Counter-voicing in the avant-garde and experimental music: Selected cases

The present article is a reworking of a lecture that was performed live and with visual and sound examples at the CoFestival. In selected examples, the author tries to articulate various vocal practices through contemporary and experimental music, performative practices and sound poetry, in which the voice escapes gender, meaning, turns into noise, and emerges through the utterances of silence.

Performance: Listening Bodies

Discussion of Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie and artist Christine Sun Kim draws attention to the embodiment of sound performance, which is considered in this chapter in relation to technology, race, gender, bilingualism and, though the parallel performances of humans and birds, ecology. The work of poets such as Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin offers examples of how sound poetry of the 1960s explored a liberated listening through recording. Yet such a listening, enabled by machines, draws attention back to the capacities of the human body. Serres’ simultaneous emphasis on the centrality of the senses and the space of codes and messages in which the body moves frames a discussion of various boundaries between language, sound and noise in the work of Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva and Rhys Trimble.

Zaum Box: New Music for Speaking Percussionist

Zaum Box is a collection of compositions for solo speaking percussionist setting transrational Russian futurist sound poetry called zaum. Zaum arose among a small interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers who invented a beyond-rational language as part of the radical disruption of traditional artistic and expressive forms, necessary to bring about the accelerated experience of a technologically-driven future. The subgenre of contemporary concert music for solo speaking instrumentalist dates from the 1970’s and has grown into a significant branch of the solo percussion repertoire. The composition of Zaum Box was founded on an extended period of research into zaum, futurism and Russian language. The complete set of compositions was produced as a limited-edition box set of uniquely formatted scores, which were realised by percussionist Katelyn Rose King in a set of ten videos. This article by the composer reviews all the phases of this project, including research and production, and examines the relationships between text, sound, music and theatricality in selected scores.

The Research of Aesthetics of Type as Image in Motion-Targeting Video Poetics at Type Motion: Type as Image in Motion Exhibition in Taiwan

Characters are signs and symbols that record our thoughts and feelings and allow the documentation of events and history. Later, the appearance of motion images marked a new milestone in the use and application of characters. Not only were the original function of characters improved and enhanced, text that integrate sound and images are also able to communicate much more diverse and abundant information. This technique is commonly found in cinema, television, advertisement, and animation. Thanks to technological advances, the combination of characters, texts, or types and images once again changed how we read. It has also created new meaning for our time. Today, type image seems to have achieved an aesthetic autonomy of their own. This has a profound impact on image and art creation and human communication. The emergence of cinema art in the late 19th century brought motion into written media and greatly expanded the possibilities of art. In today’s world of instant communication media, text and images face unprecedented changes. Chinese characters are one of the most ancient writing systems in human history. Unlike western alphabet, each Chinese character has its own form, sound, and meaning. Chinese characters are a highly figurative cultural element. This essay takes Chinese characters and the works featured in the concrete poetry/sound poetry and fragment poetry categories in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts “Type Motion: Type as Image in Motion” exhibition as the subject of study to examine the history of text and media and changes in the way we deliver information and communicate. This essay also provides an analysis of the relationship between text and motion image and the interdependency between culture and technology and media. The connections and differences between Chinese characters in different time and space is also investigated to highlight the uniqueness of the characters as a medium, its application in motion writing techniques and aesthetic forms. This essay focuses on the following four topics: Artistic expression and styles related to the development of type as image in motion. Video poetics: the association between poetics and video images, poetic framework, and analysis of film poetry. Structure, format, characteristics, and presentation of meaning in concrete poetry/sound poetry, and fragment poetry. how Chinese characters are used in Taiwan and the aesthetic features of type through the exhibited works.

Abstract Concrete

In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or evading language in order to access a space of objective communication. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and historical forms, from ritual chant-based practices to Dada performance, to the contemporaneous sound poetry of French ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs’s cut-ups, and auto-destructive art. The example of classical concrete poetry served more as a stylistic counterpoint than a direct influence. Cobbing’s practice was also centrally motivated by a counter-cultural belief that artistic forms which broke down boundaries between media could have more broadly, socially disruptive and revolutionary effects. The development of these sentiments is traced from Cobbing’s early production of duplicator prints during the 1940-50s to his non-semantic, performance-oriented concrete practice of the early 1970s, in which single visual poems become the basis for endless improvisatory reworking. At the close of the chapter, the non-linguistic quality of Cobbing’s work is considered as a manifestation of, and response to, broader tensions within the concrete style.

Off-Concrete

The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘off-concrete’ to describe one of his own concrete poems. In this chapter, the term is used to characterise his overall approach to the style, which expressed both a keen enthusiasm for the classical concrete poetry of the 1950s-60s and a pronounced scepticism regarding its formal and ideological limits. One of many styles with which Morgan experimented during the 1950s-70s – also including beat and sci-fi poetry – concrete poetry was a means both of expressing his opposition to the parochialism of Scottish literary modernist culture and of redefining that culture as internationalist and technologically oriented. At the same time, Morgan’s incorporation of narrative voices and specific thematic scenarios into the concrete poem – ranging from outer space to the animal kingdom, and periodically expressing Scottish-nationalist and anti-colonialist politics – reflects his desire to extend and subvert the grammars of concrete poetry. This dialectical movement propelled his concrete practice forwards from 1962 until around the close of the 1960s, by which time his engagement with the style was waning. However, by the 1970s, a new variant of concrete poetry, more responsive to sound poetry and new Scottish poetry in dialect, had begun to animate Morgan’s practice.