The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music was Smuggled into the Mainstream

285 Pages·2012·1.886 MB·English

by  Mark Brend

The Sound of
Tomorrow

The Sound of
Tomorrow
How Electronic Music was
Smuggled into the Mainstream
Mark Brend
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square
New York London
NY 10010 WC1B 3DP
USA UK
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2012
© Mark Brend, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-1-6235-6153-6
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Introduction vii
1 More music than they ever had before 1
2 I like music that explodes into space 29
3 The privilege of ignoring conventions 51
4 Out of the ordinary 73
5 Manhattan researchers 103
6 Because a fire was in my head 123
7 Moog men 151
8 White noise 173
9 It rhymes with vogue 195
Epilogue 213
Notes 225
Watch and listen 233
Sources 251
Acknowledgements 255
Index 257

Introduction
Some time in 1966 Paul McCartney knocked on the door of a
house in Deodar Road, Putney, south London. He was there to
meet Peter Zinovieff, who owned the house, and two colleagues,
Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, both moonlighting from the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Collectively Zinovieff, Derbyshire and
Hodgson were Unit Delta Plus, a short-lived group dedicated to the
promotion and creation of electronic music – not really a band or an
organization, but somewhere in between.
During the meeting Zinovieff led McCartney through the house
into the back garden, which stretched right down to the River
Thames. On the left hand side of the garden, about halfway
between the house and the river, a garden building, a large shed,
was sunk about four feet into the ground. Zinovieff led McCartney
across the garden and down a few steps, opening a door into a
secret futuristic kingdom: the best-equipped electronic music studio
in the country. The room was packed full of tape recorders, audio
oscillators, mixers and, uniquely for a recording studio in Britain at
the time, computers.
Not much came of this meeting. Despite later rumours that
McCartney was considering an electronic backing for a new version
of ‘Yesterday’, there would be no collaboration between him and
Unit Delta Plus. What elevates this brief and apparently fruitless
encounter above the status of historical footnote is its symbolic
significance. It is a marker of something that was just starting
to happen in rock music. At the time, The Beatles were at their
commercial and creative peak, leaving behind live performance and
Merseybeat for a more sophisticated, studio-bound rock music. A
part of that transition involved exploring new directions, and a part
of that exploration was investigating electronic and tape music.
What McCartney was doing on that far-off day was taking part in a
small but clearly identifiable trend in rock in general. A handful of
musicians, from established performers to the barely known, were
viii IntroductIon
getting interested in integrating electronic music, or electronic sound
in music, into rock.
Unit Delta Plus didn’t last much more than a year and did little of
note. It was broken apart by disagreements between Zinovieff on the
one hand and Hodgson and Derbyshire on the other. Zinovieff was
an independent inventor, composer and visionary technologist. He
was interested in using computers to advance serious avant-garde
electronic music. Hodgson and Derbyshire were different. Both had
knowledge of and an interest in the serious end of electronic music,
but much of their work for the BBC was by definition populist.
They spent a lot of their time making music and sound for popular
television and radio. That difference between Zinovieff and Hodgson
and Derbyshire was a microcosm of a tension in electronic music
at the time between the serious and the popular. McCartney might
not have known it, but in approaching Unit Delta Plus he was
approaching something that itself represented two parallel branches
in the evolution of electronic music.
When McCartney reflected on this event three decades later in
Barry Miles’ biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now he
remembered it as a meeting at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
He recalled getting a number from the phone book and calling
Delia Derbyshire. This slight confusion is understandable, and not
just because of memory’s imprecision. At the time the Radiophonic
Workshop was the public face of British electronic music and
Derbyshire its most visible member. What the episode demonstrates
is that McCartney’s awareness of electronic music at the time was
shaped, in part at least, by the outpouring of themes, jingles, sound
effects and incidental music from the Radiophonic Workshop. But he
was also interested in serious electronic music, and in February 1966
had gone to hear the Italian composer Luciano Berio lecture on the
subject.
There is a version of history that says that electronic music
filtered down from the arid, imposing mountains of serious academic
culture into the gentle foothills of pop music. This is the story
of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, of the Paris and
Cologne studios, of musique concrète and Elektronische Musik of
Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening and the Columbia-Princeton
Electronic Music Center. That McCartney, a pop musician, knew
IntroductIon ix
something about that sort of electronic music validates that version
of history. But it is not the whole story. The contention of this book
is that there is another history running alongside the emergence
of serious electronic music. Right from the start of the twentieth
century and the first performing electronic instruments there were
people trying to make electronic music for the masses. When
McCartney opened the phone book to look for the number of the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop he was also validating that second
history.
The distinction between serious and popular electronic music
tends to get very blurred with even the most casual examination.
Indeed, many advances in early electronic music came from the
energy created by an overlap between the two. Even so, it seems self-
evident that there is a difference in intent as you travel further in each
direction from the dividing line. Pierre Schaeffer and Jean-Jacques
Perrey, for example, were clearly not doing the same sort of thing,
even if they were sometimes using similar means. There are two
stories. The one about serious electronic music and its leading
figures has been told well and often before. This book touches on
it only briefly when it intersects with the second story. That second
story is the story of popular electronic music, and that’s the subject
of this book. It’s the story of Samuel Hoffman and Eric Siday; of the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Manhattan Research; of television
commercials and movie scores; of the Ondioline, the Clavioline, the
Novachord; of electronics hobbyists and inspired amateurs.
We become acclimatized gradually to new sounds. Even in 1976
The Ramones’ distillation of rock ’n’ roll was too much for many, yet
had Johnny Ramone fallen through a crack in time and come out
Mosrite blazing in 1956 he most likely would have been locked up
for life. As it was, by 1976 the distortion levels had been creeping up
for years, creating a state of readiness for the great slab chords. So it
was with electronic music. Early adopters encountered a strongly felt
but vaguely defined technophobia from many quarters. The sounds
of electronic music had never been heard before and they were met
often with bewilderment, anxiety, even fear. As Bob Moog once
said: ‘Back then, anything that didn’t come out of wood or a brass
instrument or a string was considered somehow suspect at least …
people were very suspicious of electronic instruments producing