Between Noise and Language: The Sound Installations and Music of Peter Ablinger (2009)

Throughout his career, Peter Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, especially as it appears in his extensive Weiss/Weisslich (White/Whitish) series. This essay discusses some of these works along with a specific piece from Ablinger's phonorealism series, in which recorded speech is transformed directly into the music-mechanical production of tones played by a computer-controlled player piano. I am not a musician by profession and then-fore, I have no acoustical prejudices, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects beyond himself, into an art much-beloved and studied, his desire to renew everything.--Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto I do not believe in the new. At best, I believe in a renewal in the sense of a permanent process, in the sense of an equilibrium. Renewal is needed for things to stay the same.--Peter Ablinger, Die Kldnge inter- essieren mich nieht/The Sounds Do Not Interest Me Though the Berlin-based Austrian artist and composer Peter Ablinger has gained significant exposure in European contexts ranging from music performances to gallery installations and discussions in various German publications, save for some notable exceptions (residencies at Villa Aurora and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and Bard College, New York), coverage of his work in North America, especially within a discursive context such as this journal, has been relatively limited. I will not be ambitious enough to attempt to cover the composer's entire oeuvre, which, for his nearly three decades of consistent artistic output, could already be considered staggering. Rather, I will concentrate on a few important threads I perceive as running throughout his work and that I have continued to find stimulating and provocative. The first: noise as totality: as phenomena, in lived duration, in action, or in concept. Throughout his career, Ablinger has focused extensively on noise in nearly every capacity, including ways of obtaining noise, ways of recording noise, and ways of listening to noise--a kind of listening, I might add, that need not actually include sound at all. To Ablinger, listening represents any type of perception, the ways in which we react to the world which we have to create through the same in the first place. Listening is thus the means of observing perception (Ablinger, Keine 87). Perception, pivotal for an engagement with Ablinger's noise work, should also prove invaluable in discussing questions regarding language and music in relation to Ablinger's work with the materiality of sound and speech, work he has called phonorealism. This forms another thread of interest: the relationship between language and music. In discussing work from Ablinger's phonorealism series--concentrating on one work, entitled A Letter From Schoenberg, a piece in which recorded speech is transduced directly into the music-mechanical production of musical tones played by a computer-controlled player piano --I will explore questions regarding music, language, and representation, drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This piece will also demand a short discussion of issues related to recording technology and musical automata. To a large degree, A Letter From Schoenberg would have appeared to have been the centrepiece of Ablinger's Horen horen (Hearing Listening), a gallery exhibition held in 2008 at Berlin's Haus am Waldsee, a private mansion-turned art space, built in the interwar period, that has been exhibiting contemporary art since 1946. Perhaps a context such as this might initially seem somewhat obscure for Ablinger: a composer coming from a tradition of concert music presenting work in a gallery ostensibly geared toward visual art. The Haus am Waldsee, however, has had a long-standing tradition of hosting art events ranging from concert music to theatre and literature readings. Additionally, many of the works from Horen horen took form as installation pieces comprising various media (sound recordings, sculptural works, video installations, interactive performance) and would have appeared relevant to at least a few artistic disciplines (music, sound art, sculpture, performance). …