Fontana’s River Sounding Installation – A Binaural Interpretation
Bill Fontana began his artistic career as a composer. “What really began to interest me was not so much the music that I could write, but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical”
This kind of subjective musical transformation of wherever I happened to be was fascinating. The investigation and isolation of these experiences became my obsession. I began to carry a tape recorder wherever I went (the most interesting tape recorder at this time as a miniature Nagra), so that when the ambient sounds became musical, I could make a recording of them.
As these recordings accumulated, I began to wonder what it meant. Should I make concerts out of these recordings? Should I use these recordings as raw material with which to create studio compositions out of sound?
I began to regard recording a sound as an act in mental intensity equal to writing music, with some of these recordings having the real possibility of being accepted by me as a composition. But who would believe this?, composing by listening? For these sound recordings to be as aesthetically meaningful as musical compositions required some radical solutions, but I did not as yet know what these were to be.
My search for these aesthetic solutions continued as I went to live in Australia in the early 1970’s. I had an amazing job working for the Australian Broadcasting corporation to record what Australia sounded like from 1974 to 1978. This gave me the chance to listen, dream and record with unlimited technical resources for the first time in my life.
Two recording experiences of this period had a seminal influence on my work. One was a recording I made in a tropical rain forest during a total eclipse of the sun (in 1976), and the other was an 8 channel field recording of wave patterns happening beneath a floating concrete pier.
The total eclipse recording documented a unique moment that was a once in a lifetime experience in this environment (the next occurrence at this location will be 25 November, 2030 – a span of 54 years) . During the minutes just before the moment of totality (having a duration of 2 minutes), the acoustic protocol between birds, determining who sang at the different times of day became mixed up. All available species were singing at the same time during the minutes immediately proceeding totality, as the normal temporal clues given by light were obliterated by a rainforest suddenly filled with sparkling shadows. When totality suddenly brought total darkness, there was a deep silence.
This recording was seminal for my work because a total eclipse is always conceived of as being a visual experience, and such a compelling sonic result was indicative of how ignored the acoustic sensibility is in our normal experience of the world. From this moment on, my artistic mission consciously became the transformation and deconstruction of the visual with the aural.
This led me to not only become interested in the musicality and compositional wholeness of environmental sound, so that the act of listening and its extension through sound recording equaled music; but that the visual space that was sounding equaled sculpture and architecture.
At this moment, I became interested in Duchamp, and a passage from “the bride stripped bare by her bachelors even”, which led me to call my art form sound sculpture: