[ETS/PARC List] Fw: [NJARC] Interesting obit, related to vintage electronics

[Victor Pennetta, Jr.]

Subject: Interesting obit, related to vintage electronics



> Bebe Barron, 82, Pioneer of Electronic Scores
> 
> The New York Times via Dow Jones
> 
>   Publication Date: Friday April 25, 2008 
>   The Arts/Cultural Desk; Section B; Page 7; Column 
>   c. 2008 New York Times Company 
>  
>   By DENNIS HEVESI 
> 
>   Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the
> first electronic score
> for a feature film -- the eerie gulps and burbles,
> echoes and weeeoooos that
> accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures
> in the 1956 science-fiction
> classic "Forbidden Planet" -- died Sunday in Los
> Angeles. She was 82. 
> 
>   Her son, Adam, said she died of natural causes.
> Louis Barron died in 1989. 
> 
>   The score for "Forbidden Planet" -- the tale of a
> starship crew that travels
> 17 light years from Earth to investigate why settlers
> on the planet Altair-4
> have gone silent -- "is truly a landmark in
> electro-acoustic music," Barry
> Schrader, a professor of electro-acoustic music at the
> California Institute of
> the Arts, said Thursday. 
> 
>   While the Barrons created electronically produced
> themes for the film's
> characters and events, Professor Schrader said, their
> score crossed the
> traditional line between music and sound effects. 
> 
>   "At some points it's actually impossible to say
> whether or not what you're
> hearing is music, sound effect or both," he said. "In
> doing this, they
> foreshadowed by decades the now-common role of the
> sound designer in modern film
> and video." 
> 
>   While later electro-acoustic scoring became more
> melodic, the Barrons'
> breakthrough fixed the technique's otherworldly
> identity in public
> consciousness. Perhaps the most memorable character in
> "Forbidden Planet" is
> Robby the Robot, who brews bourbon and performs
> herculean feats; for him, the
> Barrons composed a mechanically bubbly theme. For the
> invisible monster Id, a
> percussive sinking sound with a descending pitch
> punctuates every hole his
> footsteps leave on the planet's rugged terrain. 
> 
>   Contemporary electro-acoustic effects are digitally
> synthesized. The Barrons
> used vacuum tubes and tape recorders. When it came to
> amplifying vibrations from
> a stylus on a record, vacuum tubes were a major
> advance from the days of the
> phonograph horn. Mr. Barron designed vacuum tube
> circuits, organizing them in
> patterns that controlled the flow of electricity to
> produce combinations of
> pitch, timbre, volume and other variables. The sounds
> were recorded on tape. 
> 
>   Mrs. Barron would sort through hours and hours of
> tape. Together the Barrons
> would cut and splice; play segments at varying speeds
> to change the pitch; run
> segments in reverse to create new sounds;  or induce
> delays to produce echoing
> feedback. 
> 
>   Charlotte May Wind (her husband nicknamed her Bebe)
> was born in Minneapolis on
> June 16, 1925, the only child of Frank and Ruth Wind.
> She earned a music degree
> at the University of Minnesota in 1947, then moved to
> New York, where she worked
> as a researcher for Time-Life while studying music
> composition. Soon after, she
> met and married Mr. Barron, who was trained in
> electronics. Attracted by the
> avant-garde music scene in the early 1950s, the couple
> lived in Greenwich
> Village. 
> 
>   Their fascination with electro-acoustic music began
> with a wedding gift: a
> tape recorder. Part of their apartment became a
> studio. There the composer John
> Cage recorded his "Project of Music for Magnetic
> Tape." In 1952 the Barrons
> recorded the score for "Bells of Atlantis," a short
> based on a poem by Anais
> Nin, who appears on screen. 
> 
>   Then, in 1955, the Barrons crashed an art party in
> Manhattan for the wife of
> Dore Schary, the president of MGM. They told him about
> their unusual recordings.
> Ten days later they were driving to Hollywood, where
> Mr. Schary signed them for
> "Forbidden Planet." 
> 
>   The score drew critical praise, but a dispute with
> the American Federation of
> Musicians prevented the Barrons from receiving credit
> for it; their work was
> referred to as "electronic tonalities."  That slight
> was soothed in 1997, when
> Mrs. Barron was given the Seamus Award of the Society
> for Electro-Acoustic Music
> in the United States. 
> 
>   The Barrons divorced in 1970. In 1975 she married
> Leonard Neubauer. Besides
> her husband and her son, of Los Angeles, she is
> survived by a stepdaughter,
> Dylan Neubauer of Santa Cruz, Calif. 
> 
>   The Barrons never scored another feature film. But
> "Forbidden Planet" is
> etched in the mind of Professor Schrader, who first
> saw it at the Majestic in
> Johnstown, Pa. 
> 
>   "I was a 10-year-old kid who went to the movies
> every Saturday," he said. "I
> sat through it three times and was still there for a
> fourth. Then I heard my
> father's voice from the back of the theater, 'Barry,
> where are you?' " 
> 
>   
>   (END)