Daphne Oram Created the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Electronic Music (1957)

To the ques­tion of who cre­at­ed elec­tron­ic music, there can be no one answer. The for­m’s emer­gence took decades, begin­ning with the ear­li­est elec­tron­ic instru­ments in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, devel­op­ing toward the first music pro­duced sole­ly from elec­tron­ic sources in the ear­ly 1950s, and arriv­ing at such artis­tic des­ti­na­tions as Wendy Car­los’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach. Dri­ving this evo­lu­tion­ary process were artists of a vari­ety of nation­al­i­ties and musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties, a group includ­ing sev­er­al espe­cial­ly unig­nor­able fig­ures. Take, for instance, Daphne Oram, the com­pos­er and co-founder of BBC’s sto­ried Radio­phon­ic Work­shop who cre­at­ed the very first piece of elec­tron­ic music ever com­mis­sioned by the net­work.

Oram com­posed that music in 1957, the year before the estab­lish­ment of the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. She did it to score a BBC pro­duc­tion of Jean Girau­doux’s play Amphit­ry­on 38, using an elec­tron­ic sine wave oscil­la­tor, a tape recorder, and a few fil­ters — a syn­the­siz­er, in oth­er words, of her own cre­ation.

Expe­ri­ence had posi­tioned her well to design and com­pose with such a device and the process­es it demand­ed: she grew up study­ing the piano, organ, and com­po­si­tion, and as a teenag­er she’d tak­en a job as a stu­dio engi­neer at the BBC, an envi­ron­ment that gave her access to all the lat­est tech­nolo­gies for cre­at­ing and record­ing sound. Despite hav­ing reject­ed Still Point, an acoustic-elec­tron­ic piece she com­posed for turnta­bles, five micro­phones, and a “dou­ble orches­tra,” the BBC aired Amphit­ry­on 38 with her score full of “sounds unlike any ever heard before.”

That’s how Oram’s music is described in the 1950s tele­vi­sion clip above, a vis­it to the “coun­try stu­dio in Kent” where, “unlike the tra­di­tion­al com­pos­er, she uses no musi­cal instru­ments and no musi­cians.” And indeed, “she needs no con­cert hall or opera house to put on a per­for­mance: she can do it on a tape recorder.” As out­landish as Oram’s set­up might have looked to BBC view­ers at home back then, the nar­ra­tor informs them that “already, elec­tron­ic music is being used in films, tele­vi­sion, and the the­ater,” and that some peo­ple even think her col­lages of unnat­ur­al sounds will be “the music of the future.” Vin­di­cat­ing that notion is the odd famil­iar­i­ty every elec­tron­ic musi­cian today will feel when they watch Oram at work among the devices of her stu­dio, sur­round­ed as they them­selves hap­pi­ly are by those devices’ tech­no­log­i­cal descen­dants.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via reak­tor­play­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear a 20 Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Record­ings by Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Pauline Oliv­eros (RIP)

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

Hear Elec­tron­ic Lady­land, a Mix­tape Fea­tur­ing 55 Tracks from 35 Pio­neer­ing Women in Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.