Tristram Cary
Last Updated: 1:22am BST 26/04/2008
Daily Telegraph
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).
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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.
