Permission

The rise of the “New Musicology” in the 1980s coincided with a rise in social liberalizations, and their counter-response in the form of the Bush-era “culture wars.” Together they sparked a renewed interest in the listening and performing body, and in musical affect, explored here in composers’ uses of noise, silence, tonality, and meter, from Diamanda Galás to Laurence Crane, Masonna to Michael Torke. Such freedoms were also extended to the mixing of genres, and art music’s crossovers with electronica and indie rock are also discussed, as well as the further challenges to the Romantic concept of Werktreue to which these have given rise.

MEMORY TRANSMISSION, SURVIVAL AND MULTICULTURALISM IN CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN LITERATURE

In 2014, the Quebecois writer Catherine Mavrikakis published Diamanda Galas, a tribute to the American artist performer of Greek origin, Diamanda Galas – at the Montreal Publishing House, Héliotrope, inaugurating a new collection, “Guerrières et Gorgones” (Warriors and Gorgons). At the same time and in the same collection, Martine Delvaux published a tribute to the American photographer Nan Goldin, in an eponymous essay. “What survives from/through artists who are prophets of the contemporary?”, inquires Mavrikakis. Acting on the tragedy of history and transgressing it, how can literature and art play with experiences of memory transmission and “survival” without necessarily working “to fix” them? What is at the heart of this link between history and creativity, reaffirmed by Georges Didi-Huberman in Survivance des lucioles? Through reflections on transcultural transference, multiculturalism and the power of women to transgress traumatic experiences, this article explores the question of memory transmission in two contemporary narratives on art and the AIDS period of the 1980s.

Arche-speech and Sound Poetry

Steve McCaffery describes sound poetry as a “new way to blow out candles” and “what sound poets do.” In his brief survey of sound poetry, McCaffery describes the genealogy of sound poetry from its earliest formalized birth during Russian futurism (found in the experiments of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh) and builds his survey until North America, 1978. This essay will consider the history of sound poetry, a history that has no history, but retains the avant-garde experimentalism of modernist poetics. By looking at sound poems by Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters; the sound-experiments of Diamanda Galás; performance in sound poetry; the influence of “primal therapy” (which emphasizes the therapeutic potential of the scream); and the theological tradition of glossolalia, I will demonstrate how the noisiness and non-sense of sound poetry offers a variety of forms of political engagement against hegemonic uses of sound and silence. Sound poetry is notable in that it is loud – originally being called Lautgedichte or literally “loud poems” – and this brash noise opens up a heterotopic space of acoustic potential: of potential sonic engagement outside of normative chirps, whistles, vocalizations, glottal stops, fricatives, and speech. This “sonic engagement” will be grounded in the new theoretical concept of what I call "arche-speech" or "arche-sound."