The Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 7th – 9th October 2005
SOUND SCRIPTS
Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge
New Music Festival Conference 2005,
vol. 1 (2006)
Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries and
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts,
Edith Cowan University
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Perth, Western Australia
COVER: Ross Bolleter, Ruined Piano Sanctuary, Wambyn. Photograph courtesy of Tos Mahoney, 2006.
Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 2005,
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vol. 1 (2006)
The Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference was part of
The Totally Huge New Music Festival 2005
SOUND SCRIPTS
Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Conference 2005,
vol. 1 (2006)
Edited by Cat Hope and Dr Jonathan Marshall
Published by Edith Cowan University
ISBN 0-7298-0618-9
Printed in Perth, Western Australia
Cat Hope Conference Convenor and proceedings Co-Editor
Jonathan Marshall Proceedings Co-Editor
Tos Mahoney Artistic Director, Tura New Music
Kate Parker General Manager Tura New Music
Conference Committee: Tos Mahoney (Chair)
Cat Hope
Kate Parker
Editorial Committee: Dr Garth Paine
Robert Sazdov
Dr Maggi Phillips
Lindsay Vickery
Dr Julian Knowles
Patricia Shaw
Darrin Verhagen
Tos Mahoney
Philip Samartzis
COVER: Ross Bolleter, Ruined Piano Sanctuary, Wambyn. Photograph courtesy of Tos Mahoney, 2006.
Design Peter Kos.
Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 2005,
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vol. 1 (2006)
Sound Scripts:
Proceedings of the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference
edited by Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall
Volume 1 (2006)
Introduction
Tos Mahoney Sound Scripts: A word from Tura New Music 1
Cat Hope A New Historicism? 2
Jonathan Marshall Sound, music and ruined pianos
Keynote Papers
Liza Lim A “Hidden Centre”: 9
Crossing cultural boundaries and ecstatic transformation
Annea Lockwood How To Prepare a Piano 19
Refereed Papers
Lindsay Vickery Western Electric: 23
A survey of recent Western Australian electronic music
Jonathan Mustard Invisible Symmetries: 32
A retrospective of the work of Lindsay Vickery.
Cat Hope Sound Art / Mobile Art 41
David Bennett Modernist and Postmodernist Arts of Noise, Part 1: 48
From the European avant-garde to contemporary Australian Sound Art
Linda Kouvaras Modernist and Postmodernist Arts of Noise, Part 2: 54
From the Clifton Hill mob to Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia
Philip Samartzis Surface Noise 60
Michal Murin Radio Art: 65
trans. Alexander Avenarius A Slovak perspective
Miha Ciglar I.B.R. Variation 1 73
Stuart Favilla The Bent Leather Band Ensemble: 77
Joanne Cannon Children of Grainger
Garry Greenwood
Susanna Ferrar Artist Presentation: Elephants and suffering in dusty corners 86
Domenico de Clario Rice and Celery (Toglen) 92
Contributor Biographies 98
Conference Events List 101
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A New Historicism? Sound, music and ruined pianos
Cat Hope Jonathan Marshall
Conference Convenor
and Co-Editor Co-Editor
Edith Cowan University Edith Cowan University
A word from the editors and an introduction to the Proceedings of the 2005 Inaugural Totally Huge New
Music Festival Conference, “Sound Scripts.”
Festival Overview
One of the highlights of every New Music festival which we attend is the banter that goes on
between artists and audiences about what we have experienced together. The Inaugural Totally Huge New
Music Festival Conference was a way to formalize these discussions for the 7th Totally Huge New Music
Festival of 2005, and it was a privilege to have been able to attend a conference about New Music in the
midst of it actually happening. The Conference was opened by the Executive Dean of the Faculty of
Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Professor Robyn Quin, and it provided
an opportunity for conversation and debate on New Music practice as it is and as it can be—to enjoy a
gathering of diverse minds and music that provided a mixture of composers, academics, sound artists and
performers alike. This collection of papers and artist presentations is a reflection of some of the wood used
to stoke the fire that made up the three day Conference.
The Festival hosted the first ever Ruined Piano Convergence, which provided a fascinating
background to many of the presentations. The Conference was also fortunate to have two exciting keynote
speakers, composers Liza Lim (Australia) and Annea Lockwood (USA / New Zealand). In recognition of
these interactions between performances, papers and exhibitions, a list of the activities which were mounted
as part of the Conference has been included at the end of this volume and, where appropriate, reference has
been made to any direct links between these events and the published papers in our introduction below.1
The Festival itself was a sixteen day exploration of New Music, and Sound Art. It featured hundreds of
musicians from Western Australia and around the world, including materials as diverse as orchestral
extravaganzas (Children’s Voices), sound galleries (You Are Here… Entangle), to burning pianos
(Lockwood). The program offered a captivating showcase of research and new work in chamber music,
electronica, installations, improvisation, radiophonics, multimedia and Sound Art, conducted in both
metropolitan and regional Western Australia. In the midst of this, the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music
Festival Conference brought together a diverse range of national and international presenters, as well as
hosting the launch of Andrew Ford’s latest book, In Defence of Classical Music, at the Perth Institute of
Contemporary Art (PICA).2
The Inaugural Conference and the Papers That Follow
In Australia, we live and work in an interesting time, where education is often confused with
training, in which research and practice can mean the same things, and where innovation may at times be
confused with improvement. The Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries at Edith Cowan
University, and its schools such as Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), have long
been at the forefront of promoting arts creation as a legitimate form of research within the academy.3 It was
therefore with great pleasure that Edith Cowan University staff and students took advantage of the
opportunity to collaborate with Tura New Music and the other artists of the Festival to help formalise this
relationship and to further promote the fluid exchange of ideas and practices between members of the
university community and those formally outside of the academy. It is hoped that through projects such as
this Conference and WAAPA’s Music Research Group (established in 2005) that the distinction between
researcher and artist will eventually be seen as essentially arbitrary. This is the first publication of the Music
Research Group and we look forward to further works in the future. The papers and artists’ talks which we
have reproduced below offer a representative sample of some of the key themes and topics which were
addressed within the Conference and which were designed to resonate with materials presented as
performances or exhibitions within the Festival and the Conference. The program for both was chosen to
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provide a balance between local, national and international perspectives. Thanks to K. Ford for providing
the title of this journal.
The volume opens with an Australian perspective in Liza Lim’s keynote paper. She examines the
ethics, poetics and processes which one must address when producing cross-cultural works involving both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists.4 While Lim stresses that she is “not an expert” and does not “speak
from a position of authority … in relation to Indigenous culture,” she offers several useful pointers towards
a program whereby non-Indigenous composers such as herself might begin to address issues of cross-
cultural relations, appropriation and power. Principal amongst these is an attempt to intuit the poetics of
knowledge which underpins the value system and aesthetics of many Australian Aboriginal peoples. Lim’s
compositions and method of working suggest a need to find ways to attempt to musically acknowledge both
colonial systems of mapping and how they enabled an oppressive re-inscription of language over the land
(Glass House Mountains, 2005), as well as to allow oneself to simply wait and listen when non-Indigenous
Australians such as herself attempt to communicate or cohabit within Aboriginal communities. Above all,
the outsider must be attentive to “different modes of acquiring knowledge that may evade the logical,
interrogative traditions of Western” culture and “academic enquiry.” The non-Aboriginal observer must
often acknowledge a “Hidden Centre—respecting that which cannot be known” and “making space for
what stays hidden” within Indigenous communities. Through such methods, one can potentially discover
commonalities of experience, whilst also acknowledging that such perceptions are often as much a product
of the mutual projection of values onto each other across the cultural divide, as they are of genuinely shared
existence.
Lim’s analysis of the politics of her process is followed by Annea Lockwood’s discussion of the
formal, aesthetic qualities revealed by own her interest in questions of process. Lockwood offers a brief
introduction to her role in the history of piano installations and events, chronicling her ongoing Piano
Transplant series. One of the pioneers of this form, Lockwood is not alone in working with the aesthetics of
the deteriorating piano as it undergoes changes. She observes in her paper that while many of her peers in
Fluxus and other artistic movements were offering “piano destruction corridas” throughout the 1960s, it
was not “destruction which fascinated me. I am interested in something less predictable, arising from the
gradual action of natural forces … on an instrument designed for maximum control.” Lockwood is keen to
unleash a slow accumulation of active processes and sounds which would otherwise remain locked within
“that complex piece of audio furniture” which is the piano. Lockwood also offered as part of the
Conference one of her piano immolations, Burning Piano (2005), and a new work, Southern Exposure:
Piano transplant number four (2005), as well as a percussion piece, performed by the WAAPA ensemble,
Defying Gravity. She is also alluded to in the paper from Michal Murin below. These and other
presentations were brought together within the Conference under the designation promoted by WA
musician, Ross Bolleter—namely that of the “Ruined Piano” Convergence.5 During early 2005 in the lead
up to the Conference, Bolleter put out a public call for neglected instruments which were to be installed as
part of his Ruined Piano Labyrinth exhibition at PICA. Today, in April 2006, not only instruments, but the
stories which accompany each of them, are still arriving. These pianos have now been moved to an olive
farm near York, WA, where they have become part of Bolleter’s long term installation and recording
project, The Ruined Piano Sanctuary. It is Lockwood’s piano from Southern Exposure, now set lose and
wild in the Australian bush at Wambyn, that is featured on the cover of this volume.
Lindsay Vickery’s paper in the collection below returns the reader to the specifics of the Australian
context with his survey of Western Australian digital and computer-based composers. Australian New
Music and Sound Art as a whole have long been comparatively neglected subjects, with John Jenkins’s
groundbreaking Twenty Two Contemporary Australian Composers (1988; now available online) and more
recently Ros Bandt’s Sound Sculpture (2001) tending to dominate an otherwise relatively sparsely
populated field.6 Vickery’s essay therefore constitutes the latest instance of his important contribution to
Australian New Music scholarship. Working far from the cultural centres of the south eastern Australian
seaboard, artists based in WA are doubly placed at the geographic margins of international music criticism.
Vickery’s survey of WA artists using various electronic techniques and media is an important step in
recognising the work of these practitioners and giving it due critical attention. Within his text, Vickery
briefly reviews some of his own practice and this is enlarged upon in Jonathan Mustard’s essay in this
volume, which presents a detailed outline and thematic commentary on Vickery’s now extensive corpus.
The presentation of papers by Mustard and Vickery coincided with a retrospective of Vickery’s work,
performed by local instrumental and vocal ensemble Guapo.
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Vickery’s article discusses several other artists whose works featured within the program.
Amongst them are David Miller and Matt Rösner. Miller presented one of his regular new music nights—
Aesoteric—as part of the Festival, at which Rösner performed as Pablo Dali. Alongside such musicians
whose work crosses between New Music, glitch and more popular dance and electronica forms, Vickery
discusses WA’s most senior Sound Artist, Alan Lamb. Best known for his meticulously edited field
recordings of “wire music,” Lamb is also alluded to below in the articles by David Bennett and Philip
Samartzis. Much of Lamb’s work has involved finding or constructing “Aeolian Harps” made of wire
strung across various points in regional Australia and documenting the sounds produced. His installation for
the Festival however represented a new direction for Lamb. Rather than a wire work, Four Bells consisted
of four tractor wheel rims suspended from the roof in a square hanging above the listeners’ heads. As Gail
Priest observed: “Acting as an analogue surround system, the joy is to be found in hitting the ‘bells’ (all
roughly the same pitch) and moving around the inner circle to experience the airshifting beats of the clarion
tones.”7 Four Bells featured in the exhibition of Sound Art, You Are Here… Entangle, which also
incorporated material from two other subjects of Vickery’s survey—namely Conference Convenor Cat
Hope, as well as Hannah Clemen (Beneath, Becoming, 2005), the latter of whom also presented a piece in
the Surround Sound Showcase within the Festival. The exhibition of Hope’s installation projects as part of
You Are Here was balanced by the live presentation of some of her concert and performance compositions,
played by herself and the WAAPA ensemble, Axis 21. In her contribution to this volume, Hope goes on to
detail her practice with Rob Muir as Metaphonica. She surveys the history of telephonic art and her own
innovative collaboration using mobile phones. Metaphonica’s Conning the Text featured alongside Hope’s
own earpiece sculpture Plug within You Are Here. This current body of work and criticism authored by
Hope seems a long way from Vickery’s portrait of her earlier compositions on distorted bass guitar and
electronics, which had previously earned her the moniker of “probably the noisiest woman” in Australian
music. The performance at WAAPA of her piece “Fetish,” however, showed that she has yet to abandon
this musical persona.
The double papers from David Bennett and Linda Kouvaras demonstrate that these and other
practices within Australian New Music are not simply a secondary reflection of international trends, but that
much Australian work represents an innovative take on contemporary, postmodern and modernist
discourses about sound culture. As Kate Bowan recently reminded us in Sounds Australian, there is ample
evidence that early twentieth century Sydney was not “the stagnant cultural wasteland that scholars … have
suggested,” but possessed “a cosmopolitan, international side … that embraced all expressions of
modernity”—including novel musical forms.8 While compositions by post World War II Australian New
Music artists are rarely dismissed quite so quickly as being simply derivative of international models as
those created by their more overtly colonial and Anglophile predecessors, considerable work remains to be
done on the particular, national interpretations of international musical and sonic discourses within this
country. In their recent questionnaire-survey of late twentieth century Australian musicians, Kouvaras and
Bennett note that most of these artists claim that academic modernism, Serialism and atonalism had—and
possibly still exerts in some cases—a potentially stultifying influence on the teaching of composition in this
country.9 Even so, the work of these “postmodernist” composers and their peers, at home and abroad,
demonstrates that modernist aesthetic principles are far from dead. Bennett’s analysis below of the
modernist and avant-garde discourse generated by Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Pierre
Schaeffer and others on the “music/noise” dichotomy suggests that the distinction between modernism and
its others was never as clear as the debates of the post World War II period sometimes implied. Indeed,
Bennett and Kouvaras identify below a degree of continuity—as well as change and reinterpretation—in the
persistence of such oppositions, which have served as a source of creative tension in such varied Australian
works as Ros Bandt’s Stack (2000-01; discussed by Bennett), Subjective Beats Metaphor (1983), composed
by Warren Burt and Chris Mann, and Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia (2004; the latter two works being
discussed by Kouvaras). This pair of papers are amongst the first to come out of the scholars’ joint ARC
research project Postmodernism in Australian Art Music (2005-07). It will be interesting to see if further
research confirms these initial findings, which might perhaps be summarised, in Jürgen Habermas’ phrase,
as indicating that not only does modernism continue to remain “dominant but dead,” but that
postmodernism itself—in its endless, self-conscious shifting of the boundaries between noise and music—
has perhaps rendered itself dominant but dead within Australian musicological discourse and practice, too.10
It is significant in the context of this that the work of Kouvaras and Bennett is currently being paralleled by
Anne Marsh in her ARC project on postmodernist discourse within Australian photographic culture.
Marsh’s initial findings indicate that postmodern discourse was also highly active within Australian art
photography throughout the 1970s, but that by the late 1980s, it was essentially a dead letter, with other
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ideas of performativity, modernist formalism and aestheticised documentary approaches, gaining greater
credence.11
It would be precipitous to make any firm pronouncements regarding the directions in which New
Music and Sound Art are moving, now that overtly postmodernist discourse appears to have exhausted
itself. Nevertheless, the themes identified within the papers below and the concerns expressed within them
enable one to propose some tentative judgements if they are read in the context of international musicology
and aesthetic criticism. Most importantly, we seem to have entered a new realm of historicisation. The
Futurists and their peers from the various European avant-garde movements of the early 1900s have
occupied a prominent place within musical history since John Cage published his initial essays during the
1930s. Nevertheless, interest in these avant-garde precedents—in their writings, in their ideas, and in how
such material might act as a springboard for innovative works—is undergoing a revival today. Since the
1990s, Europe, the USA and Australia have all seen several touring exhibitions of avant-garde ephemera
and documentation, ranging from Andy Warhol’s curious boxes, to several Fluxus exhibitions presented in
a similar fashion, as well as the first comprehensive retrospective of international Dadaism.12 The box, it
seems, has re-emerged as the preferred museological method to approach such forms of art and
performance which have otherwise left historians and artists with little in the way of traces or recordings—
be these the Futurists’ infamous creations or the various Fluxus piano events and dice games. The
publication of Michael Nyman’s groundbreaking Experimental Music (1973) has been followed since the
1990s by a steady stream of surveys in the history of sound culture and the avant-garde. The ongoing
historical commentary featured within such works as Under-Currents (2003), Wireless Imagination (1992)
and Audio Culture (2004), has been echoed by a push from New Media critics like Darren Tofts to re-
historicise the prehistory of digital culture, as well.13 As Michal Murin observes in his essay below, now
that many analogue approaches have been technologically superseded and so rendered (at least to some
degree) obsolete, they have been made readily available for “art”—and so critical attention on the aesthetic
properties of such forms has correspondingly increased, be they vinyl recordings, photochemical images,
radio plays, or pianistic explorations.
While what has been described as a kind of revivalist “hyper modernism” or “super modernism”
has developed within architecture,14 modernist principles of noise, distortion and imperfection have
likewise, if anything, gained greater authority within contemporary arts practice and criticism today.
Contributors Hope, Samartzis, Murin, and co-authors Stuart Favilla, Joanne Cannon and Garry Greenwood,
all ground their discussion in various manifestoes and writings whose principles or authorship can be
followed back to the early 1900s. For Hope, László Moholy-Nagy may be considered the author of
“telepresence” art, while Murin traces the origins of a more poetic, material and textual approach to radio
art back to Velemír Khlebnikov’s writings on “The Word As Such.” A particularly detailed discussion of
these historical trajectories is offered by Samartzis. Echoing the focus on the interplay between “noise” and
“music” proffered by Bennett and Kouvaras, Samartzis examines the tradition of viewing the imperfections
of recording and signal reproduction as a source for musical composition, with particular attention to
analogue techniques. Viewed retrospectively in this light, Frank Lambert’s lead recording originally made
for his failed talking clock (“the oldest playable recording” available to listeners of today) is transformed
into a suggestive formal precedent for the work of such avant-garde artists as Thomas Brinkmann, Dick
Raaijmakers, Gum, Cage and others. Although Samartzis also acknowledges Moholy-Nagy, his analysis
does not identify a conceptual lineage in the history of ideas in the same way that Hope and Bennett do.
Rather than tracing a heritage passed from artist to artist, Samartzis sketches chance alliances and
sometimes accidental formal similarities, graphically illustrated by the author’s own recognition today that
his previous work with Gum closely echoed Milan Knizak’s “broken vinyl” method—even though neither
he nor his collaborator Andrew Curtis were familiar with Knizak at the time. Since working with vinyl,
Samartzis has moved into the field of digital sound spacialization, whilst nevertheless continuing to use
similar principles of crafted decomposition, imperfection and noise as those he discusses in his paper.
Samartzis offered a striking example of these new works with his sonic contribution to the Festival at the
Surround Sound Showcase.
In addition to Bolleter and Lockwood, Michal Murin also participated in the Festival’s Ruined
Piano Convergence—in the latter’s case as a performance/installation artist, rather than in the field of radio
art which he discusses in his essay. Murin’s pianistic works consisted of Coffin Prepared For Silence of
John Cage (for which the naked artist continuously inhabited a piano at PICA), Piano Hotel and Your Name
Is My Signature. Although Murin’s essay on radio art has no explicit connection with these pianistic pieces,
his approach reminds one that the non-illusionistic, realist model of “Concrete Art” proposed by Fluxus
impresario Georges Maciunas—that is to say, art made directly out of the materials and the representational
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