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WD_175/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0175 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Cut and Paste: Collage and the Art of Sound" By Kevin Concannon.
Preface:
Though ill-considered as an artistic medium, sound recordings have been produced by visual artists within a variety of contexts since the beginning of the twentieth century and are numerous. Artists and individual works discussed in the following pages have been selected with an ear toward their individual merits, as representative of more general formal and aesthetic currents and for their significance within the broader context of twentieth century art and popular culture.
Taking off from Walter Benjamin's assessment of gramaphone records as enabling 'the original to meet the beholder halfway,’ I have traced my way to the contradictory notion of the recording as the 'original,' ill-suited for live 'reproduction,' through the application of an essentially formalist, and ultimately photographic, critical apparatus.
The very idea of an Audio Art implies a genre defined foremost by formalist concerns. The recordings discussed cover a broad spectrum, including poetry, music, text and drama. The foundation upon which my arguments for sound recordings as works of art are based, is the popular understanding of mechanically reproduced media as accurate transcriptions of reality. Both photography and sound recording developed, not within the fine arts community, but rather within popular culture. Their substantial popular histories are inextricably linked to their capacity to 'capture' that specific time and place and to transform it into a piece of documentary evidence, whether it be Matthew Brady's Civil War or RCA’s Caruso concert.
Music, in fact, has been one of the more problematic aspects of this study. For many, the Audio Arts are merely an extension of the musical avant garde and, as euphemisms go, only slightly less derogartory than 'experimental.' Many of the major advances in the Audio Arts have indeed been made by avant-garde composers. John Cage, in many ways, serves as a pivotal figure in this history. Having produced work in several media, he is nonetheless best known as a composer. One of Cage’s best known pieces, consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence (4'33" 1952). Rather than attempt to draw that nebulous line between composers and sound artists, it will suffice to state that superficial distinctions, such as whether or not a particular individuall works in a visual medium as well, or whether or not a particular individual has a record on the pop charts, will be kept to a minimum. I have instead tried to focus on the medium of sound recording itself and the seeds of its practice as we know it.
As the primary product of the recording industry, music represents a substantial percentage of audio artworks. Regardless of what one chooses to call it, the influence of the recording medium itself has affected much of the 'music' recorded during our time, by rock musicians as well as 'experimental' or 'serious' composers and artists. When audio recording and playback equipment came into general use, the very nature of being a composer or musician changed drastically. Composer Glenn Gould personifies this shift within the world of classical music, combining many takes of the same piece for the perfect (recorded) performance. Many recording artists are more competent with a recording studio than any traditional musical instrument. This trend has accellerated recently with the mass availability of digital processing and recording equipment. The genre of pop music currently known as urban contemporary vividly demonstrates the shift in general use of the medium from 'accurate transcriiption of reality' to material for plastic manipulation.' Using prerecorded discs of various beats and rhythm phrases, contemporary musicians compose today's hip-hop, scratch and funk. Even within the realm of pop music there exists a demonstrable concern with the intrinsic qualities of the medium. The band Bonzo Goes To Washington achieved a modest commercial success with Five More Minutes, a dance record sculpted around a recording of Ronald Reagan's infamous slip up, 'My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that we have just passed legisilation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' By processing the tape through a sampler, the President of the United States was transformed into a parody of the popular raving rap star, or vice-versa.
Some History:
As with photography, sound recording has developed consistently toward a refinement of its greatest perceived virtue: its ability to recreate, ever more accurately, an event displaced from its original time and place. Both media were created to preserve real-time reality and subsequently, both have been manipulated by artists to create realities that exist only as reproduction. Sound works by artists evolved largely out of the tradition of performance art. The early recordings of Futurists and Dada artists that began the brief and intermittent history of artists’ records, along with still photographs and precious little film footage, provide the best documents that we have of their real-time work. To this day, performance artists use recordings as a way to disseminate and promote their work.
Numerous recordings of Filiipo.Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, have been preserved and are occassionally released on anthology LP’s, CD’s and audio cassette magazines. Along with a few recordings by Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann, these Marinetti pieces not only offer an aural glimpse of early performance art but prefigure a lot of later work that only became possible with the wide availability of tape recorders, and more recently, digital audio sampling equipment.
While the tradition of sound poetry that developed from Marinetti's words-in-freedom and the Dada nonsense poetry of Hugo Ball and others is well known, both Marinetti and Kurt Schwitters became interested in manipulating sound with technology long before such manipulation became common practice. Marinetti composed five pieces for- radio performance in the 1930s that prefigured experiments with musique concrete of fifteen yyears later. 'Splicing' together several distinct sounds such as water, fire, and human voices, he created his radio sintesi.
The manifesto of the Fururist Radiophonic Theater was published by Marinetti and Pino Masnata in October 1933. The manifesto begins with a self-aggrandizing litany of Futurism’s past accomplishments presented as a report of the Second National Congress of Futurism. Among those goals advocated by the conference are the 'overcoming of earth with the intuition of the means discovered to realize the trip to the Moon’ and the 'overcoming of patriotism with a more fervid patriotism transformed into authentic religion for the country warning the semites to identify themselves with their different countries if they don't wish to disappear.’ While the former suggests the Futurists' faith in technology, the latter offers but one of many specific examples of their vile politics, certainly a major factor contributing to the scholarly neglect of Futurist work of this period.
At the point in this document when the issue of radio is brought up, the authors begin by citing the miracle of television and their anticipation of teletactilism and teletaste. While waiting, however, they would perfect the art of radio. Much of what is said reiterates the theories of Rudolph Arnheim and others, stating that their radio 'begins where theatre, cinema and narration end.' In addition to prescribing the use of noise, Marinetti's own words-in-fteedoin and simultaneous action that were the staples of Futurist performance, the manifesto proposes several other practices that were more specific to radio. Some of them were to be realized only much later:
Detection, amplification and transfuguration of vibrations given out by materials. As today we listen to the song of the forest or the sea, tomorrow we will be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or a flower.
This notion of the amplification of 'microscopic' audio phenomena has been realized more recently by such artists as Richard Lerman and Lief Brush. Both use modern microphones and electronics to 'blow up' tiny sounds, normally not heard by the human ear. Lerman, for example, uses piezo microphones to amplify the sounds of metal as activated by a blowtorch. Brush surgically implants miniature microphones into trees to make audible the sounds of trees growing. In both cases, the microphone is analogous to the microscope. While today such extreme amplification can be accomplished, in 1933 it would have been quite impossible; and their intuitive foresight on this point should be recognized as being as startling as their visions of lunar landings.
Other prescriptions in their manifesto that are more recently familiar include the ‘utilizition of interferences among radio stations and the rising and fading of sounds’ and the 'geometric limitiation and building of silence.
As best as I can determine, the actual practice of Futurist radio at this time was limited to presentations of live performances of Marinetti's plays and sound poems which were also recorded and pressed as phonograph records. Marinetti wrote five scores for radio syntheses that same year although they were not published until 1938. Three of these pieces dealt specifically with the ‘limitation and construction of silence':
Silences Speaking to Each Other:
15 seconds of pure silence
Do re mi on flute
8 seconds Of pure silence
Do re mi on flute
29 seconds of pure silence
So on piano
Do on trumpet
40 seconds of pure silence
Do on trumpet
Wheh wheh wheh of baby boy
11 seconds of pure silence
1 minute of rrr of motor
11 seconds of pure silence
Surprised Oooooh of 11-year-old girl
The Building of a Silence:
1) Build a left will with a drum roll (half a minute)
2) Build a right wall with a din, a downtown car/ street car, horn,
voices and screeches (half a minute)
3) Build a floor with a gurgling of water in pipes (half a minute)
4) Build a ceiling terrace with chirp chirp chirp srschirp of sparrows
and swallows (20 seconds)
Battle of Rhythms:
A cautious and patient slowness expressed by a tack tack tack of
dripping water, first then killed by
A flying arpeggioing elasticity of notes on the piano, first cut then
killed by
A ringing of an electric bell, first cut then killed by
A silence of three minutes, first cut then killed by
A palpitation of key in lock, tah trum track, followed by
A silence of one minute
In Silences Speak to Each Other, the emphasis on the segments of ‘pure’ silence seems fairly straightforward. The use of conventional orchestral instruments, something not in keeping with the rhetoric of Futurism, is apparently intended to provide a delimitation of the periods of silence in something of a figure/ground reversal. The use of 'concrete' sounds, non-musical sounds accurately transcribed onto records from life, better fulfill the Futurist program as set forth in manifestos such as Russolo’s Art of' Noises. For example, the motor and vehicle noises in the first two pieces are characterisitc of the Futurist's glorification of the machine. While it would have been relatively easy to realize the first piece with the help of a few musical instruments, voices and theatre sound effects records that were plentiful at the time, the sculptural, three dimensional quality of The Building of a Silence would have been rather ineffective given the fact that stereo separation did not yet exist in either recording or broadcast media. A truly successful realization of the scorc would really require quadrophonic sound. In Daniele Lombardi’s reconstruction of the piece on the Cramps Record Musica Futurista (1980), the left and right walls were created using stereo recording.
The one minute silence that concludes the third piece leaves the listener- in doubt as to when the piece actually ends. The Lombirdi reconstruction first came to my attention through an Austrian radio producer who mentioned that she had doubts about its suitability for airplay as silence is commonly considered as 'dead air' and frowned upon by radio regulators. Michael Kirby asserts that the nature of radio programming in the 1930s was much different than it is now, and at the time when Marinetti’s scores were written, listeners were more likely to tune in for a specific program and less likely to be station scanning as is the general custom today. John Cage would later become famous for his piece, 4'33", which consisted of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Cage's silence, however, was not 'pure' and allowed for the ambient sounds of the concert hall. Marinetti’s silence, of course, could not have been 'pure' in any radio broadcast then or now unless white noise constitutes purity.
Marinetti and Masnata also called for 'fights of sounds and different distances, namely the spatial drama added to the temporal drama.’ If the spatial drama of' which the manifesto speaks seems improbable in a sculptural sense, as the later score suggests, the Drama of Distances might fulfill a more literal interpretation:
Drama of Distances:
11 seconds of a military march in Rome
11 seconds of a tango danced in Santos
11 seconds of Japanese religious music played in Tokyo
11 seconds of a lively country dance from around Varèse
11 seconds of a boxing match in New York
11 seconds of street noises in Milan
11 seconds of a Neapolitan song sung in the Cape Cabana Hotel
in Rio de Janeiro
If The Buildiiig of Silence failed to create a physical sense of distance due to the technical limitations of the era, Drama of Distances would certainly have conveyed at least a referential sense of distance with its juxtaposition of easily identified sounds from specific places.
While it is unclear whether or not Marinetti ever realized these scores, Kurt Schwitters was among the first to approach sound recording as a plastic medium. Using sound film, Schwitters edited and collaged his nonsense poems after he recorded them and before he pressed them into records. Everett C. Frost cites Klaus Schöning's talk given at theInternational Congress on the Evolution of Broadcasting:
Klaus Schöning remarked that Kurt Schwitters was the first to experiment with such manipulations—even before there was audiotape. In the days when recordings were made on wax cylinders, Schwitters dubbed the recording onto film and edited the film into an audio collage.
With the introduction of tape recording technology many years later, this idea of editing sound became more commonplace, no doubt taking its lead from cinematic technique.
The notion of collaging sounds from life to create music is most commonly associated with Pierre Schaeffer, head of the Radiodiffusion Broadcast Studios in Paris, in the 1940s. It is to Schaeffer that the term musique concrète is attributed. Using his Paris broadcast studios, he began his experiments in 1942. In the United States, John Cage was the first to create a musique concrète work. In the same year that he presented the notorious 4'33" (1952), he introduced his first piece composed specifically for magnetic tape. Williams Mix was constructed from a library of recorded sounds divided into six types: country sounds, city sounds, electronic or synthetic sounds, windproduced sounds (including songs), manually-produced sounds and small sounds requiring amplification to be heard with the others. The various sounds were played on eight discrete tracks of recording tape so that they overlapped. The score for the piece was determined using the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes which Cage used often throughout his career. The use of tape libraries and chance operations would later become common compositional techniques for experimental composers.
To some extent, Cage was influenced by Futurist and Dada art. He cites the work of Marinetti and Russolo in his early writings and he was a close friend to Marcel Duchamp. The extended capabilities of new recording technology made possible the realization of most (largely) theoretical work proposed in the early part of the century. Artists were not, however, the only people to realize this. When Leopold Stokowski began broadcasting in 1929, he was astonished to discover that in addition to a carefully planned seating arrangement of his orchestra, certain instruments could be emphasized or buried with the use of the mixing console. Encouraged by his experience, in 1931 he proclaimed that 'the composer of the future will create his harmonies directly in tone by means of electrical-musical instruments which will record his idea exactly.' Working in colliboration with Bell Laboratory, Stokowski, by the late 1930s, had created stereophonic recordings twenty-five years before stereo was introduced.
The Influence of Recording Technology on Popular Music:
By the mid-1960s popular musicians began to exploit the sophisticaited technology of the recording studio. This phenomenon prompted the Beatles to announce that they were retiring from touring because it was impossible to 'reproduce' their recorded music live. On their White Album, the track Revolution Number Nine introduced musique concrète to a wide audience. This track instigated the 'Paul is dead' rumour. As the attorney F. Lee Bailey demonstrated on a special television program dedicated to a discussion of this rumour, when played backwards on a turn-table the phrase 'number nine ... number nine,' repeated throughout the piece, became 'turn me on dead man.' Other artists began to use prerecorded tapes both in the studio and in the live concert context. Holger Czukay (one of the founding members of the German rock group Can) worked extensively with musique concrète and his produced several albums that were very influential with contemporary musicians such as David Byrne and Brian Eno.
In addition to the use of prepared tapes, by the 1970s rock began to perform live using technology that had previously been limited to the recording studio. Brian Eno, as a member of the art-rock band Roxy Music, began playing synthesizers and treating other instruments with electronic filters during live performances. In his subsequent solo studio recordings, Eno adopted chance techniques of composition in addition to his extreme manipulation and collaging of sound. He has acknowledged the influence Cage specifically in relation to his tape music and chance operations. Along with painter Peter Schmidt, he created Oblique Strategies (1975), a set of cards with instructions and suggestions that may be applied to a variety of creative activities. While recording in the studio, he would place the cards face down around the room. When confronted with a creative problem, one or several cards could be consulted for inspiration and direction. Over 100 cards offered a variety of suggestions:
Give way to your worst impulse
Emphasize the flaws
Use 'unqualified' people
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten
Eno employs these Obliqtie Strategies in the creation of his own audio and video work and on recordings that he produces for other bands. His influence is best known through his work with popular recording artists Talking Heads, including their recording of Hugo Ball's I Zimbra, the most obvious example of the Futurist/Dada legacy as manifested in pop music. Talking Heads member David Byrne has commented:
I remember hearing an old recording of Kurt Schwitter's Ur Sonata when I was in school. It struck me is very transient, very rhythmic ...(almost funky) ... very funny and very entertaining. It was one of the first times I had heard the musicality of 'language' made so explicit. It didn't matter that it wis a made up language. Later I read that a very similar thing was happening in Russia at about the same time ... they were performing elaborate stage productions in a nonsense' language. Alice in Wonderland had already been published. Gertrude Stein wrote The Making of Americans at the same time, in another city. Although not nonsense ... her writing sometimes made the perceptual and thinking processes explicit in a way that could seem irrational ... yet musical.
There seemed to be an enthusiasm in the air ... an excitement about the possibility of creating a new language ... or re-ordering the existing language to meet new ends.
I have aways been fascinated with manipulating or juxtaposing irrational elements in a formal, almost 'logical' manner. It seems to me that this is the way things are.
Using Hugo Ball's text for I Zimbra was Brian Eno's suggestion. I felt it was the perfect solution to the quandary we had gotten ourselves into: how do we have a 'chant-like' vocal that doesn't place undue emphasis on the lyric content. We continued to use 'found' vocals over rhythmic beds on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts ... We hoped to emphasize the emotive force of the voice(s) as represented only by their sound and texture. For us, the emotion came across strongly ... there was no need to understand in a logical or narrative manner what the words were about ... the intense emotion carried by the quality of the voice, the melody, the rhythms, and the relationship of the vocal to the music (in two pieces we used almost the same bit of found vocal ... against different music ... and the effect was completely different). For us it was not only a good 'idea,' but an emotional experience.
By the mid-1970s, it seemed that art schools were producing more rock artists than painters or sculptors. Talking Heads was formed when its original members were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. John Lennon had been an art student before hitting it big with the Beatles. When he and Fluxus artist Yoko Ono made 'happenings' together in the late 196os—their bed-in for peace, for example—the love-affair between art and rock began to flourish. Bands like The Art of Noise, Cabaret Voltaire and Bauhaus had emerged by the early 1980s, taking their names, and to varying extents their creative sensibilities, from a Russolo manifesto, a Dada nightclub, and a Germin art school respectively. The Art of Noise recorded their first records for the Zang Tumb Tumb label, the name of which is the title for Marinetti's most famous spound poem of which two recordings exist (1924 and 1935). The Art of Noise's first hit, Close to the Edit, begins with the sound of an automobile engine starting, used as a percussive element. Today it's sometimes hard to distinguish between the artists and the pop stars. Looking through the bins of a local music store can be like flipping through a history of twentieth century art.
The collage sensibility has been appropriated by recording artists of all sensibilities. In the 1950s, Buchanan and Goodman predicted the postmodern fever of 1980s with their hit, The Flying Saucer, in which they pieced together bits of hits such is I Hear You Knockin and Earth Angel with segues of newscaster patter about platters from outer space. They even released a novelty Christmas record called Santa and the Satellite using the same formula. As with many of the contemporary collage platters, Buchanan and Goodman soon found themselves facing lawsuits for copyright infringement. A current example of this problem concerns a piece by Steinski and the Mass Media that cannot be sold commercially due to the legal complications involved with the appropriated bits, but was included free with New Music Express (February 1987). The Motorcade Sped On begins with Ed McMahon's famous introduction, 'Here's Johnny,' is followed by John Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for your ...' rap, and is mixed with Walter Cronkite's 1963 coverage of the JFK assassination, all anchored by a funk beat.
Note: Continued on the following "page" as "WD_176".
-Kevin Concannon/ www.localmotives.com/hoved/tema/nr_2/cut.html
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