Gathering Sounds and Making the Object Breathe

GATHERING SOUNDS AND MAKING THE OBJECT BREATHE / PHILIP MILLER & WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

WK:

Let’s talk about sound for The Refusal of Time—about brass instruments,

about time delays, about earlier work on metronomes and the Edwardian sound of the hurdy-gurdy.

PM:

I’ve thought about the acoustic treatment of sound, the creative process and

the working process. On a more conceptual level, I’ve thought about the mysteriousness of sound, and what it does in terms of how one perceives images. You mentioned a conversation you had with Walter Murch about the abstract nature of sound.

I’ve been thinking about why I seldom ever start composing with the musical idea coming first from the head, which is then written down to form the basis of the compositional material to follow. Usually, I start with a sound or an idea of a sound, or a thought. One of the first things we discussed was the pumps breathing time under the streets of Paris in the 19th century.

WK:

And how did that translate into sound in the project?

Pages from the notebook of Philip Miller, 2011.

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PM:

I work a lot with singers; and the sounds that come out of the mouth that are

the non-sung sounds. The click from the tongue or the teeth. Ann Masina using click sounds, the sound of a breath or a gasp. The sounds between the vocal notes interest me. Then there is the idea of breathing, the nature of voice, of a singer’s machine.

The lungs pumping air up through the windpipes, vibrating onto the vocal chords.

This is in itself a machine. The idea of air coming out through the body is very powerful.

WK:

The body becomes a machine but also, the machine becomes humanized. The abstract

nature of time gets brought into the body. But you also took the breathing lung out of the body into the brass instruments.

PM:

To stay with the body for the moment, the sound coming out of the body can be

more emotionally powerful than the sound of an instrument played as an external object. There’s something about sound coming from inside the body. Then taking the breathing and looking at how inanimate objects, wind instruments, become the breathing object. Instead of a tuba or a trombone making a beautiful pitched musical note, we hear a blast of air, a gasp.

SONIC GRAMMAR WK:

There are elements in the music made for The Refusal of Time which have

a pre-history in other work that we’ve done together. The breathing tubas, “Vuvuzela Voluntary,” were used for the project Carnets d’Egypte.

PM:

We also worked with the language of the old phonograph. The hisses, the pops.

Those sounds have moved into another language, that of the cell phone, which of course refers back to Kimmy Skota.

WK:

In the project Breathe Dissolve Return, Kimmy Skota sang into a cell phone

in one city, you played the piano in another city. The music went from the speakerphone and the live piano to your recorder.

PM:

Taking our contemporary technology of the digital cell phone and then

re-recording that sound as something that had both the quality of the old record player with a big horn, but also another strange sound to it. Cell phone interference, the buzzing of the cell phone. That grammar is intriguing because it has two histories.

It has the Edwardian connotation, but it also has a grammar that we know today as a cell phone sound.

WK:

Let’s talk about Edwardian sound. One of the key dates for The Refusal of Time

is 1905, the year of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Some of the films we made were set around that time, and that comes through in some of the music that you write.

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PM:

The hurdy-gurdy sound has a strange drone of air in a cyclical way, a breathing

rhythm but also a drone. It has a mechanical sound to it, because as you turn the handle of the hurdy-gurdy you hear both that mechanical turning sound and the vibration of the reeds in the belly of the hurdy-gurdy. Why did they bring sound into film?

It was to cover up the silence of film, the discomfort of the silence of film.

If a film were being shown without sound, you would hear the noise of the projector and that mechanical clickety-clickety-clack. The hurdy-gurdy brings that back.

But because it has something else to it, that strange drone and something quite mysterious, it changes.

WK:

Let’s describe the process of getting from the first impulses, which might

be a breathing lung or the idea of time being pumped through pipes, to brass pipes or the brass instrument, to the actual layering and construction of the music.

PM:

The first stage would have been a response to the conversations we had. Peter

Galison, you, and I. Particular phrases emerged quite quickly in the process.

WK:

It’s a key phrase rather than a deep idea. An idea, some part of a theory,

or some metaphoric suggestion of a theory that sparks a material thought. For me, a drawing, an object. For you, a sound, a way of thinking.

THE VOCAL GESTURE PM:

Often a sound in response to something you’ve said. You spoke about the “refusal

of time” and then I worked with Ann Masina on music for the film Other Faces, and she came up with that emphatic “uh uh!”—the refusal. The phrase “refusal” becomes a vocal gesture and that vocal gesture was Ann’s “uh uh!” which has a particular resonance to a South African ear.

WK:

The double repeat of a breathy “uh” becomes a strong “no,” a strong negative.

PM:

That becomes my cell, my musical motif.

WK:

There is a musical cell. What would be the next stage? Working with musicians?

PM:

Often working with musicians, both in the studio and in the workshop process

itself. There will be a series of rough sketches in my head of what I am thinking about. A breathing rhythm, which would have been the ‘streets of Paris’ idea; or playing with the Shembe March.

WK:

There are three or four things here. There is a phrase, which becomes a musical

cell, which both get tested in the studio, bringing a singer in and working with that.

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PM:

That becomes two processes. There is acoustic treatment, with all of the things

that digital technology allows us: sampling, stretching, taking the audio wave and playing with it. That is a solitary work process for me. Then there is bringing the acoustic live performer into the studio space.

WK:

Then there’s the workshop, where there is the singer in conjunction with images

and other performers and text.

Pages from the notebook of Philip Miller, 2011.

PM:

Yes. For example, the idea of the counting time click loop was a response

to something you brought in with the walking rhythm.

WK:

We have an idea that comes from a phrase: an idea from watching something

in the workshop, which may relate to the rhythm. We test it in the studio with the singer, altering it digitally, and you sit down alone with your notes.

What used to be the sole activity of the composer, sitting with a piece of paper writing notes, becomes one of a number of processes through which the music is constructed.

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Following pages: MUSICAL SCORE FOR COUNTING TIME

BY PHILIP MILLER, 2011.

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PM:

Sometimes the notes come after this, sometimes they come before and then get

changed.

WK:

Sometimes other people’s notes are used as a found object, like Berlioz’s

“Spectre de la Rose,” which we took as a piece of raw material to be cut up, for you to put through many transformations.

NON-MUSICAL METHODS PM:

There is the Berlioz song: a finite piece of music, which has a beginning, middle,

and an end. What are the ways in which one can take another look at it in terms of time change? Some of these processes are the staple tools of any composer: slowing something down, speeding it up, repetition, augmentation, breaking it up.

All those things, lengthening the notes, halving the notes, these are automatic tools. The vocabulary that composers have used since way back. Then there are more interesting thoughts about non-traditional musical methods. Digital technology makes it easy to reverse sound, to take the audio wave and reverse it. You can do something called retrograde inversion, which is inverting it backwards. You brought in the idea of the anagram and the palindrome. You brought that in with DUK I FI SA [As If I Could] and I thought about reversing the Berlioz both through the libretto, the lyrics, and the music. Some of the failures were clear. Just singing the notes from the last note to the first note is not particularly interesting.

WK:

It is a conceptual idea. The workshop becomes a way of testing out things

that start as ideas. Until they are tested, it’s very difficult to know which in the end will be interesting, revealing, or strange. But within “Spectre” you’ve also shifted it from the voice to other instruments. You dropped it down octaves. It’s extremely slow in some moments, with the tuba.

PM:

Using both color of orchestra and instruments, but also using technology,

you can slow it to something that has a very different feeling. Also playing with the sonic sounds of it. What does it mean when you hear it sung on an old recording on YouTube as opposed to a modern recording? What does it mean to hear that sound sung through a cell phone rather than in a beautiful studio? That tiny voice of Joanna Dudley singing, almost whispering it through to me on the phone, from your studio to my studio in Johannesburg, and then putting it out into the ether, into that whole world of static. You talk of the universal archive of images, but it’s also an archive of sound, floating around the black hole. Suddenly her voice is one amongst many voices floating into this space, into the ether.

WK:

I’ve never realized as strongly as now, the way in which there is a similarity

between the construction of music and compositions, and the construction of images.

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It relates to the processes of fragmentation and reassembly; tearing a drawing up into many pieces and putting the pieces together differently, or using a book as the background, or an old map—which is like the Berlioz piece in your musical construction—and then adding other images as collage or silhouettes, or other sounds on top of it.

There is also the sense of the images being provoked by the music as it returns.

It may be that an image or the pace that I walk at sets a rhythm for you. Once that returns as a provisional piece of recorded sound or constructed sound, it sets a whole other series of possibilities in motion.

Let’s return to your point about the strangeness of the juxtaposition of sound and image. What happens when we take music that has been carefully constructed for one set of images and put completely different images with it? Is there a deep underlying structure in which an understanding of the world or a technique means that there is a flexibility that allows images or sounds to migrate? If you think of the confetti paper that moved right at the end of the editing process to a completely different piece of music. Music carefully written for the pieces of paper flowing, and then images jump to a different place entirely.

Pages from the notebook of Philip Miller, 2011.

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PM:

There are two aspects to it. There’s a grammar that we’ve set up between one

another over the course of this project. So even though the pieces are different, there are certain things that I am thinking about in all the pieces, and this allows that flexibility. There is also the abstract nature of sound we don’t know, and because I am not working in the traditional film soundtrack way, even if I see the coffee pot, I have a rhythm in my head as I’m working, but I’m also aware that a rhythm that counterpoints can also work well.

WK:

For the confetti coffee pot, initially you had the idea that it was going

to be blown away by a human breath. When we shifted it, we were still in the world of breathing, brass instruments, and the tuba and trombone. The fact that it was no longer in time with the object gave you a sense that if there is a breath of wind, three seconds later the curtain flutters. Not instantly. We recognize those displacements. It’s an elastic form of synchronization. This is something we’ve learnt from other projects.

A UNIVERSAL ARCHIVE PM:

Not being fearful of what would happen if music written for one thing moved

to some sequence of a new set of images. That goes back to the alchemy. There can always be the most amazing surprises. You cannot articulate why something can sometimes work or why it doesn’t. There is a mystery to it.

Gathering sounds is a huge part of my work process, just as gathering images is a huge part of yours. I’m located in Jo’burg, and I know that there is the Shembe church where these extraordinary long horns are used. Immediately, I think about that piece of soundscape, that part of my world in this city. Then, I think about more arcane things, like the clock sounds from the Carnavalet Museum in Paris I was given by a journalist. I think about what I would do with those sounds, using analog and digital equipment, recording them onto a CD, playing them on a CD, fastforwarding and rewinding them on a CD, but recording the sounds from the speakers.

Again, using a process of double recording. I love the idea that those clock sounds from the 1800s can take on new life. I love moments like that. A set of sounds came from people’s different spoken signals sent out into space: different countries’ readings of times were sent out in radio broadcasts from the Greenwich beats.

There were also colonial dances, those fantastic colonial dance bands.

WK:

The dance band at the hotel on lake Kariba from the CD we listened to of colonial

dance music, when we were thinking of Dada's dances. There was also finding the instruments. You found the schalmei, the double euphonium, and the hurdy-gurdy.

They were chosen partly for how they would look on stage, but also added something extra to the sound world. They became part of the musical vocabulary you were working with.

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PM:

The schalmei was used as a signal for the trains on the railways.

WK:

If you think of railways as a distant background, as a part of the pre-

history of relativity—that is, the coordination of clocks for European trains, and the coordination of clocks that Einstein is working on in the patent office— and the metaphors he uses for discussing relativity, then the schalmei becomes the mechanical and musical device for performing these experiments.

PM:

It certainly wasn’t something that I consciously knew about or thought about.

But even the brass instruments we were using were being developed and made at the time in which the piece is located. Adolphe Sax was busy inventing the saxophone at the same time as Berlioz was also thinking…

WK:

… Thinking about mechanical orchestras and coordinating them with signals across

distance. One needs the conversation, the text and the premise of the project to release the metaphors. Within those metaphors, there’s the visual world, there’s the possibility of a language for sound and objects for sound. It’s not possible without those conversations about time. But once those metaphors are released, they fly off and always come back in strange ways to the original text, to the premise of the whole project.

PM:

There are things that return to sound worlds and music worlds that I inhabit.

The bellows relate very much to the concertina and the squeezebox, which is an instrument that the singer Bham Ntabeni works with.

WK:

It’s also what the specific performers bring, and your choice of performers

by what you think they can bring.

PM:

I know that Bham works with the language of the squeezebox with his traditional

Maskandi singing. So that relationship feels very natural for me.

WK:

These are extra layers. There is the found object, the concertina, and the

particular performer you want to work with and what s/he brings. But it relates back to the breathing of human lungs, which relates to the bellows used to send time through the streets of Paris. We have an over-determination: there is more than enough justification of each object, which is confirmed by many different points embedded deeply in the project itself. That’s why, when an image or piece of music shifts position, there is flexibility. Connections can be made across multiple series of different images and sounds.

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