Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros sits on stage in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern, exuding an air of serene consideration. She briefly looks around, while a charged silence builds up. … [continue reading]

Listening to Noise and Silence / review

The Journal of Sonic Studies, vol. 2, features my review of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010) by Salomé Voegelin:

I would like to focus my attention on what has been left, in previous reviews of Listening to Noise and Silence, in the margins: the writing voice of Salomé Voegelin. I would like to consider this writing voice as the embodiment of Voegelin’s philosophy of sound – not a separate element, but one ingrained in her modus operandi. By doing so, I would like to support and expand on Voegelin’s claim for a renewed approach to listening, one that necessarily affects the approach to writing: ‘A philosophy of sound art must remain a strategy of listening rather than an instruction to hear, and thus its language itself is under scrutiny’ (Voegelin, xiv). I would like to look at what happens if the activity of writing is considered parallel to the activity of listening, defined by Voegelin as ‘the invention of sound’ – where writing appears as yet another layer in such an invention. … [read more]

John Wynne, Installation no. 2 for High and Low Frequencies / review

On entering the large space taken up by John Wynne’s new installation, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer physical impact of low frequencies as they make the windows rattle and the floor tremble, and by the elusiveness of high frequencies that flutter around the ears and intermittently create an odd sense of aural déjà vu … [read more]

painting, allegory, speech / Salvator Rosa, Dante Alighieri, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Not having much to write around music and sound these days, I turned to painting and poetry, philosophy and allegory. I knew I would found my way back into listening. Here are some initial notes, only a beginning:

 

                                                             Poetry, oil on canvas, c. 1641                                                                      

Philosophy, oil on canvas, 1640

Poetry holds a notebook and a quill. She is just about to write something, but glances backwards, toward me, with brooding eyes. Is that page the space of knowing that some truth somewhere exists? Have I just caught her writing? Is poetry that space caught between my guessing and her glance? Is poetry that woman’s face?

Philosophy is also troubled, his face so dark. He does not write though, his words have been written already – carved, it seems: ‘Aut tace Aut loquere meliora silentio’. ‘Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence’. Is philosophy this constant oscillation between an absolute silence, and the tension to say something so heavy that is heavier and more loaded than silence?

As it were, the real titles of these paintings are not Poetry and Philosophy, but Lucrezia as Poetry and Self-Portrait as Philosophy. The Italian 17th-century painter Salvator Rosa, author of both paintings, used a portrait of his lover alongside his self-portrait to give shape to his allegorical representations of Poetry and Philosophy. As if the two could not be without a relationship, a tension in between. It is not ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ as absolute categories that he seems most concerned with, but poetry in the face of Lucrezia, philosophy in the shape of Salvator. Unique human beings, lovers; their glances and their gestures, engaging in a silent dialogue, outlining a changeable territory of seduction, and breakups, and attractions.

Looking for singular faces and catching the singular expressions of my Lucrezia Poetry and of my Salvator Philosophy, I imagine the possible words between them, or between me and each of them. I think of their singular expressions, one by one, I lose myself in a word, or in an inflection of the eye, rather than looking for any universal meaning or lines of demarcation beyond them. I am thrilled when I realise that a certain black in Salvator’s eyes is the same hue as Lucrezia’s. Or that they might share the sky above. Or that he is stuck in the immobility of his frontal posture, while she is all torsion and enclosed dynamism.

Both paintings are known to art historians as allegories. So: allegory. I could start with a Medieval saying:

Littera gesta docet,
Quod credas allegoria
.  .  .  .  .

The literal sense teaches what happened,
The allegorical what you believe
.  .  .  .  .

And with the excuse of being Italian, I would move to one of my favourite writers with no further justification: Dante Alighieri. In the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, he writes of the Divine Comedy: ‘The subject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, understood in a simple sense; for the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this’.

For the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this: the literal side, understood in a simple sense. What is remarkable is the emphasis on the literal truth as a foundation for any other levels of meaning. So perhaps I should look at these two paintings again in detail, and not think of Poetry and Philosophy at all, but of the faces and the bodies of Lucrezia and Salvator: literally. They seem to be inscribed in the same shade of grey, although more or less abstract in form. What happens when a poem is inscribed within a philosophical text? When thought flows into poetry?

I go back to another book by Dante. The Convivio is a treatise dedicated to Lady Philosophy; it is a book on knowledge, and it is full of poems. Furthermore, it is written in volgare, not in Latin: in 14^thcentury Italy, Latin was the language of philosophy and vulgar was the language of the people, of songs, of poems. Philosophy is impersonated as a woman Dante loves; the proximity between philosophy and poetry is resolved by intersecting the argument in the text with a number of poems, and through a metaphor in which knowledge is a banquet, and the food is poetry, and the bread that goes with it is philosophy.
One of the poems in the Convivio, entitled Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, Love that converses with me inside my mind, ends up like this:

My song, it seems you speak contrary to
Words spoken by a sister whom you have;
For this lady, whom you claim to be so humble,
She calls proud and disdainful.
You know the sky is always bright
and clear,
and of itself is never clouded.
And yet our eyes, for many reasons,
Sometimes say a star is dark.
Likewise when she calls her proud,
She views her not according to the truth
But only as what she seems to her.
For my soul was full of fear,
And still is, so much that everything I see
Seems proud, when she casts her gaze on me.
So excuse yourself, should the need arise;
And when you can, present yourself to her
And say: ‘My Lady, if it is your wish,
I will speak of you in every place’.

Canzone, e’ par che tu parli contraro
al dir d’una sorella che tu hai;
che questa donna, che tanto umil fai,
ella la chiama fera e disdegnosa.
Tu sai che ‘l ciel sempr’è lucente e chiaro,
e quanto in sé, non si turba già mai;
ma li nostri occhi, per cagioni assai,
chiaman la stella talor tenebrosa.
Così, quand’ella la chiama orgogliosa,
non considera lei secondo il vero,
ma pur secondo quel ch’a lei parea:
ché l’anima temea,
e teme ancora, sì che mi par fero
quantunqu’io veggio là ‘v’ella mi senta.
Così ti scusa, se ti fa mestero;
e quando poi a lei ti rappresenta,
dirai: ‘Madonna, s’ello v’è a grato,
io parlerò di voi in ciascun lato’.

‘I will speak of you in every place’: could I think of the space opening up between philosophy and poetry as the space of speech? An utterance that is not necessarily delivered to destination, but that resounds nonetheless, and forms a space, makes the form of its understanding?

Now I think of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the tombs of Antonio Gramsci and Percy Bysshe Shelley, before he wrote his poem The Ashes of Gramsci. Published in 1952, the poem breathed an elegiac and sensuous feel into the tight structure of a Dantesque terza rima. In these verses, Pasolini appears constantly torn between the moving force of thinking as a changing form and the pressing call of his aesthetic inclinations as the making of a shape.

Like Pasolini sitting in the Protestant cemetery and speaking out the words of Gramsci and the words of Shelley through his own verses, wondering how the words of the two could breathe and exist in the same ancient rhythm, what is spoken out appears as a space of osmotic exchange that brings poetry and philosophy together and makes them alive: resounding.

… – thus lives the I: I
alive, eluding life, while the feeling grows
of a life becoming grieving
violent oblivion … Ah how well
I understand, silent in the wind’s wet
humming, here where Rome is silent,
among wearily agitated cypresses,
next to you, Spirit whose inscription resounds
Shelley …

… vive l’io: io,
vivo, eludendo la vita, con nel petto
il senso di una vita che sia oblio
accorante, violento… Ah come
capisco, muto nel fradicio brusio
del vento, qui dov’è muta Roma,
tra i cipressi stancamente sconvolti,
presso te, l’anima il cui graffito suona
Shelley …

writing, drifting, silencing, choking

Early morning today spent reading The Relationship with Text by Arnold Schönberg, an essay published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac in 1912, advocating the primacy of intuition in musical perception beyond instructions and interpretation. The flow of thoughts and words by Schönberg in these pages is at its most Swedenborgian mixture of rigour and vision. In any point you pin music, he says, it will bleed. However you might want to analyse or dissect it, you will see the same blood. At the time Schönberg was writing against programme music, intended as a faithful, point-by-point correspondence between a prescriptive text and subsequent sounds. In his text he put forward an idea of music as a living entity supported by a singular driving force – hence the blood metaphor. I like to turn the issue upside down and think of the relationship between sound before, and the words that may or may not come after.

So what happens when I write after listening, when I write in a foreign language that I find demanding to articulate clearly, and that often leaves me speechless, helpless? Can I shift the trite question I am often asked, ‘Do you dream in English or in Italian?’ into something a bit more twisted: ‘Do you listen in English or in Italian?’ And then, write.

The fact that I am more willing to write of my listening experiences in English – a language that bears a lot more opacity to my eyes and ears, not being my mother tongue – tempts me to make the opacity between sounds and words even more obvious, without attempting any gentle fade-ins between the two, just considering them as different entities trying to look at each other through a thick fog, half-guessing each other but never clearly. They call for each other but the closest they can get is an unsteady unison, soon to be disrupted. In other words, I’m trying to leave aside the old point, ‘it’s impossible to write about sound’, and to think instead of ‘writing away from sound’. To stop considering writing as derivative of sound, hence constantly frustrated by not being sound, or watered down because it cannot be of the same essence: to consider the writing not as a document, but as a self-standing entity carrying as much presence and possessed by a singular driving force as much as sound does. Like music for Schönberg, if you pin the words they will bleed too.

Words exist in the porous, half-empty space of my listening in a foreign language, and struggle to be anchored to anything definitive or clear: because maybe the only steady anchors belong to another language, to another listening, another thinking – which are gradually drifting away, becoming more and more ambiguous. Can this writing be seen as a silencing – to which extent can these words be soundproofed, half-recalling the inner soundings of references, tradition, history?

After reading Schönberg today I listened to a London morning:

This coming to a foreign place: to be able to say its name correctly, to be at home. Around are plants whose name I do not know, and this broken weather, that I might be listening to with ardent quiet, and void between my listening and my words. See, nothing here is literal. Maybe a snap of thought uncovered something elsewhere: a note. This opacity of words of sounds begins to look like an uneasy special place. Deprived of proper words and of horizon I have no voice here, nor song, but a tongue tied to a thick rope of hemp right in my throat. It chokes me inside the barrel of my every London morning, in sawdust days of tea and tar.
‘Keep the words worn out, listless by this choking, keep the ruptured breathing’.

This sonorous writing of nowhere. (Or: To go back to words and sounds. To forget about Deleuze)

‘I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about’.

Reading these words by Flannery O’Connor on the train back to London from Whitstable after a day at the Off the Page festival, prompted me to gather some thoughts on Simon Reynolds’ ‘intellectual profile’ of David Toop presented as part of the event organised by Sound and Music and The Wire.

For if the slogan ‘We are all David Toop’, skilfully placed by Reynolds at the beginning of his talk, worked well to endear the audience and to warm them into condescending smiles as they tweeted it all over, one issue remains: throughout his presentation Reynolds seemed more inclined to theorising about Toop’s writing than witnessing to it, not quite looking at who we all supposedly are and Toop is – and leaving the writing, and what makes the writing, more or less absent from the scene.

I am always fascinated by how writers speak, by how they read their words aloud; by what types of space they create when they talk – wittingly, or in spite of themselves. The space of Reynold’s words was outlined by an angular delivery that frustrated what he introduced as a comment on ‘flow motion’. Despite its talks of shifting plateaux, the presentation was obstructed by its thwarted attempts to clamp down the ideas behind Toop’s writing, whilst overlooking its presence and spirit. As if you could detach the ‘ideas’ from the actual writing, from what shapes and informs it: other words, music, soundmaking, image-looking, listening. In Reynold’s talk Toop’s writing was replaced by a refrain of Deleuze-Guattari jargon. All the scrupulously arranged references to ‘deterritorialisation’ attempted to scrutinise the subject of the talk as if it was motionless. Suddenly ‘the rhizomitisation of writing’ appeared like a nightmare anticipating some obscure surgical procedure on a subject that eventually was not there – because you can’t dissect what is alive and flees.

Toop’s writing always meant for me the freedom – as a writer – to actually leave aside Deleuze, or any theorist du jour as canonised frameworks of legitimisation, and to explore instead unexpected, incorrect and incidental references. In Toop’s words, to write of music arises out of a search into ‘uncollected archives, those that gather like loose sand in the unofficial corners of culture’ and ‘teeter dangerously on the brink of vanishing’. Not certainly the safety of the Deleuzeian idiom.

So, I would like to witness now to this writing, to the space of Toop’s writing.

***

Every time I enter it, it’s as if I found myself in the Pitt Rivers Museum after a major earthquake – first overwhelmed, then gradually attracted by an array of curious and mysterious objects and signs, whose function is not always clear but that I can spend time with re-arranging. And then: a breadth of vision, multiple pasts crashing into now, lost histories, debris, dust and charms. They all prompt the forming and re-forming of a disjointed self in the manner of ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’, which is inextricably tied – James Clifford showed it – to the process of writing.

This writing: the recurring clusters of splintered loops; the self-corroding prose toward the end of Sinister Resonance, consuming the space of anticipation and hesitation reflected in listening. The animated rhythms against a canvas of stillness. Memories arranged in a rhapsodic manner. This writing moves and can seem to lead nowhere, and what really matters is that we are there – inside – and it still speaks. Read the loosening up and syntactical surrender in Burning Fuse, last year’s landmark article on mellow soul in The Wire: read the locked groove toward the end of the article, reciting ‘I am thinking’ six times, six long and ticking times, until the thinking is un-thought and its timing gives way to a feel, makes a point for an exclusion.

This writing is an instrument of nowhere. An attempt – always forestalled, always reinstated – at reflecting what Jankélévitch called the charm of music. It resists paraphrasing. It points at freedom on the edge of a line. It cannot be canonised because it exists in metamorphosis. Toop’s ‘impure’ mode of writing mixes personal reverie, biography, accounts, descriptions, fragments and quotes, meanderings. It is born out of the erratic density of notebooks constructed around the sensing of a living person. It speaks a hybrid language, attuned to heteroglossia. It does not explain, judge, claim to give value, impose interpretation. A lot is hidden: losses, voids against which the words are even more present as they hover on the disintegrating boundary of a self, that’s constructed and destructed polyphonically. The gathering of these elements is fleeting and non-scientific and unpredictable. This writing exudes no uplifting or secure strategy: it wants to be contaminated, it listens closely, in all the details, to the off-track moments of singular stories. This writing is not arranged according to the linear structures of a theorist, but according to the singular cadenzas of a musician. Like Toop says, this writing is gathered from vanishing sources, ‘the small print of record sleeves; oral history picked up (like a sexually transmitted disease) in a motel or bar; the obsessive-compulsive lists of fanatics; the outgrowth of analysis, discourse, accumulating factoids, gossip and rumour that clusters around their core activity, the workings of sound and listening that we call music’. It is precarious, frayed because alive. It leaves me longing to be mesmerised to listen, it makes me want to write.

This writing shows that to write is arbitrary, but demands to construct the arbitrariness with rigour: a rigour true to one’s own life. If it has to do with understanding, it does so literally by standing under the layered substance of experience – which is not authority, but attention. It carries the responsibility of making a shape.

This writing hallucinates sounds into words.

‘We listen to feelings; we listen to music. Both torture us with their resistance to language’. This writing is tainted and fickle, just like any listening moment. It is not a crystal-clear system of analysis. It does not call for deciphering, it has no key or code. It wants to be read; it exists on its own and needs no other justification than its very existence. It wants you to say, ‘I want to be here’, an act of volition that constructs its own world and place: a leap of faith.

So in this writing I like to read the night and shades before this leap of faith, generating precarious and alluring constructions. As a reader, I like to believe that in those words lies the nocturnal agony of doubt and of beginning, from which the words – and I with them – can’t be healed. Although drenched in music, art, poetry, this writing has visited many places and known people who stray from what’s commonly regarded as ‘art’.

This writing unveils and covers sounds at once. In the spaces in-between I have encountered from time to time: distant percussions, ruffles, soft voices, a sigh; the afterimage of a painting recalled; ecstatic rhythms; stories told, reinvented and interconnected; dust and ashes of songs; the unbearable lashing of a silence in a room, in a place that – I knew this from the start – is many-whered.

In this volatile space it is a solace to think, like Seneca once said, that ‘to be everywhere is to be nowhere’. That’s all there is, and where all we are: in this sonorous writing of nowhere, and it’s plenty.

Reading

David Toop, Sinister Resonance, New York and London: Continuum, 2010

David Toop, ‘Burning Fuse’, The Wire. Adventures in Modern Music, n. 327, May 2011, pp. 30-35

Flannery O’Connor, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’, in Mystery and Manners, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, p. 36

James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning’, in The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 92-113

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]

where? / the foreigners’ dark garden

Walter Crane, The Grave of Keats, 1873

Where?

writing sound, part 6 (the end)

[...]

Listening and writing are bound to remain strangers to each other, and writing sound inhabits the space of this otherness. There is no prescriptive way of being in such a space because it is ultimately the space of memory, personal and constructed in the present.

I think of writing sound as the space of an absence, strictly tied to the act of remembering: and how does memory take shape? To remember means to construct an impression of a lost presence; moreover, often memory has to do with the desire of a memory, thus questioning any claim for an origin that prescribes a one-sided faithfulness to it. Think for example of that part in Proust’s Recherche when the narrator recalls his first meeting with Gilberte, and says: ‘If her eyes hadn’t been so dark, I would have not loved in her, as I did, especially her blue eyes 12’. Here the presumed authenticity of Gilberte’s black eyes fades in the authenticity of the narrator’s vision of blue eyes, and both merge in a memory that is written and constructed through the experience of a place: the hiss of the wind, the hues and smells of the pink hawthorns, all contributing to the construction of the recollection.

Each memory, hence each memory of a sound, is mediated, filtered, deferred – and yet, present every time it is written. Sounds cannot be separated from a sense of place, and writing sound in turn is not concerned with abstractions only manifested to the ears, detached and purely aural: writing embraces sound as it calls for the participation of deepest perceptions, desires and further recollections, and possesses us to the point when we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard. Ultimately, what we know is what we write.

Sounds as sounds will stay as such. To write sound has to do with our not being in sounds; our memories of them speak of the places where we experience them in time. What we exchange as humans are our reports mixed with our longing, our words and the words of others: stories of stories, constructions of constructions.

The landscape of writing sound appears like a mise en abîme with blurred margins, where the frame of each new scene fades into the next and is not clearly defined: where memories and words from the past are renewed into the now. As I write sound, what I outline cannot be but a layered construction of all the thoughts and words and images that have been with me through the years within the landscapes of my listening, and that load my every return. There is no claim for authenticity, it doesn’t matter what is real and what is fake in the texture woven in such a hybrid operation. Rather than interrogating the provenance and aim of the resulting text I’d lose myself in its patterns of recalled, reinvented and revisited scenarios, in words. What matters is what is here / what I hear today, when I construct my writing sound as a mise en abîme of eroding and revived experiences, anticipations, recollections.

To conclude, I go back to Calvino’s lonely king. Despite of the illusion of dialogic space encountered in his duet, at the end he wakes up in a cave underground. Once more alone, once more with his buzz in his head, once more uncertain of his status and place. The circularity of reaching out, through words, and yet being entrenched in the uniqueness of each listening moment, is the space of writing sound. It is prompted by a question: ‘Where am I?’. It enquires about a place, and it constructs over and over the landscape in which I locate myself, or lose myself – personally, culturally – every time I set out to write after listening. It opens incremental horizons through the singularities of each telling. It doesn’t have to do with prescriptive ways, all-encompassing categories or defining reasons, but with the presence of an experience and of a place, in the intermittences, the raptures and the falls of every other today.

 

---

12 Proust, Marcel. (1985). Dalla parte di Swann. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, p.231. Translation from Italian is mine.

writing sound, part 4

[...]

I think of Writing Sound as I read A King Listens 4 by Italo Calvino, a short story published posthumously in 1986 as part of an unfinished collection dedicated to the five senses. It is the story of a king who lives alone in a constant state of surveillance, capturing every acoustic signal in his palace as a sign of a plot against himself and his status. By writing of listening as an isolated act, Calvino points right at the heart of the paradox of writing sound. I would like to look more closely at the very distinctive voice in this story.

Throughout his text Calvino uses the second person, a powerful singular ‘you’, and by doing so the reader is placed constantly on the edge: that ‘you’ is highly ambiguous and one is never sure if it’s the writer addressing the king who listens, the king’s mind addressing the listening king, the writer addressing the reader-as-king as he or she listens, Calvino using his text as a mirror to reflect his words unto us, the readers.

Alone, the king listening to the silence around him and in turn, the reader reading and the writer writing the story and its threatening silence, become the figure of a solipsistic exercise verging into the buzz of paranoia. The king’s palace is but an ear. He sits lonely on top of his throne. Around, silence swarms with voices as he listens to ‘time as it goes by’ and its ‘sonorous numbers’ 5. Inside, silence is not the absence of signal, but the absence of a space articulated outside of the experience of listening as such. In one of his moments of doubt the king/narrator wonders, ‘Is there a story that links one noise to another?’ 6. Listening then needs to be articulated, attached to something outside of itself, otherwise it falls into a status of isolation and self-referentiality. The ‘you singular’ in Calvino’s story signifies the hesitancy of the narrator between the elusiveness of the aural dimension as such, and the necessity to extend it across words.

At last the king goes out of his palace and his ear is caught by a melody. He hears a woman singing and he no longer pays attention to the plotting of his lonely mind. He reaches out and sings a duet with her: his experience of listening now takes place in an articulated, rounded dimension. The sense of precariousness, the hovering site of the listener represented by the lonely king and by that ambiguous ‘you’, slippery and placeless, is resolved by Calvino by shaping the listening experience of a ‘singular you’ in a story that reaches out to many ‘I’s, ‘she’s and ‘he’s.

But this is not to say that they reply.

[...]

---

4 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Un re in ascolto. In: Calvino, Italo. Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti, pp.51-77. Translation from Italian is mine.
The Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero wrote a detailed analysis of this story with regards to the relational nature of what she calls ‘the vocalic’; that is, the sounding quality of a voice before its semantic connotations. Cavarero, Adriana. (2005). For More Than One Voice. Toward A Philosophy Of Vocal Expression. Translated from Italian by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Op. Cit.

6 Ibid.

writing sound, part 2

[…]

As I listen to sounds and then set out to write, I become more and more aware of my distance from them. My words cannot capture them: they let them go astray, dissolve. Instead, my words inscribe sounds with their own presence, they answer the enigma of sounds with yet another enigma.

I read David Toop’s words in Sinister Resonance: ‘If we expect sound merely to give, or to invade, just like the earth digger on the building site or the bass drum, then we miss the other side. Better we should think of sound as an ear, a mirror, a resonant echo, a carrier, a shell 2’.

What is the question that I whisper in that ear? What do I see appearing in the mirror of listening? What do I ask of sound? What echoes out of sound as I listen?

I think of writing as ‘the other side’ of sound. Instead of looking for answers it echoes questions with questions, it adds complexity to complexity. Writing sound traces the shifting in the tuning of my words, of my questions, of sounds drifting.

[…]

---

2 Toop, David. (2010). Writhing Sigla. In: Sinister Resonance. The Mediumship of the Listener. New York and London: Continuum, p.53