jimi Henrix and Pink Floyd. The backing to the Beatles 'Yesterday' was originally to be an electronic composition.

All the while, they needed to earn their keep at the BBC which viewed them as a source of cheap jingles and backing tracks. A notable composition was the signature tune to Radio Sheffield which was assembled from the sounds made using one of the sets of cutlery that the city was famous for.

If I walked up to you and said only the words 'BBC' and 'Music' there could only be one possible piece that would come to mind. The finest piece of music ever to come out of the public service was composed by Ron Granger but realized and recorded by Delia Derbyshire over the space of two weeks. Recovering from the shock of hearing his 'Dr Who Theme' for the first time, Granger asked "Did I really write this"?. "Most of it" was Delia's reply.

Sadly the introduction of the huge modular synthesizers (ironically what most people imagine when they think of the workshop) left the old guard feeling that the techniques that they had developed were now redundant. The public backlash over the 'godawful racket' eminating from the workshop no doubt contributed. Most retired or like Derbyshire became reclusive. One wonders what they thought of upstarts like Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jarre who took electronic music into the realm of the rock arena making a great deal of money in the process. The BBC were somewhat releived to be rid of the experimentation and the Workshop began a decline back to a jingle factory.

Delia Derbyshire retreated to northern Cumbria. No longer involved in music, she rarely talked about her Radiophonic Workshop experience. Probably the penultimate cult pioneer of electronic music, it would be rich to say that people were beating a path to her door but the scant and flippant comments that she made on her career tended to reinforce her status. She granted interviews in the mid 90s with a number of Electronic musicians and Journalists, expressing something of a sense that music and associated technologies had finally caught up.

The Akai MPC through to Pro Tools in the 90s through to GarageBand have a structurally identical workflow to the tape loop methods of the Radiophonic Workshop staff. GarageBand in has meant that many schools now teach structure and composition using loop methods. Yes, there were earlier electronic 'musicians', but the daily pressure from BBC management to produce populist jingles and sound effect meant that the Workshop moved electronic music from the 'sound collage' to, you know, music. Music as we know it will always be the same.

Posted by nic at 09.01.06 16:51