2. A Bridge Runs Through It: Frances White and Centre Bridge

For Frances White, the first walk across the bridge between Stockton, New Jersey and Solebury Township, Pennsylvania was quite uneventful: ‘I didn't particularly notice anything!!!’ she reports, in an interview I conducted with her via email (White Reference White2010).Footnote 2 Following a return visit to the same spot a year later, however, White notes that her perception of the bridge had completely changed. To her great surprise, she had not heard, on that first visit, the unique sounds that would ultimately inspire the composition of Centre Bridge. White writes ‘I kept asking myself “how could I not have heard this?” ’ and she continues, ‘that second time [visiting the bridge] I immediately knew there was a piece there’ (White Reference White2010). The piece White refers to is Centre Bridge, composed in 1999 for two shakuhachi and electronic accompaniment. Even after Centre Bridge was completed, White's relationship to the bridge and its sounds continued to evolve: ‘I realized that there was also the string piece there’ (here she refers to Centre Bridge (Dark River), composed in 2001 for string quintet and tape) and goes on, ‘I have the feeling there may well be other bridge pieces in my future – sometimes I listen to the bridge, or to my recordings, and think “you know, I'd never have to write another note in my life! I could just transcribe this beautiful bridge music!” ’ (White Reference White2010). Clearly, the listening experience on the bridge between Solebury and Stockton had a lasting impact on White. How this impact is articulated musically in the first of the Centre Bridge works is the subject of the following discussion.

White describes the electronic accompaniment in Centre Bridge as taking on the role of the river (White Reference White2010). In Centre Bridge (Dark River) she uses the literal sound of water, transformed as the piece goes on but recognisable as water nonetheless. In the case of the earliest Centre Bridge composition, however, rather than build a sense of the river from literal water, White recasts the fundamental voice of the bridge (the hum of cars passing on a metal grate roadway) into the role of the powerful, separating river. The timbrally rich, drone-like electronic accompaniment to the piece is comprised of one continuous recording of cars crossing the bridge, to which, White admits, she probably made some edits to highlight the pervasive sense of counterpoint created as cars approach, pass and leave the bridge in opposing directions (White Reference White2010). The sounds are filtered and processed in such a way as to erase any audible sense of source, leaving behind spectral traces of the original that suggest something humming, floating, vibrating, quivering and distant. The swells and fades of cars remain audible in the form of muted slow surges that build and fall in varying densities and intensity throughout the twelve minutes of music that comprise the work (Sound example 1).

At approximately five-and-a-half minutes into the piece (in other words, just before the mid-point of the work) a very low drone centred around G sounds beneath the texture and persists for about two minutes.Footnote 3 Preceding the onset of this drone is a series of two-, three- and four-note descending, melodic phrases that emerges from the tape part like a highly distorted, reverberant tremolo floating above the body of the sound. Once the low drone is established, similar melodic phrases, accompanied by large dynamic swells, occur several more times. The entire passage, roughly three minutes in duration, is unique in the piece. The moment is further distinguished from the material that preceded it and that which follows by the appearance, in both shakuhachi parts, of a fluttering glissando effect (tamane) that features a prominent onset of sound followed by a rapid descent in both pitch and volume. The shakuhachi voices engage here in a kind of timbrally mimetic counterpoint with the electronic accompaniment that serves to create both a sense of reflection (as one might hear when shouting across the banks of a river) and expansion (a useful metaphor in considering the view of the riverscape afforded by arrival at the centre of the bridge). There is also the fact that the sound of the shakuhachi begins here to sound quite a bit like the passing whir of cars speeding across a metal bridge (Sound example 2).

White's treatment of the electronic accompaniment throughout this passage, integrated with very idiomatic writing for the shakuhachi, establishes the role of the bridge as something much larger than its physical manifestation as the connecting point between the two shores. The listener's attention is directed away from the idea of a literal bridge, much as the distinction between the shakuhachi and the electronic accompaniment is blurred by the pairing of the tamane effect, the fluttering melodic descents in the tape and the pervasive drone beneath it all. The listener is drawn into a more ephemeral and holistic experience of the riverscape, of which the bridge is just one part. As the midway point of the piece arrives, so does a musical climax built around a convergence of melody and drone, conveyed through intricate interaction between the two live instruments and their electronic counterpart. The section draws to a close as the tape's low drone and singing, melodic upper lines meet at a four-note cluster centred around B, several octaves above the drone on G with which the section began, yet a perfect fourth lower than a similar cluster heard in the first half of the work. Such an arrival serves to further complicate the notion of river and bridge as separate entities. Through a simultaneous ascent from the depths of a low drone and the falling melodic fragments and repeated fluttering tamane effects, the unity of the riverscape as a total site of sensory experience is made manifest.

In another interesting twist on the role of the bridge in this work, White uses transcriptions of the recordings she made at Centre Bridge (transposed to accommodate instrumental ranges) to develop the two shakuhachi parts, which in the final form of the piece suggest the banks on either side of the river (Sound example 3). Additionally, in the performance notes White indicates that playback of the electronic accompaniment should be located in a different space from the two players, who should also be separated in space from one another and ‘face each other and play to each other, over the distance’ (White Reference White2007). The implied distance here is the space dividing the two banks of the river, far below the surface of the bridge. In her sourcing of the bridge recordings for both the electronic accompaniment and the instrumental voices, White has, in essence, called forth and sonified everything that surrounds the bridge, without explicitly creating a voice for the bridge itself. Although the title and her initial listening experience relate specifically to a notable feature of the bridge, White has made the choice to shift thematic focus away from the bridge itself, concentrating instead on what that sound experience defines. Without a river and two opposing riverbanks, there would be no bridge, yet, in this case, without the bridge (specifically, without White's recordings and personal experience of the bridge), there is nothing. In her programme notes for the work, White addresses this in the following way:

That White had such an insight, standing atop a bridge spanning an American river made famous for its historical crossings, is an intriguing irony that is, perhaps, not all that surprising. That she was able to articulate such insight through a reworking of sound recordings, resulting in a total transformation of the actual sound of one site into the imagined sound of everything surrounding that site is, for this author, quite an extraordinary feat.

Through her compositional engagement with the bridge recordings – a technical engagement, drawing out elements of form, melody, harmony, counterpoint and timbre – White has managed to achieve a sense of expressivity and poetic image inspired by her very personal aural journey over the bridge. The identification of the bridge as the source of the work is not critical to her, however. Of greater concern is this sense of journey, not only of encounter, but also of transformation. When asked if she is trying, in this and other of her works, to convey a sense of her personal experience as a listener, White states that certain sonic experiences are ‘resonant’ with something inside her. She describes these experiences as doorways, leading her into what eventually becomes the musical world of a composition.

White's thoughtful articulation of the distinction between one's experience as a listener and one's experience as a composer is critical to this discussion and sheds new light on ways that composers might engage a more dynamic relationship between perceptual experience and creativity. My work has shaped itself mainly around the exploration of the space between my own listening experience and the listening experiences of audience members hearing or participating in my performances. I've never thought to add a separate step for my experience as a composer. I've approached this in a lot of different ways, through electronic compositions, acoustic pieces, site-specificity, performance art, radio, and so on. But it's actually never occurred to me that I might, usefully, separate my experience from my process – articulating experiential and aesthetic ideas born of listening, through technical and compositional devices at a distance from the original aural encounter. To do so feels a little like breaking the rules, not being true to the original sound and my experience of it. In fact, I've often had the sense, at the point in my own process where the original aural experience is but a shadow, and I begin to remake the experience in my mind, that I've failed. Coming at it from an entirely different perspective, however, White characterises this moment in the evolution of a piece as the time when she begins to internalise the initial listening experience, a stage that she says ‘seems to me like finding, rather than making … this is when the piece comes alive’ (White Reference White2010).

Throughout White's work, one encounters compositional techniques that allow for the transformation of the sensory, psychological, emotional and spiritual. White develops ‘tracings’ of her source recordings, mapping spatial and temporal gestures in the sounds to drawings and other graphic notations; she transcribes and arranges her recordings in patterns that deviate from the chronological and spatial realities of the originals; and she digitally manipulates them to create underlying electronic layers that interact with acoustic instruments in live performance. These techniques allow White to interject aspects of her private experience into the music, which in turn creates its own significances in the mind and ear of the listener. For White, Centre Bridge the place was both a journey in and of itself and the opening of a longer creative voyage that continues to develop as Centre Bridge the music, more than a decade after the first work was composed.Footnote 4

3. ‘Hello, My Name Is…’ Annea Lockwood and A Sound Map of the Danube

Having already recorded the Hudson River some twenty years previously, Annea Lockwood had a plan as she embarked on a recording project tracing the nearly 1,800 miles of the Danube River, a process she undertook from 2001 until 2004. ‘I decided in advance of recording that this time I would acknowledge this interdependence [of river and river-dwellers] by merging voices and river sounds’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2010a). Asking each person she met and interviewed along the river's course, ‘What does the river mean to you?’, Lockwood slowly assembled a powerful collection of personal reflections on the Danube, its users and inhabitants. Although she wouldn't begin composing A Sound Map of the Danube until the recordings were complete, nearly four years after she began, Lockwood's approach to the process was shaped both by her previous experiences along the Hudson and her slowly unfolding sense of the power of rivers and their role as ‘an integral part of personal identity for those who live on them’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2007: 44).

Altogether, fifty-nine sites are presented, each of them directly on, in, or very near to the river. On the CD version of the work, sites are grouped into tracks, with the number of sites in one track ranging from as few as three to as many as seven. While all the sites are marked on a map included with the CD booklet, no time points are given, thus it is not always possible to determine which location is being played in a given moment. Conversely, when it is presented in a gallery setting, visitors to Sound Map encounter a running time display on the wall that corresponds with a large printed map. Listeners can follow along the map and note the time when a certain site can be heard. In either case, the sites along the river come and go without pause, affording the listener an opportunity to experience the work without interruption as a seamless, flowing entity.Footnote 5

In the liner notes accompanying the CD release of A Sound Map of the Danube – presented as a square of folded paper which opens to reveal a large map of the entire riverway, accompanied by translations of the texts from all of her interviews – Lockwood asks ‘what is a river … [this is] the question underlying the whole project for me’ (Lockwood 2008). She elaborates, in a short article written at the end of her recording process, and reflects on a particularly vivid experience of hearing the river ‘speak’ in response to this question:

This sense of agency stayed with Lockwood throughout the compositional process (Sound example 4). She writes, ‘The understanding which came [in Bulgaria] that the river creates its sounds by the way it carves out its banks and its bed, brought what was to me an important new sense of the river. I'm sure it affected subsequent composition of the piece’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2010a).

What is particularly striking about Lockwood's focus on the question ‘what is a river?’ is the answer that seems to emerge as the work progresses. Rather than a description of what a river is, Lockwood has allowed the agency of the river to speak. She has composed a work in which the Danube River introduces itself, responding to the question ‘Who are you?’ in the first person, with its own singular, subjective river voice. As such, one can hear the essence of the piece as an autobiographical narrative in which the river becomes the River.

There are a number of technical features, both in her recording processes and in the ways that Lockwood composes her materials in the studio, that make the shift of perspective – from river described to river heard – quite audible. Most notably, very close focus recording, a technique in which her microphone is extremely near to, and at times in, the water (or under the water); the use of long cross-fades between sections to blur boundaries between individual sites; the layering of multiple sound recordings of the same site, recorded from different vantage points; and the careful placement of human voices inside the mix of river sounds. As I hope to show in the following paragraphs, Lockwood's engagement with these techniques is the link between her aural experiences, the river's expression of agency and the end listener's perceptions of place and time.

Toward the end of the first track on the CD, a prominent water sound becomes notably less voluminous, moving from a stream to a creek to just a trickle by the end of the track. The next track begins immediately with the loud bleating of sheep: new track, totally new river point, some twenty miles from the previous (Sound example 5). If a listener fails to attend to the track markers and map points at such a moment, he or she might not notice the transition or recognise that the piece has in fact moved to a new location. The effect of the trickle of water meeting the voices of the sheep, disappearing into them and then re-emerging a minute-and-a-half later feels a bit like wandering along the edge of the river, lost in daydreaming and following the eddies and rivulets as they run down nearly to nothingness, then rounding a bend and coming, quite suddenly, across an entirely new soundscape. Throughout the work, Lockwood combines slow transitions with sudden, more dramatic shifts in service of this effect. In response to my question about the relevance (for a listener) of being able to pinpoint exact map points during any moment of the piece, Lockwood gave a broader answer that speaks directly to her intentions here:

In this case, Lockwood hones in on a sonic aesthetic idea that has a correlate in a technical procedure and the implications for the resulting music come quite close to this listener's imagined experience of moving down the river. The spaces between Lockwood's original perception of the sound, her technical interaction with it and the end-user's listening are narrowed almost to a unity. In other words, Lockwood engages technology here to bring us closer to her aural (and kinetic) experience, which, for any listener who has ever strolled alongside a river, is probably something he or she can perceive quite clearly. In contrast with Frances White, Lockwood is here drawing together her ‘experience as listener’ and her ‘experience as composer’ in quite practical and technically direct ways. The result is at once convincingly naturalistic and completely fabricated (in the sense that these sounds were neither recorded nor audible in the way that they are heard in the finished work). Only this kind of ‘imaginative making up’ could transform her personal human experiences into a voice that sings from the perspective of the river. Lockwood's blurring of spatial and temporal reality in the use of long cross-fades to connect disparate pieces of sonic material reinforces the agency of the river – we never get away from the immediacy of the river even as we move to different points along its course. If we were listening objectively to the river, tracking its course as distinct from its materiality (that is, following it, rather than moving along within its ‘riverness’), we would not be able to hear such a blending of sounds and sites over time and space. We would, rather, hear them as unique points along a line with the distance and relationship among the points determined by our own agency as listeners of or to the river.

This sense of shaping and connecting space and time broadly along the river's course is mirrored at a micro-level in Lockwood's technique of layering multiple takes of the same river site, recorded from slightly different vantage points (generally very close to the surface of the water or, using a hydrophone, submerged in the water). The aural effect as heard in her composition would only be audible in the real world if we were somehow able to be in the midst of all the sounds at once, with a large number of ears pointing in a number of different directions. From the banks, and limited by human spatial and temporal perceptual boundaries, it would be impossible. From within the river itself, heard as part of the river, it makes perfect sense. Lockwood was aware that she was recording sounds for an installation in which multiple speakers would be used. As a result, much of the musical complexity of the finished work was supported in her process by careful setup. She writes:

The short excerpt from Passau (Sound example 6) highlights Lockwood's extended approach to hearing the river and illuminates her manner of conveying that through composing choices. It's also a moment in the piece where a listener is confronted with sounds that could never be experienced in the real world as they are heard here. Through Lockwood's subtle manipulations of aural reality and her precise technical approach, the listener is encouraged to settle in, to embrace his or her own transformation from simply listening to the river, to listening with the river.

Lockwood also draws on her prior river listening experiences in the process of recording and creating the piece: ‘letting the river “have its say”, which translates into frequent close-focus micing and longer takes in the actual mix, has been central to me going back to the Hudson’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2010a). With the confidence of a mature composer deeply familiar with her own work, Lockwood seems to have a strong, intuitive understanding of what it means to let the river speak:

That sense of ‘oneness’ with the river is also reflected quite powerfully in her treatment of voices throughout the work. Over the course of the four years she was recording, Lockwood conducted a number of interviews with people whose lives and work are shaped by the Danube. She writes:

Initially, Lockwood had planned to treat the interviews by re-recording them underwater in the Danube. Her expectation was ‘that the voices and words will remain intelligible, but that the resonances enveloping them will create a distinctly different acoustic space, just as the river itself inhabits two acoustic spaces, at the surface, and underwater’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2004: 33). Noting the absence of such an effect in the finished work, I asked Lockwood to explain what had happened. ‘We [Lockwood and installation artists Liz Phillips] tried transmitting my interviews underwater through the speaker and re-recording and the result was a bust … you could hear the words quite clearly, but because of the way the water acoustics changed the spectrum balances, the personality of the speaker dissolved’ (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2010a). Lockwood might not agree with me on this, but I am so thankful that the effect didn't work! There are two wonderful moments in the piece, both featuring human voices in juxtaposition to the river, that I'd like to describe briefly. In each, it's Lockwood's subtle compositional choices that make the interviews especially powerful. An effect such as the underwater re-recording of the voices, interesting as it no doubt must have sounded, would have drawn attention to the composer's presence in a work in which technique and process, while very important, have otherwise stayed largely behind the scenes.

In the first interview, Luise Reissner, the owner of a small pension along the Danube in Neuberg, Germany, is describing the flood of 1999, an event that ravaged her inn and caused much chaos as guests arrived at her door only hours before the river was cresting and bursting its seams. The interview is preceded by the sound of a water aerating device recorded in the pond at a nearby fish farm. The effect is a kind of persistent and rhythmic, bubbling, gurgling hiss. This sound continues throughout much of the interview and is eventually mixed with the sounds of water insects and fish, and then, a bit later, some unidentifiable yet decidedly aquatic animal sounds.Footnote 6 The excerpt I've included here (Sound example 7) begins as the underwater recordings are beginning to fade out and the animal sounds begin to dominate. As Reissner describes the flood, and the filth left in its aftermath, these aquatic sounds seem to be literally leaping into her lap. The chirping quality of the sound is not unlike laughter. Paired with the innkeeper's own laughter as she recounts the event, the interview suggests a sense of lightness in the face of the inevitable power imbalances that arise between humanity and river. Lockwood has the innkeeper speaking through the river, yet doing so in a way that foregrounds the intensity and realness of the river's agency (in particular its ability to overextend its boundaries) rather than highlighting the composer's hand in the mix.

Much later in the piece we hear Janós Horvát, an elderly fisherman who has spent his life working on a lake adjacent to the river in Croatia (Sound example 8). In 1982 the area became a nature park and was closed to fishing. After describing some of his hard-laboured but well-paid fishing days, he goes on to talk about how he has grown too old to work any more. ‘Now that we are cut off from it [the Lake], even I no longer go fishing. I am now eighty years old, and I am no longer young and strong as I used to be. I tried going out once, for old times’ sake, but the boat was rocking from side to side and I almost fell out. Then it was clear to me that I should give up fishing’ (Lockwood 2008). The most striking aspect of this particular interview is the near total absence of the sound of running water. There is a stillness to the water here that reinforces the sense of the man's distance from the river and his youth. We hear herons in the near background, and other smaller birds. Like the animal sounds in the previous interview, these non-human voices draw our attention to the flux of the river, and suggest the give and take that exists among different kinds of users and inhabitants. There is a very faint hiss in the recording that I imagine is the sound of the water underlying everything (it could also just be internal noise from Lockwood's recording device, but I like to imagine otherwise…).Footnote 7 In any case, it is very quiet and the speaking voice is very resonant, clearly recorded inside, away from the river (not always the case in these interviews). At the close of the recording, we hear the herons and then the loud splash of a large fish, leaping from the water at very close range. In keeping the river quiet throughout the interview, but ending by dramatically demonstrating its actual closeness, Lockwood allows the listener to imagine that while the man may have given up on his river life, the river has not abandoned him.

Throughout her recording and composing process, Annea Lockwood maintains a close connection with her initial desire to understand the meaning and place of the river, and, more broadly, to understand what a river is. She allows her experiences of moving along the river to be shaped and re-shaped as she traverses years, moving through different seasons and environmental conditions, facing changing politics, diverse cultures and a myriad of languages along the way. Yet she seems to remain true to her goal. Lockwood's composing, strongly supported by her recording techniques in the field, and her listening at all stages of the process, weaves together her memories of place, her aural experiences, and her many thoughts, impressions and feelings on the ontology of rivers in general, and the nature of the Danube in particular.