| The relationship between radio art and sound poetry constitutes the
main subject of the following report. This seems to me a fascinating
subject, for it is possible to show the importance that the radio medium
has had for the development of sound poetry and the indelible influence
it has had in the evolution of radio art forms.
By “sound poetry” we mean, in keeping with the postulates
of, among others Henri Chopin in his book “Poesie Sonore Internationale”
(De. Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1979), the poetry that arises from the
interaction between the voice, working on verbal contents, and the electronic
audio technique. It is true that, partially because of the mediation
of this technology and partially because of of the artistic principles
that link these movements to those of other spheres of artistic experimentation
in the second half of the present century, the result of many of the
works we are dealing with here lose all contact with the intelligibility
of a text, and it is equally true that its roots are to be found in
the first Avant-Garde movements: Futurism, Dada, Surrealism.
This, in relation to the subject we are to deal with, we have to recall
the words of Henri Chopin’s aforementioned book:” To us, all
the phonetic poets -Pierre Albert-Birot, Hugo Ball, Raoul Haussmann,
Kurt Schwitters, Camille Bryen, the Lettristes, etc.- are comparable
to silent film actors, those great actors who were unable to adapt to
sound films”. In a lapidary manner, he concludes:”With the
exception of Altagot, and of François Dufrêne, none of
the poets prior to 1950 has been able to hear his own voice” (p.
41).
However, it must be remarked that, whether the above statements are
slightly exaggerated or not, the arrival of the tape recorder brought
about, from this point onwards the possiblity, basically, of pondering
on one’s own interpretation and performance, now kept as an object
as a concrete sound or a sequence of the same, kept securely on a tape.
This made it possible to perfect and refine- to an extent that had hitherto
not been expected- the relationship between the performer and the microphone,
his complicity with this technological tool that has since become a
veritable instrumental appendix, capable of multiplying the smallest
vocal gestures and of receiving those microsonic universes that had
hitherto been inaudible.
Schwitter’s role as a precursor
We insist, in case this has not been made sufficiently clear, that sound
poets nowadays are indebted to the phonetic poetry of the first Avant-Garde
movements, just as one of those artists, the German Karl Schwitters,
succeeded in providing us, in the thirties, the first influences -structural,
in this case- of those fields of radio art. The first of these facets
is that of Schwitters the collage-creator, who made two-dimensional
visual collages -presented, to all effect, as paintings-, for whose
confetcion he made use of all type of derelict objects: tram tickets,
bits of newspaper...Klaus Sch^ning has also astutely pointed out the
importance of this practice in the context of radio “collage”,
while Hanne Bergius, in a long text on the subject, has pointed out
Schwitter’s interest in taking words out of their context of associations,
so as to free them “from their own poison”, dematerialise
them and free them from their form. (...) This is precisely what his
critical attitude was all about: the transformation of social demands
into art through the re-valuing of derelict objects.” (H. Bergius:
“Kurt Scwitters, “the creation of something new from derelict
objects”, catalogue of the Kurt Schwitters exposition, ed.IVAM,
Valencia,1995, p. 61).
The second of the facets is directly linked to the practice mentioned
above, for here the artist began to work with language as a “found
object”, in a type of poetry that destroys the semantic content
precisely by using the “debris” of this language as if it
were simply another object that had been thrown out. Scwitters thus
feels totally at ease to work from his simplest aggregates, the phonemes,
or even from letters as the ultimate indivisible entity of “speech”.
His phonetic poetry was creted to be declaimed, and the most finished
instance of his de-constructive tendency (obviously, “avant la
lettre”), with the use of phonemes as practically musical notes,
is to be found in his “Ursonate”. As is well known, this is
his most ambitious phonetic work, initiated in 1921 and published in
its definitive form -virtually as a score- in 1932 in his own magazine
Merz.
Loudspeaker culture
As mentioned above, Chopin spoke that the impossibility of becoming
familiar with one’s own recorded voice didn’t allow those
“historical” authors to perfect their performing abilities..
He also likewise remarks, on the evidence of the the historical recordings
extant, on Marinetti’s strident style, Albert-Birot’s feeble
delivery, Schwitter’s monotony and the grating voice of Hausmann.
It is obvious that the appearance of the tape recorder and the technical
refinement of microphones jointly caused a revolution in the expressive
possibilities of the most experimental poets as well as in the expressiveness
of a medium such as the radio.. Since both depended on audio technology,
sound poetry and radio art have always been mediated by it.
In the case of sound poetry, these possibilities of the microphone -which
makes it possible to bring the smallest things within the ear’s
reach- and of the tape recorder -which can allow the unlimited reproduction
of a recording, along with editing and transformation with the help
of other technological devices that can vary the speed, filter or cause
echoes- were of vital importance for going beyond the phonetic poem
composed of letters, as is the case with the “Meganeumas”
invented by Gil Wolman in 1951, defined by Chopin as “a kind of
poems in “expectorations”, without a verbal content or a semantics.”
(Op.cit. page 43).
In this way, sound poetry was born immersed in what we call the “loudspeaker
culture”. If by “culture” we mean “commonplace”,
which could be linked with the agora, the public square, the mass media
as well as, in a metaphorical sense, the boundaries of a “shared
sentimentality”, we are here referring to this double reality,
a completely new one which is given its main social legitimacy by the
radio. Nowadays all acoustic information that is genuinely generated
by our civilisation comes to us via a loudspeaker. It is through loudspeakers
that we are told about the arrival time of a train or plane, we are
soothed with functional music as we are shopping in a department store,
we are placed in a type of artificial placenta with the insistent rhythms
of a disco or a night club.
Among the symbiotic sound poets who worked on these new audio techniques
towards the late fifties, mention should be made of Bernard Heidsieck
-in whose work editing has been a kind of writing, the page being an
audio tape- François Dufrêne and his “crirythmes”
on which the author has remarked upon the superiority of the tape over
the page, or Henri Chopin, the creator of a style that relies on a kind
of musicalisation of sounds made with the tongue, lips, or with resonators,
all of which were electronically transformed at the French artist’s
will.
Text-sound composition:sound poetry for the radio
A very particular case of “sound poetry” which, as such, warrants
a distinctive comment here, is that of “text-sound composition”.
The reason for this is that the authors of this current are more obviously
linked to the creation from within of the possibilities of the radio
medium than the authors we have been mentioning, and perhaps for this
reason, they have created works in which the text - used as a sorce
of sound by being manipulated by technology and delivery, though also
taken at times in its signifying capacity- is freely integrated with
electronic music, sound effects and recordings of sounds from the real
world, although the latter are not so frequent as to consider such works
as “soundscapes” or “new horspiel.”
The “text-sound composition” has another particularity: as
a phenomenom, it is essentially based on Sweden. When Yvind Fahlstram
published a “Manifesto on Concrète Poetry” in 1953,
he made the first steps for the beginning of a new type of poetry that
was specific for the radio medium. Fahlstram developed different manipulation
techniques for the tape recordings of his poems, and even a method for
reading them. In 1963, he presented his first full-length work: Birds
in Sweden, which was taken as a model by numerous Swedish artists. In
that work, Fahlstrom integrated popular music and text, which was generated
according to methods of his own that permitted the transformation of
pre-existing languages. Two years later, the composers and poets Bengt
Emil Johnson and Lars-Gunnar Bodin had the opportunity of working in
the studios of Swedish Radio and create half a dozen pieces with Steffen
Olzon as producer. The generic title of the series was semicolon. As
Bodin points out, “the department of Literature and Art (LOK) of
Swedish Radio made this type of creations essential to the medium and
an integral part of the works of art made specifically for the radio”
(L.-G. Bodin: “An introductory commentary on Swedish text-sound
compositions”, in the accompanying notes for the double CD “The
Pioneers: Five text-sound artists”, De. Phono Sweden, 1992, page
5).
In the spring of 1967, this Department organised a public performance,
broadcasted live from the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, where the
movement was formally consolidated. The works broadcasted were by the
people mentioned above and by Ake Hodell. Subsequently there were also
works by Ilmar Laaban and Sten Hanson.
In any case, the name hadn’t been born yet. It was in autumn 1967,
at an international conference celebrated in Holland, attended by representatives
of public European radios and by artists, when Johnson and Bodin coined
the term “text-sound composition” which, with some qualifications,
could be translated into Spanish as “composición sonoro-textual”.
For the Swedish authors mentioned above, the term chosen was deliberately
neutral and was to be aplied to a large range of productions, from “sound
poetry” to electronic compositions that made use of the human voice,
such as the aforementioned “Song of the Adolescents” by K.
Stockhausen. Lars-Gunnar Bodin has gone as far as to propose the term
“genre”, as if there actually existed the objective conditions
to speak in such terms of “text-sound composition”. In any
case, we must emphasize that the term has been usually applied to a
series of pieces created within a particular generation of authors and
within a particular country, though it wasn’t rescued either then
or later to denote works that, however close aesthetically, belong to
different places and different artistic groups.
Electronic audio formats for writing
This epigraph has no other meaning than the application on the part
of sound poets of a criterion we’ve mentioned before: that of considering
the audio tape as a support for writing. Consequently, the editing of
the tape -not only the mix but also the cutting of tape with scissors,
which brings us close to William Burroughs’ “cut up”-
has to be considered a gesture of writing within this new format. Even
though other gestures might include the actions leading to the creation
of these sound writings with the help of technology, which is well exemplified
by the works of Chopin and Dufrêne.
Within this scheme of things , it is hardly surprising that, apart from
those included in the “Text-Sound-Composition” movement, some
important sound poets have been invited to create works specifically
intended for the radio; or that, in a different manner, those poets
mentioned above realised that the radio was the ideal means for the
diffusion of their ideas. It must be made clear though that we are not
referring to a mere job of divulgation on the part of the radio of those
works that were not created within it as was the case, at the time,
of the work done by Fernando Millán and Javier Maderuelo in their
series “Experimentation and Phonetic Music”, broadcast on
RNE Radio 2. In reality it is much closer to what was done on the same
channel -now known as Radio Clásica- when Bartolomé Ferrando,
making use of a multitrack system, created a series of works for Ars
Sonora, or to Enzo Minarelli’s 1992 creation “Autopoem, auto-radio
and self-destruction”, presented in Madrid that same year at the
“Ciudades Invisibles” International Meeting of Radio Art.
German radio stations have been much more active, even though mention
should be made of the performances made by the aforementioned Ferrando
and a group of improvising musicians for the Berna DRS in the mid-nineties,
which were later recorded on a CD called “Red!”. As for the
German radio stations, the standout has been the WDR in Cologne, as
in so many other fields of Radio Art. Through their Studio Akustische
Kunst (Studio of Acoustic Art) managed by Klaus Schoning, it has produced
Max Ernst’s “Repetitionen”(1989) and a series of works
by the German concrète poet Franz Mon, dated between 1973(“da
du der bist”) and 1996(Von der Fahrplonen brauch...”). Or
works by the Austrians Konrad Bayer and Gerhard Rihm (“Sie werden
mir zum R%tsel, mein Vater”, created in 1958, produced in1968)
or Henri Chopin’s 8-part audiopoem “Le corpsbis” (1985).
(For further information about such productions, see the publication
“Sound Journey” by the Studio Akaustische Kunst, which includes
references of the works produced between 1968 and 1997; Chopin’s
work has, incidentally, been recently released in the the CD “Le
corpsbis & Co.”)
As I believe has been made clear in this report, the relationship between
radio art and sound poetry has yielded more quality than quantity, but
has nonetheless been important for the mutual development of both artistic
areas, which have frequently been one and the same. It would have been
tiresome to go over the use of phonetics, the noise of speech in works
within such radio genres as radio drama and soundscapes, which is indicative
of the influence exercised by sound poets on the radio as a whole. We
must thus take leave of this subject which will surely warrant a deeper
and more thorough analysis in the future.
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