Sounds – Sounds – These are image sounds – sounds made just for sound itself.[1]
When New Zealand artist Len Lye branched out into kinetic sculpture in 1958, his conceptualization was intimately connected to music. In the same way that some dance can enhance the music that accompanies it, Lye proposed that his kinetic sculpture was also naturally suited to this function as, like dance, its foundation is movement (Lye 1958: 7). Witnessing Lye’s steel sculptures in motion is a highly corporeal experience, with the sounds produced by their movements a key element in their sensory impact and appeal. To further strengthen the affective qualities of his sculpture, over a span of ten years Lye carried out numerous experiments incorporating various techniques and technology from both music and film, culminating in the idea to record and make these new sounds available to musicians and composers as source material for their compositions. Focusing on a number of key events and a set of audio recordings held in the Len Lye Foundation Archive, this paper considers how, through such experiments, Lye was able to situate his motion composition outside the visual arts and within the field of music composition, to be viewed as “musical instruments rather than visual kinetic works of art” (Lye n.d.-a:8). When considered in relation to Lye’s achievements as a filmmaker and a sculptor, the audio recordings are easily dismissed as an interesting but isolated experiment. Driven by extensive primary research material, my aim here is to revisit and reappraise Lye’s experiments with sound, placing them within a critical framework informed by consideration of his working across the disciplines of experimental film, sculpture, and music.
Lye first developed his ideas about the relationship between music and movement while working in experimental cinema in 1930s London. Jack Ellitt, a trained musician, was an important collaborator during this time, composing and compiling music for many of Lye’s early films. Their first film – Tusalava (1928) – radically reoriented their respective approaches to working with celluloid and sound. For Lye, it marked the end of his exploration of conventional animation techniques in favor of less expensive and time consuming methods of ‘direct’ filmmaking, by means ofpainting, scratching, and stenciling directly on film. For Tusalava’s soundtrack, Ellitt had composed a complex piece for two pianos but abruptly withdrew as an accompanist upon finding out that only one piano would be provided for its live performance at the film’s premier. Scarred by this experience, Ellitt turned his focus to the creative opportunities afforded by new recording and editing technologies, which were opening up a world of sound unrestricted to conventional instruments.
Tusalava was to be the first of a trilogy; for its sequel – Quicksilver – Ellitt designed a soundtrack made from the sounds of wire brushes, drums, running water and high frequency electrical current. While pair worked intermittently on the film between 1930 and 1934, a lack of finances meant it was never completed. During this time, Ellitt also worked on several pieces that he later defined as “sound constructions.” Of these early sound constructions, only one has survived – Journey #1 – believed to be from the soundtrack for Quicksilver.
Comprising a collage of abstract, edited sound material, identified by Clinton Green as including field recordings, editing cuts, as well as drawn sound (Green 2011), Journey #1 signals an approach to working with recorded sounds as musical material as first outlined by Ellitt in his 1935 article "On Sound”: “Not only can one record anything which may be produced by acoustic or electro-acoustic means, but all world sounds of interest now come within a sphere of creative control which may be termed Sound-Construction” (Ellitt 1935: 1982).[2] Lye’s experience of working alongside Ellitt and the growing developments and discourses around recording technology provide the context within which Lye first formulated his ideas around an art of recorded sound. While it would still be some years before Lye himself would begin experimenting with recording technology, Ellitt’s influence on Lye is evident in Lye’s 1936 essay “Notes on a Short Colour Film” in which he writes of “a pure sound construction, perhaps in ranges of sound not yet made use of” (Lye 1936).
Alongside his independent projects with Ellitt, Lye supported himself by making short films for commercial sponsors such as the General Post Office Film Unit. Lye became known for his radically experimental approach to the promotion of sponsors’ products, with music an important influence on the formal qualities of Lye’s films, often serving to replace any narrative. Lye’s animated films of this period feature brightly-colored lines and abstract images moving in sync to popular dance and jazz tunes, distinguishing Lye from fellow pioneers of abstract filmmaking who tended to favor more conventional classical or orchestral music to accompany their films.[3] What drew Lye to this style of music, as well as the African drum music he used in his later films, was its physical resonance (O’Rawe 2012). In his films’ blend of movement, color, and music, Lye wanted to do more than just entertain the audience; he wanted to provide maximum sensory stimulation by appealing to the physical senses. Jazz music, through what Lye called it’s “strong pulsation or sensational element,” served to strengthen his colorful, abstract films’ affective qualities (Lye 1936).[4] His reasoning for combining music and sounds with abstract images, whether film or sculpture, was “that they were both forms of energy involving rhythm, harmonics, and vibrations” (Horrocks 2009).
This emphasis on kinesthetic experience was a distinguishing feature of Lye’s practice. In the same way that some music can inspire feelings of movement in audiences, Lye sought to activate and intensify movement in his viewers by means of what he called “direct bodily empathy.”[5] Lye’s concept of direct bodily empathy assumes an active audience, with the spectator directly experiencing his films’ and sculptures’ movements and impressions of energy and force through their own sense of movement, in the relaxation and tensions of their muscles. Though we may be sitting or standing quietly, we are nonetheless responding with all of our musculature. The combined impact of the fluctuations of a sculptures’ movement and sound has a significant impact on our kinesthetic experience. Hearing is physical, as Lye put it, “The vibrating steel gives forth such a sound that the very such of it sticks inside my balancing ear to the sounds of the bones in my body resonating back and forth to my skull” (Lye n.d.-a: 23). To better describe this multisensory emphasis, Lye conceptualized his kinetic constructions in terms of movement felt, calling them “Tangible Motion Sculpture” (also “tangibles” or “music tangibles”), rather than sculpture, which would imply static forms.
Lye’s shift away from film into kinetic sculpture presented Lye with the possibility of working with a new set of materials. Lye reached for things close at hand: flipping a piece of rope along the floor to make undulating shapes, bending a packing tie he had found on the street, trying out ways different movements could be made (Lye n.d.-a: 21).[6] Once he had decided on a shape or pattern that had physical resonance, Lye would proceed to strips and bands of metal. Working out how they should move and what shapes they should create was extremely physical, involving experimenting and playing with different materials – such as iron, aluminum, and brass, each with its own feel and “plasticity.” He developed a preference for Swedish spring steel: well-tempered yet firm and pliable. Using various types of motors, Lye experimented with the visual effects of different types of movement (Lye 1960: 4). All experiments were characterized by a remarkable resourcefulness and considerations of control, energy and expression. Lye’s biographer Roger Horrocks has described how Lye adapted a sanding machine with a flat plate so that it could hold a metal strip. This small motor or “vibration device” could shake metal more rapidly and with more force than his hand, to create a wider range of patterns or “figures of motion.”[7] To make sense of these new forms, Lye borrowed the rhetoric of music to describe both the shape and the characteristic of his sculptures’ movements – harmonics, resonances, time intervals or periods (of oscillations). Using rheostats and other such devices, Lye could vary the voltage and the speed of the motor to produce sequences of effects. Through such simple means of manipulation – and careful judgments of energy input, timing and coordination – Lye could produce a great variety of figures.
Lye’s awareness of the physical properties of pieces of steel – its weight, flexibility, and tensile strength – extended to his understanding of the link between these properties and their potential sounds and interactions with other surrounding materials and bodies. Lye developed a range of techniques to heighten the potential sound-producing qualities of his sculptures, including the use of bells and percussive “strikers.” Lye’s sculpture Blade is exemplary of such an approach: made from a strip of steel attached at one end to a motor that, when set in motion, moves back and forth, the steel bellies out, as the energy increases, to form a series of harmonic curves, coming into contact with a ball of compressed cork fitted to the end of a tempered steel rod. The “gong-like” sound this produces differs in tone and pitch according to the force with which the steel band hits the cork ball. Lye could control the rhythm by laterally moving the cork striker further from the steel blade or by lowering or raising its height. The higher the striker, the more spring and a slower rhythm – shorter, less spring and a faster rhythm. This change of “swing time” combined with variations in the oscillating force of the steel enabled a variety of rhythms (Lye n.d.-a: 10-13). It also added a random element to the performance – sonic effects are largely due to chance collisions.
This particular example provides a sense of how material the process of conceiving, constructing and nuancing could be, with Lye exploring the different qualities and combinations of movement and sound in full. Lye developed several kinetic sculptures based on the same principle but emitting different timbres and tones. Themselves the result of a series of experiments and chance occurrences, the sounds produced by his sculptures were at first taken on by Lye as by-products of the physical agitation of steel:
[W]ithout trying but 2 ½ dimensioning my kinetic steel figs what happened? Why, the other ½ (or maybe an extra quarter) dimension came out of its own accord, as sound. It came from the long quest for a kinetic material of the best alloy for oscillation without metal fatigue and for visual effect of sway, spin, feedback energy, vibration, and an exact perfect balance in terms of shape and the motions composed out of this metal it so happened emitted sound in the course of this action. (Lye n.d.-a: 20)
Though not Lye’s first or main concern, sound was intimately bound up with his material experiments, requiring specific decisions regarding impact and force, what sounds should be heard, and how they should strengthen the forms of movement and their affective qualities.
This awareness of the power of his sculptures’ movements to affect our sensory impulses in this way may explain why Lye wanted to synchronize his sculptures’ performances with recorded music. In his first public presentation of his “Tangible Motion Sculpture,” Lye scored ten of his sculptures’ performances with a selection of musical soundtracks. Presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the one-night-only performance on 5 April 1961 was a demonstration of his developing ideas about movement in art. Annotated drawings and notes show how Lye formulated their performance with obsessive precision, beginning with Roundhead, Grass,and Fountain; continuing with the film Free Radicals; and ending with the performance of Lye’s seven remaining sculptures, each with its own distinctive cycle of movements (Lye 1961). Typically, the individual performance of a sculpture lasts anywhere between 5-8 minutes, with the routines of many of the sculptures having a clear beginning, middle, and end, which slowly builds up to a final, dramatic climax.
Set amongst each other on the stage of the auditorium and activated at various intervals, over the duration of an hour Lye’s sculptures performed a sequence of movements, carefully set against the rhythmic fluctuations of a musical soundtrack.[8] He approached the relationship between image and music in his sculptures in the same manner as he had in his films, selecting soundtracks which shared an energy and sensory affinity with each sculpture so that their movements appeared synchronized. The move from sculpture to sculpture would have heightened the audience’s kinesthetic appreciation of the evolving movement, for example, the switch from the frantic shaking of Dancing Fountain (Fire Bush) to the controlled, graceful swaying of Grass, with the sound-track undergoing similar changes, from the energetic percussion of Afro-American drums, selected from the Folkways recording library, to the slow melody of Miles Davis “My Funny Valentine.” At the same time, and throughout the performance, while the sound-track created musical surroundings for each sculpture, the sculptures themselves also created unique sounds that acquired an enhanced sensual energy.
From this initial public performance, Lye continued to develop his ideas around sound and sculpture, broadening his areas of research to include not only the use of musical accompaniments but also audio recordings of the sculptures. An early mention of this appears in a typed manuscript entitled “Tangible Motion Sculptures,” a lengthy unpublished text outlining key components of Lye’s new art of motion, written in 1960 as he was making the transition to kinetic sculpture. It is an important document because it begins to articulate a set of fundamental ideas around his sculpture and sound works (Lye 1960). As part of his research into the potential of sound as integral to the composition (as opposed to serving simply as accompaniment), Lye proposed taping the sounds of his sculptures and playing them back with the “tangible action” (Lye 1960: 5). For an example of its potential application Lye turned to Grass, a sculpture comprising a double line of very fine steel rods known as “music wire” set in an oak plank.
The seesaw movement of the sculpture causes the rods to sway to and fro, touching one another and producing a gentle rustling sound. Rather than incorporating musical accompaniment, Lye suggested recording and editing the “music wire sounds” of Grass and playing the composition in counterpoint to the sounds of the live performance. Strategically placed speakers would be incorporated into the sculpture’s base, producing “an antiphonal blending of the total sound” (Lye 1960: 6). Although the appeal for Lye of working with audio recordings was based on its connection to the movement of his sculpture, this text shows Lye incorporating sound into the sculptures’ performance similarly to how he used music and beginning to think forward to the potential of using recordings independently from his sculpture.
Among Lye’s hoped-for results from this area of research was the collaboration of technicians and composers in the area of programming (Lye 1960: 6). Only a few years earlier Lye had worked with director Ian Hugo and his wife Anais Nin in producing the special effects for Bells of Atlantis (1952), a short film accompanied by music scored by composers and sound engineers Bebe and Louis Barron, pioneers in the field of electronic music. Using magnetized tape, the soundtrack’s structure, rhythm, and pitch were achieved using tape loops, echo, varispeed, and slicing (Brend 2012: 56-57). In much the same way, different movements and sounds were created by Lye with his sculptures: through careful programming, sound could be reversed, slowed down, accelerated, and layered with other sounds. At around the same time that the Barron’s were working on Bells of Atlantis, they were working also with John Cage on his tape music piece Williams Mix (1952), which premiered in March the following year at the University of Illinois Festival of Contemporary Arts. Although advances in electronics had brought interesting developments to sonic artistry, for the most part the best chance of hearing such new developments remained through television or on a film soundtrack (Brend 2012: 123).
In the wake of these developments in film and sound practice, it wasn’t until the 1960s that art galleries began to pay increasing attention to music, sound and movement in exhibitions, with sound, like movement, becoming recognized as a common element of the ephemeral experience of the art of the sixties. This was a productive period for Lye, who participated in several major exhibitions of kinetic art in the United States and Europe, his presentations becoming increasingly sophisticated.[9] In his first solo exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1965, Lye presented a performance, or rather a concert, with five of his kinetic sculptures: Sky Snake, Ritual Dance, Blade, Loop, and the debut of Trilogy (Flip and Two Twisters). Unlike the presentation at MoMA, all the works were on automated timers with continuous performances taking place throughout the day. Tribal drum beats accompanied Blade and Ritual Dance, augmenting the intensity of the sculptures’ movements and audiences’ empathetic responses to them as the sculptures became more and more frenzied. The exhibition showcased the larger acoustic range of Lye’s practice, from the “bell music” of Ritual Dance, to the “cascade of thundering sound” coming from the neighboring Flip and Two Twisters, ending with a “chorus” of all the sculptures performing together to what was described in the exhibition catalogue as their “self-generated music” (Howard Wise Gallery 1965).
In 1967, Lye was among a of group of artists, writers, and musicians invited to participate in a series of talks that aimed to demonstrate the breakdown of barriers between the arts and the integration of different disciplines and practices. Titled “Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” this series has gone largely undocumented, with the exception of a performance held at the YM-YWHA on 92nd St, New York City, called “TV Dinner: Homage to E.A.T. (Food for Thought).”[10] The evening functioned as much as a laboratory as it did a demonstration. It began with a performance by Merce Cunningham, followed by a screening of films by Lye and Stan VanDerBeek. A curtain then rose to show the group sitting at a table, eating a meal on stage as they talked. Forks, knives, plates, and glasses were all wired with contact mikes.[11] For “dessert,” as reported by John Perreault for the Village Voice, “Len Lye demonstrated his model for Jump-Fish – a thin band of metal that, when bent and released, flew up into the air, making a loud clanging sound. John Cage then improvised beautiful bell-like sounds by rubbing a contact mike along the suspended Jump-Fish” (Perreault 1967: 13).
The only documentation of Lye’s sculptures being used in such a way, this improvised performance opened up creative possibilities for Lye. Rubbing a contact mike along a strip of metal transformed it into a resonating ribbon with harmonious resonances. With the utilization of contact microphones, a twenty minute record could be produced from the sounds of a piece of metal in only one position. The pitch and overtones produced would alter, depending on the physical properties of the metal – its shape, size, and weight – and on where the microphone made contact (Lye n.d.-b: 4). Lye developed this idea even further, using taped recordings of the “Sounds of Len Lye Sculpture” as the basis for a “new range of timbres for music” (Lye n.d.-a: 21). The experience of working in film studios with their libraries of “sound effects” enabled Lye to imagine a “Timbre Centre,” purpose-built to house a library of taped resonances and timbres produced by his sculptures. These “instruments,” as Lye now referred to them, their notes and rhythms, would be “exploited” using contact mikes. In Lye’s system, the recordings’ harmonic and timing elements would be noted and subsequently catalogued, making it possible for musicians and composers to request specific recordings. With little in the way of infrastructure (or money) for producing or putting into practice such non-commercial ventures, the idea exists only on paper (Lye n.d.-a: 4). Although Lye had little experience of working with sound technology, such ideas demonstrate an appreciation of what these sounds might offer the composer, linking Lye’s own ideas of an art of recorded sound with those proposed in the 1930s by Jack Ellitt.
It was during a collaboration with Morton Subotnick in 1968 that Lye made the final transformation of his work from sound-producing sculpture to musical instrument.The two met at New York University’s School of the Arts (later named the Tisch School of the Arts) where they were both artists in residence. Subotnick had moved to New York from San Francisco where, with Ramon Sender, he had set up the San Francisco Tape Music Center and conceptualized the idea for the Buchla Series 100 (or “Buchla Box”), a modular electronic music system designed by Don Buchla (Brend 2012: 169-171). In New York, the university provided the resident artists with their own studios above the Bleecker Street Cinema.[12] At some point during the two years they were based there, Lye and Subotnick produced a recording of them performing, Subotnick on his synthesizer and Lye with his sculptures Blade and Twister.[13] The seven minute recording begins with a demonstration of the sounds of Blade and Twister,introduced by Lye himself, with the remaining four minutes an abstract arrangement of the sounds of Lye’s sculpture in musical composition with Subnotnick on his synthesizer, one playing after the other, without overlap or reference to one another (Lye and Subotnick c.1968).
Len Lye and Morton Subotnick, Manipulated Twister + Blade (+ Mort), c. 1967
Len Lye Foundation Archive and Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Lacking any visual reference that might reveal specific actions or even a sculpture, the recordings draw attention to the qualities of the sound itself, as sounds made just for sound itself (Lye n.d.-c).
As far as I can ascertain, Lye made recordings of his sculpture available to only one other person, composer Ann McMillan. A former assistant to composer Edgar Varèse and Fulbright Scholar under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, McMillan was interested in using natural sounds as a basis for compositions (McMillan 1970). She saw a deficiency in the range of sounds readily available to composers in electronic studios, which to her mind remained limited, in contrast to the creative opportunities afforded by recent developments in sound technology (McMillan 1968: 1). Carefully selected sounds, McMillan believed, would be of great interest to the composer, extending the range available (McMillan 1968: 1). McMillan and Lye shared this interest in making new sounds available to composers. Her recording Earth Song Metals (1976) is based entirely on the sounds of Lye’s sculpture (McMillan 1976).
Len Lye and Ann McMillan, Earth Song Metals Pt.1, c. 1976
Len Lye Foundation Archive and Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Compiled with the unfolding hammering sounds produced by Lye’s sculptures Blade and Universe, punctuated with the twisting, torqueing sound of Twister, McMillan manipulated and organized the source material to produce a hauntingly strange composition.[14]
There would be no further recordings or collaborations after Earth Song Metals.[15] By 1976, Lye had stopped producing kinetic sculpture and, during the two years following a diagnosis of leukemia, would refocus attention on his unfinished experimental films of the 1950s. With the scratch film Particles in Space (1957/1980), Lye comes full circle. Accompanied by a “cut and paste” soundtrack that draws upon recordings of his sculpture Storm King (1964) and African drumming, Particles in Space represents not only a return to the sphere of film, but the culmination of Lye’s work in sculpture and sound.[16] By using sounds produced by his kinetic sculpture as the basis of the film’s soundtrack, Particles in Space reaffirms Lye’s contextualization of these sounds in a musical context. Lye’s early experience working in film and his collaborations with composers such as Jack Ellitt had a clear influence on Lye’s later explorations and understanding of his kinetic sculptures as instruments whose sounds could be captured and used by composers as source material. While analyses of Lye’s sculpture have tended to focus on visuality and “figures of motion,” by the end of the 1960s sound production and recording were arguably at the forefront of Lye’s concerns. This new research into Lye’s experiments with sound makes it possible to place Lye within a generation of composers and artists who produced work which extended beyond established conventions and boundaries, opening a new evaluation of his work in terms of sound art and music. As Ralph Coe, curator of Sound Art Silence, wrote in 1966, “One of the true visionary artists of this era, Lye has a gift for handling sounds in terms of mounting crescendo, as definitive patterns of change and diminution – to explore sonics in all dimensions – that remains without parallel” (Coe 1966: 12).
References
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Birtwistle, Andy (2016b). “Photographic Sound Art and the Silent Modernity of Walter Ruttmann’s ‘Weekend’ (1930)’.” The New Soundtrack 6/2: 109-27.
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Brend, Mark (2012). The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music was Smuggled into the Mainstream. London: Bloomsbury.
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Fetterman, William (2010). John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. New York: Routledge.
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Green, Alan (1996). Allen Sapp: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
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Horrocks, Roger (2017). “From Jazz to ‘Sound Construction’.” In Paul Brobbel, Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), The Long Dream of Waking (pp. 143-160). Canterbury: Canterbury University Press.
Howard Wise Gallery (1965). Exhibition invitation for “Bounding Steel Sculpture.” New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (n.d.-a). “My glimpse of the genetic in music resonance” (unpublished manuscript). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (n.d.-b). “Introduction to ‘Sounds of Len lye Sculpture’” (unpublished manuscript). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (n.d.-c). “Tapes of Tangibles” (unpublished notes). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (1936) “Notes on a Short Colour Film.” Republished in Wystan Curnow and Rogers Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings (pp. 49-51). Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Lye, Len (1958). “Music and Movement” (unpublished manuscript). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (1960). “Tangible Motion Sculptures” (unpublished manuscript). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (1961). Programme Notes for “Tangible Motion Sculpture” (unpublished notes and drawings). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Lye, Len (1984). “Beginnings.” In Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye selected writings (pp. 31-2). Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Lye, Len (2005). Composing Motion: The Sound of Tangible Motion Sculpture [CD]. Atoll.
Lye, Len and Morton Subotnick (c. 1968). Manipulated Twister + Blade (+ Mort) (unreleased ¼” open reel audio recording). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
McMillan, Ann (1968). “Project Description: New Worlds of Sound Discovered Through Modern Technology” (unpublished manuscript). New York: American Craft Council Library & Archives.
McMillan, Ann (1970). “Curriculum Vitae” (unpublished). New York: American Craft Council Library & Archives.
McMillan, Anne (1976). Earth Song Metals Pt.1 (unreleased ¼” open reel audio recording). New Plymouth: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.
Museum of Contemporary Crafts of the American Crafts Council (1970). Sound (exhibition catalogue). New York: Museum of Contemporary Crafts of the American Crafts Council.
O’Rawe, Desmond (2012). “(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29: 64-75.
Perreault, John (1967). Village Voice 12/21: 13.
Plantinga, Carl (2009). Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Source (1970). https://archive.org/details/SRC_1970_XX_XX_5
With thanks to those who have assisted in my research, including the American Craft Council Library & Archives, New York; The Museum of Arts and Design (previously the Museum of Contemporary Crafts), New York; and the Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Vienna.