"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.

An Intricate Ensemble: the Art-Science of an Ecological Imaginary

On Monday morning I will be defending my thesis for Rhode Island School of Design's brand new MA program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies alongside four other women who have been part of this inaugural cohort.

For those interested...my paper is basically a manifesto, a call to develop and deploy all manner of creative tactics that can challenge and subvert any and all "logics" that allow for exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants.

It's about undoing undue dualism and the joy of paradox. I plan to post the whole project on-line as soon as possible. The thesis is now available in its entirety at RISD Digital Commons. Meanwhile, here is a short summary:

AN INTRICATE ENSEMBLE: THE ART-SCIENCE OF AN ECOLOGICAL IMAGINARY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE EPOCH

Some early-to-mid-20th century avant-garde artistic movements, notably Dadaism and Surrealism, came out of a wholesale rejection of a “logic” based in European Enlightenment philosophy that could result not only in the slaughter of billions during World War I, but in the destruction and enslavement of people and the other-than-human world in the name of a “progress” from which the most powerful disproportionately benefit. Declaring the right to determine what should be considered an acceptable reality, the Dadaists and Surrealists developed methods by which to tap into the “irrational” – techniques including collaboration, improvisation, and chance operations.

Approximately 200 years prior to the Surrealists, the Romantic Naturalists also expressed misgivings about the mechanistic, positivist, dualist modes of thought their countrymen had been bringing to prominence in Europe since the dawn of Scientific Revolution – humans (some far more than others) were coming to see themselves as separate from, and superior to, an externalized conception of “nature.” Science, heralded as an unbiased form of inquiry based on “natural” laws, was being used to justify hierarchy, competition, and exploitation. The Romantic Naturalists countered with the view that sustained appreciation of the qualitative does not diminish the value of the quantitative; in fact, sensations that transcend reason and logic may provide an ethical basis from which to develop fairer and more just social and ecological frameworks.

Today, in a spirit akin to that of the Romantic Naturalists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, paradigm-challenging artists and philosophers are working to bring about an “ecological imaginary”…the view that, to quote feminist-philosopher Karen Barad on the central lesson of quantum physicist Niels Bohr, "we are a part of the nature that we seek to understand." 

Work emerging from fields related to the Environmental Humanities invites science to examine a paradox inherent within itself: science’s esteemed objective stance, while undeniably useful as a mindset for the purposes of research, by distancing the observer from that which is being observed, tends to reinforce an impression that humans and nature are inherently separate.

While science can, and very often does, provide elegant evidence that “we are a part of the nature that we seek to understand,” supplementary qualitative practices may help to instill in its adherents a sense of what this feels like in practice; the arts are particularly well-equipped to foster experiences of the sublime. Vacillating between – or the simultaneous holding of – states of objectivity and subjectivity, individuality and collectivity, direction and improvisation – may be of use in the collaborative formation of an ecological imaginary, a constructive image of oikos, our shared home, regardless of one’s primary discipline.

Dualisms and paradoxes abound, but we do not need to remain bound to them. It is possible to imagine an “intricate ensemble” in which beings and/or constructs can exist as separate and together.

The Notational Shift at MUSAC

The Notational Shift exhibition opened at Spain's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon on January 26, 2019 and runs until September 15, 2019.

It's truly an honor to have work in this wonderful exhibition of alternative forms of musical notation alongside so many friends and muses, including Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Barbara Held, Benton Bainbridge, and others.

10000 Things - Mass Recognition - Vernal Equinox 2019

Frottages, Providence River Oysters, 2019

In mid-February I received an invitation to participate in a project conceived by some friends on the west coast, including composer/sound artist Brenda Hutchinson (noted for, among much wonderful work, her Daily Bell Project).

This is the original call for participation:

Equinox: Emergency of Joy 

Bringing together the 10,000 Things to a moment of poise

How do we as artists recognize each other in community? What does this community do, in its union, and how? How may we rehearse our strengths so that we are ready to serve emergencies of grieving and celebration? 

The challenge at hand is for individual artists or teams of artists to generate ten thousand things each, and, as possible, to bring them together in a live encounter on the occasion of the Spring Equinox, gathering, balancing, and releasing them, at a focus on joy, recognizing an urgent need, born of compassion, for creative elation and expectancy during heavy and tangled times. 

MAKE TEN THOUSAND THINGS 

LET THEM GO 

MARCH 20^th, 2:58pm 

Sharing of the work throughout the day, as forms suggest 

Food to follow 

“Ten thousand” is rooted in the Buddhist concept of the ten thousand dharmas – an image for all observable reality. We are meant to recognize, and ultimately move through this reality, to a state of levity – a surpassing of fact, a merciful gaze on it, a move into light. 

We bring everyone together, with everything we have, and set our tens of ten thousands free at a given moment. The character of that moment is joy. Any moment realized by art is compound, we match vulnerability of change with precision of purpose (vibratory, sonic). Joy includes expectancy, and joyful expectancy is hope; hope is a kind of woundedness – admission not only of uncertainty, but also of a willingness to anticipate the good despite uncertainty. We gather to affirm a manifesto of joy in all its precarity.

This is my response:  

Invitation to a Week of Mass Recognition 

(or: A Mass of Mass Recognition. A Mass Recognition Mass)

13th century Japanese Buddhist philosopher Dogen wrote:

That the self advances 

And confirms ten thousand things 

Is called delusion 

That the ten thousand things 

Advance and confirm the self 

Is called enlightenment

A group including some Surrealists in mid-20th century Britain organized a peoples’ ethnography practice called Mass Observation Days; all were invited to record ordinary (or non-ordinary) events that occurred during an agreed-upon 24-hour period. 

Poet Allen Ginsberg advised, "Notice what you notice.” 

Upon noticing a thing, a dynamic relationship is formed. Whatever is observed becomes a known extension of the observer. Even science now agrees that there is no such thing as objective reality. (What we don't notice...ie: everything else...is an extension of the observer too...but that's another story...).

In other words: when we notice something, we recognize a part of our "self" in the "other"..but with this realization comes the awareness that there is no "self"...or "other".

A quick calculation reveals that there are approximately 10,000 minutes in a week. All are invited to participate in a "mass recognition” beginning on March 13, 2019 at 2:58pm, one week prior to the Vernal Equinox, and ending at the same time on March 20. On the evening of the Equinox, those in geographical proximity are invited to gather to share some of the things which you recognized (and in which you recognized yourself).

A very important part of this project is the in-person (ie: non-social media) aspect. Please be in touch if you would like to gather in Providence on the evening of the Equinox. Several artists and groups who are contributing to 10000 Things in this and other ways are planning to meet at a downtown location. More info TBA.

March for (Not Just Any) Science

Earth From Space, collage, Alyce Santoro, 2017

When the public sector is at the service of the private sector, the economic interests of the few are bound to trump the needs of the many. In places throughout the world – regardless of political framework – Earth’s inherent elements have been utilized by humans[1] in ways that are gravely shortsighted.

Indeed, it is now amply evident that practices that have prevailed around the globe for eons have caused cumulative harm, putting at risk the continued viability of all life on Earth. While it could be argued that many humans are complicit by (wildly varying) degrees, dependence on current systems is often by carefully orchestrated design; continued concentration of wealth and power depends upon it.

While we can speculate on the extent to which figures throughout history have been aware of the damage they were wreaking, specific examples of full awareness can now be easily sited. Of one thing we can be certain: on the path to domination, awareness, however acute, could always been justified away through dehumanization and abstraction of those and that which require oppression, exploitation, and extraction.

Given overwhelming current data, it is impossible for anyone acting today to not know.

#ExxonKnew #ShellKnew #AlexanderVonHumboltKnew #BuckminsterFullerKnew #RachelCarsonKnew #TrumpKnows, #EverybodyKnows

“…we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.” – Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968

“The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world – the very nature of its life.” – Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

“By felling the trees which cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in all climates seem to bring upon future generations two calamities at once; want of fuel and a scarcity of water.” — Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America: During the Years 1799-1804

In the interest of keeping the wheels of progress greased, theses voices and those of many others who espoused similar sentiments have been meticulously avoided, shunned, and marginalized.

Not knowing is no longer a valid excuse (if it ever was).

Coal mining, alternating current, fast food, commercial airline travel, plastics, factory farming, nuclear power, the atomic bomb, the internal combustion engine, vaccines, antibiotics, Agent Orange, hydraulic fracturing, petrochemical agriculture, weapons systems, rockets to Mars. Are these technologies good, evil…or some of each? While we may at least be able to agree that scientists (people with specialized expertise, interests, and expectations) used science (a system designed to remove bias to the greatest extent possible) to create these technologies, science cannot tell us whether its products are ultimately constructive or harmful or how, when, and whether to use them. Science and its revered “objective” method do not contain ethical components. It is the people practicing science who are now, and who have always been, responsible for determining what research questions are appropriate and worthy of exploration. What is considered conscionable may change over time. The debate about what forms of research are moral and just must be an earnest, ongoing, and inclusive one.

There is not now and there has never been any legitimate question as to whether science as a tool for gathering knowledge is necessary and important. In light of recent data (produced by science) and our growing awareness of the direness of current circumstances, science as an instrument can and will be vital in crafting solutions to problems that science itself, when wielded with a lack of emphasis on possible consequences, had a hand in creating.

Said another way: if we are using science to further our “progress”, and our definition of progress is problematic, science as a vehicle is bound to deliver us to an undesirable destination (case in point: Earth’s biosphere circa 2018).

As we gather to march for science, this can be an opportunity to become clear on our collective definition of progress and unified in our vision of the kind of science (humanitarian, ecologically sound, and just? Or devoted to profit over people and planet?) we are marching for.

Whether and when “science” is revered or reviled and by whom has everything to do with that entity’s interests (self or otherwise). If those interests are primarily economic, then any science that hinders financial gain (i.e.: anthropogenic greenhouse warming; sea level rise; water, soil, and air contamination by toxic effluent, etc.) will be vigorously opposed. At the same time, any science that furthers the entity’s agenda (i.e.: fracking, offshore drilling, weapons development, etc.) will be embraced, promoted…and well-funded.

In the case of the current administration and its advocates: it is not science per se that is being attacked; rather, these groups seek to quell any challenge to the top-down social and economic paradigms upon which their radically self-serving agendas depend. 

As scientists, we can take into consideration the impact of our efforts, and ask ourselves to what extent our skills and resources are being devoted to humane outcomes. We can, like Buckminster Fuller, imagine what an anticipatory design science would look like.

As concerned citizens and advocates, we can be discerning about the kinds of science we defend.

Richard Levins, geneticist/ecologist and prominent member of Science for the People, suggested the following rule of thumb, “…all theories are wrong which promote, justify, or tolerate injustice. The wrongness may be in the data, its interpretation, or application, but if we search for that wrongness, we will also be led to truth.”

May our shared love for science and the world it examines lead us to truth.

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[1] The Anthropocene is being proposed by some scientists and philosophers as a term to define the current geological epoch. While the word accurately identifies humans as profound influencers of our planet’s biogeophysical systems, it must be constantly stressed that not all humans are equally complicit.

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