Dichotic listening 1

It was in August that I listened to Steve Takasugi's Der Fliegenpapier the first time. The piece flickers back and forth between German and English readings of Robert Musil's text of the same name, working in, about and through a carefully assembled (and then reassembled) milieu of words, parts of words and sounds.

Musil's text is a page a half long, maybe two. A full reading takes the narrator, composer and poet Wieland Hoban, only part of what becomes a six-minute piece. Wieland is German / English bilingual and reads both versions of the text.

German Fliegenpapier is English flypaper and there's a sense in which the inter- and admixture to which Takasugi subjects Wieland's spoken-word recordings creates a type of linguistic stickiness: parts, and sometimes only parts, of language inhere such that the affect of language reception changes during the course of the piece. Moments of clarity, instants of pulverization, stretches of such complete and unexpected linguistic hybridization such that — at intervals — the historic development from Old High Gothic into the present unravels.

Dozens of cuts between languages, between texts, in the first seconds of the piece. Announcement — or pronouncement — of title. Der Fliegenpapier / The Flypaper ... Pronouncement that sets into motion the uneasy relationship between the spoken word and the three or four different sense of text active about the work: Why pronouncement? Why here? Any number of European art songs from any number of centuries treat the entirety of some text. But never, whether at beginning or end, the pronouncement of title. A strange reading-aloud.

Sounds, images and bodies multiply. And so some months ago I became another something hovering about Musil's texts, and Takasugi's piece. And now comes the opportunity to shape words into the form of a listened pathway through this constellation.

I'll put some bits of writing here. And I'll start with with an idea of dichotic listening.

What parts of the word, the syllable, or the parts of the syllable, shine through a thousand cuts? It depends on the nature of the cuts and the nature of the reading. And in Wieland's careful treatment we perceive the spoken contour of the phrase. We hear where sentences begin and end amid cuts back and forth between languages, and between text. Form — in the up-and-down shaping of the sentence — at the level of the midground becomes perceptible through a flurry of cuts at the level of the foreground.

It is Alan Cruttendon who will suggest to us a dichotic listening as we assemble instead a fragmented listening. And it is from him that I'll quote in the next post.