Things that are not : an ontology of (de)composition Paper presented to the 7th International Music Theory Conference, Principles of Musical Composition – Musical Text, May 9-11, 2007, Vilnius, Lithuania Dr. Paul Ramshaw London College of Music Thames Valley University London UK Paul.Ramshaw@tvu.ac.uk 1 Things that are not: an ontology of (de)composition abstract This paper considers the nature of ideas and their position within a field of power relations by thinking about the discourse that takes place within musical forms in general on a social and institutional level and how music is controlled. It then moves to look at the opposing sides of the discourse in the form of the orthodox/heterodox positions taken by Boulez and Schaeffer with regard to compositional style and process of musique concrete by using Nietzsche’s dualist metaphor of Apollonian and Dionysian visions as essential but opposing creative forces. Finally some aspects of John Cages thinking on the subject of indeterminism are brought in which, seem to reconcile the two positions in a way Nietzsche and perhaps Schaeffer, but not Boulez may have agreed with. Discourse is the negotiation between ways of thinking that occurs within or across institutions that defines what is permissible within its social context.1 These social rules aim to preserve the prevailing status quo and to prevent valid participants thinking the ‘unthinkable’, but do not have power over outsiders whom may challenge the ‘received wisdom’ of the discourse albeit from an outsiders position within the hierarchy. As de Jager notes: Sociologists…stress the ways in which membership of a society or of a particular social group affects the (musical) behavior of people, including that of gifted composers. de Jager (1972:253) As such, the sociology of music is concerned with the relationship between music and the social context within which it takes place and how the behavoiur of others, norms and shared values impacts on that of individuals de Jager (1972:253). Mainstream or traditional forms of composition and notation have always configured the landscape of what is acceptable in terms of process and method. Whether this is due to technical expediency or institutional necessity (or both) is debateable. Both of these will also entail dialectical relations of power in which a number of interests form a discursive field of relations. At its centre, this field has the mainstream ‘common sense’ conception that reproduces and replicates the ‘good’ knowledge and reinforces the prevailing status quo that is the orthodox format, procedure and methods of composition and notation etc. On its periphery, the discursive field is populated by contesting or heterodox conceptions of format, procedure and methods. As developments occur through time there are movements with discourse that include interactions between the ideas within the orthodoxy, but also include incursions and on occasion, concessions made by orthodox positions to heterodox ideas, which impact and affect both method and practice. Examples of 1 Discourse also configures ‘what is acceptable’ within any particular institutional setting, such as academe, governmental and international organisations. 2 this are the various graphic formats of score that have been used to attempt to communicate a music notation with more information than conventional methods can provide.2 Within the sociology of music, de Jager (1972) acknowledges that: The beliefs and convictions which people share with regard to … sounds and sound structures are sociologically much more relevant than the sounds themselves. Every society or social group has its own ideas of what it considers to be “music” and proper behavior with regard to that music. What is regarded as “music” and proper behavior is a matter of social convention, which varies in time and in geographical space as well as in social space. de Jager (1972:253) In some ways the ‘inside/outside’ configuration of proper and improper behaviour can be viewed from the perspectives of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/ Dionysian distinction introduced in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1872). Apollonian perspectives are those that appear refined, sober and with an emphasis on superficial appearance where man is separated from the immediacy of experience and concerns himself more with meaning. Dionysian perspectives are those that challenge authority, appear ‘non–rational’ an as such could easily be dismissed as uncultured and/or overly subjective. Within discursive power relations the ‘elites’ in control of the orthodox conception of meaning can use pejorative language and/or otherwise negative predicate nouns to bias the discourse in their favour. In this way outsiders are dismissed as unreasonable, unworthy, unprofessional and amateur etc. As for individual composers, de Jager argues that some may conform to mainstream conceptions and values and others deviate from the prevailing norms. The urge to innovate, i.e. to break some rules, or the tendency to conform to the rules, are in itself psychological phenomena. Sociology tries to elucidate under which social conditions these psychological phenomena can successfully occur. de Jager (1972:254) de Jager also notes that the expectations of societies and indeed types of societies function to configure and condition the composition and output of music, which can also have an effect on innovation in related processes and this is also impacted on by the influence of a free market economy. Crosscurrents in historical events and technical developments are forces that shape the way social conditions impact on development and changes in artistic endeavour expressed in music, in the arts in general and within the prevailing discourse over time. Influences such as the First and Second World Wars and the social and economic changes that these brought about in Europe created the stimuli for a wave of expression across the arts, including collaborations between artists and musicians, authors and playwrights. For example in the early 20th 2 Eg. Such as the graphic score, audio graphic and explanation notes of Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet (1992/1993) . 3 century, prior to World War One, the shift from expressionist forms to abstract expressionism in post war years and again on to post-expressionist forms of cubism in the fine arts and twelve tone composition in music. Lissa (1973:25) notes that changes in the stabilized means of musical expression – those which have socially constructed underpinnings, have accelerated from taking a century in the Middle Ages, to a generation in the Romantic Period, to a continuous flux of transformation in contemporary times. In the post war years some of these transformations began to challenge existing orthodoxies with so-called new movements across the arts that influenced a dialectic of ‘cross pollination’ of ideas that also provided a base for later developments and experimentation. However, it was the abstract nature of sound that created the wave with the biggest impact (Webster 2007).3 The development of the quality of magnetic tape and recording processes, discovered in Germany after World War Two created new opportunities for those interested in sound and composing for timbres or using timbres that were outside of the orthodox conception of conventional instrumentation and repertoire. Schaeffer’s musique concrete was a transformation that did not conform with the rules of the mainstream or draw on historical awareness of past by quoting stylistic characteristics. By embracing new technologies and going against mainstream orthodox conceptions this was at odds with tradition and another example of Nietzsche’s ‘Western appropriation’ of the Apollonian ideal. The awareness of constant variability as the fundamental principle of history forces the artist to chase new developments, those that do not yet exist and that possibly anticipate the things to come. In the musical avantgarde, everything that has happened at once becomes past, and artistic creation is a constant projection into the future. Breaking with all tradition, even with the one that has not yet become stabilized, has become the only tradition. Lissa (1973:25) Pierre Schaeffer’s conception of musique concrete began during experiments undertaken during the 1940’s at Radiodiffusion Française (ORTF), with the eventual broadcast in 1948 of the now infamous Etude aux chemins de fer with later work carried out under the Studio d'Essai, which Schaeffer also established.4 By the early 1951 the Groupe de Recherches Musicales Concrete (GRMC) 5 established in Paris by Schaeffer in 1958 was awarded official status. Schaeffer began publishing ideas on sound in the late 1930’s, which he built on over the intervening war years during which he had a major involvement in 3 Webster states “It is within the abstract nature of sound that we can trace its effect and indeed its fundamental link with the development of the visual arts at the beginning of the 20th century. Music was the driving force behind most European artists at the fore of the visual and mostly pictorial art scene in the early 1900s. Not only was it an inspirational form for the beginnings of abstract art, it equally imposed its immaterial and temporal weight on Cubism, Futurism, De Stijl, Bauhaus and later on the Fluxus movement.” (Webster 2007) Grove Music Dictionary Online. Later reformed in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) which had a more generalised research program that included instrument design (Grove Music Online). 4 5 4 the French resistance.6 Audio of Musique Concrete was first presented in a concert in 1950 with a publication named ‘Introduction a la Musique Concrete’ and a book entitled ‘A La Recherché d’une Musique Concrete’ following in 1952. Other publications included those on radiophonic techniques and also the audio visual concepts employed in cinema. These culminated in his main work7 ‘Traité des Objets Musicaux’ (1966) which set out a categorisation of sound objects into a typology as a means for analyzing sound based on perception, The typology, graphically represented in a number of tables8 (see appendix) was ‘relatively objective’ in that it did not classify sound from the position of absolute scientific objectivity but across relative categories, which appeared to allow a subjectively reflexive positioning of sound within the overall schema. This could allow for timbral differences in sounds as they occur over time. The tables contain a great deal of detail for classification of sound including a diagram for the conception of the ‘sound object’ through the focus of ‘reduced listening’ (TARTYP). The most detailed (TARSOM) contains seven criteria of musical perception, which map in grid format across nine classifications including types, classes, genres and a multi columned espêces that contains further subcategories9. However the practical use of these at best is a little cumbersome for an analyst and virtually impossible for a novice listener to get to grips with because the notational symbols schaeffer uses are letters or strings of letters to represent tabular location, and also sought to avoid a ‘socially constructed location’ of the sound in terms of the concept of ‘reduced listening’. Essentially, Schaeffer was interested in identifying ‘intentional objects’ that were explicable using phenomenological apprehension in the form of ‘reduced listening’. This permitted the examination of sound content by focusing on its mediation by human perception - what the sound content inferred per se rather than what its sound source implied - and that a more structured form of mediated perception can be used as an objective tool. Schaeffer’s perceptual approach was influenced by Husserl’s work on phenomenological theory (Kane 2007)10. According to Kane, Schaeffer seemed to be combining two concepts of Husserl’s foundational critique into a 6 7 For an overview of Schaeffer’s life and works including a full bibliography and discography see Dallet (1997) Schaeffer also continued to publish many other writings after The Traite until shortly before he became ill and died in 1995. His last written work was published in 1996. See Dallet (1997) (See Appendix 1) The BIFINTEC- (Bilan final des intentions d’ecoute), TARTYP – (Tableau Récapitulatif de la Typologie) and TARSOM – (Tableau Récapitulatif du Solfège des Objets Musicaux) within Schaeffer (Ed. du Seuil 1966) p.170-77 Included here as Appendix 1. Especes contains three main categories: Amplitude, intensity and duration, each with further sub-categories. 8 9 10 Kane (2007) discusses the influence of Husserl’s writings on Schaeffer’s work. One section covers Schaeffer’s hybrid modelling of Husserl’s approaches of ‘realism’ and ‘psychologism’. “Between the ‘realism’ of acoustical research and the ‘psychologism’ of habitual (and conventional) musical practice, Schaeffer proposes an investigation to disclose what is essential to both domains”. These opposing positions also resemble Nietzch’es dualisms. 5 ‘hybrid discipline’ applying them to the musical domain by considering the: “… ‘realism’ of acoustical research and the ‘psychologism’ of habitual (and conventional) musical practice, Schaeffer proposes an investigation to disclose what is essential to both domains” (Kane 2007:16). However, Kane’s criticism of Schaeffer’s approach, that his ontological reduction of the sound object ignores historical specificity seems well founded. Within critical sociology meaning is always contained within a framework of social forces of time and space: even an inference based on reduced listening would occur within temporal and spatial limits.11 Though musique concrete has been said to have been in a decrescendo by the mid 1950’s (Desantos 1997), and Schaeffer’s work has been considered to have largely been ignored by the established orthodoxy because it stood “at the crossroads of traditional disciplines and interfere[s] with the order in which they are taught” (Palombini 1999), Schaeffer’s work continued to influence many composers and music academics in the way they thought about using or discussing sound and music.12 Schaeffer’s conception of musique concrete provided the sound object that extended the semantics of possibility within the discourse of musical text into the realm of sonic qualities, which by nature of the process can prefigure the musical text in itself. By the early to mid 1960’s, with the advent of Schaeffer’s musique concrete being a decade earlier,13 composers began to write scores for electronics that required additional and graphical components that provided information not available with standard notation.14 Though these approaches set up a more collaborative relationship between composer and performers where a certain flexibility or freedom of interpretation is possible in the performance there remained a variability in how exacting the guidance of parameters were between composers.15 With serialist approaches, music concrete became seen as 11 12 For a consideration of meaning in music from a philiosphical perspective see Sipus (1973). See Dack (2002a). Also, as Kane (2007:22) notes, Schaeffers perspective was that reduced listening denied or removed any socio-historical content from the discovery of the sound object which, in a fundamental way constrains the purpose of individual apprehension of technological processes. The main proponents being Schaeffer, Pierre Henri, Luc Ferrari and others at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). Exanples of Stockhausen’s graphic scores can be seen at http://www.stockhausen.org/heli_pg_1.html 13 14 15 However this is not to be understood as laziness in interpretation of scores. Stockhausen’s approach exercised a “much more detailed compositional control over what was played and operated…counterbalanced by that of John Cage and John Tudor who featured greater freedoms and more diverse combinations of sound sources…” (Davies 2001). Indeed John Cage was said to be almost constantly frustrated with musicians that misinterpreted his work and that “frequently the performance instructions in his works or the basic tenets of his aesthetic were appropriated and paraphrased far too freely. Performers could be especially notorious in this regard, in the worst cases mutating the source material beyond all reasonable boundaries, mistaking the artistic privilege afforded in Cage's scores to participate actively and intelligently in a work's realization for the more puerile opportunity to behave fatuously. Undisciplined mis-readings and slapdash performances shadowed Cage throughout his life.” (Patterson 2000) 6 unsophisticated and inadequate,16 and though Schaeffer appeared to share this sentiment in his opinion of serial music, a more precise description would be “that, in principle, but not in practice, Schaeffer would admit serialism into the domain of concrete music.” (Palombini 1993). The reasons for this according to Palombini, are related to the degree of acceptance Schaeffer perceived this liaison would bring musique concrete from the orthodox establishment rather than a change of his personal sentiment. Indeed in 1957 Schaeffer proposed the new name of musique experimentale in a special 1957 edition of the Revue Musicale17 (in which Boulez also contributed). This forms an example of how Schaeffer’s heterodox position was seeking to appear to be validated or indeed co-opted into the mainstream orthodoxy. One contemporary and now quite important strand of discourse has developed under the name of spectromorphology. This aims to describe the sound object as an irreducible interaction and conjunction of sound in two parts: sound spectra in terms of a pitch spectrum and how spectra change and modified over time. As such, this perspective holds that “the art of music is no longer limited to the sounding models of instruments and voices.” (Smalley 1997)18 From the 1980’s developments in electronics and recording technologies used by both musicians and composers along with socio-economic conditions that enabled access to these technologies to the mass market has created a shift towards the perspectives of the early pioneers like Schaeffer, which has both empowered a new generation to think differently about the composing process and the purpose and meaning of what textual notation represents, and indeed if it is at all necessary. As noted by Thoresen (2002:2) the orthodox approach of western musicology privileged pitch structures, forms and rhythm over considerations of timbre which were considered “a matter of colorisation of musical structure and was treated in terms of orchestration”. Schaeffer’s Musique Concrete along with other changing societal conditions began to change these conceptions and permitted timbre to be designed and used as a compositional element with as much if not more effect on the final sonic artefact.19 However, though Schaeffer can be said to 16 Pierre Boulez, a one time student of Schaeffer’s disliked the fact that with musique concrete there was little apriori composition to the music production process. ‘Vers une Musique Experimental’ Numero Special No 236 de la Revue Musicale, (1957), Ed. Richard-Masse, Paris. In Dallet (1997). “Spectromorphology is an approach to sound materials and musical structures, which concentrates on the spectrum of available pitches and their shaping in time. The concepts and terminology of spectromorphology are tools for describing and analysing listening experience. The two parts of the term refer to the interaction between sound spectra (spectro-) and the ways they change and are shaped through time (-morphology). The spectro- cannot exist without the morphology and vice versa: something has to be shaped, and a shape must have sonic content. Although spectral content and temporal shaping are indissolubly linked, we need to conceptually to be able to separate them for discursive purposes - we cannot in the same breath describe what is shaped and the shapes themselves”. The Electro Acoustic Research Site, De Montford University, Leicester UK, http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?rubrique28 On historical differences between German and French schools see Dack (2002a) 17 18 19 7 have effectively extended the possibilities of discourse for musical text, this can also be considered as a subversion of orthodox conceptions, which could be viewed as the ‘Trojan Horse’ that populated the mainstream with new alternatives. In other words, the reversal of the composition process that now begins with sound or an analogous emotional aspect has the function of dispensing with a requirement for notational and ideational abstraction. In terms of the metaphysical element of musical composition and also writing in the pre-digital 1970’s Tuksar (1971) argues that the “free play of shapes” characterised by the development of the concrete world of sound material has replaced the metaphysical foundations in the “transcendental sphere of the imagination” with pattern based experiments with the laws of physics. The concept and the very process of composing are carried through by applying an inductive method. Experimenting with new sound material becomes the pattern, even the essential pre-condition of a creative act, and sometimes, unfortunately, also remains its final achievement. The metaphysics of music has been scorned and empiricism has taken its place (Tuksar 1971:85). Tuksar’s language reveals his preference for the traditional of the ideal and metaphysical over the experimental and practical and can be seen as a statement of orthodox resistance to changes taking place in the later half of the 20th century. In a discussion also in the 1970’s that considers an historical awareness of music as socially constructed within temporal and geographical limits (which appeals to sociological constructs), Lissa (1973) rejects the contemporary transformation into poly-stylistic musical styles that encompass new non-orthodox forms and bemoans the demise of musical imagination with a reference to the indeterminism of John Cage. In this section, the pejorative tone is quite apparent. The hypertrophy of the future-oriented historical awareness of music produces an excess of information which, as perceived by the listener, turns into chaos. If we follow John Cage in assuming that everything audible is music, then the result in music-making is that absolute freedom and lack of firm principles, the ‘freedom from the known’, which leads towards the disintegration of the musical imagination and to the inability on the part of the listener to introduce some order into the information received. Lissa (1973:25) Lissa goes on to suggest historical circumstances for this ‘tendency’ in western thinking but does not mention the post-enlightenment ethic of capitalism which spurred the acceleration of technological development and the rise of individualism that were arguably a huge influence on the antecedents of modernity and have led to the socio-technical postmodernity and ‘transformational flux’ that we now experience in the arts. From a stylistic perspective Schaeffer’s approach has linkages to principles and purposes of expressionism; methods such as experimentation, abstraction, emphasis on emotional representation and subjective apprehension are evident. 8 Dack (2002b) notes that Schaeffer actually stated as much in a la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète (1952:192) This musique concrète, which is equivalent to abstract painting, deserves just as much the adjective abstract even more than concrete . Dack (2002b) Abstract experimental methods appear similar to the ‘non-rational’ half of Nietzsche’s dualistic conception of expressionism - the emotional artistic subconscious. In ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1872), Nietzsche proposed that creativity involved a necessarily dialectical relationship between two opposing forces or experiences and that the further development of art was bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Nietzsche 1886:1). These were also applied as the visual (plastic arts) Apollonian and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. As already mentioned, the Apollonian experience included those perspectives that appear refined, sober and with an emphasis on superficial appearance where man is separated from the immediacy of experience and concerns himself more with meaning, beauty and ideals and the search or absolute truth whilst suppressing emotional input. The contrasting Dionysian experience included the non-rational and variable vision of artistic subjectivity that increased with the level of Dionysian excitement where the subjective would also fade “into complete forgetfulness of the self” (Nietzsche 1886:1). This is similar to the intuitive response of being lost in play20 with an emphasis on perceptual and emotional reality, and as such could easily be dismissed as uncultured and/or overly subjective.21 Play was also a concept that Schaeffer used to describe the process of creating concrete works in the form of sons-jeu (sound play), something that may have led Boulez to denounce musique concrete as ‘bricolage’ a kind of do-it-yourself improvisation make it up as you go along approach. The abstract expressionist artists22 of the 1940’s were familiar with Nietzsche’s conception and used it to depart from traditional forms such as portraiture and figurative art towards more abstract forms (Jachec 1991:21). In terms of the creative process, consciousness could be directed beyond the apparent “quantitative thing towards the intangible qualitative thing” which includes the variability of the subjective imagination (Jachec 1991:23). Jean Paul Sartre called this “imaginative knowledge”, which was an intentional activity: A consciousness which seeks to transcend itself…presents itself as an effort to determine this ‘something’ as a will to reach the intuitive, as an expectation of images” (Sartre 1983 quoted in Jachec 1991:23) 20 Hans Georg Gadamer used the conception of being lost in play in order to describe the hermeneutic process. See Ramshaw (2005) However, Kane (2007:15) points out that Schaeffer may have been trying to reconcile both positions together in his later written work with regard to his Husserlian phenomenological perspectives- “two themes in Schaeffer’s work: (i) that a phenomenological investigation into listening will disclose the original ground of our musical practices; (ii) that the correlate of this investigation is the discovery of an objective, yet ideal, entity – i.e. the sound object”. Wassily Kandinsky synthesised the art forms of cubism with impressionism to lead the way for abstract expressionism with various paintings from 1900 to 1944. 21 22 9 Jachec also recognised this ‘expectant state’ as a characterising Nietzsche’s Dionysian ‘reverie’ as the Eternal and original artistic power that first calls the whole world of phenomena into existence (Nietzsche 1872:143) For Nietzsche, Dionysian music was that which is not restrained by “gentle caution” and as such “turns music generally into emotionally disturbing tonal power, a united stream of melody, and the totally incomparable world of harmony” (Nietzsche 1886:2). With reference to the aesthetics of his time Nietzsche noted that “subjective” artists were considered bad artists and high artistic achievement demanded “victory over the subjective” in the form of ideal and objective art. It appears that Schaeffer was more compelled with what was possible and or functional in a concrete application or production process rather than the ideal of what should be done which gives his approach a Dionysian perspective. This realist distinction is made clear in a published interview with Francois Bayle, one time student of Schaeffer, and later director of the GRM, made in 1997 just before Bayle’s retirement after 30 years service. In this except, Bayle discusses the differences between the conceptual approaches of Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer: Boulez had an idealistic and abstract vision of composition, and Schaeffer had a concrete concept. For Boulez, technology had to be neutral and transparent in order to realize abstract ideas. In this view, technology follows the lead of an aesthetic concept. This is the viewpoint of an idealist... For Schaeffer, technology was always evolving, and he felt that one must work with its limitations. We do not live in the ideal; we live in the real. Artists must exploit their medium's limitations as well as its capabilities. Eventually, an aesthetic vision emerges from practice, rather than being imposed from an idealistic philosophy. (Desantos 1997:12) However, as noted by Kane (2007) schaeffer appears to have borrowed Husserl’s conception of an intentional ‘object’ within his theory of the sound object, perhaps after his encounter with Boulez’ criticism of his ‘bricolage’. In effect Husserl’s position had an emphasis on the ideal which seems to contradict Schaeffer’s practical stance. It may have been that Schaeffer was aiming to reconcile the opposition between these early conceptual differences in his later theoretical work. After Schaeffer’s publication of Musique Concrete and other texts had discussed the concept he also introduced the term M u s i q u e Experimentale a wider, more encompassing term which also included electronic music and tape music. John Cage, writing in 1961 seems to bring the two distinctions of the ideal and the real together with intentional elements that appear both Dionysian and Apollonian: 10 “… where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. The turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity- for a musician, the giving up of music…gradually or suddenly, one see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact everything is gained. In musical terms sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity.” (Cage 1968) Cage’s almost metaphysical perspective concerns the indeterminacy of order and (dis)organisation of things, objects, and their structure. One could say his general approach to ontology was to consider the nature of being or the ‘is’, either for the subject or object as highly variable and unfixable. This allows for a transience of form, structure and timbre to be possible without adhering, or even consciously ignoring musical convention with the result that nothing is lost and where ‘everything is gained’. This conceptual perspective appears to resolve both sides of the Schaeffer / Boulez distinction in that for Cage, they are both halves of the same whole; a philosophical balance that Cage, whose Zen Buddist leanings were common knowledge, may have been content with. In a statement on composition, with another very clearly buddist perspective, Cage almost gets to the root of the Nietzchean necessity of duality between the Apollonian and the Dionysian: Composition… as an activity integrating opposites, the rational and the irrational, bringing about, ideally a freely moving continuity within a strict division of parts, the sounds, their combination and succession being either logically related or arbitrarily chosen. (Cage 1968:18) As indeterminate and found sonic objects may be difficult to notate and compose with in the traditional sense of creating a score, the question arises of whether this disenfranchises these musical forms and composing processes in terms of the level and effect they have on the social construction of the discourse. For Cage experimental music was that without apriori listening and without necessary purpose, but sound. There was no distinction between the intended and the unintended (Cage 1968:14). Orthodox conceptions of musical text consider discursive notational elements as signifiers that communicate structure, form, musical and technical expression and conjunctions of notes in melodic and harmonic relations. These abstract conceptions configure the ontological framework of the subject of composition into the acceptable orthodox requirements and rules of academe: the (classical) composition. This framework also constitutes these elements as positively and negatively ‘predicated subjects’, which have an affirmed value. In other words the language used indicates the normative value of the subject, whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, though this can also be much more subtle. Where nonnotated elements are left to textual instructions by the composer a variable degree of interpretation by the conductor and/or musicians would exist. However where these deviate into unconventionality they may be considered as being unwelcome in the comfortable space inhabited by the orthodoxy. In terms of the 11 discourse represented by those such as Tuksar and Lissa above, sound in the form of musique concrete and other forms of recorded and processed media, has typically fallen into latter category and also from a practical standpoint require much more textual explanation to perform in live circumstances. The following aphorism attributed to John Cage conveys the meaning I intend in the above paragraph in a cleverly simple way: [The] notation of music was like Latin, and any divergent use of it was like Protestantism, and you couldn't expect the priests of the church to have any interest in what you were doing, because you were in a sense threatening the position of the whole Greek aspect of music, which is bound up in its notation, which is Greek to the layman. (Sinker 1997:210) The idea that music can only be composed and or analysed in traditionally notated form still retains its prime position within acceptable orthodox conceptions, and though developments in experimental music by Stockhausen Crumb, Cage and others in which compositions were created with graphical scores were perhaps received with as much warmth both by the orthodox music establishment as the initial public reception of the music they represented, one could point to Cage’s remarks about the priests and still see its relevance today for so-called new music. Though graphic scores as ‘texts for interpretation’ still retain methods of constructing a semantic frameworks that require understanding and translation into a performance or for analysis, there are organisations like the International Society of Contemporary Music 23 and the Society for the Promotion of New Music 24 that now consider concrete, electro-acoustic and other musical works on their sonic merits without accompanying scores alongside traditional works. Though forms of quotation and collage exist in traditional composition, it is these techniques that are also levelled at the ‘technicians’ that create montages of sound into so-called music. Another passage from Lissa in a discussion of contemporary poly-stylism indicates her bias against the emerging form of audio and musical manipulation with direct reference to Schaeffer. One thing is clear: the collage is a symptom of the new attitude in composing and can under no circumstances be evaluated by the criteria, which are applicable to mono-stylistic music… These manipulations, as well as the specific way in which the collage is received, point to the fact that its ontological structure is of a different nature from that of a stylistically homogeneous world of sound; it puts Mozart and street noises on the same level as ‘material’ in that process, thus levelling reality and art, which means a devaluation of art. By mixing music with acoustic material in the sense of Pierre Schaeffer's objets sonores, the collage, especially the total collage, makes invalid all the criteria that we have so far applied in trying to distinguish music as art form from the noises of everyday life (Lissa : 1973:32) 23 24 http://www.iscm.org/ http://www.spnm.org.uk/ 12 It seems in refusing to accept the transformative context of creative change that Lissa, is ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’, the English idiom which refers to a situation in which one fails to grasp the overall context of something because of over attention to details, so one misses the point and the meaning. In this case what may be considered to be a ‘tree’ by the orthodoxy may be something rather different. The extent and degree of effect a realm of discourse may have in social and institutional life depends on the level of inclusiveness of its ‘received or absolute wisdom’. This is the inside/outside duality configured by rules of behaviour, including semantic construction and deference to established concepts and otherwise ‘incontestable’ facts, described by Bourdieu as a socialisation process called habitus (Bourdieu 1988) 25 and also similar to a notion conceived by Jacques Derrida of the ‘metaphysical aspect of structure’. This considers ‘the thing itself’ that is appropriated rather than its meaning per se and is interesting as it approximates not finding the ‘real’ thing or ‘misrecognising’ it for itself without actually knowing it as it exists.26 In this way the orthodox mainstream conception of things misrecognises them or considers them to be non-things, ‘things that are not’ as to this mode of thinking and perception one only sees or experiences the highlighted, visible and audible parts of things but not the ‘unannounced’ parts. Quoting Schopenhauer (1819:310) , Nietzsche also considered music to be ‘the thing in itself’: …music is not, like other art forms images of appearances, but an immediate reflection of the will itself as the metaphysical counterpart to all physical things in the world, the thing in itself as counterpart to all appearances (Nietzsche 1886:16) Those that control the semantic field of play that names and or (mis)recognises things in a normative i.e. value laden manner, also decide the nature of the discourse itself, including its parameters. As de Jager notes: Apart from their own convictions, people often do not like - or do not risk - to adopt innovations which run counter to the values and norms of society and the social groups to which they belong for fear of the sanctions their co-members might inflict upon them. That is exactly the reason why so often innovations are first adopted by marginal individuals or groupings. de jager (1972:257) However, as with all things creative it is the practitioners, the artists writers and composers that own their art, whether it conforms to what the establishment wants or not. And in doing so, practitioners seek to further their art in its development and expression, sometimes to the point of embracing new and innovative technologies. As such their responsibility is to continue what they do without regard to what is espoused as the received wisdom of the establishment. As Rudy (2007) states, new sounds create new musical syntax, structures and 25 Bourdieu refers to an institutional conservatism that exists within academe, where the ruling elite have a vested interest in both defending and reproducing the prevailing hierarchical power structure. See Bourdieu (1988) But see Sipus (1973) who considers the metaphysical aspects of music and meaning. 26 13 contexts, which may not be notated. Some of these may demand resolution by the listener and these form new challenges in turn for the analyst. Rudy, notes that compositions using recorded media are capable of operating at numerous levels at once. “This is what makes recorded media unique: its ability to be direct and referential, or indirect and ambiguous all at the same time and in any combination, because its musical, associative, and psychological function is not restricted to those normally attributed to its direct cause”. ( Rudy 2007) These multiple levels may bring together the images of the perceptual imagination to deliver what Nietzche’s quotation of Schopenhauer suggested, “the reflection of the will itself,” or to use Sartre’s term “imaginative Knowledge”. Though there are many arguments against composing using parts of or entire pieces based on recorded media (which may include music itself), they may not stand up when questions of power relations and the nature of the discourse is examined from a sociological position, and one asks why the creative process should be restrained from change in order to retain a sense of Western tradition or social continuity, as art itself does not progress societies, it transforms them. 27 As Palombini points out in a paraphrase from the world of fine art: It is not with notes, my dear semiotician, that one makes music. It is with sounds." (Palombini 2001) Schaeffer also had a clear idea of the limitations of conventions forms of composition and instrumentation and their location within a socially constructed paradigm of time and space: Why twelve notes when electronic music has introduced so many more? Why series of notes when a series of sonic objects is so much more interesting? Why the anacronistic use of an orchestra whose instruments are handled with such obvious anti-naturalness by Webern and his imitators? And above all, why limit the horizon of our research to the means, usages and concepts of a music after all linked to a geography and a history; certainly an admirable music but still no more than the Occidental music of the last few centuries? (Schaeffer ed. 1957: 18) As Cole and Jakimik observe, it is not enough to identify information within an acoustic signal using only sound in context but it also requires the use of previous knowledge and expectations. That knowledge may include historical awareness of sounds and styles of presentation previously heard. In other words we may expect and aim to understand and locate a point of reference for what it is we are listening to. Also “… it is not only what we hear that tells us what we know; what we know tells us what we hear.” 28 27 This paraphrases Lissa’s (1973) use of F.J. Fetis statement L'art ne progresse pas, il se transforme, Histoire generale de la musique, Paris 1869-1876, Vol. I. Rudy (2007) quotes this phrase and attributes its use to Cole and Jakimik from Howard and Ballas (1980). 28 14 Schaeffer’s music and that also created by other composers of music concrete, the indeterminate music created after it by the likes of Cage and others impacted on what we think we hear in relation to the sounds that are identifiable, or of new sounds within a new context, and it also challenged and continues to challenge what we think we know by providing new knowledge and thus new expectations about what is possible. This overlaps a great deal with what is known as the ‘audio-visual contract’, how our minds eyes constructs our perception based on what hear and see.29 To accept Cages conceptual approach to ‘unintended sounds’ and his allusion of their equality to intended sounds, we must begin to accept that sounds created by chance or discovered during the course of the production process or during a performance, sounds that may have previously been rejected by the orthodoxy because of their non-conformity and perhaps by a majority of composers because of their inability to be notated effectively and efficiently will continue to form a discursive field that will be increasingly populated with a ‘critical mass’ to challenge and reshape orthodox perspectives of how things should be done. What those things can be, the language of description of those things and their impact on the way the discourse forms and changes over time, is up to musicians, composers and musicologists. To echo a quote of Smalley’s again “the art of music is no longer limited to the sounding models of instruments and voices”. 29 See Chion (1994) 15 Appendix 1 BIFINTEC and PROGREMU 16 Appendix 1 TARTYP 17 Appendix 1 TARSOM 18 Appendix 1 TARSOM 19 References Bourdieu, P. ‘Homo Academicus’ Trans. Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Cage, J. ‘Silence: lectures and Writings’, Calder and Boyars 1968. Chion, M. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen’ trans. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994 Cole, R.A. and Jakimik, J. (1978) ‘Undertanding Speech: how words are heard’ in G. Underwoord (Ed): Strategies of Information Processing, New York Academic Press 1978 Dack, J. (2002a) ‘Histories and Ideologies http://www.sonic.mdx.ac.uk/research/dackhis.html of Synthesis’ Online Article Dack, J. (2002b) ‘Abstract and Concrete’ Journal of Electroacoustic Music. Vol. 14. London: Sonic Arts Network: 2-7 http://www.sonic.mdx.ac.uk/research/dackabstract.html Dallet, S. 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