Sonic Thinking
Page 13
In the following, I would like to discuss three instances of in|human rhythms in works of John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and Richard Reed Parry, carefully heeding Deleuze’s advice to not see this endeavor as “a matter of setting philosophy to music, or vice versa,” but rather as “one thing folding into another” (Deleuze 1995: 163).
in|human rhythms: the longue durée of the earth
John Luther Adams—The Place Where You Go to Listen
John Luther Adams is a contemporary composer who lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska, approximately 125 miles south of the Arctic.3 Adams’s work is highly influenced by his environment, this “hyperborean zone, far from the temperate regions” (Deleuze 1997: 82), far from equilibrium.
From his early works onwards he has always pointed out that he wants his music to be understood as an interaction with nature—as a site-specific “contact” with the environment that he calls “sonic geography” (Adams 1994: 8).
Adams’s sonic geography comprises a cycle called songbirdsongs (1974–1980), consisting of various imitations of Alaskan birds reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogues d’oiseaux. Although Adams in the compositional process and the transcription brings birdsong on a “human scale” in terms of tempo, modulation, pitch, etc., he conceptualizes the different melodies—or “refrains”—as a “toolkit,” so that during the performance, an ever-new aggregation of phrases and motifs comes into existence, an open system, indetermined in combination, length, intonation, tempi, etc. Earth and the Great Weather (1990–1993), an evening-long piece—or opera—consisting of field recordings of wind, melting glaciers, thunder in combination with ritual drummings and chants of the Alaskan indigenous people, was “conceived as a journey through the physical, cultural and spiritual landscapes of the Arctic” (Adams 1998a).
In a further step, Adams combined his “sonic geography” with the concept of what he calls “sonic geometry” (Adams 1998b: 143). Adams is more and more interested in the “noisier” sounds of nature and refers to findings of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry in order to find sonic equivalents for nature’s modus operandi—Strange and Sacred Noise (1991–1997) is an example of this approach.4
To date, the culmination of Adams’s sonic geography|geometry has been his recent project The Place Where You Go to Listen, the title of which refers to an Inuit legend according to which the shamans hear the wisdom of the world in [and get their knowledge from] the whisper of the wind and the murmur of the waves, being sensitive to what Deleuze, with reference to Leibniz, calls “little perceptions” (Deleuze 1994: 213).5
Adams aims at the realization of a “musical ecosystem, … A work of art … that is directly connected to the real world in which we live and resonates sympathetically with that world and with the forces of nature” (Adams 2006b)—Adams does not only imitate nature in its manner of operation, like Cage still does, he taps into nature’s dynamic processes themselves for the generation of sound and light. Adams developed this project in close collaboration with geologists and physicists—as Adams stated in an interview, “[a]t a certain level, it was like … they were the boys in the band” (Adams 2015).
In Adams’s installation, real time data from meteorological stations all over Alaska and from the five stations of the Alaska Earthquake Information Center are collected, coordinated, and made audible through pink noise filters. As Curt Szuberla, one of the physicists involved in the project, explains, “[t]he strings and bells and drumheads are plucked, bashed and banged based on the geophysical data streams. And the geophysical data streams … are the fingers and mallets and bells that hit things and make things sound” (Adams 2015). The Place Where You Go to Listen is a permanent installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, where sound and light are generated in real time through data processing of the day and night rhythms, the rhythms of the seasons, of the moon phases, the weather conditions, and the seismic flows of the magnetic field of the Earth—nature itself, as well as the music it produces, operates according to its own times and speeds (and slownesses). Hours, even days (and more) might pass between perceivable seismic changes or changes in the magnetic field of the Earth. The Place is an open system, a machinic aggregation operating according to what Deleuze calls “differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze 1994: 222)—just like the weather. Adams’s noise-filter-machine is plugged into the sun-machine, and also into the wind-machine, rain-machine, etc. These in turn couple together to form the weather-machine—different milieus, different rhythms resonate with each other. Digital machines cut into the flows of nature, but within a machine|nature ecology|ontology which is not based on the strict separation of these two spheres, where nature is either a fixed, unchanging essence, or the mere retro-effect of culture and representation, but an ecology|ontology of dynamics and production. Adams’s installation thus presents “modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate” (Deleuze 1995: 26).
The Place Where You Go to Listen focuses on nature as process and event—in an almost Stoic emphasis on becoming versus being, Adams privileges time-sensitive dynamics, not clear-cut states. In his study La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoicisme, to which Deleuze refers in Logic of Sense, Emile Bréhier states that, according to Stoic thought, “one should not say, ‘the tree is green,’ but ‘the tree greens’ … what is expressed in this proposition is not a property, such as ‘a body is hot,’ but an event, such as ‘a body becomes hot’ ” (Bréhier 1970: 20–1).6 This becoming, writes Deleuze, passes the line “between the sensible and the intelligible, or between the soul and the body” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 63)—or nature and culture—and places itself “[b]etween things and events” (ibid.). By getting rid of the is of representational thought, where an object’s quality is at least potentially related to a subject that expresses this quality as an attribute, by replacing fixity with process as both the subject’s and the world’s manner of operation, these “infinitive-becomings have no subject: they refer only to an ‘it’ of the event” (ibid.: 64). Adams’s installation goes further in the direction of the event than Ives and even Cage—although these two composers had also already pondered the conflict between the processuality of nature, and the means of art. Ives asked himself: “A painter paints a sunset—can he paint the setting sun? … [Is] [t]here … an analogy … between both the state and power of artistic perceptions and the law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream, partly biological, partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature, in all life?” (Ives 1999: 71).
Ives tried to master these problematics by way of the ever increasing complexification of his compositorial means. Cage also emphasized that he did not think it correct to say “the world as it is”—“it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change … it is more mobile than you can imagine. You’re getting closer to this reality when you say as it ‘presents itself;’ that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process” (Cage 1981: 80).
But Ives was still the subject in control of chaos, and Cage, in spite of all indeterminacy, regretted that he was still creating “clear-cut” objects. Adams solves this problem by leaving the executing|processing energy to the processual forces of nature itself. Music and environment thus become an ecosystem of a dynamics of acoustic and optic resonances interacting in|with an environment in constant flux. “Music” in this sense thus for Adams becomes something entirely different than a “means” of human communication about an external world: “If music grounded in tone is a means of sending messages to the world, then music grounded in noise is a means of receiving messages from the world.… As we listen carefully to noise, the whole world becomes music. Rather than a vehicle for self-expression, music becomes a mode of awareness” (Adams 2006a).
Thus, The Place Where You Go to Listen leaves the conceptualiza
tion of a music about nature, of music as a means of the representation of nature and landscape, on which, e.g., Ives still relied, and creates music as a part of nature, as coextensive with the environment—“Through attentive and sustained listening to the resonances of this place, I hope to make music which belongs here, somewhat like the plants and the birds” (Adams 1994: 8). Even more direct than Cage, Adams emphasizes nature’s “manner of operation” in not only taking it as a model, but by directly “accessing” and relating to the becoming of a site-specific environment and creating works that are this relation—a music of place, of a place where you go to listen.
In this work, then, rhythm consists in the interpenetrating longue durées of cosmic milieus and seismic forces—the Place Where You Go to Listen emerges out of “an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic,’ a sonorous much more than a visual space” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 421). Deleuze and Guattari are referring to an ice desert here, but their notion of haecceity also describes Adams’s installation very well:
A season, a winter, a summer, a time of day, a date have a perfect individuality that lacks nothing, even though it can’t be confused with that of a thing or a subject. These are haecceities, in the sense that everything about them is a relationship of movement and rest between molecules or particles, the power to affect and to be affected.
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261
in|human rhythms: becoming-insect
David Dunn—“Chaos and the Emerging Mind of the Pond ”
From the longue durée of Adams, the “endlessly long time of the stars” (Rößler 1986: 40), we move further (down? the scale?) to the “short one of insects” (ibid.), exemplified in the work of David Dunn.
In 1935, the naturalist Hugh M. Smith observed the following spectacle in Thailand:
Imagine a tree thirty-five to forty feet high thickly covered with small ovate leaves, apparently with a firefly on every leaf, and all the fireflies flashing in perfect unison at the rate of about three times in two seconds, the tree being in complete darkness between flashes … Imagine a tenth of a mile of river front with an unbroken line of Sonnerati trees with fireflies on every leaf flashing in synchronism, the trees at the ends of the line acting in perfect union with those between. Then, if one’s imagination is vivid, he may form some conception of this amazing spectacle.
Smith 1935: 151
Smith marveled at this unexplainable wonder—surely, these insects did not possess intelligence that made them intentionally flash in unison? It seems that this spectacle (which is still popular today, e.g. as a tourist attraction in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) attracted lots of observers and commentators who published their responses in the journal Science in the early twentieth century. As one commentator put it:
If it is desired to get a body of men to sing or play together in perfect rhythm they not only must have a leader but must be trained to follow such a leader. Imagine the difficulty of keeping together on ‘Old Hundred’ if the notes were started with an interval so long as six or nine seconds between each. Do these insects inherit a sense of rhythm more perfect than our own?
Hudson 1918: 574
The question of how to keep a rhythm without a maestro, conductor or click-track puzzled the naturalists and scientists. Today, it seems that the answer to all this is the concept of emergence, self-organization and spontaneous order. In fact, as Hudson already pointed out, the fireflies—or crickets, for that matter, where the emitted signal is not light, but sound—do not perfectly harmonize, unison is not total, but interspersed with slight variations, accelerandos, ritardandos, and stringendos, etc.: “[s]trictly speaking, there was no measured regularity in this response and therefore no true rhythm … There was present the influence of suggestion on what may be called a ‘mob-psychology,’ but there was no special leader” (Hudson 1918: 573). In their slightly out-of-sync, non-linear unison, the insects—no matter if fireflies or cicada—are monitoring their collective boundaries rather than individual insects establishing breeding fitness.
Now, with these sounds we enter what Deleuze and Guattari call the “refrain.” Taking their cue from their analysis of birdsong (which already shows the more cosmic vision in which they locate their concepts of “rhythm” and “refrain” and which they do not connect to music alone), Deleuze and Guattari state that a refrain is “any kind of rhythmic pattern that stakes out a territory” (Bogue 2003: 17). And even if Deleuze and Guattari take birdsong as a primary example, the same relation of song and rhythm to territory can also be seen in “human music”—the deçî-tâlas (the 120 Hindu rhythms), the Greek Σνρτ ó ς (Sirtos), the Delta Blues, New Orleans Jazz, or East Coast versus West Coast Hip Hop. The refrain thus is a territorial marker that is always open to its surrounding milieus, which are constituted by different rhythms—rhythm itself is thus the difference between milieus, with chaos being the “milieu of all milieus” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313). Chaos thus is the pool of the virtuality of rhythms, out of which rhythmic patterns emerge in a self-organizing manner.
David Dunn is a sound artist, ecologist, and researcher who is both interested in “the natural world” (and its sounds), as he is in science and complexity theory. In fact, quite a lot of his work can be considered “artistic research” in that it is based on active collaborations with scientists, e.g. complexity theorist James Crutchfield.
In his work “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond” (1991), Dunn had entered the acoustic world of underwater-life. He recorded the sound of aquatic insects in ponds in New Mexico and Africa, thus fusing insect-rhythms of different milieus and territories. In this underwater world, Dunn “hears a rhythmic complexity altogether greater than that in most human music” (Raffles 2010: 323). In fact, Dunn’s work accomplishes a twist on the standard musique concrète aesthetics and ideology. Whereas in the objet sonore the identification of the sound’s origin was to remain concealed, Dunn on the one hand keeps the representational level of the sound, he wants it to be identified as “something in|of the world,” but on the other hand he also stresses the uncanniness of these sounds:
While the sounds above water are comfortable and familiar, those occuring [sic] under the surface are shocking. Their alien variety seems unprecedented as if controlled by a mysterious but urgent logic. The minutiae which produce these audible rasps and sputters remain mostly unseen amongst the tentacles of plants and layers of silt but each contributes to a sonic multiverse of exquisite complexity.
The timbres of these sounds are obviously magnificent, a tiny orchestra of homemade percussion seemingly intoxicated by the infinite diversity of audible colors, but what strikes my ears most readily are the rhythmic structures.… Amid a background hum of distant chatter the persistent clicks of several different insects pulsate. Many of these sounds are continuous but elastic, their constancy appears sensitive to the assertions of others. This fabric is punctuated by the intermittent cries of something unseen or the wheezing of larger beetles carrying their air supply between their legs. Steady state bands of sawtooth resonance waft across the distance between schools of insect thought that together form an emergent cognition. This infinitessimal [sic] world seems complete.
Dunn 1992
Dunn’s piece is both field recording, composition, and, first of all, a transposition to a human scale of those sounds which are “below the radar,” inaudible to the human ear—it takes special technology (in this case, omnidirectional hydrophones) to pick up these patterns, frequencies, rhythms.
By fusing different rhythmic refrains (of different insect ecologies and milieus) Dunn is trying to reflect “in the mix” what he estimated the most striking feature of that underwater invertebrate communication—he basically faces a super-organism, and, ultimately, a consciousness:
[T]here are these emergent rhythms, these elastic pulsations of life, sounding as if the very morphology of these little beings and the pond’s macro body were dependent upon this aquatic jazz for the maintenance of time and space: primal drummers collectively engaged in the creation of worlds through jamming together the stridulatory resonance of their viscera. This is a dance between periodicity and chaotic swirl, the expansion and contraction of momentary self-resonance within the mutuality of mind.… Perhaps the complexity of these tiny rhythmic entrainments and chaotic cycles of microcosmic heart beats hover around that basin of attraction known as thought and together bring into being an awareness which I cannot fathom. The placidity of the water’s surface takes on the sense of a membrane enclosing a collective intelligence. I know that this is not a rational thought but I find it to be irresistible.
Dunn 1992:
In a mode strongly reminiscent of Whitehead or Bateson, Dunn asserts:
My direct experience of nature convinces me that the worlds I hear are saturated with an intelligence emergent from the very fullness of interconnection which sustains them.… To assert that human consciousness, arising out of a network of material interactions similar to those which give rise to the very existence of all life, is more important than other forms of mind not operating within the human linguistic domain is absurd.