BBC Radiophonic Workshop

For decades the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has produced the majority of incidental electronic music broadcast over British airwaves, their adherence to cutting-edge technology pioneering countless creative innovations. The department was formed in 1956, when senior studio manager Desmond Briscoe and music studio manager Daphne Oram agreed upon the need "for something other than normal orchestral incidental music; " a year later the Radiophonics staff produced one of their first experimental radio productions, "Private Dreams and Public Nightmares", and in 1958 they were awarded their own studios at the BBC's Maida Vale facility, complete with a budget of £2,000. The first popular television series to feature a Radiophonics soundtrack, Quatermass and the Pit, premiered soon after; before long the crew was responsible for scoring over 150 programs a year, the majority of them for TV. In 1963, the Radiophonics Workshop's Ron Grainer outlined his ideas for the theme to a new science fiction series being developed for television; a few weeks later the completed track was produced by Delia Derbyshire, the end result -- the title theme for the cult classic Doctor Who -- becoming perhaps the most popular piece in the BBC oeuvre. (Grainer also went on to author much of the incidental music heard in the groundbreaking series The Prisoner.) In 1964, John Read combined flute and bass with electronic sounds, the first time musicians were employed in tandem with machines; now a BBC trademark, it's a convention that still remains in place today. Still, the electronic resources at the Radiophonics staff's disposal were fairly primitive throughout much of the 1960s, consisting primarily of sine and square waves as well as white noise; only at the end of the decade did they acquire their...