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sound analogies

Sound Analogies

I like each and every sound in a concert hall before and during a performance. The coughing, the rustling of cough drop wrappers being unwrapped, the dropping of programs, the gentle snoring of this weekend’s seat neighbor (a stranger,) the gasps when someone’s cellphone goes off despite house warnings, the whiny kid, the tapping feet of Rachmaninoff enthusiasts – I love them all. Music is a communal enterprise, not just between the musicians but in the shared experience, in time, with an audience, and the noise we produce makes it clear we exist and are all in this together. Community, if only for a few hours.

This weekend’s program at the Oregon Symphony added a third kind of sound to the music played and the muted noise of the listeners: the music itself contained references to things heard in the real world and then translated into notes, in this instance a ping-pong game.

Yup. Table tennis. Spin Flip by Korean composer Texu Kim was a romp of musical allusions, tightly and energetically conducted by Eun Sun Kim. (I am linking to an older performance by a different orchestra in Korea which unfortunately does not capture the richness that was heard here in Portland.)

And if this piece was about flying balls, the next one, Chopin’s Piano concerto Nr. 2, reminded me of dispersing, clattering and rolling marbles. A gorgeous performance by Benjamin Grosvenor. (My link is to Rubinstein, all I could find.) I will remain silent on the nostalgic molasses of the third part of the concert, Rachmaninoff’s 3rd, since I have no time for enraged comments about my ignorance about the true modernist core of the piece….

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We are not unfamiliar with world sounds imported into musical notations, just think of all the bird songs making an appearance, prominently with Beethoven’s Pastorale (here are his bird calls) and extensively with Messiaen’s Catalog of Birds – I wrote about it some years back here:

Up with the Birds

Since then I have learned a lot more – particularly about the relationship between environmental sounds in music and social practices. Listen to some instances here. People either imitated the voices with instruments (or whistling – a fascinating topic for another day,) or they imported the real ones through recordings. Composers also started to have extensive notations about the kind of places they wanted you to imagine while listening.

“…identifies species or environmental things like “stream” or whatever he was going for. Something about that, too, also indicates (at a really basic level) the relationship between the score and the piece. There is this project at work, in addition to the music, supplementary to the music, or complementary to the music. I’m of the mind that it’s key to understanding the piece. These really descriptive, poetic presentations of where we are in the land, in addition to the detailed marking-up of the score, says to me that this piece had a multi- sensory, multi-modal way of being in the world that it desired…where you were not only a listener, but you were also a reader, you were also a body in a physical space to absorb the sounds in a particular way.”

A true attempt to invite us to share the glories of nature.

Eventually you end up with something altogether strange: music composed of themes entirely constructed with real birdcalls, Jim Fassett’s Symphony of the Birds. (Actual piece starts at 6:20.) Ornithologists reacted with dismay – they were the specialists in recording bird song and did not cherish intruders into their scientific domain. G-d forbid, art should dilute science…

Never mind the competition for marketing: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology with its amazing collection of recordings, and the associated Cornell University press, was often selling or licensing them to Walt Disney or other film companies for their projects, creating a market place for environmental sounds.

They should ALL hurry up with the recoding: new data show we’ve lost 3 billion birds over the last half century across North America, 29 % of the population.

Let’s hear the blackbird sing in creative ways…..

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Water is the Shovel of the Shore

Need a break from the tumult of this month, this year, from politics, war, pandemics? Never mind the nail biting over the run-off election in Georgia, as I write this?

I have just the thing – something to listen to that offers gorgeous, thoughtful music, surprising with the ease and elegance with which it fluctuates between traditional and experimental sound. The Water is the Shovel of the Shore provides at times a calming mix of folk tunes and natural sound and then it shifts to provocative ways to make you think about the historical implications of our relationship to water, the way it nourishes, punishes, bringing life as well as death.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

OK, maybe not a break from politics, war and disease, after all, but time spent that fills you with beauty and, ultimately, hope for liberation from our burdens. The album is at its most effective if you reserve time to listen consciously, not just in the background. Even better with headphones, so many artistic subtleties otherwise hard to notice.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And in the department of “How could this be?”: it is again music that usually does not draw me in, namely one based in folk songs and rooted in British, Scottish, Irish and in this instance Guyanese tradition, beautifully sung both in chorus and solos. (The other was Simmerdim, reviewed here earlier.) The answer to that question is easy: the music goes way beyond tradition and explores and integrates progressive approaches to communicating with sound. It is thematically digging deep into our relationship with water, and artistically varied enough to satisfy my everlasting hunger for intellectual stimulation that does not come at the expense of emotional connection. The album serves both. Come to think of it, it feeds bits of my soul as well, given that it reminds me of formative times spent in England while still young and links to my collage work since 2019 which focussed on ships and water in climate change and pandemic contexts. (All images today are from the various series, using my photographs of ships, landscapes and paintings to be combined into photomontages, printed on German etching paper.)

In the Harbor From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

The nine-person folk ensemble Shovel Dance Collective has made a splash on the scene after only a few years of existence, as evidenced in the glowing music reviews found everywhere. Much to be learned for us uninitiated, from the fact that folk tunes have no fixed composers and thus are open to reinterpretation across centuries, to the fact that love and loss seemed to be always anchored as a dyad in traditional folk songs.

I didn’t need the insights from the reviews, though, to be reminded that labor in all of its nuances and burdens was a traditional topic in folk music. Related to water you have the sea shanties, of course, easing the strenuous work load on merchant marine and war ships (thus extracting more labor, in the end), but the music also reminds of the dangers of industrial work, in harbors, oil rigs, and the likes.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And water’s gruesome role in the perishing of human beings exemplifies what this album manages to pull off: showing that exploitation, violent oppression, denial of rights to anyone outside the ruling class are not relegated to history, as captured in traditional song. An estimated 2 million slaves perished during the Atlantic passage. (I will never get over the fact that cargo insurance did not cover ill slaves or those killed by disease while covering drowned slaves – leading to throwing sick ones alive into the ocean for profit even from their death (Ref.) Maybe a small number of all killed overall, but showing the extent of the profit motive in the barbarism of slavery. )

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

Not just the past. Of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean, 25.313 have died since 2014 and, closer to home, over 800 have perished this year alone by drowning in the Rio Grande or the opposite – lack of water leading to heat death in their approach to the US border.) There is an unbroken chain of themes that these musicians bring to the fore in contemporary fashion, enduring content in marvelously adapted form.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

The link between history and our present times is amplified by the various sound scapes recorded from rivers, harbor activity and other sources that firmly anchor the music by Alex Mckenzie, Daniel S. Evans, Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Joshua Barfoot, Mataio Austin Dean, Nick Granata, Oliver Hamilton and Tom Hardwick-Allan.

Integrating real life sound into music, or creating compositions made up entirely of that kind of sound, has been around for almost 80 years now, with the French broadcast technician Pierre Schaeffer recognized as the father of this musique concrète movement. Here is one of his extraordinary compositions using but train sounds, étude aux chemins de fer. Water was a preferred sound then already – here is one of my favorites, Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (for tape) from 1955. Most of us were likely more familiar with the inclusion of extraneous sounds in the realm of more commercial pop music. Remember the traffic noises appearing in the 1966 Loving Spoonful’s Summer in the City? Or the extraneous sounds so dominant in many albums by Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy to Uncle Meat included, way before he hooked up with Pierre Boulez, the French composer who is seen as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s successors? (For the fun of it, and I know I’m getting sidelined here, but since I am a fan: Here is Zappa’s Cough Drop commercial using musique concrète. )

Back to he Shovel Dance Collective. The immutable sounds of nature juxtaposed with the arrival of modern aural landscapes, from junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, or rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, to tourists feeding gulls, ferry noises east from London Bridge, and clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr blessing the Thames capture continuity and change, with music as a mode that embraces both, water the vehicle to ferry that idea across, having us gently float on the stream of evolution.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

As my regular readers know, I have become interested in acoustic ecology recently, given what I learned about Sonic Mapping, Sonic Spectres, Sound Analogies and Sound Variations. This album adds beauty to it all. For me, an awesome find. 

Pacific Sights (Los Angeles) From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

Listen to the Water is the Shovel of the Shore here.

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The Snails

The Snails

by Samatar Elmi

I mean, the analogy writes itself
like the onion in a grand conceit
though we really are like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.
Google “snails are…”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.

You, who cannot speak snail,
wouldn’t understand how the shell
was the gift and curse of diaspora,
how our songs and laments resound
in our half-remembered houses
that we carry to forget, to carry on.

This poem by Elmi, a young British-Somali poet, Ph.D. candidate and musician has been on my desk for a while. I wanted to pair it with photographs I shot some time ago, but it took me ages to find them. Thus is the curse of an unorganized archive. That way, though, I had occasion to read the poem repeatedly, always reacting with a mix of admiration of the poet’s craft and sadness, the way an immigrant’s life and burden so perfectly captured in his analogies. He won the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize with this work, the annual prize for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection.  

The snail analogy is of course the Black/Brown/Muslim/Latino immigrant who destroys gardens, jobs, women – ours‘ no less. Next we are redirected to the other’s perspective, in that abrupt break between stanzas, visually mirroring the distance between “us and them.” All this while analogy itself is made a subject in the first line, disorienting the reader in some fashion, trying to figure out if it really writes itself while we are grasping for understanding. It brings us right back to the fact that there is a schism between two worlds, being strangers to each other, with xenophobia so closely related to our disgust reaction to the slimy invaders known as snails.

The snail shell serves as an echo chamber, the repository of the cultural memories of a former belonging, now half remembered, and in need of forgetting to force integration. How could we understand, the loss it implies, and the demands that will never be met to Whites’ satisfaction, we who live here with our jobs, or women and our gardens?

It is all so sparse, so economical and yet so rich in meaning.

Music from his album The Winter of Discontent (he uses a different alias as a musician.)

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