Sounds Are Like People: works by Morton Feldman and Heiner Goebbels at MAC, Lyon

“It’s a funny story, actually – ” A portly, bespectacled New Yorker in his late fifties is addressing a bemused crowd in Frankfurt. It’s 1984. The title of the talk is ‘The Future of Local Music’ but it’s a title the man on stage is barely even paying lip service to. 

“Stockhausen asked for my secret. ‘What’s your secret?’ And I said, ‘I don’t have a secret, but if I do have a point of view, it’s that sounds are very much like people. And if you push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: don’t push the sounds around.’ Karlheinz leans over to me and says: ‘Not even a little bit?’” 

“I’m not like Stockhausen,” Morton Feldman insisted that day in Frankfurt, “I’m not creating music, it’s already there … ” Feldman’s not-being-like Stockhausen is one of the perennial themes of the now-famous Frankfurt lecture. “What really makes a composer distinguishable from another composer,” he says later, “is one’s orchestration,” – before adding, “ – except for Stockhausen…” 

This un-Stockhausen-ness of the great Brooklynite composer is illustrated by a diagram sketched on an A4 sheet, one of thirty recently acquired by the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, in which we find two columns headed up ‘Stockhausen’ and ‘Feldman’. In between the two we read down the parameters ‘Logic’, ‘Continuity’, ‘Climax’, ‘Tension’, and so on. Beside each of these traditional musical values – twelve in all – there’s a little tick in the column marked ‘Stockhausen’ and a little cross in the other.

Feldman’s felt-tipped notes from that Frankfurt lecture, spread across the walls of the MAC for the exhibition Listen Profoundly (which finishes today), show a sprawling and erratic sensibility. Skewed underlinings, crossings out, scarcely legible scribblings and multiple exclamation points abound in a selection of scribblings that resemble the exact opposite of the Powerpoint presentation your colleague gave at the lunchtime meeting the other day. 

We find strange diagrams with an oblong grid here, a few marked pizzicato there, dots, staves, the word ‘JERK’ in block capitals. They resemble impromptu scores as much as lecture notes – and maybe they are. This is a composer, after all, for whom sounds themselves seem just “intuitively to do things” and ideas are like “children … yearning for attention.”

It’s all about orchestration, he insists. That, and listening. “One of the problems about functional harmony is that it hears for us, see,” Feldman says. “We no longer have to hear. We are the found object, you see, where it’s listening for us. Harmony is like going to a public accountant to do certain work.”

“Listen profoundly” Feldman wrote on one of his A4 sheets, with a circle and a square below. The shapes recall the windows of the main hall in the Genko-an temple in Kyoto. “There are two differently shaped windows with views to the same garden,” Heiner Goebbels explains in the notes accompanying the exhibition, “a square window – the ‘window of confusion’ – and a round window – the ‘window of enlightenment’. More than twenty years ago I could encounter these two perspectives on a concert tour through Japan and in 2008 I started a series of installations freely adapting this experience.”

Genko-an 69006 (2014) takes us into a blackened room divided by a pillar. Taking a seat on a bench at the back of the room, we are presented with a choice: sit one side of the pillar and face a large square in neon, sit the other side, and you will face a neon circle. Everything else is blackness and – thanks to the pillar – there isn’t anyway of sitting such that you can see both.

Out of the darkness come voices, some familiar, some strange. Each voice – Alvin Lucier reading the instructions to I Am Sitting in a Room, Gertrude Stein reading from The Making of Americans, Marina Abramovic and Ulay assuring us repeatedly that “everything will be alright”, and a whole host of ethnographic recordings from around the world – comes and goes, scarcely overlapping or crowding each out. None of the sounds are being pushed around here. Feldman, doubtless, would approve.

The bright neon lights of the circle and the square seemed to me to tremble a little or to fluctuate in intensity from time to time but I was never sure whether this was simply an effect of staring at them for so long. I spent some time in this darkened room, watching and staring at these shapes, facing sometimes the circle, sometimes the square, sometimes trying – and failing – to see both at once. But I couldn’t honestly say that I felt more enlightened looking at the one or more confused looking at the other.

I could certainly say that I enjoyed my time in Goebbels’s ‘garden’. Having spent the previous hours, before arriving at the museum, soaking up the botanic gardens next door, I found these acoustic ‘flowers’ as perfectly placed, as harmoniously balanced, as those releasing their perfumes outside.

Helipkopter-Streichquartett on Pont-Neuf

What, I found myself wondering more than once this evening, would Henri IV have thought about all this? There he stood, le roi galant, enbronzed mid-trot upon his horse, rather ostentatiously looking askance as four loud speakers whirred and a giant LCD screen flickered. How would this famous homme politique, le vert gallant as they called him for his knack with the ladies, what would he have made of Stockhausen's grand conceptual fillip? 

A string quartet, you say? (Henri wouldn't have known what a string quartet was, of course. Or if he did he would have imagined something containing a viol da gamba and a lute). And each member of the quartet is sat in a different helicopter, just hammering away as it takes off and flies away? (Nor, unless perhaps if he happened to have stumbled somehow upon the notebooks of the Doctor Mirabilis Roger Bacon, would he have know what a helicopter is but we'll let that slide for now) Well, Henri might have said scratching his chin, I've got to admit it's something. But does it compare to the canal I put right in the middle of a park in Fontainebleu?

My mind would drift leisurely to such matters during gaps in the transmission, of which there were a few. For a long time, the cameraman seemed content just to point his camera up at the sky and film the clouds. It was as if this was the only way to represent the purity of Stockhausen's idea. Wow wow wow, as Pierre Arditti is famously quoted upon first being told about it by Stockhausen. 

His dream. That's how it came to him. Le fameur rêve, they said over the tannoy while the players were still strapping in and tuning up. No afternoon reverie, no wistful idea chanced upon in the free gambol of idle thought. A real dream dreamt knee deep in the sand dunes of sleep. I see a string quartet, and each player is sat in a different helicopter. They play, they take-off, they fly around. Wow wow wow. 

But what if, Arditti supposedly continued, what if they were to play on a stage, with a sound recording of helicopter noise playing over the PA? Maybe there could be a video… No. Stockhausen wasn't having it. He had a dream. And if it wouldn't be sullied then by some cheap effects, why sully it now with all the messy business of reality with its harnesses and seat belts and wires and headset mics? Film the clouds! Perhaps he was right…

I didn't know where they were taking off from. The programme said go to Pont Neuf, so there I was. I had entertained images of the helicopters taking off from right under the bridge, swooping up over Henri's statue, over the spot where Denis Lavant breathed fire in Les amants du Pont-Neuf and where Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Templars, was burnt at the stake. They didn't do that. They took off from some park somewhere else, pretty far away. 

We followed them on our LCD screen as it coughed and spluttered in split-screen. The coarse tremolo of the violins would crackle and fade, the roar of the cello wavered, blipping in and out a bad phoneline. Finally the image fell apart, finally it reconstituted itself. Never quite sure if we were hearing quite or all what we were supposed to, still we stood, or we sat. Were we listening to a concert or were we simply waiting for the racers to zoom past?

But stand or sit we did, and in our hundreds. Maybe thousands. The bridge looked full, packed with this sudden new audience for modern music. Why, David Stubbs once bemoaned, do people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen? Well, here they all were, the missing crowds. Getting it. Stockhausen. Or at least, there. 

Until they all flew past, the four helicopters. Just a few minutes off their appointed time. Really high up. Far too far away for the ambient noise of the rotors to compete with the broadcast sound. Four little black dots on the sky, all in a line. And we whooped, and we pointed, and we aimed our cameras, and on the screen the second violin whined away at the top of its neck and the viola ground down upon the earthy roots of its C string, and on they went, minding their way. 

Almost immediately, so did the audience. The strings played on, chewing furiously on each slurred note, and everyone shuffled off. As if all these however many hundreds of people, all they'd come to see, all they'd really wanted, was to see four little black dots in a line upon the sky, disappearing into the distance.

Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

"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.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Institutional Pre-History

In a 1997 interview with John Cavanagh for BBC Radio Scotland’s Original Masters series, Delia Derbyshire claimed that when the first “boss” of the Radiophonic Workshop was appointed in 1958, “there were two applicants from a drama background and three applicants with a music background. And drama won.” But things were not quite as simple as this statement implies. At the time the BBC had a particularly adventurous Drama department, heavily influenced by the ground breaking work that came out of Laurence Gilliam’s post-war Features department, and a largely conservative Music department. In the 1930s, writers like Tyrone Guthrie were already talking about “symphonic form” in radio drama, and paying attention to the significance of words as sound forms in themselves.

Though the BBC had developed a strong reputation for ‘modern’ music in the twenties and thirties, with the coming of the Second World War, a decision was made by the Programme Planning Department to move to a ‘lighter’ programming schedule against the wishes of Head of Music, Adrian Boult. In a Musical Times article from 1943, otherwise full of praise for the high standard maintained in broadcast music, the author remarks on a “falling short” in the field of contemporary music, “due to causes that nobody can remedy.”

Despite the newfound pressures of commercial competition, R. J. F. Howgill, Head of Music 1952-1959, insisted on maintaining the BBC’s commitment to the “very best” – in the ideology of the times however, this consisted of a spectacular spectrum with “at one end” the Last Night of the Proms and “at the other end of the spectrum, ‘celebrity recitals’ by Menuhin, Fischer-Dieskau, and others." Things were about to change. In 1957, William Glock conducted a performance of works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono on the Third Programme, 3 March 1957 and would become head of music in 1959 with a remit to broadcast “a wider selection of contemporary music.” Of course, by this time, the Radiophonic Workshop was already set up under the stewardship of the Drama department.

Born, G. (2004), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, 2004, London: Secker & Warburg;
Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume V: Competition, 1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Doctor, J. R., The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936, 1999, Cambridge University Press;
McN., W., ‘The BBC Comes of Age’, in The Musical Times, vol. 84, No. 1210. (Dec. 1943), p.367;
Rodger, I., Radio Drama, 1982, London: Macmillan