"Sound Morphology" (Bil Smith Composer): August 2018

In 2010, I was approached by a unique individual by the name of Bernard Charron (not sure it was his real name). He asked me about my music and we moved onto the subject of literature and writing. This led to a lengthly discussion about the Oulipo and our respective opinions about their oeuvre. Some months later he contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing short musical 'vignettes' as he described them, mimicking the Oulipian aesthetic utilizing my "compaction music" techniques.

About the Oulipo

Oulipians innovate upon the architecture of genres not to"blur," "transgress," and "unfix" boundaries, but to grasp a genre's potential. The Oulipian notion of
poteniality goes in two directions: on the one hand it
attempts to build structures in a systematic and scientific
manner; that which is potential is that which does not yet
exist. On the other hand, Oulipians strongly believe that
potential and inspiration are codependent. By acting
systematically and scientifically Oulipians focus and
clarify, not "blur," their approach to genre
transformation.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements.

An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris.

He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed.

In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

On SOUNDCOUD:

https://soundcloud.com/bil-smith/georges-perec-for-prescript