Wassily Kandinsky: Klänge / Sounds (1913–) [German, English]

Kandinsky’s self-described “musical album,” Klänge (Sounds), consists of thirty-eight prose-poems he wrote between 1909 and 1911 and fifty-six woodcuts he began in 1907. In it, he emphasizes the physiological impact of the sonic quality of language, often repeating words until focus on meaning subsides and new focus on aural character of words emerges. These poems were instrumental in Kandinsky’s development of abstraction.

“Klänge is one of his three major publications that appeared shortly before World War I, alongside Über die Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) and the Blaue Reiter almanac, which he edited with one of the group’s cofounders, Franz Marc. Fearing poor sales, Munich-based Reinhard Piper only reluctantly published Klänge, and Kandinsky had to guarantee the production costs. More than two years after its release, Klänge had sold fewer than 120 copies. The planned Russian version never materialized. The publication was nevertheless influential on other avant-garde artists, and Futurists in Russia and Dadaists in Zürich recited and published some of the poems.” (Heather Hess, source)

Publisher R. Piper, Munich, [1913]
Printer of Plates in color: F. Bruckmann A.G., Munich
Printer of Plates in black: Poeschel & Trepte, Leipzig
Printer of Text: Poeschel & Trepte, Leipzig
Book designer: Kandinsky
Typography: Grotesque
Edition of 300; plus 45 hors commerce
59 unnumbered folios, 28.1 x 27.7 cm
via MOMA

English edition
Translated and with an Introduction by Elizabeth R. Napier
Publisher Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981
ISBN 0300025106
136 pages

Commentary (Christopher Short, Tate Papers, 2006)
Wikipedia (EN)

Klänge (German, 50 MB), View online (Flash viewer at Moma.org), Different scan from Bibliotheque Kandinsky (25 MB, added on 2016-3-14)
Sounds (English, 14 MB)

Osiris 28: Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750–1980 (2013)

“The understanding of sound underwent profound changes with the advent of laboratory science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New techniques of sound visualization and detection, the use of electricity to generate sound, and the emergence of computers radically reshaped the science of acoustics and the practice of music. The essays in this volume of Osiris explore the manifold transformations of sound ranging from soundproof rooms to psychoacoustics of seismology to galvanic music to pedaling technique. They also discuss more general themes such as the nature of scientific evidence and the development of instruments and instrumentation. In examining the reciprocity between music and science, this volume reaches a new register in the evolution of scientific methodology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Edited by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell, and Myles W. Jackson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, August 2013
ISBN 022605375X, 9780226053752
303 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2020-4-16)

Stefan Helmreich: An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography (2007)

“In this article, I deliver a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin. I examine multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call the “submarine cyborg”—“doing anthropology in sound,” as advocated by Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis (2004)—I show how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and I argue that a transductive ethnography can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support this sense of sonic presence.” (Abstract)

Published in American Ethnologist 34(4), 2007, pp 621-641.

PDF (from the author, updated on 2016-8-25)