Co-chaired by Richard Elliott (Lecturer in Popular Music, Sussex.ac.uk) and
Professor Sally Jane Norman (Professor of Performance Technologies and Director of the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts)
University of Sussex
22nd November 2013, 9am – 4:30pm
SINGING PLACES
University of Sussex, 22 Nov 2013
Abstract:
The interweaving of song and place as a literally resonant cultural identifier offers a richly interdisciplinary research focus.
Music, sonic arts, cultural anthropology, and human geography feature amongst disciplines mobilised by this domain, which is also strongly invested by a range of creative practices including poetry, architecture, acoustic ecologies, and site-specific sound art.
Drawing together theorists and practitioners, this seminar aims to identify key research questions associated with the theme of "Singing Places", with a view to launching a longer- term programme of academic and artistic events.
This
wide-ranging cross-disciplinary series of talks and presentations was hopefully
the beginning of a rich and provoking longer exchange.
Arriving
from Southampton, in time for Richard Follett's paper "Soundscapes,
Creolized Identities, and the Matrix of Memory", I was immediately
absorbed by the richness of anecdote and cross-reference beginning with
Mudimbe’s Matrix of Memory (see also
http://aha.confex.com/aha/2009/webprogram/Paper2306.html)
“Historians
who have examined the sounds of New World slavery and the soundscape of
plantation cultures quite reasonably focus on the audible transcript left by
the enslaved.
Song,
folktale, hollers, and religiously inspired sound contributed to an audible
slave culture, that Shane and Graham White conclude, "was made to be
heard." These audible and visible shards of slave testimony constitute
what Valentin Yves Mudimbe refers to as "a matrix of memory," a
diasporic African "orature."
…the aural
soundscape of slavery leaves "sonic echoes" of subaltern agency and
visibility deep into the twentieth century. . .we should not think of
audibility and silence in binary terms; they were instead
slipping modes of expression, at times intensely soldered, at other points,
gliding linguistically and culturally, giving voice in a multiplicity of ways.”
His talk
raised questions about whether diasporic performance and/or expression is
necessarily or inevitably subversive and transgressive.
Quoting
Paul Gilroy on the “unsayable, unspeakable” parts of remembered terror, which
are at once audible and silent and J. C. Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’ and the
‘infra-politics of resistance’ “Domination and the
Arts of Resistance”, he segued elegantly into contemporary Afro-Brazilian
culture’s Angolan and Congolese inheritance and the similarities between
capoeira, carnival, samba and Brazilian football, who share a use of unexpected
elisions, silences and necessarily guileful pauses.
A
plausible etymology for the term ‘cool’ was argued, keeping your composure
while performing seemingly impossible complications around European dance moves
to entertain, beguile and confound their slave masters. Moving to the rhythms
formed by the audible but silent interstices, suggested but evanescent other
fluctuations between the only beat perceptible to the white men’s ears.
Richard Follett is
Professor of American History at the University of Sussex
Richard
Elliott, “Songs in/and place” began with a comparison of white American country
singer Alan Jackson’s “Where
I come from” and Jay-Z’s “Where I’m from” in terms
of lyrical content, tone and evocative referential statements of origin.
An
eclectic and broadly referenced piece, largely focused on Portuguese Fado
music: Fado originated in the dock areas of Lisbon – and therefore was a music
of many sources, concerned with place, origin, identity – unlike flamenco and
tango for example, with no accompanying dance form.
Elliott
touched on de Certeau’s “Walking
in the City”, where the ‘migrational’ and ‘metaphorical’ are superimposed
on the ‘planned’ city; the poetic power of place names; Perec’s playful and
poetic “Species
of Spaces”; Lefebvre’s “The
Production of Space” and “Rhythmanalysis”…lived
space as biological, psychological, social and mechanical rhythms… Svetlana
Boym’s “The
Future of Nostalgia”, Edward Soja’s “Thirdspace”
and “Postmetropolis”,
Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and returning to the unifying theme, with Michael
Colvin’s “The Reconstruction of Lisbon”, primarily concerned with Fado music.
Native
American folk tales, he said, were often based in familiar physical locations
while in all other aspects remaining fabulous, incredible.
Elliott
made me wonder how the textures of geo-located sound structures can be made
more to reflect and explore the audible and inaudible interstices between
present sounds in physical locations.
Richard Elliott is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Sussex.
He
presented the ethical and logistical difficulties, enlarging on the sense that
there is a value and beauty in the sound’s live transmission that would
transcend, in its unpredictability, any constructed sounds used to artificially
evoke such an ambience as would be broadcast from a live functioning
institution.
There was
discussion about the nature of liveness, given digital latency and streaming
unpredictability.
Martin’s
ontology:
Sound
translocation through technology
Evocative:
presence created
Soundscape
Recontextualisation
Sound
sculpture
He touched
on the possibilities afforded by free internet radio streaming hosters, such as
myradiostream.com and Icecast, a free streaming media
project maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation.
My
favourite quote of the day:
“In spite of the internet we still have our bodies” Jean Martin
“In spite of the internet we still have our bodies” Jean Martin
Jean Martin is a musicologist, sound researcher, composer, writer about film sound and music, radio producer and documentary film maker
Composer
Matthew Hodson presented an astonishingly beautiful example of his work
interpreting and responding to landscape in which he analysed the frequency and
timbral content of field recordings from the South Downs and after (incredibly
effective, sensitive) processing of the original sounds, superimposed synthetic
sound textures that interwove in a delightful, indefinable beast-machine
complex.
He would
take the music composed in the studio and perform it in situ with speakers
under trees. The heard effect in the examples played sounded as though they
were a studio-based mixture of field recording and composed additional layers
but the lightness of touch in production made the seams and boundaries of the
work difficult to untangle on first audition.
Hodson
touches on the ethical question of introducing sounds into an environment that
interfere with its functioning, reminding me of the pleasure of introducing
sound to landscape inaudibly for all but the
individual headset-wearing listener, with GPS-enabled notours software.
Composer and Sound Designer, www.matthewhodson.com www.bitbin.co.uk
Composer Danny Bright
presented his sound installation at Magna, the ex-Templeborough steel works at
Rotherham.
Unusual in being at
once part dis-used, part ruined and part re-purposed, the site is palpably populated
by sonic ghosts.
The former Electric Arc Furnace was turned into a melting shop
– where scrap metal was melted down to be re-used in new metal fabrication.
The scale of the site
is staggering; one mile wide with networks of rail, sidings, 14 separate
furnaces. It closed in 1996 and was dormant until the Millennium Project initiated
its partial transformation into a science education centre.
It remains largely
derelict, some underground areas filled with construction waste, others
including tunnels and shafts for communications, cabling and the movement of
people remain accessible.
These became the viscera of an enormous instrument,
the mouth of which, a hand-riveted steel trumpet bell, protruding from an old
manhole allowed the resonance of the building to literally become its own song.
A striking aspect of
this intervention was the lack of interpretative or manipulative work done –
not attempting to evoke or speak for the place, but giving a mouth to the
place’s own voice.
The arduinos and control circuits running a three channel
MAX patch had the required simplicity to never require maintenance and to be
operable from a simple three button, two slider console the visiting children
would push to its limits.
The console was constructed from the retrieved
controls of a dismantled crane.
Bright referenced
Michael Mayerfield Bell’s 1997 “The Ghosts of Place”:
“a ubiquitous aspect
of phenomenology of space is ghosts: the sense of presence of those who are not
physically there…”
Bright calls his
process of summoning and repurposing the naturally occurring sounds of the
place Sonic Ghost Composition.
It is one of a number
of similar projects he has so far completed, looking at the architectural and
acoustic resonances of a place, allowing them to take precedence over
compositional techniques.
It was a way of giving ultimate voice to the
historical and personal references and resonances of the site, as is
appropriate to a design that celebrates and memorialises the place’s former
existence and the people who manned, operated and lived through it.
Listener interaction
was reported as often being random and showing very short attention spans – or
indifference or incomprehension – but for Bright, the possibility to hear the
“space singing its own song” gave it weight and validity that he hadn’t fully
expected and this has now come profoundly to inform his current thinking and
planning for future work.
Danny Bright is a sound designer, composer, recordist and sonic manipulator http://www.bogstandardaudio.co.uk/Sound%20Tunnel.html
Co-chair Professor
Sally Jane Norman gave a penultimate concluding talk that moved rapidly and sure-footedly
over many connections between historical and contemporary sound sites:
places re-located and de-located.
Robert Fludd, 1621,
The Tuning of the World,
Soundhouses in
Bacon’s New Atlantis, 1648,
Boston Symphony Hall,
designed by Wallace Sabine in 1900, held to be the first example of
acoustically aware modern concert hall architecture,
The Oracle Room of
the Hypogeum at Malta, dating from around 3000 BC, discovered accidentally in
1902 by builders, the only known prehistoric underground necropolis with an
acoustic clearly designed to evoke and recall mystical truths and revelations.
A cross section of
the elaborate, brilliantly designed Versailles Opera, 1770,
The Philips Pavilion
of 1958, with big boss Le Corbusier’s name on it but actually designed by composer-architect
Xenakis and sonically populated or its opening by Varese’s Poeme Electronique
for 400 speakers. 55 years ago!
Francois Bayle’s
acousmonium, whose intent was to engage listeners with the timbral and temporal
qualities of ‘sampled’ and processed sounds but which had the opposite effect,
causing them to anthropomorphise and interpret as constructed, communicative
sounds that which he was merely attempting to curate and present.
Keith Fullerton
Whitman’s 2011 deconstruction and acoustic repopulation of a space at the
Kontraste Festival at Krems in Austria,
Pauline Oliveros’
uses of space in her Deep
Listening work,
and Michel Redolfi
and David Hykes’ transmission of Thoronet Abbey in France to the Kitchen in New
York,
Bennett Hogg’s “when
violins were trees” – placing the instruments in woodland and underwater
settings for them to be played by natural elements in the environment [The Violin, The River and Me],
Max Neuhaus, sounding
out the New York underground through vent shafts…
Stockhausen’s
proposal for the ‘urban sonic vacuum cleaner’….. in light particularly of the
approaching mercantile cacophony of Christmas, so bereft as it is of all
poetry.
Perhaps places need
to be quietened before it is possible really to listen to them.
How might one develop
layers of the past and present that make them mutually responsive?
The past and sonic
ghosts need not necessarily be an expression of lamentation but also celebratory,
inventing and imagining futures of the space
Identifying common
themes between Body – Song – Place among the speakers of the day.
Michael Bull’s
summing up began with the story of the Dutchmen who told him to speak for as
long as he wanted, so he did 2 ½ hours. We were not so fortunate, as the day
was drawing to a close, but he touched on how…
notion of place is
increasingly abstract in a digital-dominated experience
citing as example the
sounds of ‘Canterbury’ and Manchester’ bands – acknowledging that many of us could
already not remember these,
that the Cavern is no
longer a site of musical production or performance but a museum to a historical
artifact, removed from the context of its inception,
the commodification
of sound in place as an ever-increasing trend,
power and social
class relations dominating our reading of sound in specific places
mechanisation
constructing the imaginary nostalgic
e.g. Italian
Americans pining for ‘home’ when listening to Caruso in the 1920s
Studio tourism, even
of vanished studios…..
What was absent from
the day’s discussion in Bull’s view?
Whose sounds are in
the space, musical identities being manufactured through constructed
ideologies.
Histories of song
show that much was located in occupations and we refer to places as historical
phenomena, where ‘place’ is eroded, dissolved by the ubiquity of digital.
Anders Brevik was
listening on headphones to the Lord of the Rings as he murdered teenagers in
Norway four years ago.
What place emotional,
psychological, imaginary was he occupying in the middle of all this?
Surely there is a
direct link between the sadness of much nostalgia – even for time before our
own memory – and sadness at the
loss of one’s own days?
There is an ancient
Japanese hillside cemetery, a place of great tranquility and subtle sonic and
acoustic interest where Bull was enjoying an evening stroll, when suddenly a
hundred loudspeakers began to produce a kind of ‘celestial shopping mall’: a
horrible and disconnecting experience raising questions about the imposition of
sonic effect, someone’s vision or ideology, on a public space.
The alienating and
intrusive effect brings a strongly political aspect to discussion of sound in
public places.
Auget’s Non-Places,
to return to question of ‘what is space?’ – how we construct meaning even for
the most apparently clearly defined:
e.g. the relative
experience of singing at Greenham Common by the protesters (unifying,
supportive), the police (subversive, defiant) and military (obstructive)
Consider parents and
children arguing about what sounds to play – using the sounds they wish to hear
to define the space they are occupying from an own perspective.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Just some rough notes
to try to remember the enormous glut of new ideas and references I’ve enjoyed
during this fantastic day of sound and speech.
More sound next time, I agree!
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