"arbetets rytm"

Jag läser David Toop igen. Haunted Weather, som utgavs för några år sedan, innehåller många fina iakttagelser om ljud, tystnad, minne och lyssnande. Den här passagen sammanfattar något jag funderat på i relation till min avhandling. Toop pratar om en performanceupplevelse:

'To work with a tool, a stick or an iron bar is something that belongs to the collective memory of mankind,' Battistelli has said. 'These gestures and symbols are so deeply rooted in all of us, that people from totally different cultural backgrounds are able to find their own dimension, their own interpretation from this extract of human life.'
The opening sound (a sound of opening), was the cracking of an egg. Dough was kneaded, the blacksmith's fire crackled and for the first ten minutes or so I was charmed by the piece, its novelty and the harmonious chinking, hammering, sizzling, sawing and gossip that meshed so closely as a by-product of work. By the end, that sweetness had induced nausea. [,,,] After a time, I began to sense what it was like to visit one of the colonial expositions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when 'native' peoples were put on show in replicas of their villages. Yet this was orchestrated, also, as if the workers were puppets. They seemed to be enjooying the experience even though, or even because, the natural rhytms of work - haphazard, rich in rhytmic complexity, repetitive, potentially maddening - were entrained within a score at once cute, predictable and reeking of avant-garde tokenism. These were genuine soundmarks, though far from being 'extracts of human life', their role as a poetic echo of real graft had been pulled like a dead tooth. Through sentimentality, labour was trivialized rather than celebrated. Despite being a cross between Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood and Edgar Varèse's Ionisation, this was a composition that seemed no more edifying than any other theme park, constructed in the ruins of manufacturing industries, and staffed by the workers who once shaped their lives and communities around their work.