AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

142 saturday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
DERBYSHIRE’S AMor: A GLANCE INSIDE THE
MIND OF AN ELECTRONIC PIONEER
Louis Niebur
University of Nevada, Reno
Delia Derbyshire occupies a central place in the history of British electronic music. While
working for the BBC’s electronic studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, over a fifteen-year period,
she composed and arranged hundreds of signature tunes, most famously doctor Who.
While there she also composed more serious electronic works, including a series of projects
with poet Barry Bermange in the mid-1960s. In the days before synthesizers, Derbyshire’s
methods involved splicing together thousands of little pieces of magnetic tape, using techniques
derived from Parisian musique concrète combined with electronic sine wave generators
to guide the assembly of her sound collages. However, her pivotal role in the development of
British electronic music has until recently been a largely forgotten one, due primarily to a lack
of access to her works. When Derbyshire died in 2001, her personal archive was boxed away
and largely forgotten until the University of Manchester acquired it on permanent loan in
2007. The collection included letters and documents, but most importantly, 268 uncataloged
and unordered reel-to-reel audio tapes of her compositions and experiments from her earliest
years as a composer.
While organizing and digitizing the surviving material in 2007 and 2008, I discovered to
my surprise that many of the decaying tape reels contained not only final versions of famous
and popular works, but Derbyshire’s original make-up material. In other words, in addition
to completed versions of electronic pieces, she kept multiple stages of a work’s completion,
in which it is possible, for example, to identify the sources of concrete sounds, before they
were subjected to later sonic treatment. It is also possible to hear monophonic sound elements
before they were layered together in complex polyphonic structures. One production, Amor
dei, a 1964 radio meditation on spirituality, for which Derbyshire composed the music in collaboration
with Barry Bermange’s text, is richly represented in her archive. Using these newly
discovered materials, this paper follows the working-out process of this work from start to finish,
using Derbyshire’s make-up tapes, written notes, and internal BBC correspondence. This
material grants scholars and audiences an understanding impossible before now of the creative
process behind radiophonic music in the 1960s, the access of which enables an even stronger
respect for the pioneering spirit that forged it.
frAnce: the long vieW
georgia cowart, case Western reserve university, chair
SINGING THE COURTLY BODY: THE CHANSON LASCIVE AND THE
NOTION OF OBSCENITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
Jeanice Brooks
University of Southampton
In The reinvention of obscenity: Sex, Lies and tabloids in early Modern France, Joan DeJean
argued for a new configuration of sexuality, print and censorship that led to the creation of
a modern concept of obscenity in seventeenth-century France. But this concept was already