Harnetty, Brian 11-24-14
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Performing Sonic Archives: Listening to Berea, Sun Ra, and the Little Cities of Black Diamonds A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Brian P. Harnetty December 2014 © 2014 Brian P. Harnetty. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Performing Sonic Archives: Listening to Berea, Sun Ra, and the Little Cities of Black Diamonds by BRIAN P. HARNETTY has been approved for Interdisciplinary Arts and the College of Fine Arts by Marina Peterson Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts Margaret Kennedy-Dygas Dean, College of Fine Arts 3 ABSTRACT HARNETTY, BRIAN P., Ph. D., December 2014, Interdisciplinary Arts Performing Sonic Archives: Listening to Berea, Sun Ra, and the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Director of Dissertation: Marina Peterson This is a project of performing three sonic archives: the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection of the Creative Audio Archives in Chicago, and the Little Cities Archive in southeastern Ohio. Here, I define “performing the archive” (Calzadilla and Marcus 2006; Osthoff 2009; RC Smith 2003) as any interpretive act related to the archive, including (but not limited to) listening, musical and visual appropriation, historiography, and ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. I offer “sonic archives” as a distinct genre that requires new archival approaches––rooted in listening and sound––that do not exclude traditional archives but add to and complement them. As such, listening is my primary method used throughout the dissertation. It is both performative and dialogical, and a direct way to sonically engage with people, place, and archival materials. My interest lies in listening to the archive’s sonic components “across the grain” (Zeitlyn 2012; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991), grounding them in senses of place, and hearing the diversity of the voices they contain. I focus on the smaller stories––flawed, open-ended, fragmented, interstitial––that coalesce to form the body of an archive listened to and performed “from below” (Sekula 1986). Listening is employed in two different methodological contexts, “sonic ethnography” and “archival performance.” Sonic ethnography involves a deep 4 engagement with both the archival materials and the people and places they are connected to. Archival performance allows for an embodied re-imagining and re- contextualization of the archive. Together, these methodologies form the basis of this dissertation’s assertion to not only listen to archives “from below” but also to allow the interpretive act of remixing to be informed by this perspective. Thus, “performing the sonic archive” brings together the analytical and creative work of scholars and artists–– including myself––that seek to use, reinterpret, and re-contextualize the archive sonically, thereby highlighting an embodied agency of the archive’s materials through their interaction. 5 For Jennifer and Henry Harnetty 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank the dissertation committee for offering their skills and advice through the current dissertation process and over the past four years. I also wish to thank fellow students Adel Wang, Dan Dennis, Yining Liu, and Josh Ottum, who gave much encouragement through conversation and shared experience. I would especially like to thank Marina Peterson for her continual support as an advisor. I thank the many artists, musicians, historians, and archivists who have kindly offered their knowledge and expertise, including Lou Mallozzi and the many artists I spoke with in Chicago; John Bondurant and Harry Rice at Berea College; and John Winnenberg and Cheryl Blosser in Ohio. I am deeply indebted to personal friends who have shared viewpoints from many perspectives, including Tom Hansell, for introducing me to many communities in Kentucky and beyond, and for inspiring me with a life that is equal parts activist and artist; Scott and Robin Martin, for their friendship and encouragement; and Jeremy Woodruff and Joe Duddell, who have remained––despite living thousands of miles away––the closest of friends, and who have creatively and intellectually pushed and inspired me for the past fifteen years. I would like to thank my family, without whom I could not complete any of this work. Their thoughts and ideas are present in all that I do in work and life. I especially thank my parents who have always encouraged me in every way possible despite my interests being often so different from their own. Finally, I thank Jennifer and Henry Harnetty, who have sacrificed and offered so much in order for me to finish this degree. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 6 List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... 9 Introduction: A “Geography of Scars” and an Archive “From Below" ........................... 10 Theorizing the Archive ................................................................................................. 19 Listening as a Primary Method .................................................................................... 21 Methodologies: Archival Performance ........................................................................ 26 Methodologies: Sonic Ethnography ............................................................................. 34 Chapter Outline ............................................................................................................ 41 Part 1: Listening From Below: Berea and Sun Ra Archives ............................................ 46 Chapter 1: Archival Ethnography and the Berea Appalachian Sound Archives .............. 47 The Past is Present ........................................................................................................ 50 Learning to Listen to the Archives ............................................................................... 55 Conflating “Inside” and “Outside” ............................................................................... 62 “Close-Ups” and Up-Close Listening ........................................................................... 68 “Message” and “Noise” ................................................................................................ 74 Heterophonic Archives ................................................................................................. 76 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 2: Multi-Voiced Archival Performance and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection ... 80 Multi-Voiced Archival Performance ........................................................................... 85 The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band Performs “Space is the Place” ................... 91 “Sow So Soul”: Archival Homophones ........................................................................ 96 In-Between Sounds, Mislistening, and Peripheral Listening ....................................... 99 “Calcified Speculations” and Space as a Mythical Performative Place .................... 107 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 116 8 Part 2: Listening to Region and Place: Energy Soundscapes in the Little Cities ........... 118 Chapter 3: Prologue: Listening to the Little Cities ......................................................... 118 The Little Cities Archive ............................................................................................ 124 A Brief Soundwalk in Shawnee ................................................................................. 128 Family and Listening to Place .................................................................................... 130 Chapter 4: The Sounds of Labor and Disaster: Booms and Busts .................................. 133 Energy Soundscapes of Labor .................................................................................... 137 Historic Soundscapes of the “Little Cities” ............................................................ 138 Contrasts Between Small- and Large-Scale Energy Labor ..................................... 147 “Reading the Dirt”: Drilling a Well ........................................................................ 149 Harnetty Oil and Gas .............................................................................................. 153 The Encroaching Sounds of Fracking ..................................................................... 159 Artists at Work: "Critical Regionalism" and "What did you hear?" ....................... 164 Energy Soundscapes of Disaster ................................................................................. 168 Explosions: “A Pressure Came on Our Ears” ......................................................... 170 The New Straitsville Mine Fire: “With a Faint Hiss” ............................................. 179 Earthquakes and Frack-Waste ................................................................................