Transcription: New Conceptualism: A Dead End or a Way Out?
New Conceptualism: A Dead End or a Way Out? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bhqDjHp2p0&t=887s
Darmstadt 2014
Con (a way out): Martin Schüttler, Ashley Fure, Harry Lehmann
Pro (a dead-end): Dániel Péter Biró, Max Murray, Kai Johannes Polzhofer
Polzhofer:
Even though I do not belong to the group of Conceptual German Artists, I appreciate their will to listen to criticism, and their open-mindedness to participate in such an important discussion. For a number of years now, contemporary music, especially in Germany, has been faced with a strong collective movement, generally supported and sustained by composers of the middle generation. If you prove (2:27) the self descriptions by the protagonist, that the linage (2:32), the general characteristics of these general tendencies, it becomes obvious that this movement is identified by a strong homogeneity in regards to Musical Content; this is expressed by catch words such as: Music of This Worldliness (Musik der Diesseitigkeit), A Music of a Content Aesthetical Term (Musik einer Gehaltsästhetischen Wende), or a Music of the Digital Revolution (Musik einer Digitalen Revolution). So, what do the conclusions to their arguments look like? Although these artists and theorists remain interested in success as individuals, the role of the composing subjectivity, one that is self-reliant and responsible, is radically relativized. The very historical concept of “Art without authorship” corresponds here to an utopian society that’s transformed by the possibilities of digital technology and internet, has changed its thinking in a radical way. These changes in the era of digitalization are understood as arguments for a radically new kind of music. The claim that digital audio programs that could for instance replace both the professional training of a composer and the musician, as Lehmann claimed, is used as an argument against the more or less traditional approach to composing. Michael Rebhahn, beneficiary of the New Music, claims that one should resign from New Music: his article “Hiermit trete ich aus der Neuen Musik aus” (Hereby I resign from New Music). Consequently, the democratization of Composing will emancipate the artist in his or her infrastructural environment in general, although the Conceptualists are part and mostly use a traditional infrastructure, and the job markets of festivals and conservatories, although there is no significant audience for Conceptual Music outside the circle of New Music. Moreover, this movement, to Conceptualism, refutes the need for a Musical Material Progress (Material Fortschritt): the Concept — the domination of an extra aesthetical reality, this is the use of new technology, replaces the composer's need to develop music on a material level; and the cause of this, the use of mass media becomes symptomatic. Music’s hence faced with a definition of Art, characterized by a leveling of aesthetic values.
However, Music, according to this Conceptualism, has not only to depict the social and political realities, but to reflect on the conditions of its own medium. More important than a historically informed and critical work of music, integrating both Material and Concept, is the creed of Composing as relating to the medium itself, a self-reflexive relativizing of this traditional end of things on music. Proponents of this Conceptualism emphasize that New Music — allegedly the only Art Form which has of yet had no postmodernity — must reiterate postmodernity and in this decade, despite the fact that postmodernity in its pure form has past, it is quite obvious that this Conceptualism is highly unwoke (6:09). But despite the enormous success it has with organizers and curators, for instance Darmstadt 2014, there remains a perfusion of important questions in regards to the aesthetic consequences this movement yields in which has rarely been discussed so far. Therefore a bunch of questions arise, the specific type of Conceptualism we observe since almost one decade in Germany, convincing in its own premises, and I hope this is the crucial question for us as musicians, and its musical and artistic outcomes. Despite the novelty of these ways of thinking about music, you could furthermore ask: if this Conceptualism is really enough a thesis, as the protagonists claim, and if their own premises are really followed through, for instance, is the emancipation from the concept of Authorship and Institution against which they are fighting convincing? Are the products and results of these artists efficiently critical and precise enough that they can reflect the social realities they are searching for? Are they confronting the problems of the present age seriously and deeply enough? And furthermore, are the dichotomies that are produced, mainly the dualism between Content (Gehalt) and Material (Material); the dualism between (following Rebhahn) Reactionary Classical New Music and the real New Music (this is the Concept of Serialism) sustainable from a composed standpoint? Do we face simplifications of basic terms here?
But the more significant question for a composer today read: how is the serious and innovative composing based on a dialectical unity of Content Material Form and Ideas integral parts of musical results made possible? Finally, is the recourse to a simple Concept too much reductionism regarding the complex reality it wants to deal with? Is the conceptual way of depicting it criticizing our complex human and social realities of today sufficiently? Does the German Conceptualism we experienced for a number of years now reach its own political goals? Finally, is this Conceptualism critical enough to serve as a critical Art?
Lehmann:
So, I would like to start with some remarks about the terminology. I will not be using the notion Conceptualism, I always think and write about Conceptual Music for the following reasons: Conceptual Music is not an “ism”, like serialism, minimalism, complexism, specturalism, because Conceptual Music stands in opposition to all “isms”, it marks the breaking point in music history. In addition, Conceptual Music has the word “music” in it, Conceptualism does not. The advantage is that it immediately references the field of Music, and makes a clear distinction from the Visual Arts. Conceptualism sounds much more like an Art movement, and could be easily associated with sound art, which Conceptual Music definitely is not. The second remark about the controversy — I will argue that Conceptual Music is a way out, of course. Every “out” however implies, there is already a dead-end, but in this respect, to the New Music System. Otherwise, it would be even not thinkable, that Conceptual Music could be the way out. My starting point is that the New Music System is in an accoria, or a dead-end, because its internal value system doesn’t work anymore. New Music defines itself by the value of “newness”, and the value of “new” was always defined in the 20th century by the invention of new Musical Material. My diagnosis is that the kind of material progress has come to an end.
In the last 20 years there hasn’t been any aesthetic innovation of the impact of Musique Concrète Instrumentale, Complexism, or Specturalism. Most importantly, even if one can find today the new sound which is not very likely, the new sound does not carry the power of negation anymore: meaning it doesn’t change the notion or the idea of “Music”. The New Music System is currently in this dead-end because of the end of material progress, and the question up for discussion here is whether Conceptual Music is the way out of this aporia of the New Music scene.
There is not only one solution to this problem: first, it is possible to give up the constitutive idea of New Music: sustainable, or requirement for New Music to be “new”. This leads us to Postmodernism: a recombination of Musical Material and how it has been developed in the last 100 years. In contrary, to this Postmodernist solution, one can try to redefine the idea of “newness”. In this case, the newness of New Music no longer is defined through new Material, but through new Gehalt. This second solution which I suggest, is the Gehalts Aesthetic turn, a paradigm shift from the material aesthetic paradigm toward a Gehalt Aesthetic in New Music.
There is no adequate translation of the German word Gehalt into English, so I will use the German notion of Gehalt like one uses the German word Gestalt, or Angst in English. The meaning of the word Gehalt is close to the meaning of the word content, but there is an important difference: Gehalt is created by an interpretation, in relation to Art, the Gehalt of an artwork is the meaning of the artwork which is created by the interplay of the Concept, and of the perception of the artwork, and most importantly, the interpretation of this interplay. What is the function of Conceptual Music in this paradigm shift? What role does Conceptual Music play in the Gehalt Aesthetic term? The short answer is: it opens the door.
Conceptual Music breaks this value of aesthetic experience in general, like Conceptual Art. In other words Conceptual Music is at its core an aesthetic. It doesn’t use, or misuses the aesthetic apparatus of the classical acoustic instruments, and it undermines its aesthetic standards, example for this are 4’33” from John Cage, the Poème symphonique pour 100 Metronomes from György Ligeti, Clapping Music from Steve Reich, the Speaking Piano from Peter Ablinger, or Chance Music from Johannes Kreidler. Because of its un-aesthetic character, Conceptual Music is the most radical challenge to the Material Aesthetic Paradigm, which has exhausted itself today. By rejecting the traditional aesthetic attitude of New Music, Conceptual Music can work as a catalyst for a Gehalt Aesthetic term in New Music. But, Conceptual Music only marks the turning point between Material Aesthetic and Gehalt Aesthetic, it doesn’t belong either to the one or to the other paradigm.
Conceptual Music shares with Gehalt Aesthetic music the premise that the Idea of the piece is primary to its aesthetic realization. On the other side, there is an important difference between Conceptual Music and Gehalt Aesthetic Music, in their attitude toward aesthetics. Gehalt Aesthetic music works again, with an aesthetic apparatus of the New Music System, it doesn’t boycott the aesthetic experience of the piece, but will use the whole repertoire of compositional techniques developed in the course of the 20th century. If Conceptual Music would be the endpoint of the evolution of New Music, it actually could mean a dead-end to New Music, but this is of course a simplification and a misunderstanding. In fact, Conceptual Music fulfills the historical function in the evolution of the New Music System today, it works like a catalyst for a Gehalt Aesthetic turn in New Music. In summary, Conceptual Music opens the door and shows the way out, but Gehalt Aesthetic is the new space of innovation.
Biró:
So, my talk I’ve called Existence and Distraction (Existenz und Zerstreuung). Today I speak as a Composer, not about issues that are only relevant to Darmstadt, but rather about tendencies and problems of music composition, and the sphere of creative production we experience today. My concerns go beyond the movement sometimes described as “New Conceptualism”, and I intend to ask more precise, more difficult questions, to move the discussion into a productive domain.
My first question is: how does Contemporary, or New Music, relate to political and technological movements within a society? Current question seems to be: how the ritual of music making has changed in terms of recent technological advances. The product of this technology has been celebrated, and the digital revolution has been praised, as a means to make music creation and consumption more open, democratic, and groundbreaking, in terms of inclusiveness and innovation. But like all technology driven advancements, there are positive and negative sides to these developments. Like any internet platform, Art can either engage with societal questions or problems, or ignore them. It is this mode of engagement in Music and how we might address a culture of Distraction, that I wish to discuss today.
As an analogy to questions concerning musical production and reception, I need to discuss some issues in the political realm, that concern me, and I believe, should concern us all. I will start out by talking about a country that is not far away, and part of the European Union: Hungary. In Hungary, there is currently a new type of digital revolution: total control of all forms of electronic and digital communication by the government. In early June 2014, the government initiated a set of laws, which will silence oppositions in terms of internet, newspapers, blogs, etc.. After signing a contract with the German firm Deutsche Telekom, the government pressured the editor in chief of a popular internet site, origo.hu, to resign, or the German firm Deutsche Telekom, via its sister firm, Madjark Telekom (18:06), which shut down their portal. As the newspaper Pestroloi (18:12) correctly analyzes, quote: “die deutschen Unternehmen in Ungarn, ob sie nun im Internet im Medienbetrieb aktiv sind, oder in anderen Branchen, haben sich im Sinne der Anbiederung, und das Augen zudrücken, statt besonders ausgezeichnet, solange Steuer- und Arbeitsrecht, und andere Investitionsbedingungen in ihrem Sinne gestaltet werden.” “The German companies in Hungary, whether they are active in the media sector or in other industries, have been good at distinguishing themselves in the sense of pandering to authority and closing their eyes to the situation at hand, as long as the tax laws, labor laws, and other investment conditions are created in their favor.”
On June 6th 2014 there was a demonstration against this consolidation of industrial powers, or Gleichschaltung, in which activists including myself, marched from the parliament to the Deutsche Telekom building. In Budapest there is another ongoing demonstration that has been happening daily over the last months. In Szabadság Tér, or Freedom Square, demonstrators protest against the statue, now erected, built to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. The statue portrays an eagle representing fascist Germany, attacking the Angel of Gabriel, representing innocent Hungary. The statue is a good example of the present government’s attempt to whitewash the history of Hungarian involvement in the Holocaust. The protestors placed stones, candles, family pictures, and historical documentations in front of the monument, where photos with notes such as “My grandparents, killed by Hungarian police in 1944”. There is a citation from Admiral Horthy (Miklós Horthy), regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944, quote: “In terms of the Jewish Question, I was an antisemite my whole life.”
At the end of each demonstration the protestors sing the Hungarian national anthem, to emphasize that everyone, whether they are Christian, Jewish, Homosexual, or Roma (20:28), are all citizens of Hungary. Unfortunately, the fact of full belonging to a home country is still not a given for the minority populations of Hungary today, as they continue to be treated like second rate citizens in everyday life.
These 2 demonstrations show how the present Hungarian dictatorship financially supported and legitimized by the European Union, existing as I speak here and now, is inherently connected to the Hungarian dictatorship of the past; and just as German industries facilitated the rise of a Hungarian dictatorship 80 years ago, it facilitates the present day dictatorship and its own kind of digital revolution.
This world lives in tandem with what many think of as New Medias, positive developments. I would point out that it is exactly these developments that allow us to be distracted from the darker side of what is actually happening with our concentration, our memory, our freedom of expression, and our relationship with, and responsibility to history. As composers we make choices — we can choose to actually address what is going on around us, in the political and media realms, not by allowing our music to be submerged in these problems, but rather by reacting and responding in an intelligent and hopefully subversive manner.
Let us now leave Europe behind, and rewind to the 1980s America. Let us look at Andy Warhol’s Readymades, what did this Art deal with? For some, it represented a social critique, a mirroring of American consumer society, which as we all know, has now become an international consumer culture. It actually is this so-called “critique”, that has integrated itself into a long, really successful money making Party. This was a time of celebration — a celebration of superficiality, lightness, and the cult of the artist as genius entertainer.
We should ask: what did this Art help to distract the American’s attention from? In the 1980s, it contributed to keeping Americans from paying attention to the mass incarceration of African Americans, the final solution politics applied to American Indigenous Populations, enormous military spending during the Reagan years, US military operations in Central and Southern American, and the take over of the media and social realms of Art by large corporations. American Composers created sonorous equivalence to Warholesque visual arts: the orchestra piece with the Pizza delivery man coming in; the Postmodern string quartet with accompanying electric guitar, progressive rock licks; the performance art piece with looping TV commercials, etc.. These compositions seem to take their cue from the Television revolution and Mall Culture. As the composers who grew up with televisions integrated contemporary media and consumption experiences into their music. Because High-Art always involves pedigree, such American music attempted to breach the gap between this media experience, its Postmodern ideology, and an imagined tradition of Western Art Music. Just as Warhol’s Readymades allowed bankers to invest in million dollar art pieces that collectors could exhibit as “socially critical”, this commercialized art music projected as “socially progressiveneer”, that could be enjoyed by the subscription audiences who took time out from watching their favorite TV series to go to the nearby concert hall.
Let us fast forward to Germany today. We have all heard about the great democratizing potential of the digital revolution, because of this revolution, composers writing “unterhaltende'' (Entertaining) Music, which is often funny, seemingly socially critical, very masculine, and most importantly in the largest sense “totally cool”, fashionable, while keeping emotion and depth at bay. This “New Music” is made primarily in and for Germany, a country that is currently raking in enormous profits, especially through the sales of arms, a country with a new sense of itself, self confident, and ready to give its Music thus to all audiences, a new kind of Art Music, which intends to entertain, and move us away from the heaviness of German history of the last century.
One might ask: where the historical aspect of Musical Material resides? As the sample sound object, be it created by the composer, or by anonymous workers in India and China, seems to be the norm in terms of its presentation. Instead of investigating historical complexity, the surface of the material, its superficial nature becomes the celebrated norm, as lack of engagement allows the music to be “conceptual” and cool. What is the subject matter of such Music? The Media, globalization, the act of Composing… It takes on several formats: compose music with video; music with video game; music with text of the composer projected on a screen; composed music for Youtube; rehash quasi-fluxes actions with musical instruments intended for the German media landscape; choir music with banal techno samples; ensemble performing with comic book pages displayed on screen.
Like the art movements of 1980s America, this presents itself as a celebratory critique of Commercial Culture. The term “New Conceptualism” might be replaced by “New Superficiality”, or even taking its cue from America “New Redundancy”.
Herein seems to need help in our era of digital revolutions. It is as though Music by itself is not enough anymore. We might ask: can we even “listen” anymore? Have composers become sophomoric media artists who need to have Adorno’s aesthetic theory presented to them in the form of a Youtube cartoon? Are we totally distracted in terms of our hearing and comprehension? Or can we find our way back to engaging with Musical Material and Content?
For me, such an engagement might mean that Composers choose again to deal with Musical Material as Historical Material. We might also have to shove our eyes and concentrate on what we hear, and not on what we see. Perhaps to hear what is really going on in our world, we have to experience it in the sonorous realm. In hearing, we might actually concentrate, and thereby, learn also, what to do in terms of making better compositional listening and curatorial choices.
Schüttler:
So, I’m just making a very brief comment. I will start by replacing the term of “Conceptualism” with the term of “Context”. I prefer to talk about Context and Context in Music, showing up the conditions of production, and showing up how it’s made: how it’s made socially, politically, historically, musically; what it’s made of, in a broader point of view.
This “Conceptualism”, or using a Concept in Music, is just one possible way to deal with that in my opinion. So it’s a technique, it’s a possibility to show where it comes from, or to show how it’s made, but it’s not a solution for the problem. The problem is, that since the first concept pieces or the concept idea of the 60s in the arts, or in music, the idea of Concept was brought to the world, it’s hard to fall behind in our perception. So we came to a point where everything is context-reliant as well, so if you go to a concert, a traditional concert, and you switch into a modus of Listening, it’s a concept already, it’s a historical grown concept coming from the tradition; it’s the concept of listening in a space which is provided for listening. I still like that a lot, but for me it’s just one more concept or it shows up as a concept.
I’d like to say a quote, I did it yesterday and this morning, and I will repeat it, because I think it’s showing quite good the problem, it’s by a German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch, that’s why I am reading it in German and try to translate it. So the quote is about context as well as sensibility for contexts. “Vielmehr diffamiert, Installiverkunst und Konzeptualismus ganz grundsätzlich und d.h., auf den Blick auf das Traditionelle Bild im Rahmen, oder die Skulptur auf dem Sockel, (man konnte auch sagen “das klassische Konzert”) die Idee Kontext unabhängige Kunst als Ideologie.” Means: traditional artform, painting, and sculpting, art has to be like that, is already ideology. Later, she writes: “Avancierteste Kunst Heute ist immer auch installativ, umgekehrt ist eine Menge das Kontextbewußtsein nicht selten ein Zeichen der Provinzialität.” So, the very finest art of today is always installative, or you can say, aware of the context, and the other way, if there is a lack of conscious of context, it’s a sign of provinciality. So this means you don’t have to write only Conceptual Music, but thinking of the possibility of the conditions of the context is necessary to do Art today. So it can be in a broad variety of possibilities, and dealing with the Concept is one possible solution for that, but it’s at least not the only one.
Falling back behind that, does not necessarily mean that you can’t do this art, but it’s just not of interest for our time today. I was talking with Clemens Gadenstätter this morning and we came to the point that it’s almost comparable with Democracy, it’s something which is as an idea in the world, and there of course you mentioned it, countries in which there is huge lack of democracy right now, but you can’t fall behind the idea of democracy, you can talk about how it is provided, how does it work, how will you deal with it, how is the construction of it, how can we develop it further, but it’s not possible to go back. I think this is the same as what happened to Art in the 60s and 70s by opening up to the contexts of Art, you have to think as an artist of the conditions as well.
Murray:
My comments are also I believe relatively brief. I speak today as both a composer and performer and wish from that perspective to address questions of Interpretation and questions of the role of the Interpreter in a new conceptual framework or conceptual framework. And I think that such a discussion has to begin at its own set, with the distinction between Performer and Interpreter, and what exactly is meant by the latter category, which by my ideal standards entail a particular analytical and investigative relationship on behalf of the musician, and essentially attaining to the composer’s, whatever the composer’s intentions could be, and that has very much to do with, that is or I should say it’s deeply connected with the question of Musical Material which are to an extend rejected by Conceptual Music. By interpretation the ideal result, or the end goal is for me a sort of an absolution of performer, and the blurring of the category between work and performer in the performer’s aspiring to realization, this idea that the realization of the musical work takes place at the intersection between the work and the active producing on behalf of the musician.
Now from my understanding of Conceptual Music, there is very often the element of critique, the critical element of conceptual music is for me often raised to the element of an a priori stance, rather than the result of a compositional process or a compositional investigation which is worked out within the single work itself. And what I find troubling about that idea from an interpretive perspective is that, that relegation of critique to its stance as opposed to an intro-musical process also is deeply excluding to the performer, it inhibits the performer from fully absolving themselves in the act of producing and realizing a piece of music. Constantly in an interpretative enterprise of Conceptual Music, I find myself coming back to the unnecessary and very burdensome presence of the Conceptual underpinning of the work, which continues to kind of hang above the entire process. And that for me creates the very… I’ll leap from there to what I find to be one of the most brutal paradoxes of the Conceptual Idiom, which is that, a music which aspires, and it’ll be to a measure of sociological critique, and aspires to I would hope to raising a critique awareness of our society and dealing with issues of subjecthood and agency begins very often with the total disenfranchisement of the performer, and as much as their ideal role as interpreter is made impossible by the excessive baggage of the concept which lays behind the work. Essentially the performer very much becomes an executant of the given concept as opposed to having an open platform to potentially, I would hope, have that moment of sort of a dialectical connection with the piece of music, whereby the performance and the work are synthesized to some degree that create a musical experience.
That brings me to a question of democratic relations on this front. I will begin now, perhaps preemptively by responding to some of the comments that have previously been made. The question of democratic relations is I think a very relevant one to this, where I think even though there is the best intention to democratically breakdown what is felt to be this kind of classic archetypical relationship with the composer as a top down dictator, performer as executant, I think that the flattening of that landscape comes on the one hand of the composer conceiving a sort of invested relationship with the musical material at hand, and also comes at the cost of the actual musicians own subjecthood being actualized and utilized in the realization of the musical work. And I don’t think that that concession is necessary fundamentally, and I think it’s a premature one, and an excessively cynical one. And that leads I think at this first breakdown of what I would say Music Communication between Composer and Performer where performer is reduced to executant of thesis as opposed to interpreter of musical work, therein begins the fundamental asociality of the entire practice, and I think that what confronts a listener first and foremost in going to a concert, let’s presume that even though Kai has already pointed out that New Conceptualism its audience is very much an inner circle of New Music Enthusiasts, New Music Composers, it’s a very small listening public. Let’s assume briefly for a moment that a civilian listener were to come in to this situation, I really believe that what would confront them, what would be the most pressing facade of this experience was how totally disenfranchised the actual performing musicians were in service of a concept which in many cases could have been much better, and more effectively articulated in all kinds of other means, certain means which would involve no live performers whatsoever. I think there is a great discussion to be had there which live performers are necessary in a Conceptual Idiom.
But already starting there I believe I find the idea of the disenfranchised performer at the very epicenter of the conceptual practice to be a troubling one and an alarming one, and I think that asociality extends from Composer to Performer to Listener. There’s a lot there’s touched on in there, and I would actually rather give up the rest of the time for discussion and coming back to these points.
Fure:
I have taken the position in this debate that New Conceptualism offers a way out. To defend this stance I thus have to first clarify 2 basic issues: what am I calling “New Conceptualism” and from where does it offer us a way out. For the purposes of this short statement, I’m gonna presume that pieces falling under the rubric “New Conceptualism” act out some combination of the following 4 priorities:
They emphasize Idea over Realization, a position that brings about a turn of attention away from aesthetic object, and the rejection of beauty, rarity, and skill as measure of artistic value.
They are often self conscious and self referential, a type of Art about Art and Music about Music.
They often use minimally or intentionally degraded materials and found materials, and lean heavily on text.
They often aim to critique the institutions and channels through which they are received and presented.
Now onto the where: The Where New Music desperately needs a way out of, is a place of deep intellectual isolation. To be frank, I cannot stomach the way we tend to talk about our work. My brother went to architecture school, and he was constantly forced to consider and express the relevance of his aesthetic choices from a cultural and historical perspective. I was never asked to do this while studying music. As composers we tend to speak of our music from an interior rather than an exterior perspective; we treat our works as isolated aesthetic objects that construct and respond to their own terms. Because these terms are often context specific and jargon heavy the vast majority of those outside of our field have an extremely difficult time engaging with and intellectually connecting to what’s at stake for us, what we care about, and why. This has dire consequences: if we cannot express our aesthetic concerns in language that links beyond the esoteric bounties that enclose us, we will remain an isolated and self involved subgroup, the support of which becomes increasingly difficult to justify, as a public expenditure.
I would argue that much of the allure of New Conceptualism arises from the ease with which these works reach beyond the boundaries of the concert hall toward other cultural domains like economics, politics, art history, and cultural theory. These are links and pathways that must be forged if we are to reclaim a place of intellectual relevance and cultural connectedness.
The question I would like to explore in the next few minutes is however this: is replacing Sound with Idea the only hope New Music has in integrating into an expanded intellectual field? And if this is the case, at what cost comes this Cultural Connection?
Much of the philosophical substructure for New Conceptualism is graphed directly from Art theoretical writings from the 60s and 70s. Seth Kim-Cohen for example in his 2009 Book In the Blink of an Ear Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, sketches at a point by point translation of Rosalind Kraus’s famous 1979 diagram Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Both Kraus and Kim-Cohen attempted these graphs to chart a discursive definition of their mediums, they argue that sculpture and sound art can’t be defined anymore as list of material quality (sculpture is not just rounded marble), rather they must be negotiated through a universal terms felt in the opposition within a cultural situation. The oppositional pairs linked by arrows in these two graphs are typical of the type that underscore a lot of cultural theory. Think of classic examples like male vs. female, black vs. white, gay vs. straight, and rich vs. poor.
Considering the local context in which Kim-Cohen is writing, these oppositional terms pair up like this. And this is another excerpt from his book: we see Modernist vs. Postmodernist, Normative vs. Experimental, Quality vs. Interest, Refinement vs. Redefinition, Essence vs. Effect, and so on and so forth. Throughout In the Blink of an Ear and his most recent book which came out last year, entitled Against Ambience, Kim-Cohen accepts wholeheartedly the discursive assumption, that pit Language against the Extra-Linguistic, Culture against Nature, and Text against Matter. Derrida writes that “Nothing exists outside of Text”, and thus according to Kim-Cohen, meaningful examinations of the sonic arts must be conceived within the realm of representation and signification.
I take issue with this stance, and so does philosopher Chris Cox. In his 2011 article Beyond Representation and Signification Toward Sonic Materialism, Cox describes this all out denial of that which transpires outside languages and capitulation, a giving in: judging sound solely through its ability to signify, not only muffles Music’s most potent and most potent and specific contribution to sentient thought, it also bypasses much of the past 30 years’ Philosophy. Because here is the thing: a lot has happened in the world since these early Conceptualist Manifestos felt revolutionary, and much of the most interesting philosophy being written right now at least in my eyes, attempts to break this boundage to text, and rigorously theorize extralinguistic meaning. Take the philosopher Brian Massumi as an example (he’s just as a side note, an interesting guy because he did the English Translation both for Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, but also for Jacque Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music) In his 2002 Book Parables for the Virtual, Massumi tries to break down the grid like framework of oppositional terms at the root of so much cultural theory. The book he writes is based quote: “on the hope that movements sensations and qualities experience couched in matter in its most sense and sensing, might be culturally theoretically thinkable; without falling into either naïve realism on the one hand, or subjectivism on the other, and without contradicting the very real insides for structure’s cultural theories” Theoretically the point of departure would have to part company with the linguistic model, and find a semiotics willing to engage with continuity”.
The issues Missumi is most concerned with: matter, movement, affect, sensation, intensity, becoming, corporeality, and continuity, are issues many of us in this room battle with daily, and it is high time we speak up and break into that cultural conversation. Cox’s qualms and Kim-Cohen’s conceptualism are therefore not that it’s wrong, but that it’s passé, that it’s playing catchup, that it’s going backwards philosophically. His counter to this linguistic model of sonic meaning is not a return to some escapist notion of sound as pure sensation; on the contrary Cox argues that “sound is not a world apart, a uni-domain of non-significant and non-representation; rather, sounds and the sonic arts are firmly rooted in the material world and the powers, forces, intensities of becoming of which it is composed. If we proceed from Sound, we will be less inclined to think in terms of representation and signification, and to draw distinctions between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, mind and matter, the symbolic and the real, the textural and the physical, the meaningful and the meaningless. Instead, we might ask of an image or a text not what it means or it represents, but what it does, how it operates, what changes that defectuates.”
This is precisely the sort of analysis Deleuze offers in his books on Pruce and Kafka, Francis Bacon and cinema. Of that painting, film, and novel Deleuze writes: “It represents nothing but it produces, it means nothing but it works.” In a materialist analysis notes Deleuze, language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes the signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, to explode.
The jolt New Conceptualism has given to the intellectual climate of New Music is timely and desperately needed, but the specific strategic solution proposed by this approach is by no means the only way out, nor should it be. The last thing we need is a stylistic stampede toward the land where screeches are bad, and Youtube clips are good, and String Quartets are bad, and Midi realizations are good. That very herd mentality, the complacent huddling around our collective unspoken assumptions, is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. In order to survive as a creative ecosystem, we need different people doing different things deeply and with conviction. Tension is good, tension is vital, tension is how we keep each other on our toes and challenge each other to reach farther. All of us, those who have resigned from New Music, and those who remain gainfully employed must develop a robust vocabulary to fray both our works are stitched together on their insides, and the way their outsides stitch into a broader fabric of thoughts, because we don’t want only one way out, we want a wild mess of trap doors and back allies and wormholes and escape rooms leading to places we never knew, we didn’t know excited. That’s at least what I want.
