Re: [-empyre-] Hearing and Listening / unreasaonable effectiveness of ritual
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
dear
thanks to Roger Malina for his quite wonderful commentaries on the "the
unreasonable effectiveness of instruments"
and fine tuning, and I wish to apply my sense of such an instrument, vaguely
metaphorically, to an early week "topic" regarding the collecting
(not othering / or othering) of sound and what some, not archaelogists or
energy or brain connectome data collectors, but perhaps collectors of cultural
heritages or dimensions of transmitted ritual performance might consider a form
of recording. Maybe I am still hoping for more discussion on Kevin deForest's
post about
cross-cultural hunting and gathering; though my brief story is not about that
but about someone's return to the village.
Last Tuesday, the university where I work hosted an annual gathering
("Researching the Arts") of doctoral students, and
one of the participants of the gathering, Peter Ran Guangpei (Contemporary
China Center, U of Westminster), an ethnographic researcher and filmmaker,
presented his film "Xiansheng: Passing down the Tradition".
I thought it was a riveting yet quietly sensitive and very poetic evocation of
a rural tradition – performance chanting and sound making during funeral rite
– that was, at one point
forbidden and repressed (during the "Cultural Revolution") and now recently
rekindled and reactivated, largely due to an elderly man who seemed to remember
the "scriptures"
for the chants and wrote them down and now, as shown in the film, teaches the
sound of the chant to young Peter Ran who had returned to the village where his
grandparents lived.
The old man calls the music "scriptures", and says he remembers them with "his
stomach" (written scores had to be destroyed during the "Cultural Revolution").
Peter described his film in this manner: > Xiansheng is a group of local
ritualists, who perform funerary ceremonies in southwestern China. This
practice was previously condemned as superstitious and were thus strictly
forbidden
during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Tian Yongdi first learned to practise
Xiansheng at the age of 16. He has not only witnessed the survival of the
tradition through different historical periods, but also involved in its
eradication and revitalisation himself. His life story interweaves with the
fluctuation of the religious practice as well as the history of contemporary
China. Engaging in chant learning from Mr. Tian, the director tried to uncover
how the tradition survived
radical political campaigns, how it is passed down through generations and what
kind of future is ahead for the newly revived traditional practice.>.
What I found most interesting and moving were the scenes where the young man
listens to old Mr Tian Yongdi who chants, at the kitchen table, near where he
cooks daily soup for the family's pig which is carefully tended to, fine tuned,
even receiving smart treatment via injection by a vet when it develops a fever;
and while remembering the sound, he chats and points out the meanings (barest
glimpses of such) as his fingers trace the characters of his notebook (he says
there are 50,672 verses in toto) and perhaps throws in an anecdote or two, who
knows. From the scenes of the instruction (and the "scriptures" are
characters, not musical notes), one cannot tell whether Mr Tian Yongdi is
"correctly" remembering the sound of/in the stomach. Increasingly, I found
myself amazed, and then attracted to the idea that the old man is making up the
chants, inventing them. In very brief glimpses of the ritual performance (as
such), and they seemed to interest Peter much less, one also sees the villagers
joyfully banging on cans and pots, a delirious percussion orchestra of current
day Xiansheng, perhaps doomed to disappear again, when all the local youths
have left, or to be re-remembered and collected again by younger/older
generations, from the stomach.
respectfully
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hearing and Listening / unreasaonable effectiveness of ritual
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
dear moderator, dear all
is it all right (given the asynchronous nature of this list) to still follow
the invitation from last week that the weekend would open up a little breathing
room for dialogue and reflection?
(apologies if new topics, Feminism Confronts Audio Technology, have already
entered the playing field and taken over).
I was curious as to whether anyone thought my story about Xiansheng, posted on
Sunday, was at all relevant to previous discussions on sound and transmission,
collection and curating [culturally context-specific] -
especially as I tried to evoke the rural and ritual context of the story of
transmission of sound through the stomach, as well as proposing that culture
specific ritual performance practices, even if considered
politically and ideologically obsolete or in need of obsoletion, can be
reinvented and fabricated to serve a particular role (and as far as gender in
the transition and transmission was examined, and it was,
Peter Ran Guangpei replied that the shamans in the village were male,
performing the chants, so were the musicians improvising the percussion music;
women led the agricultural labor force and controlled other matters of family
and social
practice; animals seemed to have privileged roles too).
My post was addressed, implicitly, to Kevin deForest (his writing on 06/17
regarding):
>>
gather soundmaps and field recordings around the world
has continued the trajectory from the 1960's pioneers of acoustic
ecology. At the same time that it provides more opportunity to share
eccentric or personal mappings of local place, I am interested in the
exploration of cultures outside of the sound collector's, that is in
effect their tourist snapshots of place, a familiar exoticizing occurs.
...
And as much as the listening process can broken down into
wavelengths, signal and noise, I think the interpretation of sound is
importantly a culturally learned process
>>
So then I felt the discussion on "vibrations" could be illuminated listening to
Paul Dolden's music
from his "Below the Walls of Jericho" -- thinking of the story of the walls of
Jericho [e.g. Joshua 6:1-27]
and the sound that is said to have led to the crumbling, and the destruction
of Jericho, and I consider
the myth a very telling example of a political event (as we have continued to
see them, Baghdad recently)
here intertwined with a sound history event or a mythic allegory (walking
around the fortress, sounding the
trumpets) that I associated, on a late night watching a Hollywood film take on
the Trojan Horse, following Homer's Iliad
but compressing the long war a bit ('Troy'), with strategies we had learnt from
history, strategies for types of colonial warfare and the use of sound in
prisoner camps, during
torture, etc..
Voices too show up, collected; the British Library just hosted a symposium on
regional accents in voices from World War I (prisoners of war and their voices,
recorded in German prisoner of war camps between 1916 and 1918, survived in the
Berliner Lautarchiv, and now The British Library has acquired digital copies of
all the British voices and documentation; checking this out, I read that in
1916 young Wilhelm Doegen, a linguist and phoneticist who had studied at Oxford
in the 1900s, realised that fate had provided him with a captive audience,
literally, and an extraordinary variety of accents and languages of the British
empire including Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi, Welsh, Scots and Irish voices.
He got special permission from the authorities to take his equipment into camps
including Sennelager in Westphalia, and Wunsdorf in Brandenburg, where along
with Indian and African troops singing and telling folk tales in their own
languages he recorded regional accents from all over Britain, many now
virtually extinct, including voices from Aberdeen, Macclesfield, Bletchington
and Wolverhampton. It is the oldest collection of English dialect recordings in
the world.
I wonder how Paul reflected on the torture and the revolutionary/reactionary
side of sound production, and then wondered
how Douglas Kahn might respond - is Earth Sound Earth Signal looking at
political instrumentalizing of sonic energies
and signal energies? And Nina Eidsheim's study of voice -- I wish you would
say more about the "fallen off" pulses you mentioned on June 12.
And now, as we enter a new week of discussions on, for example, what Asha
Tamirisa calls "modular interfaces, and the ways in which their design and use
expresses
particular ideas of power, freedom, connection, and subjectivity", can we make
links back to the first and second week, and the beginning questions on labor
and value?
- and for example Jörgen Skågeby's suggestions [06/09] about:
>>
Research in interaction design, but also research in economic anthropology and
sociology, has come to highlight ethical and aesthetical values. An e
Re: [-empyre-] Hearing and Listening / unreasaonable effectiveness of ritual
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- "I wonder how Paul reflected on the torture and the revolutionary/reactionary side of sound production..." Well, since someone is inviting me to get on the soapbox I will. I generally find artists talking about their own work to be very uninteresting. However given the invitation i will express a few thoughts about my own work that it is now 25 years old!(or at least what i can remember!) "Below the Walls of Jericho" was part one of a three part work. Parts two and three were called " Dancing on the Walls of Jericho" and "Beyond the Walls of Jericho". These two movements can be found on my 1993 CD entitled "L'ivresse de la Vitesse". (Please note all my CDs are in their fourth to sixth editions and later editions have remastered versions with better sound quality. In 2012 I remastered my entire catalog again, because after another 10 years I felt the technology had vastly improved again. These versions at this time remain unpublished.) Back to the crumbling walls: In this series of works I was trying to capture the three stages of revolutionary history I learned in my liberal arts years, i.e. following the 3 movements of music, (see the titles above:) 1)the Revolution itself, the tearing down of the old structures etc. 2)the post Revolutionary period of celebration and glee. 3)the counter revolutionary period, or the conservative reaction. the violent swing back. In short to respond to Mr. Birringer, and how I responded to the idea of torture etc. That is really the third movement "Beyond the Walls of Jericho", which remains one of my most disturbing works. Rather than continue this political/historical analysis of these works I would rather take my time on the soapbox to discuss the making of such works. In short I think that "modes of production" are very important, and i think back to Jacques Attali's "Bruits" or "Noise" in which he argues that musicians' modes of production often prefigure later social forms. Or in other words if nothing else Attali's theory entitles me to be a "gear head." All 3 movements of the work achieve continuity by a very simple musical device: the octave is divided into 48 notes and all 7 octaves are used most of the time. This produces 336 notes or tracks of sound, add in 75 to 100 unpitched percussion instruments, stir, serve on ice and you are ready to knock down your consciousness or the local walls! (note there are sections of pretty Just Intonation to create constrast) The eighth tone division of the octave (25 cents) was picked because it is slightly beyond a wide vibrato. Each track or note was individually performed on a different musical instrument from the Eastern or Western music traditions. (I do all my own recordings and play all the string parts, both bowed and plucked.). Usually on each score page there are 40 different tempos operating (to create the sense of the polyrhythms you get with crowds shuffling, marching etc). In the 70s and 80s how did i produce such works? First accuracy of pitch is needed. Furthermore, how do you do such mixes without a bad signal to noise found in analogue recording? Or the building up of distortion and non linearities created by constantly bouncing tracks? Mr Birringer asks what i thought about torture etc. To tell you the truth most of my projects are always pushing the technological envelope and most of my thinking is involved in problem solving the technical issues , or god dammit "gear headness!" Unlike what was discussed in this forum I find the historical and aesthetic issues to be easy and I resolve these bedbugs before i start writing the work. Then i write the work out on large manuscript paper (like 6 feet long!) These two stages go quickly. Then the reality of making my sonic hallucination begins. On average I spend two years full time work producing the work which, when finished, averages 15 minutes in length. For those who still wonder how i produced the Walls cycle in the stone ages of audio technology, please feel free to write me for more details. In addition at the beginning of each score I have supplied lots of detail about production.. The scores can be found on line at my publishers site. (empreintes digitales=URL given at end of email), For bio, music excerpts, recordings,reviews etc go to: http://www.electrocd.com/en/bio/dolden_pa/ To see a video of a chamber orchestra work go to: http://vimeo.com/channels/575823/72579719 On Tuesday, June 24, 2014 6:41:41 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear moderator, dear all is it all right (given the asynchronous nature of this list) to still follow the invitation from last week that the weekend would open up a little breathing room for dia
Re: [-empyre-] Hearing and Listening / unreasaonable effectiveness of ritual
--empyre- soft-skinned space--The list has gone a bit quiet so, along with Paul, I too would like to respond to the question Johannes posed to me, and also add something in keeping with the topic this week. > how Douglas Kahn might respond - is Earth Sound Earth Signal looking at > political instrumentalizing of sonic energies and signal energies? The book covers quite a bit of territory with politics occurring frequently and at various levels, including instances of instrumentalization. It is an attempt to reconfigure given narratives of a number of historical back stories from the grassroots up, so it relies on speaking through innumerable original documents rather than gathering up existing glosses. The political animation follows Benjamin's dictum that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and add that there are no transmissions in which signals are not mixed (p. 16). This disposition will be evident as you read, with several themes methodically developed in stages and interrelated over the course of the book. With respect to this week's theme, the book is my first attempt to address electronic music. It was always surprising to me over the years that many electronic musicians expressed their appreciation for my book Noise Water Meat (1999) since there was really nothing on electronic music in the book and I had nothing to say about it generally. By investigating it through energies rather than the parade of inventions/inventors, composers/performers, and cinema/television soundtracks through which the standard histories of electronic music are written, I believe there is way to engage electronic music (and related artistic practices) in a way amenable to nature and ecology...it's in the book. With a little distance from the normal motifs one can notice broad approaches toward technological control and to what is controlled, with 1920s electronic music and much that followed concerned with the former and 1960s (Mumma, Lucier, Oliveros, etc.) with the latter. And with this, to circle back to Johannes, there is a politics. It is not the only political dimension but one that relates to broader operations of politics. Douglas > --empyre- soft-skinned space-- > dear moderator, dear all > > is it all right (given the asynchronous nature of this list) to still > follow the invitation from last week that the weekend would open up a > little breathing room for dialogue and reflection? > (apologies if new topics, Feminism Confronts Audio Technology, have already > entered the playing field and taken over). > > I was curious as to whether anyone thought my story about Xiansheng, posted > on Sunday, was at all relevant to previous discussions on sound and > transmission, collection and curating [culturally context-specific] - > especially as I tried to evoke the rural and ritual context of the story of > transmission of sound through the stomach, as well as proposing that > culture specific ritual performance practices, even if considered > politically and ideologically obsolete or in need of obsoletion, can be > reinvented and fabricated to serve a particular role (and as far as gender > in the transition and transmission was examined, and it was, > Peter Ran Guangpei replied that the shamans in the village were male, > performing the chants, so were the musicians improvising the percussion > music; women led the agricultural labor force and controlled other matters > of family and social > practice; animals seemed to have privileged roles too). > > My post was addressed, implicitly, to Kevin deForest (his writing on 06/17 > regarding): > > >> > gather soundmaps and field recordings around the world > has continued the trajectory from the 1960's pioneers of acoustic > ecology. At the same time that it provides more opportunity to share > eccentric or personal mappings of local place, I am interested in the > exploration of cultures outside of the sound collector's, that is in > effect their tourist snapshots of place, a familiar exoticizing occurs. > ... > And as much as the listening process can broken down into > wavelengths, signal and noise, I think the interpretation of sound is > importantly a culturally learned process > >> > > So then I felt the discussion on "vibrations" could be illuminated > listening to Paul Dolden's music > from his "Below the Walls of Jericho" -- thinking of the story of the > walls of Jericho [e.g. Joshua 6:1-27] > and the sound that is said to have led to the crumbling, and the > destruction of Jericho, and I consider > the myth a very telling example of a political event (as we have continued > to see them, Baghdad recently) > here intertwined with a sound history event or a mythic allegory (walking > around the fortress, sounding the > trumpets) that I associated, on a late night watching a Hollywood film take > on the
