Tuesday, September 18, 2018
The Sounds of Music in the 21st Century
Alex Ross' review of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989
Monday, September 18, 2017
The Aesthetics of Play
Pearce, Celia The Aesthetics of Play, Visible Language 40:1 (Jan 2006) (two special issues on Fluxus, the first being 39:3).
Article on parallels between computer games and Fluxus-related game pieces.
Article on parallels between computer games and Fluxus-related game pieces.
The selection of games as an art medium
involves suspension of certain artistic prerogatives. In the worlds of John
Cage, it requires you as the artist to "give yourself up." This does
not mean abdicating either control or even aesthetic direction; indeed the
craft of game-making lies in the ability to create a balance, to locate the
"sweet spot" between constraints and freedom. The game artist makes a
conscious choice to share the art-making process, putting at least a part of
the creative act in the hands of the player/participant.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Jeremy Kellock/Noone
Jarrod Zlatic has been trawling through recently-digitised copies of Lot's Wife (Monash Uni student newspaper) from the late 1960s/early 1970s for articles of particular interest in regard to avant garde and experimental music in Melbourne from that time. He has posted scans of articles along with his own summaries, such as:
- Several articles relating to Jeremy Kellock (AKA Jeremy Noone) of Company Caine, Sons of the Vegetal Mother, NIAGGRA and others
- Several review articles by Andrew McIntyre on avant garde music, including lengthy ones on Keith Humble.
- Several articles relating to Jeremy Kellock (AKA Jeremy Noone) of Company Caine, Sons of the Vegetal Mother, NIAGGRA and others
- Several review articles by Andrew McIntyre on avant garde music, including lengthy ones on Keith Humble.
Labels:
Jeremy Kellock,
Jeremy Noone,
Keith Humble,
Lot's Wife,
NIAGGRA
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Warrnambool Railway Accident - by Herr Schoot (1897)
'This is a re-creation of the derailment of a train that occurred between
Allansford and Warrnambool on 11 March 1897 recorded by Thomas Rome.
Drum virtuoso George Twentyman, known as 'Herr Schoot’, created effects
to mimic the sounds of a steam train pulling out from a station and then
leaving the rails. Warrnambool residents play the parts of a train
conductor and passengers reacting to the accident with screams and calls
for assistance.'
From John Whiteoak "Unorthodox adlibbers" Sounds Australian, no. 59 (2002), pp30-32: 'Probably the best-known unorthodox sound gestures are those of variety artists who perform novelty musical acts, musical clowns, buskers and such-like...Their work has often foreshadowed aspects of the instrumental music theatre of Syd Clayton, Keith Humble and other Australians of the 1960s and later...In the 1890s the "celebrated drum demon" Herr Schoot featured an act with twenty drums and other percussion devices, in which he depicted battles and other noisy or catastrophic events'.
From John Whiteoak "Unorthodox adlibbers" Sounds Australian, no. 59 (2002), pp30-32: 'Probably the best-known unorthodox sound gestures are those of variety artists who perform novelty musical acts, musical clowns, buskers and such-like...Their work has often foreshadowed aspects of the instrumental music theatre of Syd Clayton, Keith Humble and other Australians of the 1960s and later...In the 1890s the "celebrated drum demon" Herr Schoot featured an act with twenty drums and other percussion devices, in which he depicted battles and other noisy or catastrophic events'.
Labels:
George Twentyman,
Herr Schoot,
John Whiteoak,
Warrnambool
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
What is (or was) experimental music?
What is (or was)
experimental music?
-Clinton Green
Experimental music has arguably become a meaningless term in
the 21st century, despite some musicians and sound artists (the present author included) still
identifying with it to varying degrees. It is generally understood now as just
another musical genre (akin to noise
or ambient music), or as a signpost on the fringes of established genres: experimental rock, experimental dance music, experimental jazz.
It wasn’t always this way. For a time, in the twentieth
century, experimental music was something altogether different from just
another genre or sub-genre. Beyond the music itself, it was a
politically, socially and philosophically-orientated movement that framed
itself as a new way of composing, performing, and even listening to music. From
a historical perspective, it is arguable that the rise of the twentieth century
experimental music movement, along with its modern day state of either
irrelevance or genrefication, demonstrates
it was a modernist phenomena who’s demise (or perhaps transformation) was an
inevitable part of the processes of formalism and analysis inherent in many
other twentieth century modernist art movements. Was experimental music (along
with modernist literature, surrealism, avant
garde cinema and performance art) simply part of the twentieth century
modernist experience, and thus struggles for relevance today? Is the ‘process’
complete? If all the ‘experiments’ have been conducted, is there a point in
exploring them again? This article looks at these questions, casting a critical
eye over the historical development of experimental music as a movement, rather
than an in-depth discussion of its key pioneers.
To arrive at some understanding of what experimental music
is (or was), we need to explore its history, and in particular its context,
within twentieth century modernism. But
what was (or is) modernism?
Modernism as a descriptive term has had a wide range of uses
and subsequent definitions, from the very broad (anything arising from the
‘modern’, or as a synonym for the avant
garde) to an umbrella term for more identifiable art movements of the late
nineteenth/early twentieth century, such as Symbolism, Impressionism, Fauvism,
Cubism, Expressionism, and Dada.
Essentially, modernism is a general catch-all phrase that refers to the
great upheavals that occurred in Western (largely European and Anglo) society
from the late 19th century to the end of either the First or Second
World War (there is some dispute about the endpoint of modernism, and where the
postmodern era begins), to which the aforementioned art movements formed in
response. The changes this period
rendered upon Western society were largely centred around the accelerated
breakdown of the moral authority of the Church and rapid advances in
technology, culminating in the unprecedented horror of the First World
War. Existentialist thinkers like
Nietzsche and Satre captured the mood in their questioning of Western values of
God, Beauty and Truth. It was no longer
certain that God existed or that the pious went to heaven. Intellectual enquiry coupled with scientific
and technological advances chipped away at the certainty of previous centuries;
from Nietzsche to Einstein, the nature of the reality was no longer
obvious. In the art world, modernist
movements questioned the purpose and goals of art, exploring modes of
expression that were previously discarded as aesthetically unappealing or even
ugly. The world may have been outraged
when Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead, but by the end of the First World War
with Europe in ruins and a generation devastated, this seemed to some modernist
thinkers and artists to be self-evident.
The modernist project in the music world began in the 19th
century, and can be traced back to as early as Wagner with his new expression
of musical languages and reinvention of opera.
Musicologists generally hold that the modernist music era began in 1890
with the emergence of composers such as Debussy, Mahler and Strauss, and their
exploration of new concepts of rhythm, melody and structure. Certainly the beginnings of modern music were
sown in this period, but the great upheavals occurred in the early 20th
century with Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring (1913), with its radical take on meter, tonality and rhythm, and
Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School’s development of twelve tone music
(from 1908), where musical key centres were abandoned (atonality). Schoenberg is particularly important to
understanding experimental music as a result of modernism, not only for his
influence as a teacher on a young John Cage (although he refused to teach or
even discuss his twelve tone method by this stage), but for the idea of using
process to compose. Twelve tone music
(and later integral serialism, as further developed by the Darmstadt composers
and Pierre Boulez, post-Second World War) used a series of procedures to select
which pitch would occur next in the composition via a set of pitches or “tone
rows”. This is an important
characteristic by which to understand modernism: the use of objective
procedures to create art . Previous
artists had understood their creative processes to have been guided by
aesthetic goals and values; the idea of art being created by a mathematical
process would be anathema to them. Yet
modernism’s use of process questioned these pre-conceived ideas of creative
process; weren’t pre-modernist composers simply complying to systems and
procedures of harmony, melody and the tempered scale? And as for the music created by Schoenberg,
Webern and Berg, it was astounding and strange.
Deviations from tonality had been employed for effect before, but never
had tonality been completely discarded.
As alien as twelve tone music sounded to the Western musical ear
tempered by Bach and Mozart, it was an appropriate soundtrack for the chaotic
blood-soaked world of the early twentieth century. It is arguable that twelve tone music and the
serial techniques that followed became the dominant characteristics of
twentieth century orchestral and chamber music.
Glenn Gould performs Schoenberg’s Op. 25, Salzberg, 1959.
Musicologists generally view the modernist era to have ended
either at the First World War or the 1930s; the great upheavals took place in
this time and the rest of twentieth century music was built on these. But outside the concert hall, modernism
spread amongst a range of music/sound-related art movements, as early as the
Futurists (Rusollo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” is a foundation stone
of later twentieth century music movements such as noise and industrial music)
and the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters, through to the music of the Weimer
Republic where folk musics and non-Western traditions became influential. Yet
even if the modernist music project was over by the time Hitler took power in
Germany as far as musicologists are concerned, the cataclysm of the Second
World War was to have a profound effect upon twentieth century music. Again, the key drivers of change were
technology, and the failure of the Church and morality.
The development of magnetic tape recorders accelerated
rapidly in Germany during the Second World War as a communications
technique. Post-war, tape recorders
changed musical paradigms by freeing sound from the restrictions of performers
and orchestras; composers could now directly interact with sound (other methods
of electronic music had been explored by a handful of composers and artists
between the wars, including the use of optical sound on film stock, rudimentary
electronic keyboards/organs, and the development of the theremin, but none of
these techniques coalesced into a dedicated movement like the post-Second World
War advances did). Musique concrete thrived in post-war France with the use of
magnetic tape, and the role of tape in the burgeoning electronic music emerging
from Darmstadt, Germany, was central (along with Messiaen and Boulez in France)
to the development of integral serialism (which applied the principles of
twelve tone music not only to pitch, but to meter, dynamics, and all components
of music). The devastating after-effects
of the war as the Holocaust and other atrocities were uncovered led to further
existentialist thoughts about the end of God, religion and morality. The Nazis were not cultural barbarians;
Mozart, Beethoven, and particularly Wagner were held up as symbols of Aryan
supremacy, and Strauss was a firm supporter of Hitler, at least in the beginning
(Ross 2007). The SS instigated the
creation of prisoner orchestras in Auschwitz, Birkenau and other concentration
camps, who’s repertoire included Mozart, Greig, and Beethoven. Primo Levi saw the use of these bands as
another aspect of terror in the camps.
At the end of the Nazi nightmare, how could we listen to Mozart or
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” again? The
Nazis had dismissed atonality as an aspect of Jewish decadence, and many
Jewish artists fled Germany and Austria (including Schoenberg, who settled in
the US); others like Viennese violinist and conductor, Alma Rose (niece of
Mahler) were not so lucky, and perished in concentration camps. Throughout
Europe, we can identify several concerted attempts to “start again” in terms of
music. Integral serialism is the most
readily-identifiable of these movements, and it is no coincidence that this
emerged from the ruins of post-war Germany and a new generation of composers
(that included the Darmstadt wunderkind,
Karlheinz Stockhausen).
There were tensions and points of difference between
different exponents of this new avant
garde music in Europe, but it was in the United States that the key
differentiation amongst new twentieth century music would emerge, no better
exemplified than through the composer, John Cage. The son of an inventor, Cage had studied
under Schoenberg and began to emerge as an American composer of note in the
late 1930s, initially writing scores for dance and percussion ensembles. He pioneered the prepared piano as a kind of
automated percussion ensemble, and by the 1950s became immersed in Eastern
philosophies, particularly Zen. These
ideas he applied to his music in a radical fashion, incorporating chance
operations into the composition process, most famously consulting the ancient
oracle, the I Ching, to make
compositional choices. Throughout the 1950s, Cage completed several works that
Alex Ross calls ‘the most startling events and nonevents in musical history’,
including the somewhat infamous 4’33”
(perhaps the foundation piece for the
experimental music movement, and arguably an important milestone in twentieth
century music more broadly). Cage drew
his lineage from not only Schoenberg, but equally from Russolo, Satie and the
American composer, Henry Cowell. He was
also profoundly influenced by modern artists outside music, particularly
Duchamp, and rubbed shoulders in downtown New York with visual artists like De Kooning, Rothko,
Rauschenberg and Pollock in the early 1950s when he first began developing his
chance procedures. Ross (2009) classifies Pollocks drip painting as
‘semi-chance process’ in drawing comparisons between Cage and his visual art
associates, and says that Cage was ‘the original ultra-bohemian artist – in
advance of the Beats and the Hippies. He
had his lineage...but he really came from nowhere’.
Cage’s Music of Changes (Book 1), performed by David Tudor
Perhaps the simplest yet least-discussed contribution from
Cage is his legitimisation of the phrase ‘experimental music’ as a musical
movement. There is no argument that
‘experimental’ had been used as an adjective to describe music previously, but
it was Cage who used it to describe a modern musical movement that differed
from the European avant garde. As early as 1940, Cage was using the phrase,
as an (unsuccessful) grant application to the Guggenheim Foundation in that
year from Cage shows. Cage wanted to set up a Center for Experimental Music. The application shows how Cage foresaw
electronic music as the way forward in experimental music, and outlined what he
saw as the lineage for this nascent experimental music movement, beginning with
Russolo through to Henry Cowell and Edgar Varese’s experiments with electronic music
in the US. Cage’s application predicts
that these electronic methods of creating new sounds bear a relation to
Schoenberg’s twelve tone method, and includes a summary that could be seen as
an embryonic manifesto of Cage and the nascent experimental music movement:
My ultimate purpose as
a worker in the field of music is to make available and use sounds and rhythms
which are either not yet available or not yet used; that is, I intend to push
forward the frontiers of music
Cage wrote several times during the 1950s on the topic of
experimental music. In ‘Experimental
Music’ (1957) and ‘The History of Experimental Music in the United
States’(1959), Cage distinguishes experimental music from the European avant garde and novelty in American
music by what he calls ‘the ending of continuity’, whereby indeterminacy in a
composition results in it being a collection of parts who’s order can be
determined by performers rather than a linear set of instructions that a
musical score had been traditionally understood as. Cage scores from the 1950s often came in ‘open
form’, where their parts could be arranged in whatever order the performers
desired, or by chance procedures, or even overlaid on top of each other on
transparent sheets, such as in 1958’s Fontana
Mix. He wrote of composers needing
to give up the desire to ‘control sound’, and of devising compositional systems
to do so. The idea of ‘freeing music’ was not new, if not in this libertarian
context; Australian pianist and composer, Percy Grainger, had conceptualised a
‘gliding tone’ beyond the intonation of traditional instruments and composition
earlier in the century (essentially a form of microtonality), that he called
Free Music. He worked with Leon Theremin
in the 1930s, and later constructed his own Free Music machines with engineer,
Burnett Cross, in the late 1940s/early 1950s.
Cage also saw the arrival of magnetic tape (and more
broadly, electronic music) as vital in ending continuity, in eliminating the
need for meter, timing and rhythm. Ross
writes (2007, p.365-6), ‘In place of the term “avant garde” [associated with Boulez], which implied a
quasi-military forward drive, Cage preferred “experimental”, which, he said,
was ‘inclusive rather than exclusive’...For Cage, the classical tradition was
worn-out kitsch ripe for deconstruction, in the manner his intellectual hero
Duchamp’. Cage and Boulez were actually on friendly terms for a time and were
interested in the other’s compositional ideas, before their later
much-publicised (and perhaps over-hyped) break. Ross says (p.371) that Cage and
Boulez’s music ended up sounding oddly similar.
The Hungarian composer, Gyrgi Ligeti, pointed out the resemblance
between the two composers’ work in analytical articles he wrote in 1958 and
1960, concluding ‘that Boulez and other serialist composers were not fully
responsible for the outcome of their works’.
Their method obeyed a ‘compulsion neurosis that effectively randomized
their musical material’. This raises a vital point in discerning the difference
between the avant garde and
experimental music movements: wasn’t Boulez and Stockhausen’s integral
serialism just chance composition in the guise of order? And vice versa, wasn’t Cage’s I-Ching just another method at arriving
at a tone row? Integral serialism and the use of aleatoric tools like the I-Ching are both closed systems (i.e. –
the number of possible outcomes is fixed and known). Nyman identified ‘people’ and ‘contextual’
processes as key points of differentiation between experimental music and the avant garde; performer interpretation of
open scores and notation along with unpredictable performance conditions (often
encouraged) meant experimental music outcomes were less predictable. Although
it is arguable that non-traditional notation and scoring methods used by
someone like Stockhausen also left performer interpretation just as open. And
lest we forget that it was Stockhausen who wrote a string quartet to be
performed with each string player in separate helicopters! (Helikopter-Streichquartett (1993)).
Despite, or perhaps because of these commonalities, by the
1970s the Eurocentric avant garde and
Anglo/American experimental movements had coalesced into opposing camps. Boulez
belittled indeterminacy (the use of chance operations and open form scores) by
likening Cage to a ‘performing monkey’ whose methods betrayed ‘fascist
tendencies’ (Ross 2007, p.370); the ultimate insult from a post-war European avant garde composer. These attacks on the experimental music
movement, along with their own sorties launched back into Europe, bought the
movement’s identity into sharper relief. Nyman’s 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond was essentially a rallying cry
to the experimental music cause, and defined the experimental music movement in
political and social terms, as well as compositional. He categorised the post-war modernist music
split into the avant garde and
experimental music camps, labelling the avant
garde as music under the authoritarian rule of the dictatorial composer and
his integral serialist procedures, whilst experimental music sought to subvert,
or even displace altogether, the role of the composer through open form and
chance procedures. Ross (p. 370) is more
circumspect with history in identifying the Cage/Boulez divide, saying it was
indicative of the ‘sociological differences between the avant-garde cultures of America and Europe.’ Cage’s audience was ‘bohemian...Greenwich
Village eccentrics...outsiders...Boulez’s audience...overlapped with
traditional circles of connoisseurship and art appreciation’. Essentially, it was an Old World versus New
World divide that disagreed on how to approach the modernist problem of
achieving a ‘pure art’, ostensibly unaffected by social or political circumstance. Integral serialism sought to create such a
music through rigorous procedures, and experimental music’s reliance on chance
demonstrated the impossibility of such a premise.
Whatever their differences, beyond Cage’s early electronic
music-aligned hopes for the experimental music movement, the post-war split
demonstrates that experimental music increasingly defined itself by what it was
not; i.e. – the European avant garde. With the benefit of
hindsight, many of these purported differences do not hold up well to scrutiny;
composers subverting the ‘role of the composer’ is inherently problematic, for
example. Nyman’s virtual demonisation of Stockhausen created a convenient enemy
figure in the Germanic authoritarian control of performers and rigid
compositional systems. The English
composer, Cornelius Cardew, worked as an assistant to Stockhausen before a
split between the two in 1960 over the extent of Stockhausen’s control of
performers in Cardew’s realisation of Stockhausen’s Carre for four orchestras.
The split became more pronounced (at least from Cardew’s viewpoint) four
years later over a realisation by Cardew and Frederic Rzewski of Stockhausen’s
graphic notation work Plus-Minus,
where Cardew and Rzewski tried to ‘manipulate Stockhausen’s instructions to
their own ends...as they resented Stockhausen’s control’ (Stockhausen didn’t
bite, though, claiming he was fascinated by the performance). Plus-Minus had similar treatment in
other performances by experimentally-aligned performers later in the decade,
with John Tilbury using a tape ‘from London Zoo of an elephant pissing’ to
interpret particular symbology in the score (Anderson, pp.299-300). Cardew’s
main point of difference in regard to graphic notation was that Stockhausen
provided instructions on how the score should be interpreted by performers, whereas
Cardew saw the score as the responsibility of performer; once the score was
written, the composer should have no say in the music; a concrete example of
Cage’s idea of freeing music from the composer’s control.
Stockhausen’s Carre
Cardew’s ‘defection’ to the experimental music movement
became a fable to the Nyman camp.
Through the 1960s, Cardew became a pioneer in graphic scores and
notation himself under the influence of Cage, and with improvisation groups
including AMM. His graphic score for Treatise
(1963-7) was in many ways a
response to Plus-Minus in that it
provided absolutely no instructions for performers. ‘What I hope is that in
playing this piece each musician will give of his own music – he will give it as his response to my music, which is the score itself’ (Anderson, p.301). The scores
of Cage and Cardew are starting points for the creation of music, nothing more.
In 1969, Cardew formed the Scratch Orchestra out of his experimental music
class at Morely College. The Orchestra
was born out of the dissatisfaction of young composers with the musical
establishment and also included self-taught and non-musicians. In line with Cardew’s political evolution, the
Orchestra became increasingly Marxist-Leninist in its focus, seeking to
integrate with the working classes and pursue revolutionary aims. Initially, the enemy was Stockhausen and the avant garde, and Cardew and Scratch
hoped to find some politically-acceptable salvation in Cage and experimental
music; here the perceived political divide between the avant garde and experimental music became the most pronounced. Eley writes in his history of the Orchestra:
Amongst the Scratch
Orchestra members there was considerable support for the ideas of John Cage,
Christian Wolff, etc.; that is, random music with a multiplicity of fragments
without cohesion as opposed to serialism.
Aleatory (chance) music seemed richer, unpredictable, free! But serialism, the tradition stemming from
Schoenberg, was formal, abstract and authoritarian. Most important was the social implication of
Cage’s work — the idea that we are all musical, that ‘anybody can play it’. All
this, at least, in theory. Serial music, on the other hand, was definitely
elitist, uncompromisingly bourgeois, and anti-people.
Cardew and The Scratch Orchestra perform The Great Learning
Paragraph 1.
Eley separates Cage and experimental music completely from
the modernist music traced back to Schoenberg, despite the commonalities of
history and process discussed above.
This was a politically convenient argument; it does not do to
acknowledge shared forefathers with the enemy.
Yet Cardew’s Marxist-Leninist rejection of formalism soon extended to
Cage as well. Cardew’s 1974 book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism put both
Cage and Stockhausen in the same basket as ‘bourgeois composers’ of no
relevance to the working classes. Cardew
writes that Cage’s music initially outraged their bourgeois audiences, but that
all-too-soon Cage performances had become ‘society events’. Admittedly,
Cardew’s conclusions need to be understood in the context of his
Marxist-Leninist ideology, where modernist movements were often denounced as
decadent formalism, but Cardew’s later Maoist self-denouncement of his work in
both the avant garde and experimental
movements give rare insight into the heart of each movement. After rejecting both modernist music
movements, Cardew made largely-unsuccessful attempts to write Maoist folk music
(in the tonal idiom) aimed at radicalising the working classes towards
revolution. After Mao’s death in 1977, Cardew gave some indications of wanting
to explore some forms of experimental composition again (Anderson, p.317), yet
his tragic death prevented any realisation of this return. Cardew died in a hit-and-run accident in
1981; the driver was never found, leading to several assassination conspiracy
theories involving M15 or rival revolutionary groups.
This compartmentalising of modernist movements that the
fable-like story of Cardew represents is not unique to music; most art forms
went through similar splits during the twentieth century. Writing about cinema,
Peter Wollen’s concept of ‘two avant
gardes’ has parallels with the experience of modern music. Writing about similar process-orientated
problems in avant garde cinema.
Wollen looked at other modernist art movements, including the visual arts and
literature, to identify modernist characteristics that could also be recognised
in film. These included focus upon sign and signifier to the exclusion of the
signified itself (ala semiotics),
through to an art of pure signifiers detached from meaning altogether
(abstraction). Alongside the key tenets of formalism, structuralism and other
process-driven practices, Wollen also identified intertextuality as a common
factor (the play of allusion between texts, such as practiced by James Joyce
and Ezra Pound in literature, where again the process is magnified and the signified receives less emphasis). In Wollen’s assessment, the film maker
Jean-Luc Godard was a figure who trod a similar path to Cardew, in that he
moved from the establishment avant garde to
the radical experimental camp, before discarding the ideologies of both.
These parallels between different art forms poses the
question as to whether modernism is ‘finished’.
Modernism itself may be better understood as a process than an end in
itself. The twentieth century was a period of great social, cultural and
technological upheaval in the Western world (and arguably beyond the West).
Modernism was an intellectual and artistic process that attempted to deal with
this radically-altered world through new means of expression and thought; no
better demonstrated than in the arts. Placing avant
garde and experimental music alongside other modernist art movements allows
us to understand these art forms as part of the process of modernism. Modernist
music met the challenge head on, particularly in the aftermath of the Second
World War, as the activities of the avant
garde and experimental music movements have demonstrated. Although their
processes, methods, political alignments differed, both movements were essentially
tackling the same problem; the perceived end of the Western artistic and moral paradigm. As has been shown, these seemingly-opposing
movements had much more in common than either liked to admit.
Attempts later in the century to grapple with a definition
of ‘experimental music’ focussed on innovation beyond cyclical renewal
(Landy). Whiteoak uses the term ‘exploratory
music’ to encompass a range of musics, including experimental and improvisatory
practices. The composer, Warren Burt, has written that experimental music is
essentially ‘problem-creating’ rather than ‘problem-solving’; it isn’t the end
product that is important but the journey (or process) getting there. Like
modernism, the process is paramount. But
is the process complete? Definitions of
‘post modernism’ vary between it being a subset of modernism through to
something that comes ‘after modernism’.
Whatever modernism was, it’s upheavals largely seem to be over. If so, what does this mean for experimental
music practices today? In some ways, the
development of technology in music has seen the practices that composers like
Cage advocated in the 1950s, such as electronic music, now well and truly part
of the mainstream, especially in non-conservatorium ‘popular’ music genres. The rise of popular music has
also seen the toppling of the composer as all-powerful authoritarian figure;
although not as Cage might have imagined. The performer (and in some electronic
music, even the producer) is now king. Music that we might identify as
‘experimental’ still takes place throughout the world in a variety of settings;
through process-driven composition, to structured improvisation, to multimedia
events that transcend musical boundaries into performance art and happening,
and the fringe musical genres that
have sprung from experimental music practices, such as industrial music and
noise music that rose to subcultural prominence in the 1980s and 1990s
(although their existence as genres
poses the question as to how experimental these musics actually are, they are
both vividly modernist in aesthetic and intent). Problem-creating and process are still
prominent in contemporary experimental music practice; occasionally the
‘problems’ become musical genres themselves.
Experimental music is still a process rather than an answer, but
sometimes the problems become the solutions.
Sources
Virginia Anderson, ‘”Well, It’s a Vertabrate...”. Performer Choice in Cardew’s Treatise’, Jounal of Musicological Research vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 291-317.
John Cage, Silence.
Wesleyan, 1973.
Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen
Serves Imperialism. Ubuclassics, 2004 http://www.ubu.com/historical/cardew/cardew_stockhausen.pdf
Rod Eley, ‘A History of the Scratch Orchestra’, in Cornelius
Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.
Ubuclassics, 2004 http://www.ubu.com/historical/cardew/cardew_stockhausen.pdf
Guido Fackler “Official Camp Orchestras in Auschwitz”. Music and the Holocaust http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/camp-orchestras
Leigh Landy What's the
matter with today's experimental music? Organised sound too rarely heard.
Taylor & Francis, 1991.
Michael Nyman Experimental
Music: Cage and Beyond. 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Alex Ross The Rest Is
Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Farrar Straus and Giroux,
2007.
Alex Ross “Cage in Barcelona”. Unquiet Thoughts, 9 Nov. 2009 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross/2009/11/cage-in-barcelona.html
John Whiteoak Playing
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vol. 190, no. 978 (November/December 1975), pp. 171–175.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Experimental music and Australian culture
Jon Rose wins 2012 Don Banks Music Award, and speaks on experimental music in Australia in these choice quotes from an article in The Australian (21 March 2012, p.14):
Rose says the award recognises that experimental and exploratory music more than just exists in Australia but is fundamental to the health of all music and culture. “Without experimentation, there is no future for a home-grown culture with its own models, aesthetics and meaning”....
“In Aboriginal societies the most important person was the musician to carry on the oral history and make the connections...Everything had to exist in song, singing into existence the reality of the universe. Music (was) not a lifestyle option – ‘I might got to the opera tonight’ – it had to be done every day”.
Rose says the award recognises that experimental and exploratory music more than just exists in Australia but is fundamental to the health of all music and culture. “Without experimentation, there is no future for a home-grown culture with its own models, aesthetics and meaning”....
“In Aboriginal societies the most important person was the musician to carry on the oral history and make the connections...Everything had to exist in song, singing into existence the reality of the universe. Music (was) not a lifestyle option – ‘I might got to the opera tonight’ – it had to be done every day”.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Defining experimental music in 1991
What's the matter with today's experimental music? Organised sound too rarely heard by Leigh Landy (1991), reviewed in NMA #10, has a discussion on definitions of experimental music and avant garde. Most of the text is on Google Books.
Landy advocates primarily a definition where innovation is the main characteristic of the music, above (but not necessarily excluding) all other factors. He also says 'innovation' needs to be distinguished from 'renewal'.
Landy advocates primarily a definition where innovation is the main characteristic of the music, above (but not necessarily excluding) all other factors. He also says 'innovation' needs to be distinguished from 'renewal'.
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