Formalisms 2

The passage below is taken from an essay originally submitted as part of my undergraduate degree in December 2008.

A significant divide between indeterminacy and high Modernism occurs at their respective treatments of form. Referencing Cage’s discussion of the use of indeterminacy in the composition of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and Music of Changes, Bernstein suggests that the rejection of ‘intentional relationships between sounds’[1] – that is, the rejection of the ‘assumption that a musical work should be a unified whole’[2], i.e. the rejection of musical form as it conventionally functions – is a consequence of embracing indeterminacy. Musical material, be it a set of pitches chosen at random or whatever happens to be going on in the concert hall, can only remain unmediated by the compositional process if it is ‘free of the literature and “traditions” of art’. [3] Form is mediation: even where the form is not classical, but dictated by the ‘inherent tendency’[4] of the musical material, it is in the compositional mediation that takes place after the pre-composition – in the musical ideas’ dictation of form – that music actually becomes music (as opposed to mathematics) for Adorno’s Modernism. A similar reading can be made of Bernstein’s identification of the importance of ‘“totalizing” organicism’[5] to high Modernism. It is for this reason significant that Bernstein focuses on the importance of Cage’s pre-compositional sketches.

Thus, in works whose realisation incorporates an element of indeterminacy, it might be considered that a lack of form as mediation between the raw compositional elements and the listener does not adequately treat subjectivity to qualify as Modernist music. However, this may be too quick a dismissal: if Bernstein’s high Modernism seeks a totalisation of the material’s organicism, and Adorno similarly expects musical material to ‘inherently tend’ towards its own form, then it might be considered that, in the following way, this version of indeterminacy contravenes no Modernist requirements whatsoever. Indeterminacy in realisation is at no point explicitly precluded from being identified as a musical ‘form’ (that is, a mediation) that meets this ‘inherent tendency’ or ‘“totalizing” organicism’ criterion: if Adorno’s Modernism wants form dictated by content, and if we presuppose that content is (firstly) distinct from form and (secondly) capable of dictating its own realisation, then there might be raw compositional elements (such as the content of 4’33”) whose inherent tendency is to be realised, or formed, in precisely this indeterminate way. Although Adorno anticipates that a composer must be the medium through which the material is organised, indeterminate music of this type requires just this: however much we want to let sounds ‘be themselves’, in order to let them be music (or, in fact, to abstract their ‘being’ anything) we need someone to identify them as such (even if this is only the listener, and the line between composer and listener is thus blurred in a manner reminiscent of DeLio’s analysis of Durations III). This applies in equal measure to music in which indeterminacy is incorporated at the compositional, rather than the performance, stage: allowing random or extra-musical processes to ‘compose’ the material still requires the presence of a composer to calibrate and notate the processes, and, more centrally, to identify as composition what is occurring. (Music that in this way confronts the listener with his or her own necessity in the identification of a piece of art can be related to M. J. Grant’s point about the influence of quantum physics on thought on subjectivity,[6] although perhaps the only ‘Modernist’ element in this is that an observing subject is abstracted from observation.)

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[1] David W. Bernstein, ‘Cage and High Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to
John Cage, ed. by David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 186-213, p. 212.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Cage, Silence (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 59, quoted in Bernstein, p. 212.

[4] Adorno, trans. by Anne Mitchell and Wesley Bloomster, Philosophy of Modern Music (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), p. 32. (The edition cited elsewhere removes the word ‘inherent’ from the translation.)

[5] Bernstein, p. 212.

[6] M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 22-27.

Formalisms 1

I was recently asked why I could not get into sport.

For me, sport as a social art form presents a structural[ist] impasse: I can't get the hang of the relationship between its form and its content. As form alone, I would be perfectly happy with the politics and emotion that surround it - but I wouldn't be able to get passionate about what actually happened on a pitch just because it related to those politics. It would have to offer me something distinct to qualify them. If the sports players were not sports players but recorded music, I might be able to understand.

The week that Yes came out, I was reading Music Week twice daily. I still have all the web 'cuttings' about the midweeks, still know the different albums that were threatening it, still remember the daily sales figures. And I was totally, inarticulably devastated when Yes was not only beaten to number one but robbed of the number two spot its sales had earned.

But the competition for chart placing is just that: a competition. And my anguish didn't stem from the competition itself - which it strikes me is the meat of a sports match. What you watch is the competing sales figures. The press cuttings are running around in front of you. The goalkeeper is Ronan Keating's Songs for My Mother LP.

No, my anguish stemmed from what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on. For me, the competition was the form, not the content.

The joy experienced when your team is top of the league is, of course, related to what your team means to you outside of the league. But the majority of this meaning - the matches themselves - is analogous to the competition for chart placing I've just distinguished from album. It's like content built out of a vast web consisting only of form.

But to stop the chain here would be indefensibly selective. I'm unhappy with any analysis of cultural perception that doesn't take as its guiding principle a vast complex of unstable relativities without any objectives to relate to. The way I perceive cultural history, at least, is a bit like a Möbius strip, or a circuit that lacks any beginning or end. It's very definitely non-narrative. Much like the consumption of sports seems to constantly reference itself with no 'earth' wire, so too the notions of 'what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on' are only really borrowed from other arbitrary constructs like 'music' and 'identity', which trail back into the horizon without any full stops.

Perhaps, then, the theoretical separation of form and content only really comes into useful fruition - somewhat ironically - when the two swallow each other. It is then that the assumed passive object - sport, or Yes - becomes an active exercise. To perceive a form is to perform it. Once the active nature of the distinction is embraced, then we are embracing interplay, and our own role as creator and created in relation to the object being analysed. And interplay is fun.

http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/issue/view/1

My first published academic work opens the first issue of this new journal. http://www.dancecult.net/ as a resource goes wider than the journal itself, including, chiefly, a comprehensive and expanding bibliography, and plenty of linked articles. It has been proving rather difficult to find people with similar research interests, especially since the Institute for Popular Culture collapsed because no one was using it, but Dancecult seems to house a veritable zoo of them - even if the journal's editorial namechecks Simon Reynolds in rather too positive a context.