After several listens to Giacometti’s work, I feel I am an expert. I know a great deal of his work – it would be impossible to know everything completely, so I can identify what kind of recordings are interesting to my ear. After the class I took with Mark Peter-Wright on how to drag one sound to another, I was very inspired to manipulate the work of the ethnomusicologist to another level. What kind of considerations might a piece that manipulates someone else’s work have? How can I justify my ideas through editing? For the moment, I recognise that my intention regarding Giacometti’s work is to perpetuate his work and praise him. This obsession seems endless; it will become even more eternal by revealing concepts like repetition, juxtaposition, and extension in a sound piece. I don’t want to damage the subject’s voices. But I want to raise them to other levels of understanding. When we mix two Chitas (singers of traditional Beira music who became famous with Giacometti’s recordings), what can happen? What can happen when, apart from the Cheetahs, we put the masons of Lanhoso to the noise? And the campaniça guitar? And the norias? And the wind? And the hoes? And the tiredness of men? And the fishermen of Portimão? And the wool handlers? And the ladies’ songs? What sound projection could all this amalgam of sounds have?
In class with Mark, I was dazzled by the work of Maria Chavez, whom I already knew but had never connected with Peter Cusack’s sonic journalism. In essence, this pairing is a kind of archival journalism, which alludes a bit to the work of Syma Tariq. Is it possible, without speech, to demonstrate the social problems of fascist Portugal in such a piece? What if I fail? What if I fail to achieve my goal? I believe that such wisdom can only be achieved by doing! In another class with Mark, I learned that with practice, you realise, reminding me of Francis Alÿs’ work El Ensayo, where a car tries consecutively to cross a hill but fails and turns back.
It is essential to recognise that perhaps Giacometti’s best field recordings are undoubtedly the Working Songs. This is for a simple reason – music is no longer the ethnomusicologist’s main reason for collecting. There is a social issue surrounding the recording. The social reality cannot be denied, just as in post-World War II neorealism. In front of our ears, we can consider thousands of reasons for judging a society. For example, the men pounding the stone in Póvoa do Lanhoso was done the same way a century ago. However, we are in the middle of the second half of the 21st century, and here they are, the last specimens of that sound register, which most probably in other societies would already be extinct. They are sounds that seem from a very distant past but were actually recorded 50 years ago. Nowadays, these same sounds no longer exist. They exist performed in case the elderly person who knows how to break the stone in that way is asked.