Bebe and Louis Barron

Bebe Barron remarried in 1975, Louis died in 1989, and Bebe died April 20, 2008.

In 2000, she was invited to create a new work at University of California, Santa Barbara, using the latest in sound generating technology to collect sounds there. From October through early November 2000, she did all the actual composing in Jane Brockman’s Santa Monica studio with Brockman serving as recording engineer. The sounds collected at UCSB were imported into Digital Performer on a Macintosh computer and organized to create Bebe’s final work, Mixed Emotions.

He was born in Minneapolis on April 23, 1920. As a young man, Louis had an affinity for working with a soldering gun and electrical gear. He studied music at the University of Chicago. He died on 1 November 1989 in Los Angeles.

In 1962, the Barrons moved to Los Angeles. Although they divorced in 1970, they continued to compose together until the death of Louis in 1989. Bebe Barron was a founding member and the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States from 1985 to 1987. They awarded her with a lifetime achievement award in 1997.

In 1956 the Barrons composed the very first electronic score for a commercial film — Forbidden Planet, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Barrons approached Dore Schary (MGM’s executive producer) at an exhibit of Schary’s wife’s paintings in 1955. He hired them soon after, when the film was in post-production.

The soundtrack for Forbidden Planet (1956) is today recognized as the first entirely electronic score for a film. Eerie and sinister, the soundtrack was unlike anything that audiences had heard before. Music historians have often noted how groundbreaking the soundtrack was in the development of electronic music.

The Barrons’ music was noticed by the avant-garde scene. During 1952-53 the studio was used by John Cage for his very first tape work Williams Mix. The Barrons were hired by Cage to be the engineers. They recorded over 600 different sounds, and arranged them with Cage’s directions in various ways by splicing the tape together. The four and a half minute piece took over a year to finish. Cage also worked in the Barrons’ studio on his Music for Magnetic Tape with other notable composers, including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor. It was Cage who first encouraged the Barrons to consider their creations “music”.

In the early 50s, the Barrons collaborated with various celebrated filmmakers to provide music and sound effects for art films and experimental cinema. The Barrons scored three of Ian Hugo’s short experimental films based on the writings of his wife Anaïs Nin. The most notable of these three films were Bells of Atlantis (1952) and Jazz of Lights (1954). The Barrons assisted Maya Deren in the audio production of the soundtrack for The Very Eye of Night (1959), which featured music by Teiji Ito. Bridges-Go-Round (1958) by Shirley Clarke featured two alternative soundtracks, one by the Barrons and one by jazz musician Teo Macero. The film’s two versions showed the same four-minute film of New York City bridges. Showing the two versions back-to-back showed how different soundtracks affected the viewer’s perception of the film.

The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in the United States was completed by Louis and Bebe in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie. Electronic music composition and production were one and the same, and were slow and laborious. Tape had to be physically cut and pasted together to edit finished sounds and compositions.

The Musicians’ Union forced MGM to title the Forbidden Planet score “electronic tonalities”, not “music”. And seeing the handwriting on the wall, used that excuse to deny them membership in the 1950s; the union’s primary concern was losing jobs for performers rather than the medium itself. As a result, the Barrons never scored another film for Hollywood. As the years passed, the Barrons did not continue to keep up with technology, and were perfectly content to make their music in the way they always had. However, modern digital technology is now imitating the rich sounds of those old analog circuits. Bebe’s last work was Mixed Emotions in 2000, from raw material collected at the University of California, Santa Barbara studio. It sounds remarkably like the Barrons’ earlier material.

Soon after relocation to New York, the Barrons opened a recording studio at 9 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the avant-garde scene. This may have been the first electronic music studio in the United States. At the studio, the Barrons used a tape recorder to record everything and everyone. They recorded Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley reading their work in a form of early audiobook. In June 1949, Anaïs Nin recorded a full version of House of Incest and four other stories from Under a Glass Bell. These recordings were pressed on red vinyl and released on the Barrons’ Contemporary Classics record label under the Sound Portraits series.

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons’ composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior applied to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

The couple married in 1947 and moved to New York City. Louis’ cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newlyweds their first tape recorder as a wedding gift. It was early tape recorder technology that used magnetized plastic tape. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrète.

Bebe Barron ((1925-06-16)June 16, 1925 – April 20, 2008(2008-04-20) (aged 82)) and Louis Barron ((1920-04-23)April 23, 1920 – November 1, 1989(1989-11-01) (aged 69)) were two American pioneers in the field of electronic music. They are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in the United States, and the first entirely electronic film score for the MGM movie Forbidden Planet (1956).

She was born as Charlotte May Wind in Minneapolis on June 16, 1925, the only child of Ruth and Frank Wind. She studied piano at the University of Minnesota and a post-graduate degree in political science. In Minneapolis, she studied composition with Roque Cordero. She moved to New York, and worked as a researcher for Time-Life and studied musical composition. She studied music with Wallingford Riegger and Henry Cowell. She married Louis in 1947. They lived in Greenwich Village. It was Louis who nicknamed her “Bebe”. She died on April 20, 2008 in Los Angeles.