Program: 10th En RED – Sound art and Electroacoustic Music Symposium

The Symposium is organized by AMEE (Spanish Association for Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art), as part of the XXV Punto de Encuentro – Festival of Sound Art and Electroacoustic Music, with the support of Medialab Prado, Madrid, and INAEM (National Stage Arts and Music Institute in Spain).

PROGRAM

I. The Specifically Vocal

Tuesday, November 13.

17.00. (Exordium) David López de Mota-Acevedo: "a OVER e OVER i OVER u OVER o OVER a AND SO ON [Or the Specifically Vocal]."

17.30. Cristina Parapar: "Between Mass Music and Experimental Music: An Approach to the Work of Laurie Anderson."

18.00. María Salgado: "Visual Poetry Is Not Visual: Poetical Artifice In 20th Century From the Perspective of Visual Poetry."

19.00. Niño de Elche & Miguel Álvarez-Fernández: "Dialogue on Infancias."

The first presentations of the Symposium are concerned with the fundamental characteristics of the voice. The speakers of this session will address questions such as: what is the connection between sound and meaning? What kind of relationship is established between the phonetic component of the voice and the semantic dimension of language? Who is responsible for making these connections? By way of exordium, López de Mota-Acevedo will present a series of dilemmas concerning the notion of "sonority:" the relations between sound matter and significance, between the purely phonetic and syntax. Analyzing not so much the causes as the consequences of this duality is the focus of Cristina Parapar, researcher from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. In this case she will examine our current notion of "pop-culture music" ("music for mass consumption") and the place and role for what is considered "experimental music" within it. To this end, she analyzes examples of Laurie Anderson's work, focusing not only on vocal technique and verbal resources, but also emphasizing the dialogue of these techniques with the composition as a whole and with the context in which it is received.

The presentation of María Salgado (poet and researcher in contemporary poetics; part of Euraca Seminary) poses a series of questions dealing with sound (of verse) and the problematic ideas of poetry and writing that arise from the term "visual poetry." The process of rhythmic (re)organization of verbal material in time and space, the reactivation of the senses of language (sight, sound, memory and meaning), and the reorientation of ordinary language, produce a shift in the significance of sounds and textures in the (not only) poetic occidental tradition, which Salgado terms "analyrical". With this term, she proposes an attempt to enable a wider reading of written phenomena in the (not only) verbal arts of the 20th century. This involves the development of a conceptual, critical, and historiographical structure that can escape the analytical and historical framework created by the avant-garde and therefore questions the framed discussion on poetry beyond the experimental.

The first session will close with a conversation between the artists Francisco Contreras (Niño de Elche) and Miguel Álvarez-Fernández on the musical project Infancias. One of the original ideas was to confront—or, at least, superimpose—the Niño de Elche of Mis primeros llantos (2007) with the Niño de Elche of today... or the future. To add layers, memories, to inhabit the ruins of his (and our) memories, and to connect some of those materials with the idea of the nascent language, which they have been researching since 2016. A language that, among other things, and—as Jacques Lacan would say, above all—allows one to lie. The lie is not possible for the children who have not yet arrived at language—or, to whom language has not yet arrived. And language, every language, and everything in language is, in a sense, a lie—by being a representation of reality, and not reality itself.

A discussion with the audience will follow each presentation. Víctor Aguado-Machuca presents and moderates this first session.

II. The Voice No

Wednesday, November 14.

17.00. Marina Hervás: "The Voice Stolen From You: On Oblivion and Repression of the Feminine Voice."

18.00. Miguel Copón: "God's voice: Sound Methods of Disappearance."

19.00. Fernando Millán: "Dare to Sound."

The second session focuses on the numerous repressions, restrictions, and negations suffered by the voice in Western art. Voice has been silenced for many reasons, whether political (the exclusion of the female voice from the domain of abstract knowledge or its constraint to a specific poetical sphere of artistic creation), ontological (the notion of language as a human institution whose meaning relies only on its written form, thereby obliterating the semiotic value of oral tradition), or aesthetic (the pre-eminence bestowed in written culture upon individual and silent reading at the expense of public, communal readings, common in cultures in which written form has not yet been imposed). With the title of "The Voice No" we want to make reference as much to an imperative statement ("don't do it with voice," "don't say it with voice") as to a descriptive utterance ("The Voice No" being the union of all silenced voices that constitute a possible heterogeneous unity).

The session will open with Marina Hervas' lecture on political attempts to silence, without success, the female voice. Starting with a reinterpretation of Adriana Cavarero's philosophical work, Hervás will propose a history of the voice from the perspective of a critique of the implicit distinction between a masculine voice (related to knowledge) and a feminine voice (related to sensuality); the feminine voice has been reduced to what it evokes rather than what it expresses. The abstraction and separation of the voice from the body implies its intrinsic connection with language and, therefore, the oblivion of the significance of the voice beyond language, which seems to be its fate. This depersonalization of the voice coincides with the disembodiment of the masculine voice. If the feminine voice is disembodied, it is not to preserve the spoken content but rather to fit it in an eroticized body: a middle path between obedience and seduction—like Ulysses' sirens.

Miguel Copón's presentation will consist of a sound-commentary on the following verses of the poet José-Ángel Valente: "Borrarse. / Sólo en la ausencia de todo signo / Se posa el dios." Copón will analyze—through the use of ten different sound strategies, from electroacoustic to acoustic music, via the ethnic and the radiophonic—different ways to question and examine the role of identity associated with the voice, as well as the images of emptiness conjured—as preparation, annunciation, or the appearance of a mystical form—by a form that would like to integrate everything that overflows it. It means questioning the fiction of the identity driven by the voice and the exploration of the space left empty after its demolition.

The corollary of Fernando Millán's poetry is: "What is not biography is plagiarism." That is why he begins his lecture from personal experience, addressing the coercive role exercised by his paternal figure upon his own voice. He will reflect on the negation and repression in his own poetic work, which appeared for the first time in 1964. The title of this session is a tribute to the poetry group N.O that Millán founded in 1968, following the death of the Uruguayan poet Julio Campal.

Presented and moderated by Diego Zorita-Arroyo, the second session will conclude with a final discussion with the audience.

III. Noise and voice

Thursday, November 15.

17.00. Magdalena Orellana: "Conversations."

17.30. Elliot Simpson: "The Spoken Text Compositions of Samuel Vriezen."

18.00. Ramón del Castillo: "Noise and Voice in the Cinema of Jacques Tati."

19.00. (Coda) Isaac-Diego García, Montserrat Palacios & Llorenç Barber: "Spoken Music and Extended Voice."

The third session of the Symposium will address the dichotomy of noise/voice in relation to that examined during the first day: sound/meaning. The approach to the limits between the intelligible dimension of the voice and sonic materiality is articulated through artistic performances and theoretical approaches. First, the artist Magdalena Orellana will present her audiovisual work Conversations, arising from the concept of "schizophonia"—the separation of a sound from its source, or the disorder caused by this division—coined by R. Murray Schafer in 1969. The voices heard in the work form the soundscape of the Prado Museum: conversations in front of the masterpieces that, disconnected from their source, join a disorganized ensemble of disparate dialogues taking place in a shared space. Afterwards, the musician Elliot Simpson will perform the work Essay for four voices and twelve books by composer Samuel Vriezen. The work—which consists of the reading of twelve books by four different voices—addresses a series of stochastic interactions between the voice and the ambient sound within which the process of reading occurs.

The presentation "Noise and voice in the cinema of Jacques Tati" by Ramón del Castillo (professor of Cultural theory and Philosophy at the UNED and collaborator in the Master's Degree in Electro-Acoustic Composition of the Katarina-Gurska School) begins with Charlie Chaplin's resistance to sound-cinema (spoken cinema) and expounds upon Slavoj Žižek's peculiar interpretation of City Lights, based on the ideas of Pascal Bonitzer. It continues with a debate on Krakauer and Deleuze's ideas on silent comedy that lead to the main theme: the role of the voice in Tati's cinema. Supported by the theories of Michel Chion, the talk will investigate Tati's characteristic treatment of soundtrack and noise in his films, paying special attention to the sequences in which language loses its privileged function and the human voice is made equal with other noises. All of these elements will help to explain why Tati was a unique creator and why his world seems so distant from ours.

The Symposium will close with a round table on spoken music and extended vocal techniques, in which the participants will include Isaac-Diego García (professor at the University of La Rioja) and the artists Montserrat Palacios and Llorenç Barber. García will address the phenomenon of spoken music in the Spanish context of experimental music and sound art in an overview beginning in the mid-twentieth century and continuing to today, reflecting on the difficulty of historicizing the movement and addressing, in particular, the heterogeneous and diffuse character of manifestations and conceptual limits. Palacios offers another historical thread: the use of extended voice that can be traced back to Dadaism, sound poetry, Fluxus, etc. From this perspective, the materiality of the body from which sound emerges takes on an important role. Palacios will show how control of the fundamental pitch and the potential richness of harmonics are determined by the vibration of the glottis—understood not only as muscle or cartilage, but also as a void or interstice between the vocal cords that encourages a series of reflections on the phonetic and semantic quality of language. Finally, Barber will offer a reinterpretation of the Linguopharincampanología technique, which consists of inducing—by brushing one's lips over the edge of a bell—a fundamental pitch and corresponding harmonic series. This harmonic series, in turn, varies according to our mouth cavity, allowing modulation of the series and the creation of a kind of fatuous melody of changing colours.

If the voice initiates and accompanies the metallic melody of the Linguopharincampanología, the presentations of this Symposium always have a resonance that involves the audience. Ramón del Buey-Cañas presents and moderates the third session.