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Composer and musicologist Pierre-Yves Macé, author of a fascinating essay on "contemporary phonographies", takes a closer look at the issues at stake in the practice of field recording in today's music.
Born, as its name suggests, with recording, the practice of field recording has spread massively over the last three decades, with the miniaturization of equipment (but also the trivialization of travel). In a wide variety of musical directions. Whether sound artists or (ex-)rockers (or often both, like Chris Watson, eRikm or Stephen Vitellio), naturalists or abstractists, sculptors or agitators,ambient or DIY enthusiasts, many sound explorers use it in their work. Some (Watson or Jana Winderen) have even made field recording their sole instrument, their exclusive field of composition. The time is long gone when a pioneer like the Austrian Ludwig Koch (1881-1974) first recorded animal songs at the age of eight, using an Edison phonograph. Where the ethnomusicologists of the pre-analog era - Hugh Tracey, Alan and John Lomax, Alice Marshall Moyle, Kurosawa Takatomo...(1) - used the recorder to keep track of vernacular musical traditions on the verge of extinction.
For a creator, field recording also opens up fertile and fascinating questions: those of listening and its quality, of the loudspeaker and its fidelity, of the microphone and its objectivity, of the document and the exotic, of ecology and technology, of the natural world and the (hyper)real world, of the texture of sound and that of time... With field recording, it's a question of a certain "sonic use of the world", to use the title (itself a reference to the travel writer Nicolas Bouvier) of Alexandre Galand's book on the subject (2). That is, above all, poetry. After all, most of the great inventors of the genre were musician-poets - John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Knud Viktor, whose names we come across in this dossier?
Author of a fascinating musicology thesis on the use of sound documents in music, and a composer himself - notably the author of a series of Phonotopies, a new instalment of which has just been published, instrumental recordings made in various locations outside Paris - Pierre-Yves Macé looks back at field recording through the lens of its musical nature.
Among all the musical practices you group together in your book Musique et document sonore under the term "phonography", what would be the specificity of field recording? What do you think is the best translation of this term: field recording? environmental recording?
In my book, I use the technical term "phonography" to designate what is commonly called "recording". Within this grand ensemble, field recording appears as a sub-category, a special case. It could be defined as an essentially mobile practice of recording, made possible by the progressive miniaturization of recording tools. When microphones and tape recorders became portable, we were able to record a whole range of sound phenomena outdoors that previously only existedin situ: animal songs, so-called "natural" sounds (waterfalls, wind, storms...), traditional music from distant countries, etc.
There's nothing musical about this practice in itself, and it can be applied to a wide range of fields: radio, film, sound design, ethnomusicology, audio-naturalism, ornithology... Field recording only becomes musical in a framework that allows and encourages its perception as music in its own right, i.e. when it's released on record, or presented in concert. Take any Chris Watson record and set it to moving images: no one will think of hearing music on it.
Linked to the beginnings of recording and its successive technological evolutions, field recording was initially based on the idea of objectivity: it was the desire to document and archive reality that guided the first ethnomusicologists and audio-naturalists alike. At what point is this idea perceived as a lure, an illusion - at what point does the modern approach impose itself, according to which to document is already to create?
What is a delusion, rather than the desire to document itself, is to imagine that phonography is a strict replica of the original sound phenomenon. And this applies to all reproductions (photo, film): as the philosopher Clément Rosset has clearly shown, we don't duplicate reality; we only produce incomplete, partial and fragmentary "doubles" of it. And yet, unlike vocal or instrumental imitations of real phenomena (the flute in Peter and the Wolf imitating the bird, for example), the phonographic copy, by its very mechanical nature, possesses a form of exactitude that should not be minimized. It is, in Bernard Stiegler's terms, an orthothetic reproduction of the real: one that poses exactly - whatever its lacunar nature and the subsequent possibility of falsification.
As for this modern approach (to document is to create), it seems to me that it is a consequence of the plastic ready-made: the gesture of sampling becomes a work in itself. This approach is liberating, but we mustn't lose sight of its possible pitfalls. I'm thinking in particular of what Michel Chion calls "blackmail to the cause": when you've traveled thousands of kilometers to record a sound with a microphone that costs an arm and a leg, you're perhaps a little too ready to find it formidably "musical" and tell listeners to appreciate it as such.
Can a sound document be objective? Isn't the choice of equipment, the type and position of microphone(s), the moment when the "Record" button is pressed, in itself a creative act, or at any rate a subjective factor - not to mention the mode of distribution?
We'd still have to agree on what "objective" means in this context. From a certain point of view, nothing is more subjective than a sound recording, since it implies one (or more) "sound points" from which it receives the sound signal - just as a photographic or cinematographic image implies a point of view. I believe that the key notion is rather that of fidelity. Microphones (and, more generally, the entire sound chain) are required to be as faithful as possible to the original sound phenomenon. The signal fixed on the support must be as close as possible to what the "naked" ear receives in the same situation.
There's no denying that technology has made remarkable progress in this area: just listen to Edison's first cylinders and compare them with today's digital recordings. However, the notion of fidelity can be criticized for its tendency to naturalize technology, to render it purely servile, and thus to deny its specificity. Pushed to a certain point, this desire to make technology transparent borders, paradoxically, on technophobia. Such ambiguity can be seen in the work of R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and theorist who wrote the seminal book Le Paysage sonore (The Tuning of the World was published in 1977, and translated into French in 2010 by Wildproject). As Michel Chion has clearly shown, when we use the term "soundscape", we never know whether we're talking about what is presented to the listener in situ or through the mediation of phonography. It's not at all the same thing in terms of sensitive experience. And yet, for Murray Schafer, it seems to amount to the same thing. It's a way of both overestimating phonography as a technical prodigy, its capacity to "preserve" what is threatened with disappearance (whereas it only preserves traces of it), and downgrading it as a sensitive object to the rank of a substitute for "natural" listening. On the other hand, it can be argued that technology shapes our way of feeling, our relationship with the world, everything that comes under the heading ofaisthesis. We no longer hear birdsong in the same way once we've listened to Bernard Fort's music; all microacoustic phenomena (linked in particular to the activation of insects) literally need the microphone as a megaphone to access the realm of perception - composer Knud Victor has gone quite far in this domain; reduced listening, which gives us access to the morphologies of sounds, is properly an "equipped" listening experience that depends closely on the existence of technical devices.
What historical links does field recording have with musique concrète (I'm thinking of the notions of "sound object" and "reduced listening")? To what extent was Luc Ferrari's Presque rien n° 1, in 1970, a turning point?
At the time Schaeffer wrote his first essays on musique concrète (1948), field recording either didn't exist or existed in a very embryonic form, as it was virtually impossible to record outside studios. Musique concrète was theorized on a completely different basis. What Schaeffer called a "sound object" was a form that could be identified as a unit and detached from a background. Quite the opposite, in fact, to the sound flows of field recording. What's more, reduced listening consists in listening to a sound object for what it is, describing it as objectively as possible by extracting its most salient morphological features. In most musique concrète pieces of the 1950s-1960s, the entire compositional process consisted in creating and organizing such sound objects, with no consideration for the causal origin of these sounds or the referents they might conjure up. Field recording, on the other hand, tends to assert the causes and referents of sounds, however trivial.
Luc Ferrari's career is fascinating in this respect. His early works from the 1950s and 60s are, let's say, "classical" musique concrète, highly chiselled, which apprehends sounds essentially as morphologies. Then, starting withHétérozygote (1964), the composer began to introduce what he called "anecdotal" sounds: pure phonographies of banal everyday scenes, seemingly unretouched. We hear "holes", open windows onto the everyday, and it's all very surprising (an interesting reversal: it's the banality that creates the surprise...). Ferrari's intention, I believe, was to inscribe in the field of music the presence of a "trivial" level of reality, which exists in all the other arts, but to which music has always turned its back. Then there was Presque Rien n° 1 (1970), a radical piece in which Ferrari eliminates all concrete sounds, leaving only the anecdotal: the phonography of a sunrise by the sea. This caused a mini-scandal in the musique concrète world: Schaeffer refused to consider it as music. Ferrari, on the other hand, persisted, with pieces that were perhaps less radical but often highly inspired.
David Toop refers to field recording as "a natural consequence of listening". Can we say that field recording is first and foremost about listening - to the sound recordist and to the microphone? Listening as work, as it were...
Yes, that's a very good definition. In my book, about Ferrari's Presque rien n° 2, I borrowed Peter Szendy's beautiful expression: welisten to himlisten.
What do you see as the main artistic virtues of field recording - what does it bring to musical creation? What is the artistic value of field recording? Is it possible to draw up a succinct typology of its current uses, even if it now covers a wide variety of practices? What use do you make of it in your own practice as a musician?
It's hard to say exactly where the artistic value of a field recording lies. Sometimes, it's the recording itself that stands out as the bearer of musical qualities. There are countless examples of this, such as Peter Cusack's Baikal Ice (2004), where the sound process of melting ice is enough to keep you listening. Sometimes, however, field recording is subordinate to a musical intention, and valuable above all as an element in a set of relationships. This is the case with certain pieces by John Cage, Roaratorio (1979) in the foreground, or more recently by Michael Pisaro(Transparent City, 2007), in which urban recordings are subtly mixed with sinusoidal outfits.
I ventured in a similar direction myself with Phonotopies (Paris), a piece for which I recorded acoustic instruments in outdoor locations in Paris, chosen with the complicity of writer Philippe Vasset. We're halfway between traditional recording (the microphones are fixed and there's an instrumental source to capture) and field recording (the recording takes place "in the field", outdoors). In this piece, the instrumental composition is both colored by the unusual acoustics of the chosen locations and disturbed by sound events coming from outside (the unpredictable urban rumor).
Interview by David Sanson
*Anew instalment of Pierre-Yves Macé's Phonotopies has just been released on vinyl (shared with Sylvain Vanot) by the Brocoli label.
*Thisautumn, Pierre-Yves Macé's music can be heard in choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh' s show Nuée (presented in Châteauroux, Rennes and Nanterre), as well as in concert, with the premiere of his electroacoustic piece Contre-flux II (five dances), the triptych Jardins partagés (as part of the Festival d'Automne in Paris) and the premiere of Frayages for violin and loudspeakers (Toulouse). See details on his website here.
