Bamboo
I came across a bamboo wok cleaner at a Chinese supermarket in Haymarket, Sydney. The bamboo is shredded and makes a crispy, crackling, grinding sound. The sound world of the bamboo relates to a scene in the performance video where a tree is constantly falling and rising back up again. Here the performer acts like a Foley artist as the crackling of the bamboo relates to the crackling bark from the tree. This happens in real-time but the performer cannot see the tree so at times it seems disconnected. The performer twists and turns the bamboo on top of a piece of paper, which lies across the low strings, rattling against the strings when struck. The result is a rich timbral world with a dynamic percussive quality as it jolts, stutters and rolls around the sections of the piano.
Electric Fan
An electric fan with soft nylon string attach to each blade creates a soft sustaining resonance. The fan slowly glides over and sonically unveils each string, and sections, of the piano, such as high tinny sounds beyond the bridge and around the tuning pegs.
Wooden Mallet
A wooden mallet scrapes and grinds over the strings, the metal plate and wooden case of the piano. Its rough surface creates varying sounds depending on the angle it is held and the location it is played. The instructions in the score for the use of the wooden mallet are: “Let the weight of the mallet determine the pressure on the piano and its strings rather than applying additional pressure”. The performer is also to copy the man’s hand orientation shown in the video score.
Rubber Mallet
A rubber mallet is used to strike the central stress bars on the piano. The sharp attack causes the metal plate to vibrate suddenly producing an after glow of overtones from the strings. Here the performer is hitting the stress bar at the same time a man in the video is hitting hard rock with a rock-pick, which is a process for harvesting minerals from the land. Although these tools may seem damaging to some piano enthusiasts, a lot of care taken not to harm the instrument.
Experimentation Of Tools, Video as Process
In the process of creating the work I made a series of video recordings of my explorations on the piano. Here I could play around with various objects and explore the regions of the piano with these implements. These ideas were documented as videos so I could refer back to them during the later stages of the compositional process. I was doing this before I found the archival footage. I compiled these videos on a website and it became part of the poetic impetus for my musical ideas. These recordings were like meditations using shapes and movements repeated over and over in different permutations with varying tools. The shapes I explored were:
I wrote in my process diary at this time: “the inside of the piano is a terrain. The strings are a body awoken through a drama of surface tensions and colouring through materials”. This reflects a particular way of seeing the instrument that allowed me to work from my own discoveries rather than drawing from methods of other composers. When discovering the archival footage my ideas fell into place. I made sure to choose my own tools used inside the piano. I chose tools that I thought sound interesting to me. Because of the conceptual focus in this work I wanted to complement it with a sound world that was interesting to me.
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Tools
Tools and Sound Worlds
The traces of the engraving process in the archival video are performed with varying tools such as: an electric fan, shredded bamboo, and rubber and wooden mallets.
LAPEL MICROPHONE
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Study Score
Actions in the video are reduced down to lines in a ‘study score’ I made (see below) and turned into functional musical data to be interpreted by the performer. The ‘study score’ is something I developed to accompany the video score. It is a notation of instructional details drawn from the video score and put on paper into a timeline sequence. The lines on the score show the direction, shape and relative spacing of each video gesture. By using the ‘study score’ the performer can have an overview of the macrostructure and get a sense of the ordering of sequences and how long tools are used for. Which is difficult to see in a video when there are moment to moment events.
‘Study Score’ – Mapping Australia (2014) – Page 1
CARTOGRAPHY
Cartography, Philosophy And The Use of Lines in Composition
The process for developing the piano instructions and use of tools has a relationship to the cartographic engraving practices in the 1960s, which used light to create precise terrain lines. The video screen displaying the video score in my work is transference from light to physicality, where the topography process is from physical to light:
The plastic sheets are taken one at a time and placed on a light table, where a soft light shines up through a white plastic surface. This illumination from below makes the lines of the map manuscript visible through the scribecoat. An engraver carefully cuts away the scribecoat along the lines and areas that are to be a certain colour on the finished map. For example, one sheet will have all the lines for rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water that are to be blue.
(“Topographical Maps,” website)
I am interested in the reductionism that occurs as a result of the line, and the philosophical inquiries that can be drawn from that; such as turning a river into a functional representation, for example as a blue line, versus experiencing and sensing a river for qualities such as the sense of tranquility that occurs through being amongst the constant presence of a flowing stream, listening, sensing and contemplating its fluidity, its mirroring surface, its texture, its motion, its life-giving properties, its cultural or sacred significance, or religious symbolism. So in this piano performance, the map, the score and the video are all representations of something else and mediators of reality. There is also a distancing going on where there is no clear or immediate way of understanding all the elements in the piece. In other words, it is allusive. The non-grid like structure of the piece gives a sense of flowing sounds, with unstable metric divisions. The surfaces and textures of the piano and the tools used are important features when listening to the piece. I was trying to create a multi-sensory experience based on the archival video.
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ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE - Mapping Australia (1966)
Discovering Archival Footage As A Score
The archival footage used in this piece was made in 1966 by the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit Production for the Department of National Development (“Internet Archive” 1966). The video shows methods used by cartographers in Australia at the time and advertises Australia for foreign mining interests. I used fragments from the video as score material, such as a scene where a man moves his pencil around on a map in an arbitrary way, a rock-pick hitting hard rock in the search for minerals in the earth, and terrain lines being drawn on plastic surface. The Indigenous Australian perspective on land and culture is not represented nor is there any acknowledgement of Aboriginal land rights, so this politically motivated me put the work together.
My political response to the archival footage became the framework, which led me to make decisions on how to represent the video, the map, and the piano. This led me to rethink how the piano can be mapped, not just by its notes, register or strings, but by thinking of other methods like through visual or tactile things like colour, lines, shapes, contours, surface textures and spatial dimensions within the piano. By rethinking how the piano is represented it helped to open up how it was used, notated, listened to and perceived.
There is a tradition of geographical research (e.g. Gould and White 1974) which sets out from the premise that we are all cartographers in our daily lives, and that we use our bodies as the surveyor uses his instruments, to register a sensory input from multiple points of observation, which is then processed by our intelligence into an image which we carry around with us, like a map in our heads, wherever we go. (Ingold, 1993 p. 124)
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I felt personally connected to using this archival video because I am Australian and have an understanding and sympathy with the political implications of the video. What confronted me was that the archival video seems to accept the concept of ‘terra nullius’ – land belonging to no one, therefore free to divide and mine for resources. My work is a reaction to this, and I responded to it through how the piano was mapped and treated in the composition. I was also drawn in by the concept of ‘trace’ and ‘mapping’ that is inherent in the documentary as an artefact in its context as a film produced by the Australian government and its repurposed trace (its status as archival footage on achive.org and the repurposing as an art object), as well as in the literal footage of map making. But more can be associated to this then its function on a practical level. These concepts are, for me, a potent set of ideas, where connections can be made within the work and outside. I enjoy making art works and music which contain a broad conceptual scope with multi-layered meaning, and this video allowed for this. I found the video humorous yet outrageous because of the political issues it ignores about Indigenous culture and land rights in a foreign portrayal of Australian identity, which seems out-dated and bizarre to me. So I felt compelled to present it to people in a backwards way, imitating silly movements in the video and providing humorous video manipulations to go along with the performance.
When analysed in a contemporary context, this archival footage is easily mocked. Elements such as the whimsical flamboyance of the music by Hughes now seem dated and over the top. The Dutch being spoken over a film about Australia seems odd and part of some foreign romanticism. Also, the show of authority and certainty in the men as they arbitrarily glide their pencils over very large distances of Australian land connotes carelessness and negligence towards the land. This pencil scene (as shown earlier) became the central motif in my score. I also find it politically insensitive as it shows a disregard to Australia’s Indigenous history and culture, and made me question the difference between the mapping process seen in this video and the practices by some Indigenous Australians. On the surface I created a mapping notational system that reflects the archival video’s approach to mapping the land. This can be seen through my use of numbering zones on the piano and through separating the piano into large areas and drawing lines on it. Elizabeth Grosz explains the indigenous practices of mapping the land, which also reflects my approach when I make choices based on personal or the historical reasoning or creating a ritualistic presence:
…look at the work of two major artists from the western desert: Kathleen Petyarre (from Anmatyerr, a region northeast of Alice Springs, painting at Utopia) and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (also an Anmatyerr, painting at Papunya), two of the most internationally well-known indigenous artists, whose work has now been exhibited in the U.S., the UK, France, and elsewhere, and certainly the most well-known in Australia and well represented in the collections of the National and State Galleries. The work of each is an attempt to map out in spatial and figural terms the geography of their dreaming country, a cartography of the events, the topography, and the animal beings that link to the artist's own bodily and clan history. Their works are temporal maps of those ancestral spatial terrains that are distinguishable and significant not for their geographical features but for the life a geography sustains, the practices that it engenders and the movements it requires. These works are dynamic portraits of a long past history, a history of events of war, natural destruction, births, marriages, sexual alliances, animal ancestors and totems, a living history concerned primarily with the past and how its narratives and practices effect the present, like the cinematic reel compressed into a single highly complex frame. (Grosz, 2008 p. 92)
The archival video is a form of advertisement for foreign interest in mining specifically bauxite mining (“Alcoa,” 2014). This is a serious issue considering the struggles there have been for the land rights of the traditional owners of the land during this time (“Mabo,” 2013), especially when they conflict with mining interests. A major conflict occurred on 13 March 1963:
…when the Government removed more than 300 square kilometres of land from the Arnhem Land reserve so bauxite found there could be mined. On 14 August that same year cabinet minister Kim Beazley introduced a motion to the House of Representatives in calling for recognition of Aboriginal land title by the Commonwealth Government. The Bark Petition (National Archives of Australia, 2011) was received in the House of Representatives. The Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, moved that the petition be rejected. The committee's unanimous report did not recommend any significant change in government policy, and the excision went ahead, after certain assurances of 'protection' of Aboriginal people had been negotiated between the government, the mission and the mining company. Though the inquiry had demonstrated that the Yolngu (Indigenous Australian people inhabiting north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia) grievance lay partly in not having been included in negotiations about mining, Yolngu continued to be excluded from meetings where decisions were made about their land. (“Mabo” 2013)
This incident happened three years before the archival video I have used was published. The cartography methods in the video could be seen to represent the cartographer's own historically driven practices and ideals, reflecting ways of thinking and attitudes of the time—a show of technology, innovation and triumph over the land. If a cartographer’s role is to represent the world then what my piece does is represent the cartographer. The archival video presents a monotonous office environment, moving machinery with scientific precision to trace the land. The footage of photo-mechanical scribing techniques, pencil movements across great distances of lands, and the cultivated history behind the men working seem to suggest a more functional-scientific attitude towards the land when compared to that of the traditional owners (as mentioned by Grosz). I wanted the work to reflect on these practices that seem to inherently present analogies of objectification, indifference, realism, authority, scientific and drive for profits. My work replicates these analogies intentionally to exaggerate it satirically, as I thought it is more striking and highlights the issue in a more challenging way. The performance is something that brings attention to the issues and allows space for the audience to reflect on them. Leaving aside the obvious usefulness of the map in today’s society, I am reflecting on the archival video’s map-making process and the traditional uses of maps as signifiers of place, identity, country and stories about landscape, animals and ancestors. Not as a preference for one or the other but understanding and utilising elements in both and responding to them in my creative work. The use of light in this cartography practice, rivers into light, can be seen as the reverse process for the performer who essentially turns lines of light from an illuminated video screen into movement and sound.
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