2019-2020 seminar Hypatia Vourloumis: Sound (un)Bound: Resonating Materialities
Participating students in their first year: Georgia Stellin, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Marie Tuckova, Rosa Ronsdorf; and in their second year: Julian Fricker, Marc Norbert Hörler, Zachary Schoenhut, Raphael Daibert, Flávia Palladino, Gayatri Kodikal
Sound (un)Bound: Resonating Materialities
Cut 0: Listening
This year’s seminar thinks through matters and questions of sound, listening and resonance. The title of the seminar – Sound (un)Bound – seeks to do several things at the same time. It aims to emphasize the ways in which we are moved by sound, singularly and collectively, as well as how sound is materialized, moves and how we may move toward it too, bounding toward bounding and boundless sound. It also seeks to think the sonic as bond, as something that binds as well as sound as bind itself. And it wants to point to our practice of language, reading and writing: how questions of sound are also bound to and unbound from the words we incantate, scratch, type, and write into books that are pressed and bound. Also, and perhaps most importantly, by way of the play of its own rhyming, the title of this seminar seeks to sound out materially the materiality of sound.
As the relatively recent development and emergence of the field of sound studies is wrought with controversies (namely to do, as the editors of Remapping Sound Studies argue, with a Northern and whitened bias in its aims, scopes and objects of study and its elision and ignoring of a plethora of ongoing historical and contemporary studies of sound in brown and black thought, theory, aesthetics, poetics, sonic practices and performances of modernity) this year’s seminar will be the first of several that will sit with and think through the politics of the study of sound and resonance– whether in language, literature, philosophy, poetry, music, ritual, architecture, technology, social formations, popular culture, aesthetics, and what is termed as sound art.
In order to grapple with the boundlessness of sound we will study and produce our own theories of resonance. Resonance will be the key thread weaving across the different iterations of this course. Firstly, we can think of resonance as encounter. There is no published book so far that engages exclusively and explicitly with a theory of sonic resonance. This seminar makes the case that a theory of resonance is crucial to the methods, scopes and aims of collective anti-colonial theory and practice, resonance as key to what Gayatri Gopinath terms “South to South relationalities” across indigenous and diasporic geographies, social movement and unruly aesthetics. It also emphasizes the ways in which resonance is inherently interdisciplinary as resonance is only possible by way of encounter, but more importantly still, the spaces it travels, occupies, and makes between said encounter. Thus, resonance is rich with the possibility of breaking down the borders and limits of individual objects and subjects, as well as fixed notions of time and space (it does this physically, materially, practically, as well as metaphorically, theoretically, philosophically). This is the larger project of the course: the critiquing and troubling of modernity’s borders, limits, categories, ontologies and delineated subjectivities by acknowledging a preceding and exceeding resonating sociality, and builds upon and is indebted to studies of sound in black studies (the Black Atlantic, Afro-diasporas, Afro-modernity) and anticolonial music, literature and poetics (Caribbean, Mediterranean and S E Asian).
Secondly, we will engage with resonance as vibration via an analysis of the etymology of “resonance” and its varying meanings and functions as a term across different fields in the humanities and sciences. Etymologically resonance comes from the Latin “re – sonare” which means simply to re-sound. Theorizing re-sounding we will focus on vibration in sound studies, acoustics, and classical and quantum physics. We will look to queer feminist quantum physicist and theorist Karen Barad’s work to deepen questions of resonance in relation to intra-actions, indeterminancy and entanglement. Resonance as entanglement will also lead us to the critical work of Denise Ferreira da Silva. Vibration will be thought through re-sounding, reverberation, the reverb, sound systems, where a case can be made that vibration, which is resonance, is what makes planetarities gel, from their most miniscule microbacterial-organisms, to the dance floor, to their infinite galaxies and constellations. Re-sounding is also always about repetition in and as difference (and can lead to a fruitful discussion on questions regarding iterability and recording).
Thirdly, resonance is experienced as vibrating sense. The seminar will also think through what we mean when we speak of resonance as feeling connection to something or someone. How it is to be affected or affect by way of resonance? Sense will be thought through the body but also aesthetically. The seminar will also think through the sounds of nonsense. It will think through how sensorial multiplicities search for a communicability not just through prescribed words but through sound by way of an “ensemble of the senses” as Fred Moten writes. Or as historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite notes: “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” For resonance is also a word for the transmission of feeling, thought, memory, what José Muñoz terms a “transmission of brownness” that forms a commons unknowable in advance. “These Brown feelings are not the sole province of people who have been called or call themselves brown. It is, instead, and more importantly, the sharing out of a brown sense of the world.” A shared historical precariousness and the sharing out of the unsharable, invaluable, incalculable.
And yet, resonance does not make for an easy and simplistic gathering of wholeness -- for resonance is always also a discrepant engagement, its movements and relays through time and space are simultaneously integrative and disintegrative. Fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety - the creaking of the word - these practices inhabit discrepancy for as Nathaniel Mackey writes: “Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence noise, acknowledges it.” Discrepant engagements are necessary for they reveal and sound out the ways in which “creative kinship and the lines of affinity it effects are much more complex, jagged and indissociable than the totalizing pretensions of canon formation tend to acknowledge.” Discrepant engagement “is the antifoundational acknowledgement of founding noise.”
We will thus think of resonance as discrepant chorus and think and listen to echoes, rhymes and rhythms, cross cultural resonances, sonic archipelagos, Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and “opacity,” plurality, multiplicity, sounds and songs of non-human planetary life, sonic weaves. We will consider the ways in which resonance is a condition of possibility for critical fabulations that re-imagine and re-invent the world by resonating and meeting across difference –via different instances and performances of unexpected resonance, overlapping, and questions of in-betweenness, particularly in contemporary art, music and popular culture: i.e. experimental sampling, mixing, editing, writing, film, multi-media, collage. This leads us back to the findings in quantum physics that cut and touch are paradoxically one and the same. Finally, this all leads us to think sonic resonance as social resonance and for the listening to, the hearing of historical and present aesthetic and social compositions and possibilities for alternative organizing. The Invisible Committee write that revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance.
If resonance is a key theoretical and methodological trope for our seminar the accompanying key thread running through it is the emphasis and close attentiveness paid to materiality. This is nothing short of the very question of studying performance itself. Due to sound’s ephemerality, formlessness and boundless capacities often the question of sonic materiality is surprisingly absent from the study of sound itself. Thus, this first iteration of the seminar will focus on the practice of listening – specifically: To what and how are we listening, where do the sounds we listen to come from and how are they produced? This is always a question of materiality, labour, techniques and technology. By technology I mean obvious machines such as phonographs, musical instruments, and computers and so on. But I also want us to think language itself as technology, orality and writing as recording and performance technologies as well.
Thus, the books we will be reading will guide us through the ways the study and theorizing of sound entails writing sound and sound writing. Or as Alexander Weheliye writes in his phenomenal book Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity – “thinking sound/sound thinking.” We will read Alexandra Vazquez’s vital feminist work Listening in Detail: Performance of Cuban Music in order to grapple with the ethics of an incremental listening to performance and fugitive sound, and we will read Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America in order to hear music and literature and painting together and how the singular materialities of the social aesthetics he studies complicate the supposedly fixed and simple, confining categories of music, art, race and nation. These are just some of the key texts we will be closely reading and listening to. Along with these books and other essays and poems such as Nathaniel Mackey’s “Cante Moro” and Haryette Mullen’s “Muse & Drudge,” our seminar will of course entail a lot of hearing and listening to different sources and movements of music and sounds, whether in songs, film, videos, art practices, documentaries and poetry – far too boundless and unknowable in advance to prescriptively list here in and across their singular, migrating and resonating materialities.
Required readings will include:
Christine Bacareza Balance, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2005.
Nathaniel Mackey, “Cante Moro” in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, edited by Adalaide Morris. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Fred Moten, B Jenkins. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge. San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 1995.
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Lincoln, NE, iUniverse, 2005.
Janet Sarbanes, “Musicking and Communitas: The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture.” Journal of Popular Music and Society, 29, nr. 1, 2006.
Alexandra T. Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Seminar 1 (November) in Nieuwvliet
For our introductory seminar on sound, we closely read chapters from Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, in particular his essays on James Baldwin and the blues, and Jean-Michel Basquiat and jazz, hip-hop, djing -- ie: the relationship between literature and music, writing and listening, the painting of sound. We also paid close attention to how certain politics of singular and collective sounds and musical practices obliterate borders and fixed identities and monikers such as “American.”
Seminar 2 (January) in Epen
For this iteration of the course we are reading Roland Barthes’ essays “Listening” and “The Grain of the Voice.” Along with these two philosophical formulations on hearing, listening and voice we are delving into Alexandra T. Vazquez’s important book Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. We will closely read several chapters of this book in order to complicate Barthes’ approaches by way of Vazquez’s feminist detailed listening of the intertwined rhythms, instruments, gestures and voicings of the island’s sonic performances and the manners in which they are articulated and body forth.
reading:
Roland Barthes. “Listening.” In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.
Roland Barthes. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Music-Image-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Alexandra T. Vazquez. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Seminar 3 + 4 (March) in Tunis online
For our double seminar sessions in Tunis we will be reading and watching different excerpts, essays, articles and films in order to think them together across their diversity. Reading them closely and critically, we will be listening in detail for resonances between them.
Seminar 3: A key text for our seminars will be Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. We will be engaging with the ways in which the methodological structure of this book enacts its own poetics by way of non-linear associative principles. We will listen to the echoes (feedback) and chaos spiraling and resonating all at once within the book as well as what he calls la totalité-monde. Crucially, as we will find ourselves on the North African Mediterranean coast, following Glissant, we will think through the notion of historical identity as a method and not a state of being. In other words, we will engage with colonial and anticolonial history as opposed to ontology, refuse linear time, embrace opacity, and study the sounds of Glissant’s teachings – i.e. the imagination as a transformative and relational force, and poetics as a transformative mode of history: a sounding and wording which gives-on-and-with.
Via an enacted poetics of relation, the seminar’s accompanying readings to Glissant delve into the work of Caribbean author, historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite and his transformative poetics of the ‘tidalectic.’ As history’s tides lap the edges of Sidi Bou Said, the site of ancient Carthage, we will read Brathwaite’s poem the ‘Alphs’ in its evocation of Hannibal. Echoing Glissant, Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ “engage an “alter/native” historiography to linear models of colonial progress. This “tidal dialectic” resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean. Tidalectics also foreground alter/native epistemologies to western colonialism and its linear and materialist biases,” as Elizabeth DeLoughery writes in her introduction to the book Routes and Roots.
Brathwaite’s tidalectics wash into and across two short essays by SA Smythe and Ida Danewid. Two essays on the (queer) Black Mediterranean and the colonial legacies of today’s Fortress Europe. For as Glissant reminds us: Europe is not a place but a project – an ontological claim.
The Black Mediterranean is a tidalectical expanse for the revolutionary movement of freedom. For this iteration of our seminar we will be watching Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantiques and study the ways its sounds and scenes echo across and reverberate with the readings.
Seminar 4: For our second session we are reading Nathaniel Mackey’s beautiful essay ‘Cante Moro.’ In this essay Mackey reveals the ways in which the sounds of duende (dark sounds) in Garcia Lorca’s Spain and poetry reverberate with and can be traced to the duende sounds of North Africa. Keeping Glissant’s poetics of relation in mind – how do the sounds of duende, found all across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Arab world, such as in the sounds of flamenco, rebetika, and the blues and jazz of the New World, complicate the notion of ‘relation’ since sonic entanglements are almost impossible to separate across their different manifestations and articulations? How does this speak to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s important and critical essay ‘On Difference without Separability?’ How does da Silva also write against, what Glissant terms, Europe’s ‘entanglements of modernity’ via a delving into quantum’s physics entanglements? How do the reverberations and resonances of quantum physics fold into the vibrations of the total sonic weave?
Closely engaging with these two essays in order to continue thinking with the key issues brought up in our first seminar, we will also watch Wu Tsang’s 2019 film One emerging from a point of view in order to think difference without separability in the visual and cinematic, magical realism (in this film as well as Atlantiques and our readings), questions of representation and abstraction, whilst always staying with the sonic and poetic migrations and tidalectics of the Mediterranean, and all oceans, (is)lands and seas.
Readings:
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Elizabeth DeLoughery, ‘Tidalectics: Introduction’ to Routes and Roots. Univeristy of Hawai’I Press, 2007.
Ida Danewid, ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean,’ 2017. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/06/07/white-innocence-in-the-black-mediterranean/
SA Smythe, ‘The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of Imagination,’ 2018. https://essaysmythe.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/smythe-the-black-mediterranean-and-the-politics-of-imagination.pdf
Nathaniel Mackey, ‘Cante Moro,’ in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris. University of North Carolina Press, 1997
Anna Reckin, ‘Tidalectic Lectures: Kamau Brathwaite’s Prose/Poetry as Sound Space.’ Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 1:1, Dec 2003: pp.1-16
Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘On Difference without Separability.’ Published in the catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial, "Incerteza viva" (Living Uncertainty).
Films:
Mati Diop, Atlantiques, 2019
Wu Tsang, One emerging from a point of view, 2019
Seminar 5 (May) online
In Sun Ra’s collection of poetry The Planet is Doomed, he writes:
infinity is the language
all created art is music
art
choreography
sculpture
poetry
artworks
photographs
painting
architectural designs found in nature
trees
flowers
grass
every thing’s vibration is a different
degree of music
there is music everywhere
infinite infinity is the language of
enduring impression
For our penultimate seminar we will create and present singular and shared responses to Sun Ra’s poetry in The Planet is Doomed through a varied language of enduring impression. We will explore Ra’s strikingly prophetic observations of space and time – echoed in recent findings by contemporary astrophysicists, theoretical and quantum physicists. We will think through omniversal vibration and the ways in which these vibrations are sounded in the Sun Ra Arkestra’s collective practice. What do these orchestrations and vibratory patterns tell us about history, time, motions in space, planetary, galactic and improvised social compositions? Closely engaging with the sights, sounds and words of the documentary A Joyful Noise, we will ask: what does Ra mean by mythocracy vs. democracy, or that history repeats itself in ways that the universe never repeats itself, and what is at stake when we understand that the planet is the way it is because of “the scheme of words,” as he writes in the poem man and planet earth? Along with Ra’s poetry and this documentary we will be reading Graham Lock’s chapters on Sun Ra in Blutopia for their important critique of shallow discourses that deemed Ra insane, and a mere producer of “galactic gobbledegook.” Lock’s revisions on Ra’s critical work emphasizes that Ra’s cosmologies, mythologies, improvisations, and big-band inter-sonic, inter-genre musicianship, were also practices of crucial and radical re-visions, necessary and inseparable from the historical, political and social schemes and experiences of African America. We will listen to Sun Ra’s and the Arkestra’s artistry, the embodiment of the living myth of an ancient African god from outer space, musicianship as spaceship, and tap into the vibrations operating from infinite sonically technological “crossroads whence dimensions meet.“
John Akomfrah’s film The Last Angel of History begins at the crossroads whence dimensions meet, at the crossroad of the blues. In the second part of our seminar we will move to and through time-bending blue crossroads, and listen with the film’s Data-Thief to black sonic science fictions. Kodwo Eshun’s book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction writes with dub, techno, hip-hop, jazz, funk, breakbeat, and other sounds of the future and offers, (as a fellow companion Astro-Black space traveler together with the Data Thief and Sun Ra), new words for new sounds, new words for new worlds, compounds like “sonomatter,” “conceptechnics.” “metamorphonic,” “futurhythmachine.” We will read Eshun’s “operating system for the re-design of sonic reality” with Ra’s poetry and ask: what mixologies of mythsciences are required for cosmic communications, new world systems, the end of the world as we know it? How are we listening in ways that hears art everywhere, how “every thing’s vibration is a different degree of music?” How can we think of listening as breaking? The break as infinite and enduring practice that listens to the sounding of reminders and remainders: listen to and for the key change - the planet is doomed and space is the place.
Readings:
Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Sun Ra, The Planet is Doomed. New York: Kicks Books, 2011
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.
Films:
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise by Robert Mugge, 1980.
The Last Angel of History by John Akomfrah, 1996.
Seminar 6 (June) online
For our final seminar of Sound (un)Bound we are reading Vijay Iyer’s “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation” so as to follow the sounds of practice that “tell a story” and “keep things real.” Iyer complicates the narratological cliché’s surrounding jazz improvisation by disrupting linear narratives and the supposedly locatable and coherent solos of performance. We will deeply engage with the labor and minute details of improvisation and practice in order to attend to the ways “changes” tell the story, how these changes are inseparable from the “hearing body” in the world, history and community, how musical motion is the hearing of human motion, how for musical performers rhythmic motion and human motion collapses. There is no solo without company and vice versa, and Iyer’s exploration of kinesthetics, the aesthetic body, temporality and personal sound and performativity attest to how “all these traces of embodiment generate, reflect and refract stories into innumerable splinters and shards.” Iyer, in following the sound, explodes the narrative of jazz improvisation and in so doing must explode the narration of his essay itself.
In 1988, the journal for alternative poetry Caliban compiled an issue dedicated to “the prosody” of Thelonious Monk’s music. Contributions on the workings and implications of Monk’s music include poetry, musical analyses, and social commentary. We will read these texts and listen closely to music to allow for a conversation to develop, (informed by notions of aesthetic sciencing and faithful invention) between these thinkers of prosody, Monk’s formulas and practice, Iyer’s explosions, and Coltrane’s “looking for a universal sound.”
Readings:
Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation.” Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, Edited by R. G. O’ Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, & Farrah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 393- 403.
Harry Smallenburg, “A Forum on the Prosody of Thelonious Monk,” Caliban 4 (1988). https://jazzstudiesonline.org/resource/forum-prosody-thelonious-monk
Kodwo Eshun, “Cosmology of Volume,” in More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Book, 1998.
Films:
Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary. Dir: John Scheinfeld, 2016.
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser. Dir: Charlotte Zwerin, 1988.