tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6747954414775577598.post7590280110719184284..comments2017-09-18T19:05:17.536-07:00Comments on Lucky Number: What is (or was) experimental music?Clintonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11038408764888929185noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6747954414775577598.post-43881665963590467622013-08-01T21:18:19.775-07:002013-08-01T21:18:19.775-07:00The following comments are from Virginia Anderson:...The following comments are from Virginia Anderson:<br /><br />I just wished to congratulate you on the lovely blog about experimental music, which I've just found. You've taken a lot of thought in putting this together.<br /><br />However, there is one part of your blog I'd like to expand upon. The distinction between experimental indeterminacy and the serial and post-serial 'European' avant-garde (there were a lot of experimentalists in Europe, like Michael von Biel — more the avant garde in the Central European post-1800 tradition) is much more pronounced than you present. It is as deep as language: between Boulez's very limited indeterminacy that is wrongly called 'alea' and Cage's performer choice indeterminacy. Boulez developed 'alea' because he couldn't 'step off the carpet', as Nyman quoted. Cage's use of 'chance' and 'indeterminacy' (he also used 'indeterminacy' in composition and in performance) distinguished the random from the choice. The current use of aleatory for indeterminacy is just wrong. In fact, its use is promulgated by people who followed Boulez more than Cage — see Paul Griffiths' article on aleatory in Grove for an example of this bias — and their students. It could be called cultural imperialism, as it imposes the language of the dominant culture on another culture. Or rather what was the dominant culture: as you've pointed out, the division has faded over the years.<br /><br />Similarly, Cage himself stated that Music of Changes was 'a monster', in that it allowed performers no leeway, but this doesn't mean that everything generated by the I Ching (and other chance methods) precludes indeterminacy. For example, Chris Hobbs' Voicepiece (it's in Nyman, but you can see a copy here: http://experimentalmusic.co.uk/wp/?p=479 ) uses chance (telephone books, but it's the same randomization) in the act of performing an indeterminate piece.<br /><br />There's also a time value here: Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett was written in 1992–93, long after the experimental era, so it's not really the best example in your point about Cage. (Stockhausen had a gift for 'inventing' things long after everyone else has finished the same technique. He supposedly told an assembled gathering at Cal Arts in the early 1970s that he had invented indeterminate text notation. This gathering included James Tenney and other people who had written text pieces for at least a decade).<br /><br />This is a small point, but it would complement the rest of your argument, where the unification theory detracts from it. <br /><br />Virginia AndersonClintonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11038408764888929185noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6747954414775577598.post-58258112640418824602013-01-24T15:45:54.301-08:002013-01-24T15:45:54.301-08:00I asked Chris Mann for comments on this article, a...I asked Chris Mann for comments on this article, and amongst other things he sent me had previously written on Christian Wolff, which I reproduce below (with Chris' permission). It is not a direct response to this article, but I think it has some interesting points that are relevant:<br /><br />Socially embedded cognition. And then of course there is Christian Wolff.<br /><br />Prior to the net, prior to computers, prior to the phone or radio or film, what did the bourgeois do at night before going to bed? Darn socks? Play bridge? Novels? Design society? One could of course do two or more of these simultaneously, and if you were particularly gifted, even all at the same time. This admittedly ambitious concern was commonly referred to as Music. And common it was. And while the common or lumpen proletariat and the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie all had their respective folk musics, the only one we remember, the one which we indulge, the one which actually survived the nineteenth century and made it into the meticulously self interested definition of culture we currently enjoy, is the doityourself ethic of noise we call punk. And then of course there is Christian Wolff.<br /><br />And just as the I Ching that Wolff gave John Cage was a token of the social interventionism that was Helen and Kurt Wolff’s Pantheon Books, and just as Christian Wolff’s strategic listening became the tactical games of John Zorn, they all find their roots in the radical amateurism that was the political flower of listening. And just as there was one word in Greek meaning both Law and Music, we have two parallel understandings of the word Listener. So while some composers require an audient in the same way that they might require jewelry, there are also those who require an audient as a structural necessity, not as a mere decoration but as something integral to the very work itself, as if the brainpan of the listener were indeed their medium of choice. With the listener, however, comes the twentieth century and that particular form of technical determinism where dislocating performances in time and making them transparent to space (in other words, recording) gives rise to the idea of what Miles Davis called the standard or otherwise authorised performance which attempts to reassert its claim to temporal relevance by reinventing improvisation. But while some were distracted by the score, and others made a fetish of the composer, there are still those who are interested in the process. And then of course there is Christian Wolff. (There is also the anecdote that Wolff never understood the fuss surrounding 4’33”. Silence was, after all, what they practiced every day at the quaker school he attended. The point being of course that it was a social practice...)<br /><br />So, somewhere between silence and notyet, somewhere between listening To and listening For, somewhere between the sound and its articulation, somewhere between relevance and the score, and exactly in that place where an audient lives (and just as sound is the interface with the instrument, is music the argument against instrumentalisation), the beauty of Wolff is the the community for which he is required.<br /><br />And as the union songs require the audience raise their voice in solidarity, and the early works require you listen to the sounds themselves (as opposed to what they might otherwise be), and later works require you take a position, they all make for more or less desireable communities. Or as Euripides said, (here i wanted to have a smart quote, like Pancho Villa’s dying words, ‘Tell them i said something’.. But then of course there is Christian Wolff.Clintonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11038408764888929185noreply@blogger.com