Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

Cage’s Imitation Game: Cheap Imitation and Song Books through the sketches

The theme of John Cage’s Song Books (1970), according to Cage, is contained in the statement “We connect Satie with Thoreau” (".fn_cite($cage_1970).", 1). Previous studies of Cage’s Song Books have not asked what I feel to be obvious questions: how, precisely, does Cage connect Satie with Thoreau? To what end? And how does Cage connect to Satie and Thoreau (and to the other sources from which he borrows)? I make use of Cage’s sketch materials to seek answers. I examine three of the Solos for Voice from Song Books that make use of the cheap-imitation procedure that Cage had devised for his work of that name in 1969. Because Song Books is a work for vocalists while Cheap Imitation is a work for solo piano, Cage needed to apply analogous processes of textual “imitation” and mixture to the words of Thoreau to accompany the cheap imitations of the music of Satie. This article explores the persistence of compositional choice in Song Books as revealed by the sketches, in so doing exploring themes of duality in Cage’s pursuit of “poetry as I need it” in the music of Erik Satie, the words of Henry David Thoreau, and in the imitation game that he devises to connect them with one another.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.

Joseph Beuys und die Musik

Joseph Beuys expanded his concept of art to include listening and conceived of sound as sculpture. Musical material runs through his work from early drawings to late performances. This book breaks down what the acoustic elements in Beuys' works, notations, symphonies and scores are all about. What does Beuys himself do at the grand piano, what are "Erdklavier" and "Innenton"? Beuys worked with John Cage, Nam June Paik and Henning Christiansen, felt close to Erik Satie. At the time, Sigrun Hintzen laid the foundation for research into Joseph Beuys' music. This unpublished manuscript is finally being made accessible to all those who want to get to know and understand "music as an inner disposition" in Beuys' work.

Muzyka na peryferiach uwagi. Od "musique d’ameublement" do audiomarketingu

The book is an attempt to obtain the interdisciplinary insight into the musical culture of the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of "acoustic wallpaper". The author indicates the connections between functional concepts, in which background music is an instrument of social influence (Muzak and audiomarketing), and artistic concepts (Erik Satie and musique d'ameublement, Brian Eno and ambient music) intended to create a neutral background filling the public space. She deals with the issues of acoustic engineering in the public space, combining three basic research perspectives: musicological, psychological and marketing, taking into account theoretical, historical and empirical approaches.

Eggs, sugar, grated bones: colour-based food preferences in autism, eating disorders, and beyond

In 1913, eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote a fragmentary, diary-like essay where he depicted a strikingly rigid diet consisting solely of white foods: eggs, sugar, coconuts, rice, cream cheese, fuchsia juice and so on. Satie’s brief essay has later been used as one of many puzzle pieces in attempts to retrospectively diagnose him with autism spectrum disorder. With Satie’s white meal as a starting point, this paper explores colour-based food preferences and selective eating in clinical and non-clinical populations, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). General colour preferences and their causes as well as the impact of colour on taste and food identification are also explored. Selective eating during childhood is immensely common and does not generally lead to disordered eating in the long run, although subgroups may experience rigidity around food of a more enduring nature. Problems related to eating were repeatedly described in Kanner’s original 1943 autism case series and continue to be common in autism. Most studies on eating and sensory sensitivity in autism show that the texture and consistency of the food are the most common factors behind selective eating. In contrast, colour-based food preferences appear to be relatively rare, although numerous anecdotal reports exist. Foods that are white or colourless may be particularly appealing or tolerable for individuals with sensory hypersensitivity, which can occur in autism or ARFID. Ultimately, in the case of Erik Satie, this paper concludes that his description of a strictly white diet should not be read as an autobiographical account but rather as an ironic take on contemporary symbolist literature, with the famously decadent all-black dinner party in French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884; also known as Against Nature) as an obvious source of inspiration.

Erik Satie – the ‘progenitor’ of muzak or the precursor of ‘pipedown’ movement? On the concept of musique d’ameublement

Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a colourful and intriguing artist in the world of Parisian avant-garde. In the turbulent times of the early 20th century he created the concept of musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) – a vision of music that did not require attentive listening because it was supposed to play an extravagant role (as it was perceived in that period) of an acoustic background accompanying all everyday events. A change in recording and sound reproduction techniques in the 20th century that led to the ubiquity of music in the contemporary world seems to confirm that Satie’s ‘furniture music’ can be treated as a prophetic idea. However, the problem of how the concept of musique d’ameublement should be interpreted still remains ambiguous. The main aim of the present paper is to discuss the two contrary ways of the interpretation of ‘furniture music’. The first approach assumes that Satie can be treated as ‘the progenitor’ of muzak – a musical genre initially associated with the activities of Muzak company and then gradually identified with any background music provided on a mass scale to the public space. The second approach is an attempt to interpret the concept of musique d’ameublement in a completely different way – as an expression of opposition to an increasingly mechanized Western world dominated by progress and technology, where the role of music boils down only to the function of the acoustic background. Therefore, Satie becomes one of the precursors of the actions taken by the opponents of muzak (e. g. pipedown movements), who seek to eliminate the imposed background music from the public space. The reconstruction of musique d’ameublement (basing, inter alia, on selected source materials) is treated as a starting point for the discussion that leads to the acoustic ecology perspective.