The Women Who İnvented Electro: İnside The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

For decades women were systematically sidelined at the BBC. The female voice was thought to lack the necessary gravitas for newsreading – being a discreet and efficient PA to a busy male director or producer was the best that could be hoped for.

Nowhere was this exclusion more rigidly enforced than in the technical aspects of programme-making where the hands-on world of studios, microphones and cameras was believed to be a man’s domain. Yet from an unexpected corner came a quiet revolution. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a pioneering studio for electronic music which flourished from 1958 until 1998. Its function was to provide incidental music and soundtracks for television and radio drama and documentaries. Despite its rigidly utilitarian brief it produced music of astonishing originality.

The soundtracks the Workshop produced became part of the soundtrack of people’s lives in the Fifties and Sixties. Who could forget the uncanny electronic score of the classic sci-fi series Quatermass and the Pit, or the stomach gurglings of Major Bloodnok, a stock character in the comedy series The Goon Show?

Among the composer/technicians working there was a remarkable visionary woman, Daphne Oram. In her childhood she showed a flair for inventing ingenious mechanical devices, and was also fascinated by electronic sound and by the microphone, which she declared had vast potential as a musical instrument.

These two passions came together in Still Point, scored for “Double Orchestra and five microphones”, which Oram composed in the late Forties. This has gone down in history as the first piece ever to combine live orchestral musicians with electronic transformations of the orchestral sound, recorded on to disc to be played live during performances. It was, however, never performed, and only a fragmentary score survives. The composer and “turntablist” Shiva Feshareki has fashioned it into a performing version, which receives its premiere as part of the Southbank Centre’s Deep Minimalism series this month.

Oram had to pursue her passion for electronic music late at night and at weekends, when the BBC studios were not in use. Thanks in large part to her tireless campaigning, the Radiophonic Workshop was finally set up in 1958, in the teeth of much scepticism from the BBC management. Oram was appointed co-director, but she soon lost patience with the studio’s limited brief, and the patronising attitude of the male managers. “They wanted my ideas,” she recalled later, “they didn’t want me.” She took herself off in disgust to create her own studio in a remote village in Kent. For decades she worked on her own system of sound-synthesis called Oramics, lectured on the joys of electronic music in schools and colleges, and wrote visionary essays about the nature of sound, and its potential to lead to higher states of consciousness. Were it not for Oram, there would arguably be no Human League or Aphex Twin.

Oram wasn’t the only creative woman working in the Radiophonic Workshop. There was also Maddalena Fagandini, who joined in 1960 and stayed for around 10 years. In her score for a radio version of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée she came up with some remarkably ingenious effects, such as brushed piano strings for the sound of the Princess, and the sound of smashing glass played backwards for the moment when characters pass through the mirror. This was typical of the suck-it-and-see methods of the Workshop. Fagandini once had to roll around in a gravel bath to create the sounds of a fight – much to the amusement of her male colleagues.

Fagandini and Oram were optimists, consumed by their enthusiasms, for whom male disparagement was a spur to go further rather than give up in despair. Delia Derbyshire, the third of the Radiophonic Workshop’s remarkable women, was a more troubled soul. A Cambridge graduate, she joined the workshop having been rejected from record companies such as Decca because of her gender. She applied her mathematical knowledge to analysing real sounds and reconstituting them with sine wave generators, in a way that would have won the admiration of avant-garde electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, if they had heard of her – which they hadn’t, because Workshop composers, male or female, toiled away in complete anonymity.

It was Derbyshire who actually created the most famous piece that ever emerged from the Workshop, the theme tune to Doctor Who. She did it by taking a simple score by Ron Grainer and transforming it into the uncanny electronic masterpiece we know, using methods that she took care never to reveal. Yet it was Grainer who got the credit and 100 per cent of the royalties – much to his own embarrassment. It was no surprise that Derbyshire became restless at the BBC, a sign of the depression that dogged her life. She left in 1973, and after a spell in a private studio worked in a bookshop in Cumbria and later for British Gas. Only at the end of her life did she return to electronic music, encouraged by the enthusiasm for her work shown by young musicians such as Sonic Boom.

By any standards these three women were extraordinary creative spirits. So why are their names not saluted in histories of modern music? The institutional sexism of the BBC in the Fifties and Sixties is only part of the explanation. The deeper reason is that the story of modernism was always rendered as a tale of heroic males, venturing forth into strange seas of artistic expression. In electronic music it was always Stockhausen or Pierre Schaeffer who were placed in the spotlight. Now at last the three women of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop are emerging from the shadows.
The Women Who İnvented Electro: İnside The BBC Radiophonic Workshop