And I thought to myself that we do not deserve to live in this world, if we do not perceive it.
Ernest Hemingway
by Michael Rüsenberg
It was at the "Casa di Goethe" in Rome (not to be confused with the "Goethe Institut") that I attended the premiere of "Goethe in Sicily", a photo exhibition by Frank Horvat, a German artist living in Paris. A short summary of his career mentioned his new interest in digital photography. I myself had already enjoyed a session of "photoshop", during which I had actually managed to smuggle a sunset into a picture I had taken early in the afternoon.
At the reception following the exhibition, I made the observation to Horvat that digital photography is "where the lie really starts".
His half-reply, that that would be assuming that all photography up to now has been purely documentary in nature, was addressed to me as if to the last person in a whole queue of people with the same complaint.
Nonetheless, his remark perfectly matched my thoughts about my own genre - soundscaping. I had become convinced that photography was the superior documentary medium and lost faith in the ability of sound to document and mirror circumstances in the way that I believed photography had done before I met Horvat. I felt myself being drawn to the opposite notion that listening to a soundscape recording, without any written accompaniment in the form of a booklet or verbal explanation, is a purely aesthetic act.
It was actually a walk in Austria in June 1996 that had set these thoughts in motion. I was on holiday with my family and desperately wanted to avoid using a camera - the only equipment I had taken with me was my soundscape recording tools. We were approaching the Grossvenediger, a mountain of 3000-odd metres, which offers a breathtaking view - a stream in front with a forest at right hand sight and the majestic mountain in the middle. Photo-printed paper would have endlessly preserved this memory. What a poor product a sound-recording of the same location would have been by comparison! A mountain stream sounding like any mountain stream the world over, with no clue that this was a special one - springing off the Grossvenediger.
Other irritations came some years later. In Rabat, recording the sound of ibis amongst the trees, the thought struck me that these sometimes very aggressive birds could possiby be mistaken for ducks. When I played my recording later to my daughter and asked her to describe what she heard, her answer was "Ducks!"
Sounds are obviously of less semantic value than visual impressions.The liner notes to "rendu visible", a recent album by Darren Copeland, the Canadian soundcape composer, contain a simple but very important statement:
"almost every acousmatic composer - perhaps almost the entire listening audience for acousmatic art - belongs to the sighted world."
That hits the nail on the head. Listening to what you saw when you were recording and listening to what someone else has recorded, without any kind of visual experience, are two totally different forms of reception.
Whilst I greatly respect Murray Schafer, the World Soundscape Project and similar undertakings, I do think that questions of acoustic ecology and noise-pollution etc. should be left to professionals such as the noise researchers at the University of Giessen. At least they are not interested in the aesthetics of the subject!
The soundscape composer draws aesthetic benefit from the phenomenons he politically is in opposition to. When I listen to the works of Hildegard Westerkamp, I hear well-made, impressive compositions, but no statement on acoustic ecology. To me, a soundscape composer who advocates the principles of acoustic ecology is a contradiction in terms - he should applaud rather than complain about the mechanical age because it has provided him with a broad spectrum of sound. The up-and-coming digitalisation of the world around us is drastically reducing our opportunities for finding unique sounds other than those produced by nature.
One of the most impressive soundscape activities I know is "Anticipating the Archeology of Sound", led by Asmus Tietchens in Hamburg. Very Schaferian in lengthy recordings they collect sounds that may be lost tomorrow because the respective machines will be out of use very soon. The people engaged on these projects care a lot about recording techniques and do not want their efforts to be confused with those of the radio-archivist. And yet they can hardly avoid getting musically involved in their subject. Officially, they deny that their samples have any aesthetic value. Unofficially, they make a composition out of them!
Soundscapes, to my understanding, differ from musique concrète in that they seek to portray how a specific location was at a specific time, however vaguely the idea may be communicated. A comment on travel-literature by the great German author, Kurth Tucholsky (1890-1935), is, in my opinion, equally applicable to soundscapes:
"Any description of a journey describes first and foremost the traveller, and not the journey".
I must admit that locations in Lisbon and Madrid where I have made lengthy recordings sound so different on later visits that I often wonder if I have made some kind of mistake. Presumably this is not the case; the difference is due to myriad factors - a different season, a different time of day, bad luck that nothing was happening or had been happening moments before or after, above all, my own perception of the situation as tourist or soundscape recordist - roles which are capable of very different attention spans towards an ever-evolving phenomenon - the soundscape.
My friends in Hamburg make a superhuman effort to banish all aesthetic consciousness when listening to their recordings - and fail. Does this mean that I, who has no documentary purpose, should resist searching for musical forms in my own?
This question remains to be dealt with. Nonetheless, I am convinced that once you accept the Cage´ian idea that noise can be music, you are caught in a trap. You hear noise with a musical ear, whether you are recording it or not !
Three anecdotes to illustrate my point: on a trip to Chicago, we spontaneously went through an open door in Finkl´s steelworks with the idea of recording. I was wearing headmicrophones that made it look like I was listening whilst I was in fact recording. One of the steel workers was watching me, however, and since I was afraid that he might stop our activities and kick us out, I somehow managed to explain in sign language what I was doing. "You´re recording the noise?" He laughed - and let us stay.
At midnight in Rome, a street sweeper would almost have killed me when he realized I was recording him working. On this occasion, it was the language barrier alone that saved me.
In Cologne, in an attempt to get permission to record inside a huge Autobahn-bridge, I waxed lyrical to the man in charge about the sound of the expansion joints. He replied as if I had made an obscene request: "Mr Rüsenberg, I am an engineer!"
These three were pre-Cage - I am post.
Noise to them is a by-product of their work - if avoidable, they reduce it to zero. My approach is that of an artist entering unknown territory. All that interests me is the by-product of the situation, not the situation itself. Absurdly enough for them, I actually saved these recordings for the concert, well knowing that there are other people like myself, notoriously hungry for sounds that are not part of their everyday life which they hear with a different ear.
Don´t get me wrong: I am not claiming that sound-objects as the soundscape-composer finds and transforms them are music per se.
"A natural object cannot, as a matter of logic, have syntactical properties, whether it is a bird´s ´song´ or anything else." This is the voice of my favourite music philosopher, Peter Kivy (from "Music Alone“, Ithaca 1990). "However much bird ´songs´ may sound like music, they cannot be music - unless, of course, we ascribe to birds a mental life comparable to our own, which few of us will want to do."
So what do I do when I listen to the sounds of the real world and try to find a musical meaning in them? Kivy knows the answer, it is the "as-if" mode: "For to say we hear bird songs as if they had syntactical properties is not to ascribe syntactical properties to them..."
And this is what distinguishes the steel worker from the soundscape artist and the soundscape listener: the "as-if" mode.Listening to the real world is the act of aestheticism in which we follow Hemingway, for whom we do not deserve to live in this world if we do not perceive it.
*lecture at soundscapes voor 2000 conference; Amsterdam, November 1999
by Michael Rüsenberg
