The most interesting musical instrument is our voice. And we’re performing all the time. We organize our vocal sounds into patterns of words, rhythms, pitches, loudness, timbre. We can mix our sounds with different sounds.

We can create a special kind of art. Leigh Landy calls it word music. Richard Kostelanetz calls it text-sound. Early on, it was called sound poetry.

Richard Kostelanetz writes: “The art is text-sound … to acknowledge the initial presence of a text … [so] that language or verbal sounds are poetically charged with meanings or resonances they would not otherwise have.”

So … do it! Compose your words.

Leigh Landy’s  Compose Your Words will tell you how to do it. Go here.

Richard Kostelanetz’ Text-Sound, enjoyable, informative, will give you a Text-Sound history. Go here.

Read these books and send us your word music / text-sound composition for the world to hear. 

contact@intelligentarts.net

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MICHAEL KUPIETZ. In New York, he wrote “this is my contribution to blurring the line between speech and music. I made it back in 2011.”

Yikidūsō (A Dream)

JOE KUBERA and JOEL CHADABE.  Kubera and Chadabe spent time in Staten Island (New York) for an Ear to the Earth festival in 2011. Here’s a simple mix of the sounds in several ethnic restaurants.

Eating in Staten Island

GEORGIA SPIROPOULOS in Paris, asked friends around the world to read bits of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in their native languages. She then created Vocalscapes. 

Vocalscapes

LEIGH LANDY. Rock’s Music, composed in 1988, is based on snippets of texts by Gertrude Stein

Rocks Music Once

Rocks Music Fish

STEVE REICH. It’s Gonna Rain was composed in 1964 after recording Brother Walter, a Pentecostal preacher, in San Francisco’s Union Square.

It’s gonna rain

FILIPO TOMMASO MARINETTI. In 1912, founder of Futurism in Italy, published Zang Tumb Tumb, partly prose, words, phonemes that suggest the sounds of the impending First World War.

Zang Tumb Tumb

Forgotten Ways of Thinking

HEMANI SHUMAILA. Built on the idea of “sonic photographs,” Forgotten Ways of Thinking is a soundscape piece that communicates to the listener the sonic expressions of Islamic beliefs as the author experiences it. 

I travelled to the town of Bhitshah, which is three hours drive from my hometown Karachi, in the province of Sind in Pakistan in 2009. After a year studying Ethnomusicology in the graduate program in Canada, I had come to Pakistan for fieldwork, and traveled to Bhitshah to initiate learning in the singing style of Shah-jo-Raag. Shah-jo-Raag is a three hundred year old Sufi tradition in Pakistan that is attributed to be an invention of the 18^th century Islamic mystical poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai.  This soundscape piece introduces the listener  to the sounds, singing and voices of spirit possession as the author recorded and experienced it at the shrine of Shah Latif.

I was raised in the 80s in the Islamic milieu of General Zia and the Shi’ite Ismaili world of singing hymns (ginans). My religious world was embedded in Islamic beliefs in farishte (angels) and jinns (spirits) and this was a world I shared with school friends.  Later, as a result of moving into the upper-middle class and elite education institutions through scholarships and financial assistance and my education abroad, I became more secularized and progressive and distant from this religious worldview.

Visiting Bhitshah and watching women perform the possession linked me to that religious world I grew up in, in a renewed sense, invoking curiosity and raising questions. This encounter established a personal link between my self and my story of growing up in Pakistan and the religious life-worlds of rural men and women of Pakistan.  Usually, women’s lens to view society in Pakistan is influenced by the males around them, be it fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends. However, this encounter helped me to develop a perspective that was independent of male influence and is reflective of my own interests and struggle to reach out to the people.

URSONATE. Among the early examples of sound poetry by Dadaist artists, in the years before and after 1920, was Ursonate by painter and collage artist Kurt Schwitters. 

Kurt Schwitters, London 1944, 9 portraits

There had been several forays into sound poetry by Dadaist artists in the years before and after 1920, but the major work of the time was Ursonate, “composed”, one might say, by painter and collage artist Kurt Schwitters.

In 1922, Schwitters began writing a sonata for the voice based on abstract vocal sounds organized as musical phrases and motives. Between 1926 and 1932, he performed it many times and polished it into its present form. He wrote, “The sonata is in four movements, an introduction, an end, and a cadenza in the 4th movement. The first movement is a rondo with four motives, which are identified as such in the text of the sonata. The rhythm is easily felt, strong and weak, loud and soft, tight and relaxed …” The sonata was written in script to be pronounced in German.

Schwitters also wrote: “Listening to my sonata is better than reading it. This is why I like to perform my sonata in public. But since it is not possible to give performances everywhere, I intend to make a gramophone recording of the sonata …”

Jaap Blonk performs it here in 2005 with an added touch of electronics to extend his performance into a new medium called Ursonography.

Blonk’s superb recitation of the Ursonate is accompanied by Golan Levin’s ‘intelligent subtitles’. It’s an excellent example of using technology to enhance the presentation of the vocal message. In fact, as the result of Levin’s timbral-sensing software, the subtitles follow Blonk’s recitation in real time, locking onto the timing and timbral nuance of Blonk’s voice. And the typography of the subtitles illuminates the poem’s structure. Altogether it’s a wonderful example of the human voice extended by electronics.