[Saturday @ 10:00am – 12:00pm, Room 6]
Annie Garlid
“Viral Organs: Materiality and Sacrality in Contemporary Experimental Music”
Abstract
This paper examines a burgeoning (micro)trend within an international scene of experimental and electronic music in which young composers are writing for and performing on old church pipe organs. I will take as case studies the work of the American Paris-based artist Kali Malone and Swedish Berlin-based artist Ellen Arkbro. Against the backdrop of globalization and digitization, these two composers fashion sonic worlds in which slow replaces fast, material romances ether, and process complicates facade. Kali Malone, whose music is known for attracting the attention of zoomers, mindful ravers, and fashion houses alike, weds pseudo-liturgical aesthetics and Protestant notions of restraint to a sensual presentation of the organ as body. As if monitoring a gargantuan, breathing animal, she places microphones inside the instrument’s pipes and next to its creaking keys. Listeners accordingly bear intimate witness to the friction and wheezing of an archaic assemblage at particular terrestrial coordinates. Once recorded, these assemblages—themselves physical archives of histories and theories—live unexpected afterlives within a niche scene that thrives online.
Ellen Arkbro recorded her 2017 album For Organ and Brass on a 1624 church organ in Tangermünde, Germany, having sought out the instrument for its idiosyncratic meantone tuning. Like Malone, she binds listeners to a sense of place through the use of a large instrument that is inseparable from the building that houses it—a far cry from the portable computers and ubiquitous apps that allow anyone and everyone to produce new music in 2023. While considering the philosophical insights of the contemporary “experimental,” this paper will also ask the following questions: How does the “viral organ” relate to the historical organ? How do young artists gain access to these sequestered and deeply socialized religious spaces? What roles do the composers’ positionalities play in their sound- and place-oriented projects? Drawing from new organology, new materialism, religious studies, and media studies, this paper examines processes of sanctification and desanctification in an age that invites the intellectual and aesthetic straddling of old and new, material and digital.
Biography
Annie Garlid is a musician and PhD candidate at New York University, where she researches representations of nature, materiality, and place in recent experimental music. As a viola player and singer, she specializes in both historical performance practice and contemporary music. She appeared on Holly Herndon’s 2019 album PROTO and Caterina Barbieri’s 2019 album Ecstatic Computation. She has collaborated and performed with a number of other composers and artists, including Rosemarie Trockel, Bill Kouligas, Emptyset, Nile Koetting, Cat Lamb, Marc Sabat, and Laure M. Hiendl. She plays and sings with the Cramer Quartet, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Seraphic Fire, Early Music New York, De Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht, the Netherlands Bach Society, the Handel & Haydn Society, and Tafelmusik. She has been recording and touring as UCC Harlo since 2017.
Alan van Keeken
“A Democratic Interface for Popular Music?”
Abstract
Electronic home organs were one of the most successful electronic instruments in post-war West Germany. The instrument was marketed as a one-man orchestra for domestic spaces, made to fit seamlessly into furniture landscapes as well as into the musical and sonic world of middle-class households (van Keeken 2021). The advertising materials praised parts of its interface, especially the controls for the drum machine and the (semi-)automated bass and chord accompaniment as shortcuts to mastering the instrument (see fig. 1). The home organ can thus be considered a “democratizing” technology that subverted some of the gate-keeping and ideological elements of instrumentality (Hardjowirogo 2017), namely the years of training and effort musicians were expected to invest. What role did this unusual selling point play in the success, user design, and cultural impact of the instrument?
The home organ in its broader context remains a desideratum of music technology’s history, which has rarely been covered in scientific research (Stanbury 2017; Davies 2006). One reason – apart from the “low” status of the “Schweineorgel” (literally: “pig organ”) – may lie in the various options of writing contemporary instrument historiographies, especially now that mainstream organology has to share authority in this field with, for example, media studies (Dörfling 2022), STS (Pinch/Mooney 2021), or popular music studies (Brennan 2020). The joint research project Musical Objects of Popular Culture aimed at developing a new, integrative way of contextualizing music technology. Drawing on 23 case studies, it investigated the material and technical basis for popular culture phenomena in Germany from 1945 until today (Burkhardt et al. 2021).
My paper introduces socio-technical artifact analysis (van Keeken 2022) as a framework for investigating the impact of the electronic home organ. It has been developed for the sub-project Generators of Sound, concerned with musical instruments and sound-processing devices. It considers (1) the object itself as a technical materialization of design processes and production cultures; (2) contextualizes its marketing and user-design (Akrich 1992) through promotional literature and internal company documents, understood as paratexts; and (3) finally analyzes its use, domestication (Hirsch / Silverstone 2003), and appropriation in private and professional practice.
Biography
Alan van Keeken, M.A., studied musicology, sociology, and political science at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In 2018–2021, he worked as a research assistant at the rock’n’popmuseum in Gronau, Westphalia. There he was part of the project Musical Objects of Popular Culture, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. He was responsible for the sub-project Generators of Sound, concerned with sound producing devices. Since 2021, he has been working as a lecturer and research assistant at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg’s department of musicology. He currently writes his PhD thesis on the history of the electronic home organ in West Germany. Since 2020, he has published papers on popular music, science and technology studies, and music technology (van Keeken 2021a; tba.). Together with Johanna Imm, he organized the conference Instrument Research 2.0 at Martin-Luther University Halle Wittenberg (Imm / van Keeken 2021). In 2023, he will be scholar-in-residence at Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Fanny Gribenski
“The Organ as Colonial Infrastructure: Instruments, Empire, and Maintenance”
Abstract
This paper introduces organs as colonial infrastructures. In recent years, conversations surrounding instruments have omitted the organ, reflecting a broader tendency within musicology to leave the study of the instrument to the specialized field of organ studies. As my contribution will demonstrate, however, the organ raises particularly pressing social and political questions, offering new ways to think about the relation between sound and colonialism. As an integral component of church buildings, the instrument was part of broader schemes to reshape colonial territories through the transformation of urban and rural environments via the violent imposition of visual and auditory markers of power, including cathedrals, ecclesiastical housing, and bell towers. In addition, organs were crucial media for the dissemination of Western musical repertoires and systems, as well as modes of playing, singing, and experiencing music in colonial settings—in Kofi Agawu’s words, they were “colonizing forces.”
Centered on France’s efforts to develop and maintain a network of organs in the country’s colonies in the nineteenth century, my paper shows the value of rethinking the instrument through the lens of infrastructure studies. I first examine how the construction and operation of these large pieces of equipment relied on the cooperation between broad and diverse segments of society, thus offering a good starting point to disentangle the entwined histories of religion, politics, art, and industry in colonial settings. Second, I turn to recent work in the field of technology studies, which have emphasized the necessity to move away from questions of design and innovation, to examine problems associated with the maintenance of technology. I show how this shift can help us rethink the relationship between musical instruments and power in colonial settings. On the one hand, French political, religious, and industrial authorities continuously failed to sustain an operational network of organs in the colonies: frequent natural disasters regularly destroyed brand-new instruments, while local climatic conditions challenged aspirations of sonic precision. Yet despite these material failures, attempts to create a powerful infrastructure nonetheless produced important and long-lasting social and political effects, triggering ever-more intrusive schemes of surveillance over local communities.
Biography
Fanny Gribenski is an assistant professor of music at New York University. She is the author of L’Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l’espace (2019) and Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science and Politics (2023). She is the co-editor of Musiques et pratiques religieuses en France au xixe siècle (2022), of special issues of Contemporary Music Review (“Opening the Doors of the Studio,” 2020) and Transposition: Music and Social Sciences (“The Price of Music,” 2018), and of the memoirs of fin-de-siècle music lover Hermione Quinet (Ce que dit la musique [1893], 2016). Recent articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Past and Present, ISIS, Nineteenth-Century Music, Sound Studies, History of the Humanities, Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances, and the Revue de musicologie. With Viktoria Tkaczyk and David Pantalony, she is co-editing a book titled Unsound Supplies: Extractivism and the Material Provenance of Auditory Technologies.
George Rahi
“Phantoms in the Machine: Mediation and the 21st Century ‘Hyper-Organ’”
Abstract
Invoking the idea of a post-digital milieu to think through the wider relations between art, technology, and society, this presentation focuses on the pipe organ as both a traditional and radical instrument which indexes music’s changing relationship to its means of production. As the instrumental antithesis to the trends of miniaturization and standardization that have shaped contemporary music production, the pipe organ provides a unique view into a material culture which continually generates new sound worlds that extend beyond their preceding forms. Inspired by media archaeological methods of finding the ‘new’ in the ‘old’, my research seeks to locate various productive tensions and entanglements between the organ and its surroundings over history, including between religion and secularism, immaterial and material culture, animacy and object. I propose that these entanglements are not only present in contemporary organ music practices, but provide useful frameworks for discussing philosophies of art making beyond this particular field. In detailing various vitalist forces in organ arts, a notion of the organ emerges not just as a musical instrument (whose relevancy is widely considered in decline), but as a media interface which continues to be re-imagined amidst the further diffusion of digital modalities from fields such as electronic music and computational arts.
Biography
George Rahi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. His work includes installations, instrument making, composition, solo + ensemble performance, and works for radio, theatre & public spaces. Recent presentations have included Artificial Sonification exhibition (Matera), SPEKTRUM (Berlin), Kunst-Station Sankt Peter (Cologne), Fusebox Festival (Austin), Vancouver New Music, and Regenerative Feedback Festival (Rotterdam). He has been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), Lobe Spatial Sound Studio, and hcma architecture. He is currently a PhD student in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University, where his research and creation explores the emerging digital culture of the pipe organ.