By Bonnie Jones in response to Jeph Jerman (a month of) sundays, Eulachon 2012
As we celebrate John Cage’s
Centennial this year, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about
what it means to be a Post-Cagean “experimental” musician. This
term always made me a bit squirmy. As a student studying English, I
didn’t end up working through the Western musical canon and so came
late to Cage’s work. In fact, I was several years into the music
I’m making now before I ever laid eyes on Cage’s scores or
listened to seminal recordings he did with David Tudor. Whether
artists and musicians practicing today can or should be traced to
defined musical traditions and lineages is an increasingly moot point
in our late-Capitalist, globalized world. The threads of one’s
influences and the nature of our dialogue with the past appears more
like a medieval tapestry than a simple throw rug. So calling myself
Post-Cagean always felt a bit, well, disingenuous. Can you be
post-something if the something isn’t something you actually
know/knew that much about and likely still don’t?
Yet, Cage’s influence on the work I
make and listen to is surely undeniable. Cage made everyday
non-intentional sound(s), noise, silence, and chance operations
viable, if not acceptable, musical elements. He expanded the
definition of what we call “music” and proffered an invitation
for us to embark on more adventurous forms of listening. In Cage’s
work, the incidental everyday sounds had as much place inside music
as any other sound we might produce. By removing the precedence of
mastery and authorship in favor of chance and process, Cage proposed
that we imagine both musician and composer as an explorer, as one who
encounters sound and as one whom sound encounters. Cage spoke for the
presentness of the present, the way we interact with sound, the act
of moving through a sound event, even at the expense of conscious
making.
What I find most compelling about
Arizona musician/artist Jeph Jerman’s (a month of) sundays is
just this act of encounter, laid bare in the sounds he produces and
records. The piece, recorded in four, overdubbed layers over the span
of a month, is a document, a letter to the listener from the past. As
Jerman humbly notes, “almost nothing happens” in (a month of)
sundays, that is to say there are very few sound events in this
work that an average listener might declare “composed” or
“complex in musical form”. Yet this listener hears something
quite complex in this “nothing.”
The piece begins with the sound of a
door opening, what sounds like a blurt from a fed-back amplifier, and
the hiss of a recorder being turned on in Jerman’s studio/home. The
track then proceeds through 20 minutes of minute and discrete sine
tones, wooden scratches, metal scrapes speaker blurts and buzzes,
with occasional chair creaks and breath sounds from Jerman. Each
sound carefully engages with the environmental sounds picked up by
the recorder, often matching volume and intensity with what is
happening in the room. At times, Jerman even seems to listen and
respond to the digital hiss that will appear on the recording but
that would not have been audible during the session. Around 3’40”
the first small sine tone is heard. At 5’09” the second and
higher pitched sine tone is heard. At 11’43” a metal rod jangles
to the floor or table. At 12’43” the third lower pitched sine
starts, and some piece of metal is lightly rattled a few seconds
later. At 13’13” is that a dog barking outside and the sound of a
low bass in a moving car rolling past? The unusually active and
“noisy” two minute ending arrives with an uncommon forcefulness
and intentionality within a piece that moves so glacially and
precisely through the smallest sounds and musical gestures. In the
context of the work, it’s like a signature on a document.
Dear Listener,
It’s Sunday
and I’m here and you are there sometime in the future in some other
place. I imagine you, because I know your ear may find me someday.
But here in this place, in this time, I wonder if time and place have
anything to do with what is (not) happening. I left a few breadcrumbs
for you to follow, an object catalog that you might use in
association or reference (small speakers attached to a battery,
wooden balls, pumice, an e-bow and metal rods, and various spaces
around the house and studio). However, the object will speak and
sometimes her voice is quite different than you would imagine, so
don’t worry if you can’t find the pumice or the wooden ball, they
still have plenty to say.
I once thought
encountered and recorded sounds might be about capturing a place and
gifting that place to you, listener. But recently, I started to
wonder if whether it’s not about place at all, because place is so
much more confusing now and we’re all getting used to living in
places that don’t exist in space. I thought maybe it was time I was
interested in, rooting a moment that can’t be recaptured. But for
me, as a document / storage medium, that work is done, that time is
captured. So now, you are listening, and maybe that is what is
important above all – you are listening now and in the past I was
recording a listening, a body and sound. There’s history in my
document that passes through these vibrations to the present, to you
listening. There’s a hand and a body and a set of ideas in history
being transmitted to your present. I’m a medium, I can speak for
what is not longer there or too distant to be found again.
As with much of Jerman’s previous
works involving field recordings (and I see this work as a field
recording of a performance or maybe even a performance of a field
recording) the piece seems less concerned with a specific musical or
formal development and more with Jerman’s attempt to make his
performance, as nearly as possible, inside and inextricable from the
“field” recorded.
The sonic and conceptual space opened
by this gesture is fascinating. Here we have a field
recording/document of a space and place in time that includes the
actions and gestures of a performer. A performer who is aware of
being recorded and chooses to consciously situate himself inside the
total recorded space. He is improvising with the space, he is working
within that small gap between intention and non-intention between
what is natural (un-thought) and what is made and chosen. The work
asks a question about agency, about how we act upon and are acted
upon by the sound world that surrounds us. What is the nature
of this connection and construction? In this space, does the
individual move not towards erasure of the self but towards evidence
of the self through the very act of seeming to dissolve into the
space?
Cage’s musical proposition was to
make music outside of history, deskilling* the role of composer and
performer, and working towards a certain “death of the author.”
However the logical conclusion of Cage’s argument is what we as
“experimental” musicians seem to grapple with today. Is the
artist/maker/self meant to be invisible in the work? In (a month
of) sundays, there would be no need to include Jerman’s
performance to make this a piece of music. These days a field
recording can stand alone. And yet, there he is scraping wood and
metal, working objects with his hands and body, moving in his chair,
walking across the room. There he is placing himself inside of
history, his history, our history, his ear, our ear. Jerman's work
seems to respond to a desire to be both inside and outside of time.
To capture and remember one’s lived experience and history while
calling attention to the primacy and intimacy of the present.
Far from being a piece where nothing
happens, (a month of) sundays seems to contemplate everything
that can happen within a recorded sound space. The combination of
field recording and performance, puts Jerman’s decisions not to
include a sound or texture, in relief against the environmental and
inclusive sound world of his studio, his body shifting in its seat,
the cars outside, the dogs barking, the Arizona desert. The work
reveals the self (evident) and the self (invisible). It sparks the
restless imagination of the listener as we move through each minute
sonic space that Jerman explores. Jerman responds to Cage’s
invitation for us to be more adventurous in our listening and to
reconsider our definition of music and the role of the performer.
*In the 2005, two-volume text book,
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Benjamin
Buchloch defines this un-masterful gesture, this “deskilling” as
"a concept of considerable importance in describing numerous
artistic endeavors throughout the twentieth century with relative
precision. All of these are linked in their persistent effort to
eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity
from the horizon of both artist competence and aesthetic valuation."
Rosalind Krause, co-editor of the book, in an interview with Brooklyn
Rail summarizes the term as such, “deskilling is a way of
forgetting, insisting that the artist forget.”
