EMP 11

The Fairy Tale Adaptations

By Jonas Olesen

In 1955, Else Marie Pade began collaborating with the singer Aase Ziegler (1906–1975), who worked on the so-called ‘school radio’ at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (Danmarks Radio). The two had previously worked together four years earlier, when Pade had composed songs for a programme created by her then-husband, Henning Pade, and Ziegler. This time, however, it was Pade’s concrete and electronic music that Ziegler found intriguing. Ziegler imagined that it would be well suited to illustrate the fairy tales for children and radio dramas produced by the school radio.

At Danmarks Radio, sound effects for radio dramas had previously been made using traditional ‘foley’ techniques created with mechanical means. For instance, the studio possessed a wind machine and coconut shells used to simulate galloping horses. At the time, creating sound effects through electronic means was a progressive and forward-looking idea. It was not until 1958 that the BBC established its Radiophonic Workshop, a dedicated department solely focused on creating electronic music and sound effects for BBC productions. In this context, Ziegler and Pade were early pioneers in the field in Denmark.

Pade initially worked as a freelancer, but was formally employed at Danmarks Radio in 1956. She worked as a copywriter and secretary, which meant that she was in the building on a daily basis. This led to her becoming involved during this period in radio dramas for adults and more literary oriented broadcasts.

The selection of fairy tales and dramas included in this release were produced between 1955 and 1960, and the extent of Pade’s contributions varies significantly. Some broadcasts include only a few sound effects and brief musical interludes, while others involve much more radical and extensive experimentation with the studio’s possibilities.

Over the years, a growing technical professionalism becomes audible as Pade and the sound engineers gained more experience. It is likely that this experience directly informed her own actual compositions, which she worked on concurrently.

Den lille Idas blomster (Little Ida’s Flowers) (1956) is based on the 1835 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). In short, the story follows a little girl, Ida, who one day notices that her flowers have wilted. A student explains to her that it is because the flowers have been to a ball at a castle and danced all night. Each flower tells its own story, and in the end, Ida buries them so they can bloom again the following year.

The tale takes place in a purely magical universe, which Pade illustrates with relatively understated sound design. The flowers’ voices are treated with artificial reverberation, and their nocturnal dances are accompanied by piano recordings that have been pitch-shifted upwards and filtered to sound miniature – befitting the flowers’ size. Short snippets from unidentified classical music records are processed similarly, and there are a few passages that appear to feature sounds from an electronic organ.

Trylleringen (The Magic Ring) (1956) is based on a Hungarian folk tale and tells the story of children by the sea who catch various animals. The sound effects are mostly naturalistic, featuring the sound of waves, a barking dog and a hissing snake. As in Little Ida’s Flowers, short excerpts from traditional classical music are used. A dragon’s voice is created by raising the pitch of voices, adding tape echo, and playing the recording backwards. The most radical effect in this tale accompanies a fight between a child and their father, illustrated solely with synthetic sounds created by “scratching” abstract noises on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Only a brief fragment remains of the broadcast Gedehyrden Martin (Martin the Goatherd) from 1955, based on a text by Louise Zeller née Pichler (1823–1889), but those few minutes burst with creative studio work: distorted ‘Mickey Mouse’ voices, cymbals and other percussion instruments treated with tape echo, and a sound resembling cackling hens, pitch-shifted upwards. Particularly noteworthy is a mermaid’s song produced using sine tones, heavy vibrato, and echo – possibly an early experiment in addressing the challenge of finding an appropriate sound for the mermaid, which Pade later described in connection with her work on The Little Mermaid (1955–1959).

Julegavetoget (The Christmas Gift Train) (1955) is aimed at young children and is based on an American folk tale about a little train that delivers Christmas gifts to children, including dolls, teddy bears and music boxes. The characters’ voices are filtered to remove low frequencies, making them sound small. The train breaks down en route, but is repaired – and, as one might expect, the story ends happily with children’s bursts of joy by the Christmas tree. Overall, Pade’s sound design here is more traditional and consists exclusively of realistic sound effects.

The Christmas Gift Train, Martin the Goatherd, and The Magic Ring are all based on texts that originally appeared in the magazine Illustreret Tidende, published from 1859 to 1924 and featuring news, literature, and entertainment from around the world.

Klumpedumpeland (Land of the Klumpedumps) (c. 1955) is a so-called ‘nonsense tale’ for children with text and narration by Bent Friis Alsinger. The story is about ‘klumpedump creatures’ who live ‘deep in the woods, where they can make noise and have fun’. It is a zany and humorous tale, allowing Pade to fully unleash her sonic inventiveness: Almost every moment of the broadcast is accompanied by sound, including extensive use of ring-modulated tones, reversed field recordings, and sine tones with artificial reverberation. Occasionally, short melodies are heard that sound like a xylophone or a ring-modulated piano, and the narrator rhythmically synchronises his delivery with the music in these passages.

The character King Snoretree’s voice is represented by slowed-down field recordings on tape, effectively mimicking deep snoring. He is introduced with these rhyming lines:

‘At Klumpedumpe Castle stands,
With crown atop his hair so grand,
King Snoretree with his nose so keen.
He weighs fifteen thousand pounds,
And has a flat-nosed poodle hound,
Who’s awfully picky, it’s seen.’

It is nonsensical rhymes like these that define the tale more than any traditional plot. The soundscape is highly detailed and complex, successfully bringing to life the whimsical world in which the story takes place.

Borley-mysteriet (The Borley Mystery) (1960), with a script by Jytte Weiss, is inspired by tales of the haunted Borley Rectory in Essex, England. The voices of the ghosts in the radio play are shrouded in artificial reverberation and filtered so that only high frequencies remain – giving them an unearthly, bodiless quality. The other sound effects (such as birdsong) are primarily naturalistic, but the sounds of wind and horse hooves suggest that Pade also made use of the department’s old foley props or archival recordings thereof. Music is used only in the form of short excerpts of classical music and atmospheric textures.

Jonas og hvalen (Jonah and the Whale) (year unknown), based on the biblical story, is simply structured: a male narrator is telling the story, interrupted by short segments of sound effects illustrating the action. The same wind machine effect used in The Borley Mystery appears here as well. All effects are naturalistic but filtered so heavily that it is ambiguous whether this was intentional. Pade’s role here appears to be more that of a technician than an actual composer.

Historien om den forsvundne skat (The Story of the Lost Treasure) (year unknown), like Martin the Goatherd, exists only as a fragment and was likely not produced for Danmarks Radio. The manuscript credits Ingrid Friis Hansen (text and illustrations) and Nina Russ (images), which indicates that it may have been used for an audiobook or similar format. The tale is aimed at young children, featuring characters with names like Black Peter and Forest Lad. A male narrator tells the story, and short musical motifs played on flute or harmonica separate the sections. We hear a babbling baby, knocking on doors, bird song, and other sound effects – all presented entirely in a naturalistic style.