|
by Jonty Harrison |imed_0052-0001|
My acousmatic journey seems to take me down a wide road. One side of the
street has a sign saying ‘rue Schaeffer’
— here the preoccupation is with abstracting musical data from sound
objects (‘objets sonores’), without reference to their provenance
in any anecdotal way. Activity on this side of the road springs from reduced
listening and is primarily concerned with a spectromorphological exploration
of sound qualities in order to discover (and, ultimately, to release) the
latent structural properties of the material. This betrays a specifically
‘musical’ mind set, in which articulation of material and of
structure dominates. The name on the other side of the road is hard to read,
but I am sure that ‘Schafer Street’
— where natural sound is used precisely ‘because’ of its
provenance, and where signification does not reside in the
‘purely’ musical (whatever that is) — cannot be more than a
block away.*
I wander along this broad avenue in a reverie of discovery, often without
a definite goal in mind, frequently stopping without warning to examine (at
length!) some wonderful sound which presents itself along the way. To the
outside observer, I must appear to weave a fairly drunken path, colliding
with a lamp post on one side only to bounce across and graze my shins on the
curb opposite. Most of the time I seem to be in a somewhat uncertain and
unstable state somewhere in the middle of the road, in danger of being run
down by any passing vehicle — a busload of academics perhaps, or
someone driving too fast in a postmodern convertible; the groove along which
that DJ is riding could intersect with any sudden lurch I might make as I
stumble on, and even the acoustic ecologist on that bicycle over there could
pose a threat to this unwary composer.
The first two pieces on this CD seem to represent the two sides of this
street: Klang uses sounds from
casserole dishes, but the piece is not ‘about’ casserole dishes;
aside from a frivolous moment when an attempt seems to be made to ‘put
the lid on it’, to stop the sound escaping, there is nothing anecdotal
in this essentially musical discourse. Sorties, by contrast, is
referential to a degree I had never contemplated before (though this unfolds,
ironically, from a more conceptual premise: that of ‘exiting’).
In 1995 I had definitely wandered rather closer to the non-Schaefferian side
of the street, my other pieces from that year (Hot Air
and Unsound Objects)
sharing many of Sorties’
preoccupations (and sounds!). In Surface Tension I
had clearly ricocheted back towards a more abstracted mode, and the shock
caused significant oscillations across the central reservation in both
Splintering and
Streams. I am happy to
engage with material coming from both directions, often approaching something
via a spectromorphological route, only to leave by an anecdotal or
referential connection — the only criterion is that the link works at
the sonic, perceptual level.
Is it music, or sound art, or something else? I am no longer really sure;
nor am I sure that it really matters. The approach is the same whichever part
of the street I am (temporarily) occupying before wandering off to another
location. I listen; I listen inside and outside the material, seeking the
sonic hook which will allow a connection to another sonic entity — then
composition begins.
PS: With love and thanks to my wife Ali, my daughters Clare and Emma, my
mother Nancy — and to my late father Doug, to whose memory this CD is
dedicated.
* I acknowledge Canadian composer Barry
Truax’s encapsulation of the Schaeffer/Schafer division in his
distinction between acousmatic music and soundscape composition.
Jonty Harrison,
Birmingham (UK) [vi-00]
|