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.