Elemental Media as Musical Culture

Abstract

In the first half of the 20th century, some Europe countries resorted to the melting of church bells: mostly for the production of weapons citing a shortage of metal. But the Soviet Army also produced statues of Lenin and Stalin from the objects, turned religious spaces into civic spaces such as circuses and zoos, and restricted religious holidays and practices. The practice was seen as spiritually and politically demoralizing, and after the war, In Latvia, Lithuania and Croatia, Lenin monuments were melted and hundreds of church bells and other objects were again produced from the metals.  

With a historical focus on Eastern Europe and Soviet Central Asia, this research details a number of transformative moments carry metal from one form into another: from bells to monuments, to weapons, and bells again. Accounting for these specific moments of transformation, it illustrates how the sound of the standard church bell has been articulated by the demise of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the European union.  By tracing the origin of bells, carillons and their supporting infrastructures, this research is also situated in the framework of soundscapes, religious community, resistance, labour and holy spaces. I speculate on the material and spiritual qualities shared by the religious icon and the political monument, and the sounds that signal that transformation by mapping the different alloys that constitute these holy instruments.  The paper responds to the variant waves of revolutionary impulse by making connections between the nature of monumentality and the destruction of Soviet monuments and their subsequent transformation, as well as origins of violence and Russian colonialism, drawing a direct line to from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the fall of Communism, to today’s events around anti-colonial frameworks. With that, it suggests that some new perspectives on the potential of sound may be situated within the field of history and archeology. 

Biography

Xenia Benivolski curates writes and lectures about sound, music and visual art. Most of her work concerns borderlines between the East and the West. Currently she is working with the archive of Latvian outsider artist Zanis Waldheims and co-producing a first monograph for the artist in 2023. She is also curating You Can’t Trust Music at e flux.com, a research project connecting sound-based artists, musicians and writers to explore together the way that landscape, acoustics and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures. Xenia contributes to the Worker as Futurist project at Lakehead University and teaches art criticism at OCAD University.  She publishes in various art and music publications, and academic journals.

Abstract

This paper considers the ways the materiality of gut strings and symbolic ideas about animal disposability and consumption of music are entwined. As scholars in critical environmental justice, ecofeminist, and Black studies have shown, such beliefs about animal bodies have helped constitute Western humans’ attitudes of autonomy from and superiority over animals, non-human environments, and othered humans treated as less-than-human. To explore these issues, I examine the often hidden material origins and production of gut strings, which are processed animal intestines, a slaughterhouse byproduct. I also explore the ways gut strings’ prized “warm” and “lively” aesthetic qualities are a consequence of their materiality as highly flexible and resonant yet unpredictable and fragile substances, all due to their origins in animal bodies. Such entwined material and aesthetic qualities are typically distanced by gut manufacturers and users, however, through both increased physical distance between slaughterhouses and gut string manufacturers over time as well as deployment of the concept of “naturalness” to obscure the violence that treats animal lives as disposable. Finally, in an effort to highlight alternative conceptualizations of gut string materiality, I consider the absorption and swelling of the strings caused by moisture from environments and finger oils, resulting in material changes that partly rehydrate the dried animal organs and result in unruly music performance elements that cast off human attempts at control.

Biography

Bailey Hilgren is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at New York University. Her research interests include intersections of music and sound with ecofeminist and queer ecologies, environmental justices, and animal studies. She recently completed a thesis on settler colonial listening practices in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in her home state of Minnesota. She holds an M.S. in environmental studies from the University of Oregon, an M.M. in historical musicology from Florida State University, and an undergraduate degree in biology and music performance from Gustavus Adolphus College.

Abstract

This paper will discuss and demonstrate musical instruments constructed out of unfinished and abandoned brass, string, and reed instruments—instruments that I have built from scratch and refashioned into hybrid musical bodies bridging disparate instrumental families. Synthesizing both traditional and imaginary designs, these instruments explore acoustic phenomena innate to the materials themselves while simultaneously developing new effects and techniques through their integration with other instrumental de- and re-constructions. By investigating the complex roles of interference and disjuncture in craft and organology, these instruments help elucidate the convergences between construction and performance, and between human and nonhuman sounding agencies.

In tracing the twin trajectories of craftsmanship and artistic performance, I will examine how elements of instrument building fuse and interact with subsequent sounding musical performances. By virtue of being rooted in ‘broken’ and ‘faulty’ materials discarded during the construction process, these instruments testify the traumatic histories of their long, messy construction. These disjointed instrumental ontogenies pose questions about how instruments are formed, and how their bodies can be reimagined and hijacked. As discarded instrumental materials shape which new instruments and acoustic possibilities can emerge, they show how instruments help to construct themselves—holding and utilizing agency in their relationship to the world and to the resonances that they provoke therein.

By reclaiming their material agency, these instruments help reveal how the discontinuous spatiotemporal unfolding of instrument building can facilitate fresh and unexpected interfaces, relationships, and “acoustemologies” (Feld 1996). Following Alexander G. Weheliye’s call for “phonographic” practices that enact “thinking sound/sound thinking” (Weheliye 2005), this paper examines the intertwining of technology and culture, exploring how the coalescence of material and human agencies produce “sounding situated knowledges” (Goh 2017). By braiding together insight from physical craftsmanship and theoretical research, I hope to clarify the intricate and intimate entanglement between sound and the vast networks of bodies and agencies that precede the sounding moment itself, stretching backwards through time and space in chaotic, fragmented patterns of agency, causation, potential, and decay.

Biography

Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn is a sound artist and musician working around the edges of installation, improvisation, composition, and craftsmanship. He is an accomplished instrument builder and performs on his own hybrid creations at concert halls, festivals, and universities throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He publishes about sound studies, artistic research, and musicology, and his book dis/cord: Thinking Sound through Agential Realism is available from Punctum Books.