Sisters with Transistors
Resident Visitors breaking through the noise....
We women were especially drawn to electronic music when the possibility of a woman composing was in itself controversial. Electronics let us make music that could be heard by others without having to be taken seriously by the male-dominated Establishment.
-Laurie Spiegel
My mother was born in 1932 in Twickenham, a small suburb of London. When she was eight years old, the first bomb to strike the area around her house was dropped by the Luftwaffe on the night of August 24, 1940, during a raid on the oil refineries at Thames Haven.
1940 saw the borough sustain its highest casualties. 74 people were killed, the majority in a devastating attack that took place on the night of November 29. 130 bombs and between 3,000 and 5,000 incendiary devices rained down on Twickenham and nearby Teddington, destroying 150 houses and damaging more than 6,000 others. However, the worst attacks of the war were yet to come.
My mom told me a funny story about those days during the Blitz. When the sirens went off, her family all hurried to the shelters, but her mom would yell out, “Where’s Elsie? Find Elsie!” Elsie was not the youngest of her six children, it was the family chicken. Indeed, a valuable “member” of the family during those lean war-rationed years.
In the summer of 1944, V1 and V2 rockets, unmanned weapons with high explosive warheads, were launched across the channel from sites in the Netherlands and France. These were the buzz bombs I remember my mom telling me about. She’d say, “As long as you heard them you were fine, but if the sound stopped, then you knew you were in trouble. That meant they were heading down.”
When Twickenham celebrated VE Day and hostilities ended in August 1945, local residents could sit back for the first time in five years and take stock of the damage. 143 civilians had been killed in air raids. 500 houses had been destroyed, and another 32,000 residences had sustained damage.
When the Blitz ended, my mom was 13 years old. When she was 16, she left home to become a nanny for a rich, foreign family in London, where she met and married my dad, an American Airman, stationed there during the Korean War.
Delia Derbyshire, the English musician and composer of electronic music, grew up in Coventry, just southeast of Birmingham, which was also heavily bombed during the war. Perhaps more appropriately, as she jokes: “Born, bred, and Blitzed” in Coventry.
Derbyshire’s music voyaged into soundscapes and pure sound. She broke new ground on several fronts: technological as she pushed what was possible with the equipment of her time; and rhythmical as she experimented with 11- and 13-note bars and freed herself from the 12-tone scale. Unfortunately, only a tiny percentage of her work is known to the public - the majority on tape at the Archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
In the 2009 documentary The Delian Mode - Delia Derbyshire documentary, she talks about her memories of the Blitz and how the sounds from that experience contributed to her interest in electronic music:
The air raid sirens. It’s an abstract sound. Because you don’t know the source of it, as a young child. And then the all-clear. That’s electronic music in those days.
After the blitz, the worst blitz, I was shifted off to Preston, which is where my parents came from. I remember it myself. The sound of clogs on cobble. You know, people going to the mill at 6:00 in the morning or something. Even at school, I had great interest in sound, the theory of sound: the waves, the waves, the waves.
I was quite a clever girl and was accepted to read mathematics at Cambridge, which is quite something for a working-class girl in the 50s when only 1 in 10 were females.
This was a time when there were no synthesizers, and computers hadn’t been heard of. You could record anything live over a mic and put it on tape. Then you could manipulate the tape to create sounds - a very time-consuming process. For example, it took Derbyshire 40 days to compose the theme song for the 1963 smash English TV hit Doctor Who:
Delia Derbyshire is one of the women that Director Lisa Rovner introduces in her 2020 documentary film Sisters with Transistors.
According to the film’s website:
The story of the film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.
The history of women has been a history of silence. Music is no exception.
But the big question Rovner raises in her film is why we know so little about women's role in electronic music.
This week on that Big River called Jazz, we will journey into the lives of four women highlighted in Rovner’s film and try to help shed some valuable light on the amazing accomplishments of these electronic music pioneers.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where Derbyshire created the theme music for Doctor Who, was created in 1957 by Daphne Oram, born in South West England in 1925.
In October 1943, when Daphne Oram was just 17 years old, she joined the BBC as a junior programme engineer. In this position, during World War II, she was tasked with balancing the radio broadcast of live concerts at Royal Albert Hall while at the same time keeping 78 rpm disc recordings cued up and ready for broadcast if the hall was evacuated.
After reading Kurt London’s Film Music and Leopold Stokowski’s Music For All Of Us, she became interested in the idea of composing with technology - using electronic sound as music, not just as background effects.
In 1949, Oram was only 23 when she completed an innovative work for turntables called Still Point, using an ‘acoustically treated’ double orchestra, three prerecorded 78 rpm records, and five microphones. The sound was then manipulated live in performance through turntables, amplification, and echo effects. In her 2003 Guardian obituary, composer Hugh Davies, her friend and the first custodian of her archive called Still Point, “almost certainly the earliest composition to specify the real-time electronic transformation of instrumental sounds.”
It was submitted to the BBC as a speculative entry for the newly launched Italia Prize (a European broadcasting accolade), but management hated it, dismissing it as a directionless mess. Here’s an excerpt from Oram’s fascinating Still Point, reimagined 70 years later in 2016 by Shiva Feshareki and James Bulley with the London Contemporary Orchestra at St. John’s Smith Square - a bombed-out church turned concert hall:
After learning about electronic music by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and Stockhausen and the Köln School, Oram wanted to establish a British equivalent. In 1957, she proposed the idea to the BBC, and the following year she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Unable to communicate the value of experimental music to BBC management, in November 1958, she resigned, less than a year after its founding.
Immediately after leaving the BBC in 1959, Oram set up her Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition in Tower Folly, a converted oast house in Kent, South East England:
It was here that she developed the Oramics Machine:
The Oramics Machine enabled Oram to synthesize and sequence sound by painting lines and other marks on glass and film strips like this:
Oram invented the machine as a new means of musical expression, one that enabled her to finely control and vary sounds in ways that went beyond the capabilities of audio tape. It can be seen as a forerunner of MIDI sequencing and the digital audio workstation (DAW) popular today, allowing users to record audio on a personal computer.
Perhaps the best example of Oramics is the beginning of Bird of Parallax, composed in 1972 using the Oramics Machine and a concrète tape montage:
As groundbreaking as Oramics was, it did not pay the bills. She made her living writing electronic music for dance, theater, radio, TV, and film. For example, the first fifteen seconds of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in 1962, opens with a montage of electronic sounds composed and played by Oram as animated dots move across the screen and give way to a gun barrel:
The actual piece she called Atoms in Space. She recorded just over six minutes of music and sent it to Pinewood Studios, where Dr. No was filmed. These sounds were also used in other James Bond films up until Goldfinger (1964).
Oram was also a pioneer in the healing power of sound. In this regard, her work was built on by another pioneer of electronic music, Pauline Oliveros.
Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas, in 1932. She attended college at the University of Houston before moving to California to attend San Francisco State College, where she earned a BFA in composition. She was one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a hub for electronic music on the West Coast in the 1960s. Later, the Center moved to Mills College, and Oliveros served as its first director.
In a 1983 interview with Vivian Perlis, Oliveros describes her early fascination with sound, in particular the “in-between sounds”:
I remember particularly things like riding in the car with my parents, for instance, maybe in the back seat, listening to the sound of the motor. And listening to the sound of my parent’s voices being modulated by the motor… So that the voices sounded all grainy and fluttery. Listening to my grandfather tune his crystal radio… Listening to my father tune his short wave radio - listening to the whistles and pops and static.
Radio, that was the world that I grew up with… I was always fascinated with the in-between sounds in the stations - just tuning in-between. I loved that.
Along with other musicians during the 1960s, she was finding that conventional musical scores bore less and less relevance to the sounds she wanted to make.
I first learned of Oliveros when I read about her 1984 release, The Wanderer, her second solo album. It was recorded live in 1983 in New York after bidding farewell to the West Coast and moving into the Zen Center in Mount Tremper, New York. But we’ll spend more time with Pauline Oliveros next week, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Laurie Spiegel was another pioneer of computer-generated music, whose work in the 1970s and 1980s helped lay the groundwork for much of today’s electronic music.
Born in Chicago in 1945, she grew up playing banjo and singing folk songs with her sister on the South Side of Chicago before attending the Juilliard School. In 1972, she composed Sediment, which was interestingly included in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. In 1975, she composed a computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise Harmonices Mundi. It was originally commissioned by Dr. Carl Sagan for inclusion on the “Golden Record” and placed on board the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977:
In 2018, this recording reached the vastness of interstellar space, far beyond the orbit of Pluto and no longer under the influence of the Sun’s gravity.
Here’s the song re-released in 2012 on her The Expanding Universe CD:
This work was intended to be a realization of Kepler’s interpretation of “Musica Universalis” or the Music of the Spheres - musical harmonies existing within the spacing of the planets, a concept that existed in medieval philosophy before Kepler. However, what’s stunning to me is how much this sounds like the air raid sirens my mom heard over London during the war.
In the end, what I admire most about these four women is how they subverted the establishment and became catalysts of invention and inclusion. They were not just composers, they were technological innovators. I applaud Lisa Rovner’s splendid Sisters With Transistors for bringing to us all their difficult but wonderful journeys.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore a little deeper the world of Pauline Oliveros.
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It's a beautiful documentary narrated by Laurie Anderson