“never quite the same, never quite an other.”
“never quite the same, never quite an other.”
An impossible sum of sounds emanating from one instrument; the soft singing of harmonics atop a forgotten foundation; music as metaphor for the ocean; the ocean but a metaphor for the dizzying array of electromagnetic waves that we can and cannot perceive:
All this lies in Occam XVIIb, recorded in the thirteen-second reverberation of the Buffalo Bayou Cistern.
Water
How I think and move in this city has been forever changed by meeting the folks at West Street Recovery and witnessing the work that they do. This performance is dedicated to them.
In many ways, Houston’s identity comes from its proximity and access to the Gulf: a powerful body, by every possible definition, that holds massive influence over the course of our lives. After colonists led by Stephen F. Austin violently seized land that had for centuries been home to the Karankawa, shipping and oil routed through the Port of Houston facilitated the city’s rapid growth. These colonizers and oil industries have profited from this proximity and access, having over decades built up a self-protective infrastructure that leaves other communities vulnerable to the devastating impacts of hurricanes and floods. As Hirsch et al. demonstrate in “Survivors as Experts,” these vulnerabilities “are a deadly expression of inequality materialized along racial lines.” [Footnote 1] The growth of the city has decimated natural flood-resistance by covering the region in concrete, and the oil industry has directly contributed to the climate change that drives an ever-increasing frequency of "once-in-a-century" storms.
Five years after the impact of Hurricane Harvey, thousands of Houstonians are still working to rebuild their lives after its destruction. [2] Homeowners in poorer zip codes found themselves excluded from vital FEMA funding at rates far higher than average, [3] and were refused access to detailed reports about why their applications were denied. [4]
In order to meet the needs of these now-even-more-vulnerable families, West Street Recovery, formed during Harvey to distribute food and water (often by kayak) to disaster stricken communities, expanded to take on the home repairs that FEMA ignored. In their own words, "WSR has grown into a horizontally–structured and worker–directed disaster recovery nonprofit, which uses Hurricane Harvey home repair and community engagement to build more broadly towards social justice and an equitable recovery." [5]
West Street Recovery works directly with homeowners to develop a building plan that meets each resident’s needs and wants; hires electricians, plumbers, and other tradespeople from within the neighborhood to funnel even more resources to these communities; and brings in volunteers to fill in the gaps of labor.
Houston will inevitably continue to suffer hurricanes, and so West Street Recovery will always have more work to do. If you are local and have the ability to volunteer, I urge you to sign up for their build days, disaster prep events, and other volunteer opportunities. Otherwise, donations go a long way.
[1] Hirsch et al., “Survivors as Experts,” 4.
[2] Ibid, 4.
[3] Ibid, 57.
[4] Ibid, 42.
[5] West Street Recovery, “Home.”
Waves
My journey with this piece began with a handwritten letter to Éliane. I am forever grateful to her for her response, and for inviting me into this world.
Éliane Radigue’s Occam series deals with waves, broadly defined. Materially, her performers generate many overlapping sound waves; conceptually, these sound waves represent an image of the many waves of the ocean. The image of the ocean is, itself, another layer of representation: in the composer’s words:
“The first source of inspiration for Occam Océan came from my discovery of a long wall banner at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in the 1970s. It is like an emakimono–a Japanese story-telling scroll–that represents all known electromagnetic wavelengths, from the wavelengths between the earth and the sun through to micro-, mini-, nano-rays, etc. It’s clear that beyond these two extremeties, the wavelengths from the sun to the most distant planets and those our venerable star shares with its own kind cast an infinity within which all the wavelengths we know and utilise appear modest–including the miniscule zone from 30 to 40 hertz to around 16,000 hertz that our ear transforms into sound, and even the spectrum of the 300,000 hertz zone, which is perceived or interpreted as light or colour. And all this without counting the multiple, diverse wavelengths our species uses–inexplicable from the perspective of us non-specialist ignoramuses–VLFs, UHFs and as many others as to become dizzy.
“It is within this kind of vibratory universe that we live, but we have only a small zone of auditory reception by way of our ears. But just as it is for radio or television, we humans remain limited to an extremely restricted zone compared to the infinity of the universe. This is the basis, the spirit of the work: the vertiginous nature of the inconceivable.
“I chose the idea of the ocean in order to be able to perceive all this in a more human way. It’s a big leap, because it encapsulates both the tides moving along the whole expanse of the ocean as well as tiny wavelets on the beach; even if they are not Hertzian, multitudes of wavelengths develop. All of the Occams are linked to water because it also possesses multiple wavelengths.” [6]
[6] Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, 158.
Contents
The Music
My present understanding of what Occam XVIIb is, what that means, and what the work asks of its performer
The Transmission
Details of my experience working with bassist Dominic Lash, who developed Occam XVII in tandem with Éliane Radigue, and then transmitted the details of piece to me
The Venue
Discussion of how the acoustics and environment of the Buffalo Bayou Cistern shaped this particular performance
The Recording
Thoughts on the creation of a fixed product from a work that necessarily changes over time
Radigue’s Work
A brief history of the composer’s life, artistic practice, & aesthetic priorities
Works Cited
For further reading
Credits
July 27, 2022
January 31, 2022
The Cistern
Éliane Radigue
Dominic Lash
Austin Lewellen
Brad Sayles
Giancarlo Minotti
Austin Lewellen
Austin Lewellen
Sarah Jane Kerwin
Bobby Nash
Luke Nickel
Brad Sayles
Trudi Smith
Olivia Torres
West Street Recovery
- and -
Release date
Recording date
Venue
Composer
Transmitter
Performer
Audio engineer
Ass’t engineer
Videographer
Web designer
With funding from
With thanks due to
The Music
Occam XVIIb requires many contradictory statements to fully explain. Performing it is, at once, a very simple task, and a strictly ordered series of many tasks. There are no fixed durations for any of these tasks, and as such, the only explanation I have is that Occam XVIIb takes the amount of time that it takes. To accept that definition requires a similar mindset to that of fully opening one's self to the experience of hearing the work. The entire Occam series shares the following commonalities: all use the image of the ocean to represent the electromagnetic spectrum; all require continuous sound to generate what Éliane calls “the subtle and delicate interplay of partials, harmonics, sub-harmonics, playing between themselves in their immaterial, aerial, elusive way;” [7] and, most importantly, none of the pieces are written out.
Éliane contends that the nature of her Occam series makes the works better suited to oral transmission than to a notated score. In her words, “it’s a question of priorities, but it doesn’t seem to me that oral transmission would be any less faithful than a score: in both cases, there is the necessity of mental projection. Each favours the musical parameters proper to it.” [8] The twenty or so Occams that she has written were all shaped in close collaboration with their original performers. The next step in this process is to pass the works on: in order to learn Occam XVIIb, Éliane put me in contact with Dominic Lash, a British musician who is of this first generation of performers. I worked with Dominic over the course of a year; sharing ideas, teasing out the specifics of what the work needs in order to be successful, before receiving approval from both Dominic and Éliane to present the work publicly.
This work asks its performer to simultaneously produce several wavelengths of sound. As a result, it also asks you to keep mental tabs on many scales of physical activity. Éliane speaks at length of how every change should be so gradual as to be imperceptible. You should only discover the difference when you look back and realize how far you’ve come. The task of facilitating such subtleties while sustaining a continuous sound requires innumerable small steps: carefully defined movements, preceded by thoughtful, physical preparations. None of these small tasks are officially part of the piece, nor do they comprise any of the instructions I received from Dominic: they have much more to do with your body than the body; your instrument than the instrument, not to mention the specifics of the acoustical space you inhabit. Though that may seem irrelevant, without these self-derived wavelets, so to speak, the piece loses its characteristic, overwhelming power.
The most central truth of the Occam series is the dizzying multiplicity of waves, the way that this manifests is in the particular dramatic arc that it traces. This arc is, in fact, one of the few elements that needs to be explicitly transmitted from one musician to another. As concerns the performing body, this arc is the largest wave of the piece, and it is one that requires a peripheral awareness at all times, for without it, the piece just becomes a haphazard collection of small physical gestures. Its contrasts, and the timing in which it unfolds, is absolutely critical for the meaning and the power of the work.
The ripening over time that Éliane and her many collaborators agree is necessary for this series of works has, for me, a lot to do with these multiple scales of awareness. It begins, in the teaching stage, as a simple large arc. Anything is possible, and that is both beautiful and frustrating. As you peel back the layers, you begin to discover, and then define, all the small ways in which the work needs your support: the unmarked transitions, the particular sonic areas of your instrument that speak with more or less difficulty. Once you have fully defined, tested, internalized all those wavelets, you must next learn to forget them. It is only once these many small components are absorbed into that first, largest wave that the piece is ready.
These many demands transform you as you put them into practice. As Hugh Morris wrote in The New York Times, this music “often makes you forget that time exists” [9] — an experience that is as true for the performer as it is for the listener. Moreso than perhaps any other work, Occam has taught me patience, foresight, an openness to unexpected bumps, and the ability to respond graciously to them. It is a form of guiding the sound from a distance that is closely aligned with how Éliane herself wrote the works: by intervening only when absolutely necessary, yet doing so early enough that your intervention can go unnoticed.
[7] Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, 43.
[8] Ibid, 149.
[9] Morris, “For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time.”
The Transmission
Dominic Lash, the British musician who worked directly with Éliane to develop Occam XVII, occupies many very important and interesting positions with respect to this music. In addition to being the premiere performer of the work, he worked in tandem with Éliane to establish the narrative arc and the sonic materials in use. As Dominic describes it, this collaborative practice often took the form of course-correction: just as Éliane “consider(s) sound an autonomous life that need(s) to be respected,” [10] so too does she strive to stay out of her collaborator's way until an intervention becomes necessary. As a result, this piece, like each in the Occam series, inevitably bears the stamp of its original performer: it would be fair to say that my performance of this particular work is as much an expression of Dominic's artistic voice as it is of the composer's.
In the absence of a written document, the act of passing the work on to a new performer becomes complicated. This act, which Éliane and others describe as "transmission," required Dominic to relay not only his own experience of what the piece is and how it should work, but his understanding of Éliane's experience as well. It is a significant challenge to put music into words, especially to do so in a way that will be translated back into music by an entirely different person. But that, in essence, is the task that Dominic undertook in order to transmit Occam XVII — the “b” appended to the title of my performance acknowledges the transformative nature of this process of transmission.
Dominic and I have worked together on this music since the summer of 2020. Throughout this period, we spent a lot of time focused on definitions, for instance: what does the word "intensity" mean to each of us, whether physically, musically, emotionally? This process shaped not only my initial understanding of the work, but my tentative understanding of how the work might grow. A primary goal of this music is for it to continue to ripen the longer one spends with it, and there is a correct, general direction for that blossoming to take within the framework that Éliane and Dominic have built. Moments, gestures, will happen during a given performance that hew more or less closely to that direction: it becomes yet another task to disentangle whether a given moment indicates that one has strayed too far from the path on a structural level, or if it is simply a brilliant, contributing sound along the path.
Over the course of the two years that have elapsed since Dominic and I first met, I have learned that the more we strove to align our thinking, the more easily the music came to me. When something feels off, I always find it most helpful to return to the notes I took in our earliest sessions in order to recenter my thinking. Although inevitably our performances will always be different, it is what is found in the transmission that is what is so dear to the Occam series: a practice centered around listening, love, and great wonder for the natural world. How can we not be in wonder of the transmission of sound, of the legacies it holds, and the immense generosity of spirit it takes to share something so dear with another? I am grateful to Dominic for his counsel, his ears, and of course his incredible recording of this piece which set me on this journey.
For friends across the Atlantic, Dominic recently performed Occam XVII in combination with the Occams developed by fellow members of the first generation Angharad Davies and Rhodri Davies*, thereby forming what Éliane calls an Occam Delta. This live concert took place in Bristol, UK on October 16, 2022.
[10] Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, 32.
*Rhodri Davies performed yet another combinatorial Occam in Houston in December 2019, presented by Nameless Sound.
The Venue
In Espaces Intermédiares, Éliane speaks about the overwhelming, incomprehensible scale of waves that make up our universe. For her, the ocean is an apt metaphor, a body that we can witness, which contains a multitude of waves of all sizes and scales, shaping (and being shaped by) one another.
It feels significant that the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, designed to hold its own massive body of water, is equally adept at holding, nourishing, the many waves which Éliane seeks to metaphorically describe. Every sound reverberates with such a delay and is so impossibly loud that it seems as though another person is responding in your own voice. No one pitch is privileged here; every sound you make accumulates and blossoms for what feels like an eternity: audio engineer Brad Sayles clocked the reverb at an astounding 13 seconds.
In a space like this, I use the bass to play the Cistern, which becomes an instrument more powerful and complete than any other. This, to me, seems to approach the point of the Occam series, coming as close as I could imagine to representing the dizzying scale of the waves of the universe.
Space City Weather announced a flood warning for the recording day, and I had no idea how rain might echo throughout the space. The experience of entering the Cistern is wild: a winding tunnel, lit from below, grows subtly darker and quieter until you pass through the door of the cavern. In most spaces, certain notes of the scale will resonate more strongly than others, depending on the acoustics of the space. In the Cistern, however, no one pitch is privileged; every sound you make accumulates and blossoms for what feels like an eternity.
Performing in this venue was not without its challenges: because of the reverberation, splicing multiple takes is not an option. The whole of the sound is so complex, interactive, and long-lived that each work had to be recorded in one, continuous attempt. This bears remarkable similarities to the slowly unfolding methods Éliane used to create her electronic works. From one perspective, that's a stressful task: in terms of my execution, the stakes are higher. But once I brought my awareness outside of myself, I learned that the Cistern was actually supporting me: playing with a light touch activated the space just as powerfully as trying my hardest, and that freed me up to perform.
Rain persisted the whole afternoon, and its sound played me in and out of the piece, easing transitions, erasing borders. It was damp and cold, which was a challenge for the bass, the bow, and my body as the day progressed. Occam XVIIb, more than most music, is sensitive to the particulars of its environment. The sonic material of the work is delicate; the technical means of producing this material, even more so. It requires you to listen closely, with all your senses, in order to sustain and nurture the continuous sound that is the foundation of this music.
The Recording
What does it mean to record an Occam? Éliane is disinterested in notating any of her works: in her words, “it would be deadening to annotate them once and for all. That would cut the music off from its ongoing process of maturation.” [11] Rather, each performer’s personal list of tasks, derived from the image of the dizzying multiplicity of waves that makes up the work, cut more readily to the core of her artistic practice.
Similarly, it is important to note that this recording, or any recording for that matter, can never be considered definitive: this is a slice in time, a representation of where I was in the course of my life and in my relationship with the piece, and especially of how the Cistern itself responded to my voice on this rainy, January day. I say this not to invalidate my work, but to echo Éliane’s opinion that the life of this work comes from the way that it resists definition.
[11] Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, 167.
Radigue's Work
During the 1950s, Éliane’s musical practice expanded outward from performing and composing to the creation of musique concrète. She began to work with tape at the Studio d’Essai in Paris, which, by this point, had evolved into a sound research laboratory from its earlier iteration as the national resistance radio station of World War II. Éliane was particularly interested in working with tape feedback, enamored with how its sound could be made to shift very gradually. In the 1970s, she employed the same sort of musical process with the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer that she used for 25 years.
As time passed, the field shifted inevitably to digital processes. This was driven in part by the difficulties of repairing aging analogue synthesizers. In exploring the new technologies, Éliane discovered that the digital medium was unsupportive of the kinds of sounds she liked to produce. In her own words:
“I started building my own sounds, with my old recipes for applying different modular connections. The problem is that constructing them went very well, but then, when I wanted to make them evolve imperceptibly…everything fell apart completely. With this system, sounds were transferred into sand or sound dust. For two years, I made myself sick, because I am very stubborn-headed and I wanted to get there. It was an ordeal. It was Paul DeMarinis who literally saved me by explaining that it was normal that it didn’t work. Analogue sound is continuous sound, so you can make it evolve in the texture of the track. But digital sound is by nature discontinuous, produced by bits. So I understood it wasn’t for me.”
With that realization, Éliane shifted away from electronic music at the turn of the 21st century, and began working in her own way with (primarily) acoustic instruments. Early works of this period include Elemental I & II, and Naldjorlak I, II, & III, and from there the Occam series emerged: solo works created in collaboration with performers that all share a guiding image of the ocean, which are not notated, and which are intended to be passed down orally, from performer to performer.
But there is no one better at discussing the world in which she lives than the composer herself. What follows are two quotes that really shaped my preparation of the work, each followed by a brief explanation of what it means for me as a performer:
“Larsen is exclusively what happens between a speaker and a microphone. It’s none as the plague of concert hall sound engineers. Using it with the aim of generating sound matter is all about finding the limit point, where larsen occurs. If you are too close, it explodes; if you go too far, the sound disappears.”
In an acoustic performance setting, this has parallels in the physical variables of sound production: weight, speed, placement. Too heavy a bow will choke out the overtones; too light, and the sound becomes discontinuous. Speed and placement operate similarly: for each, there is a “Goldilocks zone” where everything is just right. Yet, since the game with the Occam series is to push the limit of what the string will permit, there are ways in which one has to goose things just a bit, often to smooth the introduction of something new.
“In the acoustic music, it’s indeed the breath and the bow which suggest a rhythm, but the image of waves in Occam Océan also suggests some sort of movement. A tempo establishes itself naturally, we don’t need to hunt for it. When immersed in listening, one very quickly feels this light, interior swaying movement, and needn’t be preoccupied with it. When magnificent things are happening in a concert situation, they mustn’t be stopped, nor their unfolding hampered; you maintain them. This maintenance may also nourish the ensuing passage, and allow what follows to emerge. The ear leads the musician to accommodate the transition. It happens very gently, since there is always the idea of fade-in, fade-out and cross-fade. The sound must never stop abruptly. This is part of rhythm, like organic growth: you don’t see a plant growing, nor feel the daily changes constantly taking place in your body. These are things which seem as simple as daylight, but which are actually the most complicated to produce in this kind of work.”
In this sense, the physical space in which you perform the piece has a lot of agency: Its reverberation, its atmosphere (the Cistern is particularly influenced by the outside weather) act upon the response of the instrument and impact the rate and mode by which the component parts of the work unfold. The performer, who is largely preoccupied with sustaining the fundamental in as uninterrupted a way as possible, can only remain open to what arises in the interaction of instrument, air, and space: if something appears too quickly, the performer can refuse it. So too does the environment have right of refusal. So when something arises that both performer and space desire, it becomes the performer’s task to nourish it.
[12] Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, 143.
[13] Ibid, 88.
[14] Ibid, 48-9.
Works Cited
Eckhardt, Julia. Éliane Radigue: Intermediary Spaces. Brussels: Umland, 2019.
Hirsch, Ben Lacy, Becky Selle, Doris Brown, Alice Liu, Mal Moses, Mashal Awais, Myrtala Tristan, Ann Weston, Hortencia Hurtado, Vatsala Mundra, and Melissa Villarreal. 2021. “Survivors as Experts: A Community Evaluation of Disaster Recovery in Northeast Houston.” Working Paper #110, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO.
Morris, Hugh. “For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time.” The New York Times, February 5, 2022.
West Street Recovery. “Home.” Accessed June 22, 2022.