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From a musical point of view, the world is musical at any given moment: an interview with Bill Fontana Organised Sound 10(2): 97101 © 2005 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom.
doi:10.1017/S1355771805000737
From a musical point of view, the world is
musical at any given moment: an interview
with Bill Fontana
J Ø R A N R U D I
Norwegian Network for Technology, Acoustics and Music (NOTAM), Nedre Gate 5, 0551 Oslo, Norway
E-mail: joranru@notam02.no
Sculpture with Resonators (1972 to 1975), I used
objects such as large glass bottles, tubes, sea shells,
etc., and placed microphones inside of them and
relayed the sounds to another space. These objects
were normally placed on the roof of a building and
broadcast to an interior space of this building. It
was fascinating to see how the resonance of these
things could turn any sound into something very
musical.
Sound recording had also become an important
medium at this time, and in 1974 I began to work
for the ABC in Sydney to record how Australia
sounded. With access to state-of-the-art recording
equipment, I began to make eight-channel field
recordings that mapped the sculptural properties
of an acoustic situation. Kirribilli Wharf (1976)
was my first eight-channel field recording and
represents the beginning of the current state of
my work. It was a real-time (one hour) recording
mapping of the wave events in this floating con-
crete pier, as the moving water percussively closed
the bottom ends of eight vertical, cylindrical holes
in this wharf. This was then played as a sound
installation at a number of exhibition spaces in
Australia and then later at the Whitney Museum
in New York.
Q: John Cage replaced music with natural sounds,
Russolo replaced music with noise how do you
look at music and composition?
A: I replaced the concert space and its fixed intervals
of listening time with the perpetual and indetermi-
nate listening time of a sound sculpture in a public
space.
Q: Some place in your essays you are saying . . . the
world is musical at any given moment, if one has a
musical point of view . . .. Could you develop that
thought a little further?
A: For me as a composer and artist, music is a state
of mind, a way of approaching the world. It is
a way of discovering the patterns and structures
that exist in the found acoustic world. All of the
sound sculptures explore this in the way micro-
phone positions are selected. The translation of
Bill Fontana is an American composer and artist who has
been working with large-scale sound installations since the
1970s. In his installations he recontextualises sounds by
transmitting them from one location to another, and uses the
transported sounds as acoustical overlay, masking the
sounds naturally occurring in the installation spaces. His
installations often occur in central urban environments, and
he has, for example, been commissioned in conjunction with
the fifty-year anniversary of D-Day (1994, Paris), and the
100-year anniversary of Brooklyn Bridge (1983, New York
City).
Q: Bill Fontana, you are educated as a composer, yet
you have worked with sound installations and
sound sculptures since 1974. What made you go in
this direction?
A: I am educated as a composer and also as a
philosopher. I majored in philosophy and studied
composition at the same time. The meaning of
sound was and still is the main issue for me. This is
an issue of perception and how the sounds some-
one hears are processed. I came to realise that if
my state of mind was musical, then all the sounds
around me became music. So many times I experi-
enced the sounds of a place as having the same
complexity and beauty that anyones music could
have. I tried to record these situations.
From the late 1960s to the early 1970s my work
went from minimal music to near silence to
sound sculpture. My last composition from this
period, Phantom Clarinets (1970 to 1979), is a duet
in which each performer simultaneously sustains
long tones that are slightly out of tune and played
as softly as possible. This creates an auditory illu-
sion in which the differences in pitch are louder
than the individual sounds of the instruments. This
creates a spatially disembodied subsonic vibration
that modulates the ambient noise in the space.
At this point, the central focus became the ambi-
ent sounds of spaces and the context of sound.
I became interested in how music is going on all
the time around me. The first sound sculptures
consisted of using objects that perpetually pro-
cessed ambient sound in a musical way. In Sound 98
Jøran Rudi
this into a public space where the sounds are
relocated is a strategy for making these sounds
something to hear.
Most people use their visual perception to tune out
and not pay attention to ambient sounds of a given
space. By carefully placing naturally occurring
environmental sounds in a space where they normally
do not belong, this perceptual masking technique is
defeated and people are confronted with sounds they
cannot ignore.
Q: It seems that this is one of the most important
thoughts in your work Sound Bridge. Could you
describe the ideas behind the choice of installation
sites and sounds, along with some detail on how
you recorded, transmitted and diffused the sounds
at the project sites?
A: The relocation of sound has been a basic operat-
ing principle in every project of mine in the past
thirty years. The principle is partially derived
from Duchamps idea of the found object but
taken to a different place. Visual perception and
visual identification of spaces teach us to tune
out the sounds we expect to hear in these places.
Inserting an environmental sound into a visual
context where it is unexpected bypasses peoples
natural avoidance of listening. Some projects have
been much more radical in this way, such as the
Sound Bridges that link very distant sites and
sounds. The first Sound Bridge between Cologne
and San Francisco in 1987 used a stereo analogue
satellite channel for transfer of eighteen channels
of sound from San Francisco and Cologne. It was
a radio performance organised by WDR Cologne
that linked two independent sound sculptures at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
the Museum Ludwig. Both of these projects were
about the sounds of each city. In San Francisco it
was live duet between the Golden Gate Bridge and
Farallon Islands National Refuge and in Cologne
it was a map/portrait of the city.
Figure 1. Map of foghorn and speaker placement in the first Sound Bridge foghorn. The circles with crosshairs represent
microphone broadcast points, the loudspeaker icons indicate the sculpture site at Pier 2, and the lighthouse renderings show
foghorn locations in the SF Bay area. From a musical point of view
99
In 1993, I did another Sound Bridge between Kyoto
and Cologne, which are sister cities. This was of course
a radical translocation. The sounds from two different
cultures and acoustic environments played in public
spaces in each city that were both cultural zones. In
Cologne, the Heinrich Böll Platz of the Museum
Ludwig and in Kyoto the public space in front of the
Kyoto Modern Art Museum. Temple bells, fish mar-
kets, gardens, spring birds, Japanese language from
public spaces and the train station in urban Cologne,
while in urban Kyoto the German language in public
spaces, spring birds, bells from the cathedral, the
Hauptbahnhof . . . This transmission was much more
advanced technologically than the 1987 project, and
only six years apart . . ., but the medium was a 2 Mbit
digital line over which sixteen live audio channels went
in each direction simultaneously.
Q: You are often piping sounds from nature into
urban contexts. How do you select the sounds,
and what are the artistic intentions, so to speak,
in, for example, the works Sound Island (Paris
1994) and Vertical Water (New York 2001)?
A: Three projects,
Landscape Soundings (Vienna,
1990), Vertical Water (New York, 1991) and
Sound Island (Paris, 1994) explored the use of
natural sounds to transform an urban space.
In Vienna the situation was a grand plaza situated
between the museums of Art History and Natural
History. The city of Vienna, by way of its May festival,
had asked me to create a project here on the topic of
Art and Nature. I researched the natural history of
Vienna and found that most of the city had been a
wetland of the Danube. East of Vienna was the last
remaining ancient Danube wetland, the Hainburger
Au. At the time, this was famous because the Austrian
government had unsuccessfully attempted to build
a power station there, which would have destroyed
this environment. This was prevented by organised
protests in which citizens attached themselves to trees.
With the collaboration of the ORF (Austrian State
Radio), I installed sixteen microphones and some
hydrophones in this wetland forest and transmitted a
living sound map to this grand space in Vienna. The
hydrophone sounds were played from speakers at the
periphery of the space, creating an acoustic curtain
that masked the sounds of traffic. Within the space,
speakers on the f