Delia Derbyshire | |
|---|---|
 Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Delia Ann Derbyshire |
| Born | (1937-05-05)5 May 1937 Coventry,Warwickshire, England |
| Died | 3 July 2001(2001-07-03) (aged 64) Northampton,Northamptonshire, England |
| Genres | Electronic music,musique concrète,library music |
| Occupation | Composer |
| Years active | 1959–2001 |
| Website | delia-derbyshire |
Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001)[1] was an English musician and composer ofelectronic music.[2] She carried out notable work with theBBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of thetheme music to the Britishscience-fiction television seriesDoctor Who.[3][4] She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music",[3] having influenced musicians includingAphex Twin,the Chemical Brothers andPaul Hartnoll ofOrbital.[5]
Derbyshire was born inCoventry, daughter of Emma (née Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire.[6] of Cedars Avenue, Coundon, Coventry.[7] Her father was a sheet-metal worker.[8] She had one sibling, a sister, who died young.[6] Her father died in 1965 and her mother in 1994.[9]
During theSecond World War, immediately after theCoventry Blitz in 1940, she was moved toPreston, Lancashire for safety. Her parents were from the town[6] and most of her surviving relatives still live in the area.[9] She was very bright and, by the age of four, was teaching others in her class to read and write in primary school,[6] but said "The radio was my education".[10] Her parents bought her a piano when she was eight years old. Educated atBarr's Hill Grammar School[11] from 1948 to 1956, she was accepted at bothOxford andCambridge, "quite something for a working class girl in the 'fifties, where only one in 10 [students] were female",[6] winning a scholarship to study mathematics atGirton College, Cambridge but, apart from some success in the mathematical theory of electricity, she claims she did badly.[6] After one year at Cambridge she switched to music, graduating in 1959 with a BA in mathematics and music, having specialised in medieval and modern music history.[6] Her other principal qualification wasLRAM in pianoforte.[9]
She approached the careers office at the university and told them she was interested in "sound, music and acoustics, to which they recommended a career in eitherdeaf aids ordepth sounding".[6] Then she applied for a position atDecca Records, only to be told that the company did not employ women in their recording studios.[12][13] Instead, she took positions at theUnited Nations in Geneva,[1] from June to September, teaching piano to the children of the British Consul-General and mathematics to the children of Canadian and South American diplomats.[6] Then from September to December, she worked as an assistant to Gerald G. Gross,[6] Head of Plenipotentiary and General Administrative Radio Conferences at theInternational Telecommunication Union. She returned toCoventry and from January to April 1960 taught general subjects in a primary school there. Then she went to London, where from May to October she was an assistant in the promotion department of music publishersBoosey & Hawkes.[9]
In November 1960, she joined the BBC as a trainee assistant studio manager[6] and worked onRecord Review, a magazine programme where critics reviewed classical music recordings. She said: "Some people thought I had a kind of second sight. One of the music critics would say, 'I don't know where it is, but it's where the trombones come in', and I'd hold it up to the light and see the trombones and put the needle down exactly where it was. And they thought it was magic."[6] She then heard about theRadiophonic Workshop and decided that was where she wanted to work. This news was received with some puzzlement by the heads in Central Programme Operation because people were usually "assigned" to the Radiophonic Workshop. But in April 1962, she was assigned there[9] inMaida Vale, where for eleven years she would create music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programmes.[14]
In August 1962, she assisted composerLuciano Berio at a two-weeksummer school atDartington Hall, for which she borrowed several dozen items of BBC equipment.[15] One of her first works, and most widely known, was her 1963 electronic realisation of a score byRon Grainer for thetheme of theDoctor Who series,[16] one of the first television themes to be created and produced entirely with electronics.
When Grainer heard it, he was so amazed by her arrangement of his theme that he asked: "Did I really write this?", to which Derbyshire replied: "Most of it".[17] Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was prevented by theBBC bureaucracy because they preferred that members of the workshop remain anonymous.[18] She was not credited on-screen for her work untilDoctor Who's 50th anniversary special,The Day of the Doctor. Derbyshire's original arrangement served as the Doctor Who main theme for its first seventeen series, from 1963 to 1980. The theme was reworked over the years, to her horror, because the only version that had her approval was the original.[19] Delia also composed music for other BBC programmes, includingBlue Veils and Golden Sands andThe Delian Mode.[20] The Doctor Who story Inferno reused some of Derbyshire's music originally composed for other productions.[21]
In 1964–65, she collaborated with the British artist and playwrightBarry Bermange for the BBC'sThird Programme to produce fourInventions for Radio, a series of collages of people describing their thoughts on dreams, belief in God, the possibility of life after death, and the experience of old age, voiced over an electronic soundscape.[22][23] In 1966, working with composerGeorge Newson, she collaborated on the BBC experimental radio drama,The Man Who Collected Sounds with producerDouglas Cleverdon.[24][25]
In 1966 while working at the BBC, Derbyshire, fellow Radiophonic Workshop memberBrian Hodgson andEMS founderPeter Zinovieff set up Unit Delta Plus,[1] an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music. Based in a studio in Zinovieff's townhouse inPutney, they exhibited their music at experimental and electronic music festivals, including the 1966The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, at whichThe Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its only public performance.
In 1966, she recorded a demo withAnthony Newley entitled "Moogies Bloogies", but Newley moved to the United States and the song was left unreleased until 2014. After a troubled performance at theRoyal College of Art, in 1967, the unit disbanded.[26]
In the late 1960s she again partnered with Hodgson to set up the Kaleidophon studio inCamden Town with fellow electronic musicianDavid Vorhaus.[1] The studio produced electronic music for London theatre productions, and in 1968 the three produced their first album there as the bandWhite Noise.[27] Their debut,An Electric Storm, is considered an influential album in the development of electronic music.[28] Derbyshire and Hodgson subsequently left the group, and future White Noise albums were solo Vorhaus projects.
The trio, under pseudonyms, contributed to the Standard Music Library.[29] Many of these recordings, including compositions by Derbyshire using the name "Li De la Russe" (from an anagram of the letters in "Delia" and a reference to her auburn hair) were used on the 1970sITV science fiction rivals toDoctor Who:The Tomorrow People[30] andTimeslip.[31]
In 1967, Derbyshire provided sound design alongsideGuy Woolfenden's score forPeter Hall's production ofMacbeth with theRoyal Shakespeare Company.[1] The two composers also contributed the music to Hall's filmWork Is a Four-Letter Word (1968).[32] Her other work during this period included taking part in a performance of electronic music atThe Roundhouse,[1] which also featured work byPaul McCartney, the score for anICI-sponsored student fashion show[1] and the sounds forAnthony Roland's award-winning film of Pamela Bone's photography, entitledCircle of Light.[33] She composed a score forYoko Ono's short filmWrapping Event, but no copy of the film with the soundtrack is known to exist.[34]
In 1973, Derbyshire left the BBC and worked briefly at Hodgson's Electrophon studio,[1] where she contributed to the soundtrack to the filmThe Legend of Hell House.[32]
In 1975, she stopped producing music. Her final works included two soundtracks for video artistsMadelon Hooykaas andElsa Stansfield on their short filmsEen van die dagen ("One of These Days") in 1973 andOverbruggen ("About Bridges") in 1975.[35]
Following her music career, Derbyshire worked as a radio operator for aBritish Gas pipelaying project, in an art gallery, and in a bookshop.[1] In late 1974 she married David Hunter.[36] The relationship was brief, although the couple never divorced.[clarification needed] She also frequented the LYC Museum and Art Gallery established by Chinese artistLi Yuan-chia at his stone farmhouse inCumbria and worked there as his assistant.[37] In 1978, she returned to London[9] and met Clive Blackburn. In January 1980 she bought a house in Northampton, where four months later Blackburn joined her. He remained her partner for the rest of her life.[38]
In 2001, she returned to music, providing sounds used as source material byPeter Kember onSychrondipity Machine (Taken from an Unfinished Dream), a 55-second track for the compilationGrain: A Compilation of 99 Short Tracks, released by Dot Dot Dot Music in 2001. In the liner notes, she is credited with "liquid paper sounds generated usingFourier synthesis of sound based on photo/pixel info (B2wav – bitmap to sound programme)".[39] The track was released posthumously and dedicated to her.
Derbyshire's later life was chaotic due to struggles withalcoholism. She died ofrenal failure brought on by cancer, aged 64, in July 2001.[1][40]
After Derbyshire's death, 267reel-to-reel tapes and a box of a thousand papers were found in her attic. These were entrusted to the composerMark Ayres, who had salvaged the tape archive of the Radiophonic Workshop, and in 2007 were given on permanent loan to theUniversity of Manchester for preservation. The tapes consist primarily of material from Derbyshire's freelance projects (e.g. works for theatre productions, films and festivals), some of her BBC work (the majority of Derbyshire's BBC work, including the original version of theDoctor Who theme, is housed in the BBC Archive Centre at Perivale), off-air recordings of interviews with Derbyshire and recordings of music by other composers and musicians, includingKarlheinz Stockhausen,Krzysztof Penderecki andCan. Almost all the tapes were digitised in 2007 by Louis Niebur and David Butler, but none of the music has been published owing to copyright complications.[41][42] In 2010, the university acquired Derbyshire's childhood collection of papers and artefacts from Andi Wolf. Subsequent donations to the archive have included items and recordings from Brian Hodgson, Madelon Hooykaas, Jo Hutton and Elisabeth Kozmian. These collections of material, including Derbyshire's working papers and digitised transfers of the tapes, are accessible at theJohn Rylands Library in Manchester.[43] Material from the archive was used in the Radiophonic Workshop's score for the 2018 filmPossum and provided a source of inspiration forCosey Fanni Tutti in her soundtrack to the filmDelia Derbyshire: The Myths And The Legendary Tapes (2020).[44][45]
In her 1968 novelThe Bloater,Rosemary Tonks describes a BBC experimental sound studio based on the Radiophonic Workshop. Tonks had previously collaborated with Derbyshire at the Workshop on a sound poem,Sono Montage (1966).[46] Min, the narrator of the novel, resembles Tonks herself, while her friend Jenny was partly based on Derbyshire.[47]
In 2002,BBC Radio 4 broadcast aradio play entitledBlue Veils and Golden Sands as part of itsAfternoon Play strand, telling the story of Derbyshire and her notable musical work.[48] The play starredSophie Thompson as Derbyshire[49] and was written by Martyn Wade.[48]
In October 2004, the Tron Theatre in Glasgow hostedStanding Wave, a play written by Nicola McCartney focusing on the life of Derbyshire. This was produced by Reeling and Writhing, directed by Katherine Morley, score by Pippa Murphy.[50][51]
In 2009, Canadian filmmakerKara Blake releasedThe Delian Mode, a short documentary film about Derbyshire.[52] The film won theGenie Award forBest Short Documentary Film in 2010.
In 2013, the BBC showed a television drama depicting the creation and early days ofDoctor Who in 1963, calledAn Adventure in Space and Time, as part of the celebrations for the programme's 50th anniversary. Derbyshire appeared as a character in it, portrayed bySarah Winter.[53][54][55]
Episode 5 "Derbyshire" of the BBC children's science TV programmeAbsolute Genius with Dick & Dom is an exploration of Derbyshire's creation of theDoctor Who theme recording using her techniques on equipment archived from the Radiophonic Workshop.[56]
Coventry-based theatre company Noctium Theatre produced a play named Hymns for Robots about Derbyshire's working life,[57] which played at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe festival.[citation needed]
In 2017, a short film byCaroline Catz,Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And The Legendary Tapes (2017) was screened at theBFI London Film Festival.[58] It has been expanded into a feature-length movie that debuted in October 2020.[59]
The 2020 documentarySisters with Transistors touches on Delia Derbyshire's work in electronic music and the composing of the Doctor Who soundtrack.
Derbyshire was also featured in episode 4 ofMark Ronson's "Watch the Sound" 2021 documentary series onApple TV+. The episode deals with synthesizers and hails Derbyshire's contributions.[60]
Her hometown Coventry named a street after her in November 2016, the "Derbyshire Way".[16]
A blue plaque was unveiled at Derbyshire's former home of 104 Cedars Avenue, Coventry, on 15 June 2017 as part of a BBC initiative celebrating important musicians and venues.[61] The ceremony was performed by formerDoctor Who actorsColin Baker andNicola Bryant along with BBC Coventry & Warwickshire presenter Vic Minett.[62]
On 20 November 2017, Derbyshire was awarded a posthumous honorary doctorate for her notable contributions to electronic music, byCoventry University,[63] who also erected a plaque honoring Derbyshire, on their Ellen Terry Building. Adjacent to it is a mural depicting Derbyshire. There is a permanent display dedicated to Delia atCoventry Music Museum.
In 2022,Coventry University announced that it would name its new flagship Faculty of Arts and Humanities building after Derbyshire.[64] The Delia Derbyshire building was officially opened in May 2024.[65]
her electronic music, recorded under her own name and with the band White Noise, influenced "most every current legend in the business—from Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers to Paul Hartnoll of Orbital"
The story goes that on listening to playback, he enquired of Delia, "Did I write that?". To which she replied, "Most of it!".
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