Sound Design

Interview with Alexis Bacon
Music Composer for The Plays of Mina Loy

As a composer, I started by taking a broad approach to creating a sound world for these plays. Loy’s language is dense, and since I am not from the time and place that the plays were written, it took some time for me to understand what they were about and what they were referencing. The process of collaborating with the literary scholars and other artists was helpful because it allowed me time to chew on and think about the plays while learning from my colleagues’ areas of expertise. My point of departure was to consider how the plays were related to the music of their time. I was interested in somehow incorporating the work of the Italian Futurists, particularly Luigi Russolo, a composer well known in the history of 20th century and electronic music because of his work with noise machines. Mina Loy circulated in the same social circles as the Italian Futurists and she references the Futurists frequently in her plays. So, my starting point was thinking about what role noise machines could play in these works and how we could make them or refer to them in some way. We did this by analog means, by building noise machines from mounted bicycle wheels, for instance. We also used digital means, having Victorian dolls that were programmed to say lines from the plays and make other visceral noises referenced in the works.

Some of the plays were clearly Futurist inspired, and others referenced a different social sphere. For example, The Pamperers is set in a high society salon, and includes references to specific composers.  To create its sound world, I made a score consisting of music from that and earlier eras, including Handel, Mozart, Satie, etc. For Sacred Prostitute, I went in the opposite direction with a more cartoonish approach using a foley table. We used balloons, whoopie cushions, little bells and toys, making cartoonish sounds that could either emphasize the absurdity of the text or undermine the surface sincerity of the action.

Collisons was one of the shortest plays but seemed to really have the most to do with sound in a very direct way, with its many references to sounds and explosions. To me, the work seems to be describing an artist’s creative process. The language felt very related to the Futurist artwork of the time, referencing motion and machinery, sharp angles and flashing lights. I can imagine this play as serving as a score for an electronic piece composed for an ambisonic or a 3D sound space, and that’s something I hope to compose at some point. But for the purposes of staging the play, we decided to present Collisions twice, first read as text, and the second time entirely as sound. In that second version we used our noise machines, including some made from bicycle wheels mounted on posts, so that you could turn with the pedals and put items in the spokes to get really amazing machine-like analog sounds. I was interested in keeping the sound of this play something that could have in the 1910s, using entirely physical sound sources. There was a reference to propellers in the Collisions, and playing cards and pool noodles in the spokes of the bike wheels made great propeller sounds, especially when we had three bike instruments in different locations. We ended by having all of the students making squeaky noises by letting air out of balloons, and finally releasing the balloons into the audience. With those and the toys that we had used in other parts of the plays, we created a score that fit the rough contours of the play, using lots of different noises, trying not to sit in one sound world too much. It only lasted a few minutes in the end, but it created an aural experience of the dynamic language of the play.

I didn’t know anything about Mina Loy before we started this project. As a woman artist 100 years ago, Loy was dealing with themes that still feel very, very modern to me as a woman artist today. I found it rewarding to learn about her life and learn how she grappled with these themes. Throughout the process we worked with a flat hierarchical structure where every creator’s voice was equal in value and we could all have questions or suggestions about the sound and the acting and all of the different aspects of what we were working with or just bring up ideas. From my understanding, that was a unique approach to interpreting plays and bringing these historical works to life.

Luigi Russolo, well known in the futuristic world for his contributions to the movement through music, was born on April 30th, 1885, into a family of musicians. Russolo was first recognized through his futurist artwork, such as his painting Dynamism of a Car (1913).  After watching the performance of his friend, “Pratella’s Futurist Music for Orchestra,” he reported that “the history of sound appeared in his mind as an evolution culminating in a triumphant dominance of mechanical noise.” From this revelation, Luigi Russolo published his futurist manifesto known as “The Art of Noises,” which argues for a radical new form of music based on sounds of modern industrial life. Russolo’s manifesto was the first published form of noise music.

Russolo invented countless homemade instruments with his assistant Ugo Piatti. One of his most known unique instruments — known as “intonarumori”^[1] — was the Russolophone, an organ that was able to play different noises at 12 pitches. These intonarumori were played in futuristic concerts between 1913-1914, earning both praise and violent hostility. Sadly, during the Paris bombing in World War I, his intonarumi were burned and destroyed.