[silence] Bebe Barron (1925 - 2008)

[mIEKAL aND]

From: Barry Schrader <webmaster [at] barryschrader [dot] com>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:09:49 -0500

Bebe Barron (1925 - 2008)

“It is with great sadness that I report the death of Bebe Barron on  
April 20, 2008 at the age of 82, of natural causes. Bebe was the last  
of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She  
was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady.

Bebe Barron was born Charlotte Wind in Minneapolis, on June 16, 1925.  
She received an MA in political science from the University of  
Minnesota, where she studied composition with Roque Cordero, and she  
also spent a year studying composition and ethnomusicology at the  
University of Mexico. In 1947 she moved to New York and, while working  
as a researcher for Time-Life, studied composition with Wallingford  
Reigger and Henry Cowell. That same year, she met and married Louis  
Barron (1920 - 1989). Shortly thereafter, the Barrons began their  
experiments with the recording and manipulation of sound material by  
means of a tape recorder that they received as a wedding gift. They  
created a private studio in New York and, in 1955, composed the first  
electronic music score for a commercial film, Forbidden Planet. In  
1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles; they divorced in 1970. In 1973,  
Bebe married Leonard Neubauer, a screen writer. Bebe became the first  
Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United  
States (SEAMUS) in 1985, and also served on the Board of Directors. In  
1997 Bebe was presented the SEAMUS Award for the Barrons life work in  
the field of electro-acoustic music. She is survived by her husband,  
Leonard, and her son, Adam.

Bebe’s last public appearance was on January 12, 2008, at an event  
held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, celebrating the work of her  
good friend, Anais Nin. Bebe was too ill to speak in public at this  
point, but she agreed to be interviewed for a video piece that was  
shown at the event. This is her final interview, and you can see it on  
YouTube.

Bebe’s final composition, Mixed Emotions (2000) was composed in the  
CREATE studios of the University of California at Santa Barbara. I’ll  
be putting this work up on the Downloads 2 page of my website, along  
with some photos of Bebe and myself taken in 2005 at her home on the  
Photos page within the next week.

I first met Bebe Barron in the middle 1970s; I don’t remember exactly  
when, but I think it was around 1975. I had asked Bebe and her former  
husband and composing partner Louis to attend a showing of Forbidden  
Planet that I had arranged as part of a class at CalArts. They agreed  
to do it, and I quickly became good friends with Bebe and we remained  
close over the years.

In writing about Bebe Barron, it’s impossible not to focus on the  
pioneering work that she and Louis did in electronic music. They began  
their experiments in 1948, shortly after they were married. This early  
work was done using a tape recorder, preceding the work of Luening and  
Ussachevsky and the switch from disks to tape by Pierre Schaeffer and  
the GRM. But, to my knowledge, the Barrons’ early experiments did not  
result in any completed works, a state of affairs not uncommon with  
early pioneers in the field. In 1949 they set up one of the earliest  
private electro-acoustic music studios and began their experiments  
with electronically generated sounds. They built their own circuits  
which they viewed as cybernetic organisms, having been influenced by  
Norbert Weiner’s work on cybernetics. The circuits, built with vacuum  
tubes, would exhibit characteristic qualities of pitch, timbre, and  
rhythm, and had a sort of life cycle from their beginnings until they  
burned out. The Barrons recorded the sounds from the amplification of  
these circuits and this formed the basis of their working library.  
They also employed tape manipulation techniques as part of their  
compositional procedures. The sound qualities of these various  
amplified tube circuits and the tape manipulations that they underwent  
formed the musical language that the Barrons created in their studio.  
Unlike some of the work being done elsewhere, the Barrons’ music  
reveals long phrases, often stated in tape-delayed rhythms, with the  
stark finesse of the tube circuit timbres. They created a style that  
was uniquely their own yet married to the technology they were using.

The Barrons earliest finished work, Heavenly Menagerie (1951) does not  
seem to have survived in a complete form. But their score for Ian  
Hugo’s film Bells of Atlantis (1952), based on a poem by Anais Nin,  
who appears on screen, does exist on the film sound track. This may be  
the earliest extant work of the Barrons and presages what was to come  
with Forbidden Planet, the music for which was composed in 1955, the  
film being released the next year.

The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic  
music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic  
music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film  
scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In  
Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in  
the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes  
are composed and perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in  
traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the  
scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between  
music and sound effects since the Barrons’ electronic material is used  
for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound  
world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that  
the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it’s actually  
impossible to say whether or not what you’re hearing is music, sound  
effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now  
common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.

The Barrons composed many other works for tape, film, and the theater  
in the 1950s. Their studio became the home for John Cage’s Project of  
Music for Magnetic Tape, and they assisted in the creation of Cage’s  
first chance piece Williams Mix (1951-52), as well as works by other  
members of the group such as Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. As a  
studio for the creation of their own and other composers’ works, the  
Barrons’ studio served as a functioning center for electro-acoustic  
music at a time when there was no institutional support of the medium  
in the United States. It’s curious, then, that, for many years, the  
Barrons, their studio, and their works were largely overlooked by  
composers and historians in the field. Fortunately, that injustice has  
since been corrected, and, in 1997, it was my great honor to present  
to Bebe and, posthumously, to Louis, the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement  
Award. Bebe was involved with SEAMUS from the very beginning of the  
organization. She was one of the ten original members who responded to  
my organizational call and met at CalArts in November of 1984 to form  
the group, and she was SEAMUS’s first secretary. There may have been a  
little strong-arming on my part to get her to be involved so actively,  
but Bebe was always ready to support the cause of electro-acoustic  
music in whatever way she could.

Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one’s  
work is to be judged in any regard by it’s influence, acceptance,  
longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden  
Planet is an enormous success. It remains the most widely known  
electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will  
always be the First Lady of electronic music.”