On Acoustic Ecology and,,Integral Art"
Thomas Gerwin
Center for the Arts and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Germany
tg@zkm.de http://www.zkm.de
Abstract
Outlining a concept of today's music. This paper intends to point the listeners sensitivity on the richness and the beauty -
but also on the vulnerability of our sounding environment.
1 Introduction
We are living in a symphony. We are surrounded by sounds,
rhythms and melodies. A leaf rustling in the wind, a step on the
street, the barking of a dog, a laugh from the room next door, the
clapping of a door, but also the noise of an engine, of a pneumatic
hammer, a car, a circular saw, even the noise of our neighbour's
portable is part of the one big, never- ending musical piece we are
living in. And we are listening to this piece - that is: all the time. We
cannot close our ears the way we close our eyes. Before we were
able to think, we did already hear.
First and most of all we hear noises, "every-day sounds", sounds
which have a warning, calming, stimulating or relaxing effect, or
else sounds telling us entire stories - sounds by which we feel either
pleased or bothered. Each of this environmental sounds relates to a
certain event or circumstance, and as we do in the case of events
and circumstances, we distinguish between different characters of
noises: we may regard them as either pleasant or troublesome,
useful or useless, constructive or destructive, interesting or boring.
2 The Roots
It is Pierre Schaeffers merit to have discovered the incredible
variety of everyday sounds in terms of a "pure" sound event. His
work provided the ground all further developments of
electroacoustic music were based on. However, today we have to
contradict him in two major points. First, he makes an effort to
consider and categorize all the noises he had recorded on a
completely neutral basis, "objectively" as it were. Secondly,
Schaeffer started from the idea - maybe this was due to his
education in romantic times - that a given noise had to be freed of
its concrete meaning in order to be usable for "purely musical"
purposes - that is, Schaeffer had a concept of what really is meant
by the term "music"
It was John Cage who released us from this historical burden and
from other conventions, even from the depence on the own
narrow-minded taste. Thanks to him, the musician's work is now
less narrow and foreseeable. This is not only a consequence of the
novelty of Cage's works, but also of his philosophical starting point
-he allowed things to happen, he showed respect for a free world
with free sounds - and, last but not least, of his idea of "silence".
Cage's work in combination with Joseph Beuys' concept of a
"social sculpture" and with the positively ecological aspect
contributed by Richard Murray Schafer's "soundscape" had a
major influence on the artistic concept presented here. By now, I
feel that my work consists of further elaborating these different
aspects and integrating them in an artistic manner.
According to my respective ideas and intentions, I create
equivalent concertante works, that is: structures evolving
principally within the time parameter ("space in time") as well as
sound sculptures evolving both in time and space or else sounding
spaces ("time in space"). In doing so, I am interested, above all, in
the noise's/sounds' inherent musicality and esthetics and their
correlations within the sound of the world (let me call the latter
freely happening music), with its nonintentional, irregular, widecycled, natural rhythms, sound organisms and developments.
These parameters are perceived by me, that is, their essence, their
intrinsic character are exposed through modulation, emphasized,
made audible by composition and/or decomposition respectively
(the latter a concept brought up by Karlheinz Stockhausen). In this
sense, nothing must (or can?) be newly invented - you just have to
discover what is already there. The artist's actual work consists of
this discovery.
In musical terms, this means: to integrate by revealing, while at the
same time showing respect for (both concrete and artificial) sounds.
Following Pierre Henry I believe that a sound is like a being: it is
brought into this world, it lives and dies. There is really no reason,
on principle, to restrict our work to concrete sounds in music, even
less so with regard to the fact that "purely" artificial sounds are,
mostly, much more pervious ("permeable" is the term Gottfried
Michael Koenig employs); therefore they are more easily woven
into an abstract composition. Furthermore, they are not as
obstinate, at times stubborn, as concrete sounds. But the fact is that
natural musical SUBJECTS (not only objects, as Schaeffer calls
them) which have to be dealt and managed with, are just often
much more interesting - on an acoustic as well as on a personal
level.
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