Daphne Oram

All Music Guide:

The unsung midwife of the electronic music revolution, composer and engineer Daphne Oram co-founded the famed BBC Radiophonic Workshop before developing Oramics, a system of generating synthetic sound via graphical interface. Born December 31, 1925, in Wiltshire, England, Oram studied piano, organ, and composition while attending the Sherborne School for Girls and in 1943 received an invitation to continue her education at the Royal College of Music; she nevertheless declined the offer to accept a position as a music balancer with the BBC, a job largely comprised of overseeing broadcast sound levels and creating special effects for radio dramas. As World War II raged on, Oram was also called upon to "shadow" live performances with recorded versions of the same music in the event a concert was interrupted by enemy attack. An inveterate night owl, Oram spent untold late nights in the BBC studios experimenting with tape recorders and electronic sounds, writing a series of groundbreaking compositions highlighted by 1950's "Still Point," a 30-minute piece fusing orchestra with pre-taped instrumental sounds played from 78 rpm discs in tandem with live treatments. Historian and lecturer Hugh Davies later cited "Still Point" as the first written music to manipulate electronic sounds in real-time, as opposed to introducing pre-taped material as an adjunct to a live performance -- unfortunately, the piece was never presented live or recorded, a fate that befell the vast majority of her most revolutionary work.

For close to a decade Oram remained in the background both literally and figuratively, given few assignments beyond creating aural backdrops for myriad BBC productions. In 1957 she was commissioned to score the radio drama Amphytryon 38. Employing a sine wave oscillator, tape recorders, and a handful of homemade filters, she created the first wholly synthetic score in BBC history, so impressing network brass that they finally agreed to finance a new facility devoted to producing electronic content. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop opened in 1958 in the BBC's London studio Maida Vale. While Oram was installed as director, co-founder and fellow Beeb engineer and composer Desmond Briscoe (fresh off his own success scoring Samuel Beckett's "All That Fall") was named manager. While the BBC Radiophonic 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, its pioneering tape-manipulation techniques would become commonplace in sound editing facilities across the globe, and its evocative sonic palette (typified by Delia Derbyshire's landmark electronic interpretation of the theme to Doctor Who) remains a primal inspiration for successive generations of DJs, producers, and programmers.

But Oram's tenure at the workshop proved brief. In early 1959, she resigned from the BBC, frustrated by the network's continued refusal to push electronic music into the foreground. Settling into Tower Folly, a converted oast house in Kent, she assembled her own studio and continued preliminary work on what is now known as Oramics, a system she began developing while still at the BBC. Similar in concept to Yevgeny Sholpo's Variophone optical synthesizer, the Oramics synthesizer encompasses a large, rectangular metal frame upon which pass ten synchronized strips of clear sprocketed 35mm film. Shapes and designs etched into the filmstrips are then read by photo-electric cells and transformed into sounds. Because the output was monophonic, multi-track tapes were required to create polyphonic textures. The flexibility of control over the nuances of sound production afforded by the relationship between graphics and audio signals nevertheless positioned Oramics as a viable and innovative approach to electronic music production, however, and Oram continued refining her principles across a series of installations and exhibitions. In 1961, she collaborated with film composer Georges Auric to score the Deborah Kerr horror feature The Innocents, and a year later completed her first LP, Electronic Sound Patterns, in addition to writing advertising jingles for brands including Nestea.

Oram's most significant work during the 1960s was created in collaboration with composer Thea Musgrave, most notably the pioneering Four Aspects, a tape composition that in approach and atmosphere uncannily anticipates by 15 years Brian Eno's ambient masterpiece Discreet Music. Musgrave later assisted Oram's tape contributions to the 1969 ballet Beauty and the Beast as well as the compositions "Soliloquy" and "From One to Another I," each written for solo instrument and tape (guitar and viola, respectively). A substantial grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation eventually enabled Oram to walk away from her commercial commitments, and within a few years of publishing her profoundly metaphysical 1972 book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, she even abandoned composition to devote all of her focus to advancing Oramics. She was quick to embrace computer technology, acquiring an Apple II computer in 1981 and with the assistance of programmer Steve Brett devising a simple digital equivalent to the Oramics hardware; six years later, she moved to the new Acorn Archimedes, teaching herself assembly language in the process. Between 1982 and 1989, Oram also taught weekly electronic music classes at Canterbury's Christ Church College. She suffered several debilitating strokes during the mid-'90s, and was forced to move into a nursing home. Oram died in relative anonymity on January 5, 2003, less than a week after her 78th birthday; as of this writing, the majority of her music remains unavailable.

Wikipedia:

Daphne Oram (31 December 1925 – 5 January 2003) was a British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of the "Oramics" technique for creating electronic sounds.

Early Life [edit]

Educated at Sherborne School For Girls, Oram was, from an early age, taught piano and organ as well as musical composition.

Career [edit]

Work at the BBC [edit]

In 1942 she was offered a place at the Royal College of Music but instead took up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and "music balancer" at the BBC. During this period she became aware of developments in "synthetic" sound and began experimenting with tape recorders. She also spent some time in the 1940s composing music, which remained unperformed, including an orchestal work entitled Still Point. In the 1950s she was promoted to become a music studio manager and, following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities for composing sounds and music, using electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming. In 1957 she was commissioned to compose music for the play Amphitryon 38. Using a sine wave oscillator, an early tape recorder and some self-designed filters, she produced the score from only electronic sources; the first of its kind at the BBC. Along with fellow electronic musician and BBC colleague Desmond Briscoe, she began to receive commissions for many other works - including a significant production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall. As demand grew for these electronic sounds, the BBC gave Oram and Briscoe a budget to establish the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in early 1958, where she was the first Studio Manager. In October of that year, she was sent by the BBC to the "Journées Internationales de Musique Expérimentale" at the Brussels World’s Fair (where Edgard Varèse demonstrated his Poème électronique). After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries and being unhappy at the BBC's music department's lack of interest, she decided to resign from the BBC less than one year after the workshop was opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own.

Oramics [edit]

In 1959 she installed her Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition in Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat, near Wrotham, Kent. Her output from the studio, mostly commercial, covered a far wider range than the Radiophonic Workshop, providing background music for not only radio and television but also theatre and short commercial films. She was also commissioned to provide sounds for installations and exhibitions. Other work from this studio included electronic sounds for Jack Clayton's 1961 horror film The Innocents, concert works including Four Aspects and collaborations with opera composer Thea Musgrave and Ivor Walsworth.

In February 1962, she was awarded a grant of £3550 from the Gulbenkian Foundation to support the developments and research of her "Oramics" drawn sound technique. This method of music composition and performance was intended by Oram to allow a composer to be able to draw an "alphabet of symbols" on paper and feed it through a machine that would, in turn, produce the relevant sounds on magnetic tape. A second Gulbenkian grant of £1000, awarded in 1965, enabled the Oramics composition machine to be completed. The first drawn sound composition using the machine, entitled "Contrasts Essonic", was recorded in 1968.

Other Achievements [edit]

Throughout her career she lectured on electronic music and studio techniques. In 1971 she wrote An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics which investigated electronic music in a philosophical manner. Besides being a musical innovator her other significant achievements include being the first woman to direct an electronic music studio, the first woman to set up a personal studio and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.

Death [edit]

In the 1990s she suffered two strokes and was forced to stop working, later moving to a nursing home. She died in 2003, aged 77.

Archive [edit]

After her death a large archive relating to her life's work was passed to the composer Hugh Davies. When Davies died in 2005 this material passed to Sonic Arts Network. Daphne Oram's family have now agreed that the archive will reside at the Music Department of Goldsmiths College in London where it will be made open for public access and ongoing research from February 2008 onward. In June 2008, a series of concerts and symposium at the Southbank Centre was held to celebrate the launch of the archive. This included a concert of newly reworked versions of material from the collection by music collage artist People Like Us.

In 2007, a compilation of her music, entitled Oramics, was released.

In 2008, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on her life was broadcast as part of the Sunday Feature strand entitled Wee Have Also Sound-Houses.

The Wire [edit]

A very detailed feature on Daphne Oram's musical philosophy was published in the August 2011 issue of The Wire magazine.

Click tribute [edit]

In its first show of 2012, the BBC's technology programme Click featured a piece about Daphne Oram and her synthesiser, mainly prompted by the three-part Oramics Machine being on display at the Science Museum, London, during a year-long exhibition on the history of electronic music. It showed the machine being installed in a large display cabinet, and described how it was no longer possible to play due to its fragile state; however, an interactive, virtual version of the machine has been created, which allows visitors to create their own compositions. The programme showed archive footage of Oram describing the process of what became 'Oramics', also showing her 'drawing' the music, then playing her machine. The piece was entirely positive and described her as an 'unsung hero' of electronic music.