Doctor Who theme music
Delia Derbyshire (assisted by Dick Mills) of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used musique concrète techniques to realise a score written by composer Ron Grainer.
The swooping melody and lower bassline layer were created by manually adjusting the pitch of oscillator banks to a carefully timed pattern.
The rhythmic hissing sounds, "bubbles" and "clouds", were created by cutting tape recordings of filtered white noise.
However the BBC, who wanted to keep members of the Workshop anonymous, prevented Grainer from getting Derbyshire a co-composer credit and a share of the royalties.
A rhythmic bassline opens and underlies the theme throughout, followed by a rising and falling set of notes that forms the main melody which is repeated several times.
The bridge, also known as the "middle eight", is an uplifting interlude in a major key that usually features in the closing credits or the full version of the theme.
During the 1970s, the Radio Times, the BBC's own listings magazine, announced that a child's mother said the theme music terrified her son.
Released by Pinnacle on 25 November 1978, the song peaked at number 25 in the UK Singles Chart and ran for 12 weeks in the BBC Top 75.
[3] For season 18, Radiophonic Workshop staffer Peter Howell provided a new arrangement performed on analogue synthesisers, and having a more dynamic and glossy but less haunting feel.
The opening line of the main melody was played on an ARP Odyssey Mk III, the second on an EMS Vocoder 5000, and the "middle eight" and the brass section on a Roland Jupiter-4.
The full version mix also contains a section that Howell calls the "trombone stop" which is a part in the record on which the brass sounds as if it goes up a flight of stairs towards the climax note at the end on which the reverse sting is added.
This version – again synthesizer-driven, like the Howell arrangement, only this time using digital synthesizers – was made to sound more mysterious than previous renditions but was only used for this single season of the series.
Glynn's theme reverts to the traditional key of E minor, even though it is largely detuned in some episodes (perhaps as a result of a mistake in the dubbing stage).
Producer John Nathan-Turner stated that the new music, logo and title sequence were to signal a fresh start to the programme.
[5][full citation needed] The 1996 Doctor Who television movie used a fully orchestrated version, arranged by John Debney.
This contained a new introduction, being a quieter piece of music over which part of the Eighth Doctor's (Paul McGann) opening narration was read, leading into a crescendo into the "middle eight", a departure from previous versions of the theme.
Gold created a variation on his arrangement for the closing credits of "The Christmas Invasion", which was performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
[6][7] Gold also created another new arrangement of the theme which was performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales during a special televised concert, Doctor Who: A Celebration which was broadcast in November 2006 as part of the annual Children in Need appeal.
[9] In November 2007, following the BBC's announcement that it was requiring all series to implement a shorter closing credits sequence,[10] Murray Gold produced a third version featuring additional drums, piano and bass guitar and a variation of the string counter-melody while retaining the original Derbyshire electronic melody line, used from the Christmas 2007 episode.
The reworking was something of a departure from all previous arrangements, with a prominent new melodic fanfare theme playing in the opening bars, and a percussion sound accenting each quaver of the rhythm.
This new piece retains the melodic fanfare of the opening bars, as well as Gold's bassline and lead – albeit with all of them modified (with the latter two's timbre modified – especially the bassline, and the lead dipping largely downwards during the first high B note) and lacking both the heavy use of percussion from the previous arrangement, and removing the counter-melody that featured in all previous Gold arrangements.
This arrangement was revised further for "The Bells of Saint John", featuring a more prominent bassline and removing the electronic beeps during the opening fanfare.
The fanfare over the opening bars was absent for the first time since 2010, and more of the electronic elements were removed or replaced (but the percussion and bassline were made more prominent, and the bass slides were re-instated as well) .
The 'middle eight' is absent from any broadcast version of the theme, and as such the closing credits cut straight to the main melody as they did in series 7 part 2.
As of the third episode of Capaldi's debut season, "Robot of Sherwood", the new 2014 theme was suddenly polished further, blending in the introduction transition sound and bass elements of the 2008 version.
The theme music received another revision in 2018 for Jodie Whittaker's first series as the Doctor, this time by new composer Segun Akinola.
For the end credits of series 11 episode 6, "Demons of the Punjab," Akinola created a vocal arrangement of the theme performed by singer Shahid Abbas Khan.
