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Acoustic Ephemera and Transmissions Of A thesis presented to the Faculty of Conservatory of Music Brooklyn College in Spring 2020 In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.F.A. in Sonic Arts Contents 8 38 10 46 18 52 24 56 60 32 66 tell me about yourself where were you in the eighties? you drink prosecco, why? I speak to you now from an opening eye from a spiritual buttress factory I hope for you to reap the burning of light that hits us from the sky what’s your restaurant? who are your people? that you wait for the most? who is your bearer? what are you wearing? who let you in? will call out if you faint when I come down? who is the heaviest child you’ve ever held? talking inwards shouldn’t be so hard to think —Morgan Vo Acoustic Ephemera and Transmissions of Weakness the unstable chemistry of plastic film and accompanies a collection of scores, grouped magnetic tape reels—have been reimagined together as part of an ongoing series entitled as metaphors for an artistic mode that values Folded Cyanotypes. Initiated via an evolving tactile sensitivity, contingency, and the affective instrumentarium of resonant zithers that potential of weakness. are augmented by electronics, the music Partly inspired by a series of works by of this portfolio encourages heightened artist Josiah Valle Ellis, the photographic environmental perception, as well as exper- process of the cyanotype (a kind of photogram iential associations of touch, memory, and commonly used for making blueprints) musical lineage. Through a consideration of clarifies this compositional practice. Far from materialist strategies toward noise, feedback, being a neutral schematic pointing toward sympathetic resonance, interference patterns, a mechanism or site, the folded cyanotype and the harmonic series, the feedback matrix documents its own manipulation and lays of Folded Cyanotypes and its resulting gestural bare its material qualities. It takes on attributes language have taken shape as expressive tools of its surroundings through contact and for performance, and as relational models for exposure to light, but visibly limits and composition and improvisation. My attention filters the reproduction of these encounters. to amplifying physical disturbance and material Drawing parallels between the surface of the sensitivity within this specific musical system is zither strings and the surfaces of recording part of an effort to disrupt and recontextualize substrates, the cyclical buildup and breakdown my earlier guitar-based music influenced by of signals in the Folded Cyanotypes series at abrasive developments in noise and drone once reflects broader physical properties of genres. In formulating this approach, I have acoustic vibration, and the distinct conditions, looked to the writings of theorists Boris tuning and preparation of these instruments. Groys, Christoph Cox, Marie Thompson, and Consistent with Marie Thompson’s analysis Brian Kane for their insights into noise, affect, of the fluid and communicative properties of materiality, and transtemporality in sound, noise, the Folded Cyanotypes collection serves music, and visual art. The fragile materials of as a revision to the binaries of success/failure, analog recording technologies—the membrane signal/noise, sound/music that have of the condenser microphone, the light- permeated and sometimes restrained my sensitive emulsion of darkroom photography, work with conventional instruments. Weak Noise the work of many of the composers I have looked to in communicating the intentions 10 In his essay “The Weak Universalism,” of Folded Cyanotypes, from the explorations 11 written in 2010 for the art publication e-flux of the ‘swell’ form in James Tenney’s ‘Postal journal, Boris Groys argues that “[living] Pieces,’ to Éliane Radigue’s Occam Océan within modernity means to have no time, to series of solos for acoustic instruments. experience a permanent scarcity, a lack of However, most useful to my project has time due to the fact that modern projects are been Groys’s positing of the “weak gesture,” mostly abandoned without being realized.”1 through which “the artists of the avant-garde Groys continues that “our present time is began to create images that seemed to them not a postmodern but rather an ultramodern to be so poor, so weak, so empty, that they time, because it is the time in which the would survive every possible historical scarcity of time, the lack of time, becomes catastrophe.”4 Where Groys determines increasingly obvious.”2 While “The Weak this absence of strong symbolism to be a Universalism” was influential to the visual fraught strategy for resisting the upheaval work I was making as an art student in the of modernity, Folded Cyanotypes asks what years following its publication, I have since other outcomes are available through sought ways to repurpose Groys’s language weakness. What can weak materials in the contexts of music and sound. Groys’s reveal about the present? argument is decidedly art historical in scope, Theorist and philosopher Christoph Cox, looking at how the development of visual beginning in 2011 with the essay “Beyond abstraction by artists like Wassily Kandinsky Representation and Signification: Toward and Kazimir Malevich engaged with the a Sonic Materialism,” and expanding his question of “[how] can one make art that argument with the 2018 book Sonic Flux, would escape permanent change—art presents a reappraisal of these ideas imbued that would be atemporal, transhistorical? with an awareness of the transformative The avant-garde did not want to create physical processes that characterize ‘the the art of the future—it wanted to create nature of the sonic.’ In his essay, Cox echoes transtemporal art, art for all time.”3 In Groys’s observations on a state of permanent musical contexts, an equivalent process change: “sound and the sonic arts are firmly of “radical reduction” can be found across rooted in the material world and the powers, forces, intensities, and becomings of which consonance and dissonance. Responding it is composed…On the materialist account… to Cox and others in the 2015 essay, 12 sound is thoroughly immanent, differential, “Sound studies without auditory culture: 13 and ever in flux.”5 While Cox recognizes a critique of the ontological turn,” Brian that the vibrational forces of sound are Kane questions the validity of what he terms evident in musical forms, he contends that ‘onto-aesthetics’ within sonic materialism. the most meaningful engagements with Onto-aesthetics, as Kane defines it, is “the the sonic have focused on the “materiality principle that a work of art can disclose its of sound: its texture and temporal flow, its ontology.”8 For Kane, rather than embodying palpable effect on, and affection by the essential traits of an objective reality in flux, materials through and against which it is sonic materialism reflects the subjective transmitted.”6 Elaborating on this premise ontological commitments of an intellectual in Sonic Flux, Cox differentiates between the community. In distinguishing between realms of music and sound: music and the sonic arts, Kane believes Cox has mistaken the ‘embodiment’ of “If music belongs to the symbolic, sonic materiality for its ‘exemplification’ in then sound belongs to the real… sonic art that directly references material Sound art is the art of the auditory processes.9 Writing later in Sonic Flux, real. It is concerned not with the Cox concedes that the fluid nature of sound communication of musical values but is equally present within both music and with an exploration of what [John] sound art, but maintains that “works of art Cage called ‘the entire field of sound’ can reveal these production processes, and the nature, movement, and and…some artworks do this more richly and transmission of sound as a material, profoundly than others.”10 Pertinent to the physical substance.” 7 musical fragments of Folded Cyanotypes for While the instrumental system of its incomplete and unfinished character, Folded Cyanotypes takes inspiration from Cox believes a kind of partial ‘sampling’ artists who have explored a sonic materialism, from sonic flux can accomplish this, which it decidedly embraces music, concerning he identifies in the work of Cage, Alvin itself with pitch, timbre, and subjective, Lucier, Maryanne Amacher, and Annea culturally determined associations of Lockwood, among many others. Whether or not Kane accepts this of the weak artistic gesture, I have mapped selective sampling as a disclosure of the an environmental sensitivity to noise—a 14 ontology of sound, his writing nonetheless quavering and fragile collection of voices 15 demonstrates an investment in intrinsic that must be carefully balanced—onto qualities of noise and uncertainty in the the avant-garde’s pursuit of transhistorical perception of sound. In Sound Unseen, written materials.13 Deeply personal in nature, in 2014, Kane investigates a related ontology Folded Cyanotypes does not forgo repre- of acousmatic sound. Here Kane focuses sentation and signification, but rather offers on the implications of the ‘acousmatic an abstraction of genre through materialist reduction’—by which a sound is separated tactics as a way to alter the affective bounds from its nameable, physical source—that of sonically extreme musical traditions. was formalized by Pierre Schaeffer in the This framework is of a piece with a recurring 1940s and championed by the composers of creative inclination to place amplified musique concrète. Considering Michel Chion’s and distorted signals commonly associated concept of ‘fundamental noise’ in cinema, with aggression and abrasion within Kane cites John Cage’s account of a visit to vulnerable environs. an anechoic chamber at Harvard University In her 2017 book Beyond Unwanted Sound, in 1951, where Cage claims to have observed Marie Thompson similarly critiques what she two sounds—one low, and one high—that calls the “poetics of transgression” that has he was told were his circulatory and nervous dominated the stylistic trajectory of noise systems in operation: “Imagine the uncanny music.
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