Daphne Oram
| Daphne Oram | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Daphne Blake Oram |
| Born |
31 December 1925 Devizes, Wiltshire, UK |
| Died | 5 January 2003 (aged 77) Maidstone, Kent, UK |
| Genres | Electronic music |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, electronic musician |
| Instruments | Musique concrète, Synthesisers |
| Associated acts | BBC Radiophonic Workshop |
| Notable instruments | |
| Oramics synthesiser | |
Daphne Oram (31 December 1925 – 5 January 2003) was a British composer and electronic musician. Oram was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound and was a pioneer of "musique concrete"
She was the creator of the Oramics technique for creating electronic sounds, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a central figure in the evolution of electronic music. Besides being a musical innovator, she was the first woman to direct an electronic music studio, the first woman to set up a personal electronic music studio and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.[1]
Oram was born to James and Ida Oram December 31, 1925 in Wiltshire, England. Educated at Sherborne School For Girls, Oram was, from an early age, taught piano and organ as well as musical composition. Her father was the President of the Wiltshire Archeological Society in the 1950s and Daphne's childhood home was within 10 miles of the stone circles of Avebury and 20 miles from Stonehenge.
In 1942 Oram 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. Often staying after hours, she was known to experiment with tape recorders late into the night. She recorded sounds on to tape, and then cut, spliced and looped, slowed them down, sped up, and played them backwards. She also dedicated time in the 1940s composing music, including an orchestral work entitled Still Point.Still Point was a ground breaking piece for turntables, "double orchestra" and five microphones. Still Point is held to be the first composition to combine acoustic orchestration with live electronic manipulation. Rejected by the BBC and never performed, Still Point remained unheard for 70 years. On June 24, 2016 the London Contemporary Orchestra performed Still Point for the first time. In the 1950s, she was promoted to become a music studio manager and, following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, she 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. She created this piece using a sine wave oscillator, a tape recorder and some self-designed filters, thereby producing the first wholly electronic score in BBC history. 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. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was focused on creating sound effects and theme music for all of the corporations output, including the science fiction serial Quatermass and the Pit and the radio comedy series The Goon Show. In October of 1958, Oram 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 music department's continued refusal to push electronic composition into the foreground of their activiites, 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.
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