For Jonathan Sterne

“When one traces recordings back to their so-called sources, one finds the intersection of cultural forces that made initial and subsequent moments of reproducibility desirable and possible. There was no ‘unified whole’ or idealized performance from which the sound in the recording was then alienated. To whom we attribute the possibility and the desire to record or listen is entirely context dependent. Recording is a form of exteriority: it does not preserve a sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition.”

I have returned to this paragraph from Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003) time and again. It is quoted in my first nonfiction book about sound, The New Analog, and it is quoted again in my forthcoming book, Why Sound Matters. If I have the heart to write any more nonfiction books about sound I will likely quote it again (as I am here).

What these summary sentences speak to, for me, is the embedding of recordings in lived experience – not the experience of live music, necessarily (“although there are links, of course,” as Sterne writes) but the social experience of sound at large. As a musician, I encountered this immediately at the start of my career: the experience of recording was a new sonic event in my life, unlike any I had known before. Later experiences that the recording then elicited were multiple, manifold, and complex. Recording is a form of exteriority gets it exactly right. You don’t just go in a room and hit the red button, as anyone who works in audio knows. But by the same token, none of us can just hit play, either. The meaning of these gestures is always dependent on context: technological, political, economic. Sound is society. Sound is history. Sound is all around us and sometimes it is organized by the fascinating process of art.

Jonathan Sterne died this week, after long illness. He responded to diagnosis with more writing and research, sharing a blog about his experiences and a book about impairment.

I heard the news today. Yesterday afternoon, I had found myself at an art exhibition thinking about Jonathan and his writings. The Great Learning by Pedro Gómez-Egaña is named for a composition by Cornelius Cardew. In the words of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where it is currently installed,

“The Great Learning consists of a copper rod hinged at the floor… set in a vertical position. From here, it slowly falls to the ground, the result of a meticulous balance between the weight of the rod and its eleven counterweights (the artist’s ‘gram-by-gram’ approach to choreography), as well as the friction on monofilament threads and the room’s environmental conditions. Rife with existential overtones, The Great Learning evokes, as Gómez-Egaña has written, ‘the fall of monuments and the silent, unyielding gravity of death.’”

Perhaps it was these “existential overtones” that brought Jonathan to mind. But that wasn’t my conscious thought as I sat there, experiencing the piece over a long period of time. To me, the copper rod delicately balanced with counterweights resembled nothing so much as the tone arm of a turntable. Over a period of about an hour, it slowly moves from vertical to horizontal – not steadily, as I expected, but through clusters of smooth yet sudden movement punctuated by seeming stillness (or probably more accurately, very slow motion).

The motion of the piece and its counterweights make their own sounds. But Gómez-Egaña and the List Center have also installed three other pieces in the same room, each of which contributes sound to the space. The dominant sound piece is a 32-minute recording, Cordillera, made by the artist from “harmonies associated with Andean music – which, for Gómez-Egaña, are both ‘cosmic and melancholic’ – as well as recordings of everyday sounds from his home in Oslo and his parents’ home in Colombia.” Cordillera plays on loop through speakers in the gallery, and is a spacious, ambient-style composition I found easy to enjoy. The wash of its harmonies is punctuated in the installation by three metal balls hung on pendulums which knock against the walls of the room. This piece, The Ask, functioned as regular but unpredictable percussion accompanying Cordillera. It also juxtaposed “live” sound occurring in the room – sound I could see the source of as it happened – with the recorded sound emerging from rather well-hidden speakers.

Finally, a nominally mute sculpture of a nightstand at an impossible angle, Deep Rivers, occasionally emitted a drone from a sruti box contained within. This sound was initiated and stopped by a gallery attendant, a personal intervention into the ongoing soundtrack generated by the other sculptures.

I felt, sitting in the midst of this, like I was inside a giant record player. I don’t know that I would have had the patience to sit as long as I did, had I not felt this connection through the sounds and the mechanics of the sculptures. But the hour from vertical to horizontal seemed a normal amount of time to spend listening, just as it would be to any good album.

It was during this hour that I was thinking of Jonathan and his deep explanation of a “sonic event.” Gómez-Egaña’s sculpture, in this installation created by the artist with MIT List curator Natalie Bell, “does not preserve a sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition,” to use Sterne’s words again. The possibility of preservation and repetition in this instance is not solely through recording, but also through the physicality of an artwork. As it always is for analog media, I thought, while I sat there feeling like vinyl under a tonearm.

Before I left, I asked the gallery attendants if they wouldn’t mind setting the sculpture back upright. It didn’t seem right for it to be silent.

Listening to: Nico live at Chelsea Town Hall, 1985

Cooking: round foods