For Too Long Relegated to the Footnotes of UK Cultural History, Daphne Oram

Issue !! » Autumn "#!# 28 !For too longreams relegated to the footnotes of UK cultural history, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary were unlikely, yet signiﬁcant, mid-twentieth century pioneers of electronic music. Author and musician Mark Brend traces the technical epiphanies and thwarted ambitions of two very British workers in sound. 29 Paci!c H-bomb tests of "#$%. It was broadcast in "#$$, by which time the drama department at the BBC was becoming more open to the new music, Issue !! » Autumn "#!# thanks mainly to Oram’s proselytizing. Blending tolling percussive hits with ominous drones, Cary made use of the full range of tape manipulation techniques (vari-speeding, tape reversing, splicing and so on) to create music that represented, without trying to literally recreate, the action of the play. Two years later, in "#$&, Oram !nally got her chance when she was asked to compose electronic music for a BBC TV play, Amphitryon $%. She did this by gathering equipment from various BBC studios after they had shut down for the night, taking it all up to an empty room on the sixth 'oor of Broadcasting House, and working from midnight until %am for several weeks. A number of other BBC commissions followed, and eventually the Drama Department (pointedly not the Music Department), decided that the BBC needed a specialist electronic music and sound studio, what would become known as the Radiophonic Workshop. Oram was its !rst manager. (e workshop was o)cially opened on April Fools’ day "#$*, in Room "+ at the BBC’s studio in Maida Vale, west London, equipped with substandard, out of date and sometimes malfunctioning equipment, surplus to the requirements of other departments. (e term ‘radiophonic’ including the Ondioline were demonstrated. Inspired by what she heard, was dreamt up to describe what a press release announcing the frustrated by BBC bureaucracy and craving creative freedom, Oram department’s launch called “… a new sound – suggestive of emotion, cashed in her pension, left the BBC and moved, in "#$#, to Tower Folly, a sensation, mood, rather than the literal meaning of a wind or the opening converted oast-house in Kent. (ere she built her own studio in a circular of a door. Created by mechanical means from basic sounds which may room at the base of the tower, and embarked on a freelance career as a Sixty years ago two things happened that heralded the birth of British Navy. During long hours surrounded by humming, bleeping electronic vary from the rustle of paper to a note from an electronic oscillator …” composer, inventor, producer, lecturer and writer. electronic music. A BBC ‘music balancer’ named Daphne Oram !nished equipment he, too, began to dream about electronic music. Leaving the By the time the Radiophonic Workshop was launched, Oram Cary, meanwhile, was becoming well-established. "#$$ had been composing a still unrecorded and unperformed +.-minute piece called navy in "#%,, he studied music at Trinity College, London, then began a and Cary were acquainted, and in October "#$* they visited the a pivotal year for him. Not only had he landed his !rst electronic Still Point, that was to have combined conventional orchestration with career as a composer, while assembling the equipment that would make Brussels World Fair to attend the Journées Internationales de Musique commission, he also made a breakthrough into !lms, with (non-electronic) pre-recorded instrumental sounds and live electronic treatments using up his studio (which included a disc-cutting lathe purchased with his Expérimentale. (is was a pivotal moment in the emergence of electronic music for the Ealing comedy &e Ladykillers. From that point on he moved then-standard radio equipment. At the same time, a freelance composer de-mob pay). Cary and Oram did not, at the time, know of each other’s music. (e cream of the European avant garde were present; Edgard easily between electronic and conventional composition, often combining called Tristram Cary was setting up the !rst electronic music studio in near simultaneous electronic epiphanies. It was several years before their Varèse’s Poème électronique was premiered; and electronic instruments the two, for concert hall, cinema, television and radio. His !lms included Britain – actually a collection of military surplus equipment on an old paths converged. dining room table in his home. In the immediate post-war era, electronic music barely existed. A Britain at the time was still in the grip of post-war austerity, with few composers – most notably Olivier Messiaen – had worked with one rationing in place until "#$%, and yet signs of change were everywhere. or more of the few electronic instruments then available (in Messiaen’s (e Festival of Britain ("#$") introduced radical modern architecture case, the Ondes Martenot), but in the main, electronic music was an to bombed-out London, positing a new era of technological progress idea, not a reality. (at changed in "#%*, with the appearance of the !rst symbolized by the Skylon, a rocket-like tower; the De Havilland Comet, commercially available magnetic tape recorders, developed from the the world’s !rst jet airliner went into service in "#$/; and Queen Elizabeth German Magnetophone. (e device’s potential for not only recording II’s televised coronation in "#$+ prompted a huge surge in television sound, but also manipulating it and so inventing new sounds, was quickly ownership. Cary and Oram personi!ed this state of 'ux, this reaching realized, and led to a surge of creativity. out of a constrained present into a bright new future, with their work Paris-based Pierre Schae-er, who had already been experimenting with combining a make-do-and-mend necessity with visionary radicalism. manipulated sound using wax disc recorders, pioneered musique concrète Completely unnoticed at the time, their prescient acts set in train a – considering all sound, including the traditionally non-musical, to have a sequence of events that led to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and EMS potential musical use. Schae-er and composer Pierre Henry founded the Synthesizers, marking them out as the progenitors of a peculiarly British Group de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) and in "#$" opened a new strand of electronic music only now being rediscovered and reassessed. studio, which included a tape recorder. Meanwhile, Werner Meyer-Eppler, Oram and Cary were contemporaries, both born in "#/$, Oram in Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were developing their own elektronische Devizes, Wiltshire, and Cary in Oxford. Cary was raised in a bohemian, musik, favouring the use of pure electronic tones as compositional building artistic milieu, the son of the modernist novelist Joyce Cary, while Oram blocks. In "#$+ they opened an electronic studio in Cologne. had a more conventional background. Both showed early musical promise. As news of these developments began to !lter through to London, In "#%/ a "&-year-old Oram turned down the chance to study at the Royal Oram in particular could only look on in frustrated envy. Both the Paris and Academy Of Music to join the BBC. A year later she read two books, Kurt Cologne studios were located in, and funded by radio stations. Oram and London’s Film Music ("#+,) and Leopold Stowkowski’s Music For All Of Us Cary, on the other hand, were dependent entirely on their own initiative, lone ("#%+), which triggered a fascination with the notion of electronic sound. operators without backers, funders or premises. In "#$+, Oram attempted to (at general interest took on a much more precise and unusual direction interest her employers in the BBC in investing in its own electronic music when, the following year, she was sent on a training course, during which resource, but got nowhere. She also tried, and failed, to build her own tape the tutor demonstrated a waveform visually represented on the screen of an recorder, while Cary constructed his own sound generators from the glut of oscilloscope. Could you, Oram wondered, do it the other way round? (at army surplus equipment going cheap in post-war Britain. is, draw a waveform that could somehow be turned into actual sound? She It was Cary, using this very equipment, who created what might well would spend the rest of her professional life trying to answer that question. be the !rst publicly-broadcast British electronic music, a score to a BBC Meanwhile, Cary was serving as a radar operator in the Royal radio play, &e Japanese Fishermen, about a !shing boat caught up in the 30 31 Quatermass and the Pit (!'()), and he had the distinction of providing electronic sound to accompany the Daleks when they !rst glided onto British TV in "#,+. In "#,&, he created the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, and in "#,# formed, with Peter Zinovie- and David Cockerell, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), co-designing the VCS+ (‘Putney’) synthesizer beloved of Pink Floyd and Brian Eno. In "#&%, Cary the machine, but it is unclear how e-ective it actually was. Increasingly moved to Australia, teaching at Adelaide University until "#*,. He then she turned her attention to perfecting it, and she stopped composing returned to freelance composition, taking commissions until his death by the early "#&.s. By this time electronic music was mainstream, and in /..*. It was a long and eminent career, recently celebrated by a Trunk synthesizer technology immeasurably more sophisticated than the test Records’ collection, It’s Time For Tristram Cary. oscillators and tape that Oram’s generation worked with. Working Oram, too, worked on a range of commissions at her studio, from alone and afraid of others stealing her ideas, Oram drifted away from ballet and art installations to adverts for Lego and tea. (e sinister the emerging community of electronic musicians, and without !nancial electronic tones in the !lm &e Innocents ("#,"), based on &e Turn Of backing and the involvement of anyone else, the Oramics system never the Screw, are hers.

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