Spaces of Musical Production / Production of Musical Spaces
International conference
Abstracts
Symbolic “Space” as a Time-Function of Sonic Signals
Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University of Berlin)
The inverse word play in this conference title indicates that space and music are always already intertwined. But while space and music relate to the symbolic order, the time-based (or time-basing) sonic signal rather performs a Möbius loop with “space”. It makes sense, therefore, to clearly differentiate, in the “spatial” context, between acoustics, sound, and music.
While the enframing is “spatial” (such as theatre stages and opera houses, but as well the radio apparatus and computing architectures), the sonic event itself is temporal product(ion). Any “musical” composition is a kind of geometrization of the genuinely temporal fabrics, or woven carpets of sound, while the acoustic signal is a function of time. While musical notation (and its technological equivalent “digitization”, as much as any sound “archive”) is a geometrization of sono-temporal patterns, for the acoustic signal there is no “space” but rather genuine time functions such as delay (known from echolocation). Where sound takes place, there is no space; McLuhan's term “acoustic space” is an oxymoron.
The archaeology of knowledge on the relationship between music and space becomes media-active archaeology when it comes to re-enacting past faded-away acoustics - be it ancient theatres, or the songs of the Homeric Sirens. Sound, here, is no dramaturgial supplement, but becomes genuine media theatre. But with echography, radar, and the sonograph, “space” became a direct product(ion) of signal (re-)transmission.
Landscape Dramaturgy and Postopera: Singing After Perspective
Jelena Novak (NOVA University of Lisbon)
While revisiting the historical development of the notions of landscape and perspective, Ana Vujanović reframed the concept of landscape dramaturgy. She showed how both of these notions deeply affected present ways of seeing and understanding in performance. (Vujanović, “Meandering together: New problems in landscape dramaturgy”, 2017; “Landscape dramaturgy: ‘Space after perspective’”, 2018). I will illuminate the concept of landscape dramaturgy by discussing it in the context of postopera. I intend to contextualize the experience of straying, solitude (which is not loneliness), surface replacing logocentric depth, multiplying personal views, challenging of one-point personal view, all of which Vujanović elaborates on. Pieces by Michel van der Aa, Aleksandar Raskatov, Jasna Veličković and Jennifer Walshe will be discussed, as well as opera directions by Pierre Audi and Romeo Castellucci.
On the Spaces in Between; or, What Musical Networks Produce
Jonathan Hicks (University of Aberdeen)
In common parlance space can be both characterless and characterful. It can refer to areas or volumes that appear to lack form and history; the sense of space that is figuratively and experientially empty, a counterpoint to well-loved and much-discussed places. Yet space can also refer to those settings (whether open or closed, large or small) that are rich with meaning and feeling; the sense of space that corresponds to the dimensions of lived experience. In this paper I aim to think about musical space in both senses, considering the ways in which these two kinds of space may be mutually constitutive. My starting point is a provisional inventory of musical objects in circulation around nineteenth-century theatres. Much research of late has foregrounded the mobility of musical practices and the connectedness of various sites of theatrical production. This raises fundamental questions about who/what moved and how: we know that all manner of professionals (singers, conductors, musicians, machinists, set-painters, dancing-masters, et al) travelled between performing hubs; we also know that many objects (orchestral parts, play-texts, scenery, maquettes, choreographic notation, etc.) travelled with people or sometimes ahead/instead of them. To these lists we might add the circulation of ideas and critical commentaries that helped to shape the local reception of imported spectacle. After taking stock of the various portable properties of the nineteenth-century musical stage, the second part of my paper asks what all their unsung itineraries added up to. Drawing on work by Piekut (2014), Vella (2022), and Mathew (2022) that considers the place of networks in music studies I explore the significance of theatrical performance not only for well-connected nodes (i.e., the theatres we might mark on a map of the operatic world) but also the spaces in between that seemed both characterless and characterful in light of emerging cultural geographies of metropolitan modernity.
The Hypermobility Turn in Contemporary Opera
Jingyi Zhang (Harvard University)
My paper examines the hypermobility turn and its impact on contemporary opera. By hypermobility, I’m referring to the phenomenon of “hyperactivity” in today’s unprecedented flow of musics, cultures, and ideas, which captures a certain reactiveness in the frenetic diffusion of innovations in our contemporary operatic moment. The global pandemic, and the resurgence of decolonization in the 21st-century ushered in a profound shift in opera-making sensibility, which demands hypermobility as a theoretical concept in illuminating the myriad movements, media, and mechanisms that transgress conventional spaces and mobilities, enabling us to imagine otherwise.
I engage with two operas conceived in the impossible years of 2020-21, serving as a testament to how immobility can galvanize unexpected mobilities. Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods presents radical reimaginations of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in parking garages in Detroit and Chicago. My paper highlights how the shift in location brought about transformative changes to the productions, underscoring an important ethos in the hypermobility turn. It’s not just site that changed operatic content, but also passing time. Moving on then to specifically ideological considerations, I address problematic issues arising in the collaboration with the two Black poets who wielded significant creative agency in the opera.
White Snake Projects’ The Pandemic Trilogy approaches hypermobility from a digital perspective. This set of three live virtual operas adopts transmedia storytelling (i.e., multiplatform storytelling) in responding to the global crisis we were then facing. Its birth has since prompted a serious consideration of cyber-stage as a viable medium—and site—of operatic performance. In reconceiving cyber-stage as a site-specific space carrying its own set of affordances, I challenge the naïve thinking that equivalates technology with forward-looking aesthetics and limitless possibilities. I then draw on a scene to illustrate how digital puppetry potentially offers a creative avenue that engenders enchantment, and unexpected provocations in audiences.
Cinematic Musical Spaces in Paris: Popular Music and the Advent of Sound Film
Lola San Martín Arbide (University of Sevilla)
In my study I explore the centrality of music and sound in accounts of French authenticity and Parisian local identity at the turn of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. I draw from a multidisciplinary analysis of musical, literary and cinematic sources and the exchanges between these spheres to survey how a portrait of the urban space emerges from their crossroads. Cinema and music became mutually dependent realms in Paris, with screening rooms being built next to music venues, all becoming part of the ever-growing urban entertainment spaces of the boulevards, and ensuring a fruitful interchange of ideas and people. In this paper I propose to pay closer attention to the transfer between cinema and popular song in the first French sound films representing the city of Paris. Countering the international reach of silent film, the advent of sound in French film promoted its increasing nationalisation by enabling the production of ‘non-exportable’ films that were largely reliant on a local web of references drawn from radio, chanson and varietés. Thus, cinema became the platform from which singers such as Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Gabin, Fréhel and Mistinguett became actors. This paper will show how the Paris produced in these films captured the atmosphere of popular and street song and how this transition was mediated by literature and the sonic landscapes of interwar urban literature. The intermedia approach allows a richer study of the continuities between the so-called silent era and early French sound films, from Calvacanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) and Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1926) to Henri Diamant-Berger’s Paris la nuit (1930), Pierre Chenal’s Les petits métiers de Paris (1931) or Augusto Genina’s Paris-Béguin (1931), to quote but a few examples.
“A Living Being in Constant Transformation”: Staging Opera and Architecture in 1930s Florence
Francesca Vella (Northumbria University)
Established in 1933, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino was the second (chronologically) of Fascist Italy’s two most important music festivals. With its twofold emphasis on reinventing mise-en-scène and reviving long-forgotten operas through the help of modern registi, it became a centre for experiments in scenography and theatre direction, while its broader discourse intersected with that of Florence at several points.
Widely discussed in the months that preceded the first Maggio, Florence’s new Santa Maria Novella train station, designed in 1933 by Giovanni Michelucci, was the first – rationalist –Italian architectural project that aroused a national debate. One of its supporters, Corrado Pavolini, thought its design recalled the musical ‘eurythmics’ of Tuscan Renaissance buildings. In two judgements that speak of contemporary attitudes to the stage as much as to the city, the station was also compared to the modernist scenery that Pietro Aschieri and Giorgio De Chirico conceived for Verdi’s Nabucco and Bellini’s I puritani at the Maggio. According to an anonymous commentator, such architectural and theatrical trash was tantamount to the ‘gangrene of the twentieth century’, a criticism echoed by a journalist who smelt ‘stink of Michelucci’ in Aschieri’s set designs.
In this paper I argue that such comparisons reveal not only shared aesthetic ideals but also new understandings of city and stage as organic and interconnected entities. Each of these spaces was being reconceptualised simultaneously via and against tradition, and was becoming to an unprecedented degree ‘whole’ – something demonstrated in opera by the earliest attempts at reviving old works according to modern directorial visions, and in architecture by the new ‘science’ of urban design. At a time when Fascism was promoting a comprehensive ‘urban editing’ of the peninsula and architecture was undergoing professional definition, might these parallels shed new light on the contemporary birth of opera direction, recasting this as a phenomenon that conceptually interwove with transformations of the urban imagination?
From Thin to Deep: Mapping Urban Music through Multimedia Web Apps
Martin Nicastro (University of Pavia)
The use of digital tools for geospatial data visualization constitutes one of the main research fronts in the field of Digital Humanities and it is progressively spreading across the musicological field, in particular regarding the study of musical practices in urban areas (Cohen, LMMP). While on the one hand the use of GIS (Geographical Information System) constitutes a fundamental resource for carrying out a distant and wide-ranging reading of phenomena of great complexity, on the other hand its application is not without methodological risks. Given the effectiveness of cartography, which adds to a natural tendency to trust its products, it is quite easy to lie through maps (Monmonier 1991). This is also true when visual maps are to be used to describe musical practices, whose immanent and performative features would be removed by the processes of geometric abstraction of space implicit in a process of cartographic visualization. The risk associated with the use of GIS in the musicological field would therefore be that of a new visualism, in which, not unlike what happened for decades with notational writing, the object of study could being confused with its graphic-symbolic representation.
The fact that traditional cartography brings with it this corollary of problems, some of which are particularly familiar to those involved in musicology, does not mean, however, that it is not possible to trace alternative paths. The use of web mapping, a particular digital mapping tool, makes it possible to build interactive maps capable of hosting, through specific HTML scripts, different types of hypertext links. In this way a map can become the access point to a multimedia archive, be it photographic, audio or audiovisual, opening its two-dimensional “thinness” to a new depth.
Containing Multitudes: A Sound Installation in the Montreal’s Entertainment District
Nicola Di Croce (IUAV University of Venice)
In this presentation I will draw from a Research-Creation project developed in Montreal in the framework of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship throughout 2021 and 2022. Focusing on the sonic dimension of the Montreal’s entertainment neighborhood – the Quartier des Spectacles (QDS) – the project has experimented sound-oriented, qualitative, participatory and creative approaches to inform urban policy analysis and design.
The aim was to address the neighborhood’s rapid transformations, and more specifically the challenging balance between its attractiveness, livability and inclusiveness, especially due to the growing touristification of the area and the problematic effects of the pandemic-related restrictions to public space uses.
Drawing from the results of the project developed in Montreal’s (QDS), in this presentation I focus on the implementation and assessment of a temporary sound installation realized during October 2022 in a small public square located in the heart of QDS. Addressing issues of traffic noise on the nearby streets and social inclusiveness within the square, the installation incorporated and transformed traffic sounds and everyday textures and voices recorded on the spot, aiming to create a meditative and engaging environment to encourage the cohabitation of diverse users of the public space.
In particular, I will: (i) describe the compositional process, which mainly used field recordings taken within the same spot; (ii) illustrate to what extent the sound art composition was also informed by the outcomes of two previous workshops engaging residents and city users of QDS; and finally (iii) show the results of a questionnaire, which was administered to residents and users of the square before and while the installation was running.
Peri-Urban Sound Ecology. The City Without an Outside
Ruben Baiocco (University of Milan)
Sound ecology is a term used to define a science that by recording the sound of environments is able to map acoustic and, at the same time, biological biodiversity.
Biophony, geophony, and anthrophony are the terms through which sound produced by animal species and living organisms in general is distinguished from non-biological sound produced, for example, by weather (e.g., wind, rain, etc.) and activities by humans. Sound ecology is used to provide effective documentation of the impacts of human activity on environments in terms of acoustic and biological biodiversity. Consider the pioneering work of Bernie Krauss on the musicalization of sound production of natural environments and the political effectiveness of such perceptual evidence of the impacts of anthropization. Consider also the prospect of potentially rapid scientific analysis of biodiversity through passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to assess the effects on environments from the relationship between anthropogenic practices and climate change. The capacity for easy integration between scientific data and communicability of Sound Ecology data is a policy frontier yet to be explored. Particularly for the construction of increasingly differentiated maps of global urbanization processes to be contrasted with those of the "urban era" inaugurated by the United Nations, which operate a functional simplification of neoliberal theories, where there is an "urban," the city, to be contrasted with a "non-urban," the non-city. The investigation of the peri-urban, literally understood as what is around the city, as defined by the predominant urbanization theory can include the countryside, the dumpsites at the edge of the city, to the mountains, to the deserts, to 'Antarctica to the Amazon. In the "city without an outside", theorized by Neil Brenner, it is everything one would want outside, as an operational zone, that supports the current model of urbanization.
We need to assess the potential of Sound Ecology in this sense: for thinking the urban without an outside and for a systematic reinvention of the concept of the urban.
Redefining Landscape: Aural Observations and Representations of Spaces
Francesco Bergamo (IUAV University of Venice)
The notions of Landscape and Representation are still commonly considered according to their visual features, taking for granted that it is the visible to allow observation, representation, and analysis of spaces. This bias originated from early modernity, with the discovery of perspective, and grew in the Western world also thanks to the relevance and manageability of visual thinking in philosophy and science. The words “Landscahft” and “paesaggio” (both meaning “landscape”) originated during the XVI Century in the Flemish and Italian regions to name visual representations of a land or “paese”.
Starting from the second half of the XX Century a new (or renewed) awareness started to grow towards the possibilities and relevance of the acoustic world and of listening. Contemporary music (e.g., the work of John Cage after he discovered non-Western music) and technologies for recording and reproducing audio contributed to new fields of research, such as Soundscape studies. The interest towards the possibilities of working with audio is so wide that almost every scientific field is nowadays considering it, and some scholars even recognize a ‘sonic turn’.
The contribution aims at rethinking and redefining the notion of Landscape, and partly also that of Representation, after the ‘sonic turn’ and considering the notion of Soundscape and the growing number of objections to it. Sound art and some musical approaches are playing a major role in the possibility of this redefinition, if not even contributing precisely to it, from Alvin Lucier’s Vespers and I am sitting in a room to Carlos Casas’ sonic survey and spatial composition for the Uzbek Pavilion Mahalla at the Biennale Architettura 2021.
Activities involving producing sound and listening are generally becoming more aware of their situatedness in specific spaces, both in artistic and scientific contexts of any kind, which is also reshaping human epistemologies and music.
Notes Towards an Acoustemology of Witches
Delia Casadei (UC Berkeley), Marina Romani (UC Berkeley)
This paper—researched and written in collaboration with sociologist and italianist Marina Romani—investigates the ways in which oral history and memory, as well as songs and magical formulae, construct the figure of a witch in 1960s-70s Abruzzo. In the 1960s and 70s, oral historian and ethnomusicologist Cesare Bermani led groundbreaking research into the history of witchcraft and magical practices through his fieldwork in the small town of Villa Zaccheo, near Teramo. Bermani was researching figures to whom malevolent magical powers were attributed by the community, as well as behaviors associated with witchcraft and the antidotes concocted against these behaviors. The research took its cue from De Martino’s investigations of magical practices in Lucania in the late 1950s and 1960s, but differed in three key ways: one, Bermani was interested in witches, and so in constructions of gender, motherhood, wifehood, sexuality; two, Bermani’s research was conducted through the methods of oral history, and he has made available approximately 100 hours of tapes of interviews and songs through the Archivio Cesare Bermani in Orta San Giulio (Novara). Lastly, Bermani was researching the hometown of his then wife Maria Felice Forti, who, along with her mother, alerted Bermani to the topic of witchcraft, acted as a collaborator, intermediary, interviewer, and sometimes even object of research. Through an in-depth listening to Bermani’s original tapes, as well as as preliminary fieldwork in Villa Zaccheo (which is Romani’s home town) regarding the memory, survival, and language of witch-like practices, we hope to revisit the ways in which voice, language (Italian as well as dialect), and shifting constructions of gender combine to render the figure of the witch, in the hope of laying the groundwork for future re-evaluations of the relationship of sound, media, and constructions of witchcraft.
Shower Ballads: Energy, Sound and Democracy ca. 1943
Gavin Williams (King’s College London)
The introduction of ‘sound vans’—mobile recording units—into documentary filmmaking in Britain during the Second World War meant that a variety of new locations, animals and people, previously unheard in cinema, were freshly produced upon a national stage. This paper takes as its point of departure (and terminus) one such moment of rupture in rapidly shifting fields of audiovisual representation: the sight and sound of Welsh coal miners singing in the shower while scrubbing down following a shift. It considers what this scene, apparently captured by a candid microphone in Humphrey Jennings’ The Silent Village (1943), might reveal about its historical moment—not only in its immediate wartime context, but also in a longer history of energy and democracy in which operatic vocality in working-class contexts enjoyed a special resonance.
This paper will also consider the Welsh miners singing and chatting in the showers in The Silent Village as an early example, perhaps even a primal scene, of bathroom-based musicking that has subsequently become a proud tradition in sound film and audiovisual media more broadly. In other words, it will attempt something like an archaeology of a particular moving, sounding image, pursuing its excavation in two main directions. First, it will examine the scene in terms of cinema’s attraction to the shower as a resonance chamber—as an opportunity to rehearse themes of audio-voyeurism, auto-affection and self-care. Second, it will explore what all this might mean for the Welsh miners captured and impressed in the cinematic archive in 1943, both in terms of making energy workers visible and audible, and as an ambivalent democratic gesture on the cusp of the Great Acceleration.
Voicing and Speech Capture in Romeo Castellucci’s Works
Piersandra Di Matteo (IUAV University of Venice)
Romeo Castellucci’s scenic apparatuses are based on defusing the mimetic regime of theatre. It is about liquidating the communicative, rhetorical and pedagogical potential of the stage. From the earliest production, his theatre establishes spaces in which the act of voicing and the speech are molecularized, colluded with the body noises, at the edge of the mouth, reduced to an oesophageal pulsation, swallowed without vocal cords, tattooed by phonation, unveiled as a thing-between-things. Focusing on the ventriloquist effects at play in Giudizio Possibilità Essere, the paper will question the topology of voice revealed by an iter of disembodiment that seems to break down the bodily inherence of the phonation toward a mineralized sound, thanks to a spatialized sonic dramaturgy.