These Hopeful Machines
These Hopeful Machines is a New Zealand Radio series of programmes about the genesis of electronic music. Programme 3 mentions Delia, Luciano Berio, Peter Zinovieff, Paul McCartney, Daphne Oram, Maddalena Fagandini and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and includes new interviews with Brian Hodgson, Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary and provides the first sample of Delia's effects for Macbeth (1967) from the Attic Tapes.
Transcript
Narrator: February '66, the Italian Institute, London. Luciano Berio is playing a tape of his recent piece Labyrintus 2 as part of a lecture. A couple of latecomers are shown to the front row and there's a commotion as the paperazzi swarm around the young man now sitting. This visitor is one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century. His name is Paul McCartney.
By this time he's the only Beatle living in London and he's been hanging out with a hip crowd of writers and artists. He's been experimenting with his tape recorder at home and within a few weeks of the Berio lecture brings a bag of tape loops to Abbey Road to the first recording session for the Beatles' new album.
Later in the year McCartney travels to Putney to visit an electronic music studio he's heard about. He meets the owner Peter Zinovieff and his two partners in Unit Delta Plus, Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, both moonlighting from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Delia needs no introduction to Berio from the lovable moptop though. She'd been Berio's assistant at the Dartington Summer School back in 1962. For his part, Berio has been working with tape and electronics since the mid-fifties.
[??:?? Something from Electrosonic as background
[~16:00-16:55 Brian Hodgson talking about Pierre Schaffer and musique concrete]
[18:20-] Delia's Psychadelian Waltz as background
[19:55- Brian Hodgson talking about the Motosacoche, Ron Grainer and the creation of the Doctor Who Theme.]
[20:30 Delia's Get Out and Get Under as background]
[24:30 One of the callsigns]
[25:00 Maddalena Fagandini and Interval Signals]
[26:40 Samples of Les Structures Sonores music
[27:17-29:35 The Doctor Who Theme, then Brian Hodgson describing Ron Grainer and the creation of the Theme]
[33:20]:
Narrator: Delia Derbyshire did more than the Doctor Who Theme, of course. Soon after her arrival in 1962, she was producing distinctively witty and skillful pieces. Inevitably, though, with the inevitable pressure of deadlines, the Workshop composers looked elsewhere for interesting collaborations, not to mention extra cash. Towards the end of 1965, Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire had started to hear about Peter Zinovieff's large electronic music studio in Putney. They decided to join forces as Unit Delta Plus, with Desmond Briscoe allowing Brian and Delia to moonlight from the Workshop with a nod and a wink.
Brian Hodgson: Delia and I did all the commercial stuff and Peter was more interested in the research.
Peter Zinovieff: They'd heard about what I was doing and they thought that I'd be very good at joining up with them to make an independent company to make jingles and that was our aim. I didn't fit in with that philosophy at all because I kept wanting to do more elaborate things and have more control over the equipment and they really wanted to make money. So we did one or two jingles and then gradually we drifted apart.
Brian Hodgson: Then we had a bust-up and decided that he was going in one direction and we were going in another direction and then Peter got heavily into the synthesizer manufacturing bit and created EMS.
[continues from 35:30]
Want to transcribe the rest? Get in touch!
Electronic version of Yesterday, bubble sounds, Way Out.
[36:30-37:19 Attic Tapes sound for 1967 Macbeth]
[-38:02 Brian Hodgson on arbits and omens]
[-38:20 Mark Ayres]
"Tom Hone's book on Electronic Music" mentions Delia and has a quote from her on the back cover, mention of
[38:59-40: Brian talking about Delia's character]
[41:00- Brian on John Baker]
[47:10 Music Mime and Movement & Delian music]
[48:25 Chronicle Theme ]
[49:40 Brian on Fag Ends and Lollipops]
[51:40-53:25 Two audio letters by Robert Moog about his "Abominotron" instrument]
[54:30 Elvis Collage No.1]
[55:00- Steve Reich, Pete Townsend, Jimi Hendrix, ...]
[60:02 End.]
