Radical Reimaginings

 

Ascending in All Directions 1 (Starfish) and 2 (Octopus), Vintage paper, gouache, ink on birch panel, 12"x12"x.8", 2020

Radical Reimaginings is a virtual exhibition curated by 516 ARTS and the Kolaj Institute. On view from August 22 through December 31, 2020.

 

 My exhibition statement: 

I want to reimagine the potential of the imaginary. To imagine is the first step toward realization—what once seemed impossible can begin to take form in the mind’s eye (or ear as the case may be). Collage can function as a lens through which the marvelous underpinnings of the commonplace are revealed. It can serve as a map or guide, a catalyst, prescription or elixir for maker and viewer alike.

As I was creating these pieces I was literally thinking of them as lenses through which one could glimpse a more egalitarian, cooperative, compassionate world. In reading the exhibition catalog I noticed similar sentiments reiterated by many of the artists included in the exhibition.

 

In earlier times and under different horrific circumstances artists, writers, musicians, and others have used art and music as part of efforts to endure absurd conditions. During and after World War 1, Dadaists and Surrealists used collage, automatic writing, nonsense poetry, and collaborative games such as Exquisite Corpse in response to the illogic of war, colonization, and industrialization. 

 

In music, the frameworks for improvisation that came to be known as blues and jazz emerged in response to slavery, oppression, discrimination, and exploitation.

 

These art forms went much further than serving as documents of shared suffering…they created community, provided a forum for communication, encouraged collective creativity…they offered a sense of shared purpose and meaning…in the midst of despair, these practices generated the very conditions required to transform the circumstances at hand. 

 

“The possible” is a carefully calculated convention. But when the prevailing possible so clearly serves the few at the expense of the many, it is up to those undaunted by perceived limitations to intervene in its radical reimagining. 

 

To cultivate and maintain the ability to envision parallel or alternate possible presents is a subversive act. The scale of current environmental, political, and social challenges would indicate that the possible is no longer insufficient, if it ever was…the impossible is the only viable path forward.

 

Equipped with whatever materials one may find at hand, an openness to chance, and a spirit of experimentation, collage is one route to its realization.

Avant-Garde as Dynamic Participatory Occasion

The following text is Chapter 6 of "An Intricate Ensemble: The Art-Science of an Ecological Imaginary" published in January 2020, in partial fulfillment of Rhode Island School of Design's Master of Arts program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies. The paper is available in its entirety at RISD Digital Commons. The abstract is listed in the Leonardo Abstract Service (LABS) Database.

 

 

6. CONCLUSION

 

At 5:30am on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range (a place that had been known by Spanish conquistadores as Jornada del Muerto, the route of the dead man[1]) in the New Mexican desert, the Manhattan Project completed its Trinity Test, the detonation of an 18.6 kiloton plutonium bomb.[2] As he watched the explosion, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer, director of the project, famously recalled a line from Hindu holy book the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”[3] If it had not been widely apparent prior to this moment, it certainly became known immediately afterwards: Homo sapiens—“wise man”—had acquired the power, previously ascribed only to gods and other supreme forces, to annihilate itself.

 

In addition to the nuclear threat, most of Earth’s human inhabitants now well understand that many other reckless activities engaged in by some threaten the existence of all. The entire biosphere is being catastrophically altered by a few hundred years’ worth of exploitative practices controlled by the wealthiest and most powerful, the majority of whom are now loathe to abandon the profit motive in favor of more egalitarian, less oppressive systems of social and economic organization. People around the world in all sectors of society are currently engaged in resistance to inhumane and ecocidal forces.[4] The angst inherent in the Dadaist reaction to the senselessness of the post-World War I era seems all the more sensible in light of atrocities currently unfolding.

 

In fact, the point made by the Romantic Naturalists and Surrealists—that an awareness of the “marvelous” aspects of existence serves a vital social function—remains highly relevant to the times at hand: there is still much to be learned from those who never forgot existence is intra-active, and from those who refused, and continue to refuse, to submit to reductive thinking.

 

For the oppressed, to cultivate and maintain an ability to imagine parallel or alternate possible presents remains a subversive act. René Ménil wrote:

 

The land of the marvelous is the most stunning revenge we have…Man sees the intolerable limits of everyday life fall from him like so much tawdry finery. Everything really becomes possible for him. He can transgress his spatial boundaries: he transforms himself into a tree, an animal, a peaceful lake, so discovering precious secrets as in a game. He overcomes space by instantly crossing infinite distances. He holds past and future, space and time, life and death in his hands…(Ménil 1941 in Fijalkowski and Richardson 1996,91).

 

In light of the current state of the world, Ménil’s words may seem almost excruciatingly optimistic. But giving all power to the imagination (l’imagination au pouvoir) may remain among the most potent and accessible tactics available. As philosopher Herbert Marcuse stated (somewhat paradoxically), “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world” (Marcuse 1977 [1979],32).

 

To reiterate: this thesis is intended neither to assert that art can solve all problems, nor to claim modern science is inherently flawed. From a position of constructive critique, it has been my purpose, rather:

 

1. To establish creative practices as essential forms of knowledge production in and of themselves. I am suggesting artistic techniques—ones that arouse the imagination, senses, and emotions—can be effectively applied in concert with science’s rigorous and dispassionate methods. Situations that tend to treat art as an embellishment capable only of serving in an illustrative or support capacity, or that otherwise use art to uncritically reinforce the authority of a science which fails to take humanitarian and ecological concerns foremost into account, are, I maintain, less constructive.[5]

 

2. To invite science to critically examine a paradox inherent within itself. Science’s revered objective stance—undeniably useful as a mindset for the purposes of research—is neither a scientifically demonstrable condition of reality, nor is it necessarily constructive when applied in a non-scientific (social) context. I believe science, in its privileged position as humanity’s preeminent form of knowledge production, reinforces a “detached” attitude that runs the perilous risk of preventing the most destructive segment of humanity from understanding itself (ourselves) as interconnected with one another and the biosphere.

 

3. To suggest practices which expand the imagination are valuable not only to those in the arts, but to those in the sciences, and to assert that a sound understanding of science can be of great practical use to those in creative fields.

 

Umberto Eco describes how “contemporary art can be seen as an epistemological metaphor”:

 

What we find in art is less the expression of new scientific concepts than the negation of old assumptions. While science, today, limits itself to suggesting a probable structure of things, art tries to give us a possible image of this new world, an image that our sensibility has not yet been able to formulate, since it always lags a few steps behind intelligence— indeed, so much so that we still say that the sun ‘rises’ when for three centuries we have known that it does not budge (Eco 1989,90).

 

 

Ultimately, I am calling for authentic, critical engagement of the methods of science in tandem with those of the arts. By bringing Goethe’s delicate empiricism, Schelling’s Naturephilosophie, Dadaist and Surrealist natural history, and the efforts of musical improvisors into dialog with the contemporary environmental humanities, I am pointing toward a mode of thought and action that engages the seemingly paradoxical yet complementary mindsets of art and science. I believe vacillating between—or the simultaneous holding of—states of objectivity and subjectivity, individuality and collectivity, prescription and improvisation can be of use to the collaborative formation of a constructive image of oikos, our shared home, regardless of one’s primary discipline.

 

Alexander von Humboldt expressed similar sentiments when he stated reason and imagination must be considered equally:

 

It would be a denial of the dignity of human nature and the relative importance of the faculties with which we are endowed, were we to condemn at one time austere reason engaged in investigating causes and their mutual connections, and at another that exercise of the imagination which prompts and excites discoveries by its creative powers (Alexander von Humboldt 1858,78).

 

As the Surrealists understood, such dialectical practices are only useful in relation to the revolutionary project:  

 

It is not enough…for man to become the instrument of his unconscious, for he should occupy himself with finding a concrete solution to the problems of existence. Surreality is not to be sought solely on ‘the other side,’ but should become integrated with the attributes of consciousness in order to recognize this harmony of being that will finally reconcile man to himself (Duplessis 1950 [1962],109).

 

And the revolutionary project at hand is monumental—for life on Earth to continue to thrive, the Anthropocentric model of the universe must rapidly go the way of the geocentric one. What practices have the potential to aid humanity in coming to see itself as part of an intricate ensemble with one another and the biosphere? What might be the most effective and efficient methods of restoring a sense of the marvelous, and how can they be implemented?

 

Can an avant-garde effort succeed now where similar past movements failed to take hold? I argue “success,” as a constantly-moving target, is an unfounded concern; there is never a fixed point at which victory is declared and all struggles cease. Movements inspire and reinforce one another, reconfigure, reorganize, and re-emerge in new forms, as we have seen in the twenty-first century with the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Indignados, #BlackLivesMatter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and many other social, environmental, and political uprisings around the world. According to a 1907 definition, avant-garde started out as a military term referring to the “advance guard” or the “vanguard”:

 

The avant-garde générale, avant-garde stratégique, or avant-garde d'armée is a strong force (one, two, or three army corps) pushed out a day's march to the front, immediately behind the cavalry screen. Its mission is, vigorously to engage the enemy wherever he is found, and, by binding him, to ensure liberty of action in time and space for the main army.[6]

 

Terms like “avant-garde,” “queer,” “utopian,” or “surreal,” by definition, refer to things that are out of the ordinary, ahead of their time, or are unexpected, rare, or uncommon in occurrence. “Queer” is defined as “strange, peculiar, eccentric”[7] and “utopia” literally means “no place”.[8] But for those who select these terms, the subtext is that what’s considered normal is in need of adjustment.  When it is widely taken for granted that quantum particles can leap from one place to another without having been anywhere in between,[9] those particles will cease to be “queer,” and some other phenomenon may take their place in the pantheon of queerness.

 

Barad poetically describes “queer” as:

 

…itself a lively, mutating organism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality (Barad in Kleinman 2012,81).

 

 

Ishmael proclaims in the mid-nineteenth century novel Moby Dick, “Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em,” (Melville 1902,109). When everything is queer, nothing is. And then something is again. And so the cycle goes; avant-gardeness, queerness, and utopianism are never-ending becomings.

 

It is my strong impression that the cultivation of an intricate ensemble—in any and every form this may take—is an appropriate and necessary avant-garde with which to confront the roaring (boiling, wailing, failing, flailing?) 2020s. Practices and frameworks that emphasize and enhance collaboration, spontaneity, and care—mad love—in defying convention, contain the potential to subvert it. Not acting (in-activism) is not an option. 

 

If [aesthetic vision] arouses us in any practical way, it is because it finds us ready, one way or another, to act. Not the works of art, therefore, but the [person themselves] who carries in [their] being the potential of rebellion and revolution (Fallico 1962,131).

 

 

The impossible is realized every time a “perfect coalescence of feeling with image and image with feeling” occurs in an act of creativity; we can “know what the possible feels like because we know ourselves to be its creators” (Fallico 1962,73).

 

This is a dynamic participatory occasion.[10]

---

[1]According to page 28 of Marc Simmons’ 1986 book Taos to Tome: True Tales of the Hispanic New Mexico.

[2]According to the US Department of Energy:

 https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/trinity.htm. Accessed November 18, 2019.

[3] Video of Oppenheimer recounting the moment of the Trinity Test: https://youtu.be/lb13ynu3Iac.

Accessed November 18, 2019.

[4] As of this writing, uprisings are underway in Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Chile, to name but a few hotspots.

[5] At the same time, the artist should not feel obliged to force their works into a scientific idiom (i.e.: works need not have a tangible, quantifiable, or repeatable component) in order to be accepted as valid by either practitioners or audiences. Science is science; art does not need to be science also.

 

[6] From Sadowa, an account of the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria written by General Henri Bonnal and Charles Francis Atkinson referenced at Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/avant-garde. November 19, 2019.

[7] Definition of “queer” from Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/queer. Accessed November 18, 2019.

[8] Definition of “utopia” from Online Etymology Dictionary: Utopia https://www.etymonline.com/word/utopia. Accessed November 18, 2019

[9] Karen Barad on quantum leaps:

Quantum leaps aren’t jumps (large or small) through space and time. An electron that “leaps” from one orbital to another does not travel along some continuous trajectory from here-now to there-then. Indeed, at no time does the electron occupy any spatial point in between the two orbitals. But this is not what makes this event really queer. What makes a quantum leap unlike any other is that there is no determinate answer to the question of where and when they happen. The point is that it is the intra-play of continuity and discontinuity, determinacy and indeterminacy, possibility and impossibility that constitutes the differential spacetimematterings of the world. Or to put it another way, if the indeterminate nature of existence by its nature teeters on the cusp of stability, of determinacy and indeterminacy, of possibility and impossibility, then the dynamic relationality between continuity and discontinuity is crucial to the open-ended becoming of the world which resists acausality as much as determinism (Barad 2007,182).

[10] This is the last line of my 2013 “Manifesto for the Obvious International”:

http://alycesantoro.com/obvious_international.html. Accessed November 18, 2019.

 

Frederic Rzewski on the Political Use of Music 1968/2015

The text below was included in a 1968 edition of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde magazine as part of an interview with composers about politics and music. Twenty composers were asked the same single question: Have you, or has anyone, ever used your music for political or social ends? The complete set of interviews, plus a 2015 follow-up interview with 18 additional composers (20 including two — Rzewski and Terry Riley — who had been interviewed in 1968), can be found on my website.


Statement from program notes for Festival Internationale del Teatro Universitario, Parma, March 23, 1968


In times of emergency men find it possible to perform operations necessary to survival without bureaucracy, police, money, and the other obstacles which normally obstruct the way to efficient behavior. In such moments the organism, acted upon by forces beyond its control, is able to act, to respond to reality in an efficient manner. It is forced to move, to create space for itself, in order to survive. When confronted with the possibility of destruction, it discovers the alternative of creation.

Seldom are men able to reap the fruits offered by such moments of crisis. The memory of the higher state fades as suddenly as the danger which brought it forth appeared. The greater part of the mind, called into action in moments of threat to physical survival, is content to relapse into a state of slumbering semi-awareness in the interim periods of tranquility. It re-acts the roles which it invented in moments of creativity, applying them to a new reality which the creative act caused to come forth. It drifts into dark, uncharted areas of the past, until tempestuous forces blow it back into the blinding light of now.

The organism is perpetually involved in a drunken balancing act, upon the high wire of the present, and over the abyss of the past, into which it rarely dares to glance. In this precarious enterprise, it extends itself uncontrollably, until some more or less painful contact with the force of gravity forces it to move creatively. The accuracy of this movement, the measure of its creativity, is determined by the awareness-level of the organism, the degree of its sensitivity to danger and salvation.

Normally human beings are open to the joyous pain of creation only in moments of immediate threat to individual survival. Civilization produces forms of behavior conditioned by such limited sensitivity to the larger organic process, and excludes others which tend to expand such sensitivity. In fact, the economy of minimum survival-efficiency on the level of the individual organism, which civilization by its competitive games systematically cultivates, is not sufficient to ensure survival. It results in the cancerous growth of the total life process.

In the last sixty years, 100,000,000 human beings have been murdered by other human beings. This number exceeds the sum of all who have been known to live and die in the course of human history up to that time. In order to survive at all, I must do more than merely survive. I must create.

To create means to be here and now: to be responsible to reality on the high highwire of the present.

To be responsible means to be able to communicate the presence of danger to others.

An artist is a person who lays claim to a heightened state of perception. His perceptions are acts of communication dictated by a sense of responsibility to the life process. He creates the sense of emergency in a state of tranquility, where there is no threat to individual survival, and where the spirit is free to e-merge, to extend its dimensions, to create space.

It is necessary now to create a new form of communication, through which human sensitivities can be awakened to the presence of danger on the highest level, and to the necessity for creation in order to avoid it efficiently. This form is not telephones, television, newspapers; nor is it theater, music, painting…As Baudelaire said, true civilization is not gas, electricity, or machines, but rather the diminution of the traces of original sin.

The most direct and efficient form of communication is dialog. Dialog in its highest form is creation out of nothing: the only true creation.

An art form which aims for highest efficiency in times of highest urgency must be based on dialog. It must reject the possibility of the impartial observer, present but not involved in the communication process, as contradictory to the idea of communication itself.

Such an art form must be concerned with creation out of nothing. Its decisions cannot be governed by structures and formulas retained from moments of past inspiration, which it is content to re-arrange and re-interpret. They must be born from marrying the moment, the creative moment in which the organism approaches reality so immediately that it is blessed with the perception of the highest possible future, which is its natural course toward joy. Such an art form must be improvised, free to move in the present without burdening itself with the dead weight of the past.

Improvisation is the art of creating out of nothing: a lost art form. It is necessary to rediscover this form and re-invent its rules, now. It is necessary to embark upon a disciplined search for a new harmony. Harmony is a process in which speaker and listener agree to communicate. The responsibility for undertaking this voyage of discovery is everyone’s who may come into contact with these words.

– Frederic Rzewski, SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde Volume 6, page 91, July 1968 

 

 

Frederic Rzewski with Elliot Carter in Berlin, 1965

Follow-up interview for Leonardo Music Journal in 2015:

Have you, or has anyone, ever used your music for political or social ends?

The political use of music (there is no other use for it, really, except that it can make you feel good): Music is used all the time for political purposes. What is significantly absent is the inverse: some kind of musical influence on politics. Wagner, you might say (but it really isn't clear, in this case, who is influencing whom). One could imagine a politics in which music was not merely "used", but was a basic element: a "jazz politics", for example. A politics in which art, music, and poetry were given priority because they brought enormous savings to the economy, as spiritual activities which reduced violence and hastened the coming to adulthood of the species.

But it is true that, before this can happen, there must be a fundamental change in the common perception of what is necessary for the survival of the species: individuals, or communities?

Music must become conscious of its powers. At the moment it is roving amok, not knowing where it is going and why. If music does find a direction, it could have enormous consequences. Already its power to influence behavior has been demonstrated in history: it played a huge role in influencing public opinion towards the Vietnam War, for example. It seems strangely absent now, when war threatens to become the permanent state of the society. There is nothing now to compare with Dylan's "Masters of War".

Music may or may not be able to change the world. Probably not. But it would be nice if it could. So I think we musicians should act as if it could, even though we know it probably won't. We should not act as if we didn't care. Because, in fact, we do care. Music could really have a significant influence on the course taken by humanity in the next few decades. We are really are living through a critical period in our evolution; and, like it or not, the inevitable revolution has already begun. Will it be musical? Or will it be like all the others? (As Mark Twain remarked: "Prophecy is really hard, especially when it's about the future.") But there are grounds for optimism, since the stakes are so high and the dangers so great. Therefore (with Gramsci): pessimism in thought, optimism in action. The revolution will not be televised, but it might well be musical.

As for improvisation: after fifty years of blather, we have finally come to realize that, when we talk about it, we don't really know what we are talking about, any more than we did fifty years ago. We improvise when we cross the street, and although it is necessary for survival, it is not sufficient to change the world. We can't cross the street without a plan either. We need both of these things; and that's precisely what we don't have.

(The last time I saw Elliott Carter, just a few months before his death, we talked, as we always did when we met, of serious issues facing the world. At one point he said, "The real problem in this country is that there is no communist party." Carter was not a communist, but he was a highly cultured man, and in this case he was right on the button.)

Musicians, like most artists, are frequently refuseniks, in whatever political system. But equally frequently they are collaborators, all too ready to collaborate with the system that feeds them. Some become famous and use their fame to exert political influence, sometimes admirable, sometimes questionable. Others remain in obscurity, although their work is no less important. The great composers are not solitary geniuses creating out of nothing, but simply those who put their names on the collective products of traditions which may be hundreds, even thousands of years old.

The way musicians relate to each other in the production of music can be a model for the way people relate to each other in any social situation. In this way, music is the revolution. The more we can develop it to a higher stage, the more we will be helping the revolutionary cause. As for what the final consequences may be, refer to Mark Twain.

"Vexations" in the Era of COVID-19, On the Occassion of Erik Satie's 154th Birthday

VIDEO: Satie's Vexations Arranged for C Flute and Alto Flute, Digitally Slowed 25%

By defying the logic of social and musical conventions within which he was steeped, Erik Satie apparently intended his short piece "Vexations" to nudge both player and listener into new ways of thinking.

Unlike the constant state of vexation many of us are currently experiencing as a result of the grim state of the world, Satie's contained, self-inflicted version contains an element of almost slapstick humor...a rug is pulled out from under us again and again...expectation is questioned and revealed to have been an absurdity...the mind finds satisfaction in being teased, and in the challenge to find alternatives.

In Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, the composer writes:

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers it's not boring at all, but very interesting.

In this instance, we might try replacing the word "boring" with "vexing." Vexations was discovered posthumously, so we may never know what exactly Satie had in mind when he included the inscription:

In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.

(Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses).

While, due to circumstances beyond our control, many of us may have become inadvertently prepared, perhaps the point is that no single one of us needs to play (or listen to) all 840 repetitions alone...

On the occasion of the 154th anniversary of Satie's birth (May 17, 1866), musicians around the world have taken on the challenge to realize Vexations collaboratively. My contribution to Lockdown Vexations, organized by multi-media artist Kathy Hinde, is an arrangement for alto flute and C flute.

Inspiration for the video comes from Satie's 1912 "Memoirs of an Amnesiac":

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, moldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuchsia. I have a good appetite, but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.

An Anti-Virus

An Anti-Virus (video). Tracing paper, images cut from February and March 2020 copies of Sunday New York Times

COVID-19 has quickly and profoundly illustrated the extent to which environments, livelihoods, and even microbiomes are globally-entangled and mutually-dependent; the health of one hinges, directly or indirectly, on the health of all.

Symbiosis is a term used in biology to describe cooperation between different species for shared benefit—lichens, a composite of algae and fungus, for example. Certain species of figs, wasps, and the parasites living within wasp guts are mutually dependent; each can exist only in relation to the others. 

While the microorganisms that dwell within humans are not necessarily specific to Homo sapiens, they are so abundant that approximately half “our” genetic material does not belong to “us,” but to microbes that play vital roles in nutrient absorption, immunity, and cognitive function. Microbiology reveals that human beings, at the same time that we are exquisitely unique individuals, we are also dynamic meta-organisms, cooperative communities teaming with life.   

The microbes within us arrive from all around, gleaned from food, air, soil, and water. A bite of apple grown in New Zealand, a potato grown in Peru, a tomato grown in one’s own backyard. A breath of air that arrived on a breeze from the Sahara, captured and imparted to fellow riders in a subway car in New York, Paris, or Hong Kong. Aspects of seemingly distant people and places are constantly becoming parts of our infinitely individual, yet paradoxically multitudinous, selves. Fellow humans, other-than-humans, and even that which is not universally considered “alive” (a water molecule, for example) all become parts of what make us “us.”

COVID-19 brings the question of boundaries between beings starkly into focus: if we are all constantly exchanging biological (and other) material on a global scale, then perceived “others” are, in tangible ways, extensions of ourselves. One possible remedy, then—not only for the problem of the current pandemic but for other catastrophes-in-progress—is to care for everything and everyone as if this is the case.

Perhaps this collective realization is a conceptual anti-virus with the radically beneficial, evolutionarily advantageous effect of driving those it touches into states of deep love and respect for the world and its inhabitants. Symptoms may include increased empathy, sense of wonder, and desire to be of service to others. This contagion becomes active simply by imagining it.

Southern Pacific Suite: A Collection of Train-Inspired Sound Art by Alyce Santoro and Julian Mock

A past project unearthed from our archive:
 

MOVEMENT #1: Prelude: Music for Train Whistles debuted at Southern/Pacific, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, Aug. 2011

AMTRAK K5LA: D# F# G# B D#
STANDARD K5H: D# F# A# C D# 

In the far west Texas towns of Marfa and Alpine the blast of train whistles punctuates the soundscape day and night. The sounds of trains are so common that many local residents learn to tune them out. Here at PREPARED EAR we became curious about how the chords used in train whistles were developed, since the sounds are neither so ominous as to keep frequent listeners constantly on edge, nor are they so cheerful or plain that they could be completely ignored. After much research, we discovered that most trains in the United States employ some variation on the K5H horn, which emits a D# minor 6th chord (D# F# A# C D#). Amtrak's "motive power development manager" Deane Ellsworth took it upon himself to develop a variation on this tone for it's fleet of trains, and in 1976 Mr. Ellsworth introduced the K5LA, tuned to a B major 6th chord. 

For SOUTHERN PACIFIC SUITE Alyce deconstructed and reconstructed the two chords - including the Doppler Effect - using flute. Julian was inspired by the two chords to create the melody line, played on classic guitar.

The following message is from D. H. Ellsworth himself, received on June 5, 2012 and printed here with permission:

Ms. Santoro:

I just enjoyed your Southern Pacific presentation featuring the K5H and K5LA locomotive air horns. Yours is, in fact, the second audio/visual prepared on this subject. I asked Canadian inventor Bob Swanson to retune his K5H horn for my use in America in 1976, subsequently listed by the Nathan Co. of New York as the K5LA model. I wanted something beautiful for our use at Amtrak in time for America's Bicentennial Year, and am flattered that so many agree I succeeded. A minor correction I might pass along is that Amtrak didn't have to tell me to do this, as I was Amtrak's managing developer of locomotives at that time; I got to tell myself to go get this done, picking my own musical notes to produce the K5LA's Major 6th chord, and going to Vancouver to meet with Swanson on my own time. It was a wonderful side-project, attempting to make Amtrak trains sound as nice as possible when giving audible warning of their approach.

BTW, did you retrieve that video camera before a train got it? (Just kidding...)

Thank you for your tribute! Your composition is a delight.

Sincerely,

D.H. Ellsworth 
  

I proceeded to inquire as to Mr. Ellsworth's musical background and how he had come to compose that particular chord and received the following response:

I am a musician solely by virtue of piano lessons as a youngster, playing the trumpet with the Cornell University Marching Band, teaching myself the guitar and also music notation so I could transcribe Gershwin piano rolls to sheet music, joining my wife singing in several choirs, and tape recording trains and whistles in stereo from 1969, none of it ever performed as a professional musician. I am a professional railroad mechanical engineer (retired) & photographer (still at it) of 42 years.

To the best of my knowledge, the first use of a Major 6th chord in North American railroading appeared in the early 1900's, when the Nathan Mfg. Co. of New York began marketing a five-chime steam whistle for locomotives designed to sound GBDEG (fourth piano octave). Fifty years later, inventor Robert Swanson (1905-1994), took it upon himself to design a chime-tone air horn who's voice would convince the average Joe that it's a train's voice: i.e., 'making trains sound like trains'... his exact words to me one day, and now the title of my book. His fourth try was a highly successful & marketable air horn for trains in Canada, the USA and eventually around the world. It was his "M" series, marketed through the Nathan Co. from 1950. Many of his M5 horns were tuned to sound C#EF#AC#, a gorgeous A Major 6th also in the fourth piano octave, and considered by many rail enthusiasts to be the prettiest locomotive air horn ever conceived. When the M's became too expensive to manufacture, by 1975, I took a look at Bob's newer K5H horn, an exceptionally well-engineered device he was using on trains in Canada, and asked him to retune it for me. I wanted a B Major 6th (flattening the #3 & #4 horn "bells" to make the chord) thereby Americanizing it for my use on Amtrak locomotives. Within a few years, nearly everybody's railroad in the US was (and still is) using them, or their K3LA sisters (D#F#B). I did not ask for a royalty, I just wanted to be able to hear Amtrak trains sounding this new voice I had given them. 

MOVEMENT #2: Between Stations 

BETWEEN STATIONS consists of 14 tracks inspired by life in New York City, and is composed of sounds collected between 2002 and 2005 on and under the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn interwoven with a range of created and found sounds and music.

This collection of collages is recorded onto cassette tape and woven into an audible textile called SONIC FABRIC. The album has been played at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as part of SOUNDWAVES: THE ART OF SAMPLING in 2008. It was broadcast via low-power radio transmission in Los Angeles' Union Station on April 14, 2012 as part of RADIO BREAK. 

For SOUTHERN/PACIFIC, the collection was heard in Portland, Oregon in June, 2012.