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Louis and Bebe Barron

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Louis (1920–1989) and Bebe Barron (b. 1927) were two American pioneers in the field of electronic music. They are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape, and the first entirely electronic film score for Forbidden Planet.

Contents

Early work

As a young man, Louis had an affinity for working with a soldering gun and electrical gear. He studied music at the University of Chicago. Bebe studied music with Wallingford Rieger and Henry Cowell.

The couple married in 1948 and moved to New York. Louis' cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newly weds their first tape recorder as the wedding gift[#endnote_hitler]. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrete.

The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie. This was long before Samplers and Synthesizers were invented and this meant that making electronic music was slow and laborious. The tape had to be physically cut and pasted back together to edit the finished sounds and compositions together.

Production

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons' composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable. Some circuits would die, and the Barrons could never reconstruct them back. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.

Most of the production was not scripted or notated in any way. The Barrons didn't even consider the process as music composition themselves. The circuit generated sound was not treated as notes, but instead as 'actors'. In future soundtrack composition, each circuit would be manipulated according to actions of the underlying character in the film.

After recording the sounds, the couple manipulated the material by adding effects, such as reverb and tape delay. They also reversed and changed the speed of certain sounds[#endnote_pitch]. The mixdown of multiple sounds was performed with at least three tape recorders. The outputs of two machines would be manually synchronized[#endnote_synchronization], and fed into an input of a third one, recording two separate sources simultaneously. The synchronization of future film work was accomplished by two 16 mm projectors that were tied into a 16 mm tape recorder, and thus ran at the same speed.

While Louis spent most of his time with the circuitry, Bebe did much of the composing and production, and arrangement. She had to sort through hours of tape and edit as appropriate. Together they arranged and manipulated the sounds to create otherworldly and strange electronic soundscapes.

Recording studio

Soon after relocation to New York, the Barrons opened a recording studio at 9 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the avant-garde scene. This may have been the very first electronic music studio in America. At the studio, the Barrons used a tape recorder to record everything and everyone. They recorded Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley reading their work in a form of early audio book. In June 1949 Anais Nin recorded a full version of House of Incest and four other stories from Under a Glass Bell. These recordings were pressed on red vinyl and released on the Barrons' Contemporary Classics record label under the Sound Portraits series.

For a short time, the Barrons held a monopoly on tape recording equipment. The only other competition in town were the studios owned by Raymond Scott and Eric Siday. The connection through Louis' cousin working at 3M proved to be vital in obtaining batches of early magnetic tape. Due to the lack of competition in the field, and to the surprise of the owners, the recording business was a success.

Most of the equipment in the studio was completely built by the Barrons. One of the home made pieces included a monstrous speaker which could produce very heavy bass. Electronic oscillators that produced sawtooth, sine, and square waves, were also a home built prize possession. They had a filter, a spring reverberator, and several tape recorders. The thriving business brought in the income to purchase some commercial equipment. The Stancil-Hoffmann reel to reel was custom built by the inventor for looping the samples and changing their speed.

The Barrons' music was noticed by the avant-garde scene. During 1952-53 the studio was used by John Cage for his very first tape work Williams Mix. The Barrons were hired by Cage to be the engineers. They recorded over 600 different sounds, and arranged them with Cage's directions in various ways by splicing the rap together. The four and a half minute piece took over a year to finish. Cage also worked in the Barrons' studio on his Music for Magnetic Tape with other notable composers, including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor.

Film work

The Barrons quickly learned that the avant-garde scene did not reap many financial rewards. They turned to Hollywood, which had already been using electronic instruments such as the theremin in film soundtracks for several years.

In the early 50s, the Barrons collaborated with various celebrated filmmakers to provide music and sound effects for art films and experimental cinema. The Barrons scored three of Ian Hugo's films based on his wife's, Anais Nin's, writings. The most notable film was Bells of Atlantis (1952). The Barrons assisted Maya Deren in the audio production of the soundtrack for The Very Eye of Night (1959), which featured music by Teiji Ito.

In 1956 the Barrons composed the very first electronic score for a commercial film – Forbidden Planet.

Forbidden Planet

The soundtrack for Forbidden Planet (1956) is today recognized as the first entirely electronic score for a film. Eerie and sinister, the soundtrack was unlike anything that audiences had heard before. Music historians have often noted how groundbreaking the soundtrack was in the development of electronic music.

On the album sleeve notes of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack, Louis and Bebe explain:

We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a "voice". [. . .]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.[#endnote_sleevenotes]

The producers of the film have originally wanted to hire Harry Partch to do the music score. The Barrons were brought in to do only about twenty minutes of sound effects. After the producers have heard the initial sample score, the Barrons were assigned an hour and ten minutes of the rest of the film. The studio wanted to move the couple to Hollywood where most of the film scores were produced at the time. But the couple would not budge, and took the work back to their New York studio.

The music and the sound effects stunned the audience. During the preview of a movie, when the sounds of the spaceship landing on Altair IV filled the theater, the audience broke out in spontaneous applause.

Not everyone was happy with the score. Louis and Bebe did not belong to the Musicians' Union. The original screen credit for the film, which was supposed to read "Electronic Music by Louis and Bebe Barron", was changed at the last moment by a contract lawyer from the American Federation of Musicians. In order to not upset the union, the association with the word music had to be removed. The Barrons were credited with "Electronic Tonalities". Because of their non-membership, the film was not considered for an Oscar in the soundtrack, or special effects category.

Closing

Purists would often quibble as to if the Barrons' atonal creations could be classified as "music". This was to cause problems throughout their careers, and they were never to become members of the Musicians' Union. As a result they were never to score another film. The Barrons did not continue to keep up with technology, and as a result some have said that they found themselves at a creative dead end.

In 1962, the Barrons moved to Los Angeles. Although they divorced in 1970, they continued to compose until the death of Louis in 1989. Bebe Barron was the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States from 1985 to 1987. In 1999 she was invited to create a new work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, using the latest in sound generating technology. She completed her work in 2000 titled Mixed Emotions.

Today, Bebe is fluent in computer-generated audio synthesis and real time programming languages like SuperCollider.

Quotations

Works

(in alphabetical order)

Notes

  1. ↑  The first tape recorder given to the Barrons was the same type as used in recording Hitler's speeches.
  2. ↑  Speeding up and slowing down the tape in effect changed the pitch of the recorded material and individual sounds.
  3. ↑  Manual synchronization was accomplished by actually counting out loud "one-two-three-go" and pushing the play back buttons at the same time. Precise synchronization was not necessary in composing atmospheric music.
  4. ↑  Quoted from the sleeve notes of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. See References.

References

 

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