In July 2018, in the Italian city of Prato, I found a small, antique zither in a local junk store. It was beautiful but in a sorry state. A few of its original 15 thin steel strings were missing, but those remaining had a pleasingly chiming, distinctly mournful sound. I procured it for 20 euro alongside its accompanying twelve yellowed, decaying music sheets that evoked the aesthetics of digital storage punch cards from an old computer, or player piano rolls. As the junk store owner demonstrated to me through our mutually shaky grasp of each others’ language, these triangular pieces of paper fitted under the strings to show finger positions, so even if a player wasn’t able to read music, they could still perform the songs in a kind of aural “paint by numbers.” It was an indicator of an era of folk-memory nudging up against the border of mechanisation, if not stepping over it into a literal "programmability," like a player piano. Most of the music sheets were popular Italian folk tunes. Just one was in English: the notation for the Christmas carol Silent Night.
Silent Night was composed by Franz Xaver Gruber, to lyrics by Joseph Mohr, in a small Austrian town in 1818, exactly 200 years before I bought the zither. In the subsequent two centuries, it has lost all its specificity, and travelled around the world to become a saccharine signifier of the global reach of Western culture and the commercialisation of Christmas. Might this have been one reason Len Lye chose to deconstruct it in his sculpture Roundhead (1961), a surprisingly delicate small kinetic whose material sound component is a toy music box, whose small mechanism once held this evocation of the hush of snow in a European December as its original crank tune? I suspect the carol's inclusion in the kinetic wasn’t as intentional as this, and Len used it because it belonged to one of his children, or he just happened to have it lying around the studio. Either way, during the work’s development, through processes of modification and removal of the music box’s pins by the artist, both the tune itself and all its cultural and narrative connotations were shaved down, broken, and fractured.
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Roundhead (1961)in situ in the exhibition Len Lye: Stooped Short by Wonder, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, September 2017 |
study for two unfinished silences (for Len Lye) was commissioned by the Len Lye centre for the exhibition Sensory Agents: Sounds of Len Lye Sculpture. The brief was an extraordinary one: to make a piece drawing on a sonic element of Lye's sculptural oeuvre. At the centre of study for two unfinished silences (for Len Lye) is a playing of Silent Night on the junk-store semi-programmable toy zither, captured in a one-take field recording in the room I was staying in for two nights in Prato, with busy street noise outside. Through arbitrary material damage (which parallels Lye’s more intentional erasure of the toy music box also originally programmed with Silent Night in the sculpture Roundhead), the tune itself has largely been erased through the missing strings of the damaged zither failing to register certain notes, as well as the limitations of the instrument providing their own tonal register, making this more ‘silence’ than ‘night,’ a music as rudimentary, aleatory and minimal as Lye’s broken music box.
This recording is then put into dialogue with another score, punched out on the simple paper strips of a programmable music box, that provides another layer of sonic material, which oscillates around the recording of the zither like the four rings of Lye’s sculpture, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance. This second sonic element is a phrase of musical notation written down in the field by a European listener to the song of a bird from Aotearoa / New Zealand, in 1913. Johannes C. Andersen, in his observational notes on the song of a particular tui in the vicinity of the city of Wellington, wrote: “one would suppose the bird to be “preparing” for singing, for he emitted more clicks, clacks, and gurrs than musical notes, sounding like the snapping and intermittent whirring of clockwork, as though his musical box had been undergoing seasonal repairs, and was being tested as to its mechanism.”
When Roundhead was made, it had already been a decade since Kenneth and Jean Bigwood had recorded and released the box set of 3 45 RPM records, A Treasury of New Zealand Bird Song, a set of recordings which would go on to become some of the most recognisable sounds on New Zealand radio. But it wouldn’t have been so easy for the expatriate Lye to listen to the sounds of his childhood in Aotearoa, even though I imagine he had tui lodged in his memory, whirring and clicking away. Maybe we’ve misunderstood Roundhead all these years: just as the tussocky sway of a kinetic like Grass evokes aspects of the New Zealand landscape, it would be just like Len to want to make a mechanical tui himself.
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Exhibition
4 Aug — 18 Nov 2018
Centred around Len Lye’s noise-making kinetic sculpture and a set of audio recordings held in the Len Lye Foundation Archive, Sensory Agents focuses on the role sound plays in Lye’s work, and links Lye to a younger generation of artists who share his interest in the capacity of sound and music to elicit sensory responses.
Witnessing Lye’s steel sculpture in motion is a highly physical experience, with the sounds produced by their movements – their force, energy, rhythm and resonance – vital to their sensory impact and appeal. Working with steel, Lye developed a range of techniques to heighten the potential sound-producing qualities of his sculptures, including the use of bells and percussive ‘strikers’. This gave Lye the idea to record and make these new sounds available to musicians and composers as source material for their compositions, expanding their material for music.
In keeping with this idea, Sensory Agents also presents newly commissioned compositions by contemporary artists and composers using the sounds of Lye’s sculpture alongside original recordings held in the Len Lye Foundation Archive. It opens a new evaluation of his work in terms of sound and music, to consider them, in Lye’s own words, as ‘musical instruments rather than visual kinetic works of art’.
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