Evental Aesthetics Vol 3 No 3 (2015) - Vital Materialism

Research in Phenomenology, 2013

The present article discusses the relation between painting and music in the work by Paul Klee, bringing it into conversation with the music by Anton Webern. It assumes, as a starting point, that the main question is not about relating painting and music but rather about the relation between moving towards painting and moving towards music, hence the relation between forming forces and not between formed forms. Since for Klee the musical structure of the pictorial is understood as "active linear polyphony," the article develops this notion in conversation with Webern's thoughts on the polyphonic structure of twelve-tone music. The general purpose of the article is to determine what kind of thoughts emerge from the in-between of painting and music.

Introduction The paradigm of research allows us to approach a common discourse at gatherings such as this conference. The effects of the music-making energy that motivates us appear on a continuum from pure sound to abstract questions. Each musical decision produces at least dozen such lines of enquiry, and one reason we gather together is that our particular means of production brings to the surface technical questions that demand technical answers. In this paper I shall look at some technical issues – musical, aesthetic, computational – but my real point is broader and more presumptuous. The various practices of improvising with technology have grown up defining themselves against existing cultural structures; they are not the production of scores, they are not jazz, they challenge mechanical reproduction, take their electroacoustic care over every sample and are then willing to do violence to it should musical truth demand, they argue with ownership, they even try to escape from music into other media or modes of performance at every opportunity. The real badge is of course to have a piece of custom performance kit – generally unreproduced if not unreproducible (a generalisation, but the image is not uncommon). The main point is that the mode of performance tends not to afford participation in a particular practice; it is overtly individualised. I caricature, but there is a degree of self-caricaturing in the practice. I hope to show that rather than being in any way alternative, such a mode of music-making represents a central paradigm of musical activity and understanding. This paper will therefore suggest: • That the interactive improvised work might be acknowledged as a central cultural paradigm – but to do that we need to understand what kind of thing it might be • That to do that we need to sophisticate our understanding of how such activity is distributed through time and space • That in particular we need to see where knowledge arises and how we recognise it • That because technology requires us to be explicit, we need to consider the mechanisms for self-knowledge Definitions What music is at issue here? Lets start by spreading the net too wide: technological not as in plugged-in, amplified or processed but as in a sound surface made possible by technology – and it is only just too far to think of the phonographic listening of Mahler or the additive orchestration of Ravel. Here we're talking about technology that transforms time and memory, causality, the scope of physical and imaginative intentionality. Improvised not as in the arbitrary, the mechanistic or the therapeutic – but in the meaningful determining of the direction of a musical argument during performance. Interactive is the not unproblematic term often used. What kind of work are we dealing with? These questions relate to properties common to all musical 'texts', from Guido to Miles or Karlheinz: the mode, locus and moment of inscription. What modes of inscription are proper to our historical situation? (Score-following, for example, may well turn out to be a non-problem of transition.) How then can we characterise works that characterise themselves by their lack of definition on one hand and individuality on the other? Models for the work – locus and moment Works for performance can be 'thick' or 'thin' in their constitutive properties. If it is thick, the work's determinative properties are comparatively few in number and most of the qualities of a performance are aspects of the performer's interpretation, not of the work as such. The thinner they are, the thinner is the performer to control aspects of the performance. … if the work is thick, a great many of the properties heard in a performance are crucial to its identity and must be reproduced in a fully faithful rendition of the work. The thicker the work, the more the composer controls the sonic detail of its accurate instances. (Davies 2001, 20) Now of course deriving a default model of composition from the status of the nineteenth century score is like understanding architecture on the basis of the pyramids. Tape music offered an alternative pyramid, one that can be erected by one man – an inflatable. But to extend a human-geographical metaphor they cast a long shadow, and it may be us, the peasants trying to work out a means for survival in the noisy musical third world suburbs that can offer an alternative – but to be culturally useful it needs to understand itself better. Recently working on a survey chapter on the psychology of composition I continuously assumed I was missing something – in fact there's precious little of relevance. Sloboda (1985, 118) proposes a model of the process which has validity but looks something like an optimisation algorithm for the solution of a creative problem using available technical means. What is interesting is the way it passes in and out of consciousness. We might define this process thus: Composition is a reflexive, iterative process of inscription. The work, once identified as such and externalisable to some degree, passes circularly between inner and outer states. It passes through internal and external representations – mostly

EXCESS. FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART (4.-7.8.2016) 48th International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Michael Rebhahn and Fahim Amir (CURATORS) This forum, consisting of an opening, a closing discussion and three panels, seeks to probe the current state of the relationship between music and philosophy, as well as the mutual consonances and dissonances. With a view to the present, it is of particular interest to ask what questions are stimulating New Music today, what challenges it faces, and what shared themes or »contemporaneities« unite and separate philosophy and New Music today. In this way — and very much following on from earlier discussions in Darmstadt — the forum will attempt to show how compositional strategies and concepts exemplify reflections on changes within the whole of contemporary culture. The forum, which will take place in two languages (German and English, with simultaneous interpretation), defines itself as an open-ended discussion whose topics will be introduced in keynote speeches. In each case, one composer and one philosopher will act as hosts and play the part of structuring and further developing, with their guests, the discussion that already started before the course. PANEL 1: SURPLUS Dieter Mersch ChristianGrüny, Jennifer Walshe, Ashley Fure, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Michael Pisaro, Bernhard Waldenfels The term»surplus, «which is also implied in the over- all title EXCESS, allues to today’s increasing expansion of the compositional through approaches like intermediality, heterogeneity of material, body/performance, theatricality, etc. Thus the term »surplus« relates on the one hand to the »derestriction« of the arts towards different forms of expression, representation and production; but, on the other hand, also to a political aspect between the critique of art as a productive force in modern capitalism and the surplus of the aesthetic as something that does not submit to the cycles of economic exploitation. PANEL 2: THE POLITICAL Michael Rebhahn Douglas Barrett, Dror Feiler, Fahim Amir, Chaya Czernowin, Harry Lehmann, Mathias Spahlinger The political dimension touched on in the first group of themes will be explicitly foregrounded in the second complex. It addresses the ever pressing question of the relationship between art, reality and politics, which constantly arises in new ways for music too. Just as the »worldrelation« of music is being intensely debated at the moment, the concern is at once a far more fundamental analysis of the relationship be- tween the aesthetic and all that characterizes and constitutes the polis, the political and lastly the »community«. What is the role of art in this, especially if the practice of art identifies itself first and foremost as critique, as an element of resistance or subversion against claims to political power? A substantial element of this fundamental problem also encompasses the interplay between music and the historical, as expressed in notions of »contemporaneity« and »witness.« Intervention: Fahim Amir and Tomás Saraceno Every work of art is an uncommitted crime After the critique of Eurocentrism new approaches demand to also »provincialise the human«. If dogs are indeed the new feminists as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of dOCUMENTA (13), famously stated in relation to the seminal work of Donna Haraway, what is there to be done in the realms of aesthetics, production and politics? Philosopher Fahim Amir and artist Tomás Saraceno engage in a conversation about challenges and promises of multi species constellations in art starting from both Saracenos work with spiders and Haraways Companion Species Manifesto (2003). A Cyrtophora citricola spider will join the conversation as guest speaker. PANEL 3: MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY Jörn Peter Hiekel, Simone Mahrenholz, ManosTsangaris, Brian Ferneyhough, Patrick Frank, Gunnar Hindrichs, Albrecht Wellmer Music, like art in general, constitutes its own form of thought and insight that is every bit as advanced as philosophy, but uses other means and follows different »logics.« It is not only a matter of initiating a dialogue between music and philosophy in order to evoke mutual tensions or proximities, but rather of showing how music, or the musical and »compositional,« can be viewed as »a form of philosophy« — and of attributing to it an »epistemic« power of its own. On the one hand, this raises such time-honored questions as that of »truth« in art, which after Hegel was taken up most significantly by Heidegger and Adorno; and on the other hand, it needs to be readjusted to the present conditions. One must therefore interrogate the »self-will« of aesthetic thought and ask what music — especially New Music, as the most »abstract« and at once the most emotional art — »knows,« or how it organizes and reveals its knowledge.

Musical Gesture and Phenomenology of Musical Space in 20th-Century Avant-Garde Music, 2020

In the present paper I propose a conceptual framework that establishes a link between two fundamental concepts of music theory: musical gesture and musical space. The unfolding in time is a fundamental feature of musical gesture. However, in plastic arts, the gesture can only be represented in a spatial form. Since music possesses its own internal space, it is logical to assume that musical space can also carry spatialized gestural "imprints". To describe such indirect manifestations of gesture, I introduce the concept of spatial imprint of musical gesture (SIMG). This concept entails a phenomenological approach to musical space, accordingly to which, the phenomenon of musical space includes all forms of quasi-spatial mental representations of music itself, and excludes all abstract representations like "pitch space", "space" of parameter values, schemes of formal structure, etc. I single out five general aspects of the musical space phenomenon: • Quasi-geometric space: a mental representation of music, based on the analytical spatial vision of its elements (sounds, layers, figures, shapes, etc.). • Space as sound substance: an association of sound with color, light, material, physical properties of substances, etc. • Energetic space: a quasi-spatial representation of forces acting within the musical process. • Synthetic large-scale temporal space. • Physical space. These types of spatial representations generally coexist, but one of them may acquire a leading role in certain styles. The development of the art music during past century placed a priority on three components: quasi-geometrical space, space as substance, and physical space. Quoting works by Schönberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Ligeti, I consider some paradigmatic examples, in which the SIMG becomes a key element from technical and aesthetic standpoints. In the last part of the paper I present a hypothesis, according to which, the process of "spatialization" of music and "migration" of gesture to musical space could be a result of cultural trauma. This trauma consists of the distrust of human communion and cathartic consolation through direct empathy, or, more broadly, in a distrust of Humanism.

This paper outlines a new basic model of extrinsic significance in music. Simply, a map of how things 'about' or 'from' the world can make their way into pieces of music. It will be founded on the somewhat artificial distinction between two forms of musical reality: 1. Musical experience that exists “without concept, object, purpose” (Dahlhaus, 1991) that is music that is self-referential; that rejects analysis that is based in any way on the external world. 2. Musical experience that exists as a result of it's relationship with reality. Although both of these realities are in operation in every piece of music, the research is particularly concerned with the second definition, which is often given misnomers like “conceptual”, “programmatic” or “extra-musical”. In the paper, it will be stressed that no musical experience ever be dismissed under a term such as “extra-musical”. I will talk about my own work as a composer dealing with referentiality, mimetic behaviour, the movement of thought, self-awareness, irony, critique and many other challenging, world-relating things. I will give many examples of existing music, selected from across history and culture for how clearly they contain a particular worldly trait. For this reason, I hope that the research feels most like a piece of cartography for navigating your way through the world with music, and for navigating your way through music with the world. After describing how things about the world make their way into music, I will briefly offer collected observations and my own personal experiences as to why this might happen in the composer's process. This will be to talk of inspiration as much as technique. I will talk about how my compositional process has become more aware of these pathways, and eventually included their use as part of a new understanding of the material of music.