An Individual Note
Co-curation with Ian Stonehouse of concert programme of the work of Daphne Oram
6 February 2025, Contrechamps, Auditorium Ansermet, Geneva, Switzerland
A concert of works by the composer Daphne Oram, co-curated with Ian Stonehouse as part of the Contrechamps series at Auditorium Ansermet, Geneva on 6 February 2025. Oram’s tape works were spatialised over a D&B Soundscape system within the Auditorium Ansermet. The programme notes for the concert follow.
Daphne Oram: An Individual Note
Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was a British composer and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She invented the ‘Oramics Machine,’ a combined sound synthesiser and sequencer which allowed composers to draw and control electronic sound synthesis. She was the first composer to be commissioned to provide electronic music for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), producing the soundtrack for the television drama Amphitryon 38 (1957). In 1958 she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, becoming its first director and an indelible impetus on the work produced throughout its history. Oram left the Workshop in 1959, establishing one of the first independent British electronic music studios, at Tower Folly, Kent, from where she devoted herself to ‘Oramics,’ her drawn sound technique. Not only is Oramics one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, but it is audiovisual – the composer draws on a synchronised set often 35mm film strips which overlay photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency and duration of sound.
Oram supported her work on Oramics through commissions, including concert pieces, advertisements, the electronic soundtrack for Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1964), the EMI release Electronic Sound Patterns (1972), and collaborations with film maker Geoffrey Jones, such as the Oscar nominated British Transport film Snow (1963).
Alongside her studio work, Oram was a researcher with an avid interest in the science and philosophy of sound. She wrote research papers, gave lectures on electronic music at universities, theatres and festivals, and published the book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972), which was republished in 2016, giving new generations of composers and electronic musicians access to Oram’s unique and radical perspective.
After Oram’s death in 2003, her tape collection and papers moved via composer Hugh Davies and the Sonic Arts Network (now Sound and Music) to the Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London, where they are now looked after by the Daphne Oram Trust. The Oramics Machine is preserved by the Science Museum in London where it has most recently been displayed as the centrepiece in Oramics to Electronica, an exhibition on the history of British electronic music.
PROGRAMME
1. Four Aspects (1960); 7’15” mono.
Created a year after Oram resigned from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in London, the experimental studio she’d co-founded and helped to design. Oram described Four Aspects as “a study in electronic tone colour from pure tones to abundant complexity… Electronic music specifically designed to be a simple bridge with conventional music”, with a simple A-B-A-coda form (the four aspects of the title) and tonic/dominant chords built upon lower frequencies of the harmonic series.
2. Episode Metallic (1965); 5’27” stereo.
Composed to accompany the futuristic kinetic sculpture Nucleus by Andrew Bobrowski, which was installed in Mullard House (home of Mullard Electronics) in London in December 1965. The 4-track tape also included electronic cues for automatic lighting changes upon the sculpture. The source material is derived from a Trinidadian steel drum or steelpan, manipulated and treated on tape, and intercut with some of Oram’s own recordings made in Trinidad (see Trinidad & Tobago later in the programme).
3. Snow (film) (1963); 7’47” mono.
Edited and directed by Geoffrey Jones, with music effects by Daphne Oram. The original footage was shot around the UK during the harsh winter of 1962-3, the coldest for almost 200 years. Daphne’s musical effects include meticulous rising tape speed changes and filtering of the music, which is an arrangement by Johnny Hawksworth of ‘Teen Beat', originally recorded by American jazz musician & drummer Sandy Nelson. Snow received at least 14 major awards on its release, and an Oscar nomination in 1965. Produced for British Transport Films.
4. Pompie Ballet (1971); 3’29” mono.
Pompie Ballet showcases the ‘Oramics’ machine, an electro-mechanical and opto-electronic musical device conceived, co-designed and commissioned by Daphne Oram between 1962 and 1969. This piece draws together a number of hand drawn Oramics sequences, the only sound source present throughout, each section possessing variations in timbre and amplitude.
INTERMISSION
5. Bird of Parallax (1972); 12’50” mono.
A composition written for a ballet performance, a combination of sounds generated by the Oramics Machine, field recordings, tape montage and musique concrète techniques. Footage exists of Oram at work in her Tower Folly home studio in Kent, England, creating the melody that appears a few minutes through a complex sequence of short tape edits.
6. Trinidad & Tobago (film excerpt) (1964); 9’00” excerpt, mono.
Film edited and directed by Geoffrey Jones. Music effects by Daphne Oram.
An excerpt from Geoffrey Jones’ rhythmic film work Trinidad & Tobago. Oram worked closely with Jones on this film, her extraordinary tape manipulations providing the rhythmic template for Jones’ editing. Oram made the piece by travelling to Trinidad to make one of the earliest known tape recordings of Carnival, recording renowned local musicians, steel pan players, and making unique field recordings around the islands.
7. 2001 Effects (1968); 5’49” stereo.
An excerpt from Oram’s musical ‘effects’ created for Stanley Kubrick’s legendary science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oram’s material wasn’t included in the final version but one can readily imagine it alongside the sequence where astronaut Dave Bowman (played by Keir Dullea) is attempting to return to the Discovery spaceship with the body of a deceased colleague, only for the HAL 9000 computer - the artificial intelligence protagonist - to refuse to cooperate.
8. Brociliande (1969); 10’08” mono.
Brociliande is titled after the legendary enchanted forest (Brocéliande, Brécheliant or Brécilien) which appears in numerous literary sources, including Alfred Tennyson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Arthurian legend - the wizard Merlin and the enchantress Morgan Le Fey were said to dwell there, with unfaithful knights forever lost in the Val sans retour (Vale of No Return). Brocéliande is widely believed to be present day Paimpont Forest in Brittany, France.
9. Pulse Persephone (1965); 4’00” stereo.
A commission for The Treasure of the Commonwealth exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. A more conventional sounding piece of modern music but with unusual instrumentation - bass drum, koto, flute, vibraphone, tape effects and electronics - evoking the mythic Persephone, queen of the underworld and goddess of springtime, whose cyclical return symbolises immortality.
(text written by Ian Stonehouse and James Bulley)
With gratitude to Serge Vuille & Ludivine Chopard at Contrechamps, and to Matthieu Baumann (lighting), Ladislav Agabekov (sound engineering) and all at the Auditorium Ansermet for your hospitality.