Sis­ters with Transistors

Amer­i­can com­pos­er Lau­rie Spiegel steps out onto a fire escape and leans her head over the iron rail­ings, lis­ten­ing. There is bird­song lilt­ing on the wind, the rhyth­mic flap of pigeon wings and deep rum­ble of a plane over­head; an orches­tral arrange­ment of the quo­ti­di­en echoes around her.

The music she and the oth­er pio­neers of the elec­tron­ic genre depict­ed in Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors made was indebt­ed to the very basics of noise. With this sim­plic­i­ty of mate­r­i­al, their inge­nu­ity and resis­tance to tra­di­tion, these women engi­neered entire­ly new land­scapes of sound.

Lisa Rovner’s doc­u­men­tary makes effec­tive use of archival footage and voiceover com­men­tary from con­tem­po­rary artists to illu­mi­nate the lives of nine women musi­cians and com­posers who sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tributed to the his­to­ry of elec­tron­ic music in the US and UK.

In these clips, Suzanne Ciani teach­es a vis­i­tor to her stu­dio about patch cords, rout­ing sig­nals between mod­ules on her syn­the­sis­er to cre­ate sounds, while Clara Rock­more con­torts her fin­gers in the air with incred­i­ble pre­ci­sion to play the theremin, and Delia Der­byshire demon­strates the dif­fer­ences between sound­waves in the BBC Radio­phon­ic Workshop.

A tenth woman, Wendy Car­los, appears in a jar­ring­ly brief sequence, an intro­duc­tion that goes no fur­ther despite Car­los’ intrigu­ing film score work on Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing and A Clock­work Orange.

In explor­ing not only the musi­cal­i­ty of its sub­jects but their inven­tive streaks and abil­i­ty to cre­ate new tech­nolo­gies, the film offers a fas­ci­nat­ing insight. But, for a doc­u­men­tary intent on high­light­ing the ways in which these women fought against the bound­aries of a male musi­cal estab­lish­ment, it’s a film with its own clear bound­aries too.

All of the women are white and either from or worked pre­dom­i­nant­ly in Amer­i­ca and Britain. This is not some­thing acknowl­edged by the film itself and so it feels like an ignored truth, a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to elab­o­rate on the priv­i­leged con­texts in which these women were able to work.

Still, there is much to appre­ci­ate about Rovner’s rev­e­la­tion of this area of his­to­ry and the film serves as an entic­ing spring­board from which to fur­ther explore the lives of each indi­vid­ual. Their work was wide-reach­ing, from main­stream suc­cess­es with Derbyshire’s Doc­tor Who theme, to scor­ing Hol­ly­wood stu­dio fea­tures (Ciani was the first woman to do so in 1981 for The Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing Woman), to more avant-garde ven­tures (Bebe Bar­ron worked with the likes of Shirley Clarke and Anaïs Nin).

Often from a back­ground in clas­si­cal music, these women decon­struct­ed what was taught and known at the time about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of sound and com­po­si­tion. All they gained over­all was a lega­cy of male suc­cess and a con­tin­ued pub­lic aver­sion to elec­tron­ic music that over­shad­owed their numer­ous achievements.

Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors offers a chance to reeval­u­ate and cham­pi­on their work with gen­uine feel­ing and inter­est shown by the film­mak­er. At times it is per­haps a lit­tle whis­tle-stop, veer­ing from per­son to per­son with a focus that denies a broad­er view of the social cli­mate, but as an intro­duc­to­ry piece shed­ding light on the women’s achieve­ments it pro­vokes an excite­ment to learn more.

Sis­ters with Tran­sis­tors is released 23 April via Mod­ern Films.