The Rapture of Feedback
Hope Littwin
4/25/22
The Rapture of Feedback
Composer as Container, Co-creator and Facilitator, Ep. 1
Discovering Radigue
Two weeks ago, in the midst of cooking Sunday dinner with a background YouTube station running through a Maryanne Amacher algorithm, I found myself transfixed by an unknown piece taking up a regal hold on my dining room.
From the kitchen I could sense that my dining room was filled with a certain rapture, the molecules felt engorged, radiant, mesmerized by a keen attention. I felt the atmosphere of my home had indelibly shifted from the carousel of themed tracks whose ambient wash had lulled my home into a sleepy trance, into a sharp focused and palpable NOW. Waves of intentional sound unraveling in transcendent rhythm.
I peered through the doorway of my newly enlivened kitchen to see a young sun-kissed woman, lost in the rapture of sound, holding a shell to her ear. She was in awe of the natural phenomenon of auditory pleasure, in reverence, handed over to the practice of deep listening. She was Éliane Radigue on the cover of her own album, L’lle Re-Sonante.
As Julia Eckhardt says in her book Intermediary Spaces, “Radigue always starts with a completely open attitude, without perception of what the musicians might bring her; available for the musical events that might occur. Consequently the music offers something but requests nothing.”
Controlled methods of play with an uncontrollable force: Radigue’s practice could not be contained by the inflexible principles of the dodecaphonic tradition that she was trained in. She is working auditorily (no traditional score), with natural sound (tape machine and synthesizer) and new ways of composing. She reconsiders the role of the composer by dissolving the barriers between playing and listening, composer and interpreter, modulation and resolution. Radigue was developing ways of deep, activated, and concentrated listening. Her role as composer is not in controlling but in sharing and guiding the process, as a facilitator of a high level of conversation.
Defining Composer
My discovery of Radigue’s vision has been somewhat divinely timed, as I have been working to define what, as a composer, I am actually doing. The tools of measurement for success provided to artists by our culture, such as social media attention and money, have proven to be misguided and malnourished of meaning. And so, in an effort to craft healthier guidelines for my creative endeavors, I am defining my task as composer more clearly. I am contextualizing composer as facilitator of conversation, as curator of experience. Composer as investigator of the natural world and weaver of sound and story. Composer as musical bee keeper of sonic portals to alternate dimensions. Composer as ambient, invisible host of feasts and films in the realm of emotion, relocating the artistic endeavor into shamanic territory. These all feel like frames that, at the very least, orbit the task. But the work of creativity can feel elusive and often shapeshifts as I am submerged into deeper layers of listening.
I find myself, once hopeful for an oasis, wading in an ocean of more and more poignant questions, observing a land mass without resolutions but full of wonder, emerging. In this disorienting expanse, I am comforted by the words of Composer/Director Heiner Goebbels,
My work is not about understanding, because understanding very often means you reduce what you see to what you already know. And I would really like to aim for a strong artistic experience - an artistic experience which can be an encounter of something you have never seen or heard before. Maybe something you have no words for, and this is what I’m trying to research
I am no longer interested in “reducing what I see to what I already know.” A new paradigm of Composer as Container/Co-Creator/Facilitator is coming online for me: Goebbels identifying as composer of relationships between light and video, movement and sound, text and space has stuck with me. Radigue’s work also makes a comfortable home in this ecosystem. She is host of harmony and tension of the spheres, with her devotional and immersive use of feedback as a single thread from which a cloth is woven and scaled, searching for music that eludes her.
“I dreamt of an unreal, impalpable music appearing and fading away like clouds in the blue summer sky. Frolicking in the high mountain valleys around the wind and grey rocks and trees, like white runaways. This particular music, that always eluded me. Each attempt ended in seeing it come closer but remain unreachable, only increasing the desire to try again…” (Eliane Radigue, Intermediary Spaces)
Episodic Work
This personal exploration has taken me for quite a loop, and I want to honor the enormity of what is being developed by exploring this research episodically. Episodic work is calling to me as a form for composing. Timelines for ephemeral art forms are of particular interest to me.
What has captivated me about the music of Radigue is not only her communion with elemental sound but her excellent gauge for timeline and scale. She blasts open the intensity of duration inherent in the Concert Hall experience.
Maryanne Amacher, a contemporary of Radigue, also had this skill and believed that episodic work had special potential to create an environment capable of hosting meaningful feedback and enough space for an audience to project their own experiences, a requirement for effective dialogue in and around the art form. In seeking forms that could host music in this way, Amacher says, “I wanted the kind of engaging format television has developed - with all the ‘readymade mind stuff’ a mini-series form implies - an evolving sound work ‘to be continued’ as a form, the mini-series is powerful and challenging, yet up to now, only television develops it.”
Having a background as a theater artist and a dancer before I came to music, I have found, in the presence of a traditional concert hall, some kind of self induced pressure toward an allegiance to one domain. But my true wish is to have no hierarchy between the arts and some sort of immersive deeply sensual concert experience where the audience and maker can lose their sense of time and be transported into wonder.
Within my musical exploration as composer, I have found particular road blocks of translation, idiosyncratic to the medium, namely, translating an aural medium through written instructions. Radigue has found a way around this limitation by connecting the elusive harmony of the spheres to poetry. She says,"I could change the sound from the inside. To explain it visually, you could imagine a mountain turning into a cup, but so slowly from one state to another; it takes time by nature." Radigue found meaning in a rediscovery and modern translation of wonder.
Led by Wonder
Radigue’s music is bathed in mystery, led by wonder. It is a vastly different approach than our traditional understanding of compositional technique and execution. This method, of course, is also a discipline that requires dedication and precision of intention and meaning. The philosophical and emotional labor of this work is significant and while I would like to avoid remaking the wheel, I see formalizing the approach to creativity as an impossible task. I think there is some kind of key in being led by wonder that might take me where I am looking to go.
For some homerun comfort, I turn to Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet,
“...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now...” (Letters To A young Poet, Rainier Maria Rilke)
Photo by Kelsey McMillan