Laura Cameron

Conserving Rainforest 4: aural geographies and ephemerality

Works of installation sound art are inherently spatial. Documentation of this form, which dates from the 1950s, involves an engagement with diverse histories of geographical knowledge and oral-historical methodology. David Tudors Rainforest 4 (1973) is a performed sculptural sound installation which remains the best-known of his pieces. Its durability—when most other of his works remain unperformed, partly because they are too hermetic to decipher or depend on unavailable technologies—belies its “score” which consists of a simple diagram and a few words. Oral history, formal and informal, is not only key to understanding the history of the piece, but is integral to its performance. This paper explores some historical geographies of Rainforest 4 and the aesthetic of ephemerality in live electronic music, for which documentation of performance is secondary. In examining the paradoxes of Rainforest 4s conservation, we explore Tudors engagement with particular notions of nature and spirituality as well as the social hierarchies and conservative impulse which keep the piece alive.

Science, Nature, and Hatred: ‘Finding Out’ at the Malting House Garden School, 1924–29

In reconfigurations of the ‘nature’ of the English child and childhood in the early 20th century a key role was played by the Malting House Garden School in Cambridge, England, founded by the unorthodox trader and inventor Geoffrey Pyke and codirected by pioneer educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs. Known scurrilously in the town of Cambridge as ‘a pregenital brothel’, the Malting House School was supported by ecologist A G Tansley and psychologist Jean Piaget amongst others for its ‘copious and careful record of phenomena’. Though short lived, the Malting House School experiment became widely known through popular and influential books, written by Isaacs on early childhood development and education, based largely on data collected at the school. Less is known concerning Pykes applications of psychoanalytic knowledge, his powerful scientific networks, and his grand vision for a new form of education. With recently recovered records and other archival documents, I seek to contribute to a historical geography of localized psychoanalytic knowledge by exploring the tangle of disciplinary relations in the mutual and imaginative constitution of two pillars of the Malting House School: natural science and psychoanalysis. In particular, I examine what Isaacs referred to as ‘the ecological point of view’ as well as the place of hatred in relation to the nursery schools attempted manufacture of infant scientists eager to ‘find out’. For Pyke, the main threat to the “vigorous survival of an intelligent bourgeoisie” was the Oedipus situation, as described by Sigmund Freud. Through new educational techniques that recognized powerful emotion between generations, Pyke sought to help mould a race that would be able to survive the great changes which he expected science to create in our environment.

Translocal Ecologies: The Norfolk Broads, the "Natural," and the International Phytogeographical Excursion, 1911

What we consider “nature” is always historical and relational, shaped in contingent configurations of representational and social practices. In the early twentieth century, the English ecologist A.G. Tansley lamented the pervasive problem of international misunderstandings concerning the nature of “nature.” In order to create some consensus on the concepts and language of ecological plant geography, Tansley founded the International Phytogeographical Excursion, which brought together leading plant geographers and botanists from North America and Europe. The first IPE in August 1911 started with the Norfolk Broads. It was led by Marietta Pallis, Tansley’s former student at Cambridge. This trip and the work of Pallis, neglected in other accounts of this early period of the history of ecology, influenced the relations between Tansley and important American ecologists H.C. Cowles and F.E. Clements. Understanding “place” as a network of relations, our regional focus shows how taking international dialogue, travel and interchange into account enriches understanding of ecological practice.

Benign ecology: Marietta Pallis and the floating fen of the delta of the Danube, 1912-1916

This paper considers the work of the ecologist Marietta Pallis (1882-1963), retracing the fieldwork associated with her 1916 paper on ‘The structure and history of Plav’, the floating fen of the Danube delta. Attending to links between field and home, politics and ecology, the paper explores how field cultures are implicated in the mutual and imaginative constitution of nature and society. The paper examines the scientific culture within which Pallis operated, and the wider cultures of travel and identity within which her scientific fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was facilitated and shaped by a range of encounters with officials and informants whose presence is variously engaged with and erased in Pallis’s published account. We emphasize Pallis’s understanding of Plav as a ‘benign’ form of ecology, highlighting the political complexity of that term, and of the vitalism espoused by Pallis as part of her conservative eco-philosophical imagination.

A Day in Algonquin Park: William W.H. Gunn and the Circadian Audio Portrait

This article considers the place of William W. H. ‘Bill’ Gunn in the history of electroacoustic music with a focus on one of his earliest creative forays, the 1955 production of A Day in Algonquin Park , a composition in the genre of what the authors have dubbed the circadian audio portrait . In exploring Gunn’s compositional decisions and the political and creative contexts which surrounded them, we detail his sonic practice and make the argument that Gunn was a soundscape composer before the term was coined, a forerunner of the genre indebted to composers connected with the World Soundscape Project. In doing so, we must acknowledge the ways in which the album’s creation and reception play out paradoxical aspects of the wilderness myth, while feeding into the construction of a popular and idealised Canadian identity. We also find his modernist ecological sensibility struggling to articulate a place for human visitors within nature: in this, Gunn’s outlook and concerns were not very different from some contemporary soundscape composers. However, this study goes beyond acknowledging a previously ‘unknown father’ of familiar sounds and debates; in contextualising his work with environmental sound as a contribution to the genre of the circadian audio portrait , we highlight an alternative genealogy for contemporary soundscape composition.