Bulley, James. 2016. ’Progress Music’: Daphne Oram, Geoffrey Jones and ’Trinidad and Tobago’. Bricks From The Kiln(2), [Article] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/18944/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address:
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[email protected] 4 PROGRESS MUSIC * 5 James Bulley On a Saturday morning in 2012 I hunched over a desk in the reading room of Goldsmiths Special Collections, digitising one of the last boxes of pho- tographs in the Daphne Oram Archive.1 The slides were dirty and scratched, and the scans came up on screen in blocks. Decades of deterioration had rendered ruin on the set of holiday photographs. A dusted narrative unfolded from plane window, palm-lined shore and road, continuing through fields of sugar cane, cocoa plantations and city streets. Amongst the Caribbean landscapes were two whitewashed shots of the British composer Daphne Oram, seated on a beach. In the first she looks away, inspecting the undercarriage of a turtle (fig.12), in the second, one of the last of the sequence, she sits alone, centred, smiling at the camera (fig.13). Daphne Oram was one of Britain’s earliest and most innovative composers of electronic music.