BORN 31 DECEMBER
Daphne Oram was a British composer and electronic musician. She was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, and was a pioneer of musique concrète in the UK. As a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she became a central figure in the evolution of electronic music.
She was the creator of the Oramics technique for creating electronic sounds using drawn sound. Besides being a musical innovator, she was the first woman to independently direct and set up a personal electronic music studio, and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.
Oram was born to James and Ida Oram on 31 December 1925 in Wiltshire, England. Educated at Sherborne School For Girls, she was, from an early age, taught piano and organ as well as musical composition. In 1942, Oram was offered a place at the Royal College of Music but instead took up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and "music balancer" at the BBC. She also dedicated time in the 1940s composing music, including an orchestral work entitled Still Point. In the 1950s, she was promoted to become a music studio manager.
In October 1958, Oram 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 and being unhappy at the BBC music department's continued refusal to push electronic composition into the foreground of their activities, she decided to resign from the BBC less than one year after the workshop had opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own.
Immediately after leaving the BBC in 1959, Oram began setting up her Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition in Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat, near Wrotham, Kent.
Daphne Oram envisioned spatial sound treatment and amplification in performance before sound terms like "spatial sound" were used. Her tape-manipulation techniques at the Radiophonic Workshop became influential across the globe, across many genres over many decades. Her work at the Radiophonic Workshop also helped pave the way for Delia Derbyshire, who arrived at the BBC in 1960 and later co-created the original Doctor Who theme music.
As the creator of Oramics she helped lay the foundation for modern electronic music production. She furthered music philosophy in her writings, and dedicated time to considering the human element in connection to sound and resonant frequencies. In her unfinished manuscript, The Sound of the Past, a Resonating Speculation, she postulated that ancient civilizations might have done this to a highly evolved degree. In a letter to Sir George Trevelyan, Oram expressed hope that her wide-ranging work on Oramics would plant seeds that would mature in the 21st century.
The Daphne Oram Creative Arts Building at Canterbury Christ Church University was opened in 2019.
