One can trace the artistic roots of Sandell’s proj-ect to the early Modernism of Marinetti and Kurt Schwitters, or Öyvind Fahlström in terms of a Swedish tradition, and the latter is significant . Sandell’s text is peppered with quotations from the poetry of Bengt-Emil Johnson and, as an art-istic project, it is closely aligned with the Swedish drive to bring concrete poetry closer to sound art, not least in text-sound composition,3 of which Johnson was one of the leading proponents . It is hard to believe that Sandell’s study would have taken on the same form without these precursors . This connection is not discussed in the thesis, but it is there nevertheless, as a silent reminder of how
artistic “innovation” 4 always builds on tradition to some extent . (See figure 1, p . 64) .
Sandell turns his ear towards Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical meditation on the act of listening . For Nancy, listening is always a question of par-ticipation, of how the sound is shared by all the bodies in the space where it is set in motion . Lis-tening is thus about embracing the sound, or the timbre as Nancy puts it: “that thing by which a subject makes an echo – of self, of the other, it’s all one – it’s all one in the plural” (Nancy, 2007, p . 41) . Turning an ear towards the music inside the language or towards the sound of a piano note in a specific space, in specific bodies in a space, these are thus simply different aspects of the same phenomenon . It is therefore with the utmost logic that Sandell’s research also turns to the space, with the strongest linguis-tic manifestation taking the following form in the thesis:
When I strike a key on my piano, I here the hammer hitting a string that starts to vibrate . From my actions, I register that the mechanics of my piano work . But when I listen to the note I’ve just played, I hear a keynote and a series of over- tones that already tell me something sonorously . Now I become interested in where this is going . Will this note immediately be followed by another or will there be a pause, will it be
fol-inside The siLence 3 – 69
lowed by a rapid succession of notes that might also form a chord, polyphony? Composer Morton Feldman describes this by saying: “All activity in music reflects its process .” 5
I look at the piano, turn to the audience and say: I exist in a space . My body is part of that space . Inhabits the space . Expe-riences the space as I move and play in that space . “As such we cannot say that the body is in the space, nor is it in the time . It inhabits the space and the time .” 6 (Sandell, 2013, p . 50)
Sandell suggests a phenomenology of piano play-ing here that has few parallels in academic litera-ture . One of the closest forerunners is pianist David Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (1978): a phenomeno-logical treatise on jazz piano playing with fasci-natingly deep reflections on the knowledge of the hand . Of the many textual levels that the author applies, this one in particular piques the curiosity;
Sandell strikes a tone that is deeply autoethnogra-phic, phenomenological and philosophical, but in a form that marshals the direct forces of simplicity . As a reader, one might like to have seen this train of thought taken further in the thesis . Is this not potentially one of the key points in a thesis based on “the actual performance” (Sandell, 2013, p . 14)?
A further exploration of the space as “co-play-er” begins with a concert in Kalv Church in the summer of 2010 . An exploration of the musical
space – or rather the coming together of different spaces, of sonorous objects from different places known to the listener, but also of musicians and instruments in a space that unites opposites and thus realises this interweaving of different spaces and times – is given more depth through a reading of Foucault’s heterotopia concept (= a concept of “other spaces”) that sees a natural fortspinnung (German musical term: free and non-periodic de-velopment) in images from Alice in Wonderland (Sandell, 2013, pp . 135–142) .
inside the language
So what is this music inside the language? Sandell forms a thesis that seeks to answer the question in terms of the music’s absence from and presence in the text: on page 19, after a few introductory pas-sages, the reader encounters two transcriptions of dialogues between guitarist David Stackenäs and the author . These “playing dialogues” took place in the composer’s studio and are presented here without the music that was created in the spaces between the words . These transcriptions are per-haps best understood as a manifestation of the music’s absence from the text . What is it that is lost in the transformation from spoken words to text? But even more importantly, what meaning
70 – 3 inside The siLence
does a verbal discourse have in the interplay bet-ween musicians? Doesn’t most of what is said come across as infinitely trivial in comparison with the music that the transcription is unable to reproduce? However, moving away from this negation, there are many attempts to explore the space between sound and words, between music and text in concrete poetry and in other fortspin-nung of established forms within text-sound com-position . The poetry by Sandell, together with Fredrik Nyberg and Bengt-Emil Johnson, is wo-ven like a fabric through the book, with many of these texts also forming a springboard for works that combine recitation and instrumental music . These encounters are perhaps Sandell’s greatest contribution to the field of text-sound composi-tion . Acoustic instruments and instrumental mu-sic were never at a premium among forerunners such as Sten Hansson, Åke Hodell and their ilk . When Sandell approaches text-sound composi-tion from a pianist’s perspective, this brings many new qualities to an old Modernist tradition .
The variety of textual levels is one of the assets of the thesis, with one reservation . In her own the-sis, journalist and researcher Kristina Widestedt (2001) points to a tendency towards increased use of metaphors in contemporary music criticism, which she reads as a paradigm shift away from a more initiated target group towards a broader
audience . This thesis contains examples of how Sandell’s texts about his own music verge on eval-uative statements of the same character as review prose7, a linguistic level that comes across as par-ticularly problematic when such statements are written by the performer himself .
Sandell’s thesis raises many key questions con-cerning the generation of knowledge and method- ologies within artistic research . What is artistic knowledge and how can it be conveyed? What is the relationship between artistic practice and ana-lytical understanding? How can text and language capture a musical statement? How can an image visualise music? How can music become an inter-pretation of a text? Sandell’s artistic methodology takes clearer shape as the text branches out:
When I play my piano and sing, this fosters thoughts that pro-voke different internal images, which I try to translate into a physical image and text through metaphors for the music’s progress, which creates new thought processes, that I then transfer to the music, back to the sonorous piano and voice . (Sandell, 2013, p . 123)
The artistic research still requires stronger state- ments about methodological development and epistemology . However, I would suggest that an answer to these questions can be found embed-ded in the thesis material as a whole . Within
inside The siLence 3 – 71
the book’s constant shifts between different lin-guistic levels and material, the analytical sections come across as strong statements: the parts of the text where Sandell draws on models for under-standing from Nancy and Foucault, for example, are intimately bound up with the music at the heart of the thesis, in the box of three
cd
s . The ability to move between different forms of know-ledge is a factor in artistic research that remains in its infancy, but it is clear that there need be no contradiction in this movement . Perhaps one can understand Sandell’s book as a series of attempts, a collection of études that in various ways occa- sionally succeed and occasionally fail in achieving this meeting of parallel worlds . By this, I mean that all these different approaches have a func-tion in a cohesive whole . But without a convinc- ing artistic statement, such an endeavour would be doomed to failure . This too can be seen as one of the strengths of the thesis, how it makes itself dependent on the artistic outcome and forms a strong statement, built on a solid foundation of thecd
recordings . (See figure 2, p . 65) .In my reading of the project, “Music Inside the Language – the trio” stands as the key outcome, a piece of music for three musicians that moves seamlessly from text to voice to music, inhabiting the spaces in between that the thesis evokes . In collaboration with singer Sofia Jernberg and
double bass player Nina de Heney, Sandell has created music that gives perfect form to a move-ment between text and language, sound and silence . But it doesn’t stop there . I recall a performance by the trio at “(Re)thinking Improvisation” – a festival and symposium on improvisation in various cultures at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö in 2011 – and I can still conjure up mental images of the almost telepathic interplay, the listening between the musicians that spread through the space, creating a moment of inter- action between all the listeners (musicians and audience) and the room itself . This was a per- formance that brought together various thematic strands from the thesis . Sandell quotes Nancy in his thesis, and in his words captures the core of his own project: “to be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning” (Nancy, 2007, p . 7) . This listening is also a fundamental precondition for artistic research . The generation and communi- cation of knowledge often takes place in the space between academia and art, where the artist can move freely between discursive thought and the way of the hand, applying the art of listening to the creation of knowledge in this border country .
The full thesis can be downloaded from www.konst.gu.se.