What kind of person do you imagine when you hear the phrase “electronic musician”? A pale, wildly dressed young man bent over an imposing smorgasbord of equipment?
I suspect the person you are imagining doesn’t look like Daphne Oram, with their cat-eye glasses, low-key dresses, and the respectable haircut of the 1950s librarian. And yet Oram is a pivotal figure in the history of electronic music – the co-founder of the BBC’s incalculably influential Radiophonic Workshop, the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio and now one of the worthy focuses of Lisa Rovner’s enchanting new documentary ” Sisters with transistors: The unsung heroines of electronic music. ” (The film will run through Metrograph’s virtual cinema from April 23 to May 6.)
Oram was born in 1925 and was an accomplished pianist who had been offered admission to the Royal Academy of Music. But she turned it down after recently reading a book that predicted, as she brought to the film with a palpable sense of wonder, that “future composers would compose directly in sound rather than use orchestral instruments”.
Oram wanted to be a composer of the future. She found fulfilling work at the BBC, which in the late 1940s had become a clearing house for tape machines and other electronic equipment left over from World War II. Gender norms liquefied during the war, when factories and cutting-edge corporations were forced to hire women in jobs previously reserved for men only. Suddenly the rules no longer applied for a fleeting and liberating moment.
“Technology is a tremendous liberator,” says composer Laurie Spiegel in Rovner’s film. “It blows up power structures. Women were naturally drawn to electronic music. They did not have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources: the radio stations, the record companies, the concert halls, the funding organizations. “
But in recent years pioneers like Oram and Spiegel have largely been written out of the genre’s popular history, mistakenly leading people to believe that in its many iterations, electronic music is and was a boys’ club. At a time when significant gender imbalances persist behind studio consoles and in DJ booths, Rovner’s film raises a still worthwhile question: what happened?
The main goal of “Sisters With Transistors” is to enliven the fascinating life stories of these women and to present their music in all its dazzling splendor. The film, personally told by Laurie Anderson, is a treasure trove of fascinating archive material from decades. Early theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore gives a private concert on this ethereal instrument, which one writer said sounds like “a soul singing”. Synthesizer wizard Suzanne Ciani demonstrates what the Prophet 5 synthesizer can do to a very astounded David Letterman in an episode of his 1980 morning show. Maryanne Amacher rattles the eardrums of her younger acolyte Thurston Moore with the sheer house-shaking volume of her compositions.
Most hypnotic is a 1965 clip of Delia Derbyshire – Oram’s colleague at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who is perhaps best known for bringing to life the eerie original theme song, “Doctor Who” – visibly in love with her work as she is a tutorial on creating music gives From ribbon loops to the punch she just pulled out of the air.
Like Oram, Derbyshire’s fascination with technology and emerging forms of music came from the war when she lived in Coventry as a child during the Blitz of 1940 and experienced air raid sirens. “It’s an abstract sound, and it’s meaningful – and then the all-clear,” she says in the film. “Well this is electronic music!”
These 20th century girls were enchanted by the strange new sounds of modern life. In France, a young Éliane Radigue watched intently the overhead planes that were being made as they approached and retreated. Across continents, both Derbyshire and American composer Pauline Oliveros were drawn to the crackling hiss of the radio and even the eerie noises between stations. All these frequencies lured her to new kinds of music, freed from the weight of history, tradition and the impulse, as the composer Nadia Botello puts it, Amacher paraphrased, “pushing the notes of dead white men around”.
From Ciani’s crystalline daydreams to Amacher’s quivering drones, the sounds they made of those influences and technological advances proved as diverse as the women themselves. Oliveros, who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1970 entitled “And name she did not write Lady Composers “would probably deny that there was anything essential that linked their music together. But the common thread that Rovner finds is a palpable sense of awe – a certain exuberance on every woman’s face as she explains how she works to curious camera teams and confused interviewers. Every woman in this documentary looks like she has a precious secret that society has yet to decipher.
Putting awe and affect on the origins of electronic music can be a political act in and of itself. In her 2010 book, Pink Noises: Women About Electronic Music and Sound, writer and musician Tara Rodgers called for an electronic music story “that motivates wonder and a sense of possibility rather than rhetoric of struggle and domination.” suggested that the early, formative association of electronic sound with military technology – the vocoder, for example, was first developed as a spy device – contributed to its steady and limiting masculinized stereotyping over time.
And then there is the commodifying power of capitalism. In the 1970s, when much of the equipment used to make electronic music was prohibitively expensive, Spiegel worked on her compositions for a while in the Bell Labs, then a hotbed for scientific and creative experimentation. As she recalls, the sale of AT&T in 1982 had an unfortunate aftereffect: “Bell Labs became product-oriented rather than pure research. After I left there, I was utterly abandoned. I had lost my main creative medium. “
Eventually, Spiegel took matters into its own hands and created the early algorithmic music computer software Music Mouse in 1986. “What all these women have in common is this DIY thing,” says Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, in the film. “And DIY is interesting because it doesn’t mean that you have specifically voluntarily chosen to do it yourself. There are certain obstacles that prevent you from doing anything. “
When I saw Rovner’s documentary, I saw unfortunate parallels with the film industry. In the early silent era women were more stable and often employed in more powerful positions than many years later, as Margaret Talbot noted a few years ago in a play for The New Yorker: The early industry had “not yet become bogged down” a strict division of labor by gender ” but as time went on, Hollywood became “an increasingly modern, capitalist company,” and opportunities for women diminished.
The masculinization of electronic music likely resulted from a similar type of streamlined codification in the for-profit 1980s and beyond, although Rovner’s film doesn’t take long to delve into what went wrong. It would perhaps take a more ambitious and less inspiring documentary to capture the forces that contributed to the cultural obliteration of these women’s achievements.
But “Sisters With Transistors” is a worthy correction to a persistently short-sighted view of music history and a call to rekindle something new from what it sparked in Daphne Oram’s revered “Composers of the Future”.
“This is a time when people have the feeling that there are many dead ends in music, that there is not much more to do,” thought Spiegel a few decades ago in a clip used in the film. “With technology, I experience the opposite. During this time we find that we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is musically possible. “
