I’m currently working on couple of
projects but owing to the summer break and the toings and froings that this
period naturally lends itself to they’ve been slow to develop. One is a two part
essay with the broad title In Defence of Political Spirituality. This is
firstly a response to a fairly recent text on Michel Foucault’s writings on
Iran; a series of writings which I think have great import for our times, and
particularly for ongoing events in the Middle East. Secondly this piece will
address some aspects of Foucault’s later writings on spirituality and its
relationship with other discourses like science, theology, and philosophy. The
critique the authors of the above mentioned text make of Foucault hinges on
what I argue is a misunderstanding of this admittedly strange idea; it is
nevertheless an idea I consider worth defending.
The second project is a reanimation
of my occasional musical endeavours in the form of a piece of electronic
composition. The inspiration for this was a visit last month to the little
Italian border town of Ventimiglia and my love for a certain French composer;
Luc Ferrari (1929-2005). Ferrari has always been my favourite of the early electronic
music pioneers. Like Iannis Xenakis and
Pierre Henry, Ferrari’s first electronic works were produced under the guidance
of Pierre Schaeffer the founder of the style of electronic composition called
Musique Concrete, and later the composing and theoretical collective Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Ferrari’s works
from this period (roughly 1958-63) exhibit the abstraction and dislocation
characteristic of Schaeffer’s school, with the latter’s signature acousmatic
approach to sound (the isolation and transformation of recorded sound distinct
from its source to create an uncanny effect) central to their style. But it wasn’t
until the technology allowed Ferrari to take his recording gear out into the
environment that he really found his voice. When he did it sounded very
different to that of his contemporaries. Heterozygote of 1963-64 was the
turning point. Where the Musique Concrete style would take a recorded sound,
say a fragment of conversation, and transform
it through tape manipulations into something a little alien; in
Heterozygote Ferrari collages numerous little snippets of incidental sounds, conversations
and instrumental sources leaving them untreated. The results of this
comparatively long form type of composition were a prototype for what he would
later call anecdotal music.
It’s often taken
to be the case that this piece was Ferrari’s attempt to realize John Cage’s
famous statement that music was all around us if only we had the ears to
listen. But I think there’s something more going on, and besides Cage’s use of
environmental and concrete sounds never approached the subject matter with the
degree of sensuality that Ferrari injects into his work. He wasn’t interested
in abstracting the absolute quality of sound from its source, or opening up the
composition to total indeterminacy as Cage had done. The anecdotal form which
Ferrari termed this style of tape composition takes Schaeffer’s original
insights on the uncanny quality of everyday sound and romanticizes it. Ferrari,
something of the dandy, stands in stark opposition to Xenakis’s brutal
modernism or Pierre Henry’s rendering of ancient religious texts into strange
minimal concrete melodramas. Ferrari’s concerns were much more with what Andre
Breton called the Marvelous; that strange aspect of an object beyond its
everyday qualities suggestive of other more poetic meanings.
Like Max Ernst
Ferrari deployed unconventional techniques to his objects of choice, rendering
them displaced, in unfamiliar circumstances, open to metaphorical readings. In
the fine tradition of surrealism he doesn’t construct narratives but rather
rearranges objects from everyday life, highlighting possibility, movement, and
emotion. But what make me love him most is that he creates sensual, dare I say
sexy tape compositions, brimming with desire. Recall that for the surrealists one
important facet of the marvelous is that it’s not so much found as
“encountered” by chance. In the sleeve notes to a CD of sonic “souvenirs” he
writes “the cycle des souvenirs also means that all the elements are
structured in cycles which when superimposed, produce chance encounters. That’s
why everything is turning. In this turning of sound and image, memory is
written in a distorting mirror, but one where everything is true”. Like Breton in Nadja he takes on the role of
the flaneur stalking the streets with his microphone in search of a soul in
limbo. His marvelous object might be something quite small like the cicadas in
the Presque Rien’s or it might be something very loud like the fireworks
in Promenade Symphonique Dans Un Paysage Musical Ou Un Jour De Fete A El
Oued En 1976 (1976-87). But more often than not, like a thread in the
labyrinth, it is a feminine quality that draws his attention. It could be the
female voices that enter into Presque Rien Avec Filles (1989), the
dialogue and building eroticism between the two young women at the centre of
the astonishing Danses Organique (1973), or perhaps simply the sound of
his wife Brunhild, an ever present companion on Ferrari’s travels. One of my favorite
compositions of his from the 1970s is Place Des Abbesses (1977), named
after a square halfway up the hill of Monmartre, situated suggestively between
the Sacred Heart of God and the Pigalle area of sex shops and license; Breton
would no doubt have approved.
Ventimiglia, to
draw the discussion full circle, was the subject for the fourth of the Presque
Rien series. It involved Ferrari and his wife recording their assent into
the medieval part of the town. By this point in his career Ferrari had expanded
his ideas on the form of the Presque Rien and now introduced what he
called the lie or perversion into the concept. This involved a greater degree
of intervention on his part into the raw material of the recording, adding
effects or even (as he makes clear on this occasion) entirely foreign sounds
into the mix to evoke an element of fantasy and interpretation within the anecdotal
form. My composition which will be formed around a thirty minute recording I
made whilst descending the medieval town with my partner will also include a
considerable amount of fantasy and interpretation. The thing which struck me
most when listening to my raw material and Ferrari’s piece was the similarity
in the natural sound world considering the twenty-three year gap between the
recordings; children playing in the square in front of the church, violin
practice wafting out of an open window high above us, a scooter passes by,
snippets of TV, radio, conversation, and the bells from the tower of San Michele Arcangelo ringing out at noon. Here
are a few photos of the area which might suggest the sort of sound environment
we encountered.
