Boot Camp – Fucking Things Up, November 21.

I have often been told by previous music teachers, “You should learn a piece from the end to beginning, and not form the beginning to end. That way, you don’t become so familiar with only the beginning of the piece and you understand the complexities of the work as a whole, rather than just playing it through as it looks on the page.”

So, for this week’s boot camp I have taken an English folk song, notated it in its original form, and then notated it backwards. As Mark Sample explains, deformed humanities include practices such as deliberately misreading a text, such as reading it backwards.

To go beyond the written notation, I have also taken a recording and reversed it. This recording was made last February, and I am both surprised and amused by hearing myself singing in reverse. The selection below is only the first verse of the song. The notation there as well, so you can follow along with the words as you listen to the mp3:

Now, here’s what it sounds like backwards, and what the notation looks like in reverse:

Rosa Menkman discusses the difference between music and noise – a widely debated topic in the music world. Composers such as John Cage who have written experimental music to capture the sounds of the environment (specifically 4’33”) have been both criticized and praised on their work. 4’33” was composed in 1952, and consists of three movements, with the musician never playing their instrument. It can be “performed” by any instrument of group of musicians; the sounds in the environment are what are important. Arguing that sounds constitute music, I can learn from reversing my recording of “The Blacksmith” and analyzing the variations in sound and the overall phrasing, flow, and affect of the song as a whole. Though I have only selected one verse above, listening to it in its entirety provided me with a new view of the song, and I will never perform it the same way again now that I have heard and seen what it sounds and looks like in reverse.

The program I used to reverse the music is a program called Audacity, which I regularly use to slow down, speed up, and change the pitch of audio tracks. Though there are many features this program can do, I mainly use those mentioned above. With the help of Audacity, I am able to transcribe and learn music that has not been previously notated. It is both a valuable learning and teaching tool for my students and myself. This being my first time experimenting with the reverse feature, it has opened my eyes to the construction and fine details of this particular song. As Menkman notes, “these works stretch boundaries and generate novel modes…[the glitch] is recognized as a novel form (of art)” (341).

What I learned technically from this exercise is that I take long breaths between phrases. This is not as noticeable when listening to the original recording, and the flow of the instrumental accompaniment does not make the vocal line seem choppy or interrupted. However, when I listen to it in reverse, I hear the silences more in the vocal line. Reading the notation in reverse does not sound the same as listening to the recording in reverse. How come I can follow along so much more easily in its original form, and not in the reverse notation? Fine details such as breathing between phrases and diction of particular words further morphs the output of sound, so that it does not accurately match-up with the notation. Furthermore, the embellishments and ornaments I added lose their effect in reverse. Just as Sample describes how reading backwards can “breathe life into a text” (Elbow 201), I have found new meaning to this song by listening backwards. McGann and Samuels explain that, “Reading Backward is a deformative as well as a performative program” (29), and I find that this statement rings true for music as well written language.

This boot camp was a fascinating and eye-opening learning experience for me. It is something I will experiment with again with both instrumental and vocal music. Since the articulation of a bow on a string is so different from the human voice, reversing an instrumental recording will remain more accurate to the reversed notation, especially since a violin does not need to stop and breathe between lines as a vocalist does.

The main thing I felt was lost in the reverse recording was that the listener is no longer able to understand the text. If the lyrics were written out backwards, or even words written in reverse letter-order, one could still be able to visually see the words being sung. In a recording, the lyrics are totally morphed and cannot be made out in reverse. It gives the piece a completely different character when the lyrics cannot be heard or understood. Instead of telling a story through words, the piece becomes purely a musical statement on a different level.

There have been pieces written that sound the exact same played in reverse – musical palindromes. Mozart even composed a duet that can be played with one player reading the music right-side-up, and another reading from upside-down. Hence, you only need one copy of the music, and musicians stand on either end of it, reading from one direction or the other. Pure genius! Here is a recording of the first half of it (if you are able to read music, flip your screen upside down and read from the bottom!):

If you’d like to get the full experience, here is the entire song “The Blacksmith” in its original form, and below in reverse.

Works Cited

Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto.” Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. 336-47. Print.

Sample, Mark.  “Notes Towards A Deformed Humanities” SAMPLE REALITY. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2013. <http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/>.

Samuels, Lisa, and Jerome McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 25–56.