Karl Young's acoutic/performance books
This began with a book meant to be used in performances of Jackson Mac Low's Stanzas for Iris Lezak. At first, it was merely printed two-by-fours that could be clapped together after each line of the poem; in subsequent binding drafts, Young also experimented with the spacing between each "page" and the different percussive timbres this produced.
After this piece, Young applied these techniques to his own writing with Book of Nocturnes. Because the poem was meant to emulate sketches of his apartment at night, he softened the effect of the book "claps" by covering the two-by-fours with pages, producing a sound he compared to Japanese Noh plays. Interestingly, he described this piece as a "means of performing the poems with the book as accompaniment."
Young's next work was for the Canadian sound poetry performance group the Four Horsemen. He describes this as being loud enough "to make the windows rattle when played at full volume." Each page was a box, filled with ball bearings, marbles, grains, beans, screws, et cetera, so the book could be played by clapping the pages, rattling them, or both. Only four lines of the actual poem appeared in the book, printed on the outside edges of the pages and each corresponding to one member of the group.
Another of Young's works that is worthy of note is Make a Joyful Noise, which was more deliberate both visually and musically than anything he had created before. The text goes as follows:
...make a joyful noise...
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills be joyful together.
Instead of focusing on having a "roar" of cacophony, Young chose to focus on the wide variety of sounds he could enable a book to produce. He achieved this by "building the book with resonating chambers, sympathetic vibrating strings, and chambers for objects that could rattle, ring, or make hushed rasping sounds - depending on how the book was played." The coloring of the book is vibrant and playful, nearly clashing.
These are only a few examples from a body of work spanning decades, and each one emphasizes something different about the relationship between book and performance. Of these books, which is the most typically booklike - and which is the least - and why? How does our perception of these books change as the chief purpose moves from being mostly about the text, like Stanzas, to mostly about the sound, like the Four Horseman performance book? At one point Young describes his pieces as being "accompaniment" to the books themselves, but in some cases his works were never performed (as was the case with a series of anti-war books in the 80s). What changes when his performance books are severed from the performances they were intended for?
