Week 10

Class 10 – April 9^th

Natural Sound in Composition

A brief look at composers using natural sound

·       Music concrete (Pierre Schaeffer) (downloaded class files)

·       Environmental Listening (DavidDunn/ Ron Nagorcka)

LISTENING

·       David Dunn –– Why do Whales and Children Sing? (1999)

·       Judy Klein –– The Wolves of Bay Mountain (1998)

           (scroll down the page listings of tracks to find the pop-up to open the recording)
             Readings:

·       David Dunn. 1997. Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.

·       Katharine Norman. 2004. Before and after listening to Judy Klein'sthe wolves of Bays Mountain.

·       David Ingram. 2006. 'A balance that you can hear': deep ecology,'serious listening' and the soundscape recordings of David Dunn.

Tracks of David Dunn's Why do Whales and Children Sing? come across as the practice to R.Murray Schafer's theories exploring the cultural ramifications of sound. We explore the world over, hearing storms and people's reactions to storms, frog ponds in Africa and frog ponds in Louisiana. In Venice, California, a thunderstorm is punctuated with the screams of teenagers, whereas in Switzerland we hear the ringing of cow bells in the distance. The clips of nature are a reminder of how, over time, environments have developed to create what would seem to be similar soundscapes, but which are as different from each other as say, a french horn from a bass drum. In particular a track called, "Atchafalaya Swamp, Louisiana: Insects And Frogs" stands out as uniquely rhythmic and with a variety of accordion like resonances. In contrast, the frogs and insects in Irangi, Zaire: Insects And Frogs come across as flutelike flutterings.

In David Ingram's essay on the composer, he brings up Dunn's concerns about becoming complicit in a commodification of  the soundscapes that he studies. Dunn writes, "Part of this is the idea of being able to expand access to the non-human world in a way that is non-destructive; the other side of it ends up being another level of exploitation and commodotizing the environment, in the same way we’ve commodotized every other aspect of it." This statement of Dunn's reminds me of an essential facet of McPhail's argument in Zen in the Art of Rhetoric, where he asks about whether, in the service of critiquing the dominant modes of discourse,  "might it not be possible that we participate in the construction of oppressive realities?" I had never considered the fact that Schafer, by exploring  the idea of soundscape, of course opened up a new method of discourse that could be commodified and exploited.

Judy Klein's piece is an interesting in regards to this perspective. Her recordings of wolves are the background for her electronic music compositions. While ethereal and interesting, I felt a certain disconnect between the music and the environment of the piece, as if the wolf sounds were grafted onto the music for effect. Norman's review describes Klein's music as interpretive to the natural sound,"Real wolves and dream wolves – one transforms the other, in the space between our ears." This is, perhaps, a more traditional human relationship to environmental sound, and it may be more honest. Rather than trying to distill the perfect track of unfiltered natural sound, Klein's piece is more overtly artistic, less a documentary and more like a shadow puppet show. While a helpful framework, I think I disagree somewhat with Norman's review. The wolves never become quite real in this staged context.

In the end, I do think that Dunn's practice offers something that resists commodification because the pieces are not "music concrete," as described in the Schaeffer article. Dunn's works are not discrete bits of sound but long unedited pieces of time, and you could even say that they represent even longer stretches of evolutionary or cultural time. In the marketplace, commodification is reliant on industrial practices and piece work, and has little room for time uninterrupted.