Louis Niebur’s chapter 13, ‘Case Studies of Women in Electronic Music: The Early Pioneers’, considers a range of the earliest ground-breaking women working with electronic music, including Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the UK, and Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, and Suzanne Ciani, in the US.

In this essay, I will circle various and conflicting interpretations of Benjamin Britten's Canticle I, “My Beloved Is Mine,” an extended “cantata” that struck me on first hearing as a work filled with a fascinating hermeneutic ambiguity. As Philip Brett's examination of Britten's life (and that of his professional and life partner Peter Pears) has shown, their negotiation of the “open secret” of their relationship offers ways of interpretation that center on a complex interaction of words, music, and performance rather than a strict analysis of the notes. In other words, perhaps “meaning” could be found in more abstract notions of context, live realization, and audience, bearing in mind the performative, intangible aspects of irony and polyvalence contained within a work's reification in actual performance. Canticle I, written in September 1947, was first performed on 1 November of that same year in Central Hall, London, with the composer, Britten, playing the piano, and tenor Peter Pears singing – just one recital performance among countless others in their long concertizing relationship. My approach is heavily influenced by music critic Edward T. Cone's 1974 book The Composer's Voice, but while Cone suggests some very useful concepts I will use his theories as a springboard for other notions. This essay also attempts to move beyond a simple understanding of the canticle as “an ecstatic reflection on the trust and confidence of Man in his Creator,” as Timothy Day wrote, or as just “an expression of spiritual feeling in intensely lyrical language,” as David Brown believed. The Canticle is certainly those things. But who says that it can only be these? In one way, “My Beloved is Mine” has precedent in the nineteenth-century genre of the sacred parlor song, but that tradition, as I will show, has also been useful as a way for subaltern groups to create work that transcends the genre's supposed straightforward ambitions.

PRIOR TO THE mid-twentieth century, British artists’ depictions of the sea spanned a host of contradictory metaphors. The sea could represent danger, instability, or ‘rudderlessness’, a depiction traceable at least as far back as Shakespeare's The Tempest. Alternatively, the sea's apparent timelessness and impassivity effectively contrasted with humanity's own ephemeral and emotionally transitory nature. W. H. Auden, in his poem ‘Dover’, evoked this aspect of the sea when he observed how ‘the eyes of departing migrants are fixed on the sea, / conjuring destinies out of impersonal water’. For working-class Britons, the seaside was a locale for enjoying hard-fought leisure entertainment, of British-specific art forms such as the pierside music hall, Punch and Judy shows, and evening dance-band performances. For others, Britain's proud seafaring tradition represented a fundamental aspect of national identity. One very popular (if ‘pathologically conservative’) depiction of sea life was that of the stratified world of the battleship, as portrayed in films such as In Which We Serve (1942), in which the bold Sons of Albion reliably conquered the forces of evil. But as British art began embracing elements of Continental and American modernism in the early 1950s, new associations began to emerge that presented the sea as symbolic of humanity's engagement with modernity – particularly in ways that considered how Britain's diminished political and cultural status in the post-war world would affect that engagement. These new conceptions of the sea continued to stand alongside older meanings, however, forming a fascinating (if anarchic) semiotic jumble.

This essay will examine two radio plays produced by Donald McWhinnie – James Hanley's The Ocean (1958) and Samuel Beckett's Embers (1959) – that were contemporaneous with the genesis of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Both plays feature the sea as the primary antagonist, and employed state-of-the-art technology to depict it in new and unfamiliar ways. In both works, the electronic representation of the sea reflects a desire to alienate, disorient, and distance the listener from normality, serving as a sonic analogue for the way in which the inescapable sea surrounds the main characters, either literally or symbolically.