READING DIARY: JANUARY 2022- TT SESSION 13: SOUNDING BODIES- CRITICAL IMMATERIAL ART: A WORKSHOP WITH ZEERAK AHMED- Readings 1-6
JAN22-READING 1. Silence, John Cage
For me, as a long-time Cage fan, reader of his writings, fan of his conceptual art, and listener of his music, highlights of Silence include:
His dada-esque approach to music composition, e.g., from pps. 8-9, ...Geometrical means employing spatial superimpositions at variance with the ultiruate performance in time may be used. The total field of possibilities may be roughly divided and the actual sounds within these divisions may be indicated as to number but left to the performer or to the splicer to choose. In this latter case, the composer resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture.
And his idea about the purpose of writing music, which I think holds true of the purpose of any kind of creative act, including, acting, dancing, designing, directing, documenting, art making, painting, performing, photographing, printing, sculpting, writing, etc. in any medium, e.g., from pp. 12, And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life- not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Also interesting for me about Cage's 4'13", is that on August 29th, 2014, my composer/musician husband Baird Hersey's vocal group Prana performed it at The Woodstock Artist Association & Museum.
On August 29th, 1952, presented by The Woodstock Artist Association, pianist David Tudor premiered John Cage's 4'33". It is one of Cages most famous pieces. It is a meditation on silence/sound. Prana was invited by Norm Magnusson to perform this piece at the Woodstock Artist Association & Museum hosted by Carl Van Brunt on the 62nd anniversary of it's debut. The members of Prana are Amy Fradon, Kirsti Gholson, Bruce Milner and Timothy Hill. Click here to see/hear: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbqoQYKooqs
JAN22-READING 2. The Aural Walk, Iain Chambers
Iain Chambers' most interesting ideas about the 1980s-90s Sony Walkman the central focus of The Aural Walk and what we now know as the forerunner of today's iPhone, include that it exists as a ...privileged object of contemporary nomadism that... brings the external world into the interior design of identities.
His philosophical and linguistic insights on the Walkman are encompassing, e.g.,
Music is continually being decontextualized and re-contextualized in the inclusive and acoustic and symbolic flux of everyday life.; and ...the Walkman is simultaneously an instrument and an activity that contributes into the casting, into sense, to the re-presenting, or en-framing (Ge-stell), of the contemporary world. In retracing the etymology of "technology" back to the Greek techne and its ancient connection to the arts, to poiesis and knowledge, Heidegger suggests a wider frame for thinking its sense, its wider truth.
Interestingly Chambers points out political spaces that opened up by, and deconstructs what the Walkman may be, e.g.,
A previous spatial hierarchy has had increasingly to confront an excess of languages emerging out of the histories and languages of feminism, sexual rights, ethnicity, race and the environment that overflow and undercut is authority. The Walkman is therefore a political act? It is certainly an act that unconsciously entwines with many other micro-activities in conferring a different sense on the polis. In producing a different sense of space and time, it participates in rewriting the conditions of representation: where "representation" clearly indicates both the semiotic dimensions of the everyday and potential participation in a political community.
Finally, he cites Bruce Chapman's book The Songlines, which is the most poetic idea of his analysis, e.g.,
...we are presented with the idea that the world was initially sung into being: I have a vision of the songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these traits must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African Savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song. "I AM!"."
JAN22-READING 3. Some Sound Observations, (from Audio Culture), Pauline Oliveros
I really enjoyed reading electronic music guru Oliveros...in part because I know her music well via my musician/composer ex-husband who for a few years, managed her career...and in part because I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was also a great and funny writer. I am inspired by how deftly she wove together, in tapestry-like fashion, with a seamless ease:
-Her stream-of-listening experiences of sounds around her while she wrote an article three days prior to the due date, i.e.,
My present bulldozer has started and stopped again. A faraway jet simulates a fifty foot tabla, accompanied by an infinite freeway tamboura....and,
I am tired of writing this article, but not of the opportunity it is giving me to listen and remember. My chair is creaking as restlessness grows. I wonder what God's chair sounds like? I would like to amplify it. I would like to amplify a spider spinning its web.
-Her responses to attending various live music concerts, i.e.,
Three days ago at UC Davis, I experienced a magnificent performance of Bob Ashley's Wolfman. My ears changed and adapted themselves to the sound pressure level. All the wax in my ears melted. After the performance, ordinary conversation at two feet away sounded very distant. Later, all ordinary sounds seemed heightened, much louder than usual. Today I can still feel Wolfman in my ears. MY EARS FEEL LIKE CAVES. Monday I am going to hear Wolfman again. It will be the fourth time I've heard Wolfman, and I can't wait to hear the feedback dripping from his jaws again.
-And, her ironic if not snarky critiques of academic music departments, their equipment and practices, i.e.,
In most schools and universities the language laboratories are better equipped for sound processing and modifications than the music departments.
JAN22-READING 4. Ocean of Sound: aether talk, ambient sound and imaginary worlds, David Toop
While reading some sections of Toop's two chapters, I had similar responses to those I had reading Oliveros...enjoyed, laughed, had a good feeling. But some of the reading gave me the opposite sense, that is I had a negative or creepy feeling. Though the two writers are stylistically similar and prose-y, for me, Toop might have needed a better editor...?
~Ch. 1 Memory: sound and evocation; Muzak, ambience and aethereal culture; Brian Eno and perfume; Bali, Java, Debussy
"Sitting quietly inn ever-never-land, -I am listening to summer fleas jump off my small female cat on to the polished wood floor...Truthfully, 1 am lying in intensive care. Wired, plugged and electronically connected, I have glided from coma into a sonic simulation of past, and passed, life.
...And then the note of conditioning, the slow glide of electronic curtains. My exit, probably. But I still hear the of fleas jumping off my small female cat onto the polished Wood floor."
...Yuck, but because watching David Lynch's Eraser Head altered my understanding of film making...and when it first aired, my then husband and I loved watching his Twin Peaks, I did enjoy reading the beginning of Ch. 13...
"Ocean of Sound: David Lynch; John Lilly; Kate Bush; David Sylvlan; shamanism; ambient; Information ocean
"I feel a little bit strange," says David Lynch. Well, what else? We are sitting in a large; L-shapedroom in his home. One wall, vast as a drive-in movie screen, is glass; behind it lies the vegetal mystery and darkness of the Hollywood Hills at night...
Although "Twin Peaks", designed by Lynch and writer Mark Frost for ABC TV, degenerated into aimlessness, the original pilot contained moments of genuine strangeness, particularly the music and the red curtain ending. The otherworldly quality of this latter scene came partly from the fact that it was shot in reverse. "The whole thing was shot backwards", says Lynch. "You start at the end and work to the beginning. All the camera moves therefore, are backwards. All their walking is backwards and all their talking is backwards but the whole idea of it, of course, is that it will not and it should not look exactly realistic but it should look somewhat realistic."
Later in Ch. 13 reading Toop was weird for me... maybe because when same-said ex that I mentioned earlier and I vacationed on the West coast of Mexico, c. 1983, with a small group of film makers and musicians, including Terry & Ann Riley, and John Lilly & his wife Toni, and the later two completely weirded the rest of us out, reading a few of Toop's Ch 13 paragraphs on Lilly's work triggered that memory. And ultimately Toop's Ch. 13 is very up-and-down, and as depressingly as he begins is exactly how he ends...
memory
Sitting quietly in never-never land, I am listening to summer fleas hibernating on my small female cat...
London, 1995"
(ewww)
JAN22-READING 5. Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman
Using excerpts from Goodman's Chapter 28- "2025: Déjà Entendu", in Below, I outline his key chapter ideas. For me, of the six assigned readings for this month's intensive, his writing is the most challenging, wildest, mind-bendy, of all. Reading it was an exercise in mental Jiu-Jitsu, and to get a grip I had to re-read it three times.
...the power of sound to abduct you to another time, to activate memories that obliterate consciousness of the present in front of you, in the blink of an eye, transporting you into previously overpowering sensations and affects. The potency of earworms is not limited to contagiousness. When audio viruses resonate in the host body, they can result in the feeling of temporal anomaly... We could say, perhaps only half jokingly, that it enters in this split second through an earwormhole...
...To unravel this phenomenon of déjà entendu, a symptom of the condition of schizophonia (i.e., sounds detached not just from their sources in space but also in time), we need a sense of memory in which the past and the future virtually coexist with the present so that memories and anticipated potentials resonate with each other in unpredictable ways.
In his text Bergsonism, Deleuze explores duration at various tensions, states of relaxation and contraction, and its relation to the virtual coexistence of affects from different times...In this sense for Deleuze, the "past is “contemporaneous” with the present that it has been.... The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past.... The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself in the past... it is all our past, which coexists with each present....
...While Bergson is concerned with the virtual past, Whitehead’s insight here comes from the opposite direction: the potential future. He maps the retroactivity of futurity by focusing on the microtemporality of the immediate present. Memories for him exist between the immediate past and the immediate future. Here, the past does not determine the future but eats into it. In such achronological causation, the future is active in the present, unfolding in the process by which the past- present enters the present- future. He suggests that to prehend the transition between the immediate past and the immediate future is of the order of short-term intuition—time spans that last a second or fraction of a second—“which lives actively in its antecedent world.”...
...Whitehead defines this temporal immediacy as the enjoyment of the present: an open-ended enjoyment of re-enaction and anticipation where the future enters the present once the past has perished so as for futurity to populate the present anew....
JAN22-READING 6. The Glazed Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer from The Soundscape Newsletter, Number 04, September, 1992
I enjoyed the concise, smart writing in R. Murray Schaefer's punn-ily titled The Glazed Soundscape, which begins,
The soundscape of every society is conditioned by the predominant materials from which it is constructed. Thus we may speak of bamboo, wood, metal, glass, or plastic cultures, meaning that these materials produce a repertoire of sounds of specific resonance when touched by active agents, by humans or wind or water.
Schafer gives us a brief, smart history of the glazing of the western world, i.e., North America was originally a wood culture, passing, like modern Europe, to cement and glass during the twentieth century.
He focuses in on glass, i.e.,
...Glass is the most imperceptible soundscape material and therefore needs special treatment. Its history goes back possibly nine thousand years or more, though its prominence is much more recent. About 200 B.C. Roman glass makers learned how to roll out slabs of glass to make mosaics and also to close small window surfaces, though their semi-opacity admitted only feeble light. The manufacturing of glass wax improved by the Venetians after 1300 but it was not until the seventeenth century that the glazing of windows began on a large scale. In 1567 Jean Carre, a merchant from Antwerp, had received a twenty-one-year license from Queen Elizabeth I for making window glass in Britain, but it was Louis Lucas de Nehan's new method of casting in 1688 that for the first time permitted the production of large polished plates of flat glass of relatively uniform thickness from which it was possible to make excellent mirrors and fill large window openings.
Then Schafer outlines his point, which is... Our concern is with the change of perception brought about by glazing....
The glazed window was an invention of great importance for the soundscape, framing external events in an unnatural phantom-like 'silence.' The diminution of sound transmission, while not immediate and occurring only gradually with the thickening of glazing, not only created the notion of a 'here' and a 'there' or a 'beyond', but also introduced a fission of the senses. Today one can look at one's environment, while hearing another, with a durable film separating the two. Plate glass shattered the sensorium, replacing it with contradictory visual and aural impressions.
Then Shafer makes keen observations about our glazed societies... With indoor living, two things developed anonymously: the high art of music, and noise pollution -for the noises were the sounds that were kept outside. After art music had moved indoors, street music became an object of particular scorn.
Interestingly, he compares and contrasts Hogarth's celebrated print "The Enraged Musician" with... Brueghel's The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, stating Hogarth's print contains glass windows. Brueghel's painting does not. Brueghel's people have come to the open windows to listen; Hogarth's musician has come to the window to shut it...
Finally he concludes, ...Now the interior and exterior can become totally contradictory. The world seen through the window is like the world of a movie set with the radio as soundtrack. I recall traveling in the dome car of a train passing through the Rocky Mountains with schmaltzy music on the public address system and thinking: This is a travelogue movie about the Rocky Mountains -we are not here at all.
My main take away from having read R. Murray Shafer's smart piece is that because we have surrounded and desensitize ourselves with cold, hard, womb-like glass cubes, we are not really living as beings of this earth, but instead, we are observing it.
And, wow, is he ever astute.
