week after arriving in London Koch received a letter from Mary Adams, of the BBC’s talks department, and gradually began to be offered work. After a period of internment on the Isle of Man (where ‘I was able to makea special study of the hooded crow and the herring gull’), he joined the staff of the BBC, his task to build up the sound-effects library. ‘I visited a number of factories to explore unusual noises, but amid the din of machinery I longed for the sounds of nature, and I persuaded my superiors that this was the right moment to show the enemy, by recording all kinds of farm animals, that even bombing could not entirely shatter the natural peace of this island,’ he remembered. He composed a ‘Victory Symphony’ from found sounds mimicking the opening of Beethoven Five – ‘even nature helped me, for one of the call-notes of the curlew has this victory rhythm’. Internal BBC documents detail his recordings: one memo concerning ‘Dr Ludwig Koch, 19 October 1942’, is headed, delightfully, ‘An exhaustive series of recordings of footsteps, probably out of doors’. Another note, written on the same day, contains a list of his recordings that reads like a taxonomy out of a Borges story: bugle calls, aircraft factory, farm animals, winnowing, St Paul’s Cathedral in wartime, pigs and sow, donkey braying, concolor gibbons, black-necked crackle, yellowhammer, demolition and reconstruction, tank factory, steam and hand winch, derrick and rope running out, conversation on quay re cargo, footsteps on pavement.
By January 1943 the head of the BBC’s sound library, Marie Slocombe, was despairing of Koch, whose high professional standards often prompted him to spend a great deal more time and money on projects than his employer deemed necessary. Though his work was ‘excellent beyond dispute’ he was ‘constantly straining at the leashand going beyond his terms of reference, and quite frankly wastes a lot of my time in attempts to discuss the most far-reaching schemes which are quite irrelevant and quite impracticable’. He certainly inspired BBC employees to unaccustomed heights of burnished prose. ‘To explain to him that Effects records could be continued without him is rather like trying to explain to Kreisler that it is possible for other people to play Caprice Viennoise. This does not mean Dr Koch is conceited. He just cannot understand how anyone can regard perfection as a luxury,’ noted the recorded programmes director in January 1943.
Fitzgerald cruelly killed off her Dr Vogel in Human Voices – she downed him with a piece of flying drainpipe in the Blitz, as he courteously attempted to explain a point of English law to an ARP warden. The real Koch returned to freelance life, constantly attempting to persuade the BBC of the immense care and time required to maintain his desired standards. This was particularly true of his recordings of birds: even to get sufficiently close to his often rare or shy targets, with the bulky equipment of the 1940s, could be an extraordinary feat, requiring a naturalist’s knowledge, the cunning of a thief and the patience of a saint. A typical letter, from 24 August 1946, written somehow in a strong German accent, runs:
Last spring I have been concentrating under horrid conditions watching by day and night the breeding behaviour of the Green-shank and made an attempt to record as many breeding notes as possible, especially the cracking of the eggshells and the first peeping of theyoungsters and the mother talking to the young birds is very fascinating. But with these recordings the bird is not covered yet and I intend to spend at least one or even two more months somewhere in the Highlands, early next spring, trying to get the courtship notes of the bird, including the wonderful song.
Koch also contributed a series of programmes to the BBC after the war called ‘sound pictures’. One especially delicious example was a compilation, without voiceover or
By January 1943 the head of the BBC’s sound library, Marie Slocombe, was despairing of Koch, whose high professional standards often prompted him to spend a great deal more time and money on projects than his employer deemed necessary. Though his work was ‘excellent beyond dispute’ he was ‘constantly straining at the leashand going beyond his terms of reference, and quite frankly wastes a lot of my time in attempts to discuss the most far-reaching schemes which are quite irrelevant and quite impracticable’. He certainly inspired BBC employees to unaccustomed heights of burnished prose. ‘To explain to him that Effects records could be continued without him is rather like trying to explain to Kreisler that it is possible for other people to play Caprice Viennoise. This does not mean Dr Koch is conceited. He just cannot understand how anyone can regard perfection as a luxury,’ noted the recorded programmes director in January 1943.
Fitzgerald cruelly killed off her Dr Vogel in Human Voices – she downed him with a piece of flying drainpipe in the Blitz, as he courteously attempted to explain a point of English law to an ARP warden. The real Koch returned to freelance life, constantly attempting to persuade the BBC of the immense care and time required to maintain his desired standards. This was particularly true of his recordings of birds: even to get sufficiently close to his often rare or shy targets, with the bulky equipment of the 1940s, could be an extraordinary feat, requiring a naturalist’s knowledge, the cunning of a thief and the patience of a saint. A typical letter, from 24 August 1946, written somehow in a strong German accent, runs:
Last spring I have been concentrating under horrid conditions watching by day and night the breeding behaviour of the Green-shank and made an attempt to record as many breeding notes as possible, especially the cracking of the eggshells and the first peeping of theyoungsters and the mother talking to the young birds is very fascinating. But with these recordings the bird is not covered yet and I intend to spend at least one or even two more months somewhere in the Highlands, early next spring, trying to get the courtship notes of the bird, including the wonderful song.
Koch also contributed a series of programmes to the BBC after the war called ‘sound pictures’. One especially delicious example was a compilation, without voiceover or
Similar Books
