Filed under: interview, music, oulipo | Tags: angil, bök, cage, evans, glass, hiddntracks, minimalism, mottet, oulipo, piano, reich
I am cross-posting this with my other, collaborative blog: ghostisland.wordpress.com
A few months ago I found this album by “Angil and Hiddntracks” called Oulipo Saliva, which was built with a great deal of interest in constraint, avoiding the use of the letter “e,” focusing on woodwind instrumentation, the use of an old untuned piano, and even avoiding the use of the key of E.
I would certainly recommend it–a carefully crafted piece at every level. Here’s their myspace page.
With experiments like this, results can be either gimmicky or a wonderful surprise. They are, in this case, pretty dazzling. I wrote a small piece about it and Mickaël must have had a google alert set up for his name, because he dropped me a message and then graciously agreed to have an email conversation with me about his music.
Here’s the text: I think you’ll find that Mickaël is an uncommonly aware, crafty, sharp, interesting, and friendly musician. I’ve let him know that I will be posting this here, and that you may be commenting on it. So, if you have anything to say, make sure to say it.
I would definitely recommend reading the conversation, he’s a lovely guy with a lot of things to say. My apologies for talking so much.
Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains every vowel. Bök defines the word as meaning “beautiful thinking”. This book is a marvel of constraint. Its wonderful, beautiful, surprising, and just pretty amazing in general. I would link to the Amazon page for this book, but it turns out that Coach House Books has actually posted the entirety of the book on their website.
The book is technically a lipogram, or a work in which a letter or group of letters are missing, forming a constraint game for the author. Christian Bök has done this by eliminating all but one vowel from each chapter. Its really pretty amazing how far he is willing to go with the restraint, as he has extra rules that each chapter must follow.
All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus.) The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
Essentially, he has written a pretty astounding little book. If I remember right, it took him 7 years to put together, but can easily be read in an afternoon. The chapters begin to take on a character of their own. What starts as an impressive genre exercise also reveals itself as a thoughtful examination of the English language. Reading it might teach you a thing or two.
Some precedents, for those interested, are Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, in which he uses an alliterative device allowing in the first chapter for only words that begin with “A”, for the second both “A” and “B”, and so on and so forth. A Void by George Perec avoids the use of the letter “e” for the entirety of the novel. This is the most common letter in both French and English, so the translation is perhaps more of a work of constraint than the original was.
These exercises are all born out of the Oulipo school, which I will most likely talk about a great deal, these authors being one of my chief interests. More on that later.
