Issue 144

Launch at e-flux: April 11, 7pm, with Arto Lindsay, Ben Vida and Amy Gernux, Kimberly Alidio, David Grubbs, Michał Libera, and Daniel Muzyczuk. Read more 

How many artists and art practitioners have you met who began in music? Maybe visual art offered them some relief from the rigors of musical scale and tonal structure, a broader material and conceptual palette. But what of those who stayed with musical form and sonic language while also testing its limits? Music’s own wildness takes endless forms, from the modern supernatural of recordings and long-range transmissions over air or wire to the synthetic identities promised by the energy injections of new popular sounds. The strange magical or divinatory interests of experimenters and composers have their own occult physics, automations, locutions. In this vein, we are very excited to work with curator Daniel Muzyczuk on the first in a series of issues retracing the weird and winding paths connecting musical and artistic experiments.  

—Editors

Robert Ashley’s libretto for his composition Yes, But Is It Edible? opens this issue of e-flux journal. In the piece, Ashley explains how experimental music in the 1960s tried, through the use of graphic scores, to fold time into space, and how new music is a radical attempt to oppose divisions between disciplines. As an area where different cultural practices meet, music becomes a liminal space where time can be transformed into spatial relations through its own special alchemy. Ashley’s piece is a musical work—a song, even—that is theoretically charged. It is theory performed.

Taking cues from that complex yet highly enjoyable piece, this special issue looks at music as a practice that always involves the outside, but also as a method and process for allowing otherwise unthinkable solutions. Tracing speech patterns was Robert Ashley’s most characteristic method of composing, and each contributor in this issue focuses on relationships between music, the spoken word, and poetry as common features of generating text and sound.

Michał Libera presents Ashley’s operas as magical practices that bridge mnemotechnics with capital relations. As in Yes, But Is It Edible?, these works become theoretical objects: both their structure and their production model offer grounds on which anecdotes can unfold. Here, form and content are integrated.

Speech patterns are also key to prosody (the rhythmic and sonic patterning of poetry), as found in the use of musical measure when poetry is read out loud. Alice Notley speaks to her musical influences and her methods of writing poetry, which involve specific measures and also rely heavily on the ability to reproduce features of speaking with the dead.

In my own contribution to this issue, I continue these threads by approaching dictation as a method for both poetry and music that folds together time and space. Multitudinous examples of words and sounds coming from elsewhere crystallize the notion of clairaudience—the perception of what is inaudible as if by hearing.

Kimberly Alidio is a poet who works with ekphrasis, the literary device of describing art in great detail. Her recent book Teeter opens with a series of poems based on experiences of listening to music and poetry. These poems turn into exercises in the elasticity of language. In her essay, Alidio reflects on lyrical practices that are at the root of several languages in the Philippines.

Composer and performer Alessandro Bosetti explores the possibility of remembering music without the aid of words or notation. The writings of Bergson, Borges, and Lucier assist him in this enterprise, which is closely related to Ashley’s theoretical practice.

Ben Vida explores his own compositional work alongside the notion of “narrative spectralism,” a language-based method of generating music. He focuses on the abstract qualities of language in “concrete poetry,” while also reflecting on the musicality of language itself.

Finally, Andrius Arutiunian’s “Synthetic Exercises” is a musical composition that emerges from the place where oil extraction, border politics, and auto-tune technologies meet. A specially designed algorithm activates a sound library and directs a wordless composition for synthetic voices. Arutiunian’s piece connects many of the concerns shared by this issue’s authors and moves them into the realm of relations between AI-generated music and text.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

Robert Ashley—Yes, But Is it Edible?
It can’t be said in words. Forget the books. They lie. Well intentioned, but provincial. From a time before we all knew each other and how different we can be. Keep the speed of speech, because it is so beautiful. Keep the pitch range of speech. (It can be exaggerated, if you can do it without sounding like a British Music Hall. Let the microphone take care of the details.) Keep the urgency of the storytelling. Then, you have become a character. You could be in an opera. Like me.

Michał Libera—Throat on Brain: Magic and the Art of Memory in Robert Ashley’s Operas
The brain is the first axis of Ashley’s art of memory (and perhaps its main “landscape” since it is freed from figurative bonds). This is the axis of the inaudible, the imperceptible. It is faster than the vibrations of the throat. This is modernity. It brings speed. Or rather an extreme variety of speeds. And, if we believe Ashley, the brain is unity, the coordination between the mind and the body through which we become whole. 

Alice Notley in conversation with Daniel Muzyczuk—a voice in my brain rolled up on skeins in cells
The entire mystery of the universe was contained in the poetics and the fact that you can’t ever find the stress. You can’t locate it exactly because it’s this blank place. I think that when you write a poem, you actually enter a blank space. And when you’re writing, you are actually feeling nothing. What the poetry is about is not taking place. Some blank thing is happening. And then you define it by before and after. There’s some kind of bleeding between before and after your entry into the blank space.

Daniel Muzyczuk—Ten Lessons in Clairaudience
If the ghosts of Liszt and Chopin have become fluent English speakers while in the land of the dead, isn’t it strange that they have accents? In fact, an accent is just like a composer’s signature style: a small detail that reveals the origin of a given piece. Style was what experts looked for when examining the scores written down by medium Rosemary Brown for confirmation of life after death. But why should a dead composer have the same style as when they were alive?

Kimberly Alidio—On Being Porous
Music is a kind of sound, and poetry is a kind of language. Sounds are arranged into music, as language is arranged into poetry. But what’s considered “musical” or “poetic” moves us beyond formal arrangement, beyond even their respective media, into the realms of discourse. The sense of what’s “musical” and what’s “poetic” can differ and can definitely vary, but generally one looks to be moved, or even transported, into realms of feeling, spirit, and memory. This is the lyrical mode: the ancient lyre shaped words—lyrics—into rhythmic and tonal patterns to give us poem forms—elegies, odes, sonnets—carrying song through language’s musically inflected prosodies.

Alessandro Bosetti—Singing the Zahir Away: Lucier Meets Borges
The reason for the progressive collapsing of all memory into the two-dimensionality of a linguistic plane correlates to immortality, implying the infinite repetition of all possible circumstances. In other words, Borges seems to say that everyone will be everyone, sooner or later bound to write all possible books. In this conception of temporal events and their reduction to language, individual lives and consciousnesses are inexorably flattened to an infinitely repeated script: this is the final transformation of every memory into “words”—or sounds, we might add.

Ben Vida—Pages Full of Words
I was influenced by how the conceptual poets had demonstrated the mutability of digitized text; through their work, language became a ready-made that could be repurposed in much the same fashion as an audio sample. Once sound was fixed to the medium of tape it took on a new life as a sample, a sound object that could be processed and transformed. Extracted from its source, the sample created an opportunity for the composer to reassign its signifiers through sonic transformation and recontextualization. Digitalization expanded the malleability of this process exponentially, creating the possibility for a wild morphology.

Andrius Arutiunian—Synthetic Exercises
In the late 1980s a former classical flute student, Andy Hildebrand, changes his career path and moves on to study advanced digital signal processing. Having become a specialist in stochastic estimation theory (and by now a doctor), Hildebrand starts working for Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. There he develops a very idiosyncratic solution to the one simple question that the corporation asks him—where is the oil?