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INTRODUCTION
Few months before the beginning of a new century it is necessary to
recall the aesthetical possibilities of sound poetry how it is elaborated
since World War II in Germany. Bevor starting my considerations about
German sound poetry I want to define this special art form of the 20th
century:
Sound poetry is in my definition a poetic art which avoids using the
word as a mere vehicle of sense or meaning and tries to compose phonetic
poems or sound texts in a methodical autonomy in accordance with modes
of expressing subjective intentions, which require an acoustic realization
from the side of the poet.
With good reason sound poets use the term ''composition'' to characterize
their texts indicating the close connection between speech and music.
Phonetic poems can develop their special effect only by the musical
gesture of expression of the voice – namely loudness level, sound,
tone colour, tone pitch, speed of speech.
Sound poems are not a hybrid of speech and music, they are both speech
and music or speech music.
In the following I am going to give a short survey of the post war history
of sound poetry focusing on few sound poets like Gerhard Rühm,
Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior, Franz Mon and Carlfriedrich Claus. My reflections
are directed on the standards of the acoustic art which will be continued
and extended in the 21st century. The development of the recording techniques
of the last five decades have expanded the aesthetic possibilities of
sound poetry without doubt. On one hand the tape recorders of the fifties
allowed to cut up sounds of the speech into micro-particles, to combine
them again in multi-layers and integrate them into musical structures.
Contemporary harddisk recording and sampling techniques have enlarged
the possibilities of „composing“ sound texts. Therefore there
are frontier crossings to music, radio play and radio art, these special
art forms are mutually stimulating the development of acoustical art.
On the other hand poets endeaver to explore the form of speech and the
"alchemy of words" on a sheet of paper and on stage without
using any technical aids, to demonstrate the flexibility of the letters,
of the words, and of the microparticles of speech. The genius of such
sound poets like Jaap Blonk will develop in my opinion sound poetry
much more than any technical aids, although the technique of sampling
will offer a lot of new aspects of composing sound texts.
CHAPTER 1
The first elements of sound poetry, namely children’s language,
counting rhymes, spoonerism, tongue twisters, spells, fluency exercises,
pseudo- and artificial languages, glossolalia, sound symbolism, imitation
of animal’s voices, and onomatopeia will be further elements of
sound texts. The fascination which magic spells, onomatopeia and „language
of birds“ have on poets, can be noticed in the texts of many sound
poets who took up the tradition of this popular poetry. Even in the
latest performances of various sound poets onomatopeia takes a high
value.
In the fifties and sixties Ernst Jandl often made use of onomatopeia
and sound symbolism: The phonetic poem "schtzgrm" („The
trenches“) of about 1956 is among his best known poems, which he
has called a mixed form between word and sound poem.
slide: Ernst Jandl: schtzgrmm (1956/66)
By leaving out the vowels in the word "Schützengraben"
you can see and hear that in the reductive form "schtzngrmm"
he achieved a hardening of the words, thus confronting a potentially
semantic relevant sequence of elements (schtzgrmm) with a purely sound-repeating
sequence (t-t-t-t).
The consonants respectively the sequences of consonants (sch, tz,tzn,
gr, grm, t-t-t) which are not selected from the multitude of the consonantal
stock of the German language but from the general direction of the word
alone, are by means of repetition and variation arranged to reach the
aim to imitate the din and yelling of a battle. The consonantal onomatopoeia
imitates the sounds of a battle respectively of an attack from the view
of a trench. Jandl's concept of composition and his voice realize an
exactness in his imitation to such a high degree that the "terrible
absurdity of the war“ can be heard. But the listener must meet
the requirements to decode the sound group - above all the sound sequence
of t-tt in the last line as "Tod" or "tot", as death
or dead.
I am going to play the version produced by the BBC London in 1966:
slide / track : Ernst Jandl: Schützengraben
Onomatopeia is one of the first and main elements of sound poetry. Even
in the imitation of the typical sound combinations of dialects to be
found in Gerhard Rühm’s „Viennese phonetic poems“
onomatopeia does occur, although Rühm has also pushed ahead the
dissociation of the word. Only few German sound poets have renounced
onomatopeia. Mainly the representatives of concrete poetry like Franz
Mon gave up this element of sound poetry.
CHAPTER 2
Since the beginning of the history of German sound poetry artificial
and pseudo-languages have attracted the interest of sound poets. Paul
Scheerbart, Raoul Hausmann, Hans Carl Artmann and others have invented
their own idiom or private speech.
While Gerhard Rühm, Franz Mon, and Carlfriedrich Claus push ahead
the dissociation of the word and the phonetic material, Oskar Pastior
free himselve from the semantics of the word without gaining ground
in the innermost parts of the phonetic material.
Oskar Pastior is among those poets who have devoted themselves to the
work with and at the speech and who work for the boundlessness of speech
dealing with the "alchemy of the word" (Ball) and making an
appeal to the reader's or listener's imagination and creativity - against
all norms and rules of poetry.
Concerning the specific treatment of the speech Oskar Pastior shows
an elective affinity with Velimir Chlebnikov and authors of the Viennese
group. In his collections of poems entitled "The Krimgothic Fan.
Songs and Ballads" - the title of which alludes to the language
of the Gothic tribe of the Taurus - Pastior makes use of his idiom.
The "Krimgothic language" is Pastior's private speech, a speech
material of various origins, covering the whole speech area of Central
Europe, contains many neologisms, and is mixed-up and varied by the
author, thus giving the words a blurred and even an ambiguous meaning.
Particular poems like ''The ballad of the defective cable'' can be decoded
easily:
slide: Oskar Pastior: Ballade vom defekten Kabel“ (1978)
Here Pastior pours out his anger about the technical bad luck. His swearing
and complaining are culminating in his appeal to killing. Towards the
end of the poem the lamentation about God’s calf or better about
the defect speech is resumed.
German sound poetry is here in my opinion on a high level. In other
languages like the French there are also sound poets using artificial
languages. Christian Prigent used it in his sound poem ''Liste des langues
que je parle''.
In his "Sonet-burgers" and "Anagram poems" of 1983
and 1985 Pastior continued to develop his alchemy of words or better
his genetics of speech. For his Sonetburger-poems Pastior took his Petrarca-translation
as his model. According to the general directions of a group called
OULIPO he acted according to two rules: Firstly: Every verse consists
of a certain number of characters and spaces per line. Secondly: Every
poem must be written in the form of a sonnet. While writing Pastior
discovered the anagram. So the "Sonetburgers" are sonnets
and anagram poems at the same time. They explore the room (which means
here battlefield or arena) between certainty and uncertainty, between
semantic significance and semantic insignificance.
The reader can find references to semantics in Pastior's poems, as he
doesn't disintegrate the word completely. However the play with the
material of the speech is directed not only from the meaning of the
word but also from the musical parameter as we can see in the "Sonetburger-poem"
"der bug hat zwei fübe":
slide / track: Oskar Pastior: "der bug hat zwei fübe"
(1983)
CHAPTER 3
After 1945 the authors of the Viennese group („Wiener Gruppe“)
established connections to the tradition of the modernity. To bring
up poetry to the level of consciousness of painting and music means
for Gerhard Rühm, to expand the idea of material and the possibilities
of poetry. Material of poetry means for Gerhard Rühm not only the
single word and the surface of the paper, but mainly the individual
speech sound. Rühm is writing:
"the spoken word is a product of sounds (vowels) and noise (consonants)
and beyond it means a term, which is reduced in the sound compositions."
(Rühm 1968, p. 11)
Musical parameters like tempo, tone colour, tone pitch and loudness
level are integrated in the creation of the sound texts or phonetic
texts. In his "phonetic poems" Rühm lays stress on the
emotional, expressive content of the speech sounds. A way of speaking
that supports the emotional content of a combination of sounds, Rühm
calls "sound gestures". It attributes a kind of communication
character to such a way of speaking, because it can inform us about
the psychic mood or disposition and the situation of the speaker. The
aesthetic value of the "expressions" of the year 1952/53 is
based on the play between construction, that means deliberate artistic
work, and the unconscious impulse of the speech gestures." (Rühm
1988, p. 13)
slide: Gerhard Rühm: expressionen 1-12 (1952/53)
Rühm's momentarily flaring up "expressions" show such
a brevity in their duration that associations of content cannot come
into being. Rühm's aim is to perform speech material and not creating
an emotional atmosphere.
CHAPTER 4
Mon’s concept of sound poetry is important for the future of sound
poetry in four aspects:
First: In order to give the German language again a chance to grow and
to rejuvenate again after the time of Nazism and today in the time of
neo-liberalism, it must - according to Mon - be reflected in poetry,
that is to say the language had to become material again. Material is
according to Mon:
"all levels forming the speech from the phonetic material to the
articulatory, verbal, syntactical and semantical structure." (Mon
1968, p. 433)
Second: The function of poetry is according to Franz Mon to make speech
to come into view as speech, that is to say to stop the communicative
function of the speech. In the phonetic destruction lies the chance
to renew the creative work of the poet. Important for Mon is the origin
of speech: the process of articulation, the various parameters, which
form our speech. Mon is writing:
"Qualities of the sound of speech: tone colour, tone pitch together
with the melodious gliding alone of the voice volume of sound with dynamic
accentuation and the order of the flow of the speech." (Mon 1970,
p. 102)
Mon wants to make the listener realize the procedures of micro-articulation
and feel the physilogical nature of speech and meaning. Of importance
are the reflecting effects of the speech, which are initiated with the
listener in the act of listening. How does speech take place?
Third: Mon‘s texts are not based on single sounds, vowels or consonants,
but on the so called sound dyades. These are the smallest phonetic units
which at the same time are the simplest form of a syllable. Mon is writing:
"The sounds form a gliding articulation chain between the extreme
poles of the vowel sound and sharp consonant explosives. The respiration
and the articulation, the coarticulation of adjoining sounds, cause
assimilations, which according to the neighbouring sounds show a different
appearence. This process influences "modifications, shifting reflection,
bursting of the material of articulation" and reveals traces of
meaning, an "aura" of meaning." (Mon 1970, p. 103)
Fourth: Franz Mon is legitimating his radical form of sound poetry by
refusing to make use of linear application of the speech. This closing
one's mind against the functioning of literature is also a moment of
engagement against the existing, against the automating perception.
The "shock of the incomprehensible" is to irritate the automating
course of life. Mon is writing:
"speech, which turns back to poetry, is an attempt to catch the
most obvious, that was forgotten in the complicated and exhausting process
of speech. Poetry is not exhausted in it, but it is searching for it,
it needs the primitive material experience." (Mon 1959, p. 29f.)
I think that it is necessary for every young sound poet to feel this
„primitive material experience“ furthermore, today and in
the future.
CHAPTER 5
While Mon’s work of sound poetry is rather small, the production
of sound poems takes up an important part in Carlfriedrich Claus’s
work.In the history of German sound poetry he undoubtedly holds the
first rank, being almost unrivalled in his radical exclusiveness. In
Carlfriedrich Claus's creations sounds of speech no longer appear in
connection of the communicative language of the speech which intends
to procure verbal information, but it appears in the context of autonomous
sound events or sound processes that are meant to arouse the listener's
sensibility for plasticity and the colour of speech.
Claus’s concept of sound poetry includes several aspects which
might be of interest also for listeners of the future:
First: As Claus was interested in the possibilities of certain religions
how he could bring about - with the help of sounds and sound impulses
- certain mind-expansions respectively psychical and physical changes,
he used certain religious exercises - that is the unarticulated yells
and shrieks of the shamanism, the non-verbal murmur formulas of the
lamas in Tibet etc. – in his first sound texts to lead himselve
(and the listener) to ecstatic dimensions or in silence. At the same
time physilogical processes are in the body changing the blood circulation
in the brain for example.
Second: The work of art is for Claus a starting point for an experiment
on one's own body. The sound processes require the listener's own initiative
if he wants to take such sound processes as an impulse for speech exercises
for himself by duplicating the performed articulation processes intensively
and in full concentration. These procedures can extend the sphere of
experience in an unimaginable way. So for instance contacts to the world
around us and to the open nature can be intensified with the help of
articulating in the open country. As a participant the listener has
a chance of duplicating and perceiving the articulation and its initial
stage renewdly.
Third: The sound texts and speech exercises of the fifties and nineties
are based on the idea of a dialectical relation of the vehicles of information.
Claus says:
''Writing is not only a vehicle of information. Writing itself - the
vehicle itself - transmits signals, structural information. At the same
time I understood: The same is true for the spoken language. The sounds,
too, transmit messages of their own under and above the semantical threshold."
By intensifying the material signals of single sounds which are used
in the daily act of speaking - without being noticed into exact processes
of articulation, he works out those "unconscious communicative
processes" which are present subliminal in conversation and which
shock and dismay the receiver. The existence of emotional magnetic fields
of sympathy and antipathy become clear; shocking processes unknown to
the speaker - are laid open in the listener. The activating of nonverbal
processes in the sound processes is exposing the unknown; the speech
organs thus become organs of perception and hearing. Another aspect
which is normally overlooked can be stated in the sound processes: that
is the quasimusical aspect which is already present in the natural speech,
but by destroying the natural speech the disclosure of the quasi-musical
structures is even increased.
The speech sounds have been taken out of their role as a vehicle for
semantic (grammatical, stylistic) information and they are now integrated
into new acoustical no-longer respectively not-yet structures of speech
or systems of speech into "music". Ernst Bloch's "music-philosophy"
which Claus got to know in Leipzig in the fifties had a strong influence
on him.
Claus's sound poetic work of the years 1993 and 1996 called "Lautaggregat"
(something like ''Sound Set'') and „Basale Sprechoperationsräume“
(something like ''Rooms of Basic Speech Operations'') produced for the
Studio of Acoustic Art at the West German Radio Cologne respectively
for the Bavarian Broadcasting Service Munich fulfills the musical claim
to sound poetry. These speech operations have been realized in dummy
head stereophony.
Claus’s ''Rooms of Basic Speech Operations'' consists of seventeen
recordings of sound processes which Claus has improvised from 1990 to
1994. The first part is a one-recording-session. In part 2 and 3 he
used the multi-layer-technique to listen to several recordings at the
same time and the method of dummy head stereophony to expand the listening
rooms. Carlfriedrich Claus and Bernhard Jugel worked together in realizing
this 54 minutes long piece which was broadcasted on June 28, 1996. In
1997 the composer Ernst Horn and Bernhard Jugel have made a remix of
''Rooms of Basic Speech Operations'' and have remixed the recording
material shortening and structuring the sound text. As listening gives
you a better idea of what I call ''musical structures of sound poetry'',
I want to invite you to listen to an excerpt of this piece:
Carlfriedrich Claus, Ernst Horn, Bernhard Jugel: ''Basale Sprech-Operationsräume.
Remix'' (1997)
Summary
1. Sound poetry doesn‘t give up the first elements of his art form.
Furthermore it uses the aesthetical possibilities of onomatopeia and
artificial languages.
2. The function of sound poetry is to make speech to come into view
as speech. Sound poetry makes the listener realize the procedures of
micro-articulation and feel the physilogical nature of speech and meaning.
3. Poetry needs the primitive material experience in future.
4. With the help of sound and sound impulses sound poetry causes special
mind expansions respectively psychical and physical changes.
5. The work of art is a starting point for an experiment on one’s
own body. Sound texts require the listener’s own initiative duplicating
and perceiving the articulation and its initial stage renewdly to extend
the sphere of experience in an unimaginable way.
6. With the help of today’s recording techniques sound poems transmutes
to the pure form of speech music.
Bibliographic Notes:
Claus, Carlfriedrich: Notiz zu "Bewusstseinstätigkeit
im Schlaf", in: Lautpoesie. Eine Anthologie. Obermichelbach 1987,
Textheft, o. Pag.
Jandl, Ernst: Laut und Luise. Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau 1966
Mon, Franz: artikulationen. Pfullingen 1959
Mon, Franz: An eine Säge denken, in: Akzente. München 1968,
15. Jg., S. 429-436
Mon, Franz: Literatur im Schallraum. Zur Entwicklung der phonetischen
Poesie, in: ders.: Texte Über Texte. Neuwied und Berlin 1970, S.
102-115
Pastior, Oskar: Der krimgotische Fächer. Erlangen 1978
Pastior, Oskar: sonetburger. Berlin 1983
Rühm, Gerhard: zu meinen auditiven texten, in: Neues Hörspiel.
Essays, Analysen, Gespräche. Hrsg. von Klaus Schöning. Frankfurt/Main
1970, S. 46-57
Rühm, Gerhard: Lautdichtung - Geschichte und Gegenwart (II). Manuskript
einer Sendung des Senders Freies Berlin, 20.6.73
Rühm, Gerhard: grundlagen des neuen theaters, in: ders.: TEXT-BILD-MUSIK.
ein schau- und lesebuch. Wien 1984, S. 11-20
Rühm, Gerhard: botschaft an die zukunft. gesammelte sprechgedichte.
Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988
Dr. Christian Scholz,
Weinbergstr. 11, D-90587 Obermichelbach Born in January 5th, 1949, in
Leutershausen, Bavaria, Germany.
Christian Scholzs holds a master's degree in German Language and Literature
and in 1988 received his doctorate degree. His dissertation became the
three-volume- work published by Gertraud Scholz Verlag, "Untersuchungen
zur Geschichte und Typologie der Lautpoesie" (Investigations of the
history and typology of sound poetry, book: 1989; CD-ROM: 1999). He
has edited various poetry anthologies and has been the author of a number
of journal articles and of radio documentaries (DeutschlandRadio Berlin,
Bayerischer Rundfunk Munich) about sound poetry. He has produced three
CDs of sound poetry ("Lautpoesie. Eine Anthologie" (2 CDs), "Bobeobi.
Lautpoesie") and is currently preparing a sound poetry anthology (book
and CD) which will be published by Edition Urs Engeler, Basel/Weil am
Rhein, in spring 2000. He teaches German Language and Literature, Social
Policy and History in a grammar school ("Gymnasium"). |
