BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop – A Retrospective (33 1/3)

In 1958, an anonymous group of overworked and under-budgeted BBC employees set out to create some innovative sounds for radio and TV. They ended up sending the music of the 20th century in a whole new direction. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneered some of the earliest electronic music and broadcast it to audiences of millions. They created TV’s best-known theme music, for Doctor Who. But it also created groundbreaking scores for news programs, auto maintenance shows, and children’s programming, using sampling, loops and the earliest synthesizers – long before its listeners had any idea of what these techniques were. The Beatles and Pink Floyd borrowed from them. And a generation of musicians – Aphex Twin, Portishead, and Prodigy among them – raised on BBC programming and these once alien sounds has carried on the Workshop’s legacy. Ignored for decades by music historians, the Workshop has in recent years been recognized as one of the most influential forebears of electronica, psychedelia, ambient music and synth pop.