A Knife, A Fork & A Spoon Will Beat Out a Happy Tune

Kanye West, we are told, will dine only with the very finest of cutlery. "Everything is the best quality." His knives and forks, apparently, are made of gold. I wonder, does he play the spoons with his golden spoons?

When, in 1967, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were asked to create a new signature tune for Radio Sheffield, David Cain, thinking of the city's steel industry, called for knives and forks. His thirty-second jingle was composed from the plucked tines of steel forks, recorded onto tape and sped up or slowed down for different pitches.

Perhaps Peter Sinfield, former lyricist to King Crimson, ELP, and Bucks Fizz, was thinking along similar lines when he composed this - a "music for impossible cutlery":

More often, however, the relationship between notes and knives, or tunes and tines is less harmonious, betraying moreover a certain anxiety best illustrated by two famous quotations.

Wagner is supposed to have said that when he hears Mozart he sometimes fancies he can hear the clatter of the Emperor's dinnerware interfering with the music ("Contemporary attitudes towards the musical inheritance suffer," claimed Adorno, "from the fact that no-one has the confidence to be so disrespectful.")

Erik Satie might almost have had this slur in mind when he turned to Fernand Léger one evening over dinner and stated the need for a "furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself."

I saw anxiety because both of these quotations suggest that there are at least certain circumstances when music might be forced to compete with other, more pressing activities. Wagner's remark might be regarded as the symptom of a time when feudal patronage was waning as a source of income for composers. Satie's of the burgeoning of another time, when mechanical reproduction and increased time for leisure was making music both more ubiquitous and less venerated than it had been. 

The irony, perhaps, is that when Satie went ahead and created his musique d'ameublement the audience refused to ignore it and listened in silence; while Wagner's music would become the template for the unheard melodies soundtracking a thousand Hollywood films.

Whatever Satie may have had in mind when he made his comment to Léger, I'm fairly sure it wasn't this ...

Chris Watson at Présences Électronique 2011

The lights dim, leaving two strings of fluorescent light to bisect the room across opposing diagonals. The only other luminance illuminates a quartet of bright red spherical speakers, hung from the ceiling on wires like flying saucers in an Eisenhower-era SF flick. In fact, we are surrounded by speakers of all shapes and sizes, and we, in turn, surround the artists, who perform 'in the round' - if perform is the appropriate word for standing hunched over a mixing board assiduously twitching knobs and faders.

Our first twitcher is Chris Watson, former Cabaret Voltaire man turned grand homme of UK acousmatics, and twitcher in a double sense for Watson is also a keen bird watcher. He immediately transports us to some hyper real train station 0f nightmares. Engines choke with reverb and locomotive squeals swell, while the judder of distant pistons loops into a thunderous beat. From out of the sussurant fog, the voice of a young woman announces the "Dernier appel pour le train fantôme."

Watson is a man more renowned for manipulating the sounds of - animal and insect - life. Tonight he is summoning the dead. This being an INA-GRM event, the spectre in question is Pierre Schaeffer who inaugurated the genre of musique concrète with his 'Étude aux chemins de fer' just a few years after announcing the liberation of Paris on French national radio, over half a century ago. This is the ninth edition of the Présences Électronique Festival, hosted annually by Radio France since the 55th aniversary of Schaeffer's Étude. Imagine if the BBC chose to commemorate the Radiophonic Workshop with a similar festival of experimental electronics every year, instead of desecrating its memory with the new sloppily saccharine orchestral arrangement of its most famous product, performed on kiddies' night at the Proms. . .

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

December 1956 saw the first meeting of the BBC’s new Electrophonic Effects Committee to discuss a proposal to set up a studio for the production of electronic sounds and music for use in radio drama. A month later they would realise that the term ‘electrophonic’ had already been taken by the field of audiometrics and soon changed it to Radiophonic. Electrophonic audiometry involves the playing of electronic tones at different frequencies - on an audiometer, a device credited to Bell Labs employee Harvey Fletcher - to test the subject’s hearing. The first time Desmond Briscoe remembered hearing electronic sounds it was coming from an audiometer, performing hearing tests on soldiers during wartime. Briscoe spent most of World War Two in the army educational corps running a course on music appreciation, teaching soldiers how to listen to modern music. In later life, he had a way of saying the words ‘music’ and ‘composer’ precisely as though they were doomed to hide under inverted commas, veiled by a slight ironic distance.

Daphne Oram, it is said, secretly enjoyed the war for the opportunities it provided for women in the typically male world of sound engineering. She had joined the BBC in 1943 in the music department, balancing sound output levels. In the mid-1950s Oram would petition her superiors to open a dedicated electronic music studio, staying late at night at the BBC after everyone had left to push tape machines from different studios together and experiment with electronic sounds and concrète techniques. Seemingly unaffected by the newfound pressures of competition, the music department of the BBC was intent on pursuing its policy of ‘serious’ music. Unfortunately for Oram, the music department’s idea of ‘serious’ seemed to consist largely of ‘opera and ballet.’

To many British people today, when asked about their earliest memories of electronic sounds, they may well think of something produced at the Radiophonic Workshop. Perhaps for the majority (including, most famously, the Queen), they will think of Delia Derbyshire’s theme to Doctor Who. Bill Drummond, formerly of the group, the KLF, remembers it as “like no other piece of music, and it affected me in a way that no other piece of music affected me. It did a whole generation.” In the BBC radio play about the life of Delia Derbyshire, Blue Veils and Golden Sands, electronic composer and musician Pete Kember (of Spaceman 3, Experimental Audio Research and Spectrum), who plays himself, cites a list of contemporary electronic artists in whose music he can hear the influence of Delia’s music from the Workshop: Aphex Twin, Orbital, Add N to (X). MMS, a poster on the Dissensus web forum claims the Workshop’s output is responsible for acclimatising the British public to an otherworldly sound world, “the sonics of abstract electronic music has seeped through British culture as a vast hopeful but irrational spectre,” from groups that might self-consciously reference analogue experimentation, like Stereolab, through to hardcore and rave. Another poster, calling himself Blunt, agrees, adding, "when the means of production began to be opened up to the masses in the late 80s and early 90s, it was British musicians and bedroom producers that blazed the trail” in electronic pop and dance music.

In the years 1957 and ’58, electronic music studios opened in Warsaw, Munich, Stockholm and Eindhoven, some were privately owned by electronics manufacturers like Philips and Siemens (Eindhoven and Munich, respectively) others were part of national broadcast stations, but none were quite like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Due to its institutional position and demanding remit, the Workshop is both inside and outside the history of electronic music, often summarily excluded from books on the subject or dismissed out of hand by commentators and other composers. Nonetheless, the Workshop is, in a certain sense, at the very heart of the development of electronic music, as its obscene core or uncanny double.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Institutional Pre-History

In a 1997 interview with John Cavanagh for BBC Radio Scotland’s Original Masters series, Delia Derbyshire claimed that when the first “boss” of the Radiophonic Workshop was appointed in 1958, “there were two applicants from a drama background and three applicants with a music background. And drama won.” But things were not quite as simple as this statement implies. At the time the BBC had a particularly adventurous Drama department, heavily influenced by the ground breaking work that came out of Laurence Gilliam’s post-war Features department, and a largely conservative Music department. In the 1930s, writers like Tyrone Guthrie were already talking about “symphonic form” in radio drama, and paying attention to the significance of words as sound forms in themselves.

Though the BBC had developed a strong reputation for ‘modern’ music in the twenties and thirties, with the coming of the Second World War, a decision was made by the Programme Planning Department to move to a ‘lighter’ programming schedule against the wishes of Head of Music, Adrian Boult. In a Musical Times article from 1943, otherwise full of praise for the high standard maintained in broadcast music, the author remarks on a “falling short” in the field of contemporary music, “due to causes that nobody can remedy.”

Despite the newfound pressures of commercial competition, R. J. F. Howgill, Head of Music 1952-1959, insisted on maintaining the BBC’s commitment to the “very best” – in the ideology of the times however, this consisted of a spectacular spectrum with “at one end” the Last Night of the Proms and “at the other end of the spectrum, ‘celebrity recitals’ by Menuhin, Fischer-Dieskau, and others." Things were about to change. In 1957, William Glock conducted a performance of works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono on the Third Programme, 3 March 1957 and would become head of music in 1959 with a remit to broadcast “a wider selection of contemporary music.” Of course, by this time, the Radiophonic Workshop was already set up under the stewardship of the Drama department.

Born, G. (2004), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, 2004, London: Secker & Warburg;
Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume V: Competition, 1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Doctor, J. R., The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936, 1999, Cambridge University Press;
McN., W., ‘The BBC Comes of Age’, in The Musical Times, vol. 84, No. 1210. (Dec. 1943), p.367;
Rodger, I., Radio Drama, 1982, London: Macmillan

A Very Brief History of the Piano

If the history of the development of the piano up to the Nineteenth century is a narrative of its increasing technical perfection, the expansion of its dynamic range and the richness of its sonorities, then the continuation of this story into the Twentieth century mirrors a scene in the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races in which Harpo’s piano playing causes keys to fly off and the body to break down, until he is left with just the strings and their frame - which he proceeds to play upright, as a harp. Throughout the last century, the history of the piano, as ultimate symbol of cosy Victorian domesticity, is a history of its progressive abuse and mutilation. After the ‘preparations’ of Cowell and Cage, the abuses and invasions of the Fluxus school, finally, the Radiophonic Workshop’s disembodied frame, struck by Brian Hodgson’s house keys to make the sound of the Tardis lifting off, and the single plucked string, autonomous partial object, from which Delia Derbyshire constructed the bass line of the Dr Who theme.

'Radiophonic' by The Pet Shop Boys

“The night was long and now the crowd has gone, there’s sunlight on my bed,
Feels like a radiophonic workshop beaming straight into my head.
It could make you weep, I can’t get to sleep, there’s ringing in my ears,
Like a radiophonic workshop’s orchestrated all my stupid fears.
I think I’m in love.”