[ENG] Pieter T' Jonck, Elementary Culture, 2021 - about newpolyphonies

newpolyphonies, a new work by Myriam Van Imschoot, was created in close collaboration with the four vocalists of the ensemble HYOID. Together they created a sound artwork based exclusively on sounds of the human body — though by no means only on singing.

Much of the process took place indirectly, as the coronavirus crisis made live collaboration difficult. An alternative version of the performance, presented at Kunstencentrum Buda in Kortrijk, was therefore not live, but took the form of an installation. Even then, it was already striking how spatially the work had been conceived. At the first live performance in Antwerp [sic]*, that aspect became even more pronounced through the contribution of fifteen additional “amateur” voice artists.

Sounds generated with one’s own body

An empty stage. At the front, crumpled little flags, about the size of an A4 sheet, made of softly coloured cellophane or plastic, hover from crossed slats. Five people appear and take their places, more or less in a circle, among these flags. A motley group: a man in a suit, wearing shoes, but also a somewhat older man in a T-shirt and barefoot, and several young women, also barefoot, in loose clothing. Apparently everyone comes here “as they are.”

Then the little face masks come off — for a moment. Immediately, something remarkable happens acoustically. A buzzing sound arises among the performers. Because of the electronic amplification, its source is difficult to determine. Perhaps what the performers are doing is no more than humming, but the result sounds quite different. This is clearly the result of the movements they make: a hand fluttering back and forth in front of a mouth, or arms jerking up and down like the rods of a steam locomotive. It causes the breath, and therefore the sound, to stop and restart, to stutter and flow. It reminded me of a children’s game: saying “aaaaa” for as long as possible while tapping your chest. “Aaaa” then becomes “A-A-A-A.”

That “game” becomes more complex when the man in the T-shirt adds the sound of his hand stroking his arm. It is primal music: sounds generated with one’s own body, without instruments, without scales, without right or wrong notes. Buzzing and whirring, like crickets in the maquis. And also: like an experience we share, one that unites us. It therefore seems only natural that, here and there in the audience, spectators stand up and join in with this game, while the performers on stage move into the auditorium. Of course this is staged, an enactment, but it does “catch” the momentum that arises among the “real” spectators. In this way the sounds also spread through the auditorium. You imagine yourself in the South, among crickets and cicadas.

Animation, connection, unison

Suddenly, without my consciously registering it, four or five people are once again standing to the side and at the back of the stage. This time they do explicitly use their voices, as their vocal cords vibrate. We no longer see bodies resonating, but hear voices testing the limits of their range. The register is narrow, less than semitones or even quarter tones, and without a clear key, but still with a rhythm that is also translated into gestures. It is a wave of tones that swells and shrinks.

You could compare it to an Indian raga, hovering around one or a few notes. That too is magical, but in a very different way: the voice detaches itself from the bodies, as a fundamental sound drifting across the stage in endless variations. It is not about individuals, characters or psychology, because there is no melody or text. It is about animation. In the voice, connection and unison emerge.

At that moment, small round loudspeakers, enclosed in wooden casings, descend both at the back and at the front. They bring entirely new sounds with them. Afterwards, Myriam Van Imschoot told me that these were exercises and test recordings made by the singers of HYOID during their forced isolation in the coronavirus crisis. They were meant to evoke the turbulence of airplanes or “the resonant sound of bones and tissue.”

I did not immediately recognise that in them, but I did recognise the pleasure of producing sounds in every imaginable way. You constantly wonder how the performers have produced this or that sound. That sense of wonder was even greater in the installation in Kortrijk. It was entirely based on the principle of loudspeakers moving up and down, dispersed throughout the space, resulting in bizarre spatial interferences. These rising and descending loudspeakers had a visual counterpart in rising and descending half-full water jugs. They reminded me of the way one can make music by running a wet finger along the rim of a wine glass.

A densely woven sound carpet

When, in the live performance, the performers take over again from the loudspeakers, all the buzzing, humming and singing creates a floating harmony that induces a trance. It has something in common with certain pieces by György Ligeti, and certainly with the vocal experiments of Meredith Monk. The spirit of James Tenney also seems to wander across the stage more than once. Yet these are not quotations, nor is there any epigonism here. I mention these composers rather as references, to convey something of an experience that can hardly be translated into words. It is quite a paradox: an era obsessed with “sound” actually has too few words at its disposal to say anything about it.

From this point on, you begin to drift mentally, as your ears lose themselves in the endlessly many, yet almost unnameable, details of this densely woven sound carpet. Until, suddenly, a minute change in the pattern jolts you wide awake again. Such changes are also given a spatial translation each time. Towards the end of the performance, five or six performers lie down in front of the stage, while the HYOID ensemble takes its place at the back of the stage on a small platform, and still other singers sit on chairs to the left and right of the stage. As an acoustic experience of space, this is remarkable.

Plato’s cave

Scenographically, too, this is a remarkable moment. Behind the singers to the left and right of the stage, an almost blinding light comes up. It casts sharp shadows of the performers onto the walls of the audience space. Intended or not, it unmistakably evokes Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”: what reaches the auditorium is only the shadow of the “truth” on stage. Here, that “truth” resides in the sounds bubbling up from the bodies. The image is only a weak reflection of it.

It is like a correction: today the visual dominates everywhere, but here it appears as a deceptive side effect of sound and space. Sound, of course — but space as well. Here, space is not a visual given, but a resonating chamber.

That is disarming. However musically or visually literate you may be, things happen here that touch you through the directly physical act of making sound together. These are bodily, acoustic actions that become attuned to one another with great precision, yet seemingly of their own accord. There is a particular pleasure here in the exploration of the body as an acoustic medium and of space as a resonating chamber. Primitive and sophisticated. Simple pleasure and precious attention. Culture in its most naked manifestation.

• [note of the redaction] the first live performance was not in Antwerp, but in Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, Ghent.