Tuning the lyre's strings:
Some preliminary thoughts on Choreolab Sound Sessions
13.02.11
There is an ancient Greek myth about two twin brothers who were together kings of Thebes, and their names were Zethos and Amphion. Zethus was a hunter and herdsman, a very strong man. Amphion became a great singer and musician after the god Hermes himself gave him a golden lyre, the first one ever constructed, and taught him how to play, in order to civilise his people. The two brothers built the walls around the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes on their own: while Zethus carried enormous stones from the mountains, Amphion played his lyre and the stones lifted by themselves and gently glided into place on the wall.
Can music move us? Can music move anything at all? Dance has always been accompanied by music or some sort of sound. What is that power that the sonorous has over matter-- flesh? How can something that, while its properties are not material at all, have such a profound impact on our bodies?
Sound originates from matter. It's the matter's movement, vibration, that brings sound into being. But sound transcends matter. It's not in the particles, but in the tension between them. The vibrations of the sound waves we all know from our school days are nothing more than particles coming closer and moving apart in a wave-like fashion. Sound will always be (on Earth at least) this pressure, this trace that the coming and going of particles leaves behind.
That's why they say that sound is elusive. It arrives unseen and leaves in a blink, leaving behind a trace, a press on us, as if we're sponges that slowly return to their original shape after they're pressed. As would Ana say, listening is connected to touch, or listening is a different kind of touching.
I might get on the verge of banality by saying this, but people these days don't truly listen. I don't mean that they don't pay attention to what others are saying, but how others say in general. In the sounds of the everyday there are minute details that become lives, worlds even, if one only truly listens, "stretches her ear" as they say. The sonorous in our lives has been reduced to a mere vehicle of information, which is in fact heavily encumbered with it. We learn to listen in order to catch a meaning, to understand the information that the sound stands for. So have our languages and speech (the way we become present in the world as sound waves) been treated by semiotics and linguistics. I sit at my desk writing this and I hear the noise from the street. A motorcycle drives by. What I hear is some person driving to somewhere. What I listen is a surge of energy, sound waves, hitting me, gushing in my ear, which climaxes as the vehicle drives by and fades away as it moves away too. This embodiment of my sonorous surroundings, this perception of my being here and now as a vessel of sound, a resonating chamber in which the environment re-sounds, is in my opinion a way of being in the world that we're not really used to.
So there is another layer to the world, a layer of sonorities. And I don't mean this in the way composers boast about their supposed unique perception of sound and super-human ability to hear what others don't. I'm talking about the sonorous layer of our everyday environment, that multitude of tiny swells and retractions that give us a new pair of glasses to look at the world and us in the world; to know us better. It's in the simple counterpoint of birds chirping at dawn (no composer I know of has written anything as complex and beautiful as that), the cracked voice of the beggar on the street, the humble clicks of our keys on the door when we get back home, the breath of our child sleeping, the bump of our knee on the table, the squeaks of our feet on the dance studio floor, the scratching of our skin, the combing of our hair, the crumbling of cookies in our mouth...
We sound. Why shouldn't we also listen? What are we afraid of in paying attention to the minute, the tiny, eavesdropping on the detail of our lives? To quote Nancy (and Ana): "What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message"? And to go back to Amphion's myth: is that why the lyre was a gift of the god of messages, interpretation and perception (Hermes - hermeneutics - ερμηνεία)? Is Amphion's lyre a kind of truth, hidden in the vibrations of matter, in that live connection between "me" and the vibrating "out there"? Is that what gets stones flying? Bodies moving?
( For the greek version of this section click here. )
Prelude to Session 1
16.02.11
(written in the company of two noisy cats)
One of the things we're going to do tomorrow is talk about how composers have found new ways of making music in the last 50 years or so. What were their methodologies? What tools and processes did they use to generate new material, that is new sounds and sound combinations? Then we're going to explore how could these methods of composing music be applied to a choreographer's process.
Composers have used many methods and tools for making music during the past century. For the purposes of this session I chose to present two of them here, which seem to be more compatible with choreography. These two are process and condition/state.
1) Process-based composition
I made up this term to describe music that is created by using a strict set of rules and nothing else. The composer creates a convention, a rule or a game, on which the work is based and then he/she doesn't get involved in the final outcome. Works of this kind of music usually evolve very slowly in time, in order to allow the process to "take its time" and find its way through the system of rules. It's like computer programming: when one is creating a program, he first writes the code and then tries it out to see what happens. If he doesn't like the program, he can't change it unless he changes the code. He can't change the surface of the program but the inner structure of it. In similar fashion, composers that employ processes refuse to edit the work after it's "finished", they don't try to make it pretty for a concert. They just choose the rules, the material and they let the work take its own course. As you can see, this kind of method is heavily based on chance, but also knowing the broader set of rules in which the work will take place (in this case, acoustics for example).
A great example of process-based music is the early work of Steve Reich (b.1936). In these works Reich chooses or creates some basic material (usually very short in duration) which then repeats continuously on two or more sources while these repetitions change over time. This effect is called phase shift (a concept of physics concerning the change of repetition of sound waves) or just phase. Some works by Reich that employ this technique are:
Piano Phase (1967) where two pianists play the same thing over and over again while gradually shifting their phase. It's interesting to watch the performance of it by Peter Aidu (watch here) where one pianist performs it on two pianos. It has also been choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (watch here).
Violin Phase (1967), again used by de Keersmaeker along with white dress and sneakers (here).
Come out (1966) where a short audio clip is repeated and phased, transforming itself from a meaningful text to pure sounds and rhythms (will upload it soon).
Another composer who used processes in his work is Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). Xenakis was an architect, but he was also familiar with physics, chemistry and computer programming. All these disciplines he incorporated in his work to create music that was based on mathematical theorems, laws of physics, statistics and the behaviour of particles. In other words he used extra-musical methods to organise the sound material of his works but also in order to create new sounds (by means of synthesisers and computers).
An example of this kind of process that is connected mostly to Xenakis' architectural background is the work Mycenae Alpha (1978), where Xenakis first drew a series of sketches which then he "transcribed" as sound using a computer program he created. In order to turn his design into sound he first applied the rule that the musical parameters of pitch and duration had to correspond to the vertical and horizontal axes of the drawings. The technology of the time didn't allow Xenakis to do much with the sound, but the idea of shapes and volumes turned into music was quite new at that time. Mycenae Alpha is in my opinion a process-based composition because it employs a non-musical convention that is turned into music by means of a set of rules. Xenakis doesn't edit the work afterward but sticks to the outcome as dictated by the drawings. If he had to change the resulting sound, he would first have to change the drawings. You can watch a video of Mycenae Alpha with its score here.
One might find interesting more works by Xenakis that employ non-musical processes:
Eonta (1963-64) where he used set theory (here).
Pithoprakta (1955-56) which is based on the statistical mechanics of gases (here).
Strategie (1959-62) which employs game theory (here).
A final example of the use of process in composition is John Cage's (1912-92) Voiceless Essay (1986), which was composed for Merce Cunningham's Points in Space (watch here). The original material for this composition was a recording of Cage himself reading a computer-generated text based on an essay by Thoreau. Cage then passed this recording through another computer program which stripped off all the vowels and stretched the remaining consonants in time. The result was a series of long, hissing sounds. Cage avoided involvement with his material. Instead, he let the computer do all the "choosing" for him. It seems that the coordination of dance and music in Points in Space was left to chance, since neither the composer had seen the dance while composing nor the choreographer had heard the music.
2) Conditions/states
This method is similar to a process, but the difference is that while a process-based composition depends on chance and the composer tries to involve as little as possible, a condition-based composition depends on the composer's choices. When conditions or states are deployed in a musical work, a general set of rules is applied (again, just like in process-based composition) for the composer to choose from. The work then is treated as if it exists in an imaginary space, where rules apply and things happen in reaction to certain actions. The composer doesn't create a mere set of rules but a more abstract condition that can be called a "world" or a "space", a state in which the music unravels.
An example of this kind of music is the work Vortex Temporum by Gerard Grisey (1946-98), written in 1994-96. In this work Grisey is inspired by the acoustic phenomenon of echo to create an imaginary world of reverberations in which to set his work. The music seems to be in a room where reflections of sound happen that would normally be impossible in the real world. The composer thus creates a condition in which the work exists and behaves accordingly. You can listen to Vortex Temporum here.
Another example is the work Lontano (1967) by Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006). Here the composer imagined a world of sonorities that are very far away ("lontano "means "from afar" in italian). The work is written in such a way that it evokes distance, as if it's situated in this imaginary place where everything is far away, blurred, imperceptible, unclear. Again, the composer created an imaginary world (in this case a world of extreme distance where the sound is muffled) in which he placed the work. Thus the work is inside this condition, this state of sounding. Listen to Lontano here.
A final example is a work by Hans Otte (1926-2007) called Buch der Klaenge (Book of sounds, 1979-82). For the creation of this work Otte collected over the span of 3 years more than 200 pages of musical ideas, which he noted down while improvising on the piano. The creation of this work can be seen as a very long process of free creativity and improvisation. The difference with Reich's processes is that Otte does edit the produced sound material: he doesn't allow the work to take a random course but he selects which parts of the sounds produced by the process should be included in the work. A musical moment that could last only a couple of minutes emerged only through months and years of improvising. You can listen to a part of this work here.
These two methodologies of 20th-century composers are quite generic and can be applied to basically any creative process. The first one has more to do with mathematics, logic and the absence (abstraction) of sentimentalism and sensuality (that is, the involvement of the composer's senses in the process). The second one is closer to traditional methods of composing, that are based on intuition, emotion, personal taste and of course sensation. One is tempted to describe these two methods in a way Cavarero would: the first one is the male, logical, literal way of composing (a certain saying about men, boys and toys comes to mind...) and the other one is the female, emotional, physical (connected to the sensing body) way, therefore "inferior" for most. Music has always moved between these two ends.
From the time of Pythagoras and Plato, music was connected to mathematics and logical structures. And until today we learn which "numbers" are good and which are bad, which combination of numbers is beautiful and which is dissonant, ugly. But there's also the side of music that's connected directly to sheer listening, to that basic bodily function of receiving sound waves, that has to do with tones, timbres, directions, dynamics, shifts and states. This seemingly abstract way of listening to music is in my opinion more honest than listening to series of numbers, because it brings us back to the body and the sound in the body. And the division Nancy made between hearing the meaning and listening to the sound is more than relevant here. Numbers are meaning - the sound is just sound. Strip sound of its meaning and you get pure sensation, which is what music was all about in the first place.
( Greek version available soon! )
Reflections on Sound Session 1
20.02.11
Based on the theory presented above we tried out a few tasks that involved generating material by using a minimalist process. We realised, as we tried out the different ideas and tasks, that such a process is more similar to a game than a "serious", "sophisticated" method of "making art". We allowed ourselves to play with our material, try out combinations and after a while we initiated our "games" and let them run in time to see what happens. Then it was made clear that in order for such a process to show, two or more bodies need to be involved and the element of phase shift needs to be part of it. So groups of two and three were formed which practiced repetition and phase shifting with their movement. We didn't explore the concept of phase shift on one body however (something there for your personal projects?). I was happy to see that for most of you this method of igniting a creative process was rather new and, although at first it seemed too cold and logical, you later on engaged with it with great enthusiasm. To some it felt constraining and that it limited their creative potential. Some even recognised these methods as the ones employed by many contemporary dance and dance theatre pieces presented in big theatres in Athens these days.
As a general remark we could say that a process-based method (or any other method based on mathematics, game theory, sets of rules and so on) is strictly a non-emotional one, where the creator tries to involve herself as little as possible after the process/game has begun running. It also requires a lot of time for new material to emerge and more combinations to happen. That's because the phase shift of the process/game should be slow as well, allowing for the tiny differences in the materials' shifts to become visible/ audible/ tangible etc. During our conversation in the studio we mentioned as a joke the possibilities of a dance event (not even dance; a happening of movement maybe), based on a single process and which would involve a crowd of dancers (more than 20) and which would last for hours (have you heard about the upcoming show by Dimitris Papaioannou?). Such a process would constantly renew itself because of the repetition of material but it would expand and evolve itself through the random combinations of material distributed between the dancers. However, such a process remains a study on randomness, an experiment, a mere exercise for generating crude material which would then have to become subject to further development, artistic exploration, composition and evolution. In other words, a flashy, expensive version of what we described as a mere game for warming up our artistic processes, is the highlight of the athenian dance scene for the Spring season.
An example: a good painter experiments with many different methods of applying paint on the canvas, and she might use many canvases in the process. She wouldn't present her experiments, her studies on applying paint, to the public. She would rather use her experiments to get new ideas, arrive at new ways of painting that were unknown to her before, see how colors combine and so on. Another example: German composer Hans Otte worked for years on his Book of sounds and he composed more than 200 pages of music for it. Did he go to his publisher and say: I want to publish these 200 pages of experiments? Did he go to a concert house in Berlin and say: I want to turn these 200 pages into a concert? No. He worked his material further, he refined, made selections, developed the work until in the end only 24 pages were left: a beautiful "distilled" masterpiece. That's why he's a composer and not an arranger.
Because during our session we got a little confused about the difference between "process" and "condition" I need to clarify this: artists always conduct experiments, try out things, brainstorm, strive in many ways to generate material and get a creative process going. When these methods of generating new material do not involve the artist taking decisions consciously and in real time (i.e. while the experiment is running) but rather the artist takes all the decisions and sets all the parameters before the experiment begins, then we're talking about a (minimalist) process, because the artist involves herself to the minimum. On the other hand, when such an experiment or method of generating new ideas involves active, real-time thinking, choice-making and choosing by the artist, then we're talking about a condition. We could also say, in very simple words, that in a process the artist is outside the experiment whereas in a condition the artist is part of it.
***
As a second part of our session we discussed how we listen and some theories about listening. In order to save time during the session we omitted technical information concerning the function of the ear, space acoustics and so on, but I promised that this kind of information would become available on this page, so I will dedicate a few lines here for your information.
We've talked already about sound waves being pockets of pressure moving in space. We've also described elsewhere how sound waves are not moving molecules but the tension between molecules, that's why sound can penetrate walls and other objects. The human ear works exactly in a way that takes full advantage of this pressure, this push sound waves create. A small membrane in our ear called the "ear drum" receives the sound wave vibrations and transmits them to a tiny organ called the "cochlea" through a quirky mechanism of three tiny bones (yes, we have bones in our ears) that amplifies the sound signal. This means that when one is listening to a sound, at least 2 joints in his/her body move. So literally speaking, sound does move us, on a tiny scale. When these vibrations are transmitted to the cochlea it transforms them into electrical signals that are sent to the brain, where are being processed. But sound is not limited to the ear, because our ears are connected to our pharynx through two very thin tubes called the "Eustachean tubes" (that's why your ears are closed when you have a cold. That's also how you can listen to your own throat if you yawn and talk at the same time). The push sound makes distributes to many parts of our body, it touches us on the inside too. When I mentioned in the studio that music touches us, but not metaphorically, you agreed that music has a kind of touch, which is actually not a touch but Touch in general, which touch expands in (traverses? penetrates?) our body, thus blurring the limit between the exterior and the interior, between me and the world. In this sense we could see sound as the force that brings our limits to a vibrating state, where vibration equals to non-stability and unrest. Sound urges us to reconsider our place in our environment, our safety lines, our "self-frontier" so to speak.
As we can see, the actual functions that enable us to listen are not as simple as one would expect. While one would've thought of listening as the most immediate of the senses, the complexity of our ear's structure shows otherwise. When you listen, and those tiny bones in your ear move, they make sounds too. They're called oto-emissions (oto- being a greek prefix to denote something relevant to the ear, not connected to auto-). This means that each and every one of us has a different listening experience of the same sound waves. We perceive the sonorous level of the world differently. For example, I hate tenors. I mean I dislike the singing of tenors. The voice of a tenor causes my ears vibrate so badly that any tenor high-note sounds to me like a broken air-condition machine. I'm sure that it's my faulty ears the ones to blame and not the poor tenors, otherwise we would have to accept as a fact that western-culture audiences since the time of the Renaissance enjoy listening to broken air-conditions, or that a broken air-condition sounds like Pavarotti. This is just an example of how I might be different to the next person as far as our perception of sound is concerned. I'm sure you as dancers will find similar analogies to your practice, such as an injury that doesn't allow you to do certain movements, or something positive like longer toes that help you keep your balance.
Back to our session: After we discussed a bit on listening and the sonorous level of our environment we set out to create our own sonorous environment, a sound-scape, made of sounds produced by the body (claps, hisses, throat noises, stomps and so on). Each one of the participants created her own sound which she repeated while moving randomly in the studio. Then I asked them one at a time to stand still and close their eyes, just listening to the shifting sonorous environment around her, trying to figure out any rhythms, connections, directions and so on. After all had tried this out we sat down and talked a bit more about how they felt, what image of reality did this exercise generated for them, if they felt differently and so on. We realised that different directions of sound affect the body in different ways. For example Anthi felt that sounds coming from behind made her want to move the front of her body. We also noticed that when we closed our eyes the sonorous information became more intense and complicated, almost overwhelming, and new sounds appeared that weren't perceptible when our eyes where open. Also, by closing our eyes, the effects of sound on other parts of the body became more evident (like on the feet and legs). Thus closing our eyes "opens" our body to sound, makes our body more sensitive to sound.
As a next level to this task we created a sound-scape again but this time I asked them to go in the centre of the studio one by one, close their eyes and do what they felt like doing, responding in an intuitive and personal way to the sound-scape the rest were creating around her. We begun as expected, with the one in the middle trying to cut through this dark sonorous thickness around her, but then the game became more serious than I thought. Instead of making random sounds, the ones standing at the perimeter started doing sounds at the one in the middle, trying to tease her, move her, make her react. The one in the middle found herself in the centre of a sound mass that had some kind of a mind, it was a sonorous object with a personality so to speak. This sonorous object was also a subject, both according to Nancy's theory of the resounding space as subject but also because, although humans were doing it live, connected to each other, their humanness was hidden from the eyes of the one who listened in the middle of the circle. By closing our eyes and letting ourselves free in the sound-scape, we immersed ourselves in this world of sound, vibration and movement (as Nancy says, we got "plugged in sound") that remains hidden as long as vision is active. At the same time we opened up ourselves to the "sound mass" around us, we became resonating containers of sound that both amplified the sound and allowed it to shape and move us. In other words we realised that the moving (vibrating) matter around us (skin and flesh of the others, metal, wood, plastic bags and so on) penetrated us; sound came into us and through us. In such a vibrant sonorous environment one has no other choice but to move, let go, be carried away, move along, move together (συγκινούμαι, συν-κινούμαι). This brings us back to the Amphion myth: bodies move, generating sound, which the human body receives and then moves sympathetically. In that transmission of energy and action lies a secret connection between us and the world out there, which in a performance is translated as a connection between us and the rest of the performance's parameters (other dancers' movement, sound, audience, floor, space and so on). One could say that this kind of connection is also mystical, in the sense that the one who's connected to the sounding bodies around her is initiated in a world of sonorous secrets (mystikō: secret, mýstes: the ones who are initiated). Those secrets have nothing to say, they have no information loaded on them; it's only the truth of sound as such, the pressing (touching) of sound energy on our bodies that is hidden in them.
That is why in my opinion music should be listened to as if it were a mute voice, a speech that has nothing to say, a meaningless array of sounds. However, being meaningless doesn't equal to being nonsensical. Music will always make sense, even without the burden of semiological symbolism and information, because it creates connections and relationships on the body itself. Through listening to music and taking notice of the body's response to it, a narrative emerges, a story is being told, the music speaks to us without saying anything. And that's in my opinion the most interesting conclusion we've arrived during our first session: to realise this primal, primitive, archetypical connection between our bodies and the sonorous activity around us, this simple yet powerful ability that we have of taking the world in, making things that are not part of us ours. It's through a state of vibration and movement that bodies can transcend themselves, expand to all directions and in ways they normally can't. By becoming sonorous we transcend the materiality of our bodies, we travel in space as sound, as touch; and we touch the world and others in new ways. We radiate Touch.
( For the greek version click here )
Links and Resources
A speech by deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie (watch here). In her speech Glennie addresses issues of music perception and performance.
Merce Cunningham's Points in Space; a 1986 documentary (watch here). It shows how the dance-film was produced, as well as how Cunningham collaborated with composer John Cage.
Choreosound 09 was an international workshop about contemporary dance and music that took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in September 2009. It was an experimental workshop exploring how do choreographers, composers, dancers and musicians can work together, how can dance be linked to music and more. Later on an online documentation was created, containing photos, texts and a video. http://www.choreosound.se/
A. Cavarero For more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression, Stanford University Press, 2005. (on Avaxhome)
J-L. Nancy Listening Fordham University Press, 2007 ( we found part of it on Google Books, read here)
K. Spirou Reflections and reverberations: writing music for 45,46,47-The unbearable, manuscript, 2010. (available in English and Greek)
M. Leman Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, MIT Press, 2008 (on Avaxhome)
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker interviews composer Steve Reich (read here).
About Kiriakos Spirou
Kiriakos is a pianist and composer. He studied Musicology at the University of Athens (2009), Harmony, Counterpoint and Fugue with composer Kostas Varotsis and piano with Angeliki Gaitanou. He's collaborated with choreographers and dancers in various projects: 45,46,47 with Ana Sánchez-Colberg (July-September 2010, in progress); Skin, surface; contour in process with Vicky Spanovangelis (October 2010); Time is up with dance group "Soyuz" (June 2010); Urban Trajectories: Athens Void 01 with Vicky Spanovangelis (June 2010); cOrPUS_8 with A.Sánchez-Colberg (May 2010); Manifesto with Olivia Kaloudi (November 2008); and more. He's composed new music for contemporary dance technique classes and ballet classes while working as dance-class accompanist (2008-2010). He was one of the artists invited to take part in the international workshop of contemporary dance and music "Choreosound 2009" (Gothenburg, Sweden; part of the ISCM World New Music Days Festival 2009) and is contributor to the workshop's online documentation. At the moment is studying composition with Kostas Varotsis and he's an accompanist at Morianova-Trasta Dance School in Athens. He's also working on a new piece commissioned by "Megaro Mousikis" Concert Hall in Thessaloniki.
