Call For The Hidden Sounds, continued

© Copyright by Johannes Bergmark

Playing the Finger Violin. Photo © by Greg Locke, St. John's Newfoundland.

The finger violin consists of two wooden laminae in the form of flat violin soundboards with five piano strings drawn through them, stretched between the fingers (who are attached to the ends through rings), and the back plate, locked behind the back and left arm. The strings, being so stiff, cannot be tightened enough by the fingers to make a clear fundamental tone, so the sound consists primarily of rumbling, creaking and overtone whistling, which is very effective with a contact microphone. Sometimes it sounds like a terror-struck choir when I bow a cluster on all strings. Other sounds can be achieved if you play on the edge of the lid with the bow, the teeth or anything, or shake the bow between the strings. Pizzicato also works, of course. An interesting sound is also the amplified putting on and pulling off of the instrument.

The violin form of the wooden laminae in the finger violin is not acoustically motivated, but a purely scenic point, which made me excited to research the scenic side of the musical performance more, especially in my solo playing. For many audiences, this side is more important than the musical one! I also started to mix with poetry, acting and objects in my concerts.

The Veloncell Marcel. Photo © by Johannes Bergmark.

My first electric instrument, which also has some electro-acoustic possibilities, turned out to be a celebration of the 80th anniversary of the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp: "bicycle wheel" from 1913 (which I was unaware of - just like I was unaware of that it was the 100th anniversary of the Ferris Wheel). It is a copy of the same constellation of a bicycle wheel sitting on the front fork stuck through the seat of a kitchen stool, with one important addition: it still has the dynamo left. I attached the electric wires to a plug and could bring out the unadulterated sound of the power generator through loudspeakers. It is a very strong signal which put an end to a fuse in my stereo at first attempt. Later, when I made a parallel coupling with the sound signal and the attached bicycle lights, the sound signal was reliefed a bit, and at the same time I got a nice light effect when playing on the dynamo! One acoustic possibility is to play the spokes, e.g. with a double bow - two violin bows put together with the horsehair in different directions (which I made to play two saws at the same time). Another possibility is to let the spinning spokes strike different materials. A contact microphone in the hub even amplifies details like the scraping of a comb on the fork. I also added a table-lamp spring in the wheel which gives a bass drone and various scraping. The name of this instrument is veloncell Marcel.

The Brillolin. Photo © by Johannes Bergmark.

The brillolin is a further development of the hedgehog. The fingerholder is here formed like a miniature violin, where the protruding part, in two "floors" from top and bottom, comes from where the violin neck would be (later, the upper floor broke). Instead of wooden sticks, there are pieces of piano wire coming out, and additionally, two strings are placed between fingerholder and an empty pair of glasses that the musician wears on his or her face. ("Briller" means glasses in Norwegian.) The origins of the instrument is the finding of the empty glasses, which I thought had a comical quality which ought to be used in an instrument.

The Lamp Shade Bells. Photo © by Johannes Bergmark.

On an abandoned industry I found 22 well sounding lamp-shades of glass. I took them home, sorted them according to pitch, and made a simple stand for these glass shade bells with 6 shades. Unfortunately, the 22 rapidly turned out to reduce its number during transportations, so not many extras remain today.

My repertoire of over 30 instruments and sound tools lead to a puttering about that I want to alter with a kind of one-man band which combines bowed idiophones (saw and bowed sheet and rods of metal and wood), strings, percussion and wind instruments. I have continuously revised the outline of this instrument, till I made a full-size cardboard model and gave it the name crow castle.

In a dream, I have now seen a flute which is also a two-stringed bowed instrument. The finger board of the string instrument coincides with the body of the flute. A normal descending scale on the flute would result in an ascending one on the string instrument! A related bass version with a plastic tube didjeridoo and strings waits to be made.

In waked state, I have approached the road to the one-man band by playing several instruments at once: didjeridoo, piano and saw; two saws at once; finger violin and stringed stirrups etc.

Another of my waiting projects will be to build a boat that can hang freely in the air in piano wires, e.g. under bridges. The musician will stand in the hanging boat. This vision might have been inspired by my childhood reading of Jules Verne's Lord of the Air.

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3. Death of prejudice.

This story is not finished - I collect and search for sounds everywhere; look for, meet and read about instrument inventors; try the sound potential of lamp-shades, household utensils, tools, pots, balloons, junk and body parts; bang, rub, knock, sing through time and matter. I feel closer to my nature, and to nature, in irregular rhythms, uncertain pitches, uncontrollable timbres and indefinable squeaking - but also with variations, contrasts against these. All or no sounds are strange or unusual - but only some have the character of discovery or revelation - what interests, inspires me most is the communication, identity, truth, openness with the context in which I meet the sound. I sometimes feel richer when I am not the whole factor of power, in the encounter with image, word, others playing or dancing, in a bigger context.

To be able to improvise freely and communicate with other musicians in the moment, it helps to leave behind sounds that tend to refer to an inner structural hierarchy, such as functional tonal harmony and regular rhythm. These willingly demand their own attention. To completely leave their commonly prevailing supremacy leaves the musicians naked in front of each other with their bodies' impulsive life and leaps between strength, weakness, rest and intensity. To leave the traditionally goal-oriented drama with its one-way time sequence demands an electric attention to the whole rather than on one's own part, which almost automatically seems to lead to short, fast contributions, pauses and sharp changes. The better the communication, the bigger the tension and unpredictability, since the intensive listening automatically opens for the inexhaustible curiosity and desire to experiment which is always brooding behind the "presentable". "Communication" is in this case something other than "dialogue" or "conversation". A better simile would be that every participating musician and sound are poetical elements that connect sparks between each other in analogies, above the logic of the conversation. I conceive this as a surrealist state of mind.

To present a sound drama with a predetermined solution through functional tonal harmony or regular rhythm is what is usually identified as music. Without openness for crime, this corresponds to a way of thinking which grants the highest value to the functional and regular. The reaction of fear and repression against threatening crisis is to confront chaos with order. What is needed of the human spirit and body is to confront the orders of realism and adjustment with inspired and unbridled chaos, but also to try new and other orders - orders that arise from the chaos that human desire at the first glance seems to be. Both of these ways have been opened in music by e.g. free improvisation and instrument invention. This is not something new but has always been the case, before the music became ordered, in the now prevailing sense of "composed" - but the sight has often been dimmed by musicians having become content with, or found honor in, style making, fame or positions. There is no unified movement and there is no purity in any sense. Every honest and curious musician is a lonely example: François Bayle, Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane, Sven-Åke Johansson, Spike Jones, Thomas Magee, Phil Minton, Conlon Nancarrow, Hal Rammel, Jon Rose, Giacinto Scelsi, LaDonna Smith, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Karl-Erik Welin, Christian Werner, Lasse Werner or Davey Williams (to just mention a few of those standing close enough to me or at a far distance enough) ... in relation to each other very different in temperament, style (and fame) but all alike in their release of strong powers of chaos from which new poetic orders arise, orders that show that not only music but all life can be lived in so many more, and more beautiful ways than what the law and habit command.

Footnotes:

1. The didjeridoo is a piece of a branch hollowed out by termites, adjusted in the mouthpiece and painted. The gopychand (also called ektara) has one string ending on a tuning pin where the legs meet in the top of a forked neck, and the other string end in the middle of a drum skin. As you squeeze the neck, the pitch goes down. The Bengal bauls pluck it as they sing. I usually play it with a bow.
2. This instrument, though of the same size as the gopychand and with the same name (or gopijantra, oop-goopi) actually exists in Bengal, I later discovered! They hold the resonator under the arm and pluck the string with a plectrum.
3. This inverse bridge also exists in the musical bow berimbau.
4. A playing technique that was also used on the tromba marina.
5. Like the baya, the lower one of the Indian drum pair tablas. As an instrument, it would be related to other friction drums as the cuica or rommel pot.
6. I am not alone in this discovery: since it was made, I have seen Swedish/German percussionist, accordionist and poet Sven-Åke Johansson do similar things, and the German Hans Reichel has earlier developed the idea into his daxophon. Many percussionists also use a bow on cymbals, vibraphone or bells. The saw, the most distinguished of bowed idiophones, was already known to me.
7. E.g. the triolin and the aerolin, in the tradition of the "nail harmonica" and the Waterphone (of Richard Waters). See e.g. Rammel's essay "Instrument Invention and Sound Exploration" in "The Man in the Street - translations of some writings by surrealists in Swedish", Surrealistförlaget, Stockholm, and his articles in EMI.
8. Double wind instruments is a very old idea, e.g. the ancient Greek aulos, Yugoslavian and native American flutes, and of course the bagpipe and the organ. Roland Kirk was one of the foremost in double - and triple - saxophone playing (with circular breathing, too!). But I actually don't know of double trumpets, before Hal Rammel's report of having seen Lester Bowie and another one that have played two trumpets at once.
9. Long strings and their longitudinal vibrations have been used by many artists and musicians, e.g. Ellen Fullman, but playing on strings that you are hanging in yourself I have never heard of before.
10. I have come across several water-based instruments, and water drums and water flutes moreover, do have some history. Many have communicated with whales, e.g. dolphins and killer whales, with music played through underwater loudspeakers. Very few instruments that I've heard of, are supposed to be able to be played under the water: the waterphone and the dolphin sticks. The whalesinger drum is played floating but intended to be heard by whales. (See EMI vol VI #4.)
11. How to solve this technicality remains, but I am thinking about the idea of electromagnets driving the strings, directed by signals from a microphone by the mouth. It is problematic, though: German instrument inventor and composer Volker Staub informed me of someone who has tried electromagnetic steering of string vibrations: when the amplitude of the string becomes too big, the string suddenly gets stuck to the magnet with a bang.

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