Over the previous 20 years, Brian Harnetty has labored extensively with sound archives to provide a variety of interdisciplinary artistic tasks. Ranging from the Little Cities Archives (Shawnee, Ohio), to the Creative Audio Archives (Chicago), to the Berea Sound Archives (Kentucky), his tasks create “archival performances” that invite audiences to pay attention carefully to the subtler frequencies of creative musicians, places, and communities. His newest album, Words and Silences: From the Hermitage Tapes of Thomas Merton (2022, Winesap Information), strikes a contemplative be aware by remixing recordings the Cistercian monk made in solitude in Louisville, Kentucky, with newly composed music. We caught up with Harnetty to speak about his artistic observe, this newest venture, and his upcoming live shows.
Are you able to describe the way you outline “archival efficiency,” and the way this idea has formed your analysis, listening, and inventive practices throughout your profession?
I’ve a very broad definition of an archival efficiency: any interpretive act associated to an archive. Principally, this might embrace any artistic and significant re-imagining of archival supplies into music and sound tasks. However it might additionally imply writing, historiography, visible tasks, and even the act of listening. All of these items are subjective, artistic interpretations of the fabric. On this manner, an archive turns into a type of instrument, and to make one thing new from it’s to carry out historical past.
Alongside the identical strains, I outline “archives” broadly, too. Historically, they’re regarded as top-down, bureaucratic, and linked to an establishment. However I’m extra fascinated with small, community-based archives, or perhaps a easy assortment of objects.
For instance, I consider my dad’s workbench — with its instruments, outdated radios, data, typewriter elements, and arranged junk — as a type of casual, private archive, a fabric reflection of his thoughts. After I take heed to and document these objects and their static, hum, scratch, and glow, I’m performing them.
For the previous 20 years I’ve been working with archival supplies like this, and with extra formal archives, too. I work with the communities linked to those archives, from mining cities in Appalachian Ohio to the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives in Chicago. I develop long-term relationships with neighborhood members, which assist form the music, sound artwork, and writing that I do.
What drew you to Thomas Merton? And what alternatives and challenges arose as you explored his recordings and archival supplies for Phrases and Silences?
I first learn Thomas Merton as a youngster. I used to be drawn to his solitude and silence, and to his skill to attach with completely different individuals, cultures, and contemplative practices around the globe. In his late journals, I noticed {that a} playful uncertainty and curiosity had changed the conviction of his youth. In 2017, I made a decision to go to the Thomas Merton Archives in Louisville, hoping to seek out recordings that may mirror this openness. There, the archivist pointed me to a set of unpublished recordings Merton made within the solitude of his hermitage. Instantly, I used to be struck by their candor and intimacy. I instantly knew there was a sonic venture there, one that would pair these recordings with new music as an archival efficiency.
Each a serious problem and alternative to the sort of venture is time (5 years glided by quick!). It’s necessary for me to analysis and perceive the fabric as greatest I can, and likewise develop relationships with people who find themselves linked to the archival supplies. On this case, the relationships embrace archivists and students, in addition to assembly one of many monks who knew Merton, Brother Paul Quenon (by the way, Brother Paul was the one who gave Merton the recorder to make use of in his hermitage). These relationships assist remind me that the recordings in an archive are something however abstractions; they’re linked to residing individuals at this time, who knew and have been pals with Merton. This information adjustments my relationship with the supplies; it informs what recordings I take advantage of, and the way I take advantage of them. It additionally informs how I write the music, and what compositional choices I make. It’s a sluggish and arduous course of, however one constructed on belief, which is crucial for the way I work.
One factor I really like concerning the album is the dynamic interaction between Merton’s commentary and the music. How did Merton’s use of the tape recorder as a “artistic contemplative device” for “experimental religious observe” inform the music on Phrases and Silences?
Earlier than receiving the tape recorder, Merton had already been experimenting with poetry, portray, and pictures. I admired that sense of openness and playfulness, and the way he didn’t appear to thoughts if he made errors. I feel he was fascinated with discovering as some ways as he may to disclose one thing inside himself, and to seek out methods to deeply join with the world. So, after I heard these tapes, they felt like a pure extension of that observe, now centered on a brand new medium.
In Phrases and Silences, I let this openness inform the venture. I started with cautious, shut, and repeated listening to Merton’s recordings, in addition to the music he beloved all through his life. I then made transcriptions of each the tapes and music. This turned the sonic materials that I labored with. I additionally paid consideration to further data on the tapes — sounds of a ticking clock, birds, or the pacing and emotion in Merton’s voice — as glimmers and clues of how you can make the music complement the phrases. I created a sonic house for Merton’s voice to inhabit; a comparatively static world that interacts with the phrases but additionally will get out of the best way to let Merton’s feelings and curiosity stay within the forefront.
Brian Harnetty and ensemble performing reside on the Tecumseh Theater in Shawnee, Ohio–Photograph by Kevin Davison
The wealthy essays that accompany the album define a number of tensions you skilled through the composition course of. Why was it necessary to share these struggles, resembling composing in solitude, or deciding whether or not to make use of a few of Merton’s recordings?
I can discover issues in writing that I can’t (or don’t wish to) in music. I like interdisciplinary tasks, and the way the lenses of music, writing, video, and sound can inform a venture from completely different views. Right here, the writing course of was much less about evaluation, and extra centered on documenting my means of working with the tapes. It’s not straightforward to write down about sound! So, I got down to describe the sounds as greatest I may, and likewise describe how they affected me. I used the ethnographic writing expertise that I’ve developed for analysis and utilized them to my very own course of and work.
Merton’s recordings are very wealthy and sophisticated, and like his writing, they’ll stand on their very own. I wished my strategy to this materials to strike a stability between providing context for his phrases, but additionally to keep away from being too didactic or dogmatic. I’m extra fascinated with opening up and letting go, as an alternative of defining and boxing in. Each the music and the essay allowed me to do that in numerous methods. For instance, in “Who Is This I?” the music helps reveal the deep emotion current in Merton’s wavering voice. After which within the essay I used to be capable of supply context round this second, as a part of understanding Merton’s innermost voice and unsure self. These completely different approaches allowed me to discover the strain between Merton’s fluency as a author — the place it feels so certain of itself — and the human, affective, and susceptible qualities of the recordings.
This multi-faceted venture additionally consists of reside performances, together with one at Ohio State College’s Wexner Heart for the Arts on November 9. Why is presenting the album “reside” an necessary a part of an archival efficiency venture?
I see a reside efficiency as a solution to convey archival supplies out from the basement and into the world. It’s a solution to give the recordings a brand new life and context. I additionally see archival recordings as items. Very similar to oral histories or folks tunes, their energy lies of their trade and retelling, which is sure up with my very own subjective interpretation and likewise an archival stewardship. I’m a fan of the writer Lewis Hyde, who talks of the “present financial system,” the place the sharing of items shouldn’t be transactional, however relational. It’s this circulation and motion that I’m after in a reside efficiency.
One other necessary side to my work is having a powerful connection to position. For Phrases and Silences, it’s a sense of Merton’s hermitage in rural Kentucky. For the efficiency on the Wexner Heart, we’re together with lengthy, contemplative video pictures of the hermitage, to assist the viewers get a way of how Merton lived there. To my thoughts, the place turns into an integral a part of the venture.
This summer season, I traveled to the hermitage to document a solo efficiency. Whereas acting on Merton’s entrance porch, a storm got here in. Every little thing turned darkish, and the sound of wind within the timber took over the recording. It actually felt like I used to be interacting with the place! It was such a profound expertise that I made a decision to convey the whole ensemble down with me to the hermitage in November to movie and carry out inside. The hermitage’s acoustics and environmental sounds — that are already current within the Merton tapes — may also grow to be part of the efficiency. And once more, performing on the Hermitage additionally completes the circle of the present trade, as we will return the venture to the place it started, and share it with individuals who knew Merton personally.
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