These Hopeful Machines
A six-part series - first broadcast in 2013 - in which James Gardner traces a personal path through the evolving world of electronic music and interviews some of the pioneers who made it happen. Over 100 years of recording techniques, electronic instruments and gizmos ... their use in popular music, art music and their position in Western culture.
The series was co-produced with Tim Dodd.
The Philips Pavillion at Expo 58 in Brussels. Photo: Wouter Hagens CC3.0
Pierre Schaeffer with the phonogene in his studio, 1951. Photograph: Serge Lido © INA
Unit Delta Plus was an organisation set up in 1966 by Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff to create electronic music and also promote its use in television, film and advertising.
Episode 1 - Everything Audible in the World Becomes Material
We start at the Brussels World’s Fair, Expo ’58 where a number of threads in the story were to converge and thence to radiate.
Then we go back in time to Rabelais who wrote presciently about frozen sounds back in the 16th Century.
We look at a variety of very early technologies and concepts that were to play an important role in the development of electronic music: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph; Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone; John Cage’s CREDO manifesto; Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori – mechanical noise instruments; Percy Grainger’s and Conlon Nancarrow’s work with player pianos; early electronic instruments the Theremin and Ondes Martenot; the mind-boggling work done by Russian film-makers, laboriously piecing together optical soundtracks; and much more.
Episode 2 - Raindrops in the Sun
Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète;
Early tape recording: the life-threatening steel wire tapes at the BBC, the German Magnetophon and Bing Crosby’s Ampex;
Guitarist Les Paul shows some recording chops with his overdubbing techniques;
John Cage’s early experiments with sound and recording;
Louis and Bebe Barron and their ‘electronic tonalities’ for The Forbidden Planet;
The Theremin in the movies: Miklós Rósza, Bernard Herrmann and Dr Samuel Hoffman;
Electronic keyboards from the 50s: the Solovox, Ondioline and Clavioline;
Homer Dudley’s Vocoder;
Robert Beyer, Werner Meyer-Eppler and Herbert Eimert set up a studio for elektronische Musik at Cologne Radio;
Karlheinz Stockhausen gets to work in Paris with musique concrète but gets disillusioned and moves to Cologne.
Episode 3 - Fag Ends And Lollipops
Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna and the new studio at Italian Radio;
Tristram Cary, Peter Zinovieff and Robert Moog talk about finding cheap electronics by the warehouse-full and fashioning it into new-fangled sound devices;
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Dr Who and other highjinks;
Interviews with Brian Hodgson and Mark Ayres;
The iconic Delia Derbyshire;
Her collaboration with Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff, Unit Delta Plus;
The virtuosity of John Baker;
And as a prelude to Episode 4, we look at rock ’n’ roll effects: tape delay, tape loops and feedback.
Suzanne Ciani
Episode 4 - I Was Born to Synthesize
The early development of analogue synthesizers: the Moog, the Buchla and others;
Raymond Scott;
Eric Siday;
The San Francisco Tape Music Center;
Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, the go-to guys for Moog work in the 60s;
Wendy Carlos and Switched On Bach;
Morton Subotnick and Silver Apples of the Moon;
Suzanne Ciani and her work for advertising;
EMS, the Electronic Music Studio in London and its VCS3 synthesiser: interviews with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell;
The great debate: should a synthesiser have a keyboard or not?;
In the early 70s, bands like Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer really start taking to the instruments;
And then in 1976 engineer Robbie Wedel works something out for producer Giorgio Moroder and they quietly revolutionise music with Donna Summer’s 'I Feel Love'.
Yamaha’s DX7 was an FM-based digital keyboard synthesizer with a distinctive and much-loved sound. Like the other electronic instruments we have written about, the Yamaha DX7 had a profound and lasting impact on popular music.
Episode 5 - Load Your Program. I Am Yourself
Alan Turing's Universal Machine;
Sydney's CSIRAC computer and its loudspeaker that clicked!
Max Mathews and his computer programme ‘Music’;
Early days of computer music: John Chowning, Suzanne Ciani and Barry Vercoe talk about their experiences waiting days to hear a split second of music;
The work at IRCAM in Paris;
Barry Vercoe’s music programming environment ‘Csound’;
John Chowning develops FM synthesis, a new way of making sound;
The Yamaha DX7, the biggest-selling synthesiser ever;
Peter Vogel and the Fairlight CMI;
By the 80s, computer-based music becomes affordable with the sampler.
Epidode 6 - A Dance to the Music of Time
Synthesizer bands of the 70s: Kraftwerk, The Human League etc and their equipment;
From hip-hop to house, techno, and IDM (intelligent dance music) to all the sub-, sub-sub- and sub-sub-sub-genres of electronic music of the 80s, 90s and later;
Karlheinz Stockhausen gives his view on this music in a blind test ... turns out the only one he liked came from his old student Irmin Schmidt and his band Can;
Analogue synthesizers make a comeback;
Laptops and the democratisation of music production;
Synthesiser programming: an interview with Phill Macdonald;
Alternative user-interfaces to the keyboard;
Where on earth are we heading? Peter Zinovieff, Brian Hodgson, John Chowning, Suzanne Ciani, Barry Vercoe, Morton Subotnick and Irmin Schmidt all put in their two cents, pence or pfennige.
E.M.S. Synthi KB1 Synthesizer