Daphne Oram

Daphne Blake Oram (31 December 1925 – 5 January 2003) was a British composer and electronic musician. She was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, and was an early practitioner of musique concrète in the UK. As a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she was central to the development of British electronic music. Her uncredited scoring work on the 1961 film The Innocents helped to pioneer the electronic soundtrack.

Oram was the creator of the Oramics technique for graphical sound. She was the first woman to independently direct and set up a personal electronic music studio, and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument. In her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971) she explored philosophical themes related to acoustics and electronic composition.

Oram was born to James and Ida Oram on 31 December 1925 in Devizes, Wiltshire, England. Her childhood home was within 10 miles of the stone circles of Avebury and 20 miles from Stonehenge. Her father was the President of the Wiltshire Archeological Society in the 1950s. Educated at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset, she was taught piano, organ and musical composition from an early age.

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. One of her job responsibilities was "shadowing" live concerts with a pre-recorded version so the broadcast would go on if interrupted by "enemy action". Other job duties included creating sound effects for radio shows and mixing broadcast levels. During this period she became aware of developments in electronic sound and began experimenting with tape recorders, often staying after hours to work 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.

Oram also dedicated time in the 1940s to composing music, including an electroacoustic work entitled Still Point. This was an innovative piece for turntables, "double orchestra" and five microphones. Many^[who?] consider Still Point the first composition that combined acoustic orchestration with live electronic manipulation. Rejected by the BBC and never performed during Oram's lifetime, Still Point remained unheard for 70 years; on 24 June 2016 composer Shiva Feshareki and the London Contemporary Orchestra performed it for the first time. Following the discovery of the finalised score, the premiere of the revised version of Still Point was performed at the BBC Proms in London on 23 July 2018 by Feshareki and James Bulley with the LCO.

In the 1950s, Oram was promoted to a music studio manager at the BBC. Following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, she began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities, utilizing electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming. In 1957 she was commissioned to compose music for a production of the play Amphitryon 38. She created this piece using a sine wave oscillator, a tape recorder and 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 production of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall (1957). 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 workshop was focused on creating sound effects and theme music for all of the BBC's output, including the science fiction TV serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59) and the sounds of "Major Bloodnok's Stomach" for the radio comedy series The Goon Show.

In October 1958, Oram was sent by the BBC to the "Journées Internationales de Musique Expérimentale" at Expo 58 in Brussels, where Edgard Varèse presented his electroacoustic work Poème électronique in the Philips Pavilion (alongside Pavilion architect Iannis Xenakis' piece Concret PH). After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries, and unhappy with the BBC's continued refusal to push electronic composition into the foreground of their activities, she decided to resign from the Radiophonic Workshop less than one year after it had opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own.

In 1965, Oram produced the piece Pulse Persephone for the "Treasures of the Commonwealth" exhibition at the Royal Academy of the Arts.