A fairly detailed paper with audio and video examples dealing with some of my solo work that I did in developing the Landscape Quartet idea.
the violin, the river, and me . . . . . Hz no. 18, May 2013
Hz is a yearly web journal edited by Sachiko Hyashi, associated with Fylkingen Arts Centre, Stockholm.
The Swedish national organisation for new music promoters, RANK, has invited Landscape Quartet to do three residency projects in Sweden. The first residency will take place already in August, at the KALV Festival. At Kalv, the quartet will explore pilgrim paths in the area and create a series of stations for a walking audience. The pilgrim walk will take place on August 11. More info will be found at http://kalvfestival.se/
We all hope that the weather will not repeat the endless rains in Northumbria, however, also Sweden can be rainy in summer…
The quartet will also collaborate with C/Y Contemporary in Malmö and IDKA in Gävle and create further site specific work in nature in Sweden.
One of the shared projects within the Landscape Quartet is the idea of (re)visiting one’s own homeland, the landscape of one’s childhood. A dialectic take on this is Stefan Östersjö’s project involving also the Vietnamese dan tranh player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy. The idea is to create a dialogue about homelands, about old, new and shared sites. For one thing, this would be a way to evade simplistic perspectives on identity and nationality. On April 27 Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Stefan Östersjö went to the Bắc Ninh Province as a reconnaisance trip to her homeland. In Bắc Ninh, both of her parents grew up in the same small village of Ngang Nội, famed for Quan Họ the folk music tradition of love songs that emerge from the province and has had some of its most famous tradition bearers specifically in this little village.
Otherwise, the region is characterized by rice fields and small green mountains. In April, all the rice fields are also green and not particularly wet. In autumn, when we return to do the project, the fields will be more wet and the rice bigger and soon ready for harvest.
We went out from Hanoi on Thủy’s bike, filming the entire journey back to her homeland. Hence, Thủy arrived in her uncle’s house looking like as if she was trying the latest fashion from Europe (?):
Well in the village we started out by looking at an idea that Thủy had already before the trip of hanging a đàn tranh upside down over the field to capture the sound and movement of the wind in the rice. Walking out along the river by the fields nearest to the village we also discussed another idea of making sculptures with guitar and dan tranh in bamboo trees. But the main topic was now the rice fields. We were quite convinced that the sonorities inside the instrument would be rather complex since the 19 strings of the đàn tranh provides 38 pitches by the division of the bridge into two halves. Hence, using also a guitar would not add much in terms of pitch with its 6 open strings… Still we decided to borrow a đàn tranh and make a small test later in the day. The main discussion about this idea concerned how to hang the instrument in the field: should we adapt the method developed by Bennett and Stefan with the violin-guitar tree sculptures and suspend the đàn tranh on long strings from trees? Should we even attempt at connecting it to a second instrument to get similar sympathetic resonance in the two instruments? Obviously, if we were to manage to hang it on long strings, the wind over the fields would could create harmonics in the suspending strings also. In the afternoon we shot some short video tests with a dan tranh in a field. Although limited by the lack of microphones to put inside the instrument, we were quite optimistic about the minimal addition that the movement of the rice would make to the soundscape of birds and frogs that normally add to the sound of the wind through the rice in these fields.
The soundscape also has many traces from everyday life in the nearest villages. We went up on one of the mountains and found that many sounds travel all the way up to the top. But most importantly, when we started following the small paths leading up the mountain we realized something that Thủy was not quite aware of herself: every path would lead to a graveyard or a single tomb. In fact, this particular mountain was filled with tombs all the way up to the top. The ‘meaning’ of the paths on these mountains became very obvious and coloured our further exploration of them.
We went up on two mountains (the second perhaps more beautiful than the first) but never quite figured out exactly what to think of doing in these funeral and pastoral sites. However, the paths and the function of the mountains make them a prioritized target for the project. Also, the graveyards relate to another topic of this homelands project which is the relation to spirits that Thuy feels to be so much stronger in Vietnam than in Europe. Visiting a European graveyard has no relation to encounters with spirits or ghosts for her, while in her childhood just as today, many sites, for instance in her homeland, have this specific meaning.
Up on the second mountain we heard funeral music from one of the nearby villages. It seems to be part of the nature of this project to host a series of different man-made sounds that come and go in the soundscape.
The trees all around in the area are very young. Historically, this province afforded many big trees that were used to make huge pieces of furniture (like beds) from a single piece of wood. Now all those trees are gone, replaced by more quickly growing, lighter kinds.
The homelands project in Bắc Ninh is planned to happen on site in the beginning of September, resulting in an exhibition at the alternative gallery space in the centre of Hanoi called Manzi’s.
A short-ish film showing a variety of extracts from Landscape Quartet projects over the past months, along with a selection of quotes related to some of the ideas behind the project.
Improvisation in Devil’s Water, Northumberland, with Michael Bridgewater and Bennett Hogg. One of three improvisations filmed on Wednesday 24th April, 2013. Sound recordist was Phil Begg and video was by Merrie Snell.
Bennett Hogg – when violins were trees . . .
paper given at Beyond Soundscape symposium at Queen’s University Belfast as part of Sonorities Festival, 27th April 2013
“Seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the seen, however close. And this distance enables a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth” (Voegelin 2010, xii). This is the “truth” of post-Enlightenment science, in which an externally existing reality is believed to be fully perceived by empirical observation that claims objective detachment from the distortions of subjectivity, what Donna Haraway has called the “modest_witness” of scientific observation, the observer who in performatively effacing their own subject position gets to claim their sense data as objective fact (Haraway 1998; Cranny-Francis 2006).
Although the aesthetic in Western culture cannot be restricted to the visual per se, it nevertheless seems to be organised according to a kind of objectification that is more characteristic of the visual than the auditory. Tim Morton writes, for example, that “The aesthetic is . . . a product of distance: of human beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of mind from matter” (Morton 2007, 24). Denis Cosgrove, in his seminal work on landscape writes “To speak of landscape beauty or quality is to adopt the role of observer rather than participant” (Cosgrove 1985, 18); aestheticisation of landscape, therefore, is grounded in objectification and distancing.
Arrival – Monday Dec 10th
Coffee with Bennett and Sabine. Talked about my thoughts to then: (i) idea of ‘nature’, Wicken Fen – a highly constructed place, plenty of human intervention, there isn’t anywhere that’s ‘pure’, assumed and nostalgic idea based on a separation between humans and nature, we are nature. (ii) tension between my sense of the past, some nostalgia for it, and the impossibility of a return, the places I grew up are now completely transformed (links to (i)), same for Bennett. (iii) tension re the demand to ‘make something’, previous works about allowing the space to speak with as little intervention as possible (similarly dubious idea in itself), now more about dialogue, finding a way of interacting, recognising the connection and interrelatedness, and allowing forms of expression to emerge.
Spent time showing my portable electronic improvisation set-up to Sabine while Meri worked out her readings from Cage’s Indeterminacy for the evening performance.
Three days of fieldwork – Tuesday 11th, Wednesday 12th, Thursday 13th 
Spent three days walking along a section of the Wansbeck River, East of Morpeth, a short walk from Bennett’s house. Informed by my ‘rule’ that whatever you use should be ‘at hand’, a ready-mades hangover or plain laziness?, I was happy with this and felt happily smug / justified.
Day 1. Initially we visited the place where BH had made Aeolian harps. I was not happy with the sense of space, and SV with the aggressive presence of the road. Some discussion about acceptance of traces of human activity – counter acoustic ecology, but it was still too noisy for us. Have been thinking that SV and I are in some ways attuned to some of same values and priorities of acoustic ecology (we need to be able to listen in very particular ways and in consciousness-raising ways), however, our agenda / ideology / approach is distinct (in line with the project, it is about the working out of our embedded interrelatedness, exploring / discovering and understanding what that relationship is and says). In short, it didn’t feel right.
BH knowing exactly what we’re like it seems suggested the walk along the river. Straight away felt better. Read the rest of this entry »
The material for this piece was recorded on September 22nd and 23rd 2012 at Howick, Northumberland.
On the 22nd we made recordings directly at the ocean with a seal as the audience.It did spend the whole afternoon with us and seemed to listen. As soon as we were done it disappeared.
The next day we went up the river into the woods. I was very drawn to the horsetail. This plant is 400 Million years old and has a very unique methode to survive. It has a huge brachiate root system, that has little nodules with reserve solids, that helps the plant to survive. Because of this, it survived through all the times. OK - it’s much smaller now than it used to be, but it is is still here. I was also very fascinated by its layers that it has and its pretty clear structure.
I sat there for a while and just tried to “listen” to this plant to this ancient heritage it has and imagined the huge plants and the woods out of horsetails and ferns that used to grow in the prehistoric times. The plants used to be 30 meters high.
With a small dpa microphone inside a bansuri – an indian bamboo flute – I recorded the enviroment while listening back to it and respond to and interact with it. I was mainly sitting in a “field” of horsetail while playing the flute and I also the dry horsetail leaves played onto the flute. I kind of created a new instrument – kind of a a horsetail flute, that reacted on blowing and fingering.
Resonant Pathways is a solo project of mine that has been going on for just over two years, and which was partly responsible for developing ideas for Landscape Quartet, the four-way collaboration funded by the Arts an Humanities Research Council that is documented on this website. In Resonant Pathways an acoustic violin (or two) – usually deployed in unorthodox ways such as dragging, floating, submerging, etc. – interact with the natural environment, developing an environmentally-situated sonic arts practice that is ecosystemic. That I call this an ecosystemic practice should convey a sense of participation and connectedness with the environment, in which the composer/improviser works directly with the sonic affordances of a particular place, not only recording environmental sound (collection) but generating it in a “collaboration” with the environment. This is not usually a sonic art of observing and collecting – which has a long and distinguished history, a history which inevitably informs much of this work – but of putting oneself into the natural world as simultaneously a perceiver and producer of sound. As the philosopher Salome Voegelin has pointed out, we not only perceive our sonic environment but add to it through making sound ourselves. We move and react in response to sound. Our response to listening/hearing is often to make sound ourselves; or to make ourselves sound. The attentive and silent listening of the Western art music tradition has tended to swarm out (Foucault’s term) and colonize all forms of listening. Resonant Pathways attempts to search for alternatives to this state of affairs, as well as alternatives to practices that attempt to impose sounds onto the environment. Gardening, of one sort or another, stands near to the start of the emergence of human social civilization, and takes different forms in response to the affordances of the existing environment – only certain plants will grow, certain animals survive, in particular environments. Resonant Pathways tries to start from a similar position, and work with it. Read the rest of this entry »
This ‘natural wilderness’ and the arable fenland of Wardy Hill (from yesterday) are of course both highly managed. The difference with Wicken Fen is that it follows systems of land management dating from hundreds of years ago, and allows for a far more sympathetic dynamic between the land and our use of it. I was fairly ambivalent about the difference previously. I considered the banks of the Wash – land drainage on a magnificent scale. Having visited WF, I feel very happy that this place is right. I think the ‘ecological dimension’ is becoming more meaningful to me, and the particular historic subtleties and environmental consciousness it represents seem to move me in ways the awe of brutality of the Wash and the land technologies of farming don’t actually. It seems I’ve also discovered something of the human scale I mentioned in the previous post. Read the rest of this entry »
