"Sound-Art, Radio-Art and
Post-Radio Performance" in Australia
by Nicholas
Zurbrugg In 1935 Raoul Hausmann, the dadaist writer,
gave a recital of excerpts from his novel. lt was a text overloaded with
details, precisely described; lengthy revelations; a baroque richness
in every sentence ... The acoustical emphasis, the foaming waterfall of
words, anticipated a literature of phonograph records and of the radio
- not yet accepted but in the making. What is "radio-art"? Defined most simply, radio art might be identified as that creativity predominantly dependent upon radio technology for its conception, for its realization, and for its distribution. In its most pure form, radio art might be thought of as exclusively radiophonic materials orchestrated and disseminated by radiophonic technology. The East German composer George Katzer's "Aide Memoire" (1985), typifies many aspects of this genre.(2) As Katzer explains, "Aide Memoire" - a composition processed in his own studio, and then mixed in its final form at the GDR Radio studios - is primarily composed of original radio recordings from the Nazi period in Germany between 1933-1945. Katzer characterizes his composition as:(3) "a monstrous collage of phrases, slogans, march music, mass cries, all cut from original sound-documents of the Nazi period and put together to form 7 Nightmares, between which the sleeper can find no rest."
My point then, is that contemporary composers and sound artists frequently work in quite a vast interdisciplinary sonic realm in which radio is just one potential source of material and distribution. To be sure, many conservative writers refuse to combine the signs and the sounds of their art by working for radio, for record, or for tape. As the American novelist William Burroughs reminds us,(4) "Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing ... Many of them are afraid"
Given these differing creative and critical categories, it seems possible to conceive of radio art both as a pure art, or as part of a growing range of multi-media, hybrid art-forms. Three primary categories of 'sound' creativlty come to mind. First, as a 'pre-radiophonic' genre, sound-art created in real time combines sound, music, speech, and image, colour and gesture. Second, as a 'purely radiophonic' genre, created in studio time, sound art orchestrates sound, music and speech in an art exclusively tor the ears. Thirdly, as a hybrid, 'post-radiophonic' genre, sound art combines sound, music, speech, and image, colour and gesture in both real time and studio time in variously technological broadcasts, installations and performances. The differing sub-categories of these three genres may perhaps best be represented in the following diagram: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRE-RADIOPHONIC MATERIAL: LIVE PERFORMANCE [real time]: SOUND RECORDING [studio time]: PURELY RADIOPHONIC MATERIAL: RADIO RECORDING AND ORCHESTRATION [studio
time]: POST-RADIOPHONIC MATERIAL: VIDEO AND TELEVISION [studio time]: VIDEO INSTALLATIONS [studio time + real time]: AUDIO INSTALLATIONS [studio time + real time]: LIVE MULTI-MEDIA INSTALLATIONS [studio time
+ real time]: The most significant developments within the contemporary multi-media creativity that one might associate with radio art seem to be the ways in which innovations elaborated technologically, in 'studio time', become part of new modes of partially technological and partially live performance in 'real time'. In this respect, the present seems characterized by hybrid modes of 'post-radiophonic' creativity, such as video and television art; video installations involving spectator participation; audio installations involving spectator participation or movement; and the synthesis of video and audio installations in complex, live, multi-media installations. At the same time, live performance, in real time, frequently attains considerable sophistication and conceptual transformation. Such, at least, is the general trend In Australia. While most Australian artists working within the general realms of sound art and audio art are fully aware of the creative potential of the new post-modern technologies, they often elect to work with live performance in 'real time'. Such work is perhaps best characterised as the exploration of new kinds of heightened narrative, or the attempt to tell stories in a new dynamic, live real-time rhetoric, influenced by earlier technological, studio time, experimentation. As these remarks might suggest, it is difficult to locate many Australian examples of 'pure' radiophonic creativity. Nevertheless, the influence of radio has been quite crucial to the development of the new kinds of heightened, real-time sonic performance presently explored in Australia. Radio's general impact falls into three main categories: (i) as a source of technological mass communication (ii) as a source of technological innovation and creation (iii) as a source of conceptual revolution In the first instance, as a source of mass communication, radio obviously makes existing sound art more accessible. Live performances from Sydney, for example, become available to listeners throughout Australia. Secondly, as a source of technological creativity, radio enables artists to extend their work in new ways, either individually or collectively. New modes of critical discussion The A.B.C. programme Surface Televsion, broadcast every Saturday afternoon until its recent demise, consistently documented new forms of Australian and international sound art. A typical programme played recordings of a Swiss alpine horn, from the studios of French radio, and recordings documenting live 'sound art' performances from the Performance Space gallery in Sydney. One of the most interesting of these performances was a narrative entitled "Terrier" by Allan Vizents, a 'new Australian' born in California, who first worked with the Perth collective Media Space (combining photographic, graphic, recorded and written work), and then moved to Sydney, where he directed Performance Space until his untimely death in 1987. Vizents' poem "Terrier" typifies his extremely imaginative mature narrative performances, and in the process, offers memorable verbal realization to Franz Marc's aspiration to 'paint the existence of a dog as Picasso paints the existence of a cubic shape'.(6) Vizents achieves this evocation of the feelings
and thoughts of a dog by combining two levels of narrative. At its most
fanciful, semantic level, his poem dramatizes the musings of a terrier,
in a poetic variant of the kind of fictional 'magic realism' elaborated
by Garcia Marquez and Günter Grass. At its most literal, mimetic
level, Vizents' performance counterpoints and punctuates this text with
a recording of a dog panting (creating something of the same effect explored
by Beckett in his play "That Time", in which the three narratives
of his protagonist are similarly counterpointed by the sound of 'audible,
slow and regular' breath).(7) "l'm a dog so l bark. I can bite you
bet, sure, bit and shake. l like the chair by the window in the afternoon.
I lay there and look at the lace patterns on the window. lt goes straight
in, circles and stars inside. There is a tear in the flyscreen. I don't
mind that either. The chair is smelly, my chair, dog chair. When a cloud
passes by, I open one eye and feel the cool change go straight in.
Significantly, Vizents' mature work derives
from a succession of earlier technological experiments documented upon
the audio-cassettes distributed by the Media-Space group, such as 'sound-drawings',
made by moving a microphone around objects of furniture;(9) collective
verbal and instrumental improvisations;(10) and relatively simple permutational
poems reminiscent of Brion Gysin's pioneering work in this genre.(11) In the following years, Vizents developed his own extremely individual - and extremely sophisticated - performance style, until he finally reached the point at which he preferred to minimize the technological accompaniment and equipment that had initially given birth to the verbal distortions in his poetry. In Ihe course of an interview of 1984, shortly before a performance of his work, Vizents charaderistically remarked:(13) "l've performed with pre-recorded tapes, but over the past few months l've gradually eliminated them. In fact l've tried to get the sound system turned down to the barest minimum tonight so there won't be so much interference with the quality of voice."
But as Vizents' mature performances demonstrated, his work had reached the point at which meticulously timed, live improvisation virtually eclipsed the impact of pre-recorded montage. While his real-time performance lacked the quantitative advantage of multi-layered narrative, its 'quality of voice' (to quote Vizents' phrase), attained a remarkable sonic virtuosity, with all the excitement and surprise of live, spontaneous theatricalty, 'inventing words and mucking Ihe language up, in a sense, so that it doesn't follow the strict rules of grammar'.(14) At its most coherent extreme, Vizents' experiments with grammar lead to highly amusing colloquial narratives, full of impatient repetitions and abbreviations, such as "I'm Busy": a wonderful satire of the Australian suburban ritual of lovingly repairing decrepit automobiles. Commencing with another of Vizents' splendidly abrupt assertions, this poem announces:(15) "l'm going to explain this real simple, l'm busy. I'm really busy with this car here, l'm dirty, greasy, grease under the fingernails, greasy hands, greasy pants, greasy shoes, and l can't come in the house right now, and I can't answer the phone cause I'm busy and I won't be answering the phone when any granny calls or any mum or dad or Dave, that kind of stuff, cause l'm busy ..."
Fill it out in triplicate would'ya?
Fill it up en tripleit wichya? Fill erup en tipleit wichya? By line nine, the poem's initial imperative transmutes into the bizarre request: 'Fositup in tripple whenchya?', while lines fourteen and fifteen contort this phrase into the still stranger supplication:
Such permutations are not new, but the virtuosity
of Vizents' intonation and the precision of his timing are extremely unusual,
as George Katzer remarked, while discussing a recording of this poem at
the Graz Radiokunst symposium.(17) The general consequence of this humourous, satirical impulse in Australian sound art is its surprisingly accessible public quality. One of the greatest problems for most Australian poets is the initial task ot successfully introducing innovative sound art and performance to a wider audience than their immediate circle of friends. The gradual development and acceptance of Australian sound art seems to follow a fairly predictable series ot initiatives: - live readings - taped work - taped anthologies - festivals and critical forums - radio documentation of festivals on public or subscriber stations - radio features on individual artists - video documentation on individual artists
As the Californian poet, Larry Wendt, acknowledges in a recent letter of December 1988, purist concepts ot sound art or of radio art seem very much a thing of the past.(19) "Sound poetry has perhaps died out as a specific area of working or perhaps it's not called that any more by new people working in that area."
"Actually, there is probably more electro-acoustic Iiterature and language art being done now than ever before. lt's often just called something else. One doesn't hear the words 'sound poet' as much, or even less 'text-sound composer' any more - only us die-hards still speak in those terms."
"Last year, I formed a 'band' with another technician at San Jose State ... and we did a concert of 'post-industrial music'... The campus radio station went nuts over it and will play anything now that we give them over the radio ... I always thought that one had to die to gain that kind of recognition. All that I needed to do was call it by a different name as some kind of experimental rock n'roll... These are strange days indeed."
"The piece is a work-in-progress, meaning it can be subject to changes and additions through two means. First, as a multi-track recording, voices and sounds can be added to the pre-existing first hour, so that groupings of sounds can be made dense or sparse. Second, new material can be added to the first hour, so that the piece expands in linear form as new material is added ... The reasoning behind this formula is that this work is often presented in different mediums, and is not intended to be any one specific duration of time ... Different sections of the material can be used in specific situations."
Language, then, is very much Chris Mann's primary concern, particularly the social and the ideological consequences of different verbal conventions. Whereas Larry Wendt's work may lend itself to redefinition in terms of music, and whereas Ed Tomney's compositions seem to explore the open-ended, variable composition encouraged by Cage, interweaving sound and sense in what one might thihk of as some sort of sonic 'mobile', Mann's work appears to be far more committed to concrete social contexts. Such, at least, is Mann's aspiration. Discussing his work in an interview of 1983, Mann explained:(21) "Yarns, intonation-games, skip-rope songs, jokes, nonsense words... I think that's the tradition that we slot into. I think it's a popular culture. I don't think it's a bourgeois culture. I don't think it's an art culture. There's a whole tradition particularly in Melbourne ... of dealing with language as an issue. lt's like the role of the Grammarians in the French Revolution and the role of the Proletcult in the Russian Revolution."
Mann's utterance clearly deploys several quite distinct levels of discourse. On the one hand, it exploits cryptic, epigrammatic witticisms, such as 'Chomsky was an early Nato setup', or 'Credit is distraction formalised'. At a more coherent level, it employs sustained anecdote, such as 'the one that goes that there was this lady philosopher'. But as the concluding lines of this extract demonstrate, Mann's performances also frequently erupt into abbreviated slang, colloquialisms and obscenities verging upon quite inaccessible nonsense language. These experiments have prompted quite varied responses. Cage, for example, comments:'I think of Chris Mann's work as being fresh and a new direction in poetry',(23) remarking elsewhere: 'lt is very striking. Congratulations. I would also like to know how you wrote this text'.(24) Gage's comments upon the fresh and striking quality of Mann's work obviously emphasize its formal and ludic originality. As Allan Vizents similarly comments, in an interview of 1986, Mann's texts and performances are inimitable:(25) "He's ... refined a style, an approach, and a method of constructing language, that is highly ... idiosyncratic ... only Chris Mann could have developed that kind of text."
"Is his idiosyncratic language working?
Or is it just entertainment? Does it carry any meaning beyond that sense
of play ... And on another level, is it refleoting extreme nationalism
that says, my language is particularly Australian - that's what makes
it good, valid, and a valid form to work on?
"She puts forward a kind of exploratory-of-her-own-consciousness kind of image. And it seems that she's committed toward that working on herself. And I appreciate that. lt's tough work. lt's hard work."
"I suppose my first perception in my childhood of poetry was my father who used to know a lot of poetry by heart - a lot of German poetry - and he used to say it to me, and then he would translate it. So the way I encountered poetry as such, was just sound and also sound in a foreign language."
"l'm not specially writing in a sort of distorted manner on purpose. lt's more the language of the subconscious thought, or the language of inner thinking, not the conscious literal language."
Paradoxically, this kind of seemingly private aesthetic can have surprisingly public impact. Pondering upon this possibility with reference to the way in which his own poems are 'completely personal, absolutely 100% subjective', the American poet John Giorno explains:(31) "When it works, it's like the subjectivity becomes the objectivity. lt becomes the subjectivity of the audience, so it's what the audience wants to hear ... So it's not subjective in the sense that it's just me - it's everyone in the audience, and it becomes completely objective."
"I asked other people to read my work to see how it would turn out - whether I was just projecting the sound value onto it. I asked them to read it without formally having heard it read by me. And in actual fact they did sIot into a form of reading which I actually do myself."
"kill cow hang butcher am angry hot head big ideas stronger know what bloody mary hates me look what feel over hurt knee what to do bright colour put bandage around don't want to see now look bag big things kills wife redhead in my house is jeabus so jealous tulip is loud apple is ok dwarf is nasty peaked hat knife in gut was murderer eats children..."
"Not everything I have written was meant to be read... But then, of course, l never saw mysel in any particular category, and didn't set out to produce complete sound poetry. lf that was so, I could put out tapes instead of writing it. But in my case, I do want the Iiterary part of it to exist, so that people can read it."
"My work in the visual arts is neo-expressionist, and this form of writing deals with that as weIl. I'm dealing with that autobiographical notation and enactment of inner feeling and being, and in my performances I've dealt with the same aims. So all of my work is under the same heading, using my own life."
"Voices" was first recorded and orchestrated in a recording studio, before taking its final shape as a predominantly live performance during which Walwicz lies on the stage, listening to the four voices issuing from the four surrounding speakers. Walwicz explains: "I wanted to portray an inner state in which you heard all these different voices ... In my case it was dealing with a particular personal situation, my mother's death, my reaction, and the feeling of it, which was all sorts of thoughts: my mother's voice, my father's voice, my sister's voice and mine. I recorded this in Adelaide in a studio, distorting my voice, using different voices and creating different personae."
"I would like to do more recording, experimenting with different things I could do with my own voice - not so much using musical instruments, but using overlay of my own voice and seeing what could happen with that."
"My father as an enthusiast for eighteenth century didactic poetry. He like people like Gray and Samuel Johnson - he really Ioved reading out aloud, no matter what the circumstances ... he really loved pounding that out ... lt wasn't the didactic side that impressed me ... lt was the whole sound quality ot it."
"Just repeat the word STALIN until you fall down exhausted. Try to convey both the terror and the mediocrity and the seIfconfidence... You're dealing with a species of evil spirit. Try to remember that."
"This really is a performance piece and needs a living breathing person rather than a disembodied voice. Walk onto the stage ... bent forward, hands grasped behind your back. Face the audience and take an exaggeratedly deep breath. Say "The next one is a sound poem called SOUND POEM" or something similar."
"Repeat the words SOUND POEM giving the OUND-sound full value. Gradually get faster and louder and when you're going full blast stick the fingers of both hands into your mouth. Talk round your fingers and try to maintain the sound at the same speed and loudness as you were using before. Tear at your Iips and use your fingers to pull your mouth open. Try to put your whole hand (or hands) inside your mouth ... All the while keep shouting SOUND POEM. When you - or the audience have had enough take your hands out of your mouth and say the words SOUND POEM a few more times, dropping your level of sound down to normal speech. Then stop."
"I started off as a sort of stand-up comedian, I guess. I read to very rough audiences in pubs and public places, and just to survive I had to inject a fair amount of humour into the act. I didn't start among technological people, I suppose. I worked out a way of doing it just with my vocal chords alone... I do the performance first, and then I notate it afterwards. lt's actually worked out on the night, in front of the audience, with sweat running off me, and sweat running off them."
"I think one of the least impressive things of new music or electronic music is the actual lack of visual impact in the performance. The performer's sitting at a control desk, madly twiddling knobs, and even though the sounds might be tremendous, the actual visual impact of the performance is nil. l'd rather have Paganini playing his violin or Elvis Presley and his guitar, or something like that. I think the visual part of a performance is quite important."
"The fact that I am a slightly bizarre looking character, I suppose, with a bald head and a big beard and a big belly that sort of adds to the performance, l think. Also, I tend to dress in a casual, rough way. l'm pretending to be unsophisticated, when l'm not: it has all this actor's deception type of thing. But l suppose if someone were to come along and say: "l've got this terrific studio, and it will be all at your services", I could become a technologist. l'd have to go back to school, l suppose, and learn the A.B.C. of technology. l'm not really against it as such."
Considered in a rather different context,
in terms of Jean Baudrillard's meditations upon the 'ecstasy of communication',
the realm of scenic pleasure might be said to mutate into 'pure fascination'.
Baudrillard rather ambiguously associates this state with positive 'original'
sensations, and with a seemingly negative 'new form of schizophrenia'
precipitated by vertiginous awareness of the 'perpetual interconnection
of all information and communication networks'.(40) "Pleasure is no longer that of the scenic or aesthetic manifestation (seductio) but that of pure fascination, aleatory and psychotropic (subductio). This does not necessarily imply a negative judgement, since the forms of pleasure and perception undoubtedly undergo a profound and original mutation ... In applying our old criteria and the reflexes of a "scenic" sensibility, we run the risk of misconstruing the irruption of this new ecstatic and obscene form in our sensorial sphere."
"In a way l suppose electro-acoustic music has become a bankrupt artform as a result of this commercial intrusion - the 'low-road' stuff though more accessible has become increasingly moronic, while the 'high-road' stuff remains difficult to obtain on recordings and often too interested in justifying its existence through excessively academic posturings. There seems to be very little in terms of exploring wildernesses or wild experimentalism in the field."
Duke's second generalisation becomes particularly
pertinent here. Whereas he acknowledges that he has never had access to
radiophonic technology, and concedes that he would be willing 'to go back
to school... and learn the A.B.C. of technology', Baudrillard converts
his initial confusion before the plurality of FM radio stations into the
traumatic relevation of 'the negative ecstasy of radio', bewailing - or
perhaps, celebrating - the discovery that 'I am no longer capable of knowing
what I want'.(46) Presented in a staccato mixture of declamation, cry, splutter and song, Amanda Stewart's poems focus primarily upon political and ideological issues, particularly sexual politics. "lt Becomes: July 1981" typifies many aspects of her art. Intermingling parodic cliche, fragmented colloquialisms and direct reference to politicians and world disaster, this poem - or performance score - begins:(47)
As these lines suggest, Amanda Stewart's poetry employs a highly evocative rhetoric resounding with threadbare hyperbole such as 'I mean it's amazing'. Syncopating and satirising banal conversational generalities with explosive, highly subjective, declamation, her live performances convey much the same intensity as Lichtenstein's and van Hoddis's sharply focussed expressionist Iyrics without ever describing the kind of specific detail catalogued by these poets. "Collaboration" - a nine piece radiophonic suite made in collaboration with Warren Burt in 1987 highlights Stewart's powerful diction by amplifying the sonic potential of her early poems with a number of different kinds of technological accompaniment. Discussing this collaborative venture in an interview of 1988, Warren Burt began by stressing its radiophonic quality:(48) "Amanda's pieces in "Collaboration" were indeed meant for live performance over the years. But here it's not live performance, it's radio, which is a whole other thing. We were making a radio piece with her voice."
"Hopefully, I'm not obliterating the music of her voice, but am in fact accentuating it, accompanying it, and doing what any good setter-of-texts will do throughout music history, which is to bring out other aspects of the word through the setting one gives to it."
"Here we recorded each line of the poem as a separate sample. Each of the sixteen lines of the poem goes across the keyboard. Then Amanda reads the poem, and the pitch of her voice ... extracted lines from the poem to accompany her. So the higher she speaks, the later is the line which accompanies her. lf she speaks very high, then line sixteen is played by the machine. lf she speaks very low, line one is played ... You could hear many more than two lines simultaneously. Once a line's triggered off it will play for quite a while ... So you could get a number of voices happening - a number ot Amanda voices."
"Because we know the text we can follow it through, and hear very clearly what is live voice and what is accompaniment. Other people would have difficulty doing that, and that's fine, because of the nature of the poem. "lt Becomes" is so chancey and incantatory that having other lines from other parts of the poem actually makes structural sense."
"While she did that, I had the microphone going all the time, and whenever I heard a sound I Iiked, I sampled it into the sampler, and ended up with seventeen little short vocal sounds... I then arranged the keyboard of the sampler in such a way that each three chromatic pitches had a different Amanda sound on it. Over the course of a four octave keyboard I had seventeen sounds available. So that C, C sharp and D might be such and such a sound at three different pitches, and so on. And then l said, 'Why don't I improvise on this keyboard while you improvise against it'?"
"A lot of Amanda's feminist friends were very scandalised by the piece - (a) because she dared to work with a male, (b) because she dared to use technology, and (c) because there was music in it that they didn't understand at all."
"There are moments when its obvious that one is a machine thing being played, and the other is a live human being. But there are other moments when it blurs ... Those moments are actually very nice."
"This is something significantly new, but l don't think it's a huge disjunction with the equipment we've had in the past. All the sampler enables us to do, is to do things that could have been done with magnetic tape and razor-blade, but which can now be done much more easily, in real time. And that ease, and that real-timeness, then present a whole new set of conceptual problems."
As the American composer Philip Glass remarks,
contemporary technology permits innumerable multi-media effects that 'we
couldn't have produced ... five years ago'.(49)
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3. George Katzer, 'Aide Memoire', notes in booklet enclosed within the record cited above. Unpaginated. 4. William Burroughs, 'The Art ot Fiction', interview with Conrad Knickerbocker, Paris Review, No.35 (Fall 1965), p.24. 5. Charles Amirkhanian presented 'Metropolis, San Francisco' at the 'Soundworks' Festival, The Performance Space, Sydney, 9th May, 1986. 6. Franz Marc, 'How Does a Horse See the World?', translated from 'Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen' by Ernest Mundt and Peter SeIz, collected in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), 'Theories of Modern Art' (Berkeley: University ot Carlifornia Press, 1968), p.179. 7. Samuel Beckett, 'That Time' (1976), collected in 'Shorter Plays' (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p.228. 8. Allen Vizents, 'Terrier', in 'Non-Parables': Performance Texts 1982-1986, forthcoming. 9. Allen Vizents, 'Wood Chair, Couch, Upholstered Chair' and other sound drawings appear on the Media Space Cassette 'Furniture' (Perth: 6-7-82). 10. Allen Vizents' collective improvisations 'Poor Australia' and 'Grand America' appear on an untitled Media Space Cassette (Perth: 14-3-82). 11. Brion Gysin's permutated poems are documented in William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, 'The Third Mind' (London: John Calder, 1979), and are recorded among other places in Revue-Disque OU (Paris), Nos 23-24,1965. 12. See my article 'The Voice of Barthes and the Possibilities of Sound Poelry', a discussion of the general implications of the ANZART 1983 Festival of Sound and Audio Art, in the ANZART Hobart, Supplement of 'Island Magazine' (Hobart), No.16, Spring 1983, pp.10-14. 13. Allan Vizents, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, 'Eyeline' (Brisbane), No.2, August 1987, p.21. 14. Ibid. 15. AIlan Vizents, 'l'm Busy', Nan-Parables (forthcoming). 16. Allan Vizents, 'Fill lt', ibid. 17. George Katzer, discussion with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Graz, 7 October, 1988. 18. See for example, 'Life is a Killer' (New York: Giorno Poetry Systems, 1982). 19. Larry Wendt, letter to Nicholas Zurbrugg, 18 December, 1988. 20. Ed Tomney, letter to Nicholas Zurbrugg, 20 October, 1988. 21. Chris Mann, interviewed by Roberta Bonnin during ABC radio feature on the ANZART Festival of Sound and Audio Art, broadcast 25 July, 1983. 22. Chris Mann, extract from 'SCRATCH SCRATCH', collected in Pi 0 (ed.), '0ff the Record' (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985), p.1 05. 23. John Cage, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, 'Eyeline' (Brisbane)1 No.1, May 1987, p.6. 24. John Cage, quoted in '0ff the Record' (see footnote 22), p.104. 25. Allan Vizents, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, 'A Conversation with Allan', Praxis M(Perth)1 No.16 (1987), p.10. 26. Allan Vizents, 'Eyeline' interview (see footnote 13), p.21. 27. Chris Mann's comments during symposia at the 1986 'Soundworks' Festival repeatedly stressed that 'there ain't no such thing as private language' and that poetry should have a public function. 28. Allan Vizents, 'Praxis M' interview (see footnote 25), p.1 1. 29. Ania Walwicz, comments from an ABC radio symposium on sound poetry, chaired by Amanda Stewart (Sydney) with Jas Duke and Ania Walwicz (Melbourne) and Nicholas Zurbrugg (Brisbane). All subsequent statements by Ania Walwicz are from this programme, broadcast on 14 February, 1987. 30. See Diamanda Galas, 'The Divine Punishment' (London: Mute, 1986) and Laurie Anderson, 'United States Live' (New York: Warner Bros, 1984). 31. John Giorno, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, New York, 25 August, 1982. 32. Ania Walwicz, 'Red, Boat' (Sydney: Angus and Robertson>, forthcoming. 33. Ania Walwicz's programme notes for 'Voices' describe the 'text for performance' as 'musical notation' for 'an overlay and overlapping of sound', 'Soundworks' programme (Sydney: The Performance Space, 1986), unpaginated. 34. Charles Amirkhanian, untit!ed statement, 'Stereo Headphones' (Kersey), No.5 (Winter 1972), p.35. 35. Jas Duke, statement made during ABC sound poetry symposium (see footnote 29). Unless otherwise indicated, all of Duke's statements about his work and performance in general are quoted from this programme. 36. Jas Duke, final lines of 'Five Years in Primary School' and of 'Our Traditions of Govemment', collected in 'Poems of War and Peace' (Melbourne: Collective Effort Press, 1988), pp.22 and 89. 37. Jas Duke, 'Stalin', introductory notes, ibid., p.127. 38. Jas Duke, 'Dada': a sound poem, introductory notes, ibid. 39. Jas Duke, 'Sound Poem', introductory notes, ibid., p.1 33. 40. Jean Baudrillard, 'The Ecstasy of Communication', trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), p.27. 41. lbid. 42. Ibid., pp.27-8. 43. Jas Duke, general comment on commercial new music, made during ABC sound poetry Symposium (see footnote 29). 44. Larry Wendt, letter of 18 December, 1988. 45. Wendt writes: 'I have been working here with Daniel Kelley ... From his designs, I have built a system which is portable enough to take around to performances. Unlike my previous systems, this device has a sound quality which is in some cases better than a lot of commercial devices on the market. lt also gives me a flexibility at processing sounds which I have never had access to before', ibid. 46. Baudrillard, 'The Ecstasy of Communication', p.25. 47. Amanda Stewart, 'lt Becomes: July 1981', collected in Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (eds), 'The Penguin Bock of Australian Women Poets' (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986), p.260. 48. Warren Burt, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, Brisbane, 19 August, 1988. All of Burt's statements regarding his collaborations with Amanda Stewart are taken from this interview. 49. Philip Glass, interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg, 'Eyeline' (Brisbane), No.7, December 1988, p.10. Glass refers to technological effects produced in his recent 'music-theatre' collaboration, '1000 Airplanes on the Roof'. 50. Karlheinz Stockhausen formulates this distinction in the conclusion to his article on 'Electronic and Instrumental Music', trans. Ruth Hein, collected in Charles E. McClelland and Steven P. Scher (eds), 'Postwar German Culture' (New York: Dutton, 1974), p.369. Dr Nicholas Zurbrugg, Division of Humanities,
Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, Queensland 4111, Australia. |