Sirens

Michael Bull

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501305023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Sirens are sounds that confront us in daily life, from the sounds of police cars and fire engines to, less often, tornado warnings. Ideologies of sirens embody the protective, the seductive and the dangerous elements of siren sounds – from the US Cold War public training exercises in the 1950s and 1960s to the seductive power of the sirens entrenched in popular culture: from Wagner to Dizzee Rascal, from Kafka to Kurt Vonnegut, from Hans Christian Andersen to Walt Disney. This book argues, using a wide array of theorists from Adorno to Bloch and Kittler, that we should understand 'siren sounds' in terms of their myth and materiality, and that sirens represent a sonic confluence of power, gender and destructiveness embedded in core Western ideologies to the present day. Bull poses the question of whether we can rely on sirens, both in their mythic meanings and in their material meanings in contemporary culture.

1

Prolegomena to the Sirens

[The Siren song awakens] hope and desire for a sublime beyond which, in fact is only a desert … whence silence, like noise, burns all access to the song.

Maurice Blanchot

The air raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully … Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything would burn.

Kurt Vonnegut

Almost 3,000 years separate the episode from Homer’s Odyssey in which the mythical hero, Odysseus is tempted by the song of the Sirens and Kurt Vonnegut’s description of air-raid sirens sounding off before the destruction of Dresden in 1945. The Homeric Sirens fail to lure Odysseus to his death just as the Dresden sirens fail to protect the citizens of Dresden. In the Homeric tale there are no consequences to the failure of the Sirens – Odysseus sails on unharmed into the future and is written about and continually reinvented to the present day. In later accounts it is the Sirens who suffer from their ‘failure’, ‘Upon hearing him, the Sirens threw themselves into the sea … for they were fated to die whenever a man did not fall under their spell’ (Jorge Luis Borges in Langer 2017: 145). The inhabitants of Dresden did not escape so easily with the deaths spiralling to anything between 30,000 and 115,000 on that night alone.¹ The Sirens of myth and the sirens of war are joined in name, cultural lineage and ideology.² Both siren accounts are ‘side shows’ to the main ‘event’. The Siren episode in the Odyssey, a mere eighty lines from a 300-page book, plays a minor role in the narrative of Odysseus’s successful journey home, while the Dresden sirens represent the state’s largely impotent solution to the production of its own weapons of mass destruction in which there can be no ‘innocents’. The sonic embrace of the Homeric Sirens seduce in order to destroy just as the sirens of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Coventry and Hiroshima are deceptive in their claims to protect in the very act of destruction; the one exclusive in its focus upon the listening male, the other, democratic in its annihilation of everything – animate and inanimate. Neither the Sirens of Homeric myth nor the sirens of Dresden are adequately explained by a mere reference to their ‘sonic’ qualities, rather requiring an understanding of the cultural matrix of power, ideology and knowledge in which they exist, are represented and experienced. Both Blanchot and Vonnegut place themselves in the shoes of the listener – the one ‘desirous’ for that which the Sirens signify; the other merely seeking shelter. One, a ‘literary’ reading from the page, the Odyssey is after all a book, the other thinking this is his last night on Earth – the one tempted, the other fearful. What of the sounds themselves? Blanchot, a literary theorist, knows the history of Sirens in novels and social thought recognizing that nobody has literally ever heard the Siren voice of myth, at least not until they became embodied in plays, operas and films like Disney’s The Little Princess, where they become women. Originally ‘the encounter takes place in the narrated imaginary itself’, a product of what Don Ihde refers to as our ‘auditory imagination’ (Liska 89, Ihde 20017). In this cultural imaginary, the Sirens sing only to men, originally ‘existing’ on the margins of ‘civilization’, beyond sight. The history of their embodiment is a history of Western misogyny (Dijkstra 1986) and is primarily a story of men, not women. Vonnegut’s air-raid sirens are ‘real’ but no less the product of a male-dominated culture, they are placed strategically, often out of sight – high up so that they might be heard. It is not the sirens that instil fear, but that which they represent. Vonnegut knew the destruction which modern warfare wreaks – from Guernica to Coventry, he listens to the destructive sounds of modern warfare whose origins lie beyond the sounds of the sirens – opaque in origin but direct in consequence. In this book, the Sirens of myth and the sirens of war play their role in a sonic renditioning of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno understood, as did Vonnegut, that the Siren myth extended beyond the literary imagination of Homer to be embedded in the core values of a Western culture from which the myth itself derived – these are the values of domination and instrumental rationality through which knowledge, gender, class and ‘nature’ are articulated, pursued and controlled.

2

Eclipsing the Acousmatic

The Story of the Sirens?

The acousmatic refers to a sound that we hear but cannot see or place. As I hear the distant sound of an aircraft in the sky, I might look up in search of it but might be unable to see it for a range of reasons, cloud cover, distance or poor eyesight. The situation is replicated countless times – a cry in the night, a creaking floorboard, the sound of a nearby automobile. Sonic experience invariably takes place within an embodied, multisensory and cultural context – even imaginary sounds or those sounds that are dreamt of in the middle of the night. Rick Altman in speaking of the relation of sound to image in film argued that ‘sound will always carry with it the tension of the unknown until it is anchored in sight’ (Altman 1980: 74). Can this observation concerning the sensory apprehension of film be extended more broadly to a wider range of sonic experience? David Le Breton thinks so: ‘Every sound is associated with the object that gives rise to it, it is an object’s sensible trace, a thread that connects us to the endless movement of the world that surrounds us’ (Le Breton 2017: 65). Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens is acousmatic as he sails by he never sees them. He hears only their sound. Yet, the history of the Sirens is one of their embodiment in social thought and artistic practice. This history implies, in accordance with Altman, that sound is never enough experientially or conceptually. Nevertheless, there exist proponents of the acousmatic as a ‘thing in itself’ representing a conceptual, practical and perhaps ethical challenge for those who hold the view that ‘sound is enough’. Equally, however, for those who argue that the sonic always ‘moves out’ towards the visual, towards a wider phenomenology of sensory and cognitive experience – then the nature, value and choices involved in this extending of the sonic also require explanation and investigation.

The position taken in this book is that it is impossible to fully understand sirens sounds, both mythical and/or ‘material’ without recourse to the historical and broader cultural values within which they are experienced and created. Brian Kane, writing as a response to Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion’s understanding of the ‘acousmatic’, argues that their position is one in which ‘the acousmatic experience of sound allows a listener to attend to the sound itself, apart from the causes, sources and connections it might have to the environment’ (Kane 2014: 5). Kane questions the philosophical desire or ability of a phenomenology of sound to achieve what Schaeffer and others hope to achieve whereby sounds ‘speak for themselves’ if only the listener possesses the requisite skills to decipher them. The abstracting of sound from its environment appears to deny its historic and cultural placement – its raison d’etre by rather locating its meaning in the ears of specialized listeners. Josh Epstein, in a similar vein to Kane, reinterprets Schaeffer’s notion of acousmatic sound through the earlier work of the composer George Antheil whose aims appear similar to those of Schaeffer,

The effort to produce a newly intense phenomenology of what Pierre Schaeffer later called ‘reduced listening’ – the hearing of sound without reference to its source, cause, or meaning – resembles Antheil’s claim for Ballet Mécanique’s purely formal intensification of sound. The problem is that nobody in the 1920s, excepting the purveyors of the doctrine, actually experienced Ballet Mécanique this way … noise-music addressed the material presence of noise whilst claiming a nonrepresentational musical function. (Epstein 2014: xxiv)

Sound studies practice sometimes appears to fall into this category in which some examples of sound walks isolate, sounds to be heard rather than attempting to locate them within their cultural and individual context. Kane describes these acousmatic practices as ‘a shared intersubjective practice attending to musical and non-musical sounds, a way of listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the source of sounds is beyond the horizon of visibility, uncertain, undetermined, bracketed, or wilfully and imaginatively suspended’ (Kane 2014: 7). In the following pages, it is not the inevitable contextualization of the sonic which is questioned, just as Odysseus might be imagined as craning his neck in the direction of the Siren sounds while tied to the mast of the ship as it moves beyond their singing, or as the urban dweller looks around for the origin of the police siren heard in the distance; it is that the turning of the neck in order to try to see is not a sufficient explanation in itself. The question remains, who is it that is listening and what is the cultural, historical or interpersonal context of their listening? A sound engineer working on the efficacy of police sirens will have a different sonic and perhaps ethical perspective from a worried middle-class listener, who on hearing the sirens feels safer due to her trust in the efficacy and honesty of the police, as against those who interpret police sirens as a potentially alien oppressive presence. Equally those who heard air-raid sirens heard them often ‘acousmatically’ but their meanings were filtered through their instructions to take cover – experientially this is how they are interpreted at any specific time or place. Warfare has developed its own versions of the acousmatic. From the First World War soldier poking his head above his trench in the mistaken belief that he would be able to duck on hearing a rifle shot to the belief that on looking up to the sky you would be able to see and run for cover from an intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile. Both the audio and the visual are enshrouded in their own cultural, political and ideological myths that extend beyond the siren sound, the rifle that fires its bullet, or the intercontinental missile flying towards its target – just as listening to the sounds of a disembodied Siren tells us very little.

Returning to the Homeric Sirens from where this book sets sail, we address a range of issues. To set the scene, Homer’s original Siren passage is quoted at length, it is the page that has launched a thousand commentaries and over 100 English translations of the Odyssey from the Greek. The goddess Circe begins by warning Odysseus about the dangers that the Sirens pose as he embarks upon his journey home:

First you will reach the Sirens, who bewitch

all passers-by. If anyone goes near them

in ignorance, and listen to their voices,

That man will never travel home,

And never make his wife and children happy

to have him back with them again. The Sirens

who sit there in their meadow will seduce him

with piercing songs. Around them lie

great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones,

Their skin all shrivelled up. Use wax to plug

your sailors’ ears as you row past, so they

are deaf to them. But if you wish to hear them,

Your men must fasten you to your ship’s mast

by hand and foot, straight upright, with tight ropes. (Odyssey 2017: 302)

Odysseus is forewarned, what it is that is so beguiling and dangerous to Odysseus are the voices of the Sirens, they themselves are not described, only the site from which they sing, a meadow. Circe describes their song as deceitful, rather than consummation, death is the result. Five pages later Odysseus describes his encounter with the Sirens.

And when we were in earshot of the Sirens,

they knew our ship was near, and started singing.

Odysseus! Come here! You are well known

from many stories! Glory to the Greeks!

Now stop your ship and listen to our v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Siren Beginnings
• Siren Traces
• 1 Prolegomena to the Sirens
• 2 Eclipsing the Acousmatic: The Story of the Sirens?
• 3 Sonic Sleepwalkers: Siren Myths from Homer, to Bach, to Nancy Sinatra
• 4 Remembering the Forgotten Sounds of Air-Raid Sirens: Charlie Hebdo to Dresden and Beyond
• 5 Urban Sirens: 9/11, Dizzee Rascal and Varese
• 6 Timing the Sirens: Kurt Vonnegut Meets Theodor Adorno
• 7 Siren Spaces: A Different Colonization?
• 8 Hearing the Sirens: A Tale of Sonic Exclusivity?
• 9 Sirens for the Young: From Fénelon to Disney
• 10 Kafka’s Sirens and the Story of Silencing
• 11 Sonic Aftermaths: Sirens and Stormy Daniels
• 12 Sonic Fallibility: Kittler’s Sirens
• Afterword: Let’s Sing Another Song Boys. This One Has Grown Old and Bitter (Leonard Cohen)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright