Daphne Oram obituary
- Publication: The Times
- Date: 2003-01-24
- Author:
- Page: 40
- Language: English
Daphne Oram, inventor of new sounds, was born on December 31, 1925.
She died on January 5, 2003, aged 77.
Composer whose fascination with weird and wonderful sounds helped to establish the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop
Such have been the technological changes of the past five decades that it sometimes seems that even the Tardis would be hard put to cross the gulf that separates us from the early days of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Such was the effect of this hive of electronic experiment that its outlandish creations, such as the Dr Who theme, are now the synthesized stuff of any dancefloor. We should not forget the inspiring woman who helped to bring all this about, Daphne Oram.
She was born into a Wiltshire family with technological and musical leanings (one brother, John, created the dentist's day-ray lamp still in use above the horizontal chair), and she played piano from an early age, suffusing the house with her music. After studying at Sherborne, she went to the BBC in 1943 as a trainee music balancer.
At a very early stage, while being shown the waveforms of music and sound, she expressed her determination to work back from such patterns to create new sounds.
To this end she garnered pieces of equipment from empty studios during the quiet of the night shift and linked them in various ways to set about the creation of abstract sound (returning everything to its rightful place by dawn).
From this work with magnetic tape came the creation in the early Fifties of a workshop affiliated to the Third Programme's music department. (Oram herself composed the first electronic soundtrack for a BBC television play, Amphitryon 38.) By 1958, however, it was decided that the workshop should be taken over by the drama department. A production of Beckett's All That Fall marked the debut of these strange sounds.
An extraordinary range of pieces followed, many of them short, from such composers as John Baker, David Cain and the amazing Delia Derbyshire, around whom something of a cult has grown since her death two years ago. The work-shop produced well-known pieces such as the themes for Dr Who and Tomorrow's World but also many that surfaced as local radio jingles or background tracks to children's programmes.
Although the composers were friends of Oram's, she was chagrined by the separation of the workshop from the music department and left in 1959 to try to make her way with her own projects such as film scores. As a result, most accounts of the workshop overlook her role as a guiding, instigatory spirit, and she was always too diffident to claim her due.
Her move brought many more people within her ambit as she established herself in a freezing converted oast house at Wrotham in Kent, where her clutter was augmented by a menagerie of cats, goats and chickens. She was no eccentric recluse, however.
She was fully engaged on building what she called the Oramics machine, with technical help from her brother John and funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
The idea was to create a machine that "worked by means of extrapolating sound from lines marked upon strips of 35mm film", but the project was overtaken by computers.
Film work proved elusive (although Oram worked with Auric on The Innocents), and her income was never more than modest, but among the compositions of hers to receive public performance were Pulse Persephone at the 1959 Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition at Burlington House, which was later made into the ballet Alpha Omega; collaborations with Ivan Walworth on the 1969 piano and tape piece Contrasts Essconic and the 1972 Sardonica, as well as some with Thea Musgrave, such as Soliloquy, for guitar and tape, and the 1969 ballet Beauty and the Beast, which was performed in Edinburgh.
Other diverse work included music for Geoffrey Jones's prizewinning documentary Snow, for Fred Hoyle's production at the Mermaid of Rockets in Ursa Major, and an LP from the BBC's Listen, Move and Dance series for schools.
Oram's freewheeling spirit and teeming brain brought her many friendships and made her a natural teacher in the more formal setting of the University of Canterbury for several years in the Sixties. She also lectured widely.
With bright blue eyes, she had a palpable attraction, a magnetism. Her oscillation between rest and excitement gave her an affinity with such phenomena as ley lines, standing stones and dousing. Such matter informs her only book, An Individual Note of Music: Sound and Electronics (1972), which captures her personality.
In surveying 20th-century music, not only in its electronic forms, she alludes naturally to Pope, Montaigne, Fourier, St Paul, Coleridge and Kant. She looks towards "a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, com-puters will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music, and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics".
A particular favourite of hers was Francis Bacon's Utopian vision in The New Atlantis (1620), which posits "diverse Strange and Artificiall Eccho's, Reflecting the Voice many times. We have also means to convey Sounds in Trumpets and Pipes, in Strange Lines, and Distances". She saw in this an anticipation of Ligeti, Krenek, Zumbach, Kagel and Zinovieff.
She was open to all experience, and no prude: for many years, she had a liaison with a dashing man while enjoying the friendship of his amenable wife; she was devastated by his death.
Appearing at many festivals, she also organised music, of non-electronic kinds, for performance in nursing homes, and was active in the Performing Right Society.
That organisation came to her aid in 1994, when she suffered a stroke. This perhaps meant that she was unaware of the sad news, two years later, that the Radiophonic Workshop had been closed.
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