From Stravinsky to Donna Summer, the story of connections that enriched music – in both directions
O
ne of many things I did not expect to learn in this book is that the BBC benefited from Nazi technology. Its standard tape recorder, in use till the 1970s, was called the BTR-2: EMI’s original model, the BTR-1, had been copied from a captured example of the German “magnetophon”, as used by Hitler to record a radio broadcast.
Musicians who liked fiddling with machines, too, benefited from this legacy. Delia Derbyshire, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer who produced the original Doctor Who theme tune and otherwise particularly enjoyed playing an enamel green lampshade, influenced Paul McCartney’s experiments with tape loops, while Steve Reich hit upon his compositional technique of “phasing” phrases in and out of sync with one another on tape recorders, before training live musicians to do the same.
Many other revolutions occurred in sheds and back rooms. Bob Moog, a musically trained engineer, invented his electronic synthesiser in his garage. Along with other synths such as the Buchla, it was initially used by avant garde classical composers such as the great Karlheinz Stockhausen, then deployed by psychedelic rockers in the 1960s, before eventually Giorgio Moroder used a Moog for the bass part on Donna Summer’s futurist-disco earthquake I Feel Love and all hell broke loose. Meanwhile, back in the 1920s, a Soviet physicist and spy, while working on measuring the density of gases, had accidentally invented a new electronic instrument that he named after himself. Leon Theremin’s otherworldly warbler was first toured in classical concerts before becoming a mainstay of 1960s sci-fi film soundtracks.
