Intro
In thinking about sound artists from different generations, I wondered how they fit within their eras, and despite some similarities how they are different from their contemporary musician peers. I began by choosing three artists (two of which we have discussed in class) plus an artist from a group we discussed in class. Each artist is primarily associated with a specific era but they have each continued to perform over several decades. The first artist I will discuss is Edgar (also referred to as Edgard) Varèse. He moved from Europe to the US in the early 1900s and experimented with sounds before he moved to America up until he died in the 1960s. The second artist I will examine is Allison Knowles of Fluxus. She wrote several scores in the Fluxus Performance Workbook that had been performed in the time period they were written, and again more recently. The third artist I will look at is Pamela Z. She began her performance career in the 1980s and continues to perform.
Edgar Varèse
According to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music:
Despite his output of only slightly more than a dozen compositions, Edgard Varèse is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. His concept of "organized sound" led to many experiments in form and texture. He was constantly on the lookout for new sound sources (working throughout his life with engineers, scientists and instrument builders), and was one of the first to extensively explore percussion, electronics, and taped sounds. He was, as Henry Miller called him, "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound."
Varèse was raised in Paris and Bergundy and then studied in Berlin. Due to a warehouse fire in Berlin, most of the pieces he completed during this period have not survived. He moved to the US in 1915 where the first work he completed was Amériques. According to Christopher Abbot:
Conceived on a massive scale (the orchestra originally numbered 155), it is characteristic of the Varèse method: blocks of sound moving in time, with a full complement of percussion (including the sirens also heard on Ionisation and Hyperprism); it begins, however, with a sinuous flute melody, soon accompanied by a bassoon, reminiscent of both Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring, and there are echoes of Spain in some of the later sections; the sense of a teeming, boisterous port city is present from the outset.
From this review, it seems that Abbott felt that Varèse had included in this piece influences from the cities where he lived and some music of the same time period.
In another review of Varèse’s style, an article from the Guardian states:
As early as 1916, he wrote: "We need new instruments very badly … Musicians should take up this question in deep earnest with the help of machinery specialists." In the absence of "new instruments", Varèse spent years creating a kind of proto-electronic music for live musicians, using percussion and conventional instruments to build great sound masses, unearthly harmonies and noise-based music that sounds for all the world like it could have been made in an electronic studio. The wailing sirens, the industrial percussion and scientific titles such as Integrales, Ionisation and Hyperprism speak of the machine age.
During this time, Varèse’s contemporaries were the Futurists who were creating manifestos, new poetry, visual art, and music. In Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises, he states:
Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises.
Futurist music included sounds that surrounded city dwellers on a daily basis. Russolo called for inclusion of these noises that are still a part of city life today:
· Rumbles, Roars, Explosions, Crashes, Splashes, Booms
· Whistles, Hisses, Snorts
· Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbles, Grumbles, Gurgles
· Screeches, Creaks, Rumbles, Buzzes, Crackles, Scrapes
· Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.
· Voices of animals and men: Shouts, Screams, Groans, Shrieks, Howls, Laughs, Weezes, Sobs
Despite his use of sirens and musical sounds that imitate a “boisterous port city”, Varèse refused to be categorized as a Futurist. An article by Dragana Stojanović-Novičić in New Sound: International Magazine for Music states that while Futurists attempted to use new sound instruments to recreate environmental sounds, Varèse was attempting to produce sounds that had never been heard before.
Despite his efforts at creating new sounds in his works, Varèse has many environmental noises that signify his era in his works. While the noises are sounds we still hear today in urban environments, they are somewhat bare in that rather than replacing any of those urban noises from the early twentieth century, we just keep adding noises – especially traffic (the new silence according to John Cage) and technological noises (in particular the ever present mobile device).
Compared to this piece by Russolo Varèse’s works sounded more like music with sounds incorporated rather than solely as sound art.
Al Jolson was a popular musical performer from about the same time. Here’s a recording of him singing “Swanee” Varèse’s pieces are so distinctly different from this. Jolson’s goal was to entertain while Varèse’s goal seemed to be to comment on his surroundings and the era. Jolson’s piece is a reflection of the era too but not so much a sound response as a verbal response. Jolson relies on the lyrics to tell a story rather than the sounds. In listening to another song from several years after Amériques which is instrumental, Varèse’s work is still distinctly different. Here’s Fate Marable’s Society Syncopators 1924 version of Frankie & Johnny.
From these comparisons, it seems that Varèse’s work exists somewhere in between music and sound with a leaning towards sound art. Perhaps it’s more that classical music lends itself to reflecting the sounds that surround us?
Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles was one of the founding members of the group Fluxus. Artists including John Cage and Marcel DuChamp influenced the group.
According to an April 2009 article in Art In America by Edward M Gomez about the Third Mind exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (an exhibit about Eastern influences on American art):
From Cage, who used the mechanism of the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes) to frame his chance-based approach to composing music and was also deeply influenced by the Zen sensibility he had assimilated. Fluxus inherited its defining feature: the idea that works of art could be deliberately conceived actions taking place in the everyday world and that, like musical compositions, they could be scored.
The Dadaists also had an influence on the group and some members referred to Fluxus as neo-Dadaist. Fluxus created many performance art and experimental music pieces. Knowles was known as “the woman in Fluxus” not because she was the only woman who participated in the group (Yoko Ono was one of several other women who were associated with the group) but because she was the only woman in the founding members. There were many Fluxus festivals or Fluxconcerts where the pieces of Fluxus members were performed. The first of these festivals was in 1962 in Germany. According to Oxford Art Online:
The typical Fluxconcert consisted of a rapid series of performances of short events of scored actions and music. These events frequently consisted of physical performances representative of mundane activities, or music based on non-musical sound sources. They were often humorous and concerned with involving the audience, specifically to disrupt the expected conventions of musical and theatrical performance and spectatorship; their ‘event scores’ were characterized by reduction, repetition, improvisation and chance.
The scores written by Knowles which are included in the Fluxus Performance Workbook include Make a Salad, Shuffle, and Newspaper Music.
Link to Fluxus Performance Workbook
While each of these pieces were created and performed in the 1960s, Knowles was invited to perform the pieces in May 2008 at the Tate Modern in London as part of the “Fluxus Long Weekend”.
Knowles has a focus on everyday actions or routines but enlarging the scale or amount of people completing them. Knowles’ pieces slightly changed with each performance or re-performance. Some of this is the nature of her pieces, such as “Newspaper Music” where each time the articles would be read would be different depending on the news of the day, where the newspaper is from, and the preferences of the individual performers.
So, does Knowles’ work exemplify sounds of the 1960s when she originally wrote the scores? I’m not sure. Perhaps in the overall picture “Newspaper Music” does. She’s right in the middle of the lifeline of newspapers. While they may have proliferated in the early 20th century and prior to that, they are a dying technology. There are so few left. While every major city used to have several, the advent of the internet and cable television have done the same to newspapers as big box chain stores have done to local mom and pop stores. I recognize that it’s a somewhat abstract relationship but feel it can still be considered a reflection of an era.
Perhaps for Knowles’ pieces such as Making a Salad, it spoke more about a personal time in her life where she focused on making food for those around her. In an article I read about her use of beans in her works, she said it was an available resource because there were always people coming over and she would feed them quickly made meals of beans.
In comparing popular music to Knowles’ pieces, I feel as if they are not similar enough for comparison. Is there a comparison that can be made between Knowles and popular musical performers of the 1960s such as Elvis and the Beatles? Am I wrong in including Knowles’ pieces as sound art? Should her pieces be compared to dramatic pieces of the same period? I’m not really sure.
Pamela Z
Pamela Z started experimenting with sounds at an early age. As she was introduced to music and sound technologies, she added each new tool or skill to her artist’s palette. In the article A Tool Is A Tool, PZ describes her beginnings as a sound artist:
My first instrument was my voice and, as children, my sister and I used pods from a tree that grew in our Denver neighborhood as found percussion.
She began her formal musical education with lessons beginning in elementary school and continued experimenting with recorders, a piano, and cassette tape recorders at home. PZ studied classical voice in college and at the same time continued experimenting with sound outside of her formal education. She says (in A Tool Is A Tool):
As an adult, perhaps the most profound shift in my work that I can recall occurred when I acquired my first digital sound processor. I bought an Ibanez DM1000 Digital Delay in the early 1980's. Right around that time I had become dissatisfied with the comparatively conventional music I was playing professionally and began looking for ways to start creating more experimental types of work.
She cites rock music and classical opera as her influences up until that point but became more and more interested in “experimental electronic composers” such as John Cage and Laurie Anderson.
PZ’s recorded and performance pieces are quite different from each other but at the same time they fit the medium. Her recorded pieces are contained, layered, stories. Her performance pieces add visual elements, interaction with the audience, and sounds that most likely vary every time (due to the body synth she wears).
I can see similarities in Knowles’ and PZ’s performances pieces. They include comments on life via sounds. Alternatively, I can see comparisons between PZ’s recorded pieces and a specific current musical artist, KT Tunstall. Recently I saw KT Tunstall perform one of her songs on some TV show and was really impressed by her obvious use of technology to create a one-woman show full of a variety of sounds.
[Not the performance of KT that I saw but a good example of her use of layers of sounds ]
Tunstall starts out her songs with some simple sound that she loops through pedals. She keeps adding sounds so that there are all these layers producing a really rich sound for a singular performer. While she doesn’t use technology as extensively as Pamela Z, there were enough similarities that it caused me to look at the two as similar. In looking at the differences between Tunstall and PZ, in PZ’s work there is a focus on saying something rather than merely making an aesthetically pleasing piece of entertainment. Also, for PZ, sounds make the piece as for Tunstall the sounds are part of the piece.
Conclusion
I think it’s inevitable that sounds that a composer is surrounded by will become a part of their pieces – whether it is a sound that remains the same through the ages (such as making a salad) or if it is something specific to the composer’s era. Because of this I think that it is possible that music of the same era could include some similarities but overall music is made for music’s sake while sound art is produced specifically as a comment on something the composer observes.
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