This week’s session with Salome changed the outlook I had on what an Audio Paper can be quite drastically, with Milo’s teaching being clearly from an artist’s perspective and concerned with how the format can be experimented with in order to be the most satisfying creatively, Salome’s teaching is that of a more purely academic standpoint of working within stricter confines and not approaching the paper from an artistic standpoint. In my notes I took down some ideas I found interesting;
- Art is ambiguity, it doesn’t want to not mean, it wants to find meaning in the audience participation.
- Ambiguity is not anything goes, it is very careful and orchestrated plural conclusions.
- You are composing an audio paper with artistic skills and competency but it is separate to art because you yourself are asking the questions rather than creating them for the audience.
- A scholarly form is presenting, discussing and engaging with a researched topic.
I haven’t heard a seperation between academic and artistic forms worded so eloquently before, and has started to kind of complicate things further in terms of what I want to base my own work on, as I didn’t even have an idea before so now it feels like even more needs to be taken into account than I originally thought. I am thinking it should be related to something I am doing or something I am listening to, I am listening to stupid amounts of music every day and before University I was making stupid amounts of music every day, I guess figuring out something related to my interests that I can dig further into to accomidate for me not really having so much time to research something so extensively because of my current work situation not giving me so much free time. I don’t really want to just do more work on noise though, there’s other things I like that help keep me grounded.
An audio paper about finnish folk music is right up my alley, this being particular to a style called “laments” which is traditionally for solo voice, but in this paper they discuss that these songs have been adapted to include more instrumentation overtime. The style is typically Karalean and has songs passed down through lament circles apparently, which the songs serve to be “inter therapeutic self expression”. Modern performers of the style Viliina and Emmi discuss the themes of the laments, being that of sorrow and grief, but with “behind the grief, there is love and happy memories, sorrow comes from being apart from loved ones.” A main theme for the singers as well is that laments are not just performing the music, it is performing the emotion attached, and not always are they in the headspace to convey genuine sadness so it is mostly something trained to perform.
“I noticed I can’t force myself to tears”, “I imitate the feeling of actual crying by wrinkling my face, I also change my breathing and the lament might make me feel breathless.” Performative sadness is a kind of amusing way to frame any kind of practice but can be applied to so many, but this style seems more intense than most, apparently feeding a lot of the emotion from the audience interaction. If an audience member is brought to tears, it is easier to perform, so there is a kind of oroborous relationship in this way, or a kind of feedback loop being strived to initiate with the performance.
I tried looking for some solo voice based laments for reference outside of this audio paper and one short documentary, and came across this version of one with such gorgeous strings I couldn’t help but add it here. I very much liked the “lamenter circles” idea, that there have been (and apparently still are) groups dedicated to a pure kind of vocal performance that serves as an emotional outlet in such a visceral way for both audience and performer, it makes me think of modern examples of this devotional, confessional music practice, with Ambient being an immediate thought to maybe relate this to.