Extemporizing Pippi, Experimenting SPUNK: Community, Temporality, and the Politics of Free Improvisation
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 8-2017 Extemporizing Pippi, Experimenting SPUNK: Community, Temporality, and The Politics of Free Improvisation Benjamin Alan Oyler University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Oyler, Benjamin Alan, "Extemporizing Pippi, Experimenting SPUNK: Community, Temporality, and The Politics of Free Improvisation. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2017. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/4920 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Benjamin Alan Oyler entitled "Extemporizing Pippi, Experimenting SPUNK: Community, Temporality, and The Politics of Free Improvisation." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Master of Music, with a major in Music. Rachel M. Golden, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Leslie Gay Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Extemporizing Pippi, Experimenting SPUNK: Community, Temporality, and The Politics of Free Improvisation A Thesis Presented for the Master of Music Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Benjamin Alan Oyler August 2017 ii Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Alan Oyler All Rights Reserved iii To Bee-bo; every bit Pippi’s equal iv Without Whom: This project would quite literally not exist without my mom’s support and encouragement. I cannot express enough appreciation for her lifelong investment in my happiness and success. The same goes to Lula and Summer, who have tolerated an often-intolerable schedule and loved and encouraged me unflaggingly. Many thanks to Rachel Golden and Les Gay, who impelled me to get this ball rolling again, and whose enthusiasm, careful readings, and intellectual stimulation have given me a new lease, as it were. And special thanks to Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Dan Magilow, and Harry Dahms for getting me thinking about and using theory again (and for the prudent correctives when I sling it too loosely). Special thanks to the other graduate students who, over many bowls of phở, have talked ideas on and off the ledge. And to SPUNK and Maja, who endured and answered my questions and, most importantly, continue to make wild, hilarious, and creative music… v Abstract This thesis examines the music of the Oslo-based experimental ensemble SPUNK. Maja S.K. Ratkje, Kristin Andersen, Lene Grenager, and Hild Sofie Tafjord have operated at the juncture of site-specific conceptual art and experimentalism since the early 1990s, recording and releasing much of their work for Norway’s Rune Grammofon label. Employing voice, electronics, and acoustic instrumentation in a free improvisational style, the group’s music demonstrates a robust and varied engagement with a range of experimental and avant-garde traditions. Drawing from ethnographic, theoretical, and historical methodologies, as well as my own experiences as a free improvisor and listener, I situate SPUNK’s work within the contested rubrics and fluctuating discourses underlying Euro-American experimental musical practice. I interrogate free improvisation’s political and aesthetic valences, tempering my analysis through interviews with the group and close “readings” of their recorded work. I focus particularly on their twelve-year long opus, Das Wohltemperierte SPUNK, a massive project unfolding in discrete acoustic environments throughout Oslo. With respect to this expansive work, I argue that free improvisation enacts a critical ontology that I call processual community. vi Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE: Spunk, Spink, SPUNK: Improvising Community…………………………………………..……1 Sounding Multiplicities………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2 Community………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 History and Literature Review………………………………………………………………………………………………….20 Chapter Overview…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….30 CHAPTER TWO: SPUNK in Noisy Village: Anarchy, Gender, and History…………………………………33 The Free, the Zany……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………36 Experimenting History……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..43 Sounding the Sensible: Pippi as Arkhê………………………………………………………………………………………50 CHAPTER THREE: Resonant Selves: Listening, Timbre, and Performance……………………….………56 Hearing Histories……………………………………………………………………………….…………………………………….58 Ears 1……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….61 Ears 2……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….66 Ears 3……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….68 Pippi Listens, Speaks………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..72 CHAPTER FOUR: The Group Goes for a Walk: Drones, Lines, and DWS…..………………………………73 An-Architecture……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….77 Blobs, Lines, Time…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….84 Recording…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………91 CHAPTER FIVE: In-Conclusion: Resonance and Reverberation………………………………………………..97 BIBLIOGRAPHY.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..103 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…112 vii List of Figures Figure 1.1 SPUNK .……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……..4 Figure 1.2 Album Covers……………………………………………………………………………………………………………8 Figure 2.1 Pippi Escapes! ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..…34 Figure 4.1 Das Wohltemperierte SPUNK…………………………………………………………………………………78 Figure 4.2 Selected Performance Sites........................................................................................79 1 Chapter One Spunk, Spink, SPUNK: Improvising Community Nothing is more common than being: it is the self-evidence of existence. Nothing is more uncommon than being: it is the self-evidence of community. - Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common”1 Time has stood still – If only it could. - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality2 At just the right moment, Pippi makes a fascinating discovery: spink.3 This new word – her new word – comes serendipitously to mind while she sits waiting atop the kitchen table. Pippi is always making discoveries. She is, in fact, a gifted discoverer. But it troubles her that she does not yet know what the word means. She knows only that spink is hers, nothing more. Certain at the very least that it does not mean ‘vacuum cleaner,’ Pippi enlists her incredulous friends to help find – What? Meaning? Object? How will they recognize what they do not know if indeed they finally find it? Professors collect many useless words, Pippi notes. How astonishing that they have not yet invented spink! Is it a blue flagpole? No. Squishy mud sounds? No. Perhaps it is for sale! No. Is it a bizarre disease or a tremendously fanged monster? No. Their long and fruitless search coming to nothing, the dejected children decide to return home. But – wait! Ah, now what is this? A small, unidentified beetle with green wings, crawling alone across a gravel path. The children briefly deliberate. At last, in a joyfully spontaneous and contingent act of naming, Pippi declares: “It’s a spink!”4 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, Miami Theory Collective, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 10. 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1978), 111. 3 Astrid Lindgren, Pippi in the South Seas, trans. Gerry Bothmer (New York: Viking Press, 1987 [1959]), 30. 4 Ibid., 38. 2 Sounding Multiplicities Pippi in the South Seas, the 1959 English translation of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump i Söderhavet, proposes the nonsense word spink in place of the Swedish original’s spunk.5 As Anatoly Liberman points out, spunk has carried several senses in English since the sixteenth century or earlier, but simply did not exist in Swedish until Pippi Långstrump instinctively (re)coined it in Lindgren’s popular book.6 Indeed, none of its past or present English meanings – from “tinder” to “pluck” to “semen” – adequately serve Pippi’s magical, anarchic neologism. To Pippi and her exploratory coterie, spunk itself means semantic openness, malleability, and discoverability. It embodies a capacity for invention and reinvention, for thinking and experimenting the world. The Swedish coinage and its originary magic have proved broadly influential, evidenced in part by varied, often radicalized, invocations. Notably, the international Spunk Library borrowed Pippi’s word and spirit to denominate their now-defunct, anarchist e-archive, a choice that speaks to spunk’s readily-available political valences.7 Kassel, Germany’s libertarian- socialist Spunk Gruppe draws a similar inspiration from the same source.8 For the members of Norway’s SPUNK ensemble, this generative concept contains creative and musical potential, a quality irreducible to political ideology but nonetheless brimming with anarchic vitality.9 Spunk – the same in Norwegian and Swedish versions of Lindgren’s novel – totemically concentrates