Narrative, Rhetoric and the Personal: Storytelling in Acousmatic Music John Young Music, Technology and Innovation Research

Centre De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH, UK The idea of narrative is central to time-based arts. Barthes regarded narrative as an international, transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon, simply there, like life itself: we find narratives because we exist, and it is hard to avoid the conviction that its a fundamental dimension of human thought and understanding. My view of narrative here starts with the capacity for sound recording to function as a mirror held up to lived experience. Walter Benjamin pointed to the fact that reproduction of singular artworks shifts attention away from the need to ritually go to them for the experience. But the original application of reproduction technology makes another kind of shift, which is to focus on the reproduction of our perceptions. A camera or a sound recording device make a fixed object out of our experienceits very direct. This means that recording is more than solely the support mechanism for acousmatic sound in the Schaefferian sense, nor is it solely a second hand poor cousin of live or interactive performance. It forms a trace of experience and, to transliterate the sense in which Benjamin uses it, carries an aura of experience. The nature of that experience can be questioned and revisited, but the data is permanent document. The works I am going to discuss include words as a primary vehicle for narrative, with an emphasis on ways in which this has been used to form expressions of a personal or intimate nature. In her introduction to Narrative Across Media, Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that of all the semiotic codes, language is the best suited to storytelling. The word may be the trans-medial narration tool par excellence, but one thing I hope to show is that non-verbal sound has a crucial, more than accompanimental role in making distinct forms of narrative in acousmatic work, and that her three generalised criteria for narrative, are applicable, namely: 1. Narrative creates a world, populated with characters and actions. 2. The world inhabited will undergo changes of state, through events that may or may not be imposed through human actioncreating a temporal dimension. 3. The text allows reconstruction of an interpretative network of goals, plans, causal relations, and psychological motivations around the narrated events. But Im going to sidestep that for moment to think about narrative with minimal use of words in 2 examples: Trevor Wisharts Red Bird is well known and uses a very limited set of words in a symbolic waythey are a specialized set of objects within a wider range of referential primitives and sound constructs. Wishart conceived an overall narrative for the work, which he outlined graphically, but the potency of the sound-imagery and in particular the transformations used to create metaphorical meanings overshadows any purely linear implications of the narrative. On the other hand a work called The Revenge was created in the mid-1970s for the BBC as an experimental wordless radio play by British actor Andrew Sachs, and, especially in the early part of the work, uses very similar referential primitives to Red Bird (ex. 1). The narrative is completely linear, an escaped convict

seeks and exacts violent retribution on those who contributed to his imprisonment. There is some very effective projection of context through sound in the work, but because the narrative is so linear and dedicated to the telling of the story we are not taken into the kind of metaphorical world of Red Bird. For instance when the prisoner escapes by swimming we hear him gasp on plunge underwater. In Red Bird water has a literal presence but also a more symbolic and not a clearly indicative rolewe get submerged, but is it drowning or escape? And I think we feel this most acutely in The Revenge in the sense that as auditors we are always in the same place as the character, observers at close quarters, but a deeper, more imaginative set of relationships between the sounds and the objects to which they refer is not made. Red Bird does achieve this because the discourse is not simply sequential but also transformational. I think this can be explained through the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of reference embodied in the work. On the syntagmatic axis (analagous to the flow of sense in a sentence) events have cause and effect at a local natural timescale level doors open, things pass through them, etc. At a paradigmatic level (analogous to the way linguistic subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives can be interchanged within a sentence) sounds are made to have symbolicpoetic meaning, frequently through transformation-induced metaphor. On the paradigmatic axis, timescale also plays a role a natural temporal progression can be prolonged through a focus on a specific kind of event, for example the repeated image of the door (fly trap), which takes on more of a musically-centred discourse, as a fixed instrument-agent of sound making, so that doorness is emphasized in the creation of a metaphorical image a hall of doors which in turn is resolved through the escape of the fly, a syntagmatic release. In Red Bird we enter the psychological world of the prisoner, not just as an individual but as an emblematic one. Wishart summons an array of micro-narratives, of the kind just described, which collectively imply, but do not conclusively state, a larger narrative toward the eventual disposal of the prisoner. Ferrari: Presque Rien 2 These attributes are also found in Ferraris Presque Rien no. 2. Narrative exists in several ways in this work. The environment that is projected for us is commented on with great delicacygradually elements of the space are described for us, but so is the nature of the situation, as we are told right at the start that we are to try to penetrate a landscape, which is not easy. Our attention is drawn to various perceptions of the sounds around the two people we perceive to be physically moving through this nocturnal landscape is there a train? Who is it in the distance? Moving toward sounds of birds that cannot be seen, and with commentary on actions and objects within the landscape that are not soundinga vine, a bush, toward the road, a brook that turns out to be not there. We are looking for something and then we find something else. But at the key point, Ferrari tells us that he has been enveloped by the night and is penetrated in an exchangethe night continuing in his multiple heads: the act of listeninghis penetration of the landscape, allows his imaginative sense to take over, but its an imaginative shift that appears to be prompted by elements of uncertainty and disorientation in the dark. And in that shift we are taken from an explanatory narration into a fulfillment of an imaginary, one might even say musical, relationship with the environment, evoking the kind of deeper narrative of going inside the soundscape. There should be no need to convince you of how this work demonstrates the beauty of the microphone as a tool. It can be directed out to the world, but is also quite naturally turned back on the recordist himselfthe microphone quite

naturally lends itself to being a passive receiver of our narrative on the private world of experience. Cousins: Doreen John Cousinss Doreen is a portrait of the composers mother and concerns her meeting her future husband Ted during wartime, namely the powerful sexual attraction between Doreen and Ted. The work begins with a simple piano-accompanied rendition of the Billy Mayhew song Its a Sin to Tell a Lie. Sung by Doreen, the subject of the work, the significance of the song is not fully articulated until the very end of the piece. At this point it contextualizes the idea of memorya 1930s song sung by an elderly woman, places us in the present, and creates a nostalgic atmosphere, setting an appropriate tone for the unfolding of memory. (ex. 2) What follows is initially contextualized with the introductory words of an interviewer: what Id like to do is to start with the Ngaio Town Hall and the band you used to play in Mention of during the war and where I first met Ted are spontaneously offered by Doreen in response to this, and these memory associations apparently triggered by mention of those past events, provide us with an indication that we are about to enter a world reconstructed through reminiscing triggered by powerful associations of time and place, in itself a very intimate form of narrative, which E.S. Casey has described as: a matter of actively re-entering the no longer living worlds of that which is irrevocably past [which] can be said to be a way, an essentially privileged and especially powerful way, of getting back inside our own past more intimately, of reliving it from within. The story then unfolds through recollections Doreens band playing at recreational events for soldiers on leave from the local army camp. The piano accompaniment heard at the outset underpins most of this for the first 8 minutes, providing a supporting counterpoint, in a fairly conventional documentary technique. The focus of the story moves toward details of Doreen and Teds intense sexual connection, which, on mention of their watching a fireworks display is interrupted by a shower of firework explosions. Woven within this is Doreens uncontrolled laughter. At this point we are truly invited to enter the experiential world of this womanthe onset of the fireworks is sudden in the extreme and the laughter has a salacious, visceral quality which amplifies her earlier description of her whole body exploding in love making (ex. 3). This is, for the listener, a moment where the past of another comes to life. Another cue is the subsequent presence of an oppressive high frequency tinnitus-like tone that recurs in sections that follow, which is itself something expressed by Doreen as part of her sexual experiences. So at these points, the narrative becomes not just story as recounted verbally, but as inwardly felt in the process of reminiscence, as reconstructed by the composer. Doreen describes the pregnancy that followed, and alludes to consequential marriage. The fireworks have a dual role of representing the event and the sexual simile used by Doreen, but it also is evocative of the automatic retrieval of memorythe way the sense of events forces itself back into conscious thought. And of course this kind of reiteration and reintegration of materials is a very musical way to construct a form. The very last section is a short epigram from Doreen, beginning: I should never have married but we did have something and it grew leaves the story open and unresolved, with the

suggestion that the relationship was ultimately not completely satisfactory. It is at this point that the poignancy of the opening song is fully realised within the narrative. Both of the two works I have just discussed are examples of sound recordings function of disassociating orality from co-presence: we hear these as documents, but we also are drawn in by the natural rhetorical flow of exploration of environment and memory. Dhomont Fret Profonde Fret Profonde presents narrative on a grand scale comprising threads that attempt to link the personal and universal. There is no explicit story as such, but vestiges of familiar ones that stir cultural images of the phenomenon of narration. Departing from the world of the fairy tale, the listener is led deeper into the metaphor of the forest, which symbolises both the dangers and rewards of a life-changing journey and the inevitable confrontation with the self. The titles of the works 13 sections chart the narrative, which forms an unfolding but directed series of free associations, beginning with the chambre denfants through the evocative once upon a time evocation of fairytale events from far away and long ago. At the end of the second section, the image of the locked room (Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty?) is raised via a quotation from Bruno Bettelheim, whose book The Uses of Enchantment was a central stimulus for Dhomont. At this point the symbolism of the forest, a feature of so many fairy tales is explored, opening into the initial scene of Dantes Divine Comedy via Sleeping Beauty and reaching, perhaps unexpectedly the profound depths of the holocaust. In its own terms this is an immensely powerful progression of imagery, but one that is inescapably linked to the narrative of Bettelheims life, who was interred in concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938-39 (perhaps we should remember here that wald = forest). We hear of Bettelheims suicide at the age of 87 with an escape back into childhood, images of transformation, and a final mingled image of hope through fantasy and the warning of Goldilocks at the edge of the forest seeing something shining from within. The fairy tale structure provides a means of confronting fears and threats of the adult world. This might parallel Bettelheims recollection that nightmares of his concentration camp experiences came after release, whilst dreams in the camps were of pleasant things that seemed to encourage survival. But Dhomonts inclusion of Bettelheims suicide is what make Fret profonde ultimately problematic and immensely insightful. It brings the question of confrontation with trauma to a specifically personal levelwith the very real question as to whether suicide can be universalizedimbuing the work a very individual tragedy within the dark turns taken by the narrative. But this does remain problematic, because this intense personalization cannot be fully understood solely by hearing the work. The meta-narrative for Fret Profonde is, in my reading, not so much about the experience of childhood itself, but confrontation with an inner self that is reflected back in extreme anxiety or threat. The overarching form-image hints at many traditional stories, as plot develops to a point of extreme complexity, followed by a positive resolution. This oblique form of narrative has consequence of drawing attention to the underlying human fear-action primitives that fairy tales project, and in turn allow new primitive images to emerge: the more or less direct transition from bedroom to gas chamber is an utterly shocking one even now.

One debate within narrative studies is the extent to which narratives are unique to the medium through which they are related. This is not as simple as issues around the adaptation of a novel into cinema, etc. Within any genre we can be made very aware of the internal characteristics of the medium of expression. So, for instance in Fret profonde although there is call on a range of literary references, the work could not be regarded as an adaptation, but more as an integration of references and symbols that are powerful within a literary, musical, historical and personal context. Purely in terms of the information presented to us, the work is powerfully expressive: bedtime stories, the charms and dangers of the forest, Auschwitz are potent enough, but the range of darker contemporary and archaic narratives, the life and suicide of Bettelheim, the Divine Comedy and quotations from Schumanns music multiply the vectors of human and cultural meaning. In acousmatic music, the notion of narrative presents fundamental new opportunites for the ancient distinction between diegesis and mimesis: the story told and the story acted out. For via sound recording not only do we have access to oral histories both formal and informal, but also to sounds and images that carry us across the borders of memory and is what makes these works makes these works particularly significant as acousmatic expressions. References Barthes, Roland. (1977) Image Music Text. London: Fontana. Benjamin, Walter. (2002) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reprodicibility, In Benjamin, W. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge, MA / London: Belknapp Press. Casey, Edward S. (2000) Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ryan, M-L. (2004) Narrative Across Media : the Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln, Nebraska/ London : University of Nebraska Press.