The Sound of the Avant-Garde

Timothy D. Taylor

Music Department
Denison University
taylort@cc.denison.edu

 

Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

 

Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in The Wireless Imagination as an attempt to compile a collection of “first utterances” rather than a Last Word on the subject of abstract sound. But these utterances are so disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for something a little less pomo and a little more old-fashioned: coherence. Kahn and Whitehead write, “Rather than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a hat, we have chosen to ground Wireless Imagination in the more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic resonances among the above existing histories, strangely dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear” (x).

 

Fair enough. Some of the essays are indeed historical and useful (Mel Gordon’s “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)”; Mark E. Cory’s “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art”; Christopher Schiff’s “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism”). But what’s wrong with theorizing? Perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from sprawling theory: there’s theory all over the place, and some of it makes little sense. A few essays indulge in the kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most ardent theory fetishist (Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth”; Gregory Whitehead’s “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art”; Allen S. Weiss’s “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud’s Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu“). I do not mean to make a blanket attack against theoretical work. The problem with these essays is not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as non-significant as the abstract sounds they’re ostensibly about.

 

Probably the most interesting portions of The Wireless Imagination are those that detail someone’s response to sound. Alexander Graham Bell worked with his father to try to find a written language for non-language sounds; the young Bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to “say,” “How are you, grandmamma?”; Thomas Edison believed that each person has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a machine to record these “life units” exiting dead bodies as they lay in their coffins.

 

Nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose inventions. Velimir Khlebnikov, in “The Radio of the Future,” presages Muzak: “During periods of intense hard work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great buildings, these sounds [“la” and “ti,” or the pitches A and B] can be broadcast by Radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously” (21). Khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by Mel Gordon on Russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of zaum, Alexei Kruchenykh’s “language” that incorporated all kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of schizophrenics. Khlebnikov’s zaum was meant to transcend all cultural barriers. Additionally, Khlebnikov invented a “universal alphabet,” in which each phoneme (just 25 in all) causes a certain emotional response, and is linked synesthetically with a color. So the phoneme “P,” for example, causes “explosion, release of pressure,” and is related to the color black outlined in red. Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) tells of a deboned head stored in a liquid called aqua micans. This head can be reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a connection with the head through the cone.

 

It seemed as though life once more inhabited this recently immobile remnant of faces. Certain muscles appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all directions, while others periodically went into action as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in particular moved with wild agility.(80)

 

Still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to record sound make fascinating reading, even if the contributors’ discussions of these attempts aren’t always satisfying. Alexander Graham Bell seemed to be fixated on the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life to working with his father on an attempt to notate in written symbols all kinds of sounds. Co-editor Douglas Kahn offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by Bell, describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this “language”:

 

The members of the audience were invited to make any sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my father. It was just as easy for him to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a sound that formed an element of human speech. Volunteers were called to the platform, where they uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my father studied their mouths and attempted to express in symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had observed. I was then called in, and the symbols were presented to me to interpret; and I could read in each symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. I remember on one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. They recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.(86)

 

Bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph but that Edison beat him to it. If Bell hadn’t invented the telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the foregoing excerpt.

 

There are some lacunae. The aestheticization of abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook politics, or real people “on the ground.” For example, co-editor Kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from Apollinaire’s 1916 “The Moon King” which is redolent of the kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting devices have facilitated (as Jacques Attali potently observes in his 1985 Noise):

 

The flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestrial life. Each key activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we were hearing a Japanese countryside. The wind soughed in the trees--a village was probably there, because I heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the spray of an icy waterfall. Then another key pressed down, we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I heard geysers spewing hot water. Then this wonderful morning continued in sweet Tahiti. Here we are at the market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New Cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek. You could also hear the Chinese selling tea, coffee, butter, and cakes. The sound of accordions and Jew's harps.(23)

 

The authors offer this excerpt as an example of Apollinaire’s “wirelessness,” his interest in abstracted sound, but don’t examine the issues of power and surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate sounds from all over the world.

 

But the most disturbing omissions concern gender. Some of the material presented is so outrageous that it would seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving considerations of gender. For example, the first essay, Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” avoids inclusive language, and at one point adds “the other” gender as an afterthought, as though Grivel at the last minute imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. Like so much French theory, Grivel’s essay is quote proof: “Symbol ‘become life,’ that is, substance, of a being articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently applied upon the listener” (33). Grivel describes Villiers del l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future (1886), which features a “fictitious” Edison who constructs a woman with two phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (An excerpt from del l’Isle-Adam’s story follows Grivel’s essay.) Grivel’s consideration of Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine parler” of 1892 likewise skirts gender considerations. Schwob’s story tells of a frightening device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are played by a woman, who is, in Grivel’s words, “servant to the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous ‘mechanical mouth’.” Another example is Allen S. Weiss’s discussion of Antonin Artaud in his essay, “Radio, Death, and the Devil.” Weiss, like most of the contributors to this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing vehicle–evidence of the “wireless imagination”–but does little more. His discussion of Artaud’sIl n’y a plus de firmament (c. 1932) describes “an archetypically Artaudian figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical instrument”:

 

Then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully, always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately strike with drumbeats.(297)

 

So, what is the relationship between sound and gender in such passages? Sound, it seems, can stand in for heterosexual sex, something that women “possess” and can “give” to men, or something that men violently take from, or beat out of, women.

 

All of the book’s discussions of gender serve as yet another example of the ways in which Western culture has mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case “abstract” sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence perpetrated against women. Or ethnic minorities, or whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to attack. This flexible binarism of violence has worked all too well throughout Western history, whether the target of the drumsticks was a woman’s belly or Rodney King’s head. But it goes without comment in all of these essays.

 

More satisfying considerations of the gendered nature of sound as it appears in these pages might have been possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that sound, including musical sound, signifies: here’s where the subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. Hardly any musicologist deals with this issue (and most contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers are hopeless–unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned with social and performance issues), so it would seem that the range of professions practiced by the authors of these ten essays would include someone who would tackle the problem. All of the writers and thinkers whose work is chronicled in the pages of The Wireless Imagination attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. But what does it “express,” if anything? Some of the primary texts under consideration address the issue. Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s No Music (1913), for example, begins, “Music cannot express the essence of sensation. One never knows what music is about . . .” (162). De Chirico and the other Surrealists turned against music because of their disaffection with first Erik Satie (1866-1925) and then Georges Auric (1899-1983, a Parisian composer of “Les Six”), and Christopher Schiff writes that the Surrealist movement eventually attempted to do without music altogether. But de Chirico’s writings on musical signification go without close examination. Arseni Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: “Of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization” (245). Perhaps. The authors of these essays fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger cultural and political concerns and to the other arts. Frances Dyson’s insightful essay–perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book–on John Cage comes closest to such a discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he unfortunately discounts): that Cage, in his emancipation of sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in Western bourgeois culture, despite Cage’s systematic critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture.

 

The translations of historic texts that aren’t often available are welcome; many of these form an important companion to Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos (1973). Included are de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Lamentations of Edison,” from L’Eve Future (1886); Alberto Savinio’s “Give me the Anathema, Lascivious Thing” (1915); Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923); F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La Radia (1933); and Artaud’s To have done with the Judgment of God (1947). These are important to have in recent translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine further in explicating the myriad ways Western culture has attempted to deal with sound as sound.

 

In sum, it’s about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the “avant-garde.” But as a starting point or “first word” on the subject, we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an effective weapon of political domination.