The Times Quotidian

A Simple Point About Freedom of Expression
By Aram Yardumian

Today, the Senate (Upper House) of the French parliament will vote on a bill to criminalize the denial of the Armenian Genocide. This bill was drafted by lawmakers from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party and approved by the National Assembly (Lower House) on December 22^nd of last year. If it passes the Senate, anyone who publically denies the First World War mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks constituted genocide will face a one-year jail term and a fine of up to 45,000 Euros. According to Patrick Ollier, a UMP parliamentarian, the bill simply conjoins a 1991 French law defining Shoah denial as a crime. “This is a simple coordination of punishment,” he said.

Reactions to the passing of the bill have so far been perfunctory. Turkish nationalists have flown their colors at home and abroad, and Turkey has enacted some sanctions against France, threatening more if the bill becomes law. This, in spite of the facts that the bill does not accuse modern Turkey of anything, nor does it in any way affect citizens of Turkey who choose to practice obfuscation and denial at home. Agence France-Presse quotes Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying, “I ask you: Is there freedom of thought and freedom of expression in France? The answer is, ‘No.’ France has abolished the spirit of free discussion.” He also made a bizarre attempt to accuse the French of cooking Algerians in ovens akin to Nazi crematoriums.

Scores of other public figures, bloggers, and lawmakers have followed up with their own opinions on the possible ramifications for French freedom of expression and democracy were the bill to become law. They all have warned of eroding democracy and discrimination. Not a single one has considered how such a law might, on the contrary, enable the freedom of expression.

An example. In 1934, MGM Studios purchased the filming rights to Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel about the self-defense of an Armenian community on Musa Dagh, at the eastern end of the Ottoman Empire, during the First World War. Clark Gable was slated to play a leading role. Production on the film had just begun when MGM received word from the US State Department that the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Mehmed Münir Ertegün (father of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegün) was anxious for his country not to be poorly portrayed in Hollywood films. Several water-downed versions of the Musa Dagh script were sent to Ertegün but he remained recalcitrant. Losing patience with the idea of a foreign power making editorial decisions for him, MGM’s production chief declared, “To hell with the Turks, I’m going to make the picture anyway.” Ertegün responded with a threat: “If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it. It rekindles the Armenian Question. The Armenian Question is settled.” Indeed, Turkey did launch a campaign. The September 3^rd 1935 issue of the Istanbul-based Haber newspaper featured an editorial warning Jews and Jewish companies doing business in Turkey that they would suffer if MGM (owned by Louis B. Mayer, a Jew) produced the film. Mayer, reluctantly, threw in the towel and the film was never made. The French had their part to play in the censorship of this film in America, inasmuch as their interests in the Dardanelles, as well as their concerns about the relations between Nazi Germany and Turkey, ensured their loyalties to the latter. For a thorough treatment of this affair, see the 2007 book by Edward Minasian, published by Cold Tree Press.

Musa Dagh is a heroic novel about overcoming utmost adversity. As such it found appeal in one of Hollywood’s more anthemic directors, Sylvester Stallone, who in 2006 announced his intention to resurrect Musa Dagh, but quietly abandoned the idea after receiving threatening emails. In 2009, Mel Gibson reportedly expressed interest in directing and appearing in a documentary version of Musa Dagh, but also abandoned his ambition following an email campaign spearheaded by a Turkish-American lobby group known as ASIMED.

Whether or not one accepts there is a trade-off in freedoms of expression when censorship laws weigh in favor of one special interest group or another, this can be the case. It is especially noticeable when a loud voice is muted so that softer voices may be heard. Had there been an American law against Armenian Genocide denial in 1934, this extraordinary case of extra-national censorship would not have occurred. But such a law would also have prevented scholarship, however dubious, by Drs. Justin McCarthy, Heath Lowry, and Guenter Lewy all of whom have experienced some some degree of difficulty, however self-inflicted, in expressing their views over the years.

If we believe in freedom of expression as a dialectical tool in sustained reasoned discussion, as John Stuart Mill prescribed it, then the French bill, along with similar laws regarding Shoah denial, is counterproductive. But neither Mill nor any of his inheritors, to my knowledge, including Michel Foucault, has analyzed the nature of censorship as a political pendulum within the greater historical dialectic of free societies. Is freedom of expression really an inert force to which everyone has access at all times? It seems to me it is eminently alienable, made so by those who have the coercive power to impose consequences. When the interests of two competing, asymmetrically proportioned groups are at stake, freedom of expression would seem to favor the one with more institutional power, yet public opinion and media must be taken here as a special cases of institution.

Fewer than twenty people have been convicted of Holocaust denial in Europe, and most of them invited the conviction as a martyrdom opportunity. Following Mill, if the most egregious result of Shoah Denial laws is the thirteen months David Irving spent in an Austrian jail for his opinions, then this must be weighed against tendencies for potential harm caused right-wing extortions against scholars and entertainment industry executives. Then again, if Pamela Pilger can mouth off, why can’t John Galliano?

If Turkish groups feel free to extend their own peeves into American art and commerce through extortion, then we are already practicing self-censorship. Though a criminalizing of Armenian Genocide (as well as Shoah) denial in the USA seems ill-advised, it should be noted that no one screaming about free expression is advocating for US recognition of the genocide, however much freedom of expression it would abet.

None of these countermeasures would be necessary without Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal for anyone to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions. The original 2005 wording was even vaguer, making it a crime to insult “Turkishness”, whatever that may be. In 2008, the article was amended to its present form. Far more draconian than any European form of censorship, a number of high profile charges have been brought due to 301, including against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who said in an interview with Das Magazin, a Swiss weekly newspaper supplement, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here [in Turkey], and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.”

In 2006, Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was also prosecuted under the Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness” after a rather mild and conciliatory article about the Armenian Genocide. He received a six month suspended sentence, but was assassinated by Turkish nationalists before he could serve it. He was acquitted posthumously. In 2007, Hrant’s son, Arat, and Serkis Seropyan were convicted under 301 to one-year suspended sentences under for reprinting Dink’s articles. Ironically, Hrant Dink’s experiences with censorship taught him to loathe it, and he on several occasions said to his friends he was not in favor of the nascent French bill, and moreover would personally travel to France to break it.

In the end, the Armenian Genocide bill has nothing to do with freedom of expression, per se. There are two main motivations behind it, one being the guaranteeing of half a million French-Armenian votes for Sarkozy in upcoming elections; the second and more relevant being the acid test for Turkey in its European Union ambitions. Turkey’s poorly calculated and emotional responses to the French bill, whose mirror image it upholds and enforces as a law, are good indicators of the arrogance and self-servitude it will bring to all questions of internal policy as an EU candidate. They have triggered the pratfall and kicking is only making them look worse.

In the likely event the bill does not pass the Senate, Sarkozy knows he has, for his efforts, already curried the favor of his French-Armenian population and secured the votes he wanted. The bill’s rejection will relieve the French Turks and he will be on his way to victory. This is a baiting method he learned from Obama. But Sarkozy is not the only one eager to harvest the echoes of this sad historical episode and their ramifications on freedom of expression in Europe. On January 3^rd, wealthy French businessman and political aspirant Rachid Nekkaz created a 1 million Euro fund to pay the fine of anyone convicted in France of denying the Armenian Genocide. Formerly, he also offered to pay fines imposed on French Muslim women caught wearing a burqa. Nekkaz, who has quite a lot to learn about both historiography and the limits of the French bill (see the hapless December 27^th 2011 entry of his French-language blog), is also hard at work purchasing political capital. Were he so concerned with constitutional freedom of expression as he claims to be, perhaps he would be willing to help fund and promote a Sylvester Stallone feature film called The Forty Days of Musa Dagh? Something tells me his priorities are further from freedom of expression and closer to himself, as are those of nearly everyone involved in this affair.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922
Organ accompaniment by Peter Krasinski
by Aram Yardumian

The history of Nosferatu’s soundtrack, or lack thereof, is almost as notorious as that of the film itself. Predating sound-on-film technology in Weimar Germany by several years[1], Nosferatu appeared at a time in cinema history when a full or small chamber orchestra played live accompaniment. All the great Weimar ‘silent’ cinema classics, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) were synchronized to commissioned scores played by such orchestras, and most of the large European and American cinemas of the day boasted full orchestra pits. Hans Erdmann’s original score to Nosferatu was lost during the well-known legal debacle following its release, which saw nearly all copies of the film itself destroyed, and all known copies of the score along with them.

Following the death of Florence Stoker, copies of the film began to reemerge from dark corners of film libraries all over the world, but any remaining copies of the score have yet to do so. Thus, many attempts at recapitulating it from remaining fragments, and reinterpreting the film musically have been made over the years, James Bernard’s being perhaps the most well known. But the mystery of a missing score, especially one which accompanies a film of such artistic purity, should perhaps remain a mystery.

There are exceptions to this, and Peter Krasinski is one. It being Halloween night, he began the evening with a rendition of Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565). The organ was positioned on stage such that Mr Krasinski could watch the film with the audience, and we could see him play from an oblique angle (or, for some people, from behind). When the film began rolling, Mr Krasinski immediately settled into that perfect flowing path that always stays two steps ahead of innocuous, without ever overtaking the film itself or calling attention to itself. His playing throughout amplified the drama of the film while remaining remarkably restrained and seamless, given the great temptation to thrash bombastically around on the Irvine’s 10,731-pipe Curtis Organ, one of the largest and most elaborate in the world.

Tocata & Fugue in D Minor, BMV 565, Johann Sebastian Bach, Klemmens Scnorr Organist

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The drama of the film feeds on the blood of psychological counterpoint: Hutter’s naïvete and Count Orlock’s savagery; Knock’s duplicitous sycophantry and the untiring loyalty of Harding and Annie. These contrasts and emotional undulations became thicker and denser through Mr Krasinski’s playing, for while I never detected a repeated motif, per se, he seemed to cycle and groove within the deeper undercurrents of the film. Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, a choice of low notes to vibrate the pit of the stomach rose higher with the stink of boxes filled with Transylvanian dirt in the hold of a Black Sea cargo ship. Above all, the playing grounded to the audience in a reading of Nosferatu as tragic and triumphant, menacing and mysterious, in an age when it might be passed off as a campy curiosity. The distinctly uncreepy Mr Krasinski looked moved himself, taking no delight in the strangulation of Ellen; his final crushing chord ushering her, in her ultimate sacrifice, out of this life beneath the rising of the sun over Wisborg.

Appropriately, the influences of Bach’s keyboard were in clear evidence that night. However, the improvisation was not limited to the Teutonic or even the Baroque: hints of Bernstein and other Modern American classical touches, progressive touches a la Procol Harem and Egg; here and there some passages of non-repetitive jazz piano (if you get me). Mr Krasinski is, it turns out, one of the world’s finest—if not the leading—silent film live improvisational accompanists. His accompaniments to Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, as well as Metropolis, in addition to a large repertoire of sacred works, are well known and keep him in high demand. A personable fellow, he smiled broadly to our ovations. And in a charmingly old fashioned touch, he stood in the lobby and shook hands with individual audience members as they left the theater.

Who knows what manner of plasmatic psychosexualis would have resulted had Janet and Catherine taken up Byron Coley’s challenge, and who knows—maybe they will get around to doing it someday. In the meantime, perhaps I can talk Mr Krasinski into lending his inspired genius to Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, or, hey, even Zabriske Point—with or without psilocybin molecules multifoliating in his head.

An Interview with American Sound Artist Jeph Jerman
By Aram Yardumian

In the end, whether we consider Postmodern music a calculated response to Modernist forms, or a convex re-analysis of music in general, the act of listening remains deeply mysterious. Whether we ascribe universal meaning to Mass in B Minor or The Pirates of Penzance within their authorial and historical contexts, or devise a hyperlogical system to register tones as phonemes, 4′33″ and The Well-Tuned Piano still stare back like Rorschach blotter. Perhaps the acme of Postmodern music will be an authorless text without any possible universal interpretation, only individual descriptions and resonances, such that the only possible recourse will be to listen. The act of listening is not getting any less mysterious, or vital, as technology changes. Nor are the distinctions between content and process becoming any more important. As long as resistance to poetic registers in critical description remain, so will commitments to the worst possible misapprehensions: the substance is overlooked while the procedures are hunted down and taxidermized.

Jeph Jerman doesn’t need me to tell him he’s post-anything. In fact, he prefers I would shut my mouth and listen. Yet because his sound resembles little else, his influences are diffuse and distant, and in many ways he has reinvented John Cage’s notion of automaticism for himself, from the ground up, I felt compelled to investigate. As early as 1981, Jerman was recording environmental sounds to listen to in raw form, and feed into tape loops. His interest at this time was not in making music, per se, but in sound experiments. Though he released nothing, as he says, “worth listening to” until 1987, some of his earlier material has recently been made available on CD. Jerman’s early work as Hands To, and with the noise-unit City of Worms, is rich in grays and blacks, tones of earth and metals flickering against the walls of your ears; vast ambient spaces and tight, deep underground tunnels. Sometimes the sonorous roar of hundreds warehouse district machines all blend together at night; the occasional voice rises like water from soft sand; futuristic metropolises collapsing into the mighty rivers that gave them life — or perhaps none of these things, for it is impossible to know, at present, what is actually in the text. Many of Jerman’s works in this phase are apparently idea-based and framed by the limits of his equipment; their programs are kept so hidden that you must give in and just listen. The overall structures of these early tape works is careful and contemplated, even if the vibe are dank and unfathomable, and occasionally gives the impression that it is a transmission from somewhere else, using Jerman as its shamanic medium.

Caldia, from Ashent, City of Worms, 1988

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Drome, from Crumnants, City of Worms, 1987

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Jerman has also participated in a downtuned rock-oriented quartet called Big Joey (a quartet who lasted one LP, released in 1988, plus a second which remains unreleased), as well as the full-blast free jazz unit Blowhole, whose numerous cassette releases have been transforming genomes since 1990. The releases to which he has contributed number over one hundred, and he was based in Colorado Springs and Seattle, before settling down in Arizona.

Around the turn of the millennium, Jerman transformed his lightly processed samples and tape loop-based sound into a practice of using only found objects as sound sources. Nevertheless demanding, the results have gone from overwhelming to minimal, so minimal at times the composer’s presence slips between our fingers. These days Jerman feels less inclined even to see his work as self-expression, and begins no longer with ideas but with pure sound. Like Ezra Pound staring into the depths of Chinese logograms and diving meaning, Jerman listens to the sounds around him and gives us certain of them, his authorship present more in the erasure of context than in the creation of the sounds. Creaking. Thunder. Crickets. Wind. Water. Listen.

The Listening Chair, 2008

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I think to study Frederick Sommer’s approach to photography is to learn something further about Jerman’s sound art, inasmuch as they are both methodical explorations of place, down to the grain, and both trapsed the northern Arizona desert in search of exquisite detritus. In Sommer’s treatise on aesthetics he wrote, “The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.” Similarly, Jerman considers very carefully both the sounds he records and how he reproduces them. Recording the sounds of water, for example, is not a simple matter. How do you position the mics to capture that tonal quality of water that distinguishes the tones and rhythms we recognize as water? Of all the sounds water flow can make, how is it the human ear has come to relate certain sounds with it? And so begins the philosophical-aesthetic circuit known as interpretation, made all the more drastic by Jerman’s dissolved presence as composer-author. Forget content and process, abstract and concrete, composed and aleatory, and just listen.

The following interview took place in August 2011 by email and in Cottonwood, Arizona, where Jerman makes his home and studio.

****

Aram Yardumian: How did you become involved in the world of sound art? Were you part of a movement, or did you somehow come to it on your own?

Jeph Jerman: I think like much else in my life, I sort of stumbled into it. I’ve always been interested in things beyond ’songs’: wind in the trees, radio between stations, etc., but the first time I became aware that people were deliberately doing other things with sound was when I heard a Ken Nordine record called Word Jazz that my Mom played for me and my brother and sister. There was a piece called “The Sound Museum” in which Nordine describes various ‘sound paintings’ and then lets us hear them. I was completely enthralled with these sounds, and wished that they would go on longer. I made a tape of the sound paintings only, without the narration, so that I could listen to them over and over. I wanted to hear more stuff like them, and spent lots of time looking. At around the same time I was given a tape recorder as a birthday present, and almost immediately began trying to make my own ‘sound paintings’, along with the other silly things that kids do with tape recorders. My dad had a small reel-to-reel recorder as well that I used to borrow and play around with. Wish I had that machine today. It wasn’t until much later that I found other people who knew about different musics, and then around 1980 I began working for a college radio station in Colorado Springs which had an amazing record library. That really got the ball rolling.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but that act of removing the narration from the Nordine piece is indicative of my subsequent path through sound work. Very telling. Removing the context so that the sounds stand alone.

When I, with a few friends, began making work available publicly the only movement I was aware of was the ‘cassette culture’ explosion of the early 1980’s, which was helped along by magazines like Sound Choice and Op.

Ken Nordine, The Sound Museum

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AY: Speaking of removing sound from its context, you once described your transition from ‘idea based’ material to more ’sound based’ material, and commented that this was due to your own increased interest in listening and concomitant loss of interest in contextualizing sound. Could you expand on this by explaining what is meant by ‘idea based’ and ’sound based’ and how this transition has come about?

JJ: Put simply, I’d say that idea-based material has some context outside of the sounds themselves, a perfectly mundane example would be “Peter and the Wolf”, or pick any song, past or present. The main thrust is to convey some mood or tell some story. By ’sound-based’ I’m talking about material that is only a sound or collection of sounds to be paid strict attention to, sounds that have no narrative or emotional prod. A good example might be the long string drones of Tony Conrad.

I think my waning interest in the former and gathering involvement with the latter followed along with my slowly increasing understanding of what it is to really listen—to shut off the internal dialogue and pay attention to the vibrations entering one’s ears. At the same time I felt a need to distill the work down to its barest essence. At some point I started feeling like all the added ideas were just cluttering things up, and it all seemed rather silly. There had been allusions to sort of quasi-scientific research, and I thought if I was going to go in that direction, I should apply for a research grant and go whole hog.

AY: With field recordings there is an interesting blending of concrete and abstract going on all the time. Most of your early work seems highly abstract and most of your recent work is more concrete, and even comes with a description of the recording process. To elaborate on your last answer, what are the different things you find you can achieve with specifically abstract and concrete material?

JJ: I believe these are different means to the same end. By abstract I’m assuming that we’re talking about soundwork that has no referent to real-world things or events. In the case of at least some of the hands to material, there’s no indication of what the sounds are supposed to represent. I did have some ‘mental pictures’ that went along with various pieces while I was making them, but I didn’t make these pictures available to anyone, and the titles don’t help either. (As an aside I’d like to say that in the years since making the hands to tapes, I’ve forgotten many of those mental pictures, and listening to the works at this point in time I can almost listen to them as if I didn’t make them. Almost).

By concrete then, we’re talking about sound as itself, with no mental picture or framing device such as a narrative or ‘made up’ context, i.e. here is the sound of a 22-inch wind gong being played by a small battery-powered fan. There is nothing else given to think about while one is hearing the gong. The two approaches are means to the same end because they both end up directing one’s attention to the sound only. The abstract stuff gives no information to contemplate while hearing, and the concrete only gives specifics of being. This is not to say that one’s mind will not wander while hearing either of course…

AY: What, to you, is ‘listening’? What is the difference between listening and hearing? How can a listener change or improve the practice of listening? How have you done so?

JJ: I think that the difference is in one’s attention. Hearing goes on all the time and is involuntary, but we decide which things we pay attention to. I think it’s called ‘paying’ attention because to really do so one has to give up, or at least bypass one’s internal dialogue or judgment mechanism. Listening is a practice that can be improved. When attention wanders, re-focus on the sound. That’s what I strive to do.

AY: You once said, “I wonder to what extent the history of western musics is an outline of people’s deteriorating ability to listen.” I wonder also. Have you any continued discourse on this fascinating statement?

JJ: For one thing, people’s attention span seems to be deteriorating, and I think popular music reflects that. There aren’t many real melodies in popular music anymore, just short repeated sequences of notes, or even just chants. The way that popular music is produced leaves less and less to actually listen to, it’s all very airless and compact, like a series of hammer blows or something. It doesn’t allow you in, it slaps you in the face repeatedly. People don’t pay attention so they need to be forcefully reminded. To what extent one is the cause and the other the effect I cannot say. I think the general feeling about the attention deficit is that it is due to the proliferation of television and video, the way that things are edited into short little bits. I think there may be more to it though, including things like diet and general lifestyles. There is also the idea that children grow up much slower emotionally than they used to, being able to retreat into the fantasy world of the internet and video games. I’ve read that the average 20-year-old American has the emotional maturity of someone much younger, say, twelve or so. And we know how short children’s attention spans are.

It may also involve the ‘I’m great’ culture that’s evolved alongside rap music. Some people are so busy asserting their individuality that they have no time or space mentally to pay attention to and appreciate others. I see this every day at my job.

AY: What existential or purely aesthetic, or mystical, problems or questions have you approached with your work in its early and later phases?

JJ: There’s always been the question of how other people perceive the works themselves, and I think my process has been one of making the context more and more simple and transparent. The big questions for me have always been ‘what is this stuff for? Where does the impulse to create it come from, why do it at all?’ Early on, I didn’t think about it much. As the work took on a slightly more public life and I began to get feedback about it, I started to have to defend it almost, and that led me to question my motivations and then amend my methods and aesthetic.

AY: You use a great variety of found objects as sound sources, many of which I notice are some form of detritus. What is it about detritus that attracts you?

JJ: Much of it is quite beautiful, I think. There’s something about the way an abandoned house deteriorates—the shape changing, the wood weathering and disintegrating etc, or the way metal rusts and loses its structural integrity, that I find fascinating. The Japanese have a term for it, wabi sabi. For whatever reason, newer things just don’t sound as interesting much of the time.

AY: Many of your Hands To album and individual track titles seem non-externally referential, at least to me (e.g., Q’ojfa,Suake). By this I mean, I can’t always connect what I hear with the titles, unless I really let my imagination loose. Is it part of the program to engage the listener’s imagination through sign-signifier juxtaposition, or are there more specific onomastic connections known to you?

JJ: Many of the titles are neologisms composed of shortened forms of words or phrases. I would generally start with some sound or group of sounds, which would conjure some mental picture for me, and in turn a phrase might suggest itself. Shortening the phrases into odd-sounding words seemed to better represent each individual piece without giving it a concrete meaning. Some of the phrases I left intact: “carnival blades” or “fingers breath”, and some got chopped up and lost their meaning, like “scrine” (scribe whine) or “suake” (san francisco earthquake). “q’ojfa” was a word I found on a page of automatic writing done on an old typewriter. The name hands to is a shortened form of the phrase “and so I turn my hands to the task”, which for me at the time was used to signify my differing attempts to use or abuse sounds to different ends. The task would differ from tape to tape.

Lung Organ, from “Hoast”

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Carnivale Blades from “Neumes”

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AY: Giancarlo Toniutti and I were recently discussing the art of field recordings in relation to photography and certain forms of descriptive poetry. Inasmuch as early photographic art was seen as an aid to painters, and later as a kind of automatic painting or ‘pencil of nature’, it was criticized for representing too ‘directly’, which is also a commonplace criticism of field recording. What is your take on the relationship between field recording and photography, and the criticism they have absorbed? Is there anything field recording can achieve that no other art form can?

JJ: “Represent too directly” – that makes me laugh. It reminds me of something Berhard Günter said to me once too, that he enjoyed walking in the woods as well as anyone else, but that it wasn’t art. And I thought “’why not?’ The inference, as I understood it, was that only humans could make art.

Field recordings can be utilized in many ways: for pure listening, to study aspects of a sound field either scientifically or for general information about how sounds occur in nature—the rhythms that happen, etc. One could record the same spot at different times to try and understand the sonic changes that take place. Field recordings can also be used to present sound that isn’t representative of one’s personality, to some extent. There is still the instance of choosing what to record and where to present it. Lots of artists use field recordings as raw material to be processed…

AY: Fred Sommer’s work, especially his images of the Arizona desert, reveals, I think, his training as an architect. Do you think in terms of 2D structure or 3D architecture when composing?

JJ: Perhaps in terms of three dimensional structure. I often think of the sonic artifacts that I devise as sound-fields or sound-clouds. An encompassing presence to ‘sit in’ and experience. I used to use the phrase sound-paintings to describe my work to people who were unfamiliar with this kind of stuff, so I guess it’s gone from a two dimensional analogy to a three dimensional one.

AY: Robert Frost wrote about the conundrum of committing tones to paper, meaning things like irony, acquiescence, and doubt, which are easily discernible from speech. Mastering this was one of his chief concerns, and successes, as a poet. I see a similar kind of challenge for the sound artist who wants to capture a sense of place or concrete mood but finds that sounds on the magnetic tape are as toneless as words on paper. How do you meet this challenge?

JJ: I’m not sure that I do. At some point, after I had stopped using samplers and things and was making collages of field recordings I surmised that I may be indeed trying to conjure up feelings of place. I’m not sure that sound on its own can do that. It may evoke different moods in different listeners depending on their temperament and experience. With a work such as Cicuye the sounds are presented along with a few photos of the places where the recordings were made, so there’s a little more information to explore. These days I don’t try to evoke anything, I make sound that’ll hopefully be listened to. There are still vestiges of idea-attachment now and then. I’m human after all, and old habits die hard.

AY: I would think the American Southwest to be an especially vital source of sounds. Do you agree?

JJ: Indeed. The very name ‘Sonoran Desert’ is sonic. ‘Sonoran’ is Spanish for ‘sounding’.

Interview with Georgian composer Natalie Beridze
Introduction by Aram Yardumian

A discussion of Georgian music in polite company usually relays between two poles: Zakaria Paliashvili and polyphonic choral singing. Little else of Georgia’s folk, classical and modern forms have been granted a visa to cross the borders. And yet, the more I move about the country, the more intrigued I become by the diversity of styles. Song and dance traditions vary between regions and even between villages. There is a lively hip-hop scene in K’ut’aisi, and the whiff of a garage band catches my ears some nights in my neighborhood here in T’bilisi. The conservatory is still a lively place. For better or for worse, the Rus-pop virus has infected the disc-players of all who own a Mercedes. And of course the unique polyphonic ensembles may be heard at nighttime events. Not bad for a country which for seventy years experienced cultural freezer-burn as a Soviet member state.

Beneath the Slavic blue-beats and the ringing panduris, somewhere in an apartment with a dim chandelier, dwells Tba — Natalie Beridze — with her heaving desktop computer and microphone. Alone in her world she creates warm, cleansing electronics. Never bombastic or self-aggrandizing, her realizations reach beyond the borders of her country in much the same way Björk reached out of Iceland in her post-Sugarcubes work. That is to say, with grace but on her own terms. Tba’s body of work, taken all together, cannot be said to bend in any particular breeze. Album to album she opens another electronic advent calendar door to herself and her glitchy world. Some tracks lean heavily on lounge pillows and there is the occasional house ding-dong, but always they are structured as songs or sound-poems, not interminable heaps of techno. And always the narrative is a circuitous search for something, a longing for something, or a questioning. Tba is not an acronym for ‘to be announced’, it is in fact a pronunciation of her initials (Tusia is the diminutive form of Natalie) and a Georgian word meaning ‘lake’ — an appropriate descriptor for music which both undulates softly and plumbs to classic work of great depth. ‘Beba Plays’, the opening track of Annulé, recalls Nancarrow. Other tracks strike the same Teuto-harmonic stones as early Kraftwerk. Her wordplay belongs on a shelf with Amirkhanian and Robert Ashley. Much more visits the textured planes where Orbital and Aphex Twin have landed their innerspace ships. Forget’fulness even contains a collaboration with Ryuchi Sakamoto, which signifies another kind of step taken. All of Tba’s music, from the dancefloor to the cerebellum, is warm and ringing, and as intimate as fingertips on your skin

Beba Plays from “Annulé”, 2005

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The range of styles on Tba’s eight albums to date have prompted some critics to describe them as collections of “odds and ends”, or “uneven and unsettling”, but I suspect a thinner and clearer thread runs through the works, uniting tracks which at first do not seem to add up. Indeed, sometimes they come off like post mortem collections of private recordings assembled by close friends. But just as when I listen to Ursula Bogner or Peter Laughner, I hear her albums (with the exceptions of Size and Tears — Alice in Wonderland, a concept album, and Stupid Rotation, a straight dance album) as the audio diaries of a light soul in a dark world, emotional peregrinations in a city and country where things have all her life been highly unpredictable. For all of Georgia’s indigenous sound, Tba’s albums display hardly a parochial sensibility, and yet as I prowl T’bilisi at night with Tba in my ears I can’t help but feel the city in her warm and empathetic, yet guarded, even impenetrable generosity.

Aram Yardumian: I don’t find much in the way of traditional Georgian motifs and imagery in your work, but (as I will write in the introduction), I do feel T’bilisi in the center, but I cannot articulate how. What do you think?

Natalie Beridze: I don’t know what to think, since I still don’t know what T’bilisi really is to me, or how to position it in my identity patchwork, as well as in my music. If you dig into the basic construction, then I’d say this place has provided this construction with a strong fundament, such as vivid, splendid, happy childhood, with a strong bond to family, friends and generally humans, as such. Nobody told me as a child: “It’s a stupid, dangerous, hellish world… but don’t let it frighten you!” and it wasn’t a lie. My parents and their parents truly believed in it. That’s a very Georgian approach — perfect naivety, incarnated into strong belief, which makes things really work. Reality is not so popular in Georgia. People believe in miracles, on large scale, in everyday life. That’s what makes this place non-European.
I think my music is a bearer of this fundament in a way. It carries some amount of reluctance towards existential problems. Or at least it leaves a little crack open at the end of the tunnel; the light that never goes out— it’s there without any reason, unconditionally— you can call it irresponsible and immature, you can call it humor. You can call it trust. You can call it the ‘fundament’.

However, on the other hand, the concreteness of this place is absent in my music. Any place is absent. I as a person need to have this sense of absence in order to be fully present somewhere — fully present in the thought, in given space, in relationship to another human being. I’m a classical type of introverted personality. I’m able to think, produce, experience genuine emotions only when I’m absent in relation to the outside world, hence present within. A place has limits. A thought where this place is present is boundless. So if I think about T’bilisi this way, it’s minimal on the surface, and more present at the bottom.

AY: I’ve already read a bit about who has influenced you, but this is according to other people. I have yet to hear it from you: who inspires you?

NB: Einstein says: “the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”.

In poetry & literature & movies: Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, Max Voloshin, Boris Pasternak, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud, F.M. Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, David Lynch, Dinara Asanova, Peter Jackson, etc.

I’m inspired by my husband.

I’m inspired by reading prose, written by poets.

Traveling. (Perhaps there’s no other thing that inspires me more). Atlas of the world/maps. Alps. staring at the surface of the sea, catching that inexplicable, deadly fear of the unknown and exploring through it. I’m inspired by National Geographic or BBC films about nature / animals. I’m inspired by cemeteries, by prayer, by experiencing genuine repentance and redemption. by magic of the movies and their separate stills, images of slow motion, face expressions, abstraction of sound, word structure, myths and generally by people who are myth-creators in their essence. (I love to listen to their stories and let them flow into me, inhabit and become part of the reality).

I’m inspired by the human ability to give oneself away unconditionally. The perpetuity of it all. And perfect precision in everything around. I’m inspired by modesty (an interview with Agnes Martin). I’m inspired by state of emptiness. Emptiness is a bliss. (Empty structures. empty in their substance, content — like techno music. There’s so much room for thought inside). Emptiness is unequivocally much more inspiring then fullness. Much more productive. While you’re perfectly happy, full of positive emotions, you don’t get a kick to produce, there’s no need to add anything. It’s like being in beautiful cities or nature, or in love, or drunk, or on drugs…. you’re complete within this given structure. Once there’s an imperfection, an error, emptiness, there’s a natural need to analyze it, embrace it and manifest it, incarnate into this or that — into music. Nobody is interested in how you love, it’s more or less the same everywhere. but show me your wounds and ill listen to you endlessly. You can only create with a critical spirit. …and so on, endlessly.

Hell Risers from “Pending’, 2009

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AY: Your approach strikes me as highly personal and rather (though not staunchly) apolitical. Nevertheless, how have the various conflicts and upheavals in Georgia’s history since 1991 shaped your material or role as an artist?

NB: I doubt that they have any role in me as an artist at all. It definitely has played a role on a personal level, in terms of experience — a completely different experience from the lives of teen girls living in Europe or America, in the 20th century. For example, I don’t panic and feel more prepared if and when I hear machine-gun fire or a bomb explosion; or during electric black outs and water shortages (we’ve spent several splendid winters in candle light and kerosene stove heaters in the middle of the living room. Because there were so many times when we lived on the verge, in repellent readiness to lose everything we had, I know that there are things which are important, without doubt and there are things that can be replaced. But my music bears no reflection of that period. I was a small kid back then. I remember those weird and dark times through the expressions of the faces of my grandparents and parents. I felt their pain, not mine. However I do feel heartache towards events that take place in Georgia today. I try to keep away from them (there is no other way to be dedicated to what you do), and yet I know exactly that everything that I loved and cared for in this country is being taken away from me. Bit-by-bit, with a laconic reasoning, by those who I never understood and vice versa. Their lucid dream is to make this country a Christian Dubai — a tasteless, hideous, glittering oil bunker. A place you can not become part of. A place which can only exist in a state of recollection, rather than reality.

AY: How did you get your start as a musician? How or why did you come to choose electronics as a mode of expression over traditional instruments?

NB: Probably because I don’t play any instrument. My friends, Gogi Dzozoashvili and Nika Machaidze had these big, ugly PC Windows 32 desktops and made fantastic tunes with them. I just did the same later. Back then the idea that one can communicate and actually make something on this yet unexplored device, like a computer, enchanted me. It certainly was a worthwhile decision, since I could muffle the fact that I don’t have a musical education. All i needed was some basic knowledge of Pentium and full consumption of my ears. I must say it took me very little time to understand that this was it. I had found it! I felt so rewarded and so lucky to have found what I was looking for. Even now, after almost ten years later, I have never regretted it. I think the possibility to make music is a gift, regardless if you’re successful or not.

AY: What is GosLab and what are its aims? Who belongs?

NB: It was a group of friends, who wanted to play creative games and hang out the best they could given the circumstances… it was not long after the civil war in Georgia, which was followed by another war in Abkhazia (ex part of Georgia), which left the country crumbling. It was time of fear and confusion, of electric black-outs, felony, isolation. A time of anguish and despair but nevertheless there was huge wave of commitment and eagerness to pull through. so in a sense the only way to break through was to stick together and surf on a wave different then reality. We named it GosLab for a better sense of integrity and togetherness and we had fun…nowadays there is no more need for collective effort, since there’s no more hindrance as such. So we all work separately. GosLab is now a recollection.

AY: When I walk around T’bilisi I hear the usual stuff coming out of cars and shops: pop, hip-hop, R&B, club beats, ad nauseam. But who in Georgia, besides yourself and George Dzodzuashvili are making inspired electronic music with character? Who is making musique concrète, drone, field recordings, and this kind of thing?

NB: Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi. Actually it’s thanks to him that I do music myself. He was a pioneer of computer generated Georgian music, starting from the 90s. Now there are few more people, like Jorjik, Thoma; young collectives like Kungfu Junkies, Me and My Monkey, Okinawa Lifestyle, Stia, Misho Urushadze, Luka Nakashidze. There’s this new wave which might go somewhere. Right now it sounds like most of the Western music, but this is not so important because everything is always taken from the existing, and all is stolen. Ultimately, what’s most important is from where you take it. So i feel there’s a chance something valuable emerging here, soon. At least I see eagerness, interest, and a certain readiness.

AY: You spent nine months in the United States as a teenager. What are some of the memories that stick with you from that time?

NB: Yes, I was living with a host family in Buffalo, NY. They were from the South, had an obvious strong southern accent and a persistent racist slant, which in retrospect, they never tried to hide. I was 15 and hadn’t yet taken American History, so I had very little understanding of racism in America.

It was a very cold day, with 1.5 meter high snow. The day before we were told in the school that we were going to have a day off for Martin Luther King’s birthday, so I intended to sleep longer that morning. But my host parents woke me up, shouting that I am going to be late for the school bus. I tried to tell them that it’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, it’s a day off and that the bus is not coming to pick me up, but they refused to listen and went on shouting in denial. They were indignant and outraged. They said something like,”that guy is totally overstated, definitely not worth it and that the country should not and is not having a day off due to some fraud, etc..”

They convinced me to pack my school bag and wait for the school bus in the street, where I stood for about 30 minutes, freezing. Eventually I went back inside and told them that if they still don’t believe that the bus is not coming, then they should call the school priinciple. they never called. Instead they maintained tha bad temper throughout the day, looking at me as if I was an enemy of the state.

AY: TBC Geo Doc is an especially intriguing track. Though I needn’t understand it to appreciate its phonetic-aesthetic properties, I do understand it’s about tuberculosis. How did this track come about?

NB: Through personal experience with countless doctors and blood tests. I was 22-23, diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was under heavy antibiotics treatment. I still don’t believe I was really infected, because I felt healed once I stopped taking the medication, went to the sea and drank and smoked like hell. It’s very typical of Georgian doctors to scare shit out of you. I imagined this doctor in the track as a monster, the hybrid of an animal and an old lady, with huge glasses and huge hair — very serious, pretentious, trying to swallow me. this archetype is mostly present in my “size and tears”, or at least it was meant to be. There’s much humor and a flair of mysticism to it.

TB Geo Doc from “Annulé”, 2005

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AY: What was your reaction to Don Paterson’s paean to you? How did you learn of it? She doesn’t address this part. I might get rid of the whole question and response as well as it seems really insider? your thoughts?

NB: I laughed like hell. I laughed that I have “slavic eyebrows” and how he hated my former husband – Thomas Brinkmann, and so much more. It’s a great work, I think. And I was definitely pleasantly surprised and flattered.

AY: Have you any particular habits, rituals, and technique while composing? What is typically the process of getting a song from your imagination to the master tape/disc?

NB: I don’t really have any rituals. the ritual is probably the everyday routine of turning the computer on and starting to do something, no matter if I’m inspired to make music or not. This discipline I have gained with years of experience. It’s a fragile moment of the very beginning, with no expectation at all — you fail, you are rewarded. Most important is to get into the process, into the state of contemplation, state of complete withdrawal from reality. Once you’re there, you’re up to something. The process is something to die for, not the outcome, not the aftermath. I try but I can never fully possess it, control it. There are no tools that help you get hold of it. It’s always obscure, concealed. That’s why it’s always hard to talk about music, unless it’s been released and out there for a long time. If I understand what it is I’m doing from the very beginning, it turns out to be an invincible, boring scam. Very lonely, and never-to-be-loved. I sit by the computer and keep trying things up until the moment I catch a perfect wave. There’s always this one tune in the beginning. it’s the half of the whole. Everything else is less important. The rest flows like in a panic attack — rampantly. Usually arrangement has to be done in one flow, in couple of hours. Next step is the lyrics, which is nevertheless an important process. I grab the books, or internet with favorite poets and writers and create a patchwork. take bits and pieces from every one of them and mix those with mine. Done. Record…

Silently from “Forget’fulness”, 2011

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AY: Do you anticipate any radical changes in direction, or have any plans for the next project you can discuss?

NB: I do actually. I’d like to switch to having my music be performed by live instruments, by the orchestra. I’m going to be working on two major projects this and next year, on the soundtracks for two feature films.

AY: What, if anything, is holding you back from doing exactly what you would like to do, artistically?

NB: Probably it’s the fear of confronting the limits and being incapable to overcome and go beyond them. Other than this, I think I am lucky to be doing what I’m doing. I am genuinely thankful for that.

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti
A four part serial conversation between TQ’s Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship

Aram Yardumian - Although your music is tightly composed and a cerebral experience—almost without limits—for the listener, I don’t find myself thinking it is bereft of emotion. Is emotional content a byproduct or part of the articulative structure, or something else?

Giancarlo Toniutti - I think we should better define what we mean with the word “emotion”. My idea of it is not a sentimental one. As you noticed I have spent words “against” a sentimental nature, but this is just to discriminate and separate my work from a commonplace attitude over these concepts. I understand sentiments are part of our world view and life, but they have rather limited access when you properly work with sound. The sentiment you might inscribe in a music is a literary one, a quote, we could say. And this rational literary approach to music is not something I am interested in. My music has to do with fundamental (at least this is my effort) dynamics of the psyche, the body and us anthropologically seen. So emotions if taken as a sentimental part of life is something I never use to make music. I never decide or observe my emotions (even less other’s) to generate music. I consider them to be outside the realm of rationality and language control and by remitting them to that realm would mean transforming them into a rational and narrative part of the ego, something I am not interested in as a method of work or as a purpose. Emotions are simply one of the fundamental functions of our psychic complexity, meant in its broader sense. But to work as a function they cannot be translated into or represented as something else, be it music, art, language or whatever. This representation is not the emotion itself, concretely taken, but the narrative idea the author has or wants to communicate of it. And too many times this is the only mode authors seem to have to deal with emotions, using them to convey this (limited) typification form. To me the emotional content, as you call it, is “naturally” inscribed into anyone’s action, and the more complex the action is, the more the emotional content is deep and impossible to be superficially treated. In this sense all my works have this deep level, which is something I don’t work with, as it comes by itself (you say a byproduct, we could call it an epiphenomenon), and it is a field where the dynamic side of reality is dealt with in non-rational terms. But when I speak of emotions (in this case) I am not talking of love and hate, rage, fear, pleasure etc. which are the representational verbal side of affective conventions (typifications). What I mean as interesting is the limbic perturbations of the organism connected to human behaviour and cognition. The moment I speak of them or treat them in a “figurative” way, I am already cutting them off the phenomenon and transforming them into objects of thought.

AY - Do you ever find yourself in the music, or learn anything about yourself in the process?

GT - I have not a self-indulgent ontogenetic relation with music, or sound. At least not in the role of the author. As a listener and sometime performer, which can be a special case of listener, I can be inside sounds, not necessarily finding myself. Well, I would have to define who I am, first, and since each one of us is, at the same time, many “personae”, I could anyway only find a portion of them. In this sense what I could learn is only a particle of that complexity, if I learn anything. In my opinion it’s not so much about learning as it is about cognitive functions, and in this sense I am sure music has a lot to “induce”. But when I am composing, the act of organizing and articulating sounds into a sound morphology, my self is a part of the whole process. Of course, as I said I don’t intend to remove myself from the compositional act, only my ego perhaps. In any case, I am sure that what I do has a significance if I am doing it, even the least of the actions I could do, being part of my own mental and practical processes is giving something to “humanity”. It is inevitably me, the one behind those musics. But this “me” has not to do with the realization or improvement of my self (even less my ego of course), but with a kind of cultural-cognitive function to a collective gnoseology and/or ethos, we could say, given the chances I might have to reach people. What I learn from this whole general process, of course, comes first from my research activities, which can be sonic as well as non sonic ones, even when musically oriented. I can learn about myself, as I learn about each human persona for everything and anything I do can teach me something. But this depends more on my attitude in learning and the tools I have developed to learn, then the chances given to me from occasional and fortuitous circumstances. Learning is a process depending on the questions we pose to reality. Answers depend on questions.

Tienalauami, Tahta Tarla, by Andrew Chalk and Giancarlo Toniutti

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AY - What projects have you in mind for the near and distant future? A magnum opus?

GT - As you know I have published some new work in the recent years. It’s been a renewed relation with forms. I have been investigating sounds more and more and I have plenty of ideas for new projects, cd publication, texts, live activities etc. There already are a couple of improving projects I have put my hands onto in the recent years, that will come to a conclusion hopefully within the next year or so. I cannot foretell deadlines as I have no deadlines and time for me is relative. As in the past my pace tends to be “geological”, in a way. I need to give time to each project to see if it really has a necessity behind or if it’s just a selfish compromise of my mind. I have in mind also some magnum opus as you call it, or as I represent it to myself. One should be a large documentation, in the form of a box with “cd-specific” versions, of my 4 sound-sites, the live multichannel “installation-like” sound forms I developed over the years. Then there are several investigated fields to be discovered while working and a lot of work and research to do. Anyway as for the “near” future, the two projects I should be working onto, one of which already has many recordings done, involve two main fields of interest. First one is about what I could call “marginal” sonic structures, usually meant as “ornaments” even in sound-works, which I want instead to investigate in their central functions, so to say. The idea is to work with sonic structures which are usually considered “accessory” to a main work, to investigate this accessory quality and see how it can, on the other hand, be formed as central, core function to a morphology, and then cognition. This of course tends to imply the use of both quite “inertial” sonic phenomena and environments. The other project, still to be developed, seems to rotate around the idea of critical bands in frequency perceptions. But I think it is useless to go into details at this point of the development. More has to come. One day they will certainly appear. I am never really scheduling my activities, if not as a response to commissions, or offers of projects etc. I keep my working method as open as possible and responding mainly to its quality and research time. I am fascinated by so many subjects, and only when I can pour enough material into a growing project I can think that this is something I will work onto for the next times. It’s a “double-walk” and polygenetic process.

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti
A four part serial conversation between TQ’s Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Four: il sé interiore

Aram Yardumian - What is the relationship between your album “Epigènesi” and epigenetics, if anything? Epigenetics is of course a most fascinating subject, but I failed to see how it was part of the concept of the album, if in fact it was.

Giancarlo Toniutti - Epigènesi (Italian for epigenesis) has strong connections with the notions of epigenetics. It has a relationship more with the concept of course than the concrete epigenetic conditions, at this stage. Epigenetics has to do with the interactions occurring between the genetic and environmental conditions of an organism’s development and how these interactions help the morphogenetic (the creation of form) and cognition fields of that organism. How genotypes develop into phenotypes within an environment. This is a very basic approach for my work with sounds. Seen under different (more musical) terms, it is the relation and interaction between the conceptual macrostructural approach (the general shape idea) and the concrete “environmental” conditions of each single sonic phenomenon (the single sound and their single generation) I involve in a project. “Epigènesi” is the first time I properly worked with these concepts in an operative sense. La Mutazione was based more on the contrasting encounters of different surfaces of sounds, which layered through a contrastive and/or cooperative work. Each layer in La Mutazione starts as a separate layer entering the same (sound)-space and interacting with the others (trying to find a niche etc.). In “Epigènesi”, differently, layers are formed with the contribution of many diverse sub-layers, so that their interaction with the other layers is more of a densifying type, creating specific niches etc. The final form, thus, is originated through the “conflicts” between the continuity points within layers and such “conflicts” mainly depend on the sonic “environment” generated by these process trajectories. Epigenetics in this sense also gives a “philosophic” background to the approach to the various levels of the composition. From then on it has become something like a general “rule” to my working methods, and it still is.

AY - There is something uniquely decadent about electronic music from Italy (I don’t use the term “Industrial” because I think that term was born and died with Throbbing Gristle). You and Maurizo Bianchi especially, as well as Vivenza, who is in fact French. Part of it was born there with Busoni, Russolo, and the Futurists. There is, it seems to me, a praxis in Italian electronic music the same way, for example, the 70s German underground, diverse as it was formally, shared an aesthetic. I’m not talking about nationalen Bewußtseins here (or in your case coscienza nazionale), but perhaps some kind of shared memories or shared language within an interaction sphere. What do you think?

GT - Actually from my point of view, there is not such a homogeneous “language” in what you call the “Italian” electronic music. Maybe this might be due to the fact that my personal relationship with what was happening during the early ’80s in Italy was not so big (though of course I had my contacts). I think the whole Italian underground scene was much more heterogeneous than the way you maybe perceived it, at least in my view. Certainly there has been, especially at the beginning, some shared territory, but this was mainly due, in my opinion, to the cultural currents of the time and the strong influence an author like Maurizio Bianchi had on his contemporaries (mostly younger than him). Italy has had different avantgarde waves during the twentieth century, from the Futurists to the ’50s electronic (academic: Berio, Maderna, Nono) music, to the late ’60s improvisation avantgarde like Nuova Consonanza and their innovative language and techniques within an instrumental repertoire. In the early ’80s a new avantgarde exploded much like it exploded in other European countries, but of course with certain characteristics, I cannot identify from within probably. As for me, and my activity, if I have been receiving some influence from MB’s more abstract works, I also took my own path trying to avoid any (apart from historical and unavoidable connections) direct relationship with anything like a genre or a mode of specifically making music. So even though some unconscious legacy could be somewhere in my work (though I wouldn’t see any connection between the adjective “decadent” and my music), I never worked in favour of it or in favour of any possible conclusion (or seclusion) within a shared praxis (not to speak of a shared aesthetics). All in all, I also abandoned electronics as a means to generate sound since “La Mutazione” (in “epigènesi” and somewhere else electronics has been scarcely used and basically as another “acoustic” source). I tend to think that any “common” ground of a movement is more a question of critic point, seen from elsewhere, than a real convergent function.

AY - You and your brother Massimo Toniutti both work in the field of electronic music, albeit with remarkably different results. Perhaps you might share any memories of Paroksi-Eksta (25 years ago), and comment on whether you continue to collaborate.

GT - My brother is younger than me, so probably he grew with the musics I was listening to at home, in a way. He started doing electroacoustic works around 1984 I think, with some occasional contribution to some of my recordings earlier than that. Nowadays he is more into musics for videos of different natures (from art to documentary) and maybe moved a bit away from the early electroacoustic experiments. As for Paroksi-eksta, this was a specific project we did with two friends of us (with which we ran a mail-order catalogue too at the time: Daniele Pantaleoni and Giuliana Stefani). We only realized two contributions to two compilations and the project was quickly over. It was a time of experiments under many directions and of course as any collaboration, this has been a way to see how different approaches could coalesce and give way to new possibilities. I must admit that all in all they remained just two closed experiments. As for future collaborations with my brother, I don’t think we will (though I can’t predict future!!) because there are differences in our views, mainly, and when these differences are “shared” between brothers (and people who are so close to each other) it’s always more difficult and maybe less reasonable to try to force the conditions. We certainly have quite a sharing of our differentiated experiences, so we are always in contact and keep having a fruitful mutual dialogue on the topics related to musics…

Warkswood, Tahta Tarla, by Andrew Chalk and Giancarlo Toniutti

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AY - Field recording is not yet very well understood as an art form. I think it is fair to say that it is no more a matter of pressing the button at random places and times than is photography. Do you make field recordings as a discipline wherever you go?

GT - I think Field-recording has been overestimated and at the same time underestimated. The debate over what field-recording is or could be and its limits, gains etc. has been quite restricted to a technical debate (over the equipments) or to an aesthetical one (over its “sentimental” side). But much of what should have been fundamental to it, seems to remain at the borders of the enquiries. The problem regarding the notion of nature and natural, the role of the “observer” in the observation (the recordist/recorder in the recording), the function of the field-recording and the debatable concept of soundscape, and so on, all this is still quite neglected in the artistic debate on the field. At least this is my impression and much is, on the contrary, concentrated on field-recording as a discipline as you say, or even as a label (with a dogmatic view of it). I think field-recording as a name is quite devoid of meaning if taken as it is, i.e. something done (recorded) outside of the studio. The practice of using rooms, spaces and places different from a recording studio has a long history and as for me, has been practiced since my early days. My studio has more or less been quite an occasional place to record sounds. It is a place where I work with them (still analogically, reel-to-reel tapes etc., at least in terms of its modulation, elaboration, abstraction). While to record sounds I do this wherever I find a suitable (fitting) place to go and generate sound (be it anthropically made or captured). The problem with field-recording nowadays seems to me to be the representational attitude still over-existing in its praxis. You should be followed when you write “it is no more a matter of pressing the button at random places and times than is photography”, but I think to many people it’s still that. Or its sentimental complement, the idea of representing a “natural” subject through the field-recording approach as something “more natural” and thus more true, as opposed to something cultural and thus artificial. This, that I see as a Romantic investment (with a scientific legitimacy), is something I am not following at all. My field-recording activity (intending this only as the activity of capturing sounds from the reality as compared to generating sounds myself) is “only” another possibility to continue and develop my idea of a separation of the productive gesture from the generation of sound (cf. my text “Epigenetic Hyperphonesis: maltreatment of the sound source” in “epigènesi” as a first source of this notion), this “distance” helping to avoid the intellectual, sentimental and behavioural influences one has over the involved sounds. This has nothing to do with the Cagean idea of the removal of the author (simplifying of course), but much to do with an idea of emphasizing the role of sound sources themselves (and their inherent dynamics etc.) over their productive use and utility. In this sense I only record when I have a project. I have no archive (or mostly) of “useful” field-recordings or any other recording. My activity is always functional to the specific projects, or almost so. Only when I have a project, or mostly, I start investigating, studying and collecting the sounds I intend to involve in the project. Though of course there is a constant and daily attention and investigation of sonic phenomena and their possible preliminary attraction.

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti
A four part serial conversation between TQ’s Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

Aram Yardumian - Throughout your entire career, there seems to be a search for common or fundamental dynamics in the human psyche. More recently you come to this as pre-cultural habitus. But to trace this to the source, surely there must be some recourse to symbols as C.G. Jung describes them.

Giancarlo Toniutti -Well, it’s not about Jung. Even though we can consider the recourse to some idea of archetype as (relatively) viable, actually what I am working with, my idea of what’s behind our surface has to do with the notion, though not absolutist, of something like the so-called universals. You are absolutely right when you say that my search is about fundamental dynamics behind human psyche and behaviour. My idea of search is exactly outside, but not against, the acquired (habitual) codes, at least favouring a re-examination of these common codes, and the same idea of common codes. Actually what any avantgarde has done, even though it’s been done in the footsteps of history (nothing can be done outside history), has been to break with the previous codes. This break, which can be more or less programmatic, is at the same time the gain and the problem of all “discoveries”. It is a gain because it can open new or different points of view on a reality or a view on an unseen reality, but it can also create “background” troubles because the previous shared codes are no longer active and there is always a period of unshared codes where things and their value (their signification) is less clear and less perceivable under common terms. But it’s something you cannot avoid, just by relying on tradition or conservatism. History works and what you always get is knowledge, which is the foundation of reality. I am not necessarily speaking of a rational knowledge. In fact, this problem of irrationality in the arts is a false problem and a relic of Romanticism. The fundamental question is that reality mechanisms are perceived through our perception systems and how (and how much) we are our perception systems. Symbols are not the point at this level. I mean of course we all rely on symbols, as part of our abstract thinking and relating. But falling back onto symbols only as a way to discover a deeper reality is just a way to escape it. Its “material side” is much more complex than we can think of and I believe there still is plenty of space to be investigated that any need to escape from it is just a way to cut it short and be somehow comforted by some assured (short-circuited) “truth”. No truth with the big T is out there. A large part of what we do is to work with doubts (unstable systems), and any doubt is necessarily the reality we live by.

AY - Space, or lack thereof, seems to have played an important role in your work from the beginning. Even prior to reading Thom the directions of individual pieces were minutely topographical. More recently, there seems to be a center-periphery perspective—the view from South India, the Caucasus, and elsewhere—using sounds from the periphery to reference an ostensible core. It reminds me of something V.S. Naipaul wrote about in his essay “Our Universal Civilization.”

GT - Well it’s very correct to say that space is central to my work. I treat sounds only as phenomena in a space. There is no sound if there is no space to it. I recently discovered a statement by Giacinto Scelsi (even though his view might be different from mine on certain topics) which fits well the question. He says (from his autobiographical book “the dream 101″, my translation): «the sound needs a vital space in proportion to itself to be able to resonate, vibrate and carry out its creative power». In this sense, be it dense or rare, space is never detached from sound. Or vice versa. That’s why it is important for me not to work with any electronic or artificial reverberation system, and this is why I am always recording my sounds each time in a specific space, I regard as relevant to the sonic needs I have. But then you touch a different point when you speak of the centre-periphery question. I must say that I totally disagree with Naipaul’s idea about his concept of “universal civilization”. He seems to point at one civilization as being the universal one, while I never believed that there can be one civilization which is better representing the relationship between man and nature (to say) or which is more apt to convey evolution, than others. On the contrary, my interest in marginal cultures is exactly to investigate and try to demonstrate that all cultures in the world do have tried to systematize their relationship with nature (with reality), and each one of these systems being one of the equally possible valuable ways of relationship. Naipaul’s view involves a hierarchy between centre and periphery, where my idea is not hierarchical at all. There is a relation or more than one between centre and edge, one that has been explained by Thom with his notion of catastrophe sets (at the border of systems the activity is greater due to a minor density and greater discontinuities) on one hand, or by Milford Wolpoff with his concept of centre and edge (the variation being greater at the centre due to major quantity of gene flow and greater interrelations). So my interest in marginal cultures has nothing to do with a hierarchy or with any notion of a superior civilization, but on the contrary with an abundance of qualitative “specimens” in variety. Variety is the question we have to deal with, or as it is so often called, biodiversity. One of my goals is to give notice of this also through my activities.

Qwalsamtimtukw?italuc’ik (And Now He Almost Did Make Himself Into Hemlock Needles, It Is Said)

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AY – Émile Benveniste remarked that speech acts constitute discourse space, creating a speaker, a location, and a moment of utterance that are utterly unique and always changing. What are your opinions on this?

GT - I think that in Benveniste’s view there is a failure in that he seems to underestimate the role of the listener. Without a listener no speech act has any function and probably would disappear (from evolution) as too much energy consuming for the organism. So if there is to be a speech act, a discourse space etc. there must be both a speaker and a listener. In this sense, relating to music or any other sonic activity, sound is there if and only if there is a space to it, both meant as its resonating space and its listening space. So it looks like the old chicken and egg question: who comes first. The problem is how we define a chicken and an egg. If chicken is what we see and define as chicken today, and the same for eggs, which one comes first is then irrelevant (even though to me chicken comes first…). The real point is the categories with which we arrange reality. And through which we systematize it. The uniqueness idea in Benveniste’s view, anyway, is reasonably considered as a cognition space, as it always is unique and it is a (as C.H. Waddington would say) homeorhetic system. As such it’s always changing. The important point we have to consider is the relation. Meanings exist in relation, not in their absolute state. In a relation something can be taken as blue or white or loud or weak, because in relation we compare and in comparison we categorize. These categories shape (in some form) our reality. Of course also in this case we might come back to the chicken and egg question. Is our conceptualization of reality shaping our perception or our perception systems (their audible, visible etc. physiological frequency ranges) shaping our conceptualization of reality? In my view, this is an epigenetic problem, a question of interrelated systems growing up and developing into a constant process.Maybe the rudimentary chicken comes first, but provided with rudimentary eggs…

AY - Has the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis had any influence on your techniques or overall outlook?

GT - As stated above I do not think that language strictly shapes our perception of reality (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) or reality shapes our language systems. Both views are partly acceptable and both are limited. Of course the debate is not only linked to this question but also to a possible “pyramid” view of reality (societies, cultures etc.). In any case I am basically not in full agreement with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as I regard it a limited view of the problem, even though their contribution to the debate was great at the time. If we certainly understand reality with the aid of words (and linguistic concepts), we must say that our understanding is not exactly the same as the narration of it. So we certainly narrate reality through words, languages and thus a certain amount of differences do arise from each language’s specificity. But what we understand is comprehended through many levels includinglanguage. It is interesting perhaps to notice and analyze this problem viewing how deaf-born people do understand reality (starting from an absence of language, as we mean it). And it is interesting to notice that they elaborate a “language” (several kinds of sign languages) which has the same diversity from spoken languages as it has from non-verbal ones. In this sense, so, language is certainly a tool and such a profound one that influences a lot of what we do, but language is not the only tool we have and as such we come in contact with reality through the many possible tools available to us. This general question certainly had an influence on my own work. We cut reality through our categories, and that’s certainly part of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but these categories are not strictly dependent only on language structures. On one hand Sapir and Whorf opened a way to look at language diversity in a non-hierarchical way, which is an important issue concerning all cultures. No culture is underdeveloped or backward. Each culture has developed one way to relate to reality and each one is valid. We must not compare cultures, because it is not a competition to find which one is best. The point is which question do we pose to a culture to see if it’s able “enough” to respond adequately to that question. But the usual questions (technology, economy, education etc.) are very stupid ones and quite useless because they respond to our western needs and parameters. And even if we think we are in a globalized world today, this was the same (on other levels) also in the past, the very distant one. Usually we are quite short-sighted and ego-centred about differences between present and past, between here and there, between us and them and above all about dualism in general.

AY – Your use of micro-, macro-, and meso-structures again has a certain appeal to Jung, as well as to Swedenborg, Novalis, and others who traversed the depths of their own unconscious. Do you think your layered compositional methods have any spiritual significance?

GT – Starting from the question: apart from the fact that we should define this concept of “spiritual significance”, if I take it in its traditional sense, my work has no spiritual significance. There is no spiritual research or spiritual whatsoever. I say this in relation to your mention of people like Novalis and Swedenborg which are really very distant from my way of thinking. I have no romantic background, theoretically and practically. I think it is not necessary here to go into details over a debate for or against Romanticism. But what is sure for me is that reality, I mean the material reality has so many layers and possibilities that any “spiritual” level (provided there might be one, which as you guess I strongly doubt) is absolutely unnecessary to try to understand it. And what I am interested into is this: understanding, comprehending, investigating etc. reality, of which I am part of. The inner travel, inside me for example, has a limited interest for me, if it is intended as a way to elevate myself over reality (in favour of any golden age, or paradise or whatsoever) and detach myself from it. I see this form of escapism as a problem more than a solution. I am not religious in any sense. I wouldn’t call myself materialist because I do not share the whole of those views (it’s a historical label). And because it would be difficult to label ‘materialist’, for example, someone distant from western culture like a Nganasan, or a Ket people from Siberia. I don’t mean to compare myself to them. I just say that the question is (as ever) to try and see and define the basic concepts we are working with. Labels can be useful to help (heuristically) a discussion, but they are not reality. So what is important to me is not to look into my unconscious and discover from it anything about me. What is important for me is to work through myself and see and investigate what can be more fundamental to the human kind. Not forgetting we are part of the cultures we are raised into, but certainly understanding that this culture is not the whole world. And while it is only one way to look at it, and it gives only a portion of it, the answers we get from our reality (as well as from ourselves) can only be a portion of the questions. Finding knots, relations and structural sharing between cultures (as well as individuals) is the most important fact for me. Art is a collective activity, not a single personal travel to anywhere. So my micro-, meso- and macro-structural articulations are ways, tools and categories, I employ to segment the continuity of the real, to be able to work with it. And as a consequence to understand it and conceptualize. And in the end to apply all this to reality itself as a generation process (and a function both of this generation and its imprinting articulation).

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti
A four part serial conversation between TQ’s Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

The following interview with Giancarlo Toniutti was conducted in June 2011 in hopes of providing some context through which his sound art may be introduced and appreciated. As with all permanent works of art, continued engagement yields continued reward.

Aram Yardumian – First, regardless of how I may have characterized your work historically in the introduction, how would you sum up your mission as an artist/musician at the present time?

Giancarlo Toniutti – It is difficult to question one’s own “mission” because of various reasons. The point is that evolution, which of course still has to do with the notion of improving the fitness of the species, but also the singular “abilities” of each individual is always going on and is part of the goal. If this seems to be quite a bit ambitious or haughty, maybe, I understand the problem. But if we have to speak about a goal, we should also better specify the field, before specifying the “mission”. Limiting the idea of “mission” to “making music”, if there is any mission, or goal, this has to be included in a general idea of what an “artist/musician” is within a culture or a society. Given somehow for granted some of the definitions like culture, artist, purpose and so on, I can only mention that my idea of what I do (and maybe why) is functional to the idea of evolution of “culture”, and in a way a very general anthropologic idea of culture, which has to do with humankind and phylogenesis as well, This function is related to a certain idea of purpose, as I cannot see my sound working as devoted to just entertain anyone or even supply any sentimental journey, as much as I cannot see the second law of thermodynamics as entertaining, for example, or the Yenisey river as entertaining…. Of course the question is more complex than that, but maybe I gave you a hint…

AY – What are the most important basic thematic lines a listener should follow?

GT – Do you mean in musical terms? Or not only. In musical terms my issue with working with a sonic reality is anyhow to work with its morphology. I could mention from René Thom’s book, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, a quote which, as general as it is, well applies to my idea of what making music is (for me): «One of the central problems studied by mankind is the problem of the succession of forms». So my “program” and my problem has always to do with forms, morphologies and how they interact, relate, generate, collapse, change, modulate, oscillate etc. From this basic program many levels should follow the fact that sounds are the core to the generation of music forms, the respect of their generative “natures” is fundamental to my working with them. That’s something I could call the “rights of sounds”, which has not to do with a “naturalistic” idea (representational or figurative) of the sonic phenomena, neither an impressionistic one, but with their rights to be treated according to their own morphological and morphogenetic dynamic features and fields. And in this sense one of my main ideas is what I can call “the accident as a necessity” (to paraphrase a lecture by Luigi Nono “the error as a necessity”), given the fact that the instability of micro-structural patterns has such a relevance in my construction of music. It is for this that the study of anthropology, morphology, acoustics (and more) are inevitably the rudiments for me. Then each work tries to investigate a specific question, from a certain quality of sounds, a certain quality of forms and their relations, a certain structural activity and so on (from macro- to microstructural questions). We could go into details for each work, if you like. But then we should also walk outside the musical field and into “sciences” -anthropology for example…

AY – You began reading René Thom in 1983. It seems apparent to me that his Singularity Theory provided a structural basis for “Metánárkosis” and “La Mutazione”, et al; as well his work as a topologist may have informed some of your more recent work. But I suspect his influence is more pervasive than I have detected. How would you characterize it?

GT - It is correct to say that René Thom’s theoretical approach to reality, his program of studies, as explained from his book “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis” on, has been very important for me to develop the fundamental tools to observe reality, which music is part of. His influence has been much more important from “epigènesi” on, in a way, as the previous works had more to do with a more elementary treatment of the sonic structures, from simple linear interactions, to surface modulations etc. Of course this doesn’t mean that I have closed my research within his system only, or that his system and theoretical approach is the only possible one. I find it a great investigative and generative system, but it is one of the many possibilities we have to investigate reality and as time goes on I have developed and improved my knowledges of other systems as well, which have become beneficially complementary to my work. Certainly he’s been and still is very important to the way I look into the complexity of things. It is a fact that complexity too often is taken as a problem more than a resource. But as long as we are aware of how reality works, we cannot help but recognize that what we deal with is only a limited part of the whole mechanics implied in a system, and that systems are porous, elastic and in constant mutation. Theoretical questions in general seem to me to be fundamental to our praxis, despite an always increasing anti-intellectual mood. To ask why and how things are the way they seem to be, and if they can be different, is as important as the practical choices we employ.

The Tree, La Mutazione (1985)

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AY - Apart from your early interests in Schnitzler, Schulze, Brian Eno, et al, are you consciously aware of any specifically musical interests on the material you are creating now? Regardless of influence, what if anything do you listen to these days?

GT - Certainly I am still influenced, on some level, by what I listen to. And what I read as well. Positively or negatively said. And by attraction as well as reaction to what’s going on in the field or fields of music nowadays. Of course the great formative influences usually appear at the beginning of a “career”, when we are closer to an open system. But I have been constantly trying to inform my sound-working through what I can listen to, on certain levels. There always is a chance given to my ears, and mind, to learn a bit more about things. It is about forms, as said above, and as such it is about finding forms in things we perceive. All form dynamics help understanding forms. Certainly now I tend to somehow filter more than before what I listen to. It doesn’t mean I listen less than before or that before I was less radical than I am now. It’s not to do with that. I keep being interested in things because of their values and structural qualities, more than what I can simply judge as “what I like” which is a pervasive yet vagrant and arbitrary quality of things. But there is somehow a kind of professional by-product, which influences the way I listen … Anyway I listen to a certain “limited range” perhaps, in the eyes of many, if we think music as divided in genres,which I do not. I mainly listen to electroacoustic or avantgarde or experimental, or whatever the name, musics, with my ideas of them. I can listen to other things of course, but that’s mainly done as a research work. I am not omnivorous at all. That said, I also listen with great interest to non-western musics, especially from areas I am interested in (like Siberia or the Caucasus e.g., to name a few). I have learned a lot from these cultures, how they can structure music and sounds, how they relate to them etc., which can be very different from our ideas of it all, and this is always quite relevant to me, both in theoretical and operative terms.

AY - Barring some buried found vocal snips on “The Tree”, the human voice plays no role whatsoever in your music. Have you no aesthetic interest in it, or do you find its semantic values too specific to find a place in your work?

GT - Yes, basically the human voice has no part in my sound materials. I have used it a bit in the past – early days, before becoming progressively aware of the fact that our (acoustic and neural) physiology treats human voice differently from the other sounds. It is somehow impossible, or very rarely possible, to use voice along with other sonic phenomena, and not being mainly attracted by it, or not treating it separately. This has to do exactly with the fact that our perception system has developed to select voice out of the general sonic environment of reality, as we need semantically listening to it, more than we do for other sonic events. Its place in human evolution, language, vocal signals and so on, has taken such a large amount of space (also neural), that it is impossible to avoid being influenced or affected by it. It is impossible, or nearly so, to really abstract and move it on another level of perception. What music does is to abstract the sonic quality of a phenomenon and create complex relations between such sonic qualities. But this abstraction means we have to forget the representational levels of its original source, or at least put it in a lesser degree of perceptual cognition. This could be clear, I think, when we speak of sounds from a natural source e.g. When, as a composer, I am recording the sound of a creaking tree bent by wind, I am interested in that specific creaking sound, and not in its representational image (the iconic idea of the sound of the tree, bent by wind).  But this is true and maybe even stronger, as an example with sounds from any musical instrument, like a viola, e.g. When listening to a viola playing a certain tune, we don’t have to concentrate our attention on the fact that we listen to strings attached to a wooden body and struck by a bow made of hair etc. But actually that is exactly what we are listening to. Should we stop at the “concrete” realm we would remain attached to that “idea” of sound and are unable to make the “music” experience. With voice this abstraction is much more difficult if not almost impossible to me. And that’s why it doesn’t work into my idea of music. Of course voice used to convey a narrative code is another question and I can enjoy this in other approaches to musics.

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti
A four part serial conversation with TQ’s Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti.
This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts.

Serial Four-Part Interview
Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

Introduction Essay by Aram Yardumian

Giancarlo Toniutti began conducting sonic experiments in late 1977 with his friend Tiziano Dominighini in a glassworks owned by Dominighini’s father. With the various tools, machines, surfaces, and sheets of glass, as well as a few traditional instruments, they began making “not exactly free music”. By this time Toniutti had discovered Conrad Schnitzler, Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, et al, but found these things too easy and took little inspiration from anything but his own ideas, and a desire to create his own listening world. He soon began taking his own practice of composition more seriously. In 1980 he obtained a synthesizer and in 1982 began studies of electronic music at the Conservatory in Venice. There he was introduced to the music of Ligeti, Nono, and Xenakis. At the same time he began corresponding with Maurizio Bianchi, who helped him attain a presence in cassette culture, and with the labels who would eventually release his records. On a superficial level it is not unreasonable to characterize Toniutti’s music as a bridge between the dynamic formalism of the modern Conservatory and the claustrophobic parallel universe of early Bianchi, but this would be to pass over the living world to which his sound structures are a gateway. That Toniutti began thinking and composing as a teenager unguided by any musical lantern but his own interests is essential to an understanding of the directions his musical output have taken.

The evolution of Toniutti’s oeuvre is as fluid as the work itself. I divide its course into three phases, early, middle and late. The early work (1981-84), consisting of three cassettes[1] of treated acoustic source material and synth sounds serve as a kind of foundation for the mid-period works for which he is best known. Each of these early tapes is a kind of phenomenological assault on lived experience—time, space, structure, poetics, being, and perception—an ascent to Seinsverständnis. On a superficial level it is not unreasonable to characterize this early phase of Toniutti’s music as a bridge between the dynamic formalism of the modern Conservatory and the claustrophobic parallel universe of Bianchi, but this would be to pass over the deep living world of his sound structures. You will find the pieces on these cassettes are remarkably structured and nuanced, and if you are prepared to listen to them again their complex evolutionary patterns will continue to unfold. The first of them, entitled Wechselwirkung (1982) is a series of mechanistic exercises whose complexity is derived from aleatory encounters of dual cyclic sonic lines which in time evolve from linear to granular motion. Metánárkosis (1983), in spite of its title, feels warmer, more organic and more spacious than its predecessor. Here, for the first time, we see Toniutti using specific asymmetric syncopations to dispense with linearity in favor of three-dimensional motion. It is as if you are listening to the secret interior sounds of complex cell growth. On each side of Das Todesantlitz (1983) there is one long synth-based piece of a more confrontation nature, both in terms of inter-structural elements with each other, and the overall structure. Increasingly complex, Toniutti with this cassette, as with Metánárkosis, seems to be settling into a multi-level approach to composition, one which he retains even as his intellectual and timbral modes expand and change with each subsequent release.

Toniutti’s mid-period works demonstrate a refined grasp on complex forms and their interactions, much as Xenakis did with “Orient-Occident III”. With La Mutazione (1985), his sole LP release for Gary Mundy’s formidable Broken Flag label, he reached what I would consider the apex of his density, velocity and saturation. This, along with the Bianchi-esque Epigènesi (1986) represent the middle phase of Toniutti’s discography, and a partial return to linearity. Dark underground streams weave for miles through the remains of buried ancient villages whose abandoned technologies speak in proto-languages to us as we pass, but soon we find we have moved only a few inches through a vast microcosmos of hypothalamic symbols. La Mutazione’s B-side track, “Nekrose”, continues this morphing abstract discourse on psychic fundamentals while also paying occasional tribute to the cosmic synth sounds of the 70s German underground. A more dedicated search for universals than in the first three cassettes, these mid-period works look to new emotional territory, especially with the mournful sounding “Ethmòs-Crivèllo”, the B-side of Epigènesi.

Nekrose, La Mutazione (1985)

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These works stand in stark contrast to later works such as Tahta Tarla (1993), an LP of collaborations with English sound-artist Andrew Chalk. Here, Toniutti’s interest in anthropology and human-landscape dynamics becomes overt, even as his grammatical categories become covert. Taking geographic totems as a principle, the album’s sounds are treated field recordings relating to Warkswood, Northumberland, and Tienalauami, on the Slovenian border. The places themselves are circumscribed in the sound-work as a parallax of space/perception/memory: topology and internal morphology, reminiscent of the Psychophysics of Boas and Peirce. As with his *KO/USK- (1997), a collaboration with Siegmar Fricke, the limitations of the sound sources themselves provide a framework for the compositions, and thus the modes of transmission.

Toniutti releases and distributes his own music according to his own timetable. As a result, all his works feel fully considered and perfected. Following *KO/USK- he released very little for nearly a decade. Since 2007 there have appeared three CDs (two 3” and one full length) continuing in his mode of treated field recording explorations of complex forms, each with its own theoretical and geographic orientation. He has also contributed increasingly to print media, as well as branching into radio works and multi-media events.

Personal explorations into the sciences are the foundations of Toniutti’s music—ideas built into discourses in the halls of the Ivory Tower here receive adroit articulation in the layered soundscapes of a lone electronic musician working from his second story home studio in Udine. What is more, the attractors, knots, canalization, balances, equilibrium, Heraclitian imponderables, macro and micro structure shifts—all his hard work—may remain a technical backstage mystery without diminishing his chops. His compositions, increasingly organic as they are, give off the stench of life. Even thirty years after their creation, their stench is vital. To listen to Giancarlo Toniutti is to witness a complex metastasis of form, something evolving and growing, but like all natural life, without teleological imperatives.

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[1] Each made in editions of less than 100, and now very difficult to obtain, these have been rereleased in their entirely as part of the 3xLP + 10” boxset entitled The Early Tapes Period, on Frank Maier’s Vinyl-on-Demand label.

The Isfahan Bible, A Historical Meditation
by Aram Yardumian

Of Isfahan in the mid-seventeenth century, French traveler Jean Chardin wrote, “It is the grandest and the most beautiful town in the whole of the east” and its surrounding countryside “incomparable for its beauty and fertility.” Situated on the central Iranian Plain, at the vertex of trade routes, Chardin found the city a bustling hub of commerce and education as populous as London, with broad tree-edged avenues and lanes as agreeable as those in Paris (though they predated Haussmann’s renovation program by two hundred years). The walls of its mosques were lined with porphyry and marble, the chambers of its palaces filled with mirrors, clocks, and cabinets of the finest craftsmanship, and its coffers with so much fine art that they lay in disintegrating piles. Pietro della Valle called Isfahan the New Rome. Merchants from India, Georgia, and the Ottoman lands chose to build huge palaces with exquisite gardens in Isfahan both for its own entrepreneurial scope, and its position at the strategic center of caravan trade in silk and silver.

Standing as it did at the center of the Early Modern commercial world, Isfahan was referred to by Persian poets and statesmen as “nesf-e jahan”, meaning the place from which one could see each half of the world.[1] For this reason Abbas the Great, Shah of Safavid Persia, made it his capital in 1598, some seventy-five years before Chardin’s visit. At the time, the Shah faced the same geopolitical challenge the Assyrian Empire faced some 800 years before in the same place: how to secure the open northwestern frontier against the enemy, in this case the Ottomans. In 1604, he took a step toward a solution: scorch the earth and resettle all those who lived in the frontier. Among the uprooted were some 100,000 Armenians from Julfa, a city now in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. Those who survived the journey were settled in suburb of Isfahan called New Julfa and there were permitted a near complete religious freedom their descendents still enjoy today.

The Shah’s goals were, as Kathryn Babayan notes, a centralized Safavid state and absolute power, which would come with a tightened grip on the Eurasian silk trade. The resettlement program was therefore doubly calculating on the part of the Shah, for the Armenians brought with them their vast network of trade contacts and letters of credit, which indeed would increase the wealth and power of the city, and the empire. Though the caravan was their preferred mode of transportation east and west, the Armenians were also involved in maritime enterprise in the Indian Ocean theater and the Far East, and extended their influence from Iberia to the Moluccas. Their routes, as Ina McCabe has noted, did not follow the Silk Road of popular imagination; instead they carved their own ways through Anatolia to the Mediterranean, and north through Russia by way of the Volga, to the Baltic and from there to Amsterdam. As well, it seems, they travelled by sea from Bandar-e ‘Abbas to India, Manila and beyond. Of their presence in India Braudel asked, “What would Madras have been without the Armenians?”

The significance of this time and place to history and cultural contact rests on two facts. First, Armenians were and remain Orthodox Christian and were received and trusted as such while doing business among Protestants and even Catholics in Europe, whereas Muslim traders were both subject to prejudicial mistrust and hidebound by the restrictions of their Shari’at. Second, by virtue of their chamelionism, the Armenians gained timely and perhaps unique access to new European technologies such as clocks and the printing press, and introduced them to the East. Conversely, they seem to have been instrumental in the coincidental increase of Oriental fashions in Europe. Armenian church leaders recognized the value of movable type and campaigned to introduce it to their communities. Armenian traders established a printing press in New Julfa in 1636 (the first in the Middle East with one possible exception, and  the seventh, by my count, in all of Asia), and by the end of the seventeenth century in Venice, Marseilles, Lvov, Astrakhan, Leipzig, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. The early impacts of the printing press on nations outside Europe is not yet fully understood, but if we may draw on McLuhan, the invention of alphabets, and later the practice of printing with movable type (and much later, electronic media) is to create new social categories: they may, through a principle McLuhan calls “visual quantification”, engender nationalistic, religious, economic and other formations; they may either crystallize a language and with it a people, as it did with Armenian and Arabic, or it may send a language into remission, as it did with Latin. With the Armenian printing press came lexicons, Friday Books, psalmodies, and of course Bibles. Each of these editions had the effect of binding together literate individuals who may never meet one another, into a people.

All of this brings us to an appreciation of an obscure Armenian illuminated bible produced in this enclave in Persia, at the dawn of printed bibles. One of thousands of Armenian illuminated leaves which survive in various collections, the Isfahan Bible is part of the Getty Museum’s collection, and was recently on display as part of the exhibition Stories to Watch: Narrative in Medieval Manuscripts. Though there are several Armenian bibles from Isfahan, the Isfahan Bible in the Getty is a curiosity among them. Written and illuminated in 1637-1638, its existence is probably owed to Khachatur Kesaratsi, the prelate of New Julfa, who would have commissioned it. Very little is known of the artists, whose names were Malnazar and Aghap’ir, though it is likely they came from a monastery in old Julfa along with the rest of the immigrants.

The artists decorated their bible with scenes from the Old and New Testaments such as Creation, and portraits of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many leaves are adorned with peacocks, roosters, and many unidentifiable plants and animals. Also included is a set of New Testament canon tables which helps a reader to cross-reference a story in more than one of the Gospels. A portrait of Eusebius of Caesarea, who developed the canon tables in the 300s appears in tandem with them. This manuscript was evidently inspired another, similar bible from 1623 (sometimes the date 1629 is given) by Hakob of Constantinople, as commissioned by Khoja Khachik in 1607. This prototype is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (Inv. Nr. A 152), where I have yet to see them.

Fol. 13 of the Isfahan Bible illustrates the Creation, as described in Genesis 1-3. In the top left corner of the page we see God in what appears to be his Holy City, surrounded by four beasts of the Apocalypse. It is worth noting the absence of the nimbus or halo over God in all four of the panels in which he appears. Although the Isfahan Bible post-dates the High Renaissance, at which time use of haloes began to decline, the Byzantine and Eastern Christian communities, in maintained their own traditions, continued to depict them. Beside God’s feet is the inscription in Armenian, “By grace of the Lord the earth was filled, and by the word of the Lord the heavens were made”. Here begineth the Six Days of Creation, which are encapsulated in plaited medallions, each depicting the events of one day. The subsequent episodes, depicted in three horizontal sections, are followed from beneath God’s throne, first from left to right: the creation of Adam and Eve, below which is the temptation of Eve by the serpent and the offering the fruit to Adam, which is followed right to left. Then, again from left to right is depicted the expulsion of the couple from the gates of Eden (in this case, a walled city).

The artists’ prerogative to fit all of Genesis 1-3 on a single leaf may have been due only to material limitations, but it remains only one of several unique or highly unusual aspects of this manuscript and its prototype. Among the questions its existence raised for me as I stood in the Getty and stared at it: from whence its influences?—for all its apparent plainness it seems to incorporate motifs and elements neither Byzantine, nor Persian, nor Armenian. How does the art and architecture of the Eastern Christian churches ‘fit in’ to the broader discourse of art history and cultural production? [2] Why did the printing press not multiply in Persia and the Arab world as it did in Europe, the New World, and the Raj?[3]

And what role did the beauty and wealth of Isfahan itself play in the format and tone of this illuminated book?—Isfahan, the center of the world, though far enough from the Armenian imagination. In what sense, then, does the Isfahan Bible record the circumstances of its production? For the fertility of the Safavid capital at this time we may thank the immense self-interest of the Shah, whose goal it was to profit from the presence of Armenians in his capital. Yet in a move most Stalinesque he ordered thousands of the non-merchant class deportees, along with Georgian and Circassian captives, be ghulamized—that is, their ethnic, tribal, and religious ties to their home and family and identity be dissolved entirely. The Isfahan Bible is a vestige not only of life at the fork of east and west, ancient and modern, at the cusp of the printing press and the beginning of its slow and indelible change of the entire world, but also of fantastic change among Caucasians in the Safavid Empire, of peoples trying to hold onto something to which they would never return, in a new home where their freedoms were their prison.

[2] It turns out a thorough and comparative scholarly treatment of the transmission of medieval illumination techniques between regions is lacking; the best available is to be found in Christopher de Hamel’s A History of Illuminated Manuscripts.

[3] The first printed book in Persian did not appear until 1830. Perhaps this delay was due to opposition from Muslim legal scholars and even the scribes, who opposed movable type for their various reasons. Even as late as the early twentieth century, Persian books were by and large printed in India.

Nick Broomfield’s South African documentaries:
“The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife” and “His Big White Self”,
Metronome DVD (Region 2) ©2006
by Aram Yardumian

It was the endtimes of a fatuous delusion—the casting of a dream and the narrowing of a nightmare; the sluicing of whites-only beaches and blacks-only townships, and the opening of arms caches on Transvaal sugarcane farms; it was a time of ANC pub bombs, and meetings of obscure Afrikaner insurgents in restaurant basements to chart the overthrow of F.W. de Klerk, and germ attacks on expensive hotels, It was a time when women wore the Black Sash and police informants wore the Necklace; when mobs who could still hear the echoes of Sharpsville paced the streets of Durban; when the Boer extended cordiality to the black with one hand, and lobbed grenades into the township schoolhouse with the other; when many Soweto children believed that if they touched white skin they would melt; when Piet Rudolph’s sudden and mysterious conciliation sharpened the flint of paranoia for the striking of the swart gevaar; when de Klerk’s elite began to sing the swan song of Apartheid, and when changes in rhetoric permeated even the propaganda of the day, which buoyed from onslaught to amnesty; and the whole mealy myth of separate native culture began to suffocate under the cloven hoof of its own bloated ideological apparatus. Against these contradictory social cleavages—the tearing asunder and the forcing together, documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield arrived in South Africa and shot the first of his two documentaries on the subject of its struggle.

But South Africa writ large we do not see. We do not see bright blue sea and red soil of the Cape, or Alan Paton’s Natal, or the karoo of Thomas Hardy. We see only colorless camps and dorps and uniforms of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging through the eyes of its Leader’s mercurial driver, JP Meyer, the driver’s wife, Anita, and occasionally through the eyes of the Leader himself: Eugène Terre’Blanche[1], former bodyguard to H.F. Verwoerd[2], the architect of Apartheid. This triadic perspective was not intentional, nor was it predictable; it was simply the result of Terre’Blanche’s noisy contempt for journalists who did not allow him to run the show.

The film opens with an AWB rally in Ventersdorp during which a supporter rises from his seat and proceeds to knock the camera to the floor. This was observed by JP, who offered to arrange for an interview with the Leader as an apology. Broomfield and crew arrive several times at AWB headquarters in Ventersdorp only to learn the Leader has just left, seemingly to find among Sycorax, Godot, Michael Rubbo’s Castro, and other literary figures who never actually appear. But the Leader does appear. And when finally the real meeting is imminent, Broomfield and crew deliberately linger in the café across the street from the window of the Leader’s office in full view for ten minutes, drinking tea [3]. When the interview commences, the Leader is so spitting mad at this gesture that he loses his composure, beautifully. Thus the documentary becomes a meta-documentary. It was with this film, in fact, that Broomfield codified his characteristic Les Nouvelles Egotistes filmmaking style, which had been born of necessity in Driving Me Crazy. This style, which Broomfield has been unable to shake, has also served influence to Michael Moore.

Broomfield makes no secret of his contempt for Terre’Blanche either in the film or in print. In an interview with Jason Wood he said, “I wanted to make something that would really puncture his balloon.” Annoying the Leader becomes a sub-thread of the film, which otherwise opens from its simple program of interviewing a thundering extremist into an incredulous ethnography of the lost generation of Afrikaners who all on some level knew the end was nigh. Serving as embodiments of this generation are JP and Anita, who live a life of suburban Euro-normalcy by day and high explosives funneling for Piet Rudolph and others by night. JP is an immanently likeable fellow even as he threatens racial violence—perhaps because you get the idea he doesn’t really mean it. There is something stand-up about his reluctance to stand up. Like many South Africans of the day, JP stood in a corner, his Bible in one hand, his pistol in the other, and toward him he sees the shadows of Communism, black militancy and white acquiescence approaching. “Through JP I really came to understand how fascism and its supporters came about in Nazi Germany,” says Broomfield. “It was people who had a lack of self-identity and a lack of sense of self who went for an extreme ideology at a time when they needed some kind of certainty.”

Though this swollen moment in South African history represents an important turning point, the fashioning of the Afrikaner identity is a complex and still contested issue whose central themes are the Great Trek of the 1830’s and the near mythical Battle of Blood River [4]. The objects of a further century of discrimination by the British, the Afrikaner moment of mastery came again in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and gave birth to Apartheid. Oom Paul’s peoples’ self confidence soared to impossible heights, in their pluck to conflate baaskap with natural law and their eventual quest for a nuclear weapon. Yet by the 1960s they had ventured into what Douglas Brown called “the cul-de-sac of their racial policy” and by the 1990s something had gone terribly wrong: nothing delivers an apologia to Spengler quite like the party scene in which we find the Ventersdorp upper crust dancing effetely to the strains of a bizarre cover band playing phonetically learned Bruce Springsteen songs.

In the years between The Leader and its sequel, His Big White Self, many things came to pass. The coffin of Apartheid was nailed and only the fumes of its corpse still reek in the platteland—this when the smell of gunsmoke from Johannesburg does not cover it up. The AWB, though it never succeeded in fomenting its promised race war, its supporters did commit several acts most desperate: in June 1993 it crashed an armored vehicle through the glass of the Kempton Park World Trade Center where the ANC and National Party were discussing the dissolution of Apartheid. In March 1994 they invaded Bophuthatswana and picked off a number of civilians before being picked off themselves. The Leader served three years in prison for assaulting a black petrol station worker and attempted murder of another man (crimes of which he staunchly has maintained he is innocent). JP and Anita were divorced and living separate lives, the former as an ambulance driver utterly disillusioned with both the black majority government and the AWB, and Anita as a nurse in a desegregated hospital. Broomfield, during the twelve years that separate his two South African documentaries, received numerous death threats from shadowy unknowns using suspiciously Afrikaner schwa-vowels (Broomfield for a time suspected it was JP). In spite of this, he returned to Ventersdorp in 2005 to see what had become of everyone.

He found an older and wearier though no less dramatic and driven Terre’Blanche, to whose home he gains access incognito. The Leader, twelve years and one prison term older, seems transformed from the figure he cut of Ezra Pound’s Mussolini into a post-Fiume Gabriele d’Annunzio. According to a fellow inmate he had gotten along very well in prison, in spite of being one of only three whites. It was reported he had been born again and that he even called on several black friends around town; a man still very much given to rhetoric, yet more subdued and more realistic; more invested in his poetry than in the ongoing AWB tragicomic opera.

It seems nearly ironic then that Terre’Blanche would be hacked to death in his farmhouse bedroom on April 3^rd 2010, the day before Easter, by two black farm workers, allegedly over a wage dispute. Yet his killers left him with his pants pulled down to his knees—an oldtime anti-Boer move made much of in the press. Without him the AWB lurches on, fully defanged and slightly defiant, still maintaining an Afrikaans-language website which sells khaki paramilitary uniforms, bronze busts of the Leader, and a DVD of his funeral. According to the new Leader, Steyn van Ronge, the mission of the movement is now to implement a security plan to keep farmers safe. Indeed, there exists the very real danger of Mugabe-styled land appropriation and ethnic erasure. What will become of the Boers in the 21^st century? No doubt their children will be educated in the way of their folk heroes, exogamy will remain verboten, and all the important elements of cultural durability will remain. Perhaps like the Mennonites of Belize, or the Greeks of the DR Congo, or the German farmers of Kyrgyzstan, they will endure culturally, but fade historically. But as to the famous words of Prime Minister Verwoerd, “We will see to it that we remain in power in this white South Africa”, it seems only fair to rejoin with the words of Stephen Biko, “It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die”. In the end Terre’Blanche did neither.

[2] Evidently not a particularly successful one, as Prime Minister Verwoerd was assassinated on September 6^th, 1966 in the lobby of the House of Assembly of South Africa by a parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Tsafendas; this following a nearly successful attempt six years before at the Union Exposition on the Witwatersrand.

[3] An added taunt, inasmuch as tea is a British institution, and is never taken by Afrikaners.

[4] In 1979 Terre’Blanche and several other AWB supporters tarred and feathered University of South Africa history Professor Floors Van Jaarsveld for daring to suggest there had been no divine intervention at Blood River.

Radiant Summit, Jacaranda, March 12-13th, 2011
by Nancy Cantwell

On the occasion of the Alan Hovhaness’ centenary, Patrick Scott, Artistic Director of Jacaranda, wanted to include another great Armenian American composer Richard Yardumian (1917-1985) in all-Armenian program. After much Googling, and efforts just short of the Library of Congress, Patrick, who had recently been introduced to me and the writings of Times Quotidian asked for an introduction to Aram Yardumian, whose musical musings, insights and historical research can be found regularly on TQ. Upon finally discovering a living link to the Yardumian family, a fruitful collaboration began with the composer’s daughter Miryam. Jacaranda needed permission to  commission a chamber ensemble arrangement of Yardumian’s most famous orchestral work The Armenian Suite from 1936. The series chose Armenia’s most acclaimed composer of the younger generation Vache Sharafyan (b. 1966)  for the arrangement that closed the impeccably programmed concert Radiant Summit.

The following selections are from Richard Yardumian, Armenian Suite, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui, conductor, released 2002, BIS Records

Introduction: “Harvest”

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Dance II

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Patrick Scott’s program notes are always unusually detailed, so with his permission, I have excerpted that section pertinent to Yardumian.

From the program notes for Jacaranda’s RADIANT SUMMIT concert March 12-13 2011
Philadelphia Story: Richard Yardumian

The third composer, at the tail-end of this generation, is the Philadelphia-born Richard Yardumian. The tenth and youngest child of well-educated Armenian immigrants, Richard was born April 5, 1917 — making him a member of the generation impacted by the Great Depression as a teenager. His mother Lucia was an organist and father Haig was the founding pastor of the Philadelphia Armenian Evangelical Community, which later became the Armenian Martyrs’ Congregational Church. They had fled religious persecution arriving in America in 1906. Family life was musical, religious, and rich in Armenian folk songs. Richard showed an interest in composition as early as age 14 and his older brother Elijah, a concert pianist who was studying at the newly-founded Curtis Institute, mentored him in lieu of any formal education.

Elijah’s mentoring proved effective as it supported a natural talent revealed by the composition of the Armenian Suite for large orchestra at age 19. Two years later, Yardumian began formal education in piano, harmony, theory and counterpoint with a private teacher, eventually receiving meaningful encouragement from José Iturbi who was conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. The Spanish pianist/conductor would become famous for his appearances as himself in Hollywood movies such as Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in 1943.

Soon after the U.S. entered WWII, Yardumian became a private in the army serving as a sniper in the Philippines. That experience and a photograph of a cathedral with a bombed-out roof inspired Yardumian to compose an orchestral work entitled Desolate City. After being assigned musical responsibilities in the Army he met the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra Eugene Ormandy in 1944. Ormandy was very interested in living American composers. He gave premiere performances of works by Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, William Schuman, Roger Sessions and Virgil Thompson, among others. Ormandy premiered Desolate City and Yardumian had his debut, making the beginning of a long relationship with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In the intervening years Yardumian studied conducting with Pierre Monteux and composition with Virgil Thomson in the Chelsea Hotel. Thompson was not only a powerful critic for the Herald Tribune, but also a student of the renowned French pedagog Nadia Boulanger, and the composer of the transformative opera Four Saints in Three Acts with libretto by Gertrude Stein.

Armenian Suite

Ormandy asked Yardumian to add a finale movement to the Armenian Suite before giving the entire work its premiere March 5, 1954. This quodlibet has the effect of summarizing the six preceding movements in a grand and brightly-colored ceremonial style reflecting Yardumian’s recently acquired contrapuntal command. One must assume that Yardumian touched up the orchestration on the earlier six movements, as they show no telltale signs of juvenilia. Regardless, the piece retains the simplicity of youth and its sometimes forlorn, sometimes lusty ways of getting attention.

Armenian Suite was taken on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first European tour in 1955 spawning many additional performances by European orchestras. Soon after this European tour, “Dance II,” which is the sixth movement, became the theme music of the Voice of America behind the Iron Curtain. Precisely how the opportunity was arranged remains for researchers to determine. Whether Hovhaness had a hand in connecting Yardumian to the VOA remains a piece of speculation, except for the fact that the two composers were known to have met.

Voice of America

In 1953, the ten-year-old radio service was passed from the State Department to the newly-created U.S. Information Agency. VOA broadcasts of Jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington became immensely popular behind the Iron Curtain, when the frequency was not jammed. Programming was produced in New York. It originated from the Courier, a re-purposed U.S. Coast Guard cutter anchored near the Island of Rhodes, with the permission of the Greek government.

The folk roots of each movement were identified in the program notes for the premiere. “The Harvest” activities of gathering, binding the bales and stacking are here infused with Western music’s notion of calling the faithful in a ceremonial fashion. While the melody of “Song” is original, it steps out from the company of similarly spirited Armenian folk tunes. The source song of the lullaby uses a ribbon motif to symbolize a protector linked to marriage. ”Dance I” likens love to a sycamore tree; while “The Interlude” rings bells to welcome the morning.

“Dance II,” features rapidly changing moods and a more complicated oral history. On a cloudy day the impatient lover declares a heart full of fire, with no sleep in the eyes. Another strand is the coaxing manner of a herder toward his beloved oxen.

Ormandy premiered ten Yardumian works and gave some 100 performances. Among them are two symphonies, a violin concerto, the piano concerto Passacaglia, Recitative, and Fugue, a short orchestral work featuring clarinet and harp On Plainsong: Veni, Sancte Spiritus; a one movement work for flute and strings entitled Epigram: William M. Kincaid, and the mass in English for orchestra choruses and mezzo-soprano Come Creator Spirit. Apart from composing a work for string orchestra, works for solo piano, and other secular works, Yardumian devoted a considerable amount of energy to composing hymns and other music for liturgical use.

The downside of Ormandy’s support and the long-term relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra was the notion that Yardumian was a Philadelphia exclusive. It followed that, as Ormandy’s tenure at the podium receded, so did Yardumian’s music disappear from music stands. The conductor and the composer died just five months apart in 1985 with Ormandy’s departure March 12 at age 86, and Yardumian’s August 15 at age 68.

Remembering Milton Babbitt, The Path Least Taken
by Aram Yardumian

At age 76, Milton Babbitt received his PhD from Princeton University for his thesis on 12-tone theory—an event in and of itself unremarkable, and one the composer himself hardly noticed. That it came forty-six years after the thesis’s submission makes it somewhat more intriguing. By way of explaining the delay, the university claimed its readers in the music department at the time had simply not understood it. Impossible to understand, unplayable, unimpeachably academic—such are the stigmas notching the years gone and criticisms leveled against Babbitt’s far-ranging oeuvre. Yet there are also listeners who, without comprehending the high math architecture of Babbitt’s music, have discovered a bottomless cabinet of lyrical reflection and mystery to explore.

Babbitt’s innovations in the electronic music laboratory and the traditional orchestral setting eventually resulted in a critical and unprecedented bridging of the two. In the early 1950s he (along with Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening and Roger Sessions) co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, the home of the RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer, which was the first such synthesizer in America, and on which Babbitt generated some of his most important compositions. “I could produce things faster than any pianist could play or any listener could hear” he said in an interview. Thus, in superseding human abilities, he established and justified the use of the tape deck and loudspeaker as instruments in the orchestra setting, without threatening its demise. It was also Babbitt’s innovation to extrapolate the rigor of 12-tone set to rhythm, duration, register, and overall structure, not just tone and pitch as Arnold Schoenberg had done. Thus he was a maximalist to the minimalism of Adams, Reich and Glass. These developments, in sum, have had an inestimable (and unappreciated) effect on modern music, from post-Romanticism to Noise. And to his inheritors he bequeathed a path of departure from Schoenberg, taken by Berg and Webern and all those who leapt from the 12-tone precipice, into the abyss. But Babbitt leapt further and landed deeper.

Underpinning all of Babbitt’s published work is a highly-ordered two dimensional system of 12-tone composition. The two dimensions are best visualized as x/y-axes of set segments and set aggregates, respectively, constructed to flow on different time scales, one faster than the other. With the two sets of similar structures progressing at different rates, a novel counterpoint is achieved. The effects of a 12-tone counterpoint on the span of time in music are impossible, it is true, to fully conceptualize since the varieties are all but infinite. Without launching into a digression on the constituencies of tonal and atonal vocabularies, we may at least say Babbitt’s networks of relation and differentiation, as stemming from the counterpointing of his sets, allows for nothing less than a reevaluation of time and space, or rather, time within space—musical time series in non-linear dimensions—a concept reinvented by some in the space-rock era. The subsurface of the music is further diversified by increasing the number of non-redundant aggregates to the point of dispensing with stasis altogether.

If this doesn’t make any sense, the door is still open to you. In fact, I think listeners who have little or no technical understanding of music have a great advantage over those who practice music, inasmuch as they are freer to come to it as a sublime mystery rather than as a demonstration of aptitude that must be constantly scrutinized vis-à-vis their own. To appreciate a Babbitt piece is not solely to behold the precision splendor of its architecture; not merely the solving of an advanced Sudoku. Though an intuitive sense of intervallic pattern changes is what allows us to see through the surface (just as it does with tonal music, about which need understand nothing), we do not need to be cartographers to walk the interior. It is, I think, more simply a matter of repeated, concerted listens.

Indeed it would be remiss to say that Babbitt constructed music from abstract aggregates and inflections, on paper as it were, without recourse to the actual process of listening. Ironically, within the tight hyper-rational structures there is, as in all metrical-syntactic art forms, an even greater propensity for creative freedom. As Andrew Mead as pointed out, “it is possible to hear the ghosts of jazz and American popular song lurking beneath the surface of his most abstract compositions.” Of Babbitt’s childhood in the Deep South (so deep that he was a neighbor of Eudora Welty’s) he recollects, “I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements […] we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.”

String Quartet No. 2 (1954), from Occasional Variations, Tzadik
performed by the Sherry Quartet, released 2003

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It has never been the program of modern classical music to lay dead in the canal of the untrained ear, nor to have been an act more important to the composer than the listener. It is not a different language, in the historical sense; only a different register. If Schoenberg and Webern and Berg and Babbitt sound unengaging, it is not because indeterminancy and abstraction and mathematics and sudden dynamic shifts are somehow unbecoming of music, or because of how rapidly Schoenberg and his followers (not to mention electronics) accelerated the process of change. Fifty years from now the register will be common. Though often accused of ivory tower elitism (especially due to the title of an article in High Fidelity magazine, “Who Cares if You Listen?”), Babbitt’s relationship with the audience was intimate. Of course he cared if they listened, he just didn’t care whether they liked it or not.

Composition for Guitar (aka Sheer Pluck) (1984), from Occasional Variations, Tzadik
performed by William Anderson, released 2003

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Behind the thorny high math façade was Milton Babbitt, the little funny smiling man who played the Cole Porter songbook from memory on the piano, whose puns spilled over top of the seriousness of his work (e.g., “Joy Of More Sextets” ); the non-stop conversationalist who was spoke with great pleasure of second-order hexachords and baseball, who was, in Mario Davidovsky’s words, the last of the Romantics. By this he meant Babbitt was the last to ascribe to art the transcendental power located by the Romantics. Beyond him, Auschwitz.

The Joy of More Sextets (1986), form Sextets and The Joy of More Sextets, New World Record
Performers: Alan Feinberg, Rolf Schulte, released 1988

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Milton Byron Babbitt was born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1916 and died in Princeton, NJ on January 29, 2011.

Swans, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, Young God Records, 2010
by Aram Yardumian

My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, the title of Swans’ 2010 record, refers to Michael Gira dying and following his parents up to heaven on a rope of smoke, and obliquely to the relief from asthma he experienced after giving up smoking. It is very much a journey into the unknown, as any endeavor would venture after a thirteen year hiatus. The new six-piece version of Swans includes members from different incarnations of the band—Norman Westberg and Christoph Hahn on guitar, Phil Puleo on drums, and Chris Pravdica on bass, as well as the percussionist Thor Harris. (Jarboe’s absence, though significant, is not conspicuous. She and Gira have not spoken in over ten years).

My Father is a very personal work and as such can be opaque. It is also a distinctly American record, whose grooves are long on Anglo-American imagery and theme. Apolitical and non-didactic as ever, it is still a record aware of its timing and purpose on earth. It opens with what sounds like the tolling of church bells (they are, in fact, struck tubular bells) calling for us to assemble and have our minds wiped clean by the guitar which follows and leads us into the heart of darkness. On the first track, “No Words/No Thoughts”, Gira’s voice floats as voices did in early, easy West Coast psychedelia. Some of the idiosyncratic timing reminiscent of the No-Wave era remains on the surface. The brass and pepper drum that has always marshaled the parade of Liars is still there, as is Gira’s embossing of his narrative with oblique, gnomic statements and questions. His message is increasingly sophisticated, delivered from so many points of view that the very notion of point of view dissolves, and with it the weight of traditional truth and falsity. Literary, intense, occasionally petulant—thus the record comes to itself, charging with the thick Faulknerian gothic corruptness that drives it on. If we be Liars, our flesh will be burned and dissolved in sensory overload, heat and high volume.

“Jim”, which is in fact a tribute to Jim Thirwell, is the most abstruse track, not least because one sentence hardly seems to follow the one before it, but because we do not yet fully understand the influence of Thirwell upon Gira, and therefore the signs point in every direction at once. Thirwell’s projects have always marbled savagery and precision—a technologically precise savagery, a scream the kind of despair we call defiance, a theme taken up by Camus, who wrote of our choice between acceptance of the absurd—“to drink the green sea, to drift upon the scarlet breeze”, or escape by suicide. To Jim he says, “ride your mechanical beast to heaven,” while elsewhere, to himself, he pledges martyrdom:  “Dear God in heaven, I’ll hang for you.”

Gira’s relationships with his parents are at, or close to, the heart of much of his work. He had what he described as a “[by Western standards] terrible, just horrible childhood” the details of which we know very little, except that his mother was an alcoholic, and that he did time in an adult prison in Jerusalem for selling drugs. “My Birth” would not be the first homage he has written to his mother. That most impossible of all relationships to zero out here burns in the white sand “in the blood that you spilled”. And in the distance he hears “the howl of the beast”—perhaps slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The shadows and single peeping eyes of family legacy loom always behind doors standing ajar as he says, “please never forgive me / Please spit on my name / But hold on to my memory, and keep me to blame.”

“You Fucking People Make Me Sick” is a poetic rumination beneath layers of irony and persona. Part lullaby, part Wagnerian thunder-aria, this antiphonic duet with Devendra Banhart and Gira’s three-year-old daughter, Saoirse, harnesses the freedom allotted only to those who acknowledge their worthlessness and failure. Likewise does “Inside Madeline”, a song written for his daughter but not performed by her. Inspired by watching a child wander aimlessly through a field of snow, he reminds her she is “free to drift across the sky / […] free to be a shape just becoming.”

You Fucking People Make Me Sick

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The “choking hold” that began in “Eden Prison” harks again to the nihilism without which Modernism would not have been (evidently Gira is not writing about the Eden Prison in New Zealand), and to the gyre-mediated historical motion of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. Even as one frees himself from the “greasy ochre walls” of the prison, another ship sets sail on the crimson sea with a cargo bound for Eden. The “supine wild beast upon the slab” who now moves “through the roots of the trees” is stalking the living God, whose flesh he cannot reach. At times wandering into Nick Cave territory, this track is otherwise musically closer to some older Swans material, and like some of Nick’s own material point as if to say, see? You don’t have to kill yourself to extract the demons that burr and marble in your heart, after all.

Finally, “Little Mouth”, a chain gang spiritual for wraiths trapped in heaven, and an appropriately elegiac closer to the album, bears the full weight of the Cloud of Unknowing, for it is a love song—a devotional longing for nothingness. “Teach me please, to cease to resist,” Gira asks. “May I find my way to the reason to come home / May I find my way to the foot of your throne.” He, or his persona, say this knowing what little he can get by asking. But he asks knowing full well that no such throne exists. Why then? Swans is a project of awareness, of the corporeal world and its self-destruction, and of the possibility of a better future, longs for a place to call home for eternity. Here, at last, he reaffirms his intention “to elevate, to make you levitate, almost like having it erase your body and lift you up to Heaven.” To do so without a trace of self-indulgence is testament to the authenticity of Swans: “The only thing I look for is something that is true, authentic and penetrating,” Gira writes. “I don’t have any particular allegiance to a style or sound. It’s more to do with the thread of probing, of looking for what’s inside.”

Little Mouth

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The nihilism that was so important to 1900 and to Modernism, now predicate to market genres and in the lazy reactions of every guitar hero whose name rhymes with a brand of lunch meat, reaches a kind of conclusion in Swans. Yet they are not, to my understanding, Postmodern. They are the mulch of les fleurs du mal; they are the ivory dumped overboard into Conrad’s Congo River. They have turned the corner from Modernism and found, as Cioran predicted, nothing. But they have courage. In the same way that Maurizio Bianchi indulges in decadence to outstrip it, Gira marches Quixotically out against windmills he himself has built, hauling his own steamship-sized corpse over a South American hill, succeeding by leaping into a place of paradoxes and impossibilities, where everything you experience is an illusion, yet “nothing inside you is real” either.

Swans, Early Ruminations, 1981-1997
by Aram Yardumian

Weakling, from Filth, (1983)

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Gira was never trained as a musician but he knew exactly the sounds he wanted. The first five Swans albums were exercises in surreal, percussion-driven abstraction, violent near to signal-loss, yet slow nearly to the point of stochastic interminableness; howling storms of disorientation contained in a gray celluloid frame. Or, as a Trouser Press writer put it glibly, “Sister Ray” played at half-speed. Such extensions of form simulated both the embracing and casting aside of the usual influences: SPK’s déjà la of madness, the minimal pulse of Suicide, the extended blood-letting of Hermann Nitsch, plus Throbbing Gristle-style tape loops, echoes of The Cramps and Eno. But always it was about transubstantiation and violence—and other things that have helped keep the band under the radar for thirty years. And yet Gira sees his early material as joyful and majestic. Swans are, after all “majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.”

Swans’ early period performances were made as loud as possible, occasionally causing some audience members to lose balance and vomit or the police to arrive and stop the show. Gira himself would often leave the venue coughing up blood from the intensity he generated. “I’d throw my body on the stage, get up, throw my body on the monitors, break my ribs, and I didn’t feel it,” he says. “It was like making the world into a whirlpool, lifting you up. It was exceptionally wonderful. It wasn’t negative in the least.” Then, he adds: “I guess in the lyrics it might have been a touch negative. But it went with the time.” At several mid-80s shows in Europe, Swans ordered the lights switched off and the doors locked so that the audience would simply have to take it. The legends of these events are exceeded only by stories from the making of Pasolini’s Salo.

Unbelievably, the modus operandi was not to mirror the ugliness of the world, but rather to overwhelm it, to outdo it, so to speak, with joy; to create a music so loud and overpowering that it would annihilate our corporeal bodies—to make the Kierkegaardian leap, and thereby attain eternal consciousness. But early Swans is not an exclusively emotional experience. There is an anti-Manichaean Modernism at the core of the entire project. “I have a hard time understanding the difference between ‘dark’ and ‘light’ personally,” says Gira. “There’s lots of joy in my music, always has been, and I really loathe being portrayed in the press as some sort of morose doom-meister.” It was perhaps Swans’ complete unwillingness to compromise which directed their lyric topicality to “basic states of being”, such as pain, obedience, anguish and redemption: “I don’t feel pain / I never escape / I’m under the bed / I’m licking the floor” or “Blood runs black / Cut my throat / Kill me, snake / Do what I say”. The paradox is found in simultaneous obliteration and vivification: “The act of resignation,” writes Kierkegaard, “does not require faith, but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox.”

The bludgeon approach, relying as it did so heavily on its own musical limitations, soon evolved. The appearance of the mythical Jarboe, whose presence ignited the retreat of the Swans glacier, revealed warmer climes, and at times crueler fangs. Gira began working with acoustic guitar, piano, and other simple elements, to expand. He stopped barking and developed an oaky baritone. Further diversity was forced upon the band during a tour in Eastern European, where a lack of functioning PA’s forced them to adjust their entire approach. Subsequent records made heavy use of baroque structures, and others were entirely acoustic. The late 1980s also marks the introduction of specifically religious motifs in Swans records.

Though the next several records of this new phase, among them Children of God and The Burning World, took a concern with religious questions, neither these influences nor the results sink below Gira’s perfected contradictions. Instead he sharpens the grain of his anti-didactic haze through use of contrast and counterpoint. The constant contrasts must be taken in balance. “It’s like reading Beckett,” he writes. “If you start thinking too much, you’ll never read it. You have to just let it flow through you and accept it.” Gira claims much of the material from this period was, in fact, inspired by a study of televangelist method. “They are great rock performers,” he claims. “You know, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggert. To me, they were amazingly electrified rock performers. The way they would work up a crowd. So I started listening to their language.”

Failure, from White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991)

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In 1989 Swans released what was to be their first and only record on a major label, The Burning World, on Uni/MCA. Bill Laswell produced it and in doing so, shifted the acoustic anchor left, in favor of pop melodies, and into a new, less worthwhile kind of nausea. Most of the songs sound like sea shanties. Gira’s lyrics continued to spin webs of depression, death, greed and despair, but on this record he actually sings a la Johnny Cash. They even covered “Can’t Find My Way Home”. In spite of the record’s final ten seconds, which I take to be the finest musical distillation of ambivalence since Mahler, The Burning World was, in Gira’s words, “a big fuck up. There’re a few good things on it, I think. After we recovered from the terrible anguish of that piece of shit experience I moved on and kept expanding the sound in ways that you know.”

The Other Side of the World, from Love of Life (1992)

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White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991), Love of Life (1992), Soundtracks for the Blind (1996) and the other mid-90s releases combine all Swans’ strengths, resulting in records more complex than ever before. Forms range from barbed hymns of betrayal to open-mouthed attempts at total experience, à la Francis Bacon. Failure, blindness, punishment, temptation, ideals, damnation, regret, paedophilia, and the night stars whose atomic power keeps us all alive and yet can bring instant death as well. Tracks like “Why Are We Alive?” and “The Other Side of the World” trace light years of mystery over the constant “feeding and shifting of the universe”; the instability of matter and the possibility of transmutation. “I don’t believe in an entity that is omniscient and sits there and manipulates the universe like a chessboard but I do have a sense of the strangeness and mystery of existence,” he writes. “There’s this notion of every molecule in the universe being inhabited by an intelligence that is always just imagining itself. As the molecules change and shift that is thought, that is energy. It’s a dream the entire universe is having. There isn’t really one being because, as you know, your body is liquid, it’s melting and changing and shifting.”

____________________________

Upcoming Beatific Annihilation_Part 2

Swans, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, Young God Records, 2010

Portion Control, “Progress Report 1980-1983” septuple LP box set (VOD 73)
By Aram Yardumian

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) rarely finds itself reviewed critically alongside, say, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini or Requiem in D Minor. It is often regarded as derivative of Kraftwerk at best, cold cut kitsch at worst, or merely functional for those who get off by shaking their endoskeletons. Entertaining? Yes. Fine art? No. But if EDM is the property of the discothèque, not the audio boutique, what must we do with Portion Control?—the band who has for thirty years dedicated itself to composing and occasionally performing music that is meticulous yet aggressive, elevated yet idiosyncratic, challenging yet lyrical, and altogether subtle. It also happens to be danceable.

Portion Control’s obscurity is, if you will, legendary. Admired and emulated as they have been by nearly everyone within EDM, they had numerous opportunities to achieve popularity, stiff their day jobs, pen radio hits a la Depeche Mode (with whom they have toured), and become household names. But they have always chosen (all but once, in fact) the left-handed path, viewing both rabid commercialism and rabid anti-commercialism with suspicion and disdain: they don’t release material or tour regularly, don’t have a manager or lawyer, and moreover refuse to embrace any public persona or genre. They rather prefer the descriptor “uncompromising electronic music”. But this is all social. The artistic purity of Portion Control springs not so much from the elements of refusal, but from a dedication to expression and mastery of the analog synthesizer.

Terror Leads to Better Days, from Surface and Be Seen EP, 1982

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Though the earliest analog synths actually date to the 1920s (Elisha Gray’s 19^th century attempts notwithstanding), it was not until the 1970s that they were available to those without access to commercial audio laboratories and high-end studios. Modular synthesizer manufactured by companies such as Moog, and Electronic Music Studios, and ARP Instruments became part of the repertoire of both professionals and amateurs (Metal Urbain, Tubeway Army, Kraftwerk, Devo, George Harrison’s Electronic Sound); despite the availability, remarkably few synthesizer-based records were released during that decade.

1980-81 was an epochal year for DIY electronic maverickism in Europe. It was the year punk spirit and laboratory technology conjugated to form a new musical grammar. Old World and New World punks had discovered commercial synthesizers. Joy Division’s Closer and Cabaret Voltaire’s The Voice Of America, seminal synth records both, came out in 1980, as did Der Plan’s Geri Reig. SPK had moved to London and released Information Overload Unit in 1981, the same year that saw Lustmord’s debut LP, Nocturnal Emissions’ Tissue of Lies, Chris and Cosey’s Heartbeat, and Matt Johnson’s Burning Blue Soul, and on the continent Front 242’s “Principles” 7 inch and Esplendor Geometrico’s “Necrosis En La Poya” 7 inch.

In the autumn of 1980, three student chefs at Westminster College in London made for themselves a modest studio in a flat at 319 Kennington Road, South London, and set to work with an 8-bit Apple ][ and a sampling system called Greengate DS-3—one of the first of these to be made commercially available. John Whybrew, Dean Piavani and Ian Sharp, having named themselves Portion Control (after a chef school methodology) soon upgraded to an Akai S900, an S950, and finally the S1000, which would provide the aural backbone for their variegated menace. Sampling at the time was in its infancy, having been practiced only in live setting (e.g., DJ Kool Herc’s Bronx parties) and on a few early hip-hop and electronic releases (e.g., Dreamies’ Auralgraphic Entertainment from 1973 and Grandmaster Flash’s “The Adventures of” from 1981). So unknown was this form of music at the time that Portion Control were refused Musicians Union Membership because “none of us could play a conventional instrument”.

Mass Disorder, from I Staggered Mentally LP, 1982

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Given their prescience to the scene, it would be tempting to consider Portion Control a trio of uncelebrated pioneers, but they do not see themselves as pioneers, and prefer instead to situate themselves historically in a moment defined by the post-punk scene—by Wire and the Pop Group, and perpetual California outsiders Chrome—not by the birth of the English New Wave (Human League, Ultravox, Fad Gadget, Buggles, et al). Nevertheless, their influence on multiple genres (i.e., EBM, IDM, Industrial, Techno, Ambient) is evident in adulatory name-checks by more visible bands such as Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Front Line Assembly, Orbital, and Depeche Mode.

Portion Control’s early analog synth- and sample-based material (as documented on this box set) is more diverse, and more colorful, than it first appears. Especially on the earliest and most recent material, dynamic tones and hues float to the surface of their virile, driving presence—slowly, as on the canvases of Rouault. Each track is distinct from the one before it, and yet many are somehow the same by dint of conventional song structures with verses and choruses and seductive beats (usually a simple kick pattern followed by a one or two bar step-programmed bass line, followed by more drums). And yet the music is still “difficult” and playfully unyielding, like musique concrète; tracks continue to unfold after repeated listens. Sometimes the tracks go frenetic, oppressive, for stretches claustrophobic—their ambience wrapping around your head like tight foil, even as they unfold logically, but they are never over-embellished. Indeed, the spare muscularity of Wire and Gang of Four is often in evidence. Portion Control have created and maintain a pristine and specifically English form of vintage electro-punk, one that comprehends the veracity of the tape loop, and does not litter them; one which deliberately buries vocals, rife with disgust and estrangement, deep in the mix so as to come off as just another instrument; one which is, in fact, transcendent of forms and free of commercial veneer. They are a remarkable band for making a stasis of their own naïvete, and for seeming, for all their recourse to technology, strangers to the modern world.

Untitled (3), from unreleased video soundtrack, date unknown

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Portion Control yielded eight releases between the years 1980 and 83, and all of them are collected in this box set. The original band lasted until 1987, at which time they made the error of signing with a major label, and promptly vanished from the public eye. Barring a brief foray under the moniker Solar Enemy, they did not re-emerge until 2004. In much the same mood (though now having entirely forsaken hardware) as the day they disappeared, they proceeded to yield twelve more releases, both as CD and download from their website. This septuple LP box set, compiled and released by Frank Maier of Vinyl-on-Demand, is a retrospective of the early days, including over sixty unreleased treasures among its 138 total tracks. The seven LPs (subscribers receive an additional 7 inch), along with a spiral bound photo album, a DVD, and a t-shirt, come housed in a fitted, etched aluminum box.

What must we do with Portion Control? Danceable though it may be, it is too unfriendly for the disco. High art subtleties though it may have, the tides of acceptance have not come in. It doesn’t matter to John Whybrew and Dean Piavani what we do with them[1], for like all good things, Portion Control’s near thirty years of output is the product of an obsession, not a profitable concern. It is creation without expectation, without want for immediate reward. They are still active.

From privately circulated cassette, Private Illusions No. 1, Early 1980’s

White Cubes

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Go for the Throat

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“My Name is Gauhar Jaan!” The Life and Times of a Musician, by Vikram Sampath (©2010)
Rupa Publications, New Delhi, ISBN 8129116185
By Aram Yardumian

In 1857, following the deposition of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the cities along the Ganges one by one slipped into the hands of the British East India Company and three hundred years of Mughal reign in the subcontinent ended. Shifts in fortune, power, patronage, and custom at the eye of the pyramid dripped down the walls of Indian society, north to south; new power structures were erected, and with them new technologies and customs emerged, new histories were written, and new fortunes were made, many of them sealed with blood. It was against this unutterably complex social transformation that a young girl named Gauhar Jaan (born Eileen Angelina Yeoward) arrived with her mother, ‘Badi’ Malka Jaan, a tawaif, in Calcutta to seek the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah, the fifth (and last) king of Oudh and a great patron of the arts and esoteric sciences.

In the court of Wajid Ali Shah, Malka Jaan established herself, thrived, and after three years purchased a house for her and Gauhar, who was herself well on her way to a tawaifdom. In 1886, at the age of fifteen, she performed alone at the Darbhanga Raj and, following a successful performance, was appointed court musician there. For the next several years she sang and danced at the courts of patrons and in the houses of wealthy zamindars and in doing so became a wealthy and renowned young woman. Even the Maharaja of Mysore learned of her exceptional abilities and invited her to perform at his distant southern kingdom. Increasingly it appeared as if history had a special place reserved for this hard-working and talented girl.

In 1902, Fred Gaisberg, an American, one of the world’s first record producers and talent scouts, and a hawkish proponent for the replacement of phonograph cylinders with 78 rpm flat discs, arrived in India and, under the auspices of the Gramophone Company, to make the very first recordings there. His first subject was none other than Gauhar Jaan, whom he chanced to see at the home of a wealthy Bengali patron and later recorded in a makeshift studio in a Calcutta hotel room. Gaisberg recollects that at 9:00 AM on Saturday, 8 November 1902, a fair-skinned young lady, full of jewelry, entered the room with paraphernalia, relatives, and accompanists on sarangi, harmonium and tabla. Gauhar watched as a thick shellac disc was placed on the turntable rotating at 78 RPM and on the wall was hung a huge horn into which she was told to sing loudly, and for just under three minutes.  At the end of each recording she says, “My name is Gauhar Jaan” so that mastering technicians in Hanover, Germany, to which the discs were sent, would know what to print on the record labels. Thus ended India’s first ever recording session and thus began a new epoch in the long history of Indian musical arts and in mass media.

Though its significance to mass media is not yet fully understood, the invention of the gramophone record is analogous to the invention of the printing press. The arrival of the gramophone in South Asia and the Far East represented, in McLuhan-era media studies terms, a defining moment in the inception of the global village, for vernacular musics now could be heard far from their places of origin. Most all of India’s great voices and players of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never saw a gramophone horn either for lack of opportunity or simply because most ragas and talas were far too long to fit on a 78 RPM disc, which in those days lasted less than three minutes per side. Indeed, many Hindustani and Carnatic vocalists take three minutes to develop a single phrase or word. Also, many musicians in the pre-War years were incredulous to the idea of being recorded for spiritual and superstitious reasons. Misapprehensions abounded that singing into “this evil English instrument” would cause irrevocable loss of voice. Rahimat Khan Haddu Khan stormed out of an HMV playback session because someone who sounded just like him was singing back through the horn. Singers also questioned the spiritual purity of the song if it were endlessly duplicatable, for how can the song go on living if it is not immediately, as Eric Dolphy once said, “gone in the air”? Couched in such objections is prescient critique inasmuch as they foresaw a similar political hazard in the mechanical reproduction of art as did Walter Benjamin thirty years later.

Philosophical objections aside, the more concrete limitations of the gramophone were in its obtuse response and limited frequency range—hardly suitable for musical forms that rise and fall with great subtlety. Most string instruments were completely undetectable. Recordings of this vintage were made mechanically (electrical recordings were not possible until the 1920s) by piping sound into the horn that stimulated a diaphragm that in turn stimulated the cutting stylus. Singers had to put their entire face into the horn and quite literally scream to make the needle move around. You can hear Gauhar’s voice echoing in the horn (her accompanists sound as if they are playing in another room), and the circular scratching sound of the stylus cutting the wax—itself a new vista in the metapragmatics of aesthetic experience.

Track One: Hai Gokul ghar ke chora- Khayal -Raag Multani, as sung by Gauhar Jaan

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Track Eleven: Tan man ki bisar gayi–Thumri- Raag Pahadi Jhinjhith, as sung by Gauhar Jaan

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Though other singers were recorded by Gaisberg in these initial sessions, the significance of Gauhar’s career cannot be understated. Here we have a young woman, self-made in a male-dominated tradition, who readily adapted her gayaki to fit the three-minute limitation and thus established a new template for generations of vocalists. As well, she recorded the music of her ustads and thus preserved centuries old formal traditions. Her records sold by the hundred in major cities, as did gramophone machines (which initially cost only Rs 250) to a new generation of middle class Indians, for whom gramophone ownership became something of a status symbol. Between 1902 and 1920 she recorded some 600 tracks about 150 of which are still known to exist in some form. Perhaps more remarkable, she sang in at least thirteen languages and covered the entire formal range of Hindustani classical music, as well as a few Carnatic and English language titles. Gauhar was India’s first mass media superstar; her voice was heard by millions of Indians, even those who could not afford a gramophone. Music, no longer the property of the rich and privileged, became part of the march toward democracy on which India had persevered since its first Revolution. And this meant singers and musicians achieved a kind of national, even global, popularity impossible in the nineteenth century and before, when even the most revered and talented players and voices were heard by only a parochial audience in the age of courtly salon patronage.

Gauhar Jaan’s fame and fortune steadily increased in both the commercial sector and by way of traditional private patronage. Always in demand, she travelled long distances to perform in Rampur, Madras (Chennai), and Delhi. In 1911 she was invited to via letter to perform for Emperor George V at the Delhi Durbar. Always the romantic and always prone to tragic love affairs, often at the expense of her artisanship, Gauhar fought a rapacious public eager for details of her affairs, and increasingly, the noonday demon. Unfortunately her fame also attracted the attention of parasites close to her heart. Bhaglu, the son of her mother’s maid, filed an affidavit asserting his sole right to the not inconsiderable inheritance of Malka Jaan—a legal move that could have left Gauhar on the streets. Only after months of hearings and dredging up ghosts from the past (including her estranged father Robert William Yeoward) to testify, was the case decided in her favor and Bhaglu evicted from the estate. Abbas, Gahuar’s young secretary who had taken charge and comforted her through the court hearings, and to whom Gauhar later entered into muta, came to betray her both as financial manager and lover, and yet another cause célèbre court case ensued. By the end of it Gauhar was drained emotionally and financially. This combined with the anti-nautch movement fostered by rising Christian evangelicalism in the subcontinent saw the impoverishment of thousands of tawaifs across India. Reportedly even Gandhi rejected them from his movement as “obscene”. Gauhar Jaan moved from place to place, eventually ending up in Mysore in 1928, where she died of fever in Kirishnarajendra Hospital, alone and forlorn, obscure and unknown as the day she was born.

The great mystery of Vikram Sampath’s definitive account of Gauhar Jaan’s life is how India’s first recorded voice, whose image appeared on Austrian-made matchbooks, and whose voice was known to and loved by millions of Indians all but vanish from history? That Mr Sampath’s richly detailed biography of Gauhar Jaan is the first of its kind (barring an extremely obscure Bengali language work) is testament to his inquiry into this mystery. Sometimes overnight successes vanish by the very principle that inflates them, and other times events seem to conspire against individuals and leave us with no trace of them.  Even if the old guard who, in refusing to be mechanically recorded, remain part of a millennia-old oral tradition gone without a trace and thus kept their art free from political machination, we may also listen to Gauhar Jaan as the first voice heralding the dawn of a new kind of history.

Hymns to the Night, Tommie Haglund (Composer), Hannu Koivula (Conductor), Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra), Elizabeth Pitcairn (Violin)
Label: Phono Suecia, ASIN: B003QF0J6Q, Release July 2010
by Aram Yardumian

The Ich in Novalis’ lyrical cycle Hymnen an die Nacht embarks on the great journey inward—an inversion of the hero’s journey taken by Odysseus, Rama, and Zarathustra—to a great and eternal interior space where death gives way to eternal life as night gives way to day. Typically Christian in its appeal, yet also heterodoxical, the journey into the dark night and the world beyond are dynamic and ongoing personal creations, for, as Novalis observes, “in us or nowhere is eternity with its past and future worlds”. Such ideas found a place, unsurprisingly, in 18^th century Germanic literature. On the pages of early Fichte we find movement between lower and transcendental selves, in Schelling a consciousness in nature itself, and in Swedenborg a record of dialogue with the archetypal spirits of his own deep subconscious, through which he came to a unique understanding of reality and its transcending levels. Though the great journey inward may appear at first dark and lonely, Novalis wrote, “how very different it will seem to us when this eclipse is over and the shadowing body is removed”. Similar ideas have haunted much of Christian mystical literature from its Old Testament precursors to the present, and have become, as it were, permanent mysteries in the genre, as much for the author of Psalm 23 as for St. John of the Cross.

Likewise, the Jag of Tommie Haglund’s symphonic poem for violin and orchestra, also entitled Hymnen an die Nacht, reconnoiters the abyss, beginning in a time of familiarity signified by the dialogue of the violin with the orchestra: the chaos of modernity and the orderliness of tradition. The violin is meek in its approach, but then gather moments of courage to press on as if into the desert at night, moments of reluctance, moments of trembling against the sublime wall of sound erected by the orchestra. Gradually, there are points of light, lines and basic Platonic forms, moments of universal memory that may only be the djinn come to tempt. The rosy tips of dawn trickle in and are overwhelmed again by the Night, which relents only in the final minutes with a passage of melodies which resemble John Dowland (of whom Haglund became fond during his guitar studies), perhaps representing a kind of momentary return to an older and simpler time, both in history and in the composer’s life—the soul of the composer breaking through prematurely only to realize the journey has just begun.

Novalis’ cycle is metapoetic inasmuch as the process of its creation was also the process of Novalis’ own journey and transubstantiation. Though we cannot yet say whether Haglund’s cycle is similarly metapoetic, other parallels to Novalis certainly are in evidence. Chief among them is the setting of the poet’s triadic conception of history: a state of harmony followed by one of disunity, followed again by a state of peace. Such conceptions were not uncommon among Continental writers, especially those laboring under the influence of both Greek mythology and Genesis 3. Hegel himself declared that the Prussian State was the highest political form, and therefore nothing less than the fulfillment of history. Haglund invokes not some literal Golden Age (a notion hardly borne out by archaeology) but the stages of individual spiritual ascent. Hymnen an die Nacht is in a state of constant transformation—not simply shifts in episode, but highly organic deaths and rebirths—building new forms from decaying polymers not yet turned to dust. This motif, used more often in ambient music than in classical composition, is better known as the phoenix, a metaphor well known to Novalis, who wrote in his journals that he regarded his own sorrow as a “quiet flame” that would consume him and enable him to rise from the ashes to a higher state.  This notion is repeated by many of the mystics, including St. John of the Cross, who wrote, “… the soul is purified in [the] forge like gold in the crucible … it feels both this terrible undoing in its very substance and extreme poverty as though it were approaching the end”.

The second piece on this CD, “Daughter of the Voice”,  is a reweaving of the 14^th century Revelaciones Coelestes Book I of St. Birgitta of Sweden, as arranged by Stephan Borgehammar. It is a meditation on the symbiosis of Jesus and Mary, the agony of the crucifixion physically transmitted from son to mother. This is a rather unusual theme in both the literary and visual arts; indeed most Medieval and Renaissance depictions of Mary at Golgotha (Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece [first view] being the notable exception) depict her either saddened or merely stoic. In this piece Haglund, like Grünewald (and perhaps Mel Gibson), forsakes all classical values in pursuit of the intense violence and accelerated drama of the Passion of the Cross. But the work also expresses a semblance of hope, for even the self-doubt experienced by Jesus when he cried out “Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani” was soon tempered by the joy of believing he would soon be in paradise. Dual sopranos Jeanette Bjurling and Tua Åberg carry the weight of the pain without seeming pained themselves. In twining these emotions Haglund achieves a perfect distillation of ambivalence not heard by my ears since the final moments of The Burning World by Swans. Even the syncopated metronomes that introduce the piece serve to support the confusing dialectic of pain and joy. But the painful passage through the dark night, the escape from the self and one’s other enemies, and the passive purifications of the senses and the spirit are all necessary for the ascent to Mount Caramel, and the higher or purer self.

Röstens dotter, Daughter of the Voice

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We awaken to the third piece, “To the Sunset Breeze” on the evening of a wretched hot day that seems to have lasted an eternity. But have we in fact awoken or are we awake within a dream? This piece is, of course, named for Walt Whitman’s poem (though evidently composed before ever reading the poem)—told by the unusual combination between guitar, harp, and string quartet—in which a cool breeze enters a room on a hot evening to relieve a weathered old soul . There is a pastoral European feel, conjuring images from Philip Oyler’s The Generous Earth and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and through this a cautious reluctance in the harp’s motion, perhaps reflecting the old soul, who, weak and diminished from his journey, may not truly believe the dark night has ended. In a sense this is the most difficult of the three pieces for me to penetrate, inasmuch as the mood is neither joyful nor melancholic, the tensions are never fully released, and the ultimate conclusion seems partial. Nevertheless, in spite of what may be my misunderstanding, Haglund has steered his own fate through music using, like Melville, a remarkable synthesis of Biblical and Modernist language.

This final movement is dedicated to Delius because of his admiration for Whitman. Haglund, though he never met Delius himself, met Eric Fenby, who was assistant to Delius for many years, and through this relationship came to a deeper understanding of Delius and later, through Fenby’s fiancée, of Swedenborg. That Delius was such an important influence on Haglund is hardly revealed in his music, for where Delius was chromatic and tonal, Haglund creates complex three dimensional structures with parallax views and atonal layers, in some ways similar and in some way quite distinct from other modern and postmodern Scandinavian composers such as Sven-Erik Bäck, and Karl-Birger Blomdahl. All this would be for naught without the flawless rendering of the scores by the orchestra and soloists, perhaps most notably violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn, who in fact commissioned the first movement. Pitcairn’s playing, urged by the intensity of Haglund’s composition, continues to tighten formally and fluidify emotionally as her repertoire diversifies. In Hymnen an die Nacht, Haglund’s finest moment to date, the triadic conception of history is released from the fishbowl of Teutonic political literalism, into the interior badlands of moral aesthetics elucidated by Schiller and others, where it dares to be grand in cynical times—dares to open a vista into another world that makes ours look very gossamer indeed.

Italian Electronic Music Pioneers: an overview
by Aram Yardumian

The Second World War stands, for many, as the watershed cultural event of the 20^th century. Prior to the War, electronic sound reproduction methods were limited primarily to phonographs, photoelectric cells, and rudimentary paper tape recorders. While the early proponents of electronic music on both sides of the Atlantic (Brown, Cage, Feldman, Tudor, et al in America; Henry, Schaeffer, Stockhausen, et al on the Continent), were at this time already laying the groundwork for their experiments and masterpieces, it was the horrors of the War and the dissatisfaction with pre-War culture which ushered in the age of Postmodern music, and advances in both magnetic tape machines and computers, accelerated by wartime necessity, that made it all possible.[1] For several decades after, electronic music was the property of media companies and universities that could afford the equipment and the technicians necessary to operate it. New York, Princeton, Paris, Cologne. It was in these places that some of the most well known electronic was created and recorded in the 1950s and 60s. However, another vital and scarcely understood avant-garde music scene was going on in virtual isolation outside the walls of Paris and Cologne, and had been going on for decades, care of the Futurists in Italy.

Historically speaking, the 1907 publication Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, written by Ferruccio Busoni (mentor to both Otto Luening and Edgard Varèse), begins the epoch. In this tract, Busoni bemoaned the constraints of traditional music and predicted the use of electrical and other new sounds in the music of the future. Busoni was never a member of the Futurist movement, but his ideas serve as the precursor to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, which initiated the movement. The following year, Francesco Balilla Pratella published the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, in which he lambasted 19^th century Italian music as formally obsolete, hidebound by backward-looking publishers and self-perpetuating conservatories. He called for a general liberation from the formal shackles of the past. Pratella admired Wagner, Sibelius, and Mascagni for their innovations, but much of the rest of Continental classical music and opera had sunk to mediocrity and rote conservatism. Luigi Russolo’s 1913 The Art of Noises, still in-print today, completes a sort of triumvirate of early Futurist manifestos. It is a manifesto of acoustic and electronic noise generation that paved the way for a new sonic aesthetic that continues to accrue new creative dimension today. Russolo saw the potential of Industrial Revolution developments to facilitate musical composition far into the future, and even staged what must be the world’s first acoustic noise concert, in 1914 with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (who, oddly, went on to co-author The Fascist Manifesto). It caused a riot. More such concerts in Paris before and after the First World War marked a deliberate departure in music from “limpidity and sweetness of sound” to “dissonant, strange and harsh sounds”.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Definizione di Futurismo

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Luigi Russolo, Corale (1921)

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This development was followed by an increasingly progressive and atonal trends in Continental classical music, as predicted by Busoni and by the Italian Futurists. Serialism and 12-tone music became increasingly popular in pre-War Italy and was practiced by many such as Carlo Jachino, Goffredo Petrassi, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Although he never made use of tape machines or computers, Dallapiccola was an innovator in 12-tone compositions for orchestra and voice, so important to many later Italian composers. Like Petrassi, he was inspired by Wagner to start composing, but was, as it is said, inspired by Debussy to stop. After first hearing Debussy in 1921, Dallapiccola ceased all composition for some three years in order to fully digest what he was hearing.

Although we cannot say Italian electronic music evolved in a cultural or technological vacuum, it is worth noting that many of its pioneers trace their artistic heritage not to Schaeffer and Stockhausen, but to the Futurists, as well as more outré moments in pre- and postmodern classical music. Around 1956, Italian concrète composer Vittorio Gelmetti drew not on the work of his European contemporaries, but on Schoenberg, Webern and latter-day Stravinsky. A few years earlier, classical composer Luciano Berio began pioneering magnetic tape in musical composition, following a long apprenticeship period in classical composition and piano. He co-founded the Studio di Fonologia, an electronic music studio in Milan, with Bruno Maderna in 1955 and invited a number of significant composers to work there, among them John Cage. He also produced what was I believe the world’s first periodical devoted solely to electronic music, called Incontri Musicali. Although classically trained, his interest in post-tonal thinking came early and his transition to electro-acoustic forms followed encounters with Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik . Most all of Berio’s tape music pieces make use of voice and classical instruments without classical arrangement. A few, such as O King (1968; composed in memory of Martin Luther King Jr.) and Sinfonia, are more collage in style, inasmuch as quotes from literary sources are strung together in an upbuilding discourse. Only rarely, however, did his collages (e.g., Diario immaginario, 1975) approach musique concrète in their exclusive use of found sound sources.

Luciano Berio, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958)

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Luigi Nono, like Gelmetti and unlike Berio, did not situate himself in the genealogy of the post-War electronic music giants such as Stockhausen, Schaeffer, and Boulez, the majority of whose work was expressly apolitical. Instead, as an admirer of and artistic successor to Webern, his work is both pointillist and diversely sonoric, making use of both spoken word (sometimes fractured), orchestra and chorus in what becomes both a cerebral and emotional listening experience. Nono dedicated many of his works to the victims of Capitalism, forced emigration, and European Fascism and, even to the extent of incorporating into his works readings of farewell letters written by political prisoners before execution. Greatly influenced by Adorno, Benjamin, and, later, Massimo Cacciari, his lifelong commitment to political and social justice (he was a member of both the Italian Resistance and the Italian Communist Party) became more than just a topic in his music; in fact, his mid- and late-period compositional style guided almost entirely by ideology. Like his eminent German pupil Helmut Lachenmann, who was also interested in what Western music could be in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Nono situated his art as a bulwark of resistance to Fascist power. But he also situated himself obliquely away from both the aleatory compositions of Cage and the “fascist mass structures” of Stockhausen’s statistically-determined works, preferring a highly concentrated microtonal technique frequently expressionistic and often involving both tape and live instruments. Later, as electronic technology permitted, he composed works that, as well as remaining expressly political, retheorized the very notions of content, context, time and space. It is worth noting that the endurance of Nono’s work is a challenge to the aesthetic rule of thumb that art and propaganda, in pure forms, are mutually exclusive. According to David Ackerman, Nono achieved “nothing less than a Cartesian reassessment of Western music and art in general” and as total a reconstruction of music as was technologically possible.

Luigi Nono, Tre Voci B, from the opera Prometeo, (1984)

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Another conservatory student, Luc Ferrari, became enamored of works by Berg, Schönberg, Webern, and others of the Modernist era when he was quarantined at home during a bout of tuberculosis. This inspired his resolve to break with past traditions and the mores of the conservatory. However, his full dissociation with classical forms came during visits to the Internationale Ferienkurse Darmstadt, where he, like Berio, became personally acquainted with electronic music luminaries of the day. The idea of musique concrète appealed greatly to Ferrari, as did the idea of “breaking the membrane” between it and other forms of abstract electro-acoustic music. Although a significant composer for both tape and orchestra and, like Nono, a social commentator for much of his career, Ferrari spent a great deal of his later life tape recording sounds outside the studio, assembling, changing, altering and refabricating them.

Luc Ferrari, L’Escalier des Aveugles, (1991)

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The 1960s saw new developments in compositional technique by way of sound art and collage. Though Vittorio Gelmetti may indeed be the father of this, it was Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and Musica Elettronica Viva who fully reconnoitered the territory. The former, a free-form improvisation and sound collage collective that included Giovanni Piazza, Mario Bertoncini, Gualtiero Branchi, Francesco Evangelisti, Egisto Macchi, Jesus Villa Rojo, and most notably, Ennio Morricone. As well as providing a sandbox for Morricone to sharpen his skills, Gruppo made use of extended drones, free jazz, electronics, and acoustic instruments to form a chatter that precedes much post-rock and improvisational music today. Likewise, MEV—a Rome-based collective whose membership has over the years included Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, and Steve Lacy, all of whom were living in Rome in the 1960s—used synthesizers to manipulate and generate sounds a la Tudor and Cage, as well as amplify the sounds of motors, sex vibrators, and glass as early as 1966, thus prefiguring most all of the live improvisational electronics music that has followed.

Ennio Morricone, “Seguita” from ‘Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura’ (Cold Eyes of Fear), 1971

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Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Lip Service Cantata, from The Private Sea of Dreams, (1967)

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Perhaps the truest Italian composer sui generis is Maurizio Bianchi, who in spite of personal relationships with Monte Cazzazza, Genesis P-Orridge, and Konrad Schnitzler, claims to be uninfluenced neither by them, or any artistic movement, not by philosophy or politics or anything else. He says, “Even if I listened in the second half of the seventies some works by Henry, Schaeffer, Ferrari and others … I can define such similarities as a degenerative coincidence.” Bianchi’s themes range from genocide and skin disease to human suffering and the Holy Scripture, bionics and death, and these are made deliriously vivid and emotionally pure with simple analog electronics, by Bianchi in his home studio. He has released well over one hundred cassettes, LPs and CDs since 1979 and continues today, even after a long pause due to a deepening of his religious attitudes. His music has ranged from the brutal and grotesque, and sliding on the rhythmic edge of neuro-technological collapse, to his more ambient and sustained sonic landscapes of recent years. Always highly cerebral and highly emotional at once, the often long and tortuous tracks continually reach for redemption and freedom from suffering. Bianchi has no formal musical training and operates by instinct in his album-length personality excavations, several of which have recently been reissued as multi-vinyl box sets by the venerable Vinyl-on-Demand label, which is also responsible for the reissue of the complete tape works of sound artist Giancarlo Toniutti.

Maurizio Bianchi, Violet, from Colori, (1998)

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The genealogy of post-classical and post-industrial electronic music in Italy is still extremely vague, due to so much independent artistic operation. The ADN label has, since 1985, been a vital outlet for releases by rather obscure names such as F.A.R., La 1919, Tasaday, FP and the Doubling Riders, Kino Glaz, and Riccardo Sinigaglia. Luciano Dari’s Musica Maxima Magnetica label has, while being more international in scope, also preserved Italian electronic music, both EMB and ambient. Text-sound artists such as practiced by Alessandro Bosetti, as well as the new electro-acoustic music of Sicily take their place alongside software-based computer compositions and circuit bending now to be heard in all corners of the country. While a seemingly vast distance has been covered since the predictions of Busoni and the Futurists, the work of today’s electronic and electro-acoustic composers continues sustain the aspirations of Musica Futurista.

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[1] The single invention that unleashed the genius in Cage, Schaeffer, Stockhausen, et al, was the electric magnetic tape recorder. Although various ways to record sound magnetically were in use even in the 19^th century, the real leap forward came with the change in materials used for the magnetic tape itself (the replacement of Fe₃O₄ oxide tape by ?-Fe₂O₃ with red iron oxide particles) in 1939. It was a German patent, and therefore its use was restricted by wartime necessity until models were discovered at Radio Luxembourg during the Allied invasion of 1944. (The Allies were aware that identical German radio broadcasts were being simultaneously broadcast from multiple time zones, and since their duration was far longer than a 78 RPM record, the existence of magnetic tape use was suspected). This development spread to Paris and New York in the years following the War. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer and others who had an association with the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, gained access to early magnetic tape machines and began experimenting. Slightly later, the earliest known purely computer-generated music dates to 1951.

Electroacoustic Music from Sicily, Instituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania
By Aram Yardumian

Islands are geographically unique in the ways they generate life and culture. On them we find species and traditions which have been forged in the crucible of isolation, from pollens and ideas that blow in with the trade winds, take root and grow without the pressures they would face on the continent. Remote islands such as Soqotra and the Andaman archipelago are renowned for their unique flora and fauna and outlying cultural tropes, while others like Zanzibar and Bali, closer as they are to the continental mass, respond more regularly to transmissions from culture-at-large. The Regione Autonoma Siciliana is, like all islands, the interface for multiple cultural inheritances: Greek, Roman, Norman, Spanish, Arab, Moor, and modern Italian. Sicilians have collected aesthetic forms from all these diverse colonizers and now boast a musical tradition both unified and diverse–something that has attracted the attentions of many, Alan Lomax not the least of which.

Sicily’s location between continents–two so very different continents–must be the beginning of any historical analysis of its music. On the island we find a great variety of religious and secular music played on instruments found only there. For example, the cupa cupa, a fricative percussion instrument, and the donax reed pipe. And unusual harmonic structures are found in both folk and choral music, some of which is due no doubt to the influence of the Arab tonal system. That we also find a sophisticated school of electronic music in Sicily should come as little surprise, especially to those who follow concomitant schools in mainland Italy. Sicily’s electronic music is remarkable inasmuch as we can best hear the ancient and the modern, the historic and the avant-garde, the intellectual and the emotional, the East and the West in one tradition.

For a rather short time the island even boasted the Electronic Music School of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania, under the guidance of Alessandro Cipriani (who himself studied with the venerable Barry Truax). And though it is now defunct, its approximate ten years of life has given us a small treasure box of Musique concrèt and pure electronic sound, the best of which is available on the Electronic Music Foundation’s 2003 CDr release, Electroacoustic Music From Sicily. The eleven featured compositions were recorded between 1995 and 2003 and include a few familiar names as well as several names unfamiliar even to someone who pays far too much attention to this sort of thing. Massimo Carlentini’s piece Mutamenti was featured on the Fondazione Russolo-Pratella label’s XXII° Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Elettroacustica, 2000, and Vincento Cavalli has produced or recorded the odd CD. The rest are quiet geniuses, hopefully preparing new electronic masses in monastic isolation.

Speaking in terms of the Sicilian music tradition, the compositions on Electroacoustic Music From Sicily actively cross the threshold of the traditional before our ears. Recognizable forms slowly grow unrecognizable, while always some vestige of the old folk narrative survives, for each piece (with the possible exception of Rapisarda’s  Almaquae) tells a linear story or at least describes something literal. Mario Valenti’s Inside describes “the conflict engendered by the refusal to accept solitude, squalor, death” and was recorded in the village Agira. The piece, for all its heavy topic, is the most settling of the eleven with its light rain and church bells–not to mention its sense of humor: a snoring old man is looped beneath the campanile. Vincenzo Cavalli’s Idea, the entire sonic field and narrative of which is drawn from baritone and soprano saxophone sources, is a progressing figurative piece “coordinated with a work of spatialization in the stereo sound field” in order to generate specific sonic bands. And yet the piece stands not so far apart from jazz sounds of the Italian sixties.

Inside (1999) per nastro, Mario Valenti

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Idea (2000) per nastro, Vincenzo Cavalli

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While none of the old folk melodies or modes, per se, are employed in the compositions, the donax reed pipe is sampled by Massimo Carlentini, who also uses didgeridoo in his composition entitled Recycling recycled. Overall this piece builds an ambiance not unlike Jorge Reyes’s early albums and some of the work of Kenneth Newby and Stephen Kent. This piece has shares less with European electroacoustic music than the others and as such stands apart. The title refers to Carlentini’s approach, which he characterizes as “[sonic] material, duly processed, coming from different cultures, [each with] a message to deliver”. Anna Maria Gervasio’s Calvario Metafisico likewise is weighted with the sense of urgency in its message, for it is not a single but a double allegory of the fourteen stages of Christ’s journey to Calvary, and in turn a message of hope for those who suffer. One can hardly imagine watching Enrique Irazoqui marching up to Golgotha to the tune of this; in fact, the piece draws on no part of the Christian sacred music tradition. Something melancholic is there beside the tragic hope, and something mysterious but never divine, something perhaps redolent of Pasolini’s words, “I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

Calvario Metafisico (2001) per flauto, piano e nastro, Anna Maria Gervasio

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Speaking outside the purview of Sicilian music, some of the compositions also share a reverence for Stockhausen’s vari-scale microtonal structure (even if the Arab tonal system may be the ultimate source in some cases), and obsessive attention to granular texture. There is also a distinct awareness among these artists of the implications of the sound sources they are using. Massimo Fragalà, in his piece entitled Contaminazione, utilizes sounds originating in (unspecified) nations of the former Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the sounds of his voice and some taken from “contemporary reality” as a sonic allusion to “the cancellazione of the cultures and traditions of these people,” on the one hand, and on the other, “their resurfacing in all of their strength”. (I believe we can translate cancellazione here to mean diminution, not literally “cancellation”).

Contaminazione (2003) per nastro, Massimo Fragalà

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Given what we know about the mechanics of cultural transmission it seems unwieldy to make statements about what traits and innovations belong to what set of people or to what authority. Taxonomy, as Asif Agha said “is taxidermy”. What may be worth asking is how the dynamic relationship between ideas and physical culture relates more specifically to geography, that is, to landscape and available materials (beyond the Diamond Hypothesis); and how historical memory mitigates these processes. On islands such as Sicily, where the sea both mitigates and obstructs social interactions, these processes must be continually re-imagined.

This is the final installment of a three part essay on Oman as seen through the eyes of archaeologist Aram Yardumian. In 2008, Mr. Yardumian was a member of the American team doing research at theUNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat. Various research interests have also taken him to the Caucasus, India, and southern Africa. He is currently involved in research on Turkic-speaking populations, and continues studies in various languages, including Tamil. His paper on photographer Mitchell Payne’s neurosurgery series from the early ’70’s appears in the current issue of Philologie im Netz (PhiN), the German journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

Dispatch Oman, Part Three, Gulf-kitch, Excavation of the 3rd Millennium
by Aram Yardumian

These days, Omani houses are built in the Gulf-kitch style: expensive and magnificent from afar, but inside cramped and awkward, and each complete with a sweeping faux-marble staircase that leads to a dead end—there is no second floor. And at close range you’ll notice how pocked and grainy the cement is. Some German stonemasons I met there showed fatal cracks already in the foundation of their house and in their main staircase. They gave the whole thing twenty years and then a pile of rubble.

Our house is a survivor from much more practical and traditional times. Flirting with pure utility as it does; square, solid and drafty as it is, it supported a team of eleven archaeologists, plus guests, and no one had to step on each others’ abdomens to get to the can at night. We are six Americans, one Pole, One Portuguese, two Indians and one Japanese. Two additional members of our team didn’t actually participate in this year’s work: one got held up by jury duty in Gujarat; the other stayed in Muscat ostensibly to make a comprehensive study of pottery, but so far the only sketch he’s made is of ministerial bureaucracy.

We have for ten team members, three vehicles, thousands of sealable plastic bags, hundreds of buckets and ten tin foil wheelbarrows, some tree saws for belligerent acacias, eight Omani workmen, sunglasses, stakes, a mallet and a bit of know-how between us. The work week is Saturday through Wednesday with a half-day Thursday. Fridays we usually spend traveling to another relevant archaeological site, or drinking black market rum.

Our operations in 2008 include the excavation of two late-third millennium ‘towers’ (known as 1146 and 1147 in the scholarly literature) which we call towers only for lack of a better term. Really they are just rings of foundation stones now that once supported a structure of unknown form and function. Tombs? Agricultural devices? Ritual structures? Who knows. What we do know is that there are many of them all across Oman and into the Emirates and that each measures between 20 and 23 m in diameter. Also, there are proper cairn tombs in the area, though we are not ourselves excavating them. Most of these sit astride mountain ridges, visible from great distances. There are thousands of these, also late third millennium, all over Oman, which suggests a great uniformity of culture across a wide expanse. More tombs are constantly being re-discovered and recorded.

We have a one-room laboratory in the German team’s house, where pottery is washed, drawn, and sorted; and where I go mad in effort to manage my GIS software. But day-to-day life isn’t terribly different from what people do everywhere: we get up early (I myself wake up at 5:30 with the muzzein), work, come home, eat, continue working, eat some more, and go to sleep. Our problems are everyone’s problems: lost keys, hangovers, electricity failures, lung infections and camels in our rubbish. This is true. Camels get into our garbage barrel and they spread it everywhere. And once the camel puts its head inside the barrel you can do nothing about it. Yell, throw stones, do what you want, it’s just going to stand there and lick cardboard until its enzymes shut off. And don’t touch the beast, for your teeth-eyeballs-lips-neck-spine’s sake, you’ll never know what kicked you. Sometimes two camels stick their heads in at once and you get something like a Narmer’s Palate that the artisans rejected.

The dust here is as absolute as His Majesty’s power. You can’t fight it, it’s going to win. It piles up against the walls, collects on your papers, in your shoes, ears, hermetically sealed black boxes. It blows right back where you just swept it from, it blots out the sun. Sometimes in the late afternoons so much rises into the air that the landscape as you see it goes black-and-white, and the only thing one sees move is the sun, an orange ball one may safely stare into. In the dust live scorpions and camel-spiders that our workmen like to capture on shovels to taunt the ladies.

How many coffee table books have given us how many cliches to capture the desert? Impoverished in this but rich in that; vast and alluring; ancient and foreboding. You’ve heard it all. But I will confirm, and what’s more: humans do strange things in the desert. Just ask T.E. Lawrence. Or Charles Doughty, whose brain was so affected he went about overwriting English like Jarry went about his alcoholism: as a discipline. Ask Wilfred Thessiger, who crossed the Empty Quarter twice—recreationally. Or ask Dr. Jeffrey Rose, expert in Paleolithic rock art, who claims he has discovered the semiotic origin of world religions out there somewhere. Or ask me. Apparently I sing arias of Wagner in my sleep here, and I don’t even know German.

Vittorio Gelmetti, Composer, Electronic Soundtrack for Il Deserto Rosso (Antonioni, 1964)
By Aram Yardumian

The use of electronic music composed by Vittorio Gelmetti for the soundtrack of Antonioni’s first color film Il Deserto Rosso, contributed greatly to the film’s aesthetic complexity as well as the displaced psychological underpinnings of it’s characters. Rarely heard before in cinema, this example of early musique concrète would serve as a harbinger of the now, widespread use of electronica in film and television. -NC

Vittorio Gelmetti belongs among the earliest and most significant pioneers of electronic music, not only because his earliest compositions date to the mid-1950s, but also because he was self-taught and drew his inspiration not from other electronic music composers, but from Schoenberg, Webern and latter-day Stravinsky. And yet he is very little known or listened to today, even by connoisseurs of early tape music. His LP releases are hard to come by, and only one rather parsimonious CD retrospective has been released to date.

Gelmetti’s music, especially his work from the 1960s, represents something new, if not radical, inasmuch as it accumulates elements of musique concrète (the electronic transformation of pre-recorded sounds), as popularized by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry; the elektronische Musik (purely electronically generated sounds) of Herbert Eimert and Werner Meyer-Eppler, as well as the later Musik kosmische of Stockhausen; and the aleatory universe of John Cage. There is also a spatial, sometimes theatrical element to some of his works, especially those composed specifically for film or television. What resulted was something very few at the time, especially outside of Paris and Cologne, could appreciate.

Gelmetti rejected the frigidity and ambivalence of other electronic and concrète musicians, preferring a warmer touch in his composition, one that would trick latent memories, and perhaps also create an oblique amusement, for the specter of Dada is never far behind him. If we were to divide Gelmetti’s available works into two, the majority would constitute continuous layered sound sheets and what might called entonnoir drones, not unlike the Xenakis works of that era, but otherwise quite unusual for tape-based musicians of this vintage. His remaining works, those not written for television or film (including Red Desert), are early examples of sound collage.

I would argue that Gelmetti’s most significant and underappreciated innovation is to be found in these works, for they are collages not in the sense of Ives’ text-melody juxtapositions, nor of Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer”, or even Burroughs-Gysin cut-ups. They are a real, inspired, and playful use of samples—of plagiarism—, thus serving as precursor to the Plunderphonics exercises of John Oswald and friends, Negativland hi-jinxes, and nothing less than hip-hop, house, and second-wave industrial music. Gelmetti sources radio broadcasts, bits of unidentifiable jazz and pop music, and notable classical composers such as Wagner, Bach, and Beethoven, while abstaining from recorded environmental sounds. He took few of these collage sensibilities forward into his career as a composer of film and television scores, however, so it is these, in combination with his drone-sequence works, which stand at the pinnacle of the oeuvre of this little-known Italian innovator.

Nevertheless, it is his film and television scores for which he is best remembered. Indeed, several Italian newspapers carried the headline “Morto Vittorio Gelmetti, musico Deserto Rosso” when Gelmetti died in February of 1992. His works for television are often scenic, making use of lighter tones and broader, more adaptable forms, for the sake of both changing scenes and for human motion within the scenes. Cues from classic poetry are abundant, as are parts for chorus and traditional musical instruments, as well as references to his earlier dronescapes—especially in his score for Antonioni’s Red Desert. His final, unfinished piece was an electro-acoustic choral piece for male voices entitled “New Year’s Eve Toast”.

Gelmetti rarely consorted or collaborated with his peers in the world of electronic music, nor did he consider himself part of the avant-garde, instead, he occupied a rather isolated and unfashionable position in the world of broadcast composition and cinema; never a long-term in-house composer, never with a studio workshop of his own, and never a public personality. He did, however, endure as a considerable creative authority, perhaps unconvinced of his own force and influence.

Nous Irons À Tahiti (1965), Vittorrio Gelmetti
From the compilation Musiche Elettroniche, Nepless 1997

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Persepolis (1971), Iannis Xenakis
“Nous Portons La Lumiere de la terre”
“We Bear the Light of the Earth”
by Aram Yardumian

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was fomented by the unusual pairing of ultra-conservative Islamists, reacting against the so-called “cultural contamination” of Iran by the West, and by various leftist elements, long outraged by the nation’s history of injustice, brutality and extravagance under the rule of the Shah. Left and right together filled the streets for months of protest. They marched on and sometimes burned cinemas, casinos, banks, hotels and other ostensibly un-Islamic institutions and luxuries, paving the way for the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Symbolic of the extravagance perpetrated by the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi that outraged both conservative and leftist was the Jashnhaa-ye 2500 Saaleh, or 2500th anniversary celebration of Iran’s founding by Cyrus the Great, held in 1971. This four-day event, held in an elaborate, glittering air conditioned tent city at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, and in conjunction with the Third Annual Shiraz Arts Festival, is possibly the grandest celebration ever staged. According to no less of an authority than The Guiness Book of World Records, it was also the most “well attended” international event in history, inasmuch as it attracted some sixty-five heads of state, legates and their entourages—including Sultan Qaboos of Oman, Imelda Marcos, Pres. Joseph Mobutu of Zaire, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew (representing Richard Nixon), and Tito—and their spouses—a total of six hundred dignitaries, in addition to some 150 chefs, bakers and waiters, hundreds of security personnel, teams of desert vermin exterminators, Parisian hairdressers and make-up artists, Italian drapers, florists, musicians, and chauffeurs for the 250 custom-ordered red Mercedes-Benzes. As well, some 4000 (or 6000, estimates vary) period-costumed soldiers paraded a spectacularly choreographed review of two and a half millennia of Persian imperial glory—the Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanian, Safavid, Afsharid, Qajar, and Pahlavi dynasties—in order to impress upon the guests what Iran had been in the past, was in 1971, and would be in the future.

Parisian Master Hotelier Max Blouet, came out of retirement to oversee the wait staff for the welcome banquet, an event catered by Maxim’s de Paris, which shut its Paris location for almost a fortnight in order to focus on the event. The menu, which was a carefully guarded secret, included roast peacocks with foie gras-stuffed tails, quails’ eggs stuffed with golden Caspian caviar, mousse of crayfish tails with Nantua sauce, and the finest ports and champagnes, including a 1945 Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild—hardly, many were quick to note, traditional Persian cuisine.

Following the banquet was son et lumière show and fireworks. The voice of Darius the Great spoke in the dark—in French—recounting the glories of Xerxes. This was followed by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s monumental fifty-six minute, eight-track electro-acoustic work Persepolis, which was commissioned by the Shah to simultaneously exalt ancient Persia’s aristocratic pre-Islamic religious culture, and define a new, specifically secular moment in the nation’s history. Persepolis, subtitled ‘We Bear the Light of the Earth’, was a massive multimedia spectacle (which Xenakis referred to as a ‘polytope’) employing lasers, spotlights, and hillside bonfires to evoke the Zoroastrian belief that light is eternal life. For the event, the eight independent tracks were broadcast by 48 (or 59, or 100, accounts vary) high-end speakers spread around the ruins of the ancient Palace of Darius. The audience circulated freely between six listening zones, listening as they watched laser lights scan the night sky and the ruins of the city, and the mountains. During the event, 150 Shiraz schoolboys ran with torches from the ravine, through the audience, into the columns of the ruins.

Beginning minutes of Persepolis, Composer Iannis Xennakis
Pour bande magnétique 8 pistes. Band réalisée au Studio Acousti, Paris. Creation: 20.08.1971, Persépolis, Festival de Shiraz (Iran)

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The work itself is the ebb, flow and overlap of eleven basic waves of texture, ranging from what sound like wind instrument polyphonics, rubbed glass, treated air, and the scraping together of large steel sheets. Listened to in stereo, one or another of these entities appears to dominate the encroaching and juxtaposing layers, but it is important to remember that in experiencing the work as a polytope, it would have no linear motion, only elliptical shifts in texture and “mass”—a concept Xenakis strove to introduce to the world of musical composition. The textures are often at odds, acoustically, yet they do not fight; they, in their opposition somehow strike a balance—exactly as the Zoroastrian contest between Light and Darkness. The sounds themselves burrow up like the elements in times of geologic turmoil, from unimaginable depths, oxidizing and crystallizing on the surface into forms that in turn decay and return to the earth, like civilizations. Even in stereo, Persepolis has no harmonic structure, no breaks or movements, and, like history, no beginning or end.

Xenakis spoke of Persepolis as “… [N]either a theatrical spectacle, nor a ballet, nor a happening. It is visual symbolism, parallel to and dominated by sound”. Though decidedly untheatrical, the event was certainly dramatic, even sublime as a feat of architecture rather than a history lesson, or perhaps the poverty of history consumed by the glissandi of the spheres. It was, Xenakis wrote in his notes, a “symbol of history’s noises; unassailable rocks facing the assault of the waves of civilization. Childhood’s awakening must be maintained because it represents active knowledge, perpetual questioning which forges the becoming of man. To invent light trajectories, to create signs, destinies on stone: on mountain and ruins, through sound, through fire, through light …. This music corresponds to a rock tablet on which hieroglyph or cuneiform messages are engraved in a compact, hermetic way, delivering their secrets only to those who want and know how to read them. The history of Iran, fragment of the world’s history, is thus elliptically and abstractly represented by underground currents of sound. The listener must pay for his penetration into the knowledge of the signs with great effort pain and the suffering of his own birth.”

Xenakis, born in unified Romania in 1922 to Greek parents, is remembered not only for his innovations in computer music, but specifically for the application of mathematics (specifically Peano axioms, set theory and stochastic processes) to musical composition. Unlike some of his drier and more abstruse 20th century contemporaries, his compositions are both emotional and metaphoric, immediate and cumulative in their search for a language to express the most basic and elusive philosophical forms: knowledge, life, power, and tragedy.

That the Shah would select Xenakis, a Greek living in France, for the task of firing the warning shot for an Iran both old and new reflects, I would argue, the Shah’s mystical view of history. The pendulum of history had swung once from Iran to the West and, Inshallah, it would soon swing back. Commissioning a piece so utterly European to represent Iran’s past and future suggests Perepolis and the celebration at large were a metaphor for the Shah’s ambitions for his country: a profound break from history, a reinvigoration of the distant past—a secular phoenix rising from the flames, and the rebirth of the great pre-Islamic Persian civilization as, said the Shah, the world’s “fifth most powerful nation”.

Instead, Iran’s 2500th anniversary celebration was, I would argue, the major polarizing event during the proto-Revolutionary days. Thereafter, the public was either pro- or anti-Shah, and violently so. In the months leading up to the celebration, the liberal press grew very critical, and very lazy, in their diatribes, resorting to crypto-Socialist cant about the celebration being at the expense of the “starving Iranian people”. (Exactly, or even approximately, how much it all cost remains an inflamed partisan issue with critics claiming upwards of $200 million and supporters as low as $17 million. Abdolreza Ansari, one of the organizers, in an interview, put the figure at $22 million). University students, many of whom would soon join the street protests, were caught denouncing the Persepolis celebration on the walls of bathrooms and courtyards. Of course, the most ominous, and portentous, words came from the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, then in exile in Iraq, who condemned the “evil celebrations”.

“I say these things because an even darker future, God forbid, lies ahead of you,” he warned the Shah.

The Iranian public’s reaction was marbled. There were those who saw the celebration as a diplomatic success, a rite of passage for Iran from developing to civilized nation, and a project that had employed hundreds of poor Iranians, as well as securing a major tourist infrastructure in Persepolis. Moreover, Iran’s oil revenue jumped from $2.5 billion to $18 billion in the years between the event and the Revolution. And there were those, mostly leftist, who dubbed the celebration a “ridiculous farce” and pointed to the absence of the Iranian public at the actual ceremonies as the acme of imperial arrogance. Conservative Islamists came to it as proof that the Shah was too secular, anti-Islamic, and a puppet of the west, and was westernizing Iran in an attempt to attract attention. Never mind that the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini cost an estimated two billion dollars.

On the final day of the Jashnhaa-ye 2500 Saaleh, the Shah inaugurated the Shahyad Tower (now known as the Azadi Tower), in which was displayed the Cyrus Cylinder (borrowed from the British Museum for the event). The Shah declared it to be “the first human rights charter in history” and rededicated the freedom that it had promised two and a half millennia before, to the Iranian people. Nine years later he and his family would be stateless wanderers, wanted by nobody, and Iranian history would take a hard right turn. Would that Xenakis’s Persepolis, perhaps the paragon of his repertoire, serve not to represent the pinnacle of Iranian monarchical history, but instead be its swan song.

Notes_______________________________________________________________

The audio portion of Persepolis is available in three formats:

1) the original LP version released in 1972 on the prestigious (and highly collectable) Prospective 21e Siècle label. This version features the original analog eight-channel stereo INA-GRM mix. http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis/release/655556

2) the CD version released in 2000 on Fractal Records. This version is remastered for continuous play by João Rafael from the original INA-GRM master tapes.
*http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis/release/131823

3) a second CD version released in 2002 on Asphodel. This edition contains a second disc of shorter remixes of Persepolis by Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, Otomo Yoshihide, and other electronic music artists. The version of Persepolis is, to my ears, indistinguishable from the remastered Fractal edition.*http://www.discogs.com/Iannis-Xenakis-Persepolis-Remixes-Edition-1/release/197685

* Audiophile note: since the master tapes were mixed for eight channels, but the publically available versions are mastered for stereo, Eric Falardeau of Montreal recommends a 7.1 setup with a receiver supporting Neural THX 7.1 as the surround algorithm. Unlike Dolby PLII and PLIIx, or Neo:6, Neural THX 7.1 shifts channels to the rear speakers, evidently due to a natural compatibility with the tools used to create the mix. The effect is as close to the eight-channel experience as possible.

– “Flames of Persia”, a documentary film of the event, narrated by Orson Welles, is available on DVD. It does not, however, contain any significant mention of Xenakis’s Persepolis).

The Insane Box
By Aram Yardumian

Alain Neffe launched his first tape label at home in Belgium in 1981. He called it Insane Music Contact and his first installment was called Insane Music for Insane People. Thus began a nearly thirty year foray into home-made, visionary and utterly unfashionable electronic music that has hardly made anyone involved a household name.

Insane Music released 55 titles in its most prolific years (1981-87). Five of these were vinyl records and the rest were cassettes tapes. Why cassettes tapes? Magnetic tape was the obvious solution to the problem facing many artists working without record contracts in those days. Cassettes could be recorded at home, produced at home, dubbed at home, and sold or traded by mail. No need for tasteless outside producers and marketing mojo—one needed only leave home to buy more tapes. Says Neffe, “I could copy the tapes on demand. Releasing an LP required that you print 500 copies and 1000 copies of the cover sleeve, and everything had to be paid up front … if the buyer didn’t like the music, he or she could wipe it out and record something else on it.”

Mr. Neffe was not the only one out there recording, selling and trading tapes by mail. On both sides of the Atlantic, home cassette technology was permitting the release of much groundbreaking and breathlessly beautiful work, as well as some noxious and otherwise self-indulgent wanking—that coat of many colors we call the DIY (do-it-yourself) Revolution. As early as 1974, Albrecht/d. self-released a cassette entitled Amsterdam Op De Dam in Germany. In 1976, Throbbing Gristle was distributing tapes of their infamous live recordings, and in 1977, the French electro-industrial unit Die Form began releasing tapes on their own Bain Total label. 1980 saw the release of two monumental self-released cassettes, The Storm Bugs’ A Safe Substitute and Colin Potter’s The Ghost Office. In Japan, 1980 saw the release of Merzbow’s first two cassettes, Remblandt Assemblage and Fuckexercise. And in the USA, 1981 saw John Bender’s Plaster: The Prototypes, a laconic and mysterious series of tone and vocal poems. Home taping was not limited to electronic music. R. Stevie Moore, one of the elder living ancestors of the lo-fi rock aesthetic, began releasing distributing home-made tapes via the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club sometime in the 1970s. And tapes of live punk shows from the era continue to trade hands.

Soon, cassettes were coming from everywhere: mysterious PO boxes in the Midwest, to which you sent a blank tape and three dollars and received the tape back with something on it. The Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine was a Fluxus-inspired subscription audio-journal dedicated to music as well as poetry and drama and other forms of audio-art.  Zines like Factsheet Five and Unsound devoted entire columns to the material they received from bands on home-made cassette, and demo tapes began leaking to radio stations prior to official record release dates.  It was a grassroots movement that marched in association with the self-publication of zines, comics, chapbooks, and other media. The medium had begun to become the message.

Insane Music for Insane People (which eventually reached 25 volumes) was a series compiling all home-made electronic music made by artists from across the globe. By including in the liner notes the contact address for each artist featured, Neffe helped pioneer a snail-mail network for those interested in more of what they heard. Artists from all over Europe and the USA, from Japan, New Zealand, and beyond contributed over the years. One could send a few dollars to Insane Music Contact, receive tapes in the mail, write to artists involved and receive more cassettes.

Insane Music Contact (now known as Insane Music) has always been a vehicle for Mr. Neffe’s own electronic music projects as well, many of which are periodically active to this day. Though he now makes liberal use of the CD format, Neffe’s artistic approach remains undiluted by years of underexposure. He expects very little acknowledgment of or remuneration for his efforts, which, for him, are emotional articulation, continued experimentation, and purity. It seems nothing but nothing could possibly catapult such heavily uncommercial sounds into the public consciousness–not even this thirty-year retrospective box-set entitled The Insane Box released (ironically, on vinyl) by the venerable Frank Maier of Vinyl-on-Demand Records, an outfit devoted to preserving the precious gems of cassette culture before the evidence disintegrates.

For this retrospective (4 LPs + a 7” 45), Mr. Neffe has reached into dusty attic boxes, wherein lay unreleased (or hardly available) material by five projects of which he has been a part: BeNe GeSSeRiT, Human Flesh, Pseudo Code, I Scream and Subject. Each has a unique cerebral orientation and emotional vibe made possible by the combined efforts of invited guests; each runs the high fever of a man very much committed to a personal vision of artistic purity without virtuosity, and each is distinctly French.

BeNe GeSSeRiT was not the first of Mr. Neffe’s projects to be recorded and distributed, but is, to my understanding, the genesis of his approach to music as “texts” or “photographs”, or as he puts it, “potlatch music”. On these early tracks we also detect a burgeoning interest in the endless expressive properties of the human voice, both explicitly human and as heavily-treated sound sculpture, both French and English At times, voices shout like besotted Celine parlor workers at each other from tenement windows; at other times a high-pitched female voice wails up and down like Catherine Ribeiro alone in her bathroom. In these tracks, one can also detect the half-digested influence of electro-rock luminaries Silver Apples, the avant-lashings a la Yoko Ono, and occasionally the thunder-beat of early Laibach. Primitive Casio electronics, stage whispers, delay echoes, tape loops, and a certain absurdist humor redolent of Erik Satie, neither dampen the fabric with melodrama, nor detract from the integrity of the grist, nor from the topical seriousness of the text’s subjects. BeNe GeSSeRiT is difficult music, even in the moments that risk elegy, yet it is still more accessible than some of the other Francophone avant-dada outfits of the day, such as DDAA and Étant Donnés, or Nurse with Wound in the UK.

Human Flesh is decidedly more structurally cohesive and song-oriented than BeNe GeSSeRiT, and its predecessors and influences are less clear. Still there is a clear interest in the human voice, its textures and timbers when removed of sign value by backwards-masking, and the new textures that emerge when disassembled and reassembled. Even rock-oriented at times, Human Flesh chases a more delirious climax, for the hounds of the carnival are snapping at their heels as they run. This is also a project of varied angles and pursuits, sliding as it does into poetic electro-pop (the supple and Chicago-accented voice of the late Lydia Tomkiw, of Algebra Suicide, appears on two tracks), and moments of Half Japanese-style primitivism. The side-long track “Langsam” is more reminiscent of Piper-era Pink Floyd and Brainticket, as well as other Krautrock, yet is still distinctly French. These early and rare tracks are, in contrast to the more ambitious Pseudo Code and the more intimate recordings by I Scream, more oblique for being a mix-down of materials sent to Neffe from artists around the globe. The track “Sons of God?” is also notable for what is perhaps the first recorded sample of the American fire-and-brimstone preacher Ferrell Griswold, whose voice has appeared in music by Front 242, Phallus Dei, Pragha Khan, et cetera.

The cassette medium, for all its benefits to individual artistic expression and culture, is for the selfsame reasons impermanent. Magnetic tape has a thirty year lifespan if properly archived, which means both that preserving their contents in other formats is important, and that paying hundreds of dollars for the original artifacts is a questionable collectors’ pursuit (nevertheless, you can watch it happen daily). With the advent of the mp3 and the efforts of Vinyl-on-Demand and other labels, Insane Music’s CD-r reissue program included, some of this exquisite material has been rescued from oblivion.

This is the second installment of a three part essay on Oman as seen through the eyes of archaeologist Aram Yardumian. In 2008, Mr. Yardumian was a member of the American team doing research at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat. Various research interests have also taken him to the Caucasus, India, and southern Africa. He is currently involved in research on Turkic-speaking populations, and continues studies in various languages, including Tamil. His paper on photographer Mitchell Payne’s neurosurgery series from the early ’70’s appears in the current issue of Philologie im Netz (PhiN), the German journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

Dispatch Oman, Part Two, Food and Labor
by Aram Yardumian

Muscat, the capital of Oman, is the cleanest, whitest city on earth. There is very little graffiti and what there is amusing enough to leave be. Remarkably little trash blows around, especially given the dumpsters have no lids and the Arabs litter with gusto; but the closer one is to the palace of His Majesty the squeakier the roads feel beneath your feet. Hundreds of kilometers of highway are lined with irrigated grass and flowers. Traffic moves on the British roundabout system and each roundabout has a sculpture in the center to give it a name. Muscat proper is very small, but when the surrounding districts (Ruwi, al-Khuwair, Muttrah, et al) are included the area becomes sizable. It is a port city with huge cargo ships arriving every day to unload Toyotas, beef franks and Iranian strawberries, and dhows hauling in bloody giant tuna and kingfish to be scaled and cleaned on an open tile floor by the harbor.

At a typical American strip mall you may find a Laundromat, a Chinese take-out, a real estate office, a pornographic bijou and a dollar store; here in Oman you will find a laundry (with Indians inside ironing and washing), a coffee shop with an Arabic name and Indians serving Indian food, a real estate office run by Indians, a ‘library’, (stationery store), run by Indians, and a sundry shop, run by Indians (which in the greater sense of the term includes Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.) Yes, both in Muscat as in the Interior, I must often labor to remind myself that I am not in India.

It is true, then, that Oman is fundamentally Arab, and that Omani passport-holders constitute a near-100% Arab majority, but running the show on the guest-worker program are thousands and thousands of Indians who are lucky to have made it here at all. One is hard pressed to find a blue-collar Arab anywhere, cab driving excepted, it stands to reason that businesses here are Arab-owned and Indian-operated, with profits swimming rapidly upstream.

The Indians live precariously here just as they do at home. They sleep afternoons on narrow highway medians, weld without goggles, ride three to a bicycle down dark roads, sleep two or more to a bed in a rusty, shabby brick room adjacent to whatever laundry or machine shop they work in, grinding their crescent wrenches round and round, and ironing my underwear. When they go missing their photograph and passport number are printed in the newspaper in the ‘absconded’ column, putting one in mind of the Grand Old American South. They’re Muslims naturally, though I do suspect some converted to get away from India. My regular barber in A’Direez, who for a dollar will shave you to the last particle, trim your nose hairs with a stork-beak of a scissor, and suddenly crack your neck, is Tamil.

Our cook, Amin (whom I would bring home with me if I could), comes from Chittagong—the last fingernail of Indo-European trajectory before the Burmese border. His English is a little better than my Bengali but communicating in the kitchen by pantomime and example is easy. Before Amin I was on my own for cooking and had to learn how to cook dal in a week of laboratory experiments with turmeric, green chilis and coriander. I had no intention of setting him the task of making my meal every day, but Amin took it on himself to put an end to my sad culinary attempts. Now, every lunch and dinner I came home to find some kind of well prepared dal or chana waiting for me. Prior to that I was stuck on fava beans. I ate every can of fava beans in Wahra and A’Direez and was slowly eating through Ibri’s supply, with plans to venture as far as Rustaq and Nizwa to get my hands on more of them. The men and women from whom I bought all the fava beans really thought I’d gone off. I didn’t buy bread or rice or even disposable razors and soap, just fava beans, and after two weeks I might have had liver spots or green skin for how they looked at me. I found one bag of papadum in Ibri and never, much as I tried, found another. It must have been left over from the Harappans.

Much to my delight any roadside cafe in Oman serves chicken curry, yellow dal, green salads and papadum. It’s enough to upset many an American a bit too loyal to the cuisine on which they were raised, and it’s enough to make me praise Allah. For once I can enjoy myself royally and watch others hoist themselves on the cranes of their own fussiness.

I’ve hunted near and far for what one might call ‘traditional’ Omani food and all roads seem to lead to one answer: dates. Tens, maybe hundreds of varieties of dates grow here and their specifications are as subtle and numerous as with wine. Color, density and sugar content are quantified per type, making some delicacies and others common tripe. Hints of flowers and other fruits are pointed out to you when you sample them at the souq, and naturally some are more expensive than others. It’s hard to stop eating them even when you know you are going to suffer terribly for it. Dates are eaten whole and are used to make a fecal-looking paste speckled with nuts; you dip your hands into it I’m told; thanks but no thanks. Grilled fish is another Omani specialty but not in any unique way. You can buy strips of dried, salted eel and be as confused as I about what to do with them, and you can order a grilled hamoor at a restaurant and chase bites of it with bottled water. If the flavors are singing in Oman, I can’t hear them.

The Lian and Chirgilchin Ensembles Collaborate
by Nancy Cantwell and Aram Yardumian

On April 9th, a Friday night at California Institute of the Arts, there took place an intimate and profound collaboration from a far away part of the world. The Herb Alpert School of music hosted The Lian Ensemble and Chirgilchin in their The Wild Beast music pavilion (aptly named after composer Morton Feldman’s metaphor for the untamable in music) and a new sound emerged. The Lian Ensemble, a Los Angeles based group whose roots lie in the Persian classical and mystical Sufi traditions are no strangers to the idea of fusion. Each of their nine albums  incorporates such diverse different musical styles as jazz, Flamenco, and Hindustani. The addition of Chirgilchin, the Tuvan throat singers, whose music emanates from Buddhism and Shamanism practices, was a seamless and inspired choice. The resultant recording “The Window“, which will be released in May 2010, explores this passionate blending.

The Wild Beast was the ideal environment to experience this synthesis of musical styles. Designed by architects Hodgetts + Fung in consultation with a team of acoustical engineers, the resonance of every Tuvan harmonic overtone produced an elixir of aural delight. We were lucky to find a seat in the 3,200-square foot structure that merely seats 100 people when closed and 750 when in its open-air “bandshell” configuration. Fresh faced students took advantage of the floor seating and their dogs were welcomed as the animal spirit representatives. The musicians were arranged in a u-shape, the four Tuvans in full costume occupied the left hand side of the stage while the Lian Enselmble sat stage right. Not all the talent present was on stage. A convergence of other musical notables present in the audience including composer, percussionist John Bergamo and tabla master Swapan Chauduri, made the night feel ripe for generating alchemy.

The music of the evening began with three performances by Chirgilchin of pure Tuvan origins, and progressed to the collective concert by Lian and Chirgilchin of the music of “The Window.”

Tuvan throat singing is said to have originated less as an aesthetic form and more as a form of landscape-specific communication. This part of Siberia is and remains quite open and unpopulated and therefore, the frequencies of these overtones may have developed as a way to transfer information over long distances. The deep history of this tradition may be seen in its striking resemblance to other a cappella musical forms of the Eurasian steppe, such as the yoik of the Sámi and the Shamanic traditions of northeastern Siberia and Korea. Some of the tones may indeed hark back to animistic rituals that involved communication with (or mimicry of) animals. Even today some Siberian vocal music is sung to animals. That the tradition has lately been filed under the rubric of entertainment has not diminished its power in the slightest.

The Persian classical tradition has perhaps a more complex history—also for reasons of geography—by virtue of the Persian heartland’s situation between east and west. Very little is known about the music of Iran and Greater Persia until the Medieval period—a time in which people, goods and ideas were flowing freely across the steppe from China to Europe and back. That octave and scale are arguably concepts foreign to Persian classical music distinguish it from European modes, while the idiosyncratic rhythms present in Persian music may be related to poetic forms of the East. Yet the use of lute, harp and bagpipe in the Persian court probably originated further west, in Egypt or Anatolia. That improvisation has long been a feature of Persian music gives the Lian Ensemble’s tilts into free jazz, and their stitching-in of other traditions and modes, such as Tuvan throat-singing, seem natural.

Listeners to “The Window” should realize that the experience of the collaboration belongs strictly in the realm of the senses and trust in nuance, since few people are fluent communicators in both Farsi and Tuvan. Moreover, since the styles of music have distinct formal and functional histories, such a collaboration might at first seem as incongruous as, say, a didgeridoo player performing with the Berlin Philharmonic. But this cosmic untranslatability and miscegenation make the results all the more dynamic, since the emotive power of the vocals transcend, in a sense, whatever their message may be, and speak directly to the universality of music as a language.

From “The Window”, The Basis of Creation

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In 2008 Lian Ensemble’s Houman Pourmehdi was asked by Judy Mitoma, the director of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, to arrange a composition for the World Festival of Sacred Music’s opening gala concert. Houman arranged a traditional Sufi piece to be performed by Lian Ensemble and Chirgilchin along with several other musical groups.  The musicians had one rehearsal the night before the performance. Houman said the resulting union “provided a night of sound so varied, unique, and seamless that it was as if a window had been established. To listen that night was to be transcendent.” – from the Liner Notes by Richard Barton

This is a three part essay on Oman as seen through the eyes of archaeologist Aram Yardumian. In 2008, Mr. Yardumian was a member of the American team doing research at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat. Various research interests have also taken him to the Caucasus, India, and southern Africa. He is currently involved in research on Turkic-speaking populations, and continues studies in various languages, including Tamil. His paper on photographer Mitchell Payne’s neurosurgery series from the early ’70’s appears in the current issue of Philologie im Netz (PhiN), the German journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

Dispatch Oman, Part One, The Coast, Interior and Empty Quarter
by Aram Yardumian

Oman: what do you really know about it? To begin with, it is not in the capital of Jordan, nor is it one of the trucial states. It is in an independent Arab nation whose nipple, a rock formation called Ras-al-Jinz, is the easternmost point on the Arabian Peninsula, bordering Yemen to the west, Saudi to the northwest and the Emirates to the north. Separated from all of them by vast stretches of uninviting dune desert, Oman has avoided total domination by Seljuks, Macedonians, Mongols, the British, and—most fortunately—Ottomans, and is therefore quite stable and happy. It is a nation recently opened to the world, one curiously modern and welcoming of the infidel and the things we do and peddle. In Muscat, the capital, we go to Carrefour, Lulu Hypermarket, Baskin Robbins, Borders, and KFC (rather the Omanis go to KFC, I eat at Cafe al-Failaq) to buy things and to remind ourselves that there really is no clash of civilizations. Oman’s motto, as coined by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said is something like ‘progress with respect for heritage.’ And while these forces cannot always operate concomitantly (the secret police recently built a compound on top of some important grave assemblages in Ras al-Hadd) it’s not a bad way forward.

As archaeologists, we are welcomed especially by the many bureaucrats and officials who live what appear to be painfully boring lives in plain square office warrens. The interminableness of these office buildings cannot be overstated. They are kudzu reaching into a thicket—you may follow and follow and lose your mind before the end. We nearly did. Following a visa mishap (the wrong stamp was used at the airport), I spent long afternoons traveling deeper and deeper into the Heart of Bureaucracy, one office opening into the next, each turbaned man behind each desk more salt-poisoned with boredom and less able to communicate, the maps on succeeding walls less and less resembling anything geographic. I never did find Col. Kurtz. But one sympathetic fourth cousin of the Sultan went so far as to produce a stamp and ink it, and bring it close to my passport—but he just couldn’t bring himself, in the end, to make an expedient move. Ultimately I took matters into my own hands to expedite the process. (In the end, I drove to the United Arab Emirates, had my passport stamped, made a u-turn and immediately re-entered Oman).

The country is divided, historically, between the coast and the Interior, the latter of which reaches up into the Empty Quarter, and down the southern coast of the Peninsula to the border with Yemen. The Interior is slower, more old fashioned and more preposterously friendly than Muscat which has super highways lined with bright flowers, Peugeot dealerships, blocks of mysterious-looking flats, and a desalinated water supply. In the Interior you wave at everyone, young, old, blind, animal and mineral, and they wave back, and if you are invited in for coffee or tea you kindly accept. Camels wander freely along and across the road. And you’ll tie your tubes in knots to keep from hitting one of them in the car. The sheikh of A’Direez died recently in a camel accident—that is to say, he was driving at night in the mountains and hit a camel crossing the road. When this happens, the camel’s legs buckle under its weight, and all its entire body crashes through your windshield, and it is curtains for you, with the horn blaring under the combined suffocating mass until the Bedu find you in the morning.

Geographically the Interior is much like East Africa: savannah with flat topped, thorny acacia trees that grab onto your mutarrh and pull; the fantastic mountains that look as if they were dropped there by cosmic helicopter. Settlements exist wherever there is water available through falaj (or qanat) system and the aqueducts that transport the water for irrigation. Date palm oases exist here and there by the side of the road, and are grown crowded closely to maximize one’s share of the falaj water. The groves are woven together so densely that they become, upon entry, cold and Jurassic, and unwelcoming of the sun. Yet, between the trees, bright green robust grass thrives and strange giant dragonflies move slowly about.