Rushing over the Biennale in Venice and trying to grasp most of its art exhibits in one day lets your receptors overfire at one stage. It could sound like this recording that is a detail of an installation of Rosa Barba named “The future last one day” comprised of several film projectors running at varying speeds and screening evocative word fragments around the visitor.
As the film is running at high speed through ones consciousness it slows down at certain times when the overwhelming scope of this years Biennale offers little gems and islands of contemplation. The Biennale is everything in one: sometimes boring, modiocre, infuriating, partly brilliant, thought-provoking, irritating, reflecting the modern world as it is, I suppose. Reading through reviews in the guardian, the telegraph or in Texte zur Kunst, it is easy to understand that our world is as scattered and disintegrated as our reception of art in general. This is not too bad at all. My inner film was even set to another contrasting speed when I visited the new exhibition space at Punta della Dogana by French billionaire Francois Pinault who showcasts his pompous and intimidating collection at one of Venice most central spots to overtrump the Biennale with his sense for spacious and expensive art objects. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan left one of the lasting images at the Biennale with his dead art collector swimming head over in his pool, only to re-appear at Pinault’s collection with his taxidermy-horse sticking out of a wall. It would be intersting to check in 10 years time which artists of this years Biennale will have made it into the universe of Pinault’s prestige craving.
To get to the Art Biennale of Venice the way to go is usually by a waterbus, the so called vaporetto. The vaporetto station at Biennale is particularly noisy as one section of this sound recording mix can bear witness. The swimming stations are connected to the waterfront with metal bridges that swing up and down with the waves coming in, causing high screaking sounds. Vaporetti themselves make fascinating sounds when they are tied together in rows of 5 or 6 boats at night time. They bump into each other with the waves and the deep tones of this bumbing can be heard occasionally when strolling down the promenade of Riva degli Schiavoni from Arsenale back to Piazza San Marco at late hours. I even sneaked onto the resting boats to capture some of the sounds featured in this little collage of vaporetti noises. The ropes with which the boats are moored together produce a rhythmical texture that translates the incoming waves into a sonic pattern that is quite appealing. To hear a more tranquile version of vaporetti sounds, also check the beautiful recordings of Enrico Coniglio at touch radio that he did not far from where I recorded.
Breath is at the same time a bodily necessity and an expression of emotions, of desires, fears and disquitude, feelings that are often concealed under a blanket of words. For Czech composer Michal Rataj, breath represents the fantastic conjunction of gesture, rhythm and intonation. He writes about his latest electroacoustic composition “I’m more vain than the wind“: “It is all in my breath, that which I am not able to formulate properly with words, what my words just cannot make. It is as if I hope breath will carry my information further, safely, better. There is faith, hope, desire and sadness in a breath too…”. In another beautiful composition called “dreaming life” Michal based the piece on a recording of his sleeping daughter breathing at night. In his words: “I fetched a microphone, recorded the child’s breathing from very close up, and then worked with the sound as with a musical instrument, i.e. using resonance filters, I tuned it, and instrumented it in what was in practice a traditional manner. Whatever the combination the sound is used in, you can always feel that physiological rhythm of breathing in it, even despite the fact that the other (let us say harmonic parameters) of the sound have essentially vanished. And I chose this distant sense of breathing deliberately in the attempt to draw the listener away to places where reality and dream permeate each other, where we are not sure whether we are dreaming or awake… hence the title – dreaming life.” (taken from a very informative interview Michal gave to the czech music quarterly). All of his electroacoustic compositions bear an exquisite sensitivity for sound and its underlying musicality. Maybe it is because Michal is both a trained composer who frequently writes chamber and orchestra pieces and is at the same time an expert in computer based composing techniques, thus his works are always structurally and conceptually concise and focussed. In the context of electroacoustic music he offers a very personal approach of dealing with musique concrète not as some kind of pure abstract essence but giving the audience a certain narrativity. Semantic aspects of sounds are not completely abandoned but stylized and recontextualized, the original sounds stay clearly recongnizable and therefore the listener has the opportunity to conduct his or her own “reading” of Michals abstract sound stories and to step into ones own internal dialogue with his poetic creations.
My recent sound piece „chronostasis“ has received a Silver World Medal in the category „Best Sound“ and a finalist certificate in the category „Best Editing“ at the prestigious New York Festivals Awards for Radio Programming & Promotion. The composition was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk for Studio Akustische Kunst presented by Markus Heuger. For 52 years the New York Festivals Radio Programming and Promotions Awards has recognized The World’s Best Work in radio broadcasting judged for their production values, organization, creativity and use of the medium. The full list of winners can be viewed in this pdf.
Ismael Ivo’s latest dance choreography „the waste land“ was premiered in Venice on 20th June 2009. The first two performances were a great success and the Biennale scheduled two extra performances on 29th and 30th June. The choreography lasts for about an hour and is devided in two halfs marked by the compositions of mine and Igor Stravinskys „Sacre du Printemps“. During the first half the dancers turn their backs to the audience and move separated from each other in tight borders of squares described by the light. The bodies appear to be twitching, lonely parts of flesh exposed to archaic natural forces, symbolized by the ice and fire sounds of mine. After half an hour the dancers step in front of the stage and for the first time the audience can see their faces. In this moment the first notes of Stravinskys „Sacre“ come in to great effect representing the beginning of civilization and the rise of culture that finally formed out of a long evolutionary process as characterized in the first half of the choreography. Ismael then wisely avoids to illustrate each musical nuance of Stravinskys legendary piece, the audience is given the chance to re-experience the physical strength and power of the composition after half an hour of concrete sounds and so do the dancers who linger on the rim of the stage with closed eyes like newborn babies, the gummed up eyes trying to get attuned to the bright light. From this point on the choreography speeds up and becomes more and more complex, typical conflicts of human relationships are suggested, pairs and groups build, break up and re-build in new configurations. The peak of the piece is an oil fountain that bathes the dancers in black muddy liquid in which the bodies celebrate their last animistic feast.
I’m currently working on a TV film score with a story line dealing with illegal african immigrants in Germany. To give the african characters a certain “ethno” tone, the director and me decided to work with this big “wok” thing that he saw lying around here, which is in fact a hanghang or better know as the hang drum. This instrument, invented in 2000 by Swiss instrument makers Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer of Panart, has since its inauguration drawn unexpected worldwide demand and caused the little workshop of both inventors in Bern to restrict their output to a limited amount. Today one has to set his name on a long waiting list to eventually get hold of a new hang one day. The instrument is now in its third generation and the instrument makers recently announced in a statement via the hangblog that they would open the “Hangbauhaus” again for people to pick their hang (the somehow esoteric sound of the statement makes me shiver though…). My instrument is a first generation hang with a so called “Hitzazkiar” tuning, a persian scale with the tone row A3, D4, Eb4, F#4, G4, A4, Bb4, C#5 and D5. I’m quite fond of this tuning since it is a bit more “spicy” and has more in-build tension than normal pentatonic tunings. The hang unfortunatly has been spoiled too often lately in cheap harmonious world-music-kitsch clichees, since it is very easy to tap on a hang and produce charming consonant sound patterns without big effort. I believe the potential of the instrument has still not been fully explored, apart from brilliant musicians like Manu Delago, who had millions of people watching him on youtube playing on two hangs here.
For my filmmusic work I have multisampled my own instrument in order to be able to play it chromatically. There are two sample libraries on the market, one is by sonic couture and the other is included in east west’s stormdrums 2 library. The latter has a better sound than the former but is only restricted to the actual tones of a pentatonic scale, so I always miss some additional tones to produce a bit more tension and harmonic dissonance. My own samples are not played with the hands but with some timpani mallets that produce a somewhat softer sound in my opinion. It is great for laying out ideas on the keyboard without setting up microphones and checking out how the hang could work in the mix. As a background sound those samples do a good job, but if I intend to use the hang as a center instrument I would always invite a good percussionist to my studio to get the best out of the instrument. The rich overtone structure of each tone on a hang causes samples played in another scale than the original “Hitzazkiar” tuning to interfere with the resonances of the other notes and lead to a somehow “dirty” feeling. But you can check out my EXS instrument that I posted on my homepage if you work with Logic and would like to give it a try. Click on the download button, then unzip the file and copy the sample instrument into the folder “Sampler Instruments” located in the Logic folder. If you have problems with that, drop me a mail and we can try to figure it out. Finally here is a more unknown video of Manu Delago playing the song “Maria door een doornwoud trad” on three hangs:
My new homepage is now online with heaps of listening examples, free downloads and texts. It is actually working like a blog with RSS feed and all the web 2.0 extras. Just put it in your feedreader and you will be able to follow it in the same way you did here. I will continually mirror the content of both the silent listening blog and my new homepage with the only difference that my homepage is bilingual and has all the writings in my native german language as well. I also think that on the new page it is much more convenient to listen to the sound examples because we worked hard on an audio player that opens while browsing to other pages with uninterrupted sound. Jens and Sebastian at filesharing did a great job redesigning the new page and providing a super slick CMS that makes it very easy for me to update the content. Check the new page out here. To celebrate the new design I have made my piece “Tagesringe” available as a free download.
Ismael Ivo invited me to work on a sound composition for his new choreography “The Waste Land” that will be premièred on 20th June 2009 at Venice Biennale. On Friday and Saturday I spent time with Ismael, his very friendly staff and the dancers at their rehearsals at Teatro Piccolo Arsenale to develop a sound composition for the first half of the dance piece. The second half will be Stravinsky’s Sacre Du Printemps and it is Ismael’s idea to relate to new forms of slavery and the exploitation of natural resources which earth responds in unpredictable ways. This vulnerable and shrinking planet will be represented through my sound recordings of volcanos, glaciers and breaking ice, that are composed according to the movements of the dancers. In fact, the composition will turn out to be a very condensed version of my radioart piece “fire and frost pattern“. Stravinsky’s Sacre, then, stands for the human reaction: the physical body in a ceremony of survival and confrontation. I’m looking forward to hear how the confrontation of my sound piece with Stravinsky’s classic turns out, but I imagine it will be very effective to wait for more than half an hour for the first “real” musical tone and that this might give the Sacre even more strength.
On the recent conference „recycling_sampling_jamming“ held in Berlin in February this year, Leigh Landy spoke on the subject of sampling in music. Unfortunately I was ill during the course of the festival but the lectures are still available in mp3 format here for those who missed it like me. His keynote was particularly entertaining and provocative, expecially when it comes to the role contemporary art music plays in the perception of a wider public, or should I say non-perception? In an act of resampling itself I reduced his one hour presentation about the sampling culture to my favourite sentences that can be heard in the accompaning sound file. The last comment in German stems from Rolf Großmann who moderated the panel.
Leigh Landy is in fact most well known as main editor of the Organized Sound Journal published by Cambridge University Press and as the author of „Understanding the Art of Sound Organization“, which was released by MIT Press in 2007. This book tries to build a comprehensive musicological framework to study sound-based music, which is a term coined by Landy himself to incorporate the different strains of electroacoustic art music, turntable composition, and acoustic and digital sound installations under a new umbrella term. The reader should have some basic knowledge of the relevant repertoire and the underlying theories of electroacoustic composition, but for those interested to get a profound overview of a cluster of genres and categories often considered as being separate but being in the process of convergence in recent years according to Landy’s observations this is a splendid read.
As one can guess from the audio excerpts of Landy’s lecture his mission is to promote a higher level of accessibility to sound-based music. He states that „the twentieth-century drive toward novel forms of abstraction, as deeply profound as they may be, has tended to alienate many people or at least keep them at a proper distance, in particular in terms of contemporary art music, as many listeners find such works fairly inaccessible.“ For him the problem lies in the dissociation of art from life, since contemporary art music often failed to make clear links with our day-to-day experience. As a way to get out of this dilemma, Landy proposes something he calls the „something to hold on to“ factor. He finds proof in Jean-Jacques Nattiez’ superb book „Music and Discourse“: „An object of any kind takes on meaning for an individual apprehending that object, as soon as the individual places the object in relation to areas of his (or her) lived experience – that is, in relation to a collection of other objects that belong to his or her experience of the world.“ We as listeners often try to place sounds within our personal experience. „ When we try a new cuisine, we tend to say that something tastes like something we have already eaten; when we listen, we react analogously“, Landy states ironically. Later he cites Salomé Voegelin: „It is the job of the artist to work in relation to existing (sonic) contexts to challenge them and thereby to challenge perception, listening, continually. And it is the role of the listener to be jarred, confused and challenged to find a new relationship with what he/she hears. If the artist’s work exists too far away from a recognisable expression this chasm between recognition and unfamiliarity is too wide to be overcome by the listening activity. The listener feels alienated and abandons his/her engagement.“
How to avoid this chasm? First, there should be some common ground between composer and listener. If this common ground relates to a diversity of personal experiences on the listeners side such artworks can come closer to daily life and therefore offer some things to hold on to as a means of entering the works. Appreciation will naturally follow. Second, sound-based music can also celebrate local values in at least the same extend than universal or formalistic concepts in order to support diverse communities of interest and thus access. This would enhance the social significance of sound-based music and free it from its typical ivory tower status. Of course, the definition where the compromise between challenge or innovation on the one hand and public appreciation on the other lies, is a very individual one and this is probably the point where Landy’s argument remains a bit vague.The conflict between the independance of artists and the marginalization of original artistic approaches is probably unsolvable. Nevertheless it is refreshing to have an academic promoting the idea of accessiblity of contemporary art music with such profound knowledge and the courage to summarize all the scattered musical endeavours of organized sound.
The longest second chapter of the book deals exactly with this broad field of dispersed musical genres. Landy delivers a terminological overview and defines such terms like musique concréte, electronic music, electroacoustic music, soundscape composition, sound art, electronica and many more. There are many modes of listening that have been invented and theorized by composers, apart from the different listening forms of Schaefferian reduced listening, Landy refers to contextual, reflective, causal, semantic, indicative, reflexive, referential, interactive, taxonomic, empathetic, immersed, hightened and non-listening, among many others. This part of the book can easily get confusing, but as a great bonus all these terms are catalogized on the splendid EARS ElectroAcoustic Resource website, which represents most of the research Landy did in recent years. It serves as an unrivelled reference point for any questions concerning all terms used when dealing with electroacoustic music. Finally Landy proposes the term „sound-based music“ as the new umbrella word for what typically designates the art form in which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic unit. The third chapter deals with placing the studies of sound-based music into interdisciplinary contexts such as acoustics, acoustic ecology or semiotics. This might be more interesting for the musicologist but there are enough rewarding thoughts for the music practitioner in the rest of the book. Landy writes at the end of the first chapter: „The art of organized sound offers us new means of celebration, of ritual, of sharing. As technology evolves, music as celebration will take on a range of new forms. Each community will be albe to define its own celebration(s). To anyone interested in achieving greater access and accessibility to sound-based music, the investigation of the appropriate forms of participation and presentation of this music, whether known or not yet discovered, cannot be ignored.“
I saw Gus Van Sant’s movie “Paranoid Park” on TV recently. Van Sant is well known for his controversial cinematic endeavours between mainstream success like “Good Will Hunting” and arthouse cinema as in his “death trilogy” comprising “Gerry”, “Elephant” and “Last Days”. What ever one might think about his film work, from a sound perspective those films of the trilogy and “Paranoid Park” offer really interesting insights since they are the only movies to my knowledge utilizing sound art works for dramaturgic reasons in a pertinent manner. The subject in all those movies is the alienation and solitude of younger people in modern society. In “Elephant” and “Last Days” the steadycam follows some of the characters on their walks through schools and parks while we hear sounds that obviously are not part of the natural surrounding. The sounds can be easily mistaken as displaced sound effects, but they are actually soundscape compositions of Canadian composer Hildegard Westerkamp. In both films her pieces “Beneath the Forest Floor” and “Türen der Wahrnehmung” are used to highlight the strangeness in which the main characters are situated. Randolph Jourdain writes about Van Sant’s films that they “employ the disenfranchising of sound from conventional relationships to the cinematic image as a foundation for exploring the cultural environment of disenfranchised youth.” In his article for “offscreen” he also asked Westerkamp about her view on the use of her works in the films of the “death trilogy”.
In “Paranoid Park” the compiled soundtrack is even more strange and at odds with what we would expect in a movie about young skaters. Nino Rota’s score for Federico Fellini’s masterpieces “Amarcord” and “Juliet of the Spirits” is set against the young protagonist walking down the street or drowns his girl-friends rant against him. But there are some sound art works hidden in the movie as well. I couldn’t spot a part of Bernard Parmegiani’s “Dedans Dehors” which is credited at the end, but Frances White’s “Resonant Landscape No. 2” is clearly recognizable under the shower scene where the young guy washes down his guilt from the incident which lead to the death of a police officer. Most appealing though are the Ethan Rose tracks from his release “Ceiling Songs” underlying the grainy Super-8 shots in the skater hangout called Paranoid Park that dives the whole spot into a mystical scenery. I wish more filmmakers would be as courageous as Van Sant in their use of sound. Check this excerpt from “Paranoid Park” with music of Ethan Rose:
I’m Andreas Bick. I compose and I work with sound. This is my acoustic notebook. You can find my thoughts about books and CDs I like and some sound recordings I did on the way. (I also practise my english writing skills here, so excuses for the mistakes I make...) Silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound - concrete, wild, sometimes stunningly beautiful.
Visit me at www.andreas-bick.de.
I’m Andreas Bick. I compose and I work with sound. This is my acoustic notebook. You can find my thoughts about books and CDs I like and some sound recordings I did on the way. (I also practise my english writing skills here, so excuses for the mistakes I make...) Silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound - concrete, wild, sometimes stunningly beautiful.
Visit me at 