reading sound

This passage clarifies for me the distinction I’ve often heard in passing between the experimental music tradition and the avant-garde. It seems to align with a distinction of discipline — visual art tradition vs. music tradition. (Of course, this doesn’t address the specificity of John Cage’s usage of “experimental” as a process with an unknown outcome.) It also helps to explain my perplexity at some of the work from the 3rd Practice electro-acoustic music festival — to its credit, it brought together music from both traditions, but I was not prepared for the disciplinarity of its classically informed music.

I think I’ve also been perplexed at the emphasis on process as an end in itself. I confess it annoys me at times to find artists describe their process as if it were the work. But in fact it is the work, regardless of whether one chooses to foreground it as such.

Does “pure sonic experience” invoke a metaphysics of presence? Is asemiotic music possible?

Apprehension as composition. Shifting the site from exteriority to interiority can be read as a liberatory deinstitutionalization, but also incurs a metaphysics of presence if it is thought to parallel a shift from the exteriority of signs to the interiority of nature.

Opposition between the systems approaches of experimentalists and minimalists — openness.

Here, as elsewhere, Cage seeks to distance his work from the notion of creating “objects in time”. Multiplicity of assemblage is invoked as an alternative and/or escape.

Here again, a preference for “Life”, as a transcendent self-presence, over art and sign-making.

See also Husserl’s notion (via Derrida) of persistence as moment-to-moment repetition. Openness as asemiotic experience of sound.

See also Derrida: “Speech is the representation of itself.”

By this orientalist sleight of hand Nyman substitutes experimental music for non-western musics, putting his “opponent”‘s words back into his mouth with different meanings attached.

Brecht uses very precise and specifically scientistic language here to characterize his opening to indeterminacy.

See Derrida in Speech and Phenomena — the sign is never an event.

A ‘personal correlation’ again attempts to render each interpretation an event rather than a sign.

See above regarding Nyman’s “people procedures”.

I’m intrigued by this usage “generators (or disorganizers)”. Is the “or” here serving to establish an equivalence between generating and disorganizing? Do Cage’s chance procedures really serve to disorganize sounds? Organization is commonly understood to refer to a human process of constructing a more or less ideal rational order. Might Cage’s procedures be better regarded as sidestepping the classical imperative for organization rather than actively disorganizing an organized set?

This ethic/aesthetic seems to have carried into noise music and its focus on circuit-bending, which treats not only instruments, but all manner of devices as sound sources outside their intended use.

It seems in this regard consistent with the classical tradition. Does Nyman intend to suggest a distinction here?

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 our music, we must arrange our art, 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.

This crucial passage addresses a major element of my interest in experimental music as a forerunner to generative music. Perception is arrangement => listening is composition. It also contains one of the more interesting problems — the presumption that if we sidestep art we are left with life.

Silence = non-intentional sound. It shares this designation with noise.

These Latin terms come from Spinoza — nature natured suggests a passive god, while nature naturing suggests an active one. Perhaps by this Nyman means to emphasize the dynamic quality of nature over its fixity.

I once made a similar observation about more cerebral forms of jazz: when every chord is a 13th, the sense of tonal movement is lost.

This remarkable passage is riddled with problems:

1. These are indeed the four classical determinants of (musical) sound, but since experimental music had already transcended them and placed them under erasure, they seem a poor footing for a theory of what is “correct” in music. In particular:
   • Cage had already put away pitch as a determinant, showing a predilection for percussion instruments, which are not classically regarded as being pitched (because in fact they resonate with many frequencies).
   • Silence does partake in loudness — it just happens to exhibit the special-case loudness of zero.
   • Even this last doesn’t go far enough because Cage himself demonstrated silence doesn’t exist, or in any case “silence” has a nontrivial loudness, nonempty timbre, and nonabsent pitch as well as nonzero duration.
   • “Silence” is utterly lousy with noise. Pitch is a specious narrowing of the frequency spectrum. Noise is full of myriad frequencies, and therefore innumerable pitches.
   • Pitch is based on duration just as much as is rhythm (i.e. the duration between the passage of wavefronts across the tympanic membrane), only on a micro scale not discernible by humans.
2. “Correspond[ence] with the nature of the material” seems a rather arbitrary basis for correctness (or even interest). It is also patently metaphysical, though that is neither here nor there. It seems aligned with Clement Greenberg’s notion of medium specificity. But ultimately this is circular reasoning — natural, therefore correct…?
3. Since when is Cage interested in being correct? I thought he was about multiplicity and non-ideation…?

I’ve often thought that this gesture of unbundling is the main thrust of Western industrial culture: writing unbundles speech from the speaker; capital unbundles value from goods; manufacturing unbundles design from craft; transportation unbundles subjects from clans; logic unbundles reason from truth; and ultimately digitality unbundles form from content, perception from sensory organs, presence from space and time, etc…. As Lefebvre observes, these successes are as much mythical as real, and their side-effects are costly. It’s interesting, though, in such a short span, to see Cage represented as invoking nature as an anchor point of correct behavior, and yet also invoking this analytic principle against organicism.

Interesting in contrast with Chomskyan music theorists who ask whether music is in fact a language.

Interesting to see semiosis generally deferred as a kind of dualism. I wonder how Cage might respond to the notion from C.S. Peirce’s semiology or Derrida’s differance that each signifier defers meaning to another signifier, so that what we have is not dualistic pairs but endless play of signification.

Sounds remarkably like Eno’s commentary on Music for Airports.

Schoenberg defines music by opposition to nature.

Succession, not progression.

Difference without semiosis. “Unmotivated” — is this a reference to Saussure’s notion of the relationship between sound and sense as unmotivated? Does “a-causal” mean that the sound is not caused by something, or that it causes nothing?

I wonder what this sensorium transform accomplishes for Feldman. Is he invoking a difference in the ways we perceive continuity through vision vs. audition? Do things “suddenly appear out of nowhere” to vision but not to hearing? How does “in nature” qualify that remark?

This sense of the rhetorical seems to be distinct from the sense of the literary and dramatic mentioned in Eno’s foreword. Nyman seems to be focusing on the ethos appeal of rhetoric — using drama to represent one’s own voice as powerful, as opposed to using it to enhance a narrative.

Alternate definition of indeterminacy?

Time as medium/element of music. What of space?

I’d note one important difference, however — Cage is removing self from the process in order to open to possibility, while Boulez is removing tradition in order to better promote self.

Resonates with Zen philosophy — freedom through cancellation of consciousness.

Link to Nyman’s use of “acausal” above. Also composer responsibility.

Here we see the inversion of expression — Wolff’s contingent approach frees the performer, but not for expression.

This seems to be another take on composer responsibility — in the absence of determined form it becomes more important to establish the identity of the piece.

Striving for the nontheatrical and natural event — link to the asemiotic quality of events, per Derrida.

Indication, ideality, iterability, and life in one brief statement.

Asemiosis.

Iterability, nature, asemiosis.

Freedom in group process as a driver of destructive individuation.

Generative music offers another means to destruction of the tripartite musical system.

I can see how this describes his tape phase pieces or Pendulum Music, but what of a piece such as Music for 18 Musicians? Maybe those aren’t intended to fit the category of gradual process music, although graduality is certainly an important driver.