ESTHESIC BECOMING AND ACTUALIZED WORK: An Artist’s Statement [2015] — III. Principles of Artistic Practice of Both Composer and Performer
This post is part of a series which will make up the dissertation I wrote alongside a portfolio to complete my PhD in 2015. It is exactly that: an attempt at an account of where I was two years ago, and many things have changed. Still, it might be useful in understanding how and why I write music.
Read the Preface here.
Read Chapter 1 here.
Read Chapter 2 here.
Read Chapter 4 here.
See the bibliography here.
Find my work here, here, and here.
One of the aforementioned problematic relations contained in the classical music tradition is that of the composer’s authority. “Their romantic role willingly adopted,” writes Lydia Goehr, composers after Beethoven “enjoyed describing themselves and each other as divinely inspired creators. . . whose sole task was to objectify in music something unique and personal and to express something transcendent.”1 If the work, such as it is, is to remain personal (and transcendently so), surely the composer is the one to whom all questions of its interpretation, performance, and distribution should be directed. This idea is as old-fashioned as the era whence it sprung, yet it persists, in part because of an anxiety that if the composer were to relinquish a certain amount of creative input she may become superfluous. What role can the composer have in objectifying shared philosophical systems, rather than merely unique, personal ones? Goehr writes:
The power relations between composers, conductors, performers and audiences actually mirror nothing other than the more elusive, theoretical struggle implicit in the relations that hold between works, performances, and audiences. That is to say, whenever musicians discuss the merits of treating each other in one way or another, eventually they are forced to ask the modern question: wherein resides the meaning and value of a musical work — in the work itself, in its realization through performance, or in the interpretative act of listening to a work?2
In striving for the exactitude of the experiences in my music described above (particularly in for *current* resonance), I realized I had begun to produce music for which there was basically no interpretative potential on the part of the performer. Every note, tempo, and articulation is precisely notated, and not in the manner of Complexity which compels a new interpretation at every performance. In service of my aesthetic goals, I had removed the possibility for spaces where traditional “musicality” is found: dynamic envelopes and rubato. I was moving closer to what I wanted out of my artistic process and my esthesic experience, but in doing so had moved further from the possibility of any performer crafting a personal take on my work. Moreover, while I am indebted to the performers that have dutifully taken on my work, I doubt any of them would describe strict reproduction as their idea of an actualized experience of work, or music.
Part of the (perhaps immature) frustration of a composer whose work has had a weak performance is a feeling that her craft, something with which she has a very personal, long-term relationship with, has been tampered with (or worse, disregarded). This, for me, rubbed up against the idea that surely any performer that has become a professional classical or New Music musician has just as personal a relationship with her instrument/craft — a relationship which I could certainly be thought to be disregarding with my compositional demands.
Individuality and actualization could, at some level, be known via originality. Originality is not novelty. For Hillel Schwartz, “Originality is not the urge to be different from others, it is to grasp. . . the original, the roots of both ourselves and things.”3 “Originality means proximity to the origin,” writes Giorgio Agamben. “The work of art is original because it maintains a particular relationship to its origin, to its formal ἀρχη [origin], in the sense that it not only derives from the latter and conforms to it but also remains in a relationship of permanent proximity to it.”4 For Agamben, the application of aesthetics to art was accompanied by a detaching of artistic subjectivity from material. Catherine Mills writes:
in the Middle Ages the object of artistic production was considered so closely intertwined with the subjectivity of the artist that it was impossible to consider the object has having value in itself. But, [Agamben] argues, this immediate unity of artist and material was broken. . . As Hegel writes, “No content, no form, is any longer immediately identical with the inwardness, the nature, the unconscious substantial essence of the artist; every material may be indifferent to him if only it does not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment”. It is in this way, then, that the artist appears as “the man without content”, as a figure without any substantive relation to the objects of art he produces beyond the formal values of aesthetic perfection.5
Whereas the craftsperson of modernity develops a craft specific to a material, the artist is expected to have an aesthetic sense that is independent of material. The artist then “finds himself in the paradoxical condition of having to find his own essence precisely in the inessential, his content in what is mere form.”6 Hence the enforced relationship between new music and classical music, the placement of experimental artists in conservatories, and the expectation that any Western composer is also a Western music theorist. It is not hard to make the leap to the modern New Music performer, who is expected to have a relationship to their instrument such that they can reproduce any new music put in front of them, despite the fact that each piece can be thought of as having been written in a completely different idiom, and practically for a completely different instrument.
That a musical work can be a transcendent study, something to adapt an instrument to (rather than vice versa), alienates a performer’s relationship to her instrument. The more she must consider how to wrangle an instrument in service to score, the less knowledge she has of this instrument. This came to me via Heidegger’s concept of ready-to-hand, the idea that “we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner.”7
Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter’s phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects.8
This account problematizes extended techniques for me: the more an instrumentalist must re-learn the function and application of their tool, the less primordial (or perhaps even truth-giving) their music-making is. Ready-to-hand lies at the heart of my work, which, as I say in my elevator speech, makes “weird music with normal sounds.” The “normal sounds” attempt to get to the heart of an instrument, so that one work simply could not be arranged for any other instrumentation. I cannot avoid the unfamiliarity that any musician would have with a newly acquired score, but I can examine the conditions of the training of most of the musicians with whom I work, and make their honed skills of sound production the basis of my composition.
Of course this is easier to pursue the smaller the group, and easiest with solo pieces. Untitled works with the basics of melody and of coordination. The performers have swaths of time to delve into the sounds they make (in some ways, the more they realize their sounds, the more distanced those sounds become for the listener). The recurring melody is practically an opportunity, to rehearse musical repetition, to rehearse time-stretching, and to rehearse ornamentation (as tiny, navigable changes arise in each iteration). To take Heidegger’s analogy, I hope to bridge a gap between practicing — as though the carpenter were presented a line of nails to hammer until it could be done with trance-like assuredness — and mastering, as though my role as a composer is to somehow, perhaps magically, remove the (inevitable) hitches that come up in the completion of any project, no matter how expert the practitioner.
Construction Song goes a bit further. In fact, its thoroughness in examining the instrument may subvert its “ready-to-hand-ness.” When thinking of a relationship between performer and instrument, one of my goals was to make music that highlighted the relationship to the particular instrument a performer owns and knows. The piano provides a few obstacles in this regard: first, that the pressing of a key is so removed from the hammer striking the string. In traditional playing, the performer simply does not “feel” the sound production the way she might with a cello. Second, a pianist will most likely play a different piano at every concert. There is no doubt that each piano has the individual character of each cello, but both due to the piano’s immobility and the fact that it is thought of as something of a “default” instrument (to have in houses, or to illustrate musical examples of any instrumentation), the character of an individual piano rarely factors into the composition of music for it.
The pianist is thus especially “alienated,” in the Marxian sense. Construction Song — both in its transparency and in its estrangement of the piano — will reveal plenty about a particular piano’s life and construction. The work provides the time and space necessary to achieve such an understanding (the notes also encourage audience members to vary their physical relationship to the piano, to a similar end). By writing music in this manner, I hope to reach through history to reify the relationship between performer and instrument, the priorities involved in the construction and design of that instrument. I treat the instrument like a text, and, to paraphrase Roland Barthes’ description of a text in “The Death of the Author,” I hope to reify that “an instrument is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation.”9
I rarely engage with the extremes of a given instrument. Even in the somewhat exhaustive Construction Song, I do not use the highest note or lowest note. Three p’s or three f’s are the most extreme dynamic markings I use, and they are quite rare. I do not wish for intensity to come from pushing an instrument to the edge. I may wish it from a performer pushing herself to the edge, in an intense identification, or in a deep state of ready-to-hand.
* * *
To articulate and objectify a shared philosophical system requires reconciling the craft of the composer with the craft of the performer, and the work of the composer with the work of the performer. For master woodworker Peter Korn, “craft” is necessarily at odds with industrial manufacture. While it is “a conversation flowing through time. . . Knowledge gained through experience [that] has accreted from generation to generation,” Korn asserts that “Contemporary craft, being economically marginal, is created primarily to address the spiritual needs of its maker.”10 “Craft,” in this sense is a way to distinguish the “work” of actualization from the “work” of employment (not that they need necessarily be separated).
For Hegel, “work” in this former sense empowered actual individuality:
. . .the true work is only that unity of doing and being, of willing and achieving. . . This unity is the true work; it is the very heart of the matter [die Sache selbst] which completely holds its own and is experienced as that which endures, independently of what is merely the contingent result of an individual action, the result of contingent circumstances, means, and reality.11
Marx similarly cast work as something essential to human existence, and similarly defined the degree to which work was actualizing as the degree to which it synthesized being and doing:
what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.12
A lesson with Antoine Beuger alerted me to this problem of “close attention,” the sort that prevents actualization. In our current condition, wherein rehearsal time is scarce and multiple performances are a rarity, the exactitude of coordination I demanded in scores like aspirapolvere, sega, spettro, tenere, possedere only distracted from performers’ ability to be truly connected to the events they were to coordinate. A woodworker that has perfected a certain technique will surely be disconnected from that experience if suddenly asked to perform it at the exact same time as a colleague. Beuger argued to me that, even in a setting of ideal rehearsal and familiarity with the score, a draconian relationship between composer and performer (or conductor and performer, or performer and performer) would always prevent the actualization not only of the performer’s work, but of the composer’s. Something like free improvisation, of course, would not accomplish this either: free improvisation is a genre, a skill that requires training, training that most new musicians do not have.
In bind me, take me, amplifier, humidifier, my most recent work as of this writing, I further attempt to apply a greater understanding of performers’ subjectivity to my desired esthesis. In addition to a focus on their best known methods of sound production, I attempt to open the process to include their best known methods of coordination, blending, and, on the personal level, achievement of a described (and, hopefully, ultimately desired) affect. In my recent pedagogical training, we have focused on “backwards design,” the concept that an effective teaching plan is developed to the needs of the student, and with their classroom experience in mind, rather than from the “needs” of the canon or course material.13 Just as I place my own esthesis as a listener at the forefront of my pre-composition, I place my own knowledge of the subjectivity of a performer at an equally important point, and research and collaboration, and endless process, will continue to hone this knowledge. To be sure, I want my work to be personal and unique, perhaps as much as Beethoven did. With amplifier, humidifier, though, I hope to get closer to the origin of the performer as well as the instrument.
—
1 Goehr, p. 208.
2 Ibid., p. 275.
3 Schwartz, p. 247.
4 Agamben, p. 61.
5 Mills, p. 55.
6 Agamben, p. 54.
7 Wheeler.
8 Ibid.
9 Barthes, p. 148.
10 Korn, pp. 31–32. Ibid., p. 30.
11 Hegel, pp. 245–246.
12 Marx, p. 284.
13 See Wiggins & McTighe 2005, introduction.
