6 - Phonographic Spaces: Circling San Marco, Navigating Niagara

Summary

Three interrelated productions take their cue from the architecture of Venice’s famed San Marco Basilica: Igor Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (1956), French nouveau roman writer Michel Butor’s literary prose poem Description de San Marco (1963), and Columbia Masterworks producer John McClure’s production of the LP “The Glory of Gabrieli” (1969), recorded in San Marco and dubbed “a stereo spectacular.” This chapter explores homologies between the architecture of San Marco, the polychoral music of Venetian composers, the polyvocal literature of Michel Butor and the stereophonic relief of McClure’s “stereo spectacular” in order to gauge the parallels between sound, space and phonography in these works. Exploring Butor’s photographically inspired writing leads to an examination of a “stereophonic étude” that he devoted in 1965 to another familiar monument, Niagara Falls, and the way this poetic text then got translated into a spatialized cantata by French composer Claire Schapira.