(b. 1936)
composer, poet & sonosopher

1955 first publication as poet
1958 first book published (poetry)
1961 first appearence as performance artist
1961 first performance as composer
1963 first performance as text/sound artist
1965 first intermedia work
1968 first record released (lp)
1975 first video
20?? last personal appearence

11 books
19 exhibitions
87 recordings (lps and cds)
191 items on the work list
297 publications in magazins and anthologies
400+ personal performances around the world

the years 1955 to 1960 he worked mainly as a writer and published 4 books (2 collections of poetry, one of short stories and one novel). at the same time studies in composition in stockholm, paris and new york. main influences: john cage, marcel duchamp, yves klein, olivier messaien, raoul hausmann.

from 1961 to 1975 he worked mostly as composer, performance and text/sound artist. also as organizer of experimental music concerts and text/sound concerts, specially the international text/sound festivals in stockholm 1968 - 1978. around 1970 extensive tours around europe and in us/canada, australia and the far east to stablish text/sound art internationally.

from 1975 to 1995 he worked as composer and intermedia artist with performances in all the well-known international new music festivals. this work has continued till this day with the addition of a renewed interest in text/sound work.

Text-sound composition was created by people who did not regard themselves as followers of the futurist-dadaist tradition but as users of a new and different tool - the tape recorder instead of the typewriter. They did not want to take poetry back to the direct performance situation, which seemed to be a step backwards, but rather bring newer media like records and radio broadcasts into the distribution of poetry. The possibility of text-sound composition was not at hand before the fifties when tape recorders became available for the poet's use.

Text-sound composition is an intermedium, created to fill the area of expression between poetry and music that was scarcely used before text-sound composition emerged. Three parameters, two from the world of music and one from the world of speech, seems to me to be particularly important in that achievement and are present in all the best text-sound works:

(1) The use of non-semantic oral language information. That is an essential element in all direct linguistic communication. This concept is easy to understand when one considers that people who could not write a letter to mommy can easily communicate the most complex, half subconscious "Gestalten" of experience in the person-to-person situation. Obviously, the sound of the voice is the bearer of the great bulk of that information, and the effort to find and to isolate the information-bearing elements and then put them to poetic use has preoccupied many text-sound artists. Some of them achieve that by the exclusive use of linguistic micro-particles and pre-linguistic sounds, others by isolating these particles and sound from the spoken text by electronic means.

(2) Time manipulation. That is a musical element and in fact basically what music is mainly about. All good music is a piece of the composer's biological time, condensed and stretched out, and it contains everything that that period of life did contain and that the composer and his audience might choose to find in there. That "photography of time" can of course only be made as an ongoing process, which, once settled, can not be modified by the listener.

(3) Polyphony. This is also a formal element from the world of music, which here means the possibility of several simultaneously ongoing processes. It is well established that anyone can with relative ease follow four such simultaneous processes. That is also the way that human mind works; but written literature cannot reproduce it, since you cannot read more than one word at the same time. Visual poets have - quite unsuccessfully - tried to achieve that by typographical rearrangements of the text. Only the text-sound composition has brought it to meaningful poetical use.

Text-sound composition, at its bests, brings together the exactness of written language with the time manipulation and complexity of music, thereby offering an unusually rich and penetrating experience to its listener.

Sten Hanson