MM has often been, has been especially this season, and has most notably been in this week’s episode, true epic theater for Brecht.  The drama continually builds tension but unlike traditional (Aristotelian) drama, there is no climax and falling action to allow the audience to experience catharsis.  Brecht thought that catharsis in drama was dangerous, because it allowed the audience to purge their own emotions through the actions of the characters, who are fictional.  For Brecht, drama should instead remind the audience that what they are seeing is not life, but life represented, and that it’s really going to be up to them to create their own catharsis through the engagement of social issues with their own lives.

Brecht often did this by revealing the formalistic and theatrical qualities of the drama, within the drama–”breaking the fourth wall,” as it’s called, so that the audience has no illusion that the characters on stage are unaware of them.  What this does is allow the audience to move in their evaluation of the work beyond simple judgments of character. Brecht didn’t want the audience to “like” or “dislike” the characters in themselves so much as he did want them to serve as emblems that map onto various components of society.  While MM isn’t exactly metatheatrical (that is, aware of itself as a work of theatre), every character is hyperaware that s/he is watched at all times, and is always performing for everyone; they mean to do so for the other characters but it might as well just be for the viewers themselves. To rephrase: the characters (NOT the actors) are themselves performing at all times.  And their performances reveal cultural truths about the unwritten social codes from which they constantly negotiate their identities.

This is how we can become so enraptured with a show with so few likeable characters. Roger Sterling puts on blackface, and the moment becomes a litmus test for how the characters understand race relations–and how we read this reaction, in turn, tells us about our own understanding of race in America.

It’s not them that we like.  It’s what they reveal.

I have just returned from a long hiatus, during which I was traveling through Germany and the Czech Republic.  Please stay tuned for the next posts, which will include themes such as:

- What I learned about my whiteness through teaching kids radio

- Some new perspectives on the infamous Sigúr Rós interview with the Bryant Park Project

- Howard Stern’s “Faustian bargain” with satellite radio.

Thanks for your patience.  Yours,

Sam

1. Bad radio lets you get distracted in other things, and becomes background noise.

2. Good radio keeps your attention while you do other things, and becomes an active presence in the room.

3. Great radio makes you stop what you’re doing and listen.

Much of the art of high or post-modernity is characterized by being informed by, or an application of, social or aesthetic theory. To be an informed participant in the contemporary art world is to understand that one must look beyond whether or not one is personally affected by an artwork in order to appreciate or experience the work fully. Serial music, for instance, becomes interpretable only with somewhat extensive knowledge of the compositional (or even pre-compositional) practices at work. Engagement with this kind of art thus becomes an experience more cerebral than emotional, or visceral

Audio narrative seems to be quite different in this respect. As a listener, I always appreciated that radio documentary seemed to maintain that emotive content was essential to storytelling. While I was formally studying radio documentary at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, during classtime listening sessions I noted that our critical conversations about the effectiveness of a piece had much to do with how we ourselves reacted to the piece. Because radio documentary for the most part exists beyond the trappings of academia, the practice does not seem to have a problem with interpretation hinging on the listener’s own personal reaction to the work.

This is markedly different from academic study of the humanities; if, for instance, a student of literature fails to be moved by Faulkner, it is doubtful that the student could make a compelling case that the shortcoming lies in Faulkner’s prose. Rarely in the humanities is quality measured by whether an individual finds it interesting or not, and yet we seem able to do so with radio.

Radio narrative in its present state has the capacity to subvert the necessity of theory in its production, even in our post-modern context. This may be largely due to the way in which audio narrative has remained so far outside of the mainstream of arts cultures that it has not aged to the point where an avant-garde is necessary to further its development. True, sound art does have a rich tradition in (or of) the avant-garde, but this is strictly in an arts context and not in a storytelling or documentary arts context. The fact that we are dealing with documentary arts seems to couch our perspective in a unique zone where we are able to investigate a work with aesthetic theory but are still affected enough that we may respond personally to it.

The obvious disadvantage here is that a work conceived in this light will seek to make work that registers on either the lowest common denominator of emotional affect across a diverse audience, or that it will only appeal to, quite literally, the “average” listener.

To listen to This American Life is to learn episode after episode that Aristotelian storytelling is still unashamedly at the forefront of documentary radio culture. This American Life is not without criticism as to its scope or relevance, but their formula of small stories that advance sequentially and reveal a moment of truth at their climaxes remain effective enough to communicate new compelling information with each show. Critiques of the form of This American Life are certainly valid and might offer more insight into other effective methods of storytelling, but it seems that so long as the story remains captivating, emotive, and informative, it has been a successful piece.

In consideration: \”Hungry,\” by Maisie Crow

Though my forte is radio, my official job title at the Art + Media House is “multimedia instructor.” I have interpreted this role to mean that the class begins with the medium of sound and then moves forward to figure out how to integrate sound with other media. “Audio slideshows” are one such synthesis, in which still images are added to produced audio (or vice versa). Most newspapers have these on their websites these days, from the New York Times to even the Bradenton Herald (the independent paper covering former home of Sarasota, FL). Despite the acceptance of the audio slideshow to mainstream journalism culture, I have had a difficult time finding slideshows that I like enough to show to my students. Usually, the slideshows are either “photo heavy” or “sound heavy,” or in other words, the producer was clearly skilled at one element of production and not the other. Some listserv activity lead me to the above-posted multimedia work by Maisie Crow, photojournalist for the Howard County Times. Crow’s “Hungry” is really a leap ahead in digital storytelling, combining not only photography and audio but brief segments of video as well.

What I wish to discuss in this article is not Crow’s adeptness for finding coherency between sound, image, and moving image, but actually how she captures the viewer by relating these three elements to their opposite: silence. Drawing on conversations with about the piece with peers and students, listserv buzz, and my own emotional responses to the work, my interest here is the emotional affect of the presence of silence within the work.

In the scene in question, the father says, “In the past, it was always kids with Prader-Willi Syndrome are short and fat and, retarded.” On the word “retarded,” there is a shot of Max leaning in a school desk, with just enough peripheral space on either side for the viewer to know that he is separated from others; a sign reading “No Talking Please” is prominently displayed. The father continues, “And they’re not short and fat.” He sharply exhales. A long silence, almost eight seconds. “…and retarded,” the father concludes.** In these two words, his voice is now breaking, deeply contrasting with the strength of his voice that marks his narration throughout. Another five-second silence before the father begins a thread on how Max becomes the victim of discrimination.

This moment in Crow’s piece is so poignant because it plays with our expectations. Preceding the silence(s), the father first states the expectations: kids with Prader-Willi Syndrome are short, fat, and retarded. He then qualifies the statement: my son is not short, and not fat. The complicity of silence begs from the father, is he retarded? His pause at first sounds mean, but then there is the sharp exhale, where we realize that something is happening in the father in his state of reflection. And when he finally utters, “and not retarded,” the sadness in his voice is so profound and unexpected  that we chastise ourselves for thinking that his pause might have been the set-up to a cruel joke upon one’s own son. I admit that this is only one reading of this moment, though I did observe that during a conversation with another youth educator, he analyzed the silence similarly without any prior analysis from me.

A conventional way of thinking about silence is that it is merely the space between the sound. This is, after all, exactly what this looks like in an audio editing suite: the valley between two peaks. But let us consider a passage John Cage’s essay, “Composition as Process”:

What does [the mind] do, having nothing to do?…What happens, for instance, to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, usefully towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement, where by separating sounds or two groups of sounds their differences or relationships might receive emphasis; or that of expressivity, where silences in a mutual discourse might provide pause on punctuation; or again, that of architecture, where the introduction or interruption of silence might give a definition to either a predetermined structure or to an organically developing one. Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else–not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds. The nature of these is unpredictable and changing. These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. ^

Cage takes as a given that silence is always present, and the results of its foregrounded presence will always be variable. But more importantly, by conceiving of silence as a cerebral construction and not solely as factual reality occurring in an absence of content, we may begin to understand (and therefore utilize) the specific ways in which silence may become a tool for affect.

Cage elsewhere says that music (or for our purposes, any kind of intentional sound) has four qualities: pitch, timbre, volume, and duration. By contrast, of these four silence has only duration. This is why the affect of silence is unpredictable–we don’t know its context, its intent, where it is leading us, or how long we remain in limbo until the next uttered syllable. Though while the affect of silence may be random, the same silence within a piece will systematically provoke the same mood or reaction in the audience. One student viewed the piece with me the first time I watched it after the end of class. When we watched it as a group the next day, I heard her sniffle in the heart of that silence, and she might have been tearing up a little by the end. She remarked in a lull voice, “it’s even better the second time.”

A particular silence may thus become as much a component of vocabulary for both speaker and producer. The stuff of silence is built from the unutterable, the inaudible, or the incoherent, which is why it is essential for audio producers to harness it–because these are the exciting, living-breathing moments that makes audio audio, and not print. It may seem natural for us to couch silence as the space between things, but when that space becomes noticeable and affecting, and, in fact, gets us more emotionally responsive than even words, a silence becomes anything but.

—–

**There are some issues here that one might choose to problematize in terms of how this piece frames developmental disability, though this is a theme that will not be explored here.

^ Cage, John. Silence. Pp. 22-23

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the purpose of this blog is to serve as a repository for creative sound production and critique of radio documentary and sonic art as it pertains to american society.  i will also document my experiences as an radio production instructor to a small class of teenagers in washington, dc.