About Évidence matérielle
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 (England,
UK) [vi-00]
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