2.1 ARTISTS THAT WORK WITH RECORDED SOUND - REALISM - ABSTRACTION

Musique concrete / acousmatic music

 

Tao (Feu) by Annette Vande Gorne

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While listening to Annette Vande Gorne’s acousmatic piece Tao(Feu) I felt my memories awakening, the piece connected me with past  experiences and triggered my  imagination in many different ways.

This piece is very interesting as a concrete sound composition that invites  the listener to travel through their imagination through the medium of sound.Every sounds can be used to create music as Pierre Scheffer clearly demonstrated through his work. Schaeffer made concrete music by recording sound objects or sound phenomena and then editing tapes. 

In one of his early works, Schaeffer experimented with the sounds of railway engines. He called the resulting composition “étude aux chemins de fer”. The engines have their own unique voices,   every object has its own sonic imprint which expresses the reality to which it originally belonged. The railway engine cannot be a performer by itself, It needs people  to  control it and bring it to life . When listening to Schaeffer’s railway composition, we became aware  of the engines’ unique sonic character and texture. It is a sound phenomenon, the sound of chance. It’s making an individual voice that makes us forget that it’s a train. On the topic of this composition, Schaeffer writes:

Is this a sequence that can be called musical? If I extract any sound element and repeat it without bothering about its form but varying its matter, I practically cancel out the form, it loses its meaning; only the variation of matter emerges, and with it the phenomenon of music.

So every sound phenomenon (like the words of a language) can be taken for its relative meaning or for its own substances. As long as meaning predominates, and is the main focus, we have literature and not music. But how can we forget meaning and isolate the in-it-selfness of the sound phenomenon.

This quote from Schaeffer on the topic of his Concrete Music, explains how he renewed traditional elements of musical culture through his work. His idea is that sonorous objects depict the natural truth of things, not the representations of something else. In this way, his approach is similar to that of John Cage whose compositions include the advantages of silence and noise, and invited the audience to experience the aesthetics of environmental noise, as objects in themselves, and not a representation of other things.

The sonic art critic Christoph Cox explains in his article ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’

The ideas of Schaeffer and Cage are similar to Schoepenhauer’s conception of will, in that music is different from the other arts as it is not a copy of an appearance but a copy of the will itself. The will of Art that temporarily relieves despair from the natural world. Nietzsche’s idea of art is that nature itself is artistic, creative, productive, and that we as human-beings are also a part of nature.

 

2.2 Reality – Representation

 

Francisco Lopez’s piece called La Selva is a source of inspiration for my own creative work. This composition layers recordings of sound environments in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. Lopez created this work using field recording  this location such  as waterfalls, insects, rain, and birds.

“Now that we have digital recording technology (with all its concomitant sound quality improvements) we can realize more straightforwardly that the microphones are -they always have been- our basic interfaces in our attempt at a prehending the sonic world around us, and also that they are non-neutral interfaces. Different microphones ‘hear’ so differently that they can be considered as a first transformational step with more dramatic consequences than, for example, a further re-equalization of the recordings in the studio. Even though we don’t substract or add anything we cannot avoid having a version of what we consider as reality…

What you can listen on this CD is not La Selva; it explicitly doesn’t pretend to be so. In other words, La Selva (the music piece) is not a representation of La Selva (the reserve in Costa Rica). It certainly contains elements that can be understood -and even used- as representational, but the essence of the creation of this sound work that I’m calling a piece of music is rooted on a ‘sound matter’ conception, as opposed to any documentative approach.``

 

He mentioned that the apparent realism of the recorded sounds is actually an illusion of realism, as different microphones hear differently. Each recording is a version of what we consider ‘reality’. No matter how realistic each version of the soundscape is, it cannot replace the real experience. Furthermore,the experience of hearing is individual and unique to each person. As a result, people from the region of La Selva found that the recordings were not quite real, since it doesn’t necessarily connect with  perception preserverved within their memory.  However one could argue that those recordings can help them reconnect with their memory of the  sounds of the  forest.

The piece La Selva is not a representation of La Selva, but it contains elements that make us believe that it is La Selva. What Lopez said here is that the sound matter has the potential itself. This is similar to what Cox mentioned regarding the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Namely that the selfness of nature  becomes art.

What I like about this piece is the intensity of the soundscapes and the overlap of time. The composer brought the listeners to La Selva, the natural environment after which he named the piece. We cannot know if it is the real soundscape of La Selva or not. This piece overlaps reality and memories, the experiences of the listeners as if it was an illusion of reality.

McLuhan emphasizes that most human’ creations develop over time in response to the development of technology. In every era, the medium of expressions available shape the creation as well as the imagination thus affecting the type of messages and meanings that are communicated to the world.

 Recording devices such as the camera or the tape recorder can make realistic terms and freeze the time. In the second half of the 20th century, recording devices being affordable for amateur photographers which make many amateur photographers, also tourist photographers which inspire Luc Ferrari to create a piece Presque Rien with tape recorder.

 

 

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Picture 1 The illustration from the internationale situationniste, no.11 (October 1967) Advertisement state: “I like my camera because I like to live. I record the best moments of existence. I bring them back to life in all their brilliance” 

 

“THE DOMINATION OF THE SPECTACLE OVER LIFE. This advertisement for the Eumig camera (summer 1967) evokes quite exactly the freezing of individual life, which is itself inverted in the spectacular perspective: the present is given to be lived immediately as a memory. By means of this spatialization of time, which finds itself subject to the illusory order of a permanently accessible present, both time and life together have been lost.”

Eric Drott shares the view that the recording device allows us not only to freezing a moment but also freeze existence itself.  Those innovative technologies allow us to conquer   the limitations of time. Humans try to transcend time through the technologies they create. The advent of recording technologies not only changed   our everyday habits and behaviors but altered the way we think about and relate to time forever.

 

Luc Ferrari was a composer whose work dealt with interdisciplinarity, especially connecting with the visual arts.  He was also interested in movements and what we could see, not only sounds. He also played with silence as space and time borrowing the thinking process of a sculptor mixed and applying it to his own work as a composer. Everything that happened in his piece has meaning.

Presque Rien or Le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Almost Nothing or Daybreak at the seashore) (1967-70) is a piece which presents an unretouched recording of morning in a fishing village by the Black Sea. The recordings for Presque Rien no.1 were made during the summer of 1968, in the town of Vela Luka on the isle of Korcula, now Croatia. After accumulating a number of these tapes, he pieced together over the next two years a sonic representation of a typical morning in Vela Luca, completing it in 1970.  

The concept of Presque Rien is the observation of an acoustic or social phenomenon only by recording. It would be called ‘anecdotal music’. It is a sort of reality and narrative. It is the opposite of Abstraction-based instrumental music.  

“Ferrari’s aim, it would seem, was to create a kind of music where the identification of what is represented would suffice for an adequate perception of the work. Unlike music that derives its meaning from the play of abstract form, anecdotal music has the advantage of not requiring any specialized knowledge of musical syntax or style or style to be deciphered.” So the perception of humans would connect with each person’s experience of consciousness. Recording sound is recording moments that is memory of the artist but it could make the audiences perceive something by the sense of hearing that connects with each person’s memories.

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2.3 VIDEO ARTIST EXPLORING THE THEME OF MEMORY AND PERCEPTION :
Installation Art

Ragnar Kjartansson’s artwork “The Visitors” is a nine-screen video installation taking place in a 43-room, nearly 200-year-old house called Rokeby Farm. At the start of the work, eight musicians begin to play, each in a separate room (with the artist himself naked in the bathtub). The players record their separate tracks in sync in a single continuous session as others play and sing on the porch.  

 

The sound used in this artwork is music, however it is the sound of a real time image which is synchronized with the sound. In this artwork image and sound are presented equally. The work is expressed in real time but is separated into various rooms in the house. The artwork is unified by the artist’s installation technique.

 

 

The work of the various scholars and artists discussed in this literature review provide me with several ideas for my own creative work. As Cox discusses in his conclusion, sound is a medium that is rooted in the concrete world even though it is not concrete. Art is not always a representation of something but a reality of the material-it-self. Both Lopez’s La Selva and Kjartansson’s The Visitors inspire me because they are using sound in interesting ways, separating time but harmonizing visual and sound  with different techniques.

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References

 

Caux, Jacqueline. “Concepts.” Essay. In Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 129–60. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012. 

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Cox, Christoph. “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism - Christoph Cox, 2011.” SAGE Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470412911402880.

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Drott, Eric. The Politics of Presque Rien. lucferrari.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Eric-Drott__Politics-of-presque-rien__2009.pdf. 

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Hilarie. “Never Tiring of Repeating Himself.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Jan. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/design/the-visitors-by-ragnar-kjartansson.html. 

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“La Selva.” Spotify, 1 Jan. 2009, open.spotify.com/track/0dxLjcizK0MgBXB7cWEZOS?si=bZ-KcoORSAGWvEgyW4L5RQ. 

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López, Francisco.  “Environmental Sound Matter.” The Official Francisco López Website, 2009, www.franciscolopez.net/pdf/env.pdf. 

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McLuhan, Marshall, and W. Terrence Gordon. Introduction. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2015. 

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“Ragnar Kjartansson · SFMOMA.” SFMOMA, 1 May 2019, www.sfmoma.org/read/ragnar-kjartansson/. 

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Schaeffer, Pierre, et al. In Search of a Concrete Music. University of California Press, 2013. 

 

sfmoma. “Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 Oct. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igof7jUIaaE.