“WHAT CAN A System DO?” Gilles Deleuze names this as the central question of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, which sites the entire body at the centre of a philosophy of expression. The inquiry was motivated in element by Spinoza’s motivation to radical contingency—Deleuze goes on to recommend that “We do not even know of what a overall body is capable”—but it’s a problem that feels broadly in tune with the inventive form regarded as seem poetry, which harnesses human vocality to newly expressive ends. Taken up in the course of much of the twentieth century, with precedents dating as much back again as humankind has been mouthing syllables, this unfastened group of cultural generation was the target of “Chorus: A Seem Poetry Festival,” a the latest two-working day event at New York’s Artists Area, exactly where poets, musicians, and other acousticians collected to celebrate the open up-finished and indeterminate sonic choices of the human body.
Structured by Sean McCann, the composer, curator, and audio engineer guiding the Los Angeles-based document label Recital Plan, the party stands on the shoulders of a wealthy lineage of worldwide audio poetry festivals dating back a lot more than fifty yrs. In April 1968, the Fylkingen Centre for Experimental Songs and Artwork partnered with the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation’s Literary Device to host the first party in the series, which took place at Stockholm’s Museum of Fashionable Art and showcased poets from Sweden, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Through its heritage, the competition has relocated from Stockholm to London, Amsterdam, Toronto, and New York, the place the seem artist Charlie Morrow co-arranged and performed in the 12th Once-a-year Global Sound Poetry Competition in 1980. Morrow’s involvement with the 2022 Artists Place party coincides with the launch of a new box set from Recital documenting the 1980 version of the competition, which allows situate each attempts in the tradition set up by the International Sound Poetry Festival.
The function was guided as significantly by attempts to protect sound poetry’s historical past as to showcase existing do the job. The two evenings commenced with an unreleased composition by the late French poet and musician Henri Chopin, which McCann uncovered in the large archive that Morrow maintains as part of his New Wilderness Foundation (which he co-started alongside the poet Jerome Rothenberg) and its experimental history label offshoot, New Wilderness Audiographics. Beginning in the late 1950s, Chopin developed otherworldly tape collages that recast the voice as anything deeply mechanical, and his operate assisted bridge the hole amongst Dada and Futurism-inflected strains of seem poetry and the alphabet-exploding Lettrism movement with which he was tenuously associated.
Time-based mostly artwork is inherently ephemeral, and no matter if mainly because of seem poetry’s sparse documentation—largely restricted to decaying magnetic tape and ancient handwritten scores—or its eclipse by related but extra well known inventive actions like Surrealism and Fluxus, the sort has always appeared to resist canonization. While Copin’s towering impact lingered around substantially of the festival, many performances evinced a strained connection to the musician and his background, tough the security of an currently unfixed phrase with new tips about what seem poetry is, or what it should be. Next the initially night’s Chopin recording, the poet Julie Patton opened with bells, a shaker, and a melody from a plastic children’s toy in advance of singing in an operatic style that relished in the timbral qualities of each phrase. The efficiency was one particular of a lot of that located the artist’s voice inside of a broader instrumental exercise: Sydney Spann and Kiera Mulhern both put it among droning tones from percussive subject recordings, even though Mike Pollard and Eric Schmid cued severe noise from a sampler with minimal audible relationship to Chopin. With every set, the genre was stretched further to accommodate a sprawling assortment of methods with only a cursory regard for any historical throughline.
Doing work a lot more right in conversation with audio poetry and its traditions, vocalist Thomas Buckner revived Robert Ahley’s “When Famed Last Words Fail You,” which he at first debuted along with Ashley at Carnegie Corridor as element of an American Composers Orchestra overall performance in 1997. As with Ashley’s dreamlike operas, the composition employed the self-confident tone of conventional broadcast media to new ends, obtaining a wide-eyed appeal in language shipped through Buckner’s slickest radio announcer elocution. Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille performed a piece for guitar and voice which spoke to the challenges of Connor’s a long time-extended battle with Parkinson’s disorder, meditating on the sensitive situations that make a everyday living in the arts doable. With their longstanding connection to New York, Connors and Langilles drop light-weight on seem poetry’s deep roots in the city’s experimental tunes scene, even when it proliferated underneath other style labels.
Toward the stop of the festival’s next evening, Joan La Barbara returned to her piece “Solitary Journeys of the Head.” Like a great deal of her operate given that the 1970s, the composition pushed the human voice to its limitations, making use of yelps, clicks, and whispers as impartial phonemes in provider of a sophisticated and triumphant full. La Barbara remains an immensely virtuosic improviser, and the guttural physicality of her set furnished a putting counterbalance to the tightly-edited assemblage of Chopin.
Charlie Morrow closed out the pageant with a suite of his earliest poems at the request of McCann. Heat and full of everyday living, Morrow reflected fondly on his earliest times as a composer in advance of singing open, ghost-like notes, whistling like a windstorm, and ultimately enlisting the viewers to take part in a sequence of bellowing honks motivated by many underwater species identified as toadfish. The piece was in the beginning element of a series of research in nonhuman conversation that Morrow took up in the late 1960s, which was defined at the pageant with utmost simplicity. “One of those toadfish will begin [with a honk] and then the others will imitate,” he said, likely on to describe how the fish compete with a single one more to lead the team.
Gentle and charming like significantly of Morrow’s output, this temporary moment of viewers participation led into a rendition of 1 of the composer’s quantities parts right before the night completed out with two dream chants. “Some persons discover that if you shut your eyes, you will locate yourself in a a bit lucid desire state and have some visuals,” he mentioned. “And so I’ll choose you with me.” Right after comprehensively discovering what the entire body can do as an instrument, it only produced sense to seek out-of-human body transcendence in the close.
— Rob Arcand
Chorus: A Seem Poetry Festival took place at Artists Area in New York on November 10 and November 11, 2022.