Piano Smashing: A Brief History

1. Franz Liszt (1811—1886)

“Beethoven’s piano famously spewed broken strings out of its case in his more ferocious moments, but Liszt apparently broke the cases themselves. After one of his opera paraphrases the heaving, trembling instrument would be at his feet, utterly spent, and a new one would have to be carried out on to the stage from the wings. Those early, wooden-framed pianos simply could not cope with playing which now flowed in energy and force from shoulder and back, rather than merely with the earlier wrist and forearm technique of a Hummel or a Czerny.”

– from Stephen Hough, ‘Liszt: The Man Who Broke Pianos’

2. Alberto Savinio (1891—1952)

“Savinio’s performance techniques included smashing the piano with his fists and dragging a board up and down the keys. The results were predictable but exciting. After one concert André Billy recalls hearing Apollinaire exclaim: ‘He broke the piano! Now that’s what I call a musician!’ In a written review of the same concert, Apollinaire goes further: ‘I believe that within two years he will have broken all the pianos existing in Paris, after which he might leave to traverse the world and break all the pianos existing in the universe. This will perhaps be a good riddance.’”

– from Christopher Schiff, ‘Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism’

3. Jerry Lee Lewis (1935+)

“He had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, and when it seemed that the screams had grown loudest and the rushing most chaotic, he stood, licked the piano stool away with violence, and broke into ‘Great Balls of Fire’. As the screaming chaos grew suddenly and sublimely greater, he drew from his jacket a Coke bottle full of gasoline, and he doused the piano with one hand as the other banged out the song; and he struck a wooden match and he set the piano aflame, and his hands, like the hands of a madman, did not quit the blazing keys, but kept pounding, until all became unknown tongues and holiness and fire, and the kids went utterly, magically berserk with the frenzy of it all … ”

– from Nick Tosches, Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story

4. Piano Smashing Contests (UK, 1950s–60s)

“It was a strange time to start learning the piano. In the 1950s, when I was a boy, it was the fashion in England to hold piano smashing competitions. Because television had arrived. The piano in the front parlor in most houses became suddenly redundant. And there was little or no demand for secondhand pianos. So all around the country, at school fêtes and country fairs, an orgy of piano smashing broke out. On village greens, on football pitches, teams of men with sledge hammers, axes, hacksaws and crowbars attacked upright pianos and reduced them to debris that had to pass through a hoop about two inches in diameter, to verify that the destruction was whole-hearted and thorough.”

“I witnessed a piano-smashing only once. I was shocked by it. To see two teams of grown men wantonly laying in to two defenceless uprights, to see felted hammers flying everywhere, tangles of springy piano wire, splintered wood and the black and white ivories lying slaughtered on the green grass. Now, years later, I think that it was possibly also a symbolic act, the ritual destruction of repressive Victorian values, embodied in the piano, which deserved to be taken out on to the village green by right-thinking English yeomen and smashed. Decades of primness, prudery and piety in the parlor, of hypocrisy and violence, of empire, wars and colonialism. All this projected on to the piano, around which families prayed and sang hymns and parlor songs of fervent faith and patriotism. But the craft that went into an upright piano! All gone in a twinkling. And a tinkling. How very sad it was.”

– from Anthony Marshall, ‘Still Life with Goanna?’

“Some time in the mid 1960s, by which time I’d been doing my head in the piano thing for a few years, I saw a feature on telly about people smashing up a piano with sledgehammers. It not only looked fantastic, it also sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. What I wanted to do was get a sledgehammer and smash up our piano just to hear those sounds at close quarters for myself.”

“At that time the country was full of old pianos that nobody could play anymore. They were all left over from a time before radios and record players, when people had to make their own music. To be able to play the piano was a social skill that many a young man aspired to. Every pub had one. But you know that, you’ve seen enough old films. There was another problem for these old pianos. Central heating. When it came in for the masses in the 1960s. central heating completely fucked these pianos. Buckled their frames, made them impossible to keep in tune.”

“After this one showing of a piano being smashed on telly, piano smashing swept the country. No village fete was complete without a piano smashing contest. Soon all the pianos available for smashing in the country had been smashed. So piano-smashing faded from the place it held for a few years in the public imagination and popular culture. Except I kept dreaming of smashing our piano.”

– from Bill Drummond, The 17

5. ‘Piano Activities’ by Philip Corner (as performed at the Wiesbaden Fluxus Festival, 1962)

“In Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed in 1962 at the first Fluxus-titled festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, and Emmett Williams engaged in the apparent destruction of an old, unplayable piano belonging to the Kunstverein. They did destroy the instrument, but not haphazardly … the careful rubbing of a brick over the strings, the patient waiting for the right moment to use a hammer.” 

– from Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience

“The work was not originally intended to include the destruction of the instrument, although in this performance the activities were interpreted as such and the piano was taken apart violently with crowbars, saws, and hammers. Corner was against any wanton destruction, but when informed that the parts had been turned into sculptures he understood that the piano had been positively transformed by its breakdown.”

– from Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction

6. Annea Lockwood (1939+)

“Set upright piano (not a grand) in an open space with the lid closed.

Spill a little lighter fluid on a twist of paper and place inside, near the pedals.

 Light it.

 Balloons may be stapled to the piano.

 Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can.”

– score to ‘Piano Burning’ (1968)

A Museum of Impossible Music

We can all remember the famous advertising slogan from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, “If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe?” But what of the house band at Milliways? What melodies might spring from their impossible instruments? And how could such music be housed in a museum – an institution that has always found it notoriously difficult to exhibit even the most common or garden variety of music?

The question seems to impinge on the 'pataphysics of Alfred Jarry – a problem in search of an “imaginary solution” – or the erotics of Georges Bataille, the symbolic economy – or its “speculative disorder” – in the late work of Jean Baudrillard. “Imaginary media,” wrote Eric Kluitenberg, “when understood as machines that mediate impossible desires, should be regarded as impossible machines.” The very notion of a museum of impossible music pushes us to the limits of both music and museum and, simultaneously, back to their originating impulses – in the ritual conjuration of impossible forces, and the simple act of collecting as a kind of anamnesis close to time travel.

So we might look to ideas from the literature of fantasy and science fiction to fill the first room of our imaginary museum: Richard Kongrosian, the psychokinetic pianist who plays Brahms and Schumann without touching the keyboard in Philip K. Dick's (1971) novel, The Simulacrum; the 'feely' encountered in the imagined 2039 of Stanislaw Lem's (1971) The Futurological Congress, with its “obscene compositions”. Going back further, we might think of the musical languages of the inhabitants of the moon encountered by Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac in their cosmic voyages from the seventeenth century – indeed, any music that has been conceived of existing in the vacuums of space must be, strictly speaking, impossible.

Kepler's harmony of the spheres

Johannes Kepler once assigned diverse polyphonies to the heavenly bodies and Charles Fourier thought to re-arrange the planets of the solar system for the sake of their harmonic consonance. Between these two, and extending beyond in either direction, lies a centuries-long theorising of the mystical correspondences inherent in the music of the spheres that sought not just a figurative value but, as Joscelyn Godwin says of Fourier, “the pretension to objective accuracy and mathematical precision.” The richly elaborate illustrations that adorn many of these mystical texts might adorn the walls of another room in our museum with schizoid diagrams of arcane numerology and stellar conjecture. In his own brief rumination on the theme of impossible music, composer and University of Sussex lecturer on music informatics, Nick Collins, mentions his own text composition: ”Clash two stars together”.

The nineteenth century was a boom time for impossible music. The rise of virtuosi such as Niccolo Paganini and Franz Liszt saw repeated accusations that their caprices and études were unplayable, beyond the range of human capacity. Their supposedly freakish abilities became the object of a curiously medical discourse. Paganini's abilities were explained by physicians as the result of his unique physiognomy, and his corpse was even disinterred, half a century after his death, to be viewed reverently by the Czech violinist František Ondříček, as though the body itself was some sort of magic relic. 

A cast from Franz Liszt's hand, from the Liszt museum, Budapest

We might regard the various casts and models made of Liszt's hands in a similar light, and display them side by side with Paganini's medical reports. When not regarded as a freak of nature, the virtuoso was often lambasted as an unfeeling machine, and numerous mechanical contrivances were developed as pedagogical aids to further the creation of more virtuousi – Logier's chiroplast, Kalkbrenner's guide des mains, Herz's dactylion: all were summoned to the aid of pianists who wished to play the impossible, and they all deserve a place in our museum.

In a paper published in the journal Popular Music, in 1983, H. Stith Bennett defined impossible music as a kind of gap between a communicable potentiality and its ultimate realisation, opened up by new forms of notation,

Whenever new notation systems are invented, musicians feel the pressure to stretch their performances to incorporate new notational potentials. In fact any notation can be set out in such a way that it gives directions that are impossible for even the best musicians to follow. During this experimental period, those who are producing notation feel the pressure to accommodate their activities to the performers at the same time that the performers are stretching their abilities in response to the notational challenges. Inevitably, musicians move away from performance conventions which are taken for granted by their audiences, and instead perform in a way that is unexpected, unsettling and filled with mystery. For audiences, hearing what has never before been heard creates an ironic atmosphere; some resistance too, perhaps, but also the magical actualisation of the impossible.

While Bennett's language recalls the wording of Arthur C. Clarke's famous “Third Law”, that, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, it also provides an apt rubric within which to conceptualise both the reaction to the virtuosi of the nineteenth century and, since Bennett regards recording technology as itself a “synthetic phenomenal” form of notation, certain further developments in the musicology of the impossible over the last century.

Albert Bernal Impossible Music (2006+)

With the twentieth century, recording technology proliferated mechanical musicians. George Antheil and Conlon Nancarrow took up the challenge of composing works for one of the earliest, the player piano, which would be physically impossible for human hands – a project to be echoed many decades later by tracks on the Aphex Twin's album, Drukqs, programmed for the Yamaha Diskclavier MIDI-controlled grand piano.

Modern technology has made possible simulations of many otherwise impossible musics. In developing the tones to chime the ages for Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now project, Brian Eno began investigating the physics of bells and soon found himself experimenting with digitally created “hypobells” whose real world realisation would require the suspension of several physical laws: bells impossibly large or impossibly small, entirely made of glass, or possessing bizarre acoustical properties which might make certain harmonic partials ring indefinitely long. 

In a similar vein, American composer, David A. Jaffe, created a piece of computer music, ‘Silicon ValleyBreakdown’ involving such impossible string instruments as a mandolin to small to pluck, or a monochord the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Alongside these virtual experiments, we might exhibit sculptures from 2001 by Christian Marclay which he referred to as “impossible musical instruments”. These included a bass guitar made of rubber, drum sticks made of glass, a tuba and a trumpet conjoined at the mouthpiece like siamese twins.

Christian Marclay Virtuoso (2000)

On a more macabre level, recording technology configures the possibility of jamming with the dead. The early twenty-first century genre of the ‘mash-up’ allows for duets between musicians who could never possibly have met in reality: the voice of Caruso over a backing track by Jimi Hendrix, Britney Spears singing over a Gene Krupa beat.

I like to imagine that one room of this imaginary expo could be dedicated to those composers who have been so outstretched and outgunned by their ambitions that their proposals have leapt forward into the never never. Here we might find Edgard Varèse, who for some twenty years in the first half of the twentieth century laboured over a great operatic work called variously The One-All-Alone, L'Astronome, and L'Espace. 

Though it was never completed, we find adorning the walls of our museum the various drafts of libretti written by some of the century's literary titans: Alejo Carpentier, George Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Desnos, Andre Malraux, and most extraordinary of all, Antonin Artaud, who described, “Depressurized soundings. The music will give the impression of a distant cataclysm and will fill the room, falling as from vertiginous heights. Chords will originate in the sky and then deteriorate, going from one extreme to the other. Sounds will fall as if from very high, then suddenly stop and spread out in bursts, forming vaults and parasols. Tiers of sounds...”. 

Scattered amongst them are torn fragments of score, sketches of grand totalising realisations for which such classic modernist musical tropes as sound spatialisation, the work for percussion, even for electronic music, were practically willed into existence by Varèse in the service of his proposed music drama.

Edgard Varèse, Poème électronique (1958)

On the wall facing these fragments of Varèse's we might find a portrait of the great Russian synaesthetist, Alexander Scriabin, who once proposed a sonata of pain with solo for toothache. Even earlier in the century, Scriabin spent almost as long as Varèse, planning his “Prefatory Action” known as The Mysterium. To be performed in the foothills of the Himalayas, it was to last a week, and for a finale, bring about the destruction of the entire universe followed by the birth of a new world and a new man from its ashes. Scriabin's biographer, Faubion Bowers, describes the climax of The Mysterium:

On the seventh day, after the assault on the senses of all the arts battering at man's psyche, and with the music incarnating ectoplasmic visions, all men and all nature would combine to bring the world to its closest possible point of being on “the plane of unity.” Mass joy would be like the ocean endlessly shifting and unchanging. Soul and matter would be released from their corporeal bondage one to the other. Male and female polarization would vanish. The divine androgyny of two sexes in one (as Plato once envisaged them) would first return and then become a nullity. Everything – man and his world – would plummet into the “ecstatic abyss of sunshine.” The time lag between the event and the impact of the event would telescope.

Scriabin, Sketch from Mysterium

Beyond the ecstatic visions of Scriabin, we might ask what remains impossible in the high-technology world of the twenty-first century where every new bit of off-the-shelf kit promises to create “any sound imaginable”.

The impossible is made of more than mere technics. If “politics is the art of the impossible” (Vaclav Havel), then an exhibition of the impossible in art must needs be political. The final room in our museum, then, would be handed over to guest curators from the Impossible Music Sessions of New York City. 

Conlon Nancarrow Study No. 49c

Founded by author, accordion player and human rights activist, Austin Dacey, the Impossible Music Sessions stage the non-appearance of banned musicians from all over the world. Whether underground rock groups from Iran, refused visas for performance over seas, or imprisoned Cameroonian singers, an empty stage in downtown Brooklyn becomes the scene of an international musical meeting via the telepresence of live feeds and mobile phones. Conceived by its founder as a “world-wide underground railroad for musicians”, the Impossible Music Sessions stand as a tribute to what can be achieved in the face of impossible situations.

A recent book by Adam Harper promises infinite possibilities for future music-making, but in a footnote he proposes an interactive musical situation which goes beyond the possibilities even in his expanded musical vision: a work for two performers who must respond quickly and in real time to each other's playing, while one is situated on Earth the other on Mars.

Harper's somewhat flippant examples shows that no matter how broad one's imagination, how open to the possibilities of the future, something will still remain out of reach. It also shows how thinking about the impossible and stretching the limits of the possible often go hand in hand. Curating a history of impossible musics can not only show how yesterday's impossibles can become today's realities (many of those “unplayable” works of Paganini and Liszt, for instance, are now standard practice for a professional soloist), but also provide provocative food for thought for future formal experiment.

Dactylion

But a museum of the impossible is inevitably also a museum of failure. Like Paul Virilio's proposed ‘museum of accidents’, it can provide a counter-narrative to that Whig history of music as a smooth progress towards greater and greater heights of beauty and expressiveness (perhaps coming to an end somewhere round the late works of Brahms or Puccini). The museum of impossible music would be an antidote – or a grotesque supplement – to that canonisation of the great works critiqued in Lydia Goehr's Imaginary Museum of Musical Works.

Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told.

Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)

Come to think of it ...

Richard Wagner

Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)

and even ...

Ludwig van Beethoven

Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor)

This one is perhaps a little more tenuous ...

Pierre Schaeffer

Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)

Now I'm really scraping the barrel ...

Gustav Holst

Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)

Ferruccio Busoni

Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)

Reflections on 'In C' following yesterday's performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

It is tempting to wonder if Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and the other members of the Groupe Reserches Musicales were aware of the presence in 1963 of an American named Terry Riley at one of the studios owned and operated by the French national broadcaster, Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Riley apparently described the engineer from the RTF who helped him to record Chet Baker, Luis Fuentes, Luigi Trussardi, and George Solano jamming around the theme from Miles Davis's 'So What', as "a very straight guy in a white coat." Riley recorded the group, first altogether, and then individually on separate tracks. Allowing these tapes to go out of phase with each other, looping parts, and creating recurring delays, Riley created the music for The Gift, a play by the influential 'maker' of 'Happenings' Ken Dewey, with members of the Living Theatre and Anna Halprin's dance company.

When, on November 8th of the following year, the audience filed into the San Francisco Tape Music Center, its door held open to conceal a notice from the fire department declaring the building off limits, it was this music from The Gift that was playing on as background music. It is important to locate Terry Riley's 'In C' - the very piece said audience were attending the first performance of - within the history of electronic music, because in a way it is the first piece of music whose performance relies on human instrumentalists imitating the behaviour of tape recorders, as opposed to the serial music of Stockhausen and Boulez which essentially used machines as a kind of perfection of human fallibility, its basic concepts nonetheless derived from instrumental music. Playing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again, gradually phasing and going out of time with the other players around you is actually something very difficult for a human musician to do. For a tape machine, it is just what comes naturally.

This was the curious thing about the performance of 'In C' yesterday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Recorded for Radio 3's Discovering Music series, the performance featured seventeen members of the BBC Concert Orchestra playing glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, piano, and harp plus two flutes, two clarinets, two trumpets, and a string quintet. They just couldn't quite leave it alone. The pulse kept rotating between the different pitched percussionists, losing its gnawing insistence, players would show off by playing some of the piece's fifty-three reiterative motifs in octaves or in double time, flautists were flutter-tonguing, trumpeters fanning their mutes suggestively. The beat was considerably slower than usual, and much more sparse. Instruments would drop in and out an awful lot, playing a phrase just once or twice very delicately and then keeping quiet for a bit, not at all like the kind of frenetic hammering away one hears on early recordings. This was very much an 'In C' to contemplate and appreciate, rather than an ecstatic, trancelike 'In C', and as such it stood as a marker of the piece's newfound acceptance as the 'Rite of Spring' of the late twentieth century, a fully integrated part of the canon of great western classical works.

Warner Jepson was one of the performers playing 'In C' that night in November 1964. A few years later he would leave the Tape Music Center for the National Centre for Experiments in Television (NCET), but not before creating an extraordinary electronic score for Carlos Carvajal's dance-drama, Totentanz, based, like Franz Lizst's Totentanz, on the 'Dies Irae'. The piece was created using a combination of concrete sounds and sounds from a Buchla Box, the first ever electronic sequencer, designed by Donald Buchla at the Tape Music Center while Terry Riley was in France. The period in the early to mid-seventies, with Jepson as composer-in-residence was one of the most productive in the history of NCET. Jepson was interested in the full integration of sound and vision, creating images in much the same way that he had created music, by feeding into a variety of processors a combination of found images and raw electronic signal. It was around this time that Stephen Beck invented the Direct Video Synthesizer.

Jepson was far from the only member of Riley's group that night to go on to interesting things. Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick had started the Tape Music Center in 1962, and Subotnick's (1967) piece, Silver Apples on the Moon was the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a record label (Nonesuch), and thus, in a way, the first piece of music conceived specifically for a record and not a performance. In the seventies, Subotnick began composing pieces for live instruments processed through what he called a 'ghost score'. The ghost score is a series of predetermined control voltages that effectively patch the live instrument through the audio processing modules of an analogue synthesizer, creating an entirely new means for the performance of electronic music. The instrumentalist plays, and their performance is haunted by, and filtered through, this variable virtual mesh.

The composers Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich were also present, and it was apparently Reich's idea to include the eighth note pulse to keep everyone together. As was the multi-wind instrumentalist, Jon Gibson, who has since gone on to play in the first performance of practically every major minimalist work by LaMonte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Gibson also played on the recordings of Arthur Russell's Instrumentals. Phil Winsor, a composer whose graphic scores were part of the groundbreaking (1986/87) Eye Music touring exhibition, has more recently been composing using fractal and stochastic algorithms in order to create music based on the universe's "own rhythms" for the sake of its possible healing powers. Tony Martin, also part of the group, went from designing light shows to accompany concerts by Oliveros and Subotnick to creating lighting effects for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. Stan Schaap, on the other hand, teaches a "practical spirituality" promoted through his Power to Share website, and Mel Weitzman has become the abbot of Berkeley Zen Centre.

I think in some way the sensibility of that first performance of 'In C' might be summed up by a sort of imagined triangulation point between the varied interests of its players, many of which seem to circle around the idea of the concert as a profoundly immersive and encompassing event, and around ideas of multi-media experimentation and interactivity. Terry Riley has described his initial conception of the piece as "a kind of cosmic vision of patterns that were gradually transforming and changing." This oh-so-Californian 'cosmic vision' was notable for its absence from the QEH on Thursday afternoon.

"Like a wind-up toy, you stutter at my feet" : Towards an Aesthetics of Stammering

The Shows of London is a small reading group, based out of the King's College English department and interested primarily in the "entertainment and display cultures of nineteenth century London." Last week saw them mounting a half-day symposium in the King's old anatomy museum under the heading 'Stutter London'. London, it seems, has always stuttered, always been noted for its sounds and its machinic rhythms, and this brief conference set out to explore the stammering, spluttering sounds of the city as circulation and disturbance, synaesthesia and unrest. Can we speak of a radical stuttering whilst simultaneously maintaing due sensitivity to those for whom a stammer is a serious impediment?

Sara Thornton, in a presentation on Dickens's Bleak House, evokes Deleuze's paper, 'He Stuttered' in which the stammer is enlisted in the schizoanalytic opposition of the smooth and the striated, and for which, "Style is to stutter in one's own language." She opposes the smooth, oily discourse of Chadband to the ellipses and aporias of Krook, exploiting the potential for innuendo behind stuttering's pathological designation as a 'struggle behaviour'. Louise Lee, however, notes that Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies and Westward Ho!, was crippled by a paralysing fear of new and unfamiliar situations as a result of his speech impediment, suggesting that stuttering is perhaps just as likely to be an agent of conservatism as unrest. Kingsley went to great lengths to try and cure his stammer, frequenting the very same Harley Street specialist as another famous British stutterer, Lewis Carroll.

From my own perspective, the most fruitful of the day's interventions were those that drew the notion of stuttering out of the context of the Victorian novel and into the art forms of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus explored the cinematic genre of the 'city symphony' from Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures to Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice, via Ruttman, Vertov and Joris Ivens. The city symphonies of the late twenties sought to project a kind of isomorphism from the urban rhythms of their chosen city to the rhythms of film and montage. As each of the films under consideration were silent, their status as symphonies must be understood as figurative, synaesthetic (Germaine Dulac dubbed Ivens, "One of the visual musicians of the future," and in general it seems to be one of the ironies of history that film-makers tended to forget the close family relationship between music and film at the very moment the cinema becomes sonorised).

As 'symphonic' cinema, it is striking that such city films offer rare examples, for which they were highly praised by Ezra Pound, of a kind of object-oriented cinema (elements of which are taken up later, in very different ways, by Ozu and Tati). It is clear that the only protagonist of such films is the city itself, in which any human subjects are merely subsumed, participants in a rhythm which is not their own. In Ivens's Regen, set, though not obviously so, in Amsterdam, the city, as Marcus pointed out, "knows it is raining." We see the first raindrops strike the canal before we see a man's upturned palm, testing the air for precipitants.

Though containing as much as four months worth of footage, the narrative time span of such films tended to be compressed, in the edit suite, down to the passage of a day. In this respect, we might see them, as was pointed out by a question from the audience, as heirs to the late nineteenth century fondness for using stage lighting effects to recreate the sensations of dawn and dusk, common to Puccini and French realist opera. In other respects, the musical antecedents of Ruttman and Cavalcanti are not opera composers, but the Zukunftsmusikers around Franz Liszt whose programmatic symphonic poems would be the source of Liszt's break with Wagner in the late 1850's.

Following Laura Marcus's presentation, came Tom Fogg's exploration of the craze for 'stutter edit' and similar sounds in what he insisted on describing with the rather unfortunate American term, IDM. Ever since Karlheinz Stockhausen offered his 'Advice to Clever Children' in which, at the prompting of Radio 3's Dick Witts, he compared the repetitive beats of the Aphex Twin to being, "like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can't get words out of his mouth," electronic beats have stammered with an infectious aphasic arrhythmia. The use of the stutter edit in works by Matmos or Caribou, has a kind of anthropomorphic effect on the computer, claims Fogg, while insisting that, perhaps more than any other instrument, the computer was "always already anthropomorphic."

Fogg's paper restricts its attention to the use of specific stuttering software plug-ins in recent computer-based music, his conclusion that stuttering is then a consequence of spread of home computers and their domestification, is thus largely tautological. But what would a general theory of musical stuttering look like? One that would have to go way beyond the rhizomatic glitch techno of the Mille Plateaux label (and their various imitators, discussed by Fogg), to take in Steve 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', Paul Hardcastle's 'Nineteen', the "uh uh uh" of Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman', the voice phasing of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain', even the repeated staccato quavers tht comprise the colloratura of the Queen of the Night's "Der Hölle Rache" aria in The Magic Flute. Indeed, just think how commonly Italian opera singing (perhaps most obviously in Rossini) is characterised by precisely the repetitions, unnatural prolongations, and curiously placed (from a linguistic point of view) cessations that comprise Wikipedia's definition of stammering. And that is just to speak of the most obvious vocal stutterings, whereas Fogg has already shown the possibility of expanding the term to an anthropomorphic description of instrumental and machine-made sounds.

If any piece of music were to, "Der Hölle Rache", one of the most venomous, but also one of the most beautiful, and certainly one of the most difficult to sing arias in all opera, right at the very top of a soprano's range, sits well with Deleuze's notion of a language "so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence." But perhaps Fogg is a little overhasty in dismissing the possibility of a psychoanalysis of sonic stammering. In 'O Superman', in 'Nineteen', even in Matmos's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, don't we find precisely this re-mergence, this return of the repressed - as in the young Freud of his early Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer), stuttering as hysterical symptom, "effects and residues of excitations which have acted upon the nervous system as traumas." The stammer marks the horror of the past, a nervousness towards the future, and the block of the unsayable.

All images taken from last summer's 'Stutter' exhibition at the Tate Modern.