TAYLOR, 'SOUND OF THE AVANT-GARDE', Postmodern Culture v4n1
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THE SOUND OF THE AVANT-GARDE
by
TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR
taylort@cc.denison.edu
Music Department
Denison University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.1 (September, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu
Copyright (c) 1993 by Timothy D. Taylor, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed
in electronic form, provided that the editors are
notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving,
redistribution, or republication of this text on other
terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the
author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford
University Press.
Review of:
Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. _The Wireless
Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde_. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992.
[1] Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in
_The Wireless Imagination_ as an attempt to compile a
collection of "first utterances" rather than a Last Word on
the subject of abstract sound. But these utterances are so
disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more
frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for
something a little less pomo and a little more
old-fashioned: coherence. Kahn and Whitehead write, "Rather
than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a
hat, we have chosen to ground _Wireless Imagination_ in the
more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic
resonances among the above existing histories, strangely
dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear"
(x).
[2] Fair enough. Some of the essays are indeed historical
and useful (Mel Gordon's "Songs from the Museum of the
Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)"; Mark E. Cory's
"Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art";
Christopher Schiff's "Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in
Early Surrealism"). But what's wrong with theorizing?
Perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from
sprawling theory: there's theory all over the place, and
some of it makes little sense. A few essays indulge in the
kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most
ardent theory fetishist (Charles Grivel's "The Phonograph's
Horned Mouth"; Gregory Whitehead's "Out of the Dark: Notes
on the Nobodies of Radio Art"; Allen S. Weiss's "Radio,
Death, and the Devil: Artaud's _Pour en Finir avec le
Jugement de Dieu_"). I do not mean to make a blanket attack
against theoretical work. The problem with these essays is
not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way
that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as
non-significant as the abstract sounds they're ostensibly
about.
[3] Probably the most interesting portions of _The Wireless
Imagination_ are those that detail someone's response to
sound. Alexander Graham Bell worked with his father to try
to find a written language for non-language sounds; the
young Bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak
by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to "say," "How are
you, grandmamma?"; Thomas Edison believed that each person
has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a
machine to record these "life units" exiting dead bodies as
they lay in their coffins.
[4] Nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose
inventions. Velimir Khlebnikov, in "The Radio of the
Future," presages Muzak: "During periods of intense hard
work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great
buildings, these sounds ["la" and "ti," or the pitches A and
B] can be broadcast by Radio over the entire country,
increasing its collective strength enormously" (21).
Khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by Mel Gordon on
Russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of
zaum, Alexei Kruchenykh's "language" that incorporated all
kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of
schizophrenics. Khlebnikov's zaum was meant to transcend
all cultural barriers. Additionally, Khlebnikov invented a
"universal alphabet," in which each phoneme (just 25 in all)
causes a certain emotional response, and is linked
synesthetically with a color. So the phoneme "P," for
example, causes "explosion, release of pressure," and is
related to the color black outlined in red. Raymond
Roussel's _Locus Solus_ (1914) tells of a deboned head
stored in a liquid called %aqua micans%. This head can be
reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon
taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an
electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a
connection with the head through the cone.
It seemed as though life once more inhabited this
recently immobile remnant of faces. Certain muscles
appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all
directions, while others periodically went into action
as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the
eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in
particular moved with wild agility. (80)
[5] Still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to
record sound make fascinating reading, even if the
contributors' discussions of these attempts aren't always
satisfying. Alexander Graham Bell seemed to be fixated on
the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life
to working with his father on an attempt to notate in
written symbols all kinds of sounds. Co-editor Douglas Kahn
offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by Bell,
describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this
"language":
The members of the audience were invited to make any
sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my
father. It was just as easy for him to spell the sound
of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a
sound that formed an element of human speech.
Volunteers were called to the platform, where they
uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my
father studied their mouths and attempted to express in
symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had
observed. I was then called in, and the symbols were
presented to me to interpret; and I could read in each
symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. I
remember on one occasion the attempt to follow
directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was
utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however,
at once responded with loud applause. They recognized
it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which
had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.
(86)
Bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph
but that Edison beat him to it. If Bell hadn't invented the
telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the
foregoing excerpt.
[6] There are some lacunae. The aestheticization of
abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these
sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook
politics, or real people "on the ground." For example,
co-editor Kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from
Apollinaire's 1916 "The Moon King" which is redolent of the
kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting
devices have facilitated (as Jacques Attali potently
observes in his 1985 _Noise_):
The flawless microphones of the king's device were set
so as to bring in to this underground the most distant
sounds of terrestrial life. Each key activated a
microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we
were hearing a Japanese countryside. The wind soughed
in the trees--a village was probably there, because I
heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the
spray of an icy waterfall. Then another key pressed
down, we were taken straight into morning, the king
greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I
heard geysers spewing hot water. Then this wonderful
morning continued in sweet Tahiti. Here we are at the
market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New
Cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their
lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek.
You could also hear the Chinese selling tea, coffee,
butter, and cakes. The sound of accordions and Jew's
harps. (23)
The authors offer this excerpt as an example of
Apollinaire's "wirelessness," his interest in abstracted
sound, but don't examine the issues of power and
surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the
proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate
sounds from all over the world.
[7] But the most disturbing omissions concern gender. Some
of the material presented is so outrageous that it would
seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving
considerations of gender. For example, the first essay,
Charles Grivel's "The Phonograph's Horned Mouth," avoids
inclusive language, and at one point adds "the other" gender
as an afterthought, as though Grivel at the last minute
imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. Like
so much French theory, Grivel's essay is quote proof:
"Symbol 'become life,' that is, substance, of a being
articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently
applied upon the listener" (33). Grivel describes Villiers
del l'Isle-Adam's _L'Eve Future_ (1886), which features a
"fictitious" Edison who constructs a woman with two
phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (An
excerpt from del l'Isle-Adam's story follows Grivel's
essay.) Grivel's consideration of Marcel Schwob's "La
Machine parler" of 1892 likewise skirts gender
considerations. Schwob's story tells of a frightening
device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are
played by a woman, who is, in Grivel's words, "servant to
the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous
'mechanical mouth'." Another example is Allen S. Weiss's
discussion of Antonin Artaud in his essay, "Radio, Death,
and the Devil." Weiss, like most of the contributors to
this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing
vehicle--evidence of the "wireless imagination"--but does
little more. His discussion of Artaud's_Il n'y a plus de
firmament_ (c. 1932) describes "an archetypically Artaudian
figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical
instrument":
Then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a
nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully,
always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman
with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately
strike with drumbeats. (297)
So, what is the relationship between sound and gender in
such passages? Sound, it seems, can stand in for
heterosexual sex, something that women "possess" and can
"give" to men, or something that men violently take from, or
beat out of, women.
[8] All of the book's discussions of gender serve as yet
another example of the ways in which Western culture has
mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case
"abstract" sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with
male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract
sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence
perpetrated against women. Or ethnic minorities, or
whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to
attack. This flexible binarism of violence has worked all
too well throughout Western history, whether the target of
the drumsticks was a woman's belly or Rodney King's head.
But it goes without comment in all of these essays.
[9] More satisfying considerations of the gendered nature
of sound as it appears in these pages might have been
possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that
sound, including musical sound, signifies: here's where the
subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. Hardly
any musicologist deals with this issue (and most
contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers
are hopeless--unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned
with social and performance issues), so it would seem that
the range of professions practiced by the authors of these
ten essays would include someone who would tackle the
problem. All of the writers and thinkers whose work is
chronicled in the pages of _The Wireless Imagination_
attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. But
what does it "express," if anything? Some of the primary
texts under consideration address the issue. Surrealist
Giorgio de Chirico's _No Music_ (1913), for example, begins,
"Music cannot express the essence of sensation. One never
knows what music is about . . ." (162). De Chirico and the
other Surrealists turned against music because of their
disaffection with first Erik Satie (1866-1925) and then
Georges Auric (1899-1983, a Parisian composer of "Les Six"),
and Christopher Schiff writes that the Surrealist movement
eventually attempted to do without music altogether. But de
Chirico's writings on musical signification go without close
examination. Arseni Avraamov's _The Symphony of Sirens_
(1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: "Of all
the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social
organization" (245). Perhaps. The authors of these essays
fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss
opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the
relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger
cultural and political concerns and to the other arts.
Frances Dyson's insightful essay--perhaps the most valuable
chapter in the book--on John Cage comes closest to such a
discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he
unfortunately discounts): that Cage, in his emancipation of
sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in
Western bourgeois culture, despite Cage's systematic
critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture.
[10] The translations of historic texts that aren't often
available are welcome; many of these form an important
companion to Umbro Apollonio's _Futurist Manifestos_ (1973).
Included are de l'Isle-Adam's "The Lamentations of Edison,"
from_L'Eve Future_ (1886); Alberto Savinio's "Give me the
Anathema, Lascivious Thing" (1915); Avraamov's _The Symphony
of Sirens_ (1923); F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata's _La
Radia_ (1933); and Artaud's _To have done with the Judgment
of God_ (1947). These are important to have in recent
translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine
further in explicating the myriad ways Western culture has
attempted to deal with sound as sound.
[11] In sum, it's about time somebody looked at the role of
abstract sound and radio in the "avant-garde." But as a
starting point or "first word" on the subject, we might have
done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the
everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not
merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a
concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an
effective weapon of political domination.
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