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As the co-founder and original manager of the famed BBC Radiophonic Workshop, composer and sound engineer Desmond Briscoe embraced the sensibilities of musique concrète to introduce avant-garde principles into mainstream radio drama, proving a massive influence on successive generations of electronic music pioneers. Born in Birkenhead, England on June 21, 1925, Briscoe was raised in Manchester; the son of a telephone engineer, he naturally gravitated toward technology, but also loved music and as a teen, he played the drums and led his own big band. Briscoe first joined the BBC in 1941 as a junior program assistant, and during World War II he served with the Royal Army's Education Corps, eventually rising to music adviser for the London area. In 1946 he was sent to teach troops in India, and upon exiting the military two years later returned to the BBC, working as a program operations assistant in radio drama alongside writers and producers including Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. The experience shaped Briscoe's passion for spoken word broadcasts, and with a promotion to drama studio manager in the early '50s, he began experimenting with sound effects in dramatic productions, collaborating with writers and directors to introduce electronic and electro-acoustic source materials into their works. The groundbreaking musique concrète aesthetics developed by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen would prove profoundly influential in Briscoe's own emerging ethos, and in the months and years to follow he began acquiring discarded equipment from better-funded BBC departments, stockpiling the electronics arsenal that would form the bedrock of his subsequent efforts. Briscoe experienced his most dramatic creative breakthrough via the BBC's January 13, 1957 production of the Samuel Beckett radio play All That Fall -- an ambitious yet successful attempt to realize Beckett's wish for "pure radio," (i.e. a medium fusing dialogue, music and sound effects). Briscoe assembled an ambient soundtrack from snippets of pre-recorded magnetic tape, refining his techniques over subsequent broadcasts including Giles Cooper's The Disagreeable Oyster and Frederick Bradnum's Private Dreams and Public Nightmares. The critical and commercial success of these productions provided the leverage Briscoe needed to convince BBC brass of the need for a new facility devoted to producing electronic content and sound effects, and in 1958 he and colleague Daphne Oram were awarded the budget to found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Headquartered in the Beeb's Maida Vale studios in London, the workshop initially focused on experimental drama and so-called "radophonic poems," creating effects from the sci-fi serial Quatermass and the Pit as well as the hugely popular comedy showcase The Goon Show. Assigned the position of Senior Studio Manager, with Dick Mills employed as his technical assistant, Briscoe assumed even greater control of the facility when Oram resigned in 1959 to work on her innovative "Oramics" technique, which entailed drawing on 35mm film strips to control the synthetic sounds produced. In Oram's absence, Briscoe bolstered his staff with musicians including Maddalena Fagandini and Delia Derbyshire, whose 1963 electronic interpretation of composer Ron Grainer's theme for the BBC television series Doctor Who remains the workshop's signature recording. As Briscoe's administrative workload expanded, he was forced to relinquish the majority of his creative duties, although he made time to pursue the occasional pet project, in 1969 scoring the radio feature Narrow Boats, a portrait of canal boatmen employing their own words and music. (An avid boatsman, he also chaired the Inland Waterways Association for a number of years.) And while he won three Society of Radio Authors for the 1976 production A Wall Walks Slowly, a collaboration with poet Norman Nicholson, Briscoe spent the second half of his life nurturing electronic music rather than creating it -- beloved by workshop colleagues for his support and encouragement, he regularly battled BBC execs for more equipment, studio space and funding. It is difficult to calculate the vast influence of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on contemporary pop music as well as film and television; by the time Briscoe retired from day-to-day duties in 1977, its pioneering tape manipulation techniques were commonplace in sound editing facilities across the globe, and its evocative sonic palette remains a primal inspiration for successive generations of DJs, producers and programmers. Briscoe remained with the BBC in a limited capacity until 1983, when he teamed with Roy Curtis-Bramwell on the book The First 25 Years: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The BBC shuttered the workshop for good 15 years later, part of a sweeping cost-cutting decision to eliminate all departments that failed to generate revenues commensurate with their operational costs. Briscoe died December 7, 2006 at his London home; he was 81 years old. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi