University of St. Andrews

Video: A sounding/sample from 14 day experiment, University of St. Andrews, Scotland (July 2023).

Sonic Migrations in Search of Intelligences

: a facilitated encounter to cultivate the art of listening :

Score by G.E.H. based on stairwell soundings at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, by the following performance-researchers: singers Bas Cornelissen (baritone) & Gretchen E. Henderson (soprano); flute & live remix of whale song by Stephan Kaufhold (cognitive scientist); dance by Paty Solorzano (dancer); and visiting listeners (from 06/30–07/14, 2023). Recorded video is from only one "Sounding: 07/13/23" and thus is incomplete: in medias/in media. Listen into silences at the edge of this sea. This performance-in-time unfolded over two weeks during the 2023 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. The four performers came respectively from the Netherlands, United States, Germany, and Mexico. The following is excerpted/abridged from Gretchen E. Henderson's score of this work.

—Invocation—

Sonic Migrations in Search of Intelligences is intended for group work over a period of time. This practice is meant as an invitation/intervention in a conference of disciplined minds. Within scheduled breaks, sonic migrations improvise. No special skills are necessary. Any person willing to listen can participate. Participants add embodied ways of knowing, to listen for resonances within the built environment. Any sound—from song to speech, percussion or instrumental, recorded or whispered to silence—may sound the gaps. The built environment is considered a fellow performer, instrument, and collaborator. Each body becomes a tuning fork within: continuously retuning.

Conferences and symposia are choreographed within constraints of space and time, centered around a program, often of presentations. Those who invoke Sonic Migrations should seek an architecture proximal to a conference’s primary activities, ideally one with untapped acoustic potential (for instance, a stairwell) to decenter sensory attentions during scheduled breaks. (Since breaks tend to be reserved for tea service, bathroom access, chance encounters, conversations and pauses, any associated sounds/echoes can become part of the performance.) Sonic Migrations start when two members begin the improvised invocation and can finish around the time when the break ends. The end of any break is not the end of the overall performance; the migrating vocal practice resumes during other breaks and evolves as the conference season progresses, shaped by who hears the call and joins the evolving song. If no participants come during a scheduled break, the stairwell continues as a performer of its own echoing silence. 

Inspired by whale song, animal and human vocalizations (as well as compositions ranging from John Cage’s Litany of the Whale to Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations), Sonic Migrations in Search of Intelligences is not meant to be performed formally with a central stage nor in a single sitting. Rather, the performance migrates cumulatively across breaks in a single stairwell over the timespan of a conference to evoke a migratory season. Contingent containers of time-space organize the sonic logic into movements, remixed also by machine recordings that invite further improvisation by layering animal and related sounds through site-based practices and engagements. Whoever participates—even in silence—changes the nature of the work. The entire (de)composition resonates with environmental considerations by carrying ecological undertones, since species of whales and other animals (not neglecting humans) face extinction through conditions shaped by human hands. 

Of her composition of Sonic Meditations (1971, shortly before the Endangered Species Act was signed into law), composer Pauline Oliveros wrote: “With continuous work some of the following becomes possible … Heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness, changes in physiology and psychology from known and unknown tensions to relaxations which gradually become permanent. These changes may represent a tuning of mind and body.”

Sonic Migrations in Search of Intelligences diminishes as the conference draws to a close, as participants return to their respective home environments, where each is invited to continue honing their intelligences—not only of mind but also of body and heart, nerve and pulse—to retune and sound gaps wherever they are, to explore deep listening and further embodied ways of knowing by unknowing.

Above: Performers in stairwell and shadowed Storytellers at the edge of the North Sea. Below: Whispered soundscape from G.E.H.'s Wreckage: By Land & By Sea (Lake Michigan/Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2011).

WATERSHED

North Sea—English Channel/Norwegian Sea—Atlantic Ocean