Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford Music / Media) (Oxford Music/Media Series) Paperback – Illustrated, 14 Oct. 2010

great well written book about that special sound

Niebur's book tells of the stress and angst as well as the romance, and provides a new perspective on the job every synth nut wishes they had had: that it was, at the end of the day and despite its creative element, *employment*, with all its ill connotations: bosses, deadlines, bad conditions, poor resources, politics. I don't have *quite* the same view of the Workshop that I had from listening to the records and reading Wikipedia - creating a collage of ivory magic in my head - anymore.That the author is a 'musicologist' comes over in his apparent need to do for pieces of music what English Lit does for stories: analyse them ad nauseam and give a bar-by-bar blow of what emotions are expected by the chord progressions used, etc. I found these academic indulgences (of no use to the person who prefers to experience, rather than analyse, art) distracting from the rest of the book, as noted in other reviews.It is nice to have an encapsulated hardback of the RW's story, and there was new material (for me) and there were new perspectives, which makes the book worth having. The listen-along (OUP website) I found a key element and contributed greatly to my enjoyment. Bizarrely no Dr Who theme there for anyone who has not heard the most famous export, despite a large chunk of prose devoted to it.However, I won't knock too much what is clearly a labour of love. You will enjoy it, if you can spare the quite large cover price.

This book is a thorough and systematic analysis of the origins, development and impact of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop.This book is academic in tone and form. Although this means we get a full account of the history, context and musicological aspects of the Workshop, it does also mean that at times, it's a little on the tedious side for a layperson such as myself.But persevere through the murk of what at first reads rather like someone's PhD, and the book really does take off. Many people have read about Delia Derbyshire, the making of the Dr Who theme tune and so on. This book gives us the full story, and places it all within the framework of the BBC in relationship to other electronic music centres, contextualizing the work of the Workshop with that of Stockhausen in Cologne, and Pierre's Henry and Schaeffer in Paris, amongst others.The book also goes into some detail with regards to the development of the technology used, it's effect on use in compositions and incidental scores, and it's impact on the studio itself. Ultimately, the development of technology made the studio redundant, within 20 years of the first keyboard synthesizer.Interestingly, the changes that the Radiophonic Workshop helped instigate were partly responsible for it's own downfall. The story of the development of music production is partially revealed in this account, so anyone interested in the history of recording, music studios, and gear heads will find something to like.The stories of the main protagonists in this, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgeson, John Baker and more, are all fascinating in themselves, and it's their music (made against the odds with the most limited of equipment) that still stands out as being more ahead of it's time than the later period where digital MIDI synths made things easier, but seemingly less interesting.Now, I'm currently on an early synth/proto-electronics/tape loops kind of tip, so all this is exactly what's floating my boat. If you're of a similar mind, this is highly recommended.

A staid, academic work that plods its way through the history of electronic sound generation with its focus on the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. The dry text firmly refuses to engage the reader in, what should have been, a very interesting subject.

Interesting

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was established in the late 1950s to create "special sound" for BBC radio (and later TV) productions. Initially working with tape and primitive electronics, the workshop created some of the earliest electronic sound effects and music, all for various BBC productions (most famously "Dr. Who"). They continued in this for 40 years, often pioneering the way with synthesizers and MIDI systems.Most likely due to the fact that they were not part of the academic music establishment at the time, the workshop's history has rarely been written about - the only real exception (to my knowledge) being Desmond Briscoe's impossible-to-find history of the workshop's first 25 years. Louis Niebur therefore sets out here to provide an account of the workshop's founding, the work they did, and their legacy.The text itself clocks in at just over 200 pages and reads very much like a thesis with lots of end-notes and phrases like "In the next section I will present...." There's also a lot of repetition (re-introducing people and pieces) and overload (including exhaustive accounts of newspaper reviews), particularly in the first half of the book. Some content would have been better served as an appendix.Nieber devotes a large portion of the book to discussions of the sociological & cultural issues surrounding the creation of the workshop and interactions within it, lengthy note-by-note dissections of pieces, analysis of pieces to their radio/tv contexts in terms of film theory, and lots of guesswork as to the composers' motives behind their compositions and choice of sound. These can get really tedious, and you have to wonder if he's just trying to fill up pages.That said, the book does have some very interesting and well-written material on the studio's move from tape to synthesizers to MIDI, the work done for various BBC projects, and electronic music's gradual acceptance within the BBC. The publisher also provides a companion website which has audio and video examples referenced in the book.But I feel that there's a lot left out. At most there's only minimal discussion of the actual construction of the tape works (and the techniques involved). The coverage of the pre-synthesizer equipment and electronics used in the studio was severely lacking too - the author keeps bringing up this amazing "glowpot mixer" but never actually says what it was or did. Additionally, there is very little in the way of context outside of the workshop (what was going on at other electronic music studios? where were other electronic radio/tv/film scores being composed?). I think this sort of content would help the book tremendously, making it more readable and interesting to a wider group of readers.As an academic document, or for those interested in the history and theory of film music, I imagine that this would be an excellent book. But for those interested in what the workshop composers and engineers did - and how they did it - the book sadly falls short.