Bebe Barron on AllMovie

Bebe Barron and her husband Louis Barron were pioneering figures in electronic music. They wrote the music for not quite a dozen films, of which the most prominent and successful was the 1956 science fiction feature Forbidden Planet, released by MGM. They are also credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape. Born Charlotte May Wind in 1925 in Minneapolis, she studied music with composer Wallingford Riegger and composer/pianist Henry Cowell, amongst others. She married Louis Barron in 1947, and they moved to New York and began working with a then-new device called a tape recorder. The couple soon began experimenting with sound on the machine, Louis indulging in his fascination for electronics while Bebe applied her compositional skills to the tapes of the odd, at first unclassifiable sounds that they produced. They opened their own recording studio at 9 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village, and in 1950 created the first electronic music for magnetic tape, entitled Heavenly Menagerie. They quickly found themselves at the center of the New York avant-garde art scene. By the first half of the 1950s, they were working with composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. Most of the Barrons' movie work was limited to short non-commercial films, courtesy of Maya Deren and other experimental filmmakers.

In 1955, however, MGM asked if they could work on a film still in post-production, called Forbidden Planet. A science fiction movie with a far-future setting, in deep space and on a distant alien planet, the movie was one of the most advanced cinematic efforts in the genre attempted since the advent of sound film. Initially the Barrons were only supposed to provide 20 minutes of sound effects, the producers planning on approaching the composer Harry Partch, but when they heard a sample of the duo's work, the Barrons were handed the entire project, with over 100 minutes of screen time to fill. They did the work entirely out of their New York studio. And the results were astounding in 1956 and are still startling more than five decades later with a surging, unearthly body of music that perfectly fit the film. Everyone concerned was delighted with what the Barrons had done, except for the Musicians Union, of which they were not members. As a result of union objections, they were credited with "electronic tonalities," rather than music, which prevented their work from being considered for an Oscar nomination. The denial of a music credit also prevented them from being allowed to join the union. The Barrons gave up on the idea of participating in Hollywood production again. Over the next three decades, until Louis' death in 1989, they continued to work together, eventually moving to Los Angeles. They were divorced in 1970, but continued to work together. Ironically, their work on Forbidden Planet came to follow them across their careers. In the 1970s, the Barrons authorized the first soundtrack LP devoted to their work on the film (subsequently re-released on CD). And in the late 1980s it was discovered that the Barrons had held on to a 16mm work-print of Forbidden Planet, complete with scenes and dialogue that were cut from the finished film; their print became the source for supplementary materials on the Criterion Collection laserdisc of the movie, and the basis for a new level of analysis of the movie.