Introduction
Sound, time and space are our way
of dividing a multidimensional reality into manageable subunits.
Sound in time and space constitute what we call music. This text
will primarily deal with the fact that of these three subunits,
space is the most complex, and also most dependent on social and
architectural necessity and availability: "through this small
intervention of man, a fragment of the vast space of nature becomes
a place, in the sense that, from this moment on, it distinguishes
itself from the rest of the surrounding space through a certain
symbolic or physical quality."(1)
Space is also the component of music
that attracts the least attention among composers in the sense
that it is not usually treated as a real musical parameter in
the way that melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral qualities
are. In fact, none of these traditional musical parameters can
exist without the space, and the space commands them: a space
can change everything. Moreover, the mood of an artificial (the
term "artificial" is used only to distinguish it from
a natural acoustic space, or "outdoors") space is determined
by lights and shadows, smell, the materials used in the furniture
and structure of the building. I would like to advocate for an
increased consciousness about space and its profound impact on
our experiences.
Sound, time and space
It is difficult to say when man became conscious of sound, time
and space. Which came first? It is likely that primitive cultures
found it impossible and impractical to separate the three. Sound
acts as a guide to location in space – and as such, sound
and space are inextricably linked – and time, being the
most abstract human construct, can perhaps more accurately be
described in terms of direction in space; that is, the experience
of a process or a cycle, like the sun going up in the morning
and setting in the evening. Without the experience of the process,
the notion of time is useless. So the idea of sound in space,
and the idea of time, originate in our instinctive experience
of the physical world, and their division into separate subunits
serves to clarify this. In reality, the experience, if strong
enough, will cause this separation to be bypassed, because, in
a sense, the mystery is part of what makes music exciting.
Space becomes a contextual and visual concern
Our experience of music is dependent on a number of factors (these
factors will vary from person to person, and also from time to
time for any single individual): cultural and social context,
live performance or recorded media, emotional context, but arguably
the most important dependency is space. Experiments with space
have been made since the advance of establishment. The term establishment
can refer to a religious institution, a national radio broadcasting
network, or an opera house. The idea here is that an institution
provides the necessary resources to carry out experiments with
space. Concert houses are, because of their one-dimensionality
(their sole purpose is to showcase classical music repertoire,
and sometimes academic jazz music), rarely supportive of experiments
with anything at all. Sometimes a living composer is commissioned
to write a symphonic work for the orchestra in the concert house,
but the living composer is always at the mercy of a dead composer,
who will also be featured on the program.
One of the most oft-cited pioneers of spatialisation in music
is Giovanni Gabrieli (1554/1557-1612), whose use of the two choir
lofts in the Saint Marks Basilica in Venice represents a true
concern for space, and indeed, the use of space as a musical parameter
equivalent to melody, harmony and rhythm. It is difficult to say
why, but the idea of space as a musical parameter is never quite
accepted, perhaps due to practical concerns. In fact, space slowly
becomes, with the advance of opera, a contextual concern rather
than a musical one; the set, the colours, the lighting –
in short, space, previously an acoustic concern, is now a visual,
and therefore a contextual, exploration.
Images
I would like to suggest, along the lines of Marshall McLuhan,
that from the outset of Western civilisation, we have lived in
a world of visual overstimulation, even "in a state of hypnosis,"
and that in the 20th and 21st centuries, the constant storm of
visual information, now approaching noise, conquered the possibility
of defining an independent acoustic space once and for all.(2)
This is where the idea of the image comes in; an image is a manifestation
of an abstract human construct, and as such an artificial, or
filtered, rendering of our impression of the physical world. I'd
like to include the written word in this category. Language is
now a perpetual feedback loop: the spoken word feeds into the
written word, and the written word continually changes how we
speak.
The result of the storm of visual information is that our impression
of the physical world drastically adjusts to fit that which we
imagined. Our senses adjust to the image. And for a little over
100 years now, we have been able to capture an "image"
of sound, too, and the same thing has happened to sound that happened
to the visual image. We are no longer capable of separating the
"image" of the sound from the sound itself, the source,
as we are no longer capable of separating the "image"
from the idea or physical object it is supposed to represent.
When the image is disjointed from the source, that is decontextualised,
and a number of images are layered or juxtaposed, we go from information
to noise. The brain struggles to appreciate the meaning of the
image, and in doing so it tries to determine its source. When
the source is no longer present, no longer part of a context,
the meaning is lost. In 1969, R. Murray Schafer coined the term
"schizophonia" to describe this rupture.(3)
In so many ways, these notions are largely the concerns of all
disciplines of modern art; it deals with the examination of the
physical world, including cultural phenomena, as filtered through
human constructs.
Space as an image
If we think about visual and sonic information, their appropriation
into images, and their subsequent distortion of our senses, it
becomes clear that the same thing has happened to our notion of
space. The appropriation and quantification of space through architecture,
infrastructure, vehicles and industry all serve to create an image
of reality as we experience it, a reality within reality, a space
within a space, a molding of the physical world. In doing so,
we in fact alter the physical world. The boundaries between the
"artificial" and the "natural" are set in
motion.
Space as an image in music making
Sound comes to us from above, below,
and the sides.
- Marshall McLuhan, "Visual and
Acoustic Space." (4)
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I mentioned Giovanni Gabrieli, and with a few
famous exceptions (including Bach in the St Matthew Passion
and Mozart in Don Giovanni, where spatialisation is
however mostly used as a dramatic device that underlines and
clarifies the narrative), we are hard pressed to find any applications
of the idea of space as a musical parameter (as a flexible,
moldable, integrated aspect of music making) until the advent
of electroacoustic music in the 1940s, when it quickly became
an integral defining trait of postwar avantgardism, e.g. Stockhausen's
Gruppen for three orchestras, and numerous electroacoustic
works for multi-channel speaker arrays.
The impracticalities of site-specific and spatialised works have
been and continue to be an obstacle for composers and performers
insofar that a separation of the sound from the space is impossible,
and as such works may only be performed in a specific space. Perhaps
the most blatant example of this is R. Murray Schafer's Patria,
a cycle of (so far) ten music dramas or operas whose spatial and
environmental concerns make Wagner look like an uninspired dabbler:
The work begins in the darkness before
sunrise around a wilderness lake. At the beginning we
hear the aria of the Princess drifting unaccompanied across
the water ... Musicians and singers occupy the shores
of the lake and masked actors and dancers move across
the water in canoes in the archaic ritual of The Princess
of the Stars.
- excerpt from the synopsis to Schafer's
The Princess of the Stars.(5)
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The difficulty for the "professional" composer lies
in embracing the anti-Goethean idea that nothing stays forever,
and that allowing one self to experience something in the here
and now is more useful than to be concerned with any given work's
relative potential durability. A site specific work can be a deep,
meaningful experience. There can be a sense of inevitability to
it, an expressive quality to its finality or apparent eternity
(e.g. John Cage's ASLSP that will hit the final barline
in the year of 2640). A work that takes the properties of a familiar
space, e.g. a specific type of church, and incorporates these
into its personality, is more portable, but nonetheless impractical.
Iannis Xenakis, also an architect who collaborated with Le Corbusier,
worked intensely with space, sound, lights and projections in
his series of large scale multimedia installations, polytopes
(literally poly = many, topes = spaces), in
the 1960s and 1970s. These works broke new ground and paved the
way for the many forms of multimedia works that followed, but
were made in a time when experimental arts had the (French) government's
general blessing and financial support. (6)
The British composer Natasha Barrett works consciously with location
and distance in space as narrative and expressive musical
devices through the use of multichannel surround speaker setups
(up to 16 channels). Again, where a sound is in relation
to the listener is not separate from when and what
it is. Many symphony orchestras deal with location and
distance too, but its members, as well as many conductors
and composers, only experience the problems inherent in trying
to synchronise over 100 performers in spaces not necessarily built
for the purpose.
Recordings
It's worth remembering that while the findings at the early centers
for electronic music in Paris and Cologne introduced the world
to the notion that sound and its location and direction in space
could be a real expressive musical parameter, the firstly monophonic
and later stereophonic reproduction of sound on consumer audio
systems have certainly changed our ears in terms of how we expect
a live performance to sound. The experience of direction, location,
natural reflections in a space, and distance – while fairly
well represented using more recent recording techniques – are
attributes of a physical acoustic space, and any attempt to reproduce
that space is an image, an interpretation. It is a question
of authenticity of intent, not a question of experience. The experience
is always there to be had but is dramatically changed by the space.
Headphones are the most extreme example of this, where an almost
completely contained environment essentially replaces acoustic
space with artificial space.
Recordings is now mainly how we ingest music, learn about it,
experience it; and live performances – while still
numerous and well frequented – are commanded by the
recordings; they are at the mercy of recordings, even. In electronic
and popular musics, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate
the image from the source, the original from the copy, the here
from the before, the live from the prerecorded.
Acoustics, not theatre
Whenever the notion of the stage, and the gathering of a group
of performers upon it, is challenged by the space wherein it is
set, there is an element of theatre. Whenever performers move
around in a space, or use "non-designated" areas, there
is a sense of surprise. Why is this? "Sound comes to us from
above, below, and the sides," its position is not fixed!
Sound in space is an organic, flexible matter. Every day life
proves this to us, all the time. The world is full of sounds from
all directions. It helps us navigate. So why would we want to
capture it? It is inevitable that all music on the deepest level
comes out of the experience of the sounds in the physical world,
that it is an image of what we hear in our every day lives. The
attempt to focus sound, to gather it, and to present it as an
object of expressivity, is probably something deeply human, because
the general complexity of life and our perception of the world
lead us to want to organise things in order to understand them.
And recordings have changed everything for good.
It would be constructive to work with space expressively,
rather than passively. Sound artists and electroacoustic composers
understand this, but are continually faced with using inadequate
performance spaces, but perhaps less so than composers of acoustic
music who are interested in working with space, because of the
rigidity of the establishment, because of mere practical concerns.
Today's composers are in truth robbed of their possibility to
work with space in a meaningful way. The experimental nature of
music means that there can be no standard. There can be no standard,
but in understanding this, and in understanding the need for space,
and how sound in space functions, there can be something new.
If the 20th century was all about sound, the 21st will be all
about space.
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