Latest / Electronic Music / Daphne Oram - Electronic Music Pioneer
Transcript
- Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about Electronic Music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this special episode, we are honoring Daphne Oram, a British pioneer of electronic music on what would have been her hundredth year. Daphne Oram was a composer in the era of tape and musique concrète She was also a thinker, an educator, an inventor, a sound engineer. In 1958, Daphne co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a pioneering electronic music department, producing sound and music for the BBC up until the 1990s. Daphne left the BBC shortly after it opened however, to set up her own independent studio, making music for adverts, commissions, writing a book about electronic music called An Individual Note, which I strongly recommend, inventing the Oramics compositional machine and much more. We're going to unpack the fascinating work and legacy of this visionary woman with passionate Oram archive experts and artists themselves, Sarah Angliss, Ian Stonehouse, James Bully and Shiba rei. Here's a taste of Daphne's music to get you in the zone. She made lots of lush, ambient music, but I've chosen this quirky piece called Power Tools created in 1965 as part of a soundtrack for a commercial film and it does indeed feature power tools. Sarah Angliss and Ian Stonehouse, welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast and thank-you for joining me today as we delve into the world of Daphne Oram upon her centenary celebrations. Sarah, I guess you're coming from more of a composer, researcher, machine maker yourself kind of perspective, whereas Ian, I'm going to credit you as being our Daphne Oram archive expert. Let's start with the obvious of who was Daphne Oram and here I'm not talking about a Google Wikipedia entry, I'm talking about through your lens as the experts and passionate, knowledgeable people about Daphne's work. Sarah, do you want to get us started? Yeah, I mean, it's such a huge question. Who was Dahne Oram? It's almost impossible to know where to start and so starting with the obvious I suppose, She was a composer, she worked with electronics, she was one of the pioneers of electronic music in the UK and she was also a deep thinker about sound and an inventor and so some of her ideas about sound, she put into a machine that she invented, the Oramics machine, that enabled her to find really expressive ways to work with sound, electronic sound by drawing what we'd call envelopes these days and waveforms and it is an astonishing piece of work even to imagine this thing from scratch that the Oraamics machine, it's somewhere between a sequencer and a sampler. That's how I describe it to somebody who sees it new. But imagine that, but all mechanical and sort of light driven where you are drawing on celluloid film. And so she didn't only imagine this thing, she worked with an engineer, Graham Wrench and they actually built this thing and made astounding music with it. So she's everything - she's an inventor, she's a composer, her music is really, really extraordinarily high quality, sort of compositionally and she was inventing the music from scratch. Like a lot of her peers at the time, you know, they had this equipment that was, a lot of the equipment that she worked on, as was very much the case in the UK because she was working during the war and sort of post-war, it was, if you like, you know, probably like the detritus of the Second World War. A lot of it, you know, she was working with the remains of old studios, you know, old radar equipment and things like that, like many people and she made this world from scratch. That just sounds extraordinary today. It sounds timeless and wonderful. And for me, the other important thing about her is that she had a very sort of porous relationship between the technological and the mystical, which I think is a very, very British sensibility in electronic sound, and it certainly pervades my sound. My second big piece I'm writing at the moment is about something techno spiritual and I keep finding myself coming back to Oram's thinking and Oram's work. So she's a really complex character. She can't, I can't sum her up in one sentence, you know, there isn't a sort of bullet point and sort of Wikipedia entry, but she's this person that, yeah, multifaceted and just a brilliant thinker about sound and bold, you know, bold to even express those thoughts. Because you know, yeah, I'm sure there were many, many thinkers, but whether you actually dare to commit it to paper and try and publish it or get it out there is is another thing, isn't it? And such high quality as well, because there were plenty of people experimenting, you know, there's been plenty written about people that were experimenting with tape. I should have pointed out that she also set up at her own studio. So she started off, she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, that's the sort of Wikipedia entry version of her life, she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but you know, she specified the studio. She was pushing and pushing for to do more and more all the time. You know, she wanted to work with multi-tracking when it wasn't even really considered a thing and she found her own way to do sort of guerilla multi-tracking late at night by pulling all the tape recorders together in Maida Vale. And then when she found that it wasn't adventurous enough for her, she left the BBC Radiophonic workshop pretty soon after she'd sort of put it together and spent a bit of time there and set up her own studio at home in Tower Folly and so it was one of the first independent electronic music studios and she continued making wonderful work there and collaborating with other musicians. I mean, I think she lives right across the board. She holds her own as a classical composer, she holds her own as a composer of sort of contemporary electronics, everything. And, you know, she holds her own as a technologist working with sound. So for me, she's a complete inspiration because I'm a composer, sound designer, I work with sound all the time, I've always worked with electronics to sort of get inside sound and she was doing it decades before the rest of us. Lovely. Ian, so your lens, through your lens. Gosh, actually what I was just thinking, when Sarah was speaking is I've always thought of Daphne in the same way that I think of people like Jules Verne or HG Wells, or, I dunno, the sort of, she's on this cusp between sort of science fiction and technology and also I suppose almost sort of Arthurian legend because I mean, she and her parents were all members of the Wiltshire Archeological Society. Yes, that's right. My father was the chairman for many years and she grew up 20 miles from Stonehenge and there is an, there's an unpublished text of hers called the Sound of the Past, where she, it's this follow up book that she was writing towards the end of the seventies after An Individual Note came out in '72, which is of course a very particular and very philosophical take on the world of electronic music and a very bold thing to have written and it makes a lot of the other books about electronic music read like telephone directories because they're so dry and I've always liked that about Daphne's approach, is that she doesn't add up and I think that's one of her strengths is that you can't, you know, you can't sort of put her into a pigeonhole, she covers so many bases. As Sarah was saying, I've always liked musicians and composers who don't fit in and to do things entirely on their own terms and also it's very affirming as well, the way that Daphne approaches making music because it's all on her terms. I work with her archive all the time, I'm based at Goldsmiths and I was looking at some of her log books recently where she's, Sarah was talking about her bringing tape machines together in the dead of the night. There's a piece that she, I think it's the first piece she wrote that was the, um, fiery in 38, which is the first piece of electronic music for tv. Um, and the log book for that, she's working from 10 till four in the morning, night after night in the BBC, corralling these tape machines into the one room. And as someone who often works through the night doing something similar with software, it's just so reassuring to know that, well, if Daphne worked that way, then I must be doing it right because, you know, um, everyone else is asleep and you are busy doing your thing. That's the lens that I see her through. But a lot of it is to do with the archiving as well. I mean, there are so many treasures in her archive. But, uh, yes, she's, she's a remarkable person. There's nobody really like her in, in British music. Also, I guess we haven't mentioned Francis Bacon yet. I mean, uh, in, in Duffy's collection at Goldsmiths, we have a first edition from the 16 hundreds of, of Francis Bacon's work, new Atlantis, which is a sort of proto, uh, speculative fiction. It's about a. Uh, it posits the idea of a, of an advanced civilization discovered on the other side of the world in the Pacific. This is round about the era of McAllen and, and, and Drake going around the world. And there's an astonishing section, though, where it talks about sound houses. We, we have also sound houses, and this is a section of the text that Daphne copied out and put on the wall of the Radiophonic workshop. It's basically a. Sort of pneumatic version of a recording studio where sound is piped around and mixed and processed. I mean, where, where Bacon got this idea from? I don't know, but. I mean, that's the next sort of stop on the Daphne or on bus route is, is going back to, to, you know, Elizabeth in England and this idea of, of sound houses and, and you know, this and this, this text that she has, I mean, we have a copy on the wall now in the studio at Goldsmith. It's, it's a nice thing to have on the wall because it makes people think twice about where are we, you know, when you come into this studio, it's not meant to just be a very dry. Music technology place, it's a place for the soul to be, to be nurtured. And I think this is another aspect of Daphne's work. That I, I always come back to is it's, it is very nourishing music and, and I mean everything around it. Um, even, even though it, it, some of her work is quite hard to comprehend initially. There's so many vital juices and, and sort of vitamins in there. Yeah. Yeah. Well it's like Delia, Delia is very frequency based, and I think what's exciting about that is the decolonization aspect of that as well, and the, and the, and the starting new sound world when it's frequency not pitch based, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you, I'll give you the quote from Bacon's book. Um, we also have sound houses. Where we practice and demonstrate all sounds in their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds, diverse instruments of music, likewise to you, unknown, some sweeter than any you have together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. So what's really inch? Sting. 'cause I'm, I'm doing a PhD alongside my composition at the moment. Uh, um, Imperial in the Augmented Instruments lab is, we're talking about this thing, which is very sound on sound, uh, conversation to have about what you'd call Klaviyo centrism, which is what Professor and Andrew McPherson's really into, which is this idea that. Yeah, we, we, we, you know, we took the classic story, the Moog, they put a keyboard on the Moog, basically made it more sellable and the rest is history. Mm. But what's interesting is that, that that's that idea of Klaviyo centrism, it sort of got baked into the music. So rather too easily we go to the tempered scale. And we don't get between the things. Yes, yes. And here it's talking about quarter sounds and the fantastic story about Orum is that when she was a little girl, she used to play the piano and she kept trying to want to find the notes between the keys. Mm-hmm. Wonderful. So let's unpack Tara Foley a bit. Um, this was Daphne ORMs independent studio. She set up herself with some funding help. Am I right? So, yeah. What, what can you both tell us about that? Um, Ian, maybe you can start with this. Yeah. Um, well, one of the interesting things that I've found out recently is that it seems that definitely. Chose the location, um, based partly on some of her previous work with the BBC, because less than half a mile away is, uh, the radio transmitter at Ruan, which was the first stereo radio, uh, broadcasting tower in the uk. And I think she had a, a trip there with as part her training as as an engineer with the BBC. So it may well be that she noticed this abandoned O house, which is what, what Tara Folly was. Mm. Um, interestingly, her parents, the house that she grew up in, Bellevue House in Devises, um, um, was in a semi derelict state when a family moved in there and was renovated. And it seems to be a theme, having spoken to some of her nieces and nephews. You know, when when Daphne found T Folly, it was in a dilapidated state, so she, she re rebuilt it, you know, in her own image, in a sense. She turned it into this wonderful, um, recording studio. But yeah, she converted the building into, into her studio. She used to sleep on one of the upper levels in the tower. I mean, there's, there's plenty of footage out there on YouTube and elsewhere of her working in the studio, but. What's interesting for me is, um, the majority of her work, or virtually all of it, is monophonic. Just, just to realize the, the sort of the level of the technology that she was working with and going from that to the ceramics machine is like suddenly fitting a, you know, a, a, well, she used to drive a mini, it would be like fitting it with a, you know, the engine from the Starship Enterprise. You suddenly go up to this, this. Uncharted, well, not uncharted territory, but I mean, there's, there's a couple of precursors to the ceramics machine, but nothing on the level that she envisioned. Um, it's essentially what later became things like the sin clavia or the Fairlight. That's the kind of vision that she had. And yeah, I mean I know that the machine was quite a complicated thing to switch on there. There was stories of having to climb up and down ladders between different floors to switch things on in the right sequence. It's almost like, you know, launching an Apollo rocket every morning when you, when you start it up. But you also had play pianos in there. There was all manner of, of interesting things. Her niece, Carolyn, who was one of the people who co-founded the Daphne Arm Trust, was telling me recently that when they visited at Christmas time, Daphne would put pieces of Christmas music onto the ceramics machine and had the little interface in the living room where the kids could draw the waveforms and change the way the Christmas carols started. I mean, I mean, how wonderful is that? I mean, gosh, she wouldn't want a a, an auntie like Daphne Oram. Amazing. And how did she build up all that equipment? Was it like a piece by piece going out, getting secondhand stuff or how did that work? Yeah, I mean, she used, she used to go to some of the, um, there was a lot of shops in London after the war that were selling on army surplus equipment. So, uh, I think some of the initial things that she got, like oscillators and things were essentially signal line testing equipment. But yeah. You know, she had some of the very early Brunell tape machines, certainly the Mark six, I think, which was the more advanced version. So she was beginning to work with machines that could allow stereo recording. Not that she did make stereo recording, but certainly enabled you to kinda lay material together. Um, but then, yeah, with the, the arrival of the ceramics machine in the, in the mid sixties, um, in that. Came from a, a grant from the GoldBean Foundation. Mm, actually two grants, but they only gave her a quarter of what she asked for, but she still managed to build this thing, and there were recordings in the archive of her going to this. She's going to a, an electronics manufacturer somewhere in south of England. And she records their interaction and she's explaining about this particular kind of valve that she wants making. And you can imagine these chaps with their pipes dig Well, I mean, I'm not sure that we can do that. And she say, oh no, it's very simple. You've just gotta do this, this, this, and this, and, and she's recording the whole thing. And it's this astonishing interaction where. You realize, God, she really, she was right on it. She knew exactly what she wanted right down to the individual components. On that note, later on, she tried to make a, a software version of the Orams machine. That's a whole other story, and I'm. Desperately trying to find out if I can shoehorn some more research in that into my PhD for reasons I won't go to now. So, so imagine the same scenario. So the Acorn Archimedes is out and you could do certain amounts of sound with it and. She gets a really early one off the production line and it's, I can't remember the number, maybe Ian remembers it was like number 50 or number 300 know. So she's right at the beginning and there's correspondence with her and the engineers saying, what's the sound chip gonna be like? Can you make it a bit more like this sort of thing? And. You know, it's not like, you know, like we, we might go, oh my goodness, the new apple's out. I, you know, I wanna save up my pocket money and get it. No, she was actually in correspondence with them Yes. About what it needed to do to satisfy her requirements. Amazing. Which I think is wonderful. You know, and it's like the correspondence between her and Bob Mogue when I think he, he, he realized what, what she was doing with Theorics and also this idea of the minis, the sort of commercial version. And there's a sense that he's trying to sort of. To come on board with the Moog company. And, um, and I think there's, there's some sort of notes in the margin, like she's underlined things that he's saying and has written in an exclamation mark, sort of. I don't think so. I know, and she's right. Yeah. I mean, but it is just fascinating to think in another world we may all have got mini ceramics machines and not Moog, um, had things gone differently, but. Yeah, absolutely. She knew exactly what she wanted, you know, to the ends degree, which I think is marvelous. Um, yeah, yeah. And yeah. And so, yeah. And so in a way we kind of do have something a little bit like the ceramics machine. 'cause the ceramics was almost like a physical instantiation of an early imagination of. As I say something between a sampler and a sequencer. So if you imagine you could take sound, so it was a sound generator. You could, you could draw, you could paint a waveform on glass and it would read that waveform and that would be the sound that you heard. And then you had, I think it was five strips of celluloid film where you would draw, um, draw if you like, expression envelopes and, and picture envelopes and whatever, um, to control that sound. Mm-hmm. Um, and. So when you look at it today, it has a family resemblance to, you know, opening up Logic or Cubase or whatever, or garage band or whatever it is that you use. Uh, yet it was also, it more sophisticated in a way because it, it, it enabled sort of gradual pitch change and things like that. So like this quarter tones, like the sounds between the keys of the piano that she spoke about when she was a kid and to, to. To imagine that from scratch. That to go from zero to that is just off the scale. She listened to the sort of music electronic that was coming out, all the bleepy loppy stuff, if you like, which is fascinating, like the stock housing and all that. And she was thinking it wasn't expressive enough because the, the sound was just like, here's eh, here's a waveform. And she knew that she wanted like a sort of violinist like. Expressivity a gestural thing. She was trying to create think gestural, which is, you know, again, what an amazing thing to have thought to do. And, and also it's, it's a, it was a polyphonic system 'cause it had four voice generators, so you could draw four waveforms. I mean, it, I think some of the, some of the inspiration for it may have been some of the things you'd seen at the BBC. Uh, but nobody had thought about reversing the way the television works, which is essentially what she's doing. So, so it, like, like Sarah says, it, it is like from zero to, you know, maximum. Um, I mean, what an imagination and, and, and the fact that it's a sort of expressive instrument. There, there aren't enough of those. I mean, you know, something like a Fender Stratocaster, you can play in so many different ways and it will sound different, but just the subtlest physical shaping of the hand. There were very few electronic instruments that allow you to do that. And it's kind of what we're striving for, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. We're striving to take away the technology so you can hear the humanity in there. That's kind of what's kind of what the aim is when you're making music a lot of the time as well, for me anyway. Mm-hmm. Um, so what do you think is the value of this heritage, if you like, what is the value of keeping these archives, of looking back at someone like Daphne's work? Um, yeah. What would you say is the value of it for us today? Well, I think it's two things. I think it's affirming, obviously it goes without saying the beautiful, extraordinary musical output, stunning musical output, but also it's affirming because. It's so de it's so much detail there. You're seeing this sort of daily working life and thinking life and imaginary life of a, a composer who, you know, you would aspire to have an ounce of her talent sort of thing. And you, and you see it on the page and you find out that she had this lively mind and was applying it all over the place and, and all this influence coming in. And then the fact that it challenges your assumptions all the time about what electronic music can be, what the timeline of history can be. And it's like. It's giving us a much more vivid picture of where we've come from. And also it is pointing to stuff. It's lots of unfinished business in there, like stuff that she started that didn't finish stuff that I'm, I'm interested in at the moment. Looking at, for example, with software and you just. Every time you look, you're thinking, wow, that could have been something that could have been something. And then she's onto the next thing and she's got a commission. And so yeah, it's, it's just, it's just endlessly rewarding to go in there and, and it, it, it moves you away from the sort of Wikipedia entry version of a human life to. The, the sort of rich, sometimes challenging, and there's stuff in the archive. Some of her opinions I, I certainly don't share. And you read that and thinking, I always think, oh, what I've enjoyed going down the pub with you. And I thought, well, I would, but there'd been an awkward moment, you know, but, you know, and so, uh, you know what I mean? It's sort of like, um, yeah. It's, it's just so fascinating and, and it's inspiring. I mean, I know that you've had that carry, haven't you, looking in the Darbyshire archive Mm. Inspires you to write music of your own, not, not in the style of, but it, it, it kind of, it's, yeah. It actually makes you dig deeper into who you are because, because you're getting that insight of that other person. I think it gives you more of a reflection, especially if you feel underrepresented or you know, under amplified yourself. But also I think it's kind of, I think it's a good humbling reminder of it to be aware of any kind of arrogance that we're, that it's a is, we're always on this linear progress line, whether it's technology or creativity or music itself. I think it's a good reminder in that sense as well. Ian, well, what value would you say this, this heritage has from your very unbiased perspective? Of course. Oh yeah, completely vice. I mean, I, I, yeah, it's your life work is, well, yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's my day job and my, not my day job, also my evening job. Um, yeah, it, it's, well, I think what's most rewarding is when I'm working with just ordinary punters who come in, who want to look at the archive. I mean, not, we don't just have Daphne's, we've also got Billy Greenham and Hugh Davies, and there's the Women's Art Library in all, all manner of different and interesting archives, but. I mean, in the summer we had delegates from the Women's Work in Music conference who came over and, uh, one of them had been one of Daphne's pupils and another one, um, she, uh, one of the other people is the one who told me about the fact that the BBC didn't employ married women. I mean, it was fascinating to hear. And see their responses to Daphne's archive and how energizing it was for them to actually see the physical objects that we have, because most of them knew the music anyway. But I think it's just that thing of actually tangibly seeing, you know, a score or, you know, an early draft of a, of a, a text that she wrote. And it does, it does. It's a sort of grounding thing. It makes you realize, yeah, I'm doing things the right way. If, you know, if I'm doing it like Daphne did it, or you know, if this is the way she did it, then I'm doing it okay. As well. Because, you know, she sort of just made it, made it up out of whatever, but came to hand whether it was an army surplus oscillator or a Dian framework to build the, the ceramics machine or the, the RCA 78 gramophone cabinet that has the sort of wave table thing. In, in this, I mean, it, it looks like. Something out of a, out of a bathroom or, or a sort of a dresser, but it's actually the, the brains of the ceramics machine and how, how wacky and wonderful is that you know, that you don't have to just buy stuff off the shelf. You can actually build it yourself. And, and you know, that also talks to this generation of students who are discovering modular synths and. You know, hacking culture and all of these things, let's delve into her music, actual music output then. So, um, I wonder if you can pick some pieces that you like people have to explore. So I think for me, I, I love some of the work she did for advertising, which like Suzanne Chiney said, allowed a bit more freedom in a sense to, um, to innovate. So the Lego ad, for example, and there's a power drill one, isn't there? I absolutely love, there's the, um, birds of Parallax is one of my favorites. And then of course, um. I also love the pieces she did with, um, with the school kids in Yorkshire and how they introduced their pieces for symbol and matchbox and stuff and yeah. So I was wondering if there's any pieces where you like people have to go and check that out. I actually think no matter what you think of it, what it's very time contextualized, let's say is the, um. Private dreams and public nightmares that she worked on, collaborated with others on that, didn't she? Um, in terms of the sound of music, but I think even that, Liz, one of the early pieces of experimentation with electronic sound. Yeah. Any pieces you'd like to signpost people to? Well, I, I mentioned Brasil and earlier, um, I just sort of double underline it again, I guess. Um, I mean, on, on the surface it's uh, it's a quite a hard piece to sort of break down unless you do a bit of background research, but it. It's based on a poem by Charles Williams that I think she might have encountered when she was a, a school child at, uh, Sherborn School for Girls endorse it. Um, um, but it, it's, it connects to Arthurian legend and the forest of Brazilian, which is actually located in Brittany. Um. But it's, it's just a very beautiful piece, just on a musical level, on a sonic as a sonic experience, even if you didn't know the, the sort of the deeper meaning of the piece, the, the level of detail and the way she's mixed it. And, and as I said before. Virtual of work is monophonic. You know, listen to these things on speakers because you don't really do them justice if you're listening on, on earbuds or, you know, you need to, you need to have these waves hitting you. Um, because that's how she would've mixed these things. Um, so yeah, Brazilian for me, and, um. I think also the other one that I always found interesting is, is the work that she did on the, the piece Snow, which was, um, essentially a remix. This is like a, a very early kind of remix where the piece is based on this Sandy Nelson composition called Teen Beat. Uh, which I think was arranged by Johnny Hawkesworth, but she basically takes the piece and slows it down in relation to the film footage, which is made by Jeffrey Jones for British Transport Films. It's to do with the 1963, um, blizzards that lasted for several months. And the, the tamper of the film gradually increases as the steam trains are going back and forth that he's filming. And she, she mirrors this by some very clever manipulation of the, of the speed of the, this pop track. Um, so it is, it's a sort of proto remix piece, um, but it's just very, very skillful and it's very entertaining. Um, it, it maybe doesn't. Have the sort of, you know, resonant depth of something like Brazilian. But it's a, it's a brilliant thing to see because of the way that she collaborated so effectively. And, and as Sarah was saying, her eye for detail is, is, is, is wonderful. You know. Um. Exactly. Yeah. And for me, especially as a somebody who's trying to create these kind of sound worlds in the 21st century, yeah. For me it's Pulse Persephone. And I mean, I hope you can play a bit 'cause it's indescribable, but um. So technically as I understand it, it was things like steel pans and drums and flutes and a bass, and the whole thing is drenched in tape echo. I think what I love about it is this, it's got a very particular sense of space and that's, and again, it's such a sort of a, it's so valuable to listen to her stuff where we have this maximalist idea that you've got to have multiple, you know. Spatialized sound. Mm. How she was able to use psychoacoustics to create a sense of space when she only had stereo or sometimes mono, very often mono. It's just fascinating. So this piece is absolutely beautiful and the reason I love it is it's so sort of brooding and. If I try to unpack it technically, I think it's because she's artistically using repeated bounces. So I tell you what, it reminds me of, you know, sly Stone, I love Sly Stone sound and how he was. Famous, wasn't he? He went his Winnebago. There's a famous Winnebago story where he was basically stuck in a Winnebago for ages and ages and was repeatedly bouncing and, and so much so that, you know, you practically, there was nothing, no magnetic Ferris stuff on the tape left, but it created this fantastic sound. And yeah, she was doing this some years before and it's just, it's like somebody who knows how to use tape as. As, as a compositional tool. She's not just using it to lay it down. You are, you are listening to the physicality of the tape, distressing the sound, but it's like she, like a painter, knows how to distress a color. She knows how to distress the tape. The Just the right amount. Like the well distress, the sound on the tape. Yeah. It's hard to say where one begins and the other ends, and it's just like you're listening to the physicality of mag magnetic tape and it is just found. It's just such a sort of wonderful piece. It just gives me the spooks. So now I'm excited to unpack a piece that Daphne Oram composed, I think about 19 48, 19 49, when she was only 23 called Still Point. And to do this, I have invited James Bully and Shiva Feki, as they both arranged, designed a performance, uh, for the problems of the piece. Still point. So I wonder if you could start with, um, telling me a bit about your work and how you came to work on this project and any kind of points of fascination for you at the beginning of the process. I was very fortunate actually to get in info involved with the, um, the archive of Daphne Worm's work. I was working at Goldsmith University of London where I was doing a PhD in the music department. Yeah, it was an amazing opportunity and in the process of cataloging the collection and working through and digitizing lots of things, um. I kind of started to come across mention of this piece Still point, which was written about by, uh, the composer and musicologist Hugh Davies, who had actually looked after Daphne Room towards the end of her life and looked after a lot of her material as well at his house after it had come from Tower Foley, along with Joe Langton. He had written in the Grove Music Dictionary about this piece that Orum had written. Um, still point, and it was an incredibly intriguing entry in the Grows dictionary about this piece for double orchestra, this possible very kind of first example of live electronics and orchestra and for turntable as well. Oh, wow. Shiva. Yeah, so I was at the time. Doing my doctorate at the Royal College of Music. It was a very sort of experimental and fluid process. So I was doing a lot of researching, um, but I was also creating monthly radio shows and I wanted to do a Daphne Orum special, and I'd heard about the special collections at the Goldsmiths Uni. So I contacted them and I was introduced to James and James. Really kindly showed me the whole deaf new collection in quite a detailed way, going through all the different archival material. And as part of this, he showed me still point. And yeah, it was felt like such a. Moving and incredible moment learning about still point and actually just seeing the physical sort of pen and pencil draft scores and, um, notes that DAF Newham had created. For still points. I just very vividly remember seeing this sort of a five, um, title page of it, that specified still point for double orchestra 3 78 RPM discs and. It just immediately excited me being a turntableist who, um, often incorporates turntables with orchestra, and James filled me in on the context of how he was in the prote process of digitizing this material. I think then you were still, um, in the process of kind of archiving everything. It was kind of fresh in as far as I remember, and that it had never been performed. And I just immediately thought we have to find the world premier performance in a context somewhere. And at the time, um, I was, uh, collaborating a lot with the cellist, um, Oliver Coates. Um, and we were chat, just chatting informally and. I mentioned to him that I had come across, um, this incredible score in Goldsmiths and he was in the process of actually curating a festival, um, called Deep Minimalism, and it was actually for the South Bank Center. And it was very much in line with, um, what he was doing. And it was with the London Contemporary Orchestra, and it just felt like things were just flowing with finding this performance. And so I was talking to Ollie and the South Bank Center and everyone was so excited about it. And from there, um, James and I, um, decided to collaborate on. The realization of this composition, um, all of these decades after its, um, com composition in the late forties, and that's when the puzzle began to form very gradually and in a but quite cryptic way at first. Yeah. I was gonna ask, how did you. Start to realize the piece really. And what did you have to work from Orams scores and all of her papers and things had been at Tower Folly when she'd passed away. And Hugh Davis had done a huge amount of work with Joe Langton to, um, ensure the safety of this material. 'cause it was actually at a level of risk. Um, tower Foley was kind of slightly, um. Falling down and people could, um, access this place. And it was, it was risky. So Hugh looked after a lot of the material at his house. So there was a first kind of level of this material coming to Hugh's house, um, which was in North, north London. Amazing house, but also full of all of Hugh's work as well, which is a huge amount of stuff, which is a whole other story. Um, so Orams archive actually ended up kind of on the bottom, two floors of Hughes House. Um. And then eventually through Jan Joe Langton, through in Stonehouse, John Lely, ris and various people involved in this project brought the, the material came to Goldsmith. And at that point where it was all being archived, we. Those of us working on it had assumed that this was all of the material. This was everything from Tower Folly. Mm. Shiva appearing at Goldsmiths was a, a wonderful, wonderful moment. And in a way, the trajectory from then to now is just this, this flow of perfect happenings that seemed kind of predestined, predetermined in a way. I mean, we've talked about this a lot. It feels like it was just meant to be and it had this kind of very particular energy to it. So while we were looking at this manuscript, actually what we were looking at was, um. A fragmentary, um, array of score pages for this piece. Um, done in pencil with a cover and a few other notes alongside it. And a sheet of paper from Hugh Davies that kind of described it in prey type al but the score itself was actually quite fragmentary and, and pencil written. So the realization we did for, um. The very first premier at Steep Minimalism was based on these score pages, 'cause there was nothing else so. Shiva did incredible work piecing this incredibly complex puzzle of material together to create still Point as it was performed in 2016. I think that was probably two years of work. Wow. And how long is the piece? I think the, the first performance of the South Bank Center for deep minimalism, the piece was about 30 minutes. The actual score that DAF neuro specified in the preface was 33 minutes, but it was, it is a bit longer than that actually. Yeah, so obviously I think it's been credited as being one of the first. Performances of live electronic manipulation as as of live electronic instruments. Yeah. What electronic instruments did you use and did you also manage to get a double orchestra? Yes, so we, we stuck to both of us being doctoral researchers at the time. We were quite meticulous with our approach to the realization to make sure. That it was historically accurate, but of course we were also using the technology that was both available in some ways to Orum at the time, although as a lot of her ideas were so contemporary for the time, um, a lot of the technologies were used, uh, technologies that. Orum kind of predicted or preempted, um, in her, um, instructions for still point. So we used three turntables, um, and 3 78 RPM discs. Um, and the most, his historically accurate, um, process was the, um, disc cutting process, um, where we collaborated with Alexander Kovski, who used, um, a period 1950s disc cutting lathe. To create the discs for the 2018 version for the BBC Proms, which was a very kind of high end, high production. It was cut directly from live orchestra directly onto disc using the. Period, analog process. Um, and the actual, uh, discs themselves are lack of discs that would've been available to Orum at the time in the mid 20th century. You know, it is a sort of material that, um, if you drop the disc, it would just shatter. Um, it's not like, um, vinyl or dub plates that you get now. So that was one element of it. And then the three turntables are contemporary turntables. And then Orum also specifies the use of echo in five microphones and an, uh, the use of an echo chamber. So the actual sound of the echo is created from a separate room and then that reverberation is fed back. But we used, um, Roland Space Echoes, and then yes, we did have a dry and a wet. Orchestra. Um, this was more apparent in the 2018 actual world premier for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, where one half of the orchestra are dry and actually the material, the compositional material is dry as well. There's lots of staccato and, um, sort of read the instruments like oboe. And bassoons, um, playing a lot of the kind of melodic and, um, rhythmical lines in the dry orchestra. Whereas in the wet orchestra it's more flutes, clarinets. The microphone placements also helped with the wet so that the microphone placements were sort of higher up and more roomy, more spacey, um, for the wet orchestras. Whereas, uh, for the dry it's more close microphone techniques. Um, and the way that Orum has actually spatialized the orchestra on stage. Is really fascinating because it's almost like, um, an orchestra being used, uh, preempting the idea of like a synthesizer with the, this mirror image of the orchestra. So the wet orchestra Oh wow. Is spatialized in a way, um, where it's then mirrored by the dry orchestra and that kind of was very fascinating 'cause it kind of predicted the way that we would then use. And design synthesizes in the future. Wow. How would you both describe the piece? If, if someone hadn't heard it and couldn't hear it, how would you describe it having been within the weave of it? I think the title of the piece Still Point does a really good, um, description in, in itself of. What's happening within the composition, it has this feeling of space and time just fluidly shifting and changing throughout the whole thing. And it's an amazing, um, extemporizing, as Shiva said on spatiality of sound, of close and distant micing of the ability to freeze a moment and play it backwards. To be unsure as to what, what is played in real time, what is happening on the turntables. It's an incredible evocation of, um, yeah. Space time. I mean, it's there. There aren't any pieces like this that I've ever heard, and if this, you can't help but feel that if this had happened at the time and been premiered in 1948, then perhaps the landscape of. Music composition and performance could have changed drastically. I think the, the orchestral material is, um. I would say almost like a romantic era aesthetic. And then what happens with the electronic manipulations on turntables and discs is that Orum actually specifies certain bars of the, um, orchestral material to be recorded live onto disc and then manipulated. Live using turntables and some of the notes I can read for you now. So play Y from figure 69. Reverse the turntable motors so that it runs anti-clockwise brackets. Set needles at end of sound. Thus play this passage backwards from end to beginning. Use full echo. So as you can see, there's this sort of. Romantic era aesthetic with the acoustic orchestra and the dry and the wet orchestra. And then the turntables come in at certain points, manipulating the sound, live, reversing it, manipulating the pitch, adding echo. And that's really contrasting to what's actually happening with the orchestra. The electronics are kind of like this new world and the the orchestra. It's like, um, a nostalgia and it adds this feeling of here's the familiar music, the familiarity with the double orchestra material, and here's the completely unknown unfamiliarity that arrives with the turntable manipulations. And I just find it completely unreal that this was. Um, composed and conceived and conceptualized in the late forties by a young, early twenties, Daphne Orum. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Amazing. And as a turntableist, were you able to tune into, pardon the audio pun to those, to those instructions if you like, or were you having to do a bit of detective work? Creative license? So, I, I think I describe James. And my collaboration is being very well matched because I feel like James is extremely meticulous with accuracy, whereas I kind of pretend I am and then kind of go into a little bit of a fantasy world of, oh, Daphne would've loved this, or. I can sense her spiritual energy tell, driving these creative decisions I'm making. Um, so there are lots of bullet points. So we used, the way that I, um, created the turntable material was, um, I used the, um, Daphne's notes, which are about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 points where it says record. The orchestra for the discs at this point. And that material then needs to be played, um, at these sections, um, of the composition in duet with the orchestra. But then I did add some creative license to it where I was sort of adding this more manipulations with the echo, the bits where. It would be like reverse the turntable motor play, shift the pitch down an octave. I would then sort of extemporize with that and sort of add some more glisses and more slides and, but I feel like if it was a concerto, um, say a violin concerto. Written at the time, the same thing would happen. There would be a collaboration with the soloist and the composer, and there would be sort of this idea of the soloist adding cadens and composing, um, decorations. I think with something with live electronics and turntable, something like this, it kind of needs that, it needs that sort of creative extemporizing. James, um, what were the. Of joys and challenges from your point of view? And can you unpack a bit what you were doing? The really important thing to understand, I think, about this piece is it was never performed. It was never rehearsed. Mm. So there are, there are various things that happen as. I think, I think ev everyone's kind of aware when a composer compo compose a piece and it goes into rehearsal where there's a level of adjustment to um, what then happens in rehearsal before a piece is premiered. And it was very interesting for us going through that process with a piece and, um, to think through what Orum would've done. You know, there, there were a few small, uh, notation issues, for example, but also when, if we are talking about the turntable performance, I think. To be honest, I think Shiva absolutely embodied exactly what, um, Orum specified. I mean, there's, there's also this line in the, in the notes for the program engineering turntableist that says. After the list of all these figures to record and how to perform them, it says adjust and delete according to circumstances, which I think is very indicative. Oh yes, I remember. Yeah. So I think that's important to kind of note because you know, it is a huge play on space and time and it is. To be adjusted in the context of where it's being performed, the live electronics aspect of the piece. So as in, not the turntable part, but the part for live electronics that is scored into the final score is a manipulation of both close and distant mics. So you can kind of, if you like, zoom in, close into a close, dry moment and it's specified in the score dynamically, and then you can go distant into a kind of more wet acoustic and. That live electronics part is extraordinary. It's very meticulously defined with hairpins of different microphones, um, within the score. And then also as with the turntables, there are echo effects. So for example, if there's a particular chord that's played and it's defined as echo, um, in OEM's mind, that would've been sent through an echo chamber in the Royal Albert Hall. But obviously. For us that didn't exist. So we did that as Shiva mentioned, through, um, re 2 0 1 space echos a bank of space echos that were then heard back over the pa. And the piece is now publicly available. It's been released on NMC, is that right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So if people want to find it there, has there been any kind of lasting impressions for you or any lasting influence from getting right into the weave of this piece and realizing it? Yeah, I mean my turntable techniques, there's, there's no sort of, um, separation between my techniques that I use now for my compositions and what I was using for still point, because these are sort of techniques that I've devised to be able to play. Um, or, um, still point, you know, it's become part of my sound. It's become part of my sonic identity. Um, so it's really shaped me and who I am as, as an artist. I think for me, the, the thing that has really changed the way I think about sound and composition and, and my practice is this, this conception of sound in space is this incredibly fluid thing. Um. I think kind of prior to the experience of encountering still point and then realizing this performance with Shiba, I suppose I hadn't really considered those things in the context of live orchestral performance before and suddenly it just opened up this huge world. Well, uh, like where I kind of thought, well, of course you can close mic up an instrument and you can have distant mics and you can manipulate those two things. Through amplification and this kind of linked to lot to ideas of world Isaac Walter Merchs, um, techniques that he uses in sound design for film. And these things kind of all coalesced into a way of thinking that's just become very much part of my practice. Um, but also it's incredibly profound hearing sound moving around a double orchestra in space in the way that, um, Orum had conceived it. And I think it opens up. A whole other way of working in the context of orchestral composition and large scale performance in places like the Royal Albert Hall. And have you published a score so people can follow your score, if you know what I mean? So there's a, there's a full score that, um, we've created including very detailed, uh, preface notes about, um. How, ultimately a kind of method statement based on our research of how to perform the piece and possible techniques. Um, but at this point in time, it's not publicly published, but people can contact us to ask about that and we are keen that, um, one of the things we'd like to do next is to publish this properly. Awesome. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes and further information, as well as links and details of the other episodes in the electronic music series. And just before you go, let me point you to sound on sound.com/podcasts where you can explore what's on our other channels. This has been the Kara Sea Production for Sound on Sound.