| Introduction Documenting a creative experience with a life duration of five years is an impossible task, given that in this case it was a collective experience and each of the individual members of Owen Sound would probably record events differently. So in this regard, I offer the following as my personal diary, my memories of a life-changing tenure in the service of sound poetry. 1. Early Routes & the Simultaneous Poem Owen Sound was a collective language experiment which began its life in 1975. Our initial purpose in forming the group was to provide ourselves with a context which would become a performing writers ensemble doing what we loosely termed as 'sound poetry'. Its members included myself, Steven Smith, Michael Dean and David Penhale. Beyond the fact that Owen Sound did become a professional performing ensemble, probably the single most important revelation in its lifetime was that 'sound poetry', 'text/sound composition', 'intermedia language art', call it what you will, was a direct confrontation with that phenomenon we call language. While each of us came from such differing backgrounds as music, film and theatre, we all shared one common passion: writing and an intense love of language; and this passion was to lead us together down creative pathways that none of us could foresee as being outside the traditional realm of writing, pathways which inevitably led to the discovery and creation of new ways of communicating, new ways of relating amongst ourselves and to the world, and above all to the discovery of what Steve McCaffery has called "the total range of the nomadic consciousness". When we first met as a group in 1975, the first challenge we faced was to overcome our fears of making sounds together. I remember thinking at the time, "How could we, grown men who had been struggling for years in our writing to clearly articulate our feelings and ideas through semantic form, how could we now desert that and begin babbling with meaningless sounds, and even worse, how could we exhibit such nonsensical behaviour in front of other men our own age?" Our collective curiosity, however, was stronger than our inhibitions, and so we began the experiment. At first, what we heard issuing from our mouths sounded like a barnyard full of squeals, grunts and howls; but then it changed as one of us took the lead and initiated a strong rhythm with alternatingly sounded vowels and consonants. What became apparent to me as we all joined in and built to a fortissimo polyphonic chant-like wail was an overwhelming and exhilarating release of libidinal energy. The force of it was so powerful that we all sat for the next hour discussing what each of us had just individually experienced. Our common conscensus was that we needed to harness this new frightening energy, this release of primal pre-verbal utterance, and give it form and meaning. In attempting to do this, we fell back upon linear, narrative structure. One of us mentioned that he felt like a bomb had just been dropped in our midst, and this association of 'bomb' led us to the creation of our first formal experiment aptly entitled Hiroshima. We followed the traditional, narrative form of introduction with setting and characters, development, climax and denouement, trying to convey in abstract vocal sounds how a people were tragically destroyed yet how their spirit struggled back to rebuild a shattered world. In looking back to that first meeting, and then over time having gotten to know the other members of the group, several things occur to me. Most of us had experienced a state of silence in our family lives, silence around strong emotions which were forbidden to express vocally; and this first meeting of Owen Sound was a transgression upon our past emotional conditioning, a somewhat violent confrontation with what our nervous systems had blindly accepted as a normal state of being. We all left that first meeting exhausted (we had all just been through a war with ourselves) and yet newly energized (we had found a new voice buried beneath the old); and while before the meeting we had believed our individual writing to be the primary vehicle for the articulation of our feelings and ideas, when the meeting had ended it had dawned on some of us that we had just witnessed the birth of a new language which transcended whatever we had thought of before as communication. Of course, sound poetry was not new to us. All of us had seen performances by the Four Horsemen. They had angered some of us, inspired others. But it was new to us when we finally found ourselves doing it as a group; and while in the beginning we were influenced by other sources in our approach to sound poetry, the following years begat a unique form of intermedia language art and performance research which became known as Owen Sound. In subsequent meetings we began by talking about sound poetry, how we felt about it personally; and sometimes the talking became a defense, a way of avoiding the inevitable confrontation with our nervous systems and the sounds they would manifest through our mouths. I think each of us knew that when we began 'sounding' we would reveal ourselves, our naked emotions, and at that time in our personal growth our emotions were quite raw and in some cases severely wounded. So to ease ourselves into the situation we began to do simple vocal exercises; and this gave us the needed discipline to counter the irresistable urge for an emotional/vocal blow-out. One exercise consisted of exploring a different letter of the alphabet each time we would meet. It alone became a valuable tool in discovering the range of the vocal apparatus: how mouth, lungs, throat and nasal cavities could be manipulated to produce sounds not commonly found in everyday communication. After about six months of meeting weekly and working, we finally began discovering the value and pleasure to be derived from sound poetry. We became more trustful of one another, most of our inhibitions having disappeared, and we enjoyed making sound, were impassioned with researching language more deeply than ever before. We began bringing other strengths and skills to the group: one of us, Michael Dean, had theatre experience so we explored physical gesture and drama; another, myself, had musical experience so I could contribute a richer knowledge of polyphony and polytonality; while yet another, David Penhale, was studying linguistics and learning foreign tongues such as French and Italian which gave us all an added awareness and appreciation of language sounded in other than our mother-tongue. It was at this time also that our second challenge surfaced: were we going to perform for an audience and were we ready for it? We had developed a number of sound poems of which we felt confident. We also felt comfortable making sounds in front of one another, but we were unsure of our feelings towards an audience. We had never considered the question of what an audience is or how to work with it. Michael Dean's later realizations that "composition could only be judged by performance", and that "the dynamic between audience and group was vital to understand" was a learning curve throughout our performance career. However, as with our first challenge, our curiosity was stronger than our doubts, and Owen Sound took the stage for the first time in 1976 during an evening devoted to sound poetry as part of the Kontakte Writers in Performance Series at Fat Albert's Coffeehouse in Toronto. I previously said that we had finally discovered the value and pleasure to be derived from doing sound poetry. The Fat Albert's performance brought this discovery more clearly into focus. What we all treasured about sound poetry was the strength it gave back to language, to the primal semantic utterance, the shattering of worn out linguistic forms, an utterance through which a new verbal energy could bypass a listener's mind and communicate directly with the nervous system. We discovered that, in performance, sound poetry moves people emotionally whether they like it or not. It reaches out like the direct responses of children, with an honesty totally opposite to our everyday coded language structures. With this awareness would come responsibility towards our audience. We also discovered for ourselves the phenomenon of 'synergy'; in our case manifested as a form of group energy. Michael Dean described it when he said, "I believe that being true to sound means: how sound affects audience; how sound feels when we make it; how sound, when performed, adds up to something special emotionally." That something Dean refers to is the direct synergetic communication between sound poetry and an audience. Through sound poetry we give birth to a world of language which for the majority of people remains silent or inexpressible. As Michael Dean has said: "In sound poetry we give form to the unspoken communication between things." After the Fat Albert's performance we went through a period of research and reassessment. We began to bring other sources to bear upon our recent experience. We researched the dadaist and futurist sound poets of the early 20th century. Books such as Hugo Ball's Flight Out of Time and Richard Huelsenbeck's Diary of a Dada Drummer were common reading; Dean was acquainting himself with Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty'; Smith was exploring the permutational texts of Emmett Williams; and Truhlar was absorbing the vocal tape works of Steve Reich such as Come Out and It's Gonna Rain. We began realizing that there was a wealth of knowledge and invention in language arts performance that stretched back in time and gave the appearance of a tradition. We also questioned what we doing with sound poetry. At Fat Albert's we had performed three works, all full of sonic invention, verbal rhythms and vocal complexity. Two of the works, however, lacked a major ingredient - call it context or perhaps direction - and failed to sustain themselves past their initial performance. Only one piece - an adaptation of American composer Robert Ashley's She was a Visitor - survived and became part of the Owen Sound repertoire because its subtleties of context and concept had been provided by its composer. While we could break up language, disintegrate it, reassemble and deconstruct it, we admitted that abstract sound by itself, even if it was emotive, necessarily exhausts itself. I expressed this at the time when I said, "Sound must be encompassed into an organic process which is greater than the sound itself. Emotion is the expression of a life deeply felt and experienced. One emotes through sound. We then must make a conscious link for ourselves between our sounds and our lives." Much of what Owen Sound explored in the early days was of a primal nature - a releasing of primitive energy which then could inform the mouth and allow it to 'speak in tongues'. It wasn't until a year's time after the group's formation that were able to reach a level of conceptual thinking in our work. We then created works that were more 'simultaneous poems' than what we had considered to be sound poetry; that is, abstract sound was for the most part absent. Our first successful conceptual work was Giotto's Painted Loci which explored memory and how it relates to language. As a simultaneous poem in which each member of the group had a different 'script', it demonstrated various aspects of memory: states of forgetting, of absentmindedness, the amazing recall of mnemonists, as well as the many-voiced mind where too many echoes from the past are vying for attention in one head. It was an attempt to represent memory as a nomadic tribe of past experience which it is impossible for language to fully convey. Our compositional approach was to draw together and juxtapose various elements from outside sources: scientific and medical descriptions of memory, legends of mnemonists or those who could recall entire books from memory word for word, as well as literary explorations of memory by such writers as Marcel Proust and Emmett Willliams. These elements were not arranged in any coherent or narrative manner, but were juxtaposed to provide contrasts, or were layered to provoke feelings of confusion or ambiguity. Some elements were turned into pseudolanguage - an example being a medical text tampered with sparingly to give the impression of lucid, logical discourse but in fact being pure nonsense and incoherent as semantic statement. Like Giotto's Painted Loci, our other works of this period relied upon simultaneously spoken texts inspired by a single concept. The texts themselves and the manner in which they were performed were working models of this underlying concept. Another example is the piece entitled Simultaneous Translation composed for the group by David Penhale who at the time was studying both French and Italian. The work tries to convey, in the broadest sense, the meaning and process of translation; but once again, like Giotto's Painted Loci, not through linear semantic means; but rather through a form of imitative vocal delivery: one member would speak a text while another would 'translate' it. We gave the audience an aural impression of translating each other's words, while in fact the texts had little if any coherent or logical connection with each other, the words perhaps linking etymologically, but any semantic linear narrative being denied. The other important issue for Owen Sound in its first year of life was the question of identity. We felt we needed a focus that would give the group direction and a unique image. The name Owen Sound had been coined for the group by David Penhale for its pun value on 'own sound' and its identification with the Southwestern Ontario town. So we adopted Owen Sound as a conceptual, geographical identity, and composed our next major work Meaford Tank Range. As another simultaneous spoken text, this work reflected our collective experience of the group in process. In performance, it demonstrated the inner workings of the group's endeavours: what went on at our weekly meetings, how we composed our pieces, and incorporated remembrances of when Owen Sound the group travelled to Owen Sound the town to perform for its citizens. Steven Smith, the founder of Owen Sound, was the foremost advocate of abstract sound and improvisation, and it was in Meaford Tank Range that we began to explore and integrate both. This piece was mostly composed by Michael Dean, and while most of it is highly structured and scored, particular sections afforded us the opportunity of spontaneous dialogue and sound. Towards the end of the piece, a four-way improvisational dialogue emerges in which the members of the group express themselves concerning one another, compositional ideas, feelings towards the audience, and especially how the actual performance taking place is progressing. In one sense, Meaford Tank Range is a self-referential work which at times relied upon the groups communication skills to convey to the audience the reality of the performance event of which they were a part. This particular work set Owen Sound apart from others like the Four Horsemen and established them as unique voice within Canada. 2. Dada and the resurrection of the Cabaret Voltaire It was 1977. Owen Sound had performed on a number of occasions and was building a significant repertoire. Beside simultaneous poems like Giotto's Painted Loci, Meaford Tak Range and Simultaneous Translations, the group had also been busy exploring the interface between spoken word and abstract sound in such works as Htuom and Contract, as well as purely abstract sound works as Kesawagas, among others. The members of both The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound knew one another, and in a number of cases were close friends. There was no emnity nor competitiveness between the groups; rather, because "the elder statesmen" and "new young turks" were the only two sound poetry ensembles in Canada, there grew a special collaborative relationship - not in terms of co-composing works, but in terms of combining energy and resources to make things happen; and one of the major collaborations was their combining forces to create the two landmark Cabaret Voltaire performances. The original Cabaret Voltaire was a creation of expatriate poets during World War I. The seminal figures included Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janko and Emmy Hennings. They had come to Zurich, Switzerland to escape the insanity of the war, yet what they found in Switzerland was even more disturbing to them - an inbred, complacent Swiss population that felt it was beyond the politics of current events. So these poets decided to shake things up a little, see if they could arouse the Swiss middle-class from their lethargy. They created the Dada movement, a subversive artist manifestation; they found a local venue on the Spiegelgasse; invited the Swiss middle-class with the lure of a Chopin recital; then attempted to shock and disturb them. They performed both chaotic "simulataneous poems" and "sound poems".Thus the tradition began. They failed, and as we know to this day the Swiss remain one of the unique populations of this world characterized by their inbred stupidity, racisism and illusorary belief in themselves as "untouchablle". All members of the Four Horsemen and Owen Sound were aware of this history and influenced by it to a greater or lesser degree. All of us thought it would be great to celebrate these sound poetry pioneers, and decided to stage the Cabaret Voltaire in our own unique way. At the time, Victor Coleman was the curator ot The Music Gallery (Toronto's foremost venue for the performance of avant-garde music and work); he was approached and agreed to the event. The Horsemen and Owen Sound then proceeded to create a cabaret - beside themselves, they enlisted the collaboration of some of Toronto's foremost jazz and avant-garde musicians including Eugene Martinec, John Taylor, and Mike Malone, among others. The cabaret consisted of one set each by the Horsemen and Owen Sound interspersed by wild music by the Spiegelgasse Jazz Band, as we called our wonderful musician collaborators, and the evening ended with a major piece by all participants. It was standing room only, even on the street outside where people listened to loud speakers that accomodated them. In recalling that moment now, it still amazes me that there was such a large enthusiastic audience for what all of us were doing; after all, this was not some normal, sedate, semantic poetry reading. I think it was the force of the positive energy that captured the moment, both in our presentation and performance, and as well displayed an openess on our audience's part to what we were exploring and communicating. With the success of the first Cabaret Voltaire, it was but a short time until the vision and energy amongst us built again; and the result was the Cabaret Voltaire II. We were able to secure the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto for one of the largest and most exciting sound poetry events in Canada's history. On March 18, 1978, the Four Horsemen, Owen Sound and a wonderful group of avant-garde jazz musicians took the stage to present their work to over 200 enthusiastic audience members. This time there was no division into groups (i.e. strict performance by The Horsemen and Owen Sound); rather, all the works were new and created through the interaction of poets and musicians. For my self, this experience was exhilarting, as I created a work entitled A Porcelain Cup Placed There which I conducted during the performance. The piece included four sound poets - Michael Dean, Steven Smith, David Penhale and Paul Dutton - as well as four musicians - Memo Acevedo (percussion), Mike Malone (trumpet), Don Naduriak (electric piano), and John Taylor (string bass). Many of th other artists involved in Cabaret Voltaire II also created exciting and provacative works. This event was also the first manifestation of the interface between live performance and technology to occur in Owen Sound. Steven Smith and Richard Truhlar performed a duet at Cabaret Voltaire II entitled Shale in which their vocal performances were processed live by Truhlar using sound altering media. The use of technology in live performance would , from then on, become an element in Owen Sound's futue explortions. 3. Tradition and the Barbarians at the Gates |