Fylkingen's Text-Sound Festivals 1968–1974

Fylkingen’s Text-Sound Festivals 1968–1974

Teddy Hultberg

Abstract

In the 1960s the concept and the genre of “text-sound composition” were born in Sweden. Being an offspring of sound poetry in various forms and of the new electro- acoustic music of the post-war years, it took shape as an intermedia art form par excel- lence. This essay traces the emergence of text-sound in a Swedish context and especially its appearance at the internationally renowned text-sound festivals held at Fylkingen in Stockholm during the years 1968–1974.

By the time the term was invented in the 1960, text-sound composition, as an aesthetic practice, was already an international phenomenon. The Swedish version of this intermedia genre was given an international plat- form through the famous text-sound festivals that were organised by Fylkingen in Stockholm between 1968 and 1974. Founded as a chamber music society in 1933, Fylkingen had at this time developed into an organisation that promoted all the new events in music, dance and theatre. And in this context sound poetry and text-sound composition appeared to be typi- cal art forms of the time – art forms that would explore the interstices between word and sound, poetry and music, and which would further the investigation of the electro-acoustic landscape staked out in avant-garde music from the post-war period by composers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. In short, the history of text-sound composition can be seen as the history of how technology during the early 1960s changed the poetic expression when it opened the literary field to a new kind of sound poetry. Poetry left the page of the book to invade the acoustic space – once again. In the early twentieth century Henri Barzun, who coined the term poème simultan, had predicted, like Guillaume Apollinaire, that old media such as the book would become outmoded in the near future. Around the middle of the century the poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström – an important forerunner of text-sound composition in Sweden – made similar claims. In 1961 he wrote a comprehensive sur- vey, “Bris” (Breeze), of the international tendencies in experimental literature, which was published in the literary magazine Rondo. Here Fahlström pro- claims that the future of poetry lies in radiophonic poetry, and, as he sug- gested in a letter from around the same time, in the possibilities created by

Fylkingen’s Text-sound Festivals 1968–1974 457 tape technology for “concrete kneading and reworking, copying several times, layering, fragmenting, etc., etc., of the sounding material” (quoted in Hultberg, 1999:125). It was now possible, with the help of technology, to capture and replay all sorts of sounds, even barely audible micro-particles of speech; one could study and manipulate the vocal material, change the speed or pitch and gener- ate precise layers of several sonorous events. The microphone could be turned like a magnifying glass towards the voice, and a totally new sort of vocal art began to develop. Fahlström was also one of the first to produce poetic compositions directly for the broadcasting media. It was his encounter with concrete music and concrete musicians in Paris in 1952 that had put him on the track that led to his manifesto for concrete poetry (see Jesper Olsson’s essay on Fahlström’s manifesto in Section 5) and ten years later to the acoustic composition Fåglar i Sverige (Birds in Sweden), produced in collaboration with the eminent radio technician Erik Winlöf and the actual starting-point of text-sound composition on the air in Sweden (Hultberg, 1999). Fahlström’s work exerted a direct influence on the text-sound activities of poets and composers such as Lars- Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson. But the most important effect of the piece was probably that with this multifaceted work Fahlström created an interest in the potential of radio as a medium. One year after the broadcasting of Fåglar i Sverige, and inspired by that work, Bodin and Johnson created, in tandem with the author and producer Staffan Olzon, a series of six individual radio works under the collective title Semikolon (Semicolon). These works radiate the authors’ obvious joy in discovering loudspeaker poetry. It now became even more apparent that there were producers at Swedish Radio who were open to the idea of developing a new, radio-based art. The most important location for text-sound composition in Sweden was to be Fylkingen, which had transmuted into a venue for artistic experimentation during the late 1950s and ’60s. This change is closely related to a key period during which Knut Wiggen was chairman of the organisation. Essential for the transformation were also the early contacts with John Cage, and his anti- serial and non-hierarchical philosophy, which made a great impact on the members of the group. In the 1950s Fylkingen had introduced composers such as Edgard Varèse, Karheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono to the Stockholm audience. This was followed by instrumental theatre, happen- ings, new American dance, Cage’s indeterminate music, concrete and elec- tronic music, and Nam June Paik’s action music. In 1959 the concerts began to increase in number and moved from Grünewaldsalen in the Concert House of Stockholm to the Moderna Museet, where Pontus Hultén was the director. This co-operation, fruitful for both parties, continued up to 1970. At the same time