Aura Satz’s film Making a Diagonal with Music portrays Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra and pioneer of early musique concrete. Creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands lead Ferreyra to discuss her “sound hunting” recording techniques, as well as her unique approaches to sound montage and spatialization.

Ela Bittencourt: I wasn't familiar with Beatriz Ferreyra’s work and was absolutely blown away by it when watching your film Making a Diagonal with Music. Could you speak a bit about how you first came to her music and when you knew that you wanted to make a film with her?

Aura Satz: I have made several projects centred on women in electronic and electroacoustic music, starting with Oramics: Atlantis Anew, my film about Daphne Oram from 2011. In 2018, I started a series of drawings of composer’s hands on dials, the delicate circuit of hand and ear engaged in micro-perceptual acts of sound-making and fine-tuned listening. It was the writer and sound practitioner Jo Hutton who introduced me to Beatriz’s work. Jo also facilitated an introduction, as I was looking for a photo of her hands to draw. I emailed Beatriz and she promptly replied “My hands are terrible!!! Hands of an old woman who has worked hard for 40 years!” In the end, Jo provided me with an image she had taken during her own research. The film came a year later, and was also the first time I worked in Spanish (my father tongue), and connected with my distant Argentine heritage, as Beatriz is originally from Argentina but has been based in France since the 1960s.

EB: How did you decide which musical piece to focus on?

AS: Actually, although often sound is the engine and structuring device of my films, here the music came later. My intention with this film, like with several other films and sound pieces of mine, was to try to convey a portrait of a listening practice, to get under and inside the ear, so to speak. I rarely show people’s faces in my films, mostly just their hands, gestures and touch. But Beatriz was so expressive that it was inevitable. I especially the love opening scene, where she is seen playing and listening to the miniscule creaks produced by a door, expanding the simple binary of open vs closed to encompass an entire sound universe, an expanded bandwidth of what can be heard and how we might listen – she listens with her ears, her forehead, her hand, in fact her whole body participates. That creak determined my choice of music. It’s the portal, the doorway into her sound world.

EB: I was struck by how music – which is abstract, one might say mathematical, cerebral – instead has a very powerful material and spatial dimension in your film. I wonder about the ideas that guided you in your filming to achieve this effect.

AS: I don’t necessarily think of music as overly cerebral, for me and perhaps also for many of the musicians I have worked with or made work about, sound is powerfully grounded in body and spirit. In terms of its materiality, it is essentially vibratory, and therefore deeply moving, resonating, shifting things. The spatial dimension of this film is very much Beatriz’s creative signature – she works in a very particular way with how the sound travels, what this movement does to the composition and the room it is diffused in. I found her use of onomatopoeia to describe sounds that resist description fascinating, and when combined with her dynamic hand gestures this creates a whole new language of sorts, an organic, highly personal code we may understand intuitively but it’s never fully yields itself, it remains on a threshold of decipherability.

EB: I particularly appreciated how much you focus on Ferreyra’s body – her bodily rhythms, gestural power, breathing, her voice – mirroring her own appreciation for musical reiteration, and often captured in extreme close-up. How did you arrive at this visual approach and what was the process of filming and then editing the film like?

AS: In most of my films I like to evoke a sense of close up looking and listening, macro or focal attention – and the voice becomes the primary marker of presence rather than an overview of the person. This film is rare in including more elements of her body beyond her hands, especially the aforementioned door scene. Editing is the most important moment for me, it’s how I discover the grammar of the film, and listen even more closely to the voice, the speech patterns, the pauses and breaths, and how this works with or in some kind of generative friction across the image. There are a few occasions in the door scene where I removed the image to allow for the sound to become foregrounded, as if we are sucked out of the image and expanded into our ears for a bit, until later we return to anchor and weave the sound back into what we see. I’ve done this before with other films as I find that a cinematic listening predisposition is very different to listening to music or a sound work in a gallery, at home, or on headphones in the street. There’s a more specific posture, a directionality and a state of attention that I find really interesting, especially as you are able to shift the sensory focus in a multi-modular way, folding the eye or the ear or the body inwards onto itself.

EB: When it comes to sound, Ferreyra mentions being guided by Pierre Schaeffer’s idea that one must not resort to pre-established ways of thinking about music (common terms like “staccato”), but rather to hear a sound's unique quality anew. To what extent did this notion also guide your film?

AS: Beatriz developed her electroacoustic composition techniques through working with Pierre Schaeffer, contributing to his book Traité des Objets Musicaux (1966), and participating in the recording of excerpts for his Solfège de l’Objet Sonore (1967). In the film, she talks about her recording techniques, building up of an archive of sounds to compose with, and how the recording is already in itself a highly individualised form of sensitive listening which detaches the sound from its source. Really the reason I have made these series of works on women in electronic music is precisely because I am drawn to this idea of listening differently, anew. I make these artworks in order to learn something, and I reach out to people in order to have these dialogues that take me somewhere I haven’t been before. Even in the works I am doing that are not part of this series, I use recalibration as a guiding principle. I am trying to rewire how we listen, to what, why. Listening and attuning, both physically and as a philosophy or state of attention, is absolutely central. To me the hand on the dial of an electronic synth is interpreted as a radical gesture of feminist instantiation, inventing new soundscapes, new forms of notation, sound-writing, in effect a new language or programming code, and this, in turn, leads to new ways of listening. This trajectory is beautifully articulated through Daphne Oram’s Oramics machine, through to Laurie Spiegel’s computer programming and algorithmic composition software, through to Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice and philosophy. Just to be clear, I’m not only thinking about sound and sonic practices, or listening anatomically through the ears. In “Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice)” (1999), Oliveros writes “Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is… What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener.” In each project I have made about or with these composers, I am attempting to explore how they listen, compose, notate or transmit the work, and very often their methods sit on the edge of anything that can be easily captured, transcribed or standardized. I am fascinated by this evanescent relationship to language. So for example in Tone Transmissions (2020), I wove together conversations with composer Éliane Radigue, harpist Rhodri Davies and violist Julia Eckhardt, to address the ephemeral transmission of music via conversation, mental images and living scores. Or as I mentioned earlier, Beatriz invents onomatopoeia to translate sounds that have no linguistic equivalent, and in turn often composes with snippets of speech or vocal sounds that dissolve into textures, “continuous whorls and tidal washes,” as Jo Hutton writes in the sleeve-notes of Huellas Entreveradas (2021) – Beatriz “likens her sounds to a Russian doll, inside each is another one, which contains another, and so on.”

EB: Building an extensive personal archive (of sound) is clearly fundamental for Ferreyra. As a filmmaker and artist, how do you see the importance of archival recording in your own work?

AS: That’s a really interesting question I haven’t thought about until now. I don’t really understand what I’m doing as an archive of sound or film recordings, but I guess in some ways it is. So many of my projects are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. I think what I am doing is building up a grammar or syntax of how to understand – sometimes through sound – ways of relating, of being in the world. Many people I have worked with have helped me find a language, articulate a point which I then carry forward. Like Beatriz’s door is so important to me because it captures this idea of a wider spectrum of attention in a simple visual metaphor, and it’s so powerfully concise in breaking away from an understanding of the door as a piece of wood opening or closing down a space and instead highlighting the hinge, the relational device that enables transition from one threshold to another. In other films, often through the editing process, I have ended up fully internalising a turn of phrase, the grain of voice, the pacing of it, and using it as a map, a beacon, a principle of orientation facing forward. The same goes for certain passages of sound, it’s almost like a short circuit that helps find a language – visual, sonic, verbal or otherwise – and I am building up these echoes, which help me find my way.

Making a Diagonal with Music was presented in tandem with Aura Satz’s exhibition “She Recalibrates” at Artium Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz, curated by Garbiñe Ortega.

Credits

Featuring Beatriz Ferreyra

Directed and edited by Aura Satz

DOP: Sam Williams

Music: Beatriz Ferreyra

Dubbing Mix: Gernot Fuhrmann

Language: Spanish

English Subtitles: Aura Satz

Special thanks to Jo Langton