RAINFOREST2 - Jerome Joy website

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!!La participation des auditeurs et la place de l'écoute '''''(à traduire)''''' {small}Well if ^[an audience^] come to an environmental show like Rainforest, I expect them to enjoy themselves and feel free. If I do a concert performance I hope they are able to listen, ’cause that’s what I do when I perform, I listen to the music. That’s how the performance is made. I listen to it and change it as it goes along. If I weren’t listening it wouldn’t change. ^[...^] I hope that they realize that it’s a human being that’s doing the music. That’s why I think that it’s important to do performances this way, and I can guarantee you that even if I did have a computer involvement, in the sense that it is programming the performance, that I would interfere with it. It is important to me that the audience senses the presence of a live musician. It makes all the difference in the world. — Tudor, David. ''Interview with Bruce Duffie''. Chicago, April 7, 1986. Recording obtained from the interviewer, and transcribed by Matt Rogalsky. http://www.bruceduffie.com/tudor3.html {/small} {small}In Rainforest IV, Tudor also invited the human body back into his music by using interactive sculptures of found objects to encourage audience participation. Rather than frighten listeners with a visual display of aggressive physicality as he had earlier done with Cage, Tudor now engaged their bodies directly in experiencing sound by offering them the possibility of “touching” and sensing objects acting as loudspeakers. Audience members could invent their experiences of the sound by moving around and exploring the shapes presented to them, interacting in this manner as the listeners at the first happening in Black Mountain College had, when they had projected their imagined displays onto the vacant surfaces of Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings. Tudor’s installation brought to mind as well the contemporaneous work of Robert Morris, whose “sculptures for performing on,” involved the use of “ bodily reactions.” In the spirit of Artaud’s “poésie dans l’éspace,” the sounding objects of Rainforest IV inspired categorical shifts and displacements, for example in how its participants understood the role of their various sense in the aesthetic experience of listening. As Bill Viola exclaimed to David Tudor: “you did teach me (in Rainforest) to hear with my eyes.” — (Tamara Levitz){/small} {small}David Tudor's stage role consisted of listening intently, shaping the sound created by his own electronics, and thus establishing the long wished for direct bond between his inner ear and the produced tones. David Miller was overwhelmed by the impression this living embodiment of the act of listening: “Without realizing it, I did not take my eyes from David Tudor’s face…and in this way received a remarkable confirmation of the sensuality of an active, engaged intellect. Externally viewed, what was he doing? Sitting quietly, manipulating an elaborate array of controls, his body appeared mostly dormant, the only evident activity being that taking place between the hand and the brain…What might have been interpreted as a purely cerebral process manifested itself throughout as a virtually erotic experience. The old dichotomies between mind and body, intellectual and carnal being were both stated and eliminated in this performance.” — (Tamara Levitz){/small} {small}The sounds of Rainforest IV, like its objects, tended to forefront the absent human body, which remained for Tudor a site of pain and violence, expressed aurally through intolerable, screeching or bodily noises. M.C. Richards recognized the violence of his electronically produced sounds after attending a performance in October 1966: “I fled after the volume of amplified sound became deafening,” she wrote in her diary, “ I suddenly realized the ‘hard fact’ of David’s disregard for simple human qualities, and his lack of respect for his own ‘ear’ as well as mine and others.” One visitor to the 1976 installation in Minneapolis commented, “It is a loud, cacophonous, continuously changing bombardment of sounds that surround and engulf the listener.” In capturing such an explosive source of sound energy, Tudor realized Antonine Artaud’s aim not only of expressing cruelty, but also of creating a work “in which we feel the whole nervous system burning like an incandescent lamp with vibrations, consonance which invite man to got out with his body in pursuit of this new, strange and radiant Epiphany in the sky.” Linda Fischer described the physical effect as “a condition of inner resonance and rhythms I have known and been unable to articulate…It was something like a confrontation of the physical senses with their non-physical counterparts -- an intensity that is so physical it seems I might shatter -- these were emotions that I had never felt before, but powerful and elusive and completely real.”{br}Tudor designed Rainforest in order to signal the violence of not just any absent body, but rather of his own. Rather than transfer his numbed, disassociated senses, bodily functions and desires to inanimate objects a he had earlier done, he now represented and materialized them in the outer concrete reality of electronic circuitry. Following Rauschenberg’s path, he left the outer trace of his productive, spiritual act of inner listening on the stage by symbolizing it in the intricate web of complex electronic gadgetry laid out on the table in front of him, transferring it in this way from the ethereal realm of the imagination into the physical world. In that Tudor almost always decided himself on the source and process of the ultimate sound, the circuitry and electronic gadgetry can be seen to externalize and physically represent the workings of his own mind.{br}The intense physical exertion required to exhibit his inner ear as an electronic theatrical trace in Rainforest IV caused Tudor to negate further his outer body, which became ever more a mere encasing for inner workings now externalized in circuitry. Tudor symbolized this encasing too with the object of the suitcase, which he carried with him on all his extensive travels in late years, and which contained only electronics (the technological recreation of his inner spiritual ear) and spices (the intellectualized, categorized game plan of his abstracted sense of taste). Having given all his spirituality and wisdom to sound, Tudor was left with a silent body as trampled valise. Perhaps for this reason Rainforest IV has always had such an effect on its listeners. They were not hearing Cage’s “sounds in themselves,” but rather, the direct aural expression of the violent cry of David Tudor’s body. — (Tamara Levitz){/small} {small}of course modes of attention that depend on being physically part of the work differ from things that use focus and fixation as the primary modes of attention. ^[...^] Decades ago, I lost my ability to sit still and listen to music in a concert hall. It wasn’t the music that died; it was my ability to attend to sound in that way. I can still get completely into a piece of music from the common-practice period via a recording, or by playing it out on the piano. But of course, there is a host of other ways of being involved as a listener without specifying the orthodox version of interactivity, which, as I mentioned, imposes some severe artistic limits. Distracted listening, spatial listening, cocoon listening, touristic listening, visual listening . . . the list could go on anon: All these are attentional forms that involve the listener in different ways with the material. My own introduction to other ways of listening, as we discussed before, was David Tudor’s Rainforest IV. — (Paul DeMarinis, "An Interview with Paul DeMarinis", by Gascia Ouzounian, In Computer Music Journal, 34:4, pp. 10–21, Winter 2010){/small} \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|tl ''Beaucoup ^[de solutions^] se trouve dans le caractère de l'écoute : si les haut-parleurs sont tout simplement là par eux-mêmes pour pulser du son en conserve ou s'ils "parlent" vraiment pour vous, et ceci, c'est quelque chose que seulement un musicien qui écoute peut vous apporter. Si vous avez un musicien qui joue en direct un morceau dans un espace, et qu'il est à l'écoute du son, et qui sait quand et comment faire une modification ou une modulation pour animer et rendre vivant la situation d'écoute dans laquelle vous vous trouvez avec lui, alors vous sentez que quelque chose se passe en direct. Si vous n'avez pas cela, alors vous devez accepter le fait que c'est comme aller au cinéma. Les choses ne vont pas progresser si la musique électronique reste à ce niveau de diffusion de choses "pré-conçues".'' {footnote}{small}"A lot of it is in the character of the listening: if the loudspeakers themselves are just pumping something canned or whether they are really talking to you, and that's something that really only a musician listening to it can give you. I mean, if you have a musician performing a piece who is in the same space, who is listening to the sound, who knows when and how to make an alteration to enliven the situation, then you feel that something live is happening. If you don't have that, then you have to accept the fact that it's like going to the cinema. Things won't progress if electronic music remains on that level." — David Tudor, from An Interview with David Tudor by Teddy Hultberg in Dusseldorf, May 17-18, 1988, http://davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html {/small}{/footnote}{br}{small}— David Tudor, from An Interview with David Tudor by Teddy Hultberg in Dusseldorf, May 17-18, 1988, http://davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html {/small}\| {br}{br} ----
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