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Kurt Schwitters: “Third Part: Scherzo—Trio—Scherzo”

From the work Ursonate (1922-32)

A crucial landmark in 20th-century sonic art, Kurt Schwitters‘ Ursonate is likely much better known by poets than by musicians. It is perhaps the most famous exemplar of sound poetry, an explicitly performative genre of verbal art that operates in a domain between conventional poetic recitation and the nonreferential expression of music. In the words of contemporary poet Steve McCaffery, the object of sound poetry is the “liberation and promotion of the phonetic and subphonetic features of language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavors.”

The sound poem was very much in the air in the early 20th century, to the extent that Schwitters’ Ursonate represents not so much a pioneering work of the genre but rather a kind of classical apex of its mature form. This is signaled even by the title of the work, which references the musical genre of the sonata, on whose carefully balanced form Schwitters’ poem was deliberately modeled.

The Ursonate was developed over a ten-year period from 1922 to 1932, the year in which its “score” was first published. Schwitters’ score consists of a precisely notated invented language complete with indications for tempo and volume. Like a musical score, Schwitters’ notation leaves much to the discretion of the performer, and many interpretations of the work have been made over the years. Schwitters’ own performance of the Ursonate resurfaced in 1992 through the hands of the Dutch composer Dick Raaymakers. The date of the performance is unknown.

The complete Schwitters performance, in its 40-minute duration, is a unique and powerful experience, though not for the faint of heart.

March 06, 2011, 7:44am

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Jenny Johnson: “Example in a Single Voice”

From the album Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn’s Experiments in Extension of Human Vocal Range (1956)

Traumatized by his experience at the front in World War I and deeply disturbed by the oppressive employment of the voice in Nazi propaganda, the German voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962) developed in the 1950s a unique approach to vocal pedagogy that sought to help singers discover their voice as a means of therapeutic self-realization. Wolfsohn’s method was inspired by the belief that all people, barring physical disability, were capable of using their voices to create a wider range of sound than is customarily thought possible. He dismissed the conventional division of human vocal ranges, arguing that such designations are meaningless if singers can be trained to produce over a nine-octave range. (He also rejected the idea of a significant difference in capabilities of vocal production between men and women.)

Wolfsohn’s experiments are documented on this 1956 release, part of a remarkable series of albums of experimental and electronic music put out by Folkways Records from the 50s to the 80s. (These albums have since been digitized and are available as reasonably priced downloads from Smithsonian Folkways, complete with the original liner notes.) On this record one can hear Wolfsohn’s singers’ remarkably extended vocal range, from a croaking mega-bass to an uncanny sopranino that resembles nothing so much as the electronic keening of the Theremin. The singers also experimented with tone production, learning to mimic the timbres of familiar instruments: one track on the album features four women singing an excerpt from a string quartet.

The record comes complete with an imprimatur in the form of an introduction by Henry Cowell, the high priest of the American musical avant-garde. In his introduction, Cowell hails the possibility not merely of vocal imitation of known timbres, but of the discovery and compositional exploitation of new timbres by the liberated voice—an ideal quite similar to that pursued contemporaneously in electronic music studios. Cowell sees Wolfsohn’s work as heralding a “modern sort of English madrigalism,” a prophecy that would be fulfilled by the radical vocal compositions of Berio, Stockhausen, and others in the 1960s. But perhaps the most direct connection to Wolfsohn’s methods is in the solo vocal work of Demetrio Stratos, whose Promethean efforts to extend the limits of his voice were rumored to have caused his early and unexpected demise.

March 03, 2011, 5:02pm

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Paul Lansky: Notjustmoreidlechatter (1988)

From the album More Than Idle Chatter (1994)

By name at least, Lansky is fairly well-known thanks to Radiohead’s track “Idioteque,” which samples his 1973 piece Mild und leise (which in turn quotes the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner).

Notjustmoreidlechatter is based on computer manipulations of human speech— specifically, the voice of Lansky’s wife reading from Jane Eyre.  While many composers have used the voice as a purely phonetic resource in contemporary music, Lansky’s composition is unusual in coupling an experimental treatment of speech with more conventional musical patterns.  It has a powerful rhythmic pulse, and the harmonic progressions suggested by the babel of voices sounds like it was borrowed from Enya.  The tension between the weirdness of the sound material and the conventionality of its use makes for a delightfully strange and beautiful piece of music.

May 07, 2009, 11:49am