Delia Derbyshire

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Delia Ann Derbyshire (may 1937 – July 3, 2001) was an English musician and composer of experimental music.

During the 1960s, she performed pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, including her electronic translation of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who's electronic version.

She has been dubbed "the unsung heroine of British electronic music," and has inspired artists including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers, and Orbital's Paul Hartnoll.

Early life

Emma (née Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire were born in Coventry, the daughter of Emma (née Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire. Cedars Avenue, Coundon, Coventry, is located. Her father was a sheetmetal worker. She had one sibling, a sister who died young, and she had just one sibling, a sister. Her father died in 1965 and her mother in 1994.

She was evacuated to Preston, Lancashire, immediately after the Coventry Blitz in 1940, shortly after the Coventry Blitz. Her parents were from the town, and the majority of her deceased relatives remained in the area. She was very bright and was teaching others in her class to read and write in primary school by the age of four, but she said, "The radio was my education." When she was eight years old, her parents bought her a piano. She attended both Oxford and Cambridge from 1948 to 1956, "quite a lot for a working class girl in the '60s, where only one out of ten [students] were female," she said, after winning a scholarship to study mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, but she claims she did poorly. She moved to music after one year at Cambridge, graduating in 1959 with a degree in mathematics and music, and with a concentration in medieval and modern music history. LRAM in pianoforte was her other principal qualification.

She approached the university's careers office and told them she was interested in "sound, music, and acoustics, to which they suggested a career in either deaf aids or depth sounding." Then she applied for a job at Decca Records, but she was told that the firm did not recruit women in their recording studios. Rather, she worked in Geneva from June to September, teaching piano to the children of the British Consul General and mathematics to the children of Canadian and South American diplomats. She served as an assistant to Gerald G. Gross, the President of Plenipotentiary and General Administrative Radio Conferences at the International Telecommunication Union from September to December. She returned to Coventry and taught general subjects in a primary school from January to April 1960. She then moved to London, where she served as an assistant in Boosey & Hawkes' promotion team from May to October.

She joined the BBC in November 1960 as a trainee studio manager and spent time on Record Review, a magazine show where critics analyzed classical music recordings. "Some people assumed I had a second glance," she said. One of the music critics will say, "I don't know where it is, but it's where the trombones come from," and I'd hold it up to the light and see the trombones up close and personal. And they thought it was magic." She first heard about the Radiophonic Workshop and knew that this was where she wanted to work. The heads of Central Programme Operation were left puzzled by this news, since most people were "assigned" to the Radiophonic Workshop. However, she was stationed in Maida Vale in April 1962, where she would produce music and sound for over 200 radio and television shows for over ten years.

She helped composer Luciano Berio with a two-week summer school at Dartington Hall, for which she borrowed several dozen pieces of BBC equipment. One of her first works, and most well-known, was her 1963 electronic realization of a Ron Grainer score for the Doctor Who series, one of the first television themes to be invented and entirely produced with electronics.

When Grainer heard it, he was so amazed by her theme that he asked: "Did I really write this?" "Most of it," Derbyshire replied. Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was denied by the BBC bureaucracy because the workshop's members were not identified. She was not recognized on-screen for her contributions until Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, was on display. From 1963 to 1980, Derbyshire's original arrangement was used as the Doctor Who main theme of the department's first seventeen series. Over the years, the theme was revisited, to her surprise, because the only one with her permission was the original. Delia has also composed music for other BBC shows, including Blue Veils and Golden Sands and The Delian Mode. Inferno's Story Inferno used some of Derbyshire's songs that had been intended for other projects.

In 1964–65, she collaborated with British artist and playwright Barry Bermange for the BBC's Third Programme to produce four Inventions for Radio, a series of collages of people sharing their thoughts about dreams, belief in God, the possibility of life after death, and the experience of old age.

When working at the BBC, Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, fellow Radiophonic Workshop member, and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff founded Unit Delta Plus, an association that they planned to use to produce and promote experimental music. They performed their music at experimental and experimental music festivals, including the 1966 The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, which The Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its first public appearance at a studio in Putney, Zinovieff's townhouse.

She worked with composer George Newson on the BBC experimental radio drama The Man Who Collected Sounds, with producer Douglas Cleverdon.

In 1966, she appeared in a demo with Anthony Newley titled Moogies Bloogies, but Newley escaped to the United States and the album was never released. The unit was disbanded after a turbulent appearance at the Royal College of Art in 1967.

She and fellow electronic musician David Vorhaus partnered with Hodgson in the late 1960s to create the Kaleidophon studio in Camden Town. In 1968, the three members of the band White Noise produced electronic music for London theatre performances, and the trio released their first album as the band White Noise in London. An Electric Storm, the band's debut, is considered a semi-popular record in the field of electronic music history. Eventually, Derbyshire and Hodgson left the company, and future White Noise albums were sole Vorhaus projects.

The trio, who were not identified, were contributors to the Standard Music Library. Several of these recordings, as well as compositions by Derbyshire featuring the word "Li De la Russe" (from an anagram of the letters in "Delia" and a nod to her auburn hair), were used on the 1970s ITV science fiction rivals to Doctor Who: The Tomorrow People and Timeslip.

Derbyshire was a sound design firm with Guy Woolfenden's score for Peter Hall's production of Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967. Both composers contributed to Hall's film Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968). During this time, she performed in The Roundhouse's electronic music performance, which also featured work by Paul McCartney, the film of an ICI-sponsored student fashion exhibition, and the sounds for Anthony Roland's award-winning film titled Circle of Light, which was also featuring Pamela Bone's photography, entitled Circle of Light. She wrote a score for Yoko Ono's short film Wrapping Event, but no copy of the film with the soundtrack is known to exist.

Derbyshire left the BBC and spent a brief time at Hodgson's Electrophon studio, where she contributed to the soundtrack to the film Legend of Hell House.

She stopped making music in 1975. Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield's short films Een Van Die Dagen ("One Of These Days") in 1973 and Overbruggen ("About Bridges") in 1975 were among her final films.

Derbyshire worked as an artist and in a bookshop throughout her career as a radio operator for a British Gas pipelaying project. She married David Hunter in late 1974. The marriage was brief, but the couple never divorced. Li Yuan-chia, a Chinese artist, also visited the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria, where she served as his assistant. She returned to London in 1978 and met Clive Blackburn. In January 1980, she bought a house in Northampton, where Blackburn followed her four months later. For the remainder of her life, he was her partner for the remainder of her life.

She returned to music in 2001, contributing to Peter Kember's compilation of 99 Short Tracks (Taken from an Unfinished Dream), a 55-second track on Dot Dot Music's compilation of 99 Short Tracks (Taken from an Unfinished Dream). "She is credited with "liquid paper sounds generated using Fourier synthesis of sound based on photo/pixel information (B2wav – bitmap to sound program)" in the liner's description. The album was unveiled posthumously and dedicated to her.

Derbyshire's post-life was chaotic as a result of alcoholism's infighting. In July 2001, she died of renal disease caused by cancer, aged 64.

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