The Toop and Parkinson article “Unfinished Business: A Conversation on Sound Art in the United Kingdom” was quite an interesting article to read which mainly touches on things that helped develop sound art in the UK and thus common characteristics found in sound art from the UK.
One of the pieces that I found interesting was Gilbert and George’s “Singing Sculpture” from 1969. I found this work highly funny as the stilted performance was comical but reading the context of the piece in Toop and Parkinson’s does make me think about the temporal differences between my generation and the wartime generation. Examples being how my reaction would be quite “surface level” in comparison to someone from the wartime generation and how the live-performance aspect of the piece is not that novel/radical by today’s standards compared to the 1960s.
Singing Sculpture – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsuHpi2gcGY&ab_channel=CatherineHeard
Another aspect of the article that I found particularly interesting was the part about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Something I can never really understand is how much of a cultural monolith the BBC was in the past, which usually leads to me to downplay their effect on the development of electronic music, sound arts and music in general. I wish I could listen to the radio play “Prometheus Unbound” but I couldn’t find the audio on the internet.
The last part of the article that stood out for me was the part about the Austrian composer Anton Webern. Many of the compositions for the orchestra I found of his reminded me of music/sound for film as it felt quite disjointed and had such a clear narrative that lends itself to cinema.
One example of this being “Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30” (1940) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQdEMYTdEI&ab_channel=BartjeBartmans
I missed out a lot when reading the article as I am still finding new things as I am referencing it for this blog post, so I know the discussion on it is something to look forward to.
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