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Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001 ) was an English musician and composer of electronic music and musique concrète. She is best known for her electronic realisation of Ron Grainer's theme music to the British science fiction television series DoctorWho and for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Early life [ edit source | edit beta ] Derbyshire was born in Coventry, daughter of Emma (née Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire. of Cedars Avenue, Coundon, Coventry, a sheet-metal worker. She had one sibling, a sister, who died young. Her father died in 1965 and her mother in 1994.
During the Second World War,
Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001 ) was an English musician and composer of electronic music and musique concrète. She is best known for her electronic realisation of Ron Grainer's theme music to the British science fiction television series DoctorWho and for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Early life [ edit source | edit beta ] Derbyshire was born in Coventry, daughter of Emma (née Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire. of Cedars Avenue, Coundon, Coventry, a sheet-metal worker. She had one sibling, a sister, who died young. Her father died in 1965 and her mother in 1994.
During the Second World War, immediately after the Coventry Blitz in 1940, she was moved to Preston, Lancashire for safety, where her parents had moved from and where most of her surviving relatives still live. She was very bright and, by the age of four, was teaching others in her class to read and write in primary school, but said "The radio was my education". Her parents bought her a piano when she was eight years old. Educated at Barr's Hill Grammar School from 1948 to 1956, she was accepted at both Oxford and Cambridge, "quite something for a working class girl in the 'fifties, where only one in 10 (students) were female", won a scholarship to study mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge but, apart from some success in the mathematical theory of electricity, she claims she did badly and after one year switched to music, graduating in 1959 with an MA in Mathematics and Music and specialising in medieval and modern music history. Her other principal qualification was LRAM in pianoforte.
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 either deaf aids or depth sounding". Then she applied for a position at Decca Records only to be told that the company did not employ women in their recording studios. Instead, she took positions at the UN in Geneva, 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, then from September to December as Assistant to Gerald G. Gross, Head of Plenipotentiary and General Administrative Radio Conferences at the International Telecommunications Union. She returned to Coventry and from January to April 1960 taught general subjects in a primary school there, then to London where from May to October she was an Assistant in the Promotion Dept of music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.
BBC Radiophonic Workshop [ edit source | edit beta ] In November 1960 she joined the BBC as a Trainee Assistant Studio Manager and worked on Record 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." She then heard about the Radiophonic workshop and decided that was where she wanted to work. This was received with some puzzlement by the heads in Central Programme Operation because people were usually "assigned" to the Radiophonic Workshop, and in April 1962 she was indeed assigned to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale, where for eleven years she would create music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programmes.
In August 1962 she assisted composer Luciano Berio at a two-week Summer School at Dartington Hall, for which she borrowed several dozen items of equipment from the BBC. One of her first works, and the most widely known, was her 1963 electronic realization of a score by Ron Grainer for the theme tune of the Doctor Who series, one of the first television themes to be created and produced by entirely electronic means. When Grainer first heard it, he was so amazed by her rendering of his theme that he asked "Did I really write this?" to which Derbyshire replied "Most of it". Grainer attempted to get her a co-composer credit but the attempt was prevented by the BBC bureaucracy, who then preferred to keep the members of the Workshop anonymous. The theme was reworked over the years, to her horror, and the version that had her "stamp of approval" is her original one. Delia also composed some of the incidental music for the show, including Blue Veils and Golden Sands and The Delian Mode.' In 1964-65 she collaborated with the British artist and playwright Barry Bermange for the BBC's Third Programme to produce four Inventions for Radio, a collage of people describing their dreams, set to a background of electronic sound.
Unit Delta Plus [ edit source | edit beta ] In 1966, while still working at the BBC, Derbyshire with fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff set up Unit Delta Plus, an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music. Based in a studio in Zinovieff's townhouse at 49 Deodar Road in Putney, they exhibited their music at a few experimental and electronic music festivals, including the 1966 The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at which The Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its only public playing. In 1966, she recorded a demo with Anthony Newley entitled "Moogies Bloogies", although as Anthony Newley moved to the United States, the song was never released. After a troubled performance at the Royal College of Art, in 1967, the unit disbanded.
Kaleidophon [ edit source | edit beta ] Also in the late sixties, she again worked with Hodgson in setting up the Kaleidophon studio at 281-283 Camden High Street in Camden Town with fellow electronic musician David Vorhaus. The studio produced electronic music for various London theatres and, in 1968, the three used it to produce their first album as the band White Noise. Although later albums were essentially solo Vorhaus albums, the début, An Electric Storm, featured collaborations with Derbyshire and Hodgson and is now considered an important and influential album in the development of electronic music.
The trio, using pseudonyms, also contributed to the Standard Music Library. Many of these recordings, including compositions by Delia using the name "Li De la Russe" (from an anagram-esque use of the letters in "Delia" and a reference to her auburn hair), were later used on the seventies ITV science fiction rivals to DoctorWho: The Tomorrow People and Timeslip,.
In 1967, she assisted Guy Woolfenden with his electronic score for Peter Hall's production of Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The two composers also contributed the music to Hall's film Work Is a Four-LetterWord (1968). Her other work during this period included taking part in a performance of electronic music at The Roundhouse, which also featured work by Paul McCartney, the sound-track for the Yoko Ono film, the score for an ICI-sponsored student fashion show and the sounds for Anthony Roland's award-winning film of Pamela Bone's photography, entitled Circle of Light.
Electrophon [ edit source | edit beta ] In 1973, she left the BBC and, after a brief stint working at Hodgson's Electrophon studio during which time she contributed to the soundtrack to the film The Legendof Hell House.
The Electrophon and Kaleidophon were electrical musical instruments made by Jörg Mager in pre-war Germany. She then stopped producing music and worked as a radio operator for the laying of a British Gas pipeline, in an art gallery and in a bookshop.
Experimental Audio Research [ edit source | edit beta ] In 2000 and 2001 she worked with Sonic Boom as advisor/co-producer of the EAR LPs Vibrations and Continuum.
Personal life [ edit source | edit beta ]
In late 1974 she married David Hunter from Haltwhistle in Northumberland, the labourer son of a striking miner in an attempt to gain local acceptance; the relationship was brief and disastrous although she never divorced. She also frequented the gallery space of Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia at his stone farmhouse in Cumbria. In 1978 she returned to London and met Clive Blackburn. In January 1980 she bought a house in Northampton where, four months later, her partner Clive joined her.
Death [ edit source | edit beta ]
Derbyshire returned to music in the late nineties after having her interest renewed by fellow electronic musician Peter Kember and was working on an album when she died aged 64 of renal failure.
Archive [ edit source | edit beta ]
After Derbyshire's death, 267 reel-to-reel tapes and a box of a thousand papers were found in her attic. These were entrusted to Mark Ayres of the BBC and in 2007 were given on permanent loan to the University of Manchester. Almost all the tapes were digitised in 2007 by Louis Niebur and David Butler but none of this music has been published. In 2010, the University acquired Derbyshire's childhood collection of papers and artefacts from Andi Wolf. This collection is accessible at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
Dramatic and documentary portrayals [ edit source | edit beta ]
In 2002, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio play entitled Blue Veils and Golden Sands as part of their Afternoon Play strand, telling the story of Derbyshire and her pioneering musical work. The play starred actress Sophie Thompson as Derbyshire, and was written by Martyn Wade.
In 2013 the BBC began production of a television docudrama depicting the creation and early days of DoctorWho in 1963, called An Adventure in Space and Time, as part of the celebrations for the programme's fiftieth anniversary. Derbyshire will appear as a character in An Adventure inSpace andTime, portrayed by actress Sarah Winter.
Episode 5 "Derbyshire" of the BBC children's science TV program Absolute Genius with Dick & Dom is an exploration of Derbyshire's creation of the Doctor Who theme using her techniques on equipment archived from the Radiophonic Workshop )
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