Bye bye, Bebe Barron..."Forbidden Planet" Soundtrack

[Anderton]

Another electronic music pioneer is no longer with us...if you don't know who Bebe Barron was, please read these tributes from Joel Chadabe and Joan La Barbara. --Craig

 

 

Hello all,

 

With great sadness, we note the death of Bebe Barron on April 20 in Los Angeles. Joan La Barbara joins me in this homage.

 

I remember Bebe as a woman of extraordinary charm, presence, and sensitivity, with whom I enjoyed conversations on many occasions during the 1990s. As happens too often, I regret not having known her better and not having had the opportunity to ask all of the questions that I would have liked to ask. Her modest manner belied that fact that she was one of the earliest pioneers in what I call the great opening up of music to all sounds.

 

Bebe married Louis Barron in New York in 1948. It was just about at that time that tape recorders began to appear in the market, and using a tape recorder that they were given as a wedding present, Bebe and Louis Barron co-founded an electronic sound studio. Louis experimented with circuitry. Bebe was more the composer and the file master, keeping track of their immense and continually growing library of sounds. Their early work included sound for Bells of Atlantis, which appeared in 1952. And they became well known for composing the entirely electronic score for the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, which appeared in 1956. In fact, Forbidden Planet was the first film to chart the unfamiliar territory of an all-electronic score, and the Barrons paid an explorer's price. The American Federation of Musicians prevented them from receiving music credit for the sound track and their names were omitted from the film's nomination for an Oscar.

 

Perhaps less well known, however, their hearts were in the avant garde, and they worked with John Cage, David Tudor, and Earle Brown in the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. Specifically, they recorded and prepared approximately 600 sounds in providing the initial materials for Cage's Williams Mix, the first composition to be completed in the Project.

 

Although divorced in 1970, Bebe and Louis Barron continued to collaborate until Louis' death in 1989. Bebe then stopped composing until 1999, when she was invited to create a new work at the University of California/Santa Barbara, where she had access to state-of-the-art technology. She finished the composition in 2000. She named it Mixed Emotions.

 

- Joel Chadabe

 

As a teenager, my friends, who were amateur filmmakers, and I studied Forbidden Planet devotedly, transcribing the script and learning the great lines the way subsequent generations fixated on Rocky Horror and Monty Python - it was our secret code language. And the music, which I think is clearly one of the great filmscores of all time, had a great impact on my later work. I probably listened to that soundtrack more than I did to classical works around that time. In some ways, my current working process of recording lots of material, then spending months isolating tiny fragments, labeling them with identities so that I could select them and place them into my sound fields, and finally layering them into what I now call my sonic atmospheres, is very much like what Bebe did in the early years, organizing and categorizing the miles of tapes and then manipulating them in various ways.

 

I met Bebe on a number of occasions when I lived in LA during the late '70's and early '80's, and enjoyed her intelligence, her supporting words about my compositions, and her gentle humor. Most of our encounters happened at or around the Monday Evening Concerts at the LA County Museum. The New Music crowd was somewhat small in LA at that time, so most of us got to know each other. I learned only years later that she, and Louis, had contributed to John Cage's Williams Mix and that Cage encouraged the Barrons to consider their work as music, something the Musicians' Union evidently did not permit them to do in the credits for their major film score.

 

As I watched and listened to Forbidden Planet again over the past few days, it was like encountering an old, familiar friend. And the music was just as fresh and exciting as when I first heard it. Bon voyage, Bebe, I shall remember you with warmth and gratitude for your pioneering spirit and those luscious sounds! And I honor your courage as a woman composer, especially in the field of electronic music - an arduous task that you performed brilliantly.

 

- Joan La Barbara

[blue2blue]

 

RIP Ms Barron.

 

Their music on Forbidden Planet really gave the movie a properly otherworldly feel and added hugely to the distinctiveness -- not to mention the classiness of the overall production. A movie based on Shakespeare's Tempest with something actually on its mind and a soundtrack that seemed to push the movie into ever more rarefied territory.

 

After that, other soundtracks have sounded like Esquivel records in comparison.

 

 

Another pioneer gone. I salute their spirit!

 

When I look up at the stars tonight...

 

 

[UstadKhanAli]

One of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time. No, I'm not kidding.

 

Fantastic movie, too.

 

RIP. And thank you.

[Anderton]

Thank EMF (Electronic Music Foundation), Joel Chadabe, and Joan La Barbara for getting the word out. I didn't know.

[franknputer]

RIP.

 

I see that, at least, IMDB has them somewhat credited, as composer: electronic tonalities -

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/fullcredits#writers

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0057638/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0057690/

[dahkter]

Interesting story.

I also see how history repeats itself, thirty years after she was told that her art would not be acknowledged, the same thing happened to the samplists, I recall for ten years people saying hip hop was not music per se. Whether your splicing tape or sampling soul music, if it resonates on an emotive level, I'm all for it.

RIP Bebe.

[Alndln2]

My personal favorite Sci Fi sountrack of all time. R.I.P. Bebe.