Francis Bacon - New Atlantis and Selections from the Sylva Sylvarum

Published by Repeater Books

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Introduction copyright Robert Barry 2020

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462307

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Contents

by Robert Barry

by Francis Bacon

by Francis Bacon

Introduction

Beyond Both the Old World and the New: Music, Magic, and Media in the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

by Robert Barry

In the spring of 1958, Daphne Oram pinned a piece of paper to the wall of the newly opened BBC Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale. On the sheet was printed the following text:

We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

This passage, taken from Francis Bacons posthumously published utopian novel, New Atlantis , was written more than three hundred years before it made its way into the BBCs west London studios. But for Oram and many other composers like her, intent on demonstrating all sounds and their generation it contained an uncanny presentiment of twentieth-century electronic music, with its divers tremblings and artificial echoes. With these words, neatly typed and double-spaced, Daphne Oram inaugurated Britains first public electronic music studio under a utopian sign.

It had been a long time coming. Oram started making enquiries about the possibility of electronic sound generation almost from the moment she joined the BBC. The response she received was dismissive, when not outright rude. At the Corporations Engineering Training Department at Evesham, they called her potty. Compositions for orchestra combined with phonograph turntables decades ahead of their time were summarily rejected and consigned to the desk drawer. Undaunted, from 1953 Oram began petitioning her superiors in earnest. France had the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrte set up by Pierre Schaeffer as a successor to the informal Studio dEssai he founded during the war. Since 1951, Germany had Herbert Eimerts studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, where Karlheinz Stockhausen was busy creating elektronische Musik out of sinetone generators. Why shouldnt London also have a studio dedicated to electronic sound?

In 1956, the corporation finally began to show signs of paying heed. Head of central programme operations, Brian George, commissioned a report into electronic music, to which Oram contributed. She wrote passionately about her dream of a music requiring no microphone, no artist, no studio just the composer and a recording machine. The memo stressed the urgent need for such a studio at the BBC and argued for the unique contribution Britain could make to the development of electronic music, charting a singular path between the scylla of Pariss single-minded commitment to manipulated recordings and the charybdis of Colognes fixation on pure electronically generated sound.

George appeared to take this paper seriously. A committee was assembled. And then, for a long time, nothing.

The committee wrote further reports, changed its name once or twice, organised a monthly listening group. But of a dedicated studio, there were few immediate indications.

In February of 1957, Oram decided to take matters into her own hands, moving huge desk-sized tape machines from studio to studio in the middle of the night in order to assemble her own jury-rigged multitrack rig when all the other staff had left the building. Like this, she produced the groundbreaking swirls and howls for a TV production of Jean Giraudouxs play Amphitryon 38 . Her studio was a hodgepodge, clandestinely assembled. But it was a start. Until finally Orams wish seemed to be granted.

Plans were laid for a new Radiophonic Workshop to be housed in a complex of studios operated by the BBC in the former Maida Vale Roller Skating Palace and Club. Oram set to work writing lists of desirable equipment. But from very early on, it became clear that the Workshop would not prove to be quite what she had in mind.

As the sole studio manager assigned to the new studio from the BBCs Music Department, Oram would have to share control of the Workshop with another studio manager from Drama named Desmond Briscoe. Where Oram had envisioned a centre for electronic music, the BBC clearly sought something more like an effects shop for dramatic features.

In later years, Oram would struggle with Briscoe over control of the narrative detailing the Radiophonic Workshops early years, accusing him of writing her out of the picture. Pinning her quote from the New Atlantis on the wall, then, like Martin Luthers Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, was evidently intended as a sort of manifesto for the new studio but also as a way of asserting her authority over the place, of marking her territory and staking a claim. It was her way of saying, this will not merely be some adjunct studio relegated to making funny noises for The Goon Show , but a true acoustic laboratory worthy of Bacons scientific paradise. This will be a sound-house .

Written late in life, in the twilight of his political career, the New Atlantis is something of an outlier among Bacons published writings, being neither strictly a political or legal report, nor really a philosophical essay or scientific treatise. It is presented, rather, as a fiction. We sailed from Peru, the tale begins (Bacon never set foot in Peru, nor anywhere near it). And before long our sailors, in now time honoured fashioned, find themselves storm-tossed and cast adrift.

On the point of giving themselves up for dead, a mysterious and unknown continent emerges upon the horizon, before the travellers eyes. Far from deserted, the territory soon proves to be populated by a flourishing society, technologically progressive and seemingly free of all want. Shown around by welcoming hosts, the travellers discover a land in which science appears to have solved all material needs. Its name is Bensalem.