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"Virtuoso Thinking for several invited words", Chris Mann solo


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"Humility - on eating your words", Chris Mann gemeinsam mit Jim Pugliesi (Percussion), aufgenommen im "Harvestworks Studio", NY, zusammen mit David Watson

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"Veracity, velocity, voice, declamation, animation, sharp sounds, yolled sounds, vocalic waves flowing one after the other in greater or lesser torrents, verbal magic which sets words tumbling, sliding, marrying meaning and the true music of the mouth, transforming writing into a succession of "audible" diamonds, this is the voice of Chris Mann, reconciling the Oral with the Verbal which, for so long since ist origins, has forgotten that it is essentially Speech."

Ein Zitat aus "Concerning Chris Mann" von Henri Chopin, nachzulesen in der 8. Ausgabe des Australian Journal of Media and Culture aus dem Jahre 1994.

Der Schwerpunkt von Chris Manns Arbeit bewegt sich auf dem Gebiet der kompositorischen Linguistik. In seinen theoretischen Überlegungen bezieht er sich gerne auf Wittgenstein und Husserl. Mann interessiert sich für Informationstheorie, für die einzelnen Sprachsysteme verschiedener Kulturen und vor allem für die Alltagssprache, im speziellen für diejenigen Aspekte der gesprochenen Sprache, die sich nicht unter Begriffe der Grammatik einordnen lassen.

Chris Mann in einem Interview mit dem australischen Literaturwissenschafter Nicolas Zurbrugg: "Yarns, intonation-games, skip-rope songs, jokes, nonsense words... I think that's the tradition that we slot into. I think it's a popular culture. I don't think it's a bourgeois culture. I don't think it's an art culture. There's a whole tradition particularly in Melbourne ... of dealing with language as an issue. lt's like the role of the Grammarians in the French Revolution and the role of the Proletcult in the Russian Revolution."

Immer wieder kritisiert Chris Mann die Entwicklungen in der auralen Sprachkultur, die geprägt ist durch den vorherrschenden Einfluss des Englischen in der Musik. Für Mann ist die Beschäftigung mit Sprache ein populäres und soziales Thema. Viele Jahre arbeitete er intensiv mit der australisch-britischen Künstlergruppe "Art and Language zusammen". Indem er eine Quintessenz des gesprochenen australischen Englisch destilliert und eine demokratischere, authentischere Form des Sprachgebrauchs in der Literatur aufzeigt, versucht er die Fesseln der englischen literarischen Tradition zu überwinden. Dazu kommen fallweise elektronische Verfremdungen, die seinen Texten eine besondere, radiophone Note verleihen.

Chris Mann über sein Stück "Humility — on eating your words" in einem Interview mit dem Kunstradio: "I am very sympathetic to an irritant theory of knowledge; those ideas that exist on the tip of your tongue but which you can't quite remember, or those things that you understand until you are asked to explain them. There is a proposition that states: "that which you know is that which you can't think," so knowledge then becomes a form of censorship. Dealing with these sorts of paradoxical issues are somewhat socially dangerous but useful. I mean dangerous in a positive sense, however."

Das Stück "Virtuoso thinking — for several invited words", so Chris Mann, spekuliert mit dieser in ihrer Art und Weise sehr eigenen Konversation die Wörter miteinander führen. Genauso wie das Stück "Humility — on eating your words" hat Chris Mann auch "Virtuoso thinking — for several invited words" speziell für das Medium Radio gemacht.

Chris Mann über die Bedeutung des Radios für seine Arbeiten in einem Interview mit dem Kunstradio: "There is something about this theory which suggests that there is a virtual effect: that there are several people engaged in this at the same time. Wittgenstein said that there is no such thing as private language. I like to think of a medium as something public that overhears, and I am very interested in the idea of the supposed privilige in "overhearing" something that one wasn't intent upon "listening" to. Or, in other words, the notion that something heard accidentaly is somehow priviliged and has much more credibility than that which one intended to listen to."

"Virtuoso Thinking for several invited words", Chris Mann solo

"Humility - on eating your words", Chris Mann together with Jim Pugliesi (percussion) recorded at Harvestworks studio, NY, with David Watson

Nicholas Zurbrugg in his lecture "Sound-Art, Radio-Art and Post-Radio Performance in Australia" about Chris Mann:

"Language, then, is very much Chris Mann's primary concern, particularly the social and the ideological consequences of different verbal conventions. Whereas Larry Wendt's work may lend itself to redefinition in terms of music, and whereas Ed Tomney's compositions seem to explore the open-ended, variable composition encouraged by Cage, interweaving sound and sense in what one might thihk of as some sort of sonic 'mobile', Mann's work appears to be far more committed to concrete social contexts. Such, at least, is Mann's aspiration. Discussing his work in an interview of 1983, Mann explained:

"Yarns, intonation-games, skip-rope songs, jokes, nonsense words... I think that's the tradition that we slot into. I think it's a popular culture. I don't think it's a bourgeois culture. I don't think it's an art culture. There's a whole tradition particularly in Melbourne ... of dealing with language as an issue. lt's like the role of the Grammarians in the French Revolution and the role of the Proletcult in the Russian Revolution."

Mann tries to deal with language as a popular social issue by inventing, or at least, by refining, a quintessentially colloquial form of Australian diction in narratives performed at maximum speed. In this way, Mann aspires to evade English literary traditions, and to reveal or revive a more democratic, more authentic, antipodean utterance. Mann's performance often take the form of somewhat whimsical monologues, rather like John Cage's anecdotal lectures. But whereas Cage's subject matter tends to lead his autobiographical stories towards more general meditations upon the nature of order, chance, composition and art, Mann's texts focus upon questions of linguistics and philosophy before breaking into idiosyncratic semi-phonetic colloquialisms reminiscent of Joycian wordplay in Finnegan's Wake."