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Article Excerpt
Born in 1922, Henri Chopin became, as early as the 1950s, one of a handful of poets, musicians, and artists who shared an interest in the creative possibilities inspired by the recent commercial availability of tape recorders. A pioneering figure of sound poetry whose experiments and active presence in avant-garde art spanned over six decades, Chopin relentlessly strove to forge his own path in the realm of sound, mainly in order to propel poetry in new directions: away from the written page and from speech itself. His perception of art and poetry was indeed deeply rooted in a rejection of Western cultural, philosophical, and political heritage, in which writing and language are understood as the operative figures.
This movement away from writing and speech is played out in a particular approach to the human body's sounds and voices, involving an emancipation from the mediation of language through the use of available technologies at all creative stages. Under scrutiny of both microphone and tape, the body is liberated through its sounds and presented as a fleeing, plural, rhythmic entity that infinitely recreates itself and whose complexity cannot be accounted for by fixed identities and shapes.
An in-depth look at the poem "Le Corpsbis" (1) illustrates how the body is challenged and represented throughout Chopin's work. This poem was, in many regards, pivotal to Chopin's career, and it exemplifies the main issues that define and shape his approach. Voice and body are redefined, as are the basic elements of poetry itself. A traditional word-based notion of language is set aside as the poem increasingly relies on an extended range of vocal sounds. Furthermore, as this analysis will bring to light, technology functions to expose new compositional possibilities. The tape, for example, is instrumental at all stages of the process, from primary production (recording) to the playing back of the taped piece. This reliance on tape fits a Derridean concept of writing: audiography, or writing with sound. Ultimately, the creative process culminates in an intricate performance praxis, where the audiography is both reintegrated and surpassed by the live, active presence of the poet's body. In this final, public phase of poetic creation, the sound poem is seemingly fulfilled, as the live setting allows for the poet's physical, affective, and intense presence to set in motion the forces that were locked on tape. The result is a dialogue-struggle between the on-stage body and the taped sounds. This struggle, according to Chopin, reflects the supremacy of individual over machine.
Chopin's approach echoes his refusal of a traditional Western cultural model, in which language and writing dominate every sphere of individual life. This refusal is also reflected in a somewhat uncritical admiration of "aural cultures" and a pointing instead to a broader critical context where Western discourse is destabilized. The body as entity is infinitely in flight and evolution, and its essential affective qualities are in an eternal state of becoming that can never be fully territorialized or inscribed (taped). Indeed, the body in Chopin's sound poem functions as a site of resistance and self-affirmation, and is immune to the workings of norms, ideologies, and powers.
Chopin's complete sound works are remarkably consistent for an oeuvre that spans over half a century. "Le Corpsbis" is exemplary of his tremendous body of work, informed as it is by the notion of poetry as praxis closely linked to the processes, forces, and intensities that "move" the human body. Chopin's notion of poetry as praxis relies on a relentless technological exploration of the body's myriad voices. Using early tape recorders, he recorded and amplified vocal sounds, placing ever more miniaturized and sensitive microphones in or alongside the throat, mouth, and stomach--exploring all sites of vocal production. He also took advantage of the other possibilities created by the tape recorder, such as the ability to speed up sounds or slow them down, in order to hear the vocal "microparticles" below the threshold of the usually audible. The actual piece would then be shaped through primitive editing and mixing techniques. Chopin would splice the tape and use matchsticks to block the machine's eraser-head, allowing him to obtain multiple layers when recording over pre-recorded tape.
After having discovered the potential of the tape recorder in 1955, Chopin started using his own voice as the basic component of his poetry, quickly stepping away from language to explore the concrete nature of vocal sounds. In early sound poems such as "Peche de Nuit" (created in 1957) or "Sol-Air" (created in 1961), the exploration is still very much bound to words, though mainly for their sound values. Repeated until abstraction, words reveal speech as a physical process that defies unity and hides a dynamic multiplicity of sounds. Voice thus appears as a complex phenomenon, involving the play of an ensemble of bodily elements. From these first poems, Chopin's sound poems rapidly departed from poetry's residual reliance on language towards a more radical poetics of abstraction. His subsequent audio work for the next fifty years, until his death in 2005, focussed on the voice's complexity while in action. An examination of "Le Corpsbis" will set the stage for a better understanding of this transition in Chopin's work at large.
Composed from 1957 to 1966, using somewhat primitive technology, "Le Corpsbis" marks a shift in Chopin's poetical research. Although most of the piece is constructed of sounds that bear absolutely no resemblance to any kind of articulated speech, there are, mostly in the second and third segments, resurgences of lost words and fugitive sentence fragments. Language remains a spectral presence, one of the many potential forms that lurk in the dense sound matrix.
Furthermore, "Le Corpsbis" was indeed conceived as an attempt to project the sound poem beyond the tape, creating a poetic universe and thus transforming the audience experience from an essentially contemplative, intellectual process to a physical, sensuous play with space and time. As Chopin describes, "The recording of 'Le Corpsbis,' produced from June to July 1966, is conceived for the play Live to Live II. [...] This play is intended for sound and light, with the purpose of discovering a physical and sensory theatre. [...] It is a total environment, in fact accreted by a balancing of the whole theatre which should provoke duly calculated vertiginous effects in the viewer" (Chopin and Carcano 48). Chopin's intention here signifies a performative shift in his approach, toward the premise that something was missing, as if the sound poem, as an independent recording, was not enough. For Chopin, "Le Corpsbis" did not yet...
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