Cover:
MUSIC, LANGUAGE AND
ENVIRONMENT
Environmental Sound
Works by David Dunn, 1973 – 85
On right sidebar:
“one of the first to visit that terrain of
re-enchantment”
“the radical, rigorous investigation of Deep
Ecology”
Inside booklet:
The six works represented on these
two compact discs might be heard as historical artifacts in the sense that they
exist as documentation of performed events that are not repeatable in the same
way that notated musical works generally are. However, while they involved
improvisational elements, they are not to be regarded as improvisations since
they were rigorously composed for the environmental circumstances in which they
took place. They represent an attempt to articulate an aesthetic of
environmental interactivity through sound-making, which occupied me over a
fifteen year period. During that time I generated a diverse body of work from
which these six examples have been chosen in order to illustrate the range of
those activities. All of these works share the characteristic of having been outdoor
performances. They also demonstrate a purposeful transition that my
investigations pursued over those fifteen years: a progressive expansion of
context, moving from interactions with a single member of another species toward
interactions with complex environments. Foremost in these experiments was a
concern for sound as a means to explore the emergent intelligence of non-human
living systems. My interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental
sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems — a way of
experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called "the integrated fabric of
mind that envelops us."
These recordings were often made under less-than-ideal
technical circumstances. The listener must tolerate a wide range of unusual
acoustic spaces and an even greater range of technical quality. I recommend
that listeners adjust their audio expectations to accommodate these eccentric
demands through understanding that the non-studio production values were
intentional and inseparable from the reality of the art. — David Dunn
DISC #1
(1) NEXUS
1
Nexus 1 was performed and recorded in the
interior of the Grand Canyon National Park over a three-day period from the
17th to the 20th of June, 1973. All performance and recording took place in the
area known as Hermit's Gorge, approximately two miles down into the canyon
interior along Hermit's Trail. The score specified sound gestures which the
trumpets could articulate interactively with the canyon environment. This
interaction primarily focused upon 1) the extended reverberation and
extraordinary spatial acoustics of the rock formations, and 2) the non-human
life forms such as the crows heard throughout the performance recording.
Trumpets – Ralph Dudgeon, Ed
Harkins, Jack Logan
(2) ENTRAINMENTS
1
Entrainments 1 began with an initial interaction
where square-wave oscillations were projected into the performance site in
order to both stimulate response in some fashion and to explore the inherent
resonance characteristics of the space. This interaction was recorded for
subsequent manipulation. I then recorded a performer's stream-of-consciousness
speech describing real-time events and observations of that environment. Both
recordings were eventually merged with a pitch-to-voltage converter such that
the speech sounds became tracings of the environmental sounds while modulating
the overall timbral spectra of the environment. Four layerings from this
procedure were played back into the original location and rerecorded.
Realization of the work took place at Azalea Glen, Cuyamaca State Park,
California, from May to September, 1984.
Electronically altered speaking
voice – Lizbeth Rymland
(3) ENTRAINMENTS
2
Entrainments 2 was composed for and performed in a
specific wilderness site. Three performers prerecorded stream-of-consciousness
descriptions and observations of the surrounding environment from three
mountain peaks in the Cuyamaca Mountains of California. These recordings were
subsequently mixed with static drones derived from an astrological charting for
the time and location of the performance. Playback of these sounds occurred
from portable cassette recorders with self-amplified loudspeakers and
sufficient amplitude to be audible from the center of the performance
configuration. In the center of the space was placed a computer programmed to
sample and immediately output periodic sound blocks through a central
loudspeaker. The input signal to the computer was from a parabolic microphone.
A performer carried this microphone while walking slowly around the perimeter
of a large central circle. This performer also recorded the overall performance
with binaural microphones. Three other performers carried portable
self-amplified oscillators while walking slowly around the perimeter of three
outer circles. The performance took place at Azalea Glen, Cuyamaca State Park,
California, on May 19, 1985.
Speaking voices – Ronald
Robboy, Lizbeth Rymland, Stephen Storer
Oscillators – Lizbeth Rymland,
Dan Schwartz, Stephen Storer
Computer and engineering – David
Dunn, Peter Seibel
DISC #2
(1) SKYDRIFT
Skydrift was realized on December 11, 1977 at
Little Blair Valley within the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California. The
work required ten voices, sixteen instrumentalists, and four channels of electronic
sounds derived from materials generated at the performance site. Over a thirty-minute
period the instrumentalists slowly moved outward from the central circle of
voices and electronic sound sources, while performing in response to
information from the environment, until reaching the perimeter of audibility
from the center of the space. This configuration resulted in an expanding sonic
formation which ultimately occupied a space a half-mile in diameter, remaining
audible for approximately two miles from the sound source. The project was
funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Voices
– Ellen Band, Ric Cupples, Dennis Dunn, Peter Hamlin, Gene Johnson, Phil
Keeney, Chris Robbins, Ron Robboy, Peter Seibel, Paul William Simons
Flutes – Norbert Bach, Donna
Caruso, David Savage, Jeri Webb
Clarinets – Duane
Lakin-Thomas, David Marlowe, Robert Paredes, Larry Rhodes
Trumpets – Alan Brewer,
David Dickey, Larry Fant, Jack Logan
Trombones – Bob Burns,
Russell Estes, Mark Mayer, Jeff Peterson
Sound engineer – Eugene Wahl
(2) MIMUS
POLYGLOTTOS (in
collaboration with Ric Cupples)
Mimus Polyglottos is a realtime interactive
composition for electronically generated sounds and mockingbird. The final
recording represents an initial encounter between the bird and the stimulus. It
was recorded outdoors in Balboa Park, San Diego, during July, 1976. The
composition was initially stimulated by a fascination with the mockingbird's
extraordinary ability to mimic not only the calls of other birds, but also a
variety of environmental and machine- generated sounds. Our interest was not
only in seeing how we could push that ability in terms of the actual sounds
which the bird could mimic, but more significantly to generate a linguistic
interaction.
(3) (espial)
(espial) was commissioned by the Radio
Performance Project, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1979. It was
recorded in the Anza-Borrego Desert of California. Two categories of sound
events are called for by the notated score: 1) specific pitch and timbral material
in 21-tone just intonation performed by a solo violinist; and 2) environmental
sensing that required response to events occurring in both the external
environment and the performer's body. Realization of this score required 3 1/2
hours of continuous playing in a physically harsh environment. A recording of
this performance is subsequently divided into seven separate 1/2-hour segments
that were then played back simultaneously by seven small, inexpensive cassette
recorders. The resulting degeneration of the violin sound is to be regarded as
an essential compositional factor.
Violin – David Dunn
THE MUSIC OF DAVID DUNN
I
first met David in the early 1970s in San Diego. I was a graduate student at
one university, he was an undergrad and technician at another. He first
introduced me to work by people such as earth artists Michael Heizer and Robert
Smithson, and to video artists like Bruce Nauman. He also introduced me to his
own work, which involved making music in a variety of outdoor environments. But
more than the simple intrusive gestures that Heizer's and Smithson's work entailed,
David was interested in something more – in interaction. He wanted to see
what the effect was of doing something that might otherwise be considered crazy
in a place that might otherwise be considered inappropriate. His earliest works
came closest to being a sonic analogy for the work of Heizer or Smithson. Nexus
I (1973) involved
three trumpeters and Dunn backpacking into a remote part of the Grand Canyon
and performing there, searching for echoes. But what they got was more than that,
as they observed all sorts of events occuring that, on one level, could be
interpreted as the environment, somehow, metaphorically responding to the
events placed into it. Dunn's first response to this was almost scientific,
almost empirical, but with a healthy Dada streak as well. Mimus Polyglottos (1976) had Dunn and Ric Cupples
researching what sort of sounds would goad the San Diego mockingbirds into responding.
That was the scientific part. The Dada part was sneaking into urban Balboa Park
in the middle of the night to play the tapes to the birds using portable tape
recorders, and observing the results.
After
the scientific approach of the mockingbird piece, however, a more holistic
approach began. David realized that what he was doing wasn't science, but was
more metaphorical, more artistic. His
work was, in fact, a quest to make contact with what might be called "the
spirit of a place." Many people
were talking in such terms back then, but few really made an attempt to see
what dialoging with such a metaphorical concept might actually mean. (espial), Skydrift, and Entrainments 1 and 2 were pieces where he used a variety
of rigorous processes to somehow set up a dialog with whatever forces might be,
in fact, resident and inherent in particular places. This is probably most
hearable in Entrainments 2, where
three poets talk about their responses to a particular environment, observing
the events there. The comments they are making on one visit to the performance
site are then reflected in events happening on the group performance day,
months later. It is as though in their first visit, they describe things that
will happen in the future, and then those things do happen while the tape of
their monologue is being played.
Now all of this may sound extremely mystical, or reminiscent
of the worst elements of flaky new- age hucksterism. It's important to realize
that David was (and continues to be) absolutely rigorous in setting up these
processes and following them through. It is the results of his activities that were
so strange. He himself was as amazed an observer of the interactions as were
any of us who participated in his early works/events.
Recently
I read Suzi Gablik's The Re-enchantment of Art, where she calls for a more socially
concerned, environmentally aware art. David was one of the first to visit that
terrain of re-enchantment, more than 20 years ago. He was among the first sound
artists to consider what became James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, not just as a
pious and trite metaphor (or as an openly offensive marketing gimmick!), but as
a serious principle that would have the potential to change the way he made
music.
Post-modern
theory tells us that no credit can be allowed for anyone being among the first
to do things, and that may indeed be true – consider David's (and all of
our) disillusionment as the music industry watered down his radical ecological
thinking into a CD of Mozart with loon calls mixed in. (I'm not making this up!
The disc in question absolutely exists!) Instead of the radical, rigorous investigation of Deep Ecology
that David proposed in his early works, what the music industry has given us is
nature Muzak and in the process it ignored David's work.
But
that work continues to be important and, more than ever, needs to be heard,
discussed, and debated in these days of neo-conservative anti-environmental
backlash. Rather than the tediously charming conservationist ethos of much new-age
nature music, David's pieces come howling at us from the 70s and 80s as the
sonic equivalents of serious Deep Ecology.
This
is music which (mostly) doesn't sound like anybody else’s. And which
(mostly) doesn't correspond to polite or pop notions of musical propriety. As
sound, this work is remarkable enough. But it is the combination of sound and
idea and context that makes David's work so potent, and an inspiration to a
whole generation of radical composers, artists, and ecologists. This is music
which is not absolute, which almost can't exist without its stories, contexts, politics, and responses. When, in the early
1980s, Lingua Press published the score to Skydrift, more than half of the book was devoted
to the responses of the performers who participated in the event. Environmental
and social interaction are at the very core of this music.
Consequently,
it's music which needs a multilayered listening — a listening which reveals its radical message and radical
sound, and which still, years later, constitutes a clarion call for a serious, thoughtful,
radical dealing with our relationship to all-that-is-around-us. — Warren
Burt (1995)
(Tray Card)
Music, Language and Environment
Environmental Sound Works by David Dunn, 1973 – 85
CD
#1 [70:26]
1 Nexus
1 (14:40)
2 Entrainments
1 (8:14)
3
Entrainments 2 (45:53)
CD
#2 [66:31]
1 Skydrift (31:12)
2 Mimus
Polyglottos (5:17)
3 (espial) (29:49)
Recorded, edited, and produced by David Dunn
Art direction and design: Adam Kapel
Executive Producer: Homer G. Lambrecht
ADD
© 1996 innova Recordings
332 Minnesota Street, Suite E-145
St. Paul, MN 55101-1300
fax: (612) 291-7978;
e-mail: [email protected]