Tuesday, October 20, 2015
LACHENMANN AND BEAUTY
It is a conventional point by now to unconsciously cite Nietzsche's idea that without the beautiful illusion of art we would die from exposure to the truth. One reason for the distaste that the intellectual classes of Germany have for the lush self-pity of Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder is because of the wish (encoded into the wilfully retrograde technique of a work written only three years after the liberation of the death camps) that things could be as they were once, before the war. It is a beautiful piece of music of course, I don't think anyone could deny that: but it is false, a comforting and indulgently melancholy refusal to face the reality of genocide and violence. In the nineteenth century the romantics made much of an identification of truth and beauty in art: if anything, the late 20th century is dominated by a splitting apart of this identification where the truth content of art is something that makes ugliness or de-aestheticised art feel necessary. It's difficult to feel this in our bones now, in 2015 in the way I think it was sharply present after the second world war. I think it is worth remembering: arguably popular music is all about a kind of false beauty, a shiny appearance of seamlessness and a music that really responded to the broken-ness and non-reconciled nature of the world could not engage in even the partial resolution of dissonance that musical "beauty" demands. The real interest for me of Lachenmann is in his hopefuless: he is almost arguing that if we are not to fall into the seductive traps of pleasantness or prettiness, the comforting character of hedonism, then the experience of beauty should be wrested from the world as it is, made out of the wreckage of the world. His own most beautiful works (the string quartets and Staub for orchestra are my favorites) achieve something like this: a strange whisper of hope that simply because it is possible to imagine new sounds or a new situation for older sounds that there is still hope in that imagination.
ADEQUATE LISTENING
Stockfelt is said to be challenging Adorno's characterisation of "expert" listening as the most valorised: hmmm not really, Adorno had a complex theory of listening and the category of the expert was only one of many possible modes of listening. Stockfelt (like a large number of critics of Adorno) ends up with a position very close to Adorno himself, the idea of an expanded, contextualised, materially focused listening that is not distinct from "interpretation".
I fully agree with the importance of taking the whole listening situation into account. At my record store I would often be dragged into the pointless debates about "authenticity" in performance with some customers absolutely refusing to listen to recordings of Bach on the piano. Armed with the knowledge that Bach wrote "for" the harpsichord they would declare that only a recording of the Goldberg Variations on double manual harpsichord was "historically accurate". I would sometimes point out that they were listening to a recording and that nothing could be further from Bach than a mechanical reproduction and absolutely repeatability of a performance on disc. This is where Stockfelt is almost literally Adornian in his insistence that the context of listening is just as important as the ostensible object of the listening experience. He's fundamentally correct in my view that musical situations set up ways in which the sounds must be perceived in order to function musically and that "failures" of communication are very instructive in this respect: to an audience that expects music to be heard in one way the presentation of sounds that demand to be listened to differently will usually result in a conflict or displeasure. In a certain sense this is the most interesting thing about the article: it's interesting to think about how the classical concert situation is a completely inadequate one for the adequate presentation of "non-classical" notated music. It is a standard trope by now of criticism of new music to say that it fails with audiences: I would say it is the mode of presentation that is the problem and the audiences and expectations that come along with the apparatus of the orchestra for instance are almost pre-disposed to render the music meaningless. This is why I have a great interest in works that do not simply sit nicely on a mixed program between concerto and symphony. I also have a fascination with programming that takes the dialogue between works into account or which questions the normal modes of presentation from inside the work itself.
I fully agree with the importance of taking the whole listening situation into account. At my record store I would often be dragged into the pointless debates about "authenticity" in performance with some customers absolutely refusing to listen to recordings of Bach on the piano. Armed with the knowledge that Bach wrote "for" the harpsichord they would declare that only a recording of the Goldberg Variations on double manual harpsichord was "historically accurate". I would sometimes point out that they were listening to a recording and that nothing could be further from Bach than a mechanical reproduction and absolutely repeatability of a performance on disc. This is where Stockfelt is almost literally Adornian in his insistence that the context of listening is just as important as the ostensible object of the listening experience. He's fundamentally correct in my view that musical situations set up ways in which the sounds must be perceived in order to function musically and that "failures" of communication are very instructive in this respect: to an audience that expects music to be heard in one way the presentation of sounds that demand to be listened to differently will usually result in a conflict or displeasure. In a certain sense this is the most interesting thing about the article: it's interesting to think about how the classical concert situation is a completely inadequate one for the adequate presentation of "non-classical" notated music. It is a standard trope by now of criticism of new music to say that it fails with audiences: I would say it is the mode of presentation that is the problem and the audiences and expectations that come along with the apparatus of the orchestra for instance are almost pre-disposed to render the music meaningless. This is why I have a great interest in works that do not simply sit nicely on a mixed program between concerto and symphony. I also have a fascination with programming that takes the dialogue between works into account or which questions the normal modes of presentation from inside the work itself.
MICROPHONE AND EAR
Probably one of the better explanations of elementary psychoacoustics I have read, this article points out that we always hear at once more and less than a microphone can. Our auditory apparatus performs FFT operations on sound, resolving even the most complex sounds into stacks of sine waves. I also found interesting the idea that there is a significant delay between sound and our consciousness of it, around 6 milliseconds of more or less unconscious processing before we are aware of the sound.
The fact that our ears have what seems to be a tendency towards simplification and unification (as in the example cited in the paper of early reflections from a space being integrated into the acoustic richness of the perceived sound rather than being taken as the separated sonic phenomena they in fact are) means that ideally a composition technique ought to take this into account. A great deal of the "received wisdom" about orchestration for instance is almost an empirically derived version of some of this knowledge about sound, blending, space, masking and reflection but derived from trial and error rather than science.
Of course the object of the article is to promote a conception of acoustic fidelity but a knowledge of how sound is heard and processed in the brain can also lead to explorations of interesting kinds of illusion and infidelity as well. This is a particular interest of mine lately as synthetic sound nearly always needs to be placed in a virtual space to sound at its richest (and in addition I nearly always listen on headphones especially to extended works on account of the greater sense of detail and presence one can achieve without making too much noise).
The fact that our ears have what seems to be a tendency towards simplification and unification (as in the example cited in the paper of early reflections from a space being integrated into the acoustic richness of the perceived sound rather than being taken as the separated sonic phenomena they in fact are) means that ideally a composition technique ought to take this into account. A great deal of the "received wisdom" about orchestration for instance is almost an empirically derived version of some of this knowledge about sound, blending, space, masking and reflection but derived from trial and error rather than science.
Of course the object of the article is to promote a conception of acoustic fidelity but a knowledge of how sound is heard and processed in the brain can also lead to explorations of interesting kinds of illusion and infidelity as well. This is a particular interest of mine lately as synthetic sound nearly always needs to be placed in a virtual space to sound at its richest (and in addition I nearly always listen on headphones especially to extended works on account of the greater sense of detail and presence one can achieve without making too much noise).
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
ANY MORE LIKE A DOG AND IT WOULD HAVE FLEAS: WOOF
Tom Wolfe's infamous article is just as infuriating now as it ever was. Yes one could agree that for certain artists their work is so informed by theoretical writings that it might as well be an illustration of the written word but Pollock for example was barely able to understand what Greenberg write about him and artists like Rothko and de Kooning detested the critics who supported them. Wolfe clearly has no alternative conception of what a different modern art could have been nor could he. My heart sinks when I hear artists talking about most of the theoretical baggage they pick up in art school. I get a headache when I hear someone using the term "deconstruction" as if it were a synonym for "interpretation" but this is not necessarily a problem either. There are countless incidences of great art being supported by bad theory (Cubism) as well as great theories leading inexorably to dreadful results (the 1980s). Wolfe is an able satirist but to take him seriously is a ridiculous idea.
Funnily enough for someone who delights in parading erudition ("cenacle" anyone?) his is a profoundly anti-intellectual view of modernism as well as a profoundly short sighted view of the kinds of responses that people can have to the works themselves without ever having read a word about them. You would never know from reading Wolfe that I have seen many people cry in front of Rothko's works, that I have been so excited by seeing "Lavender Mist" for the first and only time that I had to run on the spot for a bit to disperse the kind of energies it filled me with. His own view of the art is dry and academic. He obviously just doesn't respond to it (god knows what art he actually likes) and then projects this first of all onto the writers who first attempted to make sense of these new forms and then onto the painters themselves. I first saw "Blue Poles" as a child on a visit to Canberra sometime in the 1970s then again as a teenager on a school visit and last saw it a couple of years ago. Obviously in the intervening years I had read Greenberg on Pollock but I hardly ever think about the theory when I see what is one of the greatest paintings in the country. Next to Pollock's visual acheivements, the music he makes, any theory is feeble and Wolfe's is the most feeble of all.
As usual the other essay is so close to my way of thinking it's almost funny. I do think that Tenney's music is not quite so interesting as his ideas but i fully agree with most of what he says.
Funnily enough for someone who delights in parading erudition ("cenacle" anyone?) his is a profoundly anti-intellectual view of modernism as well as a profoundly short sighted view of the kinds of responses that people can have to the works themselves without ever having read a word about them. You would never know from reading Wolfe that I have seen many people cry in front of Rothko's works, that I have been so excited by seeing "Lavender Mist" for the first and only time that I had to run on the spot for a bit to disperse the kind of energies it filled me with. His own view of the art is dry and academic. He obviously just doesn't respond to it (god knows what art he actually likes) and then projects this first of all onto the writers who first attempted to make sense of these new forms and then onto the painters themselves. I first saw "Blue Poles" as a child on a visit to Canberra sometime in the 1970s then again as a teenager on a school visit and last saw it a couple of years ago. Obviously in the intervening years I had read Greenberg on Pollock but I hardly ever think about the theory when I see what is one of the greatest paintings in the country. Next to Pollock's visual acheivements, the music he makes, any theory is feeble and Wolfe's is the most feeble of all.
As usual the other essay is so close to my way of thinking it's almost funny. I do think that Tenney's music is not quite so interesting as his ideas but i fully agree with most of what he says.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
THE "TRANSCENDENTAL" QUESTION - Peterson
Again I would question exactly what "music" is in the lecture. No definitions are given, he clearly likes Bach for example but "music" includes gagaku and the Wiggles as well. I still persist in saying that there is no such thing as "music" only things that people have variously described as music.
The common complaint that "X isn't music" is actually more than a simple canard: it touches on something that Peterson somewhat avoids stating explicitly. This is intriguing as the nomination of a sequence of sonic events as "music" is precisely a question of framing. One of the implications of the idea that perception is not simply the reception of data but a process involving framing or some other quasi-unconscious categorisation is that potentially every single person has different and incomparable ways of framing.
I sometimes get the impression that some varieties of psychology have a tendency towards universalism whilst others have the opposing tendency. My own tendency is towards a kind of radical particularity of perception, almost to the point of experiential "solipsism". What I mean by this is the idea that, as we cannot hear with another person's ears or brain, we cannot access what music sounds like to them: we can imagine it and they can imagine what we imagine but there is no third position from which to compare those two imaginaries. For some people this may be a cause for despair or surprise: to me it is the most obvious explanation for the variety of different kinds of music and in addition a reason why nearly all universalist theories of music are bound for failure from the outset. Good psychological research into music perception would pay more attention to the differences between (and within) individuals rather than coming up with yet another proof of the "universality" of the major triad when most of the music of the world does without it quite fine.
Obviously the conception of music Peterson operates from is that it is pattern-making in sound that is experienced as being meaningful in some way. This is the frame problem he discusses in the lecture: if perception implies that the same set of coloured patches on the retina or sounds can be categorised in a large number of ways then the problem is how to frame the perceptions. He speaks of the difficulties of building machines that can perceive as well as we can because our perceptual systems have been informed by a whole history of perception. We might think of "tradition" in music as the material sedimentation of that history of listening: this means that the genuinely new in music is almost unable to be perceived. A more strictly musical version of the problem is what I call the "succession problem". In listening and exploring the world of music available to us the order in which we hear works affects each one: someone who doesn't hear a single note of Schubert until after they have absorbed say the music of the post WWII period is not hearing the same work as someone who listens to Schubert only without knowing anything else (yes one of my customers at our store listened almost only to Schubert lieder, having bought the massive Hyperion set of all the lieder). Someone who has never been to a lieder recital will see the weirdness of the format and its rituals in all purity.
He comes close to arguing that because music is beyond the exercise of reason that it has survived the disenchantment of the world, lived on after the death of God. This is indeed the way that Nietzsche once saw music and the idea of a "musical religion" is attractive in some ways but also dangerous: again the question is whose music? Why does thinking of Wagner as being about "the transcendental" make sense but the idea that the Wiggles are engaged in the same pursuit seems ridiculous? I get the strong impression that Peterson is a believer in "the transcendental": it is hinted in the lecture that this could well be an effect of our perception but it's not really followed through and it would take a book to describe how this might be the case.
Ultimately the framing issue is rather like the problem of whether "private language" is possible in Wittgenstein - Peterson's position seems to be that music is a universal, non-translatable "language". Obviously I tend towards the idea that "private language" is precisely what music can become and indeed, has become once the common practice era finished in the 20th century. I don't see this at all as a problem. It is actually to be celebrated even if audiences cling to ingrained habits and framings of sound which makes the "classical music" audience possibly the most backward and tedious one. If conceiving of music as a private language gives us the variety of styles and sounds we see today I can't see any problem with giving up the pretension of universality. I think composers themselves gave up on that a long time ago, theorists should as well.
The common complaint that "X isn't music" is actually more than a simple canard: it touches on something that Peterson somewhat avoids stating explicitly. This is intriguing as the nomination of a sequence of sonic events as "music" is precisely a question of framing. One of the implications of the idea that perception is not simply the reception of data but a process involving framing or some other quasi-unconscious categorisation is that potentially every single person has different and incomparable ways of framing.
I sometimes get the impression that some varieties of psychology have a tendency towards universalism whilst others have the opposing tendency. My own tendency is towards a kind of radical particularity of perception, almost to the point of experiential "solipsism". What I mean by this is the idea that, as we cannot hear with another person's ears or brain, we cannot access what music sounds like to them: we can imagine it and they can imagine what we imagine but there is no third position from which to compare those two imaginaries. For some people this may be a cause for despair or surprise: to me it is the most obvious explanation for the variety of different kinds of music and in addition a reason why nearly all universalist theories of music are bound for failure from the outset. Good psychological research into music perception would pay more attention to the differences between (and within) individuals rather than coming up with yet another proof of the "universality" of the major triad when most of the music of the world does without it quite fine.
Obviously the conception of music Peterson operates from is that it is pattern-making in sound that is experienced as being meaningful in some way. This is the frame problem he discusses in the lecture: if perception implies that the same set of coloured patches on the retina or sounds can be categorised in a large number of ways then the problem is how to frame the perceptions. He speaks of the difficulties of building machines that can perceive as well as we can because our perceptual systems have been informed by a whole history of perception. We might think of "tradition" in music as the material sedimentation of that history of listening: this means that the genuinely new in music is almost unable to be perceived. A more strictly musical version of the problem is what I call the "succession problem". In listening and exploring the world of music available to us the order in which we hear works affects each one: someone who doesn't hear a single note of Schubert until after they have absorbed say the music of the post WWII period is not hearing the same work as someone who listens to Schubert only without knowing anything else (yes one of my customers at our store listened almost only to Schubert lieder, having bought the massive Hyperion set of all the lieder). Someone who has never been to a lieder recital will see the weirdness of the format and its rituals in all purity.
He comes close to arguing that because music is beyond the exercise of reason that it has survived the disenchantment of the world, lived on after the death of God. This is indeed the way that Nietzsche once saw music and the idea of a "musical religion" is attractive in some ways but also dangerous: again the question is whose music? Why does thinking of Wagner as being about "the transcendental" make sense but the idea that the Wiggles are engaged in the same pursuit seems ridiculous? I get the strong impression that Peterson is a believer in "the transcendental": it is hinted in the lecture that this could well be an effect of our perception but it's not really followed through and it would take a book to describe how this might be the case.
Ultimately the framing issue is rather like the problem of whether "private language" is possible in Wittgenstein - Peterson's position seems to be that music is a universal, non-translatable "language". Obviously I tend towards the idea that "private language" is precisely what music can become and indeed, has become once the common practice era finished in the 20th century. I don't see this at all as a problem. It is actually to be celebrated even if audiences cling to ingrained habits and framings of sound which makes the "classical music" audience possibly the most backward and tedious one. If conceiving of music as a private language gives us the variety of styles and sounds we see today I can't see any problem with giving up the pretension of universality. I think composers themselves gave up on that a long time ago, theorists should as well.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
"PARADIGMS" . . . ugh
Trevor Wishart's chapter "Beyond the Pitch/Duration Paradigm" is an incredibly frustrating piece of writing to read. Nearly every time an interesting point was made it was followed by something that either does not follow from the previous good point or develops one of the many bad points in his writing instead. I found it interesting but thoroughly misguided on an number of counts and even pernicious to some extent as, like nearly every essay with the word "paradigm" in the title, it poses as "problem solving".
His basic conception of music seems incredibly narrow (as are those of most people, especially those who congratulate themselves on their catholicity of taste): like most theories of music this essay is primarily linked to the tastes and practices of the author. Given the necessarily subjective character of musical cognition and the massive variety of musical forms throughout the world and through history it makes no sense to me to talk about "music" or "listening" as if they were the one thing in the world that was identical to itself. Given that no one can hear with the ears of another I find this universalisation of taste highly problematic. There is no such thing as "music" there are only "musics".
He is critical of the "lattice" that structures most Western music because it is clearly implied by the notation and in fact is built into the design of most musical technologies devoted to dance music for example: there are entire nights in clubs around the world devoted to the fetishisation of that "lattice", in its rawest and most brutal form and yet it seems to cause no lasting damage. He is critical of Plato (and gets the meaning of "idea" in the theory of mimesis completely wrong by thinking Socrates was a "Platonist") but is almost as much of an idealist as Lyndon La Rouche.
Beyond calling it "formalist" he can't really say what exactly is "wrong" with highly intricate abstract constructions such as those of the late 14th and 20th centuries, both made possible and demanding in turn highly sophisticated new forms of notation. Perhaps, given his age and the generation he grew up in, "formalism" is enough of a death sentence to warrant no further content.
Later on Wishart's argument becomes an elaborately superb example of what Jacques Derrida calls "logocentrism", the longstanding set of concepts and practices (broadly identifiable with "Western metaphysics") that presupposes the primacy of "living" voice (or "spirit") over the "dead" character of writing or inscription (we might as well call it technology as well). It is a way of thinking that often goes along with some kind of naturalism or universalism: the fact that in the first paragraph he refers to "our listening experience" is instructive here. Either he is correctly using the Royal "we" or simply assuming that "listening experience" is something that would be universal. Such a universal could not at all be "experientially verified" (whatever that might mean).
I find the setting of "An die Freude" in the Beethoven Ninth simultaneously horrifying and tragic and I could write another essay beginning to explain why perhaps I find it so: if even such a canonically "communicative" work can be so terribly "misunderstood" (but my reading of it makes perfect sense to me) then what does this mean to thinking about "communication" in music?
He rightly points out that music is non-verbal but the way it is described in the essay pushes it close to telepathy by insisting repeatedly that notation stands in the way of a presumably "natural" immediacy. On page 15 he writes that only those capable of imagining that talking to a partner involves more than verbal exchange could understand what he means here. What he is attempting to demonstrate is that music is a "communion" of people (Welcome back transcendental signified it's been a while!): but if this were so then musical "misunderstanding" ought to be impossible, we ought to all agree that the finale of the Mahler Fourth Symphony is sunny, light and lyrical but "we" don't agree at all.
And when he says that it "is music's intrinsic irrefutability, its going behind the back of language, which has caused it to be viewed with so much suspicion and disdain by guardians of socially approved order" it is clear that he is only talking about music he likes (and quite possibly his own). In a move as old as music itself all this talk about "music" ignores the fact that "music" includes all the stuff the writer doesn't really like.
People who pontificate about "music" tend to forget that it necessarily includes Katy Perry as well as gagaku, includes all of us who count ourselves "musicians" as well as the writers of jingles for laxatives. For me personally "music" also includes all ambient sound and "silence", birdsong and the song of cicadas. There is no concept of "music" other than "sounds to which we can pay attention" that unifies these and I doubt such a broad and effectively meaningless concept would be of much interest to Wishart. I might add that I can think of hardly any music that has actually been viewed with suspicion and disdain by the ruling classes except for some experimental and avant-garde works.
The characterisation of notation on later pages (after p. 18 especially) is hampered by thinking of notation as transparent representation of orally-transmitted practice that then, in this just-so story, gets taken over by the big bad wolf of music that is written without coming from performance. Music that is god forbid not at all "spontaneously invented" but instead is put together over time: there are things that could be improvised but I doubt anyone could improvise even one of the simpler Ockeghem motets, nor could it be transmitted any other way than in writing.
In a move that Richard Taruskin also repeatedly makes, the invention and especially the inventiveness of "literate" music ends up seeming like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I'm as big a fan of improvisation and various "ethnic" musics from around the world (Japan, Bali, Burma and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular) as anyone but I don't see the point of making a critique of "Western notation" some 1,000 years after that horse has bolted and left the door open for Solage and Ligeti.
I certainly don't see "oral" music as better or worse than "literate" music because for me all that counts is the experience of the work in that particular performance. I don't care if you can't sight read "Unity Capsule" because that failure produces something in performance that could not happen otherwise: it also means that each successive failure transforms the work and allows a great deal of personal "interpretation". The Ardittis almost rewrite the works Ferneyhough writes for them but if he gave them a work identical to the re-written version it would sound and feel different yet again.
The later sections of the essay are better perhaps but still hampered by his reliance on a personal utopian mythology of communication/immediacy that for me merely adds yet more words to the pile of bad words written about music.
As for the Smalley article it's a great piece of writing that has helped me a lot over the past few years: one of those rare articles you read and think "yes this describes what I've been after and the way I've been thinking but much better than I could do".
His basic conception of music seems incredibly narrow (as are those of most people, especially those who congratulate themselves on their catholicity of taste): like most theories of music this essay is primarily linked to the tastes and practices of the author. Given the necessarily subjective character of musical cognition and the massive variety of musical forms throughout the world and through history it makes no sense to me to talk about "music" or "listening" as if they were the one thing in the world that was identical to itself. Given that no one can hear with the ears of another I find this universalisation of taste highly problematic. There is no such thing as "music" there are only "musics".
He is critical of the "lattice" that structures most Western music because it is clearly implied by the notation and in fact is built into the design of most musical technologies devoted to dance music for example: there are entire nights in clubs around the world devoted to the fetishisation of that "lattice", in its rawest and most brutal form and yet it seems to cause no lasting damage. He is critical of Plato (and gets the meaning of "idea" in the theory of mimesis completely wrong by thinking Socrates was a "Platonist") but is almost as much of an idealist as Lyndon La Rouche.
Beyond calling it "formalist" he can't really say what exactly is "wrong" with highly intricate abstract constructions such as those of the late 14th and 20th centuries, both made possible and demanding in turn highly sophisticated new forms of notation. Perhaps, given his age and the generation he grew up in, "formalism" is enough of a death sentence to warrant no further content.
Later on Wishart's argument becomes an elaborately superb example of what Jacques Derrida calls "logocentrism", the longstanding set of concepts and practices (broadly identifiable with "Western metaphysics") that presupposes the primacy of "living" voice (or "spirit") over the "dead" character of writing or inscription (we might as well call it technology as well). It is a way of thinking that often goes along with some kind of naturalism or universalism: the fact that in the first paragraph he refers to "our listening experience" is instructive here. Either he is correctly using the Royal "we" or simply assuming that "listening experience" is something that would be universal. Such a universal could not at all be "experientially verified" (whatever that might mean).
I find the setting of "An die Freude" in the Beethoven Ninth simultaneously horrifying and tragic and I could write another essay beginning to explain why perhaps I find it so: if even such a canonically "communicative" work can be so terribly "misunderstood" (but my reading of it makes perfect sense to me) then what does this mean to thinking about "communication" in music?
He rightly points out that music is non-verbal but the way it is described in the essay pushes it close to telepathy by insisting repeatedly that notation stands in the way of a presumably "natural" immediacy. On page 15 he writes that only those capable of imagining that talking to a partner involves more than verbal exchange could understand what he means here. What he is attempting to demonstrate is that music is a "communion" of people (Welcome back transcendental signified it's been a while!): but if this were so then musical "misunderstanding" ought to be impossible, we ought to all agree that the finale of the Mahler Fourth Symphony is sunny, light and lyrical but "we" don't agree at all.
And when he says that it "is music's intrinsic irrefutability, its going behind the back of language, which has caused it to be viewed with so much suspicion and disdain by guardians of socially approved order" it is clear that he is only talking about music he likes (and quite possibly his own). In a move as old as music itself all this talk about "music" ignores the fact that "music" includes all the stuff the writer doesn't really like.
People who pontificate about "music" tend to forget that it necessarily includes Katy Perry as well as gagaku, includes all of us who count ourselves "musicians" as well as the writers of jingles for laxatives. For me personally "music" also includes all ambient sound and "silence", birdsong and the song of cicadas. There is no concept of "music" other than "sounds to which we can pay attention" that unifies these and I doubt such a broad and effectively meaningless concept would be of much interest to Wishart. I might add that I can think of hardly any music that has actually been viewed with suspicion and disdain by the ruling classes except for some experimental and avant-garde works.
The characterisation of notation on later pages (after p. 18 especially) is hampered by thinking of notation as transparent representation of orally-transmitted practice that then, in this just-so story, gets taken over by the big bad wolf of music that is written without coming from performance. Music that is god forbid not at all "spontaneously invented" but instead is put together over time: there are things that could be improvised but I doubt anyone could improvise even one of the simpler Ockeghem motets, nor could it be transmitted any other way than in writing.
In a move that Richard Taruskin also repeatedly makes, the invention and especially the inventiveness of "literate" music ends up seeming like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I'm as big a fan of improvisation and various "ethnic" musics from around the world (Japan, Bali, Burma and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular) as anyone but I don't see the point of making a critique of "Western notation" some 1,000 years after that horse has bolted and left the door open for Solage and Ligeti.
I certainly don't see "oral" music as better or worse than "literate" music because for me all that counts is the experience of the work in that particular performance. I don't care if you can't sight read "Unity Capsule" because that failure produces something in performance that could not happen otherwise: it also means that each successive failure transforms the work and allows a great deal of personal "interpretation". The Ardittis almost rewrite the works Ferneyhough writes for them but if he gave them a work identical to the re-written version it would sound and feel different yet again.
The later sections of the essay are better perhaps but still hampered by his reliance on a personal utopian mythology of communication/immediacy that for me merely adds yet more words to the pile of bad words written about music.
As for the Smalley article it's a great piece of writing that has helped me a lot over the past few years: one of those rare articles you read and think "yes this describes what I've been after and the way I've been thinking but much better than I could do".
Friday, July 24, 2015
On Haas
"I trust my sensations. I try to find out how sound and colour and time
and dynamics fit together. I do not have any system. I do not trust
systems at all."
Georg Friedrich Haas in an interview with R. Andrew Lee
http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/5-questions-to-georg-friedrich-haas-composer/
Our thought flounders against this disavowal of a system: there cannot be any question of inconsistency because "consistency" is not what drives his work. We use a lot of affirmative-sounding terms to describe composition in ways which perhaps overstate its "rationality": fitting, tuning, forming, structuring, ordering, selecting etc. In this way "composition" is often seen in the way "art" (as tekhne) has always been seen: the domination of material by concepts, in short, the submission of matter to abstraction and idealisation. It is a delicious irony that electronic music is thought of as being "cold", disenchanted and mechanical and the perfect image of that would be the colourless purity of the sine wave. One could argue that for most analysis of music, especially from notated scores, a piece of music might as well be presented by sine waves given the inevitable idealisation that comes with thinking of "harmony" or "interval" rather than "material". Music is one of the few artforms where "error" is both an inevitable reality and something to be feared.
One point repeatedly made by the early spectralist writings was that music is made with sounds not with "notes" (or "pitch classes") and, I would add, with sounds that have a contour and a changing dynamic and phase profile through time and that this necessarily happens in space (the spectralists are more followers of Stockhausen than they would care to admit sometimes).
There are large scale formal procedures in his works but I believe Haas when he says he has no system, except perhaps that of mediating between just-intoned intervals and "normal" 12TET intervals. In works like "In Vain" or even more so in "Hyperion" and "Limited Approximations" there is a strong sense to me that the whole point of using "incompatible" systems of pitch organisation is to have them re-stage the conflict between consonance/resolution and dissonance/tension that drives the formal procedures of tonal music (and which also structures a piece like "Modulations" by Grisey).
A further feature of using such a discrepancy between systems in the one work is that one can then integrate instruments with fixed pitch into textures with instruments capable of altering the pitches produced. In some ways Haas is, like Ligeti in "Ramifications", not writing strictly "microtonal" music at all (certainly not in the sense that Partch or Young are): it is detuned music, in a state of decay and friction, in ruins and made from the ruins of tradition.
The fact that nearly all the climaxes of Haas' works involve something like spiraling turbulence (a tempest of sound in space and often extreme degrees of dissonance and brutality) indicate to me that he is not after a "well-ordered" system of tones but rather more interested in disorder. One reason I adore his work so much is that despite having listened to microtonal/spectral music since the late 1980s (I think my first experience was a broadcast of Murail's "Disintegrations" from the visit Boulez made in 1988 with EIC) here was a music that not only posed a clear "immanent critique" (in the Adornian sense) of the Austro-Germanic orchestral tradition but which also had clear expressive aims: this isn't an intellectual music at all, it's pretty clear that his aim is to think in sounds, not have sounds illustrate thoughts.
In his programme note for "Hyperion" Haas writes: "In the music can be heard, among other things, overtone chords and sounds of the tempered tone system. Two pianos are tuned according to the overtone system, one on the basis of the partials of a very low A (A0), the other on the basis of the partials of the E flat above it. The tension between fusion and friction – with which I work consciously in the majority of my pieces – is also one of the fundamental ideas in Hyperion. But whatever structures are formed disintegrate again. Unison melodies jostle against one another in different time grids and antagonistically conceived tonal systems."
In his early essay "Mikrotonalitäten" (published in the Austrian Musical News) Haas mentions that there is no "microtonal tradition" in the same way we could say there is a dodecaphonic tradition or the "tonal tradition" that was constituted retroactively with the emergence of "atonal" practices. He points out that every composer engaged in microtonality effectively invents a tradition for themselves: accordingly he repeatedly returns to that starting point in the essay.
In this essay Haas writes, for only pragmatic, polemical reasons (this is not a treatise after all) of 4 different kinds of microtonal possibility (translations are mine):
"1: tempered divisions of the octave other than the number 12 (and intervals other than the octave can be divided equally)
2: an orientation to the proportions of the overtone series ("just intonation")
3: "splitting of sound" (Klangspaltung), that is, very small, near-unison intervals which can still be clearly distinguished - at the centre of this compositional interest is "beating"
(Schwebung)
4: microtones that emerge aleatorically from an involvement in the actions of instruments, whose pitches are not exactly determinable in advance (for example those arising from piano preparation, some percussive sounds, ad libitum detuning of strings etc)."
(G.F. Haas "Mikrotonalitäten", in Osterreichische Musikalische Zeitung, June 1999, p. 10).
As Haas immediately goes on to point out that he is not attempting a "taxonomy" or "anthology" of microtonal practices but is, rather, indicating the background against which his own practice (derived I believe from the conflicts between these four possibilities) emerges. He says he is a composer not a theorist ("nicht Musikwissenschaftler"), the sketch he makes of microtonal possibilities he agrees is superficial and lacking: he is essentially a pragmatist rather than a purist, interested in what works for him as opening up a world to explore.
If we look at the practice of someone like Partch for instance (subject of a discussion in the Haas paper I'm working with here) most of his practice is geared towards a kind of "purity", an almost literally pastoral sense of microtonality, gesturing towards a lost Eden reconstituted in the simplified textures and ode-like forms of the music itself. Partch and other followers of Pythagoras end up by effectively throwing out all music based on what comes to seem (if one has read too much of Partch) the "perversions" of 12TET and the tonal practice that it made possible. In order to imagine this new music new instruments become necessary.
Haas I believe is much more interested in the energies released from the conflicts of systems, in conflict with the traditions "normal" instruments are permeated by and working with the frictions that arise from that conflict: he is the opposite of a purist which is perhaps why people with no knowledge of microtonality respond to his work. Haas is clearly fascinated by the sensations produced by beating and tends to engineer these not from pure frequency rations, nor empirically, but from the varied discrepancies produced by making overtone chords on 12TET fundamentals and placing them against a 12TET ground.
We could argue that his actual practice forms a fifth kind of microtonal practice: microtones are used primarily not in order to produce a new system of harmony but instead are groped towards, in changing ways, searching for new sounds amongst the wreckage of the tonal and atonal traditions, amongst the ruins of instrumental practice.
Hence the importance of the gesture of "retuning" in his work: "In Vain" has lengthy sections that sound like the musicians are retuning towards some kind of organisation of pitch other than that provided by accordion and piano (the harp in this work is tuned in just intonation on C). Hence, in addition, the importance of citation or evocation of historical materials in his work as well: the "horn calls" that feature in many of his works are not just clear references to Mahler, Bruckner and Wagner they are evoking the origin of such calls in untempered "primitive" instruments and the origin of them in the nature of the instruments themselves. This is a microtonal practice where the common C-major triad in 12TET of all things has a place as much as harmonies derived from the extreme upper reaches of the overtone series, where instrumental practices are modified in order to produce pitch materials that had no place in the systems of thought that gave rise to the instruments themselves. Working without 12TET pitches entirely means giving up certain registers of some instruments or even giving up on whole fields of instrumental sound tout court. A "compromised" or "inconsistent" language is for him the only one possible without going down the route of either Partchian "carpentry" or purely electronic work (in this respect "Und" for ensemble and electronics is an unusual piece and perhaps its somewhat didactic character comes from this - the failed "unison" melody at the close of the work is all the more powerful because of this perhaps?).
In its groping, experimental and open fashion, there is also a politics implied by his work (something which is often resonant with the means of visual presentation of the works in concert): given that the 12TET system and the "common practice" that was made possible by that system is still everywhere around us, still rings in our ears if we are unfortunate enough to encounter the auto-tuned pop that is everywhere, still makes overtone relations governed by higher primes sound "alien" or "foreign" then working with both together, rubbing up against one another is the truest form of microtonal practice? An internally consistent and logical microtonality (say that of Partch and his followers) seems utopian and idealist from this standpoint and, in a certain sense, assumes that habit can simply be done away with.
The mixed practice Haas uses in "In Vain" or "Hyperion" or "Limited Approximations" has the advantage of still allowing things like tonal triads in various forms of intonation to rub up against themselves, estranging thereby all systems of pitch organisation, rendering them all somehow "unreal".
This "estrangement" is clearly what his practice is motivated by, rather than theoretical consistency: this is why I would class him with the composers of the "second modernity" outlined by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (who of course does not include Haas in his list of such composers for no doubt polemical reasons). The fact that a piece like "In Vain" regularly requires the lights to go out and so disables the role of the conductor, requires players to play from memory is not mere theatrics. In the Austrian context, inspired as it was by the rise of the right wing in Austria (a movement that still made gestures towards "the natural" and, like all right wing movements, thinks of the state as an artwork) questions of harmony, tuning, mood and power that are implied by the concept of "Stimmung" are not at all innocent. In short, the social/political ramifications of "tuning" (what it means for things to fit together or not) are not innocent to a composer from the land of Hitler and Bruckner. This is not an "extra-musical" issue: there is no such thing as an "extra-musical" issue, a musical work does not finish at the double bar line, to the extent that it is a musical work it is in dialogue automatically with the totality of music. The concept of the "extra-musical" is a convenient fiction that allows the thinking of music as if it were an ideality (or made by sine waves) untouched by the very history that in fact permeates it all the way down to the smallest particles: it is a historically situated, socially mediated set of actions, ideas and practices by humans. No amount of wonder at overtone ratios can deracinate musical works from their historical situation, nor break the nexus (which goes back to the Greeks) between music and the political.
Georg Friedrich Haas in an interview with R. Andrew Lee
http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/5-questions-to-georg-friedrich-haas-composer/
Our thought flounders against this disavowal of a system: there cannot be any question of inconsistency because "consistency" is not what drives his work. We use a lot of affirmative-sounding terms to describe composition in ways which perhaps overstate its "rationality": fitting, tuning, forming, structuring, ordering, selecting etc. In this way "composition" is often seen in the way "art" (as tekhne) has always been seen: the domination of material by concepts, in short, the submission of matter to abstraction and idealisation. It is a delicious irony that electronic music is thought of as being "cold", disenchanted and mechanical and the perfect image of that would be the colourless purity of the sine wave. One could argue that for most analysis of music, especially from notated scores, a piece of music might as well be presented by sine waves given the inevitable idealisation that comes with thinking of "harmony" or "interval" rather than "material". Music is one of the few artforms where "error" is both an inevitable reality and something to be feared.
One point repeatedly made by the early spectralist writings was that music is made with sounds not with "notes" (or "pitch classes") and, I would add, with sounds that have a contour and a changing dynamic and phase profile through time and that this necessarily happens in space (the spectralists are more followers of Stockhausen than they would care to admit sometimes).
There are large scale formal procedures in his works but I believe Haas when he says he has no system, except perhaps that of mediating between just-intoned intervals and "normal" 12TET intervals. In works like "In Vain" or even more so in "Hyperion" and "Limited Approximations" there is a strong sense to me that the whole point of using "incompatible" systems of pitch organisation is to have them re-stage the conflict between consonance/resolution and dissonance/tension that drives the formal procedures of tonal music (and which also structures a piece like "Modulations" by Grisey).
A further feature of using such a discrepancy between systems in the one work is that one can then integrate instruments with fixed pitch into textures with instruments capable of altering the pitches produced. In some ways Haas is, like Ligeti in "Ramifications", not writing strictly "microtonal" music at all (certainly not in the sense that Partch or Young are): it is detuned music, in a state of decay and friction, in ruins and made from the ruins of tradition.
The fact that nearly all the climaxes of Haas' works involve something like spiraling turbulence (a tempest of sound in space and often extreme degrees of dissonance and brutality) indicate to me that he is not after a "well-ordered" system of tones but rather more interested in disorder. One reason I adore his work so much is that despite having listened to microtonal/spectral music since the late 1980s (I think my first experience was a broadcast of Murail's "Disintegrations" from the visit Boulez made in 1988 with EIC) here was a music that not only posed a clear "immanent critique" (in the Adornian sense) of the Austro-Germanic orchestral tradition but which also had clear expressive aims: this isn't an intellectual music at all, it's pretty clear that his aim is to think in sounds, not have sounds illustrate thoughts.
In his programme note for "Hyperion" Haas writes: "In the music can be heard, among other things, overtone chords and sounds of the tempered tone system. Two pianos are tuned according to the overtone system, one on the basis of the partials of a very low A (A0), the other on the basis of the partials of the E flat above it. The tension between fusion and friction – with which I work consciously in the majority of my pieces – is also one of the fundamental ideas in Hyperion. But whatever structures are formed disintegrate again. Unison melodies jostle against one another in different time grids and antagonistically conceived tonal systems."
In his early essay "Mikrotonalitäten" (published in the Austrian Musical News) Haas mentions that there is no "microtonal tradition" in the same way we could say there is a dodecaphonic tradition or the "tonal tradition" that was constituted retroactively with the emergence of "atonal" practices. He points out that every composer engaged in microtonality effectively invents a tradition for themselves: accordingly he repeatedly returns to that starting point in the essay.
In this essay Haas writes, for only pragmatic, polemical reasons (this is not a treatise after all) of 4 different kinds of microtonal possibility (translations are mine):
"1: tempered divisions of the octave other than the number 12 (and intervals other than the octave can be divided equally)
2: an orientation to the proportions of the overtone series ("just intonation")
3: "splitting of sound" (Klangspaltung), that is, very small, near-unison intervals which can still be clearly distinguished - at the centre of this compositional interest is "beating"
(Schwebung)
4: microtones that emerge aleatorically from an involvement in the actions of instruments, whose pitches are not exactly determinable in advance (for example those arising from piano preparation, some percussive sounds, ad libitum detuning of strings etc)."
(G.F. Haas "Mikrotonalitäten", in Osterreichische Musikalische Zeitung, June 1999, p. 10).
As Haas immediately goes on to point out that he is not attempting a "taxonomy" or "anthology" of microtonal practices but is, rather, indicating the background against which his own practice (derived I believe from the conflicts between these four possibilities) emerges. He says he is a composer not a theorist ("nicht Musikwissenschaftler"), the sketch he makes of microtonal possibilities he agrees is superficial and lacking: he is essentially a pragmatist rather than a purist, interested in what works for him as opening up a world to explore.
If we look at the practice of someone like Partch for instance (subject of a discussion in the Haas paper I'm working with here) most of his practice is geared towards a kind of "purity", an almost literally pastoral sense of microtonality, gesturing towards a lost Eden reconstituted in the simplified textures and ode-like forms of the music itself. Partch and other followers of Pythagoras end up by effectively throwing out all music based on what comes to seem (if one has read too much of Partch) the "perversions" of 12TET and the tonal practice that it made possible. In order to imagine this new music new instruments become necessary.
Haas I believe is much more interested in the energies released from the conflicts of systems, in conflict with the traditions "normal" instruments are permeated by and working with the frictions that arise from that conflict: he is the opposite of a purist which is perhaps why people with no knowledge of microtonality respond to his work. Haas is clearly fascinated by the sensations produced by beating and tends to engineer these not from pure frequency rations, nor empirically, but from the varied discrepancies produced by making overtone chords on 12TET fundamentals and placing them against a 12TET ground.
We could argue that his actual practice forms a fifth kind of microtonal practice: microtones are used primarily not in order to produce a new system of harmony but instead are groped towards, in changing ways, searching for new sounds amongst the wreckage of the tonal and atonal traditions, amongst the ruins of instrumental practice.
Hence the importance of the gesture of "retuning" in his work: "In Vain" has lengthy sections that sound like the musicians are retuning towards some kind of organisation of pitch other than that provided by accordion and piano (the harp in this work is tuned in just intonation on C). Hence, in addition, the importance of citation or evocation of historical materials in his work as well: the "horn calls" that feature in many of his works are not just clear references to Mahler, Bruckner and Wagner they are evoking the origin of such calls in untempered "primitive" instruments and the origin of them in the nature of the instruments themselves. This is a microtonal practice where the common C-major triad in 12TET of all things has a place as much as harmonies derived from the extreme upper reaches of the overtone series, where instrumental practices are modified in order to produce pitch materials that had no place in the systems of thought that gave rise to the instruments themselves. Working without 12TET pitches entirely means giving up certain registers of some instruments or even giving up on whole fields of instrumental sound tout court. A "compromised" or "inconsistent" language is for him the only one possible without going down the route of either Partchian "carpentry" or purely electronic work (in this respect "Und" for ensemble and electronics is an unusual piece and perhaps its somewhat didactic character comes from this - the failed "unison" melody at the close of the work is all the more powerful because of this perhaps?).
In its groping, experimental and open fashion, there is also a politics implied by his work (something which is often resonant with the means of visual presentation of the works in concert): given that the 12TET system and the "common practice" that was made possible by that system is still everywhere around us, still rings in our ears if we are unfortunate enough to encounter the auto-tuned pop that is everywhere, still makes overtone relations governed by higher primes sound "alien" or "foreign" then working with both together, rubbing up against one another is the truest form of microtonal practice? An internally consistent and logical microtonality (say that of Partch and his followers) seems utopian and idealist from this standpoint and, in a certain sense, assumes that habit can simply be done away with.
The mixed practice Haas uses in "In Vain" or "Hyperion" or "Limited Approximations" has the advantage of still allowing things like tonal triads in various forms of intonation to rub up against themselves, estranging thereby all systems of pitch organisation, rendering them all somehow "unreal".
This "estrangement" is clearly what his practice is motivated by, rather than theoretical consistency: this is why I would class him with the composers of the "second modernity" outlined by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (who of course does not include Haas in his list of such composers for no doubt polemical reasons). The fact that a piece like "In Vain" regularly requires the lights to go out and so disables the role of the conductor, requires players to play from memory is not mere theatrics. In the Austrian context, inspired as it was by the rise of the right wing in Austria (a movement that still made gestures towards "the natural" and, like all right wing movements, thinks of the state as an artwork) questions of harmony, tuning, mood and power that are implied by the concept of "Stimmung" are not at all innocent. In short, the social/political ramifications of "tuning" (what it means for things to fit together or not) are not innocent to a composer from the land of Hitler and Bruckner. This is not an "extra-musical" issue: there is no such thing as an "extra-musical" issue, a musical work does not finish at the double bar line, to the extent that it is a musical work it is in dialogue automatically with the totality of music. The concept of the "extra-musical" is a convenient fiction that allows the thinking of music as if it were an ideality (or made by sine waves) untouched by the very history that in fact permeates it all the way down to the smallest particles: it is a historically situated, socially mediated set of actions, ideas and practices by humans. No amount of wonder at overtone ratios can deracinate musical works from their historical situation, nor break the nexus (which goes back to the Greeks) between music and the political.
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