Doctor Who Music                                                                      Home Dudley is perhaps best known for creating most of the "incidental" music for Dr Who throughout the 60's and 70's. To most people, Dudley's music was the "sound of Doctor Who" just as Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker were the faces of Doctor Who during the 70's and I for one was very sad when he was "let go" by producer John Nathan-Turner before the start of season 18. I will be commenting mostly on his music for the last few Pertwee stories and the first few seasons of Tom Baker's period. This is the music with which I am most familiar and I believe that this period was Dudley's best work. Dudley's music fit Dr Who perfectly as it had both an "epic" quality and also a "sci-fi" quality. This was achieved with Dudley's unique blend of both traditional live instruments and other-wordly sounds he created on the synthesizer. Dudley's live ensemble usually consisted of percussion, french horns, muted trumpet, clarinet and bass clarinet. This was embellished later on with the electronic elements. If you'll notice, each story had it's own unique sound, which Dudley achieved with the use of a melodic "motive" and/or a specific instrument or synthesizer texture. Dudley's compositions were very fitting for the program and included not only traditional, heroic melodies but also very dissonant, haunting ones as well. Some examples of these can be found on the music sample page. Dudley's first project for Doctor Who was the William Hartnell story called "Planet of the Giants" in 1964. He then went on to score various stories throughout the Hartnell and Troughton years and created almost all the incidental music throughout the Pertwee and Baker years. For "Revenge of the Cybermen" Carey Blyton was hired for the music and the final cuts were embellished by Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For the stories "Terror of the Zygons" and "Seeds of Doom" director Douglas Camfield hired Geoffrey Burgon. (Geoffrey was the only other composer who could really write for Dr Who, IMHO!) The tragic part of the story, even more so than Dudley being taken off the job, is the fact that the BBC destroyed all of the original music tapes of his scores for Doctor Who. Apparently they thought the music alone would never be of interest to anyone! Years after his Dr Who days, Dudley himself requested copies of his old music from the BBC and was notified of this sad fact. The good news is, Mark Ayres of the DW Restoration Team has announced that some of Dudley scores for Dr Who have been recovered, and may one day see the light of day in the form of a CD Release. That's all he can tell us at the moment, but I sincerely hope that we will have the privilege of hearing it soon...