Once again from the vault, so as to catch up. I finished an original post that was supposed to be yesterday's or today's, and I have postponed it until next Wednesday the 8th, which is the day I am writing these words.
I am not placing this in the Warren Ellis category but of course this content came via Warren.
I love the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and I needed a post about it.
Here's some text, some images, and some documentaries. Enjoy.
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| Daphne Oram |
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| Richard Bird and Daphne Oram 1957 |
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/the-women-who-invented-electro-inside-the-bbc-radiophonic-worksh/
The women who invented electro: inside the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
or decades women were systematically sidelined at the BBC. The female voice was thought to lack the necessary gravitas for newsreading – being a discreet and efficient PA to a busy male director or producer was the best that could be hoped for.
Nowhere was this exclusion more rigidly enforced than in the technical aspects of programme-making where the hands-on world of studios, microphones and cameras was believed to be a man’s domain. Yet from an unexpected corner came a quiet revolution. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a pioneering studio for electronic music which flourished from 1958 until 1998. Its function was to provide incidental music and soundtracks for television and radio drama and documentaries. Despite its rigidly utilitarian brief it produced music of astonishing originality.
The soundtracks the Workshop produced became part of the soundtrack of people’s lives in the Fifties and Sixties. Who could forget the uncanny electronic score of the classic sci-fi series Quatermass and the Pit, or the stomach gurglings of Major Bloodnok, a stock character in the comedy series The Goon Show?
Among the composer/technicians working there was a remarkable visionary woman, Daphne Oram. In her childhood she showed a flair for inventing ingenious mechanical devices, and was also fascinated by electronic sound and by the microphone, which she declared had vast potential as a musical instrument.
These two passions came together in Still Point, scored for “Double Orchestra and five microphones”, which Oram composed in the late Forties. This has gone down in history as the first piece ever to combine live orchestral musicians with electronic transformations of the orchestral sound, recorded on to disc to be played live during performances. It was, however, never performed, and only a fragmentary score survives. The composer and “turntablist” Shiva Feshareki has fashioned it into a performing version, which receives its premiere as part of the Southbank Centre’s Deep Minimalism series this month.
Oram had to pursue her passion for electronic music late at night and at weekends, when the BBC studios were not in use. Thanks in large part to her tireless campaigning, the Radiophonic Workshop was finally set up in 1958, in the teeth of much scepticism from the BBC management. Oram was appointed co-director, but she soon lost patience with the studio’s limited brief, and the patronising attitude of the male managers. “They wanted my ideas,” she recalled later, “they didn’t want me.” She took herself off in disgust to create her own studio in a remote village in Kent. For decades she worked on her own system of sound-synthesis called Oramics, lectured on the joys of electronic music in schools and colleges, and wrote visionary essays about the nature of sound, and its potential to lead to higher states of consciousness. Were it not for Oram, there would arguably be no Human League or Aphex Twin.
Oram wasn’t the only creative woman working in the Radiophonic Workshop. There was also Maddalena Fagandini, who joined in 1960 and stayed for around 10 years. In her score for a radio version of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée she came up with some remarkably ingenious effects, such as brushed piano strings for the sound of the Princess, and the sound of smashing glass played backwards for the moment when characters pass through the mirror. This was typical of the suck-it-and-see methods of the Workshop. Fagandini once had to roll around in a gravel bath to create the sounds of a fight – much to the amusement of her male colleagues.
Fagandini and Oram were optimists, consumed by their enthusiasms, for whom male disparagement was a spur to go further rather than give up in despair. Delia Derbyshire, the third of the Radiophonic Workshop’s remarkable women, was a more troubled soul. A Cambridge graduate, she joined the workshop having been rejected from record companies such as Decca because of her gender. She applied her mathematical knowledge to analysing real sounds and reconstituting them with sine wave generators, in a way that would have won the admiration of avant-garde electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, if they had heard of her – which they hadn’t, because Workshop composers, male or female, toiled away in complete anonymity.
It was Derbyshire who actually created the most famous piece that ever emerged from the Workshop, the theme tune to Doctor Who. She did it by taking a simple score by Ron Grainer and transforming it into the uncanny electronic masterpiece we know, using methods that she took care never to reveal. Yet it was Grainer who got the credit and 100 per cent of the royalties – much to his own embarrassment. It was no surprise that Derbyshire became restless at the BBC, a sign of the depression that dogged her life. She left in 1973, and after a spell in a private studio worked in a bookshop in Cumbria and later for British Gas. Only at the end of her life did she return to electronic music, encouraged by the enthusiasm for her work shown by young musicians such as Sonic Boom.
By any standards these three women were extraordinary creative spirits. So why are their names not saluted in histories of modern music? The institutional sexism of the BBC in the Fifties and Sixties is only part of the explanation. The deeper reason is that the story of modernism was always rendered as a tale of heroic males, venturing forth into strange seas of artistic expression. In electronic music it was always Stockhausen or Pierre Schaeffer who were placed in the spotlight. Now at last the three women of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop are emerging from the shadows.
http://120years.net/oramicsdaphne-oramuk1959-2/
‘Oramics’ Daphne Oram. UK, 1959.
The technique of Oramics was developed by the composer and electronic engineer Daphne Oram in the UK during the early 1960s. It consisted of drawing onto a set of ten sprocketed synchronised strips of 35mm film which covered a series of photo-electric cells that in turn generated an electrical charge to control the frequency, timbre, amplitude and duration of a sound. This technique was similar to the work of Yevgeny Sholpo’s “Variophone” some years earlier in Leningrad and in some ways to the punch-roll system of the RCA Synthesiser. The output from the instrument was only monophonic relying on multi-track tape recording to build up polyphonic textures.
Oram worked at the BBC from 1942 to 1959 where she established the Radiophonic Workshop with Desmond Briscoe. She resigned from the BBC in 1959 to set up her own studio the ‘Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition’ in a converted oast-house in Wrotham, Kent. With the help of the engineer Graham Wrench, she built “with an extremely tight budget and a lot of inverted, lateral thinking” the photo-electrical equipment she christened ‘Oramics’ which she used to compose and record commercial music for not only radio and television but also theatre and short commercial films.
“There was an octagonal room,” remembers Graham, “where she’d set up her studio, but on a board covering a billiard table in an adjoining reception room was displayed the electronics for Oramics. There wasn’t very much of it! She had an oscilloscope and an oscillator that were both unusable, and a few other bits and pieces — some old GPO relays, I remember. Daphne didn’t seem to be very technical, but she explained that she wanted to build a new system for making electronic music: one that allowed the musician to become much more involved in the production of the sound. She knew about optical recording, as used for film projectors, and she wanted to be able to control her system by drawing directly onto strips of film. Daphne admitted the project had been started some years before, but no progress had been made in the last 12 months. I said I knew how to make it work, so she took me on. I left my job with the Medical Research Council and started as soon as I could.”“Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer’ Sound on Sound magazine Steve Marshall february 2009
The attraction of this technique was a direct relation of a graphic image to the audio signal and even though the system was monophonic, the flexibility of control over the nuances of sound production was unmatched in all but the most sophisticated analogue voltage controlled synthesisers. Daphne Oram continued to use the process throughout the sixties producing work for film and theatre including; “Rockets in Ursa Major”(1962), “Hamlet”(1963) and “Purple Dust” (1964).
Sources
http://daphneoram.org
http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/?artist&id=749
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb09/articles/oramics.htm
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.05 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1401 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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