a field study of countercultural saxophonics

 

Michael Horovitz (with 'Anglosaxophone') at News from Nowhere Club

The Epicentre, Leytonstone

Saturday 12th March 2011

 

My highlight of the evening with Michael Horovitz, at News from Nowhere Club, was his rendition of Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’, performed 46 years on from ‘The First Great International Poetry Reading’, at the Royal Albert Hall. Horovitz, a renowned beat poet convenor, was in the less grand surroundings of Leytonstone’s 'Epicentre', to talk about countercultural connection and creativity. 

 

The community announcements from the floor, prior to the talk, included clarion calls to our hearts and minds to protest about draconian public spending cuts. How can the belligerence of a government alliance, purporting to Big Society, be countered culturally? With hope, energy and poetry?

 

Horovitz, with his ‘Anglosaxophone’, appeared to transcend the frailties of his age. He sprang about, animated by the ecstasies of poetic and primal communication. His returns to nervousness and awkwardness, restlessly fiddling with his hair, voice flattening, speaking gloomily, contrasted with the energy and sonority of his performance. He reflected on the darker side of his experiences, be they political and personal. 

 

He recalled his unsettled childhood as a German Jewish refugee in Britain during World War II. This experience marked the beginnings of his resistance to bellicose and internecine doctrines of faith and ideology. The young Horovitz grew up defiantly unconventional, resorting to skies painted green, and trees painted blue, to express his poetic Utopian resistance. This was, he recounted, much to his mother’s consternation.

 

His 76 years form a turbulent stream of consciousness, criss-crossed with stepping stones connecting his fellows, his radical accomplices, including Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Smith and Cornelius Cardew. 

 

How potent and radical is such a Dada-infused exclamation as, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’? Is the potency in flux and context? How could the poem/performance challenge a presiding sense of cultural capital based on liberal higher education and associated class values? Perhaps, at its most contrarian, the performance was silly. A member of the audience helped answer some of these questions by elaborating on the life of Kurt Schwitters.

 

Schwitters and Horovitz are both refugees, sharing an artistic consciousness born of alienation, rupture, survival and adaptation.

 

The poem’s originator, Kurt Schwitters, featured in the Nazi curated,  'Degenerate Art (entarte Kunst) Exhibition'; a show which toured Germany extensively in 1937. Six months prior to the show opening, Schwitters fled Germany, finding temporary exile, first in Norway and then Britain. He was interned as an 'enemy alien' at the Douglas Camp, Isle of Man, for a year and a half. 

 

We heard how those World War II ‘enemy aliens’ created a university at the Douglas (Internment) Camp. This was an account of counterculture responding to dehumanising forces defiantly and hopefully. Schwitters may have been a student and teacher at the university. Michael Horovitz’s spirited performance of one of Schwitters' sound poems represented a playful testament to the aspiring and liberating powers of art.  The capacity to learn by making art, and anti-art, in the most difficult of circumstances, shows playful resilience even if that learning comes from something as ephemeral as a sneeze. 

 

Horovitz’s performance was not an iteration or explanation of the title; the performance sneezed for itself. However, I speculated about the phonics and linguistic learning games the interns may have played and practiced in the Allied internment camps. What if the "furore" (furor/furore) of the title, is spoken or uttered in accented and dialectical English?  How could inter-cultural wordplay, with "furore" as a homophone, be a taboo deformation? Furore elicits an ominous "f" / "fu" speech sound; a phoneme formed when air is blown through the top teeth touching the bottom lip, which involves baring of the teeth. Baring, sucking of, and blowing through the teeth can signify hostility and defiance depending on the culture in which the gestures are made. And are the similarities in English pronunciation between "Führer” and “furore” just a coincidence? I wondered about the roots and myths of curse words in English, and the common misconception that 'the f word' is Anglo-Saxon. My thoughts about the performance jumped around conceptually in the limited time and space of the occasion.

 

Michael Horovitz, in furious and furtive fits of playful sneezing, presented a tissue of defiant international Utopianism born of the ruptures of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

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