Bebe Barron

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Bebe Barron, born Charlotte May Wind, worked with her husband Louis on the first electronic music in the United States. She was born in 1925 in Minneapolis, studied piano at the University of Minnesota, studied political science, and studied composition with Roque Cordero. In New York she worked as a researcher for Time-Life and studied further with Wallingford Riegger. Louis Barron, born in 1920 in Minneapolis, had as a boy a passion for the soldering iron and electrical equipment and studied music in Chicago.

Music and breakthrough

The couple married in 1947 and moved to New York. A cousin of Louis's, an executive at 3M, gave them their first tape recorder as a wedding present. With it they immersed themselves in musique concrète. In 1950 they completed Heavenly Menagerie, the first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in the United States. Making electronic music and producing it were one and the same work, and it was slow: the tape had to be cut and spliced by hand. In 1956 they wrote the first entirely electronic film score, for the MGM film Forbidden Planet. Louis died in 1989 in Los Angeles, Bebe in 2008.

Influence

The Barrons were pioneers of electronic music. She showed that a film score did not have to consist of orchestral instruments, but could be made of sounds produced by circuits and tape themselves. That opened the way for later electronic film music and synthesizer pop.

Listening

In School of Rock

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• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 5^NL Reader