Sounds only

Februar / März 2011

Trevor Wishart for/with Voice


1) Red Bird (1973-1977) / 45:07
2) Anticredos (1980) / 17:18
3) Vox 2 (1982-84) / 13:04
4) Vox 4 (1987) / 10:36
5) Vox 5 / 6:02
6) Blue Tulips (1994) / 2:50
7) American Tryiptych (1999) / 6:02

Program notes

Red Bird (1973-1977) / 45:07
A political prisoner's dream 

Red Bird is not only a piece of music, but also a journey into an alternative world. When we listen to a piece of pure sonic art such as Red Bird, we bypass the theatre of the concert hall, and are cast adrift in an entirely aural universe. The whole environment is defined by the dynamic process of sound events. Sounds may again take on some of the 'magical' power they must have had for pre-literate peoples - a significance and resonance muted by the dominance of written language in our culture. If we allow ourselves, we can enter that state of perception where the environment is vibrant with significant sounds and symbols and in which myths have their power.
Red Bird is both a piece of music and a mythic retelling of the world. The underlying structural idea, as far as it can be put into words, is the conflict between 'open' and 'closed' conceptions of reality. This conflict may be expressed in a number of different ways (political, philosophical, technological…). I don't wish to explain this further, as I prefer the music to speak for itself. I will only add that such interpretations of reality are complementary, rather than conflicting - all reflect a 'deep structure' represented by the myth. What is straightforward in one interpretation may be metaphorical in another.
(…) Many processes were used to create the sound worlds, and in particular, the transformations between sounds. However, my aim was to make sure the sounds were always recognisable, and to organise them in sound landscapes. These landscapes might be surreal or ambiguous, but they are never abstract. #

Anticredos (1980) / 17:18
Performed by Singcircle director Gregory Rose, with the voices of: Nicole Tibbels, Penelope Walmsley-Clark, Alan Belk, Riebturd Wistreich, Steven Jackson, Paul Hillier 

Written in 1980, the six amplified vocalists use a wide range of unusual vocal sounds. which I had researched over the previous four years. The results of these researches are brought together in the chapter 'The Human Repertoire' in my book On Sonic Art, The piece sonically takes apart the word 'Credos' and through processes of sound transformation, develops towards a completely new and seamlessly evolving sound world, the dissolution of all fixed points of reference, Unlike Red Bird these transformations are achieved in live performance and without the use of any electronics. This is possible because the voice is the most flexible sound producer we know - capable of many more types of sound production and articulation than any other individual musical instrument. The piece also occasionally uses percussion instruments to underline attacks, while in a live performance the vocal sounds are projected from four loudspeakers surrounding the audience, and inside to move around the auditorium in a patterns specified in the score, In this recording the spatial movement has been reconceived to work in stereo.

Vox 2 (1982-84) / 13:04
Vox 2 is concerned with the detailed inner articulation of vocal sounds and its relationship to the harmonic context in which this takes place. Some of the vocal techniques employed are suggested by the vocalisation accompanying Japanese Bunraku puppet-theatre and (towards the end of the piece) the vocal music of Mali, together with vocal articulation suggested by the songs of birds and wolves. All of these are, however, integrated with contemporary extended vocal techniques to form a vocabulary unique to the piece itself.


Vox 4 (1987) / 10:36
Vox 4 is a dramatic scenario for four voices, with extensions and interventions on tape. The piece explores many and varied relationships within the group of 'actors' involved, and here extended vocal techniques are utilised for their dramatic or psychological import (unlike in Vox 1 and 2). The text used in this work is imaginary and composed primarily for ist sonic properties. In this case a computer program was used to extend the original text material, to provide the large volume of text required. The sound-image of Josef K's interrogators hammering on the doors is taken from a text-sound piece by Bernard Heidsiek, with the permission of the composer.

Vox 5 / 6:02
An entirely electro-acoustic piece, creates a "supervoice" at front center stage, whose utterances metamorphose into natural events… crowds, bells, trees, and less specific sound events… images of the creation and destruction of the world contained within the "voice of Shiva". Submitted as project to IRCAM, the computer music centre in Paris in 1979/80, it could not be realised until 1986. Using computer programs I wrote to manipulate sound analysis data from Mark Dolson’s Phase Vocoder program, I altered the spectra of vocal sounds, stretching them (making them bell-like) or interpolating them with the spectra of natural events. The 4 channel version choreographs spatial movement around the auditorium.

Blue Tulips (1994) / 2:50
A woman of over 80 years recounts her slightly disturbing dream concerning a bunch of blue tulips found in the house of a friend.

American Tryiptych (1999) / 6:02
The twentieth century was dominated by the American Dream - liberty, technological progress and the pursuit of pleasure, represented here by the voices of Martin Luther King, the astronaut and moon-Walker Neil Armstrong, and Elvis Presley.
The fall of the Berlin wall seemed to herald the final triumph of this dream, and signalled to some, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, the “End of History”. As we move into the new millenium, how permanent or ephemeral will these icons be?
American Tryiptych recreates and transforms these iconic voices. Alongside more conventional techniques, the piece plays with the poor quality of radio reception from space, using the ‘crackly’ noise background as source material, and sometimes processing the voices to reduce their sound quality and comprehensibility.

Hier werden Produktionen aus Archiven der Elektroakustischen Musik, wie z.B. dem Archiv der DEGEM oder dem IDEAMA- und dem DEGEM-Archiv des ZKM, dem Archiv des elektronischen Studios der TU Berlin sowie anderen internationalen Archiven und Dokumentationen elektroakustischer Kunst unter verschiedenen Aspekten präsentiert.