Warped Passages: Daphne Oram

Oramics (2007) ...

A founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, engineer, musician, composer and inventor...

Daphne Oram documentary - Wee Have Also Sound-Houses ...

Dr Faustus Suite ...

" 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." ...allmusic.com ...

Bird of Parallax ...

"The development of electronic music in mainland Europe, which preceded developments in Britain, came out of the demands from national radio networks for an added dimension to the new post-war ‘surreal’, play-writing styles from the likes of Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Frederick Bradnum and Giles Cooper. Concurrently magnetic tape gradually came into common usage., giving rise to new approaches to making music. It was now possible to piece music together as a puzzle of ‘pieces of sound’ or ‘sections of magnetic tape.’ Sound sources could be anything at all, as music reached beyond the confines of orchestral, traditional instruments, and conventional notions of form and structure.
She developed an interest early in her career for electronic music, and was particularly interested in Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète, his work on disk and with magnetic tape at the Radiodiffisuion Télévision Française in Paris. Whilst Britain was noticeably dragging its feet with regard to acceptance of this new electronic music, Oram is known to have visited the Paris studios of the R.T.F. when working at the BBC and subsequently embarked on a relentless campaign for equipment to be made available to develop new techniques for sound design and electronic music." ... oramarchive ...