Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

has been more difference in aesthetic position between artists in Sweden than there was between
some Swedish artists and some British artists.
The actual term, text-sound composition (coined—as “text-ljud komposition”—by Lars-Gunnar
Bodin and Bengt-Emil Johnson), as Brunson makes clear, was intended as ‘an umbrella
characterization for a complex confluence of diverse interests, the most common being language,
music and the use of technology’. So it is not surprising that they welcomed Cobbing.
To me, there was an emphasis in Fylkingen on radio, not least perhaps because the text-sound
composition festivals were put on with the support of Sveriges Radio, which included technical
support. Bengt-Emil worked at Sveriges Radio as a radio producer.
One of the routes by which Cobbing came to Swedish attention was via the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop production of ABC in Sound; but it is clear now and probably was then, that Cobbing’s
own main attention was on live performance.
Teddy Hulberg, in Visions of the Present in Retrospect [3] cites Öyvind Fahlström’s 1963 ‘Fåglar i
Sverige’ (‘Birds in Sweden’ or ‘Birds of Sweden’) as ‘illustrating the potentiality of tape recorder
technology and that of radio’; an example of text-sound composition which, from the introduction
of the term in 1967, ‘became a new inter-media genre that since then has come to be associated
with Fylkingen’, particularly, he suggests, because of the ‘important impetus’ of Fahlström’s 1963
work.
There is a problem. It goes: What do we call it, the artistic artefact? It afflicts anyone who is making
art anew.
The Fylking may have thought it had been solved by having coined “text-sound composition” but I
remember conversations in several countries which began with an assertion that such and such a
piece was not really text-sound composition; and that certainly happened when the original term
“text-ljud komposition” went abroad in translation and came back to Europe in untranslated
English proposing itself in some mouths as an aesthetic artefact of the new world.
Cobbing went with “sound poetry” and with “visual poetry” and with “concrete poetry”.
Twenty five years later in ‘Domestic Ambient Buoys’ (Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton in
Discussion with Alaric Sumner, in August 1999) published in Riding the Meridian issue 2.1, (edited
by Jennifer Ley), there took place the following exchange:
Upton: I only say “sound poetry”, if and when I say it, well now I only say it because other
people say it.
Cobbing: Exactly: We are influenced by what other people say and the concepts they have
of what we do.
Upton: […] I don’t know about “sound poetry”. I’m not going to deny the term, but
because it means so many things to so many people—