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Approaching "Text-sound composition"
On September 3rd 1967, the term "Text-sound composition" was born at the hands of two distinguished Swedish composers: Bengt Emil Johnson and Lars-Gunnar Bodin. A few days before, them and several composers, poets and radio producers had gathered together In Hilversum. The purpose was to identify this form of art creation that was being practised all over the world and especially in Sweden. Almost all the Swedish artists who adopted the term Text-sound composition to name the work they were doing belonged to Fylkingen. This was a group created in Stockholm for the promotion of different forms of music and art experimentation. All those people were together in the purpose of encouraging a creative activity -based on voice and language exploration. It was a different and indeed new way to approach the suggestive world of words; this new way was especially interested in elements from other parallel disciplines such as music and poetry.
Possibly the closest precedent to "Text-sound composition" can be found in so-called concrete poetry, a genre that was born in the early fifties; Öyvind Fahlström and the Brazilian group Noigandres were the greatest exponents. In1953 Fahlström published a manifesto where he exposed the nature and the purposes in this new discipline. It had a great influence on poetic-visual arts (the Swedish artists Eugen Gomringer and Max Bill. In addition, concrete poetry and especially the radio work "Flagar i Sverige" (birds in Sweden) by Öyvind Fahlström were the key for the later development of "Text-sound composition". Fahlström seemed to find his source of inspiration for this new poetry creation among the work and instruction of the French composer Pierre Schaeffer. He was the inventor, in 1948, of concrete music. In his "Essay on musical objects", he himself described this new way of making music as the following: "Instead of writing ideas down in solfeggio symbols and trust their concrete realisation onto known instruments, it was about collecting raw sound from wherever it came and drawing away the value of music that potentially was within it."
Somehow this idea implied putting conventional methods of music composition together with the pure sound phenomenon. All in all, composers up to then had only taken into account music notes; afterwards an interpreter brought them to life with conventional instruments. Now he could also use the vast language of concrete sounds with the intention of composing. Sound objects such as a closing door, a boat riding an ocean wave or a gun shot, would be as important as the music notes from a piano or a violin.
Fahlström understood that this form or methodology of sound and music creation could be used for words and the language world. Once more an abstraction or isolation activity was to be done. Words had to be freed from their most immediate and traditional links. Understanding words as units of meaning, as expressions of thought or even as elements with grammatical function was to be struggled against. Freeing words presumed seeing them as mere verbal components -materials or sound objects. Thus poets could make a new, spontaneous and diverse usage of words with no ties whatsoever.
We agree in the fact that Text-sound composition derived from concrete poetry. The truth is, though, the real sense of that creative discipline is in its own name. We can see that the words "Text-sound composition" tell us clearly about the sort of creation they represent. First of all we have composition, a word we can relate to music, arts and activities that joint or combine different elements. Secondly we have the text; it inevitably takes us to the world of words and language. The voice tells us about literature and fiction but also about personal anecdotes, points of reference... Sometimes the voice is clear and understandable but it can also use peculiar combinations of words, pieces of words, unknown, invented languages and a wide range of possibilities offered by verbal communication. Finally we have the word sound; it warns us about the environment in which that composition is produced, and overall about how we can experiment with it.
Taking this into account, one could say that a text-sound composition work is based on the exploitation of words, speaking and language. It occurs and has its own form of expression in the acoustic dimension of the environment. This last statement is extremely important. This art manifestation takes place in a sound environment, and that leads us far away from creations also based on words and language but likely to be printed. These last creations can only be enjoyed visually.
Probably one of the more distinctive features of Text-sound composition is the tool of creation the artist has available to him. Paper is replaced by tape (Larry Wendt, Narrative as genealogy: Sound sense in an era of the hypertext"). Nowadays it's not hard to find recording studios in someone's house, but it was indeed unusual in the early sixties. Composers or sound artists who wanted to use certain technology supplies had to lead to sound production studios, mainly located in radio stations.
Precisely the first pieces of Text-sound by Swedish artists were produced in the Electronic Music Studio (EMS), which at the time was nothing more than a department in the Swedish radio station. There, Sonja Akesson, Svante and Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Bengt Af Klintberg, Sten Hanson, Ilmar Laaban, Ake Hodell or Bengt Emil Johnson met. They all had a long list of manipulation and sound editing techniques.
The magnetic recorder offered a range of possibilities that seemed unlimited at the time, such as sound amplification or sound transfiguration. Perhaps for the first time ever, those artists produced non-stop conversations, they altered speed in someone's speech and added repetitions to it, or they had a dialogue with different reproductions of their own voices.
All those new pieces of sound work were recorded (Michel Chion, El arte de los sonidos fijados). Those compositions did not rely on traditional musical scores and most of the time needed no interpreter on stage to be expressed. On this point we reach one of the fundamental characteristics of Text-sound composition: presentation and broadcasting of the actual pieces of work. Generally the pieces of work were released by radio stations or simply through the usual channel of distribution used for electro-acoustical music: speakers. Many experts on the subject consider Text-sound art as a different discipline to sound poetry precisely because the latter still gives performing importance to the poet.
These last few lines are intended as a summary that can help identify these particular creations. A text is always the base, the raison d'être of any of these compositions. Text-sound art does not become a kind of replacement for language but rather the opposite; language is used as an own expansion of our verbal and communicative capacity (Richard Kostelanetz, Text-sound art: a survey.) The Text-sound artist has no special interest in tones or melodies nor verbal material. Instead of singing he goes for reading, telling, relating... the sound of words is as important in traditional poetry as it is in Text-sound composition. However, in Text-sound composition language is not subject to syntax or concepts. Here, sound becomes the main tool for articulation. The artist exploits technology so that he can orchestrate or transform the text. Then he records it. At the end radio transmission and, overall, the speaker becomes the main broadcaster.
References
* Poet and composer, Sten Hanson, who is with us in this PROPOSTA festival this year, was one of the most distinguished Swedish artists in Text-sound production. He was member of the Fylkingen group mentioned above. Hanson dedicated himself to this sort of art from 1961 to 1973, period in which he produced pieces of work such as: "Revolution (1970), "Railroad Poem" (1970), "Fnarp(e)" trilogy (1970), "Oips!" (1971) and "OUHM" (1973).
In The phenomenon Henri Chopin, a text Hanson wrote last December 1999, we can find some references to his personal idea of Text-sound art. To Hanson, both modernist poetry and avant-garde music had been rather elitist and without direction. "It seemed to me that the solution was to bring together again the two art forms: poetry and music. Developing melodies from a written text could not be the path to follow... somehow taking back oral tradition -which had been ignored in poetry since the middle ages- by new electro-acoustic means looked like a good start. This, in addition, would allow a successful usage of simultaneity. " Apart from that, Hanson believed Text-sound artists had to make the most of both verbal and meaningful elements of language by exploiting all their possibilities of expression.
An example of this particular point of view is "Don't Hesitate do it, do it right now", a piece from 1969 framed in a series of compositions remarkably social and political as for their contents. A brief sound creation -2'50"- where Hanson repeats the sentence "Don't hesitate do it, do it right now" non-stop, as if it was a political slogan.
After four repetitions of the sentence with no apparent electro-acoustic manipulation on his voice, a process of orchestration and transformation starts. This process takes place in two different levels. One happens continually during the whole composition and shows the meaningful features of it; we will call it the dominant level. There is one voice only; it goes faster and slower and sometimes it echoes. The other level can be seen as depending to the first; it starts from the second 24; here the voice suffers severe transformations so it gives a free and abstract dimension to the piece. This second level is far more suggestive and disappears 5 seconds before the end. The piece ends with five more repetitions alone, with no echoes or transformations, just like the four first repetitions of the piece.
* Considered today as a distinguished name in Swedish avant-garde, Ake Hodell (1919-2000) was another essential composer in Text-sound composition. In July 1941, while working as an air-force pilot, he suffered a serious plane crash and was hospitalised for a long time. During that period Hodell started to write poetry. Later on he joined the group Fylkingen, where he met, among others, the Bodin brothers, Sten Hanson and Bengt Emil Johnson.
From the 60's, Hodell started to compose radio drama and above all Text-sound work, being always supported by the Swedish radio. From this period we can highlight pieces such as "igevär" (1963), "Structures III" (1967), "Mr. Smith in Rhodesia" (1970) or "The Voyage to Labrador" (1976).
Somebody has suggested his piece "General Bussig" ("Kind General", 1963) belongs to Hodell's anti-military era. It's important to bear in mind that in the 60's in the western world, social criticism and politics had a strong influence on arts and literature. There is a booklet that includes a fantastic anthology of Text-sound recordings in which it's mentioned a new psychological strategy used by the Swedish army in the late 50's. The idea was to obtain the soldier's obedience by adopting a kind and softer manner towards them. "General Bussig" is the story of a soldier who ends up brainwashed by the kind General. It seems obvious, then, that Hodell uses this piece of work as a sort of verbal rebellion against unfair reality generated by military conquers and the establishment.
Although the author recorded in studio a version of "General Bussig" on tape in 1972, the truth is that this piece of work was closer to the usual experimental performance carried by many sound poets than to the sophisticated and laboured verbal articulation that is normally used in Text-sound art.
Hodell's voice repeats almost obsessively the words general and bussig. These rhythmic repetitions clearly evoke the military world.
* Although he was born in the United Kingdom, the American poet, painter and novelist Brion Gysin, with no apparent connection with any of the Swedish artists mentioned above, created an experimental method of articulating words: the "cut-up". Later on, together with William Burroughs and Ian Sommerville he developed this method.
It seems that Gysin discovered this method by chance. One day while cutting a frame for a drawing he realised that the cutter he was using was sectioning some paper he had put underneath. The scraps fell down on the floor and formed a series of original juxtapositions. From that moment Gysin understood: one single reality could be expressed in many different ways. Thus he had to concentrate in procedure so that he could obtain more and more unusual and innovative results. The "cut-up" was born on paper but it quickly spread over tape recording. Gysin did not only developed this method as if it was an avant-garde literature technique. He always wanted the "cut up" to be popular. He wanted everybody to use it as a tool for experimentation. "Words have life by themselves and you or anybody can put them in action".
Brion Gysin created a different version for the "cut-up"; it was called permuted poem and it was based on constant repetition of one sentence where words appeared in different order every time
the poem was repeated. "I Am That I Am" (I Am That I Am, Am I That I Am, I That Am I Am, That I Am I Am... ), was produced in 1960 in the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)studios. It was a clear example of poetical permutation and nowadays it's considered a masterpiece in Text-sound art. Apart from changing the order of words from the original sentence, Gysin also submitted the piece to speed changes and superimposed phrases when being repeated.
* "Happily Ever After" (1986 - 1988) is a brilliant composition by a magnificent composer. Randy Hostetler was born in Washington in 1963 and he lived in a permanent creative process. Slave of a restless personality, Hostetler worked on many different art fields: music, cinema, video art, theatre and dance. He was only 32 years old when he died, in 1966.
"Happily Ever After" starts with a suggestive "once upon a time". It's a 45 minutes piece where Hostetler puts together the voices of 66 people -friends and family members. They tell stories and diverse anecdotes. Some of them are joyful, superficial and short; others are long and serious. The truth is that Hostetler offers an interesting exercise of oral tradition in shape of Text-sound creation. As in most of these pieces, Hostetler made "Happily Ever After" on magnetic tape in an electro-acoustic music studio.
As for the process of recording all those stories, Hostetler carried it out between May and December 1986. The author organised all those anecdotes according to strict time criteria. Thus, stories told in May would only appear on the left channel of the stereophonic mix. Then stories told in December would only appear on the right channel: As for stories told in October they would rather appear to the right from the middle point, etc.
Although essentially the intention of "Happily Ever After" seems to be somewhere between the sense of what the people tell and the arty organisation of such sources, it's not hard to notice that the artist has not much interest in the semantic aspect of the stories. It rather looks like Hostetler uses words and phrases in an instrumental way, such as painters use colours or musicians use notes. Proof of this could be how often Hostetler cuts someone's speech when just started, in the high point of a story or even at the very last bit. Frustration or interruption gives place to a new story. One more sign of Hostetler's apparent formal priority is the insertion and superposition of small pieces of speech in search of interesting juxtapositions, rhythms and sound fabrics.
The result is a complex voice theatre in which everybody is invited as long as they dive into a multiple and diverse world and they go along every single tour proposed by the author.
We have exposed four examples of sound poets and artists. However, due to the limit of space we are given we are leaving aside other artists who would deserve at least the same attention: Trevor Wishart, Charles Amirkhanian, Charles Dodge, Kenneth Gaburo... and many more.
Happily Ever After.
Ferran Cuadras
Barcelona, August 2002
Translated from catalan by Roger Garcia Coll
Sources:
-Richard Kostelanetz, Text-sound art: a survey / Text-sound texts (W. Morrow & Company Inc, New York, 1980)
-Michel Chion, L'art des sons fixés ou la musique concrètement (Editions Metamkine, 1991)
-Larry Wendt, Narrative as genealogy: sound sense in an era of the hypertext
-Lars-Gunnar Bodin, An introductory commentary on Swedish Text-sound compositons (llibret Five Text-sound artists / Phono Suecia PSCD 63 2CD)
-Torsten Ekbon, comments on the edition (Ake Hodell, Verbal Brainwash and other works - Fylkingen Records FYCD 1018-1-2-3 3CD)
-Miscellaneous, comments on the edition (Henri Chopin, Revue Ou - Cinquième Saison, complete recordings Alga Marghen - book + 4CDs)
-www.fylkingen.se
-www.ubu.com
-www.uni.edu/~keeley/reality/gysin.html
-www.music.princeton.edu/~paul/happily.html
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