Apparatus and voice: this is no piano
In this context, Ruta Baciulyte and Ruta Gostautiene suggested a specific weaving pattern named “ruta” (Ruta / rue) that refers to a perennial plant having a strong, heavy odour and a bitter taste; also known as a ‘herb of grace’. In Lithuania, this pattern was imbued with different meanings, such that over the course of time it has as well routed through gardens and common language to become an icon representing virginity and femininity, despite the reputed efficiency of the plant in inducing abortions.
Apparatus, tool, instrument
Ruta Remake is a comprehensive process involving the gathering and organisation of what has been collected. Yet that collection is inevitably contemporary, hybrid, impure and mixed. Collection is made of voices, vestiges of tradition, and they are composed in accordance with a pattern defined by the very plant that lends its name to the title of the work, a pattern whereby different levels of voice will be interwoven to form a fully meaningful song. It is not just any pattern, nor so the different songs forthcoming, it is a pattern stemming from a tradition that has framed a space for the muting of women’s voices that understands the weaving as writing, that is followed by singing as way of story telling.
The organisation of what has been collected, in principle, has nothing in common with the standard features of a “scientific” study and they all have something to do with detachment from one’s own close reality. The objectified outcome of Ruta Remake is an apparatus, an electronic instrument, the Theramidi.
All apparatus, tool or instrument is, in itself, a true reflection of the way in which those who created it understood their reality – any one of them is a text waiting to be read and culturally interpreted, for it has been inscribed with the selfsame roots of the way in which the human being intended to create or interpret reality with it. The Theramidi has two peculiarities: on the one hand, an interpretation of the apparatus itself has already been provided and it is not merely circumstantial: to explain how it comes to be built lies at the heart of the Ruta Remake project and the very authors of the project include it in its installation; just as a musical instrument obliges the musician not only to understand how it is played but also to know as much as possible about its origin, the origin of the pattern that combines the voices and the origin of the voices themselves, otherwise the result would simply be noise, albeit a pleasant one. As a cultural object, it raises something that everyone has in common to its ultimate consequences: it is a perfect example of its time. The Theramidi is the translation of problems from a specific time and place into the language of “luthier”, yet the luthier, in this case, is aware that the creation of an instrument is not an innocent and naïve act, and consciously introduces symbolic, sociological and political variables into the internal structure of the same. It is no longer a technological experiment that may be analysed from afar like the Theremin, it is a veritable discourse on a time and a problem: the role of women’s voices in a culture, Lithuanian, where, once again, in the words of the authors of Ruta Remake, Lithuanian-patriarchal tradition has framed a space for muting of women’s voices that understands the weaving as writing, that is followed by singing as way of story telling. This performative aspect was employed by ideologies to make the women’s voice represent the motherland, or later to signify the consumer society.
Whereas with a piano each movement of the hand corresponds to a combination of hammer blows on certain strings, with the Theramidi each hand-gesture triggers a different combination of voices and songs stored in the computer, and that combination is created according to the pattern chosen, namely that of Ruta. If playing the piano requires a certain degree of ability – some skill and a music sheet – playing the Theramidi simply requires casting the shadow of one’s hands over a table with two sensors. Yet in order to ensure the Theramidi is not “out of tune”, as much as possible needs to be known about its origin. It is an instrument that requires one to know its history and its development so that its sonorous result may be interpreted. The piano is an object that is at one with its own purpose. As an object, it bears the inscription of its own history, yet to analyse that inscription and imbue it with awareness is of no relevance either to the music produced or to the person playing or listening. It is precisely the cultural inscription consciously inscribed upon the apparatus-instrument, the Theramidi, that concerns us, giving meaning to the sounds it emits and converting it into an instrument of knowledge. The aesthetic experience of any classical instrument is forthcoming from the instrument itself and from the score that is interpreted with greater or lesser success: in the case of the Theramidi that experience is fundamentally and consciously provided by the cultural codes inscribed in it, codes that are wrapped around the sound the apparatus is capable of producing.
Voice
A score and a pattern have a deep-seated common purpose: the repeated and accurate repetition of the same pieces, musical in the case of the former and involving fabric in the latter. Both are models of what is to be performed.
It would take centuries for songs or chanting to have a clear system of musical notation, transcribing this whole set of expressions onto paper, in other words, giving them material form. Prior to this, whatever was to be interpreted more than once had to be consigned to memory and constantly repeated, otherwise it was condemned to fade in time or, in the best of cases, become subject to unforeseeable variations or to the whims of memory and forgetfulness. It is a well-known fact that for centuries Christians interpreted their liturgical music from memory and thus it was passed down from one generation to the next, until the first notations appeared within the religious domain of the monasteries. If the purpose, or at least one of the purposes, of those notations was to spread Christian monotheism amongst polytheists and animists – that is, the search for a single perspective on what song should be – there is no doubt that role, register and control became, as in so many other cases, once again reunited in an exemplary manner. The aim was to instil a single manner of proceeding, a single pattern and a single truth: to do so, the monks invented those first systems of notation, the first depictions or records with which to avoid those variations or whims of memory. The notation was simple, based on the acute, grave and circumflex accents employed in the written language. The stave was obviously not used, although the horizontal lines would gradually begin to appear to facilitate reading: first one, then another and finally up to five. Time would pass, but eventually even a pause would be harnessed, the absence of sound would be noted down and the interpreter would know when a breath should and could be taken, when permission was granted, or perhaps the requirement made, to remain silent. Without going any further into this genealogy of musical notation, it should not be forgotten what it was, and still is today: a convention designed for the correct repetition of the piece, song or chant interpreted, to avoid digressions in meaning and to force an almost uniform sound and narrative.
Naturally enough, this convention was not to remain intact – but rather like any rule – it would undergo changes and even face direct challenges, although all these would be condemned to the status of exceptions that confirm the rule. Its cracks would be explored by creators and authors striving to uphold the system of notation as part of the piece and not a necessary evil or an element to be taken for granted.
Many centuries after those early notations, sound can now be recorded, and nothing better than this recording to ensure that sound is always repeated as it should be and the interpreter never makes a mistake. Perhaps playback in song is the furthest extreme of the media-induced fear of a voice that rises out of the blue or of the possibility that memory or simply the human factor may be found wanting. All levels of human voice in public will be touched by this recording malady: not only song, but also the straightforward spoken language may be repeated as many times as required with nothing being changed, without the speaker erring, or even doing away with the speaker entirely and modifying the voice to suit the taste of the one holding the recording. There is nothing better than recording a voice to ensure it remains silent. RASA KALINAUSKAITE, a journalist from Vilnius, and one of the participants in the interviews with women that underpin the origin of Ruta Remake, describes it thus:
Sometimes I think, that when I work for the radio nowadays, when I construct voices by myself, because later, when you record voices, a montage is done, and the main thing, performed by you – you cut out pauses. It seems to me, that if we consider voice as a construct of modern epoch, that is the voice without pauses. These days, people avoid pauses, they fear pauses. Because voice without pauses is information and the more information, the more it is valuable. Although I think that the voice principally resists such castration, as perhaps the most valuable elements are sighs, natural inhalations, exhalations, some kind of bodily physiology, everything what is inclusive in pauses. While, during the montage, especially if it is done by someone else, not by you, these pauses are most often removed. You just observe it how physically bits of voice, in this case – the tape are cut out. The voice is no longer there…
With recorded voice, the pattern, the score, disappears and by being recorded and modulated it becomes an example. Consider a mother’s voice, a young woman’s voice, as examples to be followed.
This is no piano
The raw material of the Ruta Remake is what is referred to as the Voice Archive, a collection of female voices taken from the Lithuanian mass media during the Soviet era. They are all examples, voices that no longer required a score because they had been previously modulated, recorded and subsequently broadcast and repeated. These are the sounds that create the possible pieces of Ruta Remake. They are typical, exemplary utterances, modulated in accordance with a cultural ideal they represent. They are just as conventional and cultural as the notes drawn from a piano, notes that are the result of a search for pure and ideal sounds, leading over the centuries to the fine-tuning of the technical mechanism that caused the strings to vibrate. The voices of Voice Archive are also ideals, yet they are sounds controlled and constructed by recording tools. The politics or the poetics that gave rise to them are not inscribed in the technical ability to fine-tune a note, but rather in the ideological scope for modulating reality by means of technological recording and registering skills in which acknowledgement is made of their ideal, exemplary and totalitarian nature.
The history behind the design of the piano involves the perfecting of a mechanism that stands between fingers and strings, in reality between fingers and potential sound, between the sound that has been sought and forged for centuries. The Theramidi is an intermediate space between our hands and the ideal, modulated and accomplished voices of an era, voices preserved thanks to the actual recording that constructs them, voices moulded not by means of technique, skill or dexterity, but rather by means of the control mechanisms for public, recorded voice that have prevailed in modern times.
We are dealing with a veritable herbarium of voices taken from the artificial environment of the Soviet-Lithuanian media, and, as with any herbarium, each specimen defines an ideal type. This herbarium of sound, and the manner in which its specimens are gathered, constitutes the point of departure for any piece to be interpreted with the Theramidi. The entire project is an exercise of stepping into the unknown regarding what is one’s own, and long-standing taxonomical rules, the simple compilation of the herbarium and traditional mapping techniques defined by the need for territorial control are of little use for addressing it. Other apparatuses, other graphic mechanisms are required for a closer approach to our societies and their underlying problems. Human beings have invented and constructed myriad devices for measuring and depicting reality, from the astrolabe to cameras mounted on satellites, including all nature of devices and utensils, whilst at the same time creating patterns with which to explain and understand almost everything, patterns for making tools or patterns provided by those same tools. The much-vaunted DNA – which culminates the positivist ideal of identification and identity – and the way in which it is obtained, is nonetheless fascinating as a method of notation and representation. From the photographic image of the sample obtained in a laboratory through to the combinations of the letters GATC, a scientific route is followed that ends up with a notation, a series of letters that by common accord we come to understand as defining us. Do, Re, Mi or G A T C. Both sequences share the common denominator of being conventional translations of a “reality” into a language of letters and spaces, of a way of understanding the world that for centuries has been seeking patterns with which to portray itself, control itself and disclose information about itself.
Ruta Remake imposes its own convention, its own pattern, its own series of combinations and it is a pattern that does not conceal its conventional nature, quite the contrary, it displays precisely how conventional its choice is as a fundamental part of the discourse it generates.
Ruta Remake deals with the absence of voices amongst Lithuanian women in a man’s world from the very roots of the mechanisms that control the presence, absence, modulation, form and expression of the voice, that is, from the recording of those voices. It involves the way in which they are assembled, introducing an interval that is vital for the voice, as sound or as song, to have meaning. It does not do so under the pretence of political activism, but instead employs the artist’s tools, reformulating the manner in which access is made to those voices, and directly acting upon the conventions that for years and years have assembled, organised and controlled sound. The apparatus becomes an instrument of reflection and portrayal of a specific, Lithuanian, reality. The pattern that controls the combination of voices is consciously full of meaning. The initial requirement, to find a pattern that combines the different levels of register, is in itself a profoundly artistic decision: the long-standing tradition regarding the construction and choice of patterns is remove from its context and rendered as another feature of the work’s medium. Furthermore, the choice made to underpin that pattern is a plant that throughout the ages has symbolised maturity in women, the passage from childhood to womanhood, being used to cure female ailments, to induce miscarriages, to preside over ceremonies, in other words, for all that has traditionally been seen and construed as a woman’s domain. Nothing could be further from the search for a scientific pattern with which to measure the tempo of song, its pauses and the superimpositions of voice. There is no music sheet for this instrument, only a mixing pattern that buries its roots into the actual processes of creation of the female identity through its voices. A pattern for the contemporary mixing of voices recorded and controlled during Lithuania’s Soviet era.
Voices that lie behind one’s own identity.
Jorge Blasco Gallardo
Barcelona, April 2005.