Listening to Hugh Davies
A few years later, after Bart Hopkins had begun publishing his California-based journal Experimental Musical Instruments, I realized Hugh's interests as a writer and archivist as well as inventor/improviser, ran parallel to my own fascination with the astounding breadth of musical exploration existing far outside the too frequently narrowed sights of modern experimentalism. Hugh's appreciation for the musical inventions of music hall, vaudeville, and radio and theater sound effects departments echoed my own fascination with the musical arsenal of Spike Jones and his City Slickers and the rare, but no less inspiring, addition of quills and bones to the recorded legacies of Henry 'Ragtime Texas' Thomas and Blind Blake. When I began to write about the lineage of these marvels, Hugh's work as an archivist was a singly significant model for how to proceed in a thorough and scholarly fashion all the while communicating the excitement and shared enthusiasm of such ephemeral discoveries. In broader terms, Hugh's articles and essays, as he wrote in the catalog for a 1989 touring exhibition called Making Music: New and Unusual Instruments, "obliged academics to take seriously research areas that previously they had largely managed to ignore."
In the early 80s I first wrote to Hugh explaining that I had an opportunity to direct some workshops on instrument invention in Chicago, that I wanted to talk about his work as an inventor and as an historian. His prompt response included slides of his own work, along with a number of images of the work of Hans-Karsten Raecke (an instrument inventor unknown to me at the time), of the percussion instruments of Lucia Dlugoszewski (whose work he had included in his entries in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments), and names and addresses of further contacts. All offered fruitful new avenues of correspondence and exchange. It was an uncommonly generous reply and a boost to my own confidence that I could present an informed survey of such sparsely recorded histories under the high standards I felt Hugh had already set for any of us following similar opportunities.
As an improviser, Hugh worked with a curious assemblage of sounds, ready at hand in an equally unique collection of instruments. Many of these instruments were folded into the newly self-invented category of 'shozyg,' a name taken from the spine of the hollowed-out final volume of an encyclopedia that housed the little sounding objects he amplified and played. However it wasn't only the range of these sounds that impressed me. The structure of his improvisations and compositions with them sounded equally original. His SAJ record from 1982 is a masterful collection of works for springboards and shozygs. Certainly his studies with Daphne Oram, his experiences with Stockhausen and the performance of Mikrophonie were vital first steps in the directions he took as a musician for there are seemingly few models for the course he took in his solo improvisations. His statement in a 1996 essay for Rubberneck titled "My Invented Instruments and Improvisations" is deceptively modest: "Usually I need to forget everything in order to avoid clichés and come as freshly as possible to the next performance." 'Forgetting everything' is no small task as an artist or musician. Harry Partch took equally decisive steps as he set about to invent a new music and the imperative Partch details in his earliest efforts to 'start over' musically are called to mind in Hugh's phrase. For Hugh Davies this garden of forgetting bore exceptional fruit. There are passages of "Shozyg Sequence No. 1" on the SAJ record, recorded at the Workshop Freie Musik in Berlin in 1979, that sound out as "certain small shafts of intense life," quoting a description that Partch uses in his preface to Genesis of a Music as he recalls the most liberating musical experiences of his early years.
Hugh and I missed crossing paths at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium by just a year in the mid 90s, and, again, a second missed opportunity passed for me a few years later in Amsterdam when I was unable to join him in an egg-slicer ensemble being organized by Johannes Bergmark. We met, finally, in Chicago just a few years ago. The Experimental Sound Studioís Outer Ear Festival for 2002 presented Hugh performing solo and in a trio with Carlos Zingaro and Richard Teitelbaum. His solo pieces overflowed with delicate detail alongside broader gestures that gave these careful assemblages the formidable presence of a bullfiddle. Joining the scattered history of instruments played without being touched (the theremin, electronically, and the k'longput, by the force of hands clapped near a bamboo tubeís open-end), he breathed sonic life into a cymbal stand-mounted shozyg by blowing against thin reeds with soda straws. Soon after, as counterpoint, scrapes and rasps were fiercely generated with simple feathers. Later in the evening Hugh joined the more orchestrally-minded duo of Carlos Zingaro and Richard Teitelbaum, enriching the ensemble with his characteristically drier, more textural batterie, but, making stunningly organic and fluid contributions to the improvisation in defiance of his sounds' origins in cast-off diminutive metallic shards.
Hugh Davies' studied and substantial contributions to our shared musical experience manifest in the far corners of the modern musicking. If you want to learn about the history of electronic musical instruments and their application to composition and improvisation in the 20th century, or the history of recording sound, or even the transformation of the nail violins in the 1700s into the toy pianos of the 1950s, the essays of Hugh Davies are the place to begin. If you want to teach musical instrument exploration as as a mode of basic music education and share with children the unusual and simple acoustic delights of larchcones, lid clickers and Chinese fans, Hugh Davies' book Sounds Heard is essential and rewarding reading. If you want insight into the history of musical improvisation over the past 40 years and the intersection of sound art, instrument invention, and the pursuit of what has come to be called extended technique, the recordings of Hugh Davies are essential listening.
I will be forever grateful for the dedication to all these roads taken by Hugh Davies in his pursuit for new musical discovery. These are remarkable and inspiring accomplishments, which never stray far from their source in his fascination with the wonders and mysteries of every single sound he heard.
- Hal Rammel, January 2005
[This article originally appeared online on the European Free Improvisation website organized by Peter Stubley. Hugh Davies passed away in January of 2005 and this was written in his memory.]