slonimsky in Goldsmith 2011
ways, we had to reconsider what “concrete poetry”
was. As time went on, we seemed to be outgrowing our original taxonomies until
we simply became a repository for the “avant-garde” (whatever that means—our
idea of what is “avant-garde” seems to be changing all the time). UbuWeb
adheres to no one historical narrative, rather we’re more interested in
putting several disciplines into the same space and seeing how they interact:
poetry, music, film, and literature from all periods encounter and bounce off
of each other in unexpected ways.
In 2005, we acquired a collection called [The 365 Days
Project](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/index.shtml), a year’s worth of
outrageous MP3s that can be best described as celebrity gaffs, recordings of
children screeching, how-to records, song-poems, propagandistic religious
ditties, spoken word pieces, even ventriloquist acts. However, buried deep
within The 365 Days Project were rare tracks by the legendary avant-gardist
[Nicolas Slonimsky](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/070.shtml), an
early-to-mid-twentieth century conductor, performer, and composer belting out
advertisements and children’s ditties on the piano in an off-key voice. UbuWeb
had already been hosting historical recordings from the 1920s he
[conducted](http://www.ubu.com/sound/slonimsky.html) of [Charles
Ives](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_02_Ives-Barn-Dance.mp3), [Carl
Ruggles](http://www.ubu.com/sound/agp/AGP167.html), and [Edgard
Varèse](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_01_Varese-Ionisation.mp3) in our Sound section, yet nestled in amongst
oddballs like [Louis Farrakhan singing
calypso](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/091.shtml) or high school
choir’s renditions of “[Fox On The
Run](http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2003/01/365-Days-Project-01-04-dondero-high-
school-a-capella-choir-fox-on-the-run-1996.mp3),” Slonimsky fit into both
categories—high and low—equally well.
A few years back, Jerome Rothenberg, the leading scholar of
[Ethnopoetics](http://ubu.com/ethno/), approached us with an idea to include a
wing which would feature Ethnopoetic sound, visual art, poetry, and essays.
Rothenberg’s interest was specific to UbuWeb: how the avant-garde dovetailed
with the world’s deep cultures—those surviving in situ as well as those that
had vanished except for transcriptions in books or recordings from earlier
decades. Sound offerings include everything from [Slim
Gaillard](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/gaillard.html) to [Inuit throat
singing](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/inuit.html), each making formal
connections to modernist strains of [Dada](http://www.ubu.com/sound/dada.html)
or [sound poetry](http://ubu.com/sound/poesia_sonora.html). Likewise, the
Ethnopoetic visual poetry section ranges from [Chippewa song
pictures](http://ubu.com/ethno/visuals/chip.html) to [Paleolithic
palimpsests](
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