Oxford University Press The Musical Quarterly
Oxford University Press The Musical Quarterly
Oxford University Press The Musical Quarterly
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Musical Quarterly
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TOWARDS AN AESTHETIC OF
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
By CHRISTOPHER BALLANTINE
224
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Experimental Music 225
insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques,
the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are
creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient
craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no
longer by considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected
by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor
space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great
innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic
invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our
very notion of art.2
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226 The Musical Quarterly
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Experimental Music 227
II
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228 The Musical Quarterly
very direct way their social possibilities. "Art," said Cage in 1967 in
a comment that would aptly describe Public Supply, "instead of
being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a
group of people. Art's socialized. It isn't someone saying something,
but people doing things, giving everyone (including those involved)
the opportunity to have experience they would not otherwise have
had."12
The entire audience should, ideally, be an intrinsic part of the event from be-
ginning to end, and when this is the case they cease te be mere audience and the
event ceases to be a concert; they create the event, it is theirs, it is no longer
done for them. They are no longer 'the public', divided off from the 'Artists' by
an unquestionable act of God which caused some people to be born with a
'Creative Spark', an 'Artistic Gift', destined to amuse the vast hordes of the sup-
posedly unimaginative. (What child was born without imagination?) They
participate in a creative process, and in so doing perhaps realize the existence
and/or importance of their own creative potential.13
12 Cage, "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),
Continued 1967," A Year from Monday (London, 1968), p. 151.
13 Wishart, Sun - Creativity and Environment (London, 1974), p. 8.
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Experimental Music 229
These tendencies may still seem new and surprising in music; but
they merely take up in a more modern form the changes noted by
Benjamin and others forty years ago in some of the other arts. They
constitute what Benjamin described as a vast melting-down process,
"in which many of the contrasts in terms of which we have been
accustomed to think may lose their relevance." This process "not
only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between
writer and poet, scholar and popularizer, but . . . questions even the
separation between author and reader.""6 Film is one example: "the
newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to
movie-extra"; as a consequence of this, "any man might even find
himself part of a work of art." Thus in Russian films some of the
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230 The Musical Quarterly
players "are not actors in our sense but people who portray them-
selves.""17 (This process, says Benjamin, has been held back in cap-
italistic Western Europe.) Contemporary literature is subject to the
same changes. The situation that existed for centuries, whereby "a
small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of
readers," has been changing since the end of the last century:
With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political,
religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing
number of readers became writers - at first, occasional ones. It began with the
daily press opening to its readers space for 'letters to the editor'. And today there
is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an
opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances,
documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author
and public is about to lose its basic character.IS
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Experimental Music 231
III
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232 The Musical Quarterly
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Experimental Music 233
concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors
from the audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence heightens
the sublime in drama, whose resonance heightens the intoxication of opera,
this abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces
of its sacral origins, has lost its function.26
tion should include or exclude. (Even if not all these features are
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234 The Musical Quarterly
absent, they are at any rate markedly less present than in traditional
music.) Such situations provide exercises in perception, or new ways
of seeing or hearing, and as such they are perfectly in keeping with
Cage's statement about music not being an occasion for passivity:
"Most people think that when they hear a piece of music, they're not
doing anything but that something is being done to them. Now this
is not true, and we must arrange everything, I believe, so that people
realize that they themselves are doing it, and not that something is
being done to them."27
IV
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Experimental Music 235
Cardew has spoken of those values that can be agreed upon in ad-
vance. He gives special place to self-discipline, which he sees as the
essential prerequisite for improvisation. Discipline is not to be seen as the ability
to conform to a rigid rule structure, but as the ability to work collectively with
other people in a harmonious and fruitful way. Integrity, self-reliance, initiative,
to be articulate (say, on an instrument) in a natural, direct way; these are the
qualities necessary for improvisation. Self-discipline is the necessary basis for the
desired spontaneity, where everything that occurs is heard and responded to with-
out the aid of arbitrarily controlled procedures and intellectual labour.28
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236 The Musical Quarterly
In Dada, the interest in and search for new meanings and a new
language to incarnate them went hand-in-hand with a belief in the
importance of what Breton called "objective chance," or what others
might call coincidence. The same nexus precisely is found in ex-
perimental music: the meaning to be incarnated is not predeterm-
ined, not even its "horizon" need be known in advance; but the
method by which it is to come into being is one that frequently, in-
deed almost always, involves a fundamental engagement with chance.
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Experimental Music 237
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238 The Musical Quarterly
contributing whatever they can recall of the work in question, filling the gaps
of memory with improvised variational material. As is appropriate to the classics,
avoid losing touch with the reading player (who may terminate the piece at his
discretion), and strive to act concertedly rather than independently. These works
should be programmed under their original titles.32
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Experimental Music 239
as it were to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which
goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect
the theater's social function."35 The attitude of the audience for epic
theater - and, if my hypothesis is correct, for experimental music
as well - is one that Brecht characterized as that of "smoking-and-
watching." It is an attitude that brings about "a theatre full of ex-
perts, just as one has sporting arenas full of experts."36 But insofar
as it rejects the "direct impact" of Aristotelian aesthetics which "flat-
tens out all social and other distinctions between individuals," non-
Aristotelian drama (and music) rejects the notion of "a collective
entity," a "common humanity ... created in the auditorium for the
duration of the entertainment." Non-Aristotelian drama (and music)
"is not interested in the establishment of such an entity." In re-
quiring its audience to take up an attitude, to cast its vote, "it divides
its audience."37 Such an audience will be at the opposite extreme
from that stigmatized by Brecht in the following passage, however
exaggerated his portrayal of it:
Most 'advanced' music nowadays is still written for the concert hall. A single glance
at the audiences who attend concerts is enough to show how impossible it is to
make any political or philosophical use of music that produces such effects. We see
entire rows of human beings transported into a peculiar doped state, wholly
passive, sunk without trace, seemingly in the grip of a severe poisoning attack.
Their tense, congealed gaze shows that these people are the helpless and in-
voluntary victims of the unchecked lurchings of their emotions. Trickles of sweat
prove how such excesses exhaust them. The worst gangster film treats its audience
more like thinking beings. Music is cast in the role of Fate. As the exceedingly
complex, wholly unanalysable fate of this period of the grisliest, most deliberate
exploitation of man by man. Such music has nothing but purely culinary ambitions
left. It seduces the listener into an enervating, because unproductive, act of enjoy-
ment. No number of refinements can convince me that its social function is any
different from that of the Broadway burlesques.38
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240 The Musical Quarterly
Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat
and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If
the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over
after the piano eats or decides not to.
VI
Experimental: the term itself suggests a music "fit for the scientific
age" - the condition Brecht required of theater. "An act the out-
come of which is unknown," Cage calls it. Cage also distinguishes
this music from music which is "a thing upon which attention is
focused." Experimental music requires something different: "the
attention moves towards the observation and audition of many things
at once, including those that are environmental - becomes, that is,
inclusive rather than exclusive."41 Some experimental music is aimed
explicitly at discovery in almost the natural-scientific sense --for
example, hearing the unhearable (Lucier's piece for the alpha
rhythms of the brain), or discovering the inherent characteristics
of a room or environment (Lucier's Vespers, and I Am Sitting in a
Room). In The Queen of the South Lucier explores those sounds that
are effective in making iron filings (or sugar or other granules) move
on flat surfaces responsive to sound. The piece bears an acknow-
ledgment to Hans Jenny, upon whose recent work it is evidently
based; Lucier's piece for alpha rhythms (Music for Solo Performer)
resulted, says Nyman, from the composer's "contact with the work
of physicist Edmond Dewan of the Air Force Cambridge Research
Lab in Bedford, Massachusetts who was engaged in brainwave re-
search in connection with flying"; and Lucier's Quasimodo the Great
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Experimental Music 241
42 Ibid., p. 91.
43 Ibid., p. 123.
44 "The Work of Art," p. 230.
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242 The Musical Quarterly
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Experimental Music 243
VII
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244 The Musical Quarterly
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Experimental Music 245
rather its workings." And of Cage: "A composer who draws attention
to himself more by his actions than by his productions."" 49 Thus the
following polarity of extremes and their confluence emerges:
VIII
49 Quoted in Karl W6rner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, trans. Bill Hopkins,
(London, 1973), pp. 229 and 236.
50 Quoted in Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 2.
51 "What Is Epic Theatre?" first version, p. 6.
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246 The Musical Quarterly
IX
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