Language and Percussion: An Actor's
Perspective
Wendy Salkind
Stuart Smith's music covers a wide range of styles, yet underlying all
the works is his deep commitment to improvisation. As in jazz performance,
he seeks a composer/performer collaboration, writing
scores that invite the performer to improvise a tempo, the
duration of a silence, entrances of the materials. Whether it
is his instrumental compositions or unsung vocal pieces, he writes
with a fascination about the performance process. Thus,
many of his pieces are written to be performed by a musician or by a singer, dancer or
actor.
Smith, in a discussion of
his childhood training as a percussionist, describes the human voice as a drum.
As a kid I was never
taught to sing pitches. I sang rhythms. There was a palpable, inevitable connection made
between language and rhythm.1
Much
of his compositional process developed from this early, visceral knowledge
of the rhythmic rather than semantic or sonic value of words. A group of his
compositions, which he calls speech songs, are spoken, and demand of the performer that the work or phrase be
experienced and performed through an
emphasis on the inherent internal rhythms. He creates those rhythms not merely with syllabic weight in a word, but through
a variety of speeds, durations, articulations and contrasts of long to short
vowels.
The textual source for these pieces is everyday speech. It is the familiar,
often banal language spoken in the home and on the street. Yet he
juxtaposes words in such a way that their sonic qualities and semantic value
are no longer familiar to the listener. The words require reinterpretation. Smith
says:
If nothing
more, speech songs are a reminder that language is invented by us and if we are not careful it
totally invents us without our awareness or control. Composing in words helps
us regain control . . .2
Regaining that control is quite different from the
actor's vocal process. An actor's training
strives for a refined sensitivity to the exprE4siveness
of words. Language is rich not only for its sonic value but because it defines
past experience or exposes spontaneous experience. Linguistic imagery is often
psychological in nature, and actors must learn to express language through their sensory knowledge of the world. They study language to know the emotional value of sounds.
For example, actors learn that certain
large, open vowels, such as AH, OH, OO, when spoken, resonate deep in the body.
The physical sensation of speaking those sounds so that they resonate
fully is subtly linked to a psychological experience.
In voicing them, one feels large, powerful, sexual, vulnerable, and rooted in the chest, the belly, the groin.
Obviously, not all words holding
those vowels have meanings that parallel the sensations I have described. But the actor, like the singer, knows
that a good writer/composer will
expose the heightened emotions of a character through language whose sounds trigger the actor's psyche and allow the voice to wail, sigh, or sing. Although the voice
can also be strident or crisp, the
actor learns that the voice is an extension of the breath, and as such it is a release of self. For the actor the voice is a
musical instrument with lyrical powers, and is rarely conceived of as a
drum.
What Smith asks of his performers, then, is that
they learn his texts first as rhythmic scores, rejecting any personalization of imagery, and gradually allow those rhythms to inform the sonic values, of
the language. This process, although not
intellectual, is not solely sensory,. but it is a process in which the
performer must externally observe her or his own internal experience of performance. In other words, the performer cannot
unlearn a personal history of words as she/he
speaks them. But in performing them with an imposed
awareness of rhythmic value, the performer re-learns those words, and thus
creates new images. In order to achieve
Smith's desired results, this self-observation cannot lapse. The performer
must never become lost in the actor's sensory world.
That self-observation is a process that then
distances the performer from the audience and
demands that the audience not only observe language being performed as music, but observe the performer observing her or himself. The audience never relaxes back in their seats to listen,
but they too re-invent this seemingly
familiar vocabulary. They must learn to see that the performer is a vehicle for the text to play on the voice
and body, rather than an interpreter of the composition.
During my rehearsal period with Smith of a speech
song, Smith discovered the difficulty in maintaining this
performance technique of self-observation
and actually chose to incorporate vocal elements of characterization and of sonic imagery. Through
this article I will discuss the resultant performance process.
Commentary on Smith's Speech Songs
Smith's two solo works, By Language Embellished: I and Songs
I-IX, are compositions for speaking voice and percussion, which place common
words and sounds in an unusual context and set them, as text, against a percussion of household objects. By Language
Embellished: I, composed in 1984,
is a text that is often descriptive and poetic, but is at times non-referential when written as a cluster of nonsense
words (see Example 1). Some sections
of the text are simply monosyllabic sounds that are used primarily for rhythmic exploration and vocal
color. The composition is made up of a
prologue, four internal movements, and an epilogue. The Prologue and Epilogue are unaccompanied texts,
while the other movements all have percussion accompaniment of diverse
materials. For Movements the percussive
sounds are used intermittently, and are notated at specific places alongside the text. However, in the fourth movement,
the percussion (four metal cans struck by chopsticks) does not serve as an
accompaniment but plays continuously so that the voice and percussion form an
instrumental duet (Example 2).
Songs I-1X, composed in 1980, differs from the later work in that it is not one long vocal text, but nine short texts, sometimes only two lines
in length. The songs are small poems where language is used metaphorically. In them, Smith relies heavily on onomatopoeia for vocal color, rhythm and for humor. All of the songs are spoken. The briefness
of the songs demands a driving intensity from the
performer, who must manipulate a large number of
percussive materials. Percussion ranges from the dry, crisp sound of rubbed sandpaper, or the harshness of a ratchet, to the
lush sounds of sloshed water- and strained delicacy of the scraped rims of
glass jars (see Example 3).
Interestingly, the tight structure of the texts
themselves is juxtaposed to the compositional
process Smith used to find a starting point for each work. That process was decidedly random. In other words, rather than compose the piece from a preconceived idea of what it should sound like or what the text might mean, he allowed his inspiration to come from capricious sources. He says that the origin of the words, "by
language embellished, I," was his
young daughter, who, having read them, taped them to the front door of their home. Similarly, the phrase,
"outside of history and forever new,"
seemed to jump off the page as Smith was reading the
poet Gary Snyder's discussion of the roots of American Indian poetry. Smith then used both these phrases to
generate the text of the Prologue of By
Language Embellished: I. He looked up the definition of each word in those two phrases and then found the
definition of all those words, until
he had compiled an enormous amount of material, from which he drew. Not
only were his sources of inspiration from found text, but he repeated this process so that all the
words and definitions from the Prologue
created the entire vocal text. For example, in researching the meanings of the word "ocean," he arrived
at the nautical terms he later usedin the third movement.
Hen-fruit
Hit the Jack
You, peakage,
Draw up the verbals!
Cut capers on a
trench!!
Amputate the mahogany!! 3
Some of the
expressions in the text are from the 18th century or from Australian slang. Smith took pleasure in writing a
phrase such as, "Floaters in the
snow," and having it sound like a Japanese haiku, when in old
England, it actually referred to food.
Example
1
His compositional method led to a text that is neither linear nor cumulative.
The placement of sections is unpredictable. One phrase does not
interpretively follow the next and often one metaphor has no relation to the poetic image which
preceded it.
Example
2:
By Language Embellished: I, MVT. I (solo version)
Example
3
This same process of found text generating more text, Smith practiced earlier in
writing the first three songs of Songs 1-IX. However, the middle three
songs, rather than come from definitions of the words of prior songs, were composed subjectively from sounds,
memories and visual pictures of his
imagination. Once again, with the last three songs, he relied on a
random structural technique although one that differed from the first described. He chose to make the linguistic meaning
of the text of Songs VII-IX an inversion of the meaning of
Songs I-Ill.
From Song I:
Gathered together Calm
Self-possessed Composed
From Song VII:
Grrah! Separately disquiescent
An aroused anti-signed nefariousing
Whippersnapper, noxiously
ne're-do-welled.4
Clearly,
the words in each song do not oppose each other in definition, but the
interpretive sense of the pictures they conjure up works inversely. One can
also see that the imagistic peacefulness of the first song is represented by
the sparseness of the words on the paper, whereas the harsh, biting character
of Song VII growls at length across the page. Songs I-IX contains many of the same
compositional structures as does By Language Embellished: I, but in the
latter work the techniques are more fully developed. For that reason, and because I worked directly with the piece,
I will continue to discuss
it-primarily, and make reference to Songs I-1X for the sake of
comparison.
The playfulness of Smith's discovery of text was reinforced by his choice
of percussive materials. Once he wrote the text and could hear it, he
knew the sounds and rhythms he needed to accompany it. In a process he
refers to as recycling sounds, he chose to use only those materials he could find in his own
environment. The third movement employs the widest range of percussive sounds. The instruments are: three metronomes set at different tempos, a typewriter, pennies in a
plastic cup that are poured into a
metal teapot, two pieces of sandpaper that are rubbed together, a chopstick inside a water glass which is trilled, a
saw blade which is drawn along the edge of a tin can, two radios set on
FM classical music and AM talk show, and a
pack of playing cards which is shuffled. In the fourth movement, aside from baby formula cans, the
percussive devices are a large cardboard box which is slapped and
trilled by hand, and a saucepan placed
upside down on which is rubbed a smooth stone. Had Smith composed the
work in some other place, surrounded by other objects and materials, his choice of percussive elements, and
thus, the texture of the sounds of the composition would have been
different.
In his introductory performance notes to By Language Embellished: I, Smith states,
"The music of the composition exists in the internal rhythms and timbres of the words."5 Yet in rehearsal, I found that it is
also the varied
uses and structures of language that direct the performer and, thus, the music.6 Both compositions demand that the
performer discover constantly changing strategies in order to realize
and communicate the text. I chose the role of a narrator when the text
was descriptive of visual pictures or experiences.
Having just reached the position
of a middle-aged
potato,
the new moon, threadbare,
renewed it's memory
by eating the
broth
with a complex
plot,
as the tiny Cone
of Sand
with it's needle leaves
and dark purple Amarillo restated
what has never been said:
If you stare like a fish
death is a white tie.7
In this role I
was a storyteller and, though I assumed no other persona, I spoke to the audience with
the awareness that these words were my own.
The
work often requires that the performer become a character and that the text become
personalized.
Hey, Chill Off!
What's a gentleman's companion anyway?
A pneumonia blouse
corrupting the color yellow?
A loose pavement stone
crushing in the bud?
Like
diamond sharks filling cavities
with a bellyful of marrow pudding?!
Hey,
Chill Off! 8
In
the above section, the character was a crass, nasal-voiced New York City
cabdriver, who was berating another driver who just rammed into her cab. When speaking as
this, or any of the characters in the piece, the vocal changes were heightened by facial expressions that emerged as an organic extension of the character transformation.
In this particular case, the
percussive accompaniment of a saw blade drawn across the edge of a tin
can intensified the characterization and vocal range.
Finally, I sought a performance style that would impose nothing on the
text. I call that condition, to which I often returned, neutral. It was a method
of performance in which there was no characterization, no embellishment
of referential imagery, merely a performance state in which the
sounds of the text played on the voice. When I was neutral, the language defined and
embellished me.
Space between,
difference, between;
here and there
A quantity of quick time
that has been or ever will be,
Often,
Large Commas,
Notwithstanding.9
Smith's most frequent manipulation of language is gibberish, or nonsense
language, where sounds are suggestive of actual words. Throughout this
text authentic words are set in the midst of gibberish to falsely suggest literal
meaning.
Yes,
I,
Dictus Roustabout
gawk yahoo gobs scad
souse mint;
hump jag turk
empt smear gelt,
uddles clover forlorn.10
Although
the words are not referential, the direction to the performer, to "recite
traditional wedding vows,"11 determines a context and an interpretation.
The above section was spoken as a young, innocent and sincere girl. In
theatre, gibberish is an improvisational technique used when
an actor is relying too heavily on the literal meaning of the words in the script. By speaking
gibberish, the actor is able to communicate deeper emotional levels of the character's actions. Smith does not use
gibberish to interpret any other text. Rather, he demands that the
performer create a meaning and context, or
simply allow the sonic value of the nonsense language to stand uninterpreted.
There are a number of passages which might be described as poetry.
In them language is metaphor, and creates visual and emotional imagery.
With
Anvil far back on night
came the breaded bone of Galilee
and straight
around the corner
He did the briny the mazy
and the Rose on oceandust,
and still the millstone
left a very deep
hollow
above His
collarbone;
For the Smith always had a spark
in his throat,
and anything too
deep
made the air blue in small tufts
for the light of the scorched.12
The
mention of Galilee and the capitalization of the pronoun, He, suggests a Biblical
story. There is also a delicacy to many of the images and a lyricism
to the whole passage. While rehearsing with Smith, I decided to extend these qualities so
that the section was performed as a narrator who, without using actual dialect, spoke in a warm, melodic voice, as though recounting an ancient Irish folktale. It is
primarily in these poetic passages that the imagery, more than the
sounds and rhythms of the words, leads the performer to the choices of vocal
color.
The second and fourth movements stress Smith's
usage of sound for rhythmic effect.
Pinoak Saltus
Azalea Cumber Pie.
.
.
.
Pre-name-clink-pokey-addle-denovo-vee-plus-ultra.
.
.
Andante.13
The
direction to the performer in this second-movement passage is to keep the text conversational,
without an attempt at interpretation. To do so, the performer must speak in the neutral voice. The section is sharply articulated with emphasis placed upon the short
syllables and elongated vowels. By minimizing inflection and strengthening the
articulation of the sounds, rhythmic value is heightened.
As is clear in many passages previously quoted, Smith explores humor by placing ordinary
words in an unusual context. Often he begins a sentence with familiar language,
in a familiar context, and then substitutes gibberish or inappropriate words. The syntax sets
up a certain expectation for the, listener, which is then
fulfilled in an unpredictable manner.
Feeling down in the trench?
.
Had your nose in iron parenthesis
for 31 days of late loan behind?
.
Add zest, by aging!14
The structure of the two
questions is a parody of hard-sell advertising. The performance notes reflect
this by stating that the performer should speak as though selling a product on a television commercial. What one realizes
is that by speaking the sentences as though they made sense, the humor is
accomplished. In Songs I-IX, Smith
uses this same technique and often relies
on visual gesture, (thigh and buttock slapping), for humorous effect. He also incorporates non-verbal sounds, such as
tongue clicks, growling and whistling, into the piece. These vocal sounds
demand that the voice function as an instrument of pure sound rather
than phonetic sound. In By Language Embellished: I, this technique, as a
source of vocal expressiveness, seems to be replaced by quick changes in
character voices.
Characterization is most
extensive in Movement I and Movement III. Originally, Smith's performance notes
indicated such characters as the Schoolmarm,
the Sideshow Barker, the Gossip. In rehearsal, we
found that the problem with speaking the
text as a given character type was that the voice responded to a stereotyped image of that character. The words were diminished because the character was
generalized. To speak as a gossip
might imply a nasal-voiced, trivial woman. But to gossip is actually an activity that can bring one great pleasure. It
provides a way of discussing
experience through a vicarious re-living of another's actions. Once the composers markings were changed to indicate the actions of
the character, as in Gossiping, rather
than the character type, the voice responded
to genuine emotion (see the last section of Example 1). The words, whether nonsense or not, became
personalized and the voice responded accordingly.
Throughout
the composition the transition from one character to another and the tonal changes occur during a silence. In Songs I-IX, the
silences are notated as a short or long
pause. In By Language Embellished:
I, each silence is marked by a
specific number of seconds, lasting anywhere from one to twenty. I found
that even though the silences were set, the actual length of these transitions
was determined through my internal sense of
time. Often during performance, the seconds were stretched, sometimes compressed, dependent upon the emotional tone of the preceding character or the psychological
tension of the forthcoming passage.
Thus the value of the second was variable, but the number of seconds remained true to the composer's markings.
During a transformation from one
character to another, the silence served as a period of unmasking. That period of time would often be colored by adjustments in seating position, change in eye
focus, or physical gesture. For
rapid shifts of character, the silence became a breath, an expressionless
moment in which to refocus. At times, the silences were not transitional elements, but beats of their own.
They provided space within the sound, they allowed stillness for the
performer, and they extended the musical tension of the whole composition. The
silences became the text.
Along
with gibberish and poetry, characterization is another of Smith's powerful devices for producing a large rhythmic and sonic range. Movement III is dense with a variety of
characters, and the percussive elements,
rather than function only as accompaniment in that movement, often intensify the emotional content of the text.
When, in an early passage, I spoke as
a pre-adolescent boy selling newspapers on a street corner, I interrupted the text with loud bursts on
the radios. For the audience, the
radios created a busy street cacophony, while for me, as the boy, the
sound intensified my urgency to be heard and to make a sale. By comparison, the percussion in Song I-IX often
works directly against the meaning and tone of the textual image or the
vocal timbre. Looking again at the text of Song / (Example 3), the word
images are spoken in a "short, clipped,
monotone, very nervous" against an equally erratic percussion of table-, and hand claps, rubbed sandpaper, and a
ringing cowbell. The overall effect is that the words stand apart from
the percussion and the accompaniment seems to comment upon the meaning of the
words. In By Language Embellished: 1, the percussive elements usually complement and support the vocalization. In Movement IV (see
Example 2), the percussion of
chopsticks tapping tin cans, is a constant, primary voice while the performer's voice of often monosyllabic
sounds, subtly weaves in and out of the percussive line.
By Language Embellished: I was carefully choreographed through Smith's design of the physical set-up
of the performance. His subtitle for the composition is,
"An opera without singing in acts." By removing the singing or
music from the opera, one is left with words. One is also left with theater. The Prologue and Movement I are spoken
with the performer sitting in a
rocking chair. For the second movement, the performer stands. A twenty second silence separates the second and
third movements, during which time
the performer moves to a card table covered with the numerous objects discussed earlier. The performer
again crosses, for the fourth
movement, to a piano bench on which are placed the tin cans, chopsticks, a large cardboard box, and saucepan.
The Epilogue is spoken with the performer standing directly in front of the
audience. The chair and tables are
arranged in a semi-circle which opens toward the audience. This is clearly a stage set. The circular
arrangement and the furniture suggest
an intimate, home-like environment. Most of the percussive materials are household objects. The performer is
dressed in casual clothes: jeans and
a sweatshirt. There is a sense of improvisation, of play, as the performer moves-from one place on stage to
another. Yet the environment is not
suggestive of any specific place. Perhaps the set is meant to imply that the audience should feel
comfortable with the performance,
that everything they are about to hear and see is familiar to them, is
already a part of their daily lives.
As is Smith's preference, the opera was originally
performed with two other compositions. Pinetop, for piano,
preceded it as an overture, and Flight, for piano and flute, followed as, in Smith's term,
an afterture.15 There were no pauses
between the performances of the three compositions.
The musicians for Flight and Pinetop wore traditional black, formal attire, and were placed at opposite ends of
the stage, with the opera set down stage center. This arrangement
enclosed the visual picture and intensified the
intimacy of the opera. It was the seemingly casual and familiar environment of the opera that was the more
theatrical of the two worlds,
particularly as it was juxtaposed to the formal, but predictable, physical performance arrangement of the other two
pieces. With the later two compositions, the audience could close their
eyes and absorb the full impact of the music. The opera, however, needed to be
watched for the performer's characterization
and interaction with the objects were an integral part of the performance. They were the element of theater that heightened
the imagistic and sonic value of the text. At the same time, the visual picture of the opera challenged the
audience's perception of the other two compositions. That contrast between the
formal and informal created theatrical tension.
The performance of Songs 1-IX and By
Language Embellished: I is not limited to only
an actor or a percussionist. Each performer is challenged to
bring a different quality to the work that will effect the ultimate interpretation. While this is true of any
re-creative art form, it is particularly so in this case. The emphasis on ordinary sounds, both percussive and vocal, creates a wide base of shared
experience from which the interpretation can proceed. Common household objects
take on a rhythmic life, gibberish
acts as comprehensible language, cultural/linguistic cliches are sources of humor. Smith demands that both the
performer and the audience look at what is most familiar in their lives
and hear it anew.
1Smith,
at present writing from an unpublished manuscript.
2
ibid.
3Stuart
Smith, By
Language Embellished: I, unpublished manuscript,
performance notes by Wendy Salkind, 1984.
4Stuart Smith, Songs 1-1X, Sonic Art Editions, 1980.
5Stuart Smith, By Language Embellished : I.
6Smith and I rehearsed
By Language Embellished: I in August and September, 1984, for the
premiere performance in October, 1984, at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
7Stuart Smith, By Language Embellished : I.
8 ibid.
9 ibid.
10 ibid.
11ibid.
12 ibid.
13 ibid.
14 ibid.
15Pinetop
(1976-1977)
and Flight
(1977-1978),
published by Lingua Press, may be and often are performed as separate pieces in
the usual concert format.