Delia Derbyshire
It really is a great honour and privilege to be invited to give the eulogy for Delia Derbyshire.
That honour is heightened by being in the presence of Delia's partner, Clive Blackburn, and several of her friends and it is especially fitting that this award comes from her home city of Coventry.
Delia was born here in 1937 and her formative childhood experiences in the city would have a direct impact on the remarkable music that she would create in her adult life. She was relocated temporarily to Preston following the Blitz on Coventry in the Second World War but the wail of the air raid sirens and drone of the all clear would haunt her imagination for years and inspire her later work. For Delia, these sounds were among her first encounters with, as she described it, 'electronic music', paving the way for her groundbreaking output as a composer and sound designer.
Born into what she described as an upper working class background, Delia was an exceptionally bright child. At the age of 11 she won a place to the all-girls grammar school Barr's Hill, where she excelled at maths and music. Her essays here frequently displayed her sensitivity to sound and awareness of the potential for music in everyday objects and elements. As well as her love of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, she would write about instruments in a music shop coming to life after dark, time-travelling trains, the need for simple pleasures and the banning of American comics. Her twin passions of music and mathematics continued when she won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, and it was during her time at Cambridge that she travelled to the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with the composer Jonathan Harvey, where she would experience Edgar Varèse's Poème électronique in Le Corbusier's pavilion. This combination of electronic music and the visual arts would prove to have a deep influence on Delia's future practice.
Her initial ambition to work at Decca Records was thwarted when she was told that women were not employed in their studios. Instead, Delia applied to the BBC in 1960 to work as a trainee assistant studio manager but in 1962 she requested a transfer to the Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop had been founded in 1958 to provide 'special sound' for BBC productions but by the early 1960s was still provoking negative reactions from listeners and viewers unimpressed, as various letters to the Radio Times grumbled, by these 'horrible emanations' and nightmarish electronic 'noise'. The Head of the Radiophonic Workshop, Desmond Briscoe, was forced to admit in 1961 that it was difficult for electronic sounds to be pleasant and beautiful. Delia changed all that. In 1963, she challenged these hostile perceptions of electronic music with one of her earliest creations: her astonishing realisation of Ron Grainer's theme tune for Doctor Who.
Delia's marvellous arrangement would become an iconic part of the soundscape of British popular culture – a combination of electronic sounds and musique concrète techniques, this blending of the popular and the experimental, informed by Delia's mathematical precision but with a human warmth and organic quality, would (and still does) generate wonder and fascination amongst the general public. This piece alone, as well as Delia's work more generally, contributed massively to the public's awareness and understanding of the possibilities of electronic music.
Among her finest achievements were the 'Inventions for Radio' that she collaborated on with the dramatist Barry Bermange. These four works created a new genre of radio feature, privileging the voices of everyday people with the status of art (the BBC received complaints from certain listeners about being unable to understand some of the 'harsh' working class accents) and demonstrate again Delia's sensitivity to finding beauty in the everyday, transforming the familiar into something extraordinary, whether that was a knock on the door, a metal lampshade or her own voice.
Beyond the BBC, Delia established an impressive freelance profile, particularly through Unit Delta Plus and Kaleidophon, which she contributed to with her dear friend and colleague Brian Hodgson. She would collaborate with leading figures in Britain's arts scene, from Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company to Ted Hughes and Yoko Ono as well as partnerships further afield with the pioneering Dutch artist Madelon Hooykaas. Her range was remarkable: layering proto-techno beats into schools radio or shimmering ambient soundscapes across documentaries. She contributed to the first edition of the Brighton Festival in 1967 and was featured at the first concert of electronic music held in the northwest of England. Yet, despite these achievements and innovations and the admiration of figures as diverse as Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd, Delia did not receive full credit and recognition for her work when she was most active as a practitioner.
Today that situation has, thankfully, changed. When she died in 2001 she had started to collaborate with Sonic Boom on new music as the available technology had begun to catch up with her ideas and imagination. She lived long enough to be aware of the impact and influence that her music was having as she and her colleagues at the Radiophonic Workshop planted deep roots in the soundscapes of children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom have become significant musicians in their own right. Today is bittersweet as one cannot help but wonder what sounds Delia would be creating if she was still with us – and yet, as can be heard in the music of artists such as Aphex Twin, Orbital and Portishead or emerging composers and musicians as well as practitioners working across the arts, Delia's creative spirit, her refusal to be held back by barriers of gender and class, continues to influence and inspire. Delia helped to change the way we think about sound and the sonic possibilities around and within us. Her example encourages us to be open to the potential not just for sound to change but the world we live in to change.
Written and delivered by David Butler.
David Butler is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. He is one of the co-founders of the charitable organisation Delia Derbyshire Day (https://deliaderbyshireday.com) and a lead researcher on the Delia Derbyshire Archive, which is housed at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.