Listening between the Lines




Listening between the Lines is a concert evening that undertakes a journey through the history of electro-acoustic music. The milestones along the way are musique concrète, Dada, concrete poetry, electronic music and works by contemporary digital composers. Featured pieces include an interpretation by Jaap Blonk of a part of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate and videos of readings by Ernst Jandl as well as compositions by such pioneers of radio art and electronic music as Herbert Eimert, Pierre Boulez and Györgi Ligeti.
Synthesis has been a leitmotif of this series since its very inception. In 2003, attention was focused on the relationship between classical modernism and digital composers; last year, it was the bond joining acoustic and visual forms of expression. The program for 2005 thematicizes phonetic-linguistic aspects of sound art over the past 50 years.

Whereas avant-garde manifestations of the plastic arts and literature such as Dada, Futurism and Fluxus were not necessarily totally reliant upon technical media of expression for the production and presentation of their ideas and thus could also be established “unplugged,” acoustic art is singularly dependent upon the availability of technology. That of magnetic tape, for example, dates back to the 1940s, and the relatively lavish, involved “composition” and playback environment necessary for it was located for the most part in the studios of public institutions. The development from a primarily intended hybridization to an explicit hybridization of the arts is a phenomenon of the increasing availability of technology and thus directly associated with the process of development in its sound-determined field. Viewed strategically, even a piece like Articulation in which Ligeti pursues the idea of utilizing orchestral means to distill sound dynamics out of phonetic material is within the tradition of this new procedure.

Acoustic art is a melting pot of heterogeneous acoustic elements (Klaus Schöning). Accordingly, the methods of amalgamation, consolidation and hybridization have always had greater techno-aesthetic significance than in the forms of plastic art being produced at the same time. It has been the setting for the condensation of an entire world of language, sounds, visual imagery and noise. For the Festival “Hybrid—living in paradox”, Listening between the Lines is thus not merely a continuation of the series of theme-specific concert evenings begun two years ago; it is one of its core elements.
Once again, the Bruckner Orchestra under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies plays a decisive role. Without the great interest that this orchestra has displayed in taking part in the experiments that have been conducted during these evening programs and to truly involve themselves wholeheartedly in them on an ongoing basis, the Festival would not even have been in the position to establish such a format.

Alone the attempt this year to present a representative sampling of a half century of musical history over the course of five hours (from 7:30 PM to 12:30 AM) calls for conditions that are nothing short of lavish with respect to their orchestral personnel requirements. Pieces of music like Ligeti’s Apparitions and Notations by Boulez (who is celebrating his 80th birthday in 2005) demand a very extensive orchestral lineup-for example, Notations, a piece that is barely 10 minutes long, calls for 18 first and 10 second violins, eight percussionists including a timpanist, four to six musicians on each brass instrument, as well as a piano, a celesta and three harps. Beyond all other motifs featured on this evening, practicing temporal minimalism with this lineup makes up one of this concert’s very special qualities.
For the first time, an integral part of the evening’s program will be the prizewinning works from the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Musics category, performances that are usually presented at their own separate concert event. The reason for this is, once again, Dennis Russell Davies who, in collaboration with this year’s winner of the Golden Nica, Maryanne Amacher, and Naut Humon, has arranged a piece for electronic instruments and the Bruckner Orchestra. This performance will be its world premiere. In the chronology of this collaboration, this is an important step from the previous practice of grouping electronic music together as an intra-genre confrontation to this new production practice.

Another composer who will be represented in the Digital Musics portion of the evening is John Oswald, whose “plunderphonics” was singled out for recognition by the Prix Ars Electronica. His piece that will be performed at this concert is one that thematicizes music and language on the basis of recordings of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. Glenn Gould’s obsession with accompanying his own piano playing by singing and humming-a “disturbance” that could usually be eliminated through considerable effort on the part of studio technicians-has been consciously highlighted by Oswald.

In addition to the works listed at the outset, Listening between the Lines will also include performances of works by Pillip Glass, Eliot Carter and Shoko Shida, Josef Klammer’s composition for flute apparatuses generated from speech synthesis software, two exemplary works created by Erich Berger and Scott Arford for the growing “Tempest” scene, John Cage’s treatment of Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, as well as an hommage to Samuel Beckett by radio art pioneer Charles Amirkhanian.
Philipp Glass’ Low Symphony will be visualized—although in the form of a slide show and thus without digital integration with the music—with works by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose images are portraits of the captivating beauty of some of this planet’s physical locations that have been ruined by human beings.


Pierre Boulez
Notations
Since the 1950s, Pierre Boulez has been among the most important protagonists of the musical avant-garde. Boulez, who originally planned to devote himself to the study of mathematics and technical sciences, began his career studying composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. Notations is based on a cycle of 12 short pieces for the piano by the then-20-year-old composer. In 1978, Boulez took the first four parts of this work from his youth and completely recomposed them and/or modified them for a large orchestra. In doing so, he combined the technique of 12-tone music with a rhythmic pattern that bears the stamp of Olivier Messiaen.
Boulez himself describes Notations as “variations on a not precisely defined basic theme. One senses their interrelatedness without being able to exactly put ones finger on it. Which is also not necessary, since this composition functions as a modular arrangement. [...] In the overall context, this results in a sort of suite with an airy coherence, with an impressive transparence.”

Györgi Ligeti
Artikulation (UA 1958, Köln), Apparitions (UA 1960, Köln)
Györgi Ligeti, who had left Hungary during the revolution in 1956, was working in 1957 in Cologne, where he produced electronic music compositions that were significant for this period. They included Glissandi, a forerunner of the orchestral work Apparitions that made its debut in 1960, and Articulation.
What particularly interested Ligeti in his artistic encounter with electronic sounds was the similarity of numerous elements with language. In this sense, then, Articulation constitutes an allusion to the intonation of a wordless conversation in which questions are followed by answers, incidental remarks are interjected, interruptions occur, there is whispering, and different vocal registers and characters are involved. Apparitions is quite different-it is based, on one hand, on aleatory principles according to which various characteristics of the sound material are organized and, on the other hand, on a strict serial plan for sound patterns interwoven in this way.


Philip Glass
Low
Philip Glass’ 1992 symphony entitled Low is based on an album of the same name by David Bowie and Brian Eno featuring songs and instrumental pieces. For their work on “Low,” Bowie and Eno also had recourse to the then-novel methods of experimental music and thereby created what amounts to a definitive work for pop and electronic music of the late ‘70s.
Glass takes his inspiration from three instrumental pieces, Subterraneans, Some Are and Warszawa, and blends them together with his own material from his three-movement symphony. In Glass’ notes about his approach and the ensuing results, he states that he chiefly followed the lead of his own compositional preferences, but, over the course of the work, nevertheless occasionally came to “surprising musical inferences.” (CD, Philip Glass, Symphonies based on music by David Bowie and Brian Eno)


Scott Arford
TV-IV
In contrast to Erich Berger, who applies his methods on digital devices and produces loops through digital images, Arford restricts himself to old vacuum-tube monitors, whereby this can be regarded as a new and, in a certain respect, thoroughly amusing counterpart of the persistent ongoing dispute among rock musicians about the pros and cons of transistorized and vacuum-tube amplifiers.


John Cage
Muoyce
Muoyce —“Music from Joyce”—was produced in 1984 at German broadcasting company WDR’s Acoustic Art Studio. John Cage whispered aloud his Fifth Writing through Finnegan’s Wake four times and superimposed the recordings. The transparency produced in the style of a Chinese canon through the superposition of the act of speaking, the language and the onomatopoeically ambiguous multiplicity of meanings of Finnegan’s Wake’s extraordinary vocabulary seems to be at once an hommage to and a thought-provoking interpretation of James Joyce’s work.


Charles Amirkhanian
Pas de voix
Radio art pioneer Charles Amirkhanian likewise conceived his piece entitled Pas de voix as an hommage to one of the greats of international literature, Samuel Beckett. This is a soundscape composed of audio stills from the area around Beckett’s last dwelling in Paris. The composition works with the material in the phase in which it becomes audible-the equivalent of the way a person takes in breath before speaking.


Josef Klammer
VoxFox
In 2003, Josef Klammer generated the sound effects and music to accompany the Elfriede Jelinek play of the same name as staged by Ernst Binder. The basis of this work was phonological-musical contents yielded by speech synthesis computer programs (text-to-speech software). This material was juxtaposed to the spoken word as uttered naturally on the stage. The attempt to enunciate semantically meaningless words and sentences (e. g. odulijamuo, bibibibe, gtogtogto, tockt, hoanseihoa etc.) and thereby to utter meaningful words and sentences gave rise to a way of compositional reprocessing. The performance of this work as conceived for Listening between the Lines confronts hybrid sounds produced in this way with sounds produced by a flute-like sound resonator designed by Professor Christian Kratzenstein in 1779.


Erich Berger
Tempest
The audiovisual performance Tempest draws its name from a U.S government code word for a set of standards for limiting electric or electromagnetic radiation from electronic equipment. The surveillance technology derived from it makes possible a technical procedure by means of which a computer screen’s contents can be reconstructed remotely by picking up the EM field emitted from the screen.
The performance Tempest utilizes the basic principles of this technique to transform purely generative graphics into a tight and intense composition of sound, noise and light. Several AM receivers are tuned into the different frequencies of a computer screen and their outputs are plugged into an audio mixer for further sound processing. The graphics on the computer screen (seen by the audience via two large projectors) become a means for producing sound, and it is only the generative graphics that determine the different timbres and rhythms. Feeding the audio back into the image-generating process adds a chaotic layer, and in this way Tempest becomes a synaesthetic instrument mastered by surfing the space of possibilities evolving from this autopoietic process.


Herbert Eimert
Epitaph
Herbert Eimert’s composition Epitaph premiered in 1962 in Darmstadt, Germany. It is dedicated to the Japanese fisherman Aikichi Kuboyama, the first casualty of the hydrogen bomb test in March 1954. The composition is based on a recording of the enunciation of the inscription on a commemorative stone, the words of which are subject to various electro-acoustic transformations.
“What predominates in the Epitaph,” Eimert wrote about the piece, “are vocalizations as acoustic-phonetic processes and their transformation into purely musical sounds, which often makes their origins unrecognizable. But also the word itself-with its pronunciation, its meaning and the experiences conjured up by its content-repeatedly comes to the fore and, taking on greater intensity with the entire weight of its significance, becomes the designation of meaning of individual words or word combinations [...]. The form of the epitaph is easy to grasp; it consists of the exposition—which also includes the reading aloud of the gravestone inscription-from the structural complexes A, B and C and the coda. [...] The foundation of the time structure is the rhythm of the spoken word. [...] The differing degrees of comprehensibility of the syllables, words and choral intonations (of up to six voices) are derived directly from the treatment of the basic material, which does not need to overcome any ‘dualism’ between word and sound because it no longer recognizes it.”




Music by: AGF.3, Maryanne Amacher, Scott Arford, Erich Berger, Biosphere (Geir Jenssen), Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Louis Dufort, Herbert Eimert, Fe-Mail, Philip Glass, Ernst Jandl, Josef Klammer, Györgi Ligeti, John Oswald, Pan Sonic, Kurt Schwitters, Shoko Shida, Otomo Yoshihide
Visuals by: Scott Arford, Erich Berger, Florian Berger, Reinhold Bidner, Edward Burtynsky, Andreas Jalsovec, Friedrich Kirschner, Golan Levin, Egbert Mittelstädt, Chris Musgrave, Stefan Schilcher, SUE.C, Masako Tanaka, Kirk Woolford

Performed by: Maryanne Amacher, Scott Arford, Erich Berger, Jaap Blonk, Brucknerorchester Linz, Dennis Russel Davies, Josef Klammer, Maki Namekawa, John Oswald, Pan Sonic, Conductor: Dennis Russell Davies

Curators: Dennis Russell Davies, Naut Humon, Gerfried Stocker

In cooperation with Brucknerhaus Linz