The Great Escape

 

 

Since the breakdown of high modernism, there has been an increasing interest in meta-music among composers of art-music. Meta-music can be many different things; I am referring to the cases of using old pieces in the creation of new music. There is nothing new about this; the practices of transcription and variation are historical examples of this. (Busoni’s transcription on Liszt’s variations of Paganini is a colourful case.) However, it is in the 20 ^th century that composeres have started to utilize old music as historical objects – not just for the generation of material – in order to work with a specific meaning in relation to these objects. The significance that the historical piece of music carries is weaved into the context that is created in the new work. In the early twentieth century we can find predecessors to today’s practices for instance in the work of Charles Ives and Alban Berg. There is a difference here in that Ives utilizes a number of sources within popular musics of his time, applied musics of festivity or religious ceremonies. (Not old music in a canonic sense, rather plainly existing music). Berg however, however, uses old music in a very specific manner in his Violin concerto. He uses the Bach’s choral Es ist Genug not just as material in melodic or harmonic sense, but to point to a specific point within the canon of western music. An equally important feature is the semantic purpose of the Bach choral in evoking a set of imagery circling around the notion of death.

Charles Ives' mode is not far from the procedures of sampling that has been a central feature of popular music after the democratization of technologies. It is also a feature of art musics of various kinds, but it is Bergs approach that has become the main strategy in the exponentially increasing amount of pieces dealing with old music. These are works that deal not with any old music, but basically music that is recognizable as canonic.

One prominent example is Luciano Berio's Sinfonia from 1968. This piece is thoroughly studied [1] and commented and has in itself become a modern classic. It is in many ways a proto-piece for a large number of works from the last four decades. It is also a process that has bifurcated into different practices spanning from composed interpretations to critical deconstructivism. The number of composers engaged in these practices span a wide field of aesthetics and ethics: Berio, Sciarrino, Zender, Rihm, Finnissy, to name but a few.

It is impossible to chart the personal and artistic motivations behind these different and highly personal projects. It is, however, tempting to ask whether there might be an element of escape involved in this practice on some level. A lot of music, if not most, written after 1960 is linked with the question of how to escape the cul-de-sac of high modernism.

Composers like Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann have proposed extreme solutions to this impasse. In different ways they integrate chaotic impulses in closed forms, thus injecting them with a new vitality. Both composers appropriate modernist material and transform it by exposing the inherent contradiction, nourishing it instead of resolving the tensions. Both composers represent an aesthetic of collision and noise: Lachenmann with the collision between musicians' bodies and instruments, resulting in sonic noise. Ferneyhough by the collision between musician and text imbedded with semiotic noise. Their aesthetics might be regarded as a deconstructivist modernism, or rather a postmodernism of resistance. The composer and theorist Ross Feller has suggested [2] that Ferneyhough criticises the impulse to sort, quantify and package by sorting and quantifying to the extreme. Lachenmann resists the tendency to normalize new music by insisting on composing in the periphery of physio-musical expression, making the 'classical' instrument a stage for physical and sonic exploration.   

Another route of escape is suggested by Kagel, in his conception of the music theatre. Even in his early serialist works, there is an eruption of elements that does not subordinate to the serial fabric. One might call it a kind of subverted serialism, where mild irony and scepticism is apparent. In his work from 1960 and onwards, Kagels pieces are mainly reflections on music, making it both the object and medium of musical discourse.

The routes of escape have been plenty, but it seems that escaping by way of meta-music is one of the most widely travelled, at least for the last couple of decades. It offers a multitude of different possible solutions to the same problem, and lends itself to different aesthetical programs and different stylistic pursuits. And the postmodern condition that allows for these escapes described above creates an ideal spatial topology for the escape-routes of meta-music. In the following I will look at how this offers solutions to several problems as well as pose new questions, specifically with regard to the critical potential of new music.

 

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Any Young composer has encountered the moment when her composition, indefinitely personal and original, upon first hearing turns out to be just another piece of music, linked to and reminding of a host of other pieces of music. No interval is without some kind of meaning embedded in it by context or tradition, no instrumental or vocal sound exists in a neutral space, ready to lend itself to say what the musical creator wants it to say. It can speak the meaning of the creator, but not without a heavy accent, sediments of what is already spoken through it by other creators. An operatic voice singing bel canto is, for most listeners, just that: an operatic voice. The quality of the operatic voice is the carrier and is preeminent to any modulation in terms of melody, expression, and dynamics.

This is what Italian composer Luca Fransesconi has identified as the semantic pressure. I understand this as semantics not defined as in reflections around the work, but in the quasi-linguistic 'meanings' the listener (and composer) identifies in the sounding music. Every composer has to find ways of dealing with this fact, or risk to find herself in a position of amnesic naivety. One way of escaping the pressure of semantics is by turning to musical objects already defined in terms of semantic status. This is an attempt to establish a commonplace, a 'neutral' ground for enacting the exchange between musician and listener. Not neutral in any real sense, but in the sense that meaning is pre-established, known and identified by both parties, and do not need to be produced in the acting out of the music. It rather gives the composer possibilities to act out other productions of meaning, related to the established objects, embracing them, deforming them or contradicting them by complex discursive trajectories.

The semantic issues are closely linked with the exhaustion of material that many composer of the modernity experienced. Turning to found objects have been one way of escaping the centripetal forces that gradually closed the systems of compositional technique with respect to material. At a point material ceased to be an area of innovation and became a given, a ready-made of musical possibilities, the modern material.

This escape has, in many cases, become an apology for giving up the work of mediating between material and issues of form. This is often the case with composers most easily identified by the reductionist affects of certain stylistic features, often ironic or nostalgic. This does not, however, exclude the possibilities of material of heteronomous sources to engage in a serious exploration of form. The excavation of materials may even encompass materials of modernity, which may be transformed by exposing its inherent contradictions. This 'Postmodernism of resistance', to borrow a term from Hal Foster, may be the case with Ferneyhoughs radicalizing of serialist materials. The postmodernism of resistance 'attempts a critical deconstruction of tradition wherever it is found', to cite Ross Feller again. [3] In his reading of postmodernism, both Lachenmann and Ferneyhough is localized within the space of postmodernism, but this space is far from the narrow stylistic taxonomy often used for polemical reasons. This is for instance the case in Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf essay on Musical Modernity, where he tries to qualify postmodernity on work-level, not as a cultural space encompassing multiple possibilities. This reductionist view of postmodernity to a set of stylistic features may be responsible for the mistake that 'postmodernity accepts foreign material, which can at best only be combined ironically or playfully' [4] The first question that arises is the question of 'foreign material'. What is it? What does it smean that 'material refers outside the piece'? What musical material does not? The view that there is such a thing as pure, autonomous material is rather naïve. And the notion that 'foreign material' only can be combined within the limitations of irony and play is seriously flawed. If an 'outside' material (e.g. a quotation) is an integral part of a musical conception, has it not been encompassed by the materiality of the idea and placed inside the work? This 'materiality of the idea' is the link between the musical material (in strict sense) and the conceptuality and contextuality of the musical thought. Mahnkopf is pointing in this direction when he talks about the 'agreement between the chosen material (or materials) and the conception of the work' [5] in his assessment of the aesthetics of the Second Modernity. But it is not necessarily a binary opposition between material and conception, just as it is unfruitful to sharply denote between works that seek an autonomous standard in its being and works with a more or less prominent contextual side. This leads us to question what the domain of material can constitute: Is it not possible to view contextual dimensions as part of the composer's material?  I would advocate that the situation of the institutional symphonic concert could be regarded as of equal material importance as the symphonic sound. Or, to make a specific example: In Staatstheater, Kagels basic material is not primarily durations and pitches, but the opera house as such. And he uses this contextual material to carry out investigations in which the musical realm encompasses social and political dimensions.

In this respect, Meta-music allows for an intensification on process (contextuality and, indeed, intertextuality – all central concepts in wide areas of contemporary art.) For instance, any musical variant of relational art would be impossible within the classical institutions without some kind of reflection on the very materials of these institutions in its fabric. So there should not be a contradiction between music involving found objects and "a rigorous process of research into material, structure, form and concept" [6], which Mahnkopf describes as an intrinsic principle of modernism. So the escape from modernist notions of material is not about escaping the problems of material in general, but about escaping the rigor mortis of previous invention.

 

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There is, of course, always the temptation to write from a point of (more or less self-induced) oblivion. There are composers writing as if any mode of musical creation, any material, any inherited place or style is possible. Surrendering to the 'Sentimental subjectivity of the lonely subject' that Walter Benjamin refers to in one of his essays. [7] This romantic position does, however, surmise that it is possible to forget, to hear again but for the first time, to shovel down mountains of historically objectified subjectivity in order to create a smooth surface where everything is sounding for the first time. This extreme position of oblivion is inaccessible to most musicians and listeners. So the use of historical works may serve as a means of circumfering this problem. It allows for using the pre-ordained object, borrowing the cloak of a historical subjectivity untainted by the developments of later musical history.

Edward Said has written that the music of the past comes from ourselves, from the memory of the listener and the performer. [8] In this respect, the sentimental escape is dependent on recognization, either in form of specific work or a specific site of memory unveiled by style. We might also add that music from the past comes from the memory of the composer. This is evident in practices where composers work with historical music as a way of tapping into personal memories, charging their musical imaginations with subjective readings of music that in different way has shaped and constituted their own listening.

The notion of sentiment is intimately related to memory. In his essay on Melody, loneliness and confirmation, [9] Said reflects upon an experience in Carnegie Hall, a performance where Alfred Brendel played Brahms' Theme and Variations op.18. He explains how this music reminded him on a host of other musics and occasions, and links it to the descriptions and role of music in Proust. At the same time Saids description of the processes of listening to this particular Brahms-performance is a study in 'real time' intertextuality. He goes on to talk about the confirmation in recognition, a central aspect of any activity of music listening, regardless of style. In the concert hall however, this confirmation is double: On the one hand it is the personal, private satisfaction and joy that Said describes. On the other hand it is the confirmation of the occasion, of the institution of the concert performance, of classical music itself and, as an inevitable result, the celebration of Status Quo.

In similar ways, it seems as the most common artistic strategy in the practices of musical re-enactment is the affirmative. Old music is used to confirm qualities of the western canon, and in the same process trying to project some of these qualities upon the new work. This notion is the direct opposite of the role of modern music according to Adorno, which has 'absolute oblivion as its goal. That is the desperate message that reaches us from the shipwrecked.' [10] Interestingly, Said cites the very same passage in an earlier essay on music. And it is another form of oblivion than the one I mentioned earlier – it is oblivion as result, not as prerequisite.

So is it possible to run for the sentimental escape and at the same time keeping up with the Adornoesque ethos of the critical artist? It could be a work with memory, not of pointing to or re-enacting the past, but of transforming it, using it to measure distances, differences, to highlight the utopian failures and the degree to which classical music has become industrialized in its apparatus. But before we arrive at the commodity-character of the classical concert-spectacle, it might be useful to make a detour into the realm of pedagogics.

The Pedagogical escape is related to the Sentimental escape is the Pedagogical escape. This is a position from which one seeks to bridge the gap between listener and musician, to reconnect the broken continuity of the western tradition of music performance. By using canonic music that is known to the informed listener, the composer has a method to guide the listener into uncharted territory without leaving the safety of the mothership. One might even ascribe the act of writing for symphony orchestra, for instance, to this kind of escapism, in that the whole apparatus of economics, place, rehearsal plans etc. is already established as scaffolding, supporting the new work of music. It is true that the 50s and 60s saw a lot of attempts to tear down these scaffoldings, but for the last couple of decades this seems to be of less importance, as composers eagerly escape from the windy lofts of invention down to the warm hearth of the concert house. And it is a fact that the modernist idea of artistic autonomy has been cooperative in the diminishing sense of political and cultural situations of new music. This domesticating is maybe most visible in cases where critical and/or radical expression of popular culture is transferred to the symphony orchestra. Very few of these expressions manage to venture into the orchestra without imploding. One example is how Phillip Glass' orchestrations of David Bowie's 70's recordings has effectively castrated the music from its original power, borrowing the melodies and the popular status of Bowie to confirm the supremacy of the symphony orchestra.

On the other hand, Berios Sinfonia, parts of it almost didactic, does not conserve the past. It transforms it. It is a sounding manifestation of Derridas words  'Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory'. [11]

But it is a fact that the pedagogical reaching-out to the audience is mainly depending on an audience well acquainted with the western canon of classical music, i.e. the audience of classical music. The gap between art music and people with no prior knowledge to this canon remain unbridged by this strategy. It will have very little impact in building new audiences outside the established concert-going crowd. In this respect the pedagogical escape is counterproductive in situating music in a wider discursive context.

 

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After this somewhat provisional overview of some established practices of meta-music, I want to arrive at a proposal for further investigation. The question is if it is possible to imagine a critical stance in re-enacting old musics and old practices in new musical works. The words 'critical' and 'escape' seem to have mutually exclusive properties, so how would this position relate and communicate with the different positions I have discussed in relation to engaging with music of the past? Is it at all imaginable to escape from the pressure of semantics and problems of material by means of a critical position? Or is the critical position different altogether, rendering questions of semantics and material to rudimentary positions as possible side effects of the act of critical composition?

 

When a praxis of compositional re-enactment moves towards a critical position, some challenges are obvious. I will pose five imperatives that may serve as starting points:

 

1) The desire to pose questions to the institutions of music (old and new alike), in order to unveil invisible but powerful structures in the production apparatus of music. This is especially important with regard to the mechanisms of cultural industry (in Adornos and Horkheimers terms) applied to the modern symphony orchestra. It can be useful to work with old music in order to explore the historical sedimentations in the apparatus both for production and performance of new music.

 

2) The ability to discuss the canonic structures of western musical thought and production from within, in other words 'using the language in which you write to criticize the language in which you write' [12] This can be carried out in investigations on a material level of sound-production and musical writing.

 

3) The boldness to discuss the problems of autonomy with regard to musics failure to communicate (both with a general public and within a wider artistic field). This requires a positive re-thinking of the nature of communication in music.

 

4) The necessity to incorporate practices from recording technologies (sampling, plunderphonics etc) both within instrumental and electronic musics. Music history is not just a history of works; it is also a history of performance and of recording. One example is working with phonographic material where the performance, the recording, has achieved an iconic status separate from the works themselves.

 

5) The will to open the intellectual and conceptual concept of critical composition to a wide area of sensuous imaginations of music, and to heterogeneous contexts in terms of genre, style and ideology. This means a willingness to regard a critical stance in music without pre-existing aesthetical and stylistic programs. 

 

These imperatives could form the basis of a further investigation in this field – an investigation that needs to be carried out in discussions drawing upon ideas of cultural and aesthetical theory, as well as the intrinsic debates in the field of new-music. But it is even more important that it is carried out  in the act of making new music where old music is re-enacted through processes of critical repetition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] See for instance David Osmond-Smith: Playing on Words: A guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (London: Royal Music Association, 1985)

[2] Ross Feller: "Resistant strains of postmodernism: The music of Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough" in Lockeahd/Auner (ed): Postmodern Music Postmodern Thought ([…:…,…]), p.[…]

[3] Ibid p.[…]

[4] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: "Musical Modernity" in Search no.4, 2008 (www.searchnewmusic.org) p.11

[5] ibid p.[…]

[6] ibid p.3

[7] The title of which has completely slipped my mind!

[8] Edward Said: Musical Elaborations. (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991)

[9] Ibid p.[…]

[10] Theodor W. Adorno: Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans Anne G. Mitchell, Wesley V. Blomster (1947; London: Continuum 2007), p.133

[11] Cited in Gregory L. Ulmer "The object of post-criticism" in Hal Foster (ed): The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture [………, 1983]

[12] In Ribeiro, Correa, Domenici: "An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough", in Search 05 (www. searchnewmusic.org/ferneyhough_interview.pdf), p.15