Sound Within Sound - Kate Molleson

SOUND WITHIN SOUND -

A HISTORY OF RADICAL TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPOSERS -

KATE MOLLESON

Take a look at the photo on the cover. It's of a woman by the name of Annea Lockwood, taken on Chelsea Embankment in 1968 showing her standing in front of a burning piano. Inside the piano are microphones wrapped in asbestos so they might withstand the flames. The microphones are wired-up to a reel-to-reel tape machine that's recording the sounds of the piano burning. Strings twanging, wood creaking, glues and varnishes melting. Elsewhere in that same year, Keith Moon was exploding his drum kit and Jimi Hendrix was burning his guitar but that was essentially performance art, with the accent on the visual. In the burning of the piano, Annea Lockwood's focus - and the whole point of the exercise - was on the sound created.

Another sonic sculpture she created that involved pianos was a piece called 'Southern Exposure' where she placed a piano on a beach at the high tide line and left it there for the sea to lap against its legs, the process creating notes from the piano as if played by the sea itself. It conjures up images, of course, of Jane Campion's 'The Piano' film when Holly Hunter's piano is left behind on the beach when she arrives in New Zealand.

Another connection to The Piano is that Michael Nyman who scored the soundtrack was an early admirer of Lockwood's work, particularly her 'glass concerts' held at Middle Earth, the hippy haven in London where Pink Floyd would often play. These 'glass concerts' involved the nightclub being plunged into darkness whilst onstage Lockwood smashed panes of glass. 

Another piano piece she did, going by the name 'Piano Garden', involved her placing (or 'planting') three pianos in a garden in a village in Essex and leaving them to the elements, the flowers and the creepers. The sounds from the pianos weren't recorded but the intention was that the pianos would 'play' forever. Interestingly, this was the same village where Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher of Crass were living (and still to this day do, at Dial House). Lockwood also took part along with various other artists such as Rimbaud and Vaucher in the legendary ICES 72 Festival held at The Roundhouse in 1972.

Annea Lockwood is just one of ten composers featured in Kate Molleson's book, Sound Within Sound - A History Of Radical Twentieth Century Composers. It's a potted history, of sorts, of radical composers who have been barely mentioned when it comes to the mainstream history of music. Ten names that I've never heard of before, for sure, and so subsequently have never heard their music. Nowadays, however, we have YouTube, so there's really no excuse. 

We have a choice: stick to what we know or what is promoted by the music industry and its algorithms, or venture out beyond our safety zones and into the wilds. And I'll tell you right now, some of the stuff mentioned by Molleson is totally out in the wilds. For example, 'Poem For Tables, Chairs Benches' by La Monte Young. It's there on YouTube. Take a listen, I dare you. In comparison, Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' is but a lullaby.

Kate Molleson is a journalist and broadcaster, and a leading commentator on contemporary classical music, and it's this classical music area that she's coming from. Pop music isn't her forte but there are crossovers everywhere, like an aural Venn diagram. Pop music can cross into classical, classical into pop music, and both can enter the avant-garde and experimental - out on the perimeter. 

Or as Molleson puts it when writing about Mexican composer Julian Carrillo: 'Sonido 13 (Carrillo's most well-known composition) works like a gateway, a filmic warp screen, a portal to a place where senses become less presumptive and more receptive'. Or as mentioned when writing about French composer Eliane Radigue when she's commissioned to make a sound 'like the silence of the stars'. Which is all very much like as Jim Morrison once intoned: 'Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned. Immaculate.'

If you're interested in music then you should probably read Kate Molleson's book and by that I don't mean if you just happen to like a bit of Lady Gaga, or if you think classical music starts with Vivaldi and ends with Nigel Kennedy. I mean if you're interested in sound or even more so, if you're interested in sound within sound. If you're interested in experimentalism and the avant-garde. If you're interested in the beyond. The metaphysical. The transcendent. If you're interested in - as John Coltrane put it - a love supreme. Yes, read this book. The key, I might add, being to read it whilst armed with YouTube so you may at the same time listen to what Molleson is writing about. And I guarantee you, your mind will be opened as well as your ears.

John Serpico