kouvaras .loading.the.silence.australian.sound.art.in.the.postdigital.age

Loading the SiLence: auStraLian Sound art in the PoSt-digitaL age

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Loading the Silence: australian Sound art in the Post-digital age

Linda ioanna KouvaraSUniversity of Melbourne, Australia

V

© Linda ioanna Kouvaras 2013

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Linda ioanna Kouvaras has asserted her right under the copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by ashgate Publishing Limited ashgate Publishing companyWey court east 110 cherry Streetunion road Suite 3-1Farnham Burlington, vt 05401-4405Surrey, gu9 7Pt uSa england

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataKouvaras, Linda ioanna. Loading the silence: australian sound art in the post-digital age. 1. noise music–history and criticism. 2. aleatory music – history and criticism. 3. Musical perception. 4. altermodern (art) 5. Music – australia – 20th century – history and criticism. 6. Music – australia – 21st century – history and criticism. i. title 780.9'05-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataKouvaras, Linda ioanna. Loading the silence: australian sound art in the post-digital age / by Linda ioanna Kouvaras. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4156-4 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4094-4157-1 (ebook) 1. avant-garde (Music) – australia. 2. Postmodernism – australia. i. title. ML360.5.K68 2013 780.994'0904–dc23

ISBN 9781409441564 (hbk)ISBN 9781409441571 (ebk – PDF)ISBN 9781472400352 (ebk – ePUB)

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Part 1 Background

Introduction: No Longer Confined to Living in ‘The Age of Flying [with] Our Archaic Notions of Harmony’ 3

1 Sound Art’s Lineage 19

2 Sound Art as Postmodernism’s Exemplar 35

Part 2 dawning

3 The Dawning of Australian Sound Art 61

Part 3 Postmodern

4 Feminizing the Sound Object 99

5 The Geographico-political 115

6 The Quotidian and Beyond 147

Part 4 altermodern

7 The Nostalgic: The Dawning of the Altermodern (1) 173

8 Neo-Modernist Arts of Noise in a Post-Postmodern Era: The Dawning of the Altermodern (2) 199

Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Agevi

Part 5 conclusion

Conclusion: Silence Charged 225

Bibliography 231Index 257

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the ARC.

Throughout this book I draw on personal interviews, in person across a café table, at a bar, or by phone, e-mail or letter, kindly and fulsomely granted by many of the numerous composers and artists I discuss here, and for which I am very grateful. These people are: Matt Adair, James Gordon Anderson, Ros Bandt, Nicholas Bates, Brenton Broadstock, Warren Burt, David Chesworth, Carolyn Connors, Sherre DeLys, Eve Duncan, Andrew Ford, Andrée Greenwell, Joan Grounds, Moya Henderson, Cat Hope, Sonia Leber, Christine McCombe, Andrián Pertout, Gail Priest, Catherine Schieve, Greg Wadley and Nick Wilson. I wish to particularly acknowledge here Warren Burt’s ever-giving availability – since 1992 – for discussion on matters experimental and beyond, and for granting me unlimited access to his works. His invitation as guest editor to me to contribute to a Sounds Australian issue on postmodernism and art music in 1992 was my first assignment in my musicological career.

Invaluable to this project have been my research assistants: Jon Dale, Poppy Fay, Jillian Graham, Jennifer Hill, Esther Lowe, Bonnie Smart, Gabby Troup, Paul Watt and Emily Wilbourne. Technical and administration help, very gratefully received, was provided by Mary Coghlan, Sue Cole, David Collins, Peter Liddelow, Kathy Palmer, Evelyn Portek, Stefan Siemsen, Elizabeth Tucker, Lena Vigilante, Christine Webster and Alexandra Williams, and Chelsea Wright’s expertise greatly enabled the cover design. Thanks to all for your care and professionalism.

For their friendship, encouragement and stimulating conversations I want to mention and thank Katy and Keith Abbott, Jane Anderson, George Apeitos, Sue Best, Brenton Broadstock, Julie Brown, Michael Brown, Janine Burke, Jon Cattapan, Malcolm Collins, Liz Conor, Robert Constable, Andrew Cooks, Rena Cotter, Jen and Thomas Daddow, Simon Dale, Johnathan Dean, Eve Duncan, David Everitt, Michael Feehan, Judi Forbes, Shelley Gage, Malcolm Gillies, Anna Goldsworthy, Jillian Graham, Stuart Greenbaum, Andrée Greenwell, Graham Hair, Janine Hanrahan, Sue-Ann Harding, Anika Helene, Moya Henderson, Susan

Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Ageviii

Hewitt, Fincina Hopgood, Lynne Horwood, Siriol Hugh-Jones, Adam Hutterer, James Hullick, Maureen Johnson, Paul Kalina, Ross Kalla, Liz Kaszpryk, Giselle Kett, Paul Kildea, Virginia Kitchen, Katrina Knell, Genevieve Lacey, Zoë Laidlaw, Alison and David Lansley, Bobo Lo, Norbert Loeffler, Sally Macarthur, Janet March, Christine McCombe, Gabrielle Mercer, David Pear, John A. Phillips, Maree and Joe Pobog-Jaworowski, Susan Lewis, Robynne McFeeters-White, Andrián Pertout, Merran Poplar, Kevin Purcell, Nicholas Purcell, Margot Quigley, Steph Rocke, Marianne Rothschild, Bob Scarfe, Jennie Shaw, Johanna Selleck, Deviani and Rosalie Segal, Bonnie Smart, Ros Smith, Jo and Kevin Summers, Christian Thorn, Esmeralda Tintner, Alex Todd, Rosemary Ward, Kira and Ethel White, Emily Wilbourne, Ann Williams, Simon Wilson and Steven and Jen Wilson.

The wonderful Ormond College Community, where I have been Resident Music Tutor since 1993, has also given me much support and an atmosphere in which to creatively thrive. My thanks in particular to the staff present during the gestation of this book, particularly Catherine Anderson, Ann Badger, Moya Barklay, Rufus Black, James Brown, Justin Brymer, Hugh and Cherry Collins, Nöelle Collombet-Sankey, Phillippa and Steven Connolley, Mary Dalton, Zoe Dauth, Dirk and Lesley den Hartog, Dave Freeman, Jane and Jim Freemantle, Billie Giles-Corti, Adrienne Harvey, Anne Herbert, Jenny and Andrew Holmes, Allan Horsfall, Deb Hulls, Richard Jackson, David Jones, Rob and Cathy Leach, Richard Lee, Michael and Barbara Leigh, Kiera Lindsey, Sue Lines, Stephen McIntyre, Nicole Meaker, Hartley Mitchell, Graeme Priest, Alice Pung, Treen Renard, Thérèse Robin, Sally Robinson, Howard Sankey, Dave Vickery, Gill Webster and Pera Wells.

My esteemed colleagues at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne, have also contributed in myriad ways to supporting me in this project, particularly Caroline Almonte, Warren Bebbington, Michael Christoforidis, Donna Coleman, Barry Conyngham, Cathy Falk, Loukia Gauntlett, Ian Godfrey, Denise Grocke, Elliott Gyger, Jennifer Hill, Elizabeth Kertesz, Michael Kieran-Harvey, Christine McCombe, Katrina McFerran-Skewes, Gary McPherson, Elizabeth Mitchell, Kerry Murphy, Bob Northey, Mark Pollard, Melanie Plesch, Glenn Riddle, Suzanne Robinson, Jan Stockigt, and Peter Tregear. I have also been energized by students’ responses upon presenting many of the ideas contained within to my classes (such as Music in Australia, From Impressionism to Postmodernism, Art-Music and Postmodernism, and Sex, Death and the Ecstatic in Music) and in my Higher Degree thesis supervisions and wish to single out Sophie Boyd-Hurrell, Esther Lowe, Sarah Moore, Kath Nelligan, Eli Simic-Prosic, Kim Tan and Emily Wilbourne, among the many.

A special thanks is due to Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Dinny O’Hearn, then-directors at the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre, where my Hugh Williamson Senior Research Fellowship in 1991–92 placed me on the path towards discovering the magic of Australian sound art, and where historian David Goodman generously gave me many hours of his considered, empathic acumen as I tried out my ideas about the then-fresh phenomenon of postmodernism in Australian art music.

Acknowledgements ix

A very big thank-you goes to the Australian Music Centre, particularly its CEO, John Davis, and to Philippa Horn, Judith Foster and Danielle Carey, for all their support. I am also grateful to the Australian Research Council for its support of this book through the Discovery Project Postmodernism in Contemporary Australian Art Music: Analysis and Reappraisal (2005–2008). Sincere thanks to Ashgate staff Laura Macy, Heidi Bishop, Jackie Bressanelli, Emma Gallon, Nicole Norman, Philip Stirups and Beatrice Beaup, and freelance proofreader Felicity Teague, for their patience, counsel and guidance.

My siblings and their partners Lila and Andreas, Danae and Fragisko, Maurice and Helena, Philip, Chrissy and Marc, and Andrew and Tania; you and your families, Bebba, Loreni, Ageliki, Maria, Daniel, Monique, Max, Taylah, Maddison and Jayden, my aunt Joan and my extended family, Mary, Derek and Christina, Sue and Tony, Michelle, Ben, James, Derek, Fiona and Daniel, Tim, Jay and Annie, Noel and Janet, Barrie and Anne, Amanda, Andrew and Alison, were a steadying and wonderfully supportive presence throughout the process of producing this book.

Finally, to Richard Ward, for the original cover design, his unstinting editorial advice, thought-provoking insights, unlimited care and devotion to me and to all my projects, my love and my deep appreciation.

Excerpts from ABC online productions reproduced by permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and ABC Online, © 2011 ABC. All rights reserved.

Linda KouvarasThe University of Melbourne

Part 1 Background

Introduction: No Longer Confined to Living in ‘The Age of Flying [with] Our Archaic

Notions of Harmony’1

‘Noisy’ Calls To Arms

The incendiary manifestos of the Italian Futurists in the early twentieth century were war cries proclaiming the dynamism of the industrial and of noise, thereby forging a bifurcation in fundamental attitudes towards composition, where noise became integral to music making in Western culture: ‘For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the Eroica or the Pastoral’.2 The Futurist call to arms proselytized for the notion of noise as music, machine as music maker. This attitude was embraced in various iterations throughout the first half of the twentieth century, laying the foundations for musique concrète; mechanistic atonal music; the use of technology by the post-World War II avant-garde as a means of musical production; the ‘prepared’ piano; integral serialism;

1 Percy Grainger, Free Music (Tablet 2) (1938), 120 Years of Electronic Music: Electronic Musical Instrument 1870–1990, Grainger Museum (2005), at http://120years.net/machines/free_music_machine/index.htm, accessed 19 February 2005. Also see Percy Grainger, The Free Music Machine (1948) or ‘The Electric Eye Tone Tool Cross-Grainger for Playing Grainger’s Free Music’, 120 Years of Electronic Music, Grainger Museum (2005), at http://120years.net/machines/free_music_machine/index.htm, accessed 7 February 2005; Burnett Cross, Grainger’s Free Music Machine, Described by Burnett Cross, International Percy Grainger Society, at http://www.percygrainger.org/, accessed 29 December 2011.

2 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (1913), at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/noises.htm, accessed 15 November 2009. Also see Mark Sinker, ‘Destroy All Music: The Futurists’ Art of Noises’, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, ed. Rob Young (London; New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 181–92; Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004) – this book is a resource of readings from significant experimentalists from the Futurists to the present. Also see, for example, John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo (1937)’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 25–8, and Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009).

Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age4

extended instrumental and vocal techniques; graphic notation; improvisation (within the context of concert music); and minimalism.3

In the tradition of high art during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continuing into the twentieth century in score-based music, the ‘creative individual’ and ideals of originality, purity, abstraction and formalism were paramount. Then in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp declared a urinal a (‘readymade’) piece of art, calling it Fountain (1917). This attitude – that art is only what we nominate it to be and that art can comprise the real world – finds its musical zenith mid-twentieth century in the experimental works of American composer John Cage. Cage lays down a gently Zen-informed, yet strongly defining, gauntlet, inviting us to open our ears and minds to embrace ambient, environmental sounds through such works as, most famously, his 4’33”: Tacit, for Solo Instrument of 1952 – 4 minutes and 33 seconds of ‘silence’, divided into three ‘movements’ or tacets (silent pauses), to be ‘performed’ on any instrument – and actually for any duration, according to the score note.4 Thus music reaches a ‘degree zero’ of modernist radicalness, emptying itself of its very stuffing, delivered from predesignated ‘content’ and will. (And the paradox that 4’33” is an expression of Cage’s own will nevertheless does not negate the radicalness of such a move.) The tenets of 4’33” resonated in Happenings throughout the 1960s.5

Score-based, high-modernist music of the mid-twentieth century that reached a high point of its own in integral serialist works also dictated a tabula rasa, annihilating – rather than building from – the past. But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos has displayed a postmodern need to fill Cage’s ‘silence’, to actually load it. This book is a select investigation of such developments in Australia.

Australia’s Experimentalist Pedigree

Australia has a rich history in experimental music. Australian-born composer and pianist and ‘Free Music’ inventor Percy Aldridge Grainger would later relate

3 Flora Dennis and Jonathan Powell, ‘Futurism’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2010), at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/music/10420, accessed 10 January 2010.

4 David Tudor premièred the work on 29 August 1952, at a recital of contemporary music at Maverick Concert Woodstock, New York. He performed 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence over three movements, 30”, 2’23”, and 1’40”, signalling the start and end of each movement by closing and opening the keyboard lid and by arm gestures, see Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 11.

5 George Brecht’s Piano Piece 1962, for example, simply comprises the phrase, ‘a vase of flowers on(to) a piano’. For ‘silent piece’ precursors to Cage’s, see Leo Carey, ‘Sh-h-h’, New Yorker (24 May 2004), at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/24/040524ta_talk_carey, accessed 22 July 2010, cited in Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, p. 18.

Introduction 5

his obsession with glissandi to his childhood days in Melbourne, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, spent immersed in the natural world and observing waveforms: ‘Personally I have heard Free Music in my head since I was a boy of 11 or 12 in Auburn, Melbourne. It is my only important contribution to music. My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave movements’, in the sea that he first observed as a young child at Brighton Beach, Victoria, and on the waters of the lake at Albert Park, Melbourne.6 These observations resulted in his pioneering experiments, begun in 1938.7 Grainger’s self-declared ‘only important contribution to music’, ‘Free Music’ (despite his many other musical accomplishments), that is, music generated by his Free Music Machines of gliding tones and beatless rhythms, would ultimately release music from the ‘tyranny of the performer’.8 Grainger enjoined the world to appreciate its relevance:

It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying and yet not to be able to execute tonal glides and curves … Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and ‘touching’ (non-harmonic) combinations of tones, yet we are unable to take up

6 Grainger, Free Music (Tablet 2). 7 Grainger’s quartet for electronic instruments was composed as early as 1937, in

which he notated the pitch by zigzags and curves. Grainger aspired not only to transcend the limitations he perceived in traditional instruments: he extended this to the traditional way of playing music – namely, to purge human intervention in performance through his ‘Free Music’ machines, such as the Estey-Reed Tone-Tool, 1950–51; the Kangaroo-Pouch Tone-Tool, 1952; and the Electric-Eye Tone-Tool (left unfinished at the time of his death). These were constructed in collaboration with Burnett Cross from 1945 to 1961. The machines were produced to enable his radical notions of Free Music polyrhythms and gliding pitch. The Electric-Eye Tone-Tool – also known as the Free Music Machine – was a machine that controlled the pitch, volume and timbre of eight oscillators. Two large rollers fed four sets of paper rolls over a set of mechanical arms that rolled over the cut contours of the paper and controlled the various aspects of the oscillators. Contours and curving lines of graphs were score directions for pitch and volume, where ‘up’ meant ‘high’ and ‘down’ meant ‘low’, enabling the musician to glide within the music from one sound to another. The Electric-Eye Tone-Tool took this idea to its conclusion, with the introduction of a painted score in which water-soluble ink patterns were ‘played’ by the instrument in accordance with the light filtration through the paper. See, for example, Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, ‘Grainger, Percy’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2007), at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11596, accessed 19 September 2007. Also see Hugh Davies, ‘Cross-Grainger Free Music Machine’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2007), at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/47637, accessed 19 September 2007; Robin Fox, ‘Experimental Music in Melbourne: A Definition and Historical Overview’, Context 24/Spring (2002): 20–21; Grainger, Free Music (Tablet 2). Grainger was also a folk music collector and arranger, educator, social and musical commentator, clothing designer, and linguist.

8 Ibid.


these beauties and expressivenesses into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony… .9

Encapsulated here is a primary disjuncture between modernist and traditional aesthetics. Grainger’s sentiments coincide with those of American composer and musical theorist Henry Cowell, who avers in 1929 that the ‘time-honoured axiom’ that music and noise are opposites ‘cannot be taken for granted’.10 Cowell considers the element of noise as generative and poetically suggests that we

consider that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good microbe, which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener, instead of producing musical oblivion. Although existent in all music, the noise-element has been to music as sex to humanity, essential to its existence, but impolite to mention, something to be cloaked by ignorance and silence.11

And indeed, Cowell’s beneficial noise-germ has since found multi-dimensioned expression in the reconsideration, destabilization and exploration of what had traditionally been categorized – and abjured – as music’s others: noise, (extended) silence, and non-musical sound,12 providing inspiration for contemporary composers working in experimentalist/sound art music genres.

The impact and influence of Grainger’s innovations was not immediate – or, in Warren Burt’s words, it was ‘extremely slow and piecemeal’13 – at the time of their inception.14 This was largely due to the limited means to promote his works and ideas, leading to a lack of wide dissemination of his projects – unlike the situation for many of the composers who are better known for the musical

9 Ibid. 10 Henry Cowell, ‘The Joys of Noise’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 22.

Cowell makes the point that noise is always present in music – in the non-tonal aspects of producing sound on a violin, for example, or even singing if one is singing anything other than vowel sounds (consonants produce irregular vibrations, that is, noise): ibid., p. 23.

11 Ibid., pp. 23–4. 12 See, for example, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, ‘I: Music and Its Others:

Noise, Sound, Silence: Introduction’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 5–6. This two-page introduction to this section of their book gives a concise overview of ‘radical’ music practices over the twentieth century.

13 Warren Burt, ‘Some Musical and Sociological Aspects of Australian Experimental Music’, Resonate Magazine (31 July 2007), originally published in Sounds Australian 37 (1993), at http://www.resonatemagazine.com.au/article.php?id=4, accessed 25 September 2012.

14 See, for example, Percy, dir. Andrew Ford, Percy Grainger and ABC Classic FM, 2001.

Introduction 7

inventions he himself paralleled or even presaged.15 Further, Grainger was living in America in White Plains, NY, during the majority of his musical experimentation with American scientist and musician Burnett Cross.16 Burt also remarks that ‘composers who have been clearly extending some of the principles of Grainger’s work have, until recently, been largely unaware of his activities’.17

Nevertheless, due to developments in Grainger scholarship and initiatives by the Grainger Museum18 over the past three decades (such as a 1997 series of events staged there to draw attention to Grainger’s works and legacy),19 Grainger’s concepts and innovations have moulded the nature and direction of much contemporary composition in Australia, to the point where several Australian composers have set about righting a perceived neglect and ignorance of one of our most important musical innovators by creating works that engage with Grainger’s legacy; Chapter 7 details some such recent belated engagements. But it was John Cage’s work and ideas, introduced by visual artist and musician Robert Rooney to

15 Such as Cage, Cowell, Edgard Varèse, Conlon Nancarrow and Harry Partch. Grainger’s experiments with aleatoric music composition, for example, predated those of John Cage by 30 years, with Random Round written in the 1920s.

16 See, for example, Warren Burt, ‘Australian Experimental Music 1963–1990’, Leonardo Music Journal 1/1 (1991): 5–6; and the article by Grainger’s collaborator, Burnett Cross, ‘Collaborating with Percy Grainger’, New Music Articles 7 (1989): 3–4.

17 Burt, ‘Some Musical and Sociological Aspects’. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear also note, ‘His [Grainger’s] attempts at “free music” did not exert a profound influence over other composers, at least not directly, as they were quickly overtaken by the massive technological advances that occurred in electronic sound synthesis during the 1950s and 60s’: ‘Grainger, Percy’.

18 Grainger established the Museum at the University of Melbourne (1935–38). ‘He stocked it well with his own curios and those of his artistic set. The museum, however, gained little attention until the mid-1970s’ (Gillies and Pear, ibid).

19 Naomi Cass declares that Grainger had ‘returned to the public imagination’ through events held at the museum in 1997 dedicated to a Grainger revival: ‘For the first time in 60 years, this monument to a pioneering modernist of international significance is finally receiving the public recognition it deserves’, quoted in Guy Healy, ‘A Little Light Music for Percy’s Sake’, The Australian, 29 October 1997. Also see Jill Fraser, ‘Eye on the Light Fantastic’, Sun Herald Sun, 18 October 1998; Warren Burt, Percy Grainger’s Work with Music Technology, Melbourne Independent Media Center (2005), at http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/02/87624.php, accessed 22 September 2006; and Stuart Favilla and Joanne Cannon, ‘Children of Grainger: Leather Instruments for Free Music’, New Interfaces for Music Expression: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NME06), Paris, France (2006), at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142305, accessed 22 September 2006. Since the year 2003 many composers have revisited Grainger’s Free Music in his writings, plus via the recordings and actual machines he created, see Chapter 7 of the present volume for more on the events staged at the Museum.


a group of musicians working in Melbourne in 1963, that galvanized Australian experimentalism.20

My interest here is in post-1970s experimentalist music – sound art. Sound art is arguably the most rapidly burgeoning area in contemporary, postmodern (and post-postmodern) music making on the international scene; my focus is on Australian iterations in this sphere.21 Not only can Australia claim Percy Grainger, one of the earliest composers to make inroads into experimentalism as a way forward; the CSIRAC (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Automatic Computer) (1949–64), the first computer programmed to play music, was developed in Australia.22 The Fairlight Synthesizer, the ‘grandparent’ of all sampling technologies, one of music’s primary heralds for the digital age, was developed in 1975 in Sydney.23 Australia also embraced such innovators as UK-born immigrant electronic and avant-garde composer Tristram Cary, who co-founded in the 1960s Britain’s highly significant Electronic Music Studio.24 Important late experimentalist/early sound art music-making activities

20 Burt, ‘Australian Experimental Music’, p. 6. 21 For sources dealing with the pre-mid-1970s history of experimental music in

Australia, see, for example, James Murdoch, Australia’s Contemporary Composers (South Melbourne, VIC: Macmillan, 1972); John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1998); John Whiteoak, Interview with Keith Humble (2003; 1989), NMA Publications, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/Humble_interview.html#2r, accessed 4 October 2007. For an overview of post-1990s Australian Sound Art and its connections with Australian broadcasting, see Andrew McLennan, A Brief Topology of Australian Sound Art and Experimental Broadcasting, at http://www.kunstradio.at/AUSTRALIA/lennon_topology.htm, accessed 29 April 2006.

22 In its earlier guise the CSIR Mk1, in (probably) 1950. The exact date was not recorded, see Music Pioneer (2002), at http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/CSIRAC/pioneer/index.aspx, accessed 19 September 2007. Also see Robyn Williams, 11 Must-see Museum Exhibits (8 September 2007), at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22392398-5012694,00.htm, accessed 18 September 2007. Also see Fox, ‘Experimental Music in Melbourne’, p. 21.

23 By Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, see Fairlight (2000), at http://www.synthmuseum.com/fair/index.htm, accessed 18 September 2007. Also see Fox, ‘Experimental Music in Melbourne’, p. 21.

24 With Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell, see What the Future Sounded Like, Official Website (2007), at http://www.whatthefuturesoundedlike.com/, accessed 19 September 2007; Ian Cuthbertson, The Sound of a Fly Screaming Started It All (Review of What the Future Sounded Like) (2007), at http://www.whatthefuturesoundedlike.com/australian_review.jpg, accessed 19 September 2007. Cary also designed and built his own electronic music facility in the late-1960s, one of the longest-established private studios in the world, and brought the equipment from this studio to Australia in the early-1970s, most of it incorporated into the expanding teaching studio at Adelaide University where it has had considerable influence on experimental music development, see About Tristram Cary (2007), at http://users.senet.com.au/~trisc/biog.htm, accessed 2 October 2007. Also see Burt, ‘Some Musical and Sociological Aspects’; Jon Rose, Listening to History:

Introduction 9

in Melbourne and Sydney during the mid-1970s preceded William Hellermann’s Sound Art Foundation in New York in the early-1980s.25 ABC Radio’s The Listening Room has presented commissioned radiophonic work from 1991 to 2003, which has greatly contributed to the dissemination of Australian sound art internationally,26 as did early Australian sound artists Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt’s duo, Plastic Platypus (formed in 1974), which toured Europe extensively, performing original works in 1979.27

Australian examples of the genre are so varied that they present a multifaceted account of postmodernism and modernity generally. Australian sound art composers have responded to currents and manoeuvres from the international scene – and continue to do so. They also create new ‘takes’ and divergences alongside, at times in collaboration with, or sometimes in advance of, their overseas counterparts. Throughout this book, I briefly contextualize Australian sound art practice within the international arena by including some prominent composers working with a similar focus – not to suggest that Australian practitioners are ‘copying’, possibly ‘following’, or even necessarily ‘influenced by’ these artists, but simply to provide a wider framework for both Australian and international readers. Progressively, I also point out distinctions between early postmodernity and the later ‘altermodern’ in sound art over the last 30 years.

The Mid- to Late-1970s as a Watershed for Late Experimentalism/Early Sound Art

The emergence of sound art during the mid- to late-1970s was a time of significant aesthetic crossroads both within Australia and internationally, with a number of cultural trajectories being defined and redefined. In 1977, Jacques Attali’s groundbreaking and highly influential Noise: The Political Economy of Music was first published,28 while R. Murray Schafer produced his World Soundscape

Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Music, 9th Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address (2007), at http://www.newmusicnetwork.com.au/PGH/JR07.html, accessed 14 February 2008.

25 See Alan Licht and Jim O’Rourke, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), p. 11.

26 See The Listening Room (2003), at http://www.abc.net.au/classic/listeningroom/, accessed 12 January 2009. Some of these works were awarded the Prix Italia.

27 They gave 19 concerts, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and at various venues in Cologne, Oslo, Bath, Cardiff and other cities, see John Jenkins, Ron Nagorcka, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds John Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/TOC.htm, accessed 19 January 2008. Burt is American born.

28 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Theory and History of Literature 16; translation of Bruits: Essai sur l’Economie Politique de la Musique (Minneapolis, MN; Paris: University of Minnesota Press; Presses Universitaires de France, 1985; 1977).


Project, which brought together the social, scientific and artistic dimensions of sound and launched the concept of Acoustic Ecology.29

In 1975, Keith Humble invited American Warren Burt to teach at Victoria’s Latrobe University in its newly established electronic music department,30 and highly influential American composer Bill Fontana ran a performance series of music, dance and performance-art events over five months in 1976 at the Sydney Opera House’s recording hall and the Institute of Contemporary Art.31 Ian Fredericks’s significant role in the development of Australian electronic music and mixed media composition from the mid-1970s until 2001 includes establishing the SEUSS electronic music studio at Sydney University.32 Peter Sculthorpe composed Port Essington for Strings in 1977, the first concert-music work informed by postcolonialist sensibilities to deal overtly with the ‘noise’ of white Settlers and their clash with indigenous people of Australia;33 and in 1976, Melbourne’s CHCMC (Clifton Hill Community Music Centre) was established by Ron Nagorcka, John Campbell and Warren Burt, the birthplace and nurturing home for many Australian sound art experimentations, coinciding with like-minded collectives Sydney’s Art Unit and Brisbane’s One Flat Gallery.34

Post-1970s Noisy Engagements

Western music composed since the 1970s that lies outside the fields of jazz or popular music is referred to as art music, concert music or contemporary classical music. It includes both avant-garde experimentalism and music that is scored and does not embrace ‘noise’ per se, and has to varying degrees opened its aesthetic purview to such elements as popular-music structures, references and even direct

29 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 1st edn (New York: Knopf, 1977).30 Frank Callaway and David Tunley, Australian Composition in the Twentieth

Century (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978).31 Burt, ‘Australian Experimental Music’, p. 7. 32 Andrew D. Lyons, ‘Ian Fredericks in Interview: Ideas of an Australian Spatial

Synthesis and Mixed Media Innovator’, Organised Sound 6 (2001): 63–7.33 Peter Sculthorpe, Port Essington: For Strings (London: Faber, 1980). The work

is based on Sculthorpe’s score to the film, Essington (1974), made for ABC TV; it was originally scored for piano, see Linda Kouvaras, ‘From Port Essington to the Himalayas: Music, Place and Spirituality in Two Recent Australian Works’, The Soundscapes of Australia: Music, Place and Spirituality, ed. Fiona Richards (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 229–45.

34 See Ernie Althoff, ‘The Clifton Hill Community Centre: 1976–1983’, New Music Articles 7 (1989): 39–43. The CHCMC followed the New Music Centre, also in Melbourne, also artist run, from 1972 to 1974, see Burt, ‘Australian Experimental Music’. For brief discussions of the Sydney and Brisbane scenes, see Ian Andrews and John Blades, ‘The Lost Decade: Post-Punk Experimental and Industrial Electronic Music’, Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia, ed. Gail Priest (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), pp. 36–56.

Introduction 11

quotations (of pre-existing popular music and/or classical music). Such practices were hitherto strongly barred from mid-twentieth-century scored and non-score-based composition.

This is not to say that a state of equal acceptance (on the part of composers and/or audiences) of all soundworlds has now been reached: ‘noise’ remains an indisputable category – even if its definitions will vary from genre to genre, person to person. The low/high divide still operates, even if the dividing line is often blurred or difficult to draw definitively. Some even question whether sound art is music, or suggest at least that it is a lesser artform than other forms of music,35 while Douglas Kahn takes issue with what he sees as recuperation of sound back into music (by Cage, and others).36 But apart from the advances in technology that have opened up and/or facilitated all sorts of possibilities for composers, there have been perceptible shifts over the last 30 or so years in the ways in which noise is dealt with, engaged, defined and redefined, and how it intersects within its socio-cultural environs. It is these transactions that I shall be following in my consideration of Australian sound art in this current historical phase. My definition of sound art is much broader than limiting it to Klangkunst, exemplified in the work of artists such as Christina Kubisch (Germany) and Bill Fontana (America), which for some restricts the field to sound installations involving the visual realm;37 more of the defining of sound art in Chapter 2.

Digitalization has profoundly changed the way that music can be created, disseminated and received. In the post-digital age, the affordability, capacity and sophistication of PCs and laptops has fuelled the rise of electronic sound art and computer-oriented performance over the last 15 years.38 In the 1990s, scholars claimed the advent of ‘another historical transformation of the subject’ due to the ‘concurrence of proliferating digital technologies in the First World and the

35 See, for example, Leigh Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 5–9, n. 7, 240 and 163.

36 See, for example, Douglas Kahn, ‘Acoustic Sculpture, Deboned Voices’, New Music Articles 8 (1990): 3–7; Douglas Kahn, ‘The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art and Design’; Leonardo Music Journal 6 (1996): 89–93; Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, ‘Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed’, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde, eds Kahn and Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 1–30.

37 See, for example, Ulrich Müller, who presents a radical point of view, perceiving sound art (which he describes as Klangkunst) as being ex-musical, beyond music, an artform unto itself only (although Müller does acknowledge the difficulty in separating the two), cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, pp. 172–3. I refer to broader discussions of the term in Chapter 2.

38 The Australian ‘Computer Music’ scene, comprised chiefly of university-sector participants, is represented by the Australian Computer Music Association (ACMA).


approaching turn of the millennium’.39 Many sound artists have captured, distorted and augmented the voice, for instance, by exploring the point of exchange between the human voice and that of the technologically produced voice – the postmodern difference from earlier relationships between voice and technology leading to a broader investigation of the situating, through social and cultural processes, of a particular person.40 Scottish-born, Berlin-based sculptor and sound artist Susan Philipsz places her recorded voice within specific locales – stairwells, a supermarket, a bus station, a roof terrace and under bridges – emphasizing the mode of presentation, the site of reception, and its affective influence on the listener as an integral part of the work. Her Lowlands, a sound installation emanating from three speakers, consists simply of a recording of Philipsz singing three overlaid versions of the sixteenth-century Scottish lament Lowlands Away. It won the 2010 Turner Prize – and was the first sound-based work to be awarded this prize. This attests not only sound art’s ‘rise’ in the artworld but also the dissolution between art forms, calling into question the oft-quoted Marshall McLuhan aphorism, ‘the medium is the message’.41 Postmodernism’s rebuttal to this dictum might well read, ‘the blurring of the medium is the message’.

R. Murray Schafer forecast in 1973, ‘The blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music’.42 If one of modernism’s achievements was at least to delineate the boundaries more strongly than ever before between high art and its Other – namely, ‘the world’ – then postmodernism, over the last three decades, has scored myriad incisions across this delineation. And what contemporary Australian sound art interprets as constituting ‘the environment’ covers an array of dimensions: gender, the urban, the non-urban, the political, not to mention Cowell’s ‘noise germ’,43 and the workings of the artform itself – historically, currently, socially, and with regard to the plastic artforms. Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-digital Age shows how Australia’s immensely varied examples in the terrain ‘cover’ these issues in multifaceted representations of postmodernism and modernity generally.

39 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 335.

40 See, for instance, Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

41 Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

42 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, p. 111. 43 See note 10, above.

Introduction 13

Sound Art Scholarship

As Susan McClary observes, ‘Musicologists tend to trust the eye-witness accounts of previous generations when they address the music of their time, yet we defer passively to the future for judgment concerning that of our own moment … [S]cholars have started to tackle early twentieth-century repertories only since the 1980s’.44 This applies no less to contemporary scholarship on sound art, with the majority of books authored by practitioners in the field. To date, Australia’s most prolific commentators on sound art are also practitioners.45

Another oft-rehearsed lament regarding international sound art scholarship, points to a dearth of texts that illuminate its context. This is also relevant for Australian works. What is perceived to be lacking is a focus both on social relevance and on conceptual framework. Scholarship from a cultural studies viewpoint, conversely, will frequently gloss over the technological dimension and excludes musical analysis.46 The majority of sound art scholarship (particularly in Australia) tends to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of sound art, who did what, where, when and how – which is of course illuminating, unique on a work-by-work basis, and necessary for a full appreciation of the phenomenon.47 But my concentration is

44 Susan McClary, ‘Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-century Culture’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 290 and 296, n. 2. The Australian Music Centre, however, takes considerable care to acknowledge and represent sound artists. Its mission statement reads, ‘The Australian Music Centre was established in 1974 to facilitate and encourage the creation, performance and understanding of music by Australian composers and sound artists’: The Australian Music Centre (2007), at http://www.amcoz.com.au/about/, accessed 5 October 2007.

45 From the 1970s onwards, these people are Ros Bandt and Warren Burt (whom one could call the ‘tribal elders’ of Australian sound art), along with Rainer Linz through NMA (New Music Articles – see Chapter 3) and its offshoots. Most recently, Gail Priest’s welcome collection of essays (by, again, practitioner authors) has been published some 20 years after John Jenkins’s landmark 22 Contemporary Australian Composers of 1988, see Priest (ed.), Experimental Music, and John Jenkins, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers (Melbourne: NMA Publications, 1988) and online, Jenkins, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.

46 See, for example, Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 295. Also see Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, pp. 120, 174–5, 182. Landy also points out that there is yet no ‘reasonably accepted sound classification system for use beyond the systems that have been created for a specific purpose’, despite Schaeffer’s and others’ best efforts (p. 190). Also see Katharine Norman, ‘Stepping Outside for a Moment: Narrative Space in Two Works for Sound Alone Lansky – Things She Carried/1, Ferrari – Presque rien avec filles’, Music, Electronic Media and Culture, ed. Simon Emmerson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 217.

47 In Rainer Linz’s words, for example, ‘The documentation of Australian music has been and is relatively poor when measured against other artforms such as the visual arts or literature. The documentation that does exist is mostly of an ephemeral or transitory nature,


on the ‘why’, with the works’ wider ramifications for a contemporary Australian context, taking note of their cultural effects – that is, their possible significations – rather than limiting the spotlight to their construction in technical, physical terms, or detailing a taxonomy of compositions.

Douglas Kahn suggests that it is ‘trickier’ to ‘field the provocations of contemporary theory within sound and music – trickier because these theories never really addressed themselves directly or adequately to such matters’.48 These theoretical ‘provocations’ occurred within such disciplines as philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis, and literary, postcolonial, feminist, indigenous and queer theory. Insights from these quarters have invigorated contemporary Australian intellectual life and permeated much of the aesthetics and broader philosophical underpinnings in composition, at times directly, in some instances more obliquely. My project here is to ask in what ways the sound art works I present take account of these new perspectives; to delve into how sound art nuances the definition of ‘music’ and its distinction from – and correlations with – ‘silence’, ‘noise’ and ‘sound’; to appreciate sound art’s challenge to traditional conceptions of authorship, [inter]textuality, historico-cultural positioning and how these sonic works instigate reflection on the way the self interacts sonically with the world.

and the discussion of musical issues is by and large not a mainstream activity’: Publishing the Debate (1995), eds NMA Publications and Rainer Linz, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/publishing.html, accessed 28 September 2007. Warren Burt exemplifies this when he announces in his 1993 overview of experimental music from 1963–1993, ‘That this article may largely be a litany of names needs no apology. This is the first attempt to survey a rather large field and, as such, I feel it should be as inclusive and as non-evaluative as possible in order to point the way for future researchers’: ‘Some Musical and Sociological Aspects’. Ros Bandt acknowledges that her book is ‘deliberately descriptive rather than evaluative’, thus perpetuating the ‘ephemeral’ trope repeatedly levelled at existing efforts in documenting sound art: Sound Sculpture, p. 8. She hopes that Sound Sculpture ‘will lay the foundation for more informed critical debate and discourse about the nature of the practice’ (p. 13). Also see, for example, Fox, ‘Experimental Music in Melbourne’, and John Potts, ‘Chartering the Landscape of Time and Space’, Real Time 49/August–September (2002): 33.

48 Kahn, ‘The Lyre’s Island’, p. 90. Ros Bandt also comments on the burgeoning interest ‘in sounding artworks, as it is a practice which merges innovation at the edges of many disciplines. It is an exploratory medium which is extending into the future in technological ways we can only dream about’: Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Sydney, NSW: Craftsman House, 2001), p. 13. She claims that ‘[a]esthetics and critical theory need to keep abreast of the actual works and the ideas of artists, as these serve as a barometer for the development of our culture. They are maps of consciousness and design’: ibid. She concludes her book with the following: ‘[Sound sculpture’s] ephemeral nature makes us question just what was heard. This is part of the magic of sound sculpture. It is also why sound is so hard to design, capture and document’ (p. 143).

Introduction 15

Sound-based music’s higher degree of interdisciplinarity than any prior music, suggests that studies in this area should be framed similarly.49 While I invoke some of the extensive international secondary texts dealing with discussions of experimentalism and sound art, throughout this volume I also engage with pertinent cultural theory in my interpretation of sound works.

The ‘way in’ for sound-based analysis that does not necessitate a musical score is simply to have recourse to one’s stores of ‘personal and communal “narratives”, “contexts” or “codes”, especially when the music incorporates source recordings from the environments (our “sound contexts”)’; Michael Norris calls these ‘“socio-cultural sound narratives”’.50 As Landy comments, ‘This remark illustrates the holistic connection between intention, discourse, and analysis and supports the growing interest in meaning in music’.51

These standpoints, reflecting my own approach, accord with the so-called New Musicology, which is usually encountered in the context of traditional areas of music, and which evolved after Joseph Kerman’s early-1980s rallying call to the musicological community to pay heed to recent theoretical developments in other artforms – namely, ‘criticism’ – in order to ‘say something more’ than the insights offered by traditional, essentially positivist, paradigms.52 The New Musicology embraces subjective interpretation that fuses gender studies, postcolonial and poststructuralist theory where emphasis is placed on the investigation of the cultural and ideological creation of meaning. In a neat act of reciprocation, this is also the ‘work’ that I perceive sound art itself carrying out in its various artistic manifestations.

49 See Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 186. 50 Cited ibid., p. 199. 51 Ibid. Similarly, Denis Smalley and Lelio Camilleri affirm their interest in ‘[a]n

important goal of analytical exploration’, namely, ‘to attempt to reconcile and relate the internal world of the work with the outside world of sonic and non-sonic experience’: ‘The Analysis of Electroacoustic Music: Introduction’, Journal of New Music Research 27/1–2 (1998): 7.

52 Joseph Kerman, ‘How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out’, Critical Inquiry 7/2 (1980): 311–31; Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana Press/Collins, 1985). Also see Linda Kouvaras, ‘Review Article: Issues at Stake Beyond the “Insuperable Melancholy Longing for the Unity of Interpretation with Experience”’, Musicology Australia 27 (2004–2005): 112–22. For more on the New Musicology, see, for example, Nicholas Cook, ‘What Is Musicology?’, BBC Music Magazine 7/9 (1999): 31–3; Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer, 1988); Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2002); Patrick McCreless, ‘Contemporary Music Theory and the New Musicology’, Journal of Musicology 15/3 (1997): 291–6; Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).


Chapter Overview

There are hundreds of recognized sound artists working in Australia, not to mention all the experimentalist works produced by composers known more for traditional, score-based writing.53 My selection is largely informed by thematic focus and by the strength with which the works not only speak to me but also reflect the primary terrain of sound-art practice. The mode of organization and argument for the works I present is a series of case studies, with brief mention of some similar examples within each thematic exploration. I detail some works at greater length than others, not to imply a hierarchy of ‘importance’ but in order to present a sense of the magnitude of Australian participation in this area. My account is not strictly chronological but I do draw an historical fault-line at the third chapter, identifying the aesthetic schisms in the late-1970s/early-1980s, and I compare later postmodern and post-postmodern expression with earlier iterations.

This and the following two chapters are background overviews, forming Part 1. Chapter 1, ‘Sound Art’s Lineage’, situates historically sound art’s immediate forebears and examines its inversion of the usual noise/music hierarchy, its distinction from (and affinities with) academic concert-music, and the many other considerations that inform the conceptual related approaches to music making. Chapter 2, ‘Sound Art as Postmodernism’s Exemplar’, justifies my preference for the term ‘sound art’ over ‘experimental music’ for post-1970s Australian music drawing on the ‘tradition’ (more on this apparent contradiction in Chapter 7). This chapter delineates the aspects of postmodernism that I glean to be most significant for my purposes, and I introduce my central proposal, namely that, of all musical genres, sound art has striking consanguinity with postmodernism and the altermodern, which, for want yet of an established term, one might call the period – or aesthetic development – after postmodernism. I also explore the paradoxical notion of the possibility of ‘noise’ in our supposedly all-accepting, pluralist times.

Part 2 comprises Chapter 3, ‘The Dawning of Australian Sound Art’, presenting the 1970s evolution from late modernism to nascent postmodernism within the field. I focus in particular on Melbourne’s CHCMC (Clifton Hill Community Music Centre), the originating venue and nurturing laboratory for much contemporary Melbourne sound art experimentation.

Part 3’s chapters, 4–8, are divided into thematic explorations and present fully fledged postmodernism in sound art. Chapter 4, ‘Feminizing the Sound Object’, explores works that make gender – in particular, the female voice – the core of their concern. Much sound art is made in and of the landscape and urban spaces, using wire, water, wind, and more; these share an environmentalist–activist stance

53 In 2001, Ros Bandt claimed a figure of over 150 Australian artists working in the genre. She compares this to the 20 or so who were active in 1980. Considering that this statement was made over a decade ago, the number is of course far greater today, see Sound Sculpture, p. 142.

Introduction 17

and form the substance of Chapter 5, ‘The Geographico-political’. Chapter 6, ‘The Quotidian and Beyond’, discusses projects that grapple with the socio-sonic potential of the everyday.

Sound art is now 30-plus years old, and experimentalism began over a century ago. Chapters 7 and 8, comprising Part 4, deal with sound art’s ‘response’ to post-postmodernism: the altermodern. These two chapters engage with works that highlight this passage of time, and the significance it has for the field. Some works pay homage to their forbears, thus affording the paradoxical dimension of a ‘tradition’ status that can now be applied to experimentalism. Chapter 7, ‘The Nostalgic: The Dawning of the Altermodern (1)’, examines what the use of quotation of and references to the past means for such a hyper-modernist approach to music making as experimentalism was, where novelty, innovation, formalism and uniqueness were valorized.

Some sound-based artists are concerned with the return to – or continuation of – the ethos of high modernism. Yet even for those who might describe themselves as ‘noise-ists’, their post-postmodernist endeavour is arguably inflected by postmodernist sensibility (just as postmodernism – as I argue in Chapter 2 – carries vestiges of modernism), and is the focus of Chapter 8, ‘Neo-modernist Arts of Noise in a Post-postmodern Era: The Dawning of the Altermodern (2)’. Part 5’s concluding chapter, ‘Silence Charged’, addresses the aesthetic consequences of the myriad ways in which Australian sound art fills Cage’s ‘silent’ launching point, as it compellingly ‘performs’ what could be described as ‘an anthropology of ourselves’.54

54 Susan McClary declares that, because of the present-day ‘bewildering profusion of musical practices and critical opinions’, it is ‘so important for us to perform – if only from time to time – an anthropology of ourselves. For there’s no time like the present’: ‘Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time’, p. 296.

Chapter 1

Sound Art’s Lineage

Mid-twentieth-century Erasure

Thinking about experimentation in Western art music throughout the twentieth century necessitates considering the presence of an agenda, as an all-important ideological component and dimension of experimental methods, rather than just attending to the sense of the investigational element. To describe a music-making enterprise as ‘experimentalist’ might, for example, provoke the rejoinder, ‘but isn’t all creativity “experimental” to a greater or lesser degree?’ Michael Nyman provides a response:

Cage’s global definition of a coherent history and aesthetic of Experimental music … removed the need for me to deal head-on with the tortured and futile (for my purposes at the time) question of what precisely is Experimental about ‘Experimental music’ (or is not, as the case may be) or what is not Experimental about ‘non-Experimental’ music (or is, as the case may be).1

Yet Nyman signals the importance he felt in 1974, at the time of writing the first edition of the above text – and continued to feel some 25 years on –, about his ‘most stringent attempt to classify Experimental music and to distinguish it from the serialism-based opposition (and to find a locus which could contain the extremes of Cagean indeterminate open systems and the closed systems of the minimalists)’.2 David Nicholls points out that ‘what distinguishes them is the extent to which they take the Eurocentric art-music tradition as a reference point. Thus, very generally, avant-garde [serialist-based] music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while Experimental music lies outside it’.3

1 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. xv. Italics in original, see John Cage, Experimental Music, 1957, Address to the Convention of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago, at grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/music/cage1/cage1.pdf, accessed 18 January 2007.

2 Nyman, Experimental Music, p. xv. 3 David Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, The Cambridge History

of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 1998), p. 518. For the roots of mid-twentieth-century noise-based music, dating back to


Pioneered by such figures as Americans Henry Cowell, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk, ‘maverick’ experimentalism sets out to produce essentially score-free music that cannot be imagined by the composer before the finished product, in order, as expressed in Cage’s Zen-inflected aspiration,4 to free oneself from one’s intentions – including composer and/or performer, with the hope that this philosophy will filter through to, and be embraced by, the listener. ‘Academic’ modernist score-based music (that is, music written on traditional staves in traditional music notation) is represented particularly by the variegated manifestations of integral serialism or sustained atonality in the works of Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, Miriam Gideon, Harrison Birtwistle, Iannis Xenakis, Elliot Carter, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, for example. These two approaches (score-free avant-garde and score-based academic modernist) stood essentially in contradistinction to one another – or, at least, were and are still largely perceived to do so.

Paradoxical Accord

This perceived opposition was exactly concurrent in inception. While the two approaches were widely accepted as antithetical to one another – and this perception still has currency today –, Nyman himself notes the paradoxical congruence between the two leading figures of the ‘opposing’ music camps, represented, namely, by Cage and Boulez. For Cage, chance procedures (typically through the use of the I Ching, or tossing coins to determine compositional procedures and outcomes)5 resulted in ‘a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and “traditions” of the art’, and this is, as it were, ‘echoed’ by Boulez when his self-declared remit for Structures Livre 1a for two pianos (1952) was to ‘eliminate from my vocabulary absolutely all trace of heritage’.6 The two strands of compositional orientation attained – by opposing means – the ‘degree zero’ from which postmodernism in general, and sound art in particular, emerged (and from which each departs).

The characteristics of this ‘blank tablet’ condition are complex. One of mid-twentieth-century high modernism’s most important articles of faith, proclaimed

the Futurists and Dadaists, see, for example, Andrew Murphie and John Potts, Culture and Technology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4.

4 Cage studied oriental philosophies and Zen Buddhism with Daisetz Suzuki in the mid-1940s at Columbia University.

5 The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese oracle text in which images are selected at random from a set of 64 by means of tossing yarrow sticks or coins, gave Cage the idea of using a coin-tossing oracle as a way of selecting the sonorities from his own charts, in the groundbreaking Music of Changes (1951).

6 Cage and Boulez are quoted in Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 60.

Sound Art’s Lineage 21

most strenuously by Roland Barthes in literature, Clement Greenberg in art criticism, and Pierre Boulez in music, was that art should withdraw from modern life, the only legitimate concern a formalist one. In other words, the focus should be the intrinsic quality of the medium of the artform. In painting, for example, the imperative was to avoid establishing any illusion of three-dimensional representation on the two-dimensional surface on which painting takes place, because flatness is the quality that is unique and exclusive to that art. Along with the inimitable stamp of the individual artist’s ‘voice’, high modernism was the pursuit of the unadulterated, self-referential art object,7 which in music expressed its tendencies in exclusively technical names, such as atonality, microtonal music, electronica. A work would ascertain its own individual premises, constituting its own class. In taking internal propositions to extremes in realization and deductive reasoning, a work was able to revel in its difficulty and purist, hermetic isolation.

Experimentalist Alvin Lucier and ‘academic’ modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen actually shared an artistic goal – the invitation to listeners to observe closely the point at which sound dissolves into noise –, yet this was achieved as a consequence of very different processes.8 This point of difference is determinedly stark: on the one hand, serialist or other ‘academic’ modernist approaches pre-ordained compositional parameters and outcomes prior to the first note committed to the page, and on the other, was experimentalism’s methodology – or its negation, certainly in a traditional sense.

Formalism’s elitist and exclusive asceticism advances the medium and furthers the autonomy of art. It also provided what a great many mid-twentieth-century Western composers saw as the only viable social and politically infused alternative – even antidote – to consumerism and cheap or ‘pap’ entertainment, in striving to avoid ‘contamination’ from proliferating mass culture. It is this attitude that led to the ‘wilful amnesia’, or ahistoric ‘purism’ described above – in the service of advancing from, as Grainger put it, ‘our archaic notions of harmony’.9 This, according to Boulez, is ‘becom[ing] an absolute part of the present … forsaking all memory, to forge a perception without precedent … renouncing the legacies of the past, to discover yet undreamed-of territories’.10 Devotees of modernism were unabashedly specialist, ‘in the know’, the informed scholars and critics who

7 See, for example, Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988).

8 See Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience, Theory out of Bounds 27, eds Michael Hardt, Sandra Buckley and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 55.

9 See Introduction, note 1, in present volume. 10 Pierre Boulez in IRCAM Press Brochure (Paris, 1974), pp. 6–7, quoted in Paul

Griffiths, Modern Music and After: Directions since 1945 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 151. See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. ix; Simon Malpas, ‘Introduction’,


could celebrate, along with the works’ creators, a heroic world of ‘pure’ vision and innovations in form.

A Note on ‘Avant-garde’, or, Distinctions Restored Developments at the ‘cutting edge’ of artistic practice are nominally described as ‘avant-garde’.11 This descriptor in twentieth-century music has been applied to distinctly different compositional practices. Michael Nyman reserves it, for example, for mid-twentieth-century integral serialists.12 ‘Avant-garde’ also often refers to experimentalism. Jim Samson’s entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, however, presents a broader brief:

Within the historical period of Modernism we can sharpen the categorical focus of avant-garde music by distinguishing it from two opposing categories. The first is ‘classical music’, a category that emerged in the nineteenth century and was institutionalized above all in the public concert. The second is ‘popular music’, distinguished by its untroubled acceptance of the commodity status inherent in a middle-class ‘institution of art’ (to use Bürger’s phrase).13

In the postmodern age the oppositions delineated by Samson are actually no longer so neatly demarcated: some works arguably border two (or more) ‘categories’ (of ‘classical’, ‘popular’ and/or ‘experimental’). Yet the notion of distinct, mutually oppositional modes of musical creation is largely entrenched in collective understanding – even if they elude consistent, clear-cut defining characteristics. Nyman’s Experimental Music (1999) might well point to paradoxical common ground between integral serialists and experimentalists mid-last century (also inferred in Grove). A correlation can certainly be found between modernism and experimentalism in their antagonism, through their respective artistic endeavours, regarding any notion of ‘representation’ (so, avoiding reference outside the medium), realized in ever-new approaches, where works are characterized by the extreme intensity and expansion of sonic elements. Nevertheless, those distinctions have endured; each faction typically views itself as entirely distinct from the other,14 with serialism’s (exclusively score-based) successors often referred to as

Postmodern Debates: Readers in Cultural Criticism, ed. Simon Malpas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–11.

11 The OED gives the following definition for avant-garde: ‘1. The foremost part of an army; the vanguard or van. 2. The pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period’.

12 Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 46. Also see Chapter 1 of present volume.13 Jim Samson, ‘Avant Garde’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2005),

at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01573, accessed 3 January 2005.

14 As is apparent in Warren Burt’s recent article in the online journal devoted to Australian music Resonate: ‘Some Musical and Sociological Aspects’. For a different perspective on these terms, see Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’. Nicholls


latter-day/neo-modernists or new complexists, and current-day experimentalists more appropriately (I am suggesting) called sound artists.

Whether produced by aleatoric or finitely organized means, mid-twentieth-century modernist music held an exalted position for Clement Greenberg, who in 1983

want[ed] to suspect that music, when we look back in time to come, is where those issues [of the ‘advancedness of modernism’] will have been most brought out in to the open, if not decided. (Modernist music’s very lack of a sufficient public seems to me to make its case the exemplary, maybe even the most significant one).15

In their respective quests for The New, experimentalists would frequently embrace the latest technology, just as ‘academic’ modernist composers explored the latest extended techniques in instruments. Composers in both streams usually concurred on shunning tonality, or any semblance of the language of Western classical music’s heritage; shock value was a commonality. The concert-music composer ‘worked with a finite set of possibilities’ relating to available instruments and their capabilities, which is ‘nothing like the range of sounds that’s possible once electronics enter the picture’16 – and, I would add, once ‘the world’ crosses the threshold into the artwork (and vice versa). In traditional music, it is the teleological progression from note to note, chord to chord, subsection to subsection that comprises its essential underpinning. Experimental music’s focus was the purposefully unconnected, discrete (often non-conventional) sounds themselves. Sound art forges a connective thread between these two approaches, situating itself within a broader sonico-social context.

asserts that there is ‘no clear demarcation line between the composers and repertories to which the terms are usually applied, or between the territory supposedly described by combining the two terms and that inhabited by other species of contemporary composer’ (p. 517). Emphasis in original.

15 Clement Greenberg, ‘Beginnings of Modernism’, Arts Magazine, 57/April (1983): 77–9, cited in Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?’, Critical Inquiry 11/2 (1984): 353. It could be argued that modernist music’s lack of public support compared with the situation in visual arts is to a large extent due to the greater ease afforded to commodification of art objects, rather than because of the nature of the medium. See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

16 Brian Eno, ‘The Studio as Compositional Tool’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 130.


Musical Experimentalism: Beyond the Stave

If the musical score was utilized at all in experimental works, the notes and rhythms would be arrived at by chance procedures. Alternatively, pages usually imparted performance directions or graphic notation. These were invented anew or contrived for each work. Full control of sound realization was disallowed, while boundaries for choice and fields of possible activity were set. Predictability was subverted. This course of events was often open-ended, without any necessary ‘conclusion’, and this is one of the crucial ways in which ‘Downtown’ score-free music distinguished itself from ‘Uptown’ scored music (just as sound art does from present-day score-based music).17 Experimentalism’s distinction from traditional approaches to creating music extended beyond ‘the page’ (or lack thereof). It generally eschewed not only musical scores but also the concert hall and its attendant material culture, including traditional instruments, or their traditional deployment; composers would veer away from the well-tempered system of tuning, for example.

Cage’s recharged focus on music’s foremost property – sound – pulled the focus onto the very present moment.18 Cage highlights here what appears to be such a simple, obvious state of affairs. It is music-as-sound’s very obviousness that risks being underestimated, glossed over or taken for granted, the danger of which it was experimentalism’s interest in arresting – as much as it is sound art’s.

In the 1960s Cage’s influence was felt profoundly in Happenings, Environments and Fluxus projects, as well as minimalist sculpture and music and conceptual art – all direct precursors to current sound art practices. In these works, language – as shaper of the operations of society and culture – is implicated. The Fluxus movement produced ‘score texts’ by artists such as Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, John Cale, Emmett Williams, George Brecht, Arthur Koepcke, Bob Watts, Daniel Spoerri, Carolee Schneemann and La Monte Young. La Monte Young’s Fluxus-inspired, ‘long duration’, early-minimalist compositions of the 1960s sit near to the line that divides academic high modernism and the push away from the academy, but they remain within the edicts of modernism. They include Composition 1960 No. 10, for example, which instructs a performer to draw a straight line and follow it, while in Composition 1960 No. 7, the performer is to hold a two-note chord for a long time.19

17 Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, ‘Experimental Musics: Introduction’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 208. Also see Brian Eno, ‘Generating and Organising Variety in the Arts’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 226–33, and David Toop, ‘The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital Culture’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 239–47. The labels ‘Downtown’ and ‘Uptown’ music were coined in New York.

18 Considerations of phenomenology and presence were, in the 1960s, concomitant with political and social issues, see LaBelle, Background Noise, p. xiii.

19 For more on Fluxus, see, for example, Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007); Nyman, Experimental Music. Also see Ken Friedman, The

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg


The line between art and life became ever fainter during the 1960s, with the body exceeding its traditional brief of being, as it were, seen and not heard; rather, it often comprised the artistic event itself. In John Cage’s performance piece O’O” of 1962, for example, he placed a contact mic on his throat and drank a glass of water. The very act of generating music constitutes the ‘music itself’ in a conceptual approach to music making. The conceptual artwork, where sound and silence are ‘determined’ by indeterminacy and chance operations, becomes both the object and its own contemplation, with context guiding the apprehension of musical works.

Cage and his followers wanted first and foremost to expunge pre-conceived ideas of what music is (or should be, could be) and that it should be separated off from life. For experimentalists (and sound artists), a radical transformation occurred in the traditional relations between composer, score and sound where both the elements of contingency and of indeterminacy that actually accompany every musical experience/performance are underlined. Experimentalism’s sense of overtly declared self-awareness becomes intensified in postmodernism. But before this intensification could occur, an evolution was required in the way people listened to sound-based works.

New Listening, New Audiences

Reduced Listening

An even more prescriptive schema of what might constitute ‘degree zero’, perhaps, than Cage’s 4’33”, was Pierre Schaeffer’s Traité des objets musicaux,20 described by one critic as ‘a new Bible … a New Testament of Music’ and ‘the first solid foundation for the future of music’.21 Schaeffer’s musique concrète (created in 1948) comprised recorded sound, treated in an unmediated way, as distinct from (in his view) the ‘indirect’ manner of writing scores (which take performers to make them ‘concrete’). Musique concrète (created in 1948) valued sounds for themselves without reference to outside, or extra-musical, sources, in sharp contrast to Cage’s project.

Musique concrète’s highly formalist procedure, then, which encompasses what is termed écoute réduite or ‘reduced listening’, formed a disconnection between the signification of sounds and their abstract qualities. This led to the development of acousmatic music,22 where, similarly to musique concrète, the sounds were

Fluxus Reader (Chichester; New York: Academy Editions, 1998).20 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines, 2nd edn

(Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1966). 21 Cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 77.22 The concept is rooted in Husserlian phenomenology, which in turn dates back to

Pythagorean philosophy, where Pythagoras’ Acousmatics, his disciples, listened to him


presented in recorded format and were intended for loudspeaker listening, the listener unable to identify to their bases or origins:23

Reduced listening is the listening attitude which consists in listening to the sound for its own sake, as a sound object by removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey … Reduced listening and the sound object are thus correlates of each other; they define each other mutually and respectively as perceptual activity and the object of perception.24

Musique concrète composers working at Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry’s GRM (Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète of 1952, which later became Groupe de Recherches Musicales – GRM – in 1958), would start the compositional process with a prepared sound material, which they transformed into final realization by exploratory manipulation, steadfastly avoiding reference to identifiable sound sources.

The Cologne Studios approach, by contrast, was more akin to a traditional methodology, the music first envisaged by the composer, then notated, then finally realized in sound.25 Japanese avant-garde collective Group Ongaku’s (‘Music Group’) concurrent enterprises from 1958 to 1962 would include found objects, radios and haphazard instruments as well as each others’ actions to catalyze musical improvisation.26

speak while he hid behind a curtain so that the listeners were forced to attend only to the words, not to his facial expressions or bodily gestures. See, for example, Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, p. 10, and Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 61. The term was reintroduced in 1955 by Jérôme Peignot and the concept is concerned with the ‘distance which separates sounds from their origin’, in other words, an audio-only presentation of sound common to electro-acoustic music. For some, the term refers narrowly to this listening situation. However, the term has come to describe a genre that largely derives from and is founded upon the musique concrète tradition. Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 246, n. 8.

23 Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley, ‘Electro-acoustic Music’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2008), at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/08695, accessed 15 August 2008. Also see Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 77.

24 Schaeffer, quoted in Landy, ibid., p. 79. Salomé Voegelin makes the point that ‘this is not reducing but freeing [the sonic] and opening it up to a multitude of possibilities’: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 35.

25 Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, 2nd edn (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 104, cited in LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. 28–9.

26 See, for example, LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. 35–45, and for a stimulating discussion on noise and the psychoanalytic subject and power relations, particularly in regard to Japanese noise artists, see Hegarty, Noise/Music, pp. 144 ff.


A slightly different approach again in electronic music composition was produced at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studios in Cologne, set up by Herbert Eimert. Stockhausen elucidates: ‘Composing electronic music means: describing that which sounds in mechanical and electro-acoustical dimensions and thinking only in terms of machines, electrical apparatuses and circuit diagrams; reckoning with one single production and unlimited repeatability of the composition’.27

In all of these mid-twentieth-century approaches, in the potentially unlimited range of sound sources, machines and archives available, any sounds from or conjuring the environment, are distorted to the extent that their origin is obscured for the listener.

Heightened Listening

A sharp division within early avant-garde forays lay between Schaeffer’s ‘reduced’ listening approach, and the ‘heightened’ listening and non-formalist conceptual-based approach to art making, epitomized by Cage’s work from the late-1940s and early-1950s. In their respective concentration on the specificity of sound as a medium, Cage and Schaeffer both demonstrated stark departures from traditional music making. Essentially, however, Schaeffer’s ex-contextual approach directs attention inwards to appreciate sound as a thing for itself, while Cage’s is more typically proto-postmodern, leading out from the sound into its surrounds, where the receivers of the sound are deeply implicated.

Cage reflects on his aspirations for such works as 4’33” and Silent Prayer (1948):

Most people think that when they hear a piece of music, they’re not doing anything but that something is being done to them. Now this is not true, and we must arrange our music, we must arrange our art, we must arrange everything, I believe, so that people realize that they themselves are doing it, and not that something is being done to them.28

Heightened listening insists on context and source and the dissolution of the divide between composer and audience. The composer ‘becomes a member of the audience’, composing as a ‘contextualised listener’.29 For Cage, ‘music means nothing as a thing’,30 whereas for Schaeffer and musique concrète context must be

27 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Electronic and Instrumental Music’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 379.

28 Cage, quoted in Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 24, see p. 1 for a series of quotes from Cage from 1955 on the most significant aspects of his compositional philosophy.

29 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston, MA: M. Boyars, 1981), p. 127, cited in LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 31.

30 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 64, quoted in LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 33.


obliterated ‘to arrive at the musical experience, for here music, and by extension sound, is everything as a thing’.31 This dichotomy to a large extent has continued to the present.

Enduring ‘Silos of Practice’32 A contemporary event in Australia can illustrate. At the 2010 Aurora/World New Music Days Festival, sound artists abjured a suggested collaboration between Ensemble Offspring and SCM Electronics for fear ‘that their individual political stance might be undermined by developing a collaboration of cross-over’, despite the work being mutually ‘relevant’.33 And this occurred some nine years after ACMA’s (Australian Computer Music Association) 2001 conference ‘Waveform 2001: A Digital Musics Conference’, held in Sydney, an international event that sought to break down the boundaries between electro-acoustic and experimentalist music that had persisted since the middle of the twentieth century.34 But these borders endure. Self-positioning and the sense of a distinct identity remain strong within various subgroups in contemporary music.

That this kind of stance on the part of the two factions persists in supposedly postmodern, pluralist times is a most fascinating phenomenon. It attests to the importance of genre, of maintaining distinctions between ‘silos of practice’,35 held by the majority of artists.

Virtuosic Listening

Concurrent with the subsidence of the mid-twentieth-century celebration of reduced listening and musique concrète, new audiences were beginning to engage with novel ways of listening to the musical territories that were developing. These lay outside commercial popular music, jazz and classical genres and were located in recordings of the environment, in alternative film soundtracks, and in

31 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 33. Also see Katharine Norman, ‘Real-world Music as Composed Listening’, Contemporary Music Review 15/1 (1996): 1–27. Also see Norman, ‘Stepping Outside for a Moment’.

32 John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre, quoted in Danielle Bentley, ‘Restrung New Chamber Festival: An Exploration of Contemporary String Practice’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2011, p. 105.

33 Ibid. The politics are expressed in the choice of locale for staging the work: the concert hall (for ‘contemporary classical and non-score-based practice’) versus small and semi-legal venues (for ‘underground and noise scenes’, residing ‘on the fringes’). Ibid.

34 Julian Knowles, ‘Setting the Scene: Developments in Australian Experimental Music since the Mid-1990s’, Experimental Music, ed. Priest, pp. 9–36. Knowles was the convenor for the conference.

35 As described by John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre, see note 32, above.


contemplative works from non-Western cultures.36 An oft-rehearsed phrase to describe the approach to the new forms was the ‘fostering of virtuoso listening’ as opposed to the more traditional cultivation of the ‘virtuoso performer’.37 An experimental ‘open work’ demands a novel type of mental ‘collaboration’ with the work ‘wherein the singularity of the moment’ finds fruition ‘in the listener’s ear’.38

American Pauline Oliveros, for example, has sought to expand on the process of listening to underline its importance for a holistic approach to life. At age 16 (in 1948), her accordion teachers taught her to hear combination tones (or the overtones above the fundamental pitch of a struck note), and from then, she sought a way of removing the fundamental tones so she could listen solely to the combination tones. Some 16 years later, she worked out how to set signal generators beyond the range of hearing and to make electronic music from amplified combination tones.39 This developed her compositional style, which incorporates a substantial element of ritual and meditation practices. Her project is to foster acute awareness to the sounds around us, and to use listening as a pathway to heightened consciousness, as a crucial aspect of meditation to lead to realization of our own musical potential and interconnectedness with one another.

New paths to listening, as much as new processes and aesthetics within composition, were assisted and advanced by the developing technology. Cage and

36 See Brian Eno, ‘Foreword’, in Nyman, Experimental Music, pp. xii–xiii. Landy notes that two key people in acoustic communication, Barry Truax and Andra McCartney, are situated in communication departments despite their music/soundscape specialization. Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 110. This is not uncommon across the world.

37 See Cox and Warner, ‘Experimental Musics’, and Michael Nyman, ‘Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 209–21. Cox and Warner point to Umberto Eco’s conception of indeterminacy ‘as a cultural analog to the scientific shift from a closed, Newtonian physics to an open, quantum physics’ and suggest that, ‘along the same lines, one might say that Experimental music figures the shift from the classical physical worldview of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (which also gave rise to the classical musical work) to the biological, evolutionary, and even cybernetic worldviews of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries’: ibid., pp. 207–8. The significance of a ‘new way of listening’ is a postmodern phenomenon that has traversed many genres, not just the experimental. See, for example, Andrew Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

38 Michael Chanan, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London; New York: Verso, 1994), pp. 273–5. Also see Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, 1st English edn (London; New York: Kahn & Averill; Broude, 2004), p. 88.

39 ‘I felt like a witch capturing sounds from a nether realm’: Pauline Oliveros, ‘Some Sound Observations’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 105. Also see, for example, Pauline Oliveros, DEEP LISTENING INSTITUTE, at http://www.deeplistening.org/site/, accessed 25 August 2009.


Schaeffer concurred in their observation that the tape recorder’s revolutionary aspects opened music ‘to the entire field of sound’, not merely those emanating from conventional instruments.40 Radio and sound recording made possible at least two modes of listening. Acousmatic listening enabled ontologically distinct, autonomous soundworlds to coexist in recordings and afforded the novel ability to listen to ‘pure’ sound. Recorded sound also allowed ambient listening, where music is an accompaniment ‘to mundane living’ (Eric Satie’s and Darius Milhaud’s envisioned ‘furniture music’ of the 1920s).41

With various business and marketing initiatives such as dedicated record labels for the new music that was emerging in the late-1960s–early-1970s, composers such as Phillip Glass, Simon Jeffes, Jon Hassell and Michael Nyman were able to build a new audience ‘almost from scratch’, an audience that has ‘continued to grow’.42 Similarly, Melbourne’s Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC), born from a disused pipe organ factory in the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, which was reopened as a community centre by the Victorian Education Department, ‘grew’ its own audience for the experimental music that was being created, functioning from the late-1970s to the early-1980s, with initiatives from people such as Philip Brophy and David Chesworth’s Innocent Records also creating specialist record labels for sound art.

Recording also had a profound effect on aesthetics – namely, expanding the sphere of what sounds could be considered to constitute music. Recording equipment enabled previously indiscernible sounds to be amplified and to gain a new focus. Recording ‘democratized’ volume in sound sources, affording aural parity to the sonic emissions of cicadas or aeroplanes, for instance, with that of orchestral instruments. This fostered a new aesthetic in approaches to sound and composition. Recording technology’s range of novel compositional potentials, then, assisted the development of the focus on sonic texture for compositional attention, and the ability to create, via electronics, virtual acoustic spaces (that is,

40 Cited in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. xiii. The tape recorder was invented in the mid-1930s but was not commercially available until some 15 years later: ibid. Schaeffer’s Concert of Noises (1948), a set of pieces composed entirely from recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, canal boats, percussion instruments and the occasional piano, and broadcast over French radio, he termed ‘musique concrète’, in contrast with traditional ‘musique abstraite’, which ‘passed through the detours of notation, instrumentation, and performance’: Cox and Warner, ‘I: Music and Its Others’, p. 5.

41 Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, ‘Modes of Listening: Introduction’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 65. More on Muzak from Chapter 3 onwards.

42 Eno, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii. For a succinct overview of the transition from modern to postmodern Happenings, concept art, and the new ensembles in Europe and America, see Eric Salzman, Twentieth-century Music: An Introduction, Prentice-Hall History of Music Series, 4th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ; London: Prentice Hall; Pearson Education, 2002), pp. 98–202.


sonorities that do not exist in nature).43 Such technological advances also gave rise to a new type of creator – that of the do-it-yourself and/or the ‘unschooled’ (that is, an autodidactic) approach.

DIY: Technology as the Agent of Social Change

Working in the 1930s, a radio engineer rather than a composer, Pierre Schaeffer came to stand for the new species of musician: an amateur researcher working directly (‘concretely’, as he put it) with sound material, creating his music in his studio – as scores, performers and conductors created what Schaeffer saw as a filter:44

[O]ne becomes empirical in a way that the classical composer never was. You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound – you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter – [s/]he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and [s/]he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.45

This do-it-yourself approach had, for John Cage, a further dimension. It accorded with his belief in individualist anarchy: ‘the best form of government is no government at all’, and society – and sounds – should be ‘free’ to be themselves, ‘unimpeded and interpenetrating’.46 He viewed his own post-1957 works as ‘musical analogies to anarchy in one form or another’.47 Cage famously declared that ‘purposeless play’ (or, as he also put it, ‘purposeful purposelessness’), a way to perceive – and carry out – his aleatoric operations, is ‘an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord’.48 In other words, it is the open mind, unshackled from received aesthetic conditioning, that will not only cultivate virtuosic listening but also free composition process for experimentalism in the mid-twentieth century.

This attitude enabled the possibility for the creation of music to be open to anyone, with no prerequisite of formal musical education. Composers would consequently in many instances operate independently of traditional musical

43 Brian Eno, ‘Ambient Music’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 95. 44 Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiii. 45 Eno, ‘The Studio’, p. 129. 46 Quoted in James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, Music in the Twentieth Century

(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 192. 47 Ibid., p. 193.48 Cage, Silence, p. 12.


precepts and would also deploy ‘low-tech’ resolutions to musical quandaries. This ‘radical’ dimension to experimental music assisted in making itself distinct from the ‘other’ side of the avant-garde divide (Stockhausen, Boulez, and the other score-based composers).

Cage maintained that music ‘is accountable not only for its aesthetic or formalistic properties, but as a social and political object with real influence’.49 The combination of radical philosophical shifts and advancements in music technology has a multitude of ramifications. Steven Connor asserts that modernity ‘may be defined as the coming of the human capacity to make inhuman noise’,50 through sound recording and amplification,51 and the advent of digital media.52 The term ‘technological determinism’ was coined by social scientist Thorstein Veblen in the 1920s, when technical capacity largely determined social policy in industrialized nations. Technological determinism posits further the notion that technology is the agent of social change. As Murphie and Potts note, ‘It is both a popular attitude – reflected in such expressions as “you can’t stop progress” – and a theoretical position’.53

49 In LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 8. 50 Steven Connor, ‘Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic’, Emotion

in Postmodernism, eds Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung, American Studies 74 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1997), p. 152. Also see Francisco López, ‘Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 82–7.

51 Media theorist Marshall McLuhan opined in the 1960s that ‘the emergence of electronic media was causing a shift in the sensorium, deposing the visual from its millennia-old hegemony and giving way to an immersive experience exemplified by the auditory’: Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiii, see McLuhan and Powers, The Global Village. This view is echoed by historian Richard Cullen Rath, who declares that modern auditory technology has ‘re-sounded our ways of thinking’: ‘History You Can See, Hear, Smell, Touch, and Taste: Interview with Emily Eakin’, New York Times, 20 December 2003, cited in Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiii. And Chris Cutler, too, notes that sound recording has toppled the culture of visuality embodied in the primacy of scored music in the European classical tradition, and ‘has throw[n] the life of music production back onto the ear’: ‘Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms’, File under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (New York: Autonomedia, 1993), p. 33, cited in Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiii.

52 Ibid., p. xiv. This includes, of course, CDs, the Internet, MP3, Napster, the CD burner. Cox and Warner note: ‘The pristine clarity of digital sound fosters an attention to sonic matter and detail; and its replicability and microscopic malleability allows even a novice to become a Sound Artist or remixer. Finally, cyberspace enables the formation and flourishing of new audio communities, networks, and resources’: ibid.

53 Murphie and Potts, Culture and Technology, pp. 12–13. For an overview on technology in music in Australian composition as of 1991, see Warren Burt, ‘Experimental Music in Australia using Live Electronics’, Contemporary Music Review 6/1 (1991): 159–72.


Technological determinism is strongly linked to the idea of progress. During the Victorian period, in this sense, it was formed as a social attitude, in which progress was calculated in industrial terms: speed of movement, volume of production. Of course, technological determinism endures through the post-industrial era to this day. The now weary and over-burdened terms ‘information society’ or ‘computer age’ expose the notion that society is shaped by its dominant technologies.54 Many sound art examples to follow present a postmodernist dialectical position where both the positive and the negative effects of technology are highlighted.

Social theorist Jacques Attali’s view is that

[l]istening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. More than colours and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among [humans] … It is a means of power and a form of entertainment. Everywhere codes analyse, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others.55

Modernism sought to institute social changes through social or aesthetic/philosophical reductionism – by leaving the social out, making formalist concerns the stuff of its enterprise. In doing so, it hoped to transcend elements it found abhorrent in mass culture (kitsch, commercialism, ‘selling-out’, formulaic and commodified production of songs, etc.), and to lead by example, or by analogy, as it were, in an act of implicit critique.

La Monte Young, for example, aspired in his 1960s works to pierce the inner essence of sound, which he located in the ‘exact relationship of one tone to another simultaneous tone’.56 This is an evolution of Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘acousmatic’ or ‘reduced’ listening: that is, listening to sound without visual or clarified reference to its source. Such sound exploration invites ‘listening inside the sounds, in the sense of one’s envelopment within the sound and in the sense of the attention paid to “microscopic” subtleties of the sounds that had hitherto gone unheard’.57 Cage, by contrast, sought through ‘heightened listening’ to return to considering the social, the outside world, and postmodernism undertakes this directly, to include the life world of human beings in an overt and obvious way. This is emphatically

54 Murphie and Potts, Culture and Technology, pp. 12–13. 55 Jacques Attali, ‘Noise and Politics’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 7.56 Evens, Sound Ideas, p. 45. Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music played sine

wave oscillators that could theoretically infinitely extend tones. Edward Strikland, ‘La Monte Young’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (2007), at http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/30721, accessed 15 March 2007.

57 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 230.


not to imply that the resultant artwork is necessarily without subtlety, but that the social intent is illuminated.

As distinct from musique concrète and acousmatic music, conceptually based approaches would prove to be the primary informants for postmodern sound art, particularly in soundscape composition, where source and context identification hold central importance. The new perspectives on listening, on sound itself, and on sound-as-music creation opened the territory for composers to increasingly probe social conventions including race, gender and sexuality – in other words, the ways in which we construct ourselves and our identities. It is through this reconfigured focus that the era of modernist experimentalist preoccupation is morphed into various forms of sound art. The following chapters trace insights into the manifestations of subjectivity offered so richly by sound art, the genre that lends itself so compellingly to postmodern – and altermodern – expression.

Chapter 2

Sound Art as Postmodernism’s Exemplar

The Term ‘Sound Art’1

There are numerous terms in use to describe the particular approaches to composition falling broadly under the rubric of experimentalism: in the pre-1970s period, concept music, land art, noise art, sonic art, computer music, radiophonics, multimedia, new media, mixed media, free improvisation, early minimalism, tape or electronic music, electronica, phonology, musique concrète, avant-garde music, Happenings, Fluxus, Downtown music (as opposed to ‘academic’ modernism’s ‘Uptown’ music);2 and, of course, experimentalism itself. More recently, while most of the above terms still have some currency, can be added glitch, interactive installation, environmentally sensitive installation, outdoor installation, ambient music, New-Age music, microwave, microscopic music, electronica – and sound art.3

Names and labels of this sort are problematic in that, while some are virtually interchangeable, there are often specific attributes signified by each term, which in practice are not transferable in every instance. Some compositions exist as CD or DVD works, outdoor-only works, some for radio airplay (radiophonic works) or the Internet, etc. Such labels are also applied to music that does not in every case conform to neat categorizations – particularly glitch, ambient music, New-Age music and free improvisation, which tend to carry connotations of popular-music subcultures. And while these elements are often significant to sound art practice, sound-based music generally falls outside the commercial domain – notwithstanding the acknowledgement on the part of innumerable musicians crossing the borders

1 For an exhaustive discussion and exposé of terms within the practice, see Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 21. Also see the related EARS: Ears: The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (2008), at http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/, accessed 7 June 2008, and Simon Atkinson and Leigh Landy, ‘The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS): Philosophy, Foundation and Aspirations’, Organised Sound 9/1 (2004): 79–85.

2 See Chapter 1, note 17. 3 See, for example, Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 2006). Also see Kyle Gann, Breaking the Chain Letter: An Essay on Downtown Music (1998), at http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/downtown.htm, accessed 13 April 2007. For more on electronica, see Cox and Warner, ‘Modes of Listening: Introduction’, p. 65. For definitions of such terms as ‘organised sound’, ‘Sonic Art’, ‘sound art’, ‘radiophonic art/radio art’, ‘electronic music’, ‘computer music’ and ‘electro-acoustic music; electro-acoustics’, ‘electronica’, also see Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, pp. 10 ff. Also see Emmerson and Smalley, ‘Electro-acoustic Music’.


of popular, jazz and classical music genres, that experimentalist artists are their aesthetic antecedents. But such divisions endure: high/low still exists as a category distinction, even as this is problematized in many artworks.4

An alternative term from that of either avant-garde or experimentalism is required, to signal the passage of time since 4’33” of 1952 – now over half a century ago. It is necessary to reflect changes within the genre since the advent of postmodernism, changes that have inflected attitudes in compositional practice that distinguish it from its antecedents.5 While Hellerman’s Sound Art Foundation (‘another way of saying “new music” or “experimental music”’)6 was initiated in the early-1980s, the term sound art was coined by Canadian composer/audio artist Dan Lander in the mid-1980s.7

Later, in the 1990s, increasing numbers of practitioners began to refer to themselves as sound artists, sound designers, sonic artists, installation artists and audio artists, whose main concern is with sound rather than traditional music.8 Sound art is as likely to emerge from people without formal musical training (just as experimentalist music did) as from those from music institutions. While Alan Licht describes experimental music as sound art’s godfather,9 Brandon LaBelle locates the development of sound art’s ‘defining steps’ – which by his reckoning occurred in the mid- to late-1960s – as coinciding with installation and performance

4 The decision where to position artworks in the world is made, arguably, more by performers, festivals, journals, venues, marketing, agents than by their creators, although, as Miriam Cosic notes, ‘It used to be so easy. There were rock fans, jazz enthusiasts and classical music buffs. A few fringe customers were fascinated by exotic folk music from faraway lands. Record retailers knew what music appealed to whom, and divided up their shops accordingly. Pity the poor retailer today, as boundaries blur and music gets made that fits no market segments known to man’: ‘Music That Defies All The Old Labels’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1995, p. 17.

5 Such evolutions include post-rave ‘alternative technocultural networks’ comprised of ‘technotribes’ and alternative media collectives, which have resonances to varying degrees with the compositions to be detailed here but which, in the main, lie outside my purview. See, for example, Graham St. John, FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor (Altona, VIC: Common Ground Publishing, 2001). Also see Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 392–8.

6 Licht and O’Rourke, Sound Art, p. 11. 7 Ibid. 8 The many high-profile exhibitions occurring around the turn of the present century

propagated the term ‘sound art’ (while creating much uncertainty regarding to what it actually referred!). The exhibitions dealt specifically with interfaces between digital art and electronic music and included electronic musicians and experimental musicians, electronic groups, sound sculptors, sound installationists/recording artists and experimental pop and rock groups, experimental/electronic composers, free-jazz composers and rock stars. Ibid., pp. 11–12.

9 Ibid., p. 218.

Sound Art as Postmodernism’s Exemplar 37

art.10 Paul Hegarty, too, nominates the moment when sound ‘creeps into galleries in the wake of affordable technologies, notably in tape technology in the 1960s, and the development of video in the late-1960s’, as ‘the first point at which … we can begin to talk of sound art’.11 A term is needed that conveys the period that has embraced the video as an artform and the advent of the digital age, where a new audio culture has emerged that encompasses all the subgenres listed above.12

Sound art practices have been at work for decades, ‘and yet the term remains vague’.13 Some define sound art as that practised by visual artists, focusing on the prevalence of installations that contain a visual component, while sonic art is that done by musicians; electronica is felt to be represented in popular or entertainment genres, while electro-acoustic music occurs in high art or serious genres.14 The subjects, complexity, hybridization and array of today’s sound-based music challenge any simple definition for the artform. Heavily cross-pollinated by other disciplines and a range of media, sound art practice, as mentioned above, frequently tends not to emanate from the classical music academy,15 and ‘in-between-ness’

10 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. xii; although he also mentions seeking in his book ‘to locate the practice of sound art from the early-1950s’ (p. 295).

11 Hegarty, Noise/Music, p. 169. 12 See Cox and Warner, ‘Modes of Listening: Introduction’, p. 65. Also see Andrew

Goodwin, ‘Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction’, On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 220–36. Also see Timothy Dean Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), and Introduction to present volume, note 37.

13 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 163. 14 See note 1, above. For ‘electro-acoustics’, one established definition is: ‘The use

of electricity for the conception, ideation, creation, storage, production, interpretation, distribution, reproduction, perception, cognition, visualization, analysis, comprehension and/or conceptualization of sound’: ibid., p. 14. Also see Barry Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology CD-ROM Edition (Cambridge Street Publishing: CSR-CDR 9901, 1999), and Emmerson and Smalley, ‘Electro-acoustic Music’. Also see Introduction, note 37, of present volume.

15 Former art-school student Brian Eno is a prominent example in this regard. Alain Thibault suggests that sound art has much more affinity with the media arts than with other forms of music, cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 170. Julian Knowles’s overview of the differences he perceives between Australian ‘composers’ and ‘sound artists’ includes the observation that sound artists have tended to emerge from art schools, communications and media departments than to have received training, like composers, from music departments, and that they are from an ‘aural-based’ tradition, as opposed to that of composers, whose tradition is notation based. He also notes sound artists’ interdisciplinary approach; that they tend to perform their own works; that recording is a ‘creative rather than documentary process’; that sound artists build custom instruments/sound-generating devices, or turn documenting devices such as cassette recorders, DAT recorders, MiniDiscs/CD-R discs, multitrack recorders and mixers into performance instruments, leading to a ‘highly idiosyncratic gestural technique’: Sound Ideologies?


is a primary marker of the genre. One perception characterizes it as ex-musical, beyond music, an artform unto itself only.16 And indeed, sound art events are often as likely to be staged away from the concert hall as within, in installation settings within art exhibition spaces (including interactive works); via radio broadcast, or on the Internet; in pieces designed for headphone use; as sonic works transmitted across locations as well as through recordings.17 Each of these formats has many possible variants, with emphasis falling on the sound source itself and/or on the processes of listening it constructs. In listing the principles of what he refers to as ‘soundscape composition’, Barry Truax speaks of a listener and environment in a ‘balanced ecological relationship’ where ‘meaning is inescapably contextual’,18 and he describes richness in terms of ‘levels of meaning, both personal and cultural, and possibly even cross-cultural’.19 This is, furthermore, always inflected by the socio-psychological dimension: our environments affect our psychological state, and this is no less applicable to the sonic realm.

Australian sound artist Ros Bandt’s definition of sound art is that it ‘involves the crossing of boundaries from music and fine art, including sculpture, installation, performance, multimedia, information technology, soundscape, environmental music, museum design, acoustic ecology’ – this last phenomenon developing in tandem with 1970s land art, each feeding off the environmental landscape for an enriched artistic encounter in ‘radiophonic composition, electro-acoustic music and noise’.20 Architecture is a vital element for many of the works I explore here. My concern with ‘space’ incorporates the built environment and site specificity, but also social space and cultural space in a metaphorical sense.

Inserting us into local environs while yet tethering us to a wider horizon, one of the most culturally valuable aspects of sound art is the way it offers startling observations – or leads us to find these ourselves – in people’s interaction with each other and with the world, with and through sound. The works I have chosen

(2002), eds John Jenkins and NMA Publications, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/ideologies.htm, accessed 28 September 2007.

16 Ulrich Müller, cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 163. Müller does acknowledge, however, the difficulty in separating the two.

17 Brian Eno’s ideal venue for a sound installation, for example, is ‘a place poised between the club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these’, quoted in Eric Tamm, Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound (Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 38, cited in Licht and O’Rourke, Sound Art, p. 216. Some commentators reserve the term ‘sonic art’ for works designed specifically for a concert-hall setting.

18 Barry Truax, ‘Soundscape, Acoustic Communication, and Environmental Sound Composition’, Contemporary Music Review: Real-world Music as Composed Listening 15/1 (1996): 52, cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 107.

19 Truax, ‘Soundscape, Acoustic Communication, and Environmental Sound Composition’, p. 60, cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 107.

20 Ros Bandt, ‘Sound Art Reconsidered’, Sounds Australian 64 (2004): 46.


to consider in the following chapters find resonance with the idea of sound art as a process of listening, of examining the act of sounding – whether produced through technology or natural means –, or a combination of both, and underlining the human connectivity experienced in the act of hearing and generating sound: listening at a peopled event is a communal activity; we hear sounds together. Extrapolating from this, we recognize the broader ramifications of social connectedness. Compositions in this vein also typically reflect back on themselves, examining their own inner workings and making this act of self-reflection an integral part of the piece of music. Making such self-awareness distinctly overt is one of postmodernism’s distinguishing features.

The Situated Artwork: Sound Art, Postmodernism and Beyond

Postmodernism: The ‘Space for Debate’21

Some critics have proclaimed (and some have hailed) postmodernism’s demise.22 However, as Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘Even if the postmodern is over today [in 2005], it is likely safe to say that it has persisted nonetheless as a “space for debate”’.23 The acceptance of the much-debated – and overburdened – phenomenon, ‘postmodernism’, has by this point in time become surely so widespread that it would be remiss, at the very least, not to use it as a term of reference to being to frame any discussion of art making since the 1970s.24 Part of that ‘debate’, to

21 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, New Accents, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 167. She quotes Malpas, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

22 For a relevant summary of critics of postmodernism, see Chapter 2 in Murphie and Potts, Culture and Technology; also see p. 62 on critics of historical fault-lines and continuity and discontinuity. Also see John McGowan, Postmodernism and its Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Margaret A. Rose, The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993); Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism (London: Routledge; Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

23 See note 21, above. 24 Or, as Fredric Jameson commented even 20 years ago, ‘The concept is not merely

contested, it is also internally conflicted and contradictory. I will argue that, for good or for evil, we cannot not use it’: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 22. Some 400 pages later, at the end of his study, he states: ‘I occasionally get just as tired of the slogan


which I want to contribute, is to address sound art’s place both in late modernism, postmodernism ‘proper’ and beyond, into what some (to date, only in the field of visual arts) are calling ‘the altermodern’.25

Most importantly, sound art’s enterprise coalesces with so many aspects of postmodernist aesthetics and stances in a general sense – as flagged in discussions about the phenomenon in other art forms – that sound art is arguably the postmodern genre par exemple: sound entrenches itself in the creation of meaning, while remaining elusive to signification26 – and sound art makes the foregrounding of this aspect one of its most compelling, acutely postmodern conceptual cornerstones. Further, if one accepts Jonathan D. Kramer’s assertion that one of the key defining features of postmodernism in music is that it ‘considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music’,27 sound art, which draws frequently on technology, is the genre that most obviously embodies postmodernism in its very substance.

Postmodernism: Essential Aspects for Sound Art

Jean-François Lyotard has identified postmodernism’s mistrust of ‘grand narratives’. This mistrust unfolds into a shift in both historical currents and aesthetics, open to seeking new kinds of cultural and societal engagements that move beyond modernist and traditional strictures.28 This shift is nuanced, for

“postmodern” as anyone else’ (p. 418). He goes on to say, however, ‘but when I am tempted to regret my complicity with it, to deplore its misuses and its notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it raises more problems than it solves, I find myself pausing to wonder whether any other concept can dramatise the issues in quite so effective and economical a fashion’ (ibid.).

25 Nicolas Bourriaud and Tate Britain (Gallery), Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Pub., 2009). Also see Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009). This text also focuses on contemporary visual art.

26 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. xvi. He continues: ‘That sound has gained momentum as a field within postmodern studies is not without its philosophical, cultural, and social backing, for the auditory provides an escape route to the representational metaphysics of modernity by offering a slippery surface upon which representation blurs and the intractable forms of codified order gain elasticity’ (p. xv). Salomé Voegelin, however, has a very different understanding of sound art: ‘what sound artists have tried to progress and establish over the last and since the beginning of this century [is] the ephemeral complexity of sound that avoids classification and focuses on being heard rather than on being understood’: Listening to Noise and Silence, p. 54. The examples I present in this volume, I firmly believe, counter this standpoint and support LaBelle’s.

27 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’, Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, eds Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 16.

28 See, for example, Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Minneapolis, MN: University of


cultural commentators Charles Jenks and Linda Hutcheon, by Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology as both a system of representation and as a necessary and unavoidable part of social totality, with the purpose of illuminating the fact that belief systems we might automatically accept as ‘natural’ or ‘right’ are in fact ‘constructed’ and neither preordained from any ‘higher’ source, nor set in stone.29 Michel Foucault’s related insight into history’s situatedness – in other words, the contingency of events upon their very historical position – is also a prime informant for postmodernism.30 Sound art is crucially concerned to underline situatedness and contingency – of its own operations and of the subject matter it presents. The ideology of representation also includes self-representation, and sound art is a concentrated expression ‘about’ representation. In this way sound art is a particularly viable filter for dealing with identity construction; gender-focused, ecological (and wider political) and postcolonialist viewpoints; as well as preoccupations with the history of sound making itself.

Postmodernism’s broad ‘brief’ in relation to postmodernity is what several scholars characterize as ‘complicit critique’:

critique is as important as complicity in the response of cultural postmodernism to the philosophical and socio-economic realities of postmodernity: postmodernism here is not so much what [Fredric] Jameson sees as a systemic form of capitalism as the name given to cultural practices which acknowledge their inevitable implication in capitalism, without relinquishing the power or will to intervene critically in it.31

Sound art can be seen to adopt a similar posture of ‘complicit critique’ regarding its relationship with traditional music, popular music genres and popular culture generally, and with modernism too.

High modernism’s ‘clean slate’ in artistic practice – transcending ‘taste’, obliterating cultural memory – was the launching pad for postmodernism: after the reaching of the avant-garde sonic endpoint, and after modernism’s quasi-papal decrees, art (for many) needed renewed direction. But sound art is not a wholesale disavowal of modernist experimentalism. It is rather an engagement with its outlook and techniques – one that is primarily ironic. Forms of the past are reappropriated to address a society from within the values and history of that society, while yet questioning it – and this includes an engagement with modernist principles. Along with this defining posture of a self-conscious, overtly declared

Minnesota Press, 1984).29 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London; New York: Verso, 1990). Althusser’s work

lays the foundation for Linda Hutcheon’s theorizing of the postmodern. 30 Michel Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1975–76, 1st edn (New York: Picador, 2003). 31 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 25.


awareness of historical positioning, is also often the incorporation of anachronistic play.

Brian Eno’s pinpointing of the ‘collapse’ of the experimental ‘tradition’,32 as he puts it, was at the time of Michael Nyman’s book: ‘What started as an esoteric bubble at the very edges of music ha[d] become transmuted into a mainstream’.33 To include the term experimentalism within the concept of a mainstream seems incongruous. Time, as postmodernism teaches us in one of its rare moments of concreteness – not to mention late capitalism’s co-optive abilities – will erode radicalism’s initial cutting edge.34 Still, writing as recently as 2004, David Nicholls is able to put forward ‘the assumption that, at any given time, both [avant-garde and Experimental music] exist at the forefront of contemporary music thought and practice (and are therefore de facto likely to disturb rather than reassure, challenge rather than comfort)’.35 While certainly often challenging, sound art’s postmodernism blurs any clear binary division between perturbation and placation.

Postmodernism, then, does not attempt or advocate a wholesale return to the past, nor exclusively adopting, say, popular-culture tropes; nor is the political stance of postmodern work unequivocal: a line is trodden between (probingly) embracing and spurning the elements with which works interact and comment upon and with the culture that is produced. Some of the means adopted by contemporary works in the service of this endeavour include the use of irony, playfulness, embracing the vernacular, foregrounding historical references, obliterating delineations between artforms and between art and life, and forging renewed relationships with the audience (in contemporary classical, score-based postmodern composition as well as sound-based, score-free).

If pre-modernist classical Western music uses its expressiveness to mount an ‘argument’ predicated upon principles of tension and repose, while experimental music celebrates uncertainty, creating metamorphoses from un-preordained elements, then sound art can be perceived to pull together both parts of these positions, capitalizing on the resultant tensions that arise. In this way it continues

32 Eno, ‘Foreword’, p. xii. 33 Ibid., p. xiii. Eric Salzman also agrees: ‘The impact of [Cage’s] ideas is now so

generalised that one can only describe them as having entered the mainstream of twentieth-century art’: Twentieth-century Music, p. 168. Michael Nyman adds, experimental music has, ‘totally against the cultural odds, proved to be remarkably and unexpectedly resilient’: Experimental Music, p. xvi. Somewhat perplexingly, Salzman also asserts, ‘[u]nexpectedly, this [Cage’s] early work has had a latter-day influence [on performance art and multimedia art]’: p. 163. Eno’s estimation of experimentalism’s ‘transmutation’ occurs just a little later than suggested by the scholars detailed above.

34 See, for example, Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, p. 517. Also see Jameson, Postmodernism.

35 Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, p. 518.


truly experimental ‘open work’ where, as explained in Chapter 1,36 it is the task of the mind to ‘finish off’ the work.

Postmodernism’s Self-aware Situatedness

Eric Salzman’s assertion that ‘modernist music is about the “idea” of music as much as its incarnation in the real world’37 can, I believe, be even more readily applied to works moving beyond modernism. The meta-stance, where artworks present contemplations ‘about’ the ‘idea’ of music, I see as a key marker of present practice.

While modernism also very much shared this preoccupation, postmodern works make apparent the positioning, as well as the self-awareness, in contrast with traditional music and with modernism, and particularly so in the period of high modernism proper (that is, the mid-twentieth century). Furthermore, I will argue that, in current times, a meta-stance is equally applicable to avowedly neo-modernist/altermodernist works. My overriding argument, however, is that it is overt situatedness that marks a postmodernist – or post-postmodernist – work.

One can have, according to this view, a ‘site-specific’ modernist artwork, but the work will not ‘refer’ or ‘respond’ to the site. Postmodern works enter exosemantically into ‘dialogue’ with their setting, whereas modernists’ works are endosemantic, only self-reflexive, and do not strive to enlist their environs beyond focusing on the sound qualities of the particular space – in fact, they purposefully avoid making any such efforts. My objective is to examine how the selected works reflect, engage with and critique their environment, culture, history and their own premises – in other words, their situatedness.

Sound Art’s Own Postmodernism

Significantly, some expressions of postmodernism are sound art’s ‘own’: its preponderance of public artworks; its new performance spaces; the new digital technology that has facilitated sound sculpture installations, for example, and studio explorations in the manipulation of sound. Conceptual art’s re-visitations with tonality and reconsiderations of language and music (to the point where some works actually were simply a written or recorded verbal directive) prompted renewed reflections on new music and its place within its social environs. Contemporary sound art composition comprises current expressions of technology, new music, the larger culture and musical language. Sound art is able palpably to demonstrate music’s – and thereby, culture’s in general – locus, its politics of representation, in ways that become much more particularized than the more generalized executions of Cage and experimentalism.

36 See Chapter 1, note 38. 37 Salzman, Twentieth-century Music, p. 212.


Alice Jardine states that modernity itself materializes when a society embarks on a questioning of the ‘very representations it has made of itself’.38 I suggest that postmodernity appears when it in turn questions – in complicit critique fashion – modernism’s belief systems, and the altermodern announces itself when neo-modernism casts doubt over postmodernism. We see this in conceptualism’s questioning of the modernist utopian-inflected ideals of Cage and of academic modernism, as explored in Chapter 1. In the way that postmodernist works maintain a tension with modernism,39 there is a similar relationship with sound art and experimentalism.

Some of the concepts, practices and technologies of sound art are not new – wind-powered Aeolian harps, for example, which feature prominently in the work of several sound artists, were designed by Renaissance Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in his treatise Musurgia Universalis.40 But ‘newness’ – particularly in a postmodern climate – is not the point. Cox and Warner suggest:

If the traditional conception of history as a continuous, linear unfolding can be thought of as analog, this new sonic sensibility might be called a digital one. It flattens the distinction between ‘high art’ and ‘mass culture’, and treats music history as a repository from which to draw random-access sonic alliances and affinities that ignore established genre categories.41

Sound art works, however, do not necessarily ‘ignore’ the established genre categories, nor do they completely ‘flatten’ the high/low cultural divide, but they do new things with them in renewed coalitions.

Postmodern Sound Art as Something the Mind and the Emotions ‘Do’

Postmodernism (particularly as delineated by Lyotard, Jenks and Hutcheon, and reinforced by Foucault) exposes the fact that much of what we commonly take for granted as ‘the way things should be’ – or even ‘the way things just are’ – is in fact culturally constructed: these aspects of modern life can encompass capitalism, patriarchy and liberal humanism, and we are all implicated in the way society adopts capitalist, patriarchal and humanistic ideology and edicts.42 To these

38 Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), quoted in LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 9.

39 According to Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, and Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture, 6th edn (London: Academy, 1991).

40 David Toop, ‘Humans, Are They Really Necessary? Sound Art, Automata and Musical Sculpture’, Undercurrents, ed. Young, p. 118.

41 Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiv. 42 See, for example, Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 2. Postmodernist

fiction of the 1980s, in works by John Barth, Angela Carter and Italo Calvino, for example, enacts a critique of its own genre by stressing the artifice of the conventions it employs.


systems, which might seem ‘natural’ or ‘given’ in a broad sense, within music can be added: unity, novelty, originality, works being cast in a single form/genre, resolution of oppositions and contradictions, maintaining a distinction between art music and popular music, and sustaining a chosen musical language – that should be of one’s ‘time’ (and does not cross eras within the one work).

Modernist avant-garde, scored music turns in on itself, the point of its apprehension not to yield its ‘secrets’ or inner machinations readily; part of the aesthetic rewards involved in engaging with these works is meeting the challenge to unravel these inner workings, whereas postmodern music looks outside itself to foreground context as an essential aspect of the work – including the ‘reward payoff’. Sound art makes art from context to a far greater degree than either music for traditional forces composed in traditional ways or experimentalist music. Sound art directs focus from sound objects to their surroundings, from one point of aural attention to a plethora of perspectives, from one’s own body in the direction of others’ – and in this way, as LaBelle points out, it correlates closely with sound itself, with its ‘very relational, spatial, and temporal nature’.43

A genre that in its very act of being annunciated conducts a seamless – and, importantly, overt – reflection on its own medium, epitomizes postmodernism. I stress the importance of overtness for postmodernism as I see experimentalism’s equally strong but unforegrounded reflection on its own medium as the quintessence of modernism. Eno’s summation of experimentalism’s legacy is: ‘If there is a lasting message from Experimental music, it’s this: music is something your mind does’.44 I would add that postmodern sound art reminds us that it is also something the emotions ‘do’ – an element that modernism at the very least did not accentuate and at its core renounced, prompting many writers and/or sound artists to call for the reintroduction of human presence in art making.45 The connection between art objective and art material is brought to the fore in many of the works under consideration here, where I explore ways in which Australian composers invite ‘the mind’ and the emotions to ‘do music’ through their sound art.

Artistic Choice: Enduring

Score-based modernists subscribe fervently to the notion of their own particular sonic signature, thus perpetuating the cult of the artist ‘genius’. Experimentalism (typically) counters this by proposing that such aspiration closes off the potential for sounds – and whole works – to reveal themselves, to come into being, in such ways as the creator could never have imagined. But it is not only the mind of the

43 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. xiii. 44 Eno, ‘Foreword’, p. xii. 45 Such as Simon Waters and the late Jeff Pressing, see Landy, Understanding the Art

of Sound Organization, p. 171.


receiver of the artwork that ‘does’ music,46 but the creator as well – a factor that deconstructionism has uncovered and which postmodernism underlines.

While one of experimentalism’s espoused doctrines is to create music that rejects individual choice and taste, or memory, even Cage chose the contents of the sound charts in Music of Changes (1951), sitting at the piano and creating sounds that appealed to him (even if he did not control their positioning within the works). But ‘[t]his control of materials was hidden in the mid-1950s in works like “The Ten Thousand Things” by his goal of inclusion’, and in his later works, references are made through sounds to things other than just themselves.47 During the waning years of high modernism after the mid-twentieth century, this ‘contradiction’ was missed. In the works to be discussed here that use a relatively high degree of chance and randomness, the individual taste, choice and memory of the creators is nevertheless apparent, and unlike the era that precedes them, postmodernist artists unabashedly affirm the significance of the subjective realm. They indirectly point out that high modernism’s operations and ideology, also, were a matter of choice – that artistic decisions are in fact always, in the end, choice (no matter how co-opted our imaginations might be…).

And after creative decisions have been made, what of the artist’s – and listener’s – aesthetico-political responsibilities? Salomé Voegelin declares that the artist’s mission is to ‘work in relation to existing (sonic) contexts to challenge them and thereby to challenge perception, listening, continually’, while the listener’s is ‘to be jarred, confused and challenged to find a new relationship with what s/he hears’.48 But Voegelin also warns that if the artist’s work ‘exists too far away from a recognisable expression this chasm between recognition and unfamiliarity is too wide to be overcome by the listening activity. The listener feels alienated and abandons his/her engagement’.49 One of postmodernist art’s vaunted achievements is accessibility, emanating from experimentalism’s DIY ethic. First and foremost this is so with regard to the venue for its presentation: just as with experimental works being performed in galleries, for instance, one is more likely to chance across a sound artwork in a park or in a streetscape than find it staged in a concert hall.

While anyone can perform La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 2, which requires the performer to ‘build a fire in front of an audience’, it is debatable (ironically) as to how many people (outside art schools) would have had access to this ‘score’, or would ‘understand’ the motivations of its composer. A sound artwork, by contrast, might stage a fire in a place where anyone would chance upon it, or might suggest building a fire. In any case, the sound artist will make the fire and its locale ‘meaningful’ (so, situated) in some way – and therefore more accessible to a wider audience, not necessarily for those apprised of avant-

46 See note 44, above. 47 Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, p. 190. 48 Quoted in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 105. 49 Quoted ibid.


garde manoeuvres. Second, when the work is interactive, which is the case far more in sound art than in experimentalism, one can actually influence the musical outcome. This kind of accessibility can produce a frisson for an audience, which comes from that initial moment of apprehension that an interactive installation work actually is interactive. From there, one can extrapolate to the wider world and one’s interaction with it, through the sonic realm, thus situating oneself within the realization of the work.

Beyond Postmodernism: The Altermodern

LaBelle draws attention to the ‘plethora of art exhibitions on sound art, in conjunction with academic programs dedicated to aural culture, sonic art, and auditory issues now emerging’, which, by his reckoning, ‘reveals the degree to which sound art (and related auditory studies) is lending definitions to the twenty-first century’.50 I fully concur, and want to develop this perspective.

I have advocated ‘sound art’ to denote late-1970s-onwards postmodern experimentalism. The use of a different ‘label’ in part acknowledges the passage of time – the 30 years since the inception of this field, modernist experimentalism having run its course from the late-1940s to the late-1970s, as well as noting the shift in aesthetic sensibility.

A further generational shift has transpired since the advent of (postmodern) sound art and accordingly warrants a new term: a highly suitable contender is the altermodern. In 2009, Nicolas Bourriaud described as ‘altermodern’ contemporary visual art ‘made in a global context which is a reaction against cultural standardisation and commercialisation’, and he lists four main attributes: ‘the end of postmodernism; cultural hybridisation; travelling as a way to produce forms; and the expanding formats of art’.51

I want to finesse Bourriaud’s reading of the altermodern for sound art. First, my take is not as prescriptive regarding the purported ‘end of postmodernism’. Further, I suggest that the altermodern encapsulates for sound art a sensibility that concerns itself with essentially two points of focus: the past of modernism (which is a nostalgia-tinged recall, and which forms the substance of Chapter 7), and also neo-modernism that is inflected with postmodernism (in Chapter 8).

While I am obviously using a ‘passage-of-time’ model to demarcate the altermodern from postmodernism, and while the works I position within its historical current are written in the late-1990s into the 2000s, I do not wish to confine it only by period-driven considerations: I present many more works, written across the last 20 years, that I define as unproblematically postmodern rather than altermodern. Just as Jonathan D. Kramer and Lawrence Kramer have identified

50 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 295.51 From the dust jacket of Bourriaud and Tate Britain (Gallery), Altermodern: Tate

Triennial. Also see note 25, above.


proto-postmodernist traits in classical (scored) music,52 so altermodernism can be viewed as a sensibility that can be expressed in an era that houses concurrent aesthetic positions – as is the case for modernism and postmodernism.

Is ‘the Medium’ still ‘the Message’?

Eric Salzman refutes McLuhan’s proposition, ‘the medium is the message’:53 ‘The medium is not the message; context (the social setting), content (‘meaning’ in a widened sense), and the contract (between creator, performer and public) are the essential elements’.54 These altered perspectives on ‘the medium’ and on ‘the message’ are crucial for sound art – just as they were for experimentalism –, the effect being to broaden (in sound art) the range of what could be deemed admissible in a compositional context.

In its departures from many traditional systems and notions of music, sound art stimulates otherwise dormant perceptions of – and within – the auditory realm; in other words, how we hear as well as what we hear. Eric Salzman declares, ‘The era of exploration is over. All experience is available as raw material for art – through 360° and on a continuum. What matters is what happens to this raw experience. New ideas must be evaluated, not for their own sake but for how they happen and what they mean’.55 My encounters with Australian sound art, however, do not suggest to me that ‘exploration’ necessarily disqualifies encounters with experience as ‘raw material for art’. Nevertheless, what does absorb me is the aesthetic impulse, the resultant potential effect of a work on the listener, and the work’s cultural context, rather than closing my discussion at the material specifics of its construction. To me, Salzman is also articulating ‘the altermodern’, where not only is a seemingly limitless compendium of styles available to artists, but at least one of those styles is informed by a neo-modernist sensibility.

Sound art ‘designates the art form in which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic unit’.56 But I do not want to preclude from consideration sound

52 See for example, Kramer, The Time of Music; Jonathan D. Kramer (ed.), Time in Contemporary Musical Thought, A Special Issue of Contemporary Music Review 7/1–2 (1993); Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, Indiana Theory Review 17/2 (1996): 21–61; Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origin of Musical Postmodernism’, Current Musicology 66 (1999): 7–20; Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

53 See Introduction, note 41 of present volume.54 Salzman, Twentieth-century Music, p. 262. He continues, ‘The best new art

concerns itself with the ordering of a particular universe of ideas and experience taken from the totality of possibilities, the menu that technology offers us every day … The range of experience and the act of communication are in themselves subject matter’: ibid.

55 Ibid. 56 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 17.


art works that do not shun the ‘musical note’. I refer to the creators of sound art as sound artists and composers, as I perceive no compelling justification in outlawing sound artists from the category of composer, while acknowledging the tension that exists between the score-based and ex-score-based creators (particularly as some sound art examples do use scores). My preference is to expand on that tension in the discussion of the works. Finally, by my use of the term sound art I do not mean to infer that other compositional approaches (not specifically sound art works) do not make forays into sound, or are not ‘art’ – or even ‘music’….57

‘But Noise Does Indeed Exist’58

Mary Russo and Daniel Warner extend Attali’s theories of noise as potential mobilizer for social change: ‘Noise is not, as information theorists would have it, a signal that we do not want to hear. It is a signal that someone does not want to hear’.59 The sonic world always encroaches upon us, contributing elements by which we orient ourselves, and much of this reflects on ways in which we transact ourselves within the social sphere, as my sound art examples will demonstrate.

But one might assume that the present-day possibility of noise as musical language that is illegitimate, thus antagonistic, is surely a redundancy or at least a non-issue after the advent of revolutionary rethinking about sound, noise and music over the course of the twentieth century. One might even suppose a levelling in regard to the collective attitude towards noise after the respective avant-garde achievements of the Futurists, mid-twentieth-century high modernism and experimentalism – and after several decades now of postmodern plurality and ‘anything goes’. Noise announces itself as it represents the occurrence of sound where (or when) it should not be sounding, and knowing this, says Douglas Kahn,

57 Edgard Varèse’s view as far back as the 1920s and 1930s was that music as a term was becoming too restrictive, and he advocated that of organized sound. For further discussion on this point, see Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, pp. 5 ff. Landy also shares his own wrestling with what to call the field of study of ‘sound-based music’, settling, unsurprisingly, on ‘studies of sound-based music’: pp. 17–18. I see my own enterprise as a branch of musicology and am loath to refine – or limit – it further, as I desire musicology to be as all-embracing as possible. Landy cites ‘those who make a clear distinction between sound art and, say, electro-acoustic or electronic music. In fact, I have met more than one individual who believes that sound artists do not possess the necessary skills and insight to gain the musical denomination. This is a view that is not synonymous with the Varèse vs Cage discussion but leads to the same separation that … I do not support’: p. 240, n. 7. While I do perceive a distinction that can often be drawn between electro-acoustic or electronic music and sound art, I would agree with Landy that the label ‘music’ is validly applicable to all streams.

58 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 21. 59 Mary Russo and Daniel Warner, ‘Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial

Noise Bands’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 53.


should negate the possibility for noise to exist. Yet he emphasizes: ‘But noise does indeed exist’.60

Kahn goes on to argue that attempting to stem noise only reinforces its persistence and cauterizes the multifaceted means through which we categorize noise as noise, while reifying noise can readily become a ploy within the repression or containment of some other thing.61 Kahn expands on this by proclaiming that to comprehend modernism’s sound emissions one needs to understand how sound events are brought into play and muffled by amplitude (or the lack of it) and affect. He cites the example of a scream, whose widest emanation is an automatic response, universally and immediately understood through unobstructed communication, demanding instant reaction. But screams in artistic contexts – literary, theatrical, musical or cinematic – are very dissimilar. No one jumps onstage to render help: despite their emotive connotations and dynamism, their impact is rhetorical.62 This is also true of noise,

which can interrupt itself as capably as what it ostensibly interrupts, and Cagean silence, which has silenced other things, as it dwells at the problematic edge of audibility … In short, the sound and the fury never signify nothing or, rather, just nothing. What such auditive states have proven to drown out are the social in sound – the political, poetical, and ecological.63

These factors are what the present text seeks to re-establish – as does, I shall demonstrate, sound art itself.

At the core of sound art practice is the activation of the dynamic between sound and space. Sound emanates outwards invariably in excess of its source, and that sound is an intensely communal experience – if one yells while people are within earshot, they are recipients of the sound whether willing, surreptitious or unwilling. These bodies within earshot combine with the space in which the yell (or whatever sound) is produced to affect the acoustic properties of the sound, and each sound receiver has a unique (however subtly so) aural perspective on the sound event. When sound art works remind us of this, they underline the workings of sociality and what sound might be communicating.

The sonic specifics of social occasions can include important distinctions in contexts that can occur in the one sound: clapping, for example, is a conventional act of applause at a concert, generally not encountered in a church service (other than American Pentecostal churches, for instance). The people in those situations are ‘positioned’ by their contexts, ‘either as a kind of subarchitecture in which

60 Ibid. Emphasis added.61 Ibid.62 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 4.63 Ibid. Emphasis added. Brandon LaBelle counters Douglas Kahn’s critique of 4’33”

as an act of denying the social: Background Noise, pp. 14–15. Also see Cox and Warner, ‘I: Music and Its Others’.


one takes one’s place, or as a kind of built-in respect for a given situation: the body occupies the correct location, either in the foreground or background, onstage or off, in front of or behind’; the crowd therefore ‘adds character to sound materially, as well as socially, according to the context of the event and its inherent positioning’.64 Sound ‘is never a private affair’:65 sound travels from a particular source and straight away arrives at several endpoints, filling other ears and filling available space. When one speaks, one ‘lives’ in more than a single head, further afield than an individual intelligence. Listening is thus a type of partaking in the participation of a sound event, however prosaic. And ‘noises are never just sounds and the sounds they mask are never just sounds: they are also ideas of noise [that] can be tetchy, abusive, transgressive, resistive, hyperbolic, scientistic [sic], generative, and cosmological’.66

To talk about what might constitute ‘noise’ in music making is to refer to a wealth of possibilities. R. Murray Schafer puts it simply: there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in any signalling system (such as static on a telephone).67 Noise disports, of course, tangible, acoustic properties. Composers have become confident with technological media and have a sizeable tradition with which to engage (or transcend), now spanning nearly a century. This translates into countless manifestations of noise. Noise is an overarching, direct interaction with the environment. It is a pulsing of sonic energy, that can come from any outdoors or rural setting, city or built environment, any enclosed space or from a machine.68 It is background or foreground; unwanted sound, accidental sound, incidental sound. It is the ‘silent’

64 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. x. 65 Ibid. 66 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 20. Also see pp. 22–3 for a comprehensive account of

the work accomplished by noise – positive and negative (including hearing loss, psychic malaise and psychological warfare). On the deployment of noise for malicious purposes in the military, see Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Music as Torture/Music as Weapon’, TRANS – Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006), article 11, at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm, accessed 5 March 2008. Also see Simon Reynolds, ‘Noise’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, pp. 55–8. Recent scientific research demonstrates that, even when one might intellectually appreciate or enjoy certain sounds, understanding them as ‘music’, the deleterious effects on the human body of ‘noise’ (at certain frequencies, in the range of 2,000–4,000 Hz) are not mitigated, see Kris Krieger, ‘Cover Your Ears!’, New Science (28 October 2011), at http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/cover-your-ears.htm>?rss=1&t=1319853257, accessed 30 October 2011.

67 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books; distributed to the book trade in the United States by American International Distribution Corp., 1997, 1993), p. 182, cited in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 126.

68 See Evens, Sound Ideas. For a discussion and definition of mixed media/new media/multimedia in contemporary European and American music making, see Salzman, Twentieth-century Music, pp. 246–53. Also see Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure’.


landscape and its subterranean noises, its subtle, hidden ones, its sounds produced by creatures, human and/or non-human, giving rise to one of the most important developments in music making since the end of the 1970s, namely, environmental music, which integrates new sounds and new musical forms in urban spaces or natural environments.

There is a metaphorical dimension to noise too, which is often used both in association with ‘antagonistic’ sounds and also applied more broadly. Noise can equate to critical commentary that runs counter to prevailing normative stances on such issues as ecology, gender and race. Noise can also be what happens between (or instead of) ‘intended’ sounds – that is, the lack of ‘music’, as was, at one level, the rationale for Cage’s 4’33”. But in other respects that work showed us that sound – and so, potentially, music – is always there, always here.69 Lastly, noise is also the ‘noise’ within the medium and history of music making.

For example, in 1999 Nyman reflects on the early-1970s: ‘it would have been unthinkable and dangerous to have predicted any relationship between experimental music and any aspect of pop music in 1972’.70 That this was actually not the case – numerous bands from the late-1960s incorporated avant-garde techniques and sounds into their music, including Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa, for example – nevertheless (obviously) does not negate the perception that the fields were mutually exclusive.

Wilful noise in high modernist composition was produced by atonality and irregular or aperiodic vibrations in harmonic analyzers. Now, a re-visitation to tonal/modal structures, the crossing of popular culture into so-called ‘art’ (and vice versa), or purposeful accessibility, are all construed by many (especially within music academies) as a type of noise in their own right. Compositions over the last 30 years range from score-based to ex-score-based creations that noisily cross the high/low divide; however, that divide still exists. Sound art’s (and score-based contemporary classical music’s) postmodern operations with popular-music elements interrogate that divide.71

69 As did its creator’s catalyzing experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1951, when he legendarily sought the experience of listening to no sound whatsoever. So he entered the specially constructed room of absorbent rather than reflective-surfaced walls, ceiling and floor, but found that he could still hear two pitches, produced by his own bodily processes, namely, his heartbeat and his nervous system.

70 Nyman, Experimental Music, p. xvii. Italics in original.71 Licht distinguishes ‘traditional’ music and pop music from sound art in that the

former are ‘like an amusement park ride: there’s a beginning, middle, and an end to it; it’s a short, consolidated experience of thrills and chills that can be readily re-experienced by simply going on the ride again, listening to the song again’: Licht and O’Rourke, Sound Art, p. 14. I offer examples of latter-day experimental works that do conform to the ‘beginning, middle, and … end’ format, and that can be included in a traditional setting as well as those intended for unconventional locales. Licht is also at pains to point out that sound art is not ‘conceptual performance pieces like pissing in a bucket, melting ice, and a phone ringing off the hook’: ibid. It must be acknowledged, however, that distinctions between ‘pop’ and


‘Noise’, as are art and music, is defined by understanding, knowledge, experience and attitude. While the Futurists proposed a new music of noise emblematic of the machine age almost a century ago, most people would consider industrial noise to be exactly that: confined to industry, with no place in art. Similarly, inadvertent squeaks, scritchings, bangs or any noises from mishaps were traditionally barred from ‘music’. But for others, a whole new noise aesthetic based not only on ‘grating’, machine-like sounds but also on ‘glitch’ has emerged from the 1970s, sprouting from ‘failures’ within the workings of digital technology.

‘Glitch’ is bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise and even the noise floor of computer sound cards, and composers use any of these as compositional fodder, through the capacity of audio tools that allow such manipulation. Technology was perceived to be commercialized and predictable in the 1990s in popular-music tracks, and so DJs started delving into all sorts of historical detritus instead – including old electronic-music albums of Cage and Stockhausen for artistic revitalization.

This will-to-glitch reminds us ‘that our control of technology is an illusion, and reveal[s] digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them’.72 The willful ‘contrariness’ that is part of the legacy of modernist experimentalism means that postmodern sound artists can celebrate the imperfections and imprecisions that provide a counter-image to the false promise of perfection, exactitude and full control of our technocratic culture.

When Steven Connor traces the dialectic between noise and voice in twentieth-century music, he presents the collapse of binary oppositions between music/noise and voice/noise, to characterize a new sensibility. Traditional approaches to music have sought to demarcate the voice from noise, while current aesthetics allows each to take on a much more complex relationship to one another, mixing ‘living voice and dead noise, integrity and cut-up, event and echo’.73 My explorations address some of the myriad treatments of the voice, and also the body in toto, in examples of Australian sound art.

The Meta-stance in Sound Art

Unlike traditional, score-based music, which subscribes to an internally interrelated, hierarchical and regimented schema, experimentalism transcends such prioritizing through the use of aleatoric procedures to allow sounds and the gaps in between

‘non-pop’ can in certain instances become very blurred. For discussions of Australian post-punk experimental and industrial electronic music between 1978 and 1984, see Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, and Cat Hope, ‘Cultural Terrorism and Anti-Music: Noise Music and its Impact on Experimental Music in Australia’, Experimental Music, ed. Priest, pp. 57–75.

72 Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure’, p. 393.73 Steven Connor, ‘The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music (Voice and Human

Experience)’, New Literary History 32/3 (2001): 482.


them, both predetermined and indeterminate, to achieve parity within a field of sound. This negates any semblance of musical argument, of dialectic. In sound art, the issue has become a meta-stance where the ‘argument’ is with the history of the experimental – and traditional – genres themselves. This radiates out to form renewed interrelationships: with concert music, traditional experimental music, and with the contexts of sound. The examples to follow explore reflections of sound art works on the place and work of noise in contemporary Australian life and art.

Experimentalism strains at the boundaries between noise and music, its roots extending back over the last century to the notion that art is what we (or the work’s creator) say it is. Postmodernism tests yet more borders that previously constrained what Western high art found acceptable; and the passage of time has diluted some of modernism’s most strictly held tenets, such as shock value, novelty, abrasiveness – so, noise ain’t what it used to be (but ‘does indeed exist’!).74 Jürgen Habermas stated famously that ‘modernism is dominant but dead’.75 In other words, postmodernity – through into altermodernity – does not constitute a decisive break with modernity, even if it does destabilize – if not completely dissolve – its foundations.76 What will be my concern here are those aspects of modernism’s ‘dominance’ with which sound art works engage – and how they frame that engagement.

Acoustic Ecology

Considerations of sound in current times go beyond mere music/noise divisions in an aesthetic sense. Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer’s exposition on ‘Acoustic Ecology’, The Tuning of the World (1977), was to prove very important for many Australian sound artists.77 Acoustic Ecology (also called Soundscape Ecology) emerged as a defined field during the 1970s, at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where an interdisciplinary merging of philosophy, sociology and art produced the World Soundscape Project. WSP participants, prominent among whom are Hildegard Westerkamp, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse and Barry Truax, collected recordings of urban ‘soundmarks’ such as noon whistles, harbour horns and train station ambiences; they documented natural soundscapes and tribal history and conducted

74 See note 60, above. 75 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project’, The Anti-aesthetic: Essays

on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 1st edn (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3–15.

76 See, for example, Andrew Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

77 Schafer, The Tuning of the World. The book was reprinted as Schafer, The Soundscape.


interviews to learn how people react to various sorts of everyday sounds.78 Schafer’s ideas evolved from Pythagoras, Russolo, Cage and Schaeffer (with the starting point from Pythagoras – furthered by Cage – that the entire cosmos itself is a musical composition) and delivered recommendations for a novel mode of listening to the world ‘soundscape’ (his term). The World Soundscape Project’s remit is to highlight the auditory environment through not only location recordings but also environmental advocacy.79

The WSP promotes superior ‘hi-fi’ environments, where clarity of sound is paramount, with no crowding or masking as occurs in ‘lo-fi’ environments.80 ‘Lo-fi environments often suffer from noise pollution, according to Shafer; many current forms of background music (‘moozak’ [muzak] for Schafer) are society’s way of reacting against such noise pollution, a form of “audioanalgesic”’.81 The sorts of questions that Schafer declared were being posed about the ‘world soundscape, the vast musical composition which is unfolding around us ceaselessly’, included those to do with the relationship between humans and the sounds of their environment and what happens when these sounds change, and pondering whether the soundscape of the world is ‘an indeterminate composition over which we have no control or are we, its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?’82

These questions were of vital import during the late-1970s because of the level of noise pollution, which, in Schafer’s view, had now emerged as a world problem. At risk is widespread virtual deafness, leading to the lack of attention to sounds that deserve preservation, encouragement and reproduction – and, consequently, those which need eradicating.83

Schafer links the cause of civilization’s detrimental noises to imperialistic, colonialist ambitions. Territorial expansion had always been one of Western civilization’s obsessions, as has our refusal to leave unappropriated a space of our environment. So, too, we continually puncture an acoustic space by sound.84 He

78 Jim Cummings, The Acoustic Ecology Institute (2001), at http://www.acousticecology.org/writings/index.htm, accessed 3 July 2009.

79 The ‘acoustic ecology’ movement is still thriving today, represented by the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Schafer’s “The Music of the Environment”’, p. 29.

80 Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 272, quoted in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 108.

81 Schafer, ibid., p. 96, quoted in Landy, ibid., p. 108. 82 R. Murray Schafer, ‘The Music of the Environment’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and

Warner, pp. 29–30. 83 Environmental acoustics as a positive study programme will lead to answers to

these questions. Ibid., p. 30.84 Ibid., p. 36.


admonishes, ‘an important principle of acoustic design [is] always to let nature sing for itself’,85 and then elaborates:

If synthetic sounds are introduced [into a garden or park] … care must be taken to ensure that they are sympathetic vibrations to the garden’s original notes. The wind chimes of the Japanese, or the once-popular Aeolian or wind harp, are reinforcements of natural sounds in the same way as the trellis reinforces the presence of the rose. The object in creating a soniferous garden would be to work up from natural sounds, materials, formations.86

In Chapters 3, 5 and 8 in particular, I feature Australian sound art works that concern themselves with sound’s interactions with, and positioning within, nature.

Cagean Silence: Sound Art’s Launching Pad

If one of postmodernism’s least contentious characteristics is an interest in process over product,87 one could then suggest that experimentalism itself, which holds a similar interest, is one of the precursors to postmodernism – it can in fact be seen as its catalyst, at least in the arts. Cage is postmodernism’s ‘true’ ancestor figure, consequently, as opposed to Pierre Schaeffer’s rarefied, medium-centred approach.88 In the closing paragraphs of these introductory chapters, it is worth taking a moment to tease out the postmodern departure sound art makes from Cage’s experimentalist pinnacle.

In its extremeness, Cage’s 4’33” – 4 minutes and 33 seconds of ‘silence’, ‘performed’ at a piano recital where the pianist does not touch the keyboard – brings to mind traditional aesthetics in its very thwarting of them. The work highlights as it stimulates expectations on the part of an audience member, who may well ask: ‘where are the “musical” notes? All that’s happening sonically is the rustling of growing audience perturbation, coughs, increasing whispers, outside noise! Where is the piece of music? I was expecting organized form, a definite beginning, a definitive end…’. Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds allowed the reappraisal and regeneration of the interaction between ‘silence’ and ‘the world’, so that these reflections could be embodied in ‘music’ that could be created between those two ‘endpoints’. Cage’s own 1957 lecture, ‘Address to the Convention of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago’, adds:

85 Ibid.86 Ibid.87 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 9. 88 Detailed in the previous chapter. Michael Nyman suggests somewhat enigmatically

in his Preface to the second edition of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond that ‘it could be asserted that Cage is the first postmodernist – even though he remained an arch-modernist to the end of his days’: p. xvi.


times have changed; music has changed; and I no longer object to the word ‘experimental’. I use it in fact to describe all the music that especially interests me and to which I am devoted, whether someone else wrote it or I myself did. What has happened is that I have become a listener and the music has become something to hear.89

Ideally, then, in keeping with Cage’s ambitions for 4’33”, our imagined audience member at its performance will go on to entertain these sorts of reactions: ‘I can detect a kind of sonic counterpoint between the tram clunking by outside and the woman next to me, rifling through her programme – probably trying to seek a “key” to understanding what’s being presented by that immobile pianist on stage. I wonder what types of birds are making those birdcalls I can hear. What an arresting rhythm they create, in conjunction especially with the trams and the restless audience shufflings. Gosh, I’ve never focused on those noises juxtaposed with one another before, as interesting sounds to which to pay attention. That poor woman, she has a look of consternation about her – she needs to open her ears and find the music in the ambient sonic events that are happening all around us – as do all those people stomping out of the hall, in high dudgeon! Hey – maybe that’s the “key”!’

However:

[A]s Yvonne Rainer has pointed out, in looking toward everyday life as material for active listening, Cage didn’t always recognize the political dimension of his own work. In disavowing ‘interest’ and individual ‘ego’, Cage can be seen to couch such things as everyday life in universal and essentialist terms, and thus miss the surface tensions of reality as doggedly marked by everyday struggle.90

Kahn concurs: ‘Cagean silence … dwells at the problematic edge of audibility and attempts to hear the world of sound without hearing aspects of the world in a sound ’.91 Sounds contain an aural–cultural imprint, as 4’33” underscored – but this was done so in a determinedly non-directive way. In this respect, 4’33” was a first-stage prototype to current creativity in sound art. Post-Cagean developments, particularly in conceptual art, would come to query, survey and prod such markings, and to arrive at a questioning of whether everyday life was really as ‘excellent’ as Cage found it to be.92 It is in the pointed specificity of the social and cultural configurations that inflect the moment where sound is actuated,

89 Cage, Experimental Music.90 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 51, see Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who—: Essays,

Interviews, Scripts, PAJ Books: Art + Performance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 88.

91 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 4. Emphasis added.92 See Chapter 1, note 48. Also see LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. 50–52.


whereby postmodern sound art develops Cage’s project of tension-play, and which demarcates sound art from its earlier forebears.

In the following chapters, I trace examples of Australian sound art’s deployment of noise, sound and music as it offers ways of disrupting the signals and codes through which we apprehend the auditory dimension of our life world. I start with the embryonic expressions of postmodernism during the late-1970s/early-1980s in post-experimentalist music, with particular focus on the critically important and (mostly) still-active members of a group at a community centre in Melbourne.

Part 2 Dawning

Chapter 3

The Dawning of Australian Sound Art

Postmodernism’s impact upon society and cultural expression throughout the 1970s was registered in experimentalism and heralded the emergence of sound art. Issuing from the energized field of modernism’s shake-up of all things cultural, these expressions in sound – and associated text – are tangibly anarchic.

What distinguishes the fault-line where experimentalism crosses into sound art, are the fascinating tensions apparent through shifting from one aesthetic sensibility to the next. This transition period embodies both a modernist and a postmodernist ethos, giving a sense of both pre- and post-. The crossover point is therefore not a simple, two-dimensional ‘line’, but is rather something more far-reaching and wider, with tangential offshoots that laid the foundations for sound art making in subsequent decades. This chapter considers the attitudes, theories and works of Australian post-experimentalist composers active during the late-1970s and into the early-1980s in the forging of postmodern sonic articulations.1

NMA and other ‘En-Em-Ahs’ of/for Australian New Music

Early postmodern incursions into sound art continued experimentalism’s undertaking of the wholesale interrogation of every aspect of music creation. The Melbourne-produced journal series New Music Articles (NMA) provided a vehicle for these redefinings of the artform of music composition, both in the works themselves and in accompanying texts. Part of NMA’s raison d’être can be located in the acronym when sounded phonetically: NMA saw itself as a cultural ‘enema’ on the part of Australian new music, a ‘broom’ to sweep out perceived archaic, conservative, reactionary attitudes forged by the ‘establishment’, the academy, and also by elements of the cynically commercial, crowd-pleasing aspects of popular culture. It epitomized the edicts of experimentalist-infused early sound art in Australia from a period covering roughly the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

John Jenkins’s title for his volume of experimental composers, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers (1988), is pointed: the 22 composers who appear in Frank Callaway and David Tunley’s ‘establishment’ collection, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century (1978), are predominantly score based.2 Jenkins’s book

1 For a brief overview of the roots of Australian mid-twentieth-century experimental music, see Burt, ‘Australian Experimental Music’, and Knowles, ‘Setting the Scene’.

2 Callaway and Tunley, Australian Composition in the Twentieth Century; Jenkins, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.


projects a counter-itinerary against – and subtle competitiveness with – traditional concepts of composition. Rainer Linz is more direct: he titles his 1995 reflection on NMA’s place in experimentalism ‘Publishing the Debate’ and defines this debate around the problematization of the enterprise of musical creativity. He recounts the published discussion on the nature and definition of the term ‘composer’ itself, citing Warren Burt’s 1982 NMA article, ‘How to be a Great Composer’, where Burt exclaims, ‘This blind, unquestioning faith that to write for orchestra, opera, string quartet etc. is the noble, laudable, desirable and god-ordained way to extend the history of music strikes me as pathetically naïve’.3 That there is no other ‘speaker’ present in the debate shows the extent to which that voice was considered so ubiquitous (and hegemonic) that its counter-arguments needed no special voicing in NMA. An ‘interview’ with Jon Rose, for example, reads: ‘Q. “I’ve often heard people call you a composer. What do you say about that?” Jon Rose: “I’ve had worse insults.”’4 In 1989, composer Keith Humble expressed unease about the appellation of ‘composer’: ‘What is really involved? What is involved is self-aggrandisement! What is involved is: “look, I’m a composer”. This is the term that doesn’t sound so bad in French, but which I am embarrassed about in English. Composer – a “poser” – that’s the point, pretending to be a creator!’5

The first issue of NMA also published John Jenkins’s Two Piano Pieces: free piano improvisations played by a non-pianist, transcribed and notated in score form, played from the score by an experienced pianist and recorded for the tape accompanying the edition. This poses, as Linz points out, an implicit unsettling of the workings of musical production and the function of the composer,6 calling into question the traditional valorization of the virtuosic ‘expert’ as privileged creator.

3 Quoted in Linz, Publishing the Debate.4 In Linz, ibid. Rose also poses the questions, in the format adopted by New Music.

A similar sense of unease about such labelling is offered by American sound artist Richard Chartier: ‘I’m not a musician … but I work with sound. I guess I’m a composer’, quoted in Licht and O’Rourke, Sound Art, p. 211. For composer Andrew Ford’s pithy remarks about his aversion to labels, see Andrew Ford, Undue Noise: Words about Music (Sydney: ABC Books, 2002), pp. 338–41. The issue is still relevant, some 35-plus years after the time in question here. Ford also has some stinging words to say about postmodernism! Ibid., pp. 350–51.

5 Whiteoak, Interview with Keith Humble. All this pinning down of compositional mores and historical eras is further complicated by the problematic nature of delimiting terms such as ‘composer’ and ‘art music’, which cause consternation for many practitioners. Composers, just as most artists, almost universally resist being categorized and having a label – at best – or an ‘-ism’ – at worst – attached to them. Despite my sympathies for their position here, it must be noted that, within the wider culture, commentators, critics, journalists, music shops, even composers themselves do use adjectives and labels to describe compositional philosophy and techniques and are not beyond the human impulse to define, pin down, distinguish this camp or approach from that.

6 Linz, Publishing the Debate.

The Dawning of Australian Sound Art 63

DIY in Australia

Extending the critique of the category of ‘composer’, part of late experimentalism/early sound art’s radical impetus was a stated desire to demystify and make more accessible the music-making process, as described in Chapter 2. Not only did this provide a how-to for aspiring practitioners, but it also flew in the face of the perceived members-only nature of high modernist and traditional classical music making, which rely on intensive schooling – that is, from the academy and its adherents.

Warren Burt’s ideal vision, for example, for a Do-It-Yourself future of music making features ‘affordability, accessibility, and performability’,7 which echoes Jacques Attali’s assertion, ‘People will make their own music, for themselves, prefiguring a free and decentralised society and political economy’.8 Regarding early-1980s outfit Sw Sw Thrght’s (sic) Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority at Sydney’s The Last Resort, the processes for producing the work (which included a malfunctioning gramophone and a piece of obsolete telephone exchange equipment, along with a PA horn being attacked by an engraving tool, grinding metal from the back of a fridge, and speakers swung above the audience) were displayed on a large vacuum-tube screen. The series of machines act as a Cagean proxy for the composer–performer; but where Cage’s indeterminate processes were never transparent to an audience, Sw Sw Thrght’s were clearly and emphatically foregrounded.9 So sounds the rumbling precursor to an historical fault-line.

The founding members of CHCMC (Melbourne’s Clifton Hill Community Music Centre) were Ron Nagorcka, John Campbell and Warren Burt, and their stated mission, ‘to change culture’, was to do so through ‘small-scale efforts giving people opportunities to be part of cultural life rather than consumers of “product”’.10 To effect such a culture change among the audience at CHCMC events, a number of Nagorcka’s works of the time involved attaching and swinging small speakers on lengths of strings, and running around the room placing portable cassette recorders in different spots to – with heavily overlaid metaphorical subtext – ‘change people’s perspectives’.11

7 Warren Burt (2002), at http://retiary.net/idea/idea5/IDEA_5/warren/warren.htm, accessed 28 May 2005.

8 Publisher’s preface in Attali, Noise.9 Biennale of Sydney (1982), Vision in Disbelief, catalogue (sound section), pp. 190–

223, cited in Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, pp. 52–4.10 Nagorcka, quoted in Jon Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, Wire 272/

October (2006): 34. Emphasis in original. Similar ‘missions’ were occurring at the time in Sydney’s Art Unit and Brisbane’s One Flat Gallery, see Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’.

11 Nagorcka, quoted in Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 35. Burt reminisces that the naming of Somnambulism by Nagorcka came about when he fell asleep performing


Independent Australian cassette labels with a focus on alternative or post-punk music often included personnel from the art–music divide of the experimental border in the late-1970s to mid-1980s.12 Some 30 years on from this period, the editors of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music can write: ‘Over the past half-century, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of musicians, composers, sound artists, scholars, and listeners attentive to sonic substance, the act of listening, and the creative possibilities of sound recording, playback and transmission’.13

The advent in the mid-1960s of the cassette format and its ready accessibility, ease of operation and ubiquity in then-contemporary culture plays a large part in carrying out the aims of the renegade music makers.14 Rik Rue has been besotted with the cassette player since his teenage years in the mid-1960s, and since the late-1980s has also used ‘live tape’ and digital manipulations in various performance projects. These include Mind/Body/Split and Social Interiors, with Jon Rose, and the Machine for Making Sense.15 The cassette player is his ‘instrument’; his ‘virtuosic’ handling of the pause button is his preferred manner, during those pre-digital days, of sound editing, as opposed to the less-immediate reel-to-reel splicing and cutting of tape, and suggests a new cultural form, leading him to spawn the terms ‘Pause Culture’ and ‘the low-tech tape movement’.16 Environmental sounds, Rue’s primary musical materials, continue to provide him with ‘abstract and subconscious pleasures and an inner understanding of the physical environment’,17 and manipulating them serves a sense of being able to assert control over the world from which they derive. This forms a definite break

it (but managed to keep playing); Nagorcka renamed the piece and incorporated snoozing as a performance direction. Ibid.

12 For examples, see Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, p. 37.13 Cox and Warner, ‘Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture’, p. xiii.14 For a discussion of the contemporaneous use of cassettes in post-punk music making

in John Nixon’s Anti-music collectives, see Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, pp. 39–40.

15 In 1980, he chanced upon a cassette tape that was lying in the gutter in a Sydney street. The cassette in question was The Boomerang Cassette Club, an aural chain letter – a precursor to today’s internet social networking activities – whereby people (‘mostly old blokes and non-musicians’) around the world, interested in sonically diarizing their day-to-day events, maintained contact with one another. He went on to use the tape in a new work. Jon Rose, ‘Interview with Rik Rue’, Australia Adlib (2003), at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s881960.htm, accessed 23 November 2006.

16 Rik Rue, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/rue.htm, accessed 14 August 2005. Virtuosity with cassette-player manipulation is also claimed by Ernie Althoff: Ferric-oxide Archaeology: A Survey of Audio Cassette Player Manipulation Techniques in Live Performance, 1977–91, John Jenkins and NMA Publications (2002), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/IDA.htm, accessed 19 January 2008.

17 Rik Rue, Top 80 (2004), at http://top80.pl/disc/artist/Rik+Rue, accessed 14 August 2005.


from the experimentalist removal of the author’s will from the process of art making. He furthers the complex postmodern take on the authorial voice through his blatant, wholesale embracing of found materials in many of his found sonic objects, while his comment in 1982, ‘Utilizing television, radio and sounds from the mass media. The consumer turns producer’,18 bespeaks a late-modernist railing against music industry control.19

Ernie Althoff’s 51 Flexibles for Gramophone Users (1985) reflects transparently on itself and its operations in the cause of the postmodern demystification of the creative process. A humorous robotic voiceover delivers a litany of orders/suggestions, over which is superimposed glitch with irritating yet simultaneously endearing fragments: ‘change the stylus/cartridge’, etc., after a definition of the word and its origin.20 Other Althoff works with a similar intention are The Way I See It and You’ve Got the Option, cassette pieces released on NMA TAPES in 1985, concerning the experiences of listening to a cassette and how they can be augmented and creatively shaped.21 While similar methods of ‘assembling’ music occurred in experimentalist musique concrète works, it is the overt foregrounding of the production process, along with the humorous content, that marks a postmodern sensibility.

Rainer Linz with Elaine Davies formed The Splinter Faction Group in Melbourne, 1980, which gave one-off performances at various Melbourne venues.22 The events were tailored to the specific occasion and its setting, and included poetry readings, seminar material, and some content that, like Rue’s emulation of vomiting and animal noises, not to mention arguments and sounds of warfare, is wholly incongruous to traditional performance: cooking smells, the actual process of entering the audience space, issuing and collecting free tickets (although non-ticket holders were also not charged admission), etc. The very name of the group itself provoked strong audience reaction, while performances

18 Rik Rue, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers. 19 Hollis Taylor sums up a common aspiration on the part of sound artists when

she describes Jon Rose, whose compositional initiatives began in this watershed time, as ‘neither a conformist [nor] a consumer, he’: Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose, Post Impressions: A Travel Book for Tragic Intellectuals (Portland, OR: Twisted Fiddle, 2007), p. 24. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). Influential social critic Theodor W. Adorno’s main argument is that the culture industry commodified and standardized art, at the expense of individuality and critical thinking. Also see Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert and Susan H. Gillespie, Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

20 See Michael J. Noone, Robert S. Parker and Canberra School of Music, Anthology of Australian Music on Disc: Handbook (Canberra: Canberra School of Music, 1989).

21 Rik Rue, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers. 22 Such as the Guild Theatre, CHCMC, La Trobe University, and at various art

galleries.


engendered either fervently supportive or pointedly mute listener response.23 With no definite beginnings and endings of pieces, the experience occupied an uncertain border, crossing ‘performance’ and ‘non-performance’, in order to extend the concept of the stage and allow it to infiltrate beyond the performance event. This concept was to prove one of the defining aspects of sound art installations in subsequent decades.

Labels are important as symbols just as much as they are descriptors. They are significant for what they represent in a profound cultural sense, not only for superficial distinguishing purposes but also for a deep sense of one’s own identity. They can also be delimiting and negative. For people engaging in what to all intents and purposes ‘should/could’ be labelled ‘composition’, the fact that some would not desire to be tagged ‘composers’ shows the extent to which experimentalists sought – and many current sound artists still seek – to position themselves ex-centrically and anarchically. But such political high ground is not so easily sustained in a culture whose precepts are antithetical, as the next section will reveal.

Utopian Sound Visions

‘Happy Anarchy’

Warren Burt’s interest in mistakes, errors and glitches dates back to the early-1970s, where, through his work with the group Fatty Acid, he perceived the effects of mistakes, hearing them not as deviations from a norm, but as sounds ‘in their own right’, and which he found quite ‘beautiful’. Similarly in his work with technology, he has often pushed circuits or software beyond the functionality envisioned by the designer.24 Thus the usual relationship between music and noise is inverted. This inversion contains more than simple noisist anarchy at its intentional core. Just as experimentalism in international settings perceived technology as a potential instrument for social betterment, so did early Australian sound art making. Emerging from the post-1960s ‘hippy’ era of raised political consciousness, a commitment to social change was at the heart of CHCMC’s enterprise. The manner in which one might demonstrate one’s political commitment through one’s musical artworks was through text scores, devoid of musical staves but full of ‘instructions’. Unlike traditional music scores that create a unidirectional power flow from composer to

23 Rainer Linz, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/linz.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

24 Warren Burt, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/burt.html, accessed 14 August 2005. Also see Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure’, p. 393. Also see Chapter 2 of present volume.


performer, text scores rather dissipate and diffuse control, authority and power in a multidirectional fashion that encompasses composer, performer (often the same person in experimental genres) and audience.25

One of the earliest Australian sound installations, Ros Bandt’s 1977 Surfaces and Cavities at CHCMC was a labyrinth of some 39 various materials and surfaces, to which it was possible to ‘listen’ by hitting a suspended coat hanger against them and holding the attached strings against one’s ears: ‘the old toy telephone approach’.26 Much of Bandt’s ‘performance/participation’ instructions are in impassioned capital letters, a vivid example of the urgency – the almost evangelical fervour – felt by early Australian sound art creators that everyone should be enlivened – and enlightened – by their sound explorations. Auditors–viewers are invited to work their way through the ‘Listening Pathway’, to strike surfaces with the coat hanger, focusing the listening (through the coat hanger) to the ‘MAGIC’ of each sound’s start, middle and cessation.27 Participants are then told to attend to the sounds of their own bodies, ‘unique’, ‘resonating chamber[s] for listening’, and notice how their bodies ‘relate to the different surfaces, textures, densities’.28 This becomes a metaphor for human beings’ adaptability, with Bandt urging people to ‘[l]earn how to use every environment in a personally meaningful way. Make your own piece. Find your own pathway. Choose. Discriminate. Utilise time, opportunity, space, people and make a positive contribution for yourself and for society. YOUR BODY AND YOUR IRRATIONAL SUBJECTIVITY NEED NOT BE A PRISON’.29 This exhortation to transcend individual subjectivity reflects the Cagean aim of letting sound be (after one has created it with an unusual source in the context of music making – namely, a coat hanger). But this is offset by the equally strong directive to ‘choose, discriminate’, with the aim of the improvement of society and self.

A similar collective to Melbourne’s CHCMC was Sydney’s AZ Music (1970–76), an outcome of the free weekly class in experimental music called the Laboratory of the Creative Ear, initiated by Sydney composer David Ahern at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1970. The philosophies of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew were central to the group, which showed disdain for ‘all academicism and the accumulation of data’.30 For the AZ Music members and its

25 See Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, p. 55.26 Ros Bandt, in 22 Contemporary Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications

(2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/bandt.htm, accessed 9 January 2006.

27 Ros Bandt, Surfaces and Cavities (Program Notes), in The New Music Newspaper (1977–78), at http://warrenburt.squarespace.com/new-music-newspaper/, accessed 22 January 2009. Emphasis in original.

28 Ibid.29 Ibid.30 Ernie Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, New Music Articles 7 (1989): 9. Ahern had studied

in Germany with Karlheinz Stockhausen and performed with Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch


offshoot, the short-lived but intense and influential improvisation group Teletopa (1971–73), the ‘noise’ of their experimentalism had an avowed political slant, with anarchy at its core.

The word ‘teletopa’ encapsulates the group’s intent: ‘topa’, from the Greek ‘topos’, means ‘the place of origin of ideas’, and here, improvisation is the originating catalyst for musical ideas. ‘Topos’ refers to the ‘utopian possibilities of society in the future’.31 Ahern comments that Cage is the ‘father-figure behind this revolution, opening our ears’ to mundane, quotidian sounds and questioning the need for the concert hall along with specialist performers through the acceptance of ubiquitous sounds and noises occurring ‘naturally’.32 Cardew, writes Ahern, marks the subsequent step from Cage’s liberation of sounds by liberating people through his Scratch Orchestra, where between 20 and 100 random people gather in the practice of music making: ‘The implication is that there need be no audience, only performers. Enter Teletopa with what might be the next step: to take music right out of the concert halls and confront the masses electronically, on television’.33 Improvisation was ideally a ‘mini music-utopia’,34 for ‘living in – as with physical space or time – rather than [listening] to’,35 where hierarchy is absent and individual expression is given utterly free rein; content determines form and occurs in the moment. Music is thus to provide an allegorical situation of a happy anarchy impossible in day-to-day life.36

One can note resonances here with Jacques Attali’s vision of a noise-produced utopia, where ‘wealth’ is ‘stockpile[d] no longer’ but rather ‘transcend[ed]’, and where ‘we … play for the other’ and ‘exchange the noises of bodies, to hear the noises of others in exchange for one’s own, to create, in common, the code within which communication will take place.37 These sentiments are the bedrock for Burt’s review of the work Divide by 4? No, Divide by 3 (1983) by CHCMC sub-collective IDA (Institute for Dronal Anarchy, a spin-off from Nagorcka and Burt’s duo, Plastic Platypus),38 comprising Ernie Althoff, Ron Nagorcka and Graeme Davis: ‘(the work) proposes a structural model of a functioning anarchy, a model based on freedom and co-operation rather than regulation and competition. In this

Orchestra in some of its very early concerts. AZ Music took as a blueprint this overseas activity, and ‘probably represented the greatest single influx of new music to Australia to that date’: Geoffrey Barnard, ‘AZ It Was’, eds John Jenkins and NMA Publications, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/Barnard.htm (accessed 23 April 2005).

31 David Ahern, ‘Teletopian Utopia’, Bulletin (1972): 49.32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 Geoffrey Barnard, quoted in Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, p. 9. Teletopa ‘began a new

era in AZ: namely that of live, continuous improvisation’: ibid., p. 10.35 Ibid., p. 10. 36 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 37 Attali, Noise, p. 143. Also see Chapter 1 of present volume.38 See Introduction to present volume, note 27.


sense then, their [IDA’s] work can be seen as political, for it proposes structural models to society different from the ones we now have’.39

Ernie Gallagher also acknowledges, however, the unfeasibility of this idealized state: ‘This utopia of immediacy is easily obliterated, as our memory tends to create often unnecessary relationships in the music. It is striven for but never reached’.40 Nevertheless, Gallagher insists that,

[e]ven though we cannot erase our memory, environment or fellow players to achieve these imaginings, there is a far richer goal – that of social and environmental involvement unshackled by the constraints of notation, regimentation, rote learning, hierarchy or ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in sound. Instead, the other players, the environment and the resultant sounds become the score. Sound architecture becomes a possibility as the players make use of the acoustics of the differing environments in which they find themselves.41

What transpired in the wider world when these ideals were attempted? In one instance, a ‘riot’ ensued at a Sydney Town Hall Prom concert in 1971 when AZ Music performed Cardew’s ‘Paragraph 2’ from The Great Learning simultaneously with an improvisation by Teletopa, comprised ‘essentially’ of, according to a review of the concert, ‘a battle between singers and drummers’ where the singers ‘intoned prolonged notes through loud-hailers and drummers [were] placed among the audience’.42 While Gallagher laments the ‘staidness’ of Prom concert audiences,43 he also refers to the Prom concert as ‘the highlight of our career in many ways’:44 the recognition of the anarchic disruption for the bourgeois Prom audience and critic proved more gratifying for AZ Music than unreserved praise and empathy.

AZ Music’s post-Cagean ‘greatest achievement’ did not lie in

creating anything radically new (although this is how it can be seen) but in revealing what actually exists in sound – and in nature. It is an exposé of sound.

39 Ernie Althoff, IDA Stands for Institute for Dronal Anarchy: The History of an Ensemble, 1979–1983, eds John Jenkins and NMA Publications (2008), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/IDA.htm, accessed 19 January 2008.

40 Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, p. 10. 41 Ibid.42 Frank Harris, ‘Concert Ends in Near Riot’, reproduced in Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, p.

11. Also see Jim Denley’s vivid description of Teletopa performances, ‘the loudest music I had ever experienced’: ‘Networks, Playfulness and Collectivity: Improv in Australia 1972–2007’, Experimental Music, ed. Priest, p. 137.

43 Additionally, he comments that another performance of the work (at the Pitt Street Congregational Church) only two months earlier had been received very favourably for both audience and critics alike: Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, p. 10.

44 Ibid.


Concert halls and traditional music structures tend to suppress this as they distract our attention away from real and natural sounds, reducing them to the level of mere ‘interruptions’. It is as though we stand outside nature in a vain attempt to control it, rather than living with it.45

Many of the ideas espoused and practised by AZ Music and Teletopa were ‘either intentionally or, through ignorance, unwittingly quashed by an overbearing and intransigent musical establishment epitomised by the Music Board of the Australia Council’.46

So Ernie Gallagher and Greg Schiemer stepped outside the marginal performance spaces of late experimentalist activity into the heart of the mainstream, treating primetime television to an example of their anarchic ‘guerilla-art’ performance displays. Channel 10’s then-popular talent quest Pot of Gold was graced in the mid-1970s by simultaneous performances of John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) (wherein the pianist does not play anything) and Ernie Gallagher’s Stethophonics for Solo Audience (n.d.) (wherein sounds are heard only by the performer). The event was awarded the show’s lowest score ever, at that time.47

Meanwhile, back in the more customary performance spaces for early sound art, a CHCMC performance took place of Nagorcka’s 3-hour Atom Bomb: An Operatic Trilogy (1977), scored primarily for voices, toy instruments and cassette tape recorders, where the performers originate sounds and then, using tape recorders, manipulate them by following the score’s detailed instructions. Each section of the trilogy concludes as a playback of the tapes that have been generated during the performance, positioned at each of the four corners of the room. The majority of the audience disappeared after the first of the three intervals.48

45 Ibid., p. 12.46 Ibid., p. 13. Ernie Althoff’s similarly astringent tone encapsulates the sentiments

felt by early sound artists towards the establishment and its lack of support – ‘The attitude of the then Music Board of the Australia Council [in 1978] to CHCMC was such that some antiquated recording equipment (remnants from New Music Centre days) stored in a back room at the Organ Factory [where the Centre was housed] was requested to be returned’: ‘The Clifton Hill Community Centre’, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/Clifton_Hill.html (accessed 5 August 2005).

47 Greg Schiemer, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/schiemer.htm, accessed 14 August 2005. The only instrument in Stethophonics is a stethoscope and a resonating chamber. Gallagher would attend concerts in 1972 put on by Ahern ‘armed with stethoscopes and acoustic resonators (cups or glasses) to perform the listening work in the audience’: Gallagher, ‘AZ Music’, p. 12.

48 Although, admittedly, Nagorcka declares that he himself ‘can’t listen to more than thirty seconds of the tapes without wanting the blessings of silence’, quoted in Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 35. Also see Jenkins, Ron Nagorcka.


In the 1989 issue of NMA, Stan Anson, in his article ‘Old Whines in New Battles, or 20th-Century Music and 18th-Century Reviewers’, referred to a ‘deaf’ critic, whose critical apparatus consists of

a range of empty critical adjectives whose significance is not technical but normative, which refer not to properties of the music, but to properties of the critic’s subjectivity … The critic claims the right to say what is not real music, real theatre, a real composer, but feels no responsibility to identify what … it is that makes real music real.49

Linz’s conclusion, drawn from the fact that at least one prominent music critic had refused to review performances of modern music since around this time, is that ‘the ground for musical debate had shifted’ and that this constituted a ‘tacit’ – if paradoxical – ‘acknowledgement of the legitimacy of emerging ideas’.50

In the face of such disregard and lack of appreciation from the ‘establishment’ – and even (at the Atom Bomb Trilogy performance) from those who were to become their audience – towards the endeavours of the CHCMC members, a response of anger is to be expected, and it is no great surprise that the DIY ethic is so strong: self-sufficiency in the creative use of objects as instruments is as much pragmatically necessary as it is part of the experimentalist ethos. New Music magazine’s51 documentation of the CHCMC’s events had an editorial self-review policy whereby CHCMC practitioners reviewed each other’s concerts, and the reviewer subsequently interviewed the performer, as exemplified above.52 This served to some degree to insulate the works and artists from uninformed or antagonistic, conservative reviews. The irony here is that the establishment, acting as ‘norm’ to experimentalism and early sound art’s ‘Other’, helped distinguish the experimentalist/sound art enterprise and assisted in galvanizing its operations, which at this time was a vital aspect for this collective.53

Members of the Clifton Hill collective believed that the DIY approach finds a strong affinity with notions of Australian-ness. Chris Mann, for example, in his Rationales of 1986 contends: ‘An Australian is someone who when asked, “Can you play the piano?”, says, “Dunno I never tried”’.54 This accords with the sense of, in Rainer Linz’s words, Australian ‘democratic fair play’, where Linz comments that post-Settlement Australia’s relative youth means ‘it should not be

49 Cited in Linz, Publishing the Debate.50 Ibid.51 Edited by David Chesworth and Philip Brophy, it ran several issues from 1978 and

contributed documentation of activities at the CHCMC, along with NMA and Warren Burt’s and Les Gilbert’s New Music Newspaper, which ran three issues in 1977.

52 See note 4, above. 53 The DIY aesthetic has parallels in contemporary electronica subgenres, see Taylor,

Strange Sounds, ‘Music at Home, Politics Afar’, pp. 162–4. 54 Quoted in Linz, Publishing the Debate.


surprising to find ambivalence toward older – which is to say European – cultures. Rather, the impetus for musical creation has been found elsewhere’.55 Most of the initiatives of experimentalists in the 1970s and early-1980s did not occur within any institutional context, with activities in the field largely unacknowledged by the music schools and universities that maintained traditional focus on technique and looked to international ‘academic’ models for the teaching of composition. Subsequently, as was the case for international experimentalists/early sound artists,56 much ex-academy activity occurred outside institutions and many composers had no formal music training.57

Noise in these late-experimentalist activities provided a vehicle for perverse, autonomous, anarchistic play. A different aspiration for utopian sound visions also came into operation in the late-1970s, and the next section details some of these.

Reaching for ‘the Higher Centres of Consciousness’: Aeolian Harps, Harmonic Singing and the Spiritual

Projecting a vastly different energy to that detailed above, further approaches to a utopian vision abound during this watershed time in the 1970s – and beyond. Noise has also served as a means to a state of ecstasy and transcendence, shaping the musical aesthetic of drone-based minimalists Americans La Monte Young and Tony Conrad as well as free jazz players.58 In Aeolian harp (and related) works instruments are crafted that the wind can ‘play’. Such an approach has certain affinities with so-called New Age music but is less commercialized, less ‘manicured’, more raw. Further, Sally Macarthur believes, such music ‘has the effect of cleansing contemporary music of its ultra rationality’,59 and also, asserts James D’Angelo, reaches ‘the higher centres of consciousness’,60 a state sought in Pauline Oliveros’s ‘deep listening’ projects.61 Experimentalism is often depicted – and indeed largely saw itself – as an ‘antidote’ to ‘academic modernism’ and

55 Ibid.56 See Chapter 2 of present volume.57 Linz, Publishing the Debate. Also see Julian Knowles’s description of the situation

about contemporary sound art in Australia in Sound Ideologies? 58 Cox and Warner, ‘I: Music and Its Others’, p. 6.59 Sally Macarthur, ‘Women, Spirituality, Landscape: The Music of Anne Boyd,

Sarah Hopkins and Moya Henderson’, The Soundscapes of Australia, ed. Richards, p. 64. Macarthur puts forward a compelling case that such sensibilities reflect a feminist stance.

60 James D’Angelo, ‘Towards a New Phenomenon of Sound in the Age of Aquarius’, Contemporary Music Review 15/3–4 (1996): 121, cited in Macarthur, ‘Women, Spirituality, Landscape’, p. 64. This approach is founded on the principles underlying the Acoustic Ecology movement, which was developed in the 1970s, see Chapter 2 of present volume. Ros Bandt is a founding member for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, which began in 1993.

61 See Chapter 2 of present volume.


its mathematically informed procedures. But it is Macarthur’s use of the word ‘cleansing’ and D’Angelo’s notion of ‘higher centres of consciousness’ here with regard to the Aeolian harp works that is significant and adds a layer to what might otherwise be seen as merely neutral ‘choice’, based around mere aesthetic considerations, in composition.

Sarah Hopkins cites Peter Hamel’s Through Music to the Self: How to Appreciate and Experience Music Anew as a significant influence on her aesthetic. The book first appeared in 1978, around the time of Hopkins’s own musico-spiritual epiphany. Hamel reports on what he perceives as a then-new ‘spiritual’ music that transcends the usual ideas of the experimental avant-garde, the culmination point of transformations of consciousness that started at the turn of the twentieth century, associated with such names as Pythagoras and the Music (or Harmony) of the Spheres, Einstein, Planck, Freud and Jung, with roots extending back to ancient cultures and mythologies from Asia, Africa and South America, and that he believes are elements of our collective, deeply recessed consciousness that ‘open up once again those stopped up wells of music which alone can reveal the way to a new type of musical experience encompassing man’s [sic] being in its entirety’.62

According to Hamel, this ancient ‘knowledge’ had been eroded by Western rationality, while it was ‘re-discovered’ at various points in Western history, such as in the Middle Ages by Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher, Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler, and resurfacing in 1960s jazz and minimalism.63 Prolonged chants, ‘ecstatic’ rhythms and ancient melodic patterns have been found to transport present-day Westerners into states of consciousness that transcend subjective personality and lock into the ‘collective unconscious within the human psyche’.64 The book also explores ‘the astonishing and nowadays demonstrable parallels between the laws of acoustics and the human psyche – taking in musical meditation, self-experience through breathing, singing and playing, and a variety of tried and tested exercises for individual and group-work on the way’.65

62 Peter Michael Hamel, Through Music to the Self: How to Appreciate and Experience Music Anew, trans. Peter Lemesurier (Longmead: Vega, 2002; 1978), pp. 1–2. Hamel asserts, ‘Whether in avant-garde music, in Jazz or in Pop music, we have been witnessing a trend towards a more soul-oriented, introverted musical language’ (p. 2). While this claim is a mite overblown – it was made in 1978, and the trend he perceived then does not seem to have taken over the world of music making in the West –, it can certainly be argued that there is a burgeoning interest in – and belief in – music that can ‘do more’ regarding the spiritual dimension.

63 Ibid., p. 2.64 Ibid., p. 92. It is significant that Pauline Oliveros describes her venture into overtone

domain as being akin to a ‘witch capturing sounds from a nether realm’, see Chapter 1 of present volume, note 39.

65 Ibid., p. 2.


In ancient Egyptian practice, each single, sustained note, intoned by all who were present, signified an incantation to a particular deity.66 Immersing oneself in the harmonic spectrum is, in numerous Asian and Arabic schools, a form of sound meditation leading to self-realization. The single note and the significance of the intervals make up the interest in the ‘new spiritual music’. The harmonic series’ ‘natural law’ has, it is believed, congruities both with demonstrable scientific fact, such as decreasing the length of string (spatial variable) resulting in an increase of frequency count (temporal variable), and with esoteric or mystical knowledge. In scientific fields such as chemistry, atomic physics, crystallography, astronomy, architecture, botany and spectroanalysis is an underlying framework of whole-number ratios such as those perceptible in notes – the octave, fifth, third and fourth:67

Under the terms of the ancient techniques of acoustic self-realisation, the knowledge of … interval subdivisions of a string took on the role of a link between nature and the soul. For these basic laws reveal the connection between notes and numbers: the intervals can be physically experienced, and the ratios correspond to particular feelings.68

Cultures from ancient Hindu rishis, the Persian Sufis, Adepts of Zoroastrianism, priests of Egyptian pyramids, to voodoo magicians and medicine men of Africa and South America believe that mantric syllables, whether sung or inwardly recited, bring about a subtle internal process that progressively awakens the invisible centres (chakras) and leads them to more profound dimensions of their consciousness. Belief systems about mantras, derived from ancient Greek music theory, assert that ‘a body can be disintegrated by means of its “own note” or basic resonance frequency’.69 Conversely, both Hamel’s research into the sound

66 Fritz Stege, Musik, Magie, Mystik (Remagen: Otto Reichel, 1961), p. 133, cited in and tr. by Hamel, Through Music to the Self, p. 97. ‘The octave and fifth rule the universe as the basis of all our music; and indeed it was only later that the chord of the third entered man’s conceptual horizons as a typically “human” phenomenon’: ibid.

67 Ibid., p. 106. 68 Ibid., p. 100. ‘Since these proportions can be detected by the ear, and even at that

time were recognised as laws fundamental to all music, musical concepts become central to the ancient Greek view of the world’: ibid.

69 Ibid., pp. 109–11. The Appendix to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927) reads: ‘Each organism exhibits its own vibratory rate, and so does every inanimate object from the grain of sand to the mountain and even to each planet and sun. When this rate of vibration is known, the organism or form can, by occult use of it, be disintegrated’ – or, for that matter, continues Hamel, ‘cognised and brought into awareness’, cited ibid., p. 109. Astronomer and astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) showed the correspondences between musical ratios (of ½, ⅓, ¾, etc.), nature (including bodily subdivisions), and the spacings of the planets, and deduced that the musical proportions must be inborn in the human soul, thus prefiguring Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious. The soul, therefore, ‘thanks to


production of the singing of the natural harmonic series and its dependence upon the vowel sung, or, more specifically, upon positioning the mouth in the formation of the vowel,70 and that conducted by Professor Middendorf in his breathing schools, found that zones of the body can be ‘opened’ by singing vowels and ‘harmonic singing’ (that is, reaching the overtone series through singing single notes by careful shaping of the embouchure), and hence bring about healing.71

This approach to music requires a corresponding listening practice, which Nestler describes as ‘pure’, and which transcends habituated intellectual and emotional responses. Effective listening concentrates on the sound and its shape in order to achieve the triggering capabilities of the music. ‘Tone-colour music is the most musical of music, because it is the music of the elemental nature of sound’.72

Aeolian tones, named after Aeolus, the god of wind in Greek mythology, are produced by the wind harp, one of the oldest musical instruments discovered by humankind: legend relates that King David hung his harp in an open window and heard it ‘played’ by the wind. In present-day times, the same effect is produced by telephone lines and power lines. When the wind activates the Aeolian harp string, only the overtone series is sounded, never the fundamental (unlike other instruments and singing). The velocity of the wind will produce the pitch that the listener perceives: the greater the wind speed, the higher the activated overtone. The resulting sounds have a gleaming, ringing quality.73 The laws of fluid dynamics mean that, when air flows past a cylinder (here, a string), it sheds vortices to either side in a regular and repetitive pattern. When this oscillation frequency is matched by that of the string’s tuning, an Aeolian tone sounds (with the string’s vibration perpendicular to the wind).74

the primal relationships which are native to it, reacts spontaneously to external harmonic manifestations’, cited ibid., pp. 109–10. Italics in original.

70 There is a gradual transition from one vowel to another – for example, from A, via O to U. Gradually modifying the mouth cavity from A to U, and through guttural pressure and mental concentration, produces the second voice, the ‘overtone-voice’, and one can discern how the formant spectrum descends from the seventh overtone to the second. And to form still higher harmonics requires shaping the mouth to a different, ‘higher’ vowel. The transition from the lower to the higher overtones in vocal production gives a correspondence between the overtones, the mathematical ratios 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 etc., and the vowel sequence U, O, A, E, I. Ibid., pp. 123–4.

71 Ibid., pp. 125 and ff. ‘If used correctly, music can heal, remove anxiety and bring relaxation through the linking of the inner tone-colour zones, i.e., the relative proportions of the “upper sounds” of a harmonic series, with the corresponding parts of the body and of the inner man’ (p. 129).

72 Gerhard Nestler, Die Form in der Musik (1954), quoted ibid., p. 109.73 Bill and Mary Buchen, Sonic Architecture (2000), at http://www.sonicarchitecture.

com/catalogue/maintext.htm, accessed 3 July 2009.74 Ibid.


Sarah Hopkins Sarah Hopkins’s compositional development traces a trajectory experienced by many people of her generation. When she began composing, her tendency was to include ‘everything’ – to display the full scope of sound possibilities; her next step was pure improvisation. The pressure she placed on herself to produce something new and different became enervating, and she came to crave structure: ‘Effectively, I had expanded and stretched the cello’s vocabulary to the limits and now wanted and needed to hone right down to the heart and essence of sound’.75

Hopkins’s longstanding explorations in harmonic singing and Aeolian harps were the route to this ‘essence’. They began when in 1980 at the Pro Musica Nova Festival in Bremen she chanced upon a man trained in Mongolian chant, singing in a public park. She was struck by his ability to intone a deep bass note simultaneously with streams of harmonic overtones, unaided, produced by precise positioning of the shape of the mouth cavity to create a ‘second vocal part’ in a much higher register, consisting of high harmonics or overtones, the natural upper partials of the sung bass fundamental. She then went on to emulate this technique on the cello, gradually evolving her ‘harmonic bowing’, which involves careful manipulation of the bow near the bridge – distinct, however, from traditional ‘ponticello’ playing –, drawing out the full harmonic series of the fundamental note and using it to weave subtle and complex melodies, augmented by left-hand vibrato. Hopkins also trained herself in harmonic singing, and went on to combine the techniques in voice and cello playing.76 She subtly reveals her acceptance of the notion that harmonic singing is a route to the spiritual dimension: ‘The ghostly and almost supernatural effect of [harmonic] singing makes it easy to understand the tradition that singers able to master such overtone melodies were in touch with the spirits’.77

Hopkins’s Cello Chi (1986) emerged after a kind of self-imposed exile of several months, during which the composer immersed herself in intensive meditative playing and composing, and was inspired by ‘the unhurried rhythms of the natural environment of the Northern Territory’, its landmarks inspiring Hopkins to reflect in a number of pointed sonic references, through emulating the sound of the didgeridoo and to this end employing extended vocal and cello techniques.78 ‘Bowed harmonics’ represent the shimmering of the sea; ‘circular didgeridoo bowing’, an original technique of Hopkins produced by moving the bow in a circular, diagonal motion between the fingerboard and bridge, thus highlights the textural and timbral shifts in the sound from sul tasto to sul ponticello while pulsations of the bow generate rhythmic variations, all evoking a ‘textured

75 Sarah Hopkins, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/hopkins.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

76 Ibid.77 Ibid.78 Ibid.


escarpment’.79 A sustained open ‘G’, ebbing and swelling in volume, is meant to conjure ‘sunset clouds shot through with golden light threads’, and harmonic singing ‘draws out “golden light strands” above and through it’.80 The result is a hypnotically contemplative effect.

This new compositional path found further expression when Warren Burt gave Hopkins a Blugal toy in 1982, a ‘Whirly’ instrument, inspiring her to make her own larger ones, using swimming pool hosing, then developing, with kitemaker Sharon Pacey, a soundkite with a Whirly mounted on its spine.81 The Whirly functions as an Aeolian harp.

Hopkins’s Whirliworks is the title for an ongoing compositional project for ‘Whirly’ instruments, initiated in 1982. She constructs whirlies from corrugated hosing of different lengths and diameters, which she precisely tunes; sounds they produce can be both melodic and percussive. The player whirls the instrument through the air, similarly to an Aboriginal bullroarer. As speed increases, the pitch rises through the harmonic series, providing an average of five separate notes. Whirlies may be used in solo, duo or ensemble performances.82 Interweave (1984), for example, for six players and six precisely tuned Whirly instruments, is a structured improvisation, the score directions for which read,

Interweave: ‘whirly’ sound fabric: One by one, as with single threads, weave together. Nurture your sounds to their full vibrating sustains. Listen always and work with the live fabric design (gently) interweaving your sound threads. Allow the fabric breathing space but don’t let all the threads cease ‘singing’ until the sound fabric is complete.83

The score contains specific and detailed technical instructions. Hopkins is concerned to allow the freedom for the performers ‘to make it their own, while demanding interaction and creativity in the moment as they rehearse and perform’.84

Hopkins’s Wind Music For Earth And Sky (1986), in collaboration with choreographer Beth Shelton, for seven dancers and variety of precisely tuned Whirly instruments, is intended to encompass an immersive experience where sound, movement, lighting and visual content are completely assimilated and the Whirly instruments are the central and uniting factor. Hopkins found, for example, that she needed ‘total bodily involvement’ to meet the physical challenge

79 Ibid.80 Ibid.81 Sarah Hopkins, ‘“Whirly Instruments”: Sarah Hopkins’, Experimental Musical

Instruments 5/3, October (2005; 1989): 10–13, at http://www.windworld.com/back_issues/bi5-6.htm, accessed 8 November 2005.

82 Sarah Hopkins, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.83 Hopkins, ‘“Whirly Instruments”’.84 Sarah Hopkins, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.


of playing a 4-metre-long instrument, while otherwise ‘the unity was expressed through integrated sound and spatial patterns’.85

Journeys on the Winds of Time 1 (1988–89) Traversing the urban and beyond, Alan Lamb’s Journeys on the Winds of Time 1 (1988–89) is the first of a series ‘exploring the emotional structures of the Australian continent and mythology’.86 Displaying clear affinities with American experimentalist Alvin Lucier’s groundbreaking Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), Journeys on the Winds of Time 1 consists of sounds produced by activating and electronically treating piano wire strung across the room. But where Lucier’s recording was made in a studio, situated indoors, Lamb’s is a recording of the sounds made by 3 miles of abandoned telegraph wires ‘singing’ in the wind in the Great Southern Hinterland of Western Australia. In this way, Lamb creates a huge ‘wind harp’ through his modifications of the wires, playing them with subtle manipulations of tension in the wires and the wind, recorded using contact microphones, then modifying them in studio, resulting in ‘an essence of the singing wires into compositions neither of my own making nor simply of the natural forces with which I interact’.87

Lamb explains that the integer harmonics of the fundamental determine the natural frequencies. When dealing with very long, thick wires, as is the case for telephone wires, the fundamental falls well below 1 Hertz, with the result that only the higher harmonic frequencies lie in the auditory range. Very high harmonics of, for example, 250 Hertz and above, become so congested that their individual frequencies are no longer perceptible. Rather, they ‘beat’ together, resulting in lower-pitched second-order frequencies. Lamb suggests that, as the relationships to the fundamental are essentially lost, the lengths of wire could be considered as a family of interacting segments, each possessing its own fundamental within the auditory range. The ‘family’ metaphor extends to the idea of a myriad of wire voices, each vying for harmonic dominance within the ‘wire choir’. ‘Eigenvalue frequencies’ (in other words, the possible frequencies arising from the given set of conditions of wind and wire) produce the harmonic patterns that will dominate. These in turn culminate in sizeable great surges in volume reaching 120 decibels or more in dynamic range. When the wind shifts and the wire tension alters, the

85 Ibid. Hopkins’s work has parallels with the popular music subcultures of trance/Goa/psy, see Taylor, Strange Sounds, ‘Turn On, Tune In, Trance Out’, pp. 165–200.

86 Alan Lamb in Stephen Scott, Liner notes, Austral Voices (San Francisco, CA: New Albion Records, 1990). Lamb tells a poignant story of walking with his nanny as a 5-year-old and being instructed by her to put his ear to the telephone poles to ‘“hear the sound the world made”. He remembers hearing a faint hum, but it was only years later that he understood “the deep truth” of her claim’: Alan Lamb, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications, at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/lamb.htm, accessed 9 January 2006.

87 Lamb in Scott, Liner notes, Austral Voices.


harmonic coherence falls away, resulting in decrescendos and a renewed harmonic patterning.88

Lamb’s works encompass immense, remote spaces, ensnaring a complex organic sound system that he relates to coherent biological patterns such as those involved in the human brain.89 Ros Bandt, who often collaborates with Lamb, observes that sounds can travel over vast expanses before impacting on one another or even arriving at the listener.90 The significance of this means that the work literally transcends the reach of the composer, has a life of its own outside the composer’s control: this suggests a metaphor for the reception of art as a whole, and a new way of negotiating the relationships between creator, work and audience. An evolution from mid-twentieth-century experimentalism’s far more abstract operations is perceptible even at this point: there is an emerging site-specific dimension to Lamb’s works that is more particularized than the concept of mere sound as sound.

Night Satellite (1983) American sound artist Bill Fontana visited Australia in 1976 and utilized radio broadcasts to create sound sculptures linking sounds from various global locales in ever-new combinations, an approach with which many contemporary Australian sound artists have found resonance. Martin Wesley-Smith’s Night Satellite (1983) deployed three Fairlight synthesizers playing simultaneously in Japan, Australia and Canada.

The sounds were transmitted by satellite across the Pacific Ocean, using the distance and the speed of transmission as sound-processing phenomena. Wesley-Smith sent musical phrases to his counterparts Jean Piché in Vancouver and Osamu Shoji in Tokyo, which they returned via satellite, producing at each transmission, ‘literally, global echo effects’.91 The intention was to provide an example of harmonious international collaboration.92 This nascent yet overt political message is at a remove from the previous generation’s sonic immersions.

Early Engagements with Popular Culture and Postmodern Theory

Alan Licht describes an international generation working in contemporary Western art music who ‘bounce between writing critical/cultural theory, sound-making and curating; between the avant-garde music world, the electronica/dance music world, and the art world, putting their critical/cultural theory into practice, leading by example’.93 Douglas Kahn declares that ‘many contemporary composers, musicians

88 Alan Lamb, Liner notes, Primal Image (Mushroom Dorobo Records 008, 1995).89 Bandt, Sound Sculpture, p. 32. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., p. 130.92 Ibid.93 Licht and O’Rourke, Sound Art, p. 29.


and sound artists in Australia owe the strength of their insights’ not only to many of the poststructuralist and postmodern ideas that proliferated throughout Australian intellectual life in the 1980s and early-1990s – and are still continuing to do so – ‘but also to skillfully adapting them to their own ends within a larger, independent intellectual environment’.94 As Jon Dale similarly notes, after conversations with several key figures from the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre days, ‘Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the CHCMC at its most feverish juncture – between the late-1970s and early-1980s – is the way it negotiated the aesthetic and ideological spaces opening up between academia, composition, New Music, punk, post-punk, DIY, mutant disco and various other forms’.95

Composer Ian Andrews writes of his time there that there were two constituents within the electronic music community at CHCMC, one that evolved at Latrobe University, where there was a studio with a Serge Modular synthesizer and eight-track recording facilities, the other without an institutional context, deploying low-tech equipment, often cheap, often borrowed, frequently malfunctioning.96 This latter grouping itself consisted of two discernible divisions: one was rock oriented and the other used popular-music elements to ‘examine’ pop culture.

As mentioned above, a recurring feature in the New Music Articles, the ‘scripted’ interviews, enabled composers to present their own ideas unmediated by a critic, the practice akin to New Music magazine’s ‘in-house’ approach.97 Ian Cox’s scripted NMA interview on behalf of Essendon Airport (of which Cox was a member) devotes considerable space to discussing structuralism: the group purposefully sought to foreground cynical manipulation in consumer society – advertising, television, popular music.98 It is this willingness to engage with popular culture, and the inherent simultaneous critical dimension, that marks a definable postmodernism.

tsk tsk tsk

Philip Brophy’s tsk tsk tsk was a name he invented in 1977 for his artistic projects (also sometimes represented as *** and, at first, graphically by a visual sign denoted by three arrows presented in a stairs-like formation).99 The concept of such a name sprang from Brophy’s anti-Romantic – and anti-high modernist –

94 Kahn, ‘The Lyre’s Island’, p. 90. 95 Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 37. 96 Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, pp. 36–7. Also in this collection is Cat

Hope’s illuminating chapter on the experimental – that is, noise-based – band scene in Australia from the 1970s onwards, detailing the activities of such groups as Whirlywirld, SPK, Signals, etc.: ‘Cultural Terrorism and Anti-music’.

97 See Jon Rose’s ‘interviews’ above, notes 4 and 50.98 Ian Cox, ‘Essendon Airport’, New Music Articles 1 (1982): 30–33.99 Participators, under Brophy’s direction, were Ralph Traviato, Anthony Montemurro,

Maria Kozic, Jayne Stevenson and Leigh Parkhill: Philip Brophy, in 22 Contemporary


philosophical, Duchamp- and Warhol-inspired viewpoint towards artistic venture, reflected in IDA’s stance, namely, that it should really be seen as part of a broad ‘network of social and cultural communication’100 rather than the outpouring of an individual. ‘Tsk tsk tsk’ is also a commonly used, non-verbal ‘tut-tutting’ vocal expression to imply disapproval in a social setting. Co-opted here in a musical setting, the implication is that either the group is expressing (ironic) censure to its audience and/or critics, or it is pre-empting possible scorn or approbation as a response to the group’s enterprise.

Brophy preferred his name not to be foregrounded in his projects, spurning any ‘false’ ‘personalizing’ or ‘humanizing’ that ensues when an individual is singled out in artistic production.101 tsk tsk tks’s earlier graphic representation was sourced from Brophy’s ‘first and only sculpture, of three arrows fixed to the corner of a room. They indicated the three descriptions of volume: length, width and height’.102 It is as though Brophy wanted to distil some essence of artistic production. There is a definite forward-going impetus to the direction of the arrows – onwards and upwards and onwards, with no endpoint. There is also a de-subjectivized element to the arrows: in their scientific-like graphology, they read as antithetical to Romantic emotionalism.

The verbal rendition, tsk tsk tsk, replaced the arrows in 1977 and correlated with his growing interest in language and grammar. This name also functioned for Brophy as a ‘sign, a linguistic identity charting the flow of projects through and across social spaces “somewhere between Art and Pop”’.103 The brief for tsk tsk tsk was ‘to articulate problematics … dealing with issues that are cultural, ideological, political, historical, linguistic and semiological. And perhaps occasionally artistic’ – and here Brophy flaunts his postmodern, playful, anarchic credentials – ‘(But only occasionally)’.104

Reconciling Glitter and Stockhausen, or, Happy Muzak-ing

Philip Brophy remarks on the difficulty he felt in the mid-1980s – a tension that he claims not to have experienced a decade earlier – in reconciling his equal fascination with both Gary Glitter and Karlheinz Stockhausen (and noting that ‘today, he prefers Glitter’), which ‘seemed to offer a cultural lesson’ and enabled him to ‘trace the planar movement of these two identities – their spheres of location; their inscribed, prescribed and described roles in art. The space their paths defined

Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/brophy.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

100 Ibid.101 Ibid.102 Ibid.103 Ibid.104 Philip Brophy, ‘Fuck Dance – Let’s Art’, Sydney Tour 1981: A Mini-retrospective,

catalogue (1981), quoted in Andrews and Blades, ‘The Lost Decade’, p. 44.


became a map of musical culture, allowing … multiple entry points into their flow’.105 His perceived aesthetic dilemma in squaring his attraction to both Glam Rock and high modernism – occurring, significantly, during the mid-1980s rather than the mid-1970s – was informed by discussions around postmodernism, in which Brophy was actively involved.

Brophy’s descriptions of the following three works demonstrate the self-conscious grappling with multiple possible entry points into the flow of musical generic currents: ‘Minimalism (1977), for saxophone, guitar, piano and two synthesizers, consisted of approximately 12 pieces dealing with minimalist processes and their ability to convey the grammatical base of harmony, as apposed to its sonic phenomenology’.106 Nice Noise (1978), for drums, guitar, saxophone, bass synthesizer and drum machine, was approximately 20 songs experimenting with the notion of Muzak as a combination of stylistic presence and expressive absence.107 Nice Noise covered several prominent mainstream rock songs of the time (including, for example, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’, Yoko Ono’s ‘Why’, Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock & Roll Part 1’, as well as the lesser-known Brian Eno’s ‘Third Uncle’), as ‘an amalgamation of key moments in the sound of rock as opposed to any “rock mythology”, and most *** projects were about the “sound” of musical language’.108

Gender considerations were also given voice in Brophy’s output: Feminimalism (1978), performed by an all-girl group playing guitar, piano, two synthesizers and flute, reworked pieces from Minimalism. Further noteworthy ensemble pieces109 exhibiting this postmodern ironically investigative standpoint include the collective’s Narrative Music (1980), seven pieces concerned with articulating ‘a communicative model of “writing/telling/reading” in place of “composing/performing/listening”’; Formula Disco (1980), for drums, guitar, bass, synthesizer and tape loops, ten pieces ‘clinically deconstructing the various essences of disco formulae’; Wartime Art (1980), for three drums and two synthesizers, ten songs, half of which are cover versions, playing with the signification of martial qualities in music; Punk Band (1977), of approximately 20 cover versions of Glam Rock songs – such a camp move caricaturing punk’s hyper-‘straight’ conceit; and lastly, applying the deconstruction move to his own creations, is Self Distortion/Self Destruction (1979), 12 reworkings of the Minimalism set.110

105 Philip Brophy, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.106 Ibid.107 Ibid.108 Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 36. Dale points out here the congruities

between *** and UK outfits such as The Red Crayola’s work with Art & Language, and Scritti Politti’s ‘stealthy deconstructions of pop and soul’: ibid.

109 Variously for instruments ranging from synthesizers, drum machine, drums, guitar, saxophones, bass, tape loops.

110 Philip Brophy, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.


Brophy’s acceptance of the idea of Muzak as an artistic expression deserving of serious artistic consideration is noteworthy for postmodernism’s embracing of kitsch. Warren Burt, similarly, states that, among compositional interests in microtonality, algorithmics, physicality (involvement of the body in computer music) and acoustic instrument building, he (Burt) also utilizes ‘the entire continuum from good to bad taste as a compositional parameter’.111 His self-described Dr Burt’s Disco-fat Arkestra (sic) Plays Their Greatest Hits (1981) for computer-synthesized big band is one of ‘many examples of the lowest, crassest kind of bad taste’.112 Other works, such as An Eminently Performable Piece (1982) for Serge synthesizer ‘unblushingly attempt to achieve the most subtle kind of serious intensity’; and he does not consider either of these standpoints as contradictory, but rather, as complementary.113

David Chesworth reflects that, in composing his first recorded work, 50 Synthesizer Greats (1978), he is not striving for any specific style but finds that timbre, melody and references to Muzak and synthesizer clichés begin to predominate.114 And instead of banishing these, as a traditional art-music composer would, rather, in postmodern complicit critique fashion, he embraces them – while, at the same time, parodying them.

Essendon Airport A Clifton Hill Community Music Centre performance by another ‘outfit’ that operated there (from 1978 to 1982), Essendon Airport comprised Robert Goodge on guitar and David Chesworth on Wurlitzer electric piano ‘along with a home-made drum machine bought from the Trading Post’.115 Their performance of Sonic Investigations of the Trivial (1979) mixed pop, process music, toy instruments and consumer electronics,116 and was a manifestation of Cage’s ideal that composition not be ‘the organisation of constituent elements known as events but would instead be the provision of occasions where certain types of events could occur’.117

The piece involved playing cards, a map, an electric razor and a microphone to capture a ‘dirtied hum’ with Chesworth using his mouth as conduit, Goodge using

111 Warren Burt, Frog Peak Music, at http://www.frogpeak.org/fpartists/fpburt.htm, accessed 15 September 2006.

112 Warren Burt, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.113 Ibid.114 David Chesworth, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and

NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/TOC.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

115 Later were added Paul Fletcher on drums, Ian Cox on saxophone, and bass player Barbara Hogarth in 1982. The outfit still performs occasionally, see David Chesworth, Essendon Airport: Sonic Investigations of the Trivial (2008), at http://www.waxsm.com.au/chesworth/essendon.htm, accessed 15 January 2009.

116 Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 34. 117 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 263.


a walkie-talkie outside, following the red line drawn on the map and broadcasting his toy saxophone back into the space. Chesworth played a harmonium and they both executed minimalist fragments on guitar, keyboard and drum machine.118

Every high-art parameter is dismantled. The very title, Sonic Investigations of the Trivial, flags the anti-high-art preoccupations of the work and its creators and is a consequence of a certain antagonism to notions of high and low. The non-musical is mixed with the musical; the ‘score’ is a map; and the non-musical things are humorous, incongruous to an art-music setting, as are the musical instruments in the toy sax. Noise is a feature. Chesworth’s communicating music through the voice is problematized not only in the way described above but also by the use of walkie-talkies.

This work is very much a post-Cagean ‘Happening’, demonstrating the move away from art object to an event that focuses on the situation, informed by aleatoric occurrences, found objects, and a distinctly theatrical element.119 But the nature of the theatrical component has shifted from Cage’s aesthetic, which stood well outside any intentional popular-culture references.

Chesworth’s 50 Synthesizer Greats (1978) was executed on a basic Korg synthesizer and taped at home on a quarter-track machine with built-in ‘sound-on-sound’ facility. All were direct inscriptions onto tape, without prior notation. Once ‘written’, a line could not be altered without erasing the entire piece – and it was this which captivated Chesworth about the project.120 This is an example of the limits of technology being used as a compositional determinant, the creator rejoicing in those limitations. It is also an example of the avoidance of ‘polish’ and ‘craft’, traditionally taken for granted as an ideal to aspire to in Western art-music composition process.

Country Music Realized by Lego

Rik Rue’s LP record released in 1984 has a purposefully disingenuous title, Country Music of Southeastern Australia, from which one might expect benign songs conforming to the country music genre in subject matter, expression and instrumentation. It includes, however, such tracks as ‘The Bully Song’, ‘Private Club’, ‘My Gas Tank Runs On Booze’, ‘I’m Sorry’, ‘The Dog Song’, ‘My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died’, ‘Workingman Blues’ and ‘Sheik Of Scrubby Creek’. Such track titles display a willingness, tinged with postmodern ironic fun, to engage with Australian identity tropes, as well as to lampoon the genre of country music.

Along with Trombone: Burgate Ralph Eppel, and Violin, Piano: Jon Rose, collaborators include: ‘Percussion (Fucked-up Snare Drum), Other (Dr. Rhythm Box, Woodblocks, Measuring Cups, Lego Motors, Dead Microphone, 1/2 Watt

118 Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 34.119 See LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. 54 ff. 120 David Chesworth, 22 Contemporary Composers.


Guitar Amplifier, Human Cheeks), Vocals, Cymbal (6” Chinese Cymbal): David Moss; Tape, Noises (Animals, Vomiting, Miscellaneous Disturbances), with Rue providing the sounds for Other (Native Rituals, Arguments, Warfare)’.121 The state of the snare drum is laconically described (and not replaced) and the non-functioning microphone is considered no impediment: abhorrent and disturbing noises such as vomiting, arguments and warfare, and others such as animal sounds and unplanned sonic occurrences, are all embraced and acknowledged as just one more ‘musical’ sound source to be credited on the album, alongside traditional instruments.

Taking Issue with Postmodernism

The engagement with postmodernism was not always straightforward, not always a positive celebration of the phenomenon. Warren Burt’s Riffs for Ross (1988), for live sampler and tape, and Samples II for Orchestra: Ravel Homage (That Which is Neither a Deconstruction nor an Appropriation, Neither Bricolage Nor Post-Modern) (1987) have a meta-purpose. They comprise musical quotations of works using a sampler – of Ravel and vintage bebop recordings from Ross Bolleter’s personal collection in the latter work – in order to ‘call into question the whole use of the term “post-modern”’, which Burt feels (writing in 1988) ‘has been so overused in describing our activities’.122 Burt also wants, ‘in a very virtuosic, smart-alec way, to call the tenets of … critical theory into question’, to take issue ‘with questions of legality created by the sampler’.123 He sees these works, ‘in addition to being nostalgic, funny, and sometimes musically very interesting (especially when musical textures are created with the fragments that are very out of character with their sources)’, as ‘a way of saying, “Enough!”, to a critical theory which has taken itself far too seriously’.124 Expressed in his signature lively, amusing and provocative style), Burt rails against

the overly developed metaphors and philosophical hype that surrounds much contemporary French-influenced visual arts and music criticism that deals with quotation … Since French critical theory, and its English language offshoots, seem to me to be the ultimate Yuppie intellectual bauble of the ’80s, it seemed

121 Eugene Chadbourne, Jon Rose, David Moss and Rik Rue, Country Music of Southeastern Australia, Top 80 (2004), at http://top80.pl/disc/release/1220178/Rik+Rue/Country+Music+Of+Southeastern+Australia, accessed 14 August 2005.

122 Warren Burt, SAMPLES III for Computer Processed Orchestra Sounds – What It Is and What It Is Not, New Music Articles 6, eds John Jenkins and NMA Publications (2003; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/SamplesIII.htm, accessed 28 September 2007.

123 Burt, ‘Experimental Music in Australia Using Live Electronics’, p. 170. 124 Ibid.


only appropriate (pun intended) to use the sampler (surely the ultimate Yuppie musical accessory of the late ’80s?).125

Amid this expression of a central modernist–experimentalist aesthetic, there is a declaration of control of intention and rhetoric beyond ‘fashionable’ current theory, adding a disclaimer to the implications of the titles. Burt is taking ‘ownership’ of his actions and titling – even as he grapples headlong with primary postmodern markers in the titles and substance of his above works; yet this act of complicit critique, I would suggest, is ultimately a postmodern gambit!

Burt points out that he was deploying techniques that were no ‘newer’ than those in the musical vocabulary of 1900 – although they were, he acknowledges, made more accessible by 1980s sampling digital sampling technology – and that, if Ives ‘were considered post-modern, then we would have to consider our whole century as part of the post-modern, and have to hunt around for a time when modernism actually existed’.126 Burt further distances himself from the possibility of any charge of ‘postmodern’ being levelled at him by stating, ‘I didn’t feel I was deconstructing Ravel, because I was not pulling any work of his apart in order to make statements about it’, and,

I did not regard myself as the innocent bricoleur, assembling new works out of whatever came to hand. I have done that many times in the past, but this was different, the quotes were very carefully selected, and the ways in which they were put together was also carefully considered.127

Burt thus raises a number of assumptions about postmodernism that are worth exploring a little longer here. He rehearses frustrations of misunderstood and maligned experimentalists: when punk embraces ‘self-actualization’, Burt’s response is, ‘Oh, they’ve finally caught up’.128 It is as though he feels that appropriation has been ‘done’ for three quarters of a century, ‘perfected’ by experimentalism, and that a term from the ‘academy’ has been coined to describe – and thereby co-opt – this technique: Burt feels himself to be appropriated, his practice also.

125 Ibid.126 Burt also underlines that he was well aware of the problems of appropriation with

regard to piracy, but here, because he had been engaged with Ravel’s works for so much of his life, he had come to regard him almost as ‘family’, and felt about using his work ‘much as I would feel about using the work of any living colleague who had given me permission, or even invited me to use their material’: SAMPLES III. This article first appeared in New Music Articles 6 (1988).

127 Ibid.128 Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 37.


It is a reasonable reflection that Ives (and Mahler) were proto-postmodernists in much of their compositional enterprise.129 But high modernism’s constraints put a resounding halt to such practices as (recognizable) quotation, references to the past, to tonality, to popular-music genres etc., excising them as retrograde and/or inferior as artistic expression. It is in what we can justifiably call postmodernist times that these paradigms are ‘legitimated’ again as compositional preoccupations (issues of intellectual property notwithstanding). Furthermore, while a composer’s intention may not be to make deconstructionist statements when using a quotation of other music, this does not mandate a congruent outcome: a listener could well perceive a deconstructionist impulse at work in the new version.130 Lastly, ‘careful consideration’ of selection and manipulation of quotations does not negate the possibility of a postmodern impulse.

Playing with Traditional Western Art-music Tropes

A key aspect of postmodern style is the overt inclusion of historical referents,131 in contradistinction to mid-twentieth-century modernism’s strong aversion to historical reference. Along with a strong fidelity to the radical experimentalist tradition out of which it clearly emerged, sound art’s enterprise is also to offer for reflection not only the material from previous eras but also, self-reflexively and self-critically, the very process of such an undertaking.

A central preoccupation in Rik Rue’s collages of found sound is the celebration of noise, which he traces back to the early-modernist Italian Futurists’ celebration of the sounds and noises of cities and of the dynamism, technology and industry of the modern world.132 Rainer Linz’s Dysrhythmic Etudes (1982–) take existing Western classical canonic piano repertoire, such as examples of Chopin’s and Bach’s Preludes, Johann Strauss’s Waltzes, and distort their rhythmic structures. With the objective of producing a disconcerting, unsettling effect, where the work phases in and out of recognizability, Linz employs a range of distorting procedures, including collage. He explains that this produces ‘an unusual effect, and the piece both is and is not recognisable; it contains familiar elements that

129 There are a number of musicological studies around the time of and after Burt’s statements here that have sought to locate proto-postmodern impulses in works by composers even pre-twentieth century, see Chapter 2, note 52 in present volume.

130 Following Roland Barthes, we know that authorial intention is not the sole determinant of meaning in any cultural production, see Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 142–9.

131 The focus of Chapter 7 of the present volume.132 Rik Rue, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, see Introduction to the present

volume.


have somehow “gone wrong”, hence the term “dysrhythmic”’; Linz equates the effect with ‘tapping your foot against the beat’.133

Warren Burt’s ensemble Fatty Acid from the early-1970s comprised violin, mandolin and accordion, and they similarly caused disarray in their repertoire choices. For example, the Prelude and ‘Liebestod ’ from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was performed directly from the piano reduction. While the group’s members played as well as they could, and kept the rhythmic impetus of the piece constant, their performance was highly humorous: ‘If you knew the original, you could hear how we approached, and strayed away from it. If you didn’t know the original, the result still had a rather surrealist stretched quality’.134

Linz’s The Opera ‘Crossed Purposes’ (1986) is a highly experimental radio opera in excerpt form. It subjects the operatic medium to playful recontextualization, using a range of media-related devices, substituting radio ‘format’ for opera ‘form’, and deploying an announcer, who provides a pre-scripted ‘explanation’ of the piece, complete with stage descriptions. The story is undercut by the segments from the ‘opera’: this comprises Linz’s own material (recorded by him) along with pirated snippets of well-known operatic and symphonic repertoire pieces upon which Linz has also imposed treatment in the electronic studio. He writes that, while there may be few clues to separate The Opera ‘Crossed Purposes’ and a typical radio program, the opera nevertheless ‘appears to be at odds with itself: it is an “opera ficta”’ – borrowed from the Wagnerian term musica ficta, which is the principle of subjecting music to mimesis or figuration – ‘in which the heroine takes up arms against the state, a state at odds with its own opera production, a radio production at odds with the state’s opera’.135 Not only is the operatic medium made to ‘argue’ with a different medium, that is, radio, but the experience of losing oneself in the listening experience – one of the most fundamental aspects for the traditional operaphile – is thwarted: rather, the work goes through a process of ‘undoing’ as it unfolds.

Caroline Wilkins also plays with modes of engagement and distancing, with an historical undertone. Her Piece for Old Accordion (1985) is for an old, out-of-tune instrument that had been especially restored and reconstructed, wherein she explores the instrument’s aural characteristics, highlighting the relationships between tuning and timbre, the bellows mechanism, and – significantly – the ‘cracked’ notes. Wilkins also embraces the ‘rawness’ linked with the embryonic days of sound production, conjuring silent film music or old gramophone recordings, which are also reflected in the incorporation of early dance rhythms, street sounds and fairground music. These are in turn made to collapse or decompose. Notable is the avoidance of a narrative structure, a hallmark of both ‘academic’ modernism and experimentalism.

133 Rainer Linz, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.134 Warren Burt, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.135 Rainer Linz, 22 Contemporary Australian Composers.


Wilkins also applies a deconstructionist treatment similar to Linz’s approach in his Etudes to the rhythmic elements of the tango in her ‘Staggered Tango’ from Physarmonica (1985) for two accordions.136 She disrupts the constant beat of the dance tempo through de-synchronization of several tempi, resulting not only in a complex polyrhythm but also in an interruption to the essential rhythmic trope. Past and present are collided through the juxtaposition of the combined sounds of old and new accordions, again playing with the sense of distancing. She describes the recurrent thematic motives that weave in and out of this structure as sometimes ‘playful’ and, at other times, ‘threatening. The motifs change their meaning according to their relationship to the basic rhythmic structure of the tango’.137 The inclusion of ‘threat’ pays heed to experimentalist ‘edginess’ that occurs as much as playfulness.

Some endeavours mock academic modernism. For example, Things Are Not So Bad After All (1980), a creation of IDA, involved ‘almost chaotic audience participatory music theatre – certainly not a positive start for any future computer reverence!’138 Wearing tropical-island castaway clothes, Ron Nagorcka was stationed at the ‘island’, controlling the Apple II. Nearby was a table piled high with toy pianos, organs, xylophones, and other keyed and numbered instruments.

The performer/creators used what might humorously be called guerrilla tactics to ensure audience participation. Two fearsome ‘robots’ (Ernie Althoff and Graeme Davis) greeted the audience as they entered the space. The robots were sporting homemade outfits of cardboard, polystyrene packaging, discarded electronic circuitry and bent coat hangers. Whenever Nagorcka played a 12-tone row, the robots would lumber over to the printer, tear off the strip of paper on which more random rows were printed, and virtually harass audience members to see the paper as a score, make the choice from instruments from the table, and begin improvising on a score of their own making. ‘Once the audience got over their initial surprise and trepidation – quite quickly because, after all, this was CHCMC – much fun was had by all’.139

The coercive tactics of directing the audience to improvise on a pre-ordained 12-tone row could well stand for the perceived hegemony of serialist academic approaches to new music. This theatrical dimension, including the use of a toy piano, the element of improvisation, not to mention the over-the-top costumes, and the inference that composers who adhere to serialist techniques are virtual

136 The word Physarmonica means ‘bellows accordion’ and was the name of the label under which the eponymous album was released. Both accordions are played by Wilkins on the recording.

137 Caroline Wilkins, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/wilkins.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

138 Althoff, IDA Stands for Institute for Dronal Anarchy.139 Ibid.


automata, undoes the seriousness of academic high modernism, poking gentle fun at its conceits and edicts.

Satirizing the ‘other’ side of the avant-garde is Clearing the Air (for double bass and four wind and/or brass instruments) (1974) by Moya Henderson, a Dada-inspired music theatre piece written and performed at Darmstadt, Germany in 1974 and 1976 – one of the earliest such works by an Australian, certainly one of the (if not the) first to receive an international airing. Four props in the form of fake loud-speaker boxes conceal four performers who slash their way out of them to ‘ambush’ the ‘deluded’ double bass player who is rapturously playing ‘exotic, high-pitched extravagances’ on his Baroque double bass. The ‘assailants’ pollute his ‘aural artistry’ with their ‘dark matter: interference sounds from flute, oboe clarinet and didjeridoo, as well as a quartet of scissor snips’; they then, ‘in the dazzle of the spotlight, kill him off’.140

Academic modernism is also given nascent postmodern iconoclastic treatment in Nagorcka and Althoff’s Seven Rare Dreamings (1981). This work also engages with indigenous culture – anathema to the dogma of high modernism, which eschewed all overt content, such as issues of gender, politics, sexuality, race, nationality and personal identity, in favour of medium-centred formalism. Seven Rare Dreamings draws on an Aboriginal legend about the origins of the didjeridu, developing into an abstract drama where a computer is an onstage protagonist, emitting synthesized video patterns, 12-tone music, randomly generated poetry, and a long drone in which overtones develop to match those of the didjeridu and Althoff’s prepared saxophone. Althoff plays the roles of expert, academic and devil’s advocate, donning a wide range of homemade masks and props. The work was staged in semi-darkness. Terracotta dragons were projected from Melbourne’s rooftops.141

Nagorcka remarks that he was originally interested in the didjeridu purely for its musical qualities, but playing it prompted the undertaking of a thorough examination of Aboriginal culture and mythology.142 Seven Rare Dreamings negates a modernist, abstract exploration of sound for its own sake, to take account of a much wider, far-reaching cultural context.

Transcending Sense

One of Australia’s first permanent sound sculptures is The Singing Ship (1970) (Peggy West-Moreland, designer; Steve Kele, builder; George Cain and David Thomas, acoustic designers), marking the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s

140 Moya Henderson, ‘Obituary: Mr Kagel 1974–1976: Much Larger Than Life’, Musicology Australia 31 (2009): 105. Henderson wrote the work under her studies with Kagel. The double bass player was Fernando Grillo.

141 Jenkins, Ron Nagorcka. 142 Ibid.


landing at Emu Point in Queensland. It is a 12-metre-high concrete structure of Aeolian pipes emitting chordal drones created by wind currents. Buried in the ground is a time capsule holding unknown elements with instructions reading, ‘to be opened May 2070’.143

The Singing Ship throws up a number of themes – a piece of music that operates permanently, outdoors, with natural elements producing the sounds (wind conditions permitting), along with the ‘secret message’ aspect shared by Ernie Gallagher’s abovementioned Stethophonics (whose sounds are heard only by the performer). Such opacity is not the sole province of experimentalism; modernist ‘traditional’ composers revelled throughout the twentieth century (and continue to do so) in the novelty of new musical languages,144 and classical music has examples of messages encoded into pitch material, such as Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926) and Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1898–99). But as part of its anarchic undertone, early sound art/late experimentalism certainly enjoyed displacements of meaning or signification.

Subjective Beats Metaphor (1983)

A work that epitomizes such an approach is Subjective Beats Metaphor (1983) (for speaking voice and electronics), a collaboration by Warren Burt and Chris Mann.145 This work inhabits a modernist/postmodernist border, dealing with a number of key ways in which the music/noise dichotomy has been addressed over the twentieth century as a dispute at the margins of the embodied and the disembodied, the scored and the unscored, the accidental and the intentional, sense and nonsense, culture and nature. Subjective Beats Metaphor deploys electronic voice manipulation, illuminating constructions such as subjectivity, the authorial voice, accent and syntactical meaning.

This work extends the tradition of Dadaist and Lettrist nonsense sound poetry of the 1920s to the 1940s.146 With chance procedures operating from both the

143 Bandt, Sound Sculpture, p. 33. 144 See, for example, Robert P. Morgan, ‘Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical

Modernism’, Critical Inquiry 10/3 (1984): 442–61.145 Warren Burt and Chris Mann, Subjective Beats Metaphor (for speaking voice

and electronics), NMATAPES 2 (Melbourne: NMA Publications, 1983), commissioned by the Paris Autumn Festival. My discussion of this work appears in modified form in Linda Kouvaras, Modernist and Postmodernist Arts of Noise, Part 2: From the Clifton Hill Mob to Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia, Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 2005, eds Jonathan Marshall and Cat Hope (2006), at http://arn.cci.ecu.edu.au/symposium_view.php?rec_id=0000000007, accessed 3 March 2006.

146 See, for example, Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War, 2nd edn (Stirling: AK Press, 1991); Marc Dachy, Dada: The Revolt of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006); Richard Sheppard, Modernism–


narrator/performer (Mann) and the sound manipulator (Burt), much of Subjective Beats Metaphor’s agenda avoids emotion and its processes in music making, in favour of objective, formalist quests for purity and expansion of the medium. It also plays with the Cagean principle of moving to a position beyond composer/audience subjectivity.

Mann recites an original text, the reading of which is electronically modified and distorted by Burt; Mann can hear only the ‘treatment’, through headphones. The audience hears the combined outcome of this process. Mann is unable to meaningfully inflect – or reflect on – his reading, and this forces a determinative (though unwilful) modification of the anti-aesthetic ‘rant’-like text. Rather, Mann is rendered robotic, de-personalized, without subjectivity. In Mann’s words, he is reduced to a ‘biological vocoder, transmitting information with a neutrality that [approaches] that of a piece of electronic equipment’.147

The work performs a distinctly anti-high-art gesture: the reading is inflected with a strong working-class Australian accent (produced from memory, as Mann cannot hear himself to moderate it) and its ‘anti-aesthetic’ pitch is evident in much of the choice of vocabulary and syntax.148 Much of the monologue is akin to a fractured inner dialogue or letter home from a faux naïve Australian traveller in London: for example,

as they say down under fuck off … we are on the other side of the world to you so that means when we sneeze you fart … whatja say t that then in that me metaphor has done a bunk n it don look too good order schmorder I think so imply a lot Christmas so now th question is is it more real to go by bus or by car?149

Dada–Postmodernism, Avant-garde and Modernism Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

147 John Jenkins, Chris Mann, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, Jenkins and NMA Publications (2000; 1988), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/mann.htm, accessed 14 August 2005.

148 This ploy can be related to the rise in the use of Australian vocal mannerisms in theatre, radio and film at this time. For example, in the works of Barry Oakley, David Williamson, John Romeril, Barry Humphries, the Pram Factory and La Mama as a whole, etc., Katherine Brisbane and others identify a self-conscious combination of working-class Australian strine with sophisticated linguistic play as a chief dialectic within these works, drawing in part upon the precedents of Banjo Paterson, The Bulletin, etc. See, for example, Katharine Brisbane, Not Wrong Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press, 2005).

149 The text for Subjective Beats Metaphor is reprinted and called ‘other’ in the second issue of New Music Articles (1983): 3. Also see Chris Mann, other (2001; 1983), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/images/Other.jpg, accessed 16 January 2009.


However, the subjective voice of this narrative is dismembered by the reading and by its treatment (as well as the ‘nonsense’ aspects of the text). It thus acts out a quest for objectivity and scorn for the purely emotive.

The work also toys metaphorically with notions of subjectivity at a more fundamental level. The very act of listening to a voice – ours, another’s – is, as it were, amplified in this work. We hear our own voice through bone to the ear’s inner regions, but others hear it ‘de-boned’. Douglas Kahn describes this ‘presence produced by the voice’ as entailing ‘a degree of delusion’ because of the difference in the sound texture between that of the speaker and that of the listener or addressee.150 Subjective Beats Metaphor throws this phenomenon – which we understand at an unconscious, intuitive level, even if we are not in the habit of articulating this – into sharp relief.

Engaging further with the act of listening, Subjective Beats Metaphor attenuates the process of voice recording. As Kahn states, after the invention of the phonograph,

The voice no longer occupied its own space and time. It was removed from the body where, following Derrida, it entered the realm of writing and the realm of the social, where one loses control of the voice because it no longer disappears. From bone to air to writing, permanence outside the subject invites greater mutability, where the primacy and purity of the voice are subjected to the machinations and imaginations of culture and politics.151

In the Burt/Mann collaboration, these ‘machinations and imaginations’ are implemented in performance, on the spot, as it were; Burt’s ‘imagination’ (and Mann’s) subject the voice to the loss of control on the part of the speaking subject.

Because Edison’s speaking machine was also a listening machine, it could reverse the loop of utterance and audition. Unlike humans it could not speak and hear simultaneously, but the displacement and delay it introduced could establish a new circularity that enabled a person to hear his or her own voice for the first time without the [cheek]bones.152

Subjective Beats Metaphor upends the facets of sound recording described here and in so doing, displaces subjectivity. When Burt manipulates Mann’s voice, he becomes the ‘machine’s listener’ – so a human being plays the part of a machine; Mann, as ‘speaking machine’, cannot ‘speak and hear simultaneously’ – so a human being is ‘robbed’ of primary aspects of normal subjectivity. The crucial stage of the ‘circularity’ (enabling speakers to hear their own voice ‘without the

150 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 7. 151 Ibid., p. 8.152 Ibid.


[cheek]bones’) is absent from the process of sound recording in Subjective Beats Metaphor.

In regard to the spoken text, the modernist abrasion of ‘worldly’ sense here is stark. The verbal delivery slips in and out of linear intelligibility. The electronic sounds make no ‘sense’ in correlation with the spoken words. The sounds unpredictably, ‘accidentally’, erode the integrity of the text. The humour suggests a parody of the abovementioned modernism’s ‘secret language’ where meaning is opaque, known only to the creator. Simultaneously, the audience is aware that meaning is being eroded at a significant level for the performer (Mann) who cannot hear or discern the verbal significance of his performance. Semantic clarity is sacrificed for the modernist–experimentalist celebration of sound properties for their own sake, inflected with the joy of ‘unplanned’ noise discoveries.

Just as integral to this piece and its effects is an impression of merriment and play. The work pokes as much fun at modernism as it does at tradition: for instance, it turns Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘acousmatics’ – that is, ‘a noise one hears without seeing what causes it, [… marking] the perceptive reality of sound as such, as distinguished from the modes of its production and transmission’153 – on its head: the audience can quite easily see what is causing the noises, but the (arguably) primary noise producer, Mann, cannot control the noise because it is Burt’s whims that doctor it.

As Douglas Kahn notes, ‘Modernism … entailed more sounds and produced a greater emphasis on listening to things, to different things, and to more of them and on listening differently’.154 And it is technology that contributed significantly to this, as witnessed by Kahn’s description of the speaking machine (which is ‘also a listening machine’) above.155 The consequences of all this in such a work as Subjective Beats Metaphor lie in multiple aspects, including power relations, where the meaning of McLuhan’s aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ is toyed with in terms of trust (in the performance situation), playfulness, disorientation (on all three angles – performer, manipulator, audience), and dichotomies between human/machine and chance/control.

No Re-wind

These early Australian sound art undertakings build on early-twentieth-century precursors, and are in a sense partly the legacy of Futurism, Dada and exemplar, John Cage, demonstrating (and exhorting us to accept) that music could be perceived beyond merely the concert hall situation and that unconventional sounds could constitute music. As composer David Chesworth recalls,

153 Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 77. Also see Chapter 1 of present volume.

154 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 8.155 See note 152, above.


The arrival of the postmodern was played out on the floor of the CHCMC. Us younger folk would appropriate and sometimes abuse existing structures – including process ideas, Fluxus and minimalism and even set theory – and place them in new contexts. We always had inverted commas around what we did.156

Simultaneously, the playing-out of the postmodern extended well beyond the floor of the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre. A paradigm shift in sound ventures was energized in Australia. Certainly, the ‘inverted commas’ Chesworth mentions are a prime signifier of the late-1970s into the early-1980s. But we can also note the coexistent vestigial modernist impulse of an unmediated celebration of technology and of sound/noise, and a sense of an almost neo-modern idealism embedded in the utopian visions for sound art investigations. Nevertheless, a significant differential of irony and playfulness – underlying the seriousness of the enterprises – marks a departure from modernism’s overburdened po-faced seriousness and abstraction, as does the willingness to include elements from popular culture. The works that incorporate Muzak hardly need to flaunt the inverted commas: Muzak is so pervasive in society that we all know what the ‘right’ (that is, high-art-informed) attitudes are towards cheesiness. Its instancing in the contexts presented above only drives this point home all the more starkly.

The Fatty Acid trio decimates the traditional grandeur of Wagnerian operatic warhorses. Caroline Wilkins destabilizes the most readily identifying aspect of the tango – its rhythmic motto –, and Rainer Linz performs the same transformation on canonic piano works. Twelve-tone serialism is transmogrified into performing robots by the Institute for Dronal Anarchy. The aesthetic content of a work such as Warren Burt and Chris Mann’s Subjective Beats Metaphor is marked by the de-subjectivized nature of the performers. The early-1980s Aeolian harp works of Sarah Hopkins, Alan Lamb and Ros Bandt begin to draw attention to music’s possible function outside the merely cerebrally contemplative, the solely aesthetic, as ancient notions of music’s ‘healing’ attributes are put forward and music creation is taken well beyond the concert hall and into the other environments.

The very artform itself and the nature of listening are now profoundly refigured. A theatre is created where one did not exist before. As a consequence, the original cultural referent – the field of sound art itself – is turned into theatre too. In other words, its own internal workings – which were not necessarily articulated in the listening experience traditionally – are no longer able to operate tacitly, but are, rather, ‘staged’, presented as an object of, or an event for, contemplation, consideration: the ironic stance strongly invites reflection. With the emergence of all these musico-aesthetic excursions, a new cultural dimension is activated, the first important strand of which is the focus of the following chapter.

156 Quoted in Dale, ‘Once Upon a Time in Melbourne’, p. 36. Chesworth adds, ‘However, this is a big generalisation on my part’: ibid.

Part 3 Postmodern

Chapter 4

Feminizing the Sound Object

From the late-1960s onwards, the issue of gender and its place in contemporary life and culture featured in the context of postmodern corporeal politics. It is exemplified, for example, in the sound art of Americans Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood and Meredith Monk, Canadian Andra McCartney and German–Canadian Hildegard Westerkamp. Australian sound art works have contributed significantly to explorations of the gendered associations of the female voice, some examples of which are presented here.

A Coloraturico-guttural, Post-1960s Happening

‘Birthday’, from Greetings (1991)

A common contemporary ploy is the inclusion of matters traditionally concealed from public view, or certainly not consisting of the stuff of high art. Greetings (1991), by Carolyn Connors, presents a vivid example. ‘The feminine’ is also projected into this sensibility.

At the 1992 National New Music Conference,1 composer–performer Carolyn Connors appeared on stage, carrying what looks like a large, commercially produced greetings card – and it is. Greetings, for solo female voice, is made up of several songs: ‘Intro’, ‘Birthday’, ‘Interlude one’, ‘Love Is’, ‘Travel’, ‘Bereavement’, ‘Birth’, ‘Interlude two’ and ‘Coda’. It is an extended vocal technique improvisation on Hallmark greetings cards, the words compiled from the texts of all the cards.2

This technologically unenhanced post-‘Happening’/performance art piece – relying solely on Connors’s virtuosic vocal prowess as she sings and accompanies herself on melodica – explores feminism, aesthetics, erotic love, maternal love, humour, Art, sincerity, irony, self-mockery, freedom, structure, virtuosity, unschooled technique, the intimately personal and private (the act of giving and receiving the card, and the note written within it by the sender), and the very generalized mass produced (the Hallmark card itself). In ‘Birthday’, the voice uses ‘circular singing’ (voice sounding on the in and out breath), and contrasts sung/

1 Held at the University of Melbourne’s Melba Hall.2 Connors had kept all the well-wishing greetings cards of congratulations people sent

her on the birth of her twin boys, and this catalyzed the work: Linda Kouvaras, interview with Carolyn Connors, 20 May 2009.


spoken/extended techniques – including overtone singing – and vocal gestures. Here, Carolyn Connors explores the sense of joy a mother might experience on the occasion of her daughter’s birthday, and contextualizes this exploration in the case of her own situation.

Ultra-Lettrist poetry of the 1950s elongated individual letters in a formalist celebration of the medium. Connors, too, draws out the words of the texts to fill the performance timeslot of some several minutes. But her traversing of magnified vocal utterances, that range from the coloratura down to guttural grunting, with a climactic burst on ‘Birthday!’, and finishing with a prolonged, very audible, kissing sound, similarly seek to extend the emotional realm concomitant with the card-giving ritual.3 In the extreme nature of the performance, where the phrase ‘Happy Birthday’, along with the rest of the greeting poem, is stretched almost beyond recognition, the creator makes an artwork out of a mundane, domestic, commonplace event – in Connors’s words, ‘ikky sweet!’4

There is an entrenched tradition of giving and receiving greetings cards. The possible emotions and motives that attend the act of sending such a greeting can span the feeling of uninvested obligation to a sincere token of love, sympathy, congratulations or well wishes for the recipient. Cards selected for these purposes are generally mass produced, the giver relying on a commercial construction to encapsulate the intense transaction of emotion in a situation that is highly intimate, uniquely personal, while nevertheless shared across the developed world. And yet while Connors’s performance reconstitutes the homespun, ‘greetings-card moment’ into the art arena, the irony of the situation is ever present: the inverted commas around the proceedings do not recede. The pang of recognition that the audience feels forces them to access their own participation in similar situations in a way that a modernist piece never would. Making such a highly feminized and kitsch moment into an artwork is also a move that goes well beyond typical 1960s Happenings and 1950s Lettrism.

A Sonic Redressing of a Gynaeco-patria-logical Pathology

Window Pain (1993)

If it is difficult to imagine a man writing or performing such a ‘song’ as Carolyn Connor’s ‘Birthday’, certainly in the early-1990s, an even more ‘woman’s-business’ sound artwork also featuring the female voice is Window Pain (1993) by Australian sound artist Frances Dyson. It examines perceived misogyny in

3 ‘Travel’, from the ‘suite’, adds a percussive element with rings on melodica and tongue clicks, representing time passing, and the voice has a train motive and uses ululations. ‘Bereavement’ taps into time-honoured representations of mourning with a descending melodic motive and chanted text.

4 Kouvaras, interview with Carolyn Connors.

Feminizing the Sound Object 101

medical interventions in specifically female pathologies – endometriosis being the case in point.

The work came about from a series of telephone conversations Dyson conducted with women suffering from this condition. Dyson listened to anecdotes from endometriosis patients and concluded that the attitudes, treatments and practices of the medical establishment – surgeries, experimental procedures, prolonged dosages of heavy drugs, and repeated and sometimes excruciating tests – potentially contributed as much to the women’s traumatic experience as did the disease itself. A most acutely disturbing and recurrent aspect in the accounts of the suffering occurred when they felt that the genuineness of their discomfort was questioned or doubted in an elusive, difficult-to-diagnose, difficult-to-treat condition. Women felt mistrusted, accused of hallucinating, even of being hysterical: ‘Could this be just one of the torments that usually afflict pubescent teenagers or older women who have never been pregnant? Do we have here a case of too much or too little womb? Are the women hiding something?’5 It was as if the treating doctors and technicians were rehearsing the pre-twentieth-century perception of the womb as an organ that wanders all over the body, producing hysteria at will. Dyson learned that the women’s treatments included pregnancy simulation drugs and, when that failed, menopause simulation drugs; they were advised that their best hope was either to completely ‘occupy’ the womb via pregnancy or completely remove it through hysterectomy. These women were infested with the unknown and unknowable. Their illness was ancient and obstinate.

Yet Dyson notes that something beyond gynecology was accruing from the series of tests and experimental procedures that were performed on these women over a number of years:

In particular, the use of high-technology imaging equipment to trace failed nerves and wandering tissues was creating a space or topos – abstract, immaterial, scientific and ultimately disembodied – where flickering signals verified the existence of a physical transmission that might be pain, but might be something else. For the women whose bodies triggered the instruments, yielded the test results or reacted adversely or positively to the medications, the practitioner’s proximity to the signs of endometriosis – his or her (usually his) delight at being able to locate, measure, quantify and represent its physical effects – meant a corresponding distance from their own physical experience. With no room for the body in its representation, endometriosis ceased to have anything to do with

5 Frances Dyson, ‘Contributors’ Notes: Window Pain’, Leonardo Music Journal 16 (1996): 112. Window Pain premiered at the Tuning of the World Conference in Banff in 1993. Dyson advises, ‘the recording on the CD has been processed using a three-dimensional sound location system for binaural listening developed by Rick Bidlack, and should be listened to with headphones for best results’: ibid., p. 115.


actual pain. The women found themselves asking ‘Am I in pain?’ ‘Is it real?’ ‘What number would I give it, a 5 or a 7?’6

Window Pain seeks to capture this space of abstraction and disembodiment – but ruptures it by the inevasible presence of the body and its undeniably ‘real’ pain. The work comes about from the ‘in-between world’ of a telephone call. The women’s experiences are presented through conversation fragments and partial recountings, while a narration details laboriously their pain, from 1 to 10. Audible markings of time are sounded by the obstinate ticking of a mechanical clock that counts time measured in numbers, and the soundworld is augmented by sounds from shortwave radio and indefinable instruments.

The resultant atmosphere is alternately remote, laconic, awkward, grotesque and faintly ridiculous, and is intended to address the issue of ‘deceptive’ pain. ‘The question, “Am I in pain?”, like the question, “Do I exist?”, is absurd, and can only be uttered within a culture – both medical and technological – that has successfully imposed a fully rationalized, instrumental, binary thinking upon the perception and representation of the body’.7 Dyson uses the cries of the body to ‘answer’ the beeps of the monitors that authenticate its existence and its experience of pain, underlining the absurdity of the notion that pain is only ‘true’ if – and only if – it can be seen or quantified.

It makes no sense to ‘see’ pain, yet, like so much that is experienced within this technologized, mediated culture, seeing and representing – through monitors, graphs, charts, signals and all manner of triggering devices – has infiltrated the ontology of somatic experience in ways that are powerful and perverse enough to give an air of rationality to something as stupid as the question of the truth of pain. After a while, it seems reasonable to accept this kind of distance. But, as one of the women forewarned, ‘It starts off as a bleep, and then it’s a screech’.8

For these particular women afflicted with endometriosis, the voice of authority, the medical profession, proclaims the (non-)truth of a pain felt to be all too real by the subjects; but in Window Pain the sufferers are given voice. They in turn give voice to their pain, a bleep, a screech, and the pain here is now no longer confined only to the bodily experience of going through the disease but extends to the social sphere where encounters with treating doctors produces the agony of not being listened to, or, just as upsetting, being disbelieved, and having technology argue with one’s own perception of one’s state.

That the composer chose the medium of the telephone for her interviews, rather than meeting in person, or eliciting written responses, suggests that a medium that allows more anonymity consequently offers greater freedom in expressing deep, personal reflections. It is also noteworthy that the conduit of expression is the voice:

6 Ibid., p. 112. 7 Ibid.8 Ibid.


The acoustic mirror is both produced and witnessed by the individual, as voice, for one speaks while hearing one’s own speaking, wedding the self and sound as a singular event. In speaking, I announce myself as an individual and am first recognized by myself, in the audibility of my own voice.9

Window Pain returns the suffering women’s voices to themselves. As a work it acts as an external witness in recognition of the women’s plight, through a constructed artwork for an audience to experience. It also allows the women themselves self-recognition and validation of the depth of the physical pain of their pathology, and of the psychic pain produced by the non-empathic response of the medical profession. Dyson creates a levelling effect through the use of sound: the women’s authentic experiences are afforded as much space as the noises emitted by the instruments of physical and psychological pain administered by the medical profession – which are now, in this setting, de-privileged. Further, the articulateness of the women contrasts starkly with the inchoate sounds of the technology, thus calling into question its supposed authority on the matter. We thus have an instance of art engaging directly with life – with lived experience – and a refusal of the traditional boundaries that separate cultural artefacts from everyday life.

Toilets, Tears and Transcendence: The (Dis-)Placement of Water in Two Examples of Australian Sound Art

I turn now to two works, sound installation The Gordon Assumption, an audio-visual collaboration of the duo Wax Sound Media that comprises Australian sound and visual artist Sonia Leber and composer/sound artist David Chesworth (2004), and ‘Tears’ (for female voice, cello, keyboard and electronics), the final movement of Andrée Greenwell’s Passion (1993).10 Both examples feature emotion-inflected women’s voices, glissandi, water and toilets as facets of their subject matter, and through which the works present a postmodern take on transcendence.

As Douglas Kahn comments, ‘The incursion of water and fluidity, signalled by Pollock’s dripping and Cage’s pouring, and a sign in its own right of so much else, generated the elemental substrate that during the 1960s would assist the

9 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. 62.10 Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, The Gordon Assumption (2004), at http://

www.waxsm.com.au/gordon.htm, accessed 15 May 2008; Andrée Greenwell, Passion (Kensington, Vic., Newmarket, NEW 1044.2, 1993). I have discussed these works in Linda Kouvaras, ‘Toilets, Tears and Transcendence: The Postmodern (Dis-)Placement of, and in, Two Water-based Examples of Australian Sound Art’, Transforming Cultures eJournal [Online] 4/1 (2009), at http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC/article/view/1062/1103, accessed 18 May 2009.


arts in confronting environmental and corporeal politics’.11 Water has endured as subject matter in Western musical works for centuries. It has been partnered with sound in observational acoustics stemming from ancient times through to Chaucer and Helmholtz and beyond, when the noise of a stone smacking onto water produced a visual correspondence, which was in turn figured back onto the sound waves’ invisible movements.12 And what Kahn calls ‘discursive’ water has streamed in ‘traditional’ musical works from Handel’s Water Music from 1717 through Romanticism, ‘albeit in the harmonic gushes that repulsed Cage’.13 In ‘experimental’ practice, the early to middle parts of the twentieth century were splattered by various interactions with water and sound, with Percy Grainger’s Free Music innovations sparked by gazing at the waves in the Victorian waters of his childhood from as far back as the late nineteenth century, to George Brecht’s and Fluxus’ respective late-1950s to early-1960s dripping works; Yoko Ono’s and Mieko Shiomi’s early-1960s water-themed pieces; and Annea Lockwood’s river recordings from 1966 onwards.14

The two sound art works I address here, The Gordon Assumption and ‘Tears’, focus on certain bodily iterations of liquid exudations within a musical context, presented by female voices: The Gordon Assumption was ‘performed’ at a disused toilet block, while ‘Tears’ uses the flushing of a toilet as part of its sound composition. To situate the works, I need to return to the evolution of works on water throughout the twentieth century, and thence to tease out the other associations arising from the works, particularly from the psychoanalytic realm, that are mobilized by the displacement of their subject matter and musical components.

As a feature in surrealist art and in that of its forefather Raymond Roussel of the mid-twentieth century, water ‘remarkably consistently’ portrayed live women ‘immersed in a concurrence of sound and water – in window displays, no less’:15

11 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 93. 12 Ibid., p. 246.13 Ibid.14 Water-with-sound endeavours continued on the part of such innovators as Futurist

Luigi Russolo with his gurgler from the second decade of the twentieth century, and Henry Cowell and his ‘8 Rice Bowls’ tuned to no definite pitch using water for Ostinato Pianissimo (for Percussion Band) (1934). Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 248. Eric Satie’s wet percussion (that is, percussion tuned by water) occurs in Parade (1918); Harold Davidson has water-tuned musical tumblers in the early-1930s: ibid., p. 249. William Russel’s, Harry Partch’s and Ray Green’s respective water-tuned musical tumblers and bottles feature in works of the early-1930s; John Cage’s first official use of water was in his collaboration with Lou Harrison, Double Music (1941), which required a Chinese gong being raised or lowered into a tub of water after striking it: ibid., p. 249. Cage’s first mention of using water in music was in his ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ (1937), where the sounds or rain could be ‘captured and controlled’ by film phonographs etc.: Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo (1937)’, cited in Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 249.

15 Ibid., pp. 253–4.


[W]hen we move to the representation of women’s voices in these three instances of immersion [by Roussel, Breton, and Aragon], what we find is that the voices are absent, supplanted by sounds as if in song or silent altogether, with sounds accompanying a dance of their presence, if not their actions. These women, in other words, have had their say in the matter dramatically reduced, both as mental and physical creatures, as occurs in many Surrealist texts and images. They are creatures after all, contained in a water in which creatures live, a water that man can live beside or on or gaze on, especially when the side of the sea is exposed as a fish tank posing as a window display.16

Kahn wonders whether the surrealist men ‘were gazing on and longing for their own former intrauterine immersion, their desire manifesting itself as nostalgia? … Intrauterine sound itself … would relate to the vaunted maternal voice proffered in certain psychoanalytic scenarios. The sound would be a hydrologically filtered mother’s voice promising the bliss of undifferentiation’.17 Kahn is referring here, I would suggest, to such Kristevan-derived theories as those which have explored poetic language, abjection and the semiotic chora, as part of what she defines as an integral part of personality formation at the pre-lingual stage of infant development.18 Kristeva’s ideas have been addressed by Kaja Silverman,19 whose critique has especial significance for the Australian works I discuss at this point, both of which feature women’s voices (many in the Leber/Chesworth; one only in the Greenwell).

The voices in The Gordon Assumption sing on ‘ah’; the single voice in ‘Tears’ sings ‘nonsense’ words: in each work, we are invited to focus on the female voice(s), rather than on any sung textual meaning. Silverman discusses the ‘primal figure’ of female vocality:20 primal because, according to what Silverman has characterized ‘a powerful cultural fantasy’, the maternal voice is the ‘first voice of love’.21 Reconstruction of this irrevocable infantile moment gives rise, according

16 Ibid., p. 257.17 Ibid., pp. 256–7.18 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Walker (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1984).19 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and

Cinema, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).

20 Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, ‘Introduction’, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, eds Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 11. For further discussions of the psychoanalytic construction of the maternal voice, see Carol Flinn, ‘The ‘Problem’ of Femininity in Theories of Film Music’, Screen 27/6 (1986): 56–72.

21 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 72. The phrase ‘first voice of love’ is Hélène Cixous’s: see Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, Theory and


to Silverman, ‘to two opposing “fantasies” of the female voice: the positive fantasy of blissful union, and the negative fantasy of entrapment’.22 ‘This potent dream of maternal presence – a presence that is embodied, literally, in the “bath of sounds” created by the mother’s soothing, singing voice – has resonated in Western literature and music for centuries’.23 As Silverman points out, both these negative and positive versions ‘equate the maternal voice with pure sonorousness’24 (which, at the very least, distorts the mother’s real role as linguistic initiator to the child).25

Ideas of Kristevan-informed psychoanalysis, the female voice and ‘pure sonorousness’ are also explored in Michel Poizat’s book The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (1992).26 The ‘pure cry’, the inarticulate explosion most absolutely represented at the death of Alban Berg’s Lulu, is the apex of operatic expression for Poizat. At a remove from both notated music and from verbal text, this vocality is a sliver of unimpeded communication, imbued with base emotions that transcend the mediation of language. Its power derives from psychoanalytic accounts of early childhood, when the infant’s inarticulate cry is answered by the mother. The cry’s significance is due to its complete lack of signification; it is an unadulterated voiced manifestation of the child’s discomfort rather than of any precise need. This extreme of emotion is only possible prior to the acquisition of language, which will act to sift all desires through societal structures. Just as Lulu’s cry is too keen, too heightened, to be enclosed by musical notation, the child’s cry is too raw in the power of its exigency to even be imaginable in words. Because of this, that first cry can never be recovered: ‘as soon as it is interpreted and elicits a reaction [from the mother], its original “purity” is lost forever, as it is now caught up within a system of signification’.27 To put this another way, all cries after this moment will be specific in their asking, and will therefore no longer have the sensuous and all-important purposeless vocality of the first utterance. The

History of Literature 24 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 93.22 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 72. For Silverman’s discussion of positive

and negative fantasies of the maternal voice, see pp. 72–100, cited in Dunn and Jones, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.

23 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 72. 24 Nancy A. Jones, ‘Music and the Maternal Voice in Purgatorio XIX’, Embodied

Voices, eds Dunn and Jones, p. 48.25 Silverman observes that the phallic model fails to take into account the crucial role

that the mother plays in the child’s early history of subjectivity. ‘Not only is her face the visual mirror in which the child first sees itself, but her voice is the acoustic mirror in which it first hears itself’: The Acoustic Mirror, p. 150. Indeed, the mother’s voice is notoriously absent in psychoanalytic tales. I have also discussed these critiques in another context: Linda Kouvaras, ‘The Semiotic and the Symbolic in Two Sweets-smearing Scenes’, Australasian Music Research 6 (2001): 65–86.

26 Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). I wish to thank Jennifer Shaw for alerting me to Poizat’s book.

27 Ibid., p. 101.


pursuit to recapture the cry is, for Poizat, the basis of the operaphile’s obsession, most intensely, of the exquisite pleasure that resides in great singers and especially their highest notes. This has significant resonance for The Gordon Assumption in particular.

Poizat talks of the cry as having the ultimate power. Further, composer intention and listener response come together at the instant of the cry, as each rebuffs the structured schemas of music and language. Tears are the only available reaction to hearing the cry, as it renders the listener devoid of speech and language. The evocative imagery concerning tears and crying proliferates throughout The Angel’s Cry. The opera house is a matchless world where all, even men, may weep freely, without feeling the need to suppress their tears. The unfolding of opera’s narratives is wrought by a desire to hear high voices at extremes of expression.28

Catherine Clément draws our attention to the fact that a staggering number of these plots is distinguished by heroine death (particularly in nineteenth-century opera).29 Poizat sees a primary reason for this as opera’s aesthetic, which sees all aspects of opera as determined by the search for sensual moments of vocal pleasure:

It is not because the dramatic logic of the libretto has led the female character to her death that she cries out at that moment; it is because the logic of vocal jouissance is at work and is driving the cry that the dramatic conditions necessary for its occurrence are created, demanding a death.30

Clément’s claim, however, is that the deaths are necessary for narrative closure: the female characters, being potentially subversive ‘Other’, must be annihilated. Either way, the plight of the women is, to say the least, an unhappy one, just as it is for the silent women subjects in their watery prisons in surrealist artworks by Breton, Roussel and Aragon.

To return now to John Cage’s works from the 1930s and 1940s that are centred in water sounds,31 the intention of the artwork is not to ‘move’ the listener as in traditional opera: emotion in early to mid-twentieth century is confined to the nascent modernist sense of excitement and exhilaration on the part of the creators at being able to work with water and sound, to control its place in their art making (albeit, of course, in a deliberately random, experimentalist way). The achievement here is

28 See Mary Ann Smart, ‘(Book Review): The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera by Michel Poizat’, Opera Quarterly 10 (1993): 117.

29 Catherine Clément, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). I discuss two Australian theatre works that address this issue in Linda Kouvaras, ‘Operatic Snuff? Gender Matters in Music Criticism’, Sounds Australian 40/Summer (1993–94): 39–43, also in Australian Feminist Studies 20/Summer (1994): 119–30, and Ormond Papers 10 (1993): 165–81.

30 Poizat, The Angel’s Cry, p. 145.31 See note 11, above.


the very first-principles basis for engaging with water in soundworks, appreciating the aesthetic potential of an unusual sound source relative to traditional Western art music, and celebrating the passing of the mid-twentieth-century moment of, as Kahn puts it, ‘water, water everywhere in program music but nobody [getting] wet’: subsequently, Cage was able to exclaim about his Water Music (1952) in a letter to Slonimsky, ‘unlike Handel’s, it really splashes’.32

Of course, it was not only Cage who abhorred the ‘harmonic gushes’33 and expressions of emotions in general through music. Modernists from both experimentalism and ‘academic’ high modernism purposefully shunned emotive connotations in their works. One of the most interesting points of departure at the historical juncture of modernism and postmodernism from about 1968 onwards is postmodernism’s willingness to engage with overtly emotional content: not in a return to – in music’s case – unproblematic, heart-on-sleeve harmonic effusiveness, but in an ironic, detached manner with aesthetic ‘investigation’ as one of its key concerns; this is a focal point for ‘Tears’. The two Australian sound art works I am discussing here deal with the place of water in music and woman’s voice through a prism that raises issues of expressiveness, psychoanalysis and transcendence.

The Gordon Assumption (2004)

David Chesworth declares that his interest in problematizing the relationship between the performer and the audience stemmed from very early on in his creative life (at the CHCMC; see Chapter 3). He likes to cause the audience to feel slightly uncertain about how they should interact with the music, impelling them, then, to give their attention to how the piece might be operating and also about their own response to it.34 A work that certainly enacts this aim, The Gordon Assumption was a sound installation in the subterranean toilet block in the Gordon Reserve at Parliament Station, Melbourne, as part of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival.35

32 Cited in Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 245. ‘Water was no longer contained in the instrument, but now the instrument was contained in the water’: ibid., p. 250. Similarly, George Brecht delighted in the fact that, ‘out of all the people who heard water dripping, I’m the first person to make a score out of it, so in a way the score calls attention to the fact that water dripping can be very beautiful – many people find a dripping faucet very annoying, they get very nervous’: cited ibid., p. 282. For these people, the sound of water is out of place in a musical or artistic context.

33 See note 13, above. 34 David Chesworth, ‘Works by Wax Sound Media’, Institute of Postcolonial Studies

Seminar Series.35 While the work was only ‘live’ during the Festival, a sizeable portion of it is still

accessible online. Leber and Chesworth, The Gordon Assumption.


There is a biblical reference here to the bodily Assumption of Mary, mother of Jesus (her physical ascent into Heaven).36 Rising up from the stairwell of the cave-like subterranean toilets comes an unremitting gushing of high-pitched, female voices, to ensnare passers-by. When they reach the lower gates, an asynchronous chorus in constantly rising pitch bombards the unwitting visitor. The voices amalgamate, becoming ever denser as they glissando upwards, always upwards. The locked gates bar the way to a beckoning luminous, eerie green chamber, its surfaces slowly scanned by a single vertical slit of sharp, white light. This is a world apart from the city’s usual operations of commuters, workers and public transport. The voices evoke the mythologies and mysteries of voices heard in caves, where oracles, seers and spirits make their pronouncements and presages. Above ground on the Reserve, new passers-by congregate in uneasy clusters, then make their wary way down into the rising trajectories of female voices.37

The visual dimension here is strong: reinforcing the sense of entrapment of the women is a steel door with wire mesh. The creators characterize the chamber behind it as ‘beckoning’.38 The Gordon Assumption presents its subject matter very tongue in cheek. The artists enjoyed the slight perturbation on the part of passers-by for these ‘trapped women’: David Chesworth reports, ‘people were concerned for the wellbeing of the ladies in the toilet. Did they get tired? When did they eat? They thought there were 100 women down there’.39 This is an instance of a ‘pure’, high-register female voice ‘detached from signification’, a stark ‘rejection of the ordered systems of music and language’:40 there is no ‘music’, per se, in conventional terms, and no verbal ‘text’. Essentially, there are just the ascending, random glissandi of the soprano voices.

But the jouissance of experiencing the high voices is unsettled by the ‘discomfort’ in the projected interpretation of the women’s predicament and in the spectators’ own consternation about what to do about these screams. A sense of unease is further raised, possibly, by the inopportuneness of not being able to surrender to the urge described by Poizat to ‘tear-up’ in a public space, compounded by the squeamishness associated with the somewhat unsavoury realm of the toilet. The audience can find no coherent place of comfort in which to ‘put’ their emotional reaction(s). This is arguably counterbalanced by the conflicting,

36 But as Peter King in the Program catalogue avers, ‘the “assuming” is ongoing and provisional: a thickening exhumation of protocols of [un?]imaginably primal music and sound: upward glissandi, Shepard’s Tones … No madrigals for Mary’: ‘The Gordon Assumption’, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Visual Arts Program catalogue (Melbourne: MIFA, 2004), at http://www.waxsm.com.au/press.htm, accessed 12 October 2012.

37 Leber and Chesworth, The Gordon Assumption.38 Ibid.39 David Chesworth, quoted in Fiona Scott-Norman, ‘Giving Voice to Their Art’, Age,

10 August 2007.40 Smart, ‘(Book Review): The Angel’s Cry’, p. 117.


seductive, mythologized lure of sirens to depths unknown and potentially dangerous, indeed ‘entrapping’. But the seductive lure of these contemporary sirens to depths unknown belies any mythological entrapment.

Such voices as these, that one might expect to encounter safely in an operatic performance, are utterly out of context, displaced, in this disused, non-functioning toilet block beside a major public transport node. They perform a feminist counter to the surrealists’ action of immersing the women in water and denying them a ‘voice’, while they overturn the psychoanalytic ‘positive fantasy of blissful union, and the negative fantasy of entrapment’:41 rather than the subject, in other words, the fantasist, who desires to return to pre-Symbolic – pre-linguistic – ‘entrapped’ infancy, the Gordon Assumption women themselves, embodied as voices, are the ones entrapped! Similarly, the ‘“bath of sounds” created by the mother’s soothing, singing voice’ that has ‘resonated in Western literature and music for centuries’42 is displaced here with contemporary irony: the ‘bath’ is a disused toilet block. There is no lurid gazing on the part of the spectators at any female forms: the women’s voices lure the audience down into their space, their false-promise womb-space – there are no wombs attached to these recorded voices as they inexorably rise and rise and are unassailably heard.

‘The beauty of working with sound is [that] it’s very focusing and personal – people think that it’s just for them. And you can’t turn away from sound like you can from a painting’.43 Chesworth’s remarks have pointed resonance in this work with the psychoanalytic dimension associated with woman’s voice. The Gordon Assumption critiques the psychoanalytic promise through the maternal voice of the ‘bliss of undifferentiation’44 and the quest to recover the infant’s ‘first cry’.45 We do not know why the Assumption voices are pushed to extremes of expression, unlike the codified terrain of operatic plots that demand such intensity from their heroines. We are left only with the sign of the extreme, the trace of the operatic female protagonists pushed to their death by our regressive desire.

The transcendent moment is fixed in time: the glissandi actually go nowhere, to no defined pitch, nor do they start from anywhere, from any defined pitch; the emotionally charged, ‘gushing’ moment is all there is. Left only to contemplate what might be the cause, and the fact that we expect there to be such a cause, the audience is placed to assess the situation for these women from the toilets who burst the seams of their confinement, who are operating outside the boundaries of the ersatz-uterine wall, heard where they should not be, transgressing place.

41 See note 22, above. 42 See note 23, above. 43 In Scott-Norman, ‘Giving Voice’.44 See note 17, above.45 Poizat, The Angel’s Cry, p. 101.


‘Tears’, from Passion (1993)

The expression of water in music also finds its way into ‘Tears’ (for voice, electronics, a pre-recorded cello track and Baroque organ), the final movement of Andrée Greenwell’s Passion.46 Greenwell’s focus here is the Passion story, another transcendence-themed catalyst, whose emotional impact has been elaborated, over the centuries, in Western religious music works. ‘Tears’ engages acutely – but with critical distance – with emotional response, distilling an essence of lamentation: namely, the sobbing noise of grief, strongly associated with the Passion tale. Here, the mezzo soprano voice range does not reach into the ‘pure cry’ of coloratura heights, but, like The Gordon Assumption, which uses no distinguishable words, there is avoidance of semantic signification: Greenwell sings her own invented, pseudo-ancient words.47

As a large-scale postmodern work contending with emotive responses to music, Greenwell turns the song into a sonic code, just as do Wax Sound Media with their transcendent Gordon Assumption chorus. The first third of this track comprises the sounding of what is usually silent: tears – here magnified into a New-Age, veritable Flood of tears, pouring forth – wept over the ages, but obviously sampled, treated, unnatural; produced by the recording of the flushing of a toilet48 they have paradoxically become an acculturated event here. Creating a further complicitly critical tension between engaging with and distancing from her material, Greenwell employs sampled sobbing on ‘Tears’.49 The sound borders the divide between guttural emission and ‘normal’ voice – at what could be called the pre-‘pure’ Poizat-cry moment, comprised only of sharp, gasping intakes of breath treated in such a way that one can indeed recognize it as sobbing – and by a woman, not an infant, at that. But the technology makes for examination of the sound rather than unquestioning acceptance of it. The looped repetition renders the sobbing mantra-like, beyond emotion. The listener can simply concentrate on it and observe it, rather than solely empathize with it. There is no pretence of ‘naturalness’: the listener is aware of the tape-loop as a device and cannot engage with this in an unmediated way. Greenwell’s choice and treatment of source material for the sounds of grief point out the contrivance.

The voice in ‘Tears’ emerges, accompanied by neo-tonal music – an equally ironic approach to that used for the noise-based material. If the preceding flood simulation denotes a high modernist sensibility, the neo-tonal harmony jars with mid-twentieth-century art music’s banishment of tonality and the ideal of a coherent soundworld. Greenwell’s music here comprises mostly triadic harmonies, although the progressions are not functional: g# minor to G Major; E Major; b

46 The remaining movements of the work are scored for soprano, tenor, female voice, trumpet, Baroque organ and cello.

47 Linda Kouvaras, interview with Andrée Greenwell, 12 September 1998. 48 Ibid.49 Ibid. The sobbing is Greenwell’s own: ibid.


minor; g minor (with the note C# appearing on the final beat in the voice, making a g diminished triad); D Major; then the cycle repeats, ending up in the ‘tonic’ of g# minor only to elide subtly into E Major with a shift in the inner voice of the organ from D# to E. The melodic and harmonic rhythm are irregular, with changes occurring not quite predictably, within an overall basic slow 3/4 meter, replete with an extended passage for a vocal semi-cadenza on the second cycle over the G Major section – giving an overall quasi-improvisatory effect. The minor/major mixture of the harmonic progression is affective, and the intimacy of one voice with organ accompaniment in this movement adds to the personalized, poignant, subjective effect of the movement, much as an aria from Bach’s St Matthew Passion does (the Baroque organ here making this association pointed).

Also featured are glissandi, as in The Gordon Assumption. But here they are (post-Bach) ‘seagull/whale’ sound effects, produced by rapid, irregular downward-moving pitch-sliding on the cello, sounding in this context as though they, too, are in grief, which, in tandem with the harmonic treatment, gives way to suggestions of flight and transcendence. But these, like the sobs and the gushing water (tears), are contrived, recorded and treated with echo and overlap, and in turn point to the similarly manipulative quality of (the) affective music. Aesthetic ‘transportation’ or religious ‘transcendence’ mixes here with the foregrounding of artifice – we feel carried away by the flood of water, of emotion … we are helpless in its wake. The connotation of tears, the weeping sounds, voices, even the whale/seagull noises, naturally evoke the bodily dimension.

But the distorted treatment of the ‘natural’ sobbing noises – using amplification, echo, overlapping and overlayering, not to mention the extreme length of the duration of the two sounds – gives rise to a sense of disembodiment, a postmodern departure from the ‘natural’. The sounds in ‘Tears’ refer to their own production rather than signifying an event of which they are the sounding result. A possible consequence of this ploy could be an invitation to focus on the way Western music (‘harmonic gushes’)50 has been used throughout the centuries, to evoke and manipulate emotional responses, perhaps to invite scepticism of the truthfulness of emotion paraded in the Passion parable and to encourage similar questioning of other socio-cultural contexts.

Postmodernizing the Feminized Sound Object

Despite the state of motion in the glissandi that feature in The Gordon Assumption and ‘Tears’ (consisting of rising voices in the Leber/Chesworth work, and descending cello in Greenwell’s), emotion is a frozen element, going no place, looping over and over like the crying out of women’s voices over time that should have been heard but were not – yet forming an antidote to modernism’s squeamishness about, and relinquishment of, emotion. Performing a latter-day, newly aestheticized take

50 See note 13, above.


on Duchamp’s provocative, ‘ready-made’ Fountain of 1917, which proposed an industrially produced urinal as a piece of art by designating it as such, the works reassert the notion that art can take place anywhere now, and that art has an underbelly: the ethereal voices, the religious sentiments and the feelings of grief are firmly conjoined to their bodily housing – the most otherworldly voice has to come from a functioning, toilet-using corporeal reality, a fact not made much of in works from the modernist or pre-modernist eras. But in a sublimely twisted postmodern move, here, through technology, this is actually not the case – there are no bodies, the voices actually are ethereal, and the auditor/spectator cannot shut them out.

This is palpably dissimilar to the situation for the mid-twentieth-century modernist surrealists’ voiceless women in their watery confines, whose voices never were audible. It is similarly unlike that for traditional operatic female characters, whose fates and demise were preordained – whether due to ‘the logic of vocal jouissance’51 or to the exigency of narrative closure to bring about the obliteration of the threatening ‘Other’, as identified by Catherine Clément in her consideration of (mainly) nineteenth-century opera.52 The female characters in all these instances deserve a meta-cry, such as that offered by the Gordon Assumption’s wailing voices or by the protracted crying in ‘Tears’.

These works thus offer a broader-stance commentary on significant aspects of high art over the past couple of hundred years and experimentalist culture since mid-last century. ‘Tears’ and The Gordon Assumption simultaneously interrogate our collective sense of psychological and bodily place, of inside-ness (ranging from the protected, blissful, watery, foetal environment, to the enclosed, private, watery space of the toilet) and outside-ness (where such spaces are repositioned and no longer belong to the inner realm), throwing up the issue of inappropriateness (which is essentially, after all, something occurring in the place that it normally should not).

The compositions discussed here are evidence of an incorporation of feminist criticism within musical practice itself. The indeterminacy or radical ambiguity of the ‘position’ from which these works ultimately ‘speak’ about their art and its values means that it is up to the audience, the receivers of the artworks, to do the work of politics and assess them, and then possibly act on the findings. But the works’ respective non-didacticism ensures that audiences will not feel ‘badgered’ on the issue and possibly repulsed from any engagement. Rather, they open space for reflection on some of our most taken-for-granted cultural tropes and attendant attitudes, such as various mythologies and clichés concerning the female voice.

The starkly confronting females of the Gordon Assumption screaming from the subterranean depths; the ‘flood of tears’ redolent of the Passion, yet actually produced from the receptacle for bodily wastes; the loaded hyperbole of Connors’s greetings-card piece; and Dyson’s delving into a female pathology and its treatment

51 See note 30, above. 52 Clément, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women.


– all are anathema to traditional Western high art music: they show us our basest selves, in highly intimate, personal moments, and firmly reinstate the mundane into high art. This is achieved through music; sound; woman’s voice; birthday greetings; the tradition of operatic heroine death; the experience of some women in the treatment of a specifically female condition; tears and toilets. And the present-day message, the reality check for the psyche – which neither traditional opera, nor surrealism, nor modernism offers – is this: one can never return to that pre-Symbolic state of infantile bliss; there is no longer such a transcendent moment to be had.

Early experimentalists, the Italian Futurists, were ‘on the side of noises and other non-abstract things: “tables, houses, frying-pans, urinals, women, etc.”’53 Postmodern sound art encompasses re-engagement with the human condition. Such subjectivities comprise questions of embodiedness, of the ways in which femaleness is constructed – in art and in the world, and how all of us discharge ourselves through our voice in the world. The following chapter looks at how sound art works can capture our encounters with the outer world.

53 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 46.

Chapter 5

The Geographico-political

‘Music IS Ecology’ (Cage)1

Superficially, John Cage’s 4’33” is a work of ‘nothing’, yet Cage himself attributed ecological significance to it:

We, as a human species, have endangered nature. We acted against it, we have rebelled against its existence. So, our concern today must be to reconstitute it for what it is. And nature is not a separation of water from air, or of the sky from the earth, etc., but a ‘working together’, or a ‘playing together’ of those elements. That is what we call ecology. Music, as I conceive it, is ecological. You could go further and say that it IS ecology.2

Cage implores us to consider in principle a perceptual and philosophical shift about the way we consider what music can be, rather than a pointed grappling with or comment on particular ecological concerns. Since the première of 4’33” (1952), ecologically aware artists have brought a new specificity to their extra-musical commentary. The World Soundscape Project collected sound recordings to document natural soundscapes and tribal history, and conducted interviews to learn how people react to the sounds of everyday life. Acoustic Ecology, an offshoot from the WSP, heightens the sense of sound as a tangible phenomenon, which can pilot a greater degree of awareness that is, according to the Forum for Acoustic Ecology, in sore demand in contemporary life.3 The bombardment of noise pollution to which we are constantly subjected and the absence of discrete episodes of ‘silence’ lead to an inability to pay heed to the environment and its exigencies. A heightened awareness of sound and noise, on the other hand, will result in built environments developed through informed design, which will create diminished noise levels, and which can facilitate the perception of discrete sounds.

American Alejandra Salinas and Spaniard Aeron Bergman, for example, are artists who work with a variety of media including sound, video, performance, installation and drawing. Their work involves establishing dialogues with rituals

1 Cage and Charles, For the Birds, p. 229.2 Ibid.3 See Chapter 2 of present volume.


that have shaped national cultures, national identities and political viewpoints.4 German–Canadian electro-acoustic composer Hildegard Westerkamp’s works since the mid-1970s have made environmental sound their core, in a creative endeavour holding creation and conservation in equal tension.5 The WSP ideals found their way into Australia through the ABC FM radio Listening Room programmes (1988–2003), particularly in the work of Les Gilbert and visiting American Bill Fontana, who were keen to record environmental sounds of endangered species and natural habitats.6

An increasing specificity regarding ecological issues informs many sound art works that are performed in, constructed in, and/or ‘collaborate’ with, the outdoors. One can observe how this approach has developed since its first expressions in Australian early postmodernism. Eve Duncan, for instance, writes in 2006, ‘Behind the material world one senses a deeper world of inspiration, mathematics, spiritual beings, living physical and psychological archetypes; a living, breathing reality of invisibility. Composition is the means by which I swim through this sea of complex activity, trying to understand what influences human, animal and mineral evolution’.7 Experimentalism’s dialectical relationship between creator, performer and listener becomes, then, even more crucial in sound art, also often extending to the work itself – particularly so when the ‘work’ is centred in a specific landscape. From the urban to the rural and the outback, the outside world is a loaded space, and sound artists embrace the implications of the world around them, showing us how we are embroiled within our environs.

British sound artist Scanner’s8 Surface Noise (1998), for example, involved plotting a London bus route determined by overlaying the sheet music from the familiar nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ onto a map of London. Wherever the notes fell on the cityscape, Scanner recorded the sounds and images. He then mixed the work live on each bus journey around the city, translating the images into sound and using the captured source recordings, which he then played through a speaker system installed throughout the bus, as it travelled from Big Ben to St Paul’s Cathedral. Surface Noise thus brings together shared sonic markers of the city of London, further ‘personalizing’ it by including the little ‘private’ noises – utterances, shuffles, sniffs – human beings emit on public transport that

4 Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas, A Minor History of Creativity, at http://aminorhistoryofcreativity.wordpress.com/artists-2/aeron-bergman-alejandra-salinas/, accessed 25 September 2011.

5 Hildegard Westerkamp: Composer, at http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/, accessed 19 September 2011.

6 See Virginia Madsen, ‘Written in Air: Experiments in Radio’, Experimental Music, ed. Priest, pp. 164–5.

7 Eve Duncan: Associate Artist, Australian Music Centre (2006), at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/duncan-eve, accessed 2 July 2009.

8 Aka Robin Rimbaud.

The Geographico-political 117

we can be assured will be ignored by others, by common understanding that they too make these sounds.9

American sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s work is concerned with the physical aspects of sound, through its structures and its ability to create an atmosphere. His World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd of 1999, for example, recorded the creaking and cracking sounds of the building after the stress of hurricane.10

Australian-born, now Europe-based, sound artist Robert Curgenven traverses a variety of sound sources from pure field recordings to feedback and instrumental harmonics. Some of his sound explorations involve his sense of dislocation – as well as the range of raw beauty – in remote areas such as Australia’s Northern Territory.11

Water has featured in countless Australian artworks across all disciplines since Settlement – with preoccupations ranging from early explorers dying from the lack of it to present-day catastrophic extremes of drought and floods.12 Chapter 4 dealt with water-infused/-informed musical works that were categorically ‘dry’, despite aural appearances to the contrary.13 This chapter’s compositions are decidedly ‘wetter’: they engage directly with specific sites or landscapes and political issues.14

9 Scanner, Surface Noise: Art by Scanner, Beat Magazine (17 May 2010), at http://www.beatmagazine.co.uk/surface-noise-art-by-scanner, accessed 30 September 2011.

10 Excerpt from the ‘Fondation pour l’art contemporain catalog for the exhibition Ce qui arrive/Unknown Quantity’, Stephen Vitiello, at http://www.stephenvitiello.com/, accessed 25 September 2011.

11 Robert Curvengen: Bio, at http://www.recordedfields.net/robert_curgenven/bio.asp, accessed 25 September 2011.

12 As composer David Worrall comments, ‘Australia’s geographical and multicultural diversity yields a markedly different acoustic and cultural diversity from one location to another: from the 40,000 years of Aboriginal elders singing the land to kilometres of wind-activated communication cables to oil drums, grain silos, factories, portable immersive environments and interactive gallery installations’: ‘Review of Ros Bandt, Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks’, Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 8/2 (2003): 229.

13 Greenwell’s ‘Tears’ does not actually have any tears; the toilets at the Gordon Reserve (where Leber and Chesworth’s The Gordon Assumption is set) are disused.

14 ‘Environmentalism’ finds its application in Australia in a 2008 episode of the ABC TV series Catalyst, which investigates the fire/water synergy in the much-threatened Murray–Darling river, as does a 2008 presentation of Channel Nine’s Sixty Minutes: Paul Willis, Fire and Water, ABC TV, Catalyst (2008), at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2230299.htm, accessed 4 May 2008; Charles Wooley, River’s End, Channel Nine, Sixty Minutes (2008), at http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/, accessed 4 May 2008. Water’s precariousness is of course not only felt in Australia: recent acknowledgement of global warming calls attention to it across the world. But among Western-culture countries, Australia is highly branded by weather extremes and their consequences. Indeed, so


Ecological and Other Politicized Dimensions in Sound Art in the ‘Outdoors’

Certain of Ros Bandt’s post-1990s works impart a postmodern sense of loss and protest. They draw attention to sounds that are ‘endangered’ or no longer heard, whereas a modernist–formalist sensibility would not necessarily lament this passing, being more likely to focus on celebrating the new sounds of modern life and its new technologies. Bandt’s philosophy has patently evolved since the early Clifton Hill Community Music Centre days where she urges us to listen to sound for its own sake, with no explicit ‘further purpose’:15 20 years later, she declares, in a spirit that accords with the WSP musical and ecological standpoint,

Sound is invisible, ephemeral, site specific and time specific. It is life’s voice. It is ever-changing. Sound exists in acoustic space. Sounds mark out moments of time and can become complicated signs for living things. As the digital world replaces the mechanical world, another interface like the industrial revolution is occurring. Communication systems bring new introduced sounds into the environment while other familiar sounds are being subverted, such as horse hooves and ticking clocks. The natural world has become the dumping ground for man’s experiments.16

Voicing the Murray (1996)

Ros Bandt’s responses to such environmental issues are now far more focused and specific. Her Voicing the Murray (1996) is ‘an acoustic ecology’; it is also ‘a fluid multi-channel sound installation and a radio work’.17 For Bandt, the

significant is water for the national consciousness that historian and broadcaster Michael Cathcart believes that how Australians live and think has been shaped by water – ‘or rather by the lack of it’, as reported in an article on him entitled ‘Shaping and Shaped by a Dry Heart’. He paints a picture of the dry interior coming into the national psyche ‘as a “troubling desolate silence” with aridity at its heart. Because of that, during the nineteenth century, an awareness of lethargy and death arose that seemed to capture the spirit of the “silent land”’. He accounts for the mythologizing of Burke and Wills as being due to the ‘arid heart’ having taken their lives: ‘They were received into the mystery that lies at the heart of Australia, and we became fascinated by that’: Katherine Smith, ‘Shaping and Shaped by a Dry Heart’, The University of Melbourne Voice 3/1 (2008), at http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/articleid_5114.html (accessed 12 May 2008). Annea Lockwood’s River Archive has the goal of recording every river in the world, see Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 288.

15 See Chapter 3 of present volume.16 Ros Bandt, ‘Voicing the Murray: From Acoustic Ecology to Cyberspace’,

Counterpoint 9/February (1997), at www.amuse.vic.edu.au/counterpoint/articles/bandt197.pdf, accessed 18 November 2008.

17 Ibid. The work was commissioned for Confluences, the Mildura Arts Festival, and was produced in collaboration with artists John Wolsely and Sieglind Karl and curated


significance of this region, ‘a man-made oasis’, is that it is a ‘unique and critical habitat for the whole of Australia’.18 She also draws attention to its ‘by-products of man’s overuse of the environment, erosion, salination, and cultural dislocation for indigenous peoples’.19 She emphasizes, under the heading ‘Defining the Brief: Acoustic Ecology’, that as a sound artist her intention was to grant the Murray River a ‘voice’, one consequential to all those which have sounded on its banks and surfaces.20

Voicing the Murray consists of six large amphora-like ceramic jars fitted with loudspeakers, within a room strewn with red-gum eucalyptus leaves. The leaves bring about associations with the ancient Australian landscape, the amphorae providing the image of ancient cultures, transportation, trade, and the consequent dissemination and dilution of culture. Bandt structures the layout of the work’s components in such a way as to facilitate the listener to move around the spatially complex multi-channel soundfield. It is made up of ocean, bush-land and other natural environments, providing a context for voice recordings of ancient and modern languages and the indigenous Yorta Yorta and Barkindji languages. Fragmented vocal monologues tell of their speakers’ experiences of possession and dispossession of land and language.

Bandt was concerned that her work bore witness to the ‘stories from the local people; grape harvesters, irrigators, the lock keepers, the dam owners, the flora and fauna experts, and most importantly the original owners, the Aboriginal people who are in danger of losing their own languages at the present time’.21 To this end, she undertook several field trips to Mildura to conduct interviews and record the sounds of her subjects, frequently camping out. During her excursions, and while looking into the impact of technology in the area, she became aware of the endangered nature of sounds, preserved sounds, lost sounds and new introduced sound.22 Reflecting a postcolonialist consciousness in seeking the consent of experts in the fields of endangered species – the grey-throated miner bird, for example, and the frogs’ habitat in the mating season –, she notes, ‘One must respect the sounds as belonging to a place and realise that the microphone can be an agent of imperialism. Permission should always be granted before proceeding’.23

The list of sound sources and voices collected by Bandt are:

by artist Tom Henty. Also see Ros Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, an Audible Polyphony, Australian Sound Design Project (2001), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/NationPaper.htm, accessed 12 March 2005.

18 Bandt, ‘Voicing the Murray’. Also see Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity.19 Bandt, ‘Voicing the Murray’.20 Ibid.21 Ibid.22 Ibid. Bandt was using a DAT 10 tape recorder and a Sony digital disc recorder.23 Ibid.


‘Sounds of the Murray region’: 1. ‘Dawn chorus under River red gums’. Cockatoos, pelican, fish in the water, parrots, magpies, yellow miners. Lake Hattah National Park. 2. ‘Picking the grapes’. Sounds of picking and laying out grapes on drying racks at vineyard locations. A mixture of text and environmental sounds were used. 3. ‘Paddlesteamer’. ‘Melbourne’ and diesel ‘Rothbury’. 4. ‘Endangered birds’. Black eared miner and red throated whistler. 5. ‘Frogs’. Buronga wetlands near the bridge. 6. ‘Pumps’. Psyche bend and the Chaffey steam pumps were recorded as well as a modern pumping station which provided modern and historical examples of water controlling devices. Ray Byrnes, First Mildura Irrigation Trust provided commentary. 7. ‘Barkindji language’. Text spoken by Rex Smith, Junette Mitchell, Kevin King. 8. ‘Yorta Yorta stories’. Told by Betty Clements and Fred Atkinson. 9. ‘Lock 11/Weir’. Permission from Jeff Galasso.24

A photograph from the installation shows Bandt with the large ceramic urns.25 They form a set of six concentric circles, which mimic preserving jars for the sounds. Inside these ‘jars’ some sounds could be conserved; others could escape into the atmosphere, shooting straight upwards from ear height in rounded columns of sound; still others could disappear completely or be cremated in the ash under the urns. Listener perception is determined by proximity to each pot, the stories forming solos, duets, concertos accordingly. Bandt carefully creates a hierarchy in the narratives, with the natural sounds of the area (including birds and water), the Aboriginal stories and Barkindji words relating to the Murray accorded prime importance by placing their outputs in central locations and confining them to a separate loop, the non-indigenous tales sharing the remaining four tracks with less movement. This design element was a cultural metaphor for Bandt. She notes that ‘Aboriginal people have lived much more harmoniously in the natural environment and are the original owners and proper keepers of it’.26

Bandt contrives the work to be ever-shifting in its component elements of sound, lighting and sculpture, just like the river. ‘People can access where and when they like, like surfing the net. It’s impossible to predict or recreate the pathways. The voices together make a virtual community which is derived from the real. We can only perceive a tiny piece of the whole at any one time’.27 Yet Bandt’s overriding redressing of what she perceives as the imbalance of human beings’ impact upon such delicate ecosystems is found in her giving the Murray a

24 Ibid. Some 10 hours of field recordings were collected from which the piece would be made. Six unit cycles of 15 minutes each would be the desired outcome.

25 Obtained by Bandt from the old Chaffey pumps furnace at Psyche Bend.26 Bandt, ‘Voicing the Murray’. This reference also gives an illustration of the grid.27 Ibid.


‘voice’, comprising all the elements that abrade its topography,28 and each voice is ‘given space, unlike the politics of real life’.29

Lake Mungo (1992)

An environmentally sensitive, interactive, temporary outdoor installation, Ros Bandt’s Lake Mungo (1992) offers what she describes as an ‘aural journey into the psyche at one of Australia’s most significant world heritage areas’.30 It, too, has a strong political subtext. Lake Mungo is a dried up lakebed, one of the 17 lakes within the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area located in Mungo National Park, 987km west of Sydney. As an important archaeological site it covered 135 square kilometres and was about 10 metres deep. It existed from 25,000–45,000 years ago; the lakes in this area have been dried up for approximately 14,000 years.31 The site of the oldest examples of human remains found in the antipodes, the spirit of this place challenged Bandt to come to terms with its enormity of its history. She notes the way the land tells its own narrative through the 20,000-year-old fossil fish underfoot and the clearly visible pre-Ice Age formations and other geomorphic changes.

High on the dunes that surround the dried-out lake-bed Bandt erects her Aeolian harp, constructed with Steve Naylor, its harmonic strains wafting continuously over and into the landscape, intermingling with ‘the stories and dreams at the Aborigines who carefully tended the site until they were rudely removed by white men 200 years ago’.32 The harps and their sounds seemed, for Bandt, a conduit back into this primaeval landscape, where the ancient ‘voice’ of the harps conjoins with those of the wind and the Aboriginal elder Alice Kelly of the local Mutti Mutti tribe as she related to Bandt the history of her people. For Bandt, the harps

28 Ibid.29 Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity.30 Ros Bandt, Lake Mungo (2002), Australian Sound Design Project, at http://www.

sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000354b.htm, accessed 15 October 2008.31 Found at the site have been the remains of many extinct animals such as Tasmanian

tigers, giant kangaroos, hairy-nosed wombats, and an animal called the zygomaturus. Aboriginal occupation in the area has been carbon-dated at about 40,000 years. Aborigines gathered mussels, emu eggs, cod and perch from the lake and hunted wallabies and kangaroos. The area has an abundance of human fossils and artefacts, uncovered then recovered again because of the winds and the blowing sand. The Aborigines were among the first people to grind flour from wild grass seeds, and their flake tools and sandstone grinders have been discovered. These sandstone grinders are reported to have come from at least 100km away, suggesting seasonal migration, see Lake Mungo, at http://www.cap.nsw.edu.au/bb_site_intro/specialplaces/special_places_st3/LakeMungo/lake_mungo.htm, accessed 8 August 2009.

32 Bandt, Lake Mungo. Bandt’s webpage has a link to an mp3 soundbite of the installation, and Mungo appears on the CD Sonic Archaeologies, MD3145.


‘screamed’ and ‘howled’ the anguish and misery experienced by the Mutti Mutti people over the last 200 years.33

The Aeolian harp also outlines a present-day geography as its sounds give punctuation to the delicate botanical forms that arise from their earthbeds, punctuate the skyline and so offer ‘audible spatial reference points, by which one might orientate oneself in this overpowering setting’.34 Bandt’s sentiments have some resonance with Peter Hamel’s 1970s findings regarding the Aeolian harp and the way it imparts what could well be experienced as a spiritual dimension,35 a sense that is supported by further evocative sounds interspersed throughout the work: a didjeridu, rustling leaves, and shells and footsteps.

Dredge (For Percussion Quartet) (2008–2010)

A 2008–2010 project by Eve Duncan in collaboration with her daughter, photographer Siri Hayes, Dredge (For Percussion Quartet) consists of photographs, photograms and lightboxes with photographs of seahorses, as well as percussion music, both live and pre-recorded. It takes issue with the deepening of the channels in Port Phillip and Westernport Bays to allow larger tankers access to the Port of Melbourne.36 The environmental consequences of this include endangering marine species including the seahorses and the grasses that are part of this habitat and vulnerable to dredging, and Hayes documents this in her photographs; the creators also consider the musicians performing the work as part of the landscapes, and they are included in the visual documenting.37 The three musical items in the performance were ‘Seahorses and Seagrasses’, ‘Time and the Tides’ and ‘Dredge Dragon’; earphones were included in which the first piece, ‘Seahorses and Seagrasses’, was experienced as a pre-recorded work.

The work is infused with further associations, drawing on Aboriginal myth and early-Settler and post-war migrant history. A film made by Hayes, as part of the collaboration, features Aboriginal elder Caroline Briggs of the local indigenous Bunurong tribe on a beach by the bay, wordlessly telling the Bunurong story of the Boonawrung tribal myth, in which Port Phillip Bay was a grassy plain inhabited by many tribes. When they began to fight, to the detriment of care for their land and their children, the spirits responded by making the sea rise, and that is how Port Phillip came into being. The sea stopped rising when the people began to attend to

33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 See Chapter 3 of present volume.36 It was presented at Melbourne’s Linden Gallery and Gallerysmith in 2010, with

performances by Speak Percussion, see Siri Hayes, Dredge (Photographs) (2010), at http://www.sirihayes.com/dredge.htm#, accessed 2 August 2010.

37 See Siri Hayes, Dredge: Listening Portraits (2010), at http://www.sirihayes.com/listening_portraits.htm, accessed 2 August 2010.


the land and one another again.38 As the dredgers uncover layers of rock and sand, so too emerge the strata of the history of the bay, from the Western Europeans and Chinese who arrived in the Victorian gold rush, to the post-war influx of Italians, Greeks and central Europeans, to more recent migrations.

‘Time and the Tides’ is based on bay tide charts.39 Duncan’s investigation into the dredging environmental report showed that some slight tide level discrepancies were to eventuate; she used the tide levels for June of one year, nearing the equinox, where she found some ‘very interesting tide variations’.40 She applied the statistics gathered that plotted the change of tides in Westernport Bay in June 2008 to the changes of rhythms, dynamics, register and textures of the movement.41 With tidal rises carrying dangerous ramifications for future prospects for the bays, the association with the reality of the tides and the Bunurong story was very germane to her.

‘Dredge Dragon’ uses purposefully grating music in order ‘to create in music a creature that represented the heartlessness, the fear, the conflict of groups of people in opposition, as well as the cold-bloodedness that surrounded the issue of dredging, and it turned into this aural dragon’.42 It speaks to the power, fear and physical force that attend the act of cutting through rock to enlarge the channel, with Duncan emphasizing the concerns about development in this dragon, as well as focusing on the mechanical power of the machines. The dragon analogy appealed to her, as while dragons do not actually exist in physical form, everyone nevertheless knows what they are. Duncan finds the ‘dragon of dredging’ analogous to the ‘dragon of wilful progress’: it will continue apparently inexorably, ignoring environmental concerns, dismissing them as mere bleating on the part of ‘bleeding heart greenies’, and this Duncan finds ‘fascinating’.43 While the environmentalists’ concerns are quite logical, the charge of intellectual weakness is levelled at them by developers.44 Duncan also notes that this music is ‘not really sophisticated’45 – a clear association on the part of the composer with the mindset of wilful and destructive progress. She had the performers ‘doll themselves up, as though for the opera, and they listen to the sea’.46

38 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Eve Duncan, 2 February 2009 and 13 July 2009.

39 The derivation of this can be perceived to hark back to one of early experimentalism’s defining moments: Percy Grainger’s epiphany while watching the waves of Albert Park Lake in Melbourne, which led to his creation of ‘Free Music’, see Introduction to present volume. Duncan did not intend this connection herself, however: e-mail, 2 February 2009.

40 Ibid.; Kouvaras, e-mail, Duncan, 13 July 2009. 41 Eve Duncan, Dredge (Score Notes) (2009).42 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Eve Duncan, 23 July 2010.43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.45 Ibid.46 Kouvaras, e-mail, Duncan, 23 July 2009.


‘Seahorses and Seagrasses’ gives the semblance of other-worldliness, using marimba, vibraphone and other ‘wobbly’ sounds, while the emulation of tidal rising and subsiding in ‘Time and the Tides’ is realized with ‘instruments’ from the docks (40-gallon and 20-gallon steel drums) and the beaches (old wine and beer bottles, takeaway foil dishes filled with shells, thongs and fishing tackle), and fisherman’s gear such as sinkers, plastic dishes with different size sinkers in them. These are used with many instruments to evoke water: wind gongs, Chinese gongs, prayer bowls. Japanese and Chinese prayer bowls are heard continuously for 10 minutes in ‘Time and the Tides’, to suggest the unified but continually shifting tide levels. Duncan highlights the connection to industry and trade by including steel drums in varying sizes.47

The visual correlation to the audio-conceptual ideas is established by the use of nautilus shells in several of the photographs, the nautilus spiral recently being seen as a model of how interrelating natural systems work. Hayes has also used messages in bottles as a poetic image of the frailty of environmental messages: the messages are unlikely to be found and read, but nevertheless hold great hopes. She has photographed the musicians listening to rocks and putting messages in bottles into the bay.48 Along with deriving her rhythms from the tide tables for Port Phillip Bay, Duncan thus strongly ‘particularizes’ the music with relation to its environs, much as Westerkamp’s Kits Beach (1989) draws attention – through her own narration, in this instance – to the minute details of natural objects along the seashore on this Vancouver beach.49

Transpoes [sic] (1994)

The installation Transpoes from 1994 by Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, staged at the Glasshouses, Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne,50 playfully foregrounds the act of searching for exotic and fantastic fruits and flowers that are not immediately discernible, requiring careful scrutiny and searching among the myriad shapes and forms in a canopy of plants. To achieve this, they situate a 1920s women’s shoe fabricated in a pinkish suede and, further aided by the inclusion of a undeniably phallic stamen of an anthurium poking out of the tongue of the shoe, the eye ‘reads’ this form as an exotic plant.

Emanating from the object are recordings of human ‘birdcallers’,51 offset by piano phrases from nineteenth-century composer Robert Schumann’s The Prophet

47 Kouvaras, e-mail, Duncan, 2 February 2009. 48 Ibid.; Kouvaras, e-mail, Duncan, 13 July 2009. 49 See, for example, Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, pp. 32 ff.50 It was exhibited as part of ‘Earwitness: Excursions in Sound’, curated by Sonia

Leber, 17 November–3 December 1994.51 Herb Patten’s indigenous gumleaf tradition calls; Malaysian-born Australian

Golden Gumleaf Champion, Virgil Reutens’s ‘new style’ calls; and those by Janet Shaw, Australian Bird Calling Champion.


Bird played by historical pianist icon Ignace Paderewski (1860–1941). Expanding the generic reach of the work, DeLys and Grounds include references to celebrity plantings by musicians, such as Dame Nellie Melba and Paderewski, in the garden, and in a corner of the Glasshouse, camouflaged by a cascading plant, hang two other 1920s women’s shoes, one of which contains a small speaker, while hanging above is a shoe constructed as a ‘wasp’s nest’.52

The composers thus establish modes of connectivity between and within species, across artforms, and across timelines, as they play with dissolutions between the constructed and the ‘natural’. Mimicry is highlighted within this postmodern work, abrim with historic references and contemporary wit and whimsy, which includes yet another sound foray into the classical piano repertoire.

A further defining dimension in the creators’ stratagem – that of audience engagement and enjoyment – is clearly articulated in their statement, where they declare a concern for ‘commitment’ to their audience: this is realized through ensuring that the work is interactive. For DeLys and Grounds, it also means that their composition should be many-layered and open-ended in possible meaning, as well as enticing the listener/audient to engage with it. They particularly welcome ‘whole-body interaction’ and ‘active listening’. The techniques of imitation of, and identification with, nature, are employed to this end, prompting a playful ‘call-and-response’ on the part of installation attendees. Tourists will call out ‘cooey’, and birds even sometimes sing in reaction to the sounds DeLys and Grounds have mounted in glasshouses. Thus seduced by the playful nature of the work, participants are placed in a position to explore some of its further layers.53

52 Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, Transpoes, Australian Sound Design Project (2003), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000488b.htm, accessed 19 November 2007. Also see Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, DeLys and Grounds (2009), at http://2mysteries.net/flash/index.htm, accessed 6 September 2009. They have developed design processes that take advantage of aleatoric potentials of hard disk playback engines (through sequencing and random operations). For the most part, they use ‘home studio’ tools in preparation. (Pro-Tools software, running on a Mac G3, augmented by a pro and a portable DAT recorder, CD-burner, Neuman microphones.) Previously, in their temporary installations they were able to work creatively around the limitations of the CD/MiniDisc technologies used to deliver installation sound. Over time they have refined their installation delivery systems, incorporating more sophisticated technologies such as DVD to give their installations increased functionality and reliability. Using interactives they have created more sophisticated layers of unfolding, based on user choices (for example, interactive triggering devices using infrared technology): ibid. For a discussion of David Lumsdaine’s recordings of birdcall, see Gordon Kerry, New Classical Music: Composing Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009).

53 DeLys and Grounds, Transpoes.


Lands Collide (2002)

Also a sound installation set in the gardens of an historic building, Melbourne’s Ripponlea House, Lands Collide, created by Brigid Burke in 2002,54 has the theme of water as a central component, with glass and text deployed in various environments. Two chairs are covered with shards of painted and etched glass, and speakers transmit the sounds of gamelan gongs to accompany multifarious sampled (gushing, sucking, pattering, splashing) water sounds, which are treated electronically.

In a self-reflexive move, the work (like many of Burke’s) has since developed, ‘feeding’ off itself and incorporating further layers, such as texts; maps; visual remnants of journeys; drawings of organic shapes (tree roots, natural forms, landscapes); scenes of rainforests compiled from books, and images that were intricately filtered and modified; and Aboriginal stories about the uses of water, and water in the environment.55 The contrast between the stately, ornate, nineteenth-century English architecture of Ripponlea House, and the raw associations conjured by the work, is stark and confronting.

Speak Before It’s Too Late (2000)

Ros Bandt’s installation Speak Before It’s Too Late (2000) returns to the use of six urns, first encountered in her Voicing the Murray (1996) (above). Speak Before It’s Too Late deals with the historical sociolinguistic aspects of Australian colonial and immigrant culture. The work is a personal one for the composer, drawing on her own family and social background, where various aspects of linguistic changes have occurred over her lifetime since the 1950s. Her youth was spent in a monolingual middle-class family in the regional Victorian town of Geelong, contrasting with her inner urban experience since the mid-1970s where, having moved to Brunswick, she finds her neighbours are mainly migrants, of European, Asian and African descent. It dawned on Bandt with great sadness that her son’s Polish–Jewish paternal grandmother could no longer converse with anyone in Melbourne in her pre-War Polish, and when she spoke this language of her youth to Bandt, the composer ‘could see the lights in her eyes’, and Bandt was also shown ‘the middle-class child sitting in her grand apartment in the main street of

54 This was the first realization of the work.55 John Jenkins, Brigid Burke: Visual Expression through the Movement of Sound

(Review of Burke’s Presentation: Up Close and Personal Composer Series), eds Jenkins and New Music Articles (2004), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/upclose/Burke.html, accessed 18 July 2007. Lands Collide appears on CD TRI DUO PLUS 4498 and was also broadcast as a 30-minute piece for ABC FM’s Listening Room programme. Also see Brigid Burke, Lands Collide, at http://www.greatwhitenoise.net/charisma/htm>/europebio.htm, accessed 15 December 2009.


Warsaw many years ago as though I was meeting her for the first time, a woman I have known intimately for 30 years’.56

Bandt came to realize the both importance of language – which is described as ‘a barometer of change’57 – for identity, for the mutual sharing and understanding of others’ tales, and how Australia’s cultural makeup has changed so radically. She also notes that the passage of time has impacted on her own memories of many aspects of language – for example, since Vatican 2, the Latin Masses she first heard as a child with friends in Geelong are gone, and she laments the threat to her own sense of historical continuity and right to Western heritage especially through the closure of Classics departments, as Ancient Greek and Latin form the very basis of the English language. There are notably few people in Australia today who can understand and speak Ancient Greek.58

The urns reflect this fragility. They beg the question, for Bandt, of whether these sounds will be preserved, or if instead they will be shut away in funerary urns, no longer accessible to future generations. To underline this, one of the urns in the installation is silent, representing ‘the silenced urn of those people who have been denied access to their original languages by being stolen, given up, removed from their proper families’.59

In their layered construction, where the temporal and the spatial come together, the voices ebb and flow from our sphere of aural perception, much as in lived experience, rubbing up against each other, dissipating, creating re-formed associations, prompting us to contemplate Australia’s relatively brief European history, its immigrant cultures and its 40,000-year-old-plus indigenous past. Bandt compels us to attend to language and the way it signals cultural shifts. Here, particularized in a small pocket of inner urban Melbourne life, her fluid playback multichannel sound installation enabled the voices to be heard as they sounded in relation to each other, the six playback channels producing an inbuilt randomness throughout the lengthy duration of the installation. The backdrop of soft, church organ music that conjures the Latin Mass not only evokes a sense of the archaic, of nostalgia, but also acts as a sotto voce admonishing commentary on the surrounding sounds, while inscribing the author’s past onto the work.

Attunements (–) [sic] and Three Inverse Genera (1989)

Catherine Schieve currently lives in and draws directly on the Illawarra region of NSW, the various environments of which comprise coast, savannah and forest, steel mills and a large Hindu temple. Schieve’s works feature the admixture of

56 Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity. Also see Ian Stevenson, ‘Sonic Residues: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia, November 17–December 2, 2000’, Computer Music Journal, 25/3, Autumn (2001): 82–5.

57 Bandt, Hearing Australian Identity.58 Ibid.59 Ibid.


live instruments and technology, including shruti Boxes (Indian reed drone instruments), balafon (West African marimba), Ecuadorian shaman’s drum, other non-Western instruments, light-controlled synthesizers and her own custom-made Plexiglass flutes, visual and environmental elements, in a non-didactic sonic exploration of place. The blurring of distinctions between sound and environment is of key importance to Schieve, as is that between the visual and aural domains.

Schieve finds a kinship between the traces left by sound making and those of drawing, and contributing to her holistic artistic approach is what John Jenkins calls her ‘acute kinaesthetic imagination, similar to that of dancers, who have an intuitive–somatic apprehension of the fluid movement of the human body through space’.60 In an anti-teleological, non-linear move, she chooses not to give dates for her works as she considers that her compositional concerns are enduring. Part of her endeavour is ‘found lines’ pieces, where chance-produced lines in the urban and ‘natural’ world – including densely populated voice places where celebratory and ritual activity happens, land surfaces, body surfaces, rock surfaces – transmute into musical scores. In her Attunements project (presented at an Astra performance in 2006), drawing from the Illawarra region, she meets and ‘plays into’ the environment with her own sound, so that the performed sound ‘melds with and speaks to the existing sound world in an encompassing and non-virtuosic way’.61 Her programme note gives a definition of ‘attunements’ – ‘adjust to, harmonize with, adapt to, acclimatize to, assimilate’ – and the outcome, which includes a large floor drawing made prior to the performance, is ‘a collection of encounters and “playings with” these distinctive acoustic spaces; and a gathering of different worlds into one concert space’.62

Schieve thus conducts what could be termed a gentle ‘working with’ the environment, responding directly to her surrounds and sculpting a direct yet low-impact auditory and visual ‘essay’ with them. Similarly, in her husband Warren Burt’s Three Inverse Genera (1989), four musicians play a set of specially made aluminium tuning forks, with a decay of some 30 seconds, tuned to a 19-tone system, allowing the use of any of the ancient Greek genera, or scales. The two-take recording occurred in a large studio/barn and had no editing or splicing, and the sounds of the Australian bush are, for the composer, an integral part of the environment that ‘gives the music life’.63 Burt holds true to his experimentalist philosophy of allowing traditionally unwanted environmental noise to ‘intrude’ on the recording process. In a postmodern, ecologically aware world, these

60 John Jenkins, Catherine Schieve: Moving Between the Eye and the Ear (Review of Schieve’s Presentation: Up Close and Personal Composer Series), New Music Articles (2004), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/upclose/Schieve.htm, accessed 18 July 2007.

61 Catherine Schieve, Attunements, Rock and Light Tracing (2006), at http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:y2e1cLyTSWEJ:www.astramusic.org.au/program-notes/2006-4.pdf+schieve+astra&hl=en&gl=au, accessed 27 June 2009.

62 Ibid.63 Scott, Liner notes, Austral Voices.


deployments of ‘glitch’ reach beyond mere ‘noise for noise’s sake’ and become an activist’s statement.

Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr) (2002–)

A collaboration between Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell with Swanney Draper Architects in Melbourne and Australian Bell has produced Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr) (2002–), a computer-controlled, outdoor, permanent, interactive installation at Birrarung Marr, Melbourne. This project, a set of carillon-like large, round-mouthed temple bells, seeks to form a unique link between hitherto-discrete and culture-specific Asian and European temple bells traditions, which originated in northern India around 600BCE and then spread across Asia with the movement of Buddhism. Rather than hiding the bells away in a tower, the bells are dispersed across a small field. And the creators’ chief concern is that the bells are also sculptural forms to be gazed upon and approached, their stated aim being to produce bells ‘which are uniquely Australian and reflective of a community in which Asian and European cultural traditions co-exist and merge’.64

The bells sound very different when one is standing in the middle of the installation from when one is 100 metres away at the edge of the park. This means that a metaphorical link can thereby be drawn between interrelating with cultures outside one’s own experience, and repositioning oneself literally in space and location – which the work entices, once one realizes the interactive nature of the sculptures – so as to offer different information and perspective, a vital insight into cultural interactions with Australia’s near neighbours.

64 Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell, Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr), Australian Sound Design Project (2002), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000386b.htm, accessed 14 November 2008. The installation is a public musical instrument. The bells are struck by computer-controlled hammers programmed to play MIDI compositions. On a daily basis (8.00 am and 5.00 pm) sequences composed for the bells by seven Australian composers play, allowing people to wander among the bells for an exhilarating experience or sit nearby and enjoy their clear and gentle musicality. While bells were once among the loudest sounds people would normally hear, they are now often drowned out by traffic and amplified music. These bells can usually be heard within about 100 metres in the relatively quiet riverside park. The sequencing of the bells uses standard musical software and the bell sounds can be downloaded from this site, allowing composers from anywhere in the world to write works for the bells and send them as MIDI files over the internet for performance: ibid.


‘Giant Musical String Instruments Covering a Continent’65

Great Fences of Australia (2002–)

Since 1983, Jon Rose has been engaged in bowing and recording the ‘music’ of fences across the world.66 In 2002, he was joined by Hollis Taylor in a project they devised titled Great Fences of Australia, and together they have travelled 35,000 kilometres to ‘play’ Australia’s 5,309km wire fences with violin bows, cello bows and drum sticks, visiting every state and territory of Australia to play and record various sections of the country’s millions of kilometres of fencing, including the well-known ‘Dog Fence’ and ‘Rabbit-proof Fences’, which they perceive as ‘giant musical string instruments covering a continent’.67 Producing audio and video recordings and a book by Taylor vividly detailing their projects,68 they also document the lives and histories of the people who construct, care for or use the fences.

Because the wires are so long, they become resonators as well as triggers for the sound, which can sometimes travel for hundreds of metres along stretches of a simple five-wire fence. They describe the music as ‘ethereal and elemental’ and they remind us that the extended harmonic series produced by the wires is the structure of all sound, while ‘the rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world’.69

The duo, in complicit–critique postmodern fashion, both celebrates and disparages ideas about Australian-ness through the Great Fences of Australia project. The music revels in the immensity of the continent in its sounds reflecting the place’s distance, boundaries and borders. Rose takes pains to underline that ‘this, however, is not the songlines, or even the white fella’s ironic version of it, but the unexpected and elegiac music of the Australian landscape “sounding” its recent history’.70 Part of that history includes delineating not only the outback but also the suburban backyard and the attendant heightened emotions that ownership brings forth. Fences ‘also mark the close physical association of man with his

65 Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor, Great Fences of Australia: A Project from Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor (2009), at http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_great_fences.htm, accessed 18 July 2009.

66 These include MUSIC FROM 4 FENCES (with the Kronos Quartet), FENCES OF ISRAEL, THE SYDNEY FENCE, THE FINLAND FENCE, THE MEXICO–USA BORDER FENCE and THE FENCE, where Rose bowed fences dividing disputed territories in Belfast, Golan Heights, Bosnia and Berlin. Rose and Taylor, Great Fences.

67 Ibid.68 Taylor and Rose, Post Impressions.69 Rose and Taylor, Great Fences. 70 Ibid.

http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_great_fences.htm


environment, the notion of belonging, the boundaries of cultures and political systems, a sense of the private and public, a statement that says, “I exist”’.71

The nineteenth-century containment of the landscape into sectionalized zones contributed to the devastation of the nomadic, indigenous way of life in Australia. Rose and Taylor reappropriate the very tools and signifiers of these imposed barriers, using their post-experimental sound art to provide a work rich with visceral commentary on history, culture and the environment.72

Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1 (1994–96)

Pre-dating American sound artist Bill Fontana’s installation Harmonic Bridge (2006), which captured the Millennium Bridge and was situated at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern and transmitted to nearby Southwark Underground Station, London, Jodi Rose’s Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1 (1994–96) finds possibilities of transcendence in the urban terrain, achieved via the commonplace. The work was a ‘performance’ on the cables of the then-new Glebe Island Bridge in Sydney, NSW.73 Rose’s project is to create ‘Bridge Symphony’, a global ‘performance’ on stay-cable bridges as the ‘instrument’, which she terms ‘an acoustic Indra’s Net’:

During the performance, an artist at each site is to be playing the bridge in a structured improvisation that will eventually strike the resonant frequency of the universe. The ultimate aim is to transcend physical being and dissolve the world by mapping the strands of the divine onto the matrix/web of information systems constantly flowing around us.74

Contact microphones were attached to the bridge cables, amplified and ‘played’ by Rose and what she calls the ‘divine’ intervention of the wind blowing through them: ‘The city has become our temple; electronic networks our religion; the inaudible vibrations of the bridge cables are the voice of the divine. The word of the universe soaks through my cochlea into the nerve centres. I am wired to

71 Ibid.72 Taylor drolly recounts an incident upon recording some galahs in Wubin on their

fence project: she and Rose have to combat the wind and end up in the women’s toilet with the door open. ‘Soon after, a woman approaches the door then steps aside, waiting patiently. Jon comes out wearing headphones and holding equipment, the ultimate nerd. The woman acts like this is perfectly normal’: Post Impressions, pp. 22–3.

73 This crosses Johnstons Bay at Glebe Island from Pyrmont to White Bay. It was recorded with the assistance of the crew from the ABC radio show The Listening Room while the bridge was still under construction, see Jodi Rose, ‘Contributors’ Notes: Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1’, Leonardo Music Journal 16 (1996): 111–15. Also see Kahn, ‘The Lyre’s Island’, p. 90.

74 Rose, ‘Contributors’ Notes’, p. 114.


god’.75 Other theological connotations arise in the skyward-arching bridge cables that for Rose evoke echoes of religious architecture constructed in such a way as to uplift the spirits of all who pass through it: ‘They elicit a visual metaphor for the global communication systems whose symbolic presence increasingly permeates everyday life in abstract and concrete forms’.76

She is interested in delving into the way in which cities ‘speak’ to us, rather than merely focusing on the solely functional and visual dimension of architecture. Numbed to the constant stream of communication and information, there is little opportunity, Rose feels, for deep human connectivity or exchange. Rose wants to access ‘the messages we cannot hear and the words we cannot speak’ in order to locate ‘the last remnants of meaning in an increasingly crazed and chaotic era’.77 Sounding what for Rose is ‘the voice of the bridge’ brings forth ‘a language of otherworldly transference from the mystical to the mundane’, which resonates beyond the mere technological act of decoding sound waves into the allegorical territory of the marginal, the fissure that marks the disjuncture of world and object: ‘The existential gaps in existence are translated into acoustic presence. On the line is the sound of the world, humming through the cables. The inaudible manifest’.78 Rose also declares that, ‘in an act of sentience, the sound that I have brought forth is also working on me, ushering my existence into presences that I could not have imagined, into a hybrid of extra-ordinary moments weaving in and out of my life, beyond my control’.79

Jodi Rose thus sets up a process whereby she ‘collaborates’ with the wind. In this way, she could be said to be tapping into a ‘spiritual’ dimension. The non-commercial, non-commodifiable aspect of the work augments this sense, as does the work’s Zen-like austerity.

Wogarno Wire Installation (1999–)

Alan Lamb’s ‘singing’ telegraph wire works evince a postmodern, post-formalist sensibility, perceivable in his explanation of his approach, which he states is ‘not intended to possess intellectual formalism’.80 Rather, in his ‘exploration of sound

75 Ibid. Italics in original.76 Ibid., p. 115.77 Ibid., p. 114. Italics in original. 78 Ibid. Italics in original. 79 Ibid., p. 115. ‘Perhaps it is the reincarnated spirit of the Tacoma Narrows bridge

struggling again to free itself from the bond of human responsibility, as it did in 1940, when, as recorded in footage from the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in New York, gusts of wind coming at the resonant frequency of the bridge built up to a velocity that caused it to warp, buckle and finally spectacularly collapse. Who am I to deny it that joy?’: ibid.

80 Alan Lamb, Lamb, Alan, Australian Sound Design Project (2009), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000277b.htm, accessed 14 June 2007. Also see Chapter 3 of present volume.


structures, neither musically “designed” nor of random occurrence’, Lamb prefers to focus on ‘beauty, complexity and evocation of the emotional, the spiritual and the imaginary.’81 Lamb also highlights his awareness of issues important for Acoustic Ecology, stressing that, ‘Whether public or private, invited or not’, he takes ‘great care to examine the “feeling” of the site’ and, placing great precedence on the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of his installations, ensuring that the owners and neighbours are consulted and carefully briefed regarding his intentions. He also places great import on researching the Aboriginal significance of the site.82

Wogarno Station, in midwest outback Western Australia, for example, had sacred importance for the Aborigines prior to the clearances of the mid-twentieth century. While it is now ‘abandoned’, Lamb nevertheless engages with the site in his Wogarno Wire Installation (1999–) with the greatest possible sensitivity so that the installation could sound yet be almost invisible and interfere minimally with the land. He states categorically, ‘Without universal goodwill the installation will fail; the wind is alive’, and he has modified installations in response to complaints.83 The avoidance of acoustic pollution is reciprocal: he requested the Department of Civil Aviation to redirect trainee pilots away from above his 12-acre property in rural Baldivis, south of Perth, Western Australia. With an experimentalist open-minded approach to unexpected, unplanned directions, he has found some happy ‘intrusions’, discovering, for example, that noise from heavy industry was especially complementary to the nature of a lighting tower installation.84

Ivories in the Outback (2008)

Produced, recorded and mixed by Jon Rose, Ivories in the Outback (2008) is a radiophonic work based on documents and Rose’s own imagination that engages with the scenario of the European keyboard instruments of colonial Australia as they were sent to the outback via bullock dray or camel. The work uses the Darnum Musical Instrument Museum of Victoria’s pioneer pianos, harmoniums and organs, brought to Australia by white settlement. It is animated by the sounds of surf and parrots squawking as much as by the instruments – in their clapped-out, unfortunate state – themselves.

Rose highlights the ‘physical and climatic hardships’ on the part of both instruments and performers and raises such issues as how the colonialists might have viewed ‘this bastion of Western culture up against one of the most extreme environments on the planet’, and what the indigenous peoples of Australia might have thought of ‘this artefact of empire as their land was taken from them’.85 This

81 Ibid.82 Ibid. Chapter 2 details Acoustic Ecology.83 Ibid.84 Ibid.85 Jon Rose, List of Selected Experimental Radio Works for Violin (2003), at http://

www.jonroseweb.com/h_radio_list.htm, accessed 5 August 2010. It was produced for


even-handed account of original inhabitants and recent arrivals in the context of the transplantation of European culture into eighteenth-century Australia is confronting. The indigenous voices jar in juxtaposition with the white Australians’: in vocal timbre and in the narratives each is telling. The former muse on what this alien object – possibly imbued with malevolence – might be, in their own language and also in English, inflected by obviously Aboriginal accents. The European men and women are represented by present-day and historical ‘ocker’, cockney and upper-class accents. They wryly bemoan the damage caused by the transit across the seas.

While Rose does not labour any ‘point’, a critical stance towards post-Settlement Australia is clear. Ivories in the Outback does not include any recognizably piano-like sounds (only very damaged clunkings and rattlings that one might only associate with a keyboard instrument through the context of the piece). And while the white voices present attitudes and reactions one would expect on the part of Europeans upon discovering the damage to the instruments caused by their transportation to Australia by sea in the late 1700s, there is just as much aural space for the sounds of indigenous people and also birds and the sea. Implicit critique of the Europeans’ position lies in the clapped-out sounds of the keyboard instruments, which disallow any revelling in lush piano timbre.

Salvado (2009)

In Salvado (2009), Jon Rose focuses again on colonialism – this time, on a very early proto-postcolonialist act on the part of Spanish Benedictine monk, missionary and author Bishop Rosendo Salvado. Salvado emigrated to Fremantle, Western Australia, from London in 1846, where he established a mission for the training of Aboriginals, which is now known as New Norcia, after Norcia, Italy, the birthplace of St Benedict.

Rose describes Salvado’s interactions with the indigenous Nyungah-speaking Yuat people as ‘enlightened’: while acknowledging the ‘Christian zealotry for “conversion of the natives”’, and noting that ‘his method was without doubt patronising’, Rose points out that he entered into a reciprocal dialogue with Aboriginal culture. Music was the conduit that sustained that dialogue, with a 20-piece Aboriginal string orchestra formed and directed by the highly competent composer and pianist Salvado. By 1885 this ensemble had transformed into a 25-piece brass band; Salvado had the Aboriginal children sing Gregorian chant

BBC Radio 3 by Somethin’ Else in 2008. Texts were sung by Neparrnga ‘Joe’ Gumbula, Djangirrawuy ‘Brian’ Garawirr’tja, Amanda Stewart, Andrew McLennan, Lorraine Reichard, Jane Ullman, Tony McGregor, Marguerite Pepper, Stephen Crittenden, Manon Winter, Ian Morrison, Ros Bandt, Tony Bond, Mary Healy and Jon Rose; with original contributions from Ross Bolleter, Albert Fox, John Mcentee, Jim Cotterill and Dinky the singing dingo; and other keyboard parts played by Jon Rose. Also see Jon Rose, Ivories in the Outback (2008), at http://www.jonroseweb.com/h_radio_ivories.htm, accessed 15 March 2009.


in the monastic choir.86 Rose also acknowledges that, while Salvado documented extensively his findings about the Yuat tribe’s customs and music (by which he was ‘in turn, fascinated, horrified, and amazed’), held in the monastery’s archives, the Aborigines’ feelings about Salvado and this Benedictine enclave residing in the West Australian outback is not known.87

Sonically – and Politically – Poeticizing Urban and Rural Terrains

Sound artists working directly with site specificity also animate the indoor realm. American Alvin Lucier’s groundbreaking ‘rooms’ works from the late-1960s, Vespers (1968) and I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), record the ambient sound of interiors. Lucier’s belief is that rooms hold memories, and these memories are made audible through his composition.

For Lucier, a room has an individual sonic disposition, due to such elements as its dimensions and the materials of its makeup that affect its acoustics. In his works, the placement of the microphones affects the recorded sounds, and the acoustic properties of the room itself provide a complex filter, which affects every sound parameter, including the particular pitches the room ‘selects’.88

Postmodern sound artists take this concept a step further, to particularize the memories that can be evoked from specific sites. One of Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based sound artist and writer Brandon LaBelle’s most recent exhibitions, entitled Room Tone (2008), was developed as a ‘conversation’ between sound and architecture, where LaBelle invited architects, designers and artists from around the world to respond to three audio recordings of his apartment in Berlin that endeavour to ‘sound out’ the space, by documenting its ambient, material and dimensional aspects. The participants were then to construct a physical model of the apartment from the sounds – which were their only guide. LaBelle thereby set up ‘a process of translation and interpretation’, putting forward ‘an understanding, however factual or fantastical, of the auditory into rendering a spatial form’.89

86 Rose, List of Selected Experimental Radio Works for Violin. Music and text composed by Jon Rose with extracts from the compositions and memoirs of Rosendo Salvado (arranged Jon Rose). Produced for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Between the Ears’ by Somethin’ Else in 2009. Texts spoken and sung up by Ruben Fernandez, Abbot Bernard Rooney, Shakara Wally, Ami Smith, Olly George and Percy George; archive restoration by Jon Rose. Gabrielle Mercer – the historic Moser organ at New Norcia, bell ringing. Hollis Taylor, Danny Yeadon, James Cuddeford, Errki Veltheim and Jon Rose – strings. Members of The Blue Mountains Concert Band – brass. Recorded on location at New Norcia or in Sydney by Jon Rose.

87 Ibid.88 See Evens, Sound Ideas, p. 54. 89 Brandon LaBelle, ROOM TONE: An Exhibition by Brandon LaBelle (2011), at

http://lagioiosamacchinadaguerra.wordpress.com/tag/sound-art/, accessed 12 September


Notable, with regard to postmodernism, is the subjective element that LaBelle encourages in the interactive process.

Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence (1994)

In Chapter 4, Dyson’s Window Pain exposes a negative side of modern technological medical processes. My next example engages with authoritarian repression from a different angle. Simon Crosbie’s Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence (1994), for environmental sounds and an improvising ensemble of violins, bass flute and electric guitar, a ‘sound performance’ at the now disused Old Melbourne Gaol, presents a sombre engagement with the sense of place.90 It involves 104 ‘sound makers’ (the same number of prisoners executed at the gaol), who beat sounds out of the metal stairs, cells and doors, juxtaposed with keening and other Irish musical reminiscences of the prisoners it once contained.91

Crosbie explored the multi-levelled structure of the gaol with transition of sound between the upper and lower levels and travelling from one side of the building to the other. The work engages with a sinister aspect of sound – namely, when it is forbidden: the Old Melbourne Gaol was based largely on the Pentonville system in England, which attempted to use silence to ‘rehabilitate’ the criminal mind. Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence was intended to give expression to the effects upon the psyche of internment and subjugation: the long-term consequences of forced silence, constrained movement, being rent from family and friends, and the resultant isolation and desolation that this situation brings about.92

John Jenkins and Rainer Linz describe the production. They were struck by the strong sense of discomfort produced by the work, when the origin of certain sounds was difficult to pin down, or what ‘horrors’ they were emulating; the darkness or semi-darkness; ‘the smells of slight decay rising through the oppressive, claustrophobic, and thick-walled gaol’; and ‘a dramatic and highly suggestive use of sound: a succession of crashing doors, marching steps and rhythmic clinking

2011.90 Simon Crosbie, Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence (1994), Australian Sound

Design Project (2003), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000498b.htm, accessed 4 August 2007.

91 Ibid. The event was part of Earwitness: Excursions in Sound (1994), held in Melbourne, 17–27 November 1994, which was a programme of contemporary sound art curated by Sonia Leber, featuring sound installations and performances in galleries and public spaces around Melbourne. It was presented by Contemporary Music Events as part of Experimenta ’94, Modern Image Makers Association’s fourth biennial media arts festival. Venues at which events were staged were: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, ether ohnetitel gallery, Royal Botanical Gardens, Old Melbourne Gaol, Old Melbourne Observatory, The Gasworks and Grierson Cinema. Keening is Irish ritual mourning through a wailing lament for the dead.

92 Quoted in John Jenkins and Rainer Linz, Arias: Recent Australian Music Theatre (Footscray, VIC: Red House Editions, 1997), p. 90.


of chains … as if authority was being asserted by the guards, and then (as it were, aurally) resisted by the inmates’.93

Acoustic Ecology highlights the damaging effects of noise pollution, and Suzanne Cusick has drawn attention to the heinous use of music (or, more specifically, loud volume) as an instrument of torture in war.94 But sound deprivation is equally dangerous for the mental state of the isolated person.95 Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence gives a vivid commentary on this sinister use of sounds as an agency of control and psychological manipulation in the history of our penal system.

Urbania (1996)

Urbania (1996) by Steve Law96 is also a construction of an aural sense of urban place. Paralleling Swiss sound artist Stini Arn’s Microscopic Trips (2006), which presents an ‘overheard’ series of conversation snippets encountered between Los Angeles and Zürich, Urbania’s subject is the city of Melbourne, through the imagined ears of a visitor not from that town, and offset by sound fragments that Law recorded on MiniDisc while wandering around Hong Kong, during an unexpected stopover from Europe. The sounds capture for Law a sense of the disorientation and unfamiliarity he felt at the time.

Law seeks to replicate this experience with regard to someone’s first experience of Law’s own, very familiar city. He manipulates the sound material through processing and then applying a web of synthetic (additive, subtractive and formant) sounds to serve as emotive commentary on the recorded sounds. Tram ‘dings’ become a percussive ‘comment’, at differing rates of speed at each recurrence, thus suggesting that music can be wrung from noise, while tram wheels screech around a corner.

Voices sound, fragmented, obviously ‘treated’. A lift operator’s mechanical voice declares, ‘Ground Floor’. One of the grand churches chimes. A train station loudspeaker intones, ‘Would you please…’ in a world-weary tone. Electronically modified announcements of train station destinations in Victoria, ‘Narrewarren, Dandenong, Sunshine’, contrast with some from Hong Kong, which are presented

93 Ibid., pp. 89–90.94 See Chapter 2, note 66 of present volume. 95 See, for example, Philip Solomon and Harvard Medical School, Sensory

Deprivation: A Symposium Held at Harvard Medical School (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Also see John P. Zubek, Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research (New York: Meredith, 1969). Also see Chapter 2, note 66 of present volume. On the devastating condition of deafness as experienced by significant canonic composers, see Elizabeth Wood, ‘On Deafness and Musical Creativity: The Case of Ethel Smyth’, Musical Quarterly June (2009): 1–37.

96 ABC CLASSIC FM COMPUTER COMPOSITION AWARD (1996), at http://www.abc.net.au/classic/nma/cmusic/finals.htm, accessed 18 February 2009.


in Cantonese. The animal world intrudes, joltingly, with snatches of what sound like chook noises. Fadings in and out of iterations of disorienting acousmatic noises, with quite dizzying stereophonic treatment sometimes morphing into snatches of toned chords and sinister, dark, low drones, crescendo-ing to a loud, white-noise multilayered hiss, all serve to intensify and distort associations with the city’s soundscape.

Sound and space are inextricably connected: sound animates air, and in order to do this it needs space. But sound configures space, and it is sound art’s remit to both enact that operation and to reflect upon it. Further, space constantly configures and reconfigures itself, with sound a component of the comprising parts, ‘and this occurs through human intervention and perception (as far as we can hear: humans cannot functionally have any other perspective)’.97 Further still, ‘the acoustical event is also a social one’:98 in other words, explains Hegarty, ‘it is not just the interaction of human subjects with an object world; it is also interactivity as society’.99 Urbania palpably underlines these standpoints.

Musings on ‘Australian-ness’ and ‘UnAustralian-ness’

Elegy in a Country Graveyard (2007)

Andrew Ford’s radiophonic piece, Elegy in a Country Graveyard (2007),100 is a response to the graveyard in Robertson, NSW, the small rural town where the composer lives. The piece includes the voices of locals reflecting on the place and its two communities – the living and deceased. Funeral sentences from the Book of Common Prayer are intoned, and Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ inspired the title.101 Joseph Parry’s hymn tune ‘Aberystwyth’ and the Latin Mass for the Dead are intertwined in an Ivesian/Mahlerian fashion with Ford’s own music, a procession of 55 chords presented, very slowly, by harp, piano, vibraphone and harmonium, and then extended by the voices and other instruments, including a brass band.

Ford had the Sydney Chamber Choir and brass players from Sydney Conservatorium listen to the basic structure of the piece and, for the most part, to isolate pitches as they heard them and to prolong them, humming or playing them very softly until they ran out of breath, then to choose another pitch and start again. Ford, with Sydney ABC sound artists Andrew McLennan and Russell Stapleton, recorded it and remixed the sounds. Ford describes the overall effect: ‘The result

97 Hegarty, Noise/Music, p. 171.98 LaBelle, Background Noise, p. x, cited in Hegarty, Noise/Music, p. 171.99 Hegarty, Noise/Music, p. 171.100 This can also be performed live.101 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Andrew Ford, 4 November 2009.


was a rich and slowly shifting smear of harmony that ran through the piece’.102 Also present are Australian birdcalls, environmental sounds typical of the location including the weather, concluding with Ford’s setting of the funeral dirge from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.103 In this way, the work manifests postmodern strategies of grappling with the vernacular; site specificity (of an otherwise undistinguished locale); mixing of musical styles and eras; the use of technology as a major aspect of the work; and the inclusion of aspects of high-modernist aleatoricism (in the semi-improvised vocal and brass writing).

While Ford accepts that the work ‘produces a sense of place’ and, indeed, ‘could hardly do otherwise’, he ‘wants to stress’, however, that he is ‘not on some sort of crusade’: he is not trying to make his piece ‘more socially relevant or more accessible or more “Australian”’.104 Nevertheless, the significance that a work such as this holds in this context is not inconsiderable. As Alain Corbin’s study of bells in the nineteenth-century French countryside reveals, self-esteem, emotional wellbeing, civic pride and territorial identity all relied on hearing the town bells, which fixed them into a cultural geography that could be readily traversed.105 Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter similarly note,

Soundmarks provided local cohesion, a contrast to the modern concept of citizenship in a sovereign nation composed of millions of individuals spread over millions of square miles … In the early twentieth century, when urban growth polluted the natural landscape with noise, trolley lines rather than nature’s sonic conduits defined social cohesion and its community boundaries … The public acoustic arena survived, but on a reduced and less personal scale.106

102 Andrew Ford, ‘Living in the Country Helps Focus on the Sounds in My Head’, Resonate Magazine (2009), at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/living-in-the-country-helps-focus-on-the-sounds-in-my-head, accessed 10 June 2009.

103 Andrew Ford’s Elegy in a Country Graveyard (2007), at http://abc.net.au/rn/intothemusic/stories/2007/1957062.htm, accessed 19 December 2007; Andrew Ford, Program Notes for Elegy in a Country Graveyard (2007), at http://www.andrewford.net.au/comps.htm#, accessed 20 December 2007. Pictures of the site are available via Anni Heino, Photographs of Robertson Cemetery, at http://www.andrewford.net.au/news.htm, accessed 4 November 2009.

104 Ford, ‘Living in the Country’.105 Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-century French

Countryside, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), cited in Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2007), p. 30.

106 Ibid.


Mid-air Conversations (2006)

A work that highlights then-recent events in Australia’s political landscape and explores the tension between sense/nonsense is Mid-air Conversations (2006) by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean. A four-channel sound piece consisting of 17 short texts by Smith, it was composed for the UnAustralia Conference in December 2006, and is available in an interactive version online.107 The stylistically and thematically distinct fragments explore varying locations or historical situations, but there is common terrain: they all pertain to topics aired daily on news broadcasts. Articulating a range of political conflicts – the disaffected, disenfranchised, powerless; the ‘walking wounded’ in the street laughing/talking to themselves; the London bombings; exhortations to stop burning fossil fuels, to take action; forms of communication, SMS, e-mails, passwords corrupted/hacked, etc.; missing tape recordings of the moon landings – the piece also creates what Smith and Dean describe as an unspace – ‘perhaps the space of UnAustralia’ – where such problems might be overcome.108 ‘To this end the piece employs its own language, constructed out of the words that compose the piece, raising the question: is this the language of that other space and if so how can we begin to adopt and understand it?’109

The work unfolds in a unique way, designed to constantly generate new combinations at each playing, Dean having constructed interactive computer performance patches that move between the fragments mostly without completing them. ‘The piece offers the challenge of construction to the listener: to assemble any of one of the 17 fragments entirely it would be necessary to use material projected in all four channels’.110 That Mid-air Conversations is different in execution each time invites the analogy that political ‘solutions’ need to be sensitive to particular circumstances, that they are not universally applicable. Coercing the listener to ‘make’ sense of the fragments as they suddenly divert into nonsense syllables (that sound quite clearly as though the words heard have been scrambled) highlights our implication in the situation, asks us to actively engage with the piece and, therefore, the issues.

The work is constructed such that intervals of blank gaps appear throughout: they feel rhetorical, as a cue for the listener to reflect actively on what has just been said – or almost-said, in the case where the words have been treated. Because one knows from reading the programme note that the work will be constructed differently each play, and because one can interact with the work at will on a PC, one is likely to indeed replay the work several times to try to complete each micro-narrative. This

107 Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, UnAustralia Online Exhibition (2006), at http://www.unaustralia.com/exhibition/AAUNOZ/dean_smith/dean_smith.htm, accessed 10 October 2009.

108 Ibid.109 Ibid.110 Ibid.


serves to provoke the analogy between replaying the work to make some kind of ‘sense’ and the need to listen perhaps more than once, perhaps many times, to people whose worldview – or way of expressing it – might be other than one’s own, in order to glean fully the meaning of what they are saying. Mid-air Conversations places one in a position then to critically examine the ideology inherent in Australia’s then-government’s concept of ‘UnAustralian-ness’.

Nocturnal Spaces

Dry (2000)

Australian composer Christine McCombe works in human-made environments. She finds strong resonances for her sound installation works and electro-acoustic compositions in Gaston Bachelard’s 1964 The Poetics of Space, which traces the very tangible bonds between imagination, memory and the built environment, particularly buildings that we inhabit.111 Bachelard draws especial attention to ‘archetypal’ spaces such as cellars, garrets and dark corners, which he says are rich with associations, and it is such spaces that we inhabit in our daydreams. He also points out memory’s vivid linking to place, ‘housed’, it could be described, with the passage of time, leaving an imprint within a space.

Bachelard’s ideas are phenomenologically based and are also inflected by Jung’s psychoanalytic account of a dwelling’s levels from the most recent upper floors to the older foundations and what lies beneath, equating with a person’s mental structure.112 McCombe applies Bachelard’s thinking, shifting its focus on domestic space to that of the built environment, which, she believes, ‘can resonate with memory and imagination as well as with sound’.113 For McCombe, old buildings, abandoned buildings, ruins, labyrinthine buildings with winding corridors, spiral staircases, ‘hidden cellars and forgotten attics containing old boxes and suitcases’ are fascinating for many.114 She seeks to create a kind of discourse between different spaces and in the resultant recontextualization of environmental sound through the technology of sound recording and manipulation.

McCombe’s Dry (2000), an electro-acoustic composition, is derived entirely from source recordings made in two Edinburgh venues: the Infirmary Street Baths, an abandoned Victorian Baths and the still-functioning Warrender Park Baths – from approximately the same period. The two spaces are made to enter into a

111 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), cited in Christine McCombe, Imagining Space through Sound, UK and Ireland Soundscape Community Conference: Sound Practice, 16–20 February, Dartington, Devon, UK (2001), at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/295/, accessed 15 May 2007.

112 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. xxxvii, cited in McCombe, Imagining Space.113 McCombe, Imagining Space.114 Ibid.


‘dialogue’ that involves absence and presence, past and present. Archetypically familiar swimming-pool noises such as the randomness of splashing water, a swimmer’s regular lapping, the laughter of children, render the sound sources easily discernible as originating at a public baths.

Recording the abandoned baths posed a challenge to the composer, who, in solving the problem of how to record the sound of an empty building, settled on finding means to articulate the specific architectural features of the space. McCombe found auricular richness in the building – its high-gabled ceiling and the large, empty tiled swimming pool beneath, the system of pipes, doors and the gallery of cubicles, each housing a large cast iron bath. She describes ‘playing’ the space ‘like an instrument, inhabiting it, making my presence heard’.115 Taking advantage of the presence of others who happened to be there to work with the space for their own projects, McCombe added the sounds of the ambient space to those of footfall, banging on pipes and bathtubs and the slamming of doors. Paradoxically, all these noises create the sense of the building’s disuse, contrasting starkly with her recordings of a busy public swimming pool.116

Dry demonstrates sound art’s ability to present parallel realities concurrently, the structure of the work enlivening the relationship between the two complementary spaces. McCombe notes that it is also a work about resonance, with regard both to acoustic resonance and the resonance of imagination: ‘In creating a dialogue between these two polarised realities I wanted to reflect on the nature of human habitation and how an empty building in many ways continues to resonate with past occupation’.117

Crichton Installation (2000–)

Crichton Installation, an ongoing (from 2000) installation-based work by Christine McCombe in collaboration with Anne Bevan,118 is situated at the site of the former Crichton Royal psychiatric hospital in Dumfries, Scotland. Again, this work has a thematic connection with water. The estate has its own water supply, pumped from nearby springs. McCombe and Bevan made audio and video recordings at various sites around the estate: on the hill above it, above and beneath the floor of the concert hall, and inside the ‘high tank’ reservoir where the water is pumped from the foot of the hill. This material then formed the basis of a work that was created in the cellar and basement under the main wing of the hospital. Visitors are invited to enter the basement through an outside door, provided with torches and left to explore the space.119

115 Ibid.116 Ibid.117 Ibid. Given the subtle environmental sounds and ambience, the work is ideally

heard through headphones: ibid.118 Bevan is an Edinburgh-based artist.119 McCombe, Imagining Space.


Again, architecture plays a significant part in delineating the form of the work, with a particular focus on the series of passageways and rooms in the basement. McCombe and Bevan find the sounds of water being heated and pumped around the building and the noises of pipes creaking and humming and gurgling, analogous to being inside a circulatory system.120 By using video images and sound, the creators of Crichton Installation lead people through the interior spaces to the darkened rooms and damp, pipe-lined passageways. They describe the effect as ‘striking and a little disconcerting’ – low bass reverberations emanating from a hole in the wall, howling wind sounding from beyond a closed door, pictures of a green hillside, light cast in a rectangular pool, all against a sonic backdrop of the constant drone and creak of the pump system operating all over the building above.121 Found objects such as iron pipe braces morph into musical instruments, spotlit by halogen lamps that break up the darkness of the space.122

McCombe notes that whereas in Dry a ‘dialogue’ is established between the two recorded sound worlds, in Crichton Installation the ‘conversation’ is between the introduced sounds and the environment in which they are heard.123 In this instance, several self-contained sonic objects are created and situated within the site with no imposed specific narrative or structure; rather, McCombe and Bevan seek to evoke a more open, undefined relationship between sound and environment. The more easily attributable sounds (such as howling wind) mix with others that are more abstract, some of which register somatically rather than lending themselves to immediate identification. In the murky basement, visual orientation is difficult, and the visitor is forced to rely on the faculty of hearing in negotiating the space, and the world of sound is significantly more simulatory.

McCombe believes the work can also be perceived to accord with Bachelard’s concept of archetypal space, the cellar space containing the richest imaginative – even subconscious – reverberances. He describes the cellar as ‘the dark entity of the house. The one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths’.124 This musing finds consanguinity with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the night:

All space for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its part to each other, but in this case [the night] the thinking starts from nowhere. On the contrary, it is from the heard of nocturnal space that I become united with it. The distress felt by neuropaths in the night is caused by the fact that it brings home to us our contingency, the uncaused and tireless impulse which directs us to seek

120 Ibid.121 Ibid.122 Ibid.123 Ibid.124 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 18.


an anchorage and to surmount ourselves in things, without any guarantee that we shall always find them.125

Here, McCombe’s works acquire further resonance. With their themes of darkness, depths, fluidity and memory, Dry and Crichton Installation become metaphorically night-like, no longer ‘merely’ nostalgic or ‘about’ remembering, but inviting the listener to take a plunge into the subconscious.

McCombe comments that her work with environmental sound is ‘an attempt to reanimate space through sound, either by attempting to “capture” space in sound as a way of creating a “virtual” space in our imagination, or by aiming to intensify the way we experience a space through the addition of designed soundscapes’.126 For McCombe, the perceptual experience is heightened from the admixture of the temporal and the sheer physical presence of sound: ‘we can experience sound in time and space as well as in our memory and imagination’,127 and it is this emphasis on memory, individualized subjective imagination and the richness of a collective experience (such as a public swimming pool and the readily evocative space of a derelict institutional basement) that marks a postmodernist sensibility.

Assisting Nature to ‘Sing for Itself’

R. Murray Schafer adjures us to ‘let nature sing for itself’.128 But this idyll of nature is, in so many instances, compromised by human agency in the form of environmental degradation. Sound artists, however, are ‘giving voice’ to nature. Sound artists working with site-specific installations take Cage’s emancipatory project to a more focused level. Drawing attention to environmental sounds through their ‘capture’ in sound, the works by Ros Bandt, Eve Duncan, Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, Brigid Burke and Catherine Schieve remind us of nature as an endangered phenomenon, emphasizing its fragility. They achieve this while mounting the sounds on the strong armature of the respective installations as a

125 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), pp. 295–9, cited in Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p. 132.

126 McCombe, Imagining Space. She quotes Sean Cubitt, who emphasizes the relationship between sound and space and time, referring to the temporality of sound, ‘not just the sound, and the time of its perception, but the time it takes a sound to cover the space between you and it, and in the aftermath of perception, as silence re-forms itself about it, and you wait for a repetition or continuation, a third time … These times constitute a form of distance, the commingling of time and space. The times of sound are also the elements of its geography’: Digital Aesthetics (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998), p. 99, cited in McCombe, Imagining Space.

127 McCombe, Imagining Space.128 Schafer, The Tuning of the World. Also see Chapter 2 of present volume.


whole, with the infrastructure of the technology and recording simultaneously creating discursive ‘dialogues’ and sonically enshrining the local, subtle, unnoticed and ultimately threatened sounds of their environments.

These activist installations and site-specific works seem to take an inspirational and motivating energy from the ancient traditions of spiritual meditation that are centred in the focused use of sounds129 to develop mindfulness and present-ness – in the moment. Further, as David Dunn states, ‘The sounds of living things are not just a resource for manipulation; they are evidence of mind in nature and are patterns of communication with which we share a common bond and meaning’.130 A sense of a spiritual dimension also, for many, arises in those works which use systems such as the Aeolian harps that accord with actual ‘musical’ properties shared by all music instruments – namely, a fundamental and upper partials. That these systems are ‘already there’, out in the world, initially unintended for musical contexts, adds not only the post-experimental aspect but also a geographico-spiritual element, as it is as though the composers are ‘tapping into’ something also fundamental, if unquantifiable and fugitive in a day-to-day sense for Westerners. That this something has also been embraced and reified by so many ancient cultures, globally, adds to the sense of the spiritual. Many of the composers of the works highlighted here – Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor’s Fence Project, Jodi Rose’s Bridge Project, Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell’s Federation Bells, for example – take this sensibility beyond the purely contemplative and extend it outwards to make direct commentary on the world. As Dunn also declares, ‘In this time of ecological crisis, we need to embrace every tool we have to remind us of the sacred’.131 These artists enact a double-move of loss and recuperation: their works present dereliction and destruction – imminent if not already reached in many instances – yet, through the creators’ efforts of educating the public as well as providing artistic nourishment, a certain restitution occurs.132

Just as was – and is – the case for modernists, the composers considered here are very much concerned with the exploration of sound. And while a great number of score-based composers write music responding to the political realm, the difference with sound art composers is that the work and/or performance is site specific: in other words, the very stuff of the musical work, or its source, comes from the actual place to which the work wants to draw attention; or it is a multidiscipline work that uses an integral visual component that pertains to the place. Christine McCombe’s installations highlight spaces of significance for people of two Scottish communities, allowing for and indeed encouraging

129 See Chapter 3 of present volume.130 David Dunn, ‘Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred’, The Book of Music and Nature:

An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts (Music/Culture), eds David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 98.

131 Ibid. 132 See Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, p. 35. Voegelin raises this notion in

the context of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach (1989), see note 49, above.


an emotional connection with the subjects of her works, while Simon Crosbie’s disturbing piece draws attention to the inhumane abuse of prisoners in the silence of solitary confinement, and Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds unabashedly push a sense of fun in their cross-species sonico-visual Transpoes.

The postcolonial attitude evident here throughout the work of Eve Duncan, Brigid Burke, Ros Bandt, Jon Rose, Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell politicizes a dispossessed indigenous culture. Andrew Ford, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, Jon Rose, Hollis Taylor, Steve Law and Warren Burt draw a focus to the Australian-ness of much of their works’ site specificity in divergent ways. I would stress, however, that, operating beyond the modernist rejection of the life-world of human beings – including such considerations as nationality or identity –, these postmodern composers implicitly offer a perceptual and conceptual richness that is a blueprint for the avoidance of narrow, jingoistic clichés about identity.

Site-specific work is inextricably bound up with the environs where it is staged. It coalesces with its surrounds, be they solid objects (such as those of the built environment), or socio-cultural practices (including the politicized spaces that exist within and – perhaps even more importantly, in between – current events), or the natural environment. Sound art is then able to reflect critically on its own conventions and on the materials it comprises, shedding light on the way we use (and abuse) the natural and built world and on how we preserve our art making (in museums, recordings, and in our writings about it).133 Site-specific sound artworks charge the ‘silence’ of the land and their locale.134 They enact a sonic metaphor of ‘water-memory’ by imposing their sounds upon – or amplifying the ‘natural’ sounds of – their locales. In a sense, these works are potentially without end: reflecting always upon their environments, they are simultaneously produced from them. They underline the fact of the world’s contingent, ever-in-flux nature, and its innate creativity. The following chapter expands upon these ideas by examining sounds we might well ‘trip over’ in the locales of our near environments.

133 See LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. ix–x.134 Douglas Kahn reports that silence becomes ‘charged’ when it follows, say, a piece

comprising loud sounds. He claims that this ‘charging of silence takes on metaphysical overtones’ (and then proceeds to discuss bodily reactions to loud sounds): Noise, Water, Meat, p. 228.

Chapter 6

The Quotidian and Beyond

Sound art abounds with explorations in the socio-cultural meanings and possibilities of sound – including the incidental that occur in the everyday. Such elements have been traditionally deemed decidedly ‘noise’, not-music. One of postmodernism’s generally recognized features is this straining of distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and art itself and life. Sound art is uniquely placed in contributing to this dissolution.

Quotidian Commands

Say Ahh (1997)

Engaging with mundane, daily human interaction, Joan Grounds and Sherre Delys’s Say Ahh (1997) was a temporary, interactive installation.1 Grounds and DeLys infiltrated the children’s hospital environs where, every day, ill children are exhorted by medical staff to ‘say “ahh”’, and, every day, volunteers assist in their care.

Say Ahh comprises patients’ voices and visual imagery inspired by toys knitted by the hospital’s volunteers. In this work, the artists also expand their ongoing experimentation with Wardian Cases, which were originally used by botanists to transport plants between Australia and London in the early 1800s, in which Grounds and DeLys place real flycatching plants, while larger faux plants with inbuilt speakers ‘break through’ the walls of the cases. From the speakers issue sounds of patients imitating nature and making nonsense sounds.2 Through small, built-in speakers, sounds animate the objects and allow them to call back and forth to one another. The creators note, ‘Embodied sound is at the core of our collaborative work, and essential to the context of this healing environment’.3 The work’s flexibility – a ‘lively corridor for outpatients and their families’ during the day and ‘a cul-de-sac providing a place for quiet contemplation and opportunity for respite during late night vigils’ – offers a range of sonic/architectural spaces

1 It was made specifically for the New Children’s Hospital at Westmead, NSW as part of Australian Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature.

2 DeLys and Grounds, DeLys and Grounds.3 Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, Say Ahh, Australian Sound Design Project

(1997), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000338b.htm, accessed 19 November 2007.


for the patients, staff and visitors of the hospital, particularly delighting the young patients in the strange sounds and the carnivorous plants of prey.4

Music therapy is a proven healing aid in the support, care and wellbeing of people who are ill.5 Grounds and DeLys are able to transform what is usually a passive, uninspiring and dismal space into a captivating, playful, interactive environment, giving children and their carers the chance to ‘themselves participate in the enchantment of nature’,6 after the example of the artists’ ‘imitation of nature in sound and image’.7 High modernism typically opts out of ‘life’. A work such as Say Ahh that attempts directly to reach out to children can be seen as completely disregarding the elitism in high modernism’s worldview.

The Master’s Voice (2001)

Mounted in 2001 in Canberra’s City Walk and ongoing, The Master’s Voice, by Sonia Leber and David Chesworth,8 also deals with the voice in a public space. Here, Leber and Chesworth pursue an approach that enacts an intercession into spaces already loaded with objects, signs and connotations.

Leber and Chesworth note that, although Canberra is a relatively young city, built in 1913, it is nevertheless freighted with ever-growing numbers of memorials. ‘It was a challenging prospect for us to find a way to engage with Canberra’s contemporary conditions – which we defined as the Public Service,

4 DeLys and Grounds, DeLys and Grounds.5 See, for example, Katrina McFerran and S. Amadoru, ‘The Role of Music Therapy

in Children’s Hospice: Both Unique and Necessary’, European Journal of Palliative Care 14/3 (2007): 124–7; Katrina McFerran, G. Hessell and S. Amadoru, Perceptions of Music Therapy in an Australian Children’s Hospice, Association of Children’s Hospices (London: Linchpin, 2006); Helen Shoemark, ‘Sweet Melodies: Combining the Talents and Knowledge of Music Therapy and Elite Musicianship’, Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy (2009), at http://www.voices.no/mainissues/mi40009000305.php, accessed 24 August 2009.

6 DeLys and Grounds, Say Ahh.7 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Sherre DeLys, 6 September 2009;

Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, 27 September 2010.

8 Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, The Master’s Voice (2001–), at http://www.waxsm.com.au/mv.htm, accessed 15 May 2008. It is Canberra’s first permanent soundscape artwork. Commissioned by ACT Government Public Art Program, it was created in association with H20 architects and won the NAWIC (National Association for Women in Construction) 2002 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Design. The system uses two digital soundstores to deliver sound to eight individual weather-resistant loudspeakers housed within the wall behind stainless steel panels. Two motion sensors allow the work to be triggered by the movement of people approaching the wall.

The Quotidian and Beyond 149

the Judiciary and the National Parliament’.9 Influenced by the ‘rebellious use of space’ as advocated by Guy Debord, the dominant theorist of the Situationist International, a political–artistic cell active in Paris from the 1950s to 1970s,10 Leber and Chesworth revel in spaces where there is a readymade audience of passers-by. Leber and Chesworth adapt the Situationist concept of détournement, that is, ‘short discrete interventions in public space, and taking materials already in use and shifting the context of their reception’; however, ‘it will always be an audience not prepared and primed for an art encounter’, where Leber and Chesworth ‘try to act as provocateurs, confronting the passing audience with an unexpected encounter’ that might ‘[shake] them out of their daily reveries for a moment’ or ‘[allow] them to feel less anonymous for a short time’.11

Leber and Chesworth delight in the trickster, post-anarchic elements of their work, which are frequently ‘in your face’ and provocative but always with a wry irony at their base. In order to grab the notice of passers-by, their public-domain work needs the extroversion that will stop people in their tracks, to focus on the sounds rather than continue to pursue their errands or walk from A to B. To this end, Leber and Chesworth will commonly construct prolonged recordings derived from vocalizations that occur in everyday experience, isolating certain linguistic scraps that they reshape and reconstitute in completely new and unexpected situations. The resultant disjuncture between the recognized and the recontextualized gives rise to a ‘different kind of conceptual charge’ for the vocalizations.12

Much of their work for public spaces can be thought of as the reconfiguration of individual voices into what Leber terms ‘vocalizing crowds’:

Our fabricated crowds are influenced by the behaviour of different real world crowds: the crowds’ rhythms, sounds, ‘acoustic shape’, tone and frequency, and the way these elements are relational, with changing patterns of stimulation and arousal. Stimulation and Arousal within the vocalizing crowd is a key concept in the way we configure our soundscapes on site.13

In The Master’s Voice, for example, made of stainless steel grids, sensors, eight loudspeakers and two channels, passers-by trigger real-world recordings of people calling to animals in such settings as farms, parks, training schools, zoos, veterinary practices and animal shows. There is praise: ‘Good boy!’/‘Bravo, Micky,

9 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Sonia Leber, 28 October 2009. Also see John Jenkins, Sonia Leber: Sonic Event Spaces (Review of Leber’s Presentation: Up Close and Personal Composer Series), NMA Publications (2004), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/upclose/Leber.htm, accessed 14 August 2007.

10 See Guy Debord and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

11 Kouvaras, e-mail, Leber.12 Ibid.13 Ibid.


Bravo!’/‘Ah, he’s a good boy!’/‘You’re looking good, Mate!’ There are nonsense sounds, specifically for pet communication – ‘Chook-chook!’/‘Trrrrrrrt!’/‘cluck cluck cluck’. Owners issue plenty of commands: ‘Steady…’/‘Stand quite still, stand perfectly still! Back! Back! Good boy, walk on!’/‘Come and have your bread, come on, a bit of bread!’/‘Heel…’/‘Stay… steady!’/‘Sit!’/‘Come on!’/‘come, come, come. Come around! Over!’/‘Whoa! WHOA!’ – and remonstrations – ‘HEY! Stop it!’/‘Sit down, you lazy dog!’/‘You’re not gonna be able to walk, your stomach’s that big!’/‘Listen to me! Don’t be so slack!’/‘Hey, no. NO!’/‘Mr Heath, be a good boy! MR HEATH!’/‘Don’t grizzle!’/‘There’s nothing more fitting in that tummy! There’s gonna be a lot of waddling going on!’/‘Outa there, you silly little girl!’/‘Come on, Listen to me!’

Additionally, there are questions addressed as though the human expects a verbal response from the animal: ‘You gonna calm down a bit?’/‘Oh, can you shake hands?’/‘You like coming in the car, do you?’/‘Tell me, tell me! Who’s That? Can you sit down?’/‘Can you TALK?’/‘What’s this? Look at the size of that tummy!’/‘Are you ready? You wanna go in the ute?’/‘Are you snappy? Come on, are you gonna hide again?’/‘Satisfied? Fine!’/‘What are you doing?’/‘HEY, what’s the matter with you today?’ And a few placations are offered: ‘Hee, you poor old thing. Don’t be frightened!’14

Leber and Chesworth delve into notions of sense and how meaning is imparted. They were attracted to the fact that such ‘calls to animals found in the everyday are surprisingly inventive – almost Dadaist, Schwitters-like, inventive voice play’.15 Communication with animals is, or course, by voice inflection, ‘the proto-linguistic aspect of the voice: word play, rhythmic repetition, all that the voice carries beyond the words’,16 as opposed to the semantic sense of language. This makes all the more amusing the fact that we nevertheless use language to communicate with them as though speaking to another person who speaks the same language. The immediacy of the commands and their highly expressive dimension is the reason Leber and Chesworth enjoy placing these calls in public space: the voices are arresting, attention grabbing. With any sounds of the animals themselves edited out, the voices appear to be addressing the passers-by. The first reaction on the part of passers-by is to wonder whether the calls are directed at them.

An emotive dimension is immediately apparent, encompassing beckoning, controlling and coaxing, all spilling from a series of steel grids inserted into the ground and the low wall encircling the edge of a small park at the eastern end of the Walk, simulating the effect of following passers-by as they trigger motion sensors progressively, in the duration of their walk through the installation. The use of multiple loudspeakers maintains a relatively soft overall volume. A more

14 Leber and Chesworth, The Master’s Voice.15 Kouvaras, e-mail, Leber.16 Ibid.


intimate, close-proximity listening is experienced by those pedestrians near the wall, with the volume fading as people move away.17

Leber and Chesworth create a jarring sound collage of highly personal utterances occurring in a public arena, where all-too-human attempts to communicate with pets are suddenly catapulted out of the intimate, close sonic space of no more than a few feet, as one communicates with one’s animal, into a much wider and shared space, surrounded by commercial and government buildings. The Walk is in the city district called ‘Civic’, emphasizing the relationship of ‘citizens’ to their ‘civic spaces’. One reviewer suggests, in fact, ‘the setting in the national capital perhaps invit[es] questions about who is the master and who is on the leash’.18

Aural perception does not always pinpoint the source of the sound (the phenomenon on which acousmatic music is based, as discussed in Chapter 1). Regardless, even if one is incapable of conjuring an aural picture of a certain space, and even if one is not consciously cognizant of space changing sound, sound in space can have a deep impact upon our psyche – no matter how that space is constituted, whether indoors in a room, a recital space, an office building entrance or a cathedral.19 This point is no less vividly made when the aural space is outdoors and the sounds – unexpected in the first place – are distorted by amplification.

The playful aspect of the work is key: The Master’s Voice ‘trips up passers-by, induces double-takes, private puzzled glances … It addresses us directly … these calls are full of questions, invitations to conversation, spaces for exchange; there’s this urge for an interchange’.20 The membrane between private and public is suddenly perforated, with the effect on the listener producing a personal cringe as one imagines hearing oneself in similar situations, magnified out of proper scope, becoming a public event. Such a work can ‘redirect people’s attention to their own day-to-day experience as an available resource for innovative sound-based art making’21 – but it rather toys with this notion by making it so playful and tongue-in-cheek.

17 Leber and Chesworth, The Master’s Voice.18 Matthew Westwood, ‘The Master’s Voice’, The Australian, 4 August 2005.19 See Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, p. 361. On this point,

Blesser and Salter also note: ‘Despite its importance, however, auditory spatial awareness remains subtle, often unconscious, and seldom recognized outside of those professional disciplines which focus on aural architecture’: ibid.

20 Mitchell Whitelaw, ‘Sit Ubu Sit. Good Dog’ (review of The Master’s Voice), Realtime Arts 46/December (2001): 33.

21 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 111.


Summoned Voices (2003)

Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski’s interactive installation Summoned Voices (2003), ‘a living memory of people and place’,22 is a series of door installations, each containing an intercom, sound system and a computer, networked to a central file and database server. This work, too, plays on an aspect of the voice in everyday life.

The metaphor of the door is used to simulate the act of presenting oneself at a doorway and waiting for a response from persons unknown. Signs instruct the audience to speak, make sounds or sing into the intercom: press a button, leave a message. Their vocal emissions are stored and interpreted, then immediately played back in a new guise comprising the individual’s voice with those previously recorded. The work thus acts as sound interpreter, ‘message board’ and the auditory trace of a community, enabling free, spontaneous expression and creativity, as the contributors soon realize that they can shape the response by varying their vocal inflection. The computer system is set up to analyze and match up the vocal input sonically rather than semantically so that a sung voice instigates similar material; shouting will result in more shouting or harsh sounds; and whistling will conjure other whistled fragments or even the call tones of mobile phones.

The networked nature of Summoned Voices allows multiple individuals or groups to participate simultaneously, as they respond to the feedback and ‘riff’ on their message, often improvising around a specific topic – and including such non-verbal sounds as mobile phone tones and the tracks from portable CD players, as well as knocking on the doors as they record or scraping the stainless steel speaker grilles – to discover the sorts of sonic responses they can draw out from the installation. People are therefore ‘communicating’ not only with themselves and each other at the site but also with past events, their particular vocal signatures triggering previously recorded messages from the installation, leaving their own sonorous stamp. Summoned Voices thus gives rise not only to a sense of play but also to communality, heightening participants’ awareness of sound’s social and physical properties – and their own aural presence within sonic environs.

Soothing, Anarchic, Sonic Acts in the Workplace

It would be a rare day that passes in contemporary life where one might not hear music. Fellow commuters subject us to their musical taste via their iPods, on foot, in parallel cars at red lights, on trains, buses, trams; buskers perform music on the street and in the underground railway stations. Attempting to lull, soothe or woo us into money-spending compliance, music and/or Muzak is played to us throughout our day-to-day existence, in cafés, restaurants, in shops and shopping centres, and

22 Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski, Summoned Voices, Australian Sound Design Project (2003), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000368b.htm, accessed 5 March 2009.


while on hold on the telephone. Music and/or noise soundtracks accompany films, television programmes, advertisements, news broadcast theme tunes, internet pages. Some might suggest that it is too much. We might wonder how music came to be this ever present. There is a fine line ‘between ambient music and aural wallpaper, relaxation and irritation. Electricity’s done a lot of great things for music, but there have also been a few side-effects’.23 And as Jonathan Sterne

comments,

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that a tympanic device – a microphone or a speaker of some sort – can be found in almost every inhabited building in the United States. In 1982, it was estimated that one-third of all Americans heard programmed music (best known by its brand name, Muzak) every day of the year. That figure has probably doubtlessly increased since then.24

Wars declared by art-music composers and theorists against Muzak have been waged as far back as Adorno’s and Huxley’s 1940s critique of ‘such passive listening’, seen particularly in the use of Muzak to ‘regulate mood and increase worker productivity’,25 in John Cage’s Silent Prayer of 1948 and R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (1977), extending at least to the point where in 1989 Ted Nugent made a 10-million-dollar bid for the Muzak Corporation, intending to then erase all their recordings.26

Brian Eno in the 1970s, however, envisaged a different form of ‘background’ music, that he termed ‘ambient music’, which focused on new ways for listeners to encounter music and sonic space.27 The following Australian sound artists and works implement postmodern perspectives on ‘Muzak-al’ engagements.

Random Acts of Elevator Music (2009)

Random Acts of Elevator Music (RAEM), a Melbourne-based initiative from City Frequencies, is a collaboration between Matt Adair and Nick Wilson, who work

23 The Wire: Episode 5: The Sound Around, at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/intothemusic/stories/2006/1749912.htm, accessed 4 November 2006.

24 Sterne, The Audible Past, p. 337. 25 Cox and Warner, ‘Modes of Listening’, p. 65. Also see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On

the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein, Routledge Classics (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 29–60.

26 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, p. 22. Kim-Cohen notes, ‘In the end, though, sound always prevails over silence: in response to Nugent’s failed buyout, the Muzak Corporation created a treacly version of his 1977 hit, “Cat Scratch Fever”’: ibid.

27 LaBelle, Background Noise, pp. 10 ff, see Chapters 1 and 2 of present volume. Also see Ronald M. Radano, ‘Interpreting Muzak: Speculations on Musical Experience in Everyday Life’, American Music 7/4, Winter (1989): 448–60.


together on sound projects within the metropolitan environment. In an approach that accords with Leber and Chesworth’s Situationist-inspired forays into public space (above and in Chapter 4), RAEM seek to enlighten the consciousness of office workers with live ‘muzaktronica’ (their term). During the performance,28 the duo wander around office buildings, pretending to be any typical office workers, wearing business suits and ‘briefcases’, in which is concealed their musical equipment (which must be quickly accessible).29

The duo suddenly abandon their disguise to produce their music (the time of which ‘from entry into an elevator to the actual performance of the soundscape had to be kept at about the time it takes for an elevator to go from the ground floor to about the twelfth floor (15–20 seconds)’), with the stated intention of soothing the workers: ‘Within an elevator we have found it best to play music that does not overwhelm the audience in volume and styles, a soothing ambient soundscape provides a suitable sound for any person that walks into any point of our performance and then potentially leaves within 20–30 seconds’.30

They either jam along with – or drown out – any Muzak that might already be playing in the lift. They do not feel obliged to seek permission to perform their ‘act’. They want to ‘bring joy to the workers’, not tie themselves up with ‘bureaucratic red tape’. (They do, however, admit to a slight concern about appearing to be terrorists and are happy to explain themselves if asked.)31

Their itinerary was posted on their website during the Fringe Festival, inviting people to e-mail requests for appearances in their building. RAEM instruct, ‘Just don’t tell your HR department or the security guy at the front desk…’, and promise, ‘we won’t tell your supervisor that you gave us the inside tip…’. Some titles of their pieces are ‘Their Eyes Met Across the Partition’, ‘Waiting in the Foyer’ and

28 At the 2009 Fringe Festival of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.29 This comprises a Casio CZ-101 and Gakken, housed in a mid-sized wheeled case

with a second attaché case secured to the top of it, with an opening between the two cases allowing the Casio to be lowered from the top case down into the lower case. Below the Casio is one of the power banks providing 12v DC. Included in this case are the amplifier, speakers, mixer, power and audio distribution buses. The other sound source is based on a low power computer mainboard running Reaktor, a software synthesis programme that allows the construction and modelling of analogue synthesizers. It is housed in one case, while mounted and joined above it is an attaché case that contains an LCD screen and gamepad controller used to operate the software. At the base of this case is another power bank that provides 12v DC. Both units are powered independently and attached by an audio cable. Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Random Acts of Elevator Music, 1 October 2009.

30 Kouvaras, e-mail, Random Acts of Elevator Music. 31 John Safran, interview with Random Acts of Elevator Music (3JJJ Radio), 24

September 2006.


‘Lunchtime Meditation Session’, all of which sardonically reflect scenarios that can arise in the daily life of a contemporary office worker.32

Their music models Eno’s ambient style: understated, minimalist and essentially tonal; it includes spasmodic underpinning occurrences of beat, with random but softened noises punctuating the soundscape. In a gambit of postmodern complicit critique, they use a form of Muzak through which to attack Muzak. Adair remarks, in a post-Fluxus sensibility, adding another dimension to the vaunted ‘music therapy’ intention as stated above,

The increasing restrictions on how people can behave in public spaces inspired the act. We’re curious just to find out what reaction we get from building owners and management when we actually walk into an elevator and literally do something as innocuous as play music; whether that’s considered a threat because we’re carrying gear that’s electronic and there’s batteries involved, or whether it’s noise pollution.33

RAEM thereby enliven and reframe the daily rhythm of the working day with their brief incursions into the office environment, as they suddenly cross the border separating artist and office worker. Reading posts on their blog, it is clear that the actions of Random Acts of Elevator Music elicit, inspire and provoke a variety of responses, many of which display a knowingness of the gesture behind the act: ‘A lovely surprise. The best lift ride I’ve evr [sic] had!!! Please visit again some time!’ and ‘Appreciated the randomness, the guerrilla-ness of it all. Good luck’.34

But this duo’s project also generates complaints: a message from Security at 367 Collins Street, Melbourne left on their phone requests that they ‘please stop doing that; just had a few complaints from the tenants; while it might be nice, it’s a bit unorthodox for a place of business’.35 The avant-garde is, for some, still a discrete enterprise from everyday life, and such neo-Fluxus work still holds the potential of a currency of ‘resistance’. This can be disarmingly amusing for some, and inspire irritation, exasperation or negativity – even unease – from others.

These random acts address R. Murray Schafer’s ideas on ‘lo-fi environments’, which he says often suffer from noise pollution and which therefore require ‘moozak’, a form of ‘audioanalgesic’, to counter it.36 As Ronald Radano notes, ‘[t]he disruption of sonic–visual relationships and subversion of overt emotional expression effectively reduce the humanizing qualities we expect to encounter during a musical experience. Interference with visual and human associations

32 Random Acts of Elevator Music (2009), at http://www.akm.net.au/cityfreqs/blog/?page_id=240, accessed 29 September 2009.

33 ‘Hot in September: Fringe Festival’, Age (Melbourne) Magazine, 2006.34 Random Acts of Elevator Music.35 Ibid. 36 Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 96, quoted in Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound

Organization, p. 108, see Chapter 2 of present volume.


correspondingly eliminates the presence of the artist and performer from the artwork’.37

RAEM perform a 180-degree countering to Muzak’s usual dehumanizing properties by appearing in-person to their audience and performing live. Where Muzak ‘[eliminates] listener choice and control and [removes] music from the concert hall’,38 RAEM give listener control back – spectators can request that the performance cease or they can even interact with the musicians. And finally, where ‘Muzak epitomizes the reproduced form, shed of all personal, idiosyncratic, and human qualities – qualities of authenticity, of originality’, with the consequence that it ‘lacks the fundamental mystifying qualities of the art work, what Walter Benjamin calls its “aura”, which represents historically the personality of the composer, the performer, and the performance act’,39 RAEM reinsert the ‘aura’ and personality of composer, performer and performance act.

People who share a large office building are ‘joined’ every day by the space they cohabit. But social urban mores mean that usually, interaction is limited to a flicker of eye contact (then immediate withdrawal). Social interactions of this kind are transitory, mechanical experiences – bordering on alienation. Marc Augé recognizes this in his essay on the subway:

the law of the metro inscribes the individual itinerary into the comfort of collective morality, and in that way it is exemplary of what might be called the ritual paradox: it is always lived individually and subjectively; only individual itineraries give it a reality, and yet it is eminently social, the same for everyone, conferring on each person this minimum of collective identity through which a community is defined.40

RAEM’s ‘flash-like’, ‘spontaneous’ performances extend these ritual ‘communal’ moments, inject particularized subjectivity into them, and provide a circuit breaker in the work day, an opportunity for coming together for workers, ‘lifting’ the tenor of the day through a playful, multilayered artistic encounter. Such a performance can create a sudden ‘community’ where people are truly joined by the witnessing of an extraordinary event in sound and performance, understood by all to be so.

Imaginary Hospital Radio (2009)

UK-born installation artist Richard Crow’s Imaginary Hospital Radio (2009) is another hospital-situated work (see DeLys and Grounds’s Say Ahh, above) that, like

37 Radano, ‘Interpreting Muzak’, p. 452.38 Ibid.39 Ibid., pp. 452–3. 40 Marc Augé and Tom Conley, In the Metro (Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 30, cited in Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 9.


Random Acts of Elevator Music, also mounts a ‘war’ on Muzak, mixing surgical and medical sounds ‘with slices of radio kitsch’.41 It ‘plays upon the ostensibly therapeutic role of the hospital radio station by injecting bloodless Muzak with a form of medical waste – the incidental soundscape of the body subjected to surgical technology’.42 ‘Synthesised crackles and rumbles morph into cheery birds, soft voices and weird machine sounds. Footsteps, clicks and rattles evoke trolleys rumbling down long corridors; the changing arrays of precise, analogue sounds subverting the notion of “hospital radio” designed to keep patients “happy”’.43

Crow’s is therefore arguably a more pointedly critical exposé than RAEM’s. But the postmodern application on the part of both artists is to actively use the very object – Muzak – that they seek to critique.

Shoes Historical, Shoes Fetishized

Shoes are very prosaic objects. Here are two examples of sound art that make shoes central to their concerns.

Marie Antoinette’s Shoe (2000)

First, there is expatriate Australian sound artist Kaye Mortley’s Marie Antoinette’s Shoe (2000).44 It is

[t]he poignant saga of a single shoe, reputedly the shoe left behind as Marie Antoinette was led to the guillotine. A speculation about a life and time drawn from the imprint of a shoe. What remains? An odour? A hint of luxury and vanity out of step with the march of time? A shoe-among-shoes in the age of revolutionary boots and clogs.45

41 ABC Classic FM, New Music Up Late with Julian Day (2009), at http://www.abc.net.au/classic/newmusic/, accessed 17 September 2009.

42 Imaginary Hospital Radio, Come Hither Noise, Daily Serving: An International Forum for the Contemporary Visual Arts (2009), at http://www.dailyserving.com/sound_art/, accessed 19 September 2009. Also see Richard Crowe, Touch Radio 52 | Richard Crow (2010), at http://www.touchradio.org.uk/touch_radio_52_richard_crow.htm, accessed 14 December 2010.

43 Urszula Dawkins, ‘Sonic Insights: Come Hither Noise’, Realtime Arts, August–September 1992 (2009), at http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9560#top, accessed 30 September 2009.

44 With writer Jean Louis Scheffer, David Lord, Joseph Treindl, René Farabet. It was aired on ABC FM radio’s The Listening Room on 26 June 2000.

45 The Listening Room: Archives, June (2000), at http://www.abc.net.au/classic/lroom/stories/s134541.htm, accessed 12 January 2009.


Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (2001)

Second is the radiophonic work Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (2001) by Robyn Ravlich:

A toe-tapping radio feature that explores the desire for beautiful shoes that will transform us magically into the creatures of our imaginings – whether it be for stiletto heels, patent leather, or silk slippers enclosing tiny bound ‘lotus’ feet. A program of rich imaginings – of dancing feet, of glass slippers, of sad single shoes, of red shoes that spell trouble, of shoes found at the scene of the crime, of soul mates, of high heel sneaker, of drawers of shoes that rest in ‘shoe heaven’ in the basement of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Remembrances of shoes first worn, of mother’s shoes, of empowering shoes, of shoes that blew the budget. Traces of a life lived in shoes, connecting us to earth.46

The work was ‘inspired by dreams and fantasies about footwear (from bespoke creations in the archives of the Louvre in Paris, to shoeless urchins, sad single shoes, and forensic investigations of shoe impressions at crime scenes)’.47

While Mortley’s footwear-based essay in sound taps into an imaginary scenario, focusing on a mundane object in extremis, the ‘reality’ of which we today can never know, Ravlich presents a composition firmly in the realm of experience. Each of these works explores what shoes sound like when worn, the particulars of different types of footwear and what they can evoke. Mortley focuses on the shoe of an executed queen, ‘earthing’ her and reminding us that the ‘out-of-step’ footwear she donned was in part emblematic of what became her tragic fate. Ravlich, too, does not shy away from the reality of the ‘dark’ side of the everyday as it relates to shoes: recorded voices deliver brief soliloquies on the perilousness of high heels. Blisters from new army boots are bemoaned by a young woman soldier and a male commentator respectively, against the sounds of a squad marching on gravel with their leader barking marching orders at them and juxtaposed by a soft-voiced woman singing, unaccompanied, a ditty, ‘Oh soldier, soldier will you marry me? … Oh no, pretty maid, I cannot marry you ’cos I have no boots to put on’, the woman’s soft tunefulness starkly incongruous compared with the squadron leader’s harsh dysphonic tone. The difficulty of finding the

46 Ibid. Including shoe designers and bespoke shoe makers Jodi Morrison, Andrew McDonald and Donna May-Bolinger; style commentator Maggie Alderson; Lydia Kamitsis, Head Curator of the Musie de la Mode et du Textile at the Louvre; Louise Mitchell of the Powerhouse Museum; Egyptologist Dr Martin Raven; Caroline Baum; Detective Inspector Terry Baker; performance poet John Giorno; designer Robert Burton; Major Garry Mathieson, Corporal Narelle Hargrave of the Australian Army; and Arsenije Jovanovic, Laurie Aarons, Katrin Ravlich and Dominic Buckham.

47 Robyn Ravlich, Radio National (2007), at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunnightrn/presenter.htm, accessed 2 October 2009.


comfortable but elegant 2-inch-heeled women’s shoe for day-to-day work is also articulated.

Unlaced quotes numerous musical snippets pertaining to the topic of shoes and includes jazz band dance tunes. Quotes include: Ute Lemper’s version of ‘Illusions’ (which asks, ‘Want to buy some illusions?’); Elvis Presley singing, ‘Put on Your High Heels’; a young couple discussing ‘shrimping’ (the practice of sucking toes), straight after a man reminisces about Andy Warhol licking the man’s shoes, against Lou Reed’s ‘Open House’ from the album Songs for Drella (1989), commemorating Warhol (whose first job was drawing shoes); and Nancy Sinatra singing, ‘These Boots are Made for Walking’.

In Unlaced, we experience how shoes ‘sound’ to our deep sense of self when wearing the shoes and presenting ourselves, dressed, to ourselves and to the world: the Head Curator of the Louvre reflects that a child’s first pair of leather shoes are the mark of the socialization of children, as it is ‘the proof that the child is not an animal any more! – he walks on his two feet’, and this notion is insinuated by a very squeaky, un-nuanced, amateurish recorder rendition in the background of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. This invokes a collective memory of primary-school recorder tuition that is another manifestation of the socialization/regimentation process.

Developing the notion of the significance of the part that shoes play in identity construction, Unlaced raises such issues as consumer frenzy and ‘retail therapy’, with the cliché of women loving, obsessing over, shoes: ‘I don’t know if we can say that every woman is a kind of Imelda Marcos, but there is something of that!’48 A memory of the significance of, and a certain attachment to, particular shoes in childhood arises, as a woman’s voice recalls her insistence on wearing her favourite shoes to bed and/or to school – and being sent back home to change into school shoes.

Produced specifically for radio, this work achieves a marked postmodern levelling of its subjects. One is guided to process all the auditory information – the song fragments and verbal commentaries – in terms of connectivity, relatedness, because each elides into the next so swiftly. Sounds are seamlessly mixed, even when simultaneity occurs; and as the human voice is the vehicle, we can hear breath being drawn softly and expressed, sibilants executed – all the very real processes by which speech occurs: the ‘message’ is vividly delivered. Quotations and accounts are widely accessible in theme and content, with considerable audience identification and understanding. Because much of the material is from pre-recorded songs, one is reminded both that these quoted songs contain deep meaning for people, and of art’s all-important place in reflecting on a lived life, from childhood through to afterlife, with museums safeguarding historical shoes.

48 Comment by the Louvre Head Curator of the Musie de la Mode et du Textile.


‘Sonic Pornography’ for ‘Jetrosexuals’

Airport Symphony (2007)

Commuting by plane is for some a routine activity. Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony (2007) is an homage to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (1978) – a manifestation of Eno’s ideas about ambient music, which ‘must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting’.49 English made field recordings at Brisbane Airport of the huge bank of sound that rushes down the runway, when aircraft are taking off and landing. He sent the audio files to composers in the US, Spain, Japan and Germany, and asked them to ‘meditate on the sonic environment of the [plane]’; he also invited sound artists to download his recordings from the festival website, hoping they would utilize the material to create their own compositions offering their ‘experiences and understanding of airports and travel’.50 The resultant sound mixes are presented in raw form or transformed by processing.51

Airport Symphony invites travellers to reflect on the experience of airports and air travel that ‘ascribe some meaning and resonance within your everyday’ – whether this be the homogenous sonic environment found in airports or in planes, all over the world, or

those first glimpses of foreign lands as you peer through your portal on first touch down in a new land – each of these experiences and other aspects of the airport play an important role in creating an impressionist understanding of what travel and the mechanism that support it mean today.52

49 Brian Eno, Liner notes, Music for Airports/Ambient I (PVC 7908: (AMB 001), 1978). Cage’s 4’33” has been described as an ‘airport for sounds’, the musical companion to Rauschenberg’s ‘airports for shadows’, the all-white paintings that greatly influenced Cage: Larry J. Solomon, ‘The Sounds of Silence: John Cage and 4’33”’ (1998; 2002), at http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm (accessed 26 June 2006), see Miriam Fraser, ‘Making Music Matter’, Theory, Culture & Society 22/1 (2005): 176.

50 Quoted in Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Capturing Sounds to Excite Jetrosexuals’, The Australian (2007), at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,21751876,00.htm, accessed 19 May 2007. Artists include Francisco Lopez, Tim Hecker, David Grubbs and Christian Fennesz, as well as Australian sound artists Joel Stern and Camilla Hannan. Fenella Kernebone, Sunday Arts: Flight Club, ABC TV (2007), at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/sundayarts/txt/Sunday1July2007.htm, accessed 18 November 2007.

51 Lawrence English, AIRPORT SYMPHONY: CATALOGUE ESSAY (2007), at http://qmf.org.au/airportsymphony/default.htm, accessed 11 July 2007. The work was part of Queensland’s 2007 Music Festival.

52 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music (2007), at http://www.queenslandmusicfestival.com.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=1, accessed 24 September 2009.


Brisbane Airport Corporation’s published statement on English’s Airport Symphony (art as a public relations exercise) states that the collaboration with a sound artist would put the ‘romance, poetry and even musicality’ back into travel, adding, ‘We like the mix of the mundane and the artistic. Airports don’t normally hold a strong affection in people’s hearts, so anything that tries to break down the clichés of the airport as a soulless, windswept, barren, unfriendly place, we’re keen to support’.53

It is not only the experience of airports that can rile or alienate people. The noise of aircraft can be a major contributor to the growing noisescape of contemporary industrialized life. Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, for example, has a page on its website devoted to explaining its management policy of the noise generated by aircraft approaching or departing from Melbourne Airport.54 But in The Australian, English’s catch-line read, ‘Aircraft noise is like pornography for jetrosexuals’, with the further recommendation, ‘Living under the flight path is like having the best seat in the theatre’.55 The air traveller is asked to reframe their flying experience, and the typical sense of irritation, aggravation or even anxiety about noise is encouraged, via noise.

Muzak and Dangerous, Dangerous Books…

Fahrenheit 451 (1992)

In Chapter 4, Frances Dyson’s Window Pain exposes a negative side of modern technological medical processes, while authoritarian repression in Simon Crosbie’s Gaol Piece is explored in Chapter 5. My next example returns to the theme of repression by authority.

For people living in a robust contemporary democracy, access to sources of information and knowledge, and the right to freedom of expression, is taken for granted. In 1992, Brenton Broadstock composed the libretto and music for Fahrenheit 451, a one-act chamber opera based on Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953),56 which explores a futuristic technocratic society that actively seeks to eradicate all literature. Today, possessing or reading books

53 Quoted in Sorensen, ‘Capturing Sounds’. 54 See Australia Pacific Airports, Melbourne: Planning – Aircraft Noise (2011), at

http://www.melbourneairport.com.au/About-Melbourne-Airport/Planning/Aircraft-Noise.html, accessed 18 December 2011. Similarly, London’s Ambient Noise Strategy, formed in 1999, joins a larger governmental project to alleviate noise pollution in cities such as London. One of its strategies is to secure a night aircraft ban over the city, see ANS’s outline on the Mayor of London website. Also see Dietrich Schwela, Urban Air Pollution in Asian Cities: Status, Challenges and Management (London; Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2006).

55 Australia Pacific Airports, Melbourne.56 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953).


is a happily taken-for-granted activity. But in the twenty-fourth-century world of Fahrenheit 451, this is strictly forbidden, and all books that are found are destroyed by burning them. Paradoxically, this work is undertaken by ‘firemen’ who set fire to houses in which books are found. In this society, it is the semblance of happiness that is all important, where trivial information is valued, and knowledge, philosophy and ideas are jettisoned. But on one significant day, Fireman Montag, the central character, is horrified when a woman who owns some books chooses to die in her burning house rather than live without her books. Montag begins to change and to question the suppression of knowledge.

Mixing historical musical markers, Broadstock’s score comprises vocal lines written in a style closely related to Sprechstimme and accompanying material (composed by Broadstock), which, in the composer’s words, is a type of ‘electronic futuristic muzak’,57 pre-recorded on tape against which the performers sing live. Broadstock’s own critical engagement with Muzak has some common ground with RAEM’s (above) but is realized in a very different manner. Tapping into the transparently cynical deployment of Muzak by commercial entities in the service of mind-numbing ‘control’ as it is piped into shopping centres, for example, in order to induce a mental state conducive to increased spending, Broadstock’s work serves as a Frankfurt-School warning about a possible future totalitarian state. The choice of Sprechstimme assists in conveying the message, in this context: the technique renders the vocal lines clearly intelligible, as it is semi-speech; the music is confined to the background. Further warnings are delivered in the array of sirens and alarms and the noise of the stomach pumps (for when Mildred, Montag’s wife, overdoses in attempted suicide): the noise is palpable, making the listener really feel it in the thudding, loud rhythmical pulses.

A further dimension evident in the stylistic mix in Fahrenheit 451 is, as discussed above, that Muzak is reviled by modernists – indeed, by most ‘serious’ musicians. Its soothing, unchallenging, non-dynamic, conformist, sinisterly manipulative nature is anathema to Western traditional art-music precepts. The incongruity of mixing Sprechstimme with Muzak is heightened when one recalls Schoenberg’s dictum, ‘if it is for all it is not Art; if it is Art, it is not for all’:58 Muzak must be readily apprehended. Broadstock’s choice of style here is emphatically to underline his anti-totalitarianism warning in the context of a society where books – catalysts and disseminators of thinking and inspiration – are banned and thought is orchestrated by the government.

Significantly, the only place where Broadstock includes more ‘musical’ music, not his ‘futuristic muzak’, is at the end when Montag (the hero) discovers the ‘book-people’ in the woods (each one having memorized an entire key cultural

57 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Brenton Broadstock, 29 January 1995.

58 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea (1946)’, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1984), p. 124.


or literary text so as to keep it ‘alive’). They are walking around, reciting their books, and Montag has an epiphany, a rebirth into a new state of being, away from the world where culture is jettisoned to one where people are the custodians and transmitters of culture. That Broadstock chooses euphonic tonal music to represent this suggests that, indeed, preserving our inherited historical culture is vital for meaningful existence. He underlines this point through his deliberate avoidance of opera’s usual practice of including duets and choruses until the last, triumphant scene, because there people are ‘free’ and can ‘sing out’, whereas before it was ‘not done’.59

Broadstock’s playing with operatic convention and with other musical fields not only serves his extra-musical purposes but also reminds us of the embedded aesthetic positions that accompany all genres. Their decontextualization reminds us that the attitudes surrounding seemingly incontrovertible forms are constructs.

Bringing the Mute to Sonic Life

The Wedding Photograph (2000)

A still photograph is a ‘mute’ medium. Yet when we look at one, we can often ‘hear’ – in the mind’s ear – as much as ‘see’ what is depicted. The Wedding Photograph (2000) is a playful radiophonic work that brings to life this very process. Made by seven ABC and non-ABC radio producers, performers, students and sound engineers during a workshop under director Kaye Mortley, it explores the universal theme of the wedding day.

Starting from scratch, recordings were gathered on location and in the studio, over two weeks. The result is an aural portrait of an extended and composite bridal party, and the ambivalences of the wedding that often show through in the looks on the faces of the participants – despite the common presence of frock, cake, flowers. In the background, an Italian wedding echoes through the aural space, as we gaze beyond the image in the wedding photo.60

The seven contributors offer their reflections and interpretations on various possible scenarios arising from the photograph of an extended bridal party, highlighting the range of emotions that can often seem to characterize the facial expressions of such a group – perhaps just as common a feature as the wedding dress, cake, flowers. In a manner akin to the Third Movement of Sinfonia (1968) by Luciano Berio, which has Gustav Mahler’s Scherzo from his Second Symphony running through the work, over which is laid a collage of quotations from the canon of Western classical music and beyond, the recording of an Italian wedding forms the backdrop to the commentary in The Wedding Photograph.

59 Linda Kouvaras, interview with Brenton Broadstock, 29 November 1992.60 The Listening Room: Archives, June. Performers: Kate Bochner, Lucia Barera,

Brent Clough, Sherre DeLys, Sophea Lerner, Russell Stapleton, Gretchen Miller.


Part of the soundscape includes the following musings: [A woman:] ‘An anonymous photograph represents a wedding, in England. Twenty-five persons of all ages, two little girls, a baby. I read the date, and I compute: 1910, so they must all be dead, except, perhaps, the little girls, the baby, old ladies, and old gentleman by now’, against which a famous soprano of the 1920s sings, ‘There’s No Place Like Home’, with the recording quality of the period featuring a distinctive hiss as it recedes into the background. The Italian wedding is echoey, implying a different time and location to the musers. [A woman:] ‘She’s thinking, “We’ve been standing here for hours… I wish my father hadn’t sold me to this man… My feet are hurting” … two pairs of shoes, and I find myself wondering, “what has happened to those shoes? Has the leather and wood turned to dust and ashes?”’

Next is the sound of a handheld camera winding and two typical comments on being photographed in these situations follow: [A woman:] ‘I don’t like having my photograph taken’; [A man:] ‘I intentionally avoid the cheesy grin’. A woman recites,

married in white you’ve chosen all right; married in green – ashamed to be seen?; married in grey you’ll go far away; married in red you’ll wish yourself dead; married in blue, you’ll always be true; married in yellow – ashamed of your fellow?; married in black, you’ll wish yourself back; married in pink, of you he’ll think…

This is spoken in a semi-whisper by a woman, in children’s nursery-rhyme style, emphasizing the rhythm of the poem, delivered in a quasi-witchlike tone of voice, playing on the superstitious impulses and customs that can often attend this event. Immediately follows a middle-aged woman stating, slightly melancholically, ‘I’ve never been a flowergirl, I’ve never been a bridesmaid, I’ve never made my debut, and I never had a 21’. Then revellers talk and laugh in a language of perhaps Asian origin; a telephone rings while a woman describes in detail a drawing she’s doing for a customer of a wedding cake she’ll fax to him interstate, while snippets of Hawaiian music move the sense of time/space by connoting the possibly exotic honeymoon at this more mundane moment. The cake maker confides that she wants the cake to reflect the sort of wedding her clients are having, so she matches the colour scheme for the dresses and takes care not to clash red flowers on the table with orange and pink flowers on the cake, as it would ‘look ghastly’. Thus the behind-the-scenes preparations are just as much a part of the work as the more usual sonic associations such as organ playing, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, the soprano solo, church chimes and the ceremony itself.

A less-than-perfect rendition of the iconic Mendelssohn’s Wedding March is presented while the congregation claps, a faint male cheer applauds, and two voices say, ‘she first strips herself of every article of clothing, and puts on new and unwashed garments, protecting even pins that have never been used before’. The Wedding March peters out into a held chord at the end of the first phrase, muddied with the previous chord, a mix of dominant and tonic, made to ‘shimmer’


through electronic treatment, sounding like an arrest: the work calls attention to the mechanism of its own formulation; we are reminded that this is a construction, a piece of art, further underlined as a photo audibly snaps. Women giggle and one reflects, ‘I think there is a sense in which a successful, happy wedding photo is an advertisement for marriage’; another, ‘how do you mean?’ A man responds, ‘Isn’t the difficulty of all wedding photographs is [sic] that they’re trying to fix something that is not really fixable, that the wedding is about saying, “it’s forever”?’, and at the phrase, ‘trying to fix something that is not really fixable’, the women accompanying him chuckle, extracting a different meaning from ‘fix’:

[Woman:] ‘ – no matter what happens’.[Man:] ‘Hm-mhm’; [woman:] ‘well, the wedding is forever’.[Man:] ‘The wedding might be forever but the marriage may not’.

A woman and man, amateurish singers, hum the tune of a two-part ditty, ‘Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove’, while others describe the ambivalent scenarios depicted on an anonymous wedding photo: ‘her hand is upturned’; ‘they look so solemn, I can’t decide whether it’s tense or peaceful, there’s not much sign of a celebration’; ‘I think these people have never met’; ‘but they have actually met, unknown to their parents, before’; ‘the commitment is strong, and fixed, and the most important thing’; ‘he has really wary eyes’; ‘her head is turned down and her eyes are staring straight ahead’. The point made here is that, although these empathic observers do not know the people in the photo, recognizable human traits seem to shine through and are ‘read’ and understood.

A superstitious bride is heard ensuring she wears ‘something old/new/borrowed/blue’; another, ‘for good luck, something blue and three hairs are sewn into the wedding dress’. The chant about marrying in red/blue/etc. returns, with slight variations (‘married in green, sorrow is soon seen’, for example), as though to depict how these superstitions are handed down through generations and perpetuated, firmly entrenched and yet mutating subtly in transmission, inflected by human mishearing. That superstitions obtain and are culturally significant is invoked by having more than one woman’s voice intone, in response to a man declaring that a bride would consider it an honour to be asked to lend her veil to a new bride (‘something borrowed’), ‘No woman would part with something linked with her happiest day. She would not give such an article to the new bride for keeps, but merely [lend] it to her.’ A man adds, ‘She would shun borrowing anything from a widowed friend.’

The ‘fitting’ of wedding dresses in a shop is articulated by a zipper being pulled, with a helpful sales assistant advising which ‘slimming’, ‘princess-like cutting’ garment is also suitable for ‘girls she’s not very tall [sic]’. The sales assistant speaks in an Asian accent and goes on to describe, in the style of a guided visualization, the ritual of the groom lifting the bride’s veil at the end of the marriage ceremony ‘and everyone clap hand isn’t it! Is wonderful!’ This woman actually articulates


the main narrative of the work, ‘Taking a picture of it now, she’s ready’: again, the work self-reflexively – if unwittingly, on the part of the recorded woman – refers to itself, and declares that this is a work of art.

Church bells chime; the faint sound of an unhappy member of the congregation makes him/herself heard – a baby crying. A woman comments, ‘a time-trap; it hides time; it puts time onto a piece of paper’; a photographer, ‘I’m not sure when one decides that one’s ready to be frozen.’ The chiming of the bells provides a backdrop. The Wedding Photograph, as a piece of sound art that unfolds in time, unfreezes the picture, while at the same time, as a recorded object, it itself ‘freezes time’. It also connects with olfactory memory – a woman: ‘I’m pretty sure I can remember the smell of honeysuckle’ – while a man’s voice cuts in, captured in another recorded moment:

[first man:] ‘all her senses have closed down’;[second man:] ‘they come from this unusual group of people who have –’[woman:] ‘this man’s cold hand begins to hurt her hand –’;[second man:] ‘ – lost the ability to speak’.

Perhaps what is being evoked here is the darker social side of some weddings, where the chosen spouse might not meet the approval of family and/or friends, or circumstances mitigate that the ceremony is not a joyful affair for one or other of the betrothed.

This work, while pieced together from disparate sources, as is Ravlich’s Unlaced, nevertheless achieves an overarching narrative, with the ‘married in…’ chant recurring and previous images revisited. It has plot development: ‘actually, I’m not sure these two people have ever met’. The opening description of the old photo from 1910 also returns, concluding with the sound of a revolving LP on a turntable, the stylus slightly defective, again drawing attention to the recorded dimension of the work itself, just as the work is about recording a social ritual that is enacted an incalculable number of times all over the world yet, on an individual level, is someone’s ‘special day’. ‘Come live with me’ recurs throughout the piece, marking the significant contribution of the sonic realm in musical soundtracks in wedding celebrations, as do the abovementioned snatches of music that commonly accompanies weddings in Western culture, and as does the ringing out of church bells. The work concludes on a joyous note, with a woman revelling in her appearance as a bride: ‘I am just the most beautiful creature in the whole world.’ The roar of the crowd soars; applause builds; chattering voices, subtly treated electronically, fade out, underlining the interconnectedness of people and the human need for gathering together at such occasions, and showing that, when together in these circumstances, people’s natural inclination is to fill the airwaves with the sound of their voices as they communicate with one another.

The Wedding Photograph makes strong meta-statements. Showcasing the crackle and hiss produced by the abrading and degradation of original recordings with scratches, dents, dings and the patina of age, this sound artwork draws


attention to the very process used in its creation: namely, the recording process, demonstrating that no form of recording – visual or aural – is a fixed record, that time will exact processes of breakdown and decay and, by extension, that human memories are always a process of (faulty) re-remembering. Recollections of ‘special days’ cannot be vividly maintained in a pristine, perpetually intact state – in neither individual nor collective memory. Simultaneously, another meta-stance is asserted: that society works in such a way that we do not need the exact details to ‘know’ and respond to the myriad nuances that will accompany such occasions because of their very prosaic and universal nature, as even the faded photograph of anonymous wedding guests from 1910 allows us to interpret and provides enough information for us to know or imagine and reconstruct something of that event. The possible events are simply imagined from the facial expressions and body posture; this is evident when one person reports that her father does not see clearly any more and asks her to describe the photo to him, while another admits, in reply, ‘I can hardly see the faces’, and in the musings on the shoes’ fate from the 1910 photograph. Cultural differences are transcended, underscored by the Chinese clothes salesperson and the soundbites from the Italian wedding interspersed with the Anglocentric commentators and their narratives. Finally, foregrounding the very structures of the work’s construction (the audible recording processes), The Wedding Photograph broadcasts itself as a made object and, by analogy, demonstrates that wedding customs, superstitions, beliefs, rituals, are also human constructs.

Postmodernist Sonic Art in and of the Body

Dead Centre: The Body with Organs (1999)

While several of the sound artists in Chapter 5 record the ambient sounds of the interior of built environments, a number of others extend 1960s Happenings practice to use what is surely the sine qua non of the quotidian – namely, their body – to ‘sound’ the interior spaces of buildings and/or to amplify their inner bodily workings. The mutability of the body is the focus of Dead Centre: The Body with Organs (1999), a collaboration between Norie Neumark, Amanda Stewart, Maria Miranda and Greg White, which presents a definitively postmodern transaction between the human form and technology. It is a sound/performance installation that explores and plays with bodily organs as they are being reconfigured in computer culture. It posits the computer as ‘one (among others) particular incarnation of our organs’.61 The work also highlights the way both art and science can generate the

61 Norie Neumark, Amanda Stewart, Maria Miranda and Greg White, Dead Centre: The Body with Organs (1999), at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/headspace/special/deadcentre/, accessed 19 May 2005.


conceptual prisms through which we apprehend and interact with the biological and technological world.

Neumark, Stewart, Miranda and White explore the enculturation and historical contingency of bodily sensibility, asking such questions as, ‘How do Italians know where their livers are? Why don’t Bengalis distinguish their hearts from their livers? If we are now cyborgs with our computers, what organs do these “prostheses” support/replace?’62 These questions are addressed through snippets of narratives from people of varied backgrounds, pulsating sounds, performance and its traces, as well as through still images and sound/projected animations. The process splinters the ‘naturalness’ of the body, toying with the dichotomy between computers and the cultural.

Two figures are the vehicle for this exploration: ‘travelling and journeying and the computer as an organ of digestion, excretion, and transmission’.63 The artists draw imaginative correlations between the ‘digestion’ process experienced by both creator and computer that occurs when images are scanned in or sounds digitized, and the ‘normal’ human bodily digestive process: creativity and digestion alike can be chaotic and subject to chance. Further, ‘excretions’ can emerge in all sorts of unplanned arenas, via the Net. The creators take the digestion metaphor still further, describing the performance as ‘digested’ by the sound; the sound and performance ‘digested’ by images and animations; and sound and the animations, by the live performance. Neumark, Stewart, Miranda and White state that its interactive nature allows us to ‘enter into [it], rather than “play”’, and that we ‘pulse with’ the work rather than ‘control’ it.64 Their postmodern stance is underscored when they declare an interest in ‘the metaphors of science rather than the technologies of science’ and when they emphasize that their focus lies ‘with the base materiality and the lower end (of) computers – as organs of digestion and excretion’.65

Rehabilitating the Sounds of the Everyday

The sonority of everyday events – the cornucopia of the mundane, aural accompaniment to daily, human activity or ‘special’ social occasions – can sometimes be lost in sheer sensorial information overload and beyond apprehension as a totality. But a wealth of sonic events occurs in everyday human interactions. The works presented here bring an unexpected focus to what is often unnoticed, disregarded or unobserved, events that may fall beneath our aural radar, or whose significance may not feature uppermost in – or even gain admittance to – our consciousness.

62 Ibid.63 Ibid.64 Ibid.65 Ibid.


Australian explorations in quotidian sound, and using sound artworks to reflect on quotidian activities, foster a new awareness of our habits of hearing, listening and thinking in social spaces and environments from the urban and beyond – in such locales as hospitals, office building elevators, gardens, parks, airports, weddings, the body, as well as through commonplace acts such as reading books, using door intercoms and wearing shoes. And the overriding ‘message’ underlying such revelations is the connectedness, through sound, of individual human beings to the broader social fabric. Chapter 7 looks at works whose project is also situated across an array of spaces – through the prism of the past.

Part 4 altermodern

Chapter 7

The Nostalgic: The Dawning of the Altermodern (1)

These final two chapters deal with time, presenting works that comment on the history of the sound art genre. This feature marks an ‘altermodern’ sensibility that goes beyond ‘classic’ postmodernism, as the commentaries that these works offer also incorporate the recent past – in other words, the postmodern era itself.

The ‘Historical Avant-garde’

Pierre Boulez’s stipulation in 1974 was that artists must ‘forsake all memory and become an absolute part of the present!’1 But postmodernism’s about-face to this proposition has typically had many artists unabashedly quoting from the past. In early instances of postmodern sensibility, Linda Hutcheon, speaking in 1989, identified a ‘nostalgic, neoconservative recovery of past meaning [which is] going on in a lot of contemporary culture’ and which she terms the ‘empty and ahistoric realm of pastiche’.2 She made the distinction between this and postmodern parody, the latter being ‘deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation – in any medium’.3 This is not mere pastiche.4 Where Fredric Jameson levels the charge of trivialization at irony regarding historical representation, Hutcheon perceives it as providing the antidote to the very ‘debilitating nostalgia’ against which Jameson warns.5 The examples I will discuss here occupy a tangential path to the mindsets Jameson and Hutcheon identify, a path that is not a binary-based, either/or situation of ‘The New vs. Unproblematic Return to The Past’.

1 Quoted in an IRCAM press brochure of 1974, cited in Griffiths, Modern Music and After, p. 151.

2 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 94. The first edition of this book (in 1989) made the same point.

3 Ibid. 4 Composition, in other words, ‘in the style of … [some composer from the past]’.5 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 94. Hutcheon refers to Jameson,

Postmodernism, p. xvii. Jameson and Hutcheon are speaking here of certain ‘fashionplate historicist films’ (ibid.), but I believe the point can extend to the medium of music.


Percy Grainger insisted, Free Music ‘is an emotional, not a cerebral, product’.6 But Grainger’s is a modernist’s take on emotion, a rarefied, abstracted glorying in sound qua sound. The works to follow here delve into the emotional realm – a focus from which composers upholding the tenets of modernism would abstain, particularly from the sentiments raised by nostalgia.

The avant-garde in sound art expression is of particular relevance to Lawrence Kramer’s assertion: ‘the avant-garde has become historical. Its historical character has become the medium of its perception’.7 Chapter 8 will broach the practice of the revivification of the modernist project. But what does it say about current conceptions of ‘the modern’ when artists, exemplified in this chapter, are making – and have done so for the last 20 years, moreover – ‘nostalgic’ homages to modernism, works that engage with the past? To me it proposes a post-postmodern sensibility, placing ‘inverted commas’ not only around the past but around the idea of the postmodern itself, as there is more than a mere tinge of wistfulness in the nostalgic re-engagement with modernism.

Nostalgic Anti-rock Forays

BOK Darklord’s Untitled Album (2009)

Canadian John Oswald coined the term ‘Plunderphonics’ in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative for his own practice, that is, creating new music out of previously existing recordings. In their own ‘plundering’ of iconic popular-music culture, Australian duo BOK Darklord, a collaboration between ‘Buttress O’Kneel’ and ‘Lucas Darklord’ (aka Thomas Knox Arnold), create on an untitled album of 2009, available in entirety for free online, an entire soundscape taken from Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, track by track, using no source material but the original songs themselves.8

O’Kneel’s artistic enterprise is self-described as ‘sample-happy postpop cheeky-as-a-schoolgirl breakmashing’; Darklord’s, as ‘dark grinding corporate evil-as-a-business-retreat scrapescapes’9 and ‘one part Eddie Maguire, one part

6 Grainger, Free Music (Tablet 2).7 Lawrence Kramer, ‘“Au-delà d’une Musique Informelle”: Nostalgia, Obsolesence,

and the Avant-garde’, Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays, Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 45.

8 Buttress O’Kneel and Lucas Darklord, BOK Darklord, ed. Alias Frequencies: Art & Music (2009), at http://aliasfrequencies.org/, accessed 16 July 2009. Also see Gail Priest, ‘Sonic Extremities: Gail Priest Embraces Liquid Architecture 8, Sydney’, Realtime Arts 81 (2007), at http://www.realtimearts.net/article/81/8731, accessed 26 December 2007.

9 Jon Nelson, B’O’K, Some Assembly Required (2007), at http://www.some-assembly-required.net/blog/2007_05_01_archive.htm, accessed 20 May 2007.

The Nostalgic: The Dawning of the Altermodern (1) 175

Darth Vader, and one part Mephistopheles’.10 They also brand themselves as ‘two of Australia’s most interesting, most underground, and most belligerently misanthropic sound-artists’,11 and boast that this album, ‘a rock-purist’s worst nightmare, and a sample-police’s greatest dream’, which ‘marks the year 2009 as a year when THINGS CHANGED’, will ‘perhaps awaken the sleeping Rock Gods, dormant since Bonham’s untimely vomit-inhaling demise’, and they deliver the order, ‘Now FUCKEN ROCK!’12

The array of sounds produced from the complex treatment of this iconic album is vast.13 The duo use the sounds not only as artistic explorations in their own right, but also to comment on the original tracks, lyrically and musically, bringing certain attitudes and generic tropes – from not only rock but also symphonic Romantic structures – to light. Form is exploded in a macro sense by the very duration of the tracks, which all exceed the original, apart from, significantly, the most famous, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which is only 2’12” (the original is 8’03”): ‘Black Dog’, for example, is here, 8’20” (the original, 4’57”), and ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was originally 7’16” and in BOK Darklord’s version is 17’16”.

Then the chasm that forms at the halfway point in ‘Black Dog’ seems to open up the ‘guts’ of the song. It reaches a state of suspended animation, with a desolate moonscape-like industrial noise sequence produced from the treatment of the ‘source’ material. The overall form can be described as ‘post-arch-form’: its centrepiece is a vortex, where it seems history and the soul of rock itself are sucked into an abyss. It then drags itself out of this quasi-primordial swamp on a zither-like reverie to wend its way back to an eventful coda. In terms of structure and concept, then, the song cannot be described as a consummate, anarchic, modernist celebration of ‘pure’ noise; both form and the song’s original harmonic, melodic and rhythmic identity are clearly discernible.

BOK Darklord’s version revels in the sexualized, highly charged dynamic of the heavy metal genre. Embedded in the dense and heady mix of sounds, layers of lyrics seem to repeat and mutate in variations such as ‘gonna make you drip’ (derived from the original lyrics’ description of honey dripping) and ‘dreams of Mama’s burning muff’, which is repeated with variations such as ‘Dreams of Mama’s burning muff make me a happy man’, alternating with ‘I found out what people mean by burnin’ muff’, ‘got a flamin’ muff’, thus playing with – and insinuating – an Oedipal subtext that typifies so many (male-penned) rock songs.14

The contested issue of intellectual property in contemporary music, and the recourse to legal prosecution as a consequence of current practices such as

10 O’Kneel and Darklord, BOK Darklord.11 Nelson, B’O’K. 12 O’Kneel and Darklord, BOK Darklord.13 One is alerted to the distorted sonicscape by the distorted image of the album,

which appears on the website.14 See, for example, Ruth Padel, I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock’n’Roll (London:

Faber & Faber, 2000).


sampling and quoting, etc., is of course an underlying facet of this enterprise. Significantly, BOK Darklord make ‘their’ work both freely available and for sale.15 O’Kneel remarks:

All culture is sampling! I’m probably ranting here, but it seems so clear to me, and so unmentioned by anyone else. LIFE IS RE-USE! THOUGHT IS SAMPLING! There, I’ve said it again. So, that said, I do what I do because it’s all anyone can do. But the BATTLE aspect of what I do is a choice. Basically, when we interact with the greater world, we make a choice: Do I accept what is there already, or do I use it to make something else? When a song has been designed to be ‘catchy’, or ‘popular’ (as all ‘pop’ music is), it has been designed to take control of your brain! To brainwash you! To get stuck in your mind and repeat itself again and again – this is what the notion of ‘catchy’ is! It uses psychology and trend-analysis and basic brain-washing techniques to lodge itself in your brain and LIVE there. So, do I accept this? Or do I use this and try to free my neurones? I can’t help but choose the recontextualizing path of freedom. This is a battle of the mind, and it’s a battle I’m determined to win.16

O’Kneel espouses a radicality where all culture is considered to be a library, ‘available’ for personal use. Such a position in current times requires the acknowledgement of one’s own implication in the manipulation of the ‘culture machine’ – in other words, conceding that one is not immune from the lure of indulging in the ‘guilty pleasures’ of ‘low’ culture. It is one of the aesthetico-philosophical quandaries that have been highlighted in contemporary practice and that form the basis for much postmodern art: what to do with the fact that, sometimes, one loves an object that one’s aesthetic judgement tells one should be shunned.

BOK Darklord thus offer a double-move in terms of the Past/Present in this sound art creation, the Led Zeppelin original being invoked, its semantic, structural

15 For further discussion on this, see, for example, Shannon O’Neill, ‘“Copyright Doesn’t Mean Shit to Me”: Sampling and Appropriation in Australian Experimental Music and Sound Art’, Experimental Music, ed. Priest, pp. 75–93. ‘From Schaeffer onwards, DJ Culture has worked with two essential concepts: the cut and the mix. To record is to cut, to separate the sonic signifier (the ‘sample’) from any original context or meaning so that it might be free to function otherwise. To mix is to reinscribe, to place the floating sample into a new chain of signification. The mix is the postmodern moment, in which the most disparate of sounds can be spliced together and made to flow … DJ Culture also describes a new modality of audio history and memory. No longer a figure of linear continuity that, ideally, could be recalled in its totality, musical history becomes a network of mobile segments available at any moment for inscription and reinscription into new lines, texts, mixes. In short, musical history is no longer an analog scroll but digital and random access’: Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, ‘VIII: DJ Culture: Introduction’, Audio Culture, eds Cox and Warner, p. 330.

16 Nelson, B’O’K.


and musical meaning deconstructed and countered, its aesthetic allure embraced. Their manipulation of the source material alludes to the cynical market-based products (for example, manufactured ‘girl groups’ and ‘boy bands’) that have enjoyed mass appeal from the 1960s to the present. Simultaneously, a new critical position and aesthetic are initiated as BOK Darklord decimate the original formal scaffolding of the songs that they ‘plunder’. At the heart of this new position, when they state their desire to ‘awaken the sleeping Rock Gods’ (above), is an altermodernist nostalgia for rock’s high modernism.

Paeans to Grainger and Cage

Grainger conceptualized in the 1930s that his revolutionary Free Music would enable scales and notes to glide away in a modernist’s noise ecstasy.17 His aspiration was for his Free Music ‘to speak to his public direct’, unencumbered by the ‘limitations of the human [performer’s] hand’: hence his invention, in collaboration with Burnett Cross, of the Electric-Eye Tone-Tool, which, sadly, remained unfinished at his death.18 For mid-twentieth-century experimentalism, obviating the need for the performer contained a further dimension, that of circumventing ‘taste’ – on the part of not only the performer but also the creator.

Grainger voices the modernist concern (on the part of experimentalists and composers working more traditionally) with ‘the now’ and ‘the new’ when he writes that his Free Music is ‘the only type of music that tallies our modern scientific conception of life (our longing to know life AS IT IS, not merely in a symbolistic [sic] interpretation), and clearly the kind of music to which all musical progress of many centuries has been working up’.19 Clearly, Ros Bandt echoes his sentiment here regarding her explorations, starting in 1978, of ‘acoustic chambers and “contained” spaces’, such as water tanks and wheat silos, in which she recorded improvised performances on various instruments. The experience had a profound effect, setting her work on new paths; her excitement is palpable: ‘It opened up worlds for me… it was such a strongly non-verbal and visceral experience… I felt like a small part of a huge vibration… it was a joy to be totally immersed in sound…’.20

One could say that Grainger’s legacy in Australian experimental music making has effected a kind of jump over historical fault-lines, bypassing the mid-twentieth

17 See Kahn, ‘The Lyre’s Island’. Also see Introduction to present volume.18 Grainger, Free Music (Tablet 2), see Introduction to present volume.19 Percy Grainger, letter to Owin Downes, quoted in Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 89. 20 John Jenkins, Ros Bandt: Designing Site-specific Compositions (Review of Bandt’s

Presentation: Up Close and Personal Composer Series), eds Jenkins and NMA Publications (2004), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/upclose/Bandt.htm, accessed 14 August 2007.


century and emerging during the last 30 or so years.21 In 1997 the Grainger Museum staged ‘The Many Faces of Percy Grainger’, a number of events to draw attention to Grainger’s works and legacy.22 Since that occasion, several composers have worked alone and in collaboration on various Grainger projects that have involved the artists immersing themselves in the Museum, using Grainger’s recordings, restoring traditional instruments as well as carrying out his plans for new instruments and works. Post-experimental nostalgic homages to modernism of an entirely different type from BOK Darklord’s celebrate Percy Grainger and John Cage’s achievements in the genre.

A Global Bridge for Percy (1997)

Ros Bandt and Johannes Sistermann’s A Global Bridge for Percy (also known as A Garden for Percy’s Delight) (1997), was a real-time composition that paid homage to Grainger’s ideas of Free Music. It comprised Grainger’s instruments, the butterfly piano, the slide whistle, electric shaver, monochord and whispering duet, and was performed before a live audience at ‘The Many Faces of Percy Grainger’ by improvising musicians against a sound installation created by Bandt.

The audience sat under Bandt and Sistermann’s soniforous bridge in the Museum’s courtyard, with the sounds from Melbourne in front and those from the atrium of the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt behind.

Each part of this work involves a different spatial design – the web audio documentation, interactive installation, global performance via double ISDN link and the final live performance; together, each part fed into the others, forming a shifting counterpoint of their own. The work as a whole existed as a massive free music machine, emanating from the inner sanctum of Percy Grainger’s world, and it is dedicated to him.23

21 While Ros Bandt, for instance, had not heard of Grainger during her undergraduate music course in the late-1960s to early-1970s, she proclaims a definite affinity with Grainger’s Free Music, that is, music – as she insisted to me in an interview – ‘working in planes of sound, in colours of hills and dales going up and down in relation to each other. I’d already done heaps of sound installations before I realized that Percy Grainger could really be called the founder of sound art. For me, it’s all for the same thing [and this includes her writings], it’s all about getting people to listen to the sounds all around us as they move through them. I’ve always worked in moving counterpoint, my whole life, that’s where I’m different from other composers…’: Linda Kouvaras, interview with Ros Bandt, 6 June 2007.

22 See Introduction, note 19. 23 Bandt, Sound Sculpture, p. 133. The work was recorded live to air for ABC Radio’s

The Listening Room, and culminated in December 1997 in a live performance by the two artists at the Moltkerei Gallery in Cologne. Also see Classic FM Archives, A Global Garden for Percy: Live, Interactive Improvisation from the Grainger Museum, at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/lroom/globgar.htm, accessed 7 July 2007.


Bent Leather Band (2006) and Skeleton in the Museum (2003)

In a twenty-first-century music-making context embracing live improvisation, instrument and software design, Stuart Favilla and Joanne Cannon’s Bent Leather Band (2006) also explores Grainger’s Free Music ideas, celebrating Grainger’s ‘significant departure point for electronic musicians and instrument makers searching for new musical language, form and expression’.24 The Blisters Ensemble, comprising Australian improviser/instrument builders Jon Rose, Rainer Linz, Tom Fryer, Joanne Cannon and Stuart Favilla, created a radiophonic work, Skeleton in the Museum (2003), out of a residency at the Grainger Museum, situated in the grounds of the University of Melbourne, exploring the archives, unpublished recordings and instruments there. It was composed, directed and produced by Jon Rose, and includes an archival recording of Ella, Grainger’s wife, singing one of her compositions with Percy, and also Percy Grainger speaking.25 The title refers to Grainger’s wish to have his skeleton exhibited in his own museum – a request denied by the authorities for reasons of public health.26

The Blisters Ensemble seeks to rehabilitate Grainger’s radical notions in the face of conservative establishment reaction. While not being able to affect the literal display of Grainger’s mortal remains at his museum, they have been able to give his original wish a contemporary currency.

Percy’s Dream: Harmonics Fantasy (2006)

At the heart of Warren Burt’s commemorative gesture, Percy’s Dream: Harmonics Fantasy (2006), is the realization of one of Grainger’s original aspirations in the material form of the Reconstructed Electric-Eye Tone-Tool 2 project.27 It uses cardboard templates that Burt cut into Graingerian ‘hills and dales’ templates and controlling AudioMulch patch with stable pitch and changing harmonics. The templates sit atop the EETT2-2 (Electric-Eye Tone-Tool 2, version 2; this

24 Favilla and Cannon, ‘Children of Grainger’. They have produced a range of creative works: meta-serpent wind controllers, the fourth generation of the light-harp controller, new MAX-based software engines for signal processing, and control-modes and strategies for the instruments and music including Bent Leather Band’s recent collection of works, Children of Grainger.

25 Ibid., p. 370; Jon Rose and The Blisters Ensemble, Skeleton in the Museum (2003), at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/product/skeleton-in-the-museum, accessed 5 August 2010. ABC radio’s Listening Room programme series supported and presented the collaboration on ABC Classic FM, 13 October 2003. Readings by Robert Menzies. Percy Grainger is heard in a radio interview vehemently denying that his music is ‘cheerful’.

26 Rose, List of Selected Experimental Radio Works for Violin.27 Its first performance took place at the Sound Symposium, St. Johns, Newfoundland,

July 2006, with performers Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve; it was also performed at Wollongong TAFE, June 2007.


version does not have rollers – the scores are moved by hand over the photocells, which permits more spontaneity in performance). While in Grainger’s work the photocells control changes in pitch and loudness for independent tones, here they control the amplitude of harmonics of a single tone.

Burt imagined that Grainger would have been stimulated by the ability to change harmonics, which his machine could have achieved, had he been able to develop it further. So Burt made a drone piece of three beating oscillators that produce a rich changing timbre of shifting harmonics.28

Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit No. 1 (2001)

A manifestation of postmodernism is the practice of appropriation, repudiating modernism’s will-to-newness and absolute originality:

The concept of originality which grew up in the later eighteenth century established itself in the nineteenth as an unquestioned aesthetic doctrine … Until the end of the eighteenth century a musical idea could be a platitude, something quite commonplace, without attracting the charge of being meaningless; convention – recognisable dependence on precedent – was still regarded as aesthetically legitimate.29

A shift occurred over the course of the nineteenth century, continuing into the twentieth: originality became of paramount importance to Western art.30 For many postmodern artists, however, this way of thinking has started to break down – ever so subtly, and without resorting to an unproblematic return to that of the earlier centuries as described by Dahlhaus. But these days, the acceptance of ‘the copy’ can be witnessed by the number of ‘cover’ bands in popular culture and by the number of quotation-works in postmodern art-music compositions (particularly in the early-1980s, yet still practised today).

Warren Burt’s Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit No. 1 (2001) engages with many modernist compositional attitudes, particularly that of formalism, and also presents a reckoning with the past. Burt displays a sense of ‘knowingness’ in this work where he talks of making ‘an historical fraud’, appropriating two bars from Percy Grainger’s La Scandinavie (Scandinavian Suite) for cello and piano (1902).31 Burt describes the piece as ‘a modern computer equivalent of an old-

28 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Warren Burt, 29 November 2007. 29 Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music

of the Later Nineteenth Century, California Studies in 19th-Century Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 42–3.

30 ‘We interpret reliance on convention as betraying a lack of imagination or a blind acceptance of social formula’: Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Bloch Lectures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 3.

31 Kouvaras, e-mail, Burt.


fashioned tape-splicing piece’ as well as ‘a 2001 memory’ of the type of ‘found-object’ composing that he and his fellow experimentalists from San Diego, Los Angeles and London – Ron Robboy, David Mahler, Gavin Bryars, John White, Chris Hobbs – would do in the mid-1970s.32

Burt encaptured two bars of piano from a Grainger recording, sliced into quaver fragments of 1, 2, 3, 8, 13 etc. Using the audio editor Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition), which enables extraordinary precision in editing, Burt bonded the fragments back together, attempting to make the splicing as undetectable as possible: ‘I wanted to see if I could make a piano cut-up which sounded like piano playing, and not a cut-up’.33 He modelled his rhythmic patterns on extensions of Grainger’s signature irregular rhythmic phrasing. While Burt could have simply transcribed the outcome for a regular piano score, upon playing the piece for pianists, their response was that they preferred the way that some of the edits were not quite perfect, the imperfections felt to them to be an integral part of the piece, and that performing it on a piano would compromise a key aspect of the piece’s timbral identity. So the piece remains in the recording medium ‘(piano musique concrète?)’, but Burt also muses that ‘it would be fun one day to transcribe it and see if the piece COULD be passed off as a “lost” Grainger piece on a concert one day…’.34

Still very much present here is Grainger’s radical avant-garde ideal of the performer-free piece, as Burt’s recorded artefact does not require a live pianist. But Burt’s self-declared historicizing impulse is displayed when he harks back to definite historical moments – the 1970s ‘found-object’ composing, which refers in turn to the practice in the 1930s, not to mention the main substance of the piece: the quoting of the Grainger work, which is itself an appropriation (of Scandinavian folksongs). This, and the deliberate pastiche of Grainger’s ‘serious composing’ hallmarks (his irregular rhythmic phrasing), culminates in a further twist: Burt uses here cutting-edge, modern technology – the very cause, according to Gillies and Pear, of Grainger being over-shadowed mid-last century.35 Burt intends this technology to effect a studio-assembled piece that sounds like an actual piano piece, rather than a ‘cut-up’, yet some of the edits are not as seamless as he intended – and as the technology had promised; the pianists urge him to let the piece remain in its ‘imperfect’ state, thus returning it to experimentalism’s celebration of the noise of the ‘mistake’.36

Ironically, Burt ends up allowing the piece to conform to the subjective response on the part of the pianists’ taste! (Taste is anathema to experimentalism proper, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, and in particular to Grainger’s ideals for his Free

32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 Ibid.35 Gillies and Pear, ‘Grainger, Percy’.36 For more on the aesthetics of experimentalist and post-experimentalist ‘glitch’, see

Chapters 1 and 2 of present volume.


Music.37) If modernism can be characterized as centred on formalism, then Burt’s work can be seen as an exemplary neo-modernist work – it is all about formalist concerns. But because he is looking at all the expressions of formalism from so many different temporal locations, this piece is distinguished by multifaceted layers – one of postmodernism’s primary qualities.38 Burt’s altermodern piece thereby installs the (neo)-modernist paradigm at the very same moment that he undermines it.

Homage to John Cage (1992); To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas) (2007); Cassenoisette (1989); Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal Schoenhut Toy Piano (2005)

Chris Mann and Jonathan Mills’s Homage to John Cage (1992), a radio work, invited sound artists, composers and performers from all over Australia to contribute improvisations, complete pieces and fragments in the spirit of Cage, to honour his incursions into spatial music, random processes, indeterminate procedures and the soundscape. It was subsequently mixed and broadcast from ABC radio stations all around Australia simultaneously. The radio studios involved had synchronous live events, and, in a move that strongly recalls the experimentalist ethos, only the organizers and technicians were able to hear all of the data, while the live broadcast consisted of a general mix of selections from the various studios, chosen by Mann and Mills.39

David Young’s To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas) (2007)40 was written to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Cage’s death and to celebrate his influence on subsequent generations of musicians and artists.41 Imbuing the work with Cage’s very keen interest and high degree of expertise in mycology, Young uses a graphic score that includes botanical sketches and

37 See Introduction to present volume. 38 See, for example, Christoph Cox, ‘Return to Form: Christoph Cox on Neo-

Modernist Sound Art’, Artforum International 42/3, November (2003), at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_3_42/ai_110913969/?tag=content;coll, accessed 8 October 2007. Cox talks about postmodernism’s ‘mixture and overload’.

39 Bandt, Sound Sculpture, p. 131.40 David Young, To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas) (2007),

at http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/classic/australianmusic/amu_301020_m1662750.mp3, accessed 3 July 2009.

41 Melissa Lesnie, ‘A Compendium of Cage: Whales, Mushrooms and Hymns. Cage Uncaged // NSW // 15.09.07’, Resonate Magazine (27 October 2007), at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/a-compendium-of-cage-whales-mushrooms-and-hymns, accessed 3 July 2009. The occasion was a triptych of concerts – respectively entitled To the Sea, To the Earth and To the Air – comprising ten Cage works interspersed with new offerings by five Australian composers, each reflecting a different facet of his far-reaching influence: ibid.


microscopic images of fungi, set on a musical staff and performed by The Song Company and Ensemble Offspring. Submerged within David Young’s chosen Latin text (assembled by Cynthia Troup and translator Neville Chiaravoli) are allusions to Cage’s discovery of wild mushrooms: ‘When I first came in touch with mushrooms I was looking for strawberries’,42 embodying the spirit of experimentalism’s ‘teaching’, that one might happen upon unexpected delights if one keeps an open mind. The work also sets up a process by which this might occur.

Cassenoisette, by Rainer Linz (1989), for four operators of the sliding pitch controls (as well as the PLAY, PAUSE and volume functions) of four Realistic VSC-1000 machines, pays homage to both Grainger and Cage, thus underlining Grainger’s place in the history of what came to known as experimentalism. It is loaded with tapes of ‘Futurist’ noises, and the glissandi are reminiscent of Grainger’s Kangaroo Pouch.43

Andrián Pertout’s Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal Schoenhut Toy Piano (2005) is part of The Extensible Toy Piano Project, Clark University, Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Worcester, MA, USA. Their website avows:

It has a deceptively simple mechanism – plastic hammers hitting steel rods. Yet the toy piano produces a rich and quirky sound palette. John Cage brought the instrument from a treasured plaything to a bona fide musical instrument with his Suite for Toy Piano (1948). Our aim is to bring the instrument into the twenty-first century.44

The resultant effect of Pertout’s complex approach to tuning – he explores the equally tempered soundworld within the context of a sampled microtonal Schoenhut model 6625, 25-key toy piano – and complex polyrhythmic scheme replicates not only the endearing sounds of the toy piano, with its resonances and reminiscences of the playroom of childhood, but also the Indonesian gamelan orchestra, an oblique reference in this context to Cage’s explorations of Asian musics and philosophy.45

42 Quoted in Lesnie, ibid. 43 Althoff, Ferric-oxide Archaeology.44 The Extensible Toy Piano Project, Clark University, Department of Visual and

Performing Arts, Worcester, MA, USA, 2005, at http://www.clarku.edu/xtp/xtp.htm, accessed 30 October 2009. Pertout’s score notes detail the methodology for his piece, see Andrián Pertout, Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal Schoenhut Toy Piano (Score) (held at the Australian Music Centre, 2005).

45 The Extensible Toy Piano Project. Pertout gives extensive descriptions of his intervallic divisions and the recording technique in his score note.


4’33” Techno Remix (2001)

BOK Darklord’s plundering of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (above) simultaneously enshrines as it empties out rock music’s much-extolled example. In its larking about with ideological spaces, the now-defunct but still web-active Melbourne trio Greg Wadley’s New Waver has a gibe at experimental music with its 4’33” Techno Remix (2001).46 Wadley writes that, when he wrote the piece,

I was interested in the then-successful phenomenon of the ‘techno remix’ of old pop songs, which appeared to simply follow the format ‘take old song, add drum machine and funky sound bites, release as work of genius’. Thus Remix = original song + minor techno noises, so if you subtract the original song, you are left with just the techno noises. Doing this subtraction seemed to be in the spirit of Cage’s 4’33”. Warning: the first part of my remix is silent – a lot of people think there is something wrong J.47

Wadley’s piece gently lampoons experimentalism’s most famous work as it simultaneously spoofs techno.

Fun and Phobia at the Foley Desk48

Phobia (2003)

Swiss-born, New York-based sound artist Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002) includes a large, four-screen projection showing hundreds of snippets from old Hollywood films, and his Crossfire (2007) uses a four-screen installation that was set up to surround the audience so that clips of actors handled and fired guns directly at the viewers, the gunfire providing a potent soundtrack and distilling one of cinema’s most familiar sonic tropes,49 while American John Zorn’s ‘cut-ups’ traverse the gamut of sonic tropes with which we are all familiar, stemming

46 New Waver, 4’33” Techno Remix (2001), at http://www.spill-label.org/sound/nw/nw-cages.mp3, accessed 13 November 2008.

47 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with Greg Wadley, 10 December 2008. Emoticon in original. The band also performs covers/parodies of well-known popular songs. I have discussed New Waver in Linda Kouvaras, ‘Hissing at the Margins: Postmodern Mainstream Positioning in Australian Art-music and Sound Art’, STUCK IN THE MIDDLE: The Mainstream and its Discontents, Selected Proceedings of the 2008 IASPM-ANZ Conference, Griffith University, Brisbane, eds Catherine Strong and Michelle Phillipov (Brisbane: IASPM Australia/New Zealand, 2009), pp. 126–34.

48 I have discussed this work in Kouvaras, Modernist and Postmodernist Arts of Noise.49 Christian Marclay, at http://www.whitecube.com/artists/marclay/, accessed 25

September 2011.


from cartoons and other sources of popular culture. A similar engagement with cinematic tradition occurs in Melbourne-based Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia (2003), by composer and ‘sound conceptualizer’ Gerard Brophy, with Chamber Made Opera’s Douglas Horton as writer/director, and the performing groups The Ennio Morricone Experience and desoxy.50

Phobia is a startling tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Hollywood noise artists, or sound-effects teams, achieving a mesmeric amalgamation of music theatre, performance art and ‘physical theatre’ in which ‘noises off’ act out the disintegration of characters’ mental states, sense into nonsense, meaning into immateriality. A work that engages with sound’s potential to penetrate directly to the psyche, Phobia plays self-consciously with the legacy of film noir’s emotional connotations of sounds, along with its contemporaneous noise-world from experimentalism in the mid-twentieth century.

Phobia is a generically hybrid or indeterminate work that treads the boundary between scored and improvised, assembling a pastiche of musical styles that range from jazz and minimalism to ‘world’ music. The work could best be described as a comico-serious altermodern meta-commentary on the role of sound – including noise effects and music – in cinema and, specifically, in the noir genre from which it unashamedly lifts its plot, which is that of Hitchcock’s 1958 psychodrama Vertigo, with a few character and place-name changes.

Avant-garde noise-art and cinema have been in dialogue from the outset: when Luigi Russolo moved to Paris in 1928, for example, movie studios showed an interest in the eight intonarumori, or acoustic machines, that he had invented for his ‘art of noises’.51 Film and the avant-garde art of noise having crossbred in their earliest days, Phobia could be seen as a ritual gesture of reclaiming the art of noise from the mainstream cinema into which it was absorbed by Hollywood and demoted to an accompaniment of image and dialogue – augmenting them, interpreting, but always subordinate.52 In Phobia – the very title of which announces what every noir film at some level is ‘about’ – noises or sound effects are not the incidental

50 Gerard Brophy and Chamber Made Opera, Phobia (Melbourne: Chamber Made Opera, 2003). Members of desoxy are theatre performers Teresa Blake and Dan Witton. The Ennio Morricone Experience comprises Dan Witton, Boris Conley, Graeme Leak, David Hewitt and Patrick Cronin. Design coordinator is Jacqui Everitt; sound engineer, Steph O’Hara; producers, Performing Lines and CMO.

51 See Richard Abel and Rick Altman, The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).

52 Extensive literature exists on the history of the way in which early- to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde music became associated with horror, thriller and other genres as ‘spooky’ music, thus both popularizing yet rendering banal the association made by Schoenberg and others of modern urban life with atonal and/or otherwise discordant musics, see Philip Brophy and Australian Film Television and Radio School, Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film (North Ryde, NSW: Australian Film, Television & Radio School, 1999).


by-products of actions, serving to ‘signify’ those actions (footsteps crunching on gravel, the creaking of a door turning on its hinge, typewriter keys clicking, etc.). Rather, such noises become the primary content of aesthetic composition itself – as, indeed, they always have been for soundtrack editors, but only implicitly for audiences.

The production of this work reflects the activities of Foley artists53 during the 1950s and 1960s, when an entire film soundtrack, including the dialogue and hand-produced sound effects, was often dubbed after a film’s completion. It should be noted that postproduction dubbing of SFX, dialogue and music remains the norm. What has changed is not the use of postdubbing itself, but rather the way in which these sounds are produced. This used to be mostly Foley artists performing in real time to a projection of the relevant filmic section. Now it is achieved with consoles using a library of pre-recorded SFX. That is to say, sound libraries – which have existed since the inception of sound – have now entirely replaced the ‘live’ Foley artist, except in public performance works such as that of Phobia or the Blue Grassy Knoll. Douglas Horton comments, ‘[t]he theatricality, musicality, irony and humour of [Phobia] is partly inspired by the absurdities and intricacies involved in producing this sound world’.54 Phobia’s set is its (enormous) Foley desk (along with a car windshield, six or so tables piled high with technical oddments, microphones and scripts), the six protagonists – five men and one woman – creating every sound, including all the effects, instrument playing and all voices.

Phobia’s narrative encompasses a fairly comprehensive list of entrenched noir signifiers, including false identity; double cross; paranoia; male mental anguish because of female betrayal on the romantic front; female madness (diagnosed); male obsession (undiagnosed) on the romantic front again; revenge; suicide attempts and successes; male heroic acts of saviour (in one of the attempts); beautiful female being seduced by sleazy parts of town; bungled police chases; detective surveillance; plot unravelling and shocking dénouement (including female death and murder on the part of enraged and outraged male lover).55 While Phobia roughly rehearses the convoluted Freudian plot of Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, complete with voice-over and dialogue, the on-stage action – which is to say, the visual entertainment – of the work consists not in Hitchcock’s characters acting out their phobias and fantasies, but in the performers performing the actions required to produce the noises, the soundworld, of the piece. These include a

53 Sound effect artists, after Hollywood sound artist Jack Foley.54 Douglas Horton, ‘Writer/Director’s Note’, Phobia Program Note (Melbourne:

Chamber Made Opera, 2004). 55 Phobia’s narrative intricacy conforms neatly to noir’s narratives, which were

‘frequently complex, maze-like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor-sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration’: Tim Dirks, Film Noir (1996/2005), at http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.htm, accessed 29 June 2005.


special Foley door laden with numerous latches and locks, countless other found or modified objects, clogs and various musical instruments.56 Thus the sounds and their production in this ‘opera’ are no longer incidental to or expressive of narrative events and actions, but are, rather, as for Andrée Greenwell’s ‘Tears’ (in Chapter 4), self-referential. The audience is invited to take its primary pleasure in admiring the performers’ skill and cooperative precision in creating the sounds from an unlikely variety of objects or ‘instruments’, and the placement or situating of these sounds in the action – in the timing and articulation.

Phobia alludes archly to both experimentalism and ‘academic’ modernism in Scene IV with a score direction for five of the six-strong ensemble, ‘performed at Foley desk in the fashion of difficult contemporary music concert’, with a ‘prepared’ upright piano on the exposed strings of which the sixth performer, crouching, plucks a menacing three-note motive (A–C–B, B@–D@–C, etc.) that crawls up the eight octaves. In Phobia, both modernist and traditional hierarchies of visual narrative and music/noise are upended. Not only does an audience hear the visuals but it sees the sounds: in a kind of visual metonymy, what is usually invisible background – sound effects – becomes visible foreground. Instead of seeing a victim’s bones being broken, the audience sees the breaking of a large celery stick over a bowl; another character’s shuffling feet in a gravel tray simulates the visitor crunching his sinister way up the drive; and characters are seen attiring themselves in plastic to ensure their every movement is audible, giving the audience the claustrophobic acoustic impression of being right up next to the cast. We hear the sounds of a couple dancing – but what we see is Teresa Blake bending double on an amplified strip of the stage, her hands inserted backwards into a man’s shoes, and shuffling around on all fours. On one level, the distinction between the visual and the aural is as stark as possible: the sight of snapping celery does not bring to mind breaking bones; but on another level, because of our conditioned heritage of such signposts, in this context the noise of breaking celery can readily conjure breaking bones.

An important dimension of Phobia’s take on the role of noise effects and music in noir is its meta-commentary on music’s ability to manipulate our affective responses. In Phobia, there is no unimpeded revelry in, or simple ‘return to’, affectivity after high modernism shunned the emotive or subjective; rather, Phobia inserts postmodern inverted commas around the whole issue of emotional responses to the suspense genre that is orchestrated by sound effects.57 In noir, the critical undermining of character psychology and its construction through the narrative is often achieved via a swapping of power roles across gender lines. The characters in Phobia take this destabilization still further: no actor ‘is’ character

56 Comprising cello, double bass, percussion, tuned and untuned, and trumpet.57 A review commented, for example, ‘while the atmosphere created is rich – and

occasionally intense – the audience will have to decide for themselves whether it is at all enjoyable’: Daniel Ziffer, ‘“Phobia”’, The Age (23 May 2005), at http://theage.com.au/news/Reviews/Phobia/2005/05/22/1116700591154.htm, accessed 25 May 2005.


‘x’ or ‘y’ for the duration of the work; rather, all the actors share the roles58 – yet the archetypal personages of femme fatale, private eye etc. are readily discernible, showing how entrenched these archetypes are. Just as character mobility precludes any fully engaged or ‘pure’ emotional response, there is little entry to any character’s individuality or state of mind, no inflections from emotional nuance – apart from a kind of robotic, pervasive shock state; there is no consistent ‘grain of the voice’; the programme of affective vocal communication is ‘re-purposed’.

At one point in Phobia, a character recites his lines and then plays them back on a Dictaphone, augmenting the sense of displacement and capturing the sinisterness of noir’s ringing telephone, in response to which the performers duly ‘tense like electrocuted cats’.59 Self-referentially, the actors perform what a cinema audience might have been feeling, turning the connoted emotion of a sound into a denoted performance, so that Phobia’s audience hardly needs to do any feeling for itself. It has been suggested that Phobia ‘should be watched with eyes wide open, then shut, then open again; not to block out the scary bits but as a way of pinpointing the show’s almost indefinable brilliance’;60 this is also a way of illuminating how sounds in context – and here, every disturbed moment in Hitchcock’s films has been magnified – become signifying icons, and in this work the blurring between art and life is tangible. It is in this way that one never, during the show, becomes ‘scared’ – despite the myriad potential ‘scare’ inducements, both aurally (complete with a repeated distant scream and gasping heavy terrified breathing into telephones) and narratively.61

Phobia defies any single generic classification, least of all as opera, whether chamber or full scale. Much of the score comprises jazz charts with the odd occurrence of a bassline, rhythmic patterns, chord charts (although much of it is monodic), motivic snatches, call-and-response fragments, and directions for ‘comps’ and ‘feels’.62 The work’s composer Gerard Brophy underlines

58 ‘Voices are baton-passed’, as Horton puts it: ‘Writer/Director’s Note’.59 Anna Krien, ‘Chamber Made Opera’s “Phobia”’ (19 September 2003), at http://

www.theprogram.net.au/reviewsSub.asp?id=716, accessed 13 August 2005. 60 Victoria Laurie, ‘An Open-and-Shut-and-Open Case’, The Australian (28 April

2005), at http://www.chambermade.org.au/phobia_reviews_aust2005.htm, accessed 5 May 2005.

61 An alternative reading arises here if one accepts the essentially Freudian/psychoanalytic linking of laughter with nervous tension/threat/repression etc., which is a widely established and applied model within film criticism and cinesonics. Then the conflation of humour with fear (and sex) would become a salient feature of noir, which Phobia exploits, extends and perhaps brings to the foreground. So while one might not actually become ‘scared’ as such, one certainly becomes (or more accurately, could become) tense due to a certain degree of, albeit fragmented, character and/or narrative identification, leading to considerable tension, which counters the tendency to find the work merely humorous.

62 Such as ‘muzickdoos [sic] begins its extremely volatile and rubato naïve dance. This is accompanied by the naïve, child-like song from David’: Phobia, Scenes IX–X.


the importance to the work of sonic cultural associations when he insists that Phobia is ‘about memory’: while acknowledging that all music is dependent, to varying degrees, on memory, ‘particular attention is afforded the darker recesses of our powers of recollection’.63 That so much of the music can be successfully realized from minimal score direction attests to the extent and depth of musical ‘memories’. There are no arias, not even singable melodic lines. This music is de-programmed: it is treated as another quasi-visual effect. The emphasis is on rhythm at the expense of melody, apart from a few tantalizing solos for cello, trumpet and vibraphone – beguiling because they are allusions to or memories of full-blown musical episodes, rather than fully worked, coherent passages. A score direction for Scene II, for example, reads: ‘a spasmodic, deconstructed bop section over an insistent, driving drum solo which gradually builds but never quite comes together’. Similarly, the vocal parts often consist merely of monotone chanting of the dialogue. While the effect of the six members of the chorus speaking as one – ‘whispering confessions down the line’ – is, as a reviewer describes it, ‘chilling’,64 this prevents any soaring melodic experience and merges the aural and visual as the static melodic lines are presented as static visual tableaux by the characters. There is also much simultaneity of snatches of dialogue, radio voice-overs, intrusions of conflicting parts of the narrative into others. Because the lines are uttered either in chorus or monotone, with semantic meaning compromised, the dialogue becomes abstracted and de-subjectivized.

The sounds in Phobia rarely ‘express’ the objects that produce them. For example, the sound of a string bassline is produced by striking books rather than plucking a double bass, and the work includes the gratuitous production of ‘sound effects’ that perform no narrative or emotive function. The sounds become ‘autonomized’, not subordinated to – or even illustrative of – narrative, as in cinema. Rather than making music to accompany dialogue, music is constructed out of the dialogue. In the tradition of Laurel and Hardy’s slapstick routine, two characters use kitchen utensils as musical instruments and each other’s bodies as literal sounding boards, while engaging in the jerky, rapid and wooden dialogue of the old thrillers: the discourse is transmuted into a polyphonic percussion exchange, on two bodies.65

63 Gerard Brophy, ‘Composer’s Note’, Phobia Program Note (Melbourne: Chamber Made Opera, 2004). He continues, ‘The omnipresent ominous foreboding of the text is underpinned with the sounds of menace and darkness, and studded in this slowly writhing morass are the shards of more familiar but disembodied music’: ibid.

64 Ziffer, ‘“Phobia”’. 65 This also evokes the way Fred Astaire used to turn his environments into

instruments by tap-dancing and using his cane on them, as well as the many other comic and vaudevillian performers of early sound cinema who experimented with sound (the famous ladder step-dance sequence, for example; the Marx brothers; Eddie Kantor; etc.).


The ‘autonomizing’ of sound functions very differently from that of modernist noise art. This work is ‘about sound’ and sound’s complex interface with noise,66 and yet it also treats the object of representation as a box of aesthetic tricks, a set of sonic conventions, deployed to manipulate audience responses in cinematic noir that we can no longer (if we ever could) apprehend as an objective representation of ‘life’ and its natural/accidental sounds/noises, but only as a cluster of stylistic devices and effects. Phobia’s treatment of sound can be described using Michel Chion’s term ‘anempathic’, relating to juxtapositions in certain forms of cinema, where sounds confound the listener because of unexpected and non-realistic placements or balance in sound effects, music, speech etc. that can be deployed for overt or subconscious effect.67

Here, the noise/music binary is toppled. One’s critical apparatus is always engaged, apprehending how this sound is made, which gives rise to that action and in turn elicits that emotion, not to mention the attendant humour: it is difficult to combine pure terror with laughter.68 The response that emerges is a kind of wry knowingness. Two moments of ‘realistic’ narrative realization in terms of stage ‘action’ are the two most hyperbolic or most tragic narrative events, and these are treated in a fashion that indeed subverts the genre. The suicide of a woman jumping from a high building is repeated numerous times; she also falls (backwards, in acrobatic slow motion) down a flight of stairs.69 These events are abstracted, visual tableaux of beauty, and they are rendered as something akin to a musical ritornello: they are not experienced as horrifying moments of a character’s demise.70 This post-postmodern work renders noir cinema ‘in quotation marks’ as a dated style available for an art of ironic pastiche, through the modern work’s relationship of parody, affectionate homage and ‘re-purposing’, to the earlier entertainment genre.

66 Brophy, ‘Composer’s Note’. Horton declares that the distinctions between music, sound effect and theatricality are ‘seamlessly’ blurred: ‘Writer/Director’s Note’.

67 Michel Chion, Walter Murch and Claudia Gorbman, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), cited in Roger T. Dean and Hazel Smith, ‘Sonic Narratives: Intermedia Transformations in the Work of austraLYSIS’, Music and the Australasian Media: Australasian Music Research 8 (2004): 95.

68 The slapstick routine, for example, has already been described (above); and at another point, Teresa Blake leaps behind Dan Witton to take over the playing of a double bass.

69 Here the gender lines remain traditional and fixed.70 Catherine Clément’s charge again comes to mind here about traditional opera

audiences becoming transported by the beautiful arias to the extent that they can gloss over the heinous acts of murder occurring on stage: Opera, or, The Undoing of Women. Also see Chapter 4 of the present volume.


Immaterial Engagements with Modernism, Obsolete Technology and WARP(ed) Romanticism

The Immaterials (1985)

Many of the works discussed above have much fun with ironic engagements with modernism’s past. The Immaterials (1985), by Virginia Madsen, is a radiophonic work that also foregrounds an historical self-awareness, ‘charting the rise and fall of modernism’ that she witnessed when she attended a 1985 exhibition in Paris, which demonstrated ‘the increasing replacement of “materials” by “immaterials”’ in this rise and fall [of modernism]’.71 At the time, what Madsen describes as the ‘devastating news’ of Chernobyl ‘reached us literally on the air’.72

Working with Andrew McLennan and Martin Harrison and using an early digital Fairlight at the ABC’s overhauled 24-track drama studio, Madsen allowed the news of the ruined nuclear reactor to infiltrate the work and become part of the broader concept:

We were mixing time and space zones via the wireless as tuning device, immersing ourselves in what philosopher Gaston Bachelard called the ‘logosphere’ of radio, an ‘ionosphere of words’. We were continuing something started many years before by John Cage with his Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1952) for 12 radios and 24 players, and heard in Stockhausen’s radiophonic explorations and electronic manipulation of ‘found sound’ for Hymnen (1966–67) … [T]he signals of distress and dark revelation entered the final mix of this program as a disturbing yet beautiful interference cross-current and refrain.73

A subtle connection is made between the failure of the nuclear reactor and the (perceived) demise of modernism, using one of modernism’s very markers – technology – as Madsen and her collaborators channelled live emissions (of shortwave and ‘whatever we could pick up’) into the overall programme surrounding the exhibition.74 Post-postmodern flags abound in Madsen’s description of the work: the importance of ‘beauty’; the commentary on world events; and direct and self-conscious reference to earlier works in the tradition, not to mention unabashed acknowledgement of modernism’s ‘fall’ (as well as its ‘rise’).

71 Madsen, ‘Written in Air’, pp. 162–3. 72 Ibid., p. 163. 73 Ibid.74 Ibid.


No Answer (2006)

Another form of ‘looking back’ is expressed in No Answer (2006), an ‘anti-interactive’ sound installation by Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt. At the mouth of Lush Lane within the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, they installed eight custom-made ‘payphones’ and a six-channel pre-recorded soundscape, very high up on the side of a building.

Three speakers on either side sporadically emitted ringing sounds, with a dynamic similar to the sound of ocean waves: recurrent but at irregular intervals, limited in pitch and tone, but with sufficient space and unpredictability between each sound event to stand out against the hum of the city. The passer-by realizes that the sound is that of the increasingly obsolete public telephone. Brophy and Corompt revel in displacing the familiar on both visual and aural planes: the everyday sight of the laneway is unexpectedly enlivened by the soundscape installed at its entrance, the familiar sound of a ringing telephone bafflingly intones from it, prompting the listener to ponder, ‘Who would actually be calling?’ and ‘Why are the “public” telephones way up high on the wall, beyond reach?’75

In what could be called a hyper-post-postmodern move, this work uses a simulacrum of a technology to comment on the increasingly obsoleteness of that very technology: there is less and less landline usage, still less phonebox usage, fewer and fewer phoneboxes. The title of this work, No Answer, can be read in a number of ways. Not only does it refer directly to the work’s operations – a sonic–visual replica (the vacuum-formed, painted ‘Teledome’ Payphone hoods insinuate the idea of a public payphone, rather than actually replicating it) that gives ‘no answer’, frustrating the need to respond to a conditioned signal (the ring of a telephone) on the part of any caller who tries to use it in the usual manner; anyone who does manage to access the phones will find their response pointless, as no one is actually calling. Manipulating the audience to physically approach the work, it points out that perambulating people are the new ‘agents’ of the most commonplace communication medium: we do not have to go to the ‘shrine’, the phonebox itself, to make calls. This is also somewhat analogous to the mobility of information transmission, and thus the work centres itself squarely within its historical moment while simultaneously re-enacting a converse performance of the now-archaic mode of telephone operations: phoneboxes are usually called

75 See Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt, No Answer, Australian Sound Design Project (2006), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000609b.htm, accessed 25 October 2006. The installation was audible daily until midnight, 1 July to 1 December 2006. Each phone is illuminated by low-voltage lighting fitted under the orange domes, glowing gently in the night-time cityscape. Organic environmental factors such as wind, reflection, dispersion and competing surrounding noise also inflect the ambience of the sound, resulting in an ever-renewed listening experience. Also see Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt, No Answer, City of Melbourne (2006), at http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=75&pa=3133&pa2=2344&pg=3194, accessed 19 September 2007.


from, they do not usually call people to them. Calling their work ‘anti-interactive’ signals a post-sound art ribbing of the idea of ‘friendly’ audience interaction, undermining postmodernism’s much-vaunted ‘accessibility’.

Ivories in the Outback Again, and the Piano Deconstructed

Perhaps more than any other instrument in Western music, the piano carries a cache of historical evocations. Richard Leppert describes its role then as an ‘analogical referent to social harmony and domestic order’.76 It became ubiquitous and unrivalled in the bourgeois home in the nineteenth century – a symbol not only of the feminine and domesticity, but also of the security of the middle class. For Australia, the piano has particular historical resonance when one considers the mythology of Early Settlers having more pianos per capita than anywhere else in the world (this is a claim that has since proved erroneous, but the myth endures).77

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the piano still for the most part occupies the interior space, whether in the lounge room or the concert hall but definitely inside, away from the elements, placed ideally in fact away from outside walls, and is arguably still very much an item of comfort, a treasure, to be cosseted, tuned every six months, reconditioned when necessary (yet slowly turning into ‘furniture’ as it wears out). The next two projects frolic with this instrument and its historical associations, decontextualizing it in manifold ways.

Ruined Pianos (1987–)

Jon Rose’s Ivories in the Outback (in Chapter 5) subtly but firmly critiques Australia’s colonialist past through reflecting on the early transportation to that country of European culture – epitomized in the piano. Piano ivories are also featured in the outback in Ross Bolleter’s Ruined Pianos project, an ongoing project begun in 1987, based in Western Australia, and now part of the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies (formed in 1991).78

WARPS radically disregards traditional attitudes towards the concept of the piano in Western music, holding a very different approach to the piano as an

76 Richard Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano’, 19th-Century Music 16/2, Fall (1992): 115.

77 The myth goes that by 1888 a French instrument maker reckoned there were 700,000 pianos in the colonies, the most, per capita, in the world. This helped the new colony not only to establish its ties with the mother country and the European art tradition but also to assist in its developing pretensions towards a state of civilization, see Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967).

78 WARPS was formed by Stephen Scott (of Bowed Piano celebrity and professor of music at Colorado Collage) and Ross Bolleter. I have discussed Ross Bolleter’s Ruined Pianos in Kouvaras, ‘Hissing at the Margins’.


instrument and as a machine for making music, as its mission statement attests: it speaks of ‘giving old pianos a good home’, by which it means ‘adequate sunshine and rain’.79 The definition of a Ruined Piano is distinct from one that is neglected or ‘Devastated’, when it has been subjected to the weather, perhaps on a sheep station or tennis court, so that it will not sound as a typical, even-tempered ‘uptight’ [sic] piano.80 The frame and bodywork will remain integral, despite the soundboard being cracked and open to the sky; it can therefore be played in the usual way, unlike a Devastated Piano, which usually needs to be played in a crouched or lying position.81

‘Prepared’ by its environment, a Ruined Piano gradually retraces its ontology, its refined craftsmanship of levers, hammers and tuned strings all gradually disintegrating back to a ‘raw’ state. ‘To hear the Ruined Piano playing with the dogs barking, the birds singing, the trucks starting up is to sense its destiny in that moment’.82 Bolleter is not vandalistic or disrespectful towards the instrument, however: ‘it’s not necessary (or desirable) to burn, drown or bury a piano in order to ruin it. A Ruined Piano should ideally be an object trouvé – and be played as found’.83

Bolleter makes CDs of the unique music produced from variously weathered treasures so that access to their magical sounds is not dependent only upon a visit to far West Australia. Nallan Void features one such example recorded at the Nallan sheep station near Cue, 700km north of Perth, in 1987. During the 1930s and 1940s the instrument resided at the bar at the Big Bell Hotel; when it was moved to the station, it was left outdoors for a year, then stored in a tractor shed.84 Bolleter poetically relates the moment of the groundbreaking recording process:

I respectfully approached the Ruined Piano in the tractor shed at Nallan Sheep Station and took hold of the fall [sic] to lift it. It was so rotten that it came away in my hands. I shoved batteries into my Marantz recorder and slung microphones over the dusty rafters. As I played, ants appeared journeying in concentric circles on the front panel of the Jefferson (Chicago ’26). Golden-haired Emmy, the eight-year-old daughter of the sheep station owners, April and Dave Petersen, came in out of the majestic heat and stood on the cool floor of the tractor shed to watch me. I knelt to pull back the bass strings and then release them – firing

79 Ross Bolleter, WARPS: World Association for Ruined Piano Studies, at http://www.warpsmusic.com/, accessed 7 April 2005. ‘The organisation has world-wide membership, has never held an AGM, and tends to move into action only from whim or from a rush of blood’: ibid. Bolleter acquires the instruments either by chancing upon them in paddocks on sheep stations, for instance, or on pub verandahs, tractor sheds, by donation through word of mouth, etc.

80 Ibid.81 Ibid.82 Ross Bolleter quoted in Scott, Liner notes, Austral Voices. 83 Ross Bolleter, SECRET SANDHILLS AND SATELLITES, sleeve note, EMANEM

4128 (2006), at http://www.emanemdisc.com/E4128.htm, accessed 31 October 2009.84 Ross Bolleter in Scott, Liner notes, Austral Voices.


off huge arrows. The piano roared and groaned. After some minutes April came over and muffled Emmy’s ringleted head in her huge flowered dress, as though shielding her from an atrocity. I knew that April wanted to speak, was about to speak. I pointed frantically up to the Nanyo and the Sanyo microphones with my right hand, while trying to finish the performance with my left. Finally, she broke in – ‘Have you finished?’ And I had.85

Bolleter here ironically enacts R. Murray Schafer’s recommendations: ‘If synthetic sounds are introduced [into a garden or park] … care must be taken to ensure that they are sympathetic vibrations to the garden’s original notes’.86 The freighted associations of the instrument’s prime place in Romanticism are also not ignored by Bolleter: ‘A piano judiciously left in the open and exposed to all weathers will ruin. All that fine nineteenth-century European craftmanship, all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, degrading to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire’.87 Bolleter also describes it as ‘that arch symbol of European musical culture (and cultural imperialism)’.88 Bolleter rehabilitates the piano’s ‘raw’ state, almost as though he is ‘claiming’ it for pre-Settled Australia: ‘The piano returns to aboriginality, goes back to the earth where the chirrup of its loose wires blown about by the desert Easterly is almost indistinguishable from the cicadas’ long electric blurt’.89

Furthermore, of course, the piano was the instrument on – or rather, at – which John Cage’s ground-breaking 4’33” was ‘performed’, and while the substance – or anti-substance, in a traditional sense – of the work challenged its classical music heritage and the tolerance and/or expectations of its audience in as extreme a manner as was imaginable in 1952, the performance at least took place indoors, in a performance space.90 This traditionally indoors instrument is paced outside architectural space or designated concert space, where it wilfully dissolves the separation between natural environment and humans – Bolleter sets up the ‘music’, but the environment does too, as the elements act on the instrument, changing the physical properties of the materials from which it is constituted, as animals and insects craft its acoustics, and the wind and other outdoors sonic events add their contributions to the recordings. The instrument, way out in the paddocks, is placed well beyond the outside wall. This counters all conventional concepts of Western-music piano writing, recording, genius, authorship, control, and the customary care and maintenance of an expensive instrument. The concept of ‘piano virtuoso’

85 Ross Bolleter, ‘1. Atrocity’, WARPS STORIES, at http://www.warpsmusic.com/stories.htm, accessed 7 April 2005.

86 Schafer, ‘The Music of the Environment’, p. 36. Also see Chapter 2 of present volume.

87 Bolleter, SECRET SANDHILLS.88 Ibid.89 Ibid.90 See Introduction, note 4 of present volume.


is also undone when nature, the elements, creates the ‘music’, as much as Bolleter harnesses it and improvises with it in recordings.

The post-experimentalist aspects of the work are just as significant to the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies. In contradistinction to the modernist quest for and celebration of the new, WARPS is heavily laden with qualities associated with things past or passing: with entropy, decomposition and change. Presaging the inevitable, the project is about loss and what can be gained from loss, from letting go of institutional thinking. It does not actively bring about destruction of the instrument as does, for example, American Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning project.91 The Ruined Piano projects can be seen as a metaphor for the (much-debated) ‘decay’ of Western classical music,92 which playfully insinuates the rigidity of Western classical music systems and the cultural values encoded into the physical casing of the instrument, plus the entrenched hold of the very system of concert intonation as developed in Western music. Bolleter’s work conversely participates in that very aesthetic impulse – that is, the fundamental human impulse to make music and find beauty and pleasure in creativity –, as Bolleter plays the broken-down things, revelling in their ‘beauty’, positioning himself as an altermodernist figure of the creator genius.

I Am Piano (2005–2009)

Philip Brophy’s CD I Am Piano (2005–2009) also involves the piano and our (pre)conceptions of its iconic status in his performed reconstructions of piano samples, taken from classic modern jazz recordings and ‘reinterpreted as raw material’, performed live and un-sequenced on a midi-keyboard.93 Brophy counters any notion of celebrating what he calls the ‘humanist figure of jazz piano improvisation, let alone the heroic cliché of the Romantic concert maestro’; rather, ‘I Am Piano thrusts an ironic barb into the piano’s mythological status and aims

91 Michael Lee, ‘Annea Lockwood’s Burning Piano, Scruffed Stones, and Noble Snare: Feminist Politics and Sound Sources in Music’, Women and Music 1 (1999): 59–69. Lockwood’s project has been staged in Australia at Perth Tura Festival (2005) and at the Aurora/World New Music Days Festival in 2009.

92 See, for example, Joshua Fineberg, Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer’s Ears (New York: Routledge, 2006); Andrew Ford, In Defence of Classical Music (Sydney: ABC Books, 2005); Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

93 Philip Brophy, I Am Piano (2009), at http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/piano/background.htm, accessed 24 May 2009. This suite of pieces conceptually and performatively extends ideas on the piano and sampling covered in Philip Brophy, ‘Sonic Occupancy’, Ojeblikket 10/3 (2000), at http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/rstff/SonicOccupancy_M.html (accessed 11 October 2012), and Philip Brophy, ‘Sounding & Sampling’, New Music Articles 6 (1988): 15–18 .


to perceive it purely as a sound machine whose melodiousness is but a mirage of musical language’.94

Determinedly non-piano noisescapes feature within cut-ups in this work, a further instance of the instrument’s interrogation. The fragments are presented in stabbing fashion, stymieing any potential ‘groove’, cancelling the opportunity for the flow of emotive narrative. Through the very act of Brophy’s assemblages, his live performance of the reconstructions and the titles of the tracks, all centred on jazz pianist virtuosi – ‘I am Bill Evans, ‘I am Thelonius Monk’, ‘I am Red Garland’ and ‘I am Dave Brubeck’ –, the work paradoxically reinstates the very figures (Romantic classical-music hero/ jazz virtuoso) that its creator seeks to dismantle.

Altermodern Nostalgic Sorties into ‘the Archaeology of Knowledge’95

Much of the operations of the foregoing examples in this chapter are wilfully anachronistic. Anachronism is an artistic strategy that some commentators find ‘critically renders specific historical norms obsolete’.96 But I would argue that, in the cases presented here, the historical norms remain fully defined: their integrity is not compromised. BOK Darklord’s dismembering of an iconic Led Zeppelin album will probably not impact greatly upon its world status, even while it serves to diminish the songs’ ‘profundity’, with regard to lyrics and musical integrity, when given the mash-up treatment. Similarly, New Waver’s ‘pollution’ of techno pasted into experimentalism’s pièce de résistance, 4’33”, does not topple its cutting-edge position within music history, nor does it oust techno from its position within a hard-edged faction of mainstream popular music. In a modernist world, no self-respecting traditional experimentalist would sully or compromise their work with the codes and signals of commercialized electronic dance music, while mainstream pop music is not renowned for venturing into the cutting-edge cacophonous and/or silent terrain marked out by experimentalist ventures. The juxtaposition of all these incompatibles brings them into sharp relief. Kramer’s assertion about the avant-garde’s new historicalness97 is vividly demonstrated through all the above altermodern examples.

Ross Bolleter’s Ruined Pianos and Philip Brophy’s I Am Piano ironically rehabilitate the modernist figure of the heroic creative genius – as much as they

94 Quoted in Brophy, I Am Piano.95 Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended, cited in Piero Weiss and Richard

Taruskin (eds), Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, 2nd edn (Australia; Belmont, CA: Thomson/Schirmer, 2008), p. 515.

96 Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 276, cited in Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 178.

97 See note 7, above.


undercut it by the ‘warped’ (mis)use of the instrument from traditional standpoints. They respectively sacrifice recognizably piano-like sounds and/or accustomed processes of playing and creating. And yet they constitute themselves very much in the form of the inspired, all-controlling creator, a Romantic/modernist trope that postmodernism sought (or still seeks) to dismember. In postmodernism’s ‘prime’, from the late-1970s through to the early-1990s, this kind of double-edged presentation – of complicit critique – was hailed as a discernibly ‘pomo’ trait (especially by Charles Jenks and Linda Hutcheon).98 But I would argue that the strong focus upon the historical – with the essential dimension that advances a hankering for traits that postmodernism typically resists, if not a pang for an era that pre-dates postmodernism – that overlays these works, calls for a term that nuances ‘mere’ postmodernism: the altermodern.

The titles of the works discussed earlier in this chapter that pay homage to Cage and Grainger, along with their creators’ comments, reveal some of the extra-compositional agendas on the part of their authors – their sense of reverence, affection and eagerness to ‘spread the word’ and put history right regarding Grainger’s significance and to celebrate Cage’s achievements. Clearly palpable is the neo-modernist impulse in, for instance, Bandt’s formalist ethos. But this is inflected by standing in stark relief from recent postmodern manoeuvres – yet at the same time, simply because of the passage of decades between her works in Grainger’s name and his own time, there is a sense of post-postmodernist nostalgia (however unwitting) that unavoidably accompanies such enterprises. And in this instance it is rendered even more poignant because of Grainger’s frustrations in not seeing his ideas fully made manifest, and his reputation both during his lifetime and for a considerable period afterwards, based on works he did not consider were his ‘only important contribution to music’.99

These various sonic altermodern journeys into the past accord with what Michel Foucault identified as ‘epistemes: the assumption, usually unspoken (but, when things become unsettled, more likely to be articulated) that govern notions of what is “self-evidently” true. Foucault called the bringing of such things to light “the archaeology of knowledge”’.100 The multiply coded, complicitly critical negotiations with the assortment of aesthetic and temporal standpoints depicted here, based on the incongruity of such mixes as techno with Cage; Ruined Pianos enshrined in the semi-wilderness; callboxes with phones that ring but will provide no answer; and the variegated, highly charged noises in Phobia, make a distinct and beguiling contribution to this archaeology. They complement the examples in the following chapter, which also ‘situate’ the postmodern itself, moving beyond ‘archaeology’ – but with a twist: the revivification of (or continuation of) modernist aesthetics.

98 See Chapter 2.99 That is, his notions of Free Music – in other words, his experimentalist ideas, see

Introduction, notes 7 and 8, in present volume. 100 See note 7, above.

Chapter 8

Neo-Modernist Arts of Noise in a Post-Postmodern Era: The Dawning of the

Altermodern (2)

Is ‘the Medium [still] the Message’?

I have suggested in Chapters 1–3 that palpable distinctions can be drawn between Grainger’s and the Futurists’ early modernism, Cage’s mid-twentieth-century modernist experimentalism and postmodernism (and beyond). Hal Foster has proposed that ‘modernism and postmodernism are engaged in a kind of temporal dance, where one or the other comes to the fore at different moments’.1 While this is a compelling account of an overall historical schema, I believe that subtle interplay between the ‘dance partners’ can also be perceived. I have offered examples of early postmodernism’s playful critiques of modernism in Chapter 3, while Chapter 7 delved into altermodern ‘nostalgia’ that encompasses not only modernist experimentalism but also other historical moments in music.

I want now to include another dimension to my discussion, to further nuance the post-postmodern, or altermodern. Norrie Newmark states that ‘(sound art) noise has somewhat spent its modernist force’.2 I would suggest, however, that for many artists, the call of the modernist project was never silenced. While I have been highlighting the myriad postmodernist sensibilities in contemporary sound art, a significant element in sound art creation is the return to – or, for some, the unimpeded continuation of – the modernist ethos. This is embodied in particular through the expression of ‘noise’, celebrating formalist properties of the medium: volume, timbre, intensity of sound and glitch, all enjoyed by such practitioners as Germans Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto) and Bernhard Gunter, Swedish Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Spanish Francisco Lopez, Japanese Merzbow, Sachiko M. and Otomo Yoshihide, and Americans Richard Chartier, Kim Cascone and Steve Roden.

Christoph Cox succinctly notes, ‘Where postmodernism is about mixture and overload, neo-modernism is about purity and reduction. Where postmodernism is

1 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 1st edn (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), cited in Cox, ‘Return to Form’.

2 Norie Neumark, ‘Introduction: The Paradox of Voice’, Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, eds Neumark, Gibson and Van Leeuwen, p. xv.


about content and the concrete (the vertiginous string of recognizable samples), neo-modernism is about form and abstraction’.3 In this respect, a revival of ‘acousmatic listening’ is at the core of a neo-modernist approach to current sound art,4 and offers an implicit critique of postmodernism in its stratagems such as post-formalism, emotionally charged nostalgia and general forays into heightened emotion, etc. I will argue that much neo-modernist sound art is nevertheless inflected with postmodern elements and can be perceived to proffer a strong indication of a post-postmodernist sensibility – that is, the altermodern. This chapter considers some of these endeavours on the part of Australian sound artists.5

Songs of the Gotholin (2008), White Noise (2005), Stasis Duo’s 2006 SET Performance and re-sound (1996–)

Cox claims that neo-modernism in sound art is actually more defined than in other arts6 – just as Greenberg asserted was the case for mid-twentieth-century high modernist music, which he extolled over other contemporary artforms.7 James Hullick’s Songs of the Gotholin (2008), for example, a ‘self-playing’ instrument comprising four violins, operated by remote control, was part of a concert ‘designed to focus on a stream of sonic arts practice that explores sonic perception as the subject matter of the work rather than some kind of narrative and socio-political comment’.8

3 Cox, ‘Return to Form’. Salomé Voegelin has a different conception of noise’s place within modernism, arguing that very loud noise-based works ‘[challenge] modernism, its myths and ideals, exploding its aesthetic rationality and sense of progress, with playful dilettantism, personal obsessions, ornaments and sentimentality’: Listening to Noise and Silence, p. 51.

4 See Chapter 1 of present volume.5 For a survey of the geographical influence on West Australia’s local composers’

work in such fields as sound art (Alan Lamb and Hannah Clemen), Live Electronics (Cathie Travers and the electronic music quartet Magnetic Pig), Interactive Electronics (Jonathan Mustard and Lindsay Vickery) and Noise/Lo-Fi Electronics (Cat Hope and Lux Mammoth), see Lindsay Vickery, ‘The Western Edge: Some Recent Electronic Music from Western Australia’, Organised Sound 6 (2001): 69–74. Also see Priest (ed.), Experimental Music.

6 Cox, ‘Return to Form’.7 See Chapter 1 of present volume, note 15. Seth Kim-Cohen makes the point that

music, in fact, ‘has always functioned according to Greenbergian precepts. As a practice, music is positively obsessed with its media specificity. Only music includes as part of its discursive vocabulary, a term for the foreign matter threatening always to infect it: “the extramusical”’: In the Blink of an Ear, p. 41.

8 Benjamin Millar, ‘Sono Perception. CarriageWorks, Sydney // NSW // 20.06.2008’, Resonate Magazine (10 July 2008), at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/sono-perception, accessed 15 July 2009. The concert was Sono Perception: A Sonic Art Concert at CarriageWorks, Sydney (curated by Hullick).

Neo-Modernist Arts of Noise in a Post-Postmodern Era 201

Similarly, White Noise, a 2005 exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, explored ‘abstraction in a digital age’, focusing on the ways contemporary artists are using the language of twentieth-century abstraction within the context of the digital moving image.9 And the work of Stasis Duo, Matthew Earle and Adam Sussmann, spans ‘extreme territories from speaker-frying, subsonic devastation and harsh noise to imperceptibly still, almost silent work’.10 Their most frequently deployed instrument is the ‘emptied’ sampler: samplers that have no sounds in them, the sounds produced created by outputs on the sampler patched to the inputs creating a feedback loop, and demanding very close listening in order to detect the minute and intricate sounds fashioned by the pair. For their 2006 SET performance, they partnered with sound poet Amanda Stewart, renowned for her often riotous, virtuosic displays of vocal acrobatics and dense text-based pieces, and here exploring breath, air, whispers and vocal gestures.11

The sound art outfit re-sound [sic] (formed in Melbourne in 1996, with Thomas Reiner as founder and artistic director) holds a staunchly neo-modernist approach, seeking to develop hybrid forms that evolve from the admixture of performance gestures, sounds from acoustic instruments, digital signal processing and sound synthesis. They produce a soundspace that lies on the border of hip hop and free jazz through improvised performances for DJ and amplified chamber ensemble. Also integral are:

the dialectics of the human body and the musical formalism associated with the performance of modernist works; the relationship between composer and performer (and the subversion of that relationship) in the development of new work; the performance of electro-acoustic works that integrate dance music idioms; new notation-based work by Melbourne composers; the inclusion of dance, theatre, and interactive live computer graphics triggered by the performers.12

Thus neo-modernism reclaims elements of popular culture – a striking move announcing the altermodern.

9 Luke Jaaniste, ‘White Noise (Review)’, Artlink 25/4 (2005), at http://www.artlink.com.au/articles.cfm?id=2249, accessed 3 March 2007.

10 SET: Stasis Duo and Amanda Stewart (2006), at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/set/8.htm, accessed 15 September 2008.

11 Ibid.12 re-sound (2005), at http://www.re-sound.com/index.htm, accessed 16 October

2005.


GeneMusik (2003–)

At The University of Western Australia’s School of Anatomy and Human Biology is GeneMusik (2003–), an ongoing experimental project by Nigel Helyer, hosted by the SymbioticA Laboratory of the university, which attempts literally to breed hybrid musical works, and also asserts a neo-modernist sensibility. Helyer notes modernist composers’ use of computers to create new musical forms, ‘usually by employing some form of algorithm, for example, granular synthesis’, remarking that ‘in many respects such attempts mimic biological processes’.13

In GeneMusik, Helyer takes a ‘strictly biological approach by converting standard musical notation into DNA codes’, the sequences of which are ‘synthesized into DNA which is then introduced into the genetic composition of bacteria, who are happy to reproduce the coded tunes’.14 Helyer hopes that ‘when the bacteria are induced to share their different sequences the resulting DNA material will, upon re-sequencing, reveal new musical “mixes”’.15

Sounding the Winds (2005)

A very recent Aeolian harp work16 is Jon Drummond’s Sounding the Winds (2005). It is a sound installation that uses the motion of a kite in the wind as a gestural controller, generating a realtime electro-acoustic environment that responds to the kite’s movements. The kite has sensors attached to it that compute shifts in its orientation, speed and tension, then transmit the data to a ground-based computer via Bluetooth. Drummond’s core sound synthesis model here is founded on the Aeolian harp principle of a string held in tension, the control data sent from the kite then deployed to apply varying forces to the virtual string, which cause it to resonate and sound. For the composer, using a virtual string to generate the sound ‘also serves as an analogy to the very real string tethering the kite to the ground, itself under considerable tension and occasionally resonating audibly’.17

The dichotomy of virtual/real string treads the line between nature/culture in what might be suggested as a postmodern gambit. The instrument, by its very nature, produces sounds that proffer a discernible ‘pitch-centre’ (generally

13 Nigel Helyer, GeneMusik, Australian Sound Design Project (2 December 2003), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000558b.htm, accessed 22 March 2009.

14 Ibid.15 Ibid.16 See Chapters 3 and 5 of present volume for earlier examples.17 Jon Drummond, Sounding the Winds (2008), at http://www.jondrummond.com.au/

soundingthewinds.htm, accessed 14 October 2008. It was performed at King Edward Park Newcastle NSW as part of Electrofringe 2005. The website also includes videos of the kites in performance (with technical specifications of the instrument). The kite is a 9ft (2.7432m) Delta Conyne-style model.


speaking, this was anathema to mid-twentieth-century high modernism). But Drummond makes no claims to any ‘spirituality’, unlike the orientation of other composers discussed thus far (in Chapters 3 and 5) who also work with Aeolian harps. Further, his formalist interest here is in sound for its own sake, signalling that his enterprise has gone beyond postmodernism.

Machine For Making Sense (1989–2005)

Machine For Making Sense (MFMS) (1989–2005) first worked together after Ars Electronica in Austria, and presented their tours, performances, site-specific events, recordings and intermedia collaborations in Australia, the US and Europe from 1991. The group comprises tape and digital manipulator Rik Rue, who uses sampling and continues the late-modernist/early-postmodern practice of using the recording medium itself as an ‘instrument’,18 poet and vocalist Amanda Stewart, flautist and saxophonist Jim Denley, compositional linguist Chris Mann (New York-based since 1996) and British composer Stevie Wishart.

MFMS reassess distinctions between text and music, music and sound art, improvisation and composition, delivering highly dense text distinguished by parenthetical aggregation at express speed, and made all the more challenging to discern by the surrounding noises from instruments and electronics, as exemplified in nascent form in Mann’s early collaboration piece Subjective Beats Metaphor with Warren Burt (in Chapter 3). In the later works there are greater layers of complexity and musico-noise content. That the text is not easily perceivable draws one’s attention to the vagaries and many dimensions of listening, of ‘making sense’, particularly in a noise-music-spoken-word setting:

Talk is the noise of talk, its musicality, its chance capture, words gulped and kicked out, guttural, barked and screamed. Therefore the Machine’s talk becomes all the more important for being and around and about talk that you ignore in the usual give and take of conversation. You hear snatches of talk, you hear the voice as a musical instrument.19

MFMS thus de-subjectivize what would normally be a highly subjective mode of utterance – speech. They create a critical space for reflection, while simultaneously pushing the aesthetics of vocality to the noise–sense barrier.

Their works from the 1990s onwards were created at specific sites and on particular occasions, in order to ‘escape from the deadening environment of the concert hall’20 and thereby maintain experimentalism’s abrasive stance regarding

18 Rik Rue, Rik Rue: Voice Capades, Alias Frequencies (2004), at http://aliasfrequencies.org/af003/#more-83, accessed 14 August 2005.

19 Machine For Making Sense, at http://www.discogs.com/artist/Machine+For+Making+Sense, accessed 17 October 2010.

20 Ibid.


traditional high-art music and its setting. To this end, Fester (1995), for example (augmented by Tony Buck on drums and electronics, vocalists Carolyn Connors and Greg Kingston), was a multi-room performance staged at the ABC’s Ultimo building in Sydney, using three levels of the atrium stairwell.21

The Oscillators (1995)

Joyce Hinterding’s The Oscillators (1995), consisting of three sound-producing drawings with a solar panel, is yet another altermodern example of the hyper-interrogation of ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’. The work is essentially drawings – works on paper that deploy art conventions; but it functions simultaneously as electronics. The drawing of the circuit diagram ‘represents’ the score, but here the score supplies both instruction and actualization. Similarly, the pencil lines are both graphically representative and form a layer of thin conductive stone.

Incorporeal electricity acquires a ‘voice’ through Hinterding’s score, which is electronically treated through feedback and recombination. The composer allows this synthesized voice to respond to the quirks and drift of the system, reflecting its instabilities. The outcome is a microscopically changing ‘refrain’, which traces the speed of the energy, with the resistance in the pencil lines determining the speed at which the energy moves through the system. If this occurs too rapidly, the pitch can escape hearing range; with too much resistance, the energy moves slowly enough that the sound disappears once again.

The all-important and all-controlling length, thickness and stability of the graphite lines are at the whim of the operator:

The sound produced by the three drawings is reminiscent of crickets or cicadas, but if this circuit were built by conventional means, it would have a pure sine-wave sound that would be easily identifiable as synthesized. Ironically, the work sounds like nature – or, to put it differently, one is drawn to contemplate the system as a natural system. This may come in part from the absence of black boxes, but also comes from the fact that nearly all the materials employed are from the everyday world: paper, pencil, something that looks like aluminum foil, some cables and a solar panel. The work’s tendency to elicit the powerful sensation of observing nature is interesting in light of the fact that many people do not tend to think of electrical synthesis as a natural process. A kind of challenge takes place: the challenge to see what we might call the synthetic world as part of what we might call the natural world.22

21 Denley, ‘Networks, Playfulness and Collectivity’, p. 144. Also see, for example, Amanda Stewart, ‘Postiche: Amanda Stewart’, Australia Ad Lib (2003), at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s862622.htm, accessed 23 November 2006.

22 See Joyce Hinterding, ‘The Oscillators’, Leonardo Music Journal 6 (1995), at http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0961-1215%281996%296%3C111%3ACN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P, accessed 8 February 2005.


While ‘nature’ is evoked in the simulation of insects, it is nevertheless abstracted, and the focus is ideally inwards, pondering systems and processes, rather than drawing direct conclusions from such contemplation. This is in contradistinction to the more postmodernist ethos demonstrated in the works encountered here in previous chapters.

Altermodern Dialogues with Neo-Modernist Sensibility

Biocentennerary Afterimage (2005)

James Gordon Anderson’s mesmeric Biocentennerary Afterimage (2005) is a vivid example of a grappling with much that is redolent of neo-modernist concerns. It furthers La Monte Young’s radical minimalism of the early-1960s and engages with Marshall McLuhan’s work23 – and yet is couched in a distinctively postmodern patina.

A conceptual framework that borders both the postmodern and the neo-modern is immediately discernible, even from the title, which, for the composer, implies a number of associations, in the service of an overarching perspective magnifying human historical time into evolutionary time. Anderson thus seeks to impart an acknowledgement of the universal generative structures that natural, biological, technological, human and cultural forms share, along with recognition of the interrelations of structures within different fields.

The work is concerned with tracing the dynamics of genesis, or ‘universal building blocks’, and examining how these unfold in their processes of proliferation, as they encode, instruct, develop, morph and mutate in various contexts and structures. The composer also emphasizes the ‘non-linear nature of reality, time and consciousness (and their idiosyncratic relationship to each other)’; and ‘perhaps – although this is a longshot – the idea of our real self being an independent consciousness linked into a larger universal fabric’.24

Describing the work as ‘an evolutionary (and aesthetic) theme park of the digital world’,25 Anderson’s Biocentennerary Afterimage also engages with a host of texts that include the Upanishads, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), Terence McKenna’s New Maps of Hyperspace (1984) and his Geometric Model of Consciousness. The admixture of these texts and Anderson’s music is to obscure the borders between science, art, abstract musical representations, the media and technology and to delve into diverse cultural and perceptual forms of experience

23 See Introduction, note 41, and Chapter 1, note 51, of present volume. 24 Linda Kouvaras, e-mail correspondence with James Gordon Anderson, 26 October

2009. 25 Ibid.


through ‘newly-posited futures across all areas of next-stage human evolution – scientific, aesthetic, biological, technological, perceptual and conceptual’:26

Moving from a human, to an evolutionary and then cosmic, timescale, the ‘afterimage’ is a continuous projection and evolution of real and imagined forms into the future: the history of all forms survives in evolving and re-imagined structures. The ‘afterimage’ of history is the mirror, reflection, refraction and decay of a ‘primal’ image and its proliferating structures; the ‘ghost’ of all things; the memory of all moments in time, their mirror and decay… (‘Time is the moving image of eternity’ – Plato).27

Anderson pays heed to the idea of all-important technology and ‘the non-linear nature of reality, time and consciousness’, while his totalizing narrative of the ‘larger universal fabric’ and musings on ‘next-stage human evolution’ evoke modernist preoccupations.

A distinctly attractive, neo-tonal harmonic palette grounds an overlay of sounds bordering ambient music, modernist noise and postmodern collage. His approach to the perception and distortion of time results in a postmodern banishing of ‘style’ in favour of a cross-range of experience. Biocentennerary Afterimage provides a marked evolution from Warren Burt’s 1980s ‘testiness’ at theory and also David Chesworth’s early embrace of it, detailed in Chapter 3.

‘Etchings’, from Fear of Stranglers (2010)

Treading a line between postmodernist luring of the audience and modernist noise making, Gail Priest is interested ‘in releasing the hidden melodies and broken beats found in raw sonic material. Restlessly pacing between music and sound art, her atmospheric explorations incorporate dirty machinic [sic] rhythms and bass-heavy pulsations contrasted with glassy cascades and occasional sweet slippery vocals’.28

The glissando female voices on her ‘Etchings’ (2010, from the EP Fear of Stranglers) recall those that infinitely scale the heights in Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s The Gordon Assumption.29 Where the latter is site specific and ‘about’ those voices and their cultural connotations, Priest’s piece absorbs the sound into a larger, elusive palette that traverses grungy noise and sound constructions teetering

26 James Gordon Anderson, Biocentennerary Afterimage (2005), at http://www.jamesgordonanderson.com/media.htm, accessed 6 October 2009.

27 Ibid. 28 Gail Priest, Gail Priest, at http://www.snagglepussy.net/sounds.htm, accessed 2

December 2008.29 See Chapter 4 of present volume.


on the brink of mellifluousness in this neo-modernist, textless (the voices do not sing words) essay on sound qua sound.30

Neo-Modernist ‘Bad Boys’ (Including Honorary Members)

Over the course of the twentieth century, there have been strong connections forged between modernism, masculinism and the figure of the maverick in music.31 As Tara Rodgers notes, ‘The terms technology and music are often marked as male domains, and the trenchancy of associated gendered stereotypes seems to gain force when these fields converge in electronic music’.32 With the rise of feminism, however, women innovators in sound art (such as Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk) have been recognized – even if, at the same time, they are often presented as being welcome or accepted in the ‘club’ as ‘honorary boys’.

An album from 2000 compiled by Susan Lawley was entitled Extreme Music From Women, to demonstrate that women also want to participate in auricular intensity. When one of the contributors, Australian noise artist Cat Hope, performed at the NOW now Festival in Sydney, 2003, for example, she stated that it was ‘very much an East Coast boys’ club’.33 Further, as I have argued in Chapter 4 in particular, many sonic artists have used the questioning of gendered associations as the basis for their work.

The following four artists explore sound through the exhibition of a wilfully ‘bad-boy’, ‘noisist’ tone. Yet they also self-consciously blunt many of the masculinist renegade elements of their enterprise.

30 See Gail Priest, Gail Priest: Sound, Words (2011), at http://www.snagglepussy.net/recordings.htm, accessed 28 September 2011. Also see Gail Priest, Gail Priest (2009), at http://www.myspace.com/gailpriest, accessed 6 October 2009.

31 See, for example, Richard Taruskin, ‘Corralling a Herd of Musical Mavericks’, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2008): 153–60. Also see Andra McCartney, ‘Gender, Genre and Electroacoustic Soundmaking Practices’, Intersections 26/2 (2006): 20–48; Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Also see Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Sally Macarthur, Towards a Twenty-first-century Feminist Politics of Music (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). For how such categories are often unwittingly constructed in the musical press, in the case of a contemporary Australian primarily score-based composer, see David Bennett and Linda Kouvaras, ‘Modernist versus Postmodernist Aesthetics: Contemporary Music Criticism and the Case of Matthew Hindson’, Musicology Australia 27 (2004–2005): 54–72.

32 Rodgers, Pink Noises, p. 2. 33 Fetish: Interview with Cat Hope (2003), ABC Radio, at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/

adlib/stories/s862612.htm, accessed 14 August 2007.


Lucas Abela (2009)

Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony, discussed in Chapter 5, is a work that playfully encourages the embracing of a type of environmental noise that is usually considered aggravating. Lucas Abela’s project is similar – but he produces the grating sounds from himself.

Describing himself as a noise musician, he is distinguished for such techniques as ‘playing’ panes of glass connected to a contact microphone and a series of noise-effects pedals. Squeezing K-Y Jelly into his mouth, he smears it onto the pane of glass and pushes his lips against the glass, ‘as though he’s blowing a raspberry’; this produces ‘a distorted squeal’, the pitch and timbre of which vary as Abela moves his head, and then the pressure shatters the pane – but ‘Abela plays on undeterred, spitting out mouthfuls of glass and ignoring the blood that is now dripping down his face’.34 He will also scrape amplified fingernails on spinning concrete.35 Abela describes himself as ‘not a performance artist but a musician developing a new form of instrument’ where ‘sound is the primary concern’.36 But he has observed that over the past decade experimental electronic music ‘has become one of the most boring things ever to watch live. People have done some amazing things with computers, but I think audiences are very fatigued with that now and want to see music performed again’.37

Abela thus presents a formalist preoccupation with sound as sound, the textures of noise produced for their own sake. Also integral is the attendant enfant terrible shock value. The postmodernist mitigating factor, however, is acknowledged: ‘The comical effect of my face pressed up against the glass is a big element of the show’.38

34 Luke Benedictus, ‘Through the Pane Barrier’, Age (26 June 2005), at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/06/23/1119321846447.htm, accessed 18 May 2006.

35 Gail Priest and Dan Edwards, ‘that was shit!’, Realtime Arts 92 (2009), at http://www.realtimearts.net/article/92/9510, accessed 26 August 2009. On Abela’s Rice Corpse, an improvising band with Abela on glass, Yang Yang on drums and Li Zenghui on piano, see, for example, Priest and Edwards, ‘that was shit!’ (‘Rice corpse’ is the literal translation of the Chinese character for ‘shit’.) For a discussion of Abel wiring up a VW van, see Connor, ‘The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music (Voice and Human Experience)’. On Abel’s ‘Peeled Hearts Violin’ performance as part of Jon Rose’s ‘STRING ’EM UP, Rotterdam Festival’, see Jon Rose, STRING ’EM UP, Rotterdam (1999), at http://www.avantart.com/aktuell/termine/stringthemup.htm, accessed 14 August 2009. Also see Rice Corpse, Mrs Rice (2009), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7peCwr7lP2w, accessed 6 October 2009. For a cogent overview of much noise practice in current Australian sound art, see Hope, ‘Cultural Terrorism and Anti-Music’.

36 Quoted in Benedictus, ‘Through the Pane Barrier’.37 Quoted ibid.38 Quoted ibid.


Company Fuck (CxFx) and MaxxxxiBacon (2009)

Company Fuck (CxFx)39 describes himself as ‘a one-man noisecore karaoke explosion’ who (like BOK Darklord, in Chapter 7) ‘plunders pirated pop music’, which he combines with ‘extreme vocal improvisation, digital noise, hacked electronics, and deliberate musical homage/parody’ to avoid any adherence to a particular musical milieu.40 A palpable relish is discernible in his declaration that this realm is ‘a bloody entangled mess of audio intercourse and copyright infringement’, and that ‘nobody is safe from the CxFx treatment’.41 The machismo tone continues when CxFx describes his live shows as ‘brutal and unpredictable’, presenting ‘a totally improvised wireless noise monster’ emitting an array of ‘musical styles with every electrified scream, grunt, cough, or spit’ at ‘fast-forward’ speed.42

While CxFx uses a laptop on stage, he is careful also to distance himself from typical computer musicians who emerged from modernist experimentalism – about whom Abela complains (above) and Warren Burt laments, ‘My least favourite electronic arts performance visual is the sight of a man (and usually they are, sigh…) with his head buried in his laptop’.43 Rather, in place of any semblance of introverted, static, affect-less, live performance persona, CxFx seems to align himself more towards the role of DJ: going beyond mere modernist shock value, he describes his sound as traversing ‘an entire rainbow’ (a ‘pretty’, ‘soft’ descriptor), whose act ‘has found audiences strangely entertained on tours all over Europe, Australia, and New Zealand’, going so far as to call his stage ‘a karaoke bar of the future’ – albeit ‘hyper-violent’ – which nevertheless ‘may even persuade the audience to sing along’.44 This stressing of ultimate – if paradoxical – enjoyment, tinged with the kitsch of karaoke, and a declared interest in audience participation, postmodernizes this otherwise noise-based, purposefully jarring artist, distancing him from high modernist elitism, and from the usual mid-twentieth-century audience/performer divide even in experimentalism. Furthermore, while CxFx’s warning about ‘nobody [being] safe from the CxFx treatment’ is more readily equitable with modernist, hardline will to shock, it also alerts us to his postmodern refusal of hierarchies of ‘taste’.

CxFx also collaborates with freeka peeka [sic] (from Bordeaux, France) in MaxxxxiBacon [sic],45 who present a soundworld that draws from ‘computer glitch, grindcore, breakcore, cartoon music, and karaoke’ to ‘serve up an electrified meat-inch to the brain with random collages of screaming digital nonsense and

39 Aka Scott Sinclair.40 CxFx, Company Fuck, at http://www.companyfuck.com/, accessed 5 October 2009.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.43 Burt, Warren Burt.44 Ibid.45 The number of ‘x’s varies on their website.


mass audio confusion’.46 They have developed highly customized music software to accompany their ‘extreme and unpredictable’ vocal improvisations – which range from ‘metal fowls, to karaoke crooning, to uncomfortable vomiting, to microscopic spitting and breathing’.47

Adopting a modernist ‘bad-boy’ posture, MaxxxxiBacon purposefully transgress fitting musical conduct. Rather, they admit to ‘indulging’ in ‘brutal noise blasts, confusing musical choices, computer wizardry and vocal stupidity’.48

Listening to the titles on their selection of tracks from their website (through which one enters by clicking on the image of a big burger), ‘Pingulsn’Tdead’, ‘A666-MAxxxiBacon’, ‘AnaLchimYroughgoldintoShitz-’, ‘EnabledMIdget-MaxxxxxiBacon’, ‘CarelessSniffle-MaxiBacon’ and ‘SpinME-MaxiBacon’, is like being subjected to mashed-up quasi-cartoon soundtracks, in the manner of American composer John Zorn. At unpredictable points a surge of loud sound hits the listener, interrupted by stuttering vocal emissions of various kinds, as alerted to by the blurb on their website (above), these forming a complex series of cross-rhythms, against snippets of pop music.

Also delivered are much slower-tempo, pulsing, atmospheric, low-pitched drones against a backdrop texture in B-flat minor, in ‘AnaLchimYroughgoldintoShitz’. This dissolves into parodic cartoon noise again with overlaid metallic noises and interpolations of pop-music snatches. Some rousing big band is overtaken by random noise and then hiphop, then big-tent circus music, then gargling etc., on ‘EnabledMIdget’.

A shift in mood and mode occurs at ‘CarelessSniffle’, where a semi-narrative builds. First sounds a young man who coughs, grunts and sniffs, as though waking up – possibly hungover –, testing out his late-night-compromised, early-morning voice, then blowing his nose, against which slowly enters a highly annoying but mercifully faint, high-pitched, static noise and then a stuck-in-a-groove record-player needle. Various clunking sounds are made, as though he is negotiating his way around the kitchen, or bumping into the mic. The man finally sings along to pop group WHAM!’s ‘Careless Whisper’ (1984) (by frontperson, George Michael), which has just been broadcast on his radio or played on his record player, sounding at a very low volume and further obscured by the highly foregrounded sound of fast-tempo, quasi-animalistic, cartoon-monster-like, slobbering, lip-smacking, sucking, slurping, and other non-human and machine-like noises, some of which are like a balloon letting out air slowly, or liquid going down a drain gradually.

One now ‘gets’ the significance of the title of this MaxxxiBacon track. The singing is presented as though we are listening to a very private, intimate moment on the part of the vocalist; in fact, we feel we might be eavesdropping, intruding on this person’s vulnerable, just-woken state. After its relatively confident start, the

46 MaxxiBacon, MaxxiBacon, at http://www.halftheory.com/maxibacon/, accessed 13 October 2009.

47 Ibid.48 Ibid.


singing becomes absent-minded sounding, as the singer goes about the business of waking up for the day, perhaps reminiscing about the (likely ‘heavy’) night before. It is slurry, off-pitch, the words sometimes only half-recalled; the voice breaks either from being in the wrong key for the man (he does randomly shift octaves) or from his under-the-weather condition, or from his lovelorn state.

Before we ‘settle’ into any empathic – or squeamish, or schadenfreude-laden – response at this witnessing of someone’s unwitting domestic scenario, the noisescape shifts again, the cartoon-monster noises and high-pitched-balloon noises entering at very high volume to destabilize the song. The man is heard to exclaim, ‘Oh, fukken shut-up!’, as the next track on the record (or radio) appears, which the singer does not want to hear. Finally, some poignant string-ensemble music plays, over which noises continue merrily to stomp, finally cutting it off mid-phrase.

MaxxxiBacon’s soundworld alternates between a ‘staged’ production, composed either at a studio or on a stage but ostensibly for the pubic domain, to a construction of a domestic, private scenario, seemingly without the protagonist’s knowledge. Postmodern disunity is created across a raft of levels and one is never permitted to ‘rest’ into one soundworld before it is unceremoniously usurped by another. The outfit’s take on ‘Careless Whisper’, changing it to ‘CarelessSniffle’, encapsulates MaxxiBacon’s postmodern iconoclastic attitude towards all its creative sources and the group’s ‘level-playing-field’ approach to composition and affect, the noisescape severely undercutting any pathos the original song contained: the balloon-emitting-air high pitch can equate to ‘raspberry blowing’.

The noisy Id is given a voice, representing appetites – for food, love, drugs –, positioned starkly against the ‘civilized’ sound patina of the popsong with its subdued, tasteful orchestration and well-controlled, tuneful vocals. The choice of song could also be a metaphor for the fruitlessness of attempting to ‘control’ one’s desires, as George Michael did before declaring his sexuality. The portrayal of a man who is compromised on so many levels embodies a representation of masculinity that skews any traditional construction of the in-control, powerful, heroic figure.

Cat Hope: The ‘One-Man-[sic]Band Answer to The Soft Machine Circa. 1969, which was the Loudest Thing I have Ever Experienced’49

This quote is from an unnamed reviewer/interviewer describing Cat Hope’s performance at the abovementioned NOW now Festival in Sydney, 2003. In her embracing of extreme volume, Hope co-opts the masculinist territory of aggressive noisism: when being given a Peavey 50-watt amplifier for a concert and rhetorically asking, ‘What the hell am I going to do with that?’, the interviewer’s

49 Fetish: Interview with Cat Hope.


response is, ‘Blow it up?’ Hope replies, ‘Yeah. Take the limiter out when they’re not looking’.50

Hope details the kind of effect her bass guitar sonicscape has on her, produced not only by maximal amplified volume but also effect boxes and feedback. She uses terms and phrases such as conceiving of her sound as ‘like a colour’ and ‘enveloping’ herself ‘inside the sound’,51 which is all around one and inescapable. This recalls the feminized, womb-like ‘bath of sounds’ encountered in Chapter 4.52 For Hope, when the sound suddenly stops, ‘it’s like somebody just slapped you in the face’:53 she is wrenched from this all-encompassing sonic world. The interviewer (above), however, smartly returns her to the feminine terrain when posing the question, ‘Is this religious, meditative, like doing the washing-up?’54 Gender demarcations are still in operation in the world: artistic works and projects that call them to task are yet relevant.

Neo-Modernist Sonic Art in and of the Body

Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out (1994)

Most prominent and longstanding among sonic artists working with the human body and continuing the modernist project, unencumbered by postmodernism, is Stelarc,55 who, since the late-1960s, has been extending his body in his works, working from 1987 onwards with Rainer Linz, who has designed sound and interactive systems for many of Stelarc’s performances.

Stelarc’s Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out (1994)56 is a six-channel muscle stimulator, interfaced with a computer to facilitate complex programming of the body’s movements. The left side of Stelarc’s body is totally automated while the right side controls an attached Third Hand, a mechanism built by the artist with grasping capability and wrist rotation with a basic sense of touch that Stelarc attaches to his wrist and activates by EMG from his abdominal and leg muscles.57 Sound is choreographed with gesture and posture via sensors sampling body

50 Ibid.51 Ibid.52 See Chapter 4, note 23. 53 Fetish: Interview with Cat Hope.54 Ibid.55 Aka Stelios Arkadiou.56 Performed at Experimenta ’94, Gasworks, Melbourne.57 See Marquard Smith and Julie Clarke, Stelarc: The Monograph (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2005). Also see Stelarc, Stelarc: Third Hand (Image) (1981), at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/third-hand/, accessed 5 January 2010; Julie Clarke, An Awkward Toy? Stelarc’s Third Hand (2010), at http://juliejoyclarke.blogspot.com/2010/01/awkward-toy-stelarcs-third-hand.htm, accessed 5 March 2010, and Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford,


signals, in order to extend and enhance the body, visually and acoustically. Stelarc amplifies his bodily processes, an electroencephalogram capturing his brainwaves, electromyography his muscles, a plethysmogram for his pulse, a Doppler flow meter for his bloodflow, and other transducers and sensors monitoring limb motion and indicating body posture.

Lighting is used to amplify the body’s rhythms, to make them visible, rather than merely lighting the physical, animated form. To this end, lighting is interactive, responding in flickers and flares to the electrical discharges of Stelarc’s body, at times in sync with it, at other times forming a counterpoint. ‘The performance is a choreography of controlled, constrained and involuntary motions of internal rhythms and external gestures. It is an interplay between physiological control and electronic modulation, of human functions and machine enhancement’.58

Significantly, Stelarc says he does not think of the various sounds that he creates as ‘music’, despite releasing pieces on tape and CD as part of an experimental music series; rather, he has

always thought of it as signals that can become sound sources in terms of an integrated performance. So for me the important thing is not whether I categorise it as music or sound, but rather that the body is a medium of expression. You move, you contract something, and that can be a sound. You bend a leg… anything really, and acoustically accompany the visual performance of the body. I’ve never actually said to myself, what I am doing is music, although perhaps people have encouraged me to think of it in that way.59

One of Jonathan D. Kramer’s postmodern markers is ‘consider[ing] technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music’,60 and postmodernism’s ready embrace of multimedia is another of its defining aspects. One might therefore celebrate Stelarc’s project as the quintessence of postmodernism. But I have proposed a conception of postmodernism that focuses on situatedness, and on specificity. And while Stelarc stresses ‘expression’ (another postmodernist preoccupation, as detailed in the previous chapter), his is an abstract type of expression, reveling in technology’s ability to mould the body, sound and light into a fluid manifestation of near-synaesthetic kineticism that comes close to dissolving the borders between them – in other words, an altermodernist exploration of an expanded formalism.

Extended-body: Interview with Stelarc, at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.htm, accessed 5 January 2010.

58 Stelarc, Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out (1994), at http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ampbod/ampbod.htm, accessed 24 August 2009.

59 Rainer Linz, An Interview with Stelarc, NMA Publications (2001; 1992), at http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/repr/Stelarc_interview.htm, accessed 28 April 2010; also in New Music Articles 10 (1992): 21–7.

60 See Chapter 2, note 27 of present volume.


Internalised City (1993), i x it and (i x it)2 (1994)

A performance by Anna Sabiel, Internalised City (1993) was produced at the Warehouse in Mascot, Sydney, NSW, at the Earwitness event Body & Sound in 1994. Sabiel dons a harness connected by piano wires through empty drums to the building’s structure. Riding through the air, she ‘plays’ the space, producing subtle swaying rhythms. She tilts the resonant drums, which sometimes hold fluid. While her body is captured in the act of sounding the externalized physical space, that of the room, the work also incorporates her own body’s interior spatial memory as she rides through the shifting positions she creates. She becomes a virtual transducer of the many possibilities in the environment.61

Amanda Stewart’s i x it and (i x it)2 (1994) for voice surveys the area that lies beyond language, namely extended vocal techniques and non-verbal utterances. It serves to foreground the fundamental fragility of the human form as, through electro-acoustic treatment, the voice fractures at the boundaries of articulation.62

As Nina Wenhart comments, ‘It might be the height of technological folly to consider the body obsolete in form and function, yet it might be the height of human realisation. For it is only when the body becomes aware of its present position that it can map its post-evolutionary strategies’.63 The creators of the works presented above interrogate, with altermodernist ‘knowingness’, what they perceive as the inadequacy of a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc-brain biological form that has reached its limits in managing the dimensions and complexity of its accumulated information. The body’s limitations lie also in its ineffectualness, fragility, frequent failings and its built-in incremental malfunctioning. Taking postmodernism’s responses to the corporeal form in its technological engagements one step further, these projects assert that, due to the advancements in technological enhancement, the body now transcends its subjectivity in terms of consciousness and community; thus objectified, it is a ‘configuration’ to be observed and adjusted.

Thus arises a hyper-neo-modernist paradox: Stelarc’s Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out, Sabiel’s Internalised City and Stewart’s i x it and (i x it)2 can be perceived as highly subjective because they use the performers’ own bodies. Yet, by contrast with the examples of postmodern expressions of sonic art in and of the body in previous chapters, they are decidedly also non-figurative – there is nothing particularized about the space or the body in these contexts.

61 Anna Sabiel, Internalised City, Australian Sound Design Project (1993), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000551b.htm, accessed 18 February 2009.

62 Body & Sound (24 November 1994), Australian Sound Design Project (2003), at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000503b.htm, accessed 26 April 2008. Also see Amanda Stewart, ‘Vocal Textures’, Voice, eds Neumark, Gibson and Van Leeuwen, pp. 173–90.

63 Nina Wenhart, Prehysteries of New Media (2008), at http://prehysteries.blogspot.com/2008/07/stelarc.htm, accessed 23 August 2009.


Inner Worlds

Inner World (1994)

Carl Vine’s neo-tonal Inner World (1994) for cello and recorded tape is an example of what Leigh Landy identifies as a category of current music making that he terms ‘mixed music’, ‘a mid-point between traditional concert practices and sound-based music, an “in-between” category bringing together the traditions of both worlds’, where at one point of the axis ‘the recorded part consists of sounds derived from the performing instrument’ and at the other are ‘works where the recorded sounds clearly contrast the sounds made by live performer(s)’.64 Inner World is an essay in sound. The composer’s aim is to ‘focus on [the] amazing symbiosis’ between ‘dutiful reproduction of a series of notes and tones’ and ‘the intimate relationship between fine crafts[persons] and their instruments’, in the service of reflecting ‘the internal processes that lead to the production of marvellous music’; Vine notes that in the performance of David Pereira, the commissioning artist, ‘every sound is carved from the string, hair and wood with loving care’.65

The tape that accompanies the solo cello is constructed entirely of sounds made from a recording of Pereira playing cello. The programme note states:

The performer is not only live, but also crystallised, dissected and re-arranged. The cello is not only an instrument of natural materials but also an enveloping shroud of sound – a hall of mirrors in which artifice and reality collide and in which the sounds we hear might be no more than the performer’s own imagination.66

What is significant is not only the decidedly post-atonal soundworld of the writing and the forthright, non-apologetic statement about producing ‘marvellous music’. That this music’s definitely ‘noise-focused’ electronic dimension is couched in Vine’s honeyed harmonic palette is as postmodern a move as is his clear awareness about sound’s slipperiness. By suggesting that the sounds are products of the performer’s imagination while yet ‘enabling’ us to witness them through the electronic track that accompanies the live playing, Vine problematizes the perception of ‘natural’ and ‘real’ when we listen to the combination of recorded and live sound. Whatever comprises the ‘inner world’ is not, in Vine’s enigmatic

64 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, p. 154. Landy also notes, ‘Works on the homogeneous end of the axis often involve extended techniques that are more timbral than pitch-based, thus allowing the work to lean more toward a spectralist sound universe than others’: ibid.

65 Carl Vine, ‘Programme Note’, Inner World for Amplified Cello and Pre-Recorded DAT Tape or CD (London: Faber, 1997).

66 Ibid.


style, spelled out. The focus is the inner world of cello music making: there is a pointed, altermodern de-referencing of context.

Mantrae (2007)

Warren Burt’s Mantrae (2007) for flute and live electronics, another example of ‘mixed music’, is an essay in quasi-spiritual sonic space. Burt notes that the mantra itself ‘lives in a peculiar world’, one that is ‘neither language, nor music, but a hybrid between the two (or more fancifully, perhaps a common ancestor of the two?)’, and that when transcribed into traditional musical notation (instead of traditionally transmitted orally), ‘they lose their language connection and become wholly music’.67 Burt manages, however, to retain a sense of the dimension of speech through the use of accents and speech-like articulation played on a musical instrument. Out of three shorter mantras that Burt transcribed, he listed their pitches and durations, and how many times in the mantra each appeared, and used these percentages in composing the new material. For example, if, in a given mantra, ‘E’ appeared twice as often as ‘G’, that would be the case as well in his composed mantras. The statistics of two of the three mantras were used in each of the three different mantras that the player uses. Each mantra is on its own music stand, the player alternating between the music on the three stands, creating a larger scale structure by freely leaping between the three pages of music: here, a key aspect of the mantra – namely, its repetitious, circular nature – is altered, and the mantra acquires a more forward-moving, yet non-directional, structure.

Burt’s challenge for the player is, ‘through the use of articulation, accent and dynamics, to return the music to as much of a “speech-like” state as possible’.68 The composer sets up a division between ‘the world’ and ‘the individual’, where the latter lives in the world but is subject to the influence of it; this is represented by the electronics component. That an individual’s own actions in the world in turn alter how the world affects the individual, is metaphorically underlined by the interactive nature of the electronics. The flautist assembles the mantrae by moving between the music stands, using improvised articulation ‘to try to return the music to a dynamic speech-like state’.69 Hipno sound processing modules change the flute (played through a computer) sound substantially. The flautist’s movements between the stands are picked up by the camera and they alter the nature of the sound processing in a non-linear way (that is, a particular motion does not result in a particular change in the sound). ‘The result is a musical world where the driving

67 Kouvaras, e-mail, Burt. This piece was commissioned by Jean Penny with funds provided by the Music Board of the Australia Council. The software used to compose the flute mantras was John Dunn’s ArtWonk. The computer sound modification software was Plogue Bidule and Cycling ’74’s Hipno. The sound processing was developed by Warren Burt, together with Jean Penny and Andrew Blackburn: ibid.

68 Ibid.69 Ibid.


sound of the flute is constantly altered in changing and non-predictable ways. The challenge for the flautist, in this work as in life, is to maintain a sense of focus and inner-calm in the midst of a constantly changing and unpredictable world’.70

Integral aspects of this piece are the ‘forward-moving, yet non-directional structure’ and concern for the individual maintaining equilibrium through Eastern meditative practice as symbolized in this work, plus the mix of score-composed music with electronic. It bespeaks an ethos that encompasses a spiritually informed aesthetic that has moved on from its embryonic expression in Cage’s Zen-informed compositional practice. In contrast to the broader arena whereby Jodi Rose, Alan Lamb and Ross Bolleter respectively instigate a process by which their works will continue to ‘play themselves’, out in ‘the world’ (in Chapters 3 and 5), Warren Burt’s Mantrae returns to a more private, immediate meditation on sound.

Behind the Scenery (2008), Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation (2000), and Whispers of the City (2005)

An enduring theme in contemporary Australian sound art is reflecting on public gardens. Roger Alsop’s Gardens Project, Behind the Scenery (2008), is a site-specific work that opens up the vast activities that occur daily behind the scenes at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne, Victoria. Visitors are able to replay interviews on iPods in sequence or select specific interviews as they wander through the gardens, or listen away from the site on PCs.71

By contrast, Garth Paine’s Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation (2000), exhibited in November and December of that year on the Ornamental Lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne dwells on a more internalized world that omits an overt human presence. Its 21 large floating sculptures are modelled to represent clusters of plantings of river reed. Each reed pod contains a collection of electronics for either the gathering of weather information or the reception and dispersion of sound, Paine’s interest lying in whether ‘the sonic environment would remain homogenous even though, unlike a musical ensemble, the control inputs varied randomly and independently of each other’.72 Drawing allusions between musical ensembles and reed pods presents yet another instance of sound art teasing out the theme of blurring nature/culture.

In her altermodernist expression of neo-formalism, Sofie Loizou’s work probes the interaction between human senses and inhabited noise environments. In the attempt to selectively re-sensitize herself to specific sounds lost in the noise of urban life (as Acoustic Ecology teaches, incessant noise pollution renders us

70 Ibid. The balance between the sound processors is altered by a random mixing routine set up in Plogue Bidule, the host program for the processing. Ibid.

71 Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, Behind the Scenery, at http://www.rbgcranbourne.com.au/#BehindTheScenery, accessed 11 August 2008.

72 Garth Paine, ‘Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation’, Organised Sound 8/2 (2003): 139.


alienated or ‘detuned’ to our sounding environment), Loizou seeks the underlying patterns and ‘beautiful overtones’ in urban spaces, bouncing off the hard surfaces and reverberations of long corridors of a cityscape, declaring, with regard to her Whispers of the City (2005), for example: ‘I want to express the intimate connection between living organisms and the space they inhabit … Music can make everyday events take on extraordinary meaning … through which the listener can travel and delve into the emotional connection between memory, senses, and the urban landscape’.73 Slipping between ‘noise’ and Aeolian harp-like overtones, Loizou’s sound palette meshes electronic and acoustic soundworlds to ponder, in a non-directive way, the duality – but also the emotive connotations – of nature and the sounds of the urban.

This Map is Not to Scale (2008)

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey’s This Map is Not to Scale (2008) is for electronic and interactive underscore with works for piano, Pearl River Organ, toy piano, trumpet, flugelhorn, harmonica, voice and field recordings. It engages with genetic processes that the artists encountered during their ANAT Synapse Residency at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. In a move that makes concrete Henry Cowell’s metaphor of the ‘noise-germ’ as ‘a good microbe’,74 the work is the ‘sonification’ of these processes – that is, they produce music from the Institute’s scientific data (which are usually displayed visually in science laboratories).75 They describe the work as ‘a duet of music for theatre, where the theatre comes from the source material itself, the human genetic process, upon which all the contexts of life occur’.76

With careful manipulation of the focus of the eyepiece and ear trumpet accompanying the work that the audience may use when experiencing the piece, they greatly expand tiny moments to produce works of substance, giving focus to

73 Sofie Loizou, Whispers of the City (2005), at http://www.cracksinthepavement.com/cracks05/htm>/statements/sofieloizoustatement.htm, accessed 27 July 2008.

74 See Introduction, note 11 of present volume. 75 Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, This Map is Not to Scale (2008), at http://

www.melbournefestival.com.au/downloads/TMINTSweb.pdf, accessed 29 October 2008. Also see Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey: Synapse Residency at the Garvan Institute, Australia (2008), at http://flynnhumphrey.anat.org.au/?cat=1, accessed 13 January 2009. ‘Sonification’ is Flynn and Humphrey’s term: ibid. In their work-in-progress blog, Flynn and Humphrey describe formatting the sample/dummy data files sent to them by the Bio-informatics Department at the Garvan Institute. They then experiment with calibrating number streams from the multi-dimensional data arrays to suit the relevant sonic mappings. Their mappings involve ‘varying partial content in an additive synthesis framework (back to the analog synthesis era!), and perhaps in a more contemporary vein, using the data streams as varying co-efficients for spatial representations’: ibid.

76 Flynn and Humphrey, This Map is Not to Scale.


that which is usually marginalized in their practice. The core of their enterprise is a desire to reflect upon human expression, upon the micro-scale of the genetic process, and upon the greater effects upon humanity of the outcome of genetic research. They make their own contribution to the scientific end of the interchange: ‘From the points of view of scientists, we sense a continuing desire for tools that might be useful for interpreting data – this is a central motivation for the field of auditory display’.77

In This Map is Not to Scale, infiltrating the micro-scale sounds from genetic research are epic, tragic or even humorous elements including: a Chinese ‘Tunnel Song’ from the Korean War, gathered for a documentary film music project; fragments of Morton Feldman’s ‘Triadic Memories’; and a piece based on a poem Nocturno del hueco (Nocturne of Emptied Space) (1940), written by the poet Federico Garcìa Lorca.78 All of these inclusions meditate on the notion of scale – temporal, thematic and human – that infuses music.79 While the work celebrates what Flynn and Humphrey term the ‘heroic effort’ on the part of all – ‘from subject to scientist’ – who contribute to ‘epoch-changing advances in knowledge of how life works’, they also temper this neo-modernist sensibility with a humorous aside: ‘But we won’t be playing the theme from Star Trek’.80

The Medium and the Message (Again)

Video Game Dreaming (2007)

In what could be seen as a hyper-altermodern move suprème, a number of Matthew Hindson’s traditionally scored works81 use acoustic, classical instruments to replicate popular music subgroups that are produced technologically (such as techno, death metal, etc.). His Video Game Dreaming (2007) for clarinet quartet (1×Eb, 2×Bb, bass clarinets) meditates on how the latest technology impacts on recreational pursuits, specifically the characteristics and effects of video games on users’ everyday lives.

The first movement, ‘Start Select Pause Reset’ (referring to the buttons found on the controllers of many game consoles), recalls the early sound art fascination

77 ArtsZine, Interview with Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey on their work, This Map is not to Scale (13 October 2008), at http://www.melbournefestival.com.au/news/latest?ed=40&story=10057, accessed 14 December 2008.

78 Published in the collection Poeta en Neuva York (Poet in New York).79 Flynn and Humphrey, This Map is Not to Scale.80 ArtsZine, Interview with Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.81 See, for example, Linda Kouvaras, Liner notes, Greenbaum Hindson Peterson

(Melbourne: CD Project Recordings 1995); Linda Kouvaras, Liner notes, SPEED (by Matthew Hindson) (ABC Classics: 465 432-2, 2000). Also see Bennett and Kouvaras, ‘Modernist versus Postmodernist Aesthetics’.


with the cassette recorder.82 The sectionalized musical structure disrupts the flow, thus replicating the games’ buttons interrupting and altering the progress of the game. ‘Hypnagogia’, which describes the state between waking and sleep and the hallucinations that can occur in this state, provides the inspiration for the second movement, Hindson reflecting on a potential negative aspect associated with playing too many video games: ‘the difficulty of sleeping afterwards, with images from the games constantly flooding your mind, uninvited. It is as if the game is still playing in one’s brain without conscious control’.83

The last movement, ‘GameBoy Music’, simulates the music accompanying many Game Boy and Nintendo games in its use of repetitive motives and interlocking patterns. It ‘takes as its starting point the idea of a malfunctioning video game, perhaps a hand-held game in which the batteries have gotten wet’.84 It thus affectionately taps into, and provides a critique of, the modern anxiety response – even in merely recreational moments – when technology fails.

Sound Art in the Time of the Altermodern: Neo-Modernist ‘Dialogues’ with Postmodernism

A glance at the composition dates of the works in Chapters 4–8 reveals that the altermodern did not ‘transcend’ the postmodern at a conveniently identifiable point in time: the drive to the postmodern coincides with the altermodern across the last two decades. But the aesthetic impulses detailed in this chapter and Chapter 7 call for a reconsideration of our current era. ‘The altermodern’85 represents the culmination of three decades of post-experimentalism.

The modernist preoccupation with ‘novelty’, or newness, and chance occurrences, also present in many postmodern works, is very much apparent in the neo-modernist ones. The insight informing the works discussed in Chapter 8, which goes ‘beyond’ postmodernism and provides an inevitable if implicit critique of postmodernism, is that the formalist project is by no means redundant in contemporary times. A vital distinction, however, lies between those early post-experimentalist forays discussed in Chapter 3 of the mid-to-late-1970s/early-1980s and those of the last 20 years. Today’s musicians are adept, virtuosic even, at sound production and control; and the passage of a 70-year-plus tradition in noise-based music making has blunted much of the ‘surprise’ element in working with random procedures and ‘shock’ elements. The new expressions in current

82 See Chapter 3 of present volume.83 Matthew Hindson, New Work: Video Game Dreaming (2 April 2007), at http://

www.hindson.com.au/wordpress/2007/04/02/new-work-video-game-dreaming/, accessed 2 October 2009.

84 Ibid.85 See Chapter 2, notes 25 and 57 of present volume.


manifestations of modernist formalism result from advanced technologies and from postmodernism.

To situate the neo-modern within a wider frame of reference, could be to suggest that a ‘dialogue’ occurs with postmodernism in the works presented in my final two chapters – just as Charles Jenks and Linda Hutcheon claimed for (radical) 1980s postmodernism and its dialogue with high modernism.86 In other words, the neo-modern does not ignore the context out of which it arises. The neo-modern is inflected by postmodernism because of the very fact of postmodernism: the prefix ‘neo’ already rehearses the postmodern, after all, and postmodernist concerns and attitudes continue to inform the aesthetico-political underpinnings of altermodern works.

The altermodern in sound art is expressed through a direct re-engagement with the history of earlier modernisms, and the return to a formalist concentration on medium. In this sense, the dialogue with postmodernism conducted by the works in Chapters 7 and 8 reaches back further to one with the genre’s own history. But most significantly, what postmodern and altermodern sound art share, in their respective capacities in grappling with modernity, is to present reflections on how sound can elucidate our – and sound’s own – place and time in the world.

86 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism; Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture.

Part 5 Conclusion

Conclusion: Silence Charged

In 1977, Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music asserted that ‘noise-some’ music could be the harbinger of social change, and the first edition of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World highlighted the need for ecological (as well as aesthetic) ‘responsibility’ in the sonic domain.1 During the 1970s, site-specific works and contextual practice in general increased, as composers sought to challenge the notion that art should separate itself from the world and lived experience. Rather, experimentalists (obliquely) and sound artists (pointedly) embraced ‘the world’ in their work, often as their work, from recording actual spaces to conceptual gambits in performance and/or installation events. Such works draw attention to the determining factors that bring context into actuality, as much as they offer for consideration a sonic art object in itself, and their audience, spectators and participants create a renewed iteration of the work at every juncture as they listen to, inspect, choose, contemplate, interact with or simply wander through its sonic space.

I have explored here some of the ‘disturbances and challenges’ and ‘reassurances and comforting’2 carried out by Australian sound art over these past 30-plus years – but in postmodern fashion, the works place quotation marks around the acts of disturbing and challenging, reassuring and comforting. The examples discussed here contribute resoundingly to illuminating various ways in which contemporary sonic experience is ‘auditively immersed’ in spatial and psychological domains.3 This both provides a pre-compositional exigency and forms much of the very material of the composed works. The Australian sound art I have examined inscribes a trajectory that has been unfolding to the present day, with increased sophistication, not only in technique and technology but also in conceptual framing. These works have contributed to filling the chasm left by high modernist music’s – both experimentalist and score-based – achievement mid-twentieth century of a sonic blank slate.

In her widely read compendium of postmodern thinking, Linda Hutcheon cites theorists who worry that ‘the value [that] postmodern theory’s suspicion of truth-claims and its denaturalizing and demystifying impulses once had for oppositional critics has been compromised by its institutionalisation in the academy’.4 Sound

1 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music; Schafer, The Tuning of the World, see Chapter 2 of present volume.

2 Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, p. 518, see Chapter 2, note 35 of present volume.

3 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 3.4 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 174.


art, like its experimentalist roots, however, continues to operate, for the most part, ex-academy, its ‘denaturalizing’ and ‘demystifying’ capabilities intact. The works I have presented here have been animated by the ways in which sounds form much of the way we mark ourselves – and are marked – in our social and cultural environs and historical contexts. These include sounds made by us, sounds emitting from our bodies, sounds done to us, sounds forced on us, sounds we have encountered, sounds we call noise, sounds we call music, sounds we once called noise but now think of as art, sounds belonging to art, sounds belonging to the mundane world. They consist, too, of sounds emanating from the natural world and spaces and places that were immanent with sound that then became silenced – or to which we were ‘deaf’, or which were withheld from us – and are re-sounded again through the works discussed here, to invite ‘heightened’, ‘referential’ and ‘contextual’ listening.5

Australian sound art creators navigate fascinating intersecting pathways between cultural theory, soundscape making and curatorial projects as they cross the borders of modernism into postmodernism and altermodernism (and, sometimes, back again). Australian sound artists make musical artworks out of, in order to show us, how we experience the construction of meaningfulness through the sounds we encounter. Their work makes for charged listening: they present works for not only listening to but also with the feeling of listening in. This music charges us with listening, charges us to listen. Australian sound art shows us to ourselves – and each other – in the acts of such listening, be it centred in biological, electronic or cultural processes. These pieces theatricalize in ever-inventive ways the relationship between inner, artistic workings and the outer, social milieu. They forward the idea of sound as connective tissue – constructing infinite varieties of expressions of the bonds between and within species, across artforms and across timelines, as they play with margins and dissolutions between constructed/real, pre-determined/aleatoric, nature/culture, original/recycled, past/present, the commonplace and the transcendent, art/life, seductive/gratingly repellent sound textures and noise/music/silence.

When Percy Grainger announces that the basis for the direction his aesthetics would take must reflect the fact that he lived in the ‘age of flying’ and should therefore instigate a departure from ‘our archaic notions of harmony’,6 he demonstrates a sharpened early-modernist awareness of his position in music history. Contemporary Australian sound art uncovers the myriad currents in the practice, traced in the shifts from earlier notions of music and its Others: through collage-based works with historico-aesthetic resonances, to ironic examination of the affective nature of sonic codes, to the enkindling of neo-modernist ethos in the present altermodern era.

5 See Chapter 1 of present volume on (postmodernist) ‘heightened’ vs (modernist) ‘reduced’ listening.

6 See Introduction, note 9 of present volume.


The significance of the works is further inflected by their postmodern stylistic ruptures. This results in the jolt that we feel when we ‘witness’ the arrival of Early Settlers’ pianos revivified by spoken narratives from black and white perspectives in Jon Rose’s Ivories in the Outback; when we realize that Warren Burt’s piano piece, Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit No. 1, is a cut-up; when the ‘noise’, from a modernist point of view, of Andrée Greenwell’s unadulterated triads interrupts the noisescape texture of ‘Tears’; in the befuddlement we experience in the decontextualization of medium and object when sounds emit from knitted toys in Joan Grounds and Sherre DeLys’s Say Ahh, or from reed pods in Garth Paine’s Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation. Rupture occurs, too, in the imaginative frisson that ensues when a sonic essay on shoes in Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes by Robyn Ravlich leads not only to the sounds they make when we walk in them, but also to the cultural associations different types of footwear have and the songs they have inspired, or when Kaye Mortley brings a still image to life – not to mention the many mixed emotions it might connote through its many shared cultural references – in our aural imagination in A Wedding Photograph.

We are urged to attend to the political realm that affects our lives in such works as Sw Sw Thrght’s [sic] Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority, Eve Duncan and Siri Hayes’s Dredge, Jodi Rose’s Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1, Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr) by Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell with Swanney Draper Architects, Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor’s Great Fences of Australia Project, Simon Crosbie’s Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence, Mid-air Conversations by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, Frances Dyson’s Window Pain, Virginia Madsen’s The Immaterials, Catherine Schieve’s Attunements and Brenton Broadstock’s Fahrenheit 451. We are drawn into further complexities of indigeneity in soundscapes such as Jon Rose’s Salvado, Ron Nagorcka and Ernie Althoff’s Seven Rare Dreamings, Ros Bandt’s Voicing the Murray and Lake Mungo, Eve Duncan and Siri Hayes’s Dredge, Brigid Burke’s Lands Collide and Alan Lamb’s Wogarno Wire Installation. The vulnerability of language is brought home to us in Ros Bandt’s Speak Before It’s Too Late.

We might give a chuckle or two – or recoil, askance – when invited to appreciate the sonic ‘pornography for jetrosexuals’ in airport sounds in Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony; to acknowledge the ‘serious’ musical content in Andrián Pertout’s Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal Schoenhut Toy Piano; to assimilate Essendon Airport’s Sonic Investigations of the Trivial mix of pop, process music, toy instruments and consumer electronics; or to accept as valid musical creation, dilapidated piano accordion in Caroline Wilkins’s Piece For Old Accordion. Our aesthetic sensibilities could feel seriously exercised had we been in the audience for the mid-1970s taping of the television show Pot of Gold and experienced simultaneous performances of Greg Schiemer ‘playing’ John Cage’s 4’33” and Ernie Gallagher’s Stethophonics For Solo Audience; when Ross Bolleter enjoins us to revel in the ‘beauty’ of ‘ruined’ pianos; during Moya Henderson’s endearing spoof on the avant-garde in Clearing the Air; through attempting to find the musical potential of doorbells in Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski’s interactive


installation, Summoned Voices; when we are taken by surprise by the incongruous admixture of the zenith of experimentalism and techno in New Waver’s 4’33” Techno Remix; when IDA’s Things Are Not So Bad After All delivers guerilla robots to badger the audience into participating in the performance; when trying to make sense of Warren Burt and Chris Mann’s Subjective Beats Metaphor; through The Blisters Ensemble’s Skeleton in the Museum’s attempts to achieve in sound Percy Grainger’s unfulfilled wishes for his skeleton to be displayed in his museum; or when we are shown that the noir representation of bones being broken is produced by snapping miked-up celery in Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia. Would one, as an audience member, have been a stayer or a fleer at Ron Nagorcka’s Atom Bomb trilogy performance?

A dizzying sense of disorientation might arise when witnessing Gail Priest’s rapid-fire admixtures of grunge and the sweetly seductive; during Cat Hope’s subsonic rumbles in her bass guitar’s aural onslaught; via the digital world ‘theme park’ connoted in James Gordon Anderson’s Biocentennerary Afterimage; through re-sound’s hybrid forms that emanate from the fusion of performance gestures, sounds from acoustic instruments, digital signal processing and sound synthesis; had one been treated to cooking smells in performances during the 1980s of The Splinter Faction Group; through the media blurring between drawing/electronics/noise, body/noise, noise/talk/music and music/scientific data in such works as Joyce Hinterding’s The Oscillators, Anna Sabiel’s Internalised City, Dead Centre: The Body with Organs, a collaboration between Norie Neumark, Amanda Stewart, Maria Miranda and Greg White; the Machine for Making Sense’s Fester, and Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey’s This Map is Not to Scale, respectively. Geographical confusion could be created by flitting between Hong Kong and Melbourne in our mind’s ear via Urbania by Steve Law; between Melbourne’s Grainger Museum and Frankfurt while sitting under the soniforous bridge in Ros Bandt’s A Global Bridge for Percy or between Japan, Australia and Canada in Martin Wesley-Smith’s Night Satellite; when as an office worker in the CBD our building is visited by Random Acts of Elevator Music; or through the noisesome floating sculptures Garth Paine’s Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation.

We can join in the temporal play in the gentle melding of present into past and back again in Andrew Ford’s radiophonic piece, Elegy in a Country Graveyard, in Dry or Crichton Installation by Christine McCombe, in Roger Alsop’s Gardens Project, Behind the Scenery or through travelling from the past into the future in The Singing Ship by Peggy West-Moreland. We can marvel at hybrid musical works in Nigel Helyer’s GeneMusik and James Hullick’s Songs of the Gotholin, while our subjective sense of time and space could be significantly displaced when tuning in to Sarah Hopkins’s Wind Music For Earth And Sky, Warren Burt’s Mantrae or Alan Lamb’s Journeys on the Winds of Time 1. We will struggle to discern what is ‘real’ and what is ‘unnatural’ when listening to Carl Vine’s cello playing against the electronic recording in his Inner World, Jon Drummond’s Aeolian harp kite in Sounding the Winds, nature versus the urban environment in


Sofie Loizou’s Whispers of the City, or to the interactive birdcalls – coming from shoes!? – in Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds’s Transpoes.

We could register a reaction of confrontation – or, equally, exhilaration – at Lucas Abela’s ‘bad-boy’ one-man noisecore karaoke explosion, or at MaxxxiBacon’s dealings with Wham’s ‘Careless Whisper’; when we hear what BOK Darklord have done through their plundering of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album; how *** (tsk tsk tsk) ‘treat’ that band’s ‘Immigrant Song’; how Philip Brophy’s I Am Piano has used samples taken from classic modern jazz recordings and ‘reinterpreted’ them as ‘raw material’; when Matthew Hindson’s Video Game Dreaming replicates the deleterious effects on our mental state through engaging with video games; or through the deconstruction of canonical piano preludes and waltzes in Rainer Linz’s Dysrhythmic Etudes. The boundless potential for what can be considered as musical instruments is brought home to us by Stelarc and his use of his own wired-up and computer-enhanced body in Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out, by Rik Rue’s Country Music of Southeastern Australia and its litany of extraordinary sonic sources – from ‘Noises’ (‘Animals, Vomiting, Miscellaneous Disturbances’), to ‘Other’ (‘Native Rituals, Arguments, Warfare’), or David Young’s To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas), which realizes the sonic potential in fungi in its homage to John Cage. And we could delightedly identify with the array of emotions voiced in Carolyn Connors’s ‘Birthday’ as we simultaneously ponder the gendering of the sonic realm – and beyond – in this work and in those by Hope, Abela, CxFx, MaxxxiBacon, Greenwell, Dyson, Mortley and Ravich, and in ***’s Feminimalism, Chesworth and Leber’s The Gordon Assumption and Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia, these latter two works reminding us of the tradition of eroticizing ‘killed-off’ women in opera, film noir and mid-twentieth-century surrealism.

We find a joke turned on ourselves when, descending the stairs, we realize there are no trapped women screaming from the disused toilet block in David Chesworth and Sonia Leber’s The Gordon Assumption, or that no one is cajoling us to ‘sit still’, courtesy of their The Master’s Voice, or when we go to answer a non-functioning telephone ringing in the street, thanks to No Answer by Philip Brophy and Martine Corompt. We might even indulge in some schadenfreude when we imagine the next lot of hapless passers-by encountering these works!

The works presented throughout this volume are vivid reminders of the contingent, situated nature of noise and its effects. The divides between music and noise, music and other media, art and life continue their reconfiguration in contemporary Australian sound art with ever-imaginative outcomes. As we move through the altermodern, where postmodernism itself is brought under scrutiny, Australian sound art takes heed of the world of sound as it loads Cagean – and high modernism’s – silence.

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Index

0’0” (Cage) 254’33”: Tacit, for Solo Instrument (Cage) 4,

25, 25, 27, 36, 50n63, 52, 56–7, 70, 115, 160n49, 184, 195, 197, 227

4’33” Techno Remix (Wadley) 184, 197, 228

22 Contemporary Australian Composers (Jenkins) 13n45, 61–2

50 Synthesizer Greats (Chesworth) 83, 8451 Flexibles for Gramophone Users

(Althoff) 65

‘A666-MAxxxiBacon’ (MaxxxxiBacon), 210

A Global Bridge for Percy (A Garden for Percy’s Delight ) (Bandt and Sistermann) 178, 228

Abela, Lucas 208–9, 208n35, 229Aborigines/Aboriginality/indigeneity

colonialism and land ownership 55–6, 117n12, 131, 146, 227, see also postcolonialism

Dredge (For Percussion Quartet) 122–4, 227

Great Fences of Australia 130–1, 227

Lake Mungo 121–2, 227Speak Before It’s Too Late 126–7,

227Voicing the Murray 118–21, 126,

227Ivories in the Outback 133–4, 193,

227Nallan Void 194 Salvado 134–5, 227Seven Rare Dreamings 90, 227Wogarno Wire Installation 132–3,

227ACMA (Australian Computer Music Association) 11n38, 28

accessibility 46–7, 52, 63, 64, 86, 139, 154, 159, 193

Australia 63–6acousmatic music 25, 25n22, 30,

33, 34, 94, 138, 151, 200, see also reduced listening

Acoustic Ecology 54–6, 72n60, 115, 188, 119, 133, 137, 218, see also ecology

Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, The (Silverman) 105n19, n21, 106n22, n23, n25

Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (LaBelle) 156n40

Adair, Matt 153–7, see also RAEM ‘Address to the Convention of the Music

Teachers National Association’ (Cage) 19n1, 57

Adorno, Theodor 65n19, 153, 153n25,Aeolian harp works 44, 56, 72–3, 75, 77,

91, 95, 121–2, 145, 202–3 Ahern, David 67, 68Airport Symphony (English) 160–1, 208,

227airports and air travel 160–1Alsop, Roger 217, 228altermodern

as beyond postmodernism 9, 16, 17, 40, 43, 44, 47–8, 54, 173, 177, 182, 185, 196, 197, 198, 199–200, 201, 204, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 226, 229

compromised emotiveness in 187, 188, 189, 190, 197

consanguinity with sound art 16, 17, 34, 40, 47–8, 54, 199–200, 221, 226, 229

dialogues with neo-modernism 205–7,


see also neo-modernism, nostalgiaAlthoff, Ernie 64n16, 65, 68, 70n46,

89, 90, 227Althusser, Louis 41ambient music 35, 153, 160, 206,

see also Eno‘AnaLchimYroughgoldintoShitz’

(MaxxiBacon) 210An Eminently Performable Piece (Burt)

83anachronism 197

anachronistic play 42anarchic sound visions 31, 66–72ancient knowledge 73–4Anderson, James Gordon 205–6, 228Anderson, Laurie 99Andrews, Ian 80Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

in Opera, The (Poizat) 106–7, 109, 110n45, 111

animals, communication with 149–51Anson, Stan 71Aragon, Louis 105, 107 archaeology of knowledge 197–8archetypal space 141, 143Arkadiou, Stelios (Stelarc) 212–14, 229Arn, Stini 137Arnold, Thomas Knox 174–7art

real world as 4withdrawal of from modern life 21

artistic choice 45–7, 177Art Unit (Sydney) 10, 63n10Atom Bomb: An Operatic Trilogy

(Nagorcka) 70, 71, 228Attali, Jacques 9, 33, 49, 63, 68, 225Attunements (Schieve) 127, 227Aurora/World New Music Days Festival

(2010) 28, 196n91Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound

Reproduction, The (Sterne) 12, 153n24

audiences, uncertainty of, causing 109audio cassettes 37n15, 63, 64–5, 64n14,

n15, n16, 70, 220 Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

(Cox and Warner) 3n2, 6n12,

24n17, 30n40, n41, 31n44, 32n51, n52, 44n41, 64, 64n13, 176n15

Augé, Marc 156Australia, water in 117n14Australian Music Centre 13n44, 28n32,

n35Australian-ness 71–2, 130–1, 138–41,

146authorial voice 65avant-garde

historical 41–2, 45, 49, 52, 173–4, 197noise-art and cinema in dialogue 185satirizing in 4’33” Techno Remix 184,

197, 228; Seven Rare Dreamings (Nagorka and Althoff) 90; Clearing the Air (Henderson) 90, 227; Phobia (Brophy and CMO) 187; Sonic Investigations of the Trivial (Essendon Airport) 83–4

transcending of in ‘spiritual music’ 73, 73n62, n63, n64, n65

use of term 10, 19, 22, 22n11, 32, 35, 36

AZ Music 67–8, 69–70

Babbitt, Milton 20Bach, J.S. 87, 112Bachelard, Gaston 141, 143, 191Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound

Art (LaBelle) 13n46, 24n18, 26n25, 27n26, 28n29, n30, n31, 32n49, 37n10, 40n26, 44n38, 45n43, 47n50, 50n63, 51n64, 57n90, n92, 58n92, 84n119, 103n9, 138n98, 146n133, 153n27

Bandt, Ros 13n45, 14n47, n48, 16n53, 38, 67, 72n60, 79, 95, 118–22, 117n12, 118–22, 126–7, 134n85, 144, 146, 177, 178, 178n21, 198, 227, 228

Barkindji language 119, 120Barthes, Roland 21, 87n130 Bauer, Marion 20, Beethoven, Ludwig van 3Benjamin, Walter 156Bennett, David 207n31, 219n81Behind the Scenery (Alsop) 217,

228

Index 259

Bent Leather Band (Favilla and Cannon) 179

Bergman, Aeron 115–16Berg, Alban 91, 106Berio, Luciano 20, 163 Bevan, Anne 142–3, 142n118Biocentennerary Afterimage (Anderson)

205–6, 228‘Birthday’ (Connors) 99–100, 229Birtwistle, Harrison 20,Blake, Teresa 185n50, 187, 190n68, Blesser, Barry 139, 139n105, 151n19Blisters Ensemble 179, 228Blue Grassy Knoll 186bodies; the body 25, 33, 45, 50, 51,

51n66, 53, 67, 68, 74, 75, 75n71, 83, 93, 101, 102, 113, 125, 128, 157, 167–8, 169, 189, 201, 212–15, 226, 228, 229

BOK Darklord’s Untitled Album (O’Kneel and Darklord) 174–7, 178, 184, 197, 209, 229

Bolleter, Ross 85, 134n85, 193–6, 193n78, 197, 217, 227

Boonawrung people 122Boulez, Pierre 20, 21, 32, 173Bourriaud, Nicolas 40n25, 47bowed harmonics 76–7Brahms, Johannes 195Brecht, George 4n5, 24, 104, 108n32Breton, André 105, 107‘Bridge Symphony’ (Rose, Jodi) 131–2,

227Broadstock, Brenton 161–3, 227Broomfield, Howard 54Brophy, Gerard 185–90Brophy, Philip 30, 71n51, 80–3, 1

92–3, 196–7, 229Brown, Earl 20Bryars, Gavin 181,Buck, Tony 204Buddhism 20, 129bullroarer 77Bunurong people 122, 123built environment 38, 51, 115, 141–4,

146, 167 Burke and Wills 18n14Burke, Brigid 126, 144, 146, 227

Burgate, Ralph Eppel 84Burt, Warren 6–7, 9, 9n27, 10, 13n45,

14n47, 22n14, 62, 63, 63n11, 66, 68, 71n51, 77, 83, 85–6, 86n126, 87n129, 88, 91–4, 95, 128–9, 146, 179–82, 179n27, 203, 206, 209, 216–17, 216n67, 227, 228

Cage, John 3n2, 4, 4n5, 7–8, 7n15, 11, 17, 19, 19n1, 20, 20n4, n5, 24, 25, 27–8, 27n28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 42n33, 43, 44, 46, 49n57, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56–8, 56n88, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 83, 84, 92, 94, 103–4, 104n14, 107–8, 115, 144, 153, 160n49, 177–8, 182–4, 182n41, 191, 195, 198, 199, 217, 227, 229, see also Experimental Music (1957): ‘Address to the Convention of the Music Teachers National Association’ (Cage) 19n1, 57; For the Birds (Cage) 27n29, 115n1; ‘Future of Music: Credo (1937), The’ (Cage) 104n14; Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage) 191; Music of Changes (Cage) 20n5, 46; silence – Cagean 4, 50, 56–8, 229; Silence (Cage) 27n30, 31n48; Silent Prayer (Cage) 27, 153

Cagean silence 4, 50, 56–8, 229Cain, George 90Callaway, Frank 61Campbell, John 10, 63Canberra City Walk 148Cannon, Joanne 179Cardew, Cornelius 20, 67, 67n30, 68,

69 ‘CarelessSniffle-MaxiBacon’

(MaxxxiBacon) 210–11, 229 Carter, Elliot 20Cary, Tristram 8, 8n24Cascone, Kim 199Cassenoisette (Linz) 183cassettes, audio 37n15, 63, 64–5, 64n14,

n15, n16, 70, 220 Cathcart, Michael 118n14Cello Chi (Hopkins) 76–7


Chamber Made Opera (CMO) 185–90, 228, 229

CHCMC, see Clifton Hill Community Music Centre

chance procedures 20, 24, 91Chartier, Richard 62n4, 199Chesworth, David 30, 71, 83–4, 94–5,

95n156, 103, 108–10, 117, 148–51, 154, 206, 229

Chion, Michel‘anempathic’ sounds 190

choice, artistic 24, 28n33, 45–7, 176Chopin, Frédéric 87, 195,cinematic traditions 184–90cities, connectivity in 132City Frequencies (Adair and Wilson) 154classification of experimental music

3n2, 19–20, 22–3, 42, 45Clearing the Air (Henderson) 90, 227Clément, Catherine 107, 105n21, 113,

190n70Clifton Hill Community Music Centre

(CHCMC) 10, 10n34, 16, 30, 63, 65n22, 66, 67, 68, 70, 70n46, 71, 71n51, 80, 83, 89, 95, 108, 118

Cologne Studios 26colonialism

and land ownership 55, 130, 193pianos sent to the outback 133–4see also postcolonialism

commands in everyday events 147, 149–52

Company Fuck (CxFx) 209, 229composer as label 62, 62n5, 66Composition 1960 No. 2 (Young) 46Composition 1960 No. 7 (Young) 24Composition 1960 No. 10 (Young) 24conceptual art 24, 25, 43, 57Connor, Steven 32, 53Connors, Carolyn 99–100, 204, 229Conrad, Tony 72context, postmodernism and sound art

23, 25, 27, 34, 38, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54

Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (McClary) 180n30

Cook, Captain James 90

Corbin, Alain 139Corompt, Martine 192–3, 229country music 84–5Country Music of Southeastern Australia

(Rue) 84, 229Cowell, Henry 6, 6n10, 7n15, 12,

20, 104n14 Cox, Cristoph 3n2, 6n12, 24n17, 30n40,

n41, 31n44, 32n51, n52, 44n41, 64, 64n13, 176n15

Cox, Ian 80, 83n115Crawford, Ruth 20Crichton Installation (McCombe and

Bevan) 142–4, 228critics’ reactions 69, 69n42, 69n43,

71, 151, 187n57, 189, 211, 212Crosbie, Simon 136–7, 146, 161, 227Cross, Burnett 5n7, 7, 177Crossfire (Marclay) 184Crow, Richard 156–7CSIRAC 8Cubitt, Sean 144n126culture

as ‘available library’ 176change of as mission 63nature/culture dichotomy 91–4,

202–5, 217, 226; see Attunements (Schieve); Biocentennerary Afterimage (Anderson); Crichton Installation (McCombe and Bevan); Dead Centre: The Body with Organs (Neumark, Stewart, Miranda and White); Dredge (Duncan and Hayes); Dry (McCombe); Fester (MFMS); GeneMusik (Helyer); Great Fences of Australia Project (Rose and Taylor); Inner Worlds (Vine); Ivories in the Outback (Rose); Internalised City (Sabiel); Mantrae (Burt); No Answer (Brophy and Corompt); Phobia (Brophy and CMO); Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound Installation (Paine); Ruined Pianos (Bolleter); Say Ah (DeLys and Grounds); Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit No. 1

Index 261

(Burt); Songs of the Gotholin (Hullick); Sounding the Winds (Drummond); Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out (Stelarc); Subjective Beats Metaphor (Burt and Mann); Summoned Voices (Mott and Raszewski); The Gordon Assumption (Chesworth and Leber); The Immaterials (Madsen); The Master’s Voice (Chesworth and Leber); The Oscillators (Hinterding); This Map is Not to Scale (Flynn and Humphrey); Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds); To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas) (Young); Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich); Whispers of the City (Loizou); see also works by Bandt, Hopkins

preservation of inherited 163, 93, 195

Curgenven, Robert 117Cusick, Suzanne 51n66, 137 CxFx, Company Fuck 209, 229

Dada 20n3, 90, 91, 94, 150Dale, Jon 80, 82n108D’Angelo, James 72, 73Dahlhaus, Carl 180Darklord, Lucas 174–7, 178, 184,

197, 209, 229Darmstadt 90Davies, Elaine 65Davis, Bruce 55Davis, Graeme 68, 89Davis, John 28n32, n35Dean, Roger 140–1, 146, 227Dead Centre: The Body with Organs

(Neumark, Stewart, Miranda and White) 167–8, 228

Debord, Guy 149 decisions, artistic 45–7DeLys, Sherre 124–5, 125n52, 144, 146,

147–8, 156, 163n69, 227, 229Denley, Jim 69n42, 203didjeridoo/didjeridu 90, 122

digitalization, impact of 8, 11–12, 32, 32n52, 36n8, 37, 43, 44, 53, 64, 86, 118, 119n22, 148n8, 176n15, 191, 201, 203, 205, 209, 228

Divide by 4? No, Divide by 3 (Institute for Dronal Anarchy) 68–9

do-it-yourself (DIY) approach 31–2, 46, 63–6, 71–2, 71n53, 80

Dr Burt’s Disco-fat Arkestra Plays Their Greatest Hits (Burt) 83

Dredge (For Percussion Quartet) 122–4, 227

Drummond, Jon 202–3, 228Dry (McCombe) 141–2, 143, 144, 228Duchamp, Marcel 4, 81, 113Duncan, Eve 116, 122–4, 144, 146, 227Dunn, David 143, 145Dunn, Leslie C. 105n20, 106n22, n24 Dyson, Frances 100–3, 101n5, 113, 136,

161, 227, 229Dysrhythmic Etudes (Linz) 87–8, 229

Earle, Matthew 201ecology

see also acoustic ecologyAttunements (Schieve) 127, 227Catherine Schieve 127–8, 227dimensions of in sound art 118–29Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

122–4, 227Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr)

(McLachlan and Hassell) 129, 129n64, 227

Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 121n31, 227

land art 35, 38Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227music as 115–17noise pollution 51n69, 55, 115, 133,

137, 155, 161n54, 218Speak Before It’s Too Late (Bandt)

126–7, 227Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds)

124–6, 299Voicing the Murray (Bandt) 118–21,

126, 227World Soundscape Project (WSP)

9–10, 54, 55, 115, 116, 118


écoute réduite 25–7, 28, 33, 200, 226n5

Eimert, Herbert 27Einstein, Albert 73Electric-Eye Tone-Tool 5n7, 177, 179 electro-acoustic music 26n22, n23, 27,

28, 35n3, 37, 37n14, 38, 49n57, 78, 83, 116, 136, 141–2, 155, 200, 201, 202, 203–4, 214, 215, 216–17, 218, 228

electronic music composition 5n7, 7n17, 8n24, 10, 11, 21, 23, 26n22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32n51, 35, 35n3, 36n8, 49n57, 53, 53n71, 80, 88, 91–4, 103, 111–12, 126, 162–7, 179, 191, 200n5, 203–5, 207, 208, 209, 213, 226, 227, 228

electronica 21, 35, 35n3, 37, 71n53, 79, 197

Electronic Music Studio (UK) 8Elgar, Edward 91Elegy in a Country Graveyard (Ford)

138–9, 228Embodied Voices: Representing Female

Vocality in Western Culture (Dunn and Jones) 105n20, 106n24

emotions in music 44–5, 75, 78, 81, 92, 93, 100, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 133, 137, 139, 146, 150, 155, 163, 174, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 200, 218, 227, 229

‘EnabledMIdget’ (MaxxxxiBacon) 210endometriosis, treatment of women with

101–3English, Lawrence 160–1, 208, 227Eno, Brian 23n16, 37n15, 38n17, 42,

42n33, 45, 82, 153, 155, 160Ensemble Offspring 28, 183environment

Attunements (Schieve) 127, 227Catherine Schieve 127–8, 227Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

122–4, 227ecological dimensions in sound art

118–29ecology, music as 115–17

Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr) (McLachlan and Hassell) 129, 129n64, 227

Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 121n31, 227

Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227noise pollution 55, 115, 133, 137, 155,

161n54, 218Speak Before It’s Too Late (Bandt)

126–7, 227Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds)


126, 227errors 53, 66, see also glitchEssendon Airport 80, 83–4, 227‘Etchings’ (Priest) 206–7, 228everyday events

Airport Symphony (English) 160–1, 208, 227

airports and air travel 160–1animals, communication with 149–51bodies; bodies in experimentalist and

sound artworks 25, 26, 33, 45, 50, 51n66, 52n69, 53, 67, 68, 74, 74n69, 75, 75n71, 77, 83, 91, 93, 101–2, 104, 112, 113, 114, 125, 128, 146n134, 157, 167–8, 169, 189, 201, 212–14, 226, 228, 229

commands in 147, 149–52Dead Centre: The Body with Organs

(Neumark, Stewart, Miranda and White) 167–8, 128

Imaginary Hospital Radio (Crow) 156–7

Marie Antoinette’s Shoe (Mortley) 157, 227

The Master’s Voice (Leber and Chesworth) 148–51, 148n8, 229

Muzak 30, 55, 81, 82, 83, 95, 152–7, 153n26, 162–3

Random Acts of Elevator Music (RAEM) (Adair and Wilson) 154–6, 154n29, 157, 162, 228

repression by authority 161–3Say Ahh (Grounds and Delys) 147–8,

156, 227shoes 125, 157–60

Index 263

Summoned Voices (Mott and Raszewski) 152, 228

Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich) 158–60, 166, 227

weddings 163–7, 169experimental music

accord/non-accord between different groups in 20–3, 22n14, 28, 29n36, 32, 52

aleatoric processes 7n15, 23, 31, 53, 65, 84, 125n52, 128, 139, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 226

and anarchy 31, 61, 66–72, 81, 91, see also Institute for Dronal Anarchy (IDA)

and artistic choice 45–7, 177as agent for social change 31, 32,

66classification of 3n2, 19–20, 22–3,

28, 32, 35, 36, 42, 45Cage’s reflections on 57

collapse of tradition of 42, 47resilience of 42n33

as disturbing not reassuring 42, 89, 155

dissolving boundary between noise and music 54

‘Downtown’ vs. ‘Uptown’ music 24, 24n17, 35

as ex-academy 72, 85–6, 203–4, 226 as ‘antidote’ to academic

modernism 72, 209growing own audience 30history of in Australia 4–10, 5n7,

8n21, 10n34, 13n45, n47, 14n47, n48, 32n53

iconoclasm in 66, 67, 68, 70, 90, 211identity of subgroups 22, 22n14, 28,

29n36‘open work’ 29, 43relationship to postmodernism 56, 61relationship to sound art 41, 44, 45,

54, 56, 61, 87staves, going beyond 24–5and mid-twentieth-century surrealism

103–5and taste, avoidance of 181technology 23, 48, 66

terminology 19, 35–6wilful contrariness 53see also DIY (do it yourself) approach;

Free Music (Grainger); Futurists; listening; modernism; noise; sound art

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Nyman) 19, 22, 25n19, 29n37, 42, 42n33, 52n70, 56n88

Experimental Music (1957): Address to the convention of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago (Cage) 19n1, 57

Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia (Priest) 13n45

Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal Schoenhut Toy Piano (Pertout) 183, 227

Extensible Toy Piano Project 183Extreme Music From Women (Lawley)

207

Fahrenheit 451 (Broadstock) (opera) 161–3, 227

Fairlight synthesizer 8, 79, 191Fatty Acid 66, 88, 95Favilla, Stuart 179Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr)


Feldman, Morton 20, 219female voice 99–103, 104, 105–7, 109–12,

113, 206‘Etchings’ (Priest) 206–7, 228The Gordon Assumption (Wax Sound

Media (Chesworth and Leber)) 103, 107, 108–10, 111, 229

Greetings (Connors) 99–100, 113, 229jouissance 107, 109, 113‘Tears’ (Greenwell) 111–12, 117n13,

187, 227Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136,

161, 227Feminimalism (Brophy) 82, 229feminism 14, 72n59, 99, 110, 113, 207feminization of sound objects

‘Etchings’ 206–7, 228


female voice 16, 99–103, 105–7, 109–12, 113, 114, 206

The Gordon Assumption (Wax Sound Media (Chesworth and Leber)) 103, 107, 108–10, 111, 229

Greetings (Connors) 99–100, 113, 229

heroines in opera, number of deaths of 107

postmodernism 112–14‘Tears’ (Greenwell) 103–4, 105, 108,

111–12, 113, 117n13, 187, 227water in sound art 103–5, 104n14,

108–12, 120Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136,

161, 227fences across the world, music from 130–1Fester (MFMS) 204, 228film traditions 184–90Fludd, Robert 73Fluxus movement 24, 25n19, 35, 95,

104, 155Flynn, Madeleine 218–19, 228Foley artists 186Fontana, Bill 10, 11, 79, 116, 131Ford, Andrew 62n4, 138–9, 146, 228formalism 4, 17, 21, 25, 27, 32, 33, 90, 92,

94, 100, 118, 132, 180, 182, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 208, 213, 217, 220, 221

Formula Disco (Brophy) 82Foster, Hal 199 Foucault, Michel 41, 198found objects 26, 65, 84, 87, 143, 181

lines, found 128see also musique concrète

Fountain (Duchamp) 4, 113For the Birds (Cage) 27n29, 115n1Fredericks, Ian 10Free Music 4–6, 5n7, 7n17, n19, 104,

123n39, 174, 177, 178, 178n21, 179, 198n99

Freud, Sigmund 73, 186, 188n61‘Future of Music: Credo (1937), The’

(Cage), 3n2, 104n14Futurists 3, 3n2, 20n3, 49, 53, 87,

114, 199

Gallagher, Ernie 69, 70, 70n47, 91, 227Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence

(Crosbie) 136–7, 146, 161, 227gardens, reflections on 217–18gender

‘Etchings’ (Priest) 206–7, 228female voice 16, 99–103, 104,

105–7, 109–12, 113, 206 Feminimalism (Brophy) 82, 229The Gordon Assumption (Wax Sound


Greetings (Connors) 99–100, 229heroines in opera, number of

deaths of 107masculinism and maverick

bad boys 207–12, 229postmodernism 112–14‘Tears’ (Greenwell) 103–4, 105, 108,

111–12, 113, 117n13, 187, 227water in sound art 103–5, 104n14,

108–12, 120Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136,

161, 227prevalence of male laptop performers

209women as ‘honorary members’ of

neo-modernist ‘bad boys’ club 207see also Hope, Cat

GeneMusik (Helyer) 202, 228geographico-political themes

Attunements (Schieve) 127, 227Australian-ness 71–2, 130–1, 138–41,

146 built environment 38, 51, 115, 141–4,

146, 176Catherine Schieve 127–8, 227Crichton Installation (McCombe

and Bevan) 142–4, 228Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

122–4, 227Dry (McCombe) 141–2ecological dimensions in sound art

118–29ecology, music as 115–17Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr)


Index 265

giant instruments 130–5Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 121n31,

227Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227language and identity 127memories from specific sites 135–6nature, giving voice to 144–5ownership of land 130–1pianos sent to the outback 133–4Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1

(Rose) 131–2Speak Before It’sToo Late (Bandt)

126–7, 227Surface Noise (Scanner) 116–17urban/rural terrains 135–8Voicing the Murray (Bandt) 118–21,

126, 227water in sound art 117, 120

giant instruments 130–3Gilbert, Les 71n51, 116Gideon, Miriam 20Gillies, Malcolm 17n7, 181Glam Rock 81–2Glass, Phillip 30glitch 35, 53, 65, 66, 129, 181, 199, 209Glitter, Gary 81, 82glissandi 5, 103, 109, 109n36, 110, 112,

183, 206gold rush, Victorian 123Goodge, Robert 83–4Grainger Museum, The 7, 178, 179, 228Grainger, Percy Aldridge 3, 4–6, 5n7,

6–7, 7n15, n17, n18, n19, 8, 21, 104, 123n39, 174, 177–82, 178n21, 183, 198, 199, 226, 228

Great Fences of Australia (Rose) 130–1, 227

Greenberg, Clement 21, 23, 105n21, 200, 200n7

Greenwell, Andrée 103–4, 105, 111–12, 117n13, 187, 227

Greetings (Connors) 99–100, 229Gregorian chant 134Grounds, Joan 124–6, 125n52, 144, 146,

147–8, 157, 227, 229Group Ongaku 26Group de Recherches Musicales (GRM)

26

Gunter, Bernhard 199gynecology, treatment of women in

101–3

Habermas, Jürgen 54Hamel, Peter 73–4, 73n62, 122Handel, George Frederick 104, 108Happenings 4, 24, 30n42, 35, 100, 167harmonic singing 74–5, 76Harrison, Martin 191Hassell, Anton 129, 129n64, 145, 146, 227Hassell, Jon 30 Hausswolff, Carl Michael von 199Hayes, Siri 116, 122–4, 144, 146, 227Hegarty, Paul 37, 138 Hellermann, William 9, 36heightened listening 27–8, 33Helyer, Nigel 202, 228Henderson, Moya 90, 90n140, 227Henry, Pierre 26Henty, Tom 119n17heroines in opera, number of deaths of 107high modernism 17, 20–1, 24, 41–2, 43,

46, 49, 82, 87, 90, 108, 148, 187, 203, 221, 229

formalism in, 20–1in rock music 177music’s ‘exemplary position’ in

(Greenberg) 23paradoxical accord between avant-

garde and academic modernist music 20–1

unique imprint of artist’s ‘voice’ 21, 195

high/low divide 11, 12, 20–1, 36, 37, 44, 49, 52, 54, 61, 63, 79–85, 83–4, 95, 99, 147, 177, 184–5, 185n52, 201, 209

Hindson, Matthew 219–20, 229Hinduism 74, 127Hinterding, Joyce 204–5, 228Hitchcock, Alfred 185, 186, 188historical references in sound art 87–9Hobbs, Chris 181Homage to John Cage (Mann and Mills)

182, 229Hope, Cat 207, 211–12, 228, 229Hopkins, Sarah 73, 76–8, 95, 228


Horton, Douglas 185, 186, 188n58, 190n66

‘How to be a Great Composer’ (Burt) 62Hullick, James 200, 228human-made environment 141–4Humble, Keith 10, 62Humphrey, Tim 218–19, 228Huse, Peter 55Hutcheon, Linda 39, 41, 41n29, 44, 173,

173n5, 198, 221, 225Huxley, Aldous 153Hymnen (Stockhausen) 191

I Am Piano (Brophy) 196–7, 197–8, 229I Am Sitting in a Room (Lucier) 135I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes)

20, 20n5i x it and (i x it)2 (Stewart) 214IDA (Institute for Dronal Anarchy) 68–9,

89, 95identity

and language 127‘psychoanalytic subject’ 14, 26n26,

103, 104–7, 105n20, 106n25, 108, 110, 141, 188n61

see also The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Silverman); The Gordon Assumption (Chesworth and Leber); ‘Tears’ (Greenwell); Window Pain (Dyson)

and shoes 159ideology 41, 44, 46, 141Imaginary Hospital Radio (Crow) 156–7Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage) 191improvisation 4, 26, 35, 62, 68, 68n34, 69,

76, 77, 89, 99, 112, 131, 136, 139, 152, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185, 196, 201, 203, 208n35, 209, 210, 216

In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (Kim-Cohen) 3n2, 4n5, 26n22, 67n25, 153n26, 200n7

indigenous peoplessee also Aboriginalitycolonialism and land ownership 131Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

122–4, 227

Inner World (Vine) 215–16, 228inner worlds 215–19Innocent Records 30Institute for Dronal Anarchy (IDA)

68–9, 89, 95Institute of Contemporary Art, London 9Institute of Contemporary Art, Sydney 10Internalised City (Sabiel) 214, 228Interweave (Hopkins) 77intonarumori 185, Ives, Charles 86, 87Ivories in the Outback (Rose) 133–4,

193, 227

Jameson, Fredric 39n24, 41, 42n34, 173, 173n5

Japanese avant-garde music 26–7, 27n26, 199

Jardine, Alice 44Jeffes, Simon 30 Jenkins, John 61–2, 62–3, 128, 136–7Jenks, Charles 41, 44, 198, 221Jones, Nancy A. 105n20, 106n22, n24jouissance 107, 109, 113Journeys on the Wind of Time (Lamb)

78–9, 228Jung, Carl 73

Kagel, Mauricio 20, 90n140 Kahn, Douglas 11, 11n36, 14, 14n48,

34n57, 49–50, 51n66, 57, 57n91, 79–80, 83n117, 93, 94, 103–4, 104n14, 105, 108, 114n53, 118n14, 131n73, 146n134, 177n17, 225n3

Karl, Sieglind 118n17 Kepler, Johannes 73Kerman, Joseph 15n52keyboard instruments sent to the outback

133–4Kim-Cohen, Seth 3n2, 4n5, 26n22, 67n25,

153n26, 200n7 Kingston, Greg 204Kits Beach (Westerkamp) 124, 145n132kitsch 33, 83, 100, 157, 209Klangkunst 11, 11n37Knowles, Julian 28n34, 37n15Korg synthesizer 84

Index 267

Kouvaras, Linda 10n33, 15n52, 91n145, 99n2, 100n4, 103n10, 106n25, 107n29, 111n47, n48, n49, 123n38, n40, n42, n46, 124n47, n48, 138n101, 148n7, 149n9, n11, n12, n13, 150n15, n16, 154n29, n30, 162n57, 163n59, 178n21, 180n28, n31, 184n47, n48, 193n78, 205n24, n25, 207n31, 216n67, 219n81

Kramer, Jonathan D. 15n52, 23n15, 40, 47, 48n52, 213

Kramer, Lawrence 15n52, 47, 174, 197Kristeva, Julia 105Kronos Quartet 130n66Kubisch, Christina 11

label, composer as 62, 62n5, 66LaBelle, Brandon 13n46, 24n18, 26n25,

27n26, 28n29, n30, n31, 32n49, 36–7, 37n10, 40n26, 44n38, 45, 47n50, 50n63, 51n64, 57n90, 58n92, 84n119, 103n9, 135–6, 138n98, 146n133, 153n27, 156n40

Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 121n31, 227Lamb, Alan 78–9, 95, 132–3, 200n5, 217 Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227Lander, Dan 36Landy, Leigh 11n35, n37, 13n46, 15,

25n21, 26n22, n23, n24, 29n36, 35n1, n3, 37n13, n15, 38n16, n18, n19, 45n45, 46n48, n49, 48n56, 49n57, 51n67, 55n80, n81, 151n21, 155n36, 215, 215n64

language and identity 127Last Resort, The (Sydney) 63Latrobe University (Melbourne) 10, 80 Law, Steve 137–8, 146, 228Leber, Sonia 103, 105, 112, 117n13,

124n50, 136n91, 148–51, 154, 206Led Zeppelin 82,174, 176, 184, 197, 229Lemper, Ute 159Leppert, Richard 65n19, 193Lettrist/Lettrism 91, 100Licht, Alan 36, 52n71, 79Linden Gallery (Melbourne) 122n36lines, found 128

Linz, Rainer 13n45, n47, 62, 65, 71–2, 87–8, 89, 95, 136–7, 179, 183, 212, 229

listeningartist’s role (Voeglin) 46Cage’s experience in an anechoic

chamber 52n69heightened 27–8, 33, 57, 67, 68, 210,

226Deep Listening (Oliveros) 72

listener’s role (Voeglin) 46, 88(DeLys and Grounds) 125(Stasis Duo) 201(MFMS) 203

as passive in Muzak, critique of (Adorno and Huxley) 153

new ways of 29n37, 30, 33, 34, 46, 55, 82, 94, 95, 153, 160, 169, 192n75

practice 75reduced 25–7, 28, 33, 200, 226n5sound art as a process of 39, 51,

52n71, 64and technology 30–1, 38, 65, 79n47,

93, 94, 101n5, 151virtuosic 28–30, 31see also acousmatic music

Listening Room, The 9, 116, 126n55, 131n73, 157n44, n45, 163n60, 178n23, 179n25

Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Voeglin) 26n24, 40n26, 124n49, 144n125, 145n132, 200n3

Lockwood, Annea 99, 104, 118n14, 196, 196n91

Loizou, Sofie 218, 229Lopez, Francisco 160n50, 199Lorca, Federico Garcìa 219Lowlands (Philipsz) 12Lucier, Alvin 21, 78, 135‘Lunchtime Meditation Session’ (RAEM)

155Lyotard, Jean-François 40, 44

Macarthur, Sally 72, 72n59, n60, 73, 207n31

Machine for Making Sense (MFMS) 64, 203–4, 228


Madsen, Virginia 191, 227Mahler, David 181Mahler, Gustav 87, 138, 163Mann, Chris 71, 91–4, 95, 182, 203,

228Mantrae (Burt) 216–17, 228mantras 74, 111, 216, 216n67Marclay, Christian 184Marie Antoinette’s Shoe (Mortley) 157,

227, 229masculinism and maverick bad boys

207–12, 229Master’s Voice, The (Chesworth and

Leber) 148–51, 148n8, 229maverick bad boys 207–12, 229MaxxxxiBacon 209–11McCartney, Andra 29n36, 99McClary, Susan 13, 17n54, 180n30McCombe, Christine 141–4, 145, 228McKenna, Terence 205, McLachlan, Neil 129, 129n64, 145,

146, 227McLennan, Andrew 134n85, 138, 191McLuhan, Marshall 12, 32n51, 48,

94, 205‘medium is the message’ (McLuhan),

altered perspectives on 12, 48, 94, 199–205, 219–20

Melba, Dame Nellie 125Melbourne International Arts Festival

108, 109n36, 154n28memories from specific sites 135–6Mendelssohn, Felix 165Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 143–4Merzbow 199 meta-stance in sound art 54

The Wedding Photograph (Mortley) 163–7, 169, 227

Microscopic Trips (Arn) 137Mid-air Conversations (Smith and Dean)

140–1, 227Milhaud, Darius 30 Mills, Jonathan 182Mind/Body/Split 64 minimalist/minimalism 4, 19, 24, 35, 72,

73, 82, 84, 95, 155, 185, 205Minimalism (Brophy) 82Miranda, Maria 167, 168, 228

mistakes 66, see also glitchmixed music 215–16modernism

academic, mocking of 89–90, 94, 187accord between modernism and

experimentalism 22, 88accord between modernism,

masculinism 207avoidance of ‘contamination’ from

proliferating mass culture 148‘dominant but dead’ (Habermas) 54experimentalism as ‘antidote’ to 72interplay with postmodernism 199,

221The Immaterials (Madsen) 191, 227noise in 200n3return to 199shunning emotion/emotiveness 81, 92,

93, 107, 108, 174, see also altermodern, compromised emotiveness in

specialist devotees 21see also formalism; high modernism;

neo-modernism; postmodernismMortley, Kaye 157, 158, 163–7, 227Monk, Meredith 20, 99, 207Monk, Thelonius 197Moss, David 85Mott, Iain 152, 227movie traditions 184–90Murphie, Andrew 32music

continuous presence of 152–3see also noise as; noise and separation of from life 25

Music As Torture / Music As Weapon (Cusick) 51n66

music therapy 148, 155Music of Changes (Cage) 20n5, 46musique concrète 3, 25–6, 26n22,

27, 28, 30n40, 34, 35, 65, 181Mutti Mutti tribe 121, 122Muzak 30, 55, 81, 82, 83, 95, 152–7,

153n26, 162–3

Nagorcka, Ron 9, 10, 63, 63n11, 64n11, 68, 70n48, 70, 89, 90, 227, 228

Nallan Void (Bolleter) 194–5

Index 269

Nancarrow, Conlon 7n15, 20Narrative Music (Brophy) 82National New Music Conference

(Melbourne) (1992) 99nature, giving voice to 56, 69, 75, 144–5see nature/culture dichotomy

see also outdoorsNaylor, Steve 121neo-modernism

altermodern dialogues with 205–7as more defined in sound art than other

arts (Cox) 200Behind the Scenery (Alsop) 217, 228Biocentennerary Afterimage

(Anderson) 205–6, 228bodies 189, 201, 212–15Cat Hope 211–12, 229Company Fuck (CxFx) 209, 229defined 199–200dialogues with postmodernism 220–1‘Etchings’ (Priest) 206–7, 228Extreme Music From Women (Lawley)

207GeneMusik (Helyer) 202, 228i x it and (i x it)2 (Stewart) 214Inner World (Vine) 215–16, 228inner worlds 215–19Internalised City (Sabiel) 214, 228Lucas Abela 208–9, 208n35, 229Machine for Making Sense (MFMS)

64, 203–4, 228 Mantrae (Burt) 216–17, 228masculinism and maverick bad boys

207–12, 229MaxxxxiBacon 209–11‘medium is the message’ (McLuhan),

altered perspectives on 12, 48, 94, 199–205, 219–20

mixed music 215–16The Oscillators (Hinterding) 204–5,

228public gardens, reflections on 217–18re-sound 201Songs of the Gotholin (Hullick) 200,

228Sounding the Winds (Drummond)

202–3, 228

Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage-Out (Stelarc) 212–13, 214, 229

Stasis Duo 201This Map is Not to Scale (Flynn and

Humphrey) 218–19, 228Video Game Dreaming (Hindson)

219–20, 229Whispers of the City (Loizou) 218, 229White Noise 201see also high modernism; modernism;

postmodernismNew-age music 35 New Maps of Hyperspace (McKenna) 205New Music Articles (NMA) 61, 80New Music Newspaper 71n51New Musicology 15Neumark, Norie 167–8, 199, 228New Waver, see Wadley, Greg. 184, 228Nice Noise (Brophy) 82Nicholls, David 19, 22n14, 42, 42n35,

225n2Nicolai, Carsten (aka Noto) 199Night Satellite (Wesley-Smith) 79, 228No Answer (Brophy and Corompt) 192–3,

198, 228nocturnal spaces 141–4noir, film 185–90noise

aircraft 161as definer of modernity (Connor) 32deleterious effects of 51n66enduring, as category 11, 16, 49–53existence of 49–53in films 185–6inversion of relationship with music

16, 66manifestations of 51–2metaphorical dimension to 10, 27n26,

33, 40n26, 51, 52, 68, 129see also Attali 9, 33, 49, 63, 68, 225

in modernism 72, 95, 177, 199, 200n3, 206

and music 6, 6n10, 14, 53n71, 54, 229as music 3–4, 53, 65, 85, 95, 133,

137–8,142, 143, 183, 184, 203, 209–11


in music making 38, 51, 53, 84, 104, 111, 112, 128–9, 133, 137–8, 142, 143, 155, 162, 175, 181, 183, 184, 203, 209–11, 215, 218

Nice Noise (Brophy) 82‘noise-ists’, self-proclaimed 17,

28n33, 35, 53, 80n96, 87, 114, 128, 133, 201, 206, 207, 208, 209–11,

see also Futurists 3, 3n2, 20n3, 49, 53, 87, 114, 199

Phobia (Brophy and CMO) 185–90, 198, 228

pollution 55, 115, 133, 137, 139, 153, 155, 161, 161n54

sound dissolving into (Lucier’s and Stockhausen’s shared artistic goal) 21

Surface Noise (Scanner) 116as torture 51n66Subjective Beats Metaphor (Burt and

Mann) 91–4, 95, 203, 228,White Noise 201see also Acoustic Ecology 54–6,

72n60, 115, 188, 119, 133, 137, 218

Noise/Music: A History (Hegarty)Noise: The Political Economy of Music

(Attali)Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound

in the Arts (Kahn)Norris, Michael 15nostalgia

4’33” Techno Remix (Wadley) 184, 197, 228

anachronism 42, 197anti-rock 174–7archaeology of knowledge 197–8Bent Leather Band (Favilla and

Cannon) 179BOK Darklord’s Untitled Album

(O’Kneel and Darklord) 174–7, 184, 197, 209, 229

Cage, paeans to 182–4Cassenoisette (Linz) 183cinematic traditions 184–90Exposiciones for Sampled Microtonal

Schoenhut Toy Piano (Pertout) 183, 227

A Global Bridge for Percy (Bandt and Sistermann) 178, 228

Grainger, paeans to 177–82historical avant-garde 173–4Homage to John Cage (Mann and

Mills) 182, 229I Am Piano (Brophy) 196–7, 197–8,

229The Immaterials (Madsen) 191To Keep Things Reasonable (Young)

182–3, 229Nallan Void (Bolleter) 194–5Percy’s Dream: Harmonics Fantasy

(Burt) 179–80Phobia (Brophy and CMO) 185–90,

198, 228, 229pianos 193–7, 197–8Ruined Pianos (Bolleter) 193–6,

197–8, 227Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger

Counterfeit No. 1 (Burt) 180–2, 227

Skeleton in the Museum (Blisters Ensemble) 179, 228

NOW now Festival in Sydney, 2003 207, 211

Nugent, Ted 153Nyman, Michael 19, 20, 22, 30,

42, 52, 56n88Nyunga language 134

O’Kneel, Buttress 174–7, 178, 184, 197, 209, 229

‘Old Whines in New Battles, or 20th-Century Music and 18th-Century Reviewers’ (Anson) 71

Oliveros, Pauline 20, 29–30, 72, 73n64, 99, 297

One Flat Gallery, Brisbane 10, 63n10O’Neill, Shannon 176n15Ono, Yoko 24opera

heroines, number of deaths of 107historical reference to 88pure cry in 106–7

Opera, or, The Undoing of Women (Clément) 107, 113, 190n70

O’Rourke, Jim 36, 38n17, 52n71, 62n4, 79

Index 271

Oswald, John 174outdoors

Attunements (Schieve) 127, 227Catherine Schieve 127–8, 227Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

(Duncan and Hayes) 122–4, 227engagement with 116Federation Bells (Birrarung Marr)


Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 227Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227nature, giving voice to 144–5pianos 193–6public gardens, reflections on 217–18Surface Noise (Scanner) 116–17Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds)

124–6, 229urban/rural terrains 135–8Voicing the Murray (Bandt) 118–21,

126, 227water in sound art 117, 120

ownership of land 130–1

Paderewski, Ignace 125pain, feelings of 102–3Paine, Garth 217, 227Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels 9n27‘Paragraph 2’ (Cardew) 69Partch, Harry 7n15, 20, 104n14 Passion (Greenwell) see ‘Tears’ 103–4,

105, 108, 111–12, 113, 117n13, 187, 227

Pear, David 17n7, 181Percy’s Dream: Harmonics Fantasy (Burt)

179–80Pereira, David 215Pertout, Andrián 183, 227Phenomenology of Perception

(Merleau-Ponty) 144Philipsz, Susan 12Phobia (Brophy and CMO) 185–90,

198, 228Physarmonica (Wilkins) 89pianos

deconstructed 193–7sent to the outback 133–4see also WARPS

Piché, Jean 79Piece for Old Accordion (Wilkins) 88–9,

227place, engagement with, see geographico-

political themesPlanck, Max 73Plastic Platypus 9, 68Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as

a Compositional Prerogative (Oswald) 174

Poizat, Michel 106–7, 109, 110n45, 111political dimensions in sound art, see

geographico-political themesPolitics of Postmodernism, The (Hutcheon)

39n21, 41n31, 44n39, n42, 56n87, 173n2, n5, 197n96, 221n86, 225n4

pop musicengagement with 73, 79–85, 176, 209,

210and sound art 52, 52n71, 197see also high/low divide

Port Essington for Strings (Sculthorpe) 10postcolonialism 10, 14, 146

Ivories in the Outback (Rose) 133–4, 193, 227

Salvado (Rose) 134–5, 227Speak Before It’s Too Late (Bandt)


126, 227post-digital age, see digitalization, impact

ofpostmodernism

accessibility of 46–7, 193, 209altermodern 9, 40, 43, 44, 47–8, 54,

226, 229anarchy; post-anarchic elements 149;

152–7; 175and ‘anything goes’ 16, 52, 211Burt’s early sound art as antagonism

with 85–6Chesworth’s early sound art as

embracement of 83–4; 95appropriation 180;

see also quotation of musical works

and complicit critique 41, 44, 44n42, 83, 86, 111, 130, 155, 157, 198, 220


and context 45, 199–200, 226n5disembarkation point from modernism

20, 27, 30n42, 54, 56–8, 61, 91, 95, 108, 185, 187–8, 190, 200, 229

see also Cagean silenceas embodying sound art 12, 16, 40,

225–6and engagements with popular

culture/vernacular 22, 41, 42, 52, 79–83, 84, 87, 95, 103–4, 139, 147, 176n15see also high/low divide

engagement with 85–7essential aspects for sound art 34,

39, 40–3, 56–8feminization of sound objects 112–14highlighting codes 15, 111–12, 33, 58,

197, 226and the ideology of representation 41and inclusion of historical referents

42, 87, 88, 125, 162, 173, 181, 198and irony 41, 42, 81, 82, 84, 90, 95,

99, 100, 108, 110, 111, 113, 149, 173, 174, 186, 187, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 226

and the mind and emotions 44–5, 75, 92–3, 100, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 136, 137, 144, 146, 150, 155, 168, 174, 176, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 215, 218, 227, 229 see also altermodern, compromised

emotiveness in; emotions in music; modernism, shunning emotion/emotiveness; postmodernism and the mind and emotions; neo-modernism, dialogues with 220–1, 229

and playfulness 42, 81, 84, 88, 89, 94, 95, 124, 125, 148, 151, 155,156, 163, 196, 199, 200n3, 208, 209

and plurality 16, 28, 49, 182, 182n38, 199, 227

post-formalism 27, 132, 200, 214and process over product 56, 65proto-postmodernism 27, 48, 87,

87n129, 90questioning of the authorial voice 65,

198

self-aware situatedness 39, 43of sound art 43–5as space for debate 39–40technology as deeply implicated in 11,

12, 40, 53, 66, 84, 139, 192, 213, 220

see also bodies; ecology; high/low divide; modernism; nature/culture dichotomy; neo-modernism; nostalgia; postcolonialism; post-digital age; quotation

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson)

Pot of Gold (talent show) 70Potts, John 32Presley, Elvis 159Priest, Gail 206–7, 228production process, foregrounding of 65progress and technological determinism 33public gardens, reflections on 217–18‘Pingulsn’Tdead’ (MaxxxxiBacon) 210Punk Band (Brophy) 82‘pure cry’ in opera 106–7Pythagoras 26n22, 55, 73

quotation as guilt-free plundering, see BOK

Darklordof musical works in sound art works

BOK Darklord’s Untitled Album 174–7, 184, 197, 209, 229

‘CarelessSniffle’ (MaxxxxiBacon) 210–11, 229

Elegy in a Country Garden (Ford) 138–9, 228

Fatty Acid 88Phobia (Brophy and CMO)

185–90, 198, 228Riffs for Ross (Burt) 85 Samples II for Orchestra: Ravel

Homage (That Which is Neither a Deconstruction nor an Appropriation, Neither Bricolage Nor Post-Modern) (Burt) 85–7

Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit No. 1 (Burt) 180–2, 227

Index 273

The Wedding Photograph (Mortley) 163–7, 169, 227

This Map is Not to Scale (Flynn and Humphrey) 218–9, 228

Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich) 158–60, 227

as pastiche/parody 173see also postmodernism, appropriation; modernism; nostalgia

quotidian sound, see everyday

Radano, Ronald 155Rainer, Yvonne 57, 57n90 Random Acts of Elevator Music (RAEM)

(Adair and Wilson) 153–7, 162, 228

‘Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-century Culture’ (McClary) 13, 17n54

Raszewski, Marc 152, 227Ravlich, Robyn 158–60, 166, 227re-sound 201, 228Reconstructed Electric-Eye Tone-Tool 2

project (Burt) 179–80recorded sound 93

and listening 30–1The Wedding Photograph (Mortley)

163–7, 169, 227reduced listening 25–7, 28, 33, 200, 226n5Reeds: A Responsive Environmental Sound

Installation (Paine) 217, 227Reiner, Thomas 201, 228representation 41repression by authority

Fahrenheit 451 (Broadstock) (opera) 161–3, 227

Gaol Piece: The Architecture of Silence (Crosbie) 136–7, 146, 161, 227

Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136, 161, 227

responsibilities of artists and listeners 46–7reviewers’ reactions 69, 69n42, 71, 151,

187n57, 189, 211, 212Riffs for Ross (Burt) 85Robboy, Rob 181rock music, forays against/plunderings

of 174–7

Roden, Steve 199Rodgers, Tara 207‘rooms’ works

by Bandt 119by Lucier 78, 135by LaBelle 135–6by McCombe and Bevan 142–4 by MFMS 204 by Sabiel 214

Room Tone (LaBelle) 135–6Rooney, Robert 7–8Rose, Jodi 131–2, 145, 217, 227Rose, Jon 62, 64, 65n19, 84–5,

130–5, 145, 146, 179, 193, 208n35, 227

Roussel, Raymond 104, 105, 107Rue, Rik 64–5, 64n15, 84, 87, 203Ruined Pianos (Bolleter) 193–6, 197–8,

227rural/urban terrains 135–8Russo, Mary 49Sabiel, Anna 214, 228Sachiko M. 199Salinas, Alejandra 115–16Salter, Linda-Ruth 139Salvado (Rose) 134–5, 227Salzman, Eric 42n33, 43, 48 Samples II for Orchestra: Ravel

Homage (That Which is Neither a Deconstruction nor an Appropriation, Neither Bricolage Nor Post-Modern) (Burt) 85–7

sampling 85–6, 176, 203, 212sobbing 111–12

Samson, Jim 22Satie, Eric 30, 104n14Say Ahh (Grounds and Delys) 147–8, 156,

227Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) 116–17Schaeffer, Pierre 13n46, 25–6, 27,

28, 30, 30n40, 31, 33–4, 55, 56, 94, 176n15

Schafer, R. Murray 9, 12, 51, 54, 55–6, 144, 153, 155, 195, 225

Schiemer, Greg 70, 227Schieve, Catherine 127–8, 144,

179n27, 227Schoenberg, Arnold 162, 185n52


scholarship on sound art 13–15Schumann, Robert 124, 195SCM Electronics 28score-free/score-based music 20, 24Scott, Stephen 193n78Scratch Orchestra, The 67–8n30, 68Sculthorpe, Peter 10sense, transcending 90–4Sentimentals No. 3: Grainger Counterfeit

No. 1 (Burt) 180–2, 227Serge Modular Synthesizer 80, 83serialist/serialism 3, 4, 19, 20, 21, 22,

89, 95Sessions, Roger 20SET, see Adam Sussmann, Matthew Earle

and Amanda Stewart 201SEUSS electronic music studio, Sydney

University 10Seven Rare Dreamings (Nagorcka

and Althoff) 90, 227Shiomi, Mieko 104Shoji, Osamu 79shoes 125, 157–59, see Marie Antoinette’s

Shoe (Mortley); Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds); Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich)

silence – Cagean 4, 50, 56–8, 229Silence (Cage) 27n30, 31n48Silent Prayer (Cage) 27, 153Silverman, Kaja 105–6 Sinatra, Nancy 159Sistermann, Johannes S. 178situatedness

of history 41self-aware, of postmodernism 43

Situationist International 149Skeleton in the Museum (Blisters

Ensemble) 179, 228Smith, Hazel, see Roger Deansobbing, sampling of 111–12social change, technology as agent of

32–3Social Interiors 64Some Conditions of Obedience and

Disobedience to Authority (Sw Sw Thrght) 63, 227

Song Company, The 183

Song to Dissolve the World: Part 1 (Rose) 131–2, 145, 217, 227

Songs of the Gotholin (Hullick) 200, 228Sonic Investigations of the Trivial

(Essendon Airport) 83–4, 227sound art

4’33” as launching pad for 56–8accessibility of 46–7affinity with media arts 37–8n15and artistic choice 45–7coining of term 36and context 45cross-pollination by other disciplines

37–8defining 36–9, 52n71as embodying postmodernism 40engagements with popular culture and

postmodern theory 79–85see also 4’33” Techno Remix

(Wadley), 50 Synthesizer Greats (Chesworth), BOK Darklord’s Untitled Album (O’Kneel and Darklord), ‘CarelessSniffle’ (MaxxxxiBacon), Dr Burt’s Disco-fat Arkestra Plays Their Greatest Hits (Burt), Greetings (Connors), Lowlands (Philipsz), Sonic Investigations of the Trivial (Essendon Airport), Random Acts of Elevator Music (RAEM) (Adair and Wilson), Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich), The Wedding Photograph (Mortley)

see also experimentalismincreasing use of term 36–7meta-stance in 54and the mind and emotions 44–5, 188post-1970s in Australia 8–10postmodernism of 43–5relationship to experimentalism 41, 44,

45, 86, 116responsibilities of artists and listeners

46–7scholarship on 13–15space and sound, dynamic between 50

Index 275

staging of events 38and traditional/pop music 52, 52n71vagueness of term 37–8see also altermodern, compromised

emotiveness in; emotions in music; postmodernism and the mind and emotions; newness as not the objective

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Licht and O’Rourke) 36, 36n8, 38n17, 52n71, 62n4, 79

Sound Art Foundation, see Hellermansound effects in films 185–6Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and

Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Bandt) 14n47, n48, 16n53, 79n89, 91n143, 117n12, 178n23, 182n39

Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Evens) 21n8

Sounding the Winds (Drummond) 202–3, 228

Soundscape Ecology (Acoustic Ecology) 54–6

space and sound, dynamic between 50Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?:

Experiencing Aural Architecture (Blesser and Salter) 139n105, 151n19

Speak Before It’sToo Late (Bandt) 126–7, 227

Speak Percussion 122n36specificity, site, see geographico-political

themesspiritual possibilities in music 73–9, 122,

132, 133, 145, 203, 216, 217Splinter Faction Group 65–6, 228Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltake-Out (Stelarc)

212–13, 214, 229staging of events 38Stasis Duo 201staves, going beyond 24–5, 66Stelarc 212–14, 229Sterne, Jonathan 12n39, 153Stethophonics for Solo Audience (Gallagher)

70, 91, 227Stewart, Amanda 134n35, 167, 168, 201,

204n21, 203, 214, 214n62, 228Stockhausen, Karlheinz 20, 21, 27

Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture (Taylor) 37n12, 71n53, 78n85

Structures Livre 1a (Boulez) 20Subjective Beats Metaphor (Burt and Mann)

91–4, 95, 203, 228subjectivity 15, 34, 46, 67, 71, 73, 81, 91–,

95, 102, 106n25, 112, 114, 136, 144, 156, 181, 187, 189, 203, 214, 228

Sufis 74Summoned Voices (Mott and Raszewski)

152, 228Surface Noise (Scanner) 116–17Surfaces and Cavities (Bandt) 67, 218surrealism/surrealist art 88, 104–5, 107,

110, 113, 114, 229Sw Sw Thrght 63, 227Sydney Opera House 10

Taylor, Hollis 65n19, 130–1, 135n86, 145, 146, 227

Taylor, Timothy Dean 37n12, 71n53, 78n85

‘Tears’ (Greenwell) 103–4, 105, 108, 111–12, 113, 117n13, 187, 227

technological determinism 32–3technology

advances in 3, 7n17, 8, 11, 12, 14n48, 23, 29, 30, 31, 32n51, 37, 40, 43, 48n54, 51, 86, 87, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 111, 118, 119, 125n52, 128, 139, 141, 145, 157, 167, 168, 181, 191, 192, 205–6, 207, 213, 214, 219, 221, 225

as agent of social change 31–3, 66

as key definer in postmodernism 40, 213

control of as illusion 53, 220experimental music 23and glitches 53, 66impact on recreation 219–20limits of as compositional

determinant 84, 125n52and listening 30–1obsoleteness of 192–3

Teletopa 68, 69, 69n42, 70


text scores 66–7The Society of the Spectacle (Debord

and Nicholson-Smith) 149n10The Geometric Model of Consciousness

205The Gordon Assumption (Wax Sound


The Immaterials (Madsen) 191, 227The Master’s Voice (Leber and Chesworth)

148–51, 148n8, 229The Opera ‘Crossed Purposes’ (Linz) 88The Oscillators (Hinterding) 204–5, 228The Poetics of Space (Bachelard) 141, 143The Singing Ship (West-Moreland) 90–1,

228The Way I See It (Althoff) 65The Wedding Photograph (Mortley)

163–7, 169, 227‘Their Eyes Met Across the Partition’

RAEM) 154Thibault, Alain 37n15Things Are Not So Bad After All (IDA) 89,

228This Map is Not to Scale (Flynn and

Humphrey) 218–19, 228Three Inverse Genera (Burt) 128–9Through Music to the Self: How to

Appreciate and Experience Music Anew (Hamel) 73–5

To Keep Things Reasonable (Young) 182–3, 229

traditional music and sound art 52, 52n71Traité des objets musicaux (Schaeffer) 25Transpoes (DeLys and Grounds) 124–6,

146, 229Truax, Barry 29n36, 37n14, 38, 55tsk tsk tsk (***) 80–1, 229Toop, David 24n17, 44n40Tudor, David 4n4Tunley, David 10n30, 61Tuning of the World, The (Schafer) 10n29,

12n42, 51n67, 54, 144n128, 153, 225

Turner Prize 12Twenty-Two Contemporary Australian

Composers (Jenkins) 13n45, 61–2Two Piano Pieces (Jenkins) 62–3

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (Young) 3n2

Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (Landy) 11n35, n37, 13n46, 15n49, 25n21, n50, n51, 26n22, n23, n24, 29n36, 35n1, n3, 37n13, n15, 38n16, n18, n19, 45n45, 46n48, n49, 48n56, 49n57, 51n67, 55n80, n81, 151n21, 155n36, 215, 215n64

Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes (Ravlich) 158–60, 166, 227

urban/rural terrains 12, 16, 52, 54, 78, 116, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 135–8, 139, 156, 169, 217, 218, 228

Urbania (Law) 137–8, 228utopian sound visions 44, 95

anarchic 66–72spiritual music 73–9

Varèse, Edgard 7n15, 49n57Veblen, Thorstein 32–3Vespers (Lucier) 135Video Game Dreaming (Hindson) 219–20,

229Video Quartet (Marclay) 184Vine, Carl 215–6, 228virtuosic listening 28–30, 31Vitiello, Stephen 117Voegelin, Salomé 26n24, 40n26, 46,

124n49, 144n125, 145n132, 200n3Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and

Media (Neumark, Gibson and van Leeuwen) 12n40, 199n2

voodoo magicians 74

Wadley, Greg (New Waver) 184, 228

Wagner, Richard 3, 88, 95Warhol, Andy 81, 159 ‘Waiting in the Foyer’ (RAEM)

155Warner, Daniel 49Warner, David 3n2, 6n12, 24n17, 30n40,

n41, 31n44, 32n51, n52, 44n41, 64, 64n13, 176n15

Wartime Art (Brophy) 82

Index 277

water 103–5, 104n14, 108–12, 108n32, 117, 120, 146

as inspiration for Grainger 5Australia 117–18n14Dredge (For Percussion Quartet)

122–4, 227Lake Mungo (Bandt) 121–2, 227Voicing the Murray (Bandt) 118–21,

126, 227Lands Collide (Burke) 126, 227surrealist artworks and 103–5, 107,

113traditional and early experimental

works 25, 104, 104n14, 108, 108n32, 117

see also Crichton Installation (McCombe and Bevan), Dry (McCombe), geographical-political themes, The Gordon Assumption (Chesworth and Leber),‘Tears’ (Greenwell)

Wax Sound Media, see Chesworth and Leber.

weddings 163–7, 169Wenhart, Nina 214Wesley-Smith, Martin 79, 228Westdeutscher Rundfunk studios 27Westerkamp, Hildegard 116, 124, 145n132West-Moreland, Peggy 90, 228WHAM 210, 229Whirliworks (Hopkins) 77Whirly instruments 77Whispers of the City (Loizou) 218, 229White, Greg 167, 228White, John 181White Noise 201Wilkins, Caroline 88–9, 95, 227Wilson, Nick 154–6, see also RAEM Wind Music for Earth and Sky (Hopkins)

77–8, 228Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136, 161,

227

Wishart, Stevie 203Witton, Dan 190n68, 195n50Wogarno Wire Installation (Lamb) 132–3,

227Wolff, Christian 20Wolsely, John 118n17women’s voice 16, 99–103, 105–7,

109–12, 113, 206‘Etchings’ (Priest) (Priest) 206–7, 228The Gordon Assumption (Wax Sound


Greetings (Connors) 99–100, 229‘Tears’ (Greenwell) 111–12, 117n13,

187, 227Window Pain (Dyson) 100–3, 136,

161, 227Wood, Elizabeth 137n95World Association for Ruined Piano

Studies (WARPS) 193–4, 193n78, 196, 197, 198, 227

World Soundscape Project (WSP) 9–10, 54, 55, 115, 116, 118

World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd of 1999 (Vitiello) 117

Worrall, David 117n12

Xenakis, Iannis 20

Yorta Yorta language 119, 120Yoshihide, Otomo 199Young, David 182–3, 229Young, La Monte 24, 33, 46, 72, 205Young, Rob 3n2You’ve Got the Option (Althoff) 65Yuat people 134, 135

Zen Buddhism 4, 20, 20n4, 132, 217Zorn, John 184–5, 210Zoroastrianism 74