Every Sound Is Consequential
Ed. Note: Over the past few months, NewMusicBox readers have been introduced to a new team of regional editors stationed in cities across the country. These contributors have been our eyes and ears on the ground, surveying the new music landscape in their areas and delivering regular coverage.
It is my pleasure to welcome yet another voice to this dialog, Sidney Chen of San Francisco, California.—MS
I Was Sitting in a Room: SF Tape Music Festival
A friend who’s a record collector has always said that she wishes all concerts could take place in a completely darkened room so that audiences might train their focus entirely on the music. She seems to have some kindred spirits in the folks at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, who presented three nights of fixed-media audio compositions with all the lights off at the newly renovated ODC Theater in the Mission in San Francisco (which, ironically, is primarily used for dance, where good lighting is a positive character trait).
Presented by the San Francisco Tape Music Collective and the ever-intrepid sfSound, led by Matt Ingalls, the annual festival has been running since 2002. Works by 25 composers were chosen to be diffused through the 16+ speakers that surrounded the dedicated and attentive audience that comfortably filled the 175-seat hall the two nights I attended (January 20 and 22). I say dedicated because the festival happened to fall on the stormiest night of the season so far, and attentive because I’ve never heard such a quiet, coughless audience in winter.
Each night’s performance began with short mid-19th century phonautograms—primitive sound recordings by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville that had no playback method when they were created and which predate Edison’s phonograph recordings by two decades. The phonautograms, explained in detail in the Studio 360 story below, were realized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley by First Sounds, a collaborative group of audio historians and recording engineers.
Two works of particular interest in the latter category were by Matthew Barnard and Adam Basanta. Barnard’s The Piano Makers was constructed from recordings made at a piano factory; inspired by a book by David Wainwright of the same title that points out that “the frame and strings of a fully strung grand piano must withstand the pressure of about 20 tonnes,” Barnard’s piece is an unusual and dramatic portrait of a piano, filled with a palpable sense of tension using the sound of taut metal strings being tightened, among other things. In a glass is not a glass, Basanta narrows his focus to the sounds created from a wine glass—through striking, rubbing, bowing, clinking, and smashing. Some sounds are manipulated and abstracted, and Basanta explores (as did other composers) the effect of small sounds writ unnaturally large.
I missed out on the second night of the festival and went instead to Southern Exposure, another Mission venue a few blocks away that’s used more for visual arts than music. We got a respite that night from the storm but not the cold, and in an unheated, high-ceilinged concrete gallery space with large uncovered windows, a hardy crowd blew into their cupped hands for RE:COMPOSITION, a program curated by Julie Lazar. Using John Cage again as a touchstone, the evening’s program featured four works. A performance installation aptly titled Still Movement by Croatian visual artist Sandro Đukić opened the evening, with the audience standing while Đukić walked methodically and glacially among black pillars in a red-lighted space. The program closed with JD Beltran’s electronic, beat-driven music synchronized with Marc Barritte’s digital film of shifting shapes and colors.
The two more memorable works of the evening were sandwiched in between. It was the first public outing for Bar Hopping, a music and video project collaboratively created by cellists Joan Jeanrenaud and Paul de Jong (one half of The Books). Jeanrenaud performed the work solo with pre-recorded music and video—as of this performance, the two creators hadn’t yet met in person. The seven movements moved from lyrical melodies to melancholic viol consorts to martial ricochets, paired with video that reflected historic and contemporary visions of California. Several of the movements have been posted on de Jong’s Vimeo page; here’s the Intro:
Retallack was professorial, discussing Anarchic Harmony and poethics as they apply to Cage’s work; by contrast, Ives was, well, absurdly unhinged in a way that was at times reminiscent of Artaud. Together they were thought-provoking and hilarious, occasionally both at the same time. At one point in Retallack’s lecture, she offered the thought that “every word is equally consequential”—an idea that put me back into the crystalline clarity of the ODC Theater where every sound, whether they were coming from the speakers, the audience, or the world outside, was indeed consequential.