| Beschreibung | WERKKOMMENTARE Eloain Lovis Hübner: «deckung (versuch 1)» (2023/24) «‹Fortschrittlich› oder besser ‹emanzipatorisch› soll alles das heissen, was ermöglicht, die Welt, in der wir leben, und die Welt, von der wir leben, innerhalb eines gemeinsamen Ganzen aus rechtlichen, affektiven, moralischen, institutionellen und materiellen Phänomenen ‹zur Deckung zu bringen›;‹reaktionär› hiesse demnach alles, was dieses Band der Deckung schwächt, ignoriert oder verleugnet. Auf einmal erscheinen die auf Modernisierung setzenden Klassen insgesamt als radikal veraltet.» – Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz, Zur Entstehung einer ökologischen Klasse, These 25 «Die Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte belegt, welche Bedeutung in allen Epochen der Kultur und den Künsten beigemessen wurde. Dementsprechend muss die ökologische Klasse der Entwicklung der ihr vorhergehenden Klassen, der liberalen wie der sozialistischen, in deren Anspruch nacheifern, die Gesamtheit der kulturell mobilisierbaren Themen zu definieren. Dichtung, Film, Roman, Architektur: Nichts darf ihr fremd sein. Verglichen mit der Bedeutung, die den Künsten bei der Entwicklung des Liberalismus zukam, oder der Monopolstellung, die die Linke im Bereich der Kulturkritik innehat, ist es nur zu offensichtlich, wie sehr es der offiziellen Ökologie an dergleichen Ressourcen mangelt. Im Augenblick sind die ökologischen Parteien auf der künstlerischen Bühne erschreckend abwesend oder verfügen jedenfalls nicht über die künstlerische und intellektuelle Ausstrahlung der alten Parteien.» – Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz, Zur Entstehung einer ökologischen Klasse, These 52
Celeste Oram: «Electric Eros» (2023) This piece sets three texts: one in Middle Dutch, by Pseudo-Hadewijch (late 14th century), and two in modern English by Mina Loy (1882–1966).
Pseudo-Hadewijch is essentially Anonymous; they are so named because of the affinity between their poems and the writings of Hadewijch of Antwerp (13th century). Hadewijch was a mystic and a beguine: a member of a community of women who were not nuns—they did not take vows of allegiance to the church—but lived much like nuns, communally, in groups of uncoupled women, devoted to poverty, spiritual edification, and useful social services like caring for the poor and sick. Whether Pseudo-Hadewijch was also a beguine, or even a woman, is unknown — but their poems share with Hadewijch’s the mystic personification of the divine as Minne, as both Lover and Beloved, or indeed the force of Love itself.
Mina Loy is an uncategorizable figure of transatlantic 20th century modernity. Her restless shifting of milieux—from Italian Futurism to the New York avant-garde to proto-feminism to Christian Science—are not so much clues to ideological allegiances, but rather evidence of her idiosyncratic questing for unfettered spiritual clarity throughout the technological and geopolitical vicissitudes of her age. In this sense, Loy was a worldly kind of 20th century mystic. In addition to setting one of her earliest published poems, my piece incorporates fragments from Loy’s prose essay ‘A History of Religion and Eros’ (from the late 1940s/early 1950s), which unspools an allegory of unified divine & somatic sensation, via the language of electrical circuitry and radio transmission. The ‘Eros» of Loy’s essay is both that of carnal drive, and also a more pervading life-force: life itself yearning desirously to live.
By bringing into musical tandem texts by two quite disparate figures, in no way do I intend to equate their meaning or spiritual conviction, which each deserve careful engagement on their own terms. Rather, I was drawn to the compositional challenge of finding a musical rhetoric that might turbo-charge these poets’ remarkable crafting of language. Both Loy & (Pseudo-)Hadewijch have wrought stanzas that are effortlessly vernacular and syntactically limpid, yet hold riddling philosophical paradoxes. Both deploy rhyme to give words an almost sacramental power. Yet a musical declamation of these texts is not merely an appendage; many of Hadewijch’s poems were certainly composed to be sung. And while this poem of Loy’s is untitled, other titles betray her affinity with musical forms: ‘Songs to Joannes’, ‘Love Songs’, ‘Song of the Nightingale’.
In this way, I see in both poets’ work a desire to sculpt lyric and song itself as a technology for invoking spiritual experience. Hadewijch scholar Patricia Dailey argues that, in mystic lyric, the strophic frame serves as a container “for the most uncontainable of affective experiences… a pattern to resound in and transform suffering, desire, and longing”. These poets’ linguistic alchemy performs an “alliterative and echoic summoning” of the very divine presence for whom the words express desire — even though the divine appears to each in very different guises: to (Pseudo-)Hadewijch, ineffable; to Loy, wholly rational.
This history of song itself as a technology of divine encounter also connects with my application of audio technologies in this piece. It’s always important to me when working with electronics to keep within view the networks of material, labour, commerce and physics that produce these technologies and their imaginative affordances. A loudspeaker is never just a loudspeaker, the more expensive presumably the better. I like to reveal to a listener some of the work of the sounds’ own making, rather than shrouding electronic sounds in technical mystery.
For these reasons, I love working, as I do in this piece, within the haptic playground of acoustic feedback: the interaction of a live microphone and loudspeaker. The non-vocal electronic sounds in this piece are derived from various live feedback setups including FM radio transmitters (some fruitfully decrepit), wired loudspeakers, and bluetooth speakers. I have long been entranced by the vocality of these feedback sounds, and by the heightened awareness they bring to the materiality of audio technology, as a tangible interface with the immaterial, revealing the shape and motion and capacitance of our own bodies.
In composing this piece, I first spent a lot of time listening deeply to and ‘learning’ from these feedback-voices, and their alluring union of beauty with instability and danger. I then set out to trobar (‘to find, to compose, to invent’ —like a trobairitz!) a kind of speculative ars subtilior school of vocal counterpoint, with these feedback-voices as my teachers, their musical proclivities my models. Historically, the practice of vocal counterpoint has been demonstrably shaped by the acoustic spaces in which it was sung and heard. For me, this piece is a speculative exercise in re-imagining how the tendencies of European vocal polyphony might have turned out had they been developed not in great resonant spaces advertising imperial might, but in tiny beguinages and anchorholds — or in the vast metaphysical terrain of the electromagnetic spectrum — as an introverted practice of communion with the still, small voice, and the miraculous dimensions that can permeate everyday spaces and objects.
My grateful thanks go to Prof. Veerle Fraeters for assistance with the Middle Dutch text; and to Peter Siegwart, Leandro Gianini, Mario Bruderhofer, the singers of the Vokalensemble Zürich, the Christoph Delz Stiftung, and the Sonic Matter Festival for their warm and generous support in the creation of this piece. Last, a hat-tip to Sally Ann McIntyre, whose inimitable radiophonic work first pointed me towards Mina Loy. Ausgewählte Strophen aus «Mengeldicht #17», Pseudo-Hadewijch (late 14th century)
|
|---|
