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).
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