Bengt Emil Johnson’s Bland orrar och kor and the Legacy of 1960’s Sound Technology : Bengt Emil Johnson - after Concretism

• Bengt Emil Johnson was one of the most prominent poets of the short-lived yet highly vivid Swedish concretist movement of the early 1960’s. As for most poets involved in this movement, his carreer soon turned to other manners of writing, in his case more successfully than for many of his fellow concretists. During the second half of the 1960’s he was involved in creating the interartial genre of text-sound-composition, and ever since then he has been an internationally acclaimed composer of electro-acoustic music. Since the 1970’s he has also been recognised as an important innovator in the field of nature-poetry, displaying an attitude as keen and attentive towards the abundance of language as it is towards that of nature. Through this sensitivity he has been able to examine and unfold intriguing correspondences between language and nature. Apart from being a poet during the first half of the 1960’s, Johnson was also a writer of manifestos and essays concerning aesthetic matters. He quite frequently appeared in the press as well as in several of the important Swedish periodicals of the time. Quite a few of the aesthetical texts he wrote during this period were concerned with the artistic potential that was to be found in new technology, especially sound-technology. Particularly interesting are a number of texts which he wrote in collaboration with Lars-Gunnar Bodin. Johnson and Bodin were not, however, the only Swedish artists writing manifestos and essays from these perspectives during those years. Someone else who did was Öyvind Fahlström, the patriarch of the Swedish concretist movement. In my paper I trace a rhetoric in a number of aesthetic essays and manifestos by all these writers published between the years 1954-1965, a rhetoric which in several ways has its aim fixed on connecting technological and scientific breakthrough to artistic breakthrough. In this way I try to point out the fact that a number of the ideals behind the radical avant-garde writing strategies used by Johnson and his compatriots during his concretist years had a technological origin. I also go on to show to what extent these strategies linger in Johnson’s later writing, what part they play, and in what ways they appear. The examples I use from his later writing consist of three, among themselves quite different, poems from his 1989 poetry collection Bland orrar och kor (Amongst Black Grouse and Cows). I aim to show that Johnson, in these poems, still uses techniques appropriated from, and inspired by, mid-century sound-technological landmarks such as the contact-microphone, multiple layer recording, cut-up- and pitching techniques. And all of these technologies and techniques were discussed in the aesthetic writings of Johnson, Bodin, and Fahlström, respectively, during the 1950’s and 1960’s. And all of them were mentioned as holding great artistic potential.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Idé- och lärdomshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Ideas (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Teknikhistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History of Technology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Avant-Garde

Sound-technology

Bengt Emil Johnson

Bland orrar och kor

Concrete Poetry

1960's

Öyvind Fahlström

Lars-Gunnar Bodin

Manifestos

Rondo

Ord och Bild

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)