Daphne Oram (December 31, 1925 - January 5, 2003), was a pioneering
British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of the
"Oramics" technique, a technique used to create electronic sounds.
Educated at Sherborne School For Girls, Oram was, from an early age,
taught piano and organ as well as musical composition. In 1943 she was
offered a place at the Royal College of Music but instead took up a
position as a "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 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. 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, 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.
In February 1962 she was awarded a grant of £3500 from the Gulbenkian
Foundation. These funds supported the development of the Oramics drawn
sound technique. A second Gulbenkian grant of £1000, awarded in 1965,
enabled the Oramics composition machine to be completed. The first drawn
sound compositions using the machine had been recorded by 1968.
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.
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. 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 2007, a compilation of her post-BBC music, entitled Oramics, was released.
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.
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