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Recorded and produced at Firework Edition, Stockholm, June 1997. The sound source is a knife and a knife-sharpener.
Cover: detail from an engraving by L.E. in 1980.
Special thanks to Maja and Einar Elggren.
Limited to 300 copies.
Published
Dreamsound is a subliminal musical event
For sleeping audience which encourages relaxation,
comfortable sleep, and pleasant dreams.
A variety of audio and visual media provide impetus to dream images. The event has been performed in many venues including the New Music America Festival and as an overnight radio concert.
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Dream House is a sound and light installation, and occasional performance venue, created by minimalist composer La Monte Young and multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. Since its conception in the 1960s, several versions of the Dream House have existed in various locations; a current version housed above Young and Zazeela’s Church Street loft in Tribeca dates back to 1993.
Beginning in 1962, La Monte Young had begun formulating the concept of a continuous sound environment. In a 1964 program note for his Theatre of Eternal Music collective, Young describes «Dream Houses [that] will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition of its own, but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum.» Their intention was to create an immersive environment where «all the sensory information is unusual and outside your normal frame of reference.»
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➝ Mela Foundation
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The Dreams (1964) is the first of Delia’s four Inventions for Radio produced in collaboration with the poet and dramatist Barry Bermange.
Part of the four programme «Inventions for Radio» series, created in collaboration with Barry Bermange, Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews with people describing their dreams. Delia’s editing and repetition, together with her dissonant, often terrifying musique concrete soundbeds, make this distinctly uneasy bedtime listening. The entire piece is 45 minutes in length.
«The tapes were blended with admirable softness and skill, so that the bemused, repetitive, floating phrases did now and then achieve the numbness of a dream; and the Radiophonic Workshop put in only the discreetest accompaniment. It was ingenious, rather than inspired; but it did arrest the ear, and force recognition at a far more intimate level that radio usually disturbs.» – The Guardian, 1964
«This programme of sounds and voices is an attempt to re-create in five movements some sensations of dreaming—running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour. All the voices were recorded from life and arranged in a setting of pure electronic sounds.» – The Radio Times, 1964
«The first of three Inventions for radio by Barry Bermange, in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. More than ten years have elapsed since these ‘re-creations in sounds and voices’ were first broadcast. They introduced a fresh genre to the medium and remain classics of radio technique.» – The Radio Times, 1975
It also gets called «Within Dreams».
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Robert Desnos’s poem “I Have Dreamed of You So Much” is a particularly masterful example. The title contains an address—an immediate gesture toward inclusion of the reader, rather than alienation. From the first line, the speaker admits the difficulty of balancing the dream and the reality of the “you”: “I have dreamed of you so much that you lose your reality.” This line is traditionally surrealist and typically Desnos; in an introduction to one of his volumes, Desnos wrote that the desire was in “placing dream and reality on the same level without caring whether it is all false or all true.” However, the possible loss of the “you” to unreality is a source of anxiety; in the next lines the speaker frets, “Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss / onto that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?” It’s also worth noting Desnos’s use of “that” in these lines. This technique—known as deixis—gestures outward, as does the use of the “you.” They mark specific space and time, which is especially interesting in a poem that appears, at least initially, to struggle with a binary between real and unreal. They point readers early on to the permeable boundaries between the two. And the fact that they point readers at all is also remarkable.
(…)
In the poem’s second half, those balances tip. The speaker moves from a probable future as a shadow to the conclusion that “I have dreamed of you so much it is no longer right / for me to awaken.” In the poem’s climax, the speaker sacrifices himself to the unreal world:
I have dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken
And lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more in left me
Than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
Than the shadow which walks and will joyfully walk
On the sundial of your life.
Though the speaker has surrendered to the dream world, he is able to reclaim some dignity—and some joy—by being not just an ordinary shadow, but “a hundred times more shadow” than others. It’s inside of the dream that the speaker can be assured of unity. And not just the lovers are united; so, too, are shadow and sun, life and death. Desnos, as he indicated in the introduction when he spoke of placing reality and dream on the same level, refuses to separate. It’s this quality, along with its lucidity, self-interrogation, intimacy, duality, immediacy, and openness, that makes it truly emblematic of the spirit of surrealism.
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Giuseppe Tartini soñó que el Diablo, su esclavo, ejecutaba en el violín una prodigiosa sonata; el soñador, al despertar, dedujo de su imperfecto recuerdo el «Trillo del Diavolo». Tartini quiso imitar en la vigilia la música de un sueño.
The Violin Sonata in G minor, GT 2.g05; B.g5, more familiarly known as the Devil’s Trill Sonata (Italian: Il trillo del diavolo), is a work for solo violin (with figured bass accompaniment) by Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770).
Tartini allegedly told the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande that he had dreamed that the devil had appeared to him and had asked to be Tartini’s servant and teacher. At the end of the music lesson, Tartini handed the devil his violin to test his skill, which the devil began to play with virtuosity, delivering an intense and magnificent performance. So singularly beautiful and executed with such superior taste and precision was the Devil’s performance, that the composer felt his breath taken away. The complete story is told by Tartini himself in Lalande’s Voyage d’un François en Italie:
One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the «Devil’s Trill», but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.
Mesmerized by the devil’s brilliant and awe-inspiring playing, Tartini attempted to recreate what he had heard. However, despite having said that the sonata was his favorite, Tartini later wrote that it was «so inferior to what I had heard, that if I could have subsisted on other means, I would have broken my violin and abandoned music forever.»
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The Goldberg Variations is a musical composition for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an aria and a set of 30 variations. The story of how the variations came to be composed comes from an early biography of Bach by Johann Nikolaus Forkel:
[For this work] we have to thank the instigation of the former Russian ambassador to the electoral court of Saxony, Count Kaiserling, who often stopped in Leipzig and brought there with him the aforementioned Goldberg, in order to have him given musical instruction by Bach. The Count was often ill and had sleepless nights. At such times, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the night in an antechamber, so as to play for him during his insomnia. … Once the Count mentioned in Bach’s presence that he would like to have some clavier pieces for Goldberg, which should be of such a smooth and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought himself best able to fulfill this wish by means of Variations, the writing of which he had until then considered an ungrateful task on account of the repeatedly similar harmonic foundation. But since at this time all his works were already models of art, such also these variations became under his hand. Yet he produced only a single work of this kind. Thereafter the Count always called them his variations. He never tired of them, and for a long time sleepless nights meant: «Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.» Bach was perhaps never so rewarded for one of his works as for this. The Count presented him with a golden goblet filled with 100 Louis d’or. Nevertheless, even had the gift been a thousand times larger, their artistic value would not yet have been paid for.
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Imagen: A Hunting Nymph, Asleep (1650) de Dirck van der Lisse
Esta ópera fue la preferida del rey Luis XIV de Francia de todas las que compuso Jean-Baptiste Lully, debido a diversas identificaciones psicológicas del monarca y su esposa con los personajes de la tragedia.
Atis (Ópera) – Acto III
Este acto incluye un sommeil (sueño): un tipo de escena que había sido establecida por la ópera veneciana. Tales escenas eran especialmente útiles debido a que podían situar a un personaje en una postura vulnerable para una variedad de propósitos dramáticos potenciales. Por ejemplo, el personaje dormido puede ser atacado, sufrir un lavado de cerebro o revelar pensamientos secretos en el estado alterado de conciencia. Es la escena 4 del acto, en la que Cibeles le hace dormirse. El personaje alegórico Le Sommeil («El sueño») canta «Dormons, dormons tous» después de una larga introducción instrumental. Atis se despierta en la escena 5 con Cibeles a su lado intentando consolarle. Sangaride llega en la escena 6 y ruega a Cibeles que detenga su boda con el rey Celeno porque no lo ama. Atis, confuso, interviene en beneficio de Sangaride. Esto irrita a Cibeles porque ella también ama a Atis y le ha otorgado el título de sumo sacerdote. Cuando la dejan sola con Melisa en la escena 7, ella canta el lamento «L’ingrat Atys.»
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