THE ILLUSIONED EAR Disembodied Sound & the Musical Séances Of
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THE ILLUSIONED EAR Disembodied Sound & The Musical Issue One Séances Of Francis Grierson Spring 2014 BY MATT MARBLE earwaveevent.org century, in America and abroad, he was an acclaimed singer and pianist, essayist, psychic medium, and mystic philosopher. His mystical perspective was forged during the zeitgeist brought on by the popularity of H.P. Blavatsky's Theosophical philosophy and the rising popularity of Spiritualism, the popular and controversial practice of contacting and communicating with the spirits of the deceased. Both had entered into American consciousness by the second half of the nineteenth century. Like Blavatsky, whom he knew personally, Grierson believed there was an invisible spirit world coexisting with the phenomenal world; and, via Spiritualism, he believed he could channel and communicate with the spirits of the dead. As a pianist and singer, Grierson claimed that his music, almost entirely free-improvised, was channeled from the spirits of deceased composers - such as, Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, and numerous others - while referring to spirit communications with other historical figures in his séances and writings. His performances were so compelling that he quickly found himself traveling extensively, singing at Notre Dame, and giving private concerts for kings and queens across the globe. By his mid-20s Grierson was beginning to enter into popular consciousness, being featured in newspapers and tabloids: he was “the strangest” sensation. By 1887 Grierson was so highly regarded that two admiring Jesse Shepard / Francis Grierson, 1890 benefactors offered to custom design and build him a Victorian-style Several days ago, Grierson had just completed one of his extraordinary mansion, the Villa Montezuma, in San Diego. Grierson lived in the Villa two piano performances, during which he channeled the creative energies of years before deciding to move to Europe. By the end of the nineteenth deceased musical geniuses and presented previously unheard century Grierson was focusing more and more on writing, and with his first compositions from beyond. As the music ceased, Grierson became very publication in English he made explicit the personal transformation he was still, as was his habit... but after a long moment, his audience grew then undergoing. He changed his name from Jesse Shepard, the “psychic restless, and Tonner went to the piano to shake his friend. Grierson was dead, aged 79, most probably from heart disease exacerbated by pianist”, to Francis Grierson, world traveler and essayist. Under this new malnutrition. identity, Francis Grierson - as he’ll be referred to throughout this essay - went West Adams, LA Obituary, June 1, 1927 on to publish over 10 books and numerous articles for magazines and newspapers. He would be lauded by esteemed minds, such as William James and Edmund Wilson, while he befriended significant artists of the FROM THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS period, such as architect Claude Bragdon, composer Arthur Farwell, and Music is a metaphysical illusion, whose secrets are often felt but never uttered. writers Alexandre Dumas, Maurice Maeterlinck, Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Walt Whitman. Mallarmé once proclaimed that Grierson did Francis Grierson, Celtic Temperament (182) “with musical sounds, combinations and melodies what Poe did with the rhythm of the words” (Wilson, 74); as Maeterlinck announced Grierson to be The life of Jessie Shepard (a.k.a. Francis Grierson), born Benjamin “the supreme essayist of our age” (73). Henry Jesse Francis Shepard, is shrouded in mystery and hearsay. Today he Adding to the mystique of his medial music practice and prophetic is almost completely unknown. However, at the turn of the nineteenth Ear | Wave | Event - Issue One Marble • 2 | 27 writings, Grierson’s appearance over the years offered as much mystery to [Electronic Voice Phenomena], developed by Latvian writer and Spiritualist the onlooker: rouged cheeks, a waxed or orange-dyed mustache, wigs, a Konstantins Raudive in the 1940s, Banks claims that “EVP experimenters ruby ring surrounded by diamonds (and other expensive jewelry given by the [and other technicians of medial illusion] are or were, in effect, creative royalty he entertained), and a fur coat made of 3,000 squirrel skins. He was artists, producing, through their audio experimentation, forms of sound art known by many notable artists and royal powers as a genius, a madmen, or and poetry” (Banks, 114). both; but he fascinated the majority he encountered. Dumas had told “EVP,” says Banks, “is a religious belief system based on the Grierson during his passage through Paris in the 1860’s, “[w]ith your gifts misperception of illusions of sound” (Banks, 102). The technologically-derived you will find all doors open before you.” And for quite some time that is EVP was an outgrowth of the techniques of illusion developed through the exactly what the young Grierson found. séances of American Spiritualism and, preceding them, the multimedia horror Nevertheless, as he aged and the times changed, his confident shows of the European phantasmagoria, combined with the accessibility of esotericism would begin to lose the interest of the public eye, especially audio recording technology. Readers are encouraged to read Banks’ work, during the last two decades of his life. Despite several flurries of success and which resonates throughout this essay. While Grierson was steeped in adulation in his later years, Grierson ultimately lost his audience. After a American spiritualism, which we will explore further, we will also be looking significant stay in Europe, from 1913 on he lived in Los Angeles where he into the techniques of illusion in the phantasmagoria to better understand was consumed by poverty and malnutrition. On May 29, 1927 Grierson died similar approaches in Grierson’s own work. as he played the final piano chord of an improvisation during his last concert Throughout this essay, these techniques of illusion are highlighted in LA. At the age of 79, he left the material world utterly forgotten, and he to show how they, despite their esoteric nature, served as a cultural has largely remained so to this day. While a biography and a smattering of synthesizer of psychological and spiritual catharsis, artistic creativity, and essays and mentions have recalled his name over the years, these have popular entertainment. In Grierson’s work and in so many other instances in largely occurred in obscure academic journals or as anecdotes in books and cultural history, the disembodiment of sound has served an amphibious articles. Tapping into the ubiquitousness of the information age as well as perception of Rorschach-like imagery, calling upon the willing subject to engaging the progressive forum of sound practice that Ear|Wave|Event rummage through resonances of perception within their interior, and, if offers, The Illusioned Ear hopes to bring Grierson’s life and work to the nothing else, discover a true feeling. As the first part of this essay focuses attention of a contemporary audience. upon Grierson’s life and philosophy, the second part draws connections to contemporary music and sound art. We’ll be looking at the role of echo in While it may remain easy for many to dismiss Grierson, like so popular music, the metaphysically devised intonorumori of the early many other mediums from the same period, as a charlatan, that would not twentieth century Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo, and the disembodied choir of diminish the intrigue nor the artistic value of his creative work, despite its Janet Cardiff’s contemporary sound installation, Forty-Part Motet. Through inaudibility. As Edmund Wilson once noted, “[o]ne’s impression is, in fact, this mosaic of historical perspectives, the manipulation of sonic that Grierson himself was never quite able to account for the mysterious disembodiment, at the heart of Grierson’s musical séances, is seen to be a resources, subconscious or extra-human, on which he was able to draw” key factor in cultural patterns of paranormal interest, as well as in (Wilson, 77). And as sound artist and author Joe Banks repeatedly notes in experimental advances in the art of sound. Francis Grierson, it now seems, his recent book, Rorschach Audio, these illusioned auditions of spirit are was the prophetic prototype of American experimentalism. fundamentally a creative activity, engaging in perceptual ambiguities, imaginative projection, and often theatrical persuasion to varying degrees of As most prototypes are forgotten and replaced by their successors, success (or awareness). As the title of his work alludes, Banks associates so has been the case with Grierson. Pioneering an independent and Spiritualist sound practices with the intuitive readings of Rorschach ink-blot experimental music practice, before Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, Grierson tests used in psychology. The abstract images of these tests leave open a was one of the first American “maverick” composers. Preceding the space for subjective intuitive interpretation. Focusing primarily on EVP evolution of jazz into “free improv” and the “aleatoric” developments of Ear | Wave | Event - Issue One Marble • 3 | 27 avant-garde composition, Grierson was one of the first American “free In the late [eighteen-]fifties the people of Illinois were being prepared improvisors,” devising his music spontaneously, without forethought, for the new era by a series of scenes and incidents which nothing but the term “mystical” will fittingly describe. Things came about not so systems,