Luke Fowler – Daphne and Janet (2025)
Thursday, 10 September⋅2:30 – 3:00pm
At 2:30pm – Glasgow based artist and filmmaker, Luke Fowler explores the legacy of two of the UK’s earliest electronic music pioneers; Daphne Oram and Janet Beat.
“My first pieces were musique concrète. The first composer of musique concrète and electronic music in the UK was Daphne Oram. She helped found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but she left the BBC in the end, as they just regarded her as a maker of sound effects. And then I—I heard a piece by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who made musique concrète out of their verse, and I thought, oh, that’s interesting. So I bought a tape recorder and started to experiment myself and did my first musique concrète pieces in 1958.”
Janet Beat interviewed by Mark Vernon for Fowler’s short film portrait of the artist “ A Sensation Never Yet Known”
Oram coined the terms ELEC CELE in her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972). . She used them to describe two complementary forces or states:
- ELEC — the electrical / energetic / intangible impulse: the initial spark, tension or creative energy before it takes material form. Oram associated it with the electrical flow of energy following the “spark” of inspiration.
- CELE — the materialisation or emergence of that energy into tangible form: the process by which the intangible idea becomes something physical, audible or perceptible — a sound, composition, performance, etc.
Drawing on archival works and a palette of sounds made with feedback and test equipment – this work brings together the voices of two pioneers of British Electronic Music. Two contemporaries who – in the male dominated world of 1960’s Electronic Music- had to constantly struggle to be recognised as composers. ELEC CELE is a meditation on the work of Janet Beat and Daphne Oram.
Thanks to Ryoko Akama, Papiripar festival, The Glad Cafe, Janet Beat and The Daphne Oram Trust – for collaboration, commissioning and providing us with access to archival material.
