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Louis Barron
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Louis Barron was an American pioneer of electronic music, born in Minneapolis in 1920. As a young man he enjoyed working with soldering irons and electrical equipment. He studied music at the University of Chicago. In 1947 he married Bebe Barron, and the couple moved to New York. A cousin who worked at 3M gave them their first tape recorder as a wedding present. With it they began to experiment with sound on magnetic tape. In 1950 they made Heavenly Menagerie, the first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in the United States.
Music and breakthrough
Louis built electronic circuits, above all with a ring modulator, that produced sounds and patterns that were unique and unpredictable. He made the recordings, while Bebe combed through hours of tape and shaped the compositions from it. In 1952 and 1953 John Cage used their studio for his first tape piece, Williams Mix, for which the Barrons recorded more than six hundred sounds. It was Cage who convinced them that their sounds were music. In 1956 they composed the first fully electronic film score, for MGM's Forbidden Planet. Because of a dispute with the musicians' union, the credits did not carry the intended word music but read electronic tonalities instead.
Influence
The music for Forbidden Planet sounded eerie and ominous, and unlike anything the audience had heard before. In doing so, Louis and Bebe Barron pointed the way to electronic sounds in film, pop music and later synthesizers.
Listening
Mentioned in other articles
- Theremin, tape and electronic pioneers Genre
For Forbidden Planet (1956), Bebe and Louis Barron made an entirely electronic soundtrack with self-built circuits; the end credits speak of ‘electronic tonalities’.