Horror Vacui

by Dajuin

How can a concert of solid works composed by GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales) members and flawlessly diffused by a professional GRM composer on a high quality 8-channel speaker system that superbly projected the spatialization of Christian Zanesi’s Schaefferian train in a magnificent concert hall possibly go wrong? Six works by GRM composers including such luminaries as Francois Bayle, Christian Zanesi, and Daniel Teruggi were presented at MusicAcoustica 2006 at the Central Conservatory on Oct 24. Somehow, this supposedly foolproof GRM-style acousmatique concert managed to be presented in a manner that we have never experienced before.

Instead of printed brochures, the audience had to read bilingual artist biographies and program notes on a huge projection screen on stage. This clever and thoughtful idea turned sour as the audience realized that the projector was left turned on for the entire duration of the concert. Neither my composer friend Lydia Ayers (former professor at Hong Kong University of Technology) nor myself had ever seen any electroacoustic/acousmatic concert presented in this way, as most of the audience ended up staring at the projected text or trying to comprehend the English during the whole show.

What can be more ironic? The very core of the concept of the acousmatique, which the GRM literally re-invented and have heralded for about half a century, is to disconnect the sight of the sound source from the aural perception, so as to focus our attention on the sound objects themselves. Although strictly speaking, the program notes are not the source of the sounds; nevertheless, it is visual distraction that has been avoided like a plague in concerts of this nature. On a deeper level, are not the forced visibility of biography of the artist and the genesis and description of the piece, and even the listing of the sound sources themselves equally “anti-acousmatic”?

That evening’s GRM concert felt more like watching a silent film made from English and Chinese text stills with soundtrack, or, a lecture on the current state of GRM with sound examples. Even if the audience wanted to close their eyes and enjoy a true acousmatic concert, the after-vision of bright yellow text on black background were still visible after the eyelids were closed.

Not only that, there were some unfriendly applause from the audience at several points when agitating music was quieting down in the pieces.

These phenomena point to a deeper issue of horror vacui, an art historical term referring to the fear of empty spaces in visual designs. The horror vacui that ran deep under the surface of the concert that night was not only visual, as indicated by the former phenomenon, but also aural, as indicated by the latter.

For the former, I have come up with a wonderful excuse for the concert organizer – that this year’s theme of MusicAcoustica is indeed “language,” therefore listening to GRM works while checking out the English-Chinese translation of program notes was only fitting, not to mention its educational value for Chinese students of music, who really need to sharpen their foreign language skills.

As for the latter, I am as clueless as the unfriendly applauding audience.




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  1. 新浪为这次音乐节做的专题，各位请看：http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/y/06acoustica/index.shtml

    Comment by lowercase — October 27, 2006 #

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