Incidentally Speaking: Appreciating Dudley Simpson
Guest contributor Shane Spangler celebrates one of the biggest composers of the classic era. 7-14-13
http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/incidentally-speaking-appreciating-dudley-simpson-51282.htm
The Music and Sound of Doctor Who
http://www.mfiles.co.uk/doctor-who-music.htm
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Dudley Simpson is an Australian composer who became the backbone of Doctor Who music for many years. He first served on the William Hartnell stories "Planet of Giants", "The Crusade", "The Chase" and "The Celestial Toymaker", nicely complementing the Toymaker's sinister games. He scored even more Patrick Troughton stories including "The Macra Terror" with electronic keyboard music and holiday-camp style jingles (and a stock track called "Musak" created by John Baker of the Radiophonic Workshop), "Evil of the Daleks" where he gave new companion Victoria a romantic theme on oboe, and "Fury from the Deep" where a heartbeat was added to the music for the seaweed creature. A feature of some 60s stories was that the episode title and writer credits sometimes appeared on screen after the title music had faded. In some stories this served as a short prologue to remind viewers of the setting for the story. This prologue sometimes featured music or sound effects such as a stock drum roll in most episodes of the "The War Machines", some stock bagpipe music in "The Highlanders" and some battle sounds in "The War Games". But the best example of this was "The Seeds of Death" whose opening sequence at the start of every episode showed the sun, the moon and the earth accompanied by Dudley Simpson's dramatic music. This sequence was almost certainly inspired by similar sequences in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" released the previous year.
When Jon Pertwee assumed the lead role, Simpson was effectively the house composer scoring the majority of stories through most of the 1970s until near the end of the Tom Baker era. Due to budget restrictions, his music was usually played by a small handful of musicians and then often augmented with synth sounds by members of the Radiophonic Workshop to make the sound thicker and more complex, essentially more orchestral. In total he composed the music for 60 stories, including many stories now regarded as classics such as "Genesis of the Daleks" (dramatic with great characterisation), "The Pyramids of Mars" (with its Egyptian sounds and memorable organ sound for Sutekh), "The Invasion of Time" which has a variety of different moods (both dramatic and wryly humorous) for the different locations and groups of protagonists, and "City of Death" (full of fun with the Doctor and Romana almost in holiday mood) a story written by Douglas Adams (who also wrote "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") and set in Paris (Simpson's theme suggesting car horn traffic noises is surely inspired by Gershwin's An American in Paris). A number of stories from the "Key to Time" season have largely acoustic scores: "The Ribos Operation" uses a small group of instruments and an organ to create a convincing atmosphere for the planet, and "The Stones of Blood" and "Androids of Tara" also benefit from an acoustic sound and some wonderful music.
The Master became a recurring character in the Jon Pertwee era (equivalent to Sherlock Holmes' Moriarty), and Simpson introduced a theme for the character which had a characteristic 3 note motif. A few years later during Tom Baker's time, Simpson was to develop some musical ideas which briefly became the Doctor's Theme. In the Tom Baker story "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" Dudley Simpson also had an on-screen part as the music hall conductor.
Ironically, given his huge contribution to the series, there is not a lot of Dudley Simpson's music available on CD. One of the best albums of his music is a recreation by Heathcliff Blair of Simpson's music, since the original tapes no longer existed at the BBC but some manuscripts were kept. The album has several tracks from classic stories of the Tom Baker era: "The Ark in Space", "Genesis of the Daleks", "Pyramids of Mars", "Planet of Evil" and "The Brain of Morbius", plus the aforementioned Doctor's Theme. Simpson also comments on his music among the special features on the DVDs for "The War Games", "The Sun Makers", "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Brain of Morbius". Outside of Doctor Who, Dudley Simpson had a busy career writing music for many other television productions. He scored the BBC mini-series adaptation of "The Last of the Mohicans" and wrote themes or incidental music for "Paul Temple", "The Tomorrow People", "Target", "Sense and Sensibility", "Supergran" and Terry Nation's other famous creation "Blake's 7". The album "BBC Space Themes" has Simpson's themes for "Moonbase 3" and "Blake's 7"."
The Doctor Who Column: The (occasionally excessive?) music of Doctor Who
Wednesday, 25 April 2012 18:41 | by
John Bensalhia
http://www.shadowlocked.com/201204252567/opinion-features/the-doctor-who-column-the-occasionally-excessive-music-of-doctor-who.html
"... However, one composer was to make a distinct impression – Dudley Simpson. Simpson would go on to become one of the most prolific and talented composers of
Who. One or two fans have said that his music sounds a bit too samey (particularly in the late '70s), but I think that it's more a case of sticking with his own inimitable style. After all, it never did Status Quo any harm, did it?
For me, Simpson's music succeeds on a number of points. For one thing, he can create tension when there isn't really any on the screen. The Fendahl Core, for example, is no more than a woman in gold paint, swishing robes and fake eyes painted over Wanda Ventham's closed eyelids. What Simpson does is to disregard this and create a strange, eerie howl over the top of a doomy church organ. The end result adds a lot more to the drama, and makes the Fendahl Core just that bit more unearthly and creepy. The ending of Part Two of
The Power Of Kroll sees poor old Harg pulled to his doom by a fake rubber tentacle. Sounds silly? Well, in fact, not only do we get some great agonised screaming from actor Grahame Mallard, we also get a big, bold, dramatic scoring from Dudley Simpson – all culminating in Philip Madoc's memorable bellow of “HAAAARRRGGG!!” What could have been a ridiculous cliffhanger now works rather well, and Simpson plays an important part in this. The Nimon, the Mandrels and even the Taran Beast boost greatly from Simpson's music, and considering that they're not among the top-tiered monsters, that's some accomplishment.
Another trick of Simpson's is to subtly reflect what's going on on screen in his music.
The Robots Of Death is one of the best examples of this. The throbbing heartbeat theme for the Robot attacks perfectly sums up the thumping pounding of the heart in a stressful situation of fear – and just as cleverly, the music suddenly stops at the point of death, just like the luckless victims on board the Sandminer. Then there's the clever chord sequence at the end of
City Of Death's Part Three, which rapidly goes through a progression of chord changes until the big sting at the end – just like Kerensky's rapid ageing which culminates in a rotting skeleton, a smug grin from Scarlioni and the crashing cliffhanger scream. And let's not forget the ominous
Who riff for the Daleks' arrival in
The Evil Of The Daleks.
The
Who theme itself was regarded as one of those things that sent the kids behind the sofa, so Simpson cleverly parodied this to heighten the fear in the Daleks' victims (as seen in the great cliffhanger to Part One, as a pepperpot threatens a quaking Kennedy). Simpson pulls this trick out of the bag time and again, showing not just a talent for great tunes, but also an intelligent understanding of what's actually happening on screen (as opposed to just random big, dramatic chords for the hell of it).
Not only that, but Dudley's music just somehow helps to create the atmosphere. Whether he's spreading fear on the streets of Victorian London with gongs and mournful brass, providing romantic canoodling music for Jo and Cliff to swap test tubes over, or creating a filmic, joyous celebration of Paris for The Doctor and Romana to run around in, Dudley Simpson just gets it. The one composer that knew
Doctor Who inside and out, front and backwards, Simpson still remains my favourite composer.
Mind you, I'll agree that his Season Eight scores occasionally leave a little to be desired (although the Keller Machine riffs works brilliantly in upping the scares), but then a good counter-argument is that they are simply reflecting the times. Looking back at the
Who scores, the interesting in that by and large, they reflect the popular styles and trends of music in each age.
The Invasion, for example, has twangy guitar and Hammond organ, making it so Sixties, you half expect UNIT to mellow out in kaftans and Jesus sandals at the story's conclusion. The Season Eight stories, along with
The Sea Devils and
The Mutants may comprise oddball electronic burbles and squeaks, but the early 1970s saw many a musician and pop group dabble with this style. The early Roxy Music toons, for example, feature odd electronic burbles – same goes for Tangerine Dream and even some of the early 1970s Pink Floyd albums. The early 1970s
Who stories were just following what was in vogue, even if the results didn't always come off.
By the mid 1970s, the trend for mixing brass and orchestras with modern instruments was growing ever more popular – whether it was in soul (Stevie Wonder's Superstition and You Are The Sunshine Of My Life or Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On album, for example) or the burgeoning success of American jazz rock (Joni Mitchell's Court And Spark and Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic were doing the rounds to great acclaim in 1974). And likewise, in the groovy sounds of
Doctor Who World, this mixture of brass, woodwind and modern synth held court for most of the mid to late 1970s, whether it was Dudley Simpson, Carey Blyton or Geoffrey Burgon, who provided two, haunting, lilting scores for Terror Of The Zygons and The Seeds Of Doom."
Creating Ron Grainer's original Doctor Who Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIEkLww3lg
**** Mills and Brian Hodgson's Doctor Who sound effects (including the famous materialization/dematerialization sound design)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE7DIcX_I9k