Resonance

Sounding the South: Greek Tragedy in Contemporary South Africa

Anna Frieda Kuhn

In South Africa, Sophocles is confined on Robben Island, Aeschylus’ spectre haunts indigenous music, and Euripides frequents the postcolonial stage. Although enjoying much popularity in the global marketplace, adaptations of Greek tragedy in postcolonial zones are enmeshed in a complex ideological web—part child of hegemonic educational practices, part outgrowth of a deconstructivist decolonisation. This becomes most evident when looking at the much-neglected function of sound in these adaptations. Here it would seem that the attribution of visuality as modern and Western has placed sound as the Other of vision, thus calcifying the border between the West and the non-Western Other. With the domination of the visual sense in the Global North, however, the important function of sound within dramaturgical practices of the Global South has largely been neglected. The hegemony of the Global North has thus firmly placed sound and the South at the periphery of a globalised world. In analysing contemporary South African adaptations of Greek tragedy, such as Mark Fleishman’s visceral Antigone (not quite/quiet) (2019) and Yaël Farber’s internationally acclaimed Molora (2007), I aim to highlight how sound has become a vector for the transmission of neo-Orientalist phenomenologies into contemporary theatre, at the same time as the Othering of sound has allowed many acoustically rich tragedies to escape, what
Jacques Lacan terms, the Symbolic. Though, as the sine qua non of subversive acts, subversion holds within it the potential to consolidate the primacy of that which it seeks to subvert, it becomes clear that in Greek tragedy and its contemporary counterparts, meaning is osmosed through sound to the visual world; thus opening up opportunities for resistance, revolution, and ultimately, worlding.

Literary Evocations of Insect Soundscapes: Temporal or Timeless?

Tekla Babyak

How do literary works depict the affects and temporalities of the sonic worlds of insects? Reading insect soundscapes across texts by Goethe, Keats, and Proust, this paper proposes that the music of insects has often been heard as entangled with seasonal cycles and ritual events.

Goethe’s Faust (1808) contains a carnivalesque interlude, “Walpurgis Night,” in which an insect orchestra performs for fairies and spirits. This orchestra--which includes flies, mosquitoes, and crickets--is an ephemeral ensemble that only exists on the Walpurgis Night. The conductor expresses irritation about their limitations as performers: “Snout of fly, mosquito nose, damnable amateurs!”

In contrast to this depiction of insect music as fleeting and amateurish, we encounter an eternal soundscape of insect harmonies in Keats’s poem “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (1816). For Keats, “the poetry of earth is never dead,” for the grasshopper sings all summer and the cricket takes up the same song in the winter. Keats seems to be imagining a form of collaboration between the two species in which they work together to produce an unbroken song. 

Proust’s novel Swann’s Way (1912) embeds insect song in a seasonal context to a greater extent than Goethe and Keats. For Proust, the “flies who performed for my benefit” create what he calls “the chamber music of summer” which is “bound to the season.” Proust thus draws an implicit opposition between the year-round time of human beings and the seasonal time of the flies. However, Proust also suggests that each new hearing of the summer insects evokes the aural memory of previous summers. As Steven Connor has eloquently observed, Proust implies that flies have the “power to preserve and restore the essence of the past” (Steven Connor, Fly, p. 177) in a way that resembles the evocative force of the famous madeleine. 

Listening to Borneo: Literary Mapping of Sounds in Li Yongping’s The End of the River

Yao Xiaoling

Li Yongping was a Sarawak-born, Chinese-speaking, Taiwan-based writer who was familiar with Western literature. This essay grapples with the role sound and sound representation play in Li’s spatial imagination in relation to his continuously shifting cultural identities. Focusing on The End of the River (Da He Jin Tou), I will discuss how Li deploys sound as a literary trope to imagine and map the place where he was born, Borneo, and how this literary cartography project reveals Borneo’s entangled cultural histories that lead to his identity crisis. Different types of sounds are mixed together and archived in this narrative: natural sounds and artificial noises, Malaysian folk songs and Western folk music, heterogeneous languages, female and male voices, indigenous cries and colonists’ carnivals, animal’s talking, etc. This dynamic soundscape necessitates a mode of close listening that requires readers to actively attend to the unseen and unspeakable. Through the discussion of how readers should close listen to the text, I argue that sound, instead of visual cues, is constitutive of space mapping as it encourages people to engage more actively with spatial imagination; the representation of sound, emerging as a response to Li’s wandering experiences, is essentially related to his “cartographic anxiety” to seek for a coherent, even if provisional, cultural identity.

Musical Performativity of Piano Performance in Thomas Mann’s Tristan, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out

Alexandra Huang

This paper investigates three novelistic works in Modernism as acoustic texts, in which musical acoustics are not
audibly represented by verbal means. Instead, the creative connotations of sound-making are astutely deployed in the musical performance scenes. By transposing ordinary musicality of piano-playing into prosaic language, the three writers authorise a vast array of musical repertory to be performed live in the fictional contexts of the three works. Despite the absence of perceptible acoustic waves in their literary fictions, music as performed in words is empowered to form new meanings in society, to the extent that the piano-playing protagonists can evoke the world-changing capacity of “performativity”. Musical performativity denotes music’s power to engender significant change in the real
world. It is argued that musical performance, recast in fiction, effectuates analogous performative forces that are instrumental in socio-political restructuring through sound art.

Notably, the scintillating piano-performance scenes indicate how the politics of inter-subjective relationships can be reformulated. The female pianists at once approximate the creative and physical states of the musical composers whilst reconciling their distinct pianism with the prescriptive music notations. As performing agents, the pianists initiate
more than simply representing and recreating what has been scripted by the master-composers in their sacrosanct musical works. Externalising gestures of sound and body, their musical virtuosity rehearses and realises theatrical potential beyond artistic framework. For instance, Forster’s heroine renders Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111 as triumphantly feminist, supplanting the late Beethovenian tragic heroism. Mann’s tubercular pianist democratises
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, domesticating its laborious production as solo pianistic monologue at the sanitorium. Woolf’s pianist sets jungle ritual dance into rhythm by appropriating Mozart’s Classical Sonata, attuning her post-
Romantic European audience to alternative aurality. Their music-making thus punctures the composer-performer hierarchy that pre-determines how music should be perceived. Enmeshed in-between the pianists’ ordinary life vis-à-vis their creative experience, their peripheral pianism proclaims their rights to perform virtuosic music as they persist

as virtuous women in society. Overall, discursively produced as performative acts, their undertakings of piano-playing problematise the performance practice of Western art music.

Using the Torino J. II. 9 Codex (c. 1430) and Girolamo Maggi’s De Tintinnabulis (1664) to Reconstruct the Soundscape of Medieval Famagusta

Michael Walsh

In the medieval city sound was an important part of the urban experience - produced, patrolled, co-ordinated, consumed and comprehended. Bells could unify and signal alliances, or indicate feuds, vendettas, and pacts within their sonic matrix. At best the city could be a harmonious and harmonic auditory experience – at its worst a discordant soundscape redolent of conflict. In any case, it was not mute. The bells of Famagusta have all gone. What remains however is a book, written in Latin by Girolamo Maggi during his imprisonment in Constantinople after the siege of Famagusta in 1571, on the subject of bells, and published a century after his murder. It proves a very useful starting point in any reconstruction of the soundscape of the historic Cypriot city. 
Within the churches and palaces a very different sonic regime existed in the form of music. Fortunately history has bequeathed us a unique key to the ecclesiastical and courtly music of medieval Cyprus with the Codex J.II.9, currently housed at the Torino Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, which ‘preserves the repertory of an outpost of Latin Christendom in the eastern Mediterranean, making it the only source of medieval Western polyphony from the Levante’. Centuries of silence can now be replaced with music right across the court: liturgical pieces, an Ordinary Mass, motets (short sacred pieces), secular songs, grand ballades, rondeaux (a poetic form) and virelais (rhythmic format) in both French and Latin.
This paper sets out to explore the archaeology of sound from six centuries ago and asks how much of medieval Famagusta’s soundscape can be reconstructed academically?