Early Electronic Music Through Bebe Barron’s Eyes
This week I chose to further investigate the work of Louis and Bebe Barron based on a key resource: a 1992 interview with Bebe Barron (Brockman). The score of Forbidden Planet seems so central to the development of both popular and art music, but at the time this was still widely considered “sound art” rather than music. Did the Barrons’ professional/experimental activities tie them into the American music scene in other ways, or were they always considered peripheral to music (as in the film’s credits)? As it turns out, for once, there is a definite answer to this question. This interview reveals that they had close with, and undoubtedly influenced, some very important composers who have maintained a place in the history of art music.
In the interview, conducted by Jane Brockman and first published by the Society of Composer’s and Lyricists, Barron provides a lot of information about the technical process of this early electronic music, and well as numerous inferences about the impact she and Louis Barron had on American electronic music. Bebe Barron’s descriptions are a fascinating insight into the process of creating and recording electronic sounds in the 1940s and 50s. Furthermore, she reveals the harmonious process that allowed the two Barrons to operate as one artistic force: he (Louis) was entirely self-taught in the realm of technology, thus benefiting from no formal guidelines, and built most of their studio equipment (other than the tape recorder). This explains how his methods for creating sounds were so purely innovative.
While Louis was primarily responsible for the small-scale processes that produced unique electronic sound, Bebe had an ear for expressively that allowed her to interpret and arrange the sounds in ways appropriate, for example, in different film contexts. Regarding the Forbidden Planet process, she says:
“We relied on my ear for what sounds had possibilities that would make them worth processing. . . It came out of the circuits sounding like gibberish — harsh miserable sounds, and I got so that I could somehow hear the possibilities for it” (Brockman).
However well-received the soundscape of Forbidden Planet proved to become, the impact of Bebe and Louis Barron appears to have been not so heavily influenced by the groundbreaking film they scored, but rather through time spent with friends in their New York home studio.
The Barrons’ personal studio was born following the gift of a commercial tape recorder from Germany, around 1949. Bebe Barron speculated that this may have been the first such device to be used in the United States; this was almost ten years prior to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, co-founded by Milton Babbitt and often credited as the first center for electronic music in the U.S. (It is still operational, and now called the Computer Music Center.) It is no wonder that curious, forward-thinking creators would be drawn to such a laboratory of innovation; though this is not the focus of the article, the interview reveals that Louis and Bebe Barron frequently “hung out” with John Cage and Edgard Varése, two of the most prominent composer active in the States at this time, in their home studio. It seems that the studio and its enthusiastic proprietors worked directly on some of the earliest electronic pieces by these composers. Barron refers to “the time [they] worked with Cage” as a wonderful reinforcement of the “no-rules”mentality, and it seems that they had a relationship with Cage that proved to have profound mutual benefits; they recorded and arranged hundred of sounds for Cage’s first tape work, while Cage encouraged them to pursue their sound art and consider it “music” (Brockman).
This story parallels that of so many instances where “underdog” artists or creative movements seem to grow and blossom out of obscurity. Oftentimes we learn about the champions of these movements, for example Cage and Varése of the American electronic scene, and fail to recognize the vital forces at play prior to and throughout their success. Without early-career friendships and collaborations, such as those between these composers and the Barrons, the electronic musical landscape would not have unfolded as it did.
Source:
Brockman, Jane. “The Score” in Society of Composers & Lyricists, Vol. VII, №3,
Fall/Winter 1992
https://web.archive.org/web/20140129231512/http://www.janebrockman.org/BebeBarron/BebeBarron.html
