Tag: electronic music

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A Return to Dialectic: Luigi Nono’s …..sofferte onde serene… (suffered, serene waves), 1976

In the last few months of 2017, as I was being spiritually pulverized by the ennui of part-making, I found some catharsis in listening to Daniel Vezza’s remarkable 2012-2013 podcast series Composer Conversations, the most memorable episode of which was his interview with his former mentor Martin Bresnick–in which the Yale composition Professor diplomatically recounts his colorful 1970 encounter with Luigi Nono. Bresnick gave a more detailed written account in a New York Times opinion piece some time earlier. To summarize, Bresnick, a moderate socialist, had presented a short film score as part of a Prague conference; Nono, then already recognized as one of the great representatives of the Darmstadt diaspora and Marxist-composer par excellence, was the next presenter. Nono proceeded to give what Alex Ross so vividly describes as “a withering Marxist critique” of this modest work; this Adorno-flavored roast was followed by a presentation of Nono’s own electronic work Non Consumiamo Marx, which, as Bresnick writes, consisted of “surging masses of sound” in which he “could just barely make out the Italian partisan song ‘O Bella Ciao,’ people chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min,’ and later ‘Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung.’” Apparently, Bresnick was one of three listeners—together with Nono himself and his sound engineer—who managed to sit through this “deafening” collage of socialist fervor; the audience proper had fled, either to construct their counterrevolutionary barricades or to protect their fading hearing. 

           1970 probably marked the height of what commentators call Nono’s “second style” (which, according to De Assis, spans his output from 1960-1975)—a style derided by critics as one that hits “audiences over the head with superficial sloganism” but hailed by advocates as one that, at least in its best manifestations, produced work of incredibly visceral emotional impact and defiant political solidarity. Six years after Bresnick’s fateful encounter with Nono, however, this second period, which saw Nono the master composer as political activist, came to an abrupt end with …..sofferte onde serene…. (1976), for piano and tape.

            What does music from this second period sound like? Non cosumiamo Marx, as Luis Velasco-Pufleau writes, collages text from anti-fascist poetry by Cesare Pavese, field recordings of the 1968 Venice protests (against the “commercial cultural institution” of the Venice Biennale), and anti-De Gaulle slogans sprayed on the walls of Paris, to communicate, as Velasco-Pufleau quotes, the “human experiences of the class struggle of our time” through “electronic composition technique.” Como una ola de fuerza y luz (1972) is a volcanic “concerto” for soprano, piano, orchestra, and tape, which memorializes the communist revolutionary Luciano Cruz, whom Nono admired for his “extraordinary Marxist capacity to fight for Chilean freedom.”

            …..sofferte onde serene…, on the other hand, is seemingly apolitical. To begin with, this is the first textless piece Nono composed since his breakthrough work, Il Canto Sospeso—naturally, this suggests a movement away from concrete political content to a more abstract realm of “absolute” music. De Assis writes: “…..sofferte onde serene… has no direct political message or contents.” Indeed, Stephen Davismoon points to an almost Debussyan attempt at impressionism, nodding to the “very subtle shimmering effect” of the piece’s pitch material as an evocation of “the play of light on the lagoon, by the Giudecca in Venice where Nono lived.”

            Did Nono, the same revolutionary communist who fervently and publicly decried all the Marxist-aesthetic shortcomings of Bresnick’s film score, abandon politics? None of Nono’s work after ….. sofferte onde serene… ever returned to the explicit activism of his second period. For Warnaby, this was a turn toward mysticism, a kind of religious retreat into what one could call (although it sounds positively ridiculous) monastic communism. Some might say that Nono finally recognized that his work was not particularly successful at initiating revolutions (as, like most art, his music sparked no violent overthrow of capitalist governments), and returned to the “honest work” of pure artistic experimentation.

            I intend to argue that …..sofferte onde serene… marks Nono’s forceful return to the capitalist dialectic and is therefore charged with revolutionary communist intention, even if such revolutionary concerns are expressed through a relatively less explicit framework.

The capitalist dialectic

Nono in 1983, from Planet Hugill

What is the nature of the “capitalist dialectic?” In Hopkin’s short theoretical paper on Nono, he begins with an illuminating quote from philosopher Roland Barthes:

“Communist writers are alone in having imperturbably maintained a bourgeois technique which bourgeois writers themselves have long since condemned—have condemned, in fact, from the very moment of their awareness that it was compromised through the impostures of their own ideology, the very moment, in other words, at which Marxism proved justified.”

There are two important points to draw from this quote which together illustrate the nature of the capitalist dialectic. The first is that bourgeois art is always evolving in an attempt to assert the ideological legitimacy of its context. Here, bourgeois art does not refer necessarily to art made by the bourgeois class but to art conceived in the tradition of bourgeois art—namely, art that presents itself as a teleological successor to previous art. In this teleological succession, every new work—every embodiment of a new “bourgeois” technique—is presented as an endpoint.

Without getting into the semantics, in the traditional understanding of dialectical history (upon which Marx’s conception of history is built), every social structure can be understood as a thesis, which, because it is incomplete or insufficient, immanently produces an antithesis; these two, together, produce a synthesis, a kind of resolution of these two. Yet, each synthesis is merely a new thesis until—one hypothetical day—the resulting synthesis is truly complete. For Marx, this complete synthesis, this full realization of the social dialectic, is communist utopia—the end of history. But before this eternal zenith, history is generated by a cycle of new syntheses. In Hegel’s version of this dialectical history, he identifies the incomplete realization of human freedom in various social structures throughout history and how the evolution of society has made human freedom (gradually) more complete—from the public freedom of the Greco-Roman world, to the individual intellectual freedom of the Reformation, to the constitutional freedoms of contemporary politics.

When an artwork asserts itself as a final synthesis, it creates the brief illusion that the capitalist system in which it was produced—an incomplete synthesis—is somehow a final synthesis of social structure. We see in neoclassicism—in works like Stravinsky’s Octuor—a move to objectivity: like newly-ordained adults, neoclassicists turned with disdain from their youthful nationalist fervor and romantic excess and proclaimed a musical language of what Taruskin summarizes as “purity…austerity…dynamism…and transcendent craft.” Mason Bates provides a more recent example: as Ritchey writes, “Bates’s use of technology and cool techno beats” in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is served as apparent evidence that we have moved past the “elitist culture” that once characterized classical music. But just as contemporary audiences understand that the “moral maturity” of the 1920s was far from the endpoint of moral evolution and that Stravinsky’s attempt at objectivity can only register today as a kind of archeological artifact (really by ignoring its inherent eurocentrism and imperialism), I would hope that future audiences would agree that the institutional inclusivity purported by Bates’s opera is really insufficient and that incorporating “techno beats” is far from the endpoint of institutional openness.

What characterizes the capitalist dialectic in music, then? It is characterized by an endless push for novelty, which is manifest in music in the construction of different sound relations and the uncovering of new sonorities. These novelties quickly become outdated, because their ideological foundations—the social context upon which they are built and in which they must function—are incomplete. Novelty is foregrounded: when one listens to the Octuor or to The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs one hears the “radically new” neoclassical texture and techno-infused stylistic plurality, respectively—and only after that the myriad other constructive elements that constitute the pieces.

The second takeaway from Barthes’s quote is that communist artists have somehow created a space apart from this capitalist dialectic. His criticism is primarily against socialist realism: by regressing (unironically) into old idioms, communist practitioners of socialist realism essentially divorce themselves entirely from this unquenchable drive towards novelty. It was entirely possible for a composer living in the capitalist world of the 1980s to ignore the work of Shostakovich, but almost impossible to ignore the work of Stockhausen. This is problematic for communist composers, since communism is fundamentally a synthesis that emerges from the capitalist dialectic. In traditional Marxist theory, communism cannot emerge independently from capitalism: as Marx writes, “between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other” (my emphasis). Therefore, in a world still far from total communism, the capitalist dialectic—both in the broad social sense and its specific music-historical manifestation—are the vehicle for the realization of communism.

A truly revolutionary communist composer, therefore, should be engaged directly with the capitalist dialectic—and thereby enacting the transformation of capitalism into communism. Specifically, the communist composer must be actively pushing the extreme forefront of the avant-garde. As Ritchey writes in the article linked to above, Mason Bates’s attempts at bringing techno into the classical concert hall are half-hearted—but this level of “middling music” is only possible because this is, unfortunately, the very fringe of the avant-garde. Because there are essentially no composers engaged in this vein of the capitalist dialectic who are working with challenging audiences through bringing in radically experimental techno elements, Bates can rest secure in the illusory “edginess” and “inclusivity” of his music. The communist composer must smash such illusions and thereby drive music forward on its teleological progression towards complete synthesis.

Returning to the dialectic

Nono’s work can hardly be criticized as socialist realist, but his work from his second period effectively departed from the capitalist dialectic. De Assis writes that the elder Nono “realised…that his previous works, with all their explicit political engagement, had been easily misunderstood as bare ‘pamphlet art,’ their political contents shadowing their intrinsic musical features, so that the latter were not properly perceived by the listener.” These works contained techniques which could be associated with the forefront of the avant-garde, but such techniques were not foregrounded by the music: that Nono was using radical new approaches to electronics and space was rarely as apparent as the fact that he was having singers shout anti-capitalist slogans. Non consumiamo Marx, for instance, works with techniques of documentary collage (being simultaneously explored by Luc Ferrari in the late 60s) and the threshold of listening pain (which is a central concern in the work of Maryanne Amacher in the late 70s); these experimental traits are subsumed into the idea that the piece is a work of angry protest.

…..sofferte onde serene… returns to the capitalist dialectic, both because it is radically new and also because it foregrounds its newness. What is new in …..sofferte onde serene…? Davismoon (in the article linked to above) recognizes the remarkable relationship between electronics and piano. The placement of speakers, in contrast to Stockhausen’s preference for circular spatialization, is intended to expand the spatiality inherent in the piano; the electronic sounds, which exist neither in “opposition, nor in counterpoint” to the electronic sounds but instead stem from the physicality of Pollini’s piano playing—“the tonal attacks, the extremely articulated percussion on the keys…nullifying the alien mechanical nature of the tape”—prefigure the centrality of gesturality in the major works of Helmut Lachenmann (consider the centrality of gesture to Lachenmann’s own analysis of Reigen seliger Geister) and Salvatore Sciarrino (see especially pages 23-27), in addition to the idea of electronic liveness, which spectral composer Jonathan Harvey addresses almost two decades later in his seminal The metaphysics of live electronics. Harvey considers how electronics can simultaneously produce “sounds that have no, or only vestigial, traces of human instrumental performance,” in addition to sounds that merge with instruments “in a theatre of transformation,” in which “no-one listening knows exactly what is instrumental and what is electronic”; such varying degrees of transformation are explored in Nono’s tape, from pure recorded piano pitches to heavily filtered thumps.

Nono and Lachenmann, with Monica Lichtenfeld, Iannis Xenakis and Klaus Huber, from Bruno Serrou

Particularly notable, however, is how Nono foregrounds this novel relationship between live sound and electronics. This is Nono’s only mature work for solo piano. The choice of instrumentation is doubly important: firstly, the piano can only lay claim to a very limited domain of timbres, since, in contrast to almost all other string instruments, the location of attack (and therefore content of harmonic spectra) is fixed. As I mentioned above, …..sofferte onde serene…, through its almost prophetic investigation of the gesturality and physicality of performance, presages Harvey’s investigations into degrees of electronic transformation—because the sound of the piano is essentially fixed, degrees of liveness are optimally perceptible. In other words, because there is essentially one kind of untransformed sound, all transformed sounds can be evaluated for their degree of transformation in relation to this untransformed sound.

Secondly, the piano, in contrast to the grandiose public theatre of Nono’s second period—much of it intended to be played for workers in industrial settings, as Warnaby notes in his aforementioned article—the grand piano is a fixture of the bourgeois concert hall. Nono’s choice of instrument was a literal re-entry into the capitalist performing space, a forceful intrusion into the capitalist dialectic.

At least as important as the choice of instrument to the presentation of this “newness” is the use of form, in particular its relation to time. As Davismoon notes, …..sofferte onde serene… uses a kind of non-linear temporality. In music where timbre, particularly the perception of live and electronic timbre, is so central, a linear, narrative temporality can be a severe distraction, since one almost automatically becomes engaged with the flow of musical material rather than with specific sonorities. Davismoon analyzes the temporal fluctuations of Nono’s work to show how it creates a kind of wave-like ebb and flow of intensity such that, as he quotes Kramer, “the result is a single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite ‘now’” in which “whatever structure in the music exists between simultaneous layers of sound, not between successive gestures.”

By suspending narrative time, Nono allows us to access, according to Spangemacher, “the tiniest corners of harmony…most isolated and inaccessible regions of sound.” It is precisely this ability to create suspended time, to force us to experience sound at the most microscopic level, that characterizes Nono’s work from …..sofferte onde serene… onwards.

Caminantes … Ayacucho (1987)

In Nono’s second period, radically new sonorities were often suppressed perceptually into monumental narrative frames and the centrality of political messages; in Nono’s late work, he is able to bring us into an incomparably intimate and contemplative encounter with such novel sounds. The communist composer, as exemplified by Nono’s late period, is the destroyer and creator of myths: his work is the storm of progress, propelling the dialectic forward until its inevitable conclusion. To quote Walter Benjamin:

“[The Angel of History’s] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

-Haotian Yu

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The Grain of Sound: Development of Granular Synthesis and Its Relationships with Musical Performance

It seems that western classical music performers’ pursuits in instrumental sound has always been bit of a paradox. On the one hand, one seeks for an “impossible perfection” of the timbre: players try to work against the physical limitations of the instrument in order to attain flawless sound. No matter how “natural” and “relaxed” one is taught to be, producing a purer sound is always the more important task, and that often results in greater sufferings of the body. On the other hand, many musicians seem to value some occurrences of “imperfection” in music playing. A brief moment of scratch tone, a slipped-aside pitch, or maybe just some unexpected errors of rhythms, can sometimes become the most expressive moment in a performance. Very often, one would even intentionally “distort” the sound, so that a more dramatic effect could be achieved.

But why would that be? What makes a sound expressive? Composers in the 20th Century are intrigued by the reasoning behind these ideas, and they have proposed numerous theories on how the most minute details of a sound changes everything in a performance.

During his lecture on electronic music in 1972, Karlheinz Stockhausen proposed the idea that compressing and stretching the duration of a sound would completely change the listener’s perception of it. Every piece of music can be a distinct timbre, and every brief sound can be a piece of music. This theory regards all sounds as highly complex compounds of information and structure, hence expectedly resonates with the idea that a single molecule is loaded with infinite contents. Indeed, the nature never ceases to overwhelm us with its sheer amount of details, and it is from different combinations of these details can we recognize an object’s quality. If one regards a sound as an object in the auditory realm, one can see what the sound consists of through deconstruction.

However, how does one utilize this idea in music composition? How can one find directions within the vast ocean of sounds which in reality last a single second? The answers are infinite. The micro-structure of a sound is a world of its own, we can of course explore as much as we want in it just the same as in our universe. Here is an example of complex sonic details created by new ways of using materials in a performance.

Australian composer Liza Lim uses a unique kind of bow in her cello solo piece Invisibility. The hair is wrapped around the stick of the bow; and, in Liza Lim’s words, “the stop/start structure of the serrated bow adds an uneven granular layer of articulation over every sound.” In her mind, this special bow enables the sound to outline the movement of the player, simultaneously outputting the “grains” and the “fluid”, thus providing new expressive possibilities in the relationship between the instrument and the player. Arguably, it is the instability and randomness in such grains that evokes the sense of body movement.

Helped by development of a new type of technology—granular synthesis—in the 20th century, composers were able to find the grains of sound for the first time, and that created a whole world of sonic expression completely unheard before. Arguably, many composers’ use of grain layer in the sound stems from the aesthetics inspired by this new found sonic granulation technique.

Demonstration of a simple process of granular synthesis. (source link)

The basic concept of granular synthesis is to create a special playback system which splits a sound sample into hundreds of thousands of small “grains”, providing the possibility of microscopic manipulations such as stretching and transposing. Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis was the first to introduce the use of this concept in musical composition. In his piece Analogique A-B, he physically cuts the tape recordings into extremely small segments and rearranges them when sticking together. It was a tremendous amount of work without the help of computer, and the experiment one could operate is very limited.

It was not until 1990 when Canadian composer Barry Truax fully implemented the real-time processing of granular synthesis in his piece Riverrun, where he applied a computer program that allows immediate playback in the middle of a sample when changing the configurations of the synthesis. Now one can experiment very efficiently with all kinds of granulations of sound, and in real-time transition from one kind to another gradually in order to create difference in fluctuation as a musical parameter. With this advanced granulation system, one can truly combine the mentioned ideas proposed by Stockhausen and Lim: the sense of physical movement achieved by stretching and exposing the details of sound, that is the sonic particles, the complexity of grains. Below is a piece called “Bamboo, Silk and Stone” by Truax for Koto and electronics.

In the piece, the player performs the initial material for granulation, and the tape would then answer it with the granulated sound, and so on so forth. Source materials from bells alike are also added in the piece, along with the granulation of those sounds. From the processed sound of the electronics, we can see that Truax uses granulation to segregate each attack from the Koto sound, making it into a fast group of identical “clouds” of sound that has a ghostly quality. We can also hear airy sound with rapid pulses which derives from sound of the vessel flute Xun. Such transformation produces the effect that as if the sound is physically constructing and deconstructing itself. The reason one might have such impression is that, in the process of stretching and magnifying the small grains of sound, the characteristics of that sound is still perceivable. Therefore, we can say that, through microscopic manipulations, we can treat sounds fully as physical objects and make them flexible to distortion without losing their own identities.

Working with the vast details and finding the physicality in sound has not only given birth to new forms of electronic music and compositional inspirations, but also provided new insights into performance practices.

In his essay “The Grain of the Voice”, French philosopher Roland Barthes examines and compares the quality of two singers’ voices (Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau) and explains why he finds one of them (Panzera, who has a very distinctive bright voice and carries out peculiar interpretations) superior. One of his conclusion is that the physicality—the bodily communication—of speaking a language is shown through the grains of sound, and such physicality expresses without limitation of linguistic laws. He calls this kind of singing a “genosong”.

  • Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
  • Charles Panzera

Now going back to another technical detail in granular synthesis: the use of randomization is very important when one granulates a sound, because this intended unevenness of grain positions would improve the effect, especially of stretched sound. Inspired by the concept of this technology, percussionist Tim Feeney writes that his drum roll is pretty much like a “hand-made granular synthesis”. Each attack is a single grain, and their positions in time and on the drum skin are partially the basic configurations of a synthesis. More importantly he writes that, when he has rolled for a long time and experienced lack of strength, occasional technical failures of rolling in reality brings out the equivalence of a randomization function in the granular process, and that provides a variety of new effects.

If one views the function of granular synthesis as a whole, one would find that the process is still very much like the mentioned paradox in traditional instrument playing. One operates fine control of a sound, and at the same time adds a layer of randomness to it. It seems that human never really left this duality: the “imperfect perfection”. It is then natural to see that, composers in the 21st Century have been trying to combine the technology and the traditional practices together, so as to maximize expressiveness. Live granulation is now available through a faster operation system on computers, and performers can now hear the sound of their instrument being granulated instantly as they are playing. Using the power of granulation, computer live processing is now able to “amplify” human’s physical actions, to transform the sound of the instrument and to expand its musical vocabulary.

Barthes writes that “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs”. It is possible that, after music has been through all these advancement of technologies, people still tend to value behaviors of themselves the most. In the future, with this focus on physical movements, one potential evolution of music would be the merging of relationships between the composers, the performers and the audiences. Technologies would allow the sound in music to be changed by the listener’s behaviors. Overall, art can be regarded as organized expressive human behaviors. The beginning gesture of a piece, the initial splashing of color on the canvas…all points to the motion of the flesh which, although being the most primal and ritualistic, signifies a cry of our existence.

–Yan Yue

Sources:

  1. Roads, Curtis. “Introduction to Granular Synthesis.” Computer Music Journal 12, no. 2 (1988): 11-13. doi:10.2307/3679937.
  2. https://www.granularsynthesis.com/
  3. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. 1977. Image, music, text. London: Fontana Press.
  4. Feeney, Tim. “Weakness, Ambience and Irrelevance: Failure as a Method for Acoustic Variety.” Leonardo Music Journal 22 (2012): 53-54.
  5. Harley, James. “Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001).” Computer Music Journal 25, no. 3 (2001): 7.
  6. https://lizalimcomposer.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/liza-lim-patterns-of-ecstasy.pdf
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Finding Beings in Sound: A Short History of Found Sound in Electronic Music

The essence of technology, according to philosopher Martin Heidegger, is, in his own jargon, a clearing: specifically, technology is a kind of worldview that reveals—or more often than not imposes—an essential purpose to things. For those who are interested in reading Heidegger’s original paper, it can be found here.

His most important points, for our purposes, are as follows:

  1. Things by themselves simply are—they do not need to serve any purpose (a tree simply is)
  2. Technology is the imposition—the forcing-on—of purpose on things (technology imposes purposes on a tree—as part of a shelter, or the handle of an axe, etc.)
  3. Technology is therefore a violation of the freedom of things, which prevents us from appreciating them in-and-of-themselves (we view the tree as a means to end; this perspective degrades our experience of the tree)

Before recording devices, free sonic beings in-and-of-themselves did not appear in formal concert settings. All music-making, pre-phonograph, necessitated a technological manipulation of an object outside of its natural context. The bone flute, perhaps the most technologically “primitive” of all instruments, is still relatively technological in its appropriation of the bone—which doesn’t seem remotely musical by itself—as an end to musical sound. Or, from another point of view, sonic experiences, pre-phonograph, were marked by a clear partition between outdoor and indoor sounds: there was the natural world itself (the world of free sounds) and the technological world of the concert hall.

Jiahu flute, circa 7000 BC (image from Virtual Collection of Asian Masterpieces)

            The idea of found sound, then, should be absolutely revolutionary—at least from a Heideggerian point of view. Found sound—the use of recorded, so-called “non-musical” sounds in an “indoor” setting—is perhaps the very first instance of a sonic-being appreciated in-and-of-itself in a concert hall milieu. Its history, therefore, outlines a story of ethics, framed around changing conceptions of the role of the “unadulterated” sound. We will attempt to dissect this narrative in four seminal works of electronic music.

1. Pierre Schaeffer: Étude de Bruits

            Found sound entangles itself with philosophy; it is not surprising, then, that is has been subject to much very polemical writing. The first major works of found sound composition, musique concrète (music made by manipulating recorded sound) were entrenched in the typically heated debate of the post-1945 (postwar) generation of composers, many of them heavily invested in creating a new kind of electronic art distinct from the burdened music of the past (for a more detailed discussion of that and the following, see chapter 1 in Joanna Demers’s Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music).

            Most discussions of electronic music in general (including this one) begin with musique concrète, but that umbrella term encompassed at least two very different perspectives to found sound. Indeed, Pierre Schaeffer, who almost single-handedly invented musique concrete in his Paris Studio in the 40s, wrote music of constantly evolving characteristics—not least as a result of the technological limitations of his times, and these divergent approaches, although not by themselves always philosophically grounded, positioned found sound radically differently in relation to Heidegger’s notion of being-in-and-of-itself.

This first and earliest work of musique concrète, Étude de Bruits, was composed on a shellac record disk, such that techniques nowadays considered commonplace—transposition, looping, filtering—were manipulated excruciatingly by hand. The limits of this “primitive” technology can be heard in the piece. This piece contradicts, for better or worse, the ideals developed in Schaeffer’s later philosophical writings (which I will discuss shortly): this is a kind of musique concrète where sound sources are easily identified—and indeed come with whole packages of connotations.

Schaeffer at work on shellac (image from Prepared Guitar blog)

            What might Heidegger have thought of these musicalized trains and sauce pans? His questions may have revolved around the intended affect of such a piece: it is a settled fact that the first étude recalls a running train, but to what end? My personal impression of the piece is primarily of a filmic experience. There is a sense in which the grainy audio recalls a likewise visually grainy old black-and-white film, populated by the objects suggested in the music.

 Is this an experience of sound as a being-in-and-of-itself? It is rather easy to suggest that Schaeffer fails to achieve this kind of experience because the recorded sound becomes a technological means—and therefore an unfree being—of evoking a filmic quasi-narrative. And yet, on a certain plane, this kind of filmic sound already suggests a lesser degree of technological manipulation than instrumental music. Traditional instrumental music subsumes the identity of the object within its sound, such that when we hear, say, a violin, we do not hear it as a sound stemming from an object but as a sound, to which the object is subservient. These Études are, to my ears, something different: no such hierarchy exists between the train and its sounds.

2: Pierre Schaeffer: Étude aux objets

            Schaeffer eventually published his musico-philosophical musings in several writings. Many of his ideas are summarized in Demers’s book—Schaeffer turns his back on the filmic sounds of Bruits, the failures of which he blames on the technological limitations of the 1940s. With the invention of the more versatile tape recorder, Schaeffer experienced a degree of artistic freedom which enabled him to experiment with “emancipated” sound, much inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology (as Dostal writes, Heidegger’s work is based on the framework of Husserl’s thought). As Demers writes, Schaeffer attempts to create a free sound-being “through the removal of visual cues” and “through the intentional disregard of the perceived sources and origins of a sound.”

            What this sounds like in Étude aux objects is a rather complex collage of sounds—sounds of obviously physical/natural emanation, but of imprecise origin and context. This, for Schaeffer, was a liberated sound-being. Schaeffer is in part addressing his own Études aux bruits and that technologization of sound, in which sounds become mnemonics, markers for objects: in this new musique concrète, Schaeffer advocates a kind of music which leads us to, one, hear the sound as being real, and, two, hear the sound as having interest in and of itself. Sounds must be heard as beings distinct from visual entities.

            Demers’s book captures some of the polemic that surrounded this claim. While Schaeffer’s ideas—on paper—seem to suggest a true “autonomous” and free sound being, Demers notes that composers, especially of the younger generation (the infamously argumentative young Pierre Boulez perhaps leading the charge), had doubts about a sound’s ability to separate itself from an outside context without being turned into an instrument (which would eliminate its philosophically vital distinction from instrumental music).

            Such complaints are clearly heard in the music. Listening to Études aux objets, one is compelled to guess the origins of the sounds, and it is difficult to hear the piece without feeling that there are two contradictory layers of organization—as Lévi-Strauss notes: one, the implied contexts and worldly emanations of the sounds, the implications of which suggest a network of relationships, and two, the actual organizing principles of the music. For instance, a sound similar to a car horn followed by a crumpling or crashing sound automatically suggest their own narrative, such that this sequence interferes with a more abstract, composed structure.

            I have mixed feelings, however, about the value of such objections to Schaeffer’s thought. Heidegger’s thought is centered around the idea that our understanding of the world must be unlearned: likewise, is it not possible to unlearn our mnemonic understanding of sound?

3: Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte

            Supposing that Boulez et al. had touched on truth in their rejection of Schaeffer’s “autonomous” sound-being, it may be the case that a truly freed sound must speak of itself. Citing Stockhausen’s Kontakte as an example of found sound is a bit of a stretch, since the sounds are entirely synthesized—made from scratch—from basic wave generators, but my thinking here is that, in Stockhausen, the attempted autonomous sound-being is sound itself, detached from any specific context. In The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music, Stockhausen illuminates how works like Kontakte stem structurally from acoustic principles. One particularly spectacular instance is a long and dramatic glissando (which Stockhausen draws out in the air rather spectacularly in a 1970s lecture here) which illustrates how a single pitch can be lowered until it is a series of attacks—illustrating that timbre/pitch and rhythm exist on the same continuum. Like in some modernist architecture, in which light is not used merely to illuminate spaces but to be savored on its own as an independent architectural entity, sound here is not merely a material for music, but the driving force behind the music itself.

Ando: Church of Light (full-scale reproduction) (image from Dezeen)

4: Hildegard Westerkamp: Talking Rain

            One of the criticisms of Schaeffer’s earliest works is, as mentioned above, the apparent mnemonic quality of sound imposed by found sounds of obvious origin. One can reject found sound’s context—as Schaeffer—or disregard found sound entirely—as Stockhausen—but it is indeed also possible to go the opposite direction and embrace the context of found sounds as the primary element of musical organization. Soundscape composition, often described as acoustic ecology – a school of electronic music first written about extensively by Canadian R. Murray Schafer (no relation to the French Schaeffer), is such a musical movement.

Soundscape composer Gordon Hempton with a binaural microphone (image from KNKX)

            As Demers writes, soundscape composers recognize that sounds are inexorably linked to an environmental context. Whole sections of pieces consist of field recordings of what one might call ambient sounds, often with the intent of preserving the unique soundscape of a locale, be it an inhabited or pristinely natural one. Such recordings are often achieved with binaural recording systems, replicating a listener’s experience of the sound with maximal precision. In a sense, soundscape composition is a kind of virtual travel for the ears alone. In addition to being “unadulterated” sound in a literal sense, the idea of soundscape can also be seen as Heideggerian in that it recognizes that the very definition of being implies being part of an environment, what Heidegger calls facticity. Yet, this claim can be problematic. In Talking Rain we have a sequence of environmental milieus, not an actual field recording that runs for 15 minutes. One can argue that the milieus are extracted and technologized to serve the structure of the piece: the recordings lose their freedom in the context of a larger musical structure. On the other hand, I would argue that each soundscape is sufficiently immersive on its own to become autonomous, but ultimately this relies on a specific mode of listening.

Indeed, as with all previous attempts to liberate sound from technology, what is perhaps most important is the perspective of the listener. It is the listener who imposes purpose, but it is also the listener who frees sound by the act of listening.

-Haotian Yu