Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear

Edited and introduced by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

Publication: 12 November 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7393717-1-5
Silver Press

OEI # 98–99: AURAL POETICS

edited by Michael Nardone.

With contributions by:

Raven Chacon, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Dylan Robinson, Constance DeJong, Eyvind Kang, Gail Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Damon Krukowski, Candice Hopkins + Raven Chacon, Merlin Sheldrake, Amber Rose Johnson, John Melillo, Heather Davis, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Diane Glancy, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sophie Seita, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Patrick Nickleson, Dalie Giroux, Simon Brown, Dalie Giroux + François Lemieux, Mitchell Akiyama, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Michael Nardone, Marshall Trammell, Luke Nickel, Lauren (Lou) Turner, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato, Nicholas Komodore, Lewis Freedman, Tiziana La Melia + Ellis Sam, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Alexandre St-Onge, Danny Snelson, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Raymond Boisjoly, Max Ritts, Steven Feld + Xenia Benivolski, Tom Miller, Daniel Borzutsky, Anne Bourne, and Marcus Boon.

Designed by Eller Med A, with special thanks to Marte Meling Enoksen.

Listening is Sanctuary

Hören Sie als Zuflucht

rewrite by Anne Bourne

musik texte zeitschrift für neue musik Issue 152, Cologne, Germany 2017

I was invited to perform with Pauline Oliveros in 1994 by composer James Tenney. He explained I was to meet Pauline in the stratosphere and improvise a composition with a small chamber ensemble in Toronto; a group in Paris; and Pauline and her band in Manhattan, where the empathic global assembly, connected sonically by satellite, would be viewed and heard by an audience at the Kitchen in NY. I asked Jim if there was anything he thought I should know. He said Pauline plays an accordion tuned in two different courses of just intonation. When I arrived at the small broadcast studio at University of Toronto, , I could see on screen Pauline, and her friends Stewart Dempster and David Gamper, standing behind her like two attendants. I ran my fingers along the strings of my cello a caress, a sound I thought I owned as unique, and I heard Pauline’s voice for the first time in instant recognition, ‘Ah the cello.’ At the end of the performance, I sent a message to PO through the producer ‘I want to meet you in person.’ and Pauline sent back her reply, ‘Come to New Mexico.’

I purchased a tent and a plane ticket. I could pick up the rest in Santa Fe. I had cleared my schedule recently, leaving a life of continuous concert touring, and there was something compelling about the potential to slow time down to moments. Moments of truth, moments of creating, moments of peace. I did not really know much about Bye Bye Butterfly then, only that I was drawn to PO’s strength and absolute conviction. PO was a black belt in gentle compassion. And when I arrived, silence being my most natural state, I felt I was in my natural habitat. There was limited electricity, we bathed sparingly in rainwater, we let the noise go, as if something began through listening. Starlight was within reach on Rose mountain. Our responsibilities were simple. Tai Chi in the pines. Dream into the silence. Practice listening and compose, and at the sound of the conch, come and listen to Pauline speak.

PO could define the parameters of listening like she was drawing architecture in the sky. ‘ Listen to the beginnings and the endings of sounds.’ And we would sit. And we would sing, from those places in the body that we kept secret, as if we knew of a key to a world of inclusiveness.

The idea of listening, active receptive mode, began to change the axis of composition for me. Global attention and focal attention, moving from internal to external listening, an undulation. Breathing into sound. Listening to each detail of the soundscape we had the privilege of being in, sitting on a boulder, and then with the flicker of a mirror neuron, making a sound.

Being in Pauline’s company is an experience of resonance. ‘Can you imagine the sound of all the footsteps you have ever taken?’ Footsteps that brought me to New Mexico and then to PO’s house, with IO, in New York. To be new, to receive all there is to listen too at all times.

To listen creates a beautiful space of empathy. To laugh together, even better to dissolve illusion and despair. Wasn’t the name Deep Listening a pun on the Cistern recording. And doesn’t it now exist as a sophisticated human algorithm that can be taken into any room. As any image and sound can be sent around the world telematically, dissolving political boundaries to create pictures of light and sonic wonder that can touch all beings, from the heart of PO’s technological research. I improvised telematically with PO recently. I was in Toronto with Doug van Nort at the Dispersion Lab, PO in New York at the CRAIVE Lab, Chris Chafe at Stanford in the CCRMA studio, all in cities listening. And most recently at XAvantXI in Toronto, we shared a beautiful improvisation in concert as wild and unrestrained as a lightening storm. We tenderly listened, composing a map.

In 1998, after engaging creatively together for four years, PO created the mandala score for Primordial/ Lift. We could feel the world changing. The four mandalas of the score that organize our listening and sounding, are points of departure that draw a relationship to the earth, just sub-audible, from circumambulating perspective of a sound world that radiates in mutual harmonic order. A resonance that can be listened to both inside the body and outside the earth’s atmosphere. One can wonder what did Pauline find, listening to everything it is possible to listen too at all times? A depth of love, a boundless love. What PO was becoming all along.

Is listening sanctuary?

Issue 152 of musiktexte.de 152, Pauline Oliveros tributes include:

• A truly fulfilled life. Pauline Oliveros: 1932–2016 (Geeta Dayal)

• Meta composer (Ellen Fullman)

• Across the continent (Maggi Payne)

• Getting to the bottom of things (Alvin Lucier)

• Full of enthusiasm (Christina Kubisch)

• Plugged in: About Pauline (Roger Reynolds)

• Texan Laughter (Bill Dietz)

• "What does that have to do with music?" (Brenda Hutchinson)

• Visionary and saint (Alvin Curran)

• Listening is a refuge (Anne Bourne)

• Of loneliness as a tribal leader (Diamanda Galás)

• Outstanding quality (Christian Wolff)

• Hereafter and this world with one another. Crossroads and projects with Pauline Oliveros (Johannes Goebel)

• "I let the body choose" (Gisela Gronemeyer)

• Sex as we don't know it. Future prospects of computer music ( Pauline Oliveros)

E-FLUX Journal #115 JAN 2021 - Xenia Benivolski - You Can’t Trust Music

At the Banff Centre in 2017, I attended a concert performance of A Song for Margrit, a composition by the late composer Pauline Oliveros in which the players make sounds in response to any sound they hear in the room, which can also come from the audience. The session was guided by the Toronto experimental musician Anne Bourne. Oliveros’s works, often performed communally, allude to de-skilling and a form of performance that functions “without the mediating code of musical performance history.”27 When the group of improvisors started playing, it felt like the sounds were articulating some already existing social dynamic among the musicians: hierarchies audibly and visibly emerged as the performers exchanged glances and took turns, some yielding and some interrupting. After the first set, they performed a second iteration of the improvisation, in which half of the performers were blindfolded. Without the visual communication they had relied on before, the melody changed into a softer, more collaborative rhythm. Bill Dietz and Gavin Steingo write in their article “Experiments in Civility” that “within the performing collective, the literal relations between musicians, their perception of each other’s cues and coordinations, describe an indeterminate geography in which sound becomes secondary to the intersubjective, collective execution of it.”

Musicworks ARTICLES:

• ‘Working in the Dark‘ An Interview with Frances-Marie Uitti, by Anne Bourne ‘I sketch notations. I sketch out the structure of the tree, the branches—and the leaves can float, they can blow in the wind ‘ — Musicworks Magazine #103 Spring 2009

• ’John Oswald, The making of Qui: evoking a contemporary relationship with spirit ‘ — Musicworks Magazine #98 Summer 2007

• QUI (excerpt)

  When I walked into Laurel MacDonald’s home we climbed to her third floor studio. Past the vocal room, with permanent microphone set-up, we arrive in the room where she sits with John Oswald when she records the singers for his conceptual hybrid Qui. One of many singers who have climbed the stairs, Lizzy Mahashe, born in South Africa, noted after her session, “While I was singing I felt like I was home with the cat strolling in.”

  Across town, on his third floor, John is listening to the 19 tracks recorded so far, and imaging them in his listening, to fill a space, through what will become 35 different speaker placements. The Libeskind Crystal, a steel girder chapel that deconstructs the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, will fill each day at Evensong, with sounds that evoke a contemporary relationship with spirit—Oswald’s choral feature Qui, which sings within his circadian sound installation, a time to hear for here. Named Qui, the Latin word for ‘who.’

  The musical template for Oswald’s creation is known as Qui Habitat, the Josquin des Prez Motet in 24 parts. It was composer Christopher Butterfield who, in the mid 80’s, first drew John’s attention to the possibilities of 16th C motet-form for multi-speaker sound installation.

  John writes me, “It looks like I'll be deviating quite a bit from the traditional motet-form in the final mix (or separation) of Qui.”

  Now there is a composite of 20 voices arranged by Oswald’s compositional instincts. And while his aim is to make balances appear natural, there will be no central listening vantage point. He has begun the process of separation, as he shifts the tuning of individual pitches in microtones to reference a specific tuning system, and moves the voices throughout the geometry of the imagined space, to create his sound mobile.

  It is a perfect opportunity for the choreographer and dancer in John to send sound into the room that can affect the movement of a listener. In addition to the speakers built into the architecture, Oswald has added hyper-directional speakers that you can hear only if you step into their stream of sound, and notice a fragment from the in-between moments of the Qui recording sessions. An invisible whisperer might surprise you, as you walk in, and then walk through to the next gallery.

  The collective sound of voices recorded so far, holds the heart of the many individual singers Laurel has sought out. This is not an existing trained choir. One operatic tenor is singing, but in Korean. Another tenor is female, and sang a second alto part in Zulu. Almost all are singing in mother tongues.

  Oswald sketched a list our languages, proportionate to the population who speak them in Canada. Not all of our languages will be present in the piece but many. Oswald feels it is important to represent indigenous languages, though the numbers of us who speak these languages are fewer. Laurel is researching a distance recording of a Cree singer in Edmonton. Remote recording worked well when she facilitated this for Scottish Gaelic singer Mary Jane Lamond while she was in Nova Scotia, and Laurel was in Toronto, with constant communication and FTP internet sound file transfers. On the afternoon I am speaking to Laurel, she is preparing her studio to record Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. Looking at the text translated into Inuktitut adds to the increasing abstraction of Qui as it comes to life in sound.

  Psalm 91 is the text for Josquin DesPrez’s score. The added dimension is that Oswald wanted to have the canon expressed in as many languages as Canadian culture contains, in a direct proportionate balance based on the 2002 Census. And as the Psalm is of the King James Bible, there are 100’s of translations to be found. Still, not all of the languages that began to emerge through the singers’ inspiration had translations available. (Ori Dagan called Laurel back late and said, ‘Get me the score, my grandparents speak Hungarian!’)  Singers began developing translations and phrasing on their own, with family members’ help, and the process lifted the sounds of languages sometimes buried, to current conversation. They write together a translation that is both accurate, and possible to phrase musically.

  It may have been Laurel’s setting of the English-language version of the Motet that established personal translation as part of recording process. Laurel’s was the original soprano part written in Latin in the late 15th Century. And her take as a singer, her interpretation, may be why each singer had the opportunity to discover a relationship to the sacred in the text, in modern and familial terms. And Oswald’s receptivity to their interpretation of Qui Habitat is why his piece becomes, for me, a declaration against fear.

  “I gave the singers both the Latin and my English-setting for reference,” explains Laurel. In the singing of Qui, God becomes female or remains male, “…and in Finnish, God is supposedly an it.” Oswald muses. The Latin text meaning remains somewhat intact when Neema Bickersteth, in the Krio language of Sierra Leone, sings in accordance with the words her Uncle has given her, God becomes ‘the big man’, and sinners ‘the bad people.’

  Laurel changed the English lyrics to change the meaning and sensation of the sound, and simply because a word like ‘wicked’ is awkward to sing as a lyrical phrase.

  “I sang in my own voice, not operatic, more like a boy soprano —like painting a neutral line with my voice.”

  “I was not comfortable with the negative tone, and the original language was not beautiful to sing, so I changed the English translation of the last verse.” 

   The words were initially: “Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold the eyes of the wicked.”

  And Laurel, songwriter, and optimist resolved this to: “With thine eyes see innocence, justice and purity.”

   Laurel’s sense of wonder is at the response from the singers she has invited. The singers have approached the creation of this piece with heart and individual inspiration, to offer more than asked for. Now that the essence of the motet recording is complete in its original arrangement, singers are no longer required to sing solo outside of context, but are beginning to improvise to the sound of all their voices together that John prepares. Lizzy Mahashe, her Zulu track is complete, and John asks her to return once more to sing in some additional African languages.

  “What I would like to do,” she offers, “is listen to the others and sing in my home languages Sesotho, and Xhosa, (a click language.) “I want to listen to the others and respond.”

  When Oswald’s installation The Spirit House opens at the Royal Ontario Museum, in June of 2007, it will be resonant with the sound of singing once each day, in Oswald’s circadian sound mobile. With Qui, John’s invitation is to listen to the sound of who we are, where we are in the time/space continuum, and how this time hold’s meaning. Listen to this against a bell that will sound for each endangered species, timed on the clock of their extinction rate. When the voices of Qui are heard singing, it will be a sound with the resonant sense of who we walk with.

  Qui excerpt

   

• ‘The percussive art of Rick Sacks’ — Musicworks Magazine #97 Spring 2007

• ‘Electric Eclectics: Festival of Modern Irritainment’  Event Review — Musicworks Magazine #96 Fall 2006

• ‘Joelle Leandre & India Cooke  Firedance’ Live Recording Guelph Jazz Festival 2004 Review Musicworks Magazine #95 Summer 2006