News

July 2021
There is now Delia's audio for one movement of

• The Evenings of Certain Lives

a reconstruction from her manuscript score of

• Poets_in_Prison_-_Intro

and the Medialink library of high-definition scans of Delia's papers is now included in the WikiDelia, cross-referenced with the photosnaps that identify them.

June 2017
There is now Delia's sound for:

• Radio Newsreel
• The Autocrat
• It Was a Solid Killing Match

and her collaboration with Jani Christou for

• Oedipus the King

Feb-May 2017
There are new pages for

• the Delia Derbyshire Collection: a torrent of most of Delia's music as MP3s
• Three new radio programmes about Delia:
  • Breege Brennan's sublime episode of Amazing Graces
  • the jolly Delia Derbyshire's eightieth birthday special and
  • the erudite piece in Monteverdi 450‎.
• People: Waris Hussein, Julia Cave, Alan Oldham and Robin Gwyn

There are now images of Delia's manuscripts for

• Engineering Craft Studies
• This Question of Pressures
• The Legend of Hell House and
• Science All Around - Sound.

A comparison of the various makeups for Hamlet against the script shows that in fact they come from two different productions.

Many entries have been enriched with information from the wonderful BBC Genome Project and all the spectrograms that suffered from sndfile-spectrogram's “strange florets” bug have been recalculated with fixed software.

A new biographical titbit has surfaced: that Delia was in the National Youth Orchestra in the 1950s where she met and befriended fellow composer Jonathan Harvey with whom she went to the Brussels World Fair ‘Expo 58’ where they heard the world première of Edgard Varese's all-electronic Poème Eléctronique on 425 loudspeakers.

June-July 2016
There are now the papers for

• the 1971 Greenwich Macbeth
• the ICI Fashion Show
• Medea
• Moogies Bloogies
• Orpheus
• Spin, music for a lost 1966 TV advert
• The Cloud
• the Unit Delta Plus Concert of Electronic Music
• Work is a Four Letter Word

and there are now audio and spectrograms for

• Ernst Jandl's 13 Radiophone Texte from 1966
• The Naked Sun, a 1968 scifi radio play
• Travelling in Winter, a 1971 radio play about how medieval rich and poor people feel the cold

5 March 2016
Someone has sent audio for I Think in Shapes from 1968.

5 January 2016
The audio for Closed Planet from 1962 has turned up. It was previously only known from four sides of Delia's handwritten notes and turns out to be a spoken scifi drama with Delian backing tracks almost continuously throughout, providing the setting for each scene. The intenser highlights are on its page.

21 December 2015
Curses! A bug in sndfile-spectrogram has covered the spectrograms with strange spider-web-like interference patterns. I've fixed the bug and the fix will be included in its next release but now I have to recalculate all the spectrograms and try to remember the settings used for each!

Meanwhile, there is a potentially better technique to produce such spectrograms: the Constant-Q transform. See Spectrograms#Software for links to papers and implementations.

19 November 2015
A different mix of Quest - fast was used to make the theme for Physical Science from 1975, including a rhythm loop made from just four of the beats. Unfortunately, it looks like this was someone else mangling Delia's work.

21 October 2015
There are now spectrograms for the pieces in An Electric Storm.

3 October 2015
Electrosonic and A Game of Chess now have spectrograms.

September 2015
There are now typeset scores for The Pattern Emerges and Moogies Bloogies, derived form their spectrograms.

Centarra Inc. headquarters, 2323 Bryan St., Dallas

25th August 2015
The wikidelia and delia-derbyshire.net have been down for some days, as its web hosting company closed down and ran off with the ten years' credit that I had put aside to keep them available on the web, whatever happens to me. It is now hosted at a different company on a faster server costing 6USD per month and is paid up for the next month. All donation go to pay these sites' web hosting in advance, thereby ensuring their continued existence. Thanks!

3rd February 2015
There are now audio extracts of Delia's music for The Bagman, the Aztec suite and Ways of Seeing.

31st January 2015
There is now a reconstruction of Delia's score for Anything Goes.

1st January 2015
There is now the audio for Delia's soundscapes from the 1969 film version of Hamlet.

19th December 2014
There is now the audio for Shadow of the Pharoah.

10th December 2014
To combat the censorship of delia-derbyshire.net by Avast! "antivirus" and facebook, wiki.delia-derbyshire.net is now wikidelia.net

18th September 2014
Audio12 has contributed typeset scores and midi for two pieces:

• Clothes, a piece existing only in manuscript form and composed on the 22nd of December 1968, i.e. at Christmas in the middle of her most productive period, and
• Science and Health whose Delian audio is, of course, known.

The musical mark-up on the reverse of the Science and Health manuscript seems to be something else, possibly another new piece.

8th September 2014
I just found out that the pay-for "Internet Zone" Avast! Antivirus product is blocking delia-derbyshire.net and wiki.delia-derbyshire.net, saying that they contains malware. This is simply not true.

5th September 2014
There is now the audio for Pompeii.

31st August 2014
Bad news. Delia's title music for Engineering Craft Studies was never used (they used "Popcorn" instead), and the BBC has lost the tape on which there was a copy.

23rd August 2014
I have finished going through the Tape Library List's catalogue of the 300 tapes in the BBC Radiophonic Archive that are credited to Delia, to be able to reply to the Director of BBC Worldwide's belief that there is nothing there to be published. Result: There are Delia's final master tapes of her unpublished music for 124 (one hundred and twenty-four) BBC programmes on tape there, as compared to the 31 of Delia's pieces of music that have ever been published by the BBC (and remember, for each programme Delia often created several pieces of music). A further 31 tapes containing her unpublished music for another 31 programmes are missing and I have found alternate sources for just 4 of these.

For a detailed list, see the page Category:TRW.

6th July 2014
In the papers, two more pieces are mentioned: Science in the Shadows and Magic Box.

3rd July 2014
The audio for About Bridges has come to light.

1 July 2014
Roy Matthews donated 5 EUR. Cheers, Roy! Full steam ahead!

9 June 2014
The Director of BBC Worldwide has made a first reply. See Petition.

30 May 2014
The BBC Trust has replied to the Petition, passing the matter on to the BBC.

28 May 2014
The Naked Sun scene 4's audio has been cleaned up, removing the hum and revealing a background sound.

26 April 2014
There is now a copy of the Queen Elizabeth Hall video clip of Delia.

1 April 2014
The WikiDelia has been off line since mid-January, when its free web hosting died without warning. Thanks to some donations I have now been able to put it up again, paid up until April 2015.

So far this year, the audio for six more works has come to light:

• Petya's Dream
• The Bagman
• Hamlet
• Macbeth (1970)
• Chronicle: The Realms of Gold (the "Aztec/Maya" suite)
• Chronicle: Pompeii