Elizabeth Parker is a British film and television composer who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1978 until the workshop's closure in 1996. Classically trained in cello and piano, she graduated from the University of East Anglia with a degree in Music in 1973 and became UEA’s first recipient of a Masters degree in Electronic music in 1974. Her graduation piece was a Hilaire Belloc poem based purely on vocal sounds cut together using razor-blades and a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
She was later awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Staffordshire University.
Entering the BBC as a studio manager in 1975, she joined the Radiophonic Workshop in 1978 and, following in the steps of Delia Derbyshire, explored the creative use of sounds as music, fashioning many unique sonic experiments along the way. She worked at the RWS for 18 years until its closure in 1996.
Elizabeth is one of a handful of composers who went from using reel-to-reel tape recorders in 1978 through to running an entire studio contained in a single computer set-up in 2008. From cutting up tape, making loops of sound and using the Synthi 100 and VCR3 to create the Blake’s 7 sounds, she moved on to incorporating synthesisers into her work, first a monophonic Yamaha and then the multi-functional PPG. At one point there were only 2 PPGs in the UK and the other PPG belonged to the Pet Shop Boys. The PPG was brilliant but had a nasty habit of crashing at crucial moments, which made it infuriatingly unpredictable. The WaveTerm, an add-on to the PPG, enabled Elizabeth to experiment massively with sampling sounds creatively, and this was put to good use in her first major commission, the ground-breaking The Living Planet, 1982, which illustrated the early use of unlikely sound sources for the score, something covered by Miles Kington at the time for BBC TV. Her score earned her an Emmy nomination, as did her soundtrack for Poison in 2002 (outstanding individual achievement in a craft: music and sound.)
Over her career, Elizabeth fulfilled over 1400 commissions for TV and Radio.
During her time at the RWS she had a long association with BBC Radios 3 and 4. She created special sound for The Day of the Triffids, and Lord of the Rings, and composed music for countless Radio Drama plays, including Iris Murdoch’s The Sea,The Sea, Harold Pinter’s Moonlight, all of Howard Barker’s radio plays, and mammoth productions such as King Lear, Wordsworth’s Prelude and The Pallisers. Radio 1’s Talk of the Devil won Lambeth Palace’s top religious programme award in 1993. Her very first commissions for BBC TV were trails for The Future on BBC1. The success of The Living Planet in1983 led to a great body of work for the BBC Natural History Unit, the first of which was Wild Life on One’s Roadrunner followed by numerous commissions for The Natural World and many NHU strands. At one point in the late ‘80s she had at least 5 signature tunes running each week including Points of View, Horizon, Doctors to Be, Survivors and Everyman.
Becoming freelance in 1996 her studio and work were the subject of a major interview in Sound on Sound magazine. She was also interviewed by the BBC’s Backstage programme, who challenged her to play different music on the spot for the same sequence without any prior notice.
As a freelancer, Elizabeth’s arrangement of Faure’s Pavane for the BBC’s World Cup ’98 coverage got to no. 9 in the charts before England crashed out. Her score for The Human Body joined that of award-winning Weird Nature in complimenting some cutting edge filming and graphics. She wrote additional music for the DVD version of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, as well as music for Michael Palin’s Full Circle and Sahara. Her music for The Lost Gardens of Heligan was hugely popular.
Today, Elizabeth divides her time between Central London and a place by the sea where she walks daily, never without her beloved ear-pods and a download of a new album or another podcast to explore.
Despite leaving the active music business, Elizabeth’s interest in music of every genre remains as strong as ever. She adores the excitement of finding new tracks to add to her eclectic play-list.
She has particularly enjoyed mentoring one or two very special up-and-coming young composers and always has numerous projects on the go, many having absolutely nothing to do with music. However her most favourite time is spent enjoying her ever-expanding family.
