Conference Agenda

This paper explores the practice of Japanese sound artist Tomoko Sauvage, who builds on traditional jal tarang performance (in which water-filled porcelain bowls are tuned and played with mallets). In the expanded palette of Sauvage's jal tarang, the technology of the hydrophone has allowed her to capture sound from the inside out, letting the water communicate its own perspective. Accordingly, it is this technology that allows us to take the life of water more seriously as listeners. Our ears are drawn just as much to the contents as to the container: rather than being a mere tool for tuning the bowl, the water fills the bowl, moves in it, evaporates, drips, splashes, and forms bubbles. Using water, ice, porcelain bowls, hydrophones, mixers, and various props (terracotta, mallets, air pumps, wooden spoons, small motors), Sauvage has developed performances and installations for festivals and venues throughout the world.
This paper will focus on Sauvage's recordings and performances in a particular venue: the Wasserspeicher (water tank) in Berlin. The Wasserspeicher was built in 1877 in Prenzlauer Berg and served the city until 1914, when it was deemed too small for ongoing use and emptied. The structure, like so many in Europe, has since lived through many dark days. From 1933 to 1934 it was used by the SA as a storage and supplementary facility for one of the early "wild" concentration camps, and thereafter became converted into a public green space. In 1981, a memorial went up to mark the Wasserspeicher's use in the Nazi regime, and since 1994 the building has been used for public concerts and art events. It is especially desirable as a concert venue because of its unusual cavernous shape and long, deep reverberation. I am interested in Sauvage’s use of different containers for water, one a microcosm and the other a macrocosm haunted by its own history. Referring to Toni Morrison’s assertion that “water remembers where it has been,” my paper will explore water as a musical instrument with capacities for both sound and memory.

As part of the festivities celebrating the 1608 marriage of crown prince Cosimo II and archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria, the Medici court planned three extravagant outdoor entertainments, two of them designed to feature the groom in a leading role. One of these was Lorenzo Franceschi’s Ballo dei venti, a horse ballet in which the prince personified Zephyr, the west wind. The other was Francesco Cini’s L’Argonautica, a water entertainment that relocated Jason and his Argonauts’ capture of the Golden Fleece to the Arno River, complete with elaborately decorated boats, naval and land battles, and music by voices and instruments.

Art historians have contributed most of the modern scholarship on the Argonautica, unsurprising given the spectacular nature of the individual vessels that conveyed its participants. Giulio Parigi and Jacopo Ligozzi fashioned boats shaped as reefs and shells, along with birds and sea creatures such as a swan, a peacock, and a lobster, all published in Remigio Cantagallina’s contemporaneous etchings. Historians have also acknowledged the work in studies devoted to the conspicuous management of water as a symbol of political control. Musicologists have tended to mention the entertainment only in passing, since no music was believed to have survived.

But one of the entertainment’s seven vocal works does survive—Paolo Grazi’s “Ecco ho sposa bramata alta regina,” an eight-voice madrigal tucked into four partbooks of Domenico Visconti’s Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1615). Its text is identical to that published in 1608, which musicians performed from the deck of the galley commanded by prince Cosimo, costumed as Jason. Grazi’s madrigal is reminiscent of an instrumental canzona, characterized by frequently repeated pitches and large leaps in individual voice parts, combined with metrical and textural contrasts. As befits a work conceived for an outdoor performance it relies more on broad textural events than subtle vocal writing. Yet its survival, along with my identification of its original performance context, sheds light not only on this specific work but on music for ephemeral entertainments more broadly, restoring sound to music whose existence otherwise ended with the final notes of a performance.

“But now I feel water is like tears, tears of nature.” So says composer Tan Dun about the exploitation and pollution of the environment which characterize the anthropocene. Unsatisfied with current environmental realities, Tan’s compositional practice is informed by his desire to seek balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. His “organic music” reaches towards this goal by exploring the acoustic range of objects from nature, such as rocks or water, and placing their soundings alongside human instruments. In this paper, I examine Tan’s Water Concerto (1998) through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) concept of becoming, arguing that Tan Dun’s piece creates an aesthetic space where humans and water are presented as one mutually dependent ecology. Engaging with Tan’s own statements, textual analysis, and recent scholarship (Morton, 2007; Gibson, 2018; Von Glahn, 2023), I contend that water’s aestheticization in Water Concerto marks it as an active agent and highlights the often-ignored role it plays in the (musical) environment, symbiotically existing alongside humans and nonhumans alike. The multiplicity of water is placed inside the multiplicity of the orchestra, making rigid distinctions impossible and provoking the audience to consider ecological chains where the human is no longer solely dominant.

D&G’s philosophy has much to offer as ecomusicology works to shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric understandings (Allen, 2021). While recent studies have explored Deleuze’s ecosophic understanding of music (Bogue, 2019), operatic performance art as a Deleuzian/Guattarian assemblage (Tiainen, 2020), and Guattari’s three ecologies in recent sound art (Solomos, 2023), investigating contemporary ecomusicological concerns through D/G philosophical concepts remains relatively under-explored. Adding to this conversation, I use Water Concerto as a springboard to gesture towards the wider relationship between D&G’s heterogeneous, changing rhizomatic systems and Jeff Todd Titon’s “music ecologies” (2023), as well as consider the political possibilities and conceptual limits of decentering the human in (eco)musical(ogical) practices within the framework of D/G territorializations and ethics. By critically attending to claims that music is capable of generating new emotions, knowledge, and affects and potentially inspiring political action, I attend to the potential dangers and outcomes of posthumanistic, ecological art and scholarship.