julian_craster

Obituary: Tristram Cary

Daily Telegraph
26/04/2008

Tristram Cary, the composer who died on Wednesday aged 82, was a leading exponent of electronic music, producing concert works and scores for films and television, including several episodes of Doctor Who.

Although Cary discovered that his output filled no fewer than 76 CDs, he was disappointed to be largely unrecognised in his native England, perhaps because he had emigrated to Australia in midlife.

In a global context, however, Cary was acknowledged as the father of electronic music.

Having experimented with sound and tape manipulation while working as a naval radar engineer during the Second World War, in the 1950s Cary created one of the first electronic music studios and worked on scores for such films as the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and a three-part Disney adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper (1962).

In Doctor Who Cary scored incidental music for several memorable episodes, including the first to introduce the Daleks in December 1963, and others such as "Marco Polo" (1964), "The Daleks' Master Plan" (1966) and "The Mutants" (1972).

He also provided scores for television dramas such as Jane Eyre (1963) and Madame Bovary (1964).

Before emigrating to Australia in 1972 Cary was commissioned by the Olivetti company to write a piece using the noises of their office equipment.

The result was his Divertimento for 16 singers, jazz drummer and Olivetti machines, which was performed live at the opening of the firm's new training centre in Surrey, with Cary himself conducting in front of a VIP audience that included the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The text of the work comprised cardinal numbers sung in four languages.

Another innovative piece, his extended cantata Peccata mundi (for which he wrote his own libretto) was introduced at the 1972 Cheltenham Festival. It called for the conventional forces of chorus and orchestra, but with the addition of a speaking voice and four tape tracks.

Although Cary composed for traditional instruments and ensembles, his abiding interest lay in electronic music, which he wrote for concert performance in most of the accepted genres: synthetic, musique concrète (or a mixture of both), mixed works for live performers and electronic sounds.

As a founder director of Electronic Music Studios (EMS), he helped to design the VCS3 portable synthesiser, which Pink Floyd used on their 1973 concept album The Dark Side Of The Moon.

While visiting Australia to demonstrate the synthesiser to music lecturers, Cary was offered a one-year contract as visiting composer at Adelaide University. In the event, he remained there for 12 years as senior lecturer until his retirement in 1986.

Tristram Ogilvie Cary was born on May 14 1925 in Oxford, the third son of the novelist Joyce Cary and his wife Gertrude. Educated at Westminster, he was a King's scholar and a friend of both Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who introduced him to the music of Stravinsky.

Tristram won an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, but after two terms his Science studies were interrupted by the Second World War, and he served in the Royal Navy between 1943 and 1946.

Specialising in radar - he had been a radio enthusiast in his teens - he received training in electronics and grasped the potential of new technology from Germany that enabled sound to be recorded on magnetic tape; on his demobilisation in late 1946 he returned to Oxford, changed his degree course to PPE and immediately began experimenting with tape recorders.

He realised that, as well as being a way of reproducing sound, tape could be the source of an altogether new type of music.

After graduating Cary enrolled at the Trinity College of Music, studying composition, piano, horn, viola and conducting, and taught at evening classes to augment his student grant.

During the early 1950s Cary began to write and teach music and took a part-time job in a gramophone shop selling expensive hi-fi while developing his first electronic music studio.

By 1954 he was able to earn a full-time living writing music for radio, films and the emerging medium of television, as well as composing numerous concert works.

In an early experiment in the field of environmental sound, Cary provided a sound-environment for the different sections of the British pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal.

In the same year he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, the first of its kind in Britain, and designed and built another for himself, which he transported from London to his house in Suffolk and subsequently to Australia, where it was incorporated into the expanding teaching studio at Adelaide University.

Returning to freelance composition, Cary drew on the university's studio and his own at home to generate music across the spectrum, from film scores to concert pieces.

In the mid-1990s there were performances of his work to mark his 70th birthday, and a new suite based on his music for the film The Ladykillers won The Gramophone magazine's award for best film music CD in 1998.

Cary also wrote on concerts and opera for The Australian, and in 2005 received the Adelaide Critics' Circle lifetime achievement award. Adelaide University honoured him with a Music doctorate in 2001.

A citizen of both Britain and Australia, in 1991 Cary was awarded the medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to Australian music. He also broadcast regularly.

Tristram Cary married, in 1961 (dissolved 1980), Dorse Dukes. He married secondly, in 2003, Jane Delin.

Both wives survive him with the two sons and daughter of his first marriage.

Dave Rattigan

RIP.

Great score for Quatermass and the Pit, if a bit obvious in places.

smudge

Tristram Cary was quite ahead of his time. Another sad loss.

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

Boris_G

Liked his score for The Ladykillers - somehow most effective during the heist. A sad day now he's gone.

julian_craster

Tristram Cary: Pioneer of electronic music
The Independent
Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Tristram Cary was a pioneer of tape and electronic music but was equally at home with more conventional forces. As well as writing for the concert hall, he scored the film The Ladykillers and episodes of Doctor Who. He co-designed, with Peter Cockerell and David Zinovieff, the VCS3 synthesizer, making the new technology widely available; the synthesizer featured on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon among many other albums.

Born in 1925, Tristram Cary was the third child of the novelist Joyce Cary and his wife Gertrude. Aware that fame had not brought wealth, his father wanted Cary to be a doctor but supported his decision to be a composer. His mother was musical but her taste stopped at Brahms and Wagner. Cary was introduced to modern music by his school friend Donald Swann.

As a child Cary had been interested in electronics and when the Second World War interrupted his studies at Trinity College of Music he joined the Royal Navy, specialising in radar. This inspired him to contemplate using tapes in music, and as soon as he was demobbed in 1946 he began experimenting, whilst studying piano, horn, viola, composition and conducting. A combination of teaching, composition and part-time jobs supported the development of his first electronic music studio.

Even so, his early works were for conventional forces and, as with most composers, he began with chamber music, though in 1952 he wrote a concerto for two horns and strings. In writing about his work, Cary was clear about its strengths but could be disarmingly frank about it. The first piece he recognised was a Partita for Piano from 1949 and five years later he got his first paid commission, for a BBC radio broadcast, The Saint and the Sinner.

His first film, the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), came about because he and the director Alexander Mackendrick both frequented the Fringes pub in Fulham Road. If Cary's contribution is rather overshadowed by the Boccherini string quintet that the robbers use as an alibi, it is because he wove it so cleverly into his own music.

Cary now began to support himself with commissions from the Old Vic and other theatres, BBC radio and television, and more films as well as concert pieces. Some required conventional scores, but for Richard Williams' award-winning animation The Little Island (1958) he combined orchestra and electronics. Cary also created sound effects for films including the ill-fated Casino Royale (1967), and the apocalyptic animation When the Wind Blows (1986).

His work at the BBC included several classic serials and incidental music for Doctor Who – he scored the first dalek story. His 1962 radio musical The Ballad of Peckham Rye (one of several collaborations with Muriel Spark) won a Prix Italia, and was later staged in London and Germany and televised in Austria. For Leviathan 99 (1968), based on Roy Bradbury's space version of Moby Dick he wrote "a sort of 19th-century electronic score".

While tape pieces give the composer access to different sound worlds, their fixed nature makes "performances" less interesting, and Cary looked for something more dynamic. In Narcissus (1968), a flautist and a tape operator reflect each other's performances (hence the title), and Trios (1971) employs the VCS3 synthesizer and two turntable operators whose actions are directed by dice.

In 1967 Cary founded the Royal College of Music electronic music studio, whilst also designing and building his own facility. When he emigrated to Australia, in the early 1970s, most of his own equipment was incorporated into Adelaide Univer sity's expanding teaching studio. Cary was involved in Expo 67 in Montreal, scoring Don Levy's multi-screen film Sources of Power, as well as providing the music for the British pavilion's industrial section, using stereo sound and 16 film loops.

In 1967 he also worked on the first of two films for the Hammer company; the studio provided several "serious" composers with work. In Quatermass and the Pit, construction of a London Underground extension uncovers a mysterious craft, unleashing ancient forces and telekinetic chaos. Cary supplemented his pithy, highly dissonant and atmospheric score with a panoply of special sound effects. Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971) needed a more conventional score, including Hollywood-ish "Egyptian" music for the predictably reincarnated princess and woozy "remembrance of past life" cues.

In 1973 he was commissioned by the machine manufacturer Olivetti. In the resulting piece, Divertimento, Cary employed the company's technology alongside 16 singers and a jazz drummer. Comparing the demands of corporate and court patronage, Cary described the piece as "friendly" and "undemanding". One of his last theatrical works was Echoes till Sunset, a three-hour open-air, multi-media entertainment for the 1984 Adelaide Festival.

Cary was a regular broadcaster, and wrote and presented two music programmes for the Open University. He was also a music critic and columnist, and wrote the Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology (1992).

After various posts at Adelaide University, in 1986 Cary returned to full-time composition and sound consultancy, remaining honorary visiting research fellow at the university. He created concert suites from some of his early films: The Ladykillers appeared on an award-winning CD, one of several devoted to his film and concert work.

In 1991 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to Australian music. His 75th birthday was marked by a commission from Symphony Australia for a large-scale orchestral piece, Scenes from a Life, which Cary described as "roughly autobiographical".

John Riley

Tristram Ogilvie Cary, composer: born Oxford 14 May 1925; married 1961 Dorse Dukes (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1980), 2003 Jane Devlin; died Adelaide, South Australia 24 April 2008.


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The Times
April 29, 2008

Tristram Cary
Godfather of British electronic music who set the mood for the Daleks in Dr Who and pioneered the VCS3 synthesizer

Tristram Cary was a versatile and prolific composer of music in a variety of genres who reached a wide audience through his inventive, electronic scores for early episodes of Doctor Who, many featuring the Doctor’s most iconic and deadly adversaries, the Daleks. Although the incidental music was collectively credited to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, it was in fact Cary who scored the first Dalek episode, The Dead Planet, in 1963, and his eerie sinusoidal inventions perfectly captured not only the bleak landscape of the eponymous Skaro, but also helped to imprint the deadly menace of its most famous residents on to the national psyche.

During the Doctor’s incarnations as William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, Cary proceeded to enhance several stories, including two further dalek series: an ambitious 12-parter, The Daleks’ Masterplan, in 1965, and the more modest The Power of the Daleks in 1967. Many episodes were destroyed in an ensuing BBC cull of archive tapes, but the surviving material has recently been restored and issued on DVD and the entire soundtracks for both series are available on CD.

Cary was as skilful in marshalling conventional instrumental forces to dramatic ends as in creating them electronically from scratch, and the fully orchestrated, high-modernist gothica with which he enriched two films of the Hammer Horror canon, Quatermass and the Pit in 1967 and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb in 1971, are as notable as much for their restraint as for their composer’s characteristically sensitive ear for novel textures and the brief but telling gesture.

These qualities were evident too in the concert works he wrote from the 1960s onwards, often featuring tape either on its own or alongside live instruments. Among those he considered to be the most important were Continuum for tape (1969), Peccata Mundi for chorus, orchestra and

tape (1972), Contours and Densities at First Hill for orchestra (1976), The Songs Inside for wind quintet (1977), Nonet (1979), Trellises (1984), I Am Here a theatrical monologue for soprano and tape (1980), and Sevens for computerised piano and strings (1991).

Tristram Cary was born into something of a bohemian family. His father was the eminent novelist Joyce Cary and his mother, Gertrude, a gifted pianist and cellist. Cary’s education, which included piano and oboe lessons, was facilitated by a scholarship to Westminster School and a classics exhibition to Oxford, but was interrupted by wartime service as a radar specialist in the Royal Navy. The academic hiatus proved a blessing in disguise, however, for it gave him the basic grounding in physics which was crucial to his emergence as the godfather of British electronic music.

On his return to Oxford the family’s plans for him to become a doctor were soon abandoned and having acquired his BA he enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he studied composition, piano, horn, viola and conducting. After graduating he was involved in a multiplicity of activities, including teaching and a stint in a gramophone shop, as well as composing and developing the still fledgeling art of electronic music.

A professional breakthrough came in 1955 when, at short notice, he supplied the music for the Ealing comedy classic The Ladykillers, which featured Alec Guinness. Three years later Cary began a score for another Guinness showcase, an adaptation of his father’s novel The Horse’s Mouth. In the event, he was replaced after only a day by Kenneth V. Jones.

By this time Cary had already begun to assemble his own studio in the living room of the family home. It included a disc lathe, a primitive tape recorder, oscillators and mixing equipment and was known in the family as “the machine”.

One of the longest established private studios in the world, it led a peripatetic existence, beginning in Marylebone, moving to Earls Court, Chelsea, Fressingfield and, with Cary’s permanent relocation to Australia in 1974, ended up at the University of Adelaide.

The 1960s were a particularly creative time for Cary. In addition to his BBC work, he began programming regular electronic music concerts, founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, provided the soundscapes for the British Pavilion of Expo 67 and, with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerel, designed and marketed the Voltage Controlled Studio Mark 3, known as the VCS3, one of the most successful synthesizers to be produced and a serious rival to the more familiar Moog. It was used by Roxy Music, Brian Eno and on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

In Australia Cary worked first at Melbourne University on the giant Synthi 100 EMS synthesizer before settling for a decade at the University of Adelaide, where he served as Dean of Music. He retired in 1986 to concentrate on freelance projects and a book, The Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology, published by Faber & Faber in 1992.

He married Dorse Jukes in 1951, and they were divorced in 1980. He married Jane Delin in 2003 and she survives him, with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

Tristram Cary, composer, was born on May 14, 1925. He died on April 23, 2008, aged 82

donna

Dont know much about music at all, wish I did, just know if I like a film score or not, but on reading about him, he seems to have contributed greatly, I think music very important part of film making.

Thunder Badger

Hi Donna,

You're right, music is very important in films, and before talkies there was only music to get the emotional 'feel' across.

julian_craster

Letter: Tristram Cary
Friday May 9, 2008
The Guardian

Brian Baxter writes: The composer Tristram Cary (obituary, May 2) notched up a further half dozen scores in the years immediately after his feature debut with Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers. These included another Mackendrick film, Sammy Going South, and for Joseph Losey, a particularly strident score for the very talkative Time Without Pity, based on a play. Later he also provided the score for the intriguing animated film The Little Island.

However, the potentially most interesting work was to have been on the screen version of The Horse's Mouth - the novel written in 1958 by his father, Joyce Cary - which boasted, uniquely, a screenplay by its star, Alec Guinness. The outcome seemingly did not appeal, since another talented and prolific film composer, Kenneth V Jones, provided the incidental music and arranged Prokofiev's Lieutenat Kijé suite to underscore the high jinks of the central character, Gully Jimpson. One wonders whether Cary's score was completed and if it exists in any form.