Making Speech-Matter: Recurring Mediations in Sound Poetics and its Contemporary Practice

This thesis produces a critical and creative space for new forms of sound poetics. Through a reflective process combining theoretical research and poetic practice – performances, text-scores and installations – the thesis tests the contemporary terms of intermedial poetics and sound poetry, establishing a conceptual terminology for speech-matter. Beginning with a study of 1960s sound poet Henri Chopin and his relation to the tape machine, I argue that this technological mediation was based on a poetics of analogue sound hinged on bodily engagement. Social and physical properties of the tape machine contribute to a mode of practice that negotiates the body, machine, and effort. Exploring Michel Serres’s concept of parasitic noise and the relation of interference to lyric appeal, via the work of Denise Riley and Hannah Weiner, I understand sound poetics as a product of lyrically active noise. Through an analysis of radio address, a conceptual link is drawn between lyric poetry and technological mediation, which posits the radiophonic as a material effect of transmission and also a mode of hailing. This is tested through sound poems that are investigative of distortion and echo. Addressing the conceptual limits of Intermedia, a new critical model is established for a poetics of sound operating in present-day media technologies. This alternative model, based on a concept of milieu, is a means of negotiating a poem’s materiality and context, in order to posit a work’s multiple connections and transmissions. This model is tested through the text and installation work of Caroline Bergvall, and subsequently realised in my own gallery installation that investigates links between sound, milieu and archive. Through this research into mediated speech, new platforms for intermedial sound poetics are produced. This project offers a model for practice-based research that produces knowledge of speech-matter by way of the ‘black box’ of poetic practice

Making Speech-Matter: Recurring Mediations in Sound Poetics and its Contemporary Practice

This thesis produces a critical and creative space for new forms of sound poetics. Through a reflective process combining theoretical research and poetic practice – performances, text-scores and installations – the thesis tests the contemporary terms of intermedial poetics and sound poetry, establishing a conceptual terminology for speech-matter. Beginning with a study of 1960s sound poet Henri Chopin and his relation to the tape machine, I argue that this technological mediation was based on a poetics of analogue sound hinged on bodily engagement. Social and physical properties of the tape machine contribute to a mode of practice that negotiates the body, machine, and effort. Exploring Michel Serres’s concept of parasitic noise and the relation of interference to lyric appeal, via the work of Denise Riley and Hannah Weiner, I understand sound poetics as a product of lyrically active noise. Through an analysis of radio address, a conceptual link is drawn between lyric poetry and technological mediation, which posits the radiophonic as a material effect of transmission and also a mode of hailing. This is tested through sound poems that are investigative of distortion and echo. Addressing the conceptual limits of Intermedia, a new critical model is established for a poetics of sound operating in present-day media technologies. This alternative model, based on a concept of milieu, is a means of negotiating a poem’s materiality and context, in order to posit a work’s multiple connections and transmissions. This model is tested through the text and installation work of Caroline Bergvall, and subsequently realised in my own gallery installation that investigates links between sound, milieu and archive. Through this research into mediated speech, new platforms for intermedial sound poetics are produced. This project offers a model for practice-based research that produces knowledge of speech-matter by way of the ‘black box’ of poetic practice

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of anextra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication, musician and writer ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, Music, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, Anthropology, University of Texas, Austi

The Names of Minimalism

Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories—but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism, Patrick Nickleson holds in tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich’s Pendulum Music, Glass’s work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca’s works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct. Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as “(early) minimalism,” to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category “art music.” Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project—artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls—not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife

Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthropology

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory

The Names of Minimalism

Minimalism stands as the key representative of 1960s radicalism in art music histories—but always as a failed project. In The Names of Minimalism, Patrick Nickleson holds in tension collaborative composers in the period of their collaboration, as well as the musicological policing of authorship in the wake of their eventual disputes. Through examinations of the droning of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Reich’s Pendulum Music, Glass’s work for multiple organs, the austere performances of punk and no wave bands, and Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca’s works for massed electric guitars, Nickleson argues for authorship as always impure, buzzing, and indistinct. Expanding the place of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy within musicology, Nickleson draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it. The book reimagines the canonic artists and works of minimalism as “(early) minimalism,” to show that art music histories refuse to take seriously challenges to conventional authorship as a means of defending the very category “art music.” Ultimately, Nickleson asks where we end up if we imagine the early minimalist project—artists forming bands to perform their own music, rejecting the score in favor of recording, making extensive use of magnetic type as compositional and archival medium, hosting performances in lofts and art galleries rather than concert halls—not as a utopian moment within a 1960s counterculture doomed to fail, but as the beginning of a process with a long and influential afterlife