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Moving Cage: Vibration, Sonification and the Quanta of Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2021
Abstract
Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy become the means to examine a politics of the body and sound, of music on movement. Additionally, in this ‘auditory architecture’ the quanta of time, its relations and (lack of) unity are exposed. This article then examines the intersubjective interplay of movement and music, body and sonicity; it considers the resonance of the performing body as intermaterial vibration and how this invites a sonic politics of relational possibility. The article will then also investigate the ways in which the interaction of motion and music, movement and stillness engenders experiences of time's indeterminacy and elasticity.
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References
Notes
1 This recount is based on the performance of Dear John on 16 February 2019 at the Esplanade Theatre, Singapore, as part of Huayi: Chinese Festival of Arts 华艺节 2019.
2 This concept will be elaborated on in a later section of the article.
3 See ‘About’ in the M.O.V.E. Theatre's website, at https://movetheatre-tw.com/about, accessed 30 December 2020.
4 Ibid.
5 See ‘人性慾望所豢養的內心之獸 – 2019 動見体《野良犬之家》A Dog's House 演出精華’, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI4nKm704Xg, accessed 30 December 2020.
6 Publicity blurb, 凱吉一歲 Dear John, M.O.V.E. Theatre, 2017, at https://movetheatre-tw.com/works/dear-john, accessed 26 September 2019.
7 Ibid.
8 Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), p. 131Google Scholar.
9 This is a translation of the show's publicity information. See publicity blurb, 凱吉一歲 Dear John, M.O.V.E. Theatre, 2017, at https://movetheatre-tw.com/works/dear-john, accessed 26 September 2019.
10 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 11Google Scholar.
11 Roger W. H. Savage, Music, Time and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality and Alterity (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 2.
12 Clemens Wöllner and Jesper Hohagen, ‘Gestural Qualities in Music’, in Clemens Wöllner, ed., Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 69–88, here p. 77.
13 See John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, in Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 7–12, here p. 7.
14 This definition is taken from Pierre Schaeffer's work on sound. See Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
15 Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, p. 10, added emphasis.
16 Paul Vickers, Bennett Hogg and David Worrall, ‘Aesthetics of Sonification: Taking the Subject-Position’, in Clemens Wöllner, ed., Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 89–109, here p. 89.
17 A sound recording of the performance can be found on YouTube. See ‘Shock! John Cage & Yoko Ono: Live Japan 1962’, 17 November 2014, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC_bg0_Tp4g, accessed 28 September 2019.
18 Vickers, Hogg and Worrall, ‘Aesthetics of Sonification’, p. 92.
19 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, pp. 16–17.
20 See ‘動見体《凱吉一歲》演出專訪 Dear John 15min’, YouTube, 17 November 2014, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwtkpxELas&list=PLu595K0T3ygJ0rW3WLyNIQGK_HY6sNtao&index=2, accessed 26 September 2019.
21 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 5.
22 In ‘“45” for a Speaker’, Cage writes, ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound’. See Cage, Silence, p. 191.
23 Vickers, Hogg and Worrall, ‘Aesthetics of Sonification’, p. 94.
24 Ibid.
25 Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 91.
26 Ibid., p. 62.
27 Wöllner and Hohagen, ‘Gestural Qualities in Music’, p. 77.
28 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 210.
29 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, p. 16.
30 Ibid., p. 17.
31 Ibid., p. 18.
32 Ibid., p. 44.
33 Ibid., p. 20.
34 Ibid., p. 21.
35 Maurya Wickstrom, Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History (London and New York: Metheun, 2018), p. 1.
36 See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
37 Clemens Wöllner, ‘Introduction’, in Wöllner, Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond, pp. 1–10, here p. 2.
38 Savage, Music, Time and Its Other, p. 4.
39 Ibid., p. 6.
40 Ibid., p. 6.
41 Ibid., p. 1.
42 Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 93.
43 Matthew Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre and Time (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p. 14.
44 Wickstrom, Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance, p. 32.
45 Rovelli, Carlo, The Order of Time (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 3Google Scholar.
46 Heathfield, Adrian, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 22Google Scholar.
47 Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans., F. L. Pogson (New York: Routledge, 2013. First published 1910 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd), p. 122.
49 Papanicolaou, Andrew C., ‘Aspects of Henri Bergson's Psycho-Physical Theory’, in Papnicolaou, Andrew C. and Gunger, Pete A. Y., eds., Bergson and Modern Thought: Towards a Unified Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 56–128Google Scholar, here p. 84.
50 Vogelin, Salomé, The Political Possibility of Sound (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Ibid., p. 37.
52 Ibid.