Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music [1 ed.] 1443816981, 9781443816984

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface by Enrico Fubini
Acknowledgements
Introduction
First Movement: History and Technics
Chapter One
1. Modern, Post-modern or Contemporary?
2. From ‘Classical’ Modernity to the Second Modernity
3. The Electroacoustic Revolution and Musiques Actuelles
4. Extremes
4.1 Indeterminate versus Determinate Music
4.2 Dematerialisation versus Saturation
4.3 Seduction versus Rationality
Chapter Two
1. Premise
2. Musical Ugliness?
3. Futurist Music
4. Musique Concrète
5. Glitch
6. Noise, Japanoise and Politico-aesthetic Resistance
6.1 Art, Aesthetics and Politics
6.2 Music and Politics
6.3 Japanoise
Chapter Three
1. Sound-Silence
2. Poetic Function
3. Cobwebs of Sound Interwoven with Silence
4. Political Function
Second Movement: Between Production and Reception
Chapter Four
1. Aesthetics and the Problem of Technics
2. Art and the Problem of Technics
3. Music and the Problem of Technics
Chapter Five
1. Emancipation and the Crisis of Compositional Individuality
2. Decline of Taste and the ‘Economisation’ of Art
3. Listening to Contemporary Music
Chapter Six
1. Premise
2. Theodor W. Adorno and His Theory of Listening
3. What Is Left of Adorno?
4. Listening to Music and New Technologies
5. Ontological and Aesthetic Consequences of the Information-Technology Revolution
Intermezzo
Chapter Seven
1. Beyond the Freedom of Music
2. At the Origins of Jazz
3. Jazz and Civil Engagement
4. “Melodious Thunk”
Third Movement: A Philosophical Reading
Chapter Eight
1. Premise
2. Music and Information Theory
3. Structure and Entropy
Chapter Nine
1. Premise
2. Composing Music and New Technologies
3. Technologisation of the Arts
4. Defining the Aesthetic Experience
5. Aesthetic Experience, Music and New Technologies
6. (Almost) Concluding Considerations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music: Sounding Constellations By

Giacomo Fronzi

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music: Sounding Constellations By Giacomo Fronzi This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Giacomo Fronzi All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1698-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1698-4

To My Family

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface by Enrico Fubini ............................................................................ xi Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xv Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 First Movement: History and Technics Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13 Extremes: Contemporary Music and Its ‘Contradictions’ 1. Modern, Post-modern or Contemporary? ........................................ 13 2. From ‘Classical’ Modernity to Second Modernity .......................... 17 3. The Electroacoustic Revolution and Musiques Actuelles................. 22 4. Extremes .......................................................................................... 26 4.1. Indeterminate versus Determinate Music ................................ 26 4.2. Dematerialisation versus Saturation ........................................ 28 4.3. Seduction versus Rationality ................................................... 29 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 Noise: Emancipation, Chaos, Resistance 1. Premise ............................................................................................ 35 2. Musical Ugliness? ............................................................................ 36 3. Futurist Music .................................................................................. 41 4. Musique Concrète ............................................................................ 45 5. Glitch ............................................................................................... 49 6. Noise, Japanoise and Politico-aesthetic Resistance ......................... 51 6.1. Art, Aesthetics and Politics ..................................................... 51 6.2. Music and Politics ................................................................... 55 6.3. Japanoise ................................................................................. 58 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 71 Silence: “Chaque atome de silence / Est la chance d’un fruit mûr” 1. Sound-Silence: A Fragile Balance ................................................... 71 2. Poetic Function ................................................................................ 72 3. Cobwebs of Sound Interwoven with Silence ................................... 76 4. Political Function ............................................................................. 78

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Second Movement: Between Production and Reception Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 91 Technology: Art, Music and Technology in the 20th Century 1. Aesthetics and the Problem of Technics .......................................... 91 2. Art and the Problem of Technics ..................................................... 94 3. Music and the Problem of Technics ................................................. 96 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 105 Audience: Individuality and Collectivity in Contemporary Music 1. Emancipation and the Crisis of Compositional Individuality ........ 105 2. Decline of Taste and the ‘Economisation’ of Art .......................... 110 3. Listening to Contemporary Music ................................................. 113 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 125 Listening: Possibilities and Complications of Listening to Music in Contemporaneity 1. Premise .......................................................................................... 125 2. Theodor W. Adorno and His Theory of Listening ......................... 126 3. What is Left of Adorno? ............................................................... 131 4. Listening to Music and New Technologies .................................... 137 5. Ontological and Aesthetic Consequences of the Information-Technology Revolution .................................................................................... 139 Intermezzo Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 149 Freedom: Thelonious Monk—Music and Civil Rights 1. Beyond the Freedom of Music ....................................................... 149 2. At the Origins of Jazz .................................................................... 150 3. Jazz and Civil Engagement ............................................................ 153 4. “Melodious Thunk” ....................................................................... 155 Third Movement: A Philosophical Reading Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 169 Disintegration: Electroacoustics, Information Theory and Aesthetics 1. Premise .......................................................................................... 169 2. Music and Information Theory ...................................................... 170 3. Structure and Entropy .................................................................... 177

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Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 191 New Media: Musical Aesthetics and the Challenges Launched by the New Technological Means 1. Premise .......................................................................................... 191 2. Composing Music and New Technologies .................................... 192 3. Technologisation of the Arts: Aesthetic Considerations. General Reflections ...................................................................... 195 4. Defining the Aesthetic Experience: Many Questions, Few Answers ............................................................................... 200 5. Aesthetic Experience, Music and New Technologies .................... 209 6. (Almost) Concluding Considerations............................................. 211 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 219 Index ........................................................................................................ 239

PREFACE

It has never been easy to find one’s way through the dense thicket of problems posed by 20th century music. Today, by now in the new century, it may be hoped that music and the arts generally can be judged with a greater critical detachment, and hence with greater clarity than in the 20th century, when we were still immersed in that fluid reality. Upon closer inspection, however, in the present time the problems seem not to have been simplified and made clearer by distance, but evermore emerge in their extreme complexity. Venturing into this territory is no easy matter and Giacomo Fronzi, in this sweeping essay, has sought precisely to return, with a critical perspective, to the key problems posed by the musical experience of the 20th century. Twentieth century music, in the vast range and multiplicity of its aspects, raises a series of questions of various kinds, which demand of the critic an unusual ability to keep track of the threads of a discourse that becomes increasingly complex and intricate as it is examined more deeply. Musical experience must be considered from many angles: relations with the culture of its time, above all; production and reception; the relationship with technics and more generally with today’s technology of the means of sound production; the relationship with contemporary society and many other problems, including those of a typically philosophical nature. We may say unhesitatingly that Giacomo Fronzi, in tackling the exacting, risky task of outlining so vast a territory, has emerged victorious. This wide-ranging study, the culmination of many years’ experience working in the field of exploration of 20th century musical thought, is a vast, profound, articulate outline of all the main problems posed by 20th century music, and the author extends his view to the whole aura surrounding musical experience in the broad sense. This book is offered to the reader as a sonata in many movements, each of which is a little like one of the possible approaches to the central theme of his work in its various angles. Although many topics are dealt with in the book, one in particular seems to dominate the research: namely, the value and significance of technics as a key element, that has determined not only epoch-making changes in the production, listening and reception of contemporary music, but also in the way we think about music, interpreting its possible meanings in our world and our society. One figure dominates in the

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volume, sometimes openly recalled, sometimes in the shadows, but always present: Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, the philosopher and musicologist to whom Fronzi had already devoted much attention in the past. Nonetheless, this presence as an important, central point of critical reference does not lessen the importance and scope of references to an immense range of critical, philosophical, aesthetic and musicological literature present in the book, which is certainly one of the merits. Recalling to mind so many critics, philosophers, musicologists and sociologists as important, indeed essential reference points for finding one’s way through the multitude of problems raised by 20th century music–this is certainly a richness of the text. Browsing these dense pages, the reader can quickly understand how many intellectual stimuli have emerged from reflection on music in the past few decades. Yet the wide range of references does not compromise the originality of Giacomo Fronzi’s thinking: he most readily clarifies his own position with regard to the many problems that emerge from these reflections. Awareness of the complexity of the problems, however, imposes judgments and cautious, above all never categorical, stances. Fronzi, who knows very well the vats, multiple musical panorama, especially of the second half of the 20th century, quite rightly has this to say at the beginning of his study, precisely in order to justify his prudent approach: Starting from the post-World War II period, the landscape of contemporary music underwent a fragmentation and ramification never before seen in the history of music. The development of the musical material, of extra or super-serial compositional techniques, the use of electric and electronic instruments, algorithmic works, soundscapes, random music, silent music, neo-melodic works, etc. are all possible gateways opening on to universes that are often mutually distant (18).

In outlining a possible coherent historical picture of this period, troubled from all points of view, he is clearly aware of dealing with a time when art, society and culture in the broad sense had continually fluctuated between modern and post-modern, concepts that are far from clearly defined. This topic too is dealt with in large measure here, and contributes to enrich the book’s intellectual and cultural substance. We may say that much of musical experiences in the post-WWII period–though the roots of the problem go back some decades earlier, with Schönberg, Webern and the Second School of Vienna–move dangerously between these two uncertainly defined domains of the modern and post-modern. As Fronzi writes:

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The new committed, Utopian currents of the early 20th century swept away not the art of the past, but its axioms, renewing expressive languages, opening unimagined perspectives of research, in close connection too with technical and technological developments. The idea of experimentation went beyond the confines of scientific research and–not always to good purpose–invaded the territories of art, creating new paths that were at once fascinating and destabilising. For instance, composers such as Cage … cherished the hope that the rule of harmony might be brought definitively to an end, centring the musical discourse and the activity of composition on new foundations, structured starting from elements that might on each separate occasion be musical, extra-musical, random or numerical (20-1).

The crisis of the traditional concept of expression is liberally present in post-WWII music, as the author well knows. Centring his attention on the problem of technology and of so-called electroacoustic music must be seen in relation to the partial, but perhaps not definitive, eclipse of the very idea of expression and the possible importance of the subject in music. Perhaps the profound meaning of this work is to be found in the concluding words, from which clearly emerge the author’s position and his lucid awareness of the complexity of problems posed by the development of music in the 20th century. Starting from these questions, the book outlines a dense, enlightening picture, one that opens up cultural, philosophical, aesthetic horizons that go far beyond music: the marked quantity of information on what is commonly called the literature on the subject is united to the writer’s particular ability to carry out a summary that can provide a very broad picture whose lines he directs with assurance, maturity of judgment and a rare balance.

Torino, September 2016 Enrico Fubini

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The acknowledgments at the beginning of a book may make us somewhat uncomfortable. At times we would prefer to elude this pleasant custom, not out of intellectual and emotional meanness, but because a research work is the fruit of a complex path, in which there are mingled traces of experiences (professional, formative, cultural, social, family, affective) and encounters, to which the author is indebted. This is why I shall limit myself to thanking (in addition to my translator, R.A. Henderson) only Professor Enrico Fubini, who has bestowed on me the honour of his friendship for many years now, for following this book from its first beginnings and for writing the Preface.

Parts of Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 are the development of ideas and concepts suggested in previous publications, namely: “Senso, consenso e dissenso. Su alcuni ‘estremi’ della (post)modernità musicale,” in Mauro Protti and Nino Salamone, eds., Prima modernità. Teoria e storia (Milano: Mimesis, 2014), 177-200; Electrosound. Storia ed estetica della musica elettroacustica (Torino: EDT, 2013); Risuonanze 2014, edited by Stefano Procaccioli (Pasian di Prato: L’Orto della Cultura, 2014), 51-62; Risuonanze 2015, edited by Stefano Procaccioli (Pasian di Prato: L’Orto della Cultura, 2014), 37-44; “Thelonious Monk. Ritratto di un eremita?,” in Il rasoio di Occam-MicroMega (02.02.2015, online).

INTRODUCTION

Taking this book into your hands, you might think: “Ah, a book on the philosophy of music”, thus expressing a certain value judgment too. This might mean, substantially, judging the book useful or useless. But regarding what? The development of the debate within philosophy or within music? Probably–at least, this is the optimistic wish–within both ambits: philosophy and music. The premise to this optimistic approach is acceptance of the following condition: “Philosophy must abandon any superiority complex and accept an equalitarian relationship with music”1. By approaching the discourse in this way, we would probably lose sight of the brilliant line from Friedrich Schlegel, who said, that in what we call philosophy of art, one of the two is usually missing: either philosophy or art. Taking from his words, we may say that in the case of philosophy of music, the risk is the absence of either philosophy or music. We should ask ourselves if it is always so, or if there really is an imbalance and a prevalence of one dimension over the other. In fact, this balance is unlikely, although it may be considered useful. Let me explain. A book on philosophy is a book on philosophy and not on music. Similarly, a book on music is a book on music and not on philosophy. Every book has its own clear identity: this is a book on the philosophy (or aesthetics) of music. This means that the perspective from which certain topics are dealt with is of a philosophical, not musical, nature. However, it is clear that music cannot disappear from the scene. Indeed, it remains the uncontested protagonist. What, then, may we say? We may say that a book like this, on the philosophy of music, has an object, namely contemporary music, and instruments with which to attempt to analyse it, these being primarily theoretical and philosophical. Nonetheless, we are a long way today from the great theoretical undertakings of the man who is still the most important 20th century philosopher of music: Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. This writer, to whom reference is often made in the pages that follow, gave a rather clear identity to what we might mean by ‘philosophy of music’ (which always means philosophy of modern music). To understand this, it is necessary to link the philosophy-music relationship with the critical theory-aesthetic theory relationship. At the basis of this double relationship is the conviction that art (when we speak of ‘art’ in relation to Adorno’s thinking,

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Introduction

we are actually referring to ‘music’: “Perhaps the pure, strict concept of art can be derived only from music”2) and the historico-social context in which it is fulfilled are not in extrinsic relationship. Art is fait social, which means that the artistic phenomenon is directly dropped into the dense web of social (hence cultural, economic and political) relations within which it sees the light. The collective nature typical of any social fact belongs also to art, and is at the basis of both its production and its reception: it is not the single individual, the empirical subject, that is the true producer of the work of art, but a historical, ‘collective’ subject. At the same time, art has its own autonomy, deriving from its being the dimension in which there is still a truth content. As Antonio Serravezza has written, the truth of musical works–a key notion in Philosophy of Modern Music as in all Adorno’s other writings on art–is charged with values that come from its reactive, claim-staking character: it is opposed to the falsification of the ideologies, breaks through its surface and in this way restores to the subject–cognitive and ethical–the dignity of its autonomy3.

In Adorno’s philosophy of music, works express a subversive charge that cannot be separated from their truth content. This truth content is strictly connected to history, to socio-economic developments, and also takes us back to the tasks of the arts in contemporary society: to identify and defend a residual space of freedom and give a positive meaning to the process of Aufklärung (‘clarification’, ‘enlightenment’) of western reason. Art is the only escape route from the deception and oppression of existence in late-capitalist (and post-capitalist) society. There is another fundamental aspect that characterises art, namely its gnoseological character: “Responsible art adjusts itself to criteria which approximate judgments: the harmonious and the inharmonious, the correct and the incorrect”4. Art is a figure of knowledge, so it is not to be enjoyed or consumed, but studied, analysed, penetrated and understood. This is much closer to philosophical reflection than to what we might call ‘aesthetic pleasure’. But, apart from the analysis of Adorno’s writings, how much of all this might today be theoretically tenable? Does contemporary music take part in the great historico-political and social movements? Does it still have a special relationship with freedom and conscience? Is it ethically and cognitively substantial? Does it maintain those characteristics that lead to its being the object of philosophers’ attention? I believe there is not a single answer, because that would mean unifying the whole galaxy of contemporary music in a single figure. In the

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arts, none other than music has the characteristics of diversification, mutability, dynamism, continual transformation. Thus in some cases the distance from the ethical and cognitive sphere will be greater, in others lesser; in some cases civic engagement will be guaranteed and intentional, in others it will be kept at due distance. Thus far we have begun to introduce music, with its characteristics and historical developments. What of the philosopher? What must be her/his relationship with music to be able to speak of it? Indubitably, among the various arts, it is music that resists most to the comprehension and penetration of those who do not know its language, much less its history. This is basically the same paradox that has marked the destiny of the reception of music, always and everywhere: music is one of the most present things in our lives (in any form: from the ringing of the alarm clock to a Mahler symphony, from the background music of an advertisement to the car radio, etc.) and at the same time one of the things we know least about. The philosopher is a person too, and so has to do with music, but may not know it. Is this an insuperable limit for theory? It has been said that Hegel was the last philosopher who could permit himself the luxury of talking about art without knowing it. In fact, the problem remains of the correct distance that there should be between the philosopher and the object of her/his research: neither excessively close nor excessively far off, neither passive adherence nor a solitary, detached reflection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his famous Éloge de la Philosophie, writes: Philosophy cannot be a tête-à-tête of the philosopher with the true. It cannot be a judgment given from on high on life, the world, history, as if the philosopher was not part of it–nor can it subordinate the internally recognized truth to any exterior instance of it. It must go beyond this alternative5.

These remarks are also valid within the specific ‘philosophies’, including the philosophy of music. Borrowing Merleau-Ponty’s words, we might say that the philosopher of music can not utter a judgment on music from on high, from outside, which means penetrating the object with a suitable ‘toolbox’. But in search of what? Truth? “There is no place of truth”6, says Merleau-Ponty, quoting Bergson. The demands of philosophy when it makes its approach to contemporary music should perhaps be led back to a more practicable path, one that, while less ambitious, is however no less complex. There are two reasons for this. The first regards philosophy today. This discipline does not seem to be in the best of health, for the past hundred years exhausted by attacks on the

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part, above all, of those scientific, mathematical and economic fringes that consider philosophy a substantial waste of time. Obviously, we arrive at a superficial summary judgment like this if we see philosophy as nonapplied knowledge. This, however, is a great misinterpretation: philosophy is an applied knowledge, though not directly and immediately. Think of a doctor: before arriving at a treatment, s/he must necessarily pass through the stage of diagnosis. Philosophy is at this–so to speak–‘diagnostic’ level of relationship with reality, with its manifestations and degenerations. As Merleau-Ponty said more than fifty years ago, so we may perhaps say of our own time that it rejects philosophy and is witnessing the retreat of thought, turning in on itself: Having passed a certain point of tension, ideas cease to develop and live. They fall to the level of justifications and pretexts, relics of the past, points of honor; and what one pompously calls the movement of ideas is reduced to the sum of our nostalgias, our grudges, our timidities, and our phobias7.

In the case of philosophy of music, the question is still more complicated, since it refers to a nebulous, faded, opaque dimension, at a level of experience that is neither clear nor reassuring. Aesthetic ambition arises from a “tragic non-fulfilment”8, and this tragic accent is not only typical of art at primary level, but remains up to its results. Diffidence in the face of the philosophy of music may, then, be still greater than for philosophy tout court. On the other hand, it is the philosophy of music that must itself make every effort to be recognised as useful, as an instrument for reading and analysis of the contemporary musical reality. That adjective ‘contemporary’ is of great importance. Alessandro Arbo has rightly stressed that To reflect (or reflecting) upon music nowadays does not mean, at least in regards to a grand part of the contemporary philosophical discussion, to reflect upon today’s music9.

In fact, the tendency is for the philosophy of music to give inadequate attention to contemporary music, by virtue of choices (historical, personal, of a musical genre, etc.) that risk making the theoretical effort ineffective. The second reason has to do with the conditions of existence of contemporary music today–these conditions being concerned with both the productive and the receptive dimension. Twentieth century music is in a totally different position from the preceding centuries. It is not only a matter of the great variety of aims, genres, styles, paths, forms, but also of very important novelties in terms of the technical tools, the places, the

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contexts. The modalities of production, diffusion and listening to music at the turn of the millennium underwent an unprecedented revolution. As a result, the picture is complex, articulate and hard to interpret10. The tesserae that make up the mosaic of contemporary music (and of the contemporary position of that music) are so various that at times they lead to evaluations and analyses that move in opposite directions. This means that it is not possible to identify one single thought of contemporary music, nor to outline one single philosophy of contemporary music that could cast light on the many phenomena that are silhouetted on the horizon. To this must be added the by now legendary difficulty of assimilation of contemporary music by an audience other than the distinguished names of critics, composers, interpreters or experts. The distance created between the composers and the audience, from the dodecaphonic turnaround on, seems to be remaining in all its gravity. Despite all efforts, difficulty of understanding seems to be an obstacle hard to surmount for an untrained and–perhaps–uninterested ear. This situation is all the more significant if we note that in the last few decades music criticism has not always warmly welcomed the novelties that gradually emerged in the 20th century. Two examples will suffice. In the early 1960s, Adorno did not conceal his unease at finding himself in a musical situation that posed and imposed an onerous alternative: take either the attitude ‘thus far and no further’, or the attitude of one who is desperately trying to jump on the train of the latest novelties, determined not to be considered a diehard. This kind of alternative, said Adorno in 1961, must be overcome because it is too abstract. Among the various charges brought against Adorno over the years is the accusation that he failed to understand the potential of the new research carried out by composers who had grown up in the tracks and cult of Webern. But Adorno was of another time, another musical-theoretical dimension. This is no small detail. Indeed, it explains the fact that his productive imagination–as he himself said with great honesty–could not understand works like Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Kontakte or Zeitmasse in the same way in which it understood the later works of Webern. The reason for this difficulty lies in the fact that–as Adorno carefully states–serial and postserial music “is founded on a quite different mode of apperception, in so far as music can be said to be based on apperception at all”11. The second example is from the Italian tradition. In 1948, Alfredo Parente wrote: The greatest discredit is brought upon the arts when, as frequently happens, the mere search for new means of expression, with the specious appearance of technical innovations and revolutions, with the tenacity of what has not

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Introduction yet been done, is passed off as creative art. … We see paintings and hear music that have no merit unless that of offering a new spatial solution, a hitherto never experienced way of dismantling, upsetting, dissolving and remaking the figure of an object, an unheard harmonic relationship, a novel timbric hotchpotch. If there is drama in all this, it is the drama of gratuitous striving, of invention as a competitive or sporting fact. The search remains in the strictly optical or acoustic ambit, and the results may cause external gratification, cold admiration, since their value is ingeniousness, skill in excogitation, the rarity of what is novel, and for the rest they communicate no thrill, remaining in the merely cerebral or sensorial12.

This lengthy quotation makes two aspects perfectly clear: a) even music criticism may express great perplexity regarding some directions taken by contemporary music; b) despite his forcefully expressed diffidence, Parente identifies two poles around which, shortly afterwards, much contemporary–above all technological–music (in this book they will be called, without differentiation, ‘technological music’ and ‘electroacoustic music’) was to congeal: the ‘cerebral’ and the ‘sensorial’. It seems very clear that if there are problems of reception in the world of the experts, it may easily be attested, always supposing this is necessary, how difficult the process of reception of contemporary music is for a wider audience. In part, this problem is attenuated by the great amount of music offered by the Internet and by the many computer-based and digital solutions available to us. This is undoubtedly another characteristic of the present time. But let us move on to the book. The text is developed around nine words: ‘Extremes’, ‘Noise’, ‘Silence’, ‘Technology’, ‘Audience’, ‘Listening’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Disintegration’ and ‘New media’, to each of which a chapter is devoted. The chapters, in their turn, are organised in three movements with an intermezzo between the second and third movements, almost recalling a sort of musical form. Starting from the idea that the diversity and complexity of the landscape can in some way be brought back to nine topics, in each chapter I aim to give a possible reading of the way contemporary music and contemporaneity are placed with regard to this topic. It is not a matter only of reflecting on contemporary music and the features it displays, but also of opening the debate as far as possible. With this in mind, I offer the ‘Intermezzo’ devoted to jazz, and specifically to Thelonious Monk. I believe it is necessary to clarify how the philosophy of music (hence both philosophy and music) must be constantly opened to the plurality of voices emerging from the musical panorama. The categories of interpretation are subject to change, adjustment and variation. Some will be more suited to

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certain genres and authors, and quite unsuited to other genres and authors. What can never be missing, however, is openness (insatiable openness, I would say) to all the forms of music that characterise our present time. In this book I concentrate especially on so-called ‘cultivated music’, but there are ventures (with Monk, for instance) into various territories, and in any case I consider them a legitimate object of extra-musical and philosophical analysis. In conclusion, I want to clarify what might be called the ‘methodological’ choice of the words used as starting points for the single studies. This choice–as will probably be immediately clear to many readers–was inspired by Italo Calvino’s texts for the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures, which he was supposed to give in 1985-1986 academic year at the University of Harvard; he passed away, however, on the 19th of September 1985, at the beginning of the academic year. The texts of five of the six lectures13 were subsequently published under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium. As we know, each lecture had a topic: “Lightness”, “Quickness”, “Exactitude”, “Visibility” and “Multiplicity”. Introducing them, Calvino explains his choice as follows: I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within the perspective of the new millennium14.

In some sense, the nine words chosen here also refer to values, qualities or specific aspects of contemporary music (its production and reception), and clearly mark the passage from the second to the third millennium. It is hard to imagine what the future holds for us, but, starting from what history tells us, the challenge is always the same: to imagine it, in order to better face and experience it.

Lecce, September 2016

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Introduction

Notes 1

Elio Matassi, Musica (Napoli: Guida, 2004), 10. Unless otherwise specified translations are mine. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, fragments and texts edited by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7; orig. ed. Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, Hg. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). 3 Antonio Serravezza, “Introduzione” to Theodor W. Adorno, Filosofia della musica moderna (Torino: Einaudi, 2002), XII-XIII; orig. ed. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1949); english ed. Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London-New York: Continuum, 2007). 4 I do not believe this English translation completely and most clearly renders the thesis Adorno expressed. He used the German “Stimmigen” and “Unstimmigen”, “Richtigen” and “Falschen”, which I believe referred to the cognitive (exactinexact) and ethical (right-wrong) sphere. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 30; orig. ed. Éloge de la Philosophie. Leçon inaugurale faite au Collège de France, le jeudi 15 janvier 1953 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 31. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 41. 8 Thomas Harrison, “Filosofia dell’arte, filosofia della morte,” in Filosofia ’95, edited by Gianni Vattimo (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 7. 9 Alessandro Arbo, “Ton ou son? Réfléchir sur la musique (d’)aujourd’hui,” in Archéologie de l’écoute. Essais d’esthétique musicale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 334. 10 Not that there was absolute unity of style in the preceding centuries, but certainly there was not such a plurality of voices as has characterised the contemporary age. To this regard, as Charles Rosen wrote in Sonatas Forms (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), there is a tendency to overvalue the stylistic unity of the late 18th century. In that historical period there were not conflicts like those of the present age (like that, for example, between Gian Carlo Menotti and John Cage, at least to which there is common reference). Nevertheless, Rosen goes on to say, that in the 1780s there were composers whose styles were more different from Haydn’s than Benjamin Britten’s differed from Stravinskij’s. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una fantasia. Essay on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London-New York: Verso, 1992), 271. 12 Alfredo Parente, “La crisi del linguaggio come crisi morale,” in Castità della musica (Torino: Einaudi, 1961 [1948]), 52. 13 As Esther Calvino explains, Italo Calvino wrote five lectures before leaving for the US. The sixth, entitled “Consistency”, had been written at Harvard and so was not found on his desk, in the folder in which the lectures were carefully collected.

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14 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1; orig. ed. Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio (Milano: Garzanti, 1988).

FIRST MOVEMENT HISTORY AND TECHNICS

CHAPTER ONE EXTREMES: CONTEMPORARY MUSIC AND ITS ‘CONTRADICTIONS’

1. Modern, Post-modern or Contemporary? There is a first, preliminary problem that appears as soon as we begin to talk of so-called ‘contemporary music’. The fact is that there are at least three adjectives available to define music composed from the beginning of the 20th century to our own days: modern, post-modern and contemporary. Why should we prefer one rather than another of these adjectives? How should the music of our own time be considered? And what attributes should it have in order to fit one of these three definitions? It is my belief that in order to approach the most intricate, but also the most interesting questions at the heart of the debate on music since the early 20th century, it is necessary to establish the subject of the relationship between music, modernity, post-modernity and contemporaneity, starting specifically from the modern/post-modern problem. In fact, to speak of contemporary music (which I shall do in the course of this book) is not only to place something within a chronologically defined period, but to attribute to it certain characteristics which may properly be spoken of as contemporary. To this end, the starting point is, as I have said, the relationship between music and modernity. It is particularly complicated to interpret certain stages of the history of music in the light of categories, historical coordinates, transversal periodisations that are held to be valid in fields other than the philosophico- or sociologico-musical. The concepts of modernity and post-modernity, though clearly expressed and constantly rethinkable, can in any case be brought back to theoretical contexts and perspectives that have provided, and still provide, tools useful to the social scientist or philosopher for the interpretation of the real. If modernity, in its various

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expressions, is a compact symbolic, albeit problematic, universe, postmodernity may be said to represent the negation/surpassing of this universe, which has now been fragmented into a dense network of possible micro-universes. The term post-modern especially appears in all its complexity and contradiction. That it is of a basically contradictory nature is the conviction of various theoreticians, such as Donald Kuspit, according to whom “The term ‘post-modernism’ reflects the uncertain destiny of criticality in contemporary society and culture”1. From this point of view, postmodernism is seen as a very versatile category, a sort of passkey that can be used to open all doors: culture, society, the arts, politics, philosophy and so on. To this characterisation another can be added, according to which: Post-modernism is more of a program developed by theorists than the common reality of contemporary society and culture. Post-modernism is a rhapsodic, elusive, exhilarating concept, used with license, because the hopes and fears–anxious ambitions?–of theorists are riding on it. I suggest that the term “post-modernism” is deliberately kept flexible and enchanting–so rich with connotations that it dissolves on direct contact with reality–as a pretentious, pseudo-autonomous display of theory’s critical power in its bourgeois situation of social impotence2.

Kuspit’s is a very interesting viewpoint, which, here, must be adapted with reference to our approach. Hence, respective of the historico-cultural succession of modernity and post-modernity, where does the musical phenomenon fit in? I believe that its position is decidedly anomalous, one might almost say ‘dangerous’. If we were to see post-modernity as beginning with the crisis of man, as revealed at the turn of the 19th-20th century, it might be thought that, in parallel and contextually, this loss of the ‘centre’ was attested and declined in music too. Traditionally (though already in Bach there are cases of criticism of tonality3 which, analogously with Giotto’s intuitive perspective, prefigure certain later developments), it is to Richard Wagner, with his famous “Tristan-Akkord” in Tristan und Isolde, that the beginning is traced of what was to be the atonal, dodecaphonic revolution. Traditional harmony, unfolded melody, lovely, well-defined forms revert to ingredients of out-of-date sound structures, to threadbare formants, limited and limiting. The radical turnaround brought about by the Second School of Vienna (Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg) meant the end of the great structural ‘forms’ that constituted the development of western music, the annihilation of the

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‘tyranny’ of tonality, the de-naturalisation of the traditional melodic, harmonic, tonal system. From this point of view, so-called ‘modern music’ seems already to be characterised as ‘post-modern’4, insofar as the concept of post-modernity, as defined by Jean-François Lyotard, defines a period characterised by the twilight of the ‘great stories’, that is, of the great ideologies that had guaranteed certain values, but also of a progressive, unitary view of history and of the world5. The musical material (in the sense of a device common to all members of the community) exercises the function of a ‘universal of communication’, and this function is doubly bound to the chameleon-like ability of the tonal system, thanks to which it survived through the ages, and which, together with its special ‘flexibility’, permitted it to resist across time, being renewed and ‘imposed’ as a ‘second nature’. But is the tonal system the only device that can bring to concreteness and expression all that can be composed at the individual level? The answer is affirmative, if we are speaking in terms of the defeat and supersession of the tonal system as the dismantling of the only device that makes musical communication possible; it is negative if it is conceived as one of the possible communicative systems in music. This is where dodecaphonic, serial music comes in, defined as ‘modern’, but born as already ‘post-modern’. It incarnates the characteristics of post-modernity already mentioned, but by a sort of overturning of characteristics, modernpostmodern music falls into the legend of ideology, though presented as a manifestation in sound of that criticism of ideology that cannot rightly be called post-modern. The new music (Neue Musik), according to Theodor W. Adorno, was (in chronological order) the last stage of the development of music, a development marked by an ever-increasing rationalisation of musical instruments (in all senses) and directed towards the neutralisation of the tonal system. The new music had the whole work of art as its objective, the final moment of a process of rationalisation of all the dimensions linked to the practice of composition. This can easily be read as the specification in music of the general, radical, universal (and wholly modern) process of Aufklärung that typifies the conduct of western humanity. The stubborn faith in (at first) dodecaphonic and (subsequently) serial procedures, taken as a guarantee of a completed whole, had an unexpected consequence. In the new music certain rules had been codified and taken to the conscious level, rules that were perfectly integrated in the procedure of composition. This integration prejudiced the true character of the rules, which in the end were closed to any possible dialectic correction.

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According to Adorno, the father (though with no heir) of the philosophy of modern music, there was at this point an inescapable pair of alternatives: ignore the conquests that had defined this system at risk, however, of impotently clinging to conceptions that had been surpassed by this point, or make of the system itself an idée fixe and see it as a sort of universal panacea6. It is not a matter of considering the procedure mistaken in itself, but of hypostasising it, rejecting other possibilities not included in it. These are the premises of that ageing process revealed by Adorno7, an ageing that was substantiated by obsolescence and mannerism: the means became the ends, and dodecaphonic technique ended by being badly used as a mere change of tonality. Thus an ideologically connoted dimension gave way to one that was at first de-ideologised, but then slipped back into a new form of ideology. Hence modern-postmodern music was born ambiguous and grew up contradictory. With these characteristics, though in partial and reductive form, modern music is presented in Adorno’s well-known analysis. His Philosophie der neuen Musik is “the most important and profound attempt at interpretation, certainly the most sensational, of the contemporary musical crisis”8. The double track on which Adorno moves, the musicological and the philosophico-sociological, answers his precise intentions: for Adorno, music, at the mercy of the historical dialectic, took part in this process, dodecaphony was its destiny9. A certain caution should be exercised in accepting the acute, charming description of contemporary music in consideration of its two greatest representatives (Schönberg and Stravinskij) proposed by Adorno. This is the case above all when we come to consider the paralysing conclusions drawn from it, since the concept of ‘progress’, and that of ‘restoration’, which distinguish the two composers end by being prisoners of the permanent contradiction inherent in today’s society, which has drawn away from subjectivity to the anonymous objectivity of mass culture demanded by industrial civilisation. The dialectical, oppositive view typical of Adorno’s analysis has been severely criticised, because it is objectively partial. It is certainly misleading to reduce modern music to the antithesis between Schönberg and Stravinskij, but it is also true that, in Adorno’s dialectic perspective (based in its turn on the philosophy of history of Walter Benjamin), the ‘new music’ might well be analysed philosophically through reference to its two extremes, pausing where it makes sense to discuss the content of truth of this music, without expressing a judgment on its value and on the significance of what lies between10.

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What seems interesting is not so much the emphasis on this limit, but rather attention to how the oppositive contradiction typical of the modernpostmodern music embodied by the Second School of Vienna exploded in the flowing decades and clearly characterised the developments of contemporary music, which tends to be directed to extremes. Before giving attention to some of these extremes, it will be of interest to recall a concept that, like my almost paradoxical idea of modern-postmodern music, gives the measure of the complexity of the subject, which here will be dealt with in conformity with its nature, i.e. fragmentarily. I refer to the concept of ‘second modernity’, developed especially by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf11.

2. From ‘Classical’ Modernity to the Second Modernity Mahnkopf’s reflections are in line with the course launched not only by Mahnkopf himself, but also by Harry Lehmann (in the field of music) and other scholars (in other areas)12. In Mahnkopf’s view, the ‘new music’ is to be understood not so much (or not only) as a consequence of the Schönbergean revolution, but rather as the result of a course that began with Beethoven–a course thanks to which the work is seen as fruit of the subject’s free self-determination. It is not difficult to detect in this hypothesis a certain undercurrent of Adorno. It was he, in fact, who established this course, putting Beethoven and Schönberg along the same genetic and developmental line, from his first writings at the beginning of the 1930s. In the concluding part of a 1934 essay devoted to Schönberg, Adorno bridges the gap between the two composers. As on other occasions, here too Schönberg’s indisputable greatness is affirmed, in the “verwaltete Welt”, but there is also a clear tribute to Beethoven, the first to have consciously given musical voice to the dream of freedom13. In Beethoven, as in no other, are truth, freedom and knowledge. From this point of view, i.e. in an analysis that holds together philosophy of history, critical theory of society and philosophy of music, the pre-eminence of Beethoven’s music rests on its being a model of authentic art. Throughout his writings, Adorno never fails to stress the fundamental importance of the revolution represented by Beethoven above all with regard to the later developments of modern music. One of the numerous examples is to be found in a passage from the Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, in the chapter devoted to the “function of music”, where Adorno, in stressing the conditions for the aspiration of true music in modern times, once more invokes Beethoven. The aspiration of true

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music, says Adorno, is that, by means of its own entirety, it outlines the image of a fullness of time, an intense duration, of the “glorious moment”14. It is this moment, which Beethoven’s music constantly pursues and achieves, that is the aspiration of true music. And the content of truth in Beethoven’s works, like every authentic work of art, reveals its independence even as it frees and clarifies its social content. The Doppelcharakter of art, its autonomous existence and yet fait social, is thus fully expressed in Beethoven. Apropos this, since in the case of a work of art the form is, like the content, strictly linked to social processes, freedom of form also implies a certain degree of freedom from social conventions. So what makes Beethoven’s music incomparable is that autonomy and freedom, becoming self-aware, penetrate the problem of form as never before: Beethoven’s music … is incomparable in that the intervention enjoined by the problematic of form is permeated with autonomy, that is, with the freedom of the subject that is coming to self-consciousness15.

It is on this basis, according to Adorno, and also, it would seem, according to Mahnkopf, that the process is activated that would lead to the new music. Starting from the post-World War II period, the landscape of contemporary music underwent a fragmentation and ramification never before seen in the history of music. The development of the musical material, of extra or super-serial compositional techniques, the use of electric and electronic instruments, algorithmic works, soundscapes, random music, silent music, neo-melodic works, etc. are all possible gateways opening on to universes that are often mutually distant. The experiments of the second half of the 20th century, for Niklas Luhmann, are the ‘avant-garde’, while the formula ‘classical modernity’ may be applied to the Second School of Vienna, to Igor Stravinskij, to Belà Bartók and similarly to Charles Ives. For Mahnkopf, however, the modern composers substantially preserved the existing lexis, its syntax, its grammar and corresponding semantics, though in search of new musical materials. It would take Pierre Boulez, announcing and certifying the death of Schönberg, to set in motion an overall process of change of perspective, above all rejecting the work of art in its traditional sense. The last decades of contemporary music, according to Mahnkopf, offer a picture (namely, post-modernity) that was to become “second modernity”, substantially attributable to four main directions, to which a fifth was subsequently added:

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1) Musical negativism, in particular with Helmut Lachenmann. This current concentrates on the sounds of instruments in their non-traditional role, in order to be the object of experimentation and exhibition in a separate form, which deliberately conflicts with what is familiar, although, as Mahnkopf clarifies, the problem of “form” is not solved with this “nonidentical” material. 2) Musical complexism cultivates, starting from Brian Ferneyhough, the differentiation and ‘complexification’ of the musical discourse. 3) Statistical-stochastic composition, introduced by Iannis Xenakis. This type of approach produces concrete compositions based on stochastics and on the corpuscular performance of auditory matter. Its aim is to point towards a new road to concrete music, which has become too stereotyped, too manneristic. Mahnkopf, however, maintains that his music cannot do justice to every musical element, as it is “individual”. 4) Spectralism, of which Gérard Grisey is the main exponent, drives research on harmonic language still further, with a view to arriving at a situation of soundspace, though without being able to develop an aesthetic capable of going beyond a somewhat naïve ‘naturalism’. In the 1990s, according to Mahnkopf, a fifth road emerged, though its modernity is not defined in terms of typically technico-compositional problems. This music (we may think, for example, of György Kurtág) is, for Mahnkopf, certainly authentically contemporary, though characterised by a “‘nostalgic’ poetics”, and perhaps does not follow the latest forms of musical progress, for all that it is not regressive16. Post-modern music, whose form may be said to be characterised particularly by a special denial (modernity denies the means–arriving at atonality; the avant-garde denies work; post-modernity perhaps denies truth), offers a non-truth that may be presented in various ways: as irony, as a lie, as deceit, as mockery, etc. Moreover, according to Mahnkopf, post-modern music is marked by four basic characteristics: 1. The postmodern musical work is hedonistic; it displays an enjoyment of its own combinatorial imagination with a certain frivolous air unique to music; its reception occurs in the mode of pleasure (e.g., Kagel, Match). 2. The postmodern musical work is narrative; it presents a musical narrative, not a composition of sounds or structures (e.g., Rihm, Musik für drei Streicher). 3. The postmodern musical work is formally heteronomous, i.e., the difficult problem of form is solved, this being achieved through a strong connection to previously existing and functioning forms (e.g., Ligeti, Passacaglia ungherese). 4. The postmodern musical work refers outside of itself; its material is taken from other music (e.g., Schnittke, Third String Quartet)17.

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The presence of a single one of these characteristics does not tell us that we are dealing with a post-modern work, whereas the presence of all four connotes an integral post-modern work, which, moreover, must be of one of the following types: 1. Poly-stylistic postmodernity; 2. Ironic postmodernity; 3. Hybrid postmodernity; 4. Naïve postmodernity; 5. Bad postmodernity; 6. Epigonal postmodernity18. Regarding these features, “second modernity” is seen as a dimension in which classical modernity, avant-garde and post-modernity flow together, but differs from them in the new relationship it establishes with the truth. The term “second modernity”, provisionally, refers to what follows postmodernity, in terms not only of succession in time but also of aesthetic choices. Still according to one of its most convinced theoreticians, second modernity is not simply a period or a generation, but a “qualitative concept”. It is polyhydric, diversified, plural. On the battlefield of compositional practice Mahnkopf identifies–in addition to himself–the models who best represent the characteristics of this second modernity: Mark André, Richard Barrett, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Sebastian Claren, Frank Cox, Liza Lim, Chris Mercer, Brice Pauset, Enno Poppe, Wolfram Schurig, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Franck Yeznikian. These composers, each with a unique, individual aesthetic and technical vision, have in his opinion a “common catalogue of values”: their intention is to compose in an attitude of critically tackling the concept of a “work”, giving the “work” the sense of an entity, a construction with clear internal and external borders, and not an experimental structure of uncertain results. In addition, these composers are critical of contemporary culture, and hence are motivated first and foremost by the desire, not to make progress, but each to develop a personal style and poetics. These elements–especially regarding the stress laid on instances of subjectivity and expression, rejecting any principle of authority or withdrawal from the debate on the bases and characteristics of the aesthetic experience–may certainly be read as the achievement of a freedom almost unknown to those composers born before the 1950s1960s, but also as “none other than an extreme mainstay in a context where young musicians have relinquished the exercise of control”19. The new committed, Utopian currents of the early 20th century swept away not the art of the past, but its axioms, renewing expressive languages, opening unimagined perspectives of research, in close connection too with technical and technological developments. The idea of experimentation went beyond the confines of scientific research and–not always to good purpose–invaded the territories of art, creating new paths

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that were at once fascinating and destabilising. For instance, composers such as Cage (whose centenary and the twentieth anniversary of whose death were commemorated in 201220) cherished the hope that the rule of harmony might be brought definitively to an end21, centring the musical discourse and the activity of composition on new foundations, structured starting from elements that might on each separate occasion be musical, extra-musical, random or numerical. It is possible to go still further. John Rea, writing of the post-modernists (evidently not holding to the idea of a “second modernity” after the post-modern), distinguishes between “critical post-modernists” and “acritical post-modernists”: the former, metaphorically speaking, wear masks and carry icons about, in art though not necessarily in life; the latter do the opposite, becoming producers of kitsch. Furthermore, Thanks to self-awareness and to the bearing of masks and icons, playful, critical post-modernity shapes particular visions of the world in translating itself into a myriad of possibilities. The critical postmodernists attempt to dissimulate their disappointments regarding life by exploiting poetic strategies which, among other things, imply the notions of indeterminacy, impurity, hybridisation, borrowing, indifference of the interior towards the exterior, gay or feminist perspectives, decontextualisation/recontextualisation, as well as intertextuality and grotesque metafiction22.

But at this point queries emerge: has the experimental thrust of the avant-gardes had consequences? What forms have continued to express it best? How do the composers of the so-called “second modernity” approach this question? Still in less “staid” fashion (in the sense in which this is typical of Teutonic reasoning), John Rea seems to be not even minimally a diverted by finding the differences between modernists and post-modernists. As regards “experimental capability”, if we may so express it, Rea maintains that while the modernist age is characterised by a psychotechnical imperative along the lines of “necessity, more often inferior necessity, is the mother of invention” (putting the horse before the cart), the post-modern age appears to have taken as its imperative the idea that “invention is the mother of necessity, often an external necessity” (thus putting the cart before the horse)23. Imagining that the creation of the work is a game of chess, Rea writes, the need to make moves forces the modernist composer to become inventive, if not aggressive and violent. The post-modern composer, in contrast, is inspired by the game itself to intuit the necessity of those rules that allow him to make his moves, even

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backwards. Thus, “the first type of player must always win, at any cost”, whereas the second “likes playing the match”24. Rea’s intention in approaching this subject is clearly critical, polemical, but also ironic: he is able to talk of a sort of “necrophagy” typical of certain post-modern American composers (such as Michael Torke, Michael Daugherty or Aaron Jay Kernis), all of whom according to Rea behave like grave-robbers, ransacking the creations of their famous predecessors such as Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson or Leonard Bernstein), behaving as though these composers had never existed. Rea’s analysis inevitably concludes with an “uncertain prognosis”: “post-modernism in music may be an entreprise en pärt de vitesse, a firm in progressive difficulty”25, one that basically looks back to a legendary past it longs to possess. Rea ends his analysis recalling an observation by Paolo Rossi, for whom the Viconian view of history lays the stress not so much on the topic of “return” and “repetition” (though these are obviously present) as on the subject of “the corruption of reason”, the emergence of a form of barbarism at the end of the “race” of civilisation, in the closing phase of a course, which no longer has the characteristics of spontaneity and immediacy of the generous barbarism of the age of meaning and imagination, civilised life, as the mark of a renewed loneliness of the human being … Vico also sees in this process of decadence a reason for hope26.

Analogously with these considerations, Rea concludes pithily: “in the fields of music, in my opinion, post-modernism is merely a last resort”27.

3. The Electroacoustic Revolution and Musiques Actuelles Rea is the other side of the coin or, to be still more faithful to the state of affairs, one of the many sides displayed by the critique of musical (post)modernity. His approach is certainly radically different from Mahnkopf’s, to which I now turn again. The picture outlined by Mahnkopf has its own legitimacy, which makes it, in some respects, particularly interesting and evocative. Like every other attempt at theoretically recognising (or arranging) a subject as fluid as contemporary music, Mahnkopf’s suggestion does not avoid the risk of being partial, for instance in its undervaluation or, at the very least, scant attention to the whole territory of electroacoustic music. I would be inclined to go further, and say that he merely troubles the waters still more

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and complicates the already complicated picture. I shall refer to a trend in contemporary music which, almost ‘situationistically’, is claimed to be more contemporary than the rest or, at least, markedly contemporary, and which does not form part of the case study proposed by Mahnkopf. But let us start at the beginning: electroacoustic music. One of the distinguishing traits of contemporary developments in the arts is the ever-increasing recourse by the artists to the ‘aesthetic’ use of solutions that arose in the ambit of technical and scientific research. Indeed, aesthetological thinking has been (and is) constantly in a state of crisis because of the succession of epochal provocations, in relation to which it seems not fully to assume its own role, sometimes failing in its task continuing to work on an apparatus of categories that are connected with the pre-technological age of artistic output. Within this general picture, not all the arts have had the same relationship with technico-scientific development. In one case, indeed, the result is the inevitable premises for the constitution of the electroacoustic work of art, in the double sense that characterises the process (technicisation and mathematisation of art, or moment of artistic ennobling and aesthetic sublimation of technique?). This is of fundamental importance in identifying the directions contemporary music was taking in the second half of the 20th century. The situation is actually complicated by the hitherto unheard-of interaction between composer and instrumentation/equipment that was at first extra-musical. Electroacoustic music is a radical turnaround in the history of musical (and not only musical) forms. It amounts to a revolution, because never before had there been so dense an interweaving of technique-technology and compositional practice. There were at least two consequences, of unforeseeable importance. The first was that the high level of technologisation and electrification of music meant that societies, private groups, institutions, etc. gradually made their entrance, in an increasingly showy, influential manner, in the musical world, to the point that, for better or for worse, they directed the developments and research programmes in this area. Secondly, the musical and aesthetic acquisitions and results achieved within the tight-knit circle of composers of so-called cultivated music, thanks in part to the technical refinement of the electronic instruments (ever lighter, more rapid and portable), led to the breaching of the dam that kept the two worlds of classical and so-called light music apart. But that is another story28. Gillo Dorfles wrote that, the importance of electronic music lies not so much in the fact that this music is produced by means of an ‘artificial’ mechanism instead of the

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Chapter One strings or organ pipes or reeds of an instrument ‘played’ by a human being, as in the fact that by virtue of this our art has recovered the infinite, no longer stemmed range of sound, held back by the artificial barriers of the tone, the semitone, the third, fourth and sixth part of a tone29.

It is beyond question that electronic music has contributed decisively to this limitless opening up to any sound; but it is also true that this process began at a moment in history when, strictly, the idea of electronic music could not be used. There are of course many reasons of strictly music interest, first among them the broadening of the composer’s range of action with the use of electronic instruments. This was the beginning, which may be defined as ‘conceptual’, because it refers to a new attitude of the 20th century artist. Without this attitude, the electronic instruments would not have become instruments of sound production, but would have remained simply instruments of reproduction of sound. To this must naturally be added the ‘specific’, the most defining element: namely, the relationship with the new media: no traditional art has been so devastated as music, in its very nature and in the means of application and communication, by the appearance of the new media and of the technologies of recording, re-transmission and synthesis30.

Innumerable elements come into play at the mere mention of electroacoustics: the technical drift, the change of linguistic and expressive codes, the risk of subordination of the aesthetic to the technical result, how it is used, how it is produced and so on. In addition–recalling the problematic truthful nature stressed by Mahnkopf–there is another element: regarding the presumption of truth, electroacoustic music is the final testimony to the surrender of human beings in the face of any attempt at constitution, at foundation. The basis, the Grund, the first principle are fragmented, scattered, transformed into shards of meaning developed and redeveloped electronically. It is a matter of making music no longer for the heart, but for the mind and the senses. Although the first composers of electroacoustic music intended to safeguard the ‘humanistic’ aspect of the new music–we may think, for instance, of Luciano Berio, who maintained that “the deep sense of electronic music is common to the sense of any other experience that reminds us of the human detail when we talk of humanity”31–what proved to be the case is abandonment, even irrationalistic, to perceptions, to the fluxus, to the landscape and the sound context as such, valid in itself, representative of nothing, no longer the

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bearer of meaning. From this standpoint too, electronically-produced music has marked out a path, and indicated a trend. I do not wish here to overvalue or undervalue the significance of the electroacoustic revolution, but I would simply propose some doubts regarding the overall staying power of Mahnkopf’s clearly expressed, demanding proposal, which seems, to me, to elude a more precise comparison with technological music and with other experimental forms, such as those put forward by so-called ‘musiques actuelles’. It was probably in 1983, during a festival organised in Quebec with the title Festival de musique actuelle, that ‘musique actuelle’ was spoken of for the first time. This formula defines a new musical style and at the same time a new way of making music, in clear opposition to ‘contemporary’ music, the term generally applied to any musical form produced according to the principles of serialisation and those of the School of Darmstadt32.

Generally speaking, the Actualist Movement is considered to be a North American cultural product, though by now it has spread to various parts of the world, with a constellation of young composers firmly determined to safeguard the underground, ‘exceptional’ nature of their output. ‘Musique actuelle’ claims to be free of stylistic restraints, academic barriers and rigid hierarchies of genre, though its roots are in the contemporary music of the second half of the 20th century, as in jazz, up to rock. These composers-improvisers-interpreters33 seek to set in motion a “new, less rigid avant-garde”34, less the victim of stringent logics both internal and external. They promote an approach to composition and to intuitive music, anti-academic and anti-intellectual. It is a sort of musical counterculture, filled with a certain narcissism, a certain extreme desire for distinction, “vulgar, shouted, disconcerting and impure; it is raw. In addition, it plays truant from school, it is delinquent, iconoclastic and proletarian”35. In this anti-institutional, anti-conventional wave, however, what is given up is also memory, the past, reflection, giving maximum emphasis to the work of creation in itself, radicalising the attitude of musical instinctivity, and in the end producing de-culturalised music, so to speak: “victims of their own universe, the actualists are unable to develop decisively the discussion on the relevance of the thought–through musical attitude”36, producing a vaguely unproductive form of dissent.

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4. Extremes It may therefore be useful in discussing an almost infinite constellation, to return to the methodology of dialectic opposition which characterised, for example, +EXTREME– (6-13 October 2012), the 56th International Festival of Contemporary Music at the Venice Biennial, directed by Ivan Fedele, on the theme of musical minimalisms and maximalisms of our time. The solution Fedele proposed is convincing: What is particularly striking in the musical panorama of our days are the extreme orientations: minimalisms and maximalisms seeking to inhabit the frontier areas of musical language, apparently antithetical approaches that have in common the radical nature of their aesthetic-poetic intent, actually abandoning the politically correct attitude of the piece that works or sounds good37.

Some of the difficulties of reading and interpretation of the panorama of contemporary music, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, are linked precisely to the marked radicalisation of opposing trends, marking a fragmented, composite yet decidedly fascinating landscape. At this point we may look briefly at three of the many possible extremes to which some works of contemporary music belong.

4.1. Indeterminate versus Determinate Music ‘Indeterminate music’ is the result of an artistic development that is at one and the same time extremely logical, but also vaguely absurd38, in that it constitutes an attempt to achieve balance between logic and chance, between structuring and arbitrariness, between order and disorder. As James Pritchett has pointed out, in the literature on this subject, the terms ‘chance’ and ‘indeterminacy’ have been used to describe recourse to random procedures in composition, the variability of execution, or both. In the terminology of the composer John Cage, ‘chance’ refers to the use of a sort of ‘random procedure’ in the act of composing. Hence, randomness is a matter of methods of identifying the parameters, whereas indeterminacy is seen when the indeterminate work is related to its later execution. A famous, typical example of music built on risky procedures (and not of a compositional method that is indeterminate in regard to its later execution) is Cage’s Music of Changes. As Cage himself insists, in this work,

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structure, which is the division of the whole into parts; method, which is the note-to-note procedure; form, which is the expressive content, the morphology of the continuity; and materials, the sounds and silences of the composition, are all determined. Though no two performances of the Music of Changes will be identical (each act is virgin, even the repeated one, to refer to René Char’s thought), two performances will resemble one another closely. Though chance operations brought about the determinations of the composition, these operations are not available in its performance. The function of the performer in the case of the Music of Changes is that of a contractor who, following an architect’s blueprint, constructs a building. That the Music of Changes was composed by means of chance operations identifies the composer with no matter what eventuality. But that its notation is in all respects determinate does not permit the performer any such identification: his work is specifically laid out before him. He is therefore not able to perform from his own center but must identify himself insofar as possible with the center of the work as written. The Music of Changes is an object more inhuman than human, since chance operations brought it into being39.

The concept of ‘chance’ was to be at the centre of the profound divergence of outlook between Pierre Boulez and Cage. Boulez was not unwilling to accept ‘chance’ as an element to which one might have recourse, but he regarded the “method of absolute randomness (with the tossing of a coin)” as quite inadequate. He was convinced that chance had to be greatly controlled, considering the phenomenon of the automatism of chance, whether written or not, to be a totally unnecessary facilitation40. At the opposite pole is the hyperdeterministic experience that was developed in the channel of that Elektronische Musik whose founding father, in Cologne, was Karlheinz Stockhausen. At first his research and experimentation revolved around two focal points: the radicalisation of the lesson of Webern and its declination in technological terms. His compositional praxis is defined as the union of scientific thought and serial technique, of Helmholtz’s acoustic physics [Fourier’s theorem] and the electronic technique that made possible the use of sinusoidal sound41.

Stockhausen immediately attempted to extend the serial procedures to all dimensions (height, timbre, intensity, rhythm, etc.), arriving at a serial integral design. The electronic music produced in Cologne in the 1950s is the result of a variegated set of ideological trends, revolutionary impulses and desires for emancipation. This result was built and organised starting

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from a substantial hyperserial and hyperdeterministic trust, accompanied by a splendid dose of neo-positivist enthusiasm regarding technology. This approach, clearly and rigidly structured, is one of the influential traditions of contemporary music, from which–sometimes on manneristic lines–new paths were developed, clearly directed towards the almost obsessive stipulation and specification of all the parameters and all the phases, from writing to execution. Cage is far away.

4.2. Dematerialisation versus Saturation Webern had specified a way that in the following decades would become the starting point of pure electronics, beginning from Stockhausen: electronics that aims to isolate and reconstitute the shadowy, primitive energy of pure sound. The art of Webern, fruit of a deep, rigorous need for structuring, tends in this direction. This is the fruitful contradiction of Webern: the extreme art of compositional technique, the liveliest consciousness, the most mindful formal discipline, serve only to free music from every preestablished rule, from every arbitrary link imposed on the spirit, from every architecture and symmetry, until it really sounds like the song of a caged blackbird42.

Webern’s horizon is of absolute lyricism, of the attempt at the dissolution and dispersion of musical materiality, including the objective moments of musical configuration, in the pure flatus vocis of the subject, which no longer faces him extraneously. We may also include in this type of perspective those composers who work on the subject of sound, above all at the level of the microformal, meticulously generating and organising dusty microstructures, musically, technically and poetically. One such is Curtis Roads, who investigated the technique of ‘grainy synthesis’, developed by Barry Truax and used in the synthesis of sound, working with elementary acoustic elements, namely microsounds (or indeed, grains); others are Salvatore Sciarrino, and with the most recent minimalism Carola Bauckholt. This trend moves in the direction opposite to the current of the French ‘saturationists’, among whom we must certainly count Raphaël Cendo and Franck Bedrossian. The technical and aesthetic choice that is the basis of their work is the choice to go beyond the limits, through excesses of energy, especially exploring the extremes of instrumental possibilities, particularly in relation to speed.

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‘Saturationist’ music is characterised by this tension towards the increase and freeing of energy, by means of the extensive use of instruments. The result is the creation of paroxysmal musical contexts of great impact, seeming to offer a new, original, contemporary horror vacui, the musical alter ego of the high complexity of today’s world. This trend is also characteristic of noise music, to which I will turn in the next chapter.

4.3. Seduction versus Rationality One of the most hotly debated topics in the field of contemporary music has to do with the presumed elimination of any relationship with pleasure. Adorno’s theses on this are well known, as are those–in opposition–of Hans Robert Jauss. Yet the question of the seductive or repelling drive of contemporary music remains open. Music is presented as the dimension within which the play between illumination and concealment is central, as Heidegger might say, between being and not-being, between sound and silence. Indeed, it is not a matter of simple centrality, but rather of a status essential to the subsistence of the phenomenon of music, which is marked by its irreducible, indefinable, contradictory nature. In music we trace a series of “confusions”, or rather “infinite confusion”, which clearly expresses the idea of what music is, and what is its “natural regime”: Finding that it is standing before infinity, possibility, and indeterminacy, the mind loses itself in an inextricable crisscrossing of bifurcated bifurcation, in a labyrinthine network of crossroads that branch into crossroads of crossroads. There are no more simple givens, but rather complications that proliferate into infinity. The infinitely equivocal: this is music’s natural regime43.

The infinite confusion represented by music is what it is bound to, in addition to the critique of the metaphysical and linguistic conception of music, even the critique of the expressionist prejudices. Music, on the basis of these prejudices, is seen as the bearer of meaning and instrument for the communication of ideas. Vladimir Jankélévitch, conversely, does not see it as an instrumental or ‘tool’ expressionism that “presupposes the precedence and the hegemony of guiding intellect, that is, the logical and reasoning aspect of our soul”44. Thus, still considering music as mere language, meaning must precede it and pre-exist it, in order to be subsequently expressed. Consequently, before audible music there must be a supersensitive, superaudible music: “perfectly silent music that is

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indifferent to any particular expression”45. To this music-in-itself, expressed music would be an obstacle, so that the sense of hearing, in order to receive the sound wave emitted by the instrument, must reduce inaudible music. But then: does hearing place us in communication with the world of sound or bar us from the music of the angels? Allow us to hear perceptible music or prevent us from grasping intelligible music?46.

These paradoxes are reached on the wave of the expressionist prejudices, or rather because of an actual “expressionist corruption of the relationships between meaning and sign”. The landing place of Jankélévitch’s philosophico-musical thought is where subjectivity, in the aesthetic experience, is taken on in its tendency towards the confines of “universal omnipotence”, where, finally, speech will be evasion. In the aesthetic-musical dimension ambiguities and constant contradictions tend to be fused and confused. Music speaks without saying anything, it is an “absent presence”, a “who knows what, and who knows where, and who knows when”47, it is “inscrutable workings of the musical Charme” and of the “innocence of a poetic act that has time as its only dimension”48. Thus the ineffability of music touches on its own theoretical treatment, which also becomes ineffable, faithful, in this respect, to the assumption that no one should write “on” music, but “with” music and musically, remaining accomplices of its mystery49. But what are these mysteries, supposing that there is always one available and ready to be used? What degree of seduction and sensuality is there in contemporary music? Indeed, is there any necessity for seduction and sensuality? A reflection is necessary on the relationship between the aesthetic pleasure and the rational (or hyper-rationalistic) organisation of composition, above all when it springs from mathematical or algorithmic operations. The question arises of the possibility of balancing expressive urgency with musical research of an almost scientific orientation. It is not easy to answer clearly. It is probably more useful to formulate a question, returning to an observation of Luigi Rognoni’s regarding electroacoustic music. Does contemporary music, failing to devote adequate attention to its relationship with the public, perhaps run the risk of moving in a blind alley, lost in the abstractions of mathematical calculation, … concerned only to attain astounding, absurd constructions empty of that “emotive” content … that had justified and validated the works of its most direct predecessors?50

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Notes 1

Donald Kuspit, “The Contradictory Character of Post-modernism,” in Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics, edited by John W. Bender and H. Gene Blocker (Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, 1993), 94. 2 Donald Kuspit, “The Contradictory Character of Post-modernism,” 93. 3 This is the case for instance, of the Double fugue in G sharp minor in the second volume of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, with which, according to Theodor W. Adorno, the late Beethoven must have been very well acquainted. Adorno writes that it is an extraordinary piece, not only because of the chromatisms in it (by no means rare in Bach), but above all because of the suspended, consciously vague harmonisation, which ends by recalling the more mature Chopin (see Theodor W. Adorno, “Bach Defended against his Devotees,” trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, in Prisms [London: Neville Spearman, 1969], 133-46; orig. ed. “Bach gegen seine Liebhaber verteidigt,” in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [Berlin-Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1955] - Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 10, Erste Hälfte [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003], 138-51). 4 I must at once make clear that in these passages there is a touch of the paradoxical, and of the provocative. It is indisputable, in fact, that there is a passage from a generic ‘modern’ to an equally generically ‘post-modern’ dimension. The difficulty is how to decide which characteristics to assign beyond a shadow of a doubt to one or the other. 5 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); orig. ed. La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 6 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” in Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1963) (Gesammelte Schriften, Bd 15: Komposition für den Film - Der getreue Korrepetitor [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003] 188-248). 7 I refer, of course, to the essay “The Aging of New Music,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2002), 181-202; orig. ed. “Das Altern der Neuen Musik” (1955), in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 1991 [1956]), 136-59. 8 Luigi Rognoni, “La musicologia filosofica di Adorno,” introduction to Theodor W. Adorno, Filosofia della musica moderna, trans. Giacomo Manzoni (Torino: Einaudi 19595); new ed. edited by Antonio Serravezza (Torino: Einaudi, 2002); orig. ed. Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1949). For a brief but very accurate analysis of Rognoni’s introduction and more generally on some aspects of the first reception in Italy of Filosofia della musica moderna, see Antonio Serravezza, “Introduzione” to Theodor W. Adorno, Filosofia della musica moderna (2002), especially VII-XIII. On the ‘crisis’ to which Rognoni referred, Serravezza explains that “it was, symbolically, the key word and the cipher of an

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ethico-political horizon that saw intellectual work as analysis of the unresolved complexity of the real, of its unstable, contradictory, intrinsically uncertain nature, and hence as tension towards the solution of the problem in the sense of reason–in the lay sense–and progress” (Antonio Serravezza, “Introduzione” to Theodor W. Adorno, Filosofia della musica moderna, VIII). 9 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London-New York: Continuum, 2007). 10 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music. 11 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity. Provisional Considerations, online http://www.searchnewmusic.org/Mahnkopf_modernity.pdf. 12 See Harry Lehmann, “Avant-Garde Today. A Theoretical Model of Aesthetic Modernity,” in Critical Composition Today (= New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, vol. 5), edited by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (Hofheim: Wolke, 2006), 9-42; Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Kritik der neuen Musik. Entwurf einer Musik des 21. Jahrhunderts (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998); Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Neue Musik am Beginn der Zweiten Moderne,” Merkur 594/595 (1998), 864-75; ClausSteffen Mahnkopf, “Thesen zur Zweiten Moderne,” Musik & Ästhetik 36 (2005), 38-40; Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Theorie der musikalischen Post-moderne,” Musik & Ästhetik 46 (2008), 10-32; Oliver Fahle, Bilder der Zweiten Moderne (= serie moderner film, vol. 3) (Weimar, 2005); Peter Ruzicka, “Zweite Moderne und Musiktheater,” Musik & Ästhetik 30 (2004), 81-92; Heinrich Klotz, Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Moderne, Post-moderne, Zweite Moderne (Münich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1999). 13 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Der dialektische Komponist,” in Impromptus. Zweite Folge neu gedruckter musikalischer Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968). On the interweaving of philosophical thought, critical theory and function of music, see Giacomo Fronzi, Theodor W. Adorno. Pensiero critico e musica, preface by Paolo Pellegrino (Milano: Mimesis, 2011). 14 See Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (London-New York: Continuum, 2012); orig. ed. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölfe theoritische Vorlesungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1962). 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London-New York: Continuum, 2002), 222; orig. ed. Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970). 16 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity, 4. 17 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity, 5. 18 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity, 5-6. 19 Andrea Lanza, Il secondo Novecento (Torino: EDT, 1991), 265.

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33

On Cage, see Giacomo Fronzi, ed., John Cage. Una rivoluzione lunga cent’anni (Milano: Mimesis, 2012) and Giacomo Fronzi, La filosofia di John Cage. Per una politica dell’ascolto, preface by Carlo Serra (Milano: Mimesis, 2014). 21 Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October LXXXI (1997), 73. 22 John Rea, “Il post-moderno,” in Enciclopedia della Musica (10 voll.), edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, with the collaboration of Margaret Bent, Rossana Dalmonte and Mario Baroni, vol. IV “Piaceri e seduzioni nella musica del XXsecolo” (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), 1215. 23 John Rea, “Il post-moderno,” 1219. 24 John Rea, “Il post-moderno,” 1221. 25 John Rea, “Il post-moderno,” 1234. 26 Paolo Rossi, ed., La Scienza Nuova di Giambattista Vico (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), 37, quoted in John Rea, “Il post-moderno”, 1235. 27 John Rea, “Il post-moderno,” 1235. 28 I deal with these questions in my book Electrosound. Storia ed estetica della musica elettroacustica (Torino: EDT, 2013). 29 Gillo Dorfles, Il divenire delle arti. Ricognizione nei linguaggi artistici (Milano: Bompiani, 20024; I ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1959), 197. 30 Michel Chion, Musica, media e tecnologie: un manuale per capire, un saggio per riflettere (Milano: il Saggiatore 1996 [1994]), 7. 31 Luciano Berio, “Prefazione” to La musica elettronica, edited by Henri Pousseur (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976), IX. 32 Dominique Olivier, “Le «musique actuelles»,” in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. IV, 1182. On this, see Andrew Jones, Plunderphonics, Pataphysics and Pop Mechanics. An Introduction to ‘musique actuelle’ (Wembley, UK: Saf, 1995). 33 Among the main exponents of this new musical avant-garde we may mention René Lussier, Heiner Goebbels, Tom Zé, Lindsay Cooper and Fred Frith. 34 Dominique Olivier, “Le «musique actuelles»,” 1187. 35 Danielle Pallardy-Roger, “Dans le ventre de la musique actuelle,” Circuit VI, no. 2 (1995), 11, quoted in Dominique Olivier, “Le «musique actuelles»,” 1189. 36 Dominique Olivier, “Le «musique actuelles»,” 1190. 37 Ivan Fedele, Presentation of the Festival. 38 See Richard Kostelanetz, “Beginning with Cage” (1949), in Writings about John Cage, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 9. 39 See John Cage, “Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 36. On the process of composition of Music of Changes, see John Cage, “To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in Silence, 57-9. 40 See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 41 Francesco Galante and Nicola Sani, Musica espansa. Percorsi elettroacustici di fine millennio (Milano: Ricordi-LIM, 2000), 62.

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See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anton von Webern,” in Impromptus (Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 17: Musikalische Schriften IV. Moments musicaux – Impromptus, [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003], 204-9). 43 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 63-4; orig. ed. La musique et l’ineffable (Paris: A. Colin, 1961). 44 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 25. 45 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 26. 46 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 26. 47 See Vladimir Jankélévitch, La présence lointaine. Albéniz, Séverac, Mompou (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). 48 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, XXII. 49 See Vladimir Jankélévitch and Béatrice Berlowitz, Quelque part dans l’inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 50 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” in Fenomenologia della musica radicale (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 23.

CHAPTER TWO NOISE: EMANCIPATION, CHAOS, RESISTANCE

1. Premise In Chapter One I brought out certain preliminary questions linked to contemporary music, i.e. music composed during the 20th century. I devoted particular attention to the definition of contemporary music in its relationship with modernity and post-modernity, and on certain contemporary trends. As for this, I focused attention on certain contemporary trends, such as electroacoustic music, a subject to which I shall often return in the course of this book. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on one of the most important words in the vocabulary of contemporary music, which has been radically revived especially by electroacoustic music: noise. Noise is generally perceived and considered as the opposite pole to sound. The term sound indicates both the physical-acoustic phenomenon represented by vibrations (which are no other than alternating movements of an elastic body around its position of equilibrium) transmitted in an environment, and the subjective effect constituted by the sensation produced by the stimulation of the hearing apparatus. It is the first meaning that interests us at this point. Regarding this, it must be added that sound is propagated in the air periodically in waves, and is characterised on the basis of three dimensions: height (which depends on the frequency of the vibrations), intensity (which depends on their with) and timbre (which depends mainly on the wave form). In contrast, noise is a non-periodic physical-acoustic phenomenon, whose components are not harmonics of a base frequency and which, above all, is felt as particularly unpleasant. This is an approximate, superficial definition, since–as we shall see–the relationship between noise and aesthetic pleasure is by no means to be taken for granted.

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From a strictly musical point of view, at the beginning of the 20th century noise appeared as the result of an aesthetic re-appropriation of the residual, of waste (parallel with an analogous trend of the historical avantgarde and of later artistic movements), but also as a sort of extra-musical degeneration of dissonance. These two meanings are neither antithetical nor unrelated. On the contrary, they represent closely interwoven developments. Nonetheless, with reference to the second meaning, the irruption of noise in the musical field emerged as a natural consequence of the gradual broadening of composers’ research on sound, starting on the harmonic, melodic, timbric and structural level (though always in the context of a traditional instrumental timbre) at the beginning of the 20th century, and arriving at the most extreme regions of ‘sound’ or rather ‘acoustics’. From the acusmatic composers to today’s DJs, by way of a multitude of unclassifiable artists and rock groups, research on noise is still in a very happy phase. I do not intend here to follow these experimental paths1 exhaustively, but in more limited fashion to recall four particular moments in this rich history, namely those at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the 20th century, but also at the beginning of the 21st. My aim is to stress the aesthetic and, if you will, poetic (and political) importance of noise, considered no longer banally and superficially as an element of disturbance from which to flee, but as an aesthetic category dense in theoretical, historical and sociological, as well as perceptive and technological, implications. Since the role played by noise in 20th century music is, in my view, parallel with and analogous to the role of the ugly in the 20th century art, before dealing with the aesthetic function of noise in some places in 20th and 21st century music, it will be convenient to step back and retrace the developmental lines of the aesthetic of the ugly.

2. Musical Ugliness? To say that art is not identical with the concept of beauty, but requires for its realization the concept of the ugly as its negation, is a platitude2.

The doctrine of the beautiful with which aesthetics arose and was affirmed, starting from the year of the publication (1750) of Alexander G. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, identifies it with sensible perfection3. This notion relates, on the one hand, to the character of perfection peculiar to sensible representation as artistic representation; on the other, to the

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special character that distinguishes the feeling of pleasure that accompanies the aesthetic experience. If Immanuel Kant allows the beautiful a certain independence alongside the traditional moral (good) and cognitive (true) values–though maintaining a deep relationship with the ethical sphere–in Romanticism, especially in Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schelling, art is identified with the beautiful. To this is added the perspective of Hegel, which goes back irresistibly to the overlap of beauty and truth (typical of the classical Greek world). According to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, art is experiencing a phase of “dissolution” (Auflösung) in the modern world; to this concept is linked the famous idea of the “death of art”. Contrary to what has sometimes been mistakenly supposed, this expression–not Hegel’s own– does not indicate an overall, definitive disappearance of the phenomenon of art, but rather the fact that art is simply a means of giving complete expression to the true in sensible form4. Hegel’s position may be seen in the broader picture of the mid-19th century, when both art and beauty were under indictment, and there was a growing feeling towards them of disappointment and rejection, which was to contribute to the introduction into the theoretical debate of a category traditionally opposed to the beautiful, one which had previously been beyond the pale of art: the ugly. In 1853, a student of Hegel’s, Karl Rosenkranz, published the first systematic treatment of ugliness: Aesthetics of Ugliness5. As was to be the case for noise, ugliness was not ‘discovered’ in the 19th-20th century, but ‘rediscovered’ after thousands of years of obscurity, of forced concealment. From the conception of ugliness in Plato and Plotinus as zero degrees of beauty, as mere privation, as ‘not-being’, passing through the 18th century re-evaluation of other categories–such as the horrid, the tragic, the sublime, the immense, the disharmonic, etc.–and before Rosenkranz, came Friedrich Schlegel. As Remo Bodei reminds us in his prefatory essay to the Italian edition of Rosenkranz’s book, in 1795 Schlegel wrote a Study of Greek Poetry (revised in 1823), in which he laments the lack of essays worthy of the name on the “theory of ugliness”. In this context ugliness takes on the nature of denial of the beautiful (and no longer of mere being) and of a specific element of modern art, of which Hamlet is the symbol. In fact this work is connected … to ugliness in that [the ugly] is present in the characterisation, in the individual, in what is interesting, in the world of abstractions6.

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The beautiful becomes the alter ego of the ugly, correlative to it. It is here that Schlegel paves the way to an extended idea of the beautiful that includes even the ugly and the most typical trends of modern art, in which the ugly, the ephemeral and the banal play a leading role. With regard to this, the works of Charles Baudelaire, in particular, are among the most typical manifestations of the changes undergone by the sensibility and the aesthetic consciousness of modern man. The 18th century, with the passing from interiority and transcendence to exteriority and immanence, was the period of greatest ‘concentration’ and ‘limitation’ of aestheticity and pleasure in certain precise locations: the drawing room, the boudoir, the garden. The level of sensibility was further freed in the 19th century, when it opened up to a broader, more all-inclusive context, taking in dimensions that had hitherto been, on the whole, tacit (except, perhaps, for a few trends in baroque architecture): the bizarre, the unusual, the monstrous, the disturbing, the ephemeral. Baudelaire’s role in this development was of great significance. The link between the beautiful and the ephemeral, which the Futurists supported and revived at the beginning of the 20th century, was clearly traced by Baudelaire, who held that beauty materialises in the fleeting and eternal instant of an encounter, of an impossible but illusory promise of happiness, constantly deferred. But let us return to Rosenkranz. It is in the explosion and continuous succession of contradictions and conflicts that the dimension of the ugly is positioned. It is not merely passive, inert, but an active vigour, in development, which the more it is subjugated to the beautiful, the more it contributes to the looming power of the beautiful, which in its turn ceases to be static, to be an eternal, immutable idea to which art must simply adapt7.

Thus Rosenkranz’s work is offered as a sort of “paradoxical organisation of aesthetic chaos”, as the precise categorisation of the ugly of every species and subspecies, from the amorphous to the disharmonic, from the banal to the criminal and to the spectral, from the feeble to the hideous, from the awkward to the diabolical, concluding with the grotesque. What makes Rosenkranz’s analysis still more interesting is that he has put the subject of the ugly in a broader context, pertaining to social pathology, so that “his diagnosis implies a descent not only into the substratum of art, but into the hell of his own time”8, made up of emptiness, dissolution, horror. Rosenkranz, a faithful student of Hegel, still believes in the power of reason, and yet there begins to emerge a certain split from the iron trust Hegel harboured in the rationality of the

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real. The concept of the ugly, thought of as a term halfway between the concepts of the beautiful and of the comic, is analysed by Rosenkranz by way of what he intends as a way of laying out the entire universe of the ugly, in a parabola that curves from his first cloudy ideas (asymmetry and amorphousness) to the disorganisation of the beautiful by means of parody9. In the background is the conviction that hell is not only ethical or religious, but also aesthetic: we are overwhelmed by evil, sin and the ugly. This is the starting point for Rosenkranz, in his attempt to study the role of the ugly in a period that he regards as physically and morally corrupt, lacking the strength to conceive of authentic beauty; to this he prefers the spice of frivolity and corruption. In order to stimulate the dull nerves, the unheard-of, the disparate and the repugnant are brought together to the extreme: the disharmony of spirits, writes Rosenkranz, feeds on the ugly, which for this disharmony becomes the ideal of its negativity10. These last words do not show their real age. We need only see how and to what degree they correspond to certain expressions of contemporary art, abominable in the strict sense11, and also at the degenerations of taste in the context of the media of mass communication. Beyond this, however, we must note how the new role of the ugly in art, and the consequent encroachment in the extra-aesthetic, the grotesque and the ugly, reflect this path that passes from Romanticism into Verism, by way of Realism. On the basis of this development, the ugly would undergo a sort of aesthetic re-modulation through the agency of each art, starting from the historical avant-gardes. We may start again with a question. Can noise (in music) be considered the degeneration and radicalisation of what we might define as ‘musical ugliness’? Rosenkranz makes only fleeting mention of the ugly in music, in a section devoted to the ugly in relation to the single arts. In the case of music, because of the nature–ethereal, volatile, mysterious and symbolic–of sound and the uncertainty of the critical parameters, the ugly takes over even more space than in painting12. The ugly of which Rosenkranz writes is really none other than something that has not turned out well, that is uncompleted, a mistake, rather than an objective, a purpose, a trend, which was to be the case with the avant-gardes and, still later, the neo-avant-gardes. As far as noise is concerned in music, speaking some years ago Alessandro Arbo offered reflections on the ways in which the music of the West has come to terms with the confusion, the disorder of sound, saturated sound, degenerated or simply

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It is not a matter, in the 19th-20th century, of discovering or inventing noise, but rather, as in the case of the ugly, of re-discovering it after centuries of oblivion. The reasons for this exclusion, even more than musical, are of a philosophical-epistemological nature and are those of which I have written above. As in the case of philosophical writings related to art, so in the case of ancient writings on music, from Plato to St. Augustine, there is praise for order. Harmony in music, throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in parallel with the beautiful in art, was seen as an appreciable manifestation of a kind that can only be evoked in the ideal of a sound that is mathematically and acoustically “pure” (there was to be a return to pure sound in the 20th century, with the first attempts at composition with sinusoidal waves14). During the course of modernity and above all in the 18th century, sound came to be conceived “in its specific separation from noise”, together with the fact that noise became the object of imitation. The premises are represented by the arrival of a theatrical music, designed to calculate the effect produced on the listener and, of course, by the undisputed predominance of the paradigm of the mimesis/imitation of nature. Until its latest expressions, the Baroque found noise as a sign or presence of nature, from which the product of the imitation was expected to keep a certain distance15.

In the second half of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was do deal with this topic in various ways, for perhaps the first time yielding a certain argumentative space to noise. From Rousseau’s pages in the Dictionnaire de musique (1768) there emerges an ambivalent conception of noise: it is both a specific sound, going against the idea that noise would not be other than a “hearing sensation that is not sound and significant”, but at the same time, the noise would be “bewildering, confused music, where we hear more racket than harmony, more uproar than song”. Arbo rightly takes this double definition to a double level of analysis, aesthetic and then historical, in the sense that bewildering music is the degeneration so greatly feared by Rousseau, and in some cases given flesh by the music of his time. Probably one of Rousseau’s most brilliant intuitions on this topic is his bringing noise (like sound) back into the context of harmonics. In addition to these strictly musical considerations, there are socio-anthropological

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considerations linked to industrial development and to the very marked increase of the presence of sound in modern societies, to the point that, in the 20th century, it became a constant presence. “This condition of continuous noise, of constant motion, of incessant becoming, torments us now everywhere, at every moment”16. Raymond M. Schafer wrote that the progressive increase in time spent in closed environments, between the 19th and the 20th century, contributed to the development of two directionally opposed factors: the supreme art of music, and acoustic pollution, that is to say, noise17.

3. Futurist Music Although we owe the official, definitive liberation of noise in music to Futurism, traces of it can be found even earlier in history. This is explained by the fact that–as Jean-Jacques Nattiez writes–the border between music and noise is always defined culturally18, and that means that the characteristics of both are subject to historical dialectics. With Futurism, for the first time, we are faced with an artistic movement gifted with a global ideology that regards not only all the fields of expression of communication, but also those of morality and politics. It was Futurism that paved the way to the other two great movements of the first half of the 20th century: Dadaism and Surrealism. This was the first authentic avant-garde of the 20th century19, because its inspirer and founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the movement only after carrying out what Massimo Donà called the “universal resetting” of the arts. The revolutionary spirit of Futurism was entirely directed towards not only the renewal of all the arts, but also the total reformation of human existence. The trend inaugurated by the Futurist Movement and by inspiring sounds is the creation of a new ‘imagination’, a new lexicon of the arts. This trend would mark the beginning of a new aesthetic model, aiming to reform the existence of humans on the earth in toto. … It was a matter–Donà continues–of causing the explosion of the subversive power of a time that was at last ‘light’, freed, that is, from the weight of a pointlessly braking history; of welcoming it in the space set up by the creative act for a truly inaugural gesture. It was a matter of inhabiting the beginning and accepting its disconcerting freedom20.

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Futurism attempts to apply its own inspiring principles to all the arts: from painting to sculpture, from architecture to theatre and to photography, from literature to ceramics, from cinema to music. The revolutionary nature of futurist provocations, but also of the brilliant ideas that filled them, is an important stage in the history of music too21. The Italian Futurists could soon be heard berating Italy as the land where museums and ruins spread across the cultural landscape like a crop of tombstones and were leading them forward with Marinetti’s revelation in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism22 that a roaring car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace23. For the futurists this meant breaking with academic art, which was frozen in its traditions and in its senseless bond with the beautiful and with the emotional world, to yield a place to all the noises of the modern world. As Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli had written many years earlier in Pesi, misure e prezzi del genio artistico (1914), the beautiful has nothing to do with art and emotion, but is an accessory characteristic of the work of art: it may or may not exist, varying from one individual to another and from one moment to the next. Emotion is of no use for determining the objective value of a work of art. Futurism has taught that beauty may be found in the most insignificant act, the most elementary and impoverished of intellectual trappings. Eternity is the fixation of poets who are too serious and pretentious: enjoy the ephemeral, said Marinetti, the first to perceive that the everyday object, the advertising image, the commercial product will end in museums24.

From the harmonic adventures of the romantics to the chromatism of Wagner and the decomposition of impressionist sound, we come to the noise breakthrough of Futurism. The most important single achievement in the early history of avant-garde noise was the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s art of noises. … The art of noises seemingly came out of nowhere: there was no easily observable precedent for it within music, and it came from an unlikely person25.

In his Manifesto tecnico della musica futurista, of 11 March 1911, Francesco Balilla Pratella insists on recourse to the whole range of sounds available, entirely without exclusion or discrimination. Sky, waters, forests, rivers, mountains, tangles of ships and teeming cities, through the soul of the musician are transformed into wonderful, powerful

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voices that humanly sing the passions and desires of man, for his joy and his griefs, and reveal to him through art the common, indissoluble relationship that binds him to the rest of nature26.

Musica futurista, composed by Pratella and first performed in 1913 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, is a work still clearly animated by a sort of Neoclassicism based on the scale of whole tones, with a pinch of French Impressionism, but the intention is openly announced to approach ‘enharmonism’ (i.e. micro-interval music) and polyrhythmia, both elements that were to be established in both jazz and electronic music. The idea of enharmonic music which proceeds by micro-intervals destroying at its roots any semblance of diatonic system, was perhaps the most original statement of Pratella’s Manifesto, although on closer inspection it was not such a new idea: Busoni, in his 1900 Saggio di una nuova estetica musicale had already spoken of thirds and sixths of a tone27.

On 11 March 1913, after the performance of Pratella’s work, the Arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista (Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto) was made public. Here Luigi Russolo describes the futurist project in music. It is thus the birth of bruitism. Yes, this time, without the shadow of a doubt, it is well the noise, that the futurists, directly, are (that they advocate!) as the base material of their work 28.

In this text, where we see the “most agressive and most genuinely avant-garde face”29 typical of Marinetti’s Futurism, Russolo exalts Pratella’s artistic innovation, along with the irruption and eruption of noise in the 19th century, linked to the invention and spread of machines. Nature is silent, the mechanised human world is noisy. Nor is it only a matter of the irruption of the noise of machines and industry. As Douglas Kahn writes, Russolo’s art of noises appears to be an ineluctable expression of the machines and motors of modernity, yet if that were the case, an art of noises seemingly would have arisen much earlier elsewhere. Although Italy arrived late to the industrial revolution, its accelerated growth rivaled that of any spot on the continent: it was not so much modernism per se but modernism hitting the ground at full speed30.

Worn-out melodies cast aside, futurist musical art sought increasingly dissonant, strange, harsh sound amalgams, approaching noise-sound. Thus,

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As Fred Prieberg shows, the artistic discovery of noise is the consequence of the recognition that it is necessary to willingly accept the world of machines in the work of musical art, or, still better, of an “animation” of the mechanism. Russolo especially attempted to always use the new acoustic material, freed of its exterior meaning, in stylised fashion, as a symbol of a new vital feeling, like a brutal “primitive scream”32. This is not simply imitative reproduction. The aim is to harmonise and regulate noises harmonically and rhythmically: to this end, the ‘noise tuners’ were produced. By 1916, Russolo had made twenty-one of these instruments, for various noises and intensities of noise, according to a precise intonation, because he wanted to use them melodically, with an imperceptible transition from one degree to the next of noise-sounds, as in a glissando33. Enrico Fubini asks pointedly whether futurist musicians, whose impact on Italian music between the two World Wars was little or nothing, should be considered “unheard prophets or men out of time projecting childish quirks”34. His answer is that probably neither one nor the other is the case. Without undervaluing their contribution in terms of the future developments of music, they are to be considered men of their time, interpreters of a particular aspect of that time. This, Fubini goes on, can be verified only if we bear in mind the intimate, organic nexus linking Futurism to Fascism, which in Italy between 1910 and 1920 was explicitly subversive, made up of violence, brutality, activism as ends in themselves, exaltation of disorder and of invasion in war, exaggerated nationalism, antisocialism, antidemocracy, a falsely aesthetic view of life35.

All these are also characteristics of futurism. Although the Fascist exaltation of disorder was followed by restoration, bureaucratic and hierarchic order, the repression of all freedom and the rhetorical recovery of the past, this transition was not the end of the convergence of ideals with Futurism, since Fascism always prevails by means of the double face of subversion and the violent break with the past, institutional destruction and restoration of a new order. Hence the futurists should be considered “the avant-garde of Fascism, the cultural interpreters of its subverting period”36.

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Thus Fubini is in open disagreement with the tide of “aesthetic revisionism” to which the Futurist Movement was subject, remaining inevitably compromised by the Fascist regime. This, Fubini insists, does not mean denial of the European success of Italian Futurism, nor of its indubitable influence on other avant-garde movements; nor is it to deny the importance of Russolo’s intuitions. We may therefore conclude that the way pointed by Futurism, beyond the actual results and disregarding in some sense of both the ideological and the aesthetic value of its products, remains an inescapable passage in the context of the developments of contemporary music and, more precisely, (1) of the relationship between compositional praxis and technico-technological development, and (2) of the musical, aesthetic and political importance of the extra-sound dimension.

4. Musique Concrète Contemporary music, in its development, has repudiated consonances to create space for an ever-increasing number of dissonances, opening the way to the introduction of noises. It became necessary to combine them and subordinate them to an Art of Noises in order to obtain a new, truly contemporary music. For Jean Molino, the dialectic between sound and noise is between pure and impure. What, indeed, is more impure than simple noise? But what “special acoustic pleasure” it produces, too, when it is subjected to an aesthetic perception, in other words separated from its function and its utilitarian meaning, where it stands out against the background of the musical sounds of tradition. It is a pleasure much like that given by dissonance, a new dissonance, not yet integrated in the system. In the case of noise, however, integration is more difficult and with pleasure (this is a constant in modern art) are mingled disgust, shock, the pain of the amorphous and ugly, which offer an entirely new tonality and intensity37. Arbo, following Pierre-Albert Castanet, nonetheless stresses that the futurist apologia of noise is symbolic of a broader trend, of a more general awareness that is taking form in European milieus. Examples of this (in music) are Anton Webern’s Funeral March the fourth of the Sechs Stücke für grosse Orchester op. 6 (1909) and Alban Berg’s Präludium of the Drei Orchesterstücke op. 6 (1913-14). In 1917, Erik Satie, at the urging of Jean Cocteau, wrote the score for the ballet Parade, for which he succeeded in setting to music certain specific elements that Cocteau intended to introduce in the theatre (the daily, the cinema, the circus, etc.). Cocteau

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asked Satie for a neutral score, “that would be a background of sounds of various kinds (dynamo, Morse equipment, sirens, express trains/coffee machines and aeroplanes …)”38. Satie responded at his best, introducing many concrete noises, in particular of a percussive nature, becoming by full right a member of the group of those who carried out what we may call the “sound trials” that were making inroads in that period39. From the 1920s to the 1950s the musical universe was being transformed into an acoustic universe, in which noises, more or less organised, more or less reworked, played an increasingly important part, from Varèse to Cage, arriving at the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. The 1950s saw the development of an infinite series of possibilities of exploration of sound/noise, to the point that one might say that, in the span of a decade, there was no avant-garde music that was not or did not claim to be (at least to some degree) bruitiste40.

Especially as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the development of a new sound universe underwent an acceleration, supported both by the new noise trends and by the spread of the first electrical technologies and the invention of proto-electronic tools capable of generating musical signals. Against this background, as early as the end of the 1940s, the experience of concrete music arose and developed, with its creator Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer and musician. Fred Prieberg evocatively recounts his first experience with concrete music. It was some time between Saturday night and Sunday morning in October 1953, at the “Donaueschinger Musiktage”. One item on the programme of these Days was the performance of Schaeffer’s opera Orphée 53. Prieberg was present at the dress rehearsal of the opera, sitting attentively in the riding school, waiting to see something happen, in some excitement. Once the preparations were completed, Schaeffer appeared in person, a figure, writes Prieberg, often encountered at the frontiers between true art and humbug, slim, energetic, fiercely combative. At the same time, Prieberg goes on, he looked like a sleepwalker, one who could never be regarded as responsible for his actions, a scatterbrain, at one and the same time a musician, a writer, a poet, an engineer, a mathematician–a man of explosive, ceaseless brainwaves, arrogant, a capable organiser and propagandist. His Parisian charm, concludes Prieberg, seemed to have been completely transformed into a fanatical, almost repulsive perseverance41. Prieberg managed to sit it out to the end of the performance, in the company, to be honest, of few other listeners. What emerged furiously from the loudspeakers was noise, noise and more noise. Everything raged

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almost without pause or interruption, drawing the ear to every corner of the room, bombarding it with volleys of cruel blows. Sometimes it was caressed by lyrical passages, unexpected sweetness. The result was not enthralling. Schaeffer’s attempt to introduce concrete music in Germany was a failure, not so much because of the amateurish performance as because of the short-sightedness of the German music critics. Despite these initial difficulties, Schaeffer remains a point of reference, the figure from whom it all began. Born in a family of instrumentalists (he himself was an amateur musician), he was above all a technician, and as such, as an engineer to be exact, he joined the RDF (later RTFRadiodiffusion Télévision Française) in 1936. His research on noise and concrete music began twelve years later, in 1948, at the RTF, when Schaeffer, who was interested in investigating the various sociological, aesthetic and technological aspects of music and acoustic communication in general, undertook a programme of experimentation on pre-recorded materials, first of all noises. The first steps in this direction, apart from the Italian futurist experience, were taken in the context of the “Club d’Essai”, founded in 1946 by Wladimir Porché, director general of the RTF. Two years later, Schaeffer began to hypothesise a symphony of noises, developing the idea of using noise instead of sound, approaching music to a catalogue of mainly environmental sounds and beginning to experiment with the use of variations of speed, of the height of sound or mixing several sources reproduced simultaneously. In parallel, he set to work to give written form (in essays) to his impressions, his experiences and his research. These theoretical reflections were brought together in the two texts Introduction à la musique concrète and À la recherche d’une musique concrète42. Schaeffer’s writings offer evidence of many intuitions, among which some were particularly fruitful, such as the idea that “extramusical sounds could be treated musically by means of classifying them in a sort of ‘scale’, while maintaining their characteristic of being ‘noise’”43. This led Schaeffer to the definition of “concrete music”: “Ce parti pris de composition avec des matériaux prélevés sur le donné sonore experimental, je le nomme, par construction, Musique Concrète”. The first piece of concrete music is the well-known Etude aux chemins de fer: three minutes of railway material assembled and transformed with the meagre means he had at his disposal. The single sound events were selected and re-recorded on various turntables, and subsequently mixed. Apart from a melodic variation of the whistle, no significant transformations appear. The historical importance of this piece lies, however, as Lowell Cross notes, in four observations: 1. For the first time

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the act of composition is the fruit of a procedure of a technological nature; 2. The work can be played an infinite number of times always in the same way; 3. The ‘performance’ does not depend on a human ‘performer’; 4. The sound formants are concrete, and induce the listener to take a completely different approach from that typical of ‘abstract’ music. The main obstacle Schaeffer met was of a technical nature and not strictly musical, and it is linked to the fact that there was no instrument on which concrete music could be played. Schaeffer imagined an enormous machine, of the cybernetic type, capable of carrying out millions of combinations, not knowing, but hoping confidently, that one would actually be invented. In the absence of this machine, Schaeffer instinctively turned to the piano, because, on the basis of his experience with manipulating sounds and noises, he was well aware that a piano can replace all the other ways of generating noises, by way of striking the strings, plucking them, skimming them, and so on. Moreover, the keyboard may be considered no longer as a musical instrument, but as a handy way of attaching the strings, which would have previously undergone a certain ‘preparation’44. Towards the end of the 1950s, Schaeffer, open reflection on sound theory and of a new ‘art of listening’, thus promotes research pieces that voluntarily conceal sound sources and seek an obliged abstraction 45,

setting up the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), which in the 1950s and 1960s … became a focus for many young composers and fostered an important French school of electro-acoustic composition and research; for a period, this lay claim to be the main French avant-garde46.

In the years that followed, Schaeffer’s position was marked by his excessively austere, rigid character, which prevented him from facing the strong personalities emerging at the GRM who, shortly after, were to open new frontiers for concrete music: for example, Guy Reibel, FrançoisBernard Mâche, Ivo Malec, Luc Ferrari, François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, Iannis Xenakis, Françoise Barrière or Christian Clozier. Schaeffer’s (theoretical and musical) output, as well as giving noise a new guise, raises important questions about the nature and development of the relationship between the ear and the concrete or ‘noise’ universe. Listening to concrete works, according to Kosmicki, produces the pleasure of feeling the energy of sound matter in these works, which are full of life.

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They are works that may be evaluated in various ways, interpreting the importance and the role of Schaeffer’s work differently. Nonetheless, one’s works are nevertheless essential. They lead the way for electronic music to follow. They definitively incorporate the vastness of audible sound, while brushing aside the separation between noise and its music from an experimental point of view as from an aesthetic point of view47.

5. Glitch As I said in the opening pages, the course of noise in contemporary music can only be followed by a series of leaps, which may be difficult and exaggerated, though inevitable. Adopting this ‘narrative’ strategy demands reference to what happened at the beginning of the 20th century (with Futurism), in mid-century (in particular with Schaeffer), at the end of the century and in our own day (to which I shall turn in the next section), omitting whatever of importance may have happened in the intermediate decades. So we shall set aside the French casseroles and come directly to the digital age, or rather the age of post-digital aesthetics. As is well known, the spread of personal computers and Internet, as well as other digital media, has enormously increased the sphere of users and creators of electronic music. This set in motion the digital revolution, which as early as the late 1990s no less an observer than Nicholas Negroponte considered at an end: “The digital revolution is over”48. This period was followed by a phase that Kim Cascone has defined as “postdigital”49, whose keywords are glitch, microwave, DSP (Digital Signal Processor50) and microscopic music. It is interesting that, by a sort of heterogenesis of ends or, more simply, ‘gaffes’, post-digital music appeared as the result of a failure. Post-digital aesthetics is the consequence of the ‘failure’ of digital technology, consisting of errors of application, of clipping, of noises of quantisation and background noises, of glitches, system crashes, bugs, and so on. This is the sounding or “noisy” matter that the post-digital composers try to incorporate in their music: While technological failure is often controlled and suppressed–its effects buried beneath the threshold of perception–most audio tools can zoom in on the errors, allowing composers to make them the focus of their work51.

There are various kinds of audio-digital ‘failure’ and, inevitably, fluctuation between horrible results and tapestries of very interesting

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sounds. Yet what seems a completely new perspective is really the representation of experimental research even from the distant past, sub specie contemporary. Much work had previously been done in this area such as the optical soundtrack work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the vinyl record manipulations of John Cage and Christian Marclay, to name a few. What is new is that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short period of time52.

It is thus a sort of ‘back to the future’, a contemporary declension of a trend, starting with Duchamp, with the futurists, and then reasserted with the neo-avant-garde, directed at the unhealthy, ‘peripheral’ heart of the social body and the natural environment. This trend is taken as its own by the post-digital, which concentrates on what is in our immediate vicinity, but to which we generally pay scant attention, exploring worlds that are usually barred to our everyday perceptions. Cascone rightly identifies in Futurism and in Cage’s 4’33” the forerunners of this current of research. Yet, the ‘neo-noise’ has a far more articulate background. The keyword of the post-digital age is probably glitch. This word (which is said to have been used for the first time by a former astronaut, John Glenn, in 1962, to refer to a peak or a change of tension in an electrical current) is used to refer to the ‘error’ in a digital sound or in a combination of digital sounds, connected to a problem of translation or of deterioration of the digital data. The use in art and music of these ‘errors’ led to a genuine electronic genre, which also arose from the ashes of a techno, in the early 1990s, which seemed to move increasingly in the ‘already said’, the foreseeable, the aesthetically homogeneous53. To make this sector of electronics more dynamic, some DJs and musicians with a degree of familiarity with the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Morton Subotnick began to explore new, ‘hybrid’ territories. Thus in Finland there arose Mika Vainio’s recording label “Sähkö”, which soon issued to a jampacked catalogue of a sort of minimal-techno-glitch. In the context of this sort of subset of contemporary electronics, the main protagonists may be said to be Oval, Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda. Oval is a German electronic music group, founded in 1991 on the basis of the idea of Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, though the latter two were to leave the group in 1995. Oval recuperated the newest version of phonographic failure, the sound of digital skipping and scratching, transforming the sounds of dysfunction into something musical54,

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substantially rejecting the use of synthesisers and preferring deliberately scratched compact discs. Alva Noto, the pseudonym of Carsten Nicolai, is another German artist, distinctly eclectic, interested in achieving aesthetic results starting from the use of unusual technological devices, such as modems or fax machines. Alva Noto’s sound, in the late 1990s and the first years of this century, is in effect a glitch conceived in terms of microsound, made up of changing, barely perceptible effects, typified by a regular rhythmic combination. Alva Noto “loves to work with inscrutable sounds”55, and in his albums Xerrox No. 1 and Xerrox No. 2 (respectively 2007 and 2009) he develops the sounds with a hypnotic extension of their effects, reducing the rhythmic element to a minimum. This last is a tendency to be found also in the works that are the fruit of his collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 1999, Alva Noto, with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender, founded the label “Raster Noton”, which has, since the beginning, specialised in the most innovative digital music. Ryoji Ikeda, who “identifies himself as both a musician and a sound artist, and his works frequently feature sounds that travel through the stereophonic field”56. He, does not composes instrumental music, but only electronic music with images, giving life to a “hybrid ultra-minimalist” aesthetics, which takes the form of a sound exploration centred on the relationship between nature, perception and space. His unmistakable style betrays the desire to prompt completely new experiences, going beyond the outer limits of the various perceptive (acoustic and visual) conditions, playing at fever pitch with sounds, noises, colours and lights, as is clear from his Test Pattern (2006-2007). In the last few years, the Glitch Movement has grown, and now includes dozens of artists, such as Taylor Deupree, Nobukazu Takemura, Neina, Richard Chartier, Pimmon, *0, Autopoieses or T:un[k], artists who were to enliven the second wave of the Glitch Movement, and who have differentiated and enriched the aesthetic possibilities.

6. Noise, Japanoise and Politico-aesthetic Resistance 6.1. Art, Aesthetics and Politics At this point I would like to introduce another topic that might, in fact, be cited with reference not only to noise, but to music and the arts in general: the relationship between art, aesthetics and politics.

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This is not an entirely original question, but one that took on very specific connotations in the 20th and 21st centuries. It was art, before aesthetics, that historically had direct relations with politics, though in a particularly broad sense. This relationship is more precisely between art (in the sense of the activity in which private and public relations, technical problems, problems of relationship with tradition, with the public, and so on converge) and social praxis (in the sense of the world of social transformations and of the institutions). Art and politics have a deep, consubstantial relationship, with regard not only to the content and themes dealt with, but also in the external (extra-artistic) relations of the artistic fact, relations that make of the artistic fact a social fact. If art is to be seen as historico-social, inevitably it falls within the political dimension, obviously in a very broad sense. The social aspect of art, which in some cases is presented immediately, is mediated by the formal principle, or, to use György Lukàcs’s expression, by the “perspective”. The sheer form expresses a critical-oppositive stimulus which still cannot, however, be strictly called ‘political’. As we shall see, the subject may be dealt with in many different ways. Among the most interesting contributions to this debate, especially as regards the relationship between aesthetics and politics, is Jacques Rancière’s, according to which aesthetics and politics share not the means, but the context, the ambit, namely aisthesis. The object and setting of politics, as Paolo Godani makes clear in the Preface to the Italian edition of Malaise dans l’esthétique57, is the conformation of the ordinary sensible world, hence aesthetics and politics occupy the same space58. The relationship between aesthetics and politics, says Rancière, is the relationship between this “aesthetics of politics” and the “politics of aesthetics”, or in other words the way the practices and forms of visibility of art intervene in the “distribution of the sensible” and in its “reconformation”, setting aside spaces and times, subjects and objects, ordinary and singular59. This cohabitation leads to further distinctions, which were current in much German thought at the end of the 18th century, between necessity and freedom, instinct and reason, sensibility and intellect. For instance, Friedrich Schiller, who provides a picture that is closely related to the topic we are dealing with, states the need for an “aesthetic education” designed as the basis for the political formation of the State, for it is only through beauty that freedom can be achieved60. This formulation starts from the premise that man is animated by two instincts, which refer to a double affiliation: to the sensible world (necessity) and to the intelligible world (freedom). For Schiller, the mediation between these two instincts is guaranteed by art in the sense of

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Spieltrieb (“play instinct”). But, Rancière wonders, how can the ‘gratuitous’ activity of play at one and the same time fuse “the autonomy of a context proper to art” and “the construction of the forms of a new collective life”? In answering this question, Rancière starts from the specificity of the work of art, or, more precisely, the mechanism on the basis of which a practice (a form of visibility or a manner of intelligibility) is traced back to a particular regime, proper precisely to art. Turning to the example of Schiller’s Juno Ludovisi, Rancière maintains that this statue may or may not be art, according to the regime of identification within which it is regarded. First of all, there is a regime in which Juno is regarded only as an image of herself (that is, as an image of the goddess). In the strict sense, there is no art in this regime, but only images, on which we pass judgment with regard to their intrinsic truth and to the effects they may have on the way of being of individuals and of the community. This regime Rancière defines as “ethical regime of the images”, in the sense “regime of indistinctness of art”61. There is yet another regime, in which the statue is freed from judgment as per its validity: this additional regime puts the work in the specific context of imitations. On this level, Juno may be defined as art for two reasons: 1) because it imposes a form on a substance; 2) because it is the implementation of a representation. Rancière defines this regime as “representation regime of the arts”. To these two regimes he adds a third, the “aesthetic regime of art”. The status of work of art is not recognised because the sculptor is considered to be faithful to an appropriate idea of the goddess or of the canons of representation. It is rather recognised in virtue of the statue’s belonging to a “specific sensorium”. For Rancière, the property of being an “artistic object” is bound not to a distinction among ways of doing, but rather to a “distinction among ways of being”. From this point of view, the work of art is a sensible heterogeneous form compared to the usual forms of sensible experience, because it appears in the context of a specific experience that suspends the ordinary connections both between reality and appearance and between matter and form, activity and passivity, intellect and sensibility62. Thus we return to Schiller, more precisely to Schiller’s (and Kant’s) concept of “play”. In play, ordinary experience is suspended. But, Rancière wonders, how can this suspension found a new art of living and a new form of life in common? The answer lies in the fact that the objects of art, in this specific aesthetic regime, are such to the degree that they belong to a sensorium different from that of “domination”. In Kant, free play and free appearance

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suspend the supremacy of form over matter or of intelligence over sensibility. Schiller, he continues, translates Kant’s philosophical propositions into anthropological, political propositions, so that, in the context of the French Revolution, the power of form over matter is the power of the State over the masses, of the class of intellect over the class of feeling, of men of culture over men of nature63. This, for Rancière, is how the aesthetic suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity is the basis of a revolution not only of state forms but, at a deeper level, of the sensible existence itself, for it is in virtue of its being a specific experience that art is able to impinge on the “political area of the sensible”. The alternative between autonomous and heteronomous art is clearly rejected by the aesthetic regime of art. There is no reason for the existence of the difference between art pour l’art and art at the service of politics, between street art and museum art, because the autonomy of the aesthetic regime of art is not the autonomy of artistic “making”, but rather the autonomy of a form of sensible experience, capable of cherishing (as Rancière writes) the seed of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life64. Before going on to the more specific relationship between music and politics, I should like to recall one last insight from Rancière regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. He maintains that there are many ways in which the two are linked. On one hand, politics is not to be understood simply, superficially, as the field of action that comes after the “aesthetic revelation” of a state of affairs and of a certain situation. Politics has its own specific aesthetics, which for Rancière consists in its manners of dissensual creation of scenes and characters, of enunciations, of manifestations–all elements that are different from artistic creations and that are actually opposed to them in some cases. On the other hand, aesthetics has its own specific politics–or rather, as Rancière clarifies, aesthetics wavers between two opposed politics: Between the logic of art becoming life at the price of its self-elimination and the logic of art’s getting involved in politics on the express condition of not having anything to do with it65.

In this view, what Rancière calls “critical art” must seek to mediate between two tendencies: to approach art to life, and to separate aesthetic sensoriality from other forms of sensible experience. Is this what actually happens in art? In music? In the world of noise directed aesthetically? It is necessary to go back to the complex, articulated, unresolved topic of the autonomy of art.

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6.2. Music and Politics According to Linda Goehr, in literature, in aesthetics and in the arts two different solutions have been put forward to the problem of autonomy. Goehr defines the first of these as “crude” (vulgar, naïve or pre-reflective), the second as “critical” (reflective). Very briefly, the “crude” position suggests a clear-cut solution: a musical work is either autonomous or political, and cannot be both; whereas the “critical” solution means that only an autonomous work is really, authentically political. Those who prefer the “crude” solution consider the “critical” solution contradictory, arguing as follows: how can an autonomous work be truly political if autonomy is defined precisely in terms of its being non-political?66 In fact, the “critical” solution has been subject to a particularly wide range of expression: romantic aesthetics, Hegelism, Marxism, critical theory, phenomenological existentialism, etc. The outcome of the various reflections is that it is possible to keep aesthetics and politics together, if we accept the idea that an autonomous work of art expresses its political content indirectly. When the critical solution separates out the aesthetic from the political, it does so only as the first step. The second is to demonstrate that this separation is necessary for art to fulfill its function, to serve in its aesthetic freedom the cause also of political freedom67.

This is, of course, valid for works of art in general, but also for musical works in particular. We shall now approach the specific subject of the relationship between music and politics, starting from the premise that it is a matter of a set of problems that do not permit a single, definitive view. Indeed, the problem may be tackled and discussed from several points of view, depending on the meaning assigned to world of music and to world of politics. The tangle of questions relating to the relationship between music and politics involves the social character of music, its possible ideological drift, its potential aesthetisation and the possible politicisation of music (as Walter Benjamin would say). If we free ourselves, however, from more extravagant connotations, the fruit of a historical period in which anything that could be used as a political tool was so used (certainly, art has always been a vehicle of politico-social basic education, as the history of religions teaches us), how can the relationship between art and politics be understood? The starting point should be the divergent position that the musician has had within the social system over the centuries. Until the 18th century

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the musician was considered substantially inferior to ecclesiastical and political powers, as regards both the practice of music and the social role of the artist. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, the musicians’ task was to provide works for liturgical use or for the entertainment of nobles and aristocrats. At the same time, the leading European political personalities of this era competed for the most fashionable composers in order to enhance their own credibility and, in consequence, their political prestige. From the second half of the 18th century there emerged figures such as Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who were the first great composers to put in motion a process of emancipation that would reach a fundamental degree of development with Ludwig van Beethoven. Despite the fetters of publishing contracts and the need to find suitable financing, the idea of the artist’s independence began to be established. This independence took shape first and foremost as independence from political power. Until a certain point in history, institutions decisively conditioned the activity of musicians. Although this still happens today, albeit much less obviously, there comes a time when the power of control becomes “as much more arbitrary as the musician increasingly is not or does not want to be aware of it”68. Today’s musicians, while bearing in mind the complex, more or less generically political problems involving music, can keep their activity well away from possible political conditioning. But can there be complete autonomy? Can we imagine the artistic-musical system disembodied as compared with the political-institutional system? Obviously not, since the bond between the two systems is intimate and constitutive. The problem however arises as to how far and in what way the musician can or must characterise her/his activity in the political sense. The problem arises once more of engagement, of the wish to give life to works that can impinge on the social structure, politically. Is it possible to choose a middle way between complete autonomy and political disinterest, on the one hand, and compromise and direct politico-civil engagement, on the other? In Linda Goehr’s terms, is it possible to escape the alternative between “crude” and “critical”? Each of the two alternatives denies both itself and the other: engaged art, because although, as art, necessarily detached from reality, cancels the difference that separates it from reality; the alternative of art pour l’art, because in becoming absolute it denies that insuppressible relationship with the reality contained in its automisation in the face of the real as it polemical a priori of it69.

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Art, which is a moment of society, a moment of conflict and opposition, cannot close its eyes in the face of society itself, but if it is not to think of its being conditioned, it “mystifies the curse that weighs on society and transforms it into its theodicy”70. Even in the most abstract work of art, Adorno maintains, an aspiration to renewal is concealed, a content of truth that drives towards transformation, mediated by the form, from whose laws works of art are not dispensed. Criticism is always “das Formgesetz der Werke selber”71: If in art formal characteristics are not facilely interpretable in political terms, everything formal in art nevertheless has substantive implications and they extend into politics72.

Still more: “In all art that is still possible, social critique must be raised to the level of form, to the point that it wipes out all manifestly social content”73. It is as though the exemplary works of art, the masterpieces, betrayed a need for social modification without being subjugated to any engagement. The social and political aspect of art is mediated by the formal principle, which means that art must not find a pretext and raison d’être in something outside itself and its function must be directly, immediately aesthetic, though at the same time indirectly political-social. Works of art offer directives for praxis, from which they abstain: the achievement of a righteous life. This mediation is not something halfway between engagement and autonomy, a hybrid of avant-garde formal elements and spiritual content aiming at a genuinely or supposedly progressive politics74.

The content of a work is not as much or as little of the spirit with which it is filled, but rather the contrary. The character of an autonomous work of art, however, is also historico-social, and the hardening of the relationships that are unwanted and cannot be dissolved somehow constrains the spirit to be present precisely where it can avoid “becoming a rogue”. In avoiding that culture and artworks, even the most honest, remain suffocated by cultivated chatter, it is necessary for art to recognize its obligation in saving it from ruin, and without much babble, that which is inaccessible to culture. What is up to date, concludes Adorno, are not political works of art, but the unengaged works, even to those which seem politically insensitive like Kafka’s parable of toy rifles, where the idea of non-violence is fused with the first flowering of the awareness of the increasingly serious paralysis that is blocking politics75.

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6.3. Japanoise The Japanoise phenomenon has much to do with the broader questions linked to the cultural and political function and significance of sound. Euphony or cacophony, harmony or noise are culturally and socially connected with control, order, power, chaos. The topic of aesthetic resistance has, in fact, a high level of socio-political content because it calls into question the quality and complexity of interhuman relations in contemporary society. As Anna Sara D’Aversa wrote, The space of cultural resistance is a space of free ideology, where new languages, meanings and views of the world, communities, networks of meaning and organizational models are constructed76.

As far as the specific area of noise is concerned, To the cultural history and anthropology of the senses we owe our knowledge of the longstanding association between noise and chaos. In war, revolution and ritual, the irregular and extremely loud use of drums and bells usually expresses intimidation, change and chaos, whereas a restoration of rhythm stands for situations being in control77.

For Karin Bijsterveld, these are types of cultural convention implicit in what she has defined as “the symbolism of sound”. This “symbolism” has a basic function in the co-constituting of the cultural meaning of sound. Nevertheless, sound is not reduced to symbolism, including even those cultures or listening practices that have been manifested historically, also, and above all, as a consequence of the introduction of new audio technologies. In the first place, Bijsterveld stresses, noise is seen as a public problem, initially “defined as a problem situated in the chaos of simultaneously perceived sounds and the absence of a univocal rhythm”78. In the 1920s, the Noise Commission of London established that the noise coming from the streets was a much greater problem than industrial noise. This is linked to a substantial difference between the two kinds of noises: the first, in contrast with the second, has no rhythm. This made the clatter of traffic harder to adjust to than the cadence of industrial machines. Such difficulty of habituating to the chaos of street noise created angry emotions and added to fatigue79.

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The result is that street noise comes to be perceived as much more distressing than industrial noise. Obviously this does not exclude the fact that industrial noise, for all the “positive” nature of its characteristic rhythmic nature, carries with it marked risks and dangers for the workers, not so much for their health as for their efficiency, which may be compromised precisely by the possible absence of rhythm. As Bijsterveld writes, As early as 1913, Josephine Goldmark, chair of the Committee on the Legal Defense of Labor Laws of the US National Consumers’ League, was quite clear on the dangers of noise. Noise, she claimed, ‘not only distracts attention but necessitates a greater exertion of intensity or conscious application, thereby hastening the onset of fatigue of the attention’80.

In order to improve the workers’ efficiency, a strategy had to be adopted that would guarantee the sensation of rhythm during work, and so an unexpected innovation was introduced: Playing the phonograph, the gramophone or the radio on the shop-floor was seen as a promising way of recreating such a rhythmic feel within the factory walls. This strategy started out from the assumption that the rhythm of music facilitated effective performance. Initially, arguments for the significance of musical rhythm for work were of a historico-anthropological nature. … In 1915, Edison ‘used a programmed selection of phonographic music for factories to determine the extent to which it would mask hazardous drones and boost morale. But the infant loudspeaker and transmission technology was still too weak’81.

I shall return to the subject of the man-machine relationship and of listening in the age of electronic reproducibility later. Here I wish to pursue this path where noise, strategies of noise, chaos, order, productive and social assets, cultural and musical trends, dynamics of power and biopower intersect. To this end, after a brief reference to some of the reflections offered by Bijsterveld, reflections that introduce the problem of noise in the sense of “public problem” (which means both ‘of public importance’, hence political, and ‘with public consequences’, hence once again political), I wish to redirect attention on to the phenomenon of Japanoise; but first I will recall another important voice, from outside the world of music and the arts: the voice of the economist Jacques Attali. Attali too offers a social, economic, political and historical analysis of the function of noise and of music in the development of societies, starting from the premise that “With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the

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world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion”82. If all music and every organisation of sound are actually a way of creating and consolidating a community or a totality, legitimising logics of power, no theory of power can escape a theory of the localisation of noise and of the forms to which it is endowed. The arts and music seek to tend towards a sort of aesthetic rationalisation, though in their various forms and manifestations, different but always socially accepted. Noise, in contrast, is seen as the refuge for ‘residual irrationality’. Bio-power, bio-aesthetics and noise interweave inevitably and inexorably: The economic and political dynamics of the industrialized societies living under parliamentary democracy also lead power to invest art, and to invest in art, without necessarily theorizing its control, as is done under dicatorship. Everywhere we look, the monopolization of the broadcast of messages, the control of noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of others assure the durability of power83.

But if, as Attali maintains, music today is substantially the way the monologue of power is disguised, what role can there be for noise? The Japanese scene may help to provide a possible answer, all the more since it powerfully revives a very close relationship between body, society and machine. Japanoise is a very specific synthesis in a particular context, that of 1980s Japan, when Japan was facing the worst consequences of galloping industrialisation, of excessive financialisation, of hierarchisation and closure of its social system. In Japan, the phenomenon that in the West was called ‘industrial’ (or ‘indie’) was recognised and welcomed, but was subdued to particular cultural components, which ensured that it could not be called ‘Industrial’, nor even ‘Noise’–terms that were too generic–but implicitly demand that a new term be coined for it; that is why for the phenomenon of industrial music, in its specific, unique, inimitable declination, the term ‘Japanoise’ was coined84.

We have said that this current is found specifically in the Japanese context. After the post-WWII period, Japan went through a time of rapid, vigorous economic growth, which was to produce the creation of a consumer society very similar to that of the leading capitalist countries. The imposition of this new social model brought with it a “retreat towards the domestic, private, restricted sphere”85. This restricted family nucleus, which has a very strong ‘social’ character, was obliged, in order to be in line with the general social system, to adopt the ‘3 Cs’: colour TV, cooler and car. Electrical household goods and cars were the consumerist fetishes

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of the 1960s, and having them was in fact a social obligation. Between 1985 and 1991, as Alessandro Gomarasca writes, Japan experienced the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the world. In 1989, Nikkei touched its all-time maximum. The streets of Tokyo were full of Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, Rolexes, Armanis, Louis Vuittons and all that was characteristic of the peak of luxury and wealth. However, the passage from industrial to post-industrial society and the very rapid acceleration of internal consumption provoked significant consequences on the cultural and anthropological plane: The rigid ethics of work, hoarding, saving yielded increasingly to an opposing culture, that of consumption, and in this process new social paradigms, new values, new human models inevitably emerged86.

In the 1980s, the protagonists of this new phase were young people and women. These subjects were organised in tribes, groups with their own connotation, expressed by way of clothing, music, language and places. The body was therefore central. It was the body that sent signals, ambiguous, disquieting and archetypal. It was the body that took the place of language and verbal communication, because it became the vehicle, it was itself the message of a malaise and impoverishment of meaning that young Japanese were beginning to experience. It is only in a picture of this kind that we can understand, for example, the kapuseru shindorǀmu (capsule syndrome): the term which is used to refer to the famous ‘capsule-hotels’, a sort of cybernetic coffins, electronic recesses supplied with every comfort into which one may squeeze, close the porthole and ‘disconnect’ for a few hours from external reality87.

And this same premise also allows us to understand the rise and spread of the phenomenon of the otaku: hackers, computer super-experts, provided with every possible electronic invention. At first these were individuals who lived in the shadows, but were recognisable from their clothes and from their secluded and ‘alienated’ lifestyle: lives on the margins of society and of social communication. After the worldwide affirmation of cyberpunk, the tribe of otaku emerged into the open, taking on the forms of an authentic counterculture, with its own political and aesthetic–as well as existential–profile. As Gomarasca writes, the otaku are introverted, asocial young people who are afraid of relationships, who live in a state characterised by blocked communication, a closed attitude, a considerable inability to relate to others directly and intimately. Their

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imagination is made up of electronics, virtuality, isolation, sex and violence. All this is translated into the arts and music. In Japan, this Japan, the nihilist fury of punk and the neo-romantic Sturm und Drang of the new Gothic-dark movement that came from England, and punk shortly after, found fertile ground and left deep marks88.

New bands arose, new nightclubs, new trends, characterised by a gradual, ever-increasing taking to extremes, in both musical and ‘performative’ terms. From this context there soon emerged figures like Hino Mayuko (founder of the C.C.C.C.–Cosmic Coincidence Control Centre, a duo composed of Hino and Hiroshi Hasegawa) or Akita Masami (Merzbow), figures who can be put directly into the context of Japanese noise, a context that largely concerns music, but also butǀ dance, body art, the ‘bodying’ of performance. These artists emerged in a context of profound social and cultural transition, at a time when a radical transition was taking place. The society in which Japanoise developed was a society that had overturned the man-machine relationship, substituting for the feelings of flesh and blood first valves, then silicon and later cybernetics. A society in which sound gave way increasingly to noise (not in the sense of cacophony or absence of harmony), redefining its significance89.

Yet flesh and blood, apparently paradoxically, return overwhelmingly in the performances of many noise artists. Masonna (Yamazaki ‘Maso’ Takushi), the Incapacitants (Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai), the Hanatarashi (Yamatsuka Eye and Ikuo Taketani), and Gerogerigegege (Juntaro Yamanouchi and Gero 30 [Tetsuya Endoh]) or the C.C.C.C. offer extreme performative solutions made up of noise, destruction of objects, bodily violence and gestural instinctiveness. There seems to be an echo of the famous ‘Wiener Aktionismus’, mingled with the historic noise experiences, with situationism and with the provocations of much of the neo-avant-garde. Martina Raponi, who has studied this phenomenon extensively, tends to stress, among the many features, an almost total absence of ‘political programming’. If this were the case, it would be difficult to link this phenomenon to a general tendency towards ‘resistance’, if by resistance we mean

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the very action of radical, conscious opposition to any form of repression or oppression, to any form of violence or terror exercised on individuals, on peoples, to any form of personal, social or political injustice90.

I believe, rather, the noise, especially in the most extreme forms, has an inevitable, inescapable political substance, even beyond the intentions and the aims of the artists working in this world. The ‘politicity’ of noise and its being in clear antithesis to society in the sense of an unmodifiable, false, unauthentic system are features analogous to those Theodor W. Adorno attributed to dodecaphonic music. I am not suggesting here that Adorno is a defender of noise. That would be theoretical madness and an unsustainable hermeneutic distortion. Nonetheless, I believe that–in order to be able to maintain ‘politicity’ and its being a form of ‘aesthetic resistance’–Adorno’s thesis can be applied: that it is through form that content is expressed and spread can be applied to noise, and that this is where the social content (and therefore the political importance) emerges, even beyond his more or less explicit intentions. Adorno recovers the social content of a work not so much from the representative content, as from its formal organisation. For Adorno, what works of art expose becomes their legitimate material content in being in contact with nothing other than the yearning and desire for change. But this gives them no dispensation from the law of form; even spiritual content [Inhalt] remains material and is consumed by the artworks, even when their self-consciousness insists that this subject matter is essence91.

To prove this thesis, Adorno suggests two cases: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote: In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare was not promoting love without familial guardianship; but without the longing for a situation in which love would no longer be mutilated and condemned by patriarchal or any other powers, the presence of the two lost in one another would not have the sweetness– the wordless, imageless utopia–over which, to this day, the centuries have been powerless; the taboo that prohibits knowledge of any positive utopia also reigns over artworks. Praxis is not the effect of works; rather, it is encapsuled in their truth content92.

And furthermore: Don Quixote may have served a particular and irrelevant program, that of abolishing the chivalric romance, which had been dragged along from feudal times into the bourgeois age. This modest program served as the

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Analogously, noise and its most specific expression, Japanoise, may define a context where the work of art acquires through its form an aesthetic-political profile innervated by a spirit that may be defined as ‘antagonistic’. The choice that is oppositive, antithetical to the more reassuring expressive forms is not, then, only a choice of the aesthetic, musical or artistic kind. Much less is it a neutral performative praxis whose effects remain limited within its own temporal confines. The world of noise is pure aesthetic-political ‘resistance’.

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Notes 1

For a short history of noise and its relationship with music and the arts, see the very useful essay by Alessandro Arbo, “Breve storia del rumore,” Musicalia 1 (2004), 29-51. On this subject, see Jacques Attali, Bruits (Paris: PUF, 1977); Thomas J. Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Andrea Prevignano, Noise. Suonare al massimo volume. Storia, luoghi e personaggi di una musica estrema (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1998); Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York-London: Continuum, 2006); Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York-London: Continuum, 2007); Andrea Prevignano, Noise. Guida pratica al rumore (Pavia: Apache, 2008); Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Martina Raponi, Strategie del rumore. Interferenze tra arte, filosofia e underground (Milano: Auditorium, 2015). 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London-New York: Continuum, 2002), 45; orig. ed. Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970). 3 For Baumgarten, as is well known, aesthetics is scientia cognitionis sensitivae. 4 In the triple expression of the life of the Spirit (Subjective, Objective and Absolute), the truth can be reached by following three paths, each by means of a specific form: art (whose form is sensible intuition), religion (representation) and philosophy (concept). 5 Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness. A Critical Edition, trans. Anrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (London-Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2015); orig. ed. Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Darmstadt: Nachdruck, 1973 [1853]). 6 Remo Bodei, “Presentazione” of Karl Rosenkranz, Estetica del Brutto (Bologna: il Mulino, 1984), 9. 7 Remo Bodei, “Presentazione,” 17. 8 Remo Bodei, “Presentazione,” 20. 9 See Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness. 10 See Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness. 11 On this, see Jean Clair, Méduse. Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Mario Perniola, Disgusti. Le nuove tendenze estetiche (Ancona-Milano: Costa & Nolan, 1998) and Jean Clair, De immundo. Apophatisme et apocatastase dans l’art d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Galilée, 2004). 12 See Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness. 13 Alessandro Arbo, “Breve storia del rumore,” 31. 14 This return to pure sound, according to Enrico Fubini, smacks of a return to nature: “Even electronic music and especially in its ideologists there was, absurdly enough, the idea of a return to nature by means of the most sophisticated technological devices. In fact the so-called pure sound that can be produced by an electronic device takes us back, in the intentions of the theoreticians of this music–

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if we may still speak of music in the traditional sense–to sound in its original, pure state. The most sophisticated technical equipment may offer valid tools for rediscovering nature, sound being born, without the timbre of the artificial instrumental tradition” (Enrico Fubini, La musica. Natura e storia [Torino: Einaudi, 2004], 125). 15 Alessandro Arbo, “Breve storia del rumore,” 33. 16 Gillo Dorfles, L’intervallo perduto (Milano: Skira, 2006), 11. 17 See Raymond M. Schafer, “Musica/non musica, lo spostamento delle frontiere,” in Enciclopedia della musica (10 voll.), edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, with the collaboration of Margaret Bent, Rossana Dalmonte and Mario Baroni, vol. III “Le avanguardie musicali nel Novecento” (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), 349. 18 See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); orig. ed. Musicologie générale et sémiologie (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1987). 19 It is generally stated that the “Manifesto of Futurism”, composed by Marinetti, appeared on 20 February 1909 in the French daily newspaper “Le Figaro”. However, historiographic research, has shown that, before arriving at “Le Figaro”, Marinetti had sent flyers numerous Italian newspapers with the text of the Manifesto, eight printed publications of which had been identified prior to the French: in the “Gazzetta dell’Emilia” (Bologna, on 5 February); in “Il Pungolo” (Naples, on the 6th); in the “Gazzetta di Mantova” (on the 9th); in the “Arena” (Verona on the 9th and 10th); in the “Piccolo” (Trieste on the 10th); in the weekly “Tavola rotonda” (Naples, on the 14th) and in the “Giorno” (Rome on the 16th); not to mention a Romanian newspaper, “Democratia” (Craiova, also on the 16th). See, on this topic, Giordano Bruno Guerri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Invenzioni, avventure e passioni di un rivoluzionario (Milano: Mondadori, 2009), 67. 20 Massimo Donà, Arte e filosofia (Milano: Bompiani, 2007), 230. 21 See Stefano Bianchi, La musica futurista. Ricerche e documenti (Lucca: LIM, 1995). 22 See Filippo T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” trans. R.W. Flint, in Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 23 Douglas Kahn, “Noises of the Avant-Garde,” in The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne (London-New York: Routledge, 2012), 436. 24 Giordano Bruno Guerri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 82. In the same period, Marcel Duchamp was to come to analogous conclusions. 25 Douglas Kahn, “Noises of the Avant-Garde,” 435. 26 Jean Boivin, “Musica e natura,” in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. III “Le avanguardie musicali nel Novecento”, 338. 27 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Novecento (Pisa: ETS, 2007), 36. 28 Guillame Kosmicki, Musique électroniques. Des avant-gardes aux dance floors (Gémenos: Le mot et le rest, 2009), 70. 29 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Novecento, 37. 30 Douglas Kahn, “Noises of the Avant-Garde,” 436.

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31 Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises Futurist Manifesto,” in The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 11; orig. ed. “L’arte dei rumori,” in La musica elettronica, edited by Henri Pousseur (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976 [1913]). 32 See Fred K. Prieberg, Musica ex machina: über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik (Berlin: Ullstein, 1960). 33 See Fred K. Prieberg, Musica ex machina. 34 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Novecento, 39. 35 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Novecento, 39. 36 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Novecento, 40. 37 See Jean Molino, “Il puro e l’impuro,” in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. IV “Piaceri e seduzioni nella musica del XX secolo”, 1057. 38 Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, Erik Satie tra ricerca e provocazione (Venezia: Marsilio, 1979), 117. 39 On the development of this research, interlocked with the reception of Parade in Italy, see Fiorenza Leucci, “‘Parade’ in Italia. Sperimentazioni rumoristiche negli anni Dieci in Italia e in Francia,” Musica/Realtà XIII, no. 50 (1996): 97-119. 40 Alessandro Arbo, “Breve storia del rumore,” 43. 41 See Fred K. Prieberg, Musica ex machina. 42 For Schaeffer, see “Introduction à la musique concrète,” Poliphonie 6 (1950 [1949]): 30-52; À la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952). 43 Lowell Cross, “Musica elettronica. 1948-1953,” in La musica elettronica, edited by Henri Pousseur, 27. 44 As is well known, both Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage, independently of each other, arrived at this idea, but with differing intentions and results. Cage played it, Schaeffer did not. For Schaeffer, the specially prepared piano served only to generate sounds that were subsequently to be recorded, deformed and assembled. The performer, unlike Cage, exits the scene completely and what matters is the technical process of assembly/editing (see Fred K. Prieberg, Musica ex machina). 45 Guillame Kosmicki, Musiques électroniques, 93. 46 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 75. 47 Guillame Kosmicki, Musiques électroniques, 90. 48 See Nicolas Negroponte, “Beyond Digital,” Wired 6, no. 12 (1998). 49 See Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2000): 12-8. 50 DSP permits a high level of producton and quality as compared with any kind of processing of the audio signal (equalisation, compression, espansion, limitation, filtering, delay, etc.). 51 Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” 13. 52 Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” 13. 53 It must be said that glitch aesthetic is found not only in music, but also in photography, in graphics and, generally speaking, in interactive art. One famous

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example is the ‘Glitchbrowser’, a project that ran from 2 December 2005 to 18 March 2009, fruit of the collaboration between Dimitre Lima (DMTR), Tony Scott (BETLIX) and Iman Moradi (Organized) for the New Langton Arts gallery in San Francisco. This was a software that redeveloped web pages, transforming them into graphically distorted, damaged pages, as if there had been a problem of code translation. Like I/O/D (alias, Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskirk)’s ‘Web Stalker’, Mark Napier’s ‘Shredder’ or Maciej Wisniewski’s’Netomat’, all from the 1990s, ‘Glitchbrowser’ aimed to call into question once more the conventions at the basis of traditional browsers, offering alternative modes of using the web. As regards graphic distortions, the Internet today offers the following site: www.corrupt.recyclism.com. 54 Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise, 72. 55 Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise, 87. 56 Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise, 86. 57 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); orig. ed. Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004). 58 Paolo Godani, “Prefazione” to Jacques Rancière, Il disagio dell’estetica, trans. Paolo Godani (Pisa: Ets, 2009), 9. 59 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25. 60 See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. English and German Facing, ed. and trans. with introduction, commentary and glossary by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); orig. ed. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Hg. Klaus L. Berghahn (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006 [1793-95]). 61 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 28. 62 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 30. 63 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 31. 64 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 32. 65 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 46. 66 See Linda Goehr, “Political Music and the Politics of Music,” in Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, edited by Philip Alperson (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994-1998), 134. 67 Linda Goehr, “Political Music and the Politics of Music,” 137. 68 Enrico Fubini speaking of the relationship between music and politics, published in Mario Messinis and Paolo Scarnecchia, eds., Musica e politica. Teoria e critica della contestualità sociale della musica, voci sull’est, testimonianze e letture di contemporanei, edited by the musical sector of the “Biennale di Venezia” (Venezia: Marsilio, 1977), 481. 69 Theodor W. Adorno, “Dialettica dell’impegno,” in Mario Messinis and Paolo Scarnecchia, eds., Musica e politica, 27 (the editors of the volume Musica e politica here follow the translation of Adorno’s essay published in Angelus Novus 11 [1968]). 70 Theodor W. Adorno, “Dialettica dell’impegno,” 43.

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71 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Das gegenwärtige Verhältnis von Philosophie und Musik,” in Filosofia dell’arte, edited by Enrico Castelli, Archivio di filosofia (1953): 5-30. 72 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 255. 73 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 250. 74 Theodor W. Adorno, “Dialettica dell’impegno,” 44. 75 Theodor W. Adorno, “Dialettica dell’impegno,” 44. 76 Anna Sara D’Aversa, “Fenomenologia della resistenza estetica: derivazioni ed esasperazioni dell’azione sperimentale nell’epoca delle seconde avanguardie musicali,” in Pensare la modernità, edited by G. Grimaldi (Monza: Limina Mentis, 2012), 51. 77 Karin Bijsterveld, “Listening to Machines: Industrial Noise, Hearing Loss and The Cultural Meaning of Sound,” in The Sound Studies Reader, 153. 78 Karin Bijsterveld, “Listening to Machines,” 154. 79 Karin Bijsterveld, “Listening to Machines,” 154. 80 Karin Bijsterveld, “Listening to Machines,” 154. 81 Karin Bijsterveld, “Listening to Machines,” 155. 82 Jacques Attali, “Noise: The Political Economy of Music,” in The Sound Studies Reader, 31-2. 83 Jacques Attali, “Noise,” 33. 84 Martina Raponi, Strategie del rumore , 30. 85 Martina Raponi, Strategie del rumore, 32. 86 Alessandro Gomarasca, “Occidente estremo,” in Alessandro Gomarasca and Luca Valtorta, Sol mutante. Mode, giovani e umori nel Giappone contemporaneo (Ancona-Milano: Costa & Nolan, 1996), 19-20. 87 Alessandro Gomarasca, “Occidente estremo,” 92. 88 Luca Valtorta, “Il polipo e il crisantemo,” in Alessandro Gomarasca and Luca Valtorta, Sol mutante, 131. 89 Martina Raponi, Strategie del rumore, 40. 90 Anna Sara D’Aversa, “Fenomenologia della resistenza estetica,” 47-8. 91 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 246-7. 92 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 247. 93 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 247-8.

CHAPTER THREE SILENCE: “CHAQUE ATOME DE SILENCE / EST LA CHANCE D’UN FRUIT MÛR”1

1. Sound-Silence: A Fragile Balance In Chapter One I offered a definition of the field of contemporary music as a constellation that is greatly diversified internally and traversed by various polarities. One of the most radical of these is the polarity between noise and silence. Silence has frequently been upheld as a terminus, be it the climax of artistic nullity or the void created by the inevitable cultural withdrawal of modern art. The idea of silence as a point of departure has rarely been proposed, yet modernist music shows that silence has played such a role. Silence is a state, a sonic or conceptual ideal to which a work aspires. Silence is one such ideal, as are purity, complexity, and the fragmentary2.

Thus in the field of silence, too, the discussion lies at the crossroads between aesthetics and musicology, philosophy, art and music. Among the constituent elements of any work of art (figurative, literary, musical, film) which have a value in terms of both form and content, we certainly find all that can be thought to lie behind the concept of silence. The pauses during the performance of a musical work; the silences that counterpoint the dialogue in a scene, in a film or play; the punctuation marks in a literary text; the gaps and fragmentation, in whatever form they may be presented, in a work of figurative, sculptural or architectural art: the relationships between full and empty, present and absent, spoken and unspoken, visible and invisible, audible and inaudible–all these clearly denote the characteristics of a work3. The balance (or imbalance) between these elements gives the work one or another character, though the aesthetic experience of the ‘consumer’ always remains shrouded in mystery. The

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greatness of a work lies also in its elusiveness, to which of course the formal elements contribute, hence also the gaps, the silences, the absences, the suspensions, the interruptions. These elements, by virtue of the difficulty of reading them, reinforce the idea of art as something that is based on a substantial, fundamental opacity, behind which is concealed a nucleus that is never definitively graspable. The metaphorical essence of art lies in the space between the polarities I mentioned earlier (spoken-unspoken, full-empty, etc.), opening up to ‘furtherness’ with regard to the thing, the object or the text. There is a semantic surplus in the work, which goes beyond the author’s intentions. The metaphor conceals what is hidden, creating a space of meaning between the object and its representation. This is the space that the hermeneutic effort attempts to occupy. In the game of interpretations, what is sought philosophically is the so-called ‘truth content’ of the work which, as Heidegger would say, is apparent in the oscillation between presence and absence, nearness and remoteness. From this viewpoint, the truth content of the work is presented as the result of a search, of a path ‘in search of’, which inevitably starts from sensory activity. If the truth content is shown in the oscillation between presence and absence, this means that absence (hence gap, silence) contributes to make up the meaning of the work. Silence in music is therefore, in Max Weber’s expression, a Sinngeber element, a ‘dispenser of meaning’, a constituent of the work. At this point, however, certain statements must be made. Silence in music may be understood in at least two ways. The first has to do with the composer’s treatment of ‘pauses’, of those more or less unexpected interruptions of the musical flow, of the use of silence in a sense more ‘poetic’ than formal (though always, in some way, justified on the formal level). The second, conversely, refers to the form and indeterminacy of the work, to the point of having a basic function in the world’s strategies of listening, with clear social and political repercussions (as may be understood, the main reference here is Cage). In both cases, however, in order to fully grasp the meaning given to ‘silence’ in some 20th century music, it will be necessary to make reference to other arts and also to philosophy.

2. Poetic Function In an essay on the poetics of musical silence, Thomas Clifton introduces the subject comparing silence in music with the space that lies

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between two trees in a forest. What is not there between one tree and another is essential to give the forest a character, a particular appearance. It is on the basis of these spaces that we can say whether the vegetation in the forest is dense or sparse. In the same way, silence is not purely and simply emptiness, absence without meaning. It follows that Silence is experienced both as meaningful and as adhering to the sounding portion of the musical object. Silence is experienced as embodied substance or activity. This suggests that silence participates in the presentation of musical time, space, and gesture4.

Silence, notes Clifton, is distinguished from nothingness because it is not autonomous, but is subordinate to and in strict, specific relationship with the sound context in which it is found. The relationship between sound and silence is entirely within the musical context, and so silence is not a more or less temporary interruption of the musical flow. Nonetheless, silence, as we shall see, may take on a different role and function: a) it may take on meaning within a musical context, within a specific sound tissue, without expressing what Clifton calls “intrinsic magic”, because for him it is “a blank in the dialogue where the harmonics of the existing accord or discord may appear”; b) conversely, silence may itself be the work, and the music (or non-music) in this case would be something that takes on meaning starting from the silence. Clifton concentrates especially on the first of these two cases, in which “Silence gives voice to the depths, when they are in play, and to distances, if there are any”5, proposing a triple distinction among “temporal silences”, “silences in registral space” and “silences in motion”. By “temporal silences” Clifton intends the kind of silence whose main function is to interrupt a succession of events. Silence, in these cases, is an unexpected halt, an absence that makes it possible to perceive the musical rhythm in a different way, in a swift play of anticipation and surprise. Silence that serves to halt does not necessarily interrupt the impulse. At times it may rather interrupt a ‘breath’, and so prove softer. This kind of silence, according to Clifton, may best express an intuition of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote that Music appeals not only to psychological time but also to physiological and even visceral time; this appeal is not absent in the case of mythology, since the telling of a story may be of ‘breath-taking’ interest, but it is not as essential as in music: any piece of counterpoint includes a silent part for the rhythmic movement of heart and lungs6.

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As per the use of silence as a spatial element, Clifton identifies three manners of functioning. A) Highlighting the arrival of another part, or a different activity in the same part7; B) Emphasising long-span connections8 and C) Creating gaps or absences in registral space9. Then there are ‘silences in motion’, when in the course of listening silence is experienced as movement, stimulating the body. These cases include a silence that leads to the experience of a movement that changes direction: I mention this because the sort of silence which is experienced as moving owes its genesis primarily to the experiencing body, to the listener moving to the music in such a way as to cause the gesture to bridge the gap between points of sound10.

Clifton rightly specifies that in all the examples he offers, the interaction of silence with the musical tension is implicit. The experience of anticipation or of surprise is strictly dependent on a greater or lesser tension. Silence contributes to increase or decrease this tension. With the recognition of the element of tension, which is never wholly absent from musical discourse, the network of relations that silence forms with other elements is now circumscribed, at least in outline. ... [The] silence, since it is not nothingness, is an experienced musical quality which can be pulsed or unpulsed in musical time, attached or detached to the edges of a musically spatial body, and finally, which can often be experienced as being in motion in different dimensions of the musical space-time manifold11.

I have very briefly spoken of a certain use and a certain function of silence in music in order to be able to deal more fully with these topics in relation to certain musical experiences of the 20th century and their relationship with contemporary thinking. History and philosophy in the 20th century revealed the close interweaving of alienation, reification, incommunicability, closure towards the ‘other’ and silence. Much of early 19th century philosophy is the statement, the denunciation, the X-ray of a wounded age, in which interpersonal relations gradually lost substance, content, sense and meaning. This state of affairs obviously found ample expression within the practice of art of whatever kind: literature, music, theatre, cinema, architecture, painting, sculpture, etc. Silence and the incommunicability of one’s own existential experience are directly dependent on alienation. Contemporary art has taken on the burden of condemning this implacable destiny. The supersession of the paradigms inherited by tradition (‘figure’ or ‘tonality’), and the new

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critical period of the cognitive paradigm centred on realism, are the revolutionary nucleus of the 20th century avant-garde. While the worm of relativism and nihilism progressed, with increasingly significant consequences, the idea of being able to (and of having to) represent the concreteness of the real by means of the tools of realism declined. Thus, art absorbed the ideal of the dissolution, the formal breakdown, of matter and of the image. Side by side with this radical ideologico-formal change, there emerged explosively the artists’ need to illustrate and denounce (at times with critical vigour, sometimes with melancholy resignation) the condition of contemporary humanity, its solitude, its precariousness, the dissolution of its humanitas, the inadequacy of any communication. In Die Seele und die Formen, György Lukács presents the great aesthetic forms as paths that lead to an abyss that surrounds language. This means that silence is at the basis of the work of art: it is what cannot be said, the unsayable and the undecidable from which the work springs, the darkness hidden behind every revelation. Words strike us as obvious and taken for granted; we live in a world that is already clothed linguistically, in which words, in their turn, are instituted. This is a pre-formed reality. Hence the word is no longer an event that breaks the silence. The word ceases, and art takes its place, originating in and returning to that silence. For Thomas Harrison the tragic circle of silence of language/silence of art/tragedy from which art/tragedy originates and to which it arrives became conscious of itself around 1910/1911, the years of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Auf zeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, of Lukács’ Die Seele und die Formen, of Wassily Kandinskij’s reflections on the ‘spiritual’ in art12, as well as the reflections of Arnold Schönberg and of the expressionist painters. This awareness may be linked to their attempt to raise art to the level of philosophical proposal, seeking the physical form of the pure soul. For the artists and intellectuals of those years “no form or aesthetic technique is justified except as external expression of internal contents”13. The priority, undebated demand was to give space and voice to the essence, in open conflict with the falsity, the inauthenticity and the reification of contemporary society. This was an art that tended towards the absolute, that started from the tragedy of human existence and of the barbarised world and that ended in the tragedy of the impossibility of reconciling what was irredeemably split, including its yearning for the Absolute as identity, completeness, definitive overcoming of both the universal and the particular. This profoundly tragic feature coincided with the impossibility, the limit, at whose edges silence lies. The idea returned of contemporary art as no

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longer ‘beautiful’ art, but rather ‘sublime’: an art, that is to say, whose experience is simply the realisation of the limit and the awareness of being able to think of it. The artist was called to fight with the extreme, which found a place and expression in the work of art. As Lukács wrote, for the awakening soul the limit is the recognition of all that truly pertains to it14. In 1937, Wassily Kandinskij produced a painting entitled Silent, almost suggesting, beyond the drowsiness and the aphasia of the contemporary human being, a certain tendency typical of 20th century painting. Almost thirty years later, in 1965, Hans Georg Gadamer gave a lecture entitled “The Falling Silent of the Picture”, on the occasion of the inauguration of an exhibition organised by the Künstlerbund Rhein-Neckar in Heidelberg. Introducing his talk, Gadamer maintained that falling silent did not mean having nothing to say, but if anything the opposite: it is rather a ‘way of speaking’15. Falling silent is presented as a condition in which one is close to something one considers it necessary to say, but for which the right words cannot be found. “In falling silent one approaches what should be said as something for which we are seeking new words”. Can silence in music be regarded in this way? Is musical silence a falling silent in the sense of a search for new dimensions of sound and, hence, a different way of saying? These are questions that change the direction of the discussion as compared with the beginning of this chapter. We shall therefore continue along this path.

3. Cobwebs of Sound Interwoven with Silence Theodor W. Adorno is among the philosophers of music who have most pondered the composer’s ‘attitude of silencing’ and the kind of music that is characterised by being experienced “in an atmosphere of solitude”. Anton Webern is the composer to whom he is referring: Webern’s music is like a “diaphanous cobweb of sound ‘suspended in space’ and interwoven with silence”16. In Webern’s music what is fundamental is the dialectic between sound and silence, between structure and suspension. This is true above all because this dialectic, as it unfolds, tends towards silence, in a flow of time that has decidedly unusual characteristics. In a 1932 essay, included in the collection Impromptus, published in 1968, in explaining the character of Webern’s music, Theodor W. Adorno thinks of the ‘lyric’, which unfolds in time and not simply in the moment at which it rings out17. The time Adorno refers to is not that of music or of listening, but actually the time of history. Webern’s work must unfold in

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time in order to be manifested, and that is why it appears always “outdated, intimately enwrapped in the corners of the extraneous”. By virtue of this connotation, Webern’s music withdraws in front of us, inducing disorientation, with the result that, over time, it has sometimes been subject to misunderstandings. Adorno identifies three: dependence, agonising destructiveness and late-Romantic isolation. I shall refer briefly to the first two of these. The first misunderstanding concerns Webern’s dependence on Schönberg: a frequent accusation is on the lines of similarity or interchangeability of scores by the former with scores by the latter. This is thought to show an excessive dependence and a sort of emulation so deep as to involve the sound and harmonic structures. Webern, maintains Adorno, points to a different way from Schönberg’s, a way that in the following decades would become the starting point of pure electronics, starting from Karlheinz Stockhausen–a route that aims at isolating and rebuilding the shadowy, primitive energy of pure sound. Webern’s horizon, as I have said, is that of “absolute lyricism”, of the attempt to dissolve and disperse musical materiality, including the objective moments of the musical form, in the pure flatus vocis of the subject, who stands before it no longer extraneously. This tension finds its formal expression in brevity, which is the second aspect and takes us back to the second misunderstanding to which Adorno refers when he writes of destructive agony. Brevity, in Webern, is not lack of breath but expressive concentration. The road that leads to pure sound is marked by expression, which alone can concentrate music in gesture and thicken it in sound, to the point where it is emptied of that expression, becoming pure sound, which tends to silence: the prohibition of extensive time implies the need for an expressive intensification. Extended time would prejudice the purity of the moment charged with expression and, in a sense, with hope. For Webern’s music, the absolute impermanence, the silent beating of a wing, become … the very weak but persistent seal of hope. Disappearance, impermanence, what is no longer fixed in anything that exists, what cannot even be objectified any longer, here becomes the refuge of eternity abandoned without defences18.

Webern’s serialism, charged with these features (and not only these), may be considered a sort of bridge between the historical avant-gardes and the new avant-gardes, despite the fact that it is complex and problematic to establish a true relationship of continuity between them. The leading

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European composers in the late 1940s and early 1950s could not but call themselves ‘post-Webernian’–not in order to stress a supersession of and detachment from Webern, but rather to note what might be called their ‘filiation’. In this particular historical climate, permeated by the anxiety of reconstruction, research orientations took form, orientations that cannot be traced back in the strict sense to the experience of Webern. While experimentation on the possibilities of serialism became increasingly extreme, there was the first emergence of interests in electroacoustic and concrete research. Starting from these differing principles, there arrived an almost irrationalistic conception of musical composition, which was to lose any kind of logical necessity, opening up to chance, to indeterminacy and to the ‘gamble’. The post-war period was characterised by hyperstructuralist tendencies of a serial nature, by ever-increasing attention to sound-noise and to silence, and by criticism of the pre-forming intentionality of the composer. It is in this context that the figure of Cage emerged, the man of sound and silence, who would certainly have subscribed (as indeed he may have done) to one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, to the effect that in life, as in art, it is difficult to say something that is as effective as silence.

4. Political Function John Cage began to be well known in Europe in the mid-1950s, arousing great interest, but also a certain disquiet. Although the European avant-gardes were by no means reluctant to introduce disturbing elements into their artistic practices, it seems that the American Cage’s research went somewhat further, above all as regards the treatment of what music still tended to see as marginal: noise and silence. The difference between Cage’s manner of understanding silence and the manner in which silence (in the sense of ‘pauses’ or ‘interruptions’) was generally used in the structure of a composition lies in the fact that, now, silence served not so much to emphasise, stress or bring out the music, as to go beyond the music. With Cage, the barrier that still kept separate music and extramusical reality, traditional sound and sound event, was surpassed. If we are to grasp the profound sense and ‘total’ function of silence, Cage’s poetics and aesthetics must be situated in a more general sense19. Cage went beyond the traditional boundaries of harmony and of compositional practice, first of all, by freeing himself of the nonetheless essential, formative experience of serialism. His interest in noise, silence and, more generally, music in the ‘total’ sense, was his personal manner of

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approaching the world and experiencing it. It is in this perspective that he placed all that characterises the world, life, interpersonal relations and, in a sense, his own attempt to ‘change’ the world. Revolution, the overthrowing of the state of affairs, the improvement of existential conditions, progress– all these, according to Cage, are objectives that can be attained with the use of various tools, not confined to physical tools: we cannot expect one thing alone to carry forward a revolution. Some people find words effective, others even violence; for yet others, it is music that is effective. For Cage, any means should be used20. The aim, in the last analysis, is to change the world, overturn the relations of strength, overcome every logic of dominance, starting from what we might call a ‘collective revolution of perceptions’. Branden W. Joseph writes: Cage’s project does recall the goals of the historical avant-garde: to reformulate perception as a means of anticipating life beyond the boundaries of commodity capitalism. However, rather than being limited to a merely ineffectual revival of Dada, Cage’s neo-avant-garde project marks a thorough reformulation of avant-garde aesthetics in light of the historical circumstances of the postwar era. In the face of a revolutionary hope of proletarian mass subjectivity falsely realized as the debilitating norms of a bourgeois mass culture, Cage attempted to actualize an anticipatory form of existence that would be the prerequisite for a new form of sociability, a perception of difference intended to destabilize the overriding social logic of repetition by interpenetrating, infiltrating, burrowing under and hollowing out that logic until it simply fell apart under the strain. Only then could the anarchic society of which Cage dreamed become a reality21.

Cage had a very broad view of art, to which he also attributed a social and hence political connotation. Art is not entertainment, escapism, enjoyment, flight from reality, ‘emotional’ tool, but is something to be used, devoured, consumed. Who knows whether Cage had heard of the performance by Piero Manzoni with the title “Consumption of dynamic art of the public devouring of art” (21 June 1960). It is known that on this occasion, Manzoni imprinted his thumbprint on 150 hard-boiled eggs and gave them to the audience so that they could taste them. On the subject of ‘consuming’ art, in a conversation with Kostelanetz22, Cage referred to Norman Brown, for whom art was something to be eaten, passed through the body and expelled. All this is necessary because, once we are aware of having eaten it, we feel the need for something new. The happening–an artistic genre that Cage himself may be said to have inaugurated in 1952, when with Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and other artists, at the Black Mountain College, he organised Untitled Event, the first authentic theatrical multi-media performance–does not

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only express what Cage defined as a “marvellous disappearance of the boundaries” between the arts: from this standpoint, his fifty-year artistic and existential association with Cunningham is significant. It was also the expressive mode whereby art could become theatre–which means, in Cage’s words, that everything becomes “something to hear and see”– condensing reality into a “theatrical situation”. This does not mean that the happening must be similar to life, but rather that it must be able to be consumed in relation to our lives, in such a way as to introduce us to all that is part of those lives, and all that we consume. It is clear that from this point of view art and music are to be considered social situations, in the sense of situations that involve people and their activities. To the art-life relationship corresponds the art-world relationship. If art breaks down its own boundaries, this happens for music too, and for the practice of composition. This unlimited opening up regards both the object (we move from the ‘instrumental’ sound in the traditional sense, to noise and the ‘sound of the world’) and the manners of composing works (no longer the pentagram and harmonic rules, but graphics, gambling and tossing the I Ching, until we arrive at the score a posteriori23). As I have said, in order to reach this level of emancipation it is necessary to go beyond, first of all, the limits imposed by dodecaphony and seriality. The first, basic separation, then, is the one that took place between Cage and Schönberg, who considered the American composer a true genius. Nonetheless, he told him that he would never be able to write music, because he would have found himself faced with an insurmountable, uncircumventable wall. Cage answered the father of dodecaphony saying that in that case, he would spend his life banging his head on that wall. More generally, the liberation of music achieved by Cage is based on the attempt to integrate law and liberty24, in a dimension that seems to reecho Kant’s net division between pure reason and practical reason. If Kant identified in Critique of Judgment the term midway between the two previous Critiques, Cage was to identify in gambling and the use of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, the (chance) means with which to define the parameters on which to build the work25. With Cage the relationship between music (what interrupts silence) and silence (what music is not) took on new features. His experiments in research were directed towards the attempt to make silence reverberate, letting it bring out the sounds of (and from) the world, of (and from) reality, of (and from) life. On 29 August 1952, at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, Cage’s friend the pianist David Tudor sat before the audience at the piano in silence for 4’33”. This is a work divided into

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three movements, with actual pauses between one and the other: three movements lasting respectively 30”, 2’23” and 1’40”. 4’33” is a work that changes with the place, time, context and audience for which it is performed. Cage wrote: I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being. However, they left hesitatingly and fittingly within the structure of the work. The third movement was a return to the theme of the first, but with all those profound, so-well-known alterations of world feeling associated by German tradition with the A-B-A26.

The key to understanding what lies behind 4’33” is partly provided by the composer himself, in the text of a lecture given at Vassar College on 28 February 1948 with the title “A Composer’s Confessions”, in which Cage spoke of a composition entitled Silent Prayer, consisting of three parts of four and a half minutes of silence. Cage also said that 4’33” has at least two main reference points (and others that may be said to be less direct, as Kyle Gann27 makes clear): one is Robert Rauschenberg and the other is Zen philosophy. Cage had probably seen Rauschenberg’s white paintings in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery. This discovery may have led him to reflect and to proceed, otherwise–as he himself said–he would have been tardy, otherwise his music would have been tardy. It cannot be said that these paintings contributed to the structuring of the idea that lies behind 4’33”, since this work dates to the late 1940s, and Cage probably saw the paintings in 1951. Nevertheless, seeing Rauschenberg’s works speeded the process of development of Cage’s work. The second element is eastern philosophy. It was in the late 1940s that Cage made contact with eastern thought, in particular Zen. He detested the cultural model of American society, centred as it was on success, ‘stars’, legends, money and consumption. In contrast, the path of Zen proceeds by way not of accumulation but of deprivation. Self-knowledge passes through gradual renunciation, including renunciation of one’s ego. This means that musical composition is renunciation of subjective expression.

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From the Zen standpoint, 4’33” invites concentration on a sound, isolation and acceptance of that sound, going beyond the composer’s intentions. There is a vast amount of critical writing on 4’33”28. That being so, I will not insist further on this work and its genesis, but will limit myself to a few other considerations. Certainly this performance is not a boutade, though it easily lends itself to the childish joking of the audience. It is rather an extreme offshoot of Music of Changes, in which the hyperbolic discipline, the paroxysmal rigour with which it is entrusted to chance, the renunciation of any deliberate gesture–these lead to a composition that seems to us, less an expression of joyful liberty than of absolute negation, extreme gesture, almost a vow of chastity on the part of a composer who strips himself of any ‘worldliness’ and puts on the habit and cilice of the mystic29.

The aim of 4’33” is to show that silence does not exist, that it is not what remains at the moment when the music or the voice stops, but is what makes it possible the emergence of noises, buzzes, pulsations that cannot emerge in the absence of an apparent gap. The silence Cage offers is the road to acceptance of ‘true’, active, affirmative silence, in that silence full of noises in which we find ourselves, because we have always been there30. Silence, for Cage, is none other than a change of mind. It is an acceptance of sounds that exist rather than a wish to choose and impose one’s own music. And this is the perspective in which he has always been placed and which gives his output a specific meaning: “I try when I make a new piece of music to make it in such a way that it doesn’t essentially disturb the silence which already exists”31. It cannot be disputed that this piece influenced artistic and musical culture in the second half of the 20th century, but in a more specific sense it is also indicative of Cage’s aesthetics. Overturning and disrupting the standards (sound/silence/noise) and in a sense going beyond the feelings and the ideas of the composer in order to arrive at the target of making people aware of the sounds of the environment in which they live–this is an authentic revolution. Nevertheless, at the time, they missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence [in 4’33”], because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement [in the premiere]. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all

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kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.–John Kobler (1968). People began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out. They didn’t laugh–they were irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later: they’re still angry.–Michael John White (1982)32.

These declarations of Cage’s clearly explain the value he attributes to his ‘silent piece’, a true revolution of the conception and practice of music, the definitive demonstration of the impossibility of proceeding on the track of tradition (but also of the tradition of ‘criticism of the tradition’) and of the need to break down the confining enclosures of the old territory of music. 4’33” is thus something that goes far beyond its own status as a musical work or work of art, since it recalls and is inserted in a broader dimension, in a tissue of artistic, philosophical and spiritual questions that found their greatest, most radical expression in the 20th century. Moreover, from Cage’s words there emerges the social and hence political importance of his artistic-musical practice. Choosing to bring the audience close to a greater awareness of environmental sounds means, in a broader sense, teaching them to experience their context fully and in the best way, and leading them towards a higher quality of relations between themselves and the world, and interpersonal relationships. Nor is this all. Insisting on the manner of perceiving one’s own being and one’s existing in the world is one of the ways in which, pedagogically, the artist can contribute to increasing people’s critical spirit, which must be directed principally towards oppressive structures and towards any form of domination. As Branden W. Joseph has written, in Cage’s paradigm, acknowledging every possible autonomous or semi-autonomous space of critical distance implies that every subjective transformation is developed at the perceptive rather than the cognitive level. So “a reorientation of perception toward the experience of differentiation would serve as a means of opposing the serialized logic of the commodity”33. I should like to close the chapter recalling once more Cage’s own forceful words: You know that I’ve written a piece called 4’33”, which has no sounds of my own making in it, and that Robert Rauschenberg has made paintings that have no images on them–they’re simply canvases, white canvases, with no images at all on them–and Nam June Paik, the Korean composer, has made an hour-long film that has no images on it. … Now, in the music, the sounds of the environment remain, so to speak, where they are, whereas in the case of the Rauschenberg painting the dust and the shadows, the changes in light and so forth, don’t remain where they are but

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Chapter Three come to the painting. In the case of the Nam June Paik film, which has no images on it, the room is darkened, the film is projected, and what you see is the dust that has collected on the film34. I think that’s somewhat similar to the case of the Rauschenberg painting, though the focus is more intense. The nature of the environment is more on the film, different from the dust and shadows that are the environment falling on the painting, and thus less free. These things bring me to my thought about silence: to me, the essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention35.

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Notes 1

“Each atom of silence / Is the chance for a ripe fruit” (Paul Valéry, Palme). David Metzer, “Modern Silence,” The Journal of Musicology 23, no. 3 (2006), 374. 3 Metzer writes further: “The ‘intimate relationship’ between modernism and silence has been interpreted in different ways. In what has become a critical trope, silence stands as the larger artistic and social oblivion awaiting modernist arts. Adorno, for example, calls attention to the irreversible slide of new music into silence. So removed has this music grown from audiences and so absorbed has it become in its own practices that it recedes further and further away until it becomes unheard, or silent. Susan Sontag situates silence as a ‘termination’ for contemporary art. According to her, art, as material or even ideal, torments the modern artist, who views it as an impediment to a desired ‘transcendence’. The block can only be removed by silencing–no longer creating–the work of art, a step taken by Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, and Duchamp. Umberto Eco describes a less severe form of renunciation. Restlessly stripping away the superfluous, be it the familiar or the past, modernism reaches a point of nullity, attained in the white canvas, the blank page, or four minutes and some of silence” (David Metzer, “Modern Silence,” 332-3). 4 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1976), 163. 5 Georges Gusdorf, Speaking, trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 90; quoted in Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 164. 6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 16; orig. ed. Mythologiques I. Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964). 7 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 171. 8 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 173. 9 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 174. 10 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 178. 11 Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 181. 12 See Wassily Kandinskij, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. and introduction by M.T.H. Sadler (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2000); orig. ed. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (München: Piper, 1911). 13 Thomas Harrison, “Filosofia dell’arte, filosofia della morte,” in Filosofia ’95, edited by Gianni Vattimo (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 12 (author’s italics). 14 See György Lukács, Soul and Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); orig. ed. Die Seele und die Formen (Berlin: Fleische, 1910). 15 Hans Georg Gadamer, L’attualità del bello. Studi di estetica ermeneutica (Genova: Marietti, 1988), 133. 16 Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, Il suono incrinato (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 169. 17 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anton von Webern,” in Impromptus. Zweite Folge neu gedruckter musikalischer Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968). 2

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18 Luigi Rognoni, La scuola musicale di Vienna. Espressionismo e dodecafonia (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), 147. 19 On John Cage, see Giacomo Fronzi, ed., John Cage. Una rivoluzione lunga cent’anni (Milano: Mimesis, 2012) and Giacomo Fronzi, La filosofia di John Cage. Per una politica dell’ascolto, preface by Carlo Serra (Milano: Mimesis, 2014). 20 See Max Nyffeler, Hg. “Interview mit John Cage,” Dissonanz. Kritische Zeitschrift für Musik 6 (1970). 21 Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October LXXXI (1997), 103. 22 See Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage (London-New York: Routledge, 20052 [1988]). 23 In July 1965, Cage composed Variations V. 37 Remarks re an Audio-Visual Performance for at least six tape recorders, short-wave receivers, oscillators, amplifiers and loudspeakers, as well as objects, contact microphones, other electrical equipment and dancers. The score was written between September and October of that year. 24 Apropos this, Michele Porzio writes: “This difficult but harmonious synthesis of freedom and discipline, of anarchy and metaphysics, of licence and rigour that emerges from Cage’s works and is among the most important features of his poetics, is beyond doubt the main reason for the great scandal he provoked” (Michele Porzio, Metafisica del silenzio. John Cage, l’Oriente e la nuova musica [Milano: Auditorium, 2008], XII-XIII). 25 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70. 26 John Cage, “Music Lovers’ Field Companion” (1954), in Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1961) 276. 27 See Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 56-87. 28 Among the many writings on this work, one of the most interesting is Kyle Gann’s already-mentioned No Such Thing as Silence. This is an exhaustive text as regards a first recognition of the questions underlying and raised by 4’33”, but it does not present all the possible ‘theories’ that have emerged around this work. In Gann’s treatment, for example, there is no reference to the reading suggested by Richard Kostelanetz, for whom 4’33” can be considered an excellent example of ‘inferential art’ (see John Cage, “Inferential Art” [1969], in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage [New York-Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1970], 105-9). However, No Such Thing as Silence remains one of the main reference points for this subject. For a reading of Cage’s silence from a more metaphysical and ‘spiritualist’ point of view, see Michele Porzio, Metafisica del silenzio. 29 Emanuele Arciuli, Musica per pianoforte negli Stati Uniti. Autori, opere, storia (Torino: EDT, 2010), 170. 30 See Daniel Charles, “Esercizi di silenzio,” in Emanuel D. de Melo Pimenta, John Cage. Il Silenzio della Musica (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2003), 20.

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John Cage, “Esthetics,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 244. John Cage, “His Own Music (to 1970),” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 65. 33 Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” 100. 34 Cage is referring to the film Zen for Film (1962-4), of which there are various versions, of differing lengths. 35 John Cage, “Visual Arts,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with Cage, 187. 32

SECOND MOVEMENT BETWEEN PRODUCTION AND RECEPTION

CHAPTER FOUR TECHNOLOGY: ART, MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY TH IN THE 20 CENTURY

1. Aesthetics and the Problem of Technics Aesthetics is constantly in check. The challenges posed to this discipline by the dynamic nature of the real imply constant re-modulation and rethinking. For example, for some years now aesthetics has had to confront an apparatus of categories that go beyond the pre-technological age of artistic production. In Italy, at the end of the 1990s, Mario Costa suggested re-establishing its entire disciplinary body, rethinking it on the basis of the transformations produced by the neo-technical era and, still more, on the basis of the further radical disturbances brought by the numerical and electro-electronic technologies of forms and events1.

The move from technics to technologies, in the ambit of artistic production, was in Costa’s view an authentic mutation: images, words, sounds–all that had been the fruit of bodily operations–now became the fruit of technological operations. Beyond this dispossession, the problem arose of how the artist is present in the work s/he produces, in the process s/he activates. Thirdly, technological production makes art ever less ‘representation’ and increasingly ‘presentation’, “but what it presents is no longer the ‘truth’ or the ‘meaning’, but the signifiers and their objective or techno-logical logic”2. These elements combined to cause the irreversible crisis of the traditional aesthetic categories of ‘creativity’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘expressivity’, etc., the aesthetics of the beautiful or the ugly, and opened the way to a renewed aesthetics of the sublime, or rather an aesthetics of the technological sublime.

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Contemporary music, especially in its electroacoustic version (which hereafter I will also call, generically, ‘technological music’), offers the possibility of also being read and interpreted with reference to this technological sublime (Mario Costa). Electroacoustic music seems to have some of the characteristics that Costa attributes to this particular kind of sublime. Electroacoustic productions fall into the category of works of art that fulfil the technological sublime in the light of the fact that, in technology, the more the device affirms itself, annihilates any humanistic semiosis and is made the mere appearance of its essence, the stronger is the feeling of the technological sublime, because the more our mortification is consumed, the more what we contemplate sensitises and causes our power to shine3.

Artists today are faced with the task not of expressing a subjectivity that for Costa no longer interests anyone, but of fulfilling this technological sublime, contributing to the development of this socialised, controlled utilisation of the sublime made possible by the new technologies. Aesthetic subjectivity is replaced by sublime objectivity, the active use of which, since it cannot be traced to any intellectual property, may serve to increase the spiritual life of all. If this is one of the reflections most widely noted in the ambit of the aesthetics of communication, we must however widen our angle of vision further, touching the subject, which was so important in 20th century philosophy (and which fifty years ago Luigi Rognoni rightly saw in correlation with radical and with electronic music4), of the relationship between the human being and technics. We must therefore take a step back. In 1947, in Amsterdam, Dialektik der Aufklärung was published, one of the major works of European philosophical culture, written in collaboration by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung traces the development of bourgeois identity, the path of enlightenment travelled by western humanity and apparently in constant progress. The battle that characterises this progress has as its end the liberation of humanity from misfortune, the dissolution of myth and the overturning of imagination with science5. The history of the ‘enlightenment’ of reason is the history of the dialectical relation between myth and Aufklärung. The symbol of this process of identification of western humanity is Ulysses, considered by Horkheimer and Adorno to be the prototype of the bourgeois individual: his long journey is the symbol of the exhausting journey of the subject towards the construction of her/his

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identity and the awareness of self. Being lashed to the mast, as Ulysses is in order to enjoy the bewitching but fatal song of the Sirens, is an inevitable stage on the way to domination over external nature. In order to achieve this domination, however, internal nature must be repressed. The relationship that is formed, in the breakdown of bourgeois civilisation, between technico-scientific development and theoretical culture appears as a relationship of inverse proportionality, on the basis of which the decline of the latter corresponds to the growth of the former. Moreover, enlightenment thought, in reducing differing elements to identity, at the same time reduces them to mere calculable entities. The mathematisation of everything, aimed at the total control of the human being, has led to the identification of this (mathematised) world with truth, to the mistaken coincidence of “thought with mathematics”6. These considerations are part of a broader picture that pertains substantially to two subjects: the progress and role of technics in the process of human development. The questions are philosophically important. My interest is in focusing attention on those elements that can be included in the overall picture of a theoretical interpretation of some aspects of contemporary music. First of all, it may seem contradictory to speak of progress and postmodernity (as we have seen in the first chapter), if it is said that being in a further, later time as compared with modernity means seeing it in a positive light and accepting typically modern notions such as the idea of history and its corollaries (notions of progress and of supersession). This argument, for all its typical non-conclusiveness, linked to its being purely formal, does however mark the real difficulty of clearly, unequivocally identifying the nature of the watershed of post-modernity: a mere transition expended on the line of modernity, or even dissolution of the category of the new and experience of the “end of history”7? Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger are the thinkers who, at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century, laid the foundations for the construction of an image of existence in these new conditions of post-historicity, in which the idea of history as a unitary process is dissolved and existence is coloured with marks of staticity, both because of the atomic catastrophe and because of the progress of technics and of the information system. This is the situation, described by Arnold Gehlen8, in which progress becomes routine: the human capabilities of commanding nature technically have intensified, and are still intensifying, to the point that, while new results will always be

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This is the paradoxical obsolescence that looms over progress, to which is added the immobility produced by the excessive speed, for instance, of the means of communication. The point is reached at which history, above all because of the mass media, television and the Internet, “tends to be flattened on the level of contemporaneousness and simultaneousness, thus producing a de-historicisation of experience”10. The second element is connected with the dimension of technics, to which I shall return in the Six and Nine Chapters. Just as Horkheimer and Adorno maintained, for Heidegger and, even earlier, for Edmund Husserl, the mathematisation and scientification of the world or of existence contributed to the dissolution of meaning. Husserl blames the European sciences for having built up idealisations and objectivisations that left behind the original, primary, concrete relationship with the Lebenswelt11 (the “world of life”), which is to say that connection of pre-scientific experiences, around which every type of human experience, including the scientific, must be directed, for in it lies the reasonable structure of the world, that is, the basis of meaning to which any observation of reality must make reference, because the Lebenswelt is the unitary, sole world of life12.

2. Art and the Problem of Technics In the 20th century the artistic phenomenon had to come to terms with these conceptual and historical developments. Indeed its destiny was intimately and profoundly linked to these developments, since one of the principal points of the artistic-aesthetic events of the 20th century, namely the explosion of aesthetics beyond its traditional confines, was made possible, through the revolutionary work of the avant-gardes, by the impact of technology. The exit of art from its institutional confines no longer seems exclusively, or even mainly, linked in this perspective to the Utopia of the reintegration, metaphysical or revolutionary, of existence, but to the advent of new technologies which, in fact, make possible and indeed determine a form of generalisation of aestheticity13.

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I shall return to the problem of reproducibility later. For now I wish to explain the relationship between art and technics in the 20th century, taking technics to be a general socio-historical fact. In 1959, in the book Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Pierre Francastel attempted to show how art is one of the permanent functions of humanity and should therefore not be considered as antagonistic to technics (with which it shares the Greek term téchne): indeed, the latter may be said to be a valid aid to the former. For Francastel, technics does not create the values of a society, but is at their service, materialises them and makes them concrete. The modern world appears as a battlefield between forces of violence and of relationship and organisation, and an artistic tradition based on selectivity and the editing of sensations–in order to set up systems in which the spirit anticipates the current powers of technics–is in opposition to a particular technics at the service of the violent, who demand an immediate effect, limited, of course, to the momentary capabilities of action14. We may therefore regard technics as a valid aid to art and, still more, as a genuine field of action and testing. But is the hypertechnological dimension of the time simply a means of expression even when the technics of the ‘means’ has become an ‘end’ in itself? “And is it really enough”, asks Massimo Carboni, to recall the deviant, inventive, playful, ludic nature of the artist’s use of computer, multimedia, digital hypertechnologies and so on, to guarantee its conceptual and operative independence? Is art thus reduced to a mere metaphorical variant, a sort of poetic licence of technics?15.

As to the digitalisation of art, equivalent to a general reduction to numbers of all the known currents to a single current, Pietro Montani tends to stress the great risk (which from our point of view involves technological music in its digital version) of complete homogenisation of this flowing: that is to say, the ‘world’ is presented to us, is ‘phenomenalised’ in this current. Regarding these risks, Montani continues, the task of art is to resist, to fragment the current and pluralise it. Thus resistance is achieved by introducing elements of de-fluxion or rewriting, practices that today’s electronic music seems eager to assume. Ultimately, technicism, as Edgar Zilsel and Hans Blumenberg16 have shown, is at the basis of the conception of the artist as a creative genius. What is more, in the course of the 20th century a certain voluntary subjection of art to the spirit of technics came into effect, though neither constantly nor irreversibly.

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The relationship between art and technics, to recall the viewpoint of Hans Sedlmayr, is a relationship between one and another level, between a superior and an inferior nature. Considering this comparison, rather than subordinating its superior nature to the nature of the inferior field, art should raise to its upper level the parts of the lower level that are susceptible to transformation, and ennoble them, adapting them to its own superior nature17.

3. Music and the Problem of Technics We may not agree with the lexis used by Sedlmayr or with his construction of a hierarchy. It remains true that the phenomenon of technological music in its various versions (electronic, computer music, digital music, etc.) may also be interpreted as a context in which a completely new relationship appears and is instituted with the sphere of the sensitive, producing “an authentic break, a revolution of perception and performance”18. In technological music, and especially in certain of its variants, there is in fact an anomalous, hitherto unseen link between Technik and Sinnlichkeit. I use the German words for ‘technics’ and ‘sensitivity’ because behind them lies a philosophical tradition that attributes a broader, deeper meaning to them. For example, in the word Technik, there is a clear echo of Nietzsche and of Heidegger. The nihilism theorised, declared and carried out by Nietzsche carries the sense, which is not intuitive, of an appeal to take leave of Truth and Being. This same appeal echoes in the words of Heidegger, who maintained that it was necessary to set aside “being as foundation” in order to “leap into the abyss”, towards the Ab-grund (‘absence of foundation’). Alternative thinking follows this appeal and leaps, but not into the void–into a Boden, a ground. The Boden is stable, but in a different way from the equally stable Grund, in that it has within it the seed of birth, of the new. Only on this ground can something native be given. This process enters a context, or rather a situation, characterised by the end of the epoch of metaphysics and the triumph of technics. The GeStell (which Vattimo translates “im-posizione”, “im-position”), in Heidegger’s thinking, defines the historico-destinal constellation into which we have been thrust: The technical world described as Ge-Stell is the world of planned production, which requires knowledge in the sense of performance, and in

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which humanity is constantly called into a process of orderings that demand a constant hunting down of things in order to set up reserves, foundations, in view of an ever greater development of producing19.

The opening of the appeal of Ge-Stell, within which is condensed the crisis of humanism, is the opening to the totality of technical “placing”, but also of that questioning, stimulating, ordering that is the historico-destinal essence of technics. But this essence, which seems to be antimetaphysical, is precisely metaphysics, the fulfilment of metaphysics, which has always thought of ‘being’ as Grund, which ensures reason; but technics, in its plan to link various bodies in causal rings, foreseeing and dominating, is the greatest deployment of metaphysics. In reality technics and metaphysics are not in mutual opposition, but are stages in a single process. If this is, in some ways, the role of technics in the post-modern age, the phenomenon of technological music, understood as a tessera within the deployment of technics and technology, may be linked to certain features of art, as they emerge from Nietzsche’s horizon. Technological music, on the basis of a symbolic composite of Technik and Sinnlichkeit, was to be the outcome of interlocking developments: technical, aesthetic, musical, anthropological. However, not all technological music can be reduced to music for the senses, music of the irrational, since it presents different fronts according to whether it is regarded from the point of view of production or of reception. To the sensuality of reception corresponds the rationality of production. Electroacoustic music–particularly in the German version of the origins–has travelled the path of absolute rigour, of scientificity, almost totally absorbing the technico-scientific element. Indeed, among the various accusations directed at early electroacoustic music, one was often addressed, relating to the fact that it moved in a sort of blind alley, lost in the abstractions of mathematical calculation, … concerned only to reach astounding, absurd constructions, empty of that “emotional” content, that anguish that had justified and made valid the works of its most direct predecessors20.

But is this a case of composers, to adapt an expression of Enrico Livraghi’s, held hostage by technics? Livraghi asks this question starting from the critical analysis of a book by Ubaldo Fadini who, very effectively, reconstructs the problem of the relationship between technological development and personal identity21. In the economy of my discourse (and of any similar discourse on electroacoustic music), the question of technics, as we have seen, proves to be central.

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From Luigi Rognoni’s arguments in his essay “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica” there emerges above all the inevitability and the nature of ‘destiny’, in Heidegger’s sense, of technics for electronic composers. Webern’s language, together with the difficulty of his writing, caused a movement towards the most extreme areas, beyond which lay silence or electroacoustics. Rognoni’s argument tends to privilege an interpretation à la Heidegger of technics in the sense of unveiling of truth; this partly distances us from the idea of electroacoustic music as a genre that has assimilated and made its own the worldly tendency of 20th century art, though in fact the problem of truth does not disappear, but takes on new features. Hence it is more correct to maintain that artistic–including electroacoustic–research pursues the attainment of an immanent, rather than a transcendent, truth. Along the Heidegger-Husserl axis, Rognoni attributes the function of a return to the original, or rather of a “return to nature” to disclosure, which however, directed towards a philosophy of “subjective intentionality”, makes its own that phenomenological reduction à la Husserl that leads to Lebenswelt. In the philosophy of the “subject” technics is revalued precisely because, beyond the “ontological revelations”, it leads us into the temporal process and into nature, critically conceived as the result of the “phenomenological reduction” and concretely experienced and felt as process and hence as relationship22.

It is surprising, continues Rognoni, that it is possible to point to the case of electronic music as a positive example of this function of technics as compared with nature. The problem of technics, then, for the electroacoustic musician is a possibility, indeed an opportunity, to carry out that ‘return to nature’ that was becoming more than ever urgent and substantial, “revaluing technics as a teleological process in the concrete relationship with nature”23. Although Rognoni sees positive possibilities in electronic music, in the sense just outlined, he does not seem to consider it to be a musical genre destined to survive for long, nor a genre representative of a new, great art: if it proves possible to reopen this exchange with the nature of the world of sounds, the composer, going beyond the limits of the machine that has opened up these possibilities for him, will be able to begin to build a new language, still capable of speaking to human beings and rediscovering the paths of great art24.

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Fifty years after Rognoni’s reflections, we may say that the limits of the machine have not been surpassed, since there has been a constant attempt to extend them and thus postpone their supersession. The “return to nature” to which Rognoni then referred, and which he considered the main consequence of the first research in electronics, seems to be specified as a return to human nature, in the sense of exaltation of animality, of the primordial, of the hypersensory. As Mario Costa has written, the “spiritual” in art yields to the sensitive, the sensory. The works are addressed to sensoriality pure and simple, discussed, activated, investigated in all its possible contaminations and hybridisations with technological instrumentality25.

The element of the sensory in electroacoustic music is neatly summarised in the term Sinnlichkeit, which in German applies to three different contexts, kept distinct in other languages: sensitivity, sensuality and sexuality. Electroacoustic music, in its various developments, seems to have so articulate a nature, which it shares with art, according to certain passages in the writings of Nietzsche. The Dionysian frenzy and excitement linked to the trance experience of the rave are extreme examples, but fit perfectly into this picture26. The role of art, from Nietzsche’s viewpoint, is as we know particularly important. The aspect I wish to stress here is that art, after going through several conceptual and interpretative variations (from Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister27 to Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile28) becomes one of the models, if not indeed the model, that serves to clarify the concept of desire for power. This function of the model is linked to Nietzsche’s discovery that the place where, in contrast to morals and metaphysics, there has been the continued survival of a Dionysian residue, a form of freedom of the spirit, in a word what subsequently, in the last few years, has been called desire for power, is precisely art29.

From the pages of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, specifically from aphorism 146, there emerges a conception of art that might be called ‘negative’. Whereas the scientist is devoted to the true in any form, the artist displays a “weaker morality …; defends himself against temperate and simple methods and results” and he will not renounce the most effective suppositions for his art, the fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolical, the

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In subsequent aphorisms Nietzsche attributes these characteristics to earlier, immature ages of the human spirit, in which it was the “symbolic as investment in factual reality on the part of imaginations, fantasies, anthropomorphic identities”31 that triumphed. But the artist, precisely because s/he remains psychologically little more than a child and anthropologically immature, experiences passions vehemently and is in violent antagonism towards her/his contemporaries. This vehemence is the mark of the character of excess that art manifests in these aphorisms, excess that is both the vehemence of passion, and the most basic and constitutive fact, namely investment in the external on the part of the internal, images, fantasies, symbols, etc.32.

Vattimo adds to the feature of excess in art those of surplus and exception, features to which another aspect is connected, one that emerges in Nietzsche’s fragmentary comments, in his last years, on art. Here art is considered not as great style, or concluded form, but as the upsurge of passions which, in the posthumous fragments, takes on the aspect of the sexual instinct, of chaos and Dionysian abandon, one might say of entropy. These aspects, which we may assign, generically, to the philosophy of art, seem to have something in common with electroacoustic music, especially in its most radical, extravagant form. The appeal to the senses, as regards truth content, like the cult of personality (seen in the disc jockey), the upsurge of passions, the Dionysian reside and the tendency towards the liberation of spirit and body, innervate electroacoustic pop music, as well as the music generally used in techno parades and rave parties. In these contexts, participants attempt to experience total immersion in sound and the compulsion to dance. This is not (and, of course, it need not be) the tendency towards affective, cognitive, spiritual or mental elevation, but merely a kinaesthetic and synaesthetic exacerbation. This is the apotheosis of the contemporary Dionysian. If it is true that modern western men and women have lost the ability to give equal weight to all five senses, interweaving their perceptions, without privileging one over the others (which has certainly happened with the sense of sight), and thus failing to understand that fusion of hearing and sight that the Chinese of old defined as ‘light of the ears’, the raver is the (degenerate) negation of all this. And this degeneration that involves some

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socio-musical practices seems to be the answer to the evidence of the fact that–as Marius Schneider has written–modern men and women barely perceive the great inscrutability of the acoustic world, polychromy, polyrhythm and the power of sound, from which, according to the old legends on the origins of the cosmos, the visible and tangible world was born33.

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Notes 1

Mario Costa, Il Sublime tecnologico. Piccolo trattato di estetica della tecnologia (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1998), 69. 2 Mario Costa, Il Sublime tecnologico, 70. 3 Mario Costa, Il Sublime tecnologico, 80. 4 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” in Fenomenologia della musica radicale (Bari: Laterza, 1966). 5 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); orig. ed. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947). 6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18. 7 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 8 See Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, trans. Patricia Lipscomb, foreword by Peter L. Berger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); orig. ed. Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter. Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957). 9 Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milano: Garzanti, 1991), 15. 10 Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità, 18. 11 See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. with an introduction by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); orig. ed. Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936). 12 Mario Signore, Lo sguardo della responsabilità. Politica, economia e tecnica per un antropocentrismo relazionale (Roma: Studium, 2006), 222. 13 Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità, 62. 14 See Pierre Francastel, Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); orig. ed. Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956). 15 http://www.cultura.toscana.it/artecontemporanea/documenti/montani.pdf, 1. 16 See Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion: ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal mit einer historishen Begründung (Leipzig-Wien: Braumüller, 1918); Hans Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stüttgart: Reclam, 1981). 17 See Hans Sedlmayr, Die Revolution der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955). 18 Elena Tavani, “Parole e immagini dal multimediale ai nuovi media,” introduction to Elena Tavani, ed., Parole ed estetica dei nuovi media (Roma: Carocci, 2011), 7. 19 Gianni Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza. Che cosa significa pensare dopo Nietzsche e Heidegger (Milano: Garzanti, 1988 [1980]), 185. 20 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” 23.

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21

See Ubaldo Fadini, Sviluppo tecnologico e identità personale. Linee di antropologia della tecnica (Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 2000). 22 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” 32. 23 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” 33. 24 Luigi Rognoni, “La musica «elettronica» e il problema della tecnica,” 33-4. 25 Mario Costa, Dimenticare l’Arte. Nuovi orientamenti nella teoria e nella sperimentazione estetica (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2005), 102. 26 On these issues, see Georges Lapassade, Essai sur la transe (Paris: Éd. Universitaires, 1976); Michel Maffesoli, L’Ombre de Dyonisos. Contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie (Paris: Méridien/Anthropos, 1982); Gianfranco Salvatore, Techno-trance. Una rivoluzione di fine millennio (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1998). 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Helen Zimmern and Paul V. Cohn, introduction by J.M. Kennedy (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006); orig. ed. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (Chemnitz: E. Schmeitzner, 1878). 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. J.M. Kennedy (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2007); orig. ed. Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (Chemnitz: E. Schmeitzner, 1881). 29 Gianni Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza, 101. 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, aph. 146, 91-2. 31 Gianni Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza, 101. 32 Gianni Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza, 102. 33 See Marius Schneider, Singende Steine. Rhythmus-Studien an drei katalanischen Kreuzgängen romanischen Stils (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1955). .

CHAPTER FIVE AUDIENCE: INDIVIDUALITY AND COLLECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

1. Emancipation and the Crisis of Compositional Individuality One of the great topics that emerge when we speak of contemporary music relates to its consumption. As we shall see in the next chapter, the technological media (radio, web-radio, download, peer-to-peer, streaming, CDs, iPods, etc.) permit a very considerable rise in the quantity and quality of consumption as compared with the past, both for so-called ‘cultivated’ music and for what is called ‘pop’. Narrowing our view only to ‘cultivated’ contemporary music, the topic of consumption relates not only to modalities and instruments, but also, and above all, to its very possibility. It is hard to escape the evidence that for centuries the relationship between the audience (though it would be more correct to speak of various types of audience rather than audience in general) and contemporary music (of which the same distinction should be made) has been greatly disadvantaged. From the first steps of the composers of the Second School of Vienna, the problem has arisen of creating a productive dialogue between music and its listeners. This dialogue has been frequently interrupted and has often taken on the appearance of conflict, closure, contrast. For several decades, composers preferred to affirm their individuality and personality, with a view to reaching a target (aesthetic, poetic, musical, political), rather than safeguarding the possibilities of appropriate reception. Thus the problem was presented of how far a kind of music made for catastrophe and for the crisis of contemporary humanity should be made available to comprehension. In this chapter I will seek to focus attention on these topics, starting from the gradual affirmation of the composer’s individuality and

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personality, and subsequently dealing with the complex, problematic relationship between audience and contemporary music. Jean-Jacques Nattiez wrote that with Claude Debussy and Arnold Schönberg there was a split–which was to become increasingly wide and radical–between composer and listener. This is a separation brought about in post-modernity, but already detectable in modernity, given that the ‘collective’ element (in the sense of the triadic relationship between author, client and audience) was replaced, in some cases, by the strictly individual dimension. Many–I among them–maintain that in this long process the true turning point is found in Ludwig van Beethoven, who frees the musicians from their dependence on the powerful. With him, music radically entered the era of individuality, and a new historical possibility arose: since I no longer need be accountable to my masters nor to my listeners, but only to Humanity and History, I can compose what I and I alone consider aesthetically and technically appropriate, valid and beautiful1.

In fact, until the 18th century the musician was substantially dependent on ecclesiastical and political power, and this had obvious, immediate repercussions at the level of both musical practice and the artists’ social prestige. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, as happened for the figurative arts, the task of musicians was to produce and provide works destined for liturgical use or for the entertainment of the nobility and the aristocracy. At the same time, the leading political figures of the time competed for the most fashionable composers with a view to increasing their own credibility and hence their political prestige. Starting from the second half of the 18th century, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were the first great composers to set in motion that process of liberation and emancipation that was to attain a fundamental level of development with Beethoven. Despite the limitations of publishing contracts and the need to find adequate financing, the idea began to emerge of the independence of the artist–independence, first and foremost, of political power. If, until a certain point in history, institutions decisively conditioned musicians’ activity, there is a point at which the power of control became “more arbitrary to the degree that the musician is not or chooses not to be aware of it”2. Nattiez rightly stresses that the emancipation fulfilled from Beethoven on is not simply a matter of the relationship with commissioning or power, but, taken to its extreme consequences, has to do with the relationship with

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the audience, too: “modernity is entered when a composer invents new writing procedures without worrying about how they will be perceived and understood”3. This aspect, which was to play a decisive role in the developments of the history of contemporary music, is firmly rooted in the late style of Beethoven, insofar as we find there the first signs of this formal “essentialisation” which–with the exception of Wagner’s works– would be a trend that was much followed in the 20th century. For Adorno, late Beethoven marks the first great rebellion of music against the decorative, against what is not merely, objectively necessary. It is for this reason that–by way of the affirmation of the very concept of music–classicism, fullness, harmony, roundedness and perfection were lost. His late style, the split into monody and polyphony, continues Adorno, is the self-movement of classical Beethoven. In order to be the thing itself in the purest manner, ‘classically’ without trimmings, classicality is broken into fragments. The central aspect in late Beethoven is dissociation of the centre; in other words, the death of harmony. If the lyrical appearance is shattered, if the very form of the work “tends towards fragmentation”, we are faced with a pile of “rubble”4. And at this point there appears a topic that explicitly evokes the Benjamin motif of the Angelus Novus, the angel of history whom a storm “drives irresistibly towards the future, on which it turns its back, while the pile of debris rises before him to he sky”. In the background, the “thought of death” dominates–the destructive fury before the reality of which “the right of art ceases”5. This is one of the decisive elements in Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven. There is, then, a very special process that seems to begin and end in a cyclic manner with the isolation of the musician. Being freed from the constrictive relationship with power opens up a new relational mode between the composer and the society and culture of her/his time, consigning a new independence to its fate. This is certainly emancipation. For the first time, composers came out of their isolation, “becoming aware that the destiny of music is interwoven with the great themes of contemporary culture”6, and facing up to theoretical questions, not only in the musical sphere, connected with historical developments, the progress of humanity and of society, the possibilities of art, and the engagement of the artist. From Beethoven to Richard Wagner, by way of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz, it was increasingly urgent to reflect on the relationship between art and life, civilisation and non-contamination, music and religiosity, composer and audience, subjective and collective dimension, open and closed form, conservation and revolution.

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Paradoxically, the achievement of liberty and emancipation and the escape from isolation seem to have coincided with entry into a new isolation. The difference, which is certainly not secondary and unimportant, lies in the ‘quality’ of this isolation. Before Beethoven, it was a forced isolation, linked to its being the weak pole of the power-artist polarity. But after Beethoven, it became a conscious, wished-for, desired, intentional, at times exaggerated and infuriating isolation. This brings us to postmodernity, during which the split between composer and listener reached its peak. What has been said thus far clearly outlines a path that remains very generic, not doing justice to the variety of paths taken by contemporary music. Commonly and, at times, almost inevitably, there is a tendency to assign to the same category (generally labelled as an ‘-ism’) artistic experiences that may be very different one from the other. But the need to classify, understandable and legitimate from the historical point of view, conceals pitfalls and misinterpretations that risk exploding in the field of contemporary music. If in fact the history of pre-dodecaphonic music, subject to categorisation under ‘-isms’, for that very reason risks oversimplifying the overview, in the case of the history of contemporary music the use of ‘-isms’ and, more generally, of certain apparently unambiguous, all-embracing categories may be completely misleading. Coming back to our subject, it is therefore useful to indicate that the development of contemporary music has been far from linear. It is a history that brings together Pierre Boulez and Benjamin Britten, John Cage and Anton von Webern, Francis Poulenc and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Darius Milhaud and Iannis Xenakis, Hans W. Henze and Pierre Schaeffer, Terry Riley and Max Reger, fluctuating between avant-garde and rearguard, between post-avant-garde and neo-tonality. Ultimately, the 20th century, perhaps more than any other, “was the century of the coexistence and diversity of trends”7, but it was also a crucial period in the history of music, during which a decisive step was taken from a ‘modern’ view of music to one that may generically be defined as ‘postmodern’. This, however, is a perspective that has specific characteristics and, as we saw in the first chapter, is notably difficult to interpret. Nattiez clearly shows how the ‘modern’ attempted to bring together faith in musical progress and the powerful idea that today’s experimental music will become the universal music of tomorrow. Added to this is the desire to imagine musical progress as having a trajectory parallel to political progress, directed towards a universal, classless society. Furthermore, the modern is seeking purity, is convinced of the aesthetic value of its creations, and has perfect faith in the truth of its compositional

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work. Nattiez maintains that, in contrast, the post-modern has no faith in the future, and so creates works for the listener of today, privileging pleasure and unafraid of the impurity that is the fruit of mixing different styles and genres. What is more, the post-modern tends to consider the cultures of different epochs as equivalent, since musical creations answer the taste of the listeners. As a result, there is no longer any a priori barrier or disapproval that forbids recourse to any particular style, any particular writing. The return to tonality is welcome, as it allows the pairing of so-called serious music with pop and industrial music8.

It is interesting that in the second half of the 20th century an unprecedented, almost curious situation arose, in that radical music, committed to recovering (or creating ex novo) a relationship with the audience, came close to being popular, and popular music, especially rock, tended to become increasingly radical. But the question is: how long can one kind of music hold a position of balance within the tension between two opposites? And is it therefore capable of resisting in the long term without falling now into the ‘popular’, now into the ‘radical’ category? The difficulty lies not only in the music itself; it lies even more in the demands made upon the music by the culture industry. Ultimately decisive is not whatever aims the music itself might have, but rather the way in which the music is consumed in spite of those aims. For, although the possibility of critical self-reflection within popular music indicates that it might be able, perhaps, to neutralise at least some of the effects of the culture industry (depending as these do on the manipulation and mystification of the relations between the production, reproduction and reception of music), there are few signs to show that this has actually been achieved to any lasting extent9.

Indeed, Max Paddison shows how certain marketing and distribution mechanisms have been established in increasingly complex, efficient, but at the same time compelling, forms with the result that it is increasingly difficult for any kind of music–light, popular or avant-garde, western or not–to resist its fate as merchandise. If popular music ventures on the path of radicalism, it inevitably risks drawing away from its audience, becoming music for the few, and so outside the range of what is considered ‘popular’, except in the limited sense of something that makes use of elements drawn from popular musical material. The consequence is that, for example, some of Adorno’s theses can even be applied to a certain kind of popular music. What I mean is that, for instance, like

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serious music, some examples of popular music are able to conquer the more advanced stage of their musical material, being aware of the techniques and instruments at their disposal, and attempting to escape their fate as merchandise. The reference to ‘radical’ pop music also makes it still clearer that the relationship between the contemporary musical world and the audience at this time is a complex one. Within this, of course, the subject of taste, preferences, choice of what to listen to and what to ignore is also relevant. Unfortunately, ‘cultivated’ contemporary music, for most people, falls into the last category–what to ignore. But why is this so? Is it difficult to understand, to grasp? Is it impossible to appreciate because it tends not to shake our inmost being as traditional classical music does? Is it unpleasant because it seems chaotic and meaningless? Is it rejected because people are not trained to listen to it? Let us return to Adorno and to the subject of taste.

2. Decline of Taste and the ‘Economisation’ of Art While he was leading the musical section of the Princeton Radio Research Project, so in the first few years of his US exile, Theodor W. Adorno wrote a particularly important essay: Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens. Its importance lies not only in the value of the analysis he conducted, but also in its anticipating many later reflections on aesthetic and musicological themes, not least the posthumous Ästhetische Theorie. Moreover, the ideas presented in this 1938 essay include a potential criticism that the contemporary situation seems to have partially confirmed (in some cases even more radically than what Adorno hypothesised). The debate on the validity of these ideas is in fact staked on the level of the new national and international–or rather global–social orders. The world he had left was still strongly marked by the division between the two blocks, a clear straddling between European and American economic development, between the dominant American capitalism and the attempts at ‘economic miracles’ in Europe. Adorno’s criticism is today powerfully refuted in relation, for instance, to the inevitable delegation of the independent choices of the individual to the social system, and–more closely linked to the field of aesthetics and music–the system of the cultural industry. It would be hard to maintain the impossibility of being able to choose what to listen to, or exercising one’s free judgment of aesthetics and taste. At the same time, this same fierce criticism proves

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unexpectedly up-to-date and probably necessary when we consider a mental attitude, when Adorno’s style of thought is considered a model, in that it is critical thinking that starts from self-reflection10. But this is not all. In addition to these general considerations, certain elements expressed by Adorno in his 1938 essay are interesting for our subject. I am thinking of the topic of the decline of taste, which in all truth appears cyclically in the history of culture. Indeed, decline is an eternal moment in progress itself, we must free ourselves of the illusion of progress without decline (the imagined progress in a straight line, which the wise Goethe rightly set against spiral progress)11.

For Adorno, decreeing the death of taste means testifying to and denouncing the end of freedom of choice and the inactivity of the subject faced with a mechanism of dominion that swallows her/him without scruple or rethinking. To Adorno, the listener seems merely a convinced buyer who puts up very little resistance12, victim of a market of culture and art which, thanks to its persuasive, hypnotic power, makes her/him powerless, passive in the face of the powers of dominion. The social and economic dynamics based on the search for profit and the accumulation of capital, in the shadow of which we live, prove to be hidden and beyond criticism13. Interest in profit, and hence class relations, writes Adorno in Negative Dialektik, are objectively the engine of the productive process on which all our lives depend and whose primacy finds its escape in the death of all14. The mechanism of dominion to which we are all subject, and which we ourselves constantly reactivate, pervades the artistic and musical field too, and there is no possibility of reaction. Adorno maintains that humanity is waiting for the time when the ‘no exit’ world will be set aflame by a totality that is humanity itself and against which humanity can do nothing15. Economy has penetrated and hence conditioned art, but could this have been avoided? Obviously this is a rhetorical question. What we call globalisation has invaded every area of our activities, first of all the economic field. The economy is global not just because it is a close-knit fabric of relationships of interdependence among the various national markets, but also because it has penetrated fields, such as the aesthetic, by their nature far from the economic sphere. But the regulatory and guiding function that the market of art has taken on with regard to art itself, and which Adorno so deplores and condemns, is not to be extended to all forms of artistic output. In the artistic experience of the 20th century, they are directly inserted in (and hence influenced by) the frame of advanced

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capitalism and the theoretical frame of the avant-gardes and the neo-avantgardes. The world of contemporary art, in the marked variety of its forms, is by now completely at ease in the “Capitalism Casino”16, among other things going through processes of de-differentiation and un-definition of its objects, losing specificity, opening its doors to any expressive modality that the ‘system of art’ has accepted as artistic expression. The art world has been modelled by, or–to give it a more active role–has taken to itself the transformations and accelerations of the contemporary world, becoming globalised and at the same time speaking out against globalisation, restructuring its statute in financial terms and at the same time continuing to shake the banner of anti-capitalism and social equality, recognising the existence of Latin American, Native American, Aboriginal and other artists and, at the same time, giving undue stress to western art and accentuating the difference between “us” and “them”. Thanks to the great exhibitions, the expansion of the art market and, let us not forget, the use of commercial jet aircraft, at the end of the 1960s there arose a sort of jet set of artists and curators, the cream of the art world, those happy few who promptly make their appearance as participants or organisers at the Biennials, the Triennials, the Documenta and other contemporary art festivals. Certainly, at the fashionable dinners and opening cocktail parties New Yorkers felt more comfortable talking business with colleagues from Cologne, rather than with latinos from the Bronx, farmers from Westphalia or a fourth-world Liverpool family17.

Inevitably the logic of the market in the end contaminated art too, especially music, but this may have contributed to the separation of lowlevel products from works of greater substance. The realisation and awareness of seeing standardised or, as Adorno puts it, “desperately alike” products being offered directs choice towards another dimension of musical output. Works of art are enjoyed when they are recognised, but in order to recognise them it is necessary to be capable of distinguishing them from mediocre products. We may say that the arrival at artistic music comes about by way of negation. But here a new problem arises, about which Adorno’s tone becomes particularly polemical. How is the subjectconsumer to arrive at this awareness we have mentioned? How can s/he achieve ‘good taste’ (and that means ‘critical taste’)? How can s/he distinguish a second-rate piece of music from a masterpiece? These questions pertain to a field that may be defined as ‘musical education (or pedagogy)’, a field to which we may assimilate the indisputable current problem of widespread inability to listen indirectly and structurally in

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favour of a type of listening that is regressive, immediate and de-structural (a subject to which I will return in the chapter on listening). From this process of regression we arrive at a process by which the listeners, bewitched and hypnotised, increasingly identify with the idol, with the exchange value concealed under the false pretences of the utilisation value. To Adorno’s eyes it seems that the whole musical system, from the composer’s idea to its consumption as a product, passing through execution, is inexorably devoured and emptied within by the worm of commercialisation and its consequences: standardisation, idolisation and regression. This state of affairs, which has not been definitively contradicted in the last few decades, decisively influences the consumption of so-called ‘cultured’ contemporary music, and also the relationship between the world of production and execution of this music and the world of its reception.

3. Listening to Contemporary Music Despite the (perhaps not sufficiently convinced) effort made on many sides in the spread of contemporary music, it is still too often confused with an élite artistic form or, still worse, with something incomprehensible and inaccessible. As to the execution, spread, transmission and in-depth analysis of contemporary music, the relationship between supply and demand is certainly unbalanced in favour of demand. In the last few years, both among the young and among those who habitually frequent places devoted to the production and spread of music (conservatories, universities, theatres, artistic associations, private foundations, etc.), there has been an evident increase in the need to approach contemporary music. This music is now considered–albeit not yet widely–a dimension that is at once attractive and repellent, familiar and unknown, something people want to engage with but which proves difficult to understand and penetrate. With regard to this demand for contemporary music, the supply is undoubtedly inadequate, in terms not so much of quality as of quantity. The outside environment, characterised by a sort of absent-minded, unconscious perception, at the same time clearly offers opportunities, but it also shows risks, linked to the (by now historic) fact that the undoubted attractiveness of contemporary music is experienced as difficult to access. It would therefore be useful to find suitable solutions in order to be able to do away with the inevitable perplexities or, worse still, resistance of the

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unaccustomed audience, which we may say has not been trained in listening to contemporary music. Listeners need to be accompanied on a journey across the main trends that have characterised the last few decades of the history of contemporary music, down to our own days. The problem is by no means new. Some years after the publication of the essay Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens, Adorno once more criticised how the relationship between consumer and work takes shape on the level of listening. The audience clings stubbornly to the appearance that conceals and defers the essence. The listener who attentively follows the musical flow, arriving at a dissonant chord, waits for it to be resolved. Atonal and dodecaphonic music betrays this expectation. The dissonant chord, now wholly emancipated, no longer exists as anticipation of a consonant chord but takes on value, meaning and content in its own right; the dissonances arose as the expression of tension, contradiction, and pain. They take on fixed contours and become ‘material’. They are no longer the media of subjective expression. For this reason, however, they by no means deny their origin18.

But if the effect of this new kind of music on the listeners arises from the fact that “the dissonances which horrify them testify to their own conditions; for that reason alone do they find them unbearable”19, why does it continue to exist? We may only hazard a guess, although there are those who maintain that by now the attempts to educate the audience to certain contemporary music have totally failed20. It may be that the lack of harmony between listeners and contemporary music has reasons that are not only ‘pedagogic’, but specifically perceptive. I am referring to the mechanism defined by psychology as ‘perceptive automatism’. The point is that music that pleases, thanks to its adherence to criteria such as symmetry, order, consonance and harmony, actually responds to those perceptive demands of human beings identified, and by now scientifically acquired, by Gestalttheorie. In the light of this, Adorno’s position should be revised: in answering the criticism of intellectualism often moved against the new music, he states that those who offer this ‘reproof’ are reasoning “as though the tonal idiom of the last 350 years has been derived from nature”21. Schönberg takes the same line, saying that tonality has proved not to be a postulate of natural conditions. … Since tonality is not a condition imposed by nature, it makes no sense to insist on preserving it on the basis of a natural law22.

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The new music nevertheless needed a sort of Schönberghian alter ego in philosophy. This was Adorno, who had already, in the introductory pages of his Philosophie der neuen Musik, shown how necessary, how quasi obligatory it was to offer a solid theoretical basis to the movement of modern music. In this text Adorno advances a series of motivations and arguments framed to justify the choice made by the new music to turn the page so radically. This does not mean that before the Philosophie avantgarde music had no theoretical basis. Schönberg, for instance, had played a leading role in the cultural world of Vienna, also through his participation in the publishing initiatives of the Blaue Reiter23. But what was missing was a ‘philosophy’ that might make a further contribution to the affirmation of the new music and clothe it with the responsibility of being the only road possible. Thus Adorno was concerned to remain faithful to two elements: the selective criterion based on the ‘truth’ and the centrality of the history of music, whereas he was not prepared to construct a polycentric model of the musical reality24. He was probably not interested in a widespread general consensus on the new music, for he had maintained an elitist view of music25, over time, the logical consequence of an idea of ars humana in opposition to an inhumanus social apparatus26. The exactness of dodecaphonic music, said Adorno, cannot be perceived by listening, whereas it is possible to recognise the “constriction of the dodecaphonic system”27. Regarding dodecaphonic music, one essential topic in the debate on its reception is thus the problem of its “translatability” and the meaning attributed to it by the listeners. In this absence of communication with the world, however, lies the tragedy of the new music. Because it has chosen the road of denial of reality and assumption of its contradictory, distressing, inhuman features, it has sacrificed its relationship with the audience in favour of an enforced isolation. Communicating contemporary music–which is still necessary–does not, however, mean simply reducing its circulation and the activity of deep theoretical and critical study to mere transmission of information. Against newspaper and feuilleton criticism, which is more popular than rigorous, Adorno maintains that musical criticism is not just a means of communication whereby judgments are expressed on the basis of personal impressions, to be transmitted to the widest possible audience, but that it must aim at much higher objectives: it is almost–but not really–needless to repeat the apparently banal observation that criticism must judge. This means that the critic must have the courage and the ability to take a position. Indeed, Adorno goes on to say that even a false judgment is

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preferable, as long as it is truly able to penetrate the work, to a vague attitude and the caution typical of those who circle round the problem hesitantly and warily, to conceal the critic’s cowardice. Not unusually, in fact, the critic prefers to sweeten the pill, to water down the criticism to the point where judgment disappears completely–and it is judgment that makes criticism really valid. It is a question of using the tool of criticism not to demolish or crush, but rather to penetrate the truth content of the work, recognising the problems it raises. Only then, writes Adorno, can we go on to the appropriateness of the means to achieve the end and in conclusion the truth content28. This can be said since art and music are not simply something one does, technico-manual operations. They are rather an essential means to change people’s perception of their place in the world, a basic tool to contribute to changing society. The artist need not fight the existing social structures, but must produce works whose construction provides positive models for human activity, being structured above all in non-hierarchical, community terms. These basic ideas are the conceptual foundation of any project to relaunch listening to contemporary music, with a view to renewing the relationship between musical world and audience–a relationship that seems to proceed in fluctuating phases of love and hatred. There are certain ends that the intellectual world of the organisers, operators and composers should attempt to achieve, perhaps these: 1) promote and propagate contemporary music not only in the most traditional contexts; 2) make it easier to understand and contribute to a greater involvement of an audience that is torn between attraction and diffidence; 3) set up projects for dialogue between professionals and enthusiasts, experts and audience, in a virtuous circle capable of bringing out the vitality of the areas; 4) create initiatives to involve, directly and indirectly, that basic component of the entirety of human resources that needs and insistently demands increasing space, and which has a greater, more receptive potential: the component of young musicians and listeners; 5) facilitate and intensify the relationship with educational institutions in the artistic and musical sector, and the existing excellence in the fields of contemporary theatre and dance (these are well known and have a long, persistent tradition everywhere); 6) make it possible for the public institutions to finally offer suitable financial support to the most avantgarde projects; 7) bring about a balance between theory and practice, whose relationship in the production and circulation of art and music has always seemed disproportionately favourable to practice. The result has been the neglect of a fundamental component in the process of

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understanding new artistic forms, namely deep theoretical study of the questions they raise; 8) open up the musical conversation to a broader conversation on the contemporary arts, since in the 20th century there was an increasingly dense dialogue on the destiny and functions that contemporary art can fulfil today. I believe these objectives and perspectives to be sustainable, in terms of both society and environment, whether natural or urban. The fact is that much contemporary music–especially the electronic and acousmatic varieties, but also in its relations with land art and public art–has set up a fruitful relationship with what is traditionally considered the extra-musical or a-musical or, still further, anti-musical field, drawing a curve from extreme silence to extreme noise. This historico-musical process has made composers and listeners more receptive to the acoustic vitality of the natural and urban environments, opening composition and listening to a sound universe outside the range of traditional music. Listening to music and listening to the world should be almost the same thing, in that we should accept sounds in their context, letting concrete music ‘selfcompose’, in a sense, in harmony with the Taoist concept of ‘Wu-Wei’ (non-action). Much of the best contemporary music is to be regarded as an interesting, fascinating path towards the achievement of a creative, existential freedom that can be extended from the most abstract thought to the most concrete accomplishment. And this is not unconnected with the desire to live in full awareness, actively, as the inescapable premise for the transformation of the status quo, in order to build a new alliance among human beings and between them and the world, thus giving new meaning to concepts like society, humanity, ecology. But I conclude this chapter on the audience by referring to two great voices of the French cultural 20th century. In the early 1980s, Michel Foucault and Pierre Boulez met to talk precisely about the relationship between contemporary music and audience. It is interesting to recall how this conversation proceeded, not only in terms of the level of considerations put forward by the two men, but also because it is in line with the way this book deals with certain questions relating to contemporary music. More precisely, retrieving the reading Foucault and Boulez give of the relationship between contemporary music and audience, even more emphatically than in previous times, is closely interwoven with every aspect of culture and human activities. What, then, did these two great Frenchmen have to say? Foucault, the philosopher, maintains that it is often said that contemporary music has met with a strange fate, that it has become so complex as to be inaccessible, that its structures and techniques are

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moving ever farther away. If this is what is generally held to be the case (and perhaps is partly true), what struck Foucault was “the multiplicity of links and relations between music and all the other elements of culture”29. This is clear if we consider, for example, that music is, after cinema, the art that is most sensitive to technical and technological developments. But if it seems clear that there is a relationship and close dialogue between the developments of 20th century culture, technological, artistic and musical research, so that they have been mutually influential, how can it be that contemporary music, instead of being perceived as close to the sensitivity of every individual, is experienced as being at a distance that can barely be bridged? Boulez, for his part, maintains that the musical world is divided into “circuits”: symphonic music, chamber music, opera, baroque music and so on. Each of these circuits is of a specific type, so that it is difficult to talk of a general culture. The need for these distinctions, Boulez claims, is understandable in financial terms, but there is a corresponding specialisation of the audience, or rather of the various audiences that are part of the various circuits. It follows from this state of affairs that [there] exists a tendency to form a larger or smaller society corresponding to each category of music, to establish a dangerously closed circuit among this society, its music, and its performers30.

Contemporary music, for Boulez, does not escape this development, but seems even more isolated as compared with other ‘circuits’. Nor is it immune to the defects of the world of music in general: it has its own places, stars, snobbish attitudes, rivalries, market values and statistics. In Foucault’s view, contemporary music is not culturally isolated, unless all musical circuits are isolated. For instance, the rock circuit gathers an enormous number of people, but the erudite listener, who prefers cultured music, feels excluded from that circuit. Hence, Foucault writes: One cannot speak of a single relation of contemporary culture to music in general, but of a tolerance, more or less benevolent, with respect to a plurality of musics. Each is granted the “right” to existence, and this right is perceived as an equality of worth. Each is worth as much as the group which practices it or recognizes it31.

Boulez holds that such a position conceals a sort of ‘ecumenism’, namely the attempt to solve the problem by means of pluralistic acceptance of all that exists in music, perfectly in tune with the style of advanced liberal society. All is good, all is beautiful, all is pleasurable:

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there are no values, but everyone is happy, adds the composer. This seemingly democratic, liberating position actually reinforces the divisions and the ghettoes, and “comforts one’s clear conscience for being in a ghetto, especially if from time to time one tours the ghettos of others”32. The difficulties of consumption of contemporary music are also the fruit of financial and organisational factors. As Adorno also maintained, what works best commercially is compulsively proposed/imposed, thus producing a sort of “trace” (as the neurologists call it), crystallising the habits and practices of listening. Foucault adds that what is actually made available to the audience is what the audience hears. And what the audience hears is what is made available to it, in a vicious circle that makes the mechanism increasingly constrictive, and only open and dynamic in appearance. Today the positions taken by Adorno or Foucault cannot be fully shared, since that would mean accepting the idea that the listener is wholly passive with regard to what is offered by the various individuals involved in the ‘world of music’. However, we may also think along lines that are only partially akin to Adorno’s. It is difficult, for example, to deny that radio stations, more than ever today, impose their programme schedules on the basis of the financial interests of the major labels. It is equally undeniable that the interaction between presenter and listener which gives rise to the demand to hear a piece is distorted by the fact that the listener’s request does not reflect a complete, conscious choice, but is the fruit of repeated broadcasts by the radio stations. This is what is meant by plugging, namely that mechanism of cultural industry whereby something is made popular. The favoured songs are the most popular not because they are the best, but because they are broadcast the most33. If, then, certain criticisms put forward by Adorno seem sadly current today, it must however be said that today music is not broadcast by a few ‘generalising’ radio stations. There are increasing numbers of ‘thematic’ stations, founded precisely to broadcast a specific kind of music. In addition, it must be said that music is not heard only on traditional radio, but also on web radios or via the Internet in general. This has, of course, greatly broadened the range of music offered and broadcast, thus reducing–though not entirely eliminating–the ‘ideological’ aspect of radio that Adorno criticises so harshly. It is easy to understand that all this is closely related to the spread of contemporary music, which is trounced by interests that are much greater than those strictly connected with it. Moreover, a further victim is taste and the ability to listen, both subjected to orientation and limitation. It is

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therefore only partly a problem of ‘access’ to contemporary music and much more a problem of support and circulation. To these points must be added the complex topic of the comprehensibility of contemporary music, of which we have already spoken, and which is inevitably a part of the conversation between the philosopher and the composer. Foucault tells us that it has been increasingly difficult to listen to music since music was freed from patterns, signals, and perceptible indications in a structure that foresees elements that are repeated and are thus recognisable. In classical music there is a certain transparency from the composition to the hearing. And even if many compositional features in Bach or Beethoven aren’t recognizable by most listeners, there are always other features, important ones, which are accessible to them. But contemporary music, by trying to make each of its elements a unique event, makes any grasp or recognition by the listener difficult34.

There is, then, a complex of problems around the difficulty of suitably circulating contemporary music, and this can be seen in three fields: a) training of the ear; b) financial interests and c) the intrinsic complexity (or, more correctly, the non immediate mastering of what we listen to) of contemporary music. But this is not all. To reduce the problem to these three areas is to omit the one who should be the principal actor–the recipient of the work: the listener. If attention is concentrated on record labels, radio and television stations, in specialist newspapers, concert institutions or indeed the composers, the risk is that the listener, in the sense of the person capable of choosing, will be set aside. The choice is not limited to what music to listen to, but is extended to another level, which might be called ‘gnoseological’: how interested is a generic listener in knowing music, its history and its supporting structures? How interested is the listener in going beyond the barrier that keeps her/him separate from the understanding of music and, still more, the understanding of contemporary music? With regard to this subject, Boulez is probably right, when he retorts to Foucault: [is] there really only lack of attention, indifference on the part of the listener toward contemporary music? Might not the complaints so often articulated be due to laziness, to inertia, to the pleasant sensation of remaining in known territory?35.

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It cannot be denied that 20th century music gradually dispensed with those reassuring elements that make classical and romantic music more comprehensible, or at least easier to grasp and enjoy: a recognisable melody, classified, codified chords, structures consolidated by tradition and by traditional harmony, etc. So-called ‘serious’ music is moving towards an increasingly radical renewal, in form, language and instruments used. Works, Boulez continues, are tending to become unique pieces that cannot be traced to a tradition, a school, a style or a pattern. All this hinders immediate understanding. In order to overcome these difficulties, however, the listener should at least listen to the work a certain number of times and attempt to arrive at a higher level of comprehension, which will not be immediate but, in point of fact, mediated by repeated listening. If contemporary music, even more than the music of the preceding 400 years, is like an iceberg that reveals only its (sometimes very sharp) point, the listener’s task is to make the effort to plunge in, to explore more closely all that lies below the surface of the water. Often, however, the listener merely listens, passively accepting what strikes the ears. In any case, contemporary music is by its very nature dynamic, ever new and different, lowered into a dimension of continual change and constant metamorphosis. It is a continual discovery. Certainly, writes Boulez, this nature of being in continual movement cannot become a condemnation and should not make contemporary music a field that excites the curiosity of “intrepid explorers”. In truth, it is a complex subject, there are many factors involved and solutions are hard to find. Just as we cannot speak univocally and uniformly about contemporary music (one should always say ‘musics’, precisely because of what has already been said, namely that there are as many styles as there are composers), so we cannot make a single unity of the many elements that make it difficult to circulate and ‘receive’ contemporary music. In the end, perhaps we should accept the invitation of Boulez, who ends his conversation with Foucault in these words: One would rather be tempted to say: gentlemen, place your bets, and for the rest, trust in the air du temps. But, please, play! Play! Otherwise, what infinite secretions of boredom!36.

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Notes 1

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Come raccontare il XX secolo?,” in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. III. “Le avanguardie musicali del Novecento” (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), XV-XLII: XVI. 2 These are the words of Enrico Fubini on the relationship between music and politics, in Mario Messinis and Paolo Scarnecchia, eds., Musica e politica. Teoria e critica della contestualità sociale della musica, voci sull’est, testimonianze e letture di contemporanei (Venezia: Marsilio, 1977), 481. 3 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Come raccontare il XX secolo?,” XVI. 4 On this, see Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); orig. ed. Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, Hg. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). 5 See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. 6 Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Romanticismo (Torino: EDT, 2005), VIII. 7 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Come raccontare il XX secolo?,” XIX. 8 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Come raccontare il XX secolo?,” XXII. 9 Max Paddison, “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music,” Popular Music 2 (1982), “Theory and Method”, 217. 10 For Serge Doubrovsky, criticism worthy of the name begins with being selfcritical. We must know our postulates in order to defend our certainties. See Serge Doubrovsky, The New Criticism in France, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); orig. ed. Pourquoi la nouvelle critique. Critique et Objectivité (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966). 11 Benedetto Croce, “Il concetto di decadenza,” La Critica 32 (1934), 158. 12 See Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 228-317; orig. ed. “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens” [1938], in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 1956), 9-45. 13 Sociological research shows rather that today, “the possibilities of choice have multiplied, just as the plurality of cultural forms and the possibilities for all to project their own horizons of personal meaning within the multicultural systems” (Stefan Müller-Doohm, “Pensare dalla terra di nessuno. La vita e l’opera di Theodor W. Adorno,” in Luigi Pastore and Thomas Gebur, eds., Theodor W. Adorno. Il maestro ritrovato [Roma: manifestolibri, 2008], 25). It remains true that there are vast areas of the world in which this does not occur and which thus fall within the range of Adorno’s analysis, as well as being regions whose economic structure is not the one typical of advanced capitalism. The same totalitarian dynamics are in fact found in the capitalist as much as in the authoritarian system. 14 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); orig. ed. Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966). 15 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University

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Press, 2002); orig. ed. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947). 16 Franco La Cecla, Contro l’architettura (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 112. 17 Yves Michaud, L’artiste et les commissaires. Quatre essais non pas sur l’art contemporain, mais sur ceux qui s’en occupent (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1989); english trans. of the italian L’artista e i commissari. Quattro saggi non sull’arte contemporanea, ma su chi si occupa di arte contemporanea (Roma: Edizioni IDEA, 2008), 65. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York-London: Continuum, 2004), 86; orig. ed. Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1949). 19 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 9. 20 Arnold Schönberg was convinced that time and training (though he believed “theoretical knowledge [is] not the most essential condition”) would model the ear to listen to and understand dissonant and dodecaphonic music. In 1926 he wrote: “The listener’s ear must be trained for a long time yet, before the dissonant sounds seem obvious and the procedures based on them become comprehensible” (Arnold Schönberg, “Partito preso o convinzione?,” in Luigi Rognoni, La scuola musicale di Vienna. Espressionismo e dodecafonia [Torino: Einaudi, 1966], 406). It is not clear how long the “long time” was to be. Nevertheless, Schönberg was clearly fully aware of the difficult reception of the new music by the audience. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 11. However, Adorno seems not to reject a perceptive interpretation of music. Writing of his own way of penetrating post-serial music, Adorno maintains that serial and post-serial music seems to aim at a basically different perception, insofar as one may speak of music aiming at any perception. Adorno, then, was quite clear about the importance of the “perceptive question” with regard to the consumption and comprehension of the musical work (see “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una fantasia. Essay on Modern Music [London-New York: Verso, 1992], 270-1). 22 Arnold Schönberg, “Partito preso o convinzione?,” 424. 23 As is well known, Der Blaue Reiter (The blue knight) was one of the groups of artists (and of newspapers) that were best known and most fertile at the beginning of the 20th century; it was formed in Münich in 1911. Among its members were expressionist artists, including Wassily Kandinskij, Paul Klee and Franz Marc. 24 Antonio Serravezza, “Introduzione” to Theodor W. Adorno, Filosofia della musica moderna (Torino: Einaudi, 2002), XX-XXI. 25 In his famous 1936 essay, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Benjamin, facing the problem of how technological and artistic development were brought together in mass society, attempts to stress the positive characterisitcs inherent in the technical reproducibility of works of art. While Adorno believes that the massification of art is necessarily harmful (if not lethal) for art, Benjamin stresses how in contemporary society the mass, this new political-social subject, must be able to enter the artistic circuit, so that art is no longer aristocratic and élitist, but art of the masses. Benjamin maintains that the technical reproducibility of artworks does not prejudice their quality, but favours

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their “desacralisation”. On the one hand what fails in the era of technical reproducibility is the “aura” of the artwork, its uniqueness, its originality, its authenticity, its hic et nunc. On the other hand, however, tank to the new technological objectives achieved, there are real possibilities of a widespread consumption of artworks, which had always been barred to the masses: see Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968); orig. ed. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 16 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2013). 26 Although this opposition was to be overturned, since art, in order to liberate and humanise society, must take on and develop its features, hence itself becoming ‘inhuman’: “The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the humane” (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 132). 27 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music. 28 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflexionen über Musikkritik” [1967], in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. XIX, Musikalischen Schriften VI, Hg. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1984). 29 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” trans. John Rahn, Perspectives of New Music 24, no. 1 (1985), 6. 30 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 7. 31 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 8. 32 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 8. 33 See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, 437-69; orig. ed. “On Popular Music,” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX, no. 1 (1941), 17-48. 34 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 9-10. 35 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 10. 36 Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” 12.

CHAPTER SIX LISTENING: POSSIBILITIES AND COMPLICATIONS OF LISTENING TO MUSIC IN CONTEMPORANEITY

1. Premise That every piece of music should be listened to in a different way, and indeed that listening to very different kinds of music means something completely different each time, today is not merely a common heritage recognised by the historian or theoretician of music, but their very method.

In the late 1920s, these were the first lines of an essay on the phenomenology of listening1, written by Günther Anders. Contemporaneity, in the many expressions with which it has shown its revolutionary drive, has been a radical turnaround not only in the modalities of producing music, but also in those of reception and listening. Having spoken of audience, it is necessary to face more precisely the problem of how the relationship develops between listener and music in contemporaneity. Discussing this problem means starting from a more general level, which therefore goes beyond the specific ambit of contemporary music. Listening at present has particular connotations that have to do not only with the utilisation of contemporary musical works, but with music in general, of any kind whatever, wherever the listening may happen. In this chapter, then, the word ‘listening’ will allow us to penetrate the dense tissue of the problems related to listening to music and to attempt to face each of them. I shall therefore start from more general questions, and then go on to deal with the topic of listening in the digital age, and of how the new technologies can be at the same time an opportunity and a complication in the relationship between human beings and music, in the full awareness of living in an ‘acusmatic century’2.

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2. Theodor W. Adorno and His Theory of Listening In the course of the 20th century many studies were made of the practices and modalities of listening, and innumerable sociologists, psychologists and philosophers tackled this subject, especially among Germans (we may recall Eduard Hanslick, Heinrich Schenker, Heinrich Besseler, Felix Salzer or Theodor W. Adorno), and in part French and Italian scholars (for example Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Jacques Attali, Michel Imberty, Pierre Albert Castanet, Alessandro Arbo, Gianmario Borio, Fabrizio Desideri, Enrico Fubini). Clearly, all the theories of listening that were developed in the 20th century suffer from the cultural and philosophical climate in which they were formulated, but also from the point in technical-technological development that coincided with the individual author’s life. It is in fact beyond doubt that mass communication media, the modalities of transmission and circulation (radio, television, Internet), digital support systems, etc., have repercussions on any theory of listening that aims to be effective and to respond to what emerges from society and from current history. Like listening behaviours, theories of listening too, then, are entirely rooted in history and in the history of technology and of sound reproduction: Sound-reproduction technologies are artifacts of vast transformations in the fundamental nature of sound, the human ear, the faculty of hearing, and practices of listening that occurred over the long nineteenth century. Capitalism, rationalism, science, colonialism, and a host of other factors– the “maelstrom” of modernity, to use Marshall Berman’s phrase–all affected constructs and practices of sound, hearing, and listening3.

As the starting point of our journey, we may choose Theodor W. Adorno, one of the first and leading philosophers to tackle the problem of listening4. For Adorno, there is an initial, general distinction to be made: between structural and regressive listening. In other words, we may say that Adorno starts from the premise that listeners can be divided into two broad categories: those who have the ability and the instruments to listen consciously (which means successfully mastering the work in its totality and complexity), and those who are without that ability and those instruments. Since his 1938 essay Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens, Adorno showed great interest in the topic of listening, because in all truth listening practices decidedly and decisively distinguish the reception of a musical work. It is clear that an inadequate listening practice makes the reception of a work inadequate.

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Adorno’s approach aims at confirming the anthropological and social consequences of the cultural industry on the production of works of visual and musical art, but also on listening and the listener. In Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens he shows that many listeners are attracted (emotionally) by the melodic, sentimental, ‘romantic’ character of music. Well aware of this tendency, many writers of ‘light music’ and–above all–producers and all those who sell music are induced to emphasise precisely the melodic, sentimental aspect, in order to make the product as ‘juicy’ as possible. The main consequence of this mechanism is the reduction of the listener to an individual stuck “at the infantile stage”5, a condition in which the listener remains without resisting. In fact, the next stage–says Adorno–is the identification of the listener in the musical fetish, represented by a concert ticket, the voice of a famous singer, the baton of a great conductor. The listener is in a state of regression that leads her/him to not contradict the system and to identify with the product presented as the best on the market. Utilisation value is replaced by exchange value. According to Adorno’s analysis, the entire musical system, from the composer’s idea to the moment of reception, is inescapably contaminated by the virus of commercialisation, whose consequences are standardisation, idolisation and regression. As I have said, Adorno repeatedly faces the topic of listening, and so, reference to other passages from his writings will help us to grasp the basic lines of his argumentations. In the essay “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios”, almost thirty years later, starting from the theses set out by Benjamin in his Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Adorno analyses the consequences of radio broadcasting of music. The musicradio pairing has led to a progressive degeneration both of the musical works broadcast and of the modalities of reception and hence of comprehension. That the aesthetic experience should be democratised through technical reproducibility and circulation should make us happy. But not everyone is overjoyed. And those who are not, Adorno maintains, are at risk of being suspected of a conservative, elitist conception of culture6. The point is that the possibility, granted to anyone, of enjoying music regardless of cultural level and geographical location is shifted from a positive to a negative element. For the farmer’s wife, who can now listen to classical music without leaving the house and almost gratis, but whose knowledge of music is not sufficient for her to grasp the (musical) sense of what she is listening to, the coordination of her listening habits with her household duties will prevent her from completely devoting herself to

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what she is listening to in the degree and manner required by their greatly exalted integration in culture. The result is that while she believes the best fits her to perfection, she has already let it escape7. Adorno is well aware that technology in itself is innocent, neutral: Technics is not to blame as such for those results which the naïve, and those who have remained inferior to it at the level of their own consciousness, believe that they see everywhere: it is to blame only because of its position and social value (Stellenwert)8.

What Adorno contests is the social function taken on by technics, in the turbulent interweaving with the logic of dominion, with the administrative sphere and with the sphere of finance and marketing. With regard to this general picture, the practices and modalities of listening also undergo a specific distortion, which to understand we must refer to a third text by Adorno, again from the early 1960s, within which we find the famous classification of types of musical behaviour: Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. This work was published in 1962, and in the first part of the twelve lessons of which it is composed Adorno identifies, classifies and describes seven types of listeners to music, who are not presented “in chemical purity”, and so will be exposed to the “universal skepticism [of] empirical science, notably psychology”9. Here, as so often elsewhere, Adorno’s intentions are to grasp the profound nexus that links the productive to the cultural, musical and social dimension: Once we posit the premise that among the ways in which social problems and complexities express themselves are contradictions in the relation between musical production and reception, that indeed those ways are expressed in the very structure of listening–once we adopt this point of departure we shall not be able to expect an unbroken continuum to lead from fully adequate listening to an unrelated or surrogated one. Instead, we shall expect those contradictions and contrasts to influence even the way and the habits of listening to music10.

Adorno keeps his distance from “administrative research” and clarifies that the criterion used to construct the various types is not in reference to listeners’ taste, preferences, dislikes and habits (which is what happens in empirical inquiries, which are purely subjective), but is based above all on the adequacy or inadequacy of the listening. The outline Adorno offers may seem rather elementary, relatively generic and dictated simply by general good sense. But on deeper, transversal reading there emerges a sizeable number of unresolved

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problems, made even more articulate by the complexity and variety of the types of listeners at the present time: 1. Expert; 2. Good listener; 3. Culture consumer; 4. Emotional listener; 5. Resentment listener; 6. Listener to whom music is entertainment; 7. Type of the musically indifferent, the unmusical, and the anti-musical (“if we may combine those in a type”11). Nothing escapes the expert, who is fully aware of what s/he is listening to and hence listens in a perfectly suitable manner. S/he can spontaneously follow the musical development and at the same time reconstruct the succession of the various moments. Thus, this type of listener arrives at an overall picture from the complete meaning. As to modern music, the expert is the only one able to reach the level of listening to works of atonal freedom or dodecaphonic technique (but also works inspired by these schools), to spontaneously perceive the ramification and the logic of their progress in the same way as the old coterie of amateurs perceives traditional music12. This type of listener is capable of “structural listening”. Like the expert, the good listener goes beyond the single detail, spontaneously grasps the links and relations, but having unconsciously mastered its immanent logic, he understands music about the way we understand our own language even though virtually or wholly ignorant of its grammar and syntax13.

This type of listener is only partly analogous to the first type, not having the awareness and mastery of what is being listened to. According to Adorno, this is a category of listeners that is gradually disappearing, in favour of a greater diffusion of the extreme categories: “today one tends to understand either everything or nothing”14. The culture consumer may be considered a music maniac, a person who listens a great deal, insatiably and often irrationally, respecting music as a cultural good, “often as something a man must know for the sake of his own social standing; this attitude runs the gamut from an earnest sense of obligation to vulgar snobbery”15. At times, the premieres in great theatres offer an interesting window in which we see many culture consumers crowded together. Another example is offered by the perhaps too numerous makeshift musical critics for whom–sated with a remarkable amount of information and perhaps in possession of a certain quantity of audio and/or audiovisual musical material–“the structure of hearing is atomistic: the type lies in wait for specific elements, for supposedly beautiful melodies, for grandiose moments”16. These are the listeners of ‘appreciation’, who are awaiting a virtuoso, exorbitant performance, and who, though not far from a type of depersonalised listening,

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The third type of listener is defined by Adorno as the emotional listener, who is at an even greater distance from what s/he perceives and has a less rigid, indirect relationship with music than the culture consumer. For this type of listener, the relation becomes crucial for triggering instinctual stirrings otherwise tamed or repressed by norms of civilization. Often music becomes a source of irrationality, whereby a man inexorably harnessed to the bustle of rationalistic self-preservation will be enabled to keep having feelings at all18.

These listeners sometimes use music as a safety valve, a recipient into which they pour their painful emotions: “at other times they will identify with the music, drawing from it the emotions they miss in themselves”19. Next comes the category of the resentment listener, to which, for example, the lover of Bach belongs, “and even more the sticklers for preBachian music”20. In her/his specific ambit s/he is a true expert and may be capable of making music actively. The limitation and inability of these people lies in their total ignorance of entire musical sectors, which is important to know. Similar to this type of listener are the jazz expert and the jazz fan, in the habitus of “received heresy,” of a protest against the official culture that has been socially captured and rendered harmless. The same kinship shows in the need for musical spontaneity in opposition to the prescribed ever-sameness, and it shows in the sectarian character21.

This type expresses unease and aversion regarding cultural buzzwords, and would therefore prefer to replace aesthetic behaviour with a “norm of conduct for technology and sports”. Claiming to be progressive, bold and avant-garde, these people fail to understand that their extreme points were surpassed decades ago by serious music. But the category that is by far the most widely represented in contemporary society is that of people who listen to music as a pastime. This type of listener is the favourite target of the cultural industry, the object to which it adapts after creating it or giving it prominence. The pastime listener, for Adorno, should be seen in the context of a “leveled

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unitarian ideology” and it would be useful to see whether, in this ideology, social differences are revealed in pastime listeners: One hypothesis would be that the lower stratum will surrender to unrationalized entertainment while the upper will dress it up idealistically, as spirit and culture, and will select it accordingly. The widespread elevated entertainment music would square very well with this compromise between ideology and actual listening22.

The last category is the indifferent, non-musical or anti-musical listeners. For this type of listeners, there is no lack of natural aptitude, nor is there an absence of talent: it is not a case of having no gift for music, but of processes that occurred in early childhood. Adorno hypothesises: it was always brutal authority which in those days caused the defects in this type. Children of particularly strict fathers often seem unable even to learn to read notes–now, by the way, the premise of a musical education worthy of humankind23.

At the end of this categorisation, Adorno specifies that it was not his intention to insult those who belong to types of listeners described negatively, nor to arrive at a judgment on the conditions of the world on the basis of the problem of listening to music. The presence of the single listener in one of the categories cannot be explained in terms of blame to be assigned to the listener or to the system based on the cultural industry: the condition arises from the nethermost sociological layers: from the separation of mental and manual labor, or of high and low forms of art; later from the socialized semiculture; ultimately from the fact that the right consciousness in the wrong world is impossible, and that even the modes of social reaction to music are in thrall to the false consciousness24.

3. What Is Left of Adorno? According to Max Paddison, the types of listener classified by Adorno could be reduced to a single pair of categories: appropriate forms of listening and regressive forms of listening. This seems to me a useful suggestion for the clarification of the central knot, which we have already introduced in the preceding pages. The point is precisely this: the quality of the modalities of listening. Paddison maintains that the first of Adorno’s categories “includes two main types, labelled in Einleitung in die

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Musiksoziologie the ‘expert listener’ and the ‘good listener’, fully conscious of what he hears”25. This is a highly informed type of listener, capable of independent reflection and judgment, able to think along with what is heard and able to understand the individual moments as parts of a ‘complex of meaning’, a context made up of past, present and future moments which constitute the musical work as it unfolds through time26.

Beyond doubt the most crowded category to which the majority of listeners belong is that of regressive listeners. It is not very clear, however, Paddison writes, if this type of listening is a product of the cultural industry or if the cultural industry creates and nourishes it. From my own standpoint (not least in view of what Adorno maintains in the essay Résumé über Kulturindustrie), for Adorno the cultural industry tends to occupy a territory that is already unstable in itself and to whose increasing instability it contributes. Most listeners display a deficit in listening ability, usually linked to initial lacunae in their basic education. As time passes, to this is added the action, at once surgical and on a vast scale, put into effect by the cultural industry, which we may say, finishes the job. It is clear, however, that basically the problem of listening to music is of a very complex nature, which cannot be reduced to the single ambit of the relationship between the listener and music. In order to understand all the dynamics in play, we must broaden the discourse to include questions of pedagogy of music and sociology of music. Every musical behaviour arises and is developed partly in relation to individual capabilities, to the presence or absence of a natural, spontaneous predisposition, but also to the ability to understand music and the possibility of having a musical education that goes beyond mere basic information. It is on these conditions that what Adorno calls “structural listening” can be developed. This is tantamount to the ability to perceive the musical nexuses, to grasp the work as a discourse saturated with meanings: This is what is meant by the concept of structural listening, whose demands, critical of everything that is mired in the momentary, of bad naiveté, are emphatically and acutely with us nowadays27.

It is clear that there is continuity in Adorno’s reflections on the topic of listening. Over many years, the theses expressed in the 1938 essay return cyclically, both in the intermediate period and in his latest works. Indeed, in the essay Kleine Häresie, Adorno links structural listening to the

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possibility of perceiving the sensitive in music as an intellectual, spiritual fact–an ability that is missing in the listener whose attitude is atomising. This type of listening inevitably degenerates into a sort of sensual enjoyment, a sort of ‘sampling’ to which even the listener to serious music is susceptible. The fetishising taste for insatiable repetition of successful melodies and motifs, which lead the listener towards a dangerous, damaging deviation as to the comprehension of the meaning and sense of the work, has its roots in 19th century music. This, in fact, was the period when interest and attention were increasingly concentrated on the single melody, by that time freed from subjective lyricism, still notably present in composers such as Franz Schubert. From these premises, an exaggerated emancipation was reached of the melody, which became independent “as a brand name”, to the detriment of the “objective, constructive context of the musical whole”28. To grasp this connection, for Adorno, is to listen to what arises here and now in relation to what preceded it and, anticipating, to what will follow it. But the main problem that seems to engage Adorno is linked less to the clarification of the ‘secondary’ listening modalities than to the discussion on listening to New Music, the only musical genre whose duration is worth guaranteeing: the works will last only if they are understood by those listening to them29. Atomised listening, demanded by the music that is mass-produced by the cultural industry, is in net contrast with structural listening. The tendency to atomised listening is, for Adorno, a pre-artistic inclination to sample isolated stimuli. This tendency, as we have said, is powerfully encouraged by the general system of music and by the social decrease in listening. Hence it is necessary to resist this inclination, above all when listening to modern music30. There are traces of these problem areas in various works, but they are most clearly thematised in the two essays “Die gewürdigte Musik” and “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik”, both included in the collection Der getreue Korrepetitor. There are both objective and subjective reasons for the difficulty of listening to and understanding modern music–reasons, that is, related to the music itself and to the listeners. Among the objective reasons are the abandonment of stable systems of relationships, the loss of acoustics that are pleasing to the ear, and the compositional and structural complexity of the works. The subjective reasons include the crisis in musical education (the inevitable premise for understanding music31), the failure of the ability to concentrate, and the triumph of the habit of judging everything on the basis of what one wants to make one’s own with the least possible effort.

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Further, one of the greatest difficulties in understanding the new music is linked to the difficulty of composition, which demands an active attitude of the listener, who much oftener gives up, saying “I don’t understand this”32. One of the preliminary conditions for being able to understand modern music is the precisely the way it is approached. I refer to the expectations and to what we may call–not in Adorno’s terms–the preunderstandings. The main obstacle between the listener and the new music is the reduction of listening to fixed patterns, which is the result of almost four centuries of tonal music, giving rise to a complex tissue of ‘conditioned reflexes’: The problem of the cultivation of our ear is not, then, to be undervalued. The ear of western humanity is powerfully acculturised to tonal music and to the type of hierarchisation of the notes and intervals within the diatonic scale it implies, and it is ill at ease and perplexed in dealing with a modal melody or music constructed on pentatonic scales33.

Tonality has penetrated human beings as if by second nature, so we must free ourselves of the old, traditional patterns and try to follow the progress of music without relating it to an expectation that modern music cannot fulfil and does not recognise as its unit of measurement. It may be objected that all the great traditional music, composed within the tonal system, is characterised precisely by the disappointment of expectations, precisely in the sense attributed to this mechanism by Hans Robert Jauss. But there is, in reality, a decisive difference. In the case of traditional music, what is unexpected for the listener is so in relation to what is foreseeable. This relationship between expectation and disconcertion (or confirmation), which has already been dealt with in the preceding pages, is cancelled by the new music, leaving no place for any expectation. As a result, the unanticipated and the unexpected rise to the highest levels in the work, and are its logic. The problem of expectation, then, not only has to do with the harmony or details of the musical context, but regards the form too: that is to say, the development of the whole. From this derives the fact that it is not possible to appeal or refer to the notion of a universal, preestablished form, within which the musical data can be made to fit. In order to follow and understand the new music we must suspend the categories of the music that precedes it. To this end, we must engage a high level of attention and concentration, the only instruments capable of counterbalancing in the listener the aid that derived from recognised and recognisable patterns. At this point another element comes into play, which is related to listening to traditional music too, but which in the case of radical music,

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without footholds, so to speak, becomes almost obligatory: re-listening. If we are to master works of new music completely, we must hear the single elements of the piece and the whole work several times. Nor is this a matter of re-listening in order to make the New Music more familiar and habitual. Adorno writes that it is rather a case of learning, by re-listening, to distinguish the details after glancing briefly at the whole, exactly as literary or theoretical texts of a certain complexity must be read several times34. After dealing with it in several works, especially the volume entitled Emotion and Meaning in Music35, Leonard B. Meyer, in his essay “On Rehearing Music”36, comes back to the problem of listening and to the stimulus-response argument. Here Meyer discusses the topic of relistening starting from information theory, on the basis of which he had defined music as a provocation of deliberately, voluntarily incomplete experiences, suddenly interrupted in order to stimulate, by means of a frustrated expectation, our natural tendency to completion. The problem is complex. Musical comprehension implies bringing into relationship the components and constitutive moments of the work, and listening presupposes sensitivity, intelligence and memory, factors that play a fundamental part in re-listening, an operation in which the listener concentrates on elements that had escaped her/him at the first listening. It is not enough, however, to talk generically of re-listening. On another occasion, apropos this I suggested a distinction between a) relistening to tonal works and to those that fall outside the tonal tradition; b) re-listening by an expert listener and by a less competent listener; c) relistening to the same execution of a piece or of a piece performed by other interpreters. Even this brief analysis involves different kinds of problems, which cannot lead to generic, immediate conclusions. Meyer had the virtue of insisting on the relationship between emotions and meaning, and on their role in the experience of music, opening up a rich, fertile line of research. However, his analyses cannot be applied to examples of non-tonal music, and hence the topic of re-listening is not fully dealt with on this front, as is desirable and necessary. Re-listening, in the case of non-tonal music, proves to be of fundamental importance, because in this way alone can the design underlying the work begin to emerge more clearly. It is probable, however, that not even attentive, proper, repeated listening is enough, but a scrupulous analysis of the score is necessary–an analysis that is clearly not within the capacities of all, not even of the so-called experts.

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I should like to conclude this section with an attempt at answering the initial question: what is left of Adorno? It is always difficult to answer a question pertaining to the up-to-dateness or otherwise of a great writer’s thinking. This is even more the case with Adorno, a philosopher whose speculative horizon is to be placed at a very particular historico-political moment, on the threshold of a specific philosophical tradition, and taking form thanks to a highly personal writing style. It is right, however, to attempt to answer it. The variety of listening modalities to which we may pay attention in the contemporary period leads to a certain caution in judgment, though the typification proposed by Adorno still seems especially up-to-date. As Piero Cresto-Dina writes, Today more than ever a general levelling, a widespread standardisation and an increasing massification of ways of listening seems to be travelling across all the places of music, from the auditoria appointed to preserve the historical heritage of the classical tradition to the private spaces of digital reproduction, radio listening or consumption of music on the Internet37.

What has changed then, are probably certain places and certain modalities (in the sense of instruments used), but in fact that differentiation to which Adorno refers persists. Beyond the reduction to the polarity suggested by Paddison, Adorno’s distinction clarifies the notable differences in capabilities of listening and in the modalities with which the single listener recognises music. But this topic must be further studied, with reference to the relationship between listening to music and new technologies, focusing attention too on some forms of contemporary music (of the technological variety) that create radical problems regarding the idea of structural listening conceived as the only suitable listening modality–for when structure is lacking, how can we speak of structural listening? Hence it may even preserve a certain legitimacy when we limit ourselves to proposing it as a regulating criterion for a specific musical repertoire, although even in this case we cannot fail to perceive further levels of meaning that are quite inaccessible to an analysis that focuses exclusively on formal structures38.

Contemporary music and the new technological devices pose new questions and create problems for the model of structural listening, yet allowing full legitimacy to the more general model of ‘suitable listening’

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(but it is still not clear what this suitability refers to: instruments? contexts? knowledge of music?).

4. Listening to Music and New Technologies We have repeatedly said that the utilisation of music mediated by the new technologies may offer a glimpse of two opposite tendencies. On the one hand, anyone can reproduce music anywhere and at any time, going beyond pre-determined space-time coordinates. On the other hand, the tendency is towards closure, the reduction of the relational capacity of the aesthetic experience activated by the utilisation of music. It is thus a case of an ambiguous process, fluctuating between individualism and communitarianism. Sharing, which is one of the specific characteristics of life online, may be manifested in two ways: it may come down to a silent, domestic exchange of musical material ‘ferried’ from the Internet, or it may be considered the entrance to a new collectivity, “since it situates subjects within an emergent structure of listening which offers experiential confirmation of a social configuration”39. After this brief premise, let us try to be more specific. The relationship between listening to music and new technologies is developed in two different ways. Technology may, in fact, be a useful tool for the reproduction and broadcasting of music (of any time or genre), or it may be the sole modality of reception, itself being the tool without which certain musical genres could not exist. Technology, then, may have an instrumental or a productive-practical function. This distinction proves useful not least because listening today is always mediated–with few exceptions–by the electric or electronic element: music is produced and utilised with the help of technological devices. To this we must add the interactive revolution promoted by the Internet and by information science, which has literally re-modulated the contexts, places and practices of listening to and utilising music. This is only the most recent of innumerable revolutions that have marked the historical development of music and the arts in general, from the late 19th century to our own time. These revolutions have sometimes been poetic, aesthetic or conceptual; at other times they have been technical and hence instrumental revolutions. Technological music, as we have seen and will see again, is one of these revolutions, since it powerfully inserts the technological element in the discourse on music and its utilisation.

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As Benjamin spoke of the work of art in the era of technical reproducibility, so today we speak of listening to music in the era of technological (and digital) reproducibility40. At the beginning of the 20th century, radio was expanding rapidly. The gust of euphoria brought by this new means of mass communication went hand in hand with a new page in the history of the aesthetic experience and of the utilisation of art and music. Just as technical reproducibility allowed everyone to enjoy a painting or sculpture exhibited thousands of miles from her/his home, so radio allowed domestic enjoyment of music to take the place of crowds, hubbub and pushing and shoving41. In addition to this first important novelty, the spread of radio and the introduction of music into programme scheduling meant that this means of communication became a sort of large emotional container, in which one could find the right musical equivalent for one’s state of mind. The music transmitted by the new technological devices is approached not passively, but actively, as the listener seeks specific, ever differing emotional-sound experiences42. These new means were able to make music “a technology of self”: [the] ostensibly ‘private’ sphere of music use is part and parcel of the cultural constitution of subjectivity, part of how individuals are involved in constituting themselves as social agents43.

There is more. The new technologies may have an indirect effect on the relationship between the individual and society, between the individual and the social, urban context. In the case of solitary, individual listening, for instance, there is reinforcement of the tendency to social isolation, pseudo-sharing, which comes about not in ‘residing’ in the same place, but in peer-to-peer anonymity. In the case of listening through headphones, in contrast, a different modality of isolation is set up, one which, while it yet again affirms an atomistic, atomising tendency, yet resets the manner in which the listener experiences her/his context. As Jean-Paul Thibaud has written, listening with headphones creates very deep, complex, powerful links with the surrounding urban context, the context, that is, through which the listener passes while walking along with headphones on. This link may be structured in one of two ways. It may create a situation of “interference”, in which outside noises block out or fragment what is being listened to, conditioning the level of independence of listening. Alternatively, listening with headphones may establish a relationship between visual and musical landscapes, creating what has been called a “visiophonic tangle”. In this case, the listener experiences a perfect convergence of the audible with the visible, traversing a multiform sensorial landscape44.

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Moving around in urban territory with headphones on, in any case, induces the listener to create a personal sonar context, which, as we have said, may come into conflict or synergy with the external sonar context. This means that each individual brings into being a personal auditory landscape, in the ears, in the mind and in the soul, and “reimposes control over the environment”45. But what type of aesthetic experience is activated on listening to music with electronic or digital means? It is clear by now that the conditions of listening in our own time pose complex theoretical conditions, which philosophy alone cannot interpret exhaustively, as they refer to cultural contexts that may even be very different from one another. As I have explained in more detail elsewhere46, technological listening may be defined in consideration of certain pairs of categories or polarities: individual/community, private/public, professionalism/amateurism, high definition/low definition, chance/rigour, saturation/emptiness, nature/artifice, original/reproduced and so on. If this is the case, we must however admit the impossibility of formulating a unitary discourse that can hold these polarities together. Limiting our pretensions, then, we can still clarify some aspects characteristic of the new listening practices in our time, in relation to the new technological means and their influence on the existence of musical works. I shall deal with this in the next section and in the closing chapter.

5. Ontological and Aesthetic Consequences of the Information-Technology Revolution Especially in the last few years, an interesting debate has arisen around the repercussions on listening practices resulting from the spread of new modalities of reception and utilisation of music, linked to the electronic support systems and the Internet. As we have said, these are questions that not only and simply regard the history of music, but involve other disciplines, among them philosophy and aesthetics. I shall linger here, then, on certain theses found in an essay by Alessandro Arbo with the title L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace. Implications esthétiques et ontologiques47, which help us to understand how the musical object undergoes an ontological modification in the neo-technological world. Arbo starts from the premise that the 20th century and the beginning of the third millennium have offered us innumerable cases of revolution in music all over the world, not only in what was for centuries the beating heart of the global musical universe. In addition, the invention of new,

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unforeseen systems of reproduction, broadcast, recording and manipulation of sound have re-invented both the creation of music and the way it is listened to and interpreted. In the late 20th and early 21st century, however, a new revolution took place: “recorded music, mostly converted in digital format, migrated–as every entity in the social world–to the Internet”48. In this state of affairs, Arbo continues, we may choose between two directions of deeper study. The first aims at analysing the technical transformations in relation to the social contexts and their consequences on these contexts. The second–which we shall follow Arbo in examining– aims rather at focusing attention on the modifications undergone by the musical object following the technical transformations. In Arbo’s analysis, the new techniques of recording take on a fundamental role. Progress in this field has determined the rise of new musical entities, whose existence is intimately linked with the technology used to produce them: the score has been replaced by sound fixing, and it is the recording that comprises the work49. If we consider the musical process as something that can be recognised in terms of a work first and foremost in relation to the fixing of a (sound)track, we can affirm that the advent of studio work (recording systems) was the beginning of a genuine paradigm shift. In abandoning the allographic regulation of art (Goodman), it has largely assumed, at least if we think about the world of rock and pop, that of an autographic art: in a certain sense, as in painting one art at a time. To access the work of Pink Floyd, we no longer need the mediation of an interpreter: it’s sufficient to listen to the album50.

What follows the recording is the transfer to digital systems, with the progressive development of digital supports, and subsequently, thanks to the creation of specific software, of files that can be transmitted online, initially in the famous .mp3 format51. Arbo gives a brief but very precise reconstruction of the chronicle of music on the web, from the creation of the .mp3 format to Spotify, and examining the ontological and aesthetic consequences of these processes. Arbo claims to take an immanentist perspective, by virtue of which musical works are considered as social objects requiring specific attitudes if they are to be identified and thus recognised. Recognition–one of the most important attitudes–seems to have been rendered problematic in the era of the media, after a process of “decontextualisation”. In this general picture,

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The Internet exposes ever more works in an uprooting process, by spreading upon the same screen or even transforming them into a sort of background noise unable to go beyond the solicitation of ephemeral, emotional tremors52.

However, Arbo rightly adds that to ease of access to works, a remarkable ease in finding information about the work and its creation corresponds. The internet offers many opportunities for deeper study and knowledge, on a scale hitherto never available. It is therefore a tool, Arbo concludes, that does not weaken but actually may contribute to safeguard those attitudes (including, indeed, recognition) necessary for the identification and appreciation of musical works. The broadcasting of music on the web and in the form of files has often raised the topic of dematerialisation of the works, as though this novelty implied consequences on the ontological level. Indeed, Arbo maintains that the failure of (local) supports does not lead to an actual dematerialisation of the tracks, which are present as electrical charges in the semi-conductors of the server: the digitisation and computerisation of the processes of composition, broadcasting and utilisation of musical tracks has to do with the matter of which music is formed, but not the substance of their being. From a general point of view, the gradual disappearance (which is actually more so a reduction and centralisation) of physical media should not be seen as evidence of an ontological change of musical works53.

But the passage from analogical to digital raises still other questions, which once again send us back to the ontological level of the musical work. For instance, Arbo asks, where is the true identity situated of a work that is analogically recorded and which, when re-burned in digital form, reveals differences from the original version? “Now, if in the work we understand a certain sound equilibrium, then, the difference between the versions poses a problem of ontological identification”54. The same problem arises when we listen to a piece that was recorded live but, in the post-production phase, has undergone so many “adjustments” that it has become literally a different matter as compared with the original performance. These last notes take us back directly to the topic of listening, for it is when we listen that the differences emerge, and it is listening that is the final test that any musical product undergoes. Listening in the digital era, thanks to the possibility of re-listening an infinite number of times and, where possible, in the best acoustic conditions, allows us to grasp “new structures of matter or new layers of the real” or features and details of a

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sound image “that had previously escaped us”55. Hence the new modalities of listening notably increase the possibilities of analysis. Nor is this analysis reserved exclusively to the listener: it is possible for the web. In fact, Arbo reminds us that our listening experiences, our research and therefore our tastes are registered and evaluated by algorithms, on the basis of which some websites offer suggestions to us. This aspect recalls a further fundamental novelty, namely interactivity, thanks to which everything, potentially, is available to us. There is inevitably the other side of the coin: for a listener accustomed to traditional media, this availability can be seen as an extraordinary resource, but at the same time, an occurrence susceptible to impoverishing the intrinsic value of its experience. For all that is available to us could cause us to conclude that there is truly nothing still worth being discovered56.

Nevertheless, faced with such a mass of astonishing novelties, we will be able to evaluate the effects and consequences of these processes in time. What is certain is that the contemporary listener witnessing the opening up of new horizons for the modalities of experiencing music, which facilitate the establishment of new cognitive attitudes and encourage “forms of listening and attention more flexible and interactive, globally diverse from those implicated in the record’s era”57.

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Notes 1

See Günther Anders, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9. Jhrg. (1927): 610-19. 2 See Alessandro Giovannucci, Il secolo acusmatico. Teorie dell’ascolto e attività compositiva (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2014). 3 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. Sterne writes, “The Audible Past elevates the question of possibility as itself a central historical problem. Practice is a ground of historical contest, but so too is possibility. How and under what conditions did it become possible to manipulate sound in new ways? How and under what conditions did new practices of listening become possible? Possibility is both a conceptual problem and a material issue: a practice or an event must be both thinkable and potentially able to be accomplished” (341). 4 See my Theodor W. Adorno. Pensiero critico e musica, Preface by Paolo Pellegrino (Milano: Mimesis, 2011), where I deal in more detail with some of the argumentations that are partly re-addressed in these pages. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 303; orig. ed. “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”, in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 1991 [1956]), 9-45. 6 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios,” in Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1963) (Gesammelte Schriften 15: Komposition für den Film - Der getreue Korrepetitor [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003], 369-401). 7 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios”. 8 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios”. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 2; orig. ed. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölfe theoritische Vorlesungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1962) (Gesammelte Schriften 14). 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 2. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 17. 12 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” in Der getreue Korrepetitor, 188-248. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 5. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 6. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 6. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 7. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 7. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 8. 19 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 9. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 10.

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Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 12-3. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 14-5. 23 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 17. 24 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 18. 25 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 210. 26 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 210. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, “Little Heresy,” in Essays on Music, 318; orig. ed. Kleine Häresie, in Impromptus. Zweite Folge neu gedruckter musikalischer Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968) (Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 17: Musikalische Schriften IV. Moments musicaux – Impromptus [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003], 297-302). 28 Theodor W. Adorno, “Little Heresy,” 319. 29 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik”. 30 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik”. 31 On this, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Musikpädagogik,” in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 102-19. 32 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik”. 33 Enrico Fubini, “Naturalità della percezione e storicità della struttura,” in Silvia Vizzardelli, ed., La regressione dell’ascolto. Forma e materia sonora nell’estetica musicale contemporanea (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2002), 18. 34 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik”. 35 Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956). On the relationship between listening to music and comprehension, see Erkki Huovinen, “Levels and Kinds of Listeners’ Musical Understanding,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (2008): 315-37. 36 See Leonard B. Meyer, “On Rehearing Music,” American Musicological Society 14, no. 2 (1961): 257-267. On this topic, see Paolo Pellegrino, “L’ascolto e riascolto in musica: problemi di estetica e analisi musicale,” in L’estetica del neoidealismo italiano (Galatina: Congedo Editore, 1996), 209-26. 37 Piero Cresto-Dina, “La medietà dell’ascolto. Adorno e la critica della coscienza musicale,” in Silvia Vizzardelli, ed., La regressione dell’ascolto, 57. 38 Piero Cresto-Dina, “La medietà dell’ascolto,” 64. 39 John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of its Electronic Reproducibility,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge-London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 193. 40 On this specific topic, see Gianmario Borio, ed., Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) and Alessandro Arbo and Fabrizio Desideri, eds., “Aesthetics of Streaming,” Aisthesis 9, no. 1 (2016), especially Giacomo Fronzi, “Listening to Music in the Digital Era”: 51-69. Apropos Benjamin, as we know, one of the most famous theses contained in his 1936 essay is that technical reproducibility has destroyed the “aura”, that aura of mystery that makes the work of art unique and unrepeatable, precisely like the 22

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experience of its utilisation, in the hic et nunc of its developing. What happens to the aura in the age of digital production and reproduction? Technological music and electronic producibility make it possible today for anyone (including the DJs whose creative performances are live) to create a product complete with aura. In addition, the hic et nunc of the work, to which are connected its unrepeatability and authenticity, makes a notable return, since every product is ‘here’ and every product is ‘now’, in any part of the world at any time. Every product, produced in an exact place at an exact time, maintains its aura in any other place, since the reproduction in no way differs from the original. The dialectic between original and copy, in contemporaneity, has entered an irreversible decline. This is connected with the topic of bringing the copy up to date, which is probably to be seen in terms of the perpetual up-to-dateness of the product-copy. 41 Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 65. 42 Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004), Special Issue on “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” 642-3. 43 Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47. 44 See Jean-Paul Thibaud, “The Sonic Composition of the City,” in Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford-New York: Berg, 2003), 329-42. 45 Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford-New York: Berg, 2000), 186. 46 See Giacomo Fronzi, “Listening to Music in the Digital Era”. 47 See Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace. Implications esthétiques et ontologiques,” in Alessandro Arbo and Fabrizio Desideri, eds., “Aesthetics of Streaming”: 5-27. 48 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 6. 49 See Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 8 and Roger Pouivet, “La triple ontologie de deux sortes d’enregistrements musicaux,” in Pierre-Henry Frangne and Hervé Lacombe, dir. Musique et enregistrement (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 159-72. 50 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 8. 51 On this, see Esteban Buch, “On the Evolution of Private Record Collections: A Short Story,” in Gianmario Borio, ed., Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, 41-51 and Alessandro Arbo, “Music and Technical Reproducibility: A Paradigm Shift,” in Gianmario Borio, ed., Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, 53-67. 52 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 13. 53 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 16. 54 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 19. 55 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 20. 56 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 22. 57 Alessandro Arbo, “L’œuvre musicale dans le cyberespace,” 24.

INTERMEZZO

CHAPTER SEVEN FREEDOM: THELONIOUS MONK— MUSIC AND CIVIL RIGHTS

1. Beyond the Freedom of Music It is useful first to clarify briefly the meaning of this ‘Intermezzo’, devoted to the word ‘freedom’. It may seem that freedom can be taken for granted in the ambit of the arts. The artist is doubtless a figure who, in the contemporary social overview, enjoys, as we have said, a very high degree of freedom and independence in the field of her/his profession: freedom in the choice of instruments, places, contexts, relationships, aims, forms, etc. If this is so, it would be trite to remark that ‘freedom’ is beyond doubt part of the vocabulary of contemporary music–indeed, one of the fundamental words of the arts in general. Yet there are moments in history, and in the history of music, when this word takes on more specific contours, and further, more significant meanings. In some cases and in some contexts, the exercise and practice of freedom in art means much more than ‘simply’ freedom of art, going beyond itself. What I mean is that the arts may come to symbolise, incarnate and represent a freedom of a social and political kind. We have already seen that there is a deep relationship between the artistic and the socio-political dimensions. Freedom plays a fundamental role in the structure of this relationship. Freedom of art and in art is often the tool for the fulfilment of a worldwide social freedom, for the affirmation of rights that have been denied, for the achievement of a higher degree of ‘humanity’. However, it is a question of identifying a model that represents what has just been said, a figure able to restore this idea of the freedom of art, one that goes beyond the confines of the self and interacts with the world around him, attempting to influence its developments. I have chosen to identify this model not in ‘pure’ cultured music, but rather in the multicoloured world of jazz. This choice also explains why this chapter is

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presented as an ‘Intermezzo’ and not as a segment of one of the three parts into which the book is divided. The idea, then, is to confirm the theory according to which the freedom of art has much to do with the freedom of humanity, by way of a musical genre that is not really cultured and a ‘mixed’ figure who can be seen as both a pianist and a composer: Thelonious Monk. The treatment here will be ‘intermediate’; it will all be a sort of ‘between’, in a middle ground. This will be true of the writing style, and of what is said, starting from the overall frame: jazz, the threshold musical genre par excellence, a meeting point of ‘cultured’ and ‘extra-cultured’, of professionalism and amateurism, of ‘academicity’ and ‘self-teaching’. Freedom of music, freedom in music, freedom beyond music: this will be the subject of the chapter, itself written with a special freedom!

2. At the Origins of Jazz 21 June 1969, Greenwich Village, New York. After the umpteenth police roundup, the first gay revolt breaks out. Years of oppression and provocations (this on both sides, probably) cause an explosion of anger, uncontrollable anger, the premise to the rise of Gay Pride. That same night, at the “Haven”, an illegal night club, another revolution takes place– not civil, but musical, thanks to an Italo-American DJ, Francis Grasso. This is the birth of disco music, the music of freedom, of emancipation, of love, supported by social groups that had hitherto been oppressed and marginalised, such as blacks, Hispanics, gays, working-class whites. Grasso’s mixing and mood manipulation, Alex Rosner’s sound systems and Mancuso’s musical investigations and ideals of togetherness all came together against the background of New York clubland’s new black/gay democracy and the wider liberating forces of social change. Music was evolving, too. Funk’s ‘on the one’ danceability was meeting crossover soul’s prettiness, and a new sound had emerged1.

Apart from what it was to become in later years, disco music was the background to a period of dramatic social changes. It was the soundtrack of the flight from a reality made up of war (in Vietnam), the oil crisis and serious economic recession. And gradually, as the prejudices against blacks and gays began to diminish, it was the right music to celebrate new freedoms, with its extraordinary, innovative mix of R’n’B, Latin rhythms and funk.

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I have made this initial reference to disco music for two reasons. First, it serves to emphasise once again how close is the link between musical developments and social dynamics. Every revolution, every demand for rights has its own soundtrack. Secondly, I want to show how jazz can be considered a quintessential musical genre in the overall picture of protest music, above all because historically it was the first great musical genre to arise in a context of violation of rights. We know very well that some of the extra-cultured musical genres most listened to in the world (rap, reggae, jazz or blues) have their distant historical, cultural and, if you like, ideological roots in Africa. Jazz was born of the convergence of African and European cultures in the North American colonies, in that dark, tragic process from the 16th to the 20th century that we call the “slave trade”2. We are talking of some twenty million people. This enormous displacement of men and women led to a convergence of cultures never before experienced, in characteristics and modalities. From the musical standpoint, the US saw the arrival of African instruments (such as the banjo) and musical practices linked to both dance and song (like work songs). The plantations echoed with field hollers, a call, a demand for help, a solitary plaint, a long, loud, musical cry3. There followed the transformation into sacred song, in the spiritual. This happened in the British colonies (Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia), but not in Louisiana, in New Orleans, where it was African slaves from the south of Morocco who landed: those who were to be called ‘creoles’, referring to light-skinned blacks of mixed parentage, with French names. As has been said, their music swings, influenced as it is by Koranic chant, which for preference uses portable string instruments to the detriment of polyrhythmic orchestration4. In 1762, the French ceded Louisiana to the Spanish, who made New Orleans a dancing city–a city linked, moreover, to nearby Cuba by notable commercial exchanges. This led to such a mixture that its fruit was an Afro-Mediterranean-Cuban music, above all in the form of dance, a dance that is a sort of sympathetic religion, based on the assistance and the (physical and cultural) resistance of the slaves. The next stage was the rise of a new figure: the entertainer, whose repertoire includes plantation songs and original compositions of nostalgic, refined sound quality; this music tackled an antagonistic society that had relegated blacks to the role of losers5. By the end of the 19th century, black pianists and composers had succeeded in carving out a place of their own. “A piano school was taking shape made up of composers/improvisers who stitched together dances of oral origin, with an abundance of African American syncope”6. This style,

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in which were also merged the band marching rhythm and the cakewalk (a dance that goes back to slavery and that became, for the blacks, the “parody of the slave-owners’ cerimoniousness”7), took on the name of ragtime (we may recall Scott Joplin, James Scott or Joseph Lamb), a style that released an irresistible propulsive energy, an inexhaustible melodic vein and a pervasive rhythmic self-assurance, all charged with powerful optimism. Meanwhile, with the freeing of the slaves and the recognition of American citizenship by President Lincoln in 1863, those who had lived in chains, after the first violent reaction of disorientation and maladjustment, were forced to redefine their role, their identity, their ambitions and their hopes. In many rural communities in the South, however, the situation was still dramatically conflictual, because of the very marked opposition to the proclamation of emancipation of blacks, seen above all in the application of discriminatory laws and frequent lynchings. It was in this context that, in the 1890s, in the Mississippi Delta region, between Georgia and eastern Texas, a kind of lyrics set to music arose in rural environments, for solo voice and instrumental accompaniment: the blues, cultural fruit of the first generation of black farmworkers born after slavery, who found themselves faced with new problems of financial independence, social adjustment, family organisation and individual expression. The blues thus sprang from the new challenges that young blacks had to face in an increasingly hostile, violent society8.

Meanwhile, musicians from New Orleans began to flock to Chicago, especially whites who came to perform mostly in cabarets. It was here, in 1916, that the ODJB (Original Dixie Jazz Band) was born. “Dixieland” or “Dixie” geographically refers to states that seceded the Union in the Civil War (SC, MS, FL, AL, GA, LA, TX, VA, AR, NC, TN). But there were already various forms of ‘jazz’: in San Francisco and Chicago, it was the polyphonic swing music of blacks from New Orleans, whereas in New York it was the frantic polyphony of the ODJB. We are speaking, then, of black jazz and white jazz. The history of jazz was, of course, to continue being enriched by legendary figures like Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecker, Duke Ellington and all the great instrumentalists/improvisers/composers who have made the jazz universe increasingly complex. But let us first turn our attention to some general considerations and then to one of the most eccentric figures in jazz history.

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3. Jazz and Civil Engagement It must be said that the history of jazz shows us a path and a course that are not in the least rigid and monolithic. This musical genre, though inevitably, like every other, crushed by the unstoppable epidemic of standardisation and commercialisation, has always been powerfully conditioned by the context in which it developed, the time and the place, and hence always supremely ‘up to date’ and, for the same reasons, supremely different. Jazz should be consumed hot, with the participation of the listener in the creative moment; it must mature in the present reality, reflect that reality more intensely than any other music has ever been capable of doing, and thus be ceaselessly renewed9.

Yet there are those who maintain that this ceaseless renewal has slowed somewhat if, in the early 1990s, Larry Kart held that the state of jazz at that time could be summarised in the words “The old ones are going, and the young ones aren’t growing”. In a mere twenty years from its birth, jazz had grown so rapidly that at least three main figures (Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton) and a series of undeniable masterpieces had emerged; towards the end of the 20th century, it began to show signs of ‘aging’, as Adorno would put it. This glorious music began to lose appeal, not for a lack of popularity but in terms of its artistic vitality, which seemed to be deteriorating. Capable of inner renewal, there came a point in its history when jazz seemed to be spinning helplessly, even when it opened up to fusion or to world music10. Nevertheless, glancing at the history of jazz, we may say that as many forms of jazz developed as there were social and geographical contexts where it had arisen: white jazz, black jazz, American jazz, European jazz, Italian jazz and so on. The expansion of jazz throughout the world has led to a modification of its original language, thanks to a series of evolutions/revolutions that [revealed] its explosive vitality, leading not only to the rise of stylemes related to the change in social and economic situations, first in America and then in the world, but to the involvement of jazz musicians–above all Europeans–who gradually [took over] jazz languages, inserting in them elements derived from their own ethnic heritage, thus creating other languages characterised by a very apparent originality11.

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Jazz has always expressed ambivalent but powerfully defined emotions: hope, joy, despair and anger. Together with other musical genres, it is the symbol of freedom and of the liberation of people of colour and African Americans. And scattered throughout its history are legendary characters experienced as the symbol of insubordination to white supremacy, but also of brotherhood, equal rights, cultural renewal. Jazz, soul, reggae and ska are all musical models, but also and above all models of underground culture in which the relations of gender and class, and between generations, could be actively remodelled towards greater equality. At this point a new relationship with the world of blackness and a new racial politics took form, which resisted in the post-war years12.

Jazz, in Cold War America, in Sixties America, was like a megaphone for the demands for emancipation of the African American community. The expansion of jazz in those years went hand in hand with the ideological conviction that it was ‘colour blind’, that jazz cared nothing about skin colour: since jazz was by now spreading worldwide, it transcended racial problems. But this was not really the case. The black jazz musicians’ union was discriminated against, the contracts with record companies were straitjacket contracts, the audience was not integrated and work opportunities were limited. Just after the War, as we know, one of the most burning questions in the US was precisely the problem of racial segregation. Blacks and whites were separated in every daily activity of civil society. In the 1960s there was an increasing sense of urgency regarding the need to have the civil rights of the whole population recognised, without discrimination. What did jazz musicians do in this atmosphere? Just after 1955 works were released such as the Freedom Suite by the great saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins, and the Haitian Fight Song by Charles Mingus, the superb double bass player, pianist and composer. In the second half of the Sixties there was increasing engagement on the part of jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Abbey Lincoln: this last, in 1960, with the poet Oscar Brown Jr. and her husband Max Roach, drummer and composer, developed the disc-manifesto Freedom Now Suite!, on the sleeve of which a group of men, black and white, sitting at a bar counter, turn on us a calmly challenging gaze. The bar counter is obviously a symbol for the protest gesture by four university students in Greensboro who, on 1 February 1960, sat in a bar in the places reserved to whites. Among the jazz musicians engaged to defend the rights of blacks there appeared the ‘solitary’ Thelonious Monk.

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4. “Melodious Thunk”13 1944 saw the publication of one of the best known and most often performed pieces in the jazz repertoire, ’Round midnight, written by a man who was generally considered eccentric, a ‘threshold’ figure, but who in fact was fully aware of his place in society and of how music might serve as a useful tool for improving the world: Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on 10 October 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. At the age of four, with his parents Barbara and Thelonious Sr., he moved to New York, where they lived for the next five years. He began studying classical piano at the age of eleven, but his talent for this instrument had already emerged earlier, also because music, for the Monks, was one of the family. Robin D.G. Kelley writes that Thelonious Monk knew and greatly loved western classical music, to say nothing of his encyclopaedic knowledge of hymns, gospel music, American popular songs and a great many little-known tunes that are hard to classify. For him, it was all music14. When he was seventeen, Monk left Stuyvesant High School to pursue his musical career, first as pianist and organist accompanying gospel songs in churches and subsequently, in his first band, starting from 1933: this allowed him to travel around the country. These years were of great importance for Monk’s training, for he was able in his travels to listen to the great pianists of the stride tradition15, such as Fats Waller, Art Tatum or James P. Johnson. In 1941 he began working at Minton’s club in Harlem, where he continued to develop a style that was to be known as ‘bebop’, a style that began to be enriched with a marked tendency of reharmonisation and reshaping of the tunes of standard songs. With Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Monk explored new paths, preferring a rapid, highly creative style that was to open the way to modern jazz. He began recording in 1944, playing with Coleman Hawkins, who had just invited him to play in his quartet, at the Yacht Club. This was the beginning of his recording career, first at Prestige and then, in the early 1960s, at Columbia. In 1951, he was arrested with the pianist Bud Powell for possession of drugs; this led to 60 days in jail and the withdrawal (until 1957) of his cabaret card, indispensable to perform in clubs. In 1958 he was arrested once again for disturbance of the peace, and his licence was revoked for the second time, but in the late 1950s Monk began to find the success he deserved, and the recordings made on the Riverside label (but also on two other independent labels, Blue Note and Prestige16) were so successful that

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in 1962 he signed a contract with Columbia, the same label as had signed Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington. His recording success went hand in hand with acclaim for his concerts, sealed by a performance in December 1963 at Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall in New York. In the early Seventies, Monk performed and recorded in a trio for Black Lion, London, but he was appearing in ever fewer concerts. This was the prelude to a gradual, inexorable isolation that was to strike him dumb, not only musically. After a concert at Carnegie Hall in March 1976, he withdrew definitively from the scene. He died on 17 February 1982 at the Englewood Hospital in New Jersey, after a stroke. Yet again his wife Nellie was at his side: she had been much more than a companion. They had met when she was just twelve and he was sixteen. For fifty years this woman was an irreplaceable figure, at one and the same time wife, manager, mother, organiser, accountant and muse. She was the second female figure that marked Monk’s life: the other was the wealthy heiress and patroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness” (also known as the “bebop baroness”), who contributed greatly to support Monk and his music. It was she who, in 1957, made it possible for him to recover the cabaret card that had been withdrawn in 1951. As we have seen, it was in the 1950s that the critics and the audience stopped ignoring Monk, probably because until then the more relaxed, soft, cool jazz had hindered a proper appreciation of Monk’s jazz, which was certainly more dissonant, rougher and more transgressive. To this must be added his ‘strange’ behaviour: the awkward dances he did while his group was playing, the bizarre hairstyle he adopted at concerts, his habit of turning round and round and of course his long silences17.

Yet Kelley, one of the main scholars of Monk, is convinced that his solitude and strangeness do not do justice to this strange figure. For Kelley, the crystallisation in the general imagination of Monk as shy and elusive, surrounded by an aura of mystery, is to be at least partly attributed to the advertising campaign for a 1948 album. Actually, Monk was indeed like this, but he was not only this. He was also a loving husband and father, a cheerful neighbour, a generous teacher. Thelonious Monk, says Kelley, lived fully in the world, until his mental and physical decline forced him to retire. From that point his world seemed to become smaller and in some respects impenetrable. But for most of his life, Monk interacted with his surroundings, which fascinated him. Politics, art, business, nature, architecture, history–there was no subject that he

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considered irrelevant, and he loved a lively argument, for all the tales of his inability to communicate18. This means that Monk was perfectly inserted in the musical, historical and political tissue of his time. Given this, for Kelley there is a close connection between the history of Monk’s success and the rise of the jazz avant-gardes (usually called “free jazz” or “New Thing”). Various musical and political aspects bring the two histories together. The emergence of avant-garde jazz at the beginning of the 1960s created the ideal conditions for the flourishing of Monk’s musical experience, as it did for other musician-composers, such as Charles Mingus, who, Kelley tells us, until ten years earlier had been considered too distant from the sensibilities of the time, too experimental, perhaps too daring. To this development within the world of jazz, as was said at the beginning of the section, must be added social and political reasons. It must never be forgotten that musical and listening practices are always intimately related to the historico-social moment. The almost miraculous interweaving of the development of avant-garde jazz and Monk’s success in part corresponds to the changing political landscape–one in which black nationalism, Third World solidarity, and even the more localized struggles against racism and exploitation in the music industry challenged Cold War liberalism19.

It is difficult to place Monk exactly in the developments of free jazz or other ‘avant-gardistes’, since each attempted to draw music to its own side. What is certain is that Monk made a fundamental contribution in giving life, body and substance to avant-garde jazz. Indeed, as Kelley points out, the term avant-garde confuses rather than clarifying, conceals rather than revealing. This is not the place to enter the debate on the definition of avant-garde. I shall simply remain within the bounds traced by Kelley, within which, besides Monk, there are artists like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra. It is impossible, Kelley maintains, to group all these artists under a single label: words like ‘avantgarde’, ‘free jazz’ or ‘jazz’ could not cover the entire range of the music they produced. Nevertheless, most of these artists not only identified themselves as part of a new movement, but their work taken collectively reveals some common elements. By moving away from traditional sixteen- and thirty-two-bar song structures, standard chord progressions, and the general rules of tonal harmonic practice, they opened up new possibilities for improvisation by drawing on non-Western music; experimenting with tonality, flexible

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With free jazz, a number of new ‘rules’ were established: music may or may not have a tonal centre; there may or may not be a fixed beat or a rhythmic pattern that recurs; the musical flow may seem to be suspended. This certainly does not mean abandonment to chaos, but rather the reframing of the modalities and improvisational practices, the opening of new roads for instrumental praxis and timbre. In any case, the impetus Monk gave to the developments of avantgarde jazz coincided with his return to the scene in 1957, when he was able to recover his cabaret card. That done, Monk attained a continuous engagement at the Five Spot, with a quartet mainly composed of John Coltrane on saxophone, Wilbur Ware on double bass and Ombra Wilson on percussion. Kelley tells us that, with this triumphant return to the New York scene, Monk not only launched one of the most famous quartets in jazz history, but became a full member of the avant-garde revolution. In any case, The Five Spot was no ordinary place. Among those who gathered there were expressionist painters, sculptors, Beat Generation poets, eclectic artists, various kinds of intellectuals and young black writers, such as LeRoi Jones, Frank London Brown, Ted Joans or Jayne Cortez. This kind of koinè is reflected in the music of the Monk quartet, by no means predictable, traditional, ordinary, and certainly new and experimental. Thus the Five Spot was the ideal context of contamination and germination of that modernist sensibility that was to give rise to the 1960s revolution of the avant-gardes. These apparently very specific aspects reflect the more general reality of the US in the Sixties, torn by racial conflicts, even within the musical world, among music critics and jazz critics. Kelley affirms that the avantgarde world was not at all united and close-knit on political questions, nor did it express uniform interest in politics. It remains true, however, that some musicians were certainly engaged in the fight against racism, exploitation and injustice. For many black musicians of the 1950s and early 1960s, both inside and out of the avant-garde, the emancipation of form coincided with the movement for African freedom. The convergence of these political and aesthetic forces, combined with a search for spiritual alternatives to Western materialism, led to the formation of collectives such as Abdullah, The Melodic Art-tet, the Aboriginal Music Society, and the Revolutionary Ensemble. The new wave of musicians also formed collectives for economic security, developing structures for cooperative work that anticipated the Black Arts movement’s efforts of the late 1960s21.

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Monk is regarded as the most innovative and creative pianist of the bebop period (“a term that like jazz and swing before it was as much a brief rhythmic description as the name of a style”22), as well as being one of the artists who made the greatest contribution (directly or indirectly) to the cause of African Americans. In his very detailed biography, Kelley draws a decidedly original picture of the life and career of Monk, by means of a profound, sophisticated approach capable of doing justice to the contribution Monk offered to American music and to international jazz. As Larry A. Greene rightly points out, the subtitle of Kelley’s book, “The Life and Times of an American Original”, gives a precise description of the breadth and depth of this research and also, above all, of Monk’s place in the overall picture of American music. Monk’s was a powerfully original approach to jazz, one which, though never completely betraying it, draws away from the swing territory of the big bands of the Thirties, triggering the bebop revolution23. Apropos swing, Kelley suggests that the political meaning of this term in the time of free jazz should not be underestimated. The lack of “swing” that seemed to characterise new jazz disturbed many critics, who maintained that it was of the very essence of jazz itself. In 1964, Dan Morgenstern lamented the loss of swing, which in his view amounted to the loss of the distinctive feature of jazz. For Morgenstern, the ‘New Thing’ “is a form of 20th century ‘art music’ rather than that unique blend of popular and ‘true’ art that has been (and is, and will be) jazz as we know it”24. For some critics, the loss of swing perverted jazz, stripping it not only of its authentic, original dimension, but also of a certain ‘emotional’ connotation. The alternative to being swing is being cerebral, and Monk was accused of this too. In all truth, Monk’s music is ambivalent, fluctuating between absolute freedom and iron rigour, between emotion and brain, between experimentalism and tradition. When he is alone, his musical stream flows at intervals, in a fashion that may almost seem strained (Jürgen Arndt has called it “poetics of hesitation”25), because it is broken, fragmented, “cubist”. The discontinuity typical of bebop with Monk “arrives at the extreme consequences, breaking the last bond between one phrase and the next, replacing it with the irruption of the unexpected, the unheard-of”26. In contrast, when Monk plays with a group, “his music seems firmly linked to a theme, a regular rhythmic scansion”27, showing that he always kept an open channel of communication with tradition. As Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso rightly observe, African American experimental music tends not to innovate by resting on intellectual (or

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intellectualistic) mannerisms or attitudes, but rather to develop a sort of gradual revolution in continuity. Monk’s ambivalence and freedom, then, are able to maintain a strict bond with tradition, while opening up to a dissonant, indefinite harmonic universe. This ambivalence and this freedom thus become ambiguity–an ambiguity that may invade all levels: structural, harmonic, melodic, timbric. The result is an oblique music, unpredictable, piercing, not in the least reassuring, made up of clusters, chromatisms, dissonances and sudden interruptions, yet within the rigour of the form. It is a ‘mistaken’, yet free music, that welcomes the out-of-place note, the finger that slips on to the wrong key (“I made the wrong mistakes”, Monk is supposed to have said on one occasion), precisely because these elements of fibrillation make the final result unforeseeable, the synthesis and emblem of the variety and richness of the world. As Sascha Feinstein reports in a 1964 article, the music critic Martin Williams described a set with Monk’s quartet in the following words: Just before the bridge, Monk leans to his left and looks under the piano, almost as if the next notes were down there somewhere. Then a break takes them into tempo for the second chorus, with tenor saxophonist Rouse walking onto the bandstand as he plays, and Monk really working behind him with a clipped distillation of the melody in support. Halfway through the chorus, Monk gets up, leaving his instrument to undertake his swaying, shuffling dance. Half the crowd seems to be nodding knowingly about his eccentricity. But a few in the audience seem to realize that, besides giving the group a change of texture and sound by laying out, Monk is conducting. His movements are encouraging ... [the musicians] to hear, not just the obvious beat, but the accent and space around the one-two-threefour, the rhythms that Monk is so interested in28.

As Feinstein stresses, this brief portrait from Williams brings out two characteristics that made Monk unmistakeable and that have absorbed and inspired many kinds of listeners (poets included). The first is his musicality, “which combined a brilliant sense of time with textured, dissonant harmonics that made him one of the most demanding and exciting leaders in jazz”29. To this characteristic another may be added, which concerns Monk’s personality above all–so eccentric and magnetic a personality as to attract many followers, “from adulating hipsters to humorously charmed intellectuals”30. This outstanding combination of genius and eccentricity, Feinstein concludes, made Monk one of the most interesting figures in the history of jazz. Many artists in the jazz world have developed a distinctive personal style, a personal instrumental technique, but only a few have incarnated a

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new, anti-conventional (or non-conventional) spirit as Monk did. Often accused of being an inept pianist, especially at the beginning of his career, he later became–as Benjamin Givan maintains–one of the icons of jazz, venerated as a pianist as much as a composer, seen in the common imagination as the archetype of the modernist intellectual and the anticonformist artist31. In Monk, the mistake is not linked to some kind of ineptitude or lack of technique. It is true that his approach to the piano (the way he uses his forearm, wrist, hands, fingers), even his choice of fingering, seem to be parts of a disjointed, almost imprecise whole, whereas they are the fruit of a conscious choice, studied as a function of an expressive universe32. They are, then, components of a language that is gestural more than stylistic, or both these at the same time, since this music works as sound language by virtue of the gestural language that supports it and gives it life. … To see Monk play is to participate in a total sensory experience, which brings together gesture and listening, sound and vision (and kinaesthetic participation)33.

What little has been said thus far restores at least partially the multicoloured mosaic of piano-playing and musical creativity of an artist– Monk–who did not found a school, at least not deliberately. Like all those with a touch of genius, Monk had a language and a style that were so particular as to be inimitable, unless as mere mimicry, caricature. Hence it is very difficult to speak of his heritage34, at least, as we have said, if the parameter used is a ‘school’. Beyond the specific characteristics of a job or an activity following the relationship with someone else’s job or activity, the result, by and large, is always original. So it is more correct to speak of influence, an influence that Monk has had far beyond his intentions, in part contributing decisively to the development of bebop, in part freeing jazz from that shadow of ‘predictability’ that might have consumed his creative charge. Developing what we may call the “poetics of unpredictability”, Monk was, in Zenni’s words, the most genuine and the most anomalous of bebop composers: “anomalous in the enigmatic, astounding features of his music, genuine because at times these very features appear as a sort of hyperbole of bebop” 35. In conclusion, it is worth emphasising once more how the freedom, the eccentricity, the mastery and the ‘anomaly’ concentrated in the figure of Monk have left an indelible mark on the developments of jazz–and not only jazz–music, so that, as we have noted he has inspired many poets. In the case of this category of listeners, they have inevitably been led to identify an authentic, ever-present ‘poetic quality’ in the style and music of Monk. The poet Sascha Feinstein has worked particularly to promote

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the relationship between Monk and the poetic dimension (in the sense of a dimension in which the poetic word and the poets themselves live together). I close this chapter, then, with a poem dedicated to the great pianist: … dying before I could see you though I’ve heard so many gigs in my mind: it’s late, you look past the whole room, your silence inviting everyone into your world like the talk we never had, or those months when performing didn’t matter. It’s how I see you even now: not wanting to play, just nudging the piano like a rush-hour New Yorker– hit a stray note, stare at it, wait for the leftover sound to tell you what tune to fall into, or who’ll survive your patience, who will leave– wait for some polyester jacket to say, Mr. Monk, it’s really time to begin– Those were the moods that kept us keyed into you more than the elbow dances off the stand. Because so much decision pressed itself into each small move, because we wanted to say We’re listening, man, we’ve got the night, and you, with your black fez & shades, everything you didn’t play36. *

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Notes 1

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York: Groove Press, 1999), 160. 2 This is where Stefano Zenni’s history of jazz begins, starting from a “global perspective”: see Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz. Una prospettiva globale (Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa Nuovi Equilibri, 2012). 3 See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: Norton, 1997). 4 Ned Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans. From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hills Books, 2008), 60. 5 See Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz, 35 and Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton, 2001), 199. 6 Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz, 36. 7 Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz, 36. 8 Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz, 43. 9 Arrigo Polillo, Jazz. La vicenda e i protagonisti della musica afro-americana (Milano: Mondadori, 19882), 664. 10 See Larry Kart, “Provocative Opinion: The Death of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 76-81. 11 Gian Carlo Roncaglia, Il jazz e il suo mondo (Torino: Einaudi, 1998), 10. 12 Paul Girloy, “Could You Be Loved? Bob Marley, Anti-politics and Universal Sufferation,” Critical Quarterly 47, no. 1-2 (2005), 237. 13 One of the features of Monk’s playing is his percussive touch. On this, Stuart Isacoff writes: “Monk’s wife, Nellie, described the combination of disruptive rhythms and highly percussive attacks as ‘Melodious Thunk’” (Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians – from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between [London: Souvenir Press, 2012]). 14 See Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009). 15 The term stride is to be understood as stride piano, a piano style typical of a certain kind of jazz in the 1930s, above all in Harlem, characterised by a rapid lefthand accompaniment alternating bichords of an octave (or a tenth) on the beat and chords off the beat (in four-beat bars). 16 For a basic preliminary discography, see Piano Solo, Disques Vogue – M. 33.342, France 1954; Thelonious Monk Plays, Prestige – PRLP 189, US 1954, The Unique Thelonious Monk, Riverside Records – RLP 12-209, US 1956; Round Midnight / In Walked Bud, Blue Note – 45-1664, US 1957; Columbia – CL 2038, US 1963; Misterioso (Recorded On Tour), Columbia – CS 9216, UK 1966; Epistrophy, Affinity – L6-AF 11, Spain 1980; Blue Monk, Jazz MasterWorks – CJZLP 8, Italy 1985. 17 Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso, La filosofia di Monk o l’incredibile ricchezza del mondo (Milano: Mimesis, 2014), 19. 18 See Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk.

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19 Robin D.G. Kelley, “New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde,” Black Music Research Journal 19, no. 2 “New Perspectives on Thelonious Monk” (1999), 136. 20 Robin D.G. Kelley, “New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde,” 137. 21 Robin D.G. Kelley, “New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde,” 144-5. 22 Martin Williams, “What Kind of Composer Was Thelonious Monk?,” The Musical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (1992), 435. 23 See Larry A. Greene, “Thelonious Monk: ‘The high priest of bepop’,” The Journal of African American History 99, no. 1-2, Special Issue on “Rediscovering the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (2014): 119-22. 24 Dan Morgenstern and Martin Williams, “The October Revolution: Two Views of the Avant-garde in Action” Down Beat (19 November 1964), 33. 25 See Jürgen Arndt, Thelonious Monk und der Free Jazz (Graz: ADEVA Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt Graz, 2002), 274. 26 Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso, La filosofia di Monk o l’incredibile ricchezza del mondo, 26. 27 Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso, La filosofia di Monk o l’incredibile ricchezza del mondo, 26. 28 Martin Williams, Jazz Changes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 97; quoted in Sascha Feinstein, “Epistrophies: Poems Celebrating Thelonious Monk and his Music,” African American Review 31, no. 1 (1997), 56. In this interesting article, Feinstein concentrates on the relationship between jazz and poetry, more specifically on how poets were inspired by Monk, saying that “Monk had more poems written in his honor during his lifetime than any other jazz musician in history. He has also, of course, been the subject of numerous posthumous tributes, including Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Elegy for Thelonious,’ which begins with grief– ‘Damn the snow. / Its senseless beauty / pours a hard light / through the hemlock. / Thelonious is dead’–but moves through the history of Monk’s music (‘Crepuscule with Nellie,’ ‘Coming on the Hudson,’ ‘Monk’s Dream’) until the speaker can imagine Monk himself, can pull the poem out of elegy and into the comfort of jazz” (58). 29 Sascha Feinstein, “Epistrophies: Poems Celebrating Thelonious Monk and his Music,” 56. 30 Sascha Feinstein, “Epistrophies: Poems Celebrating Thelonious Monk and his Music,” 56. 31 See Benjamin Givan, “Thelonious Monk’s Pianism,” The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 3 (2009): 404-42. 32 Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso, La filosofia di Monk o l’incredibile ricchezza del mondo, 52. 33 Arrigo Cappelletti and Giacomo Franzoso, La filosofia di Monk o l’incredibile ricchezza del mondo, 54 34 On the heritage of Monk, see Gabriel Solis, Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Berkeley-London: University of California Press, 2008). 35 Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz, 307.

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36 Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, eds., The Jazz Poetry Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), 60-1.

THIRD MOVEMENT A PHILOSOPHICAL READING

CHAPTER EIGHT DISINTEGRATION: ELECTROACOUSTICS, INFORMATION THEORY AND AESTHETICS

1. Premise There is a particular ‘figure’ in contemporary music, of the ‘technological’ variety, whose developments across time have met with a natural (but perhaps not sufficient) treatment within the scope of the history of music or of musicological studies, but seem to have been analysed above all from the strictly musical point of view. However, the ‘hybrid’ nature of technological music deserves specific, deeper study, starting in the first place from a broadening of the perspective of the investigation. Technological music is one figure in the phenomenology of music, but is at one and the same time–as we have seen–a destination and a starting point, a moment of reflection on the state of contemporary music and on the relationship between the human being and technics. Broadening the horizon of the investigation, evaluating the importance and the role of music in terms not only of its developmental process, but also of contemporary sensibility takes on a deeper significance if to this is further added its re-collocation in a broader theoretical picture, whose limits do not necessarily coincide exclusively with those of music history. In this chapter, then, I will focus attention on three aspects, three theoretical and philosophical in-depth studies of electroacoustic music which, though different, have in common a special relationship with the question of disorder. The first regards the intimate relationship–already established when electroacoustic music was taking its first steps–between music and information theory. In this respect it is a matter of bringing together certain guidelines from information theory on the nature of the aesthetic message produced by electroacoustic music, with a view to bringing out elements that may make a useful contribution to the definition of its characteristics. The second topic relates to the problem of structure,

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which I will approach through the analysis carried out by Rudolf Arnheim on the relationship between order and (structural) disorder in contemporary art. The third and last aspect I will deal with is the philosophical interpretation of electronic music, undertaken starting from the reflections of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially as developed in Mille Plateaux.

2. Music and Information Theory The main theories of communication were developed in the second half of the 20th century, at precisely the same time, on the one hand, with the advances in computer science (hence the rise of increasingly sophisticated electronic instruments), and on the other hand, as the gradual, unstoppable expansion of mass communications media. Information theory is to be seen in this ambit of theoretical development. It “tends to calculate the quantity of information contained in a particular message”; it is a method of calculation of the units of signal that can be and are transmitted, not a method of calculation of the units of meaning. This takes us back to the distinction pointed out by Louis Trolle Hjelmslev in the context of semiotic studies of expression and content, in their turn to be separated into form of expression/substance of expression and form of content/substance of content1. Regarding verbal language, it may be maintained, starting from this outline, that in the undifferentiated entirety of all the possible sounds, a language selects some and organises them into phonemes and monemes. An organisation of this kind is the form of expression. If we go on to analyse the meaning of one of their possible contents, the argument moves to another level, relating precisely to content. The amount of information of a message is circumscribed by a series of cognisances that I may have, regarding the degree of reliability of a source. It is, then, an additive quantity, that is to say, something added to what I already know, but the information must first be defined in the context of simpler situations, in which the quantity of information can be measured with the use of mathematical systems and can be expressed in numbers, without reference to a possible receiver. This, for Umberto Eco, is the job of information theory2. Its calculations are adaptable to any kind of message, numerical or linguistic symbols, sequences of sounds, etc. The amount of information is calculated between the two extremes of maximum (1) and minimum (2) probability, and in order to proceed to the measurement of the increase or decrease of this quantity, the theoreticians

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have recourse to a concept deriving from thermodynamics: entropy. In the context of information theory (where what counts is not the meaning communicated, but the number of alternatives necessary to define an event unambiguously), entropy is the state of equo-probability to which the elements of a message tend. Entropy is otherwise identified with a state of disorder, in the sense that order is a system of probabilities which is introduced into the system in order to be able to foresee its evolution3.

In the case of an aesthetic message, there is the formulation of a highly improbable signifying sequence, with the purpose of suggesting improbable, multiple meanings. The aesthetic message is also distinguished by its selfreflectiveness, which lies in its forcing the recipient to take the message into consideration not only as a vehicle of possible meanings, but as a physical body of signals that transmits, among its basic meanings, the ambiguous nature of its organisation too4.

Regarding the aesthetic message, information theory may serve to compute the deviations from the codified norm, and hence the quantity of information achieved, at the level of the signals (and hence of the form of expression)5;

but it may also further segment what is usually considered the ‘substance’ of the expression, reformulating it and calculating at this level too the informative impact of the message. Within the general complex of information, then, so-called ‘aesthetic information’ makes headway, where ‘aesthetic information’ is to be understood as the requalification, in pertinentising, computable terms, of a substance of the expression that in normal communication is used as vague, replaceable, indefinable, not pertinent6.

Information theory applied to aesthetics shows the usefulness of its valuable tools regarding form and expression, but it also draws attention to the limits regarding content, since information theory is certainly not left helpless regarding the fact that the work is characterised by a continuum of semantic possibilities that the user may identify, choose and direct on to the message, but it is devoid of tools regarding the “selectionability” of these semantic possibilities selectionability that is ultimately unknown to

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anyone, unless a Global Semantic System is constructed–and this, Eco concludes, is unthinkable. Within the relationship between information theory and aesthetics, there is a place for the computer analysis of the auditory message, faced for probably the first time by Abraham Moles, who in his study on information theory and aesthetic perception follows the Cartesian method in passing from the simpler to the more complex aesthetic message. To the first category–i.e. complete aesthetic messages, which are satisfying in themselves–belongs the phonetic and musical sound message. The latter additionally offers “a case in which the structures on a vast scale–notes, bars, phrases, parts–are particularly clear and decisive for the effect of the work as a whole”7. With Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez and Jacques Poullin, Moles had given life to the coterie that formed around Pierre Schaeffer and the Club d’Essay in the late 1940s. He made a close examination of the difference between the technological sound object and traditional musical materials, noting that the introduction of the electroacoustic dimension had brought about a novelty not at the structural, but at the perceptive level. Music, he recalls, should be regarded as a fluctuation between constraints of method and violations of all the acquired rules. The laws broken by experimental music (and also by exotic, primitive and modern music), while not destroying the value of the music, are not of a structural kind, but make reference to a more secret and, at the same time, more general field. The defect of acoustic music may be seen as its being uninterested in the real problems of the creation of sound structures (it is, for example, concerned with the friction of the bow on the string, while the musician is really interested in the note produced by that string); and this is a matter to which information theory may be addressed, in the sense of “physics of the message”. Thus Moles attempts to explain the structures of the sound message, “using a method of eidetic variation in order to establish the existence of the sound phenomenon in itself … in a word, in order to establish the existence of the sound object”8. The new phenomenological approach to the musical event moved away from the traditional approach precisely when the broadcasting of music by radio and recording brought out the material nature of the musical message. It was from recording, Moles writes, that the ‘musical matter’ arose, putting music in the same situation as literature after the invention of the printing press. Not only does recording preserve a sound in time, it is above all

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an application of time on space, which makes the temporal substance, hitherto ungraspable, a participant in the properties of space: properties of which the most evident is the permanence of time9.

From this standpoint, reproducibility becomes a guarantee of permanence, of eternity and of the creation of an identity of the musical phenomenon, on which the fact of its not passing away but remaining confers a personality. Furthermore, Moles adds, in contrast with the irreversibility of time and of temporal phenomena, recording is reversible, since it can be read in the reverse direction from that in which the work was conceived by its author. Finally, the application of time on space achieved by recording determines a separability of the temporal matter, since the continuity of the length without solution may be divided, manipulated and fragmented almost infinitely. Moles’s study is directed towards the identification and specification of the characters of the sound object, in the sense of the conceptual and material entity that has gone beyond the “note” of traditional music. For Moles, the note is a small musical segment with precise characteristics: inner homogeneity, defined in terms of height and average level; individuality, achieved by adding harmonics to the basic tone; development in duration, corresponding to a specific form on the dynamic level: a beginning, the body of the note, a dying out. By way of the atomisation of the sound object into elements of perceived length, proposed by information theory, it is instead possible to establish on a general basis certain harmonic and melodic laws relative to this kind of organisation. The four harmonic laws Moles suggests regulate the choice of the elements that make up the instantaneous timbre, and restrict the actual repertoire of the symbols of the more general sound message10.

The two melodic laws translate the concept of inner homogeneity of a sound entity and are relative to the development of the symbols in the duration of that entity. Information theory may be a useful tool for the development of an “experimental aesthetics of single sounds”, making it possible to go beyond the musical tradition that conceived of sound objects only in combination. To this we must add the role of technics and the new possibilities offered by recording, which permits both the materialisation of the sound object and its recreation ad libitum, as though it were a musical instrument, though without establishing any qualitative distinction of principle among the sound phenomena of the outside world, but

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gathering them all indiscriminately and offering them to the listener on a level of equality. This is the creative path taken by Schaeffer, writes his friend Moles, aiming to “use any sound object” and to “make of music a pure dialectic of duration”11. In conclusion, summing up Moles’s theses, we may say that a phenomenology of musical perception aims to bring out the temporal sound matter, made concrete by recording, which transforms it into an observable object. Recording is understood here as an application of time on space, which makes time the partner of the properties of space, to be precise of its reproducibility, permanence, reversibility and divisibility. The sound substance analysed is appropriately represented in a threedimensional diagram featuring level, height and time, within which the development of the timbre (i.e. the spectrum) is translated in the course of time. The continuity of the sound substance is further subdivided into many sound objects, which have a “centre of independent interest” around which, once they have been isolated, a “direct perception of duration as a dimension of the sound object itself”12 is organised. Information theory applied to the sound object then leads to its recomposition, starting from symbols made up of combinations of elements L (level L corresponds to the physical intensity and is expressed in decibels) and H (height H corresponds to the physical frequency and is expressed in savarts13), combinations that obey the four harmonic laws (of energy, harmonics, convergence and concealment) and the two melodic laws (of permanence and transients). Sound objects are not necessarily generated by traditional musical instruments. Every sound and every noise can claim its place in what Schaeffer calls “the most general orchestra that exists”. Lastly, Moles identifies the structures of the sound message: an elementary structure (the periodicity of the sound matter); a microstructure (the combination of symbols that leads to the sound object); an intermediate structure (the development of the sound objects, according to precise aesthetic modalities, resulting in the temporal cell) and a macrostructure (the composition of the objects and the cells). In order to be more precise, I believe it is useful to refer to an essay by Leonard B. Meyer which, although published in the same period, namely the late 1950s, lays before us a series of elements that contribute to clarify the nature of the ground on which we are moving, starting from the “tendency to suspense” in the formation and structuring of any musical experience. Analysing such experiences, Meyer understood that many concepts that emerge were developed in the area of information theory, where they find surprising analogies. Among these are the importance of uncertainty in musical communication and the probabilistic nature of

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musical style. Specifically, it would appear that the psycho-stylistic conditions that produce musical meaning, be they affective or intellectual, are the same as those that produce information in general. This hypothesis, for Meyer, is especially interesting because, once endorsed and reasoned, it may bring worlds that are apparently distant–physical phenomena, biosocial behaviour and the humanistic creation–to a single fundamental principle: the law of entropy. Let us start, following Meyer, from the topic of “meaning”. Music can bring into being two kinds of meaning. It may be meaningful in referring to things different from itself (as when it evokes associations with ideas, feelings or physical objects) or in the sense that, within a musical context, the listener on listening to a certain passage expects something to happen. In both cases, Meyer writes, The “character” (designative meaning) of a piece of music will, when welldefined, influence our expectations as to subsequent musical events (embodied meaning), just as our estimate of the character of an individual will influence our expectations as to his behavior in a given set of circumstances. Conversely, the way in which expectations are satisfied, delayed, or blocked plays an important part in the characterization of the designative meaning of a passage, in the same way that we make inferences as to an individual’s character on the basis of his behavior in a particular cultural situation14.

This happens beyond the specific nature of the single musical styles that have succeeded one another or been superimposed on one another in history. In fact, Meyer maintains, what remains constant from one style to another is not the scales or the harmonies, but the “psychology of the mental processes”, which is to say the ways the mind, working within a tissue of culturally established norms, selects and organises the stimuli. For instance, the human mind, striving for stability and completeness “expects” structural gaps to be filled in. But what constitutes a structural gap will vary from style to style. Thus a melodic skip of a third which is a structural gap in the diatonic-chromatic tonal system of the West would not be a gap in a pentatonic tonal system in which such a skip is given as normative15.

As soon as a musical style becomes a sort of familiar context, Meyer continues, a series of interwoven responses that combine composers, interpreters and listeners, that musical style can be considered a complex system of probabilities.

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In books on harmony, which give the rules on the basis of which music is composed and the collection of norms that allow composers to move within a shared syntax, we find the demonstration of how musical styles are “interiorised systems of probability”: for example, in the traditional harmony of western music, we are told that the tonic more probably follows the dominant, rather than the submediant. Musicologists and ethno-musicologists have in a sense recognised the probabilistic nature of the musical systems and styles, to the point that, as Meyer says, elaborate statistics have been compiled in which we find the frequency with which a certain progression or a certain interval occurs. What Meyer notes is that Out of such internalized probability systems arise the expectations–the tendencies–upon which musical meaning is built. But probability is not the same as expectation. Or, to put the matter in another way, we must distinguish between active and latent expectation–between the fact of probability and the awareness that an individual has of alternative probabilities16.

Our whole existence, Meyer emphasises, is made up of expectations and answers to those expectations, which may be latent or explicit, but our lives develop within a normal condition of ‘waiting’, which confirms or contradicts the probable continuity of events. This is the basis of the construction of norms of behaviour, of private and above all collective, social customs. This very mechanism is present in music: such latent expectations are necessary conditions for the communication of musical information, while the disturbances of these norms are the sufficient condition for musical communication17.

What has been said thus far is strictly and deeply linked with the question of musical meaning. In general, meaning emerges when there is an increase in knowledge or information following a stimulus, in a specific context. In the ambit of a habitual behaviour or an ordinary context, the stimuli are neither meaningful nor meaningless, but are ‘neutral’. For instance, Meyer writes, when we are driving a car we notice a series of visual and auditory stimuli (pedestrians, advertising hoardings, etc.) which respond to our habits, and hence stimulate no special attention, apart from ordinary notice. It is the unexpected stimulus (for example, a driver who swerves, or suddenly, for no reason, brakes) that disturbs our ordinary, habitual conduct, and this is what takes on meaning. This mechanism is also found in music:

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a tonal process which moves in the expected and probable way without deviation may be said to be neutral with regard to meaning. Musical meaning, then, arises when our expectant habit responses are delayed or blocked–when the normal course of stylistic-mental events is disturbed by some form of deviation18.

At this point, Meyer identifies three possible forms of deviation: (1) in the first, what the listener expects is delayed. In this way expectation is postponed and placed at the end of a less direct path; (2) in the second, the starting point is ambiguous, which means that there may be various options regarding what may happen. In this case, the listener may foster various expectations, all equally probable, but the automatic responses will in any case be inadequate, because of the insufficient initial clarity; (3) in the third form, there are neither delays nor ambiguities, but the resulting event is unexpected and is considered unlikely in that specific context. On the basis of all this, musical meaning can be defined as follows: Musical meaning arises when an antecedent situation, requiring an estimate as to the probable modes of pattern continuation, produces uncertainty as to the temporal-tonal nature of the expected consequent19.

Here the relationship between music and information theory becomes quite clear: as uncertainty increases regarding what follows an organised event, so the information increases and we may say that the degree of entropy is high. Information, stimuli and meaning are brought together in the ‘probability of uncertainty’; or, to put it more clearly, value, information, and meaning might profitably be considered as being different, though related, experiential realizations of a basic stochastic process governed by the law of entropy20.

3. Structure and Entropy The idea of entropy (excluding its natural context, that of physics) does not refer exclusively to the ambit of information theory, but also refers to questions that pertain to the definition of chaos in contemporary music and, even earlier, to the discussion on the relationship between entropy an art. According to Rudolf Arnheim, the development of the visual arts in the 20th century with regard to this question has brought out two stylistic trends which at first sight seem to be mutually opposed.

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on the other hand, there is a trend in which disorder, whether accidental or deliberately produced, is fundamental: this can be traced back to Dutch ‘still life’ paintings, to the disorderly scenes of social criticism in the generation of Hogarth or to the groups of unrelated individuals in 19th century French scenes. In modern painting we note the more or less controlled splashes and sprays of paint, in sculpture a reliance on chance textures, tears of twists of various materials, and found objects. Related symptoms in other branches of art are the use of random sequences of words or pages in literature, or a musical performance presenting nothing but silence so that the audience may listen to the noises of the street outside22.

Arnheim’s argument starts from a brief but obviously accurate recognition of certain aspects of scientific, philosophical, psychological and physiological thinking, in the attempt to show how the activities of nature and of human beings cannot be said to be fundamentally in mutual conflict. The human tendency towards order derives from a similar tendency in the organic world, up to the simplest structural level present in physical systems. This cosmic tendency to order must, however, be distinguished from the catabolic decomposition typical of material things, which leads to disorder or, more generally, to the destruction of any organised form. The renewal of order as universal principle suggests, however, at the same time, that regularity as such is not sufficient to account for the nature of organised systems in general, or of those created by human beings in particular. Pure regularity, Arnheim maintains, produces a progressive, ever-increasing impoverishment, leading in the end to the lowest structural level, which cannot be distinguished from chaos, i.e. the absence of order. We need a “counterprinciple”, which Arnheim describes as the anabolic creation of a structural theme, which establishes “what the thing is about,” be it a crystal or a solar system, a society or a machine, a statement of thoughts or a work of art. Subjected to the tendency toward simplest structure, the object or event or institution assumes orderly, functioning shape23.

Both tendencies–the impulse towards simplicity, which promotes regularity and the lowering of the level of order, and the impulse towards

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disordered disintegration–lead to reduction of tension. These phenomena are shown more clearly in correspondence with a lower impact on them of the opposite tendency, that is to say, of the “anabolic establishment of a structural theme, which introduces and maintains tension”24. The point is that to which art aims. It may happen that the need for simplicity is not counterbalanced by the complex experience and by the invention (directed at the pleasure of the reduction of tension, making do with a minimum structure at a low level of order, potentially arriving at the “emptiness of homogeneity”25), or it may happen that the organised structure surrenders to disintegration. Arnheim attributes disintegration and excessive reduction of tension to the absence or powerlessness of an articulated structure. This is the condition typical of many works of contemporary art. On this basis Arnheim concludes, however, that whatever the cause, these products, although often substandard artistically, reveal strongly positive objectives: an almost desperate need to wrest order from a chaotic environment, even at the most elementary level; and the frank exhibition of bankruptcy and sterility wrought by that same environment26.

Arnheim’s essay, as may be expected on the basis of the above, ends with an actual “call for structure” which, as he specifies, is not merely a question of form. The structural theme of the work of art takes its value from the human condition, whose particular form of order it makes visible or audible. It is also true that a high level of structural order is a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite for a work of art, also in the sense of “state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy”27, since this order must ultimately reflect “a genuine, true, profound view of life”28. Moving to another angle, the subject of structure, seen from the visual viewpoint of semiological studies, is central in the research carried out by Umberto Eco in the late 1960s. In his book La struttura assente, Eco claims to be at one and the same time a structuralist and an antistructuralist, since the arguments in the book deny Structure, but affirm structures. The idea of a structured whole pervaded philosophical reflection throughout the centuries, until in 20th century thinking it became dominant. Hence, as Eco writes, it is not enough to speak of structures, to recognise structures or to operate structurally, in order to be and to claim to be “structuralist”29. We may attempt to circumscribe a central current, an “orthodox” structuralism that starts with Ferdinand De Saussure and

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arrives at the Soviet and French semiologists, by way of Claude LéviStrauss and Jacques Lacan. A choice of this kind, however, would imply facing a variety of underlying philosophical attitudes leading to the statement that, within the central current, divergent forces operate, so that “structuralism” becomes a point of departure for various destinations. Hence, Eco writes, we must recognise that there are three types of structuralism: the “generic” (defined as such only by one’s own or another’s error), “methodological” and “ontological”30. In this context, linguistic structuralism has had the merit of making it clear not so much that a structure is a system of interdependent parts, but–which is original– that this structure may be expressed in terms of oppositions and differences, independently of the elements that contribute to comprise the values made up of the oppositive, differential poles. In any case, there are two ways of conceiving structure, pointed out by Maria Corti31 and shared by Eco. Structure may be conceived as “organised object” or as “generalising model”. In the first sense, structuralism tends to the definition of what Gianfranco Contini has called the “integrity” of the author, which is struck by a single spotlight, in its entirety. In the second sense, structuralism develops analyses of language as system and, going on to the analysis of the single work, directs the critic’s attention to the failure to observe the norm. This double polarity is followed by another, more general one, which apparently opposes the viewpoint of the critic who tends to see the work more as a discourse than as a form, and that of the critic who sees form rather than discourse in the work. In reality the requirement is the same: namely, the desire not to reduce the work to a system of structured signs, in order to allow it to resonate in all its possible resolutions. Conceiving the work as message, as something that is not only “pure presence” or “pure absence”, but something that “speaks”, that communicates, hence as a system of signifiers that connote possible meanings–this makes it possible to interpret any residuum as a continual contribution offered by various subjectivities that have a place in history and in society. These various subjectivities cause an “increase” of presence and transform it into a “system of meanings” which is at once stable and mutable, and whose structures are not the means of the communication, but the most important of the contents. In the general context of the discussion Eco offers on structuralism and its theoretical implications, there is space for a chapter devoted to structural and serial thought, which leads the discourse back to the musical dimension. The distinction between structural and serial thought is discussed by Lévi-Strauss in the Introduction to Le cru et le cuit32, where

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he refers first to the philosophical position that subtends the method of structuralist investigation, and secondly to the philosophy implicit in postWebern poetics, above all in Pierre Boulez. As Boulez writes, in the mid-20th century the series became a polyvalent way of thinking, a global reaction to classical thinking, which tends towards the application of pre-existing forms, hence presenting itself as a “general morphology”, like the thinking of perpetual expansion. Serial thinking is offered as the production of an open, polyvalent structure. But– Eco asks–is it possible to think structurally of an open structure? We must start again from the fact that structural thinking, on the one hand, has shown that, beyond the differences of languages and systems of the various social groups, there are constant, simple, universal structures, whereas serial thinking, on the other, has led to a crisis of the tonal system and any universal, constant, a-historical option. Starting from this divarication, Eco wonders if a mediation can be effected. Let us suppose, taking the viewpoint of ontological structuralism, that there are in effect deep communicative structures, constant, unchangeable behaviours of the human mind. Regarding this, structural research should tend to disclose deeper structures; but why believe that they are those of tonal music? May it instead be thought that there are generative structures underlying all grammar (including that of tonal music) and all negation of grammar (as implied by atonal music), as well as every selective system that aims at the definition of sounds with distinctive cultural traits in a continuum of noise?33.

Framing the discourse in these terms obviously means offering structural research the possibility of explaining the historical transition from the Greek scales to post-Webernian music, without having to develop a primary system (of which the tonal system is an example), but a sort of “generative mechanism” of any possible sound application. Lévi-Strauss’s refusal to combine structural with serial thinking is linked to the fact that in his speculative horizon, structural thinking must oppose to serial thinking pre-established, pre-existing structures, useful for the evaluation of the validity of new types of communication. But Eco rightly maintains the naivety of an attitude taken by those who deny the right to existence to new modalities for the simple reason that they are structured in directions not foreseen by the theory (antecedent, however, to their development). Of course, these new modes may well be non-communicative; on the other hand, it would be wrong not to consider, even if only as a hypothesis, that the theory may not be comprehensive enough. In this case, serialism would

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The dialectic relationship between variance and invariance, in postWebernian music, was to be absolutely constitutive, organic to compositions and to compositional thinking. As we have said, it is possible, regarding the music of the second half of the 20th century, to talk not of structure, but of structures; not of universe, but of pluriverse; not of centripetal forces, but of centrifugal forces. The loss of the centre and of meaning, which goes hand in hand with the disintegration of the solid ontological and metaphysical bases that had supported human progress from the time of classical antiquity, marks the existence of 20th century man and woman, and also of the music they produce. Nonetheless, to instability and variance, invariance and repetitiveness correspond as method, as model. From Henri Pousseur to contemporary electronics there are innumerable examples of an aesthetic of repetition, closure, and cyclicality that involves and reflects the conservative ideology and pedagogy characteristic of particular political and social structure35.

But let us return to the starting point. We said that the typical elements of post-Webernian electronic music should be discussed not least in relation to the problem of their internal organisation. This discourse inevitably takes us back to the notion of entropy. According to the second principle of thermodynamics, the degree of disorder of an isolated system (or a closed system, namely one which exchanges neither mass nor energy with the external environment, integrating in no way with it; the sole example of an isolated system has always been considered to be the universe) can never decrease spontaneously, and hence tends towards increasing disorder. A more modern (but equivalent) formulation states that in the state of minimum energy, entropy has a well-defined value that depends solely on the degeneration of the basic state. In truth, however, entropy, used in thermodynamics to define a “consumption” of energy, is effectively a statistical measurement and hence a mathematically neutral tool. Boltzmann’s principle of irreversibility, connected to this, is equally of a statistical nature: it states that the process of reversion of a closed system is not impossible, but statistically improbable.

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In the course of the 20th century, on both a philosophico-sociological and a scientific level, the role and function of disorder underwent radical reconsideration. Edgar Morin, for instance, maintained that the universe, nature, humanity cannot be explained unless by taking disorder as a determining and probabilistically more present factor. Disorder can no longer be regarded as a disintegrating element, but rather as a constituent element of every physical reality; it entails no longer simple degradation, but existence. Chaos is the rule; order the exception36. From this the hypothesis drives of an ‘organising disorder’, intersecting and connecting point among order, disorder and organisation. It is not a matter of diachronic passages, chronologically and logically succeeding one another, but the consequence of the mutual, chance co-production of the “great game of cosmogenesis”: The encounters are aleatory, but the effects of these encounters, on welldetermined elements, in determined conditions, become necessary, and they establish the order of “laws”. Relationing interactions generate forms and organization37.

The constituent elements of this “game”, its rules and the various combinations give rise to a process that is “more and more varied, more and more aleatory, more and more rich, more and more complex, more and more organizing”38. In this play of combinations, what is fundamental is the intertwining of relationships, interactions and connections, but also of clashes and collisions, that is created. To the question “what is the idea of chaos?” Morin answers: We have forgotten that it was a genesic idea. We see in it no more than destruction and disorganization. But the idea of chaos is first of all an energic idea: it carries in its loins bubblings, flamings, turbulences. Chaos is an idea antedating distinction, separation, and opposition, an idea, therefore, of indistinction, of confusion between destructive power, between order and disorder, between disintegration and organization, between Hybris and Dike39.

The fluctuation between chaotic vertigo and future complex constructions, we may say with Félix Guattari, goes on this side of distinction, organisation, time and space. The transition from a state of “chaotic grasping” to the unfolding of constitutions connected to the worldly coordinates lies beyond processes of spatialisation and temporalisation40. But at the same time, it must not be regarded as mere indifferentiation. Chaos has a precise ontological design41, which is why it is possible to speak of “deterministic chaos”. These frontiers of thought offer the

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possibility of developing an idea of system that is no longer cold, impeccable, “centric” but in continual development, a-centric and polycentric. Regarding the phenomenon of electroacoustic and, more specifically, electronic and digital music, the new horizon within which chaos is reconsidered and the consequent ideas of polycentricity and reticularity are fully appropriate. It is probable that the transition from the scientific to the musical ambit is exhausted at the philosophical level, to be precise in the conceptual constellation of Deleuze and Guattari. As a matter of fact, many composers of electronic music have referred their compositional choices to the direction of thought originating with Deleuze. The standardisation and repetitiveness of some musical genres is translated, in Deleuze’s lexis, into the notion of territorialisation. From this standpoint, the refrain is to be understood as a “territorial articulation”42, a strategy of definition and appropriation of a space-time; it is “the result of an act that organises and constitutes a nucleus of subjectivity within the indeterminate flow of chaos”43. The developments of western music may be integrally read in the light of the dialectic between territorialisation and de-territorialisation, with a tendency to supersession, in the 20th century, of the former by the latter, at least in generically experimental music. Genres such as jazz, pop music and rock, deriving from rock’n’roll, all display a high degree of territorialisation. Jazz, for instance, is a genre that gambles everything on the relationship between background and foreground, between melody, rhythm and harmony, within patterns that are all substantially the same. But it is within jazz that the need arose to go beyond this model, to contest it. This came about with the success of free jazz, in the 1970s, which was presented as the attempt to dislocate the standard connections and dismantle the established hierarchies of jazz. Free Jazz said: “Forget the chord, forget the background and the foreground, ignore the stable instrumental roles. Treat every instrument as a sound device, like any other. Play as a collective whole and achieve a collective energy”44.

An analogous development in parallel with traditional style, controlled and ‘commercial’, is found in the ambit of rock music. Although this is a genre that arose in the context of protest and liberation, “few musical genres are more rigidly stratified than rock”45. We have mentioned that historic jazz was bound and restricted within an especially rigid formal, sound and instrumental organisation. Equal rigidity is found in rock, which

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consists of a standard instrumentation serving a basic spatial and auditory hierarchy: (from the top) voice, solo guitar, rhythm guitar, bass and percussion. It organises desire along conventional lines.

As in the case of jazz, in the history of rock there have been countercurrents, a counter-tradition, as in the case of the Velvet Underground or Kraftwerk. But these trends, in the 1990s, exploded and took on new, varied forms, in the first place under the pressure of a new presence–disco music, which seriously challenged the individualism, the masculinity and the personality cult typical of rock. From that point, rock followed three different roads: it took refuge in the calm, reassuring and almost limitless home of pop; it attempted contamination with different genres and styles (blues rock, neo-melodic rock, psychedelic rock, garage rock, etc.); and it took the ideological component to extremes (punk, heavy metal, etc.). Post-rock is situated at the intersection among these derivations, attempting to go beyond traditional rock (though substantially maintaining intact the classic instrumental complement), using variously ambient, jazz and electronic sounds, progressively de-stratifying historic rock and subjecting the standard features of rock to a profound détournement. Groups such as the Main and the Flying Saucer Attack definitively removed chords and progressions, treating the guitar as an electronic device for the generation of timbres and textures46.

If rock and pop encompass the very rich republic of the refrain, which is to say of what is essentially territorial, territorialising or reterritorialising, it is likely that an authentic, definite de-territorialisation took place in the field of electronic research, starting, however, from the dodecaphonic turnaround. Schönberg, in fact, carried out the first deterritorialisation of the classical work, overturning the ‘tyranny’ of tonality, and de-naturalising the traditional melodic, harmonic and tonal system. Being distributed along the entire chromatic scale, atonal music tales on a fluid character and avoids resolution. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards there was a re-territorialisation, at the point when the main unifier of the series took the place of that of tonality. It was to be the experimental developments of post-Webernian music, starting from the 1940s, that offered new possibilities of de-territorialisation of the classical work, by means of the research carried out by Varèse, Feldman, Cage, Schaeffer, Stockhausen and the generation of electronic composers. The strategies of de-territorialisation in order to decentralise, ramify, atomise, ionise sound, established a privileged relationship with technics,

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especially from the mid-20th century. These de facto strategies “mark the entrance into the era of the machine, of processes-mechanisms … the era of electronics, of the synthesiser”47. Electronic music intensifies the processes of de-territorialisation to the point where they become its constitutive element, at various levels. This music is integrated in that musical development of which I have given a brief account, isolating and intensifying one element: the tendency to make music a body without organs, which in the language of Deleuze corresponds to a formless, disorganised, non-stratified or de-stratified body. As Emanuele Quinz rightly pointed out in one of our conversations, this point should be better specified in order to avoid slipping into misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Speaking of disorganisation and disintegration may prove ambiguous and even incorrect, if this aspect is not first made clear. Electronic music is certainly based on ordered structures, so much so that I have suggested applying to this ambit Morin’s notion of “organised disorder”. The disorder or disintegration of which I am speaking is not only expressed somewhat provocatively, but makes reference to the macro-structure in certain electronic works, in which the structured microparts are in a mutually pseudo-ordered relation. Nevertheless, this is so arbitrary an order that it results in apparent disorder, above all in perceptive terms. The perceptive element, together with the de-stratifying and de-territorialising trends, leads to a distortion that has the character of disintegration. Perhaps one of the most striking examples, in this sense, is glitch aesthetics. Hence, to speak of disintegration in this context is to make reference to the chaotic (but rational) development of the elements, the sequences, the rhythms and the tempo. This sort of aesthetics of disintegration is not disintegration made an art, or better still a theory of disintegrated art, but a theoretical-practical trend that (rationally and conceptually) rethinks chaos. This is not strictly ‘disintegrated music’ but rather poetics or aesthetics of disintegration. That said, we may return to our discourse. Various studies agree that, not least because of the explicit tribute made to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, some experimental electronic music, at the heart of musical practice, has fulfilled the basic concepts of Deleuze’s philosophy. Still more: Deleuze, in the years after his death, became a sort of intellectual hero of experimental electronics, which Christoph Cox believes to derive not from classical modernism but from house, hip-hop and techno. Though it is difficult to deny that even the experimental electronics of the 1990s had its roots in classical modernism–Cox himself, retracing some stages in the history of music

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from the point of view of territorialisation-de-territorialisation dialectics, indicates a generative relationship of noise and minimalist house with ‘historical’ electronics–it is plausible that the most advanced attempt, whose success obviously varies from one work to another, at making music a BwO (body without organs) is to be found in the experimental electronics to which Cox refers and in which, he argues, are present all the ways of doing it: disarticulation and de-stratification (electronics disarticulates and de-stratifies the sound, which becomes a flow that is free to wander, a sheer power no longer bound to forms or functions); tracing the lines of a plan (the plan of organisation is replaced by a plan of consistency: a smooth surface on which the particles of sound are distributed, linked by the absence of bonds and predisposed to experience); distribution of singularity and haecceity, tremolos and intensities (on their spaces, electronic works distribute singularity and haecceity, tremolos and intensities: sheer auditory qualities, quantities and aggregates disarticulated from the melodies, forms and structures); construction and mapping of a body or an assemblage (abstract, molecular, machinic and de-subjectified)48. The analogies with Deleuze’s thinking are a further element that serves the reconstruction of some aspects of contemporary, especially electroacoustic music. In this sound context the general atomisation of what exists is reflected–an atomisation that is variously declined in the various human practices and hence also in artistic and musical activity. Abstract, molecular, machinic and de-subjectified, pieces of electronic music are simple selections of series of sound particles lined to others and in relation, in their turn, with those of other pieces.

Music is thus transformed into a Body without Organs: “not subjects, forms, themes or narrations; only flows, cuts, aggregates, strengths”49. In some ways, electroacoustic music, in its inexhaustible ability to free sound molecules from the strong energetic charge, may be seen as the reflection of contemporary society: apparently unstoppable flows and sudden standstill, interrupted paths and linear courses, inextricable tissues and unexpected glimmers.

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Notes 1

See Louis T. Hjelmslev, Principes de grammaire générale (Copenhagen: Høst go søn, 1928) and Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Baltimore: Indiana University, 1953); orig. ed. Omkring sproghistoriens grundlæggelse (Copenhagen: København, 1943). 2 See Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cangogni, with an introduction by David Robey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); orig. ed. Opera aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1962). 3 Umberto Eco, “Introduzione” to Umberto Eco, ed., Estetica e teoria dell’informazione (Milano: Bompiani, 1972), 15 (italics in the original). 4 Umberto Eco, “Introduzione” to Umberto Eco, ed., Estetica e teoria dell’informazione, 25 (italics in the original). 5 Umberto Eco, “Introduzione” to Umberto Eco, ed., Estetica e teoria dell’informazione, 25 (italics in the original). 6 Umberto Eco, “Introduzione” to Umberto Eco, ed., Estetica e teoria dell’informazione, 26. 7 See Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception, trans. Joel E. Cohen (Urbana-London: University of Illinois Press, 1966); orig. ed. Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958). All Moles’ quotations are translated into English from the Italian edition: Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, trad. David Mezzacapa (Roma: Lerici, 1969), 160. 8 Abraham Moles, Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, 163. 9 Abraham Moles, Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, 165. 10 Abraham Moles, Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, 176. 11 Abraham Moles, Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, 183. 12 Abraham Moles, Teoria dell’informazione e percezione estetica, 188. 13 Savarts are submultiples of the octave. 14 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 4 (1957), 413. 15 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 413-4. 16 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 414. 17 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 414. 18 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 415. 19 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 416. 20 Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” 424. 21 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (BerkeleyLos Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1971), 10. 22 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 11 (the reference here could be to 4’33” by Cage). 23 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 49. 24 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 52. 25 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 53. Examples include the batteries of Brillo Box (1964), all identical, presented by Andy Warhol.

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Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 55. Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 56. 28 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art, 56. 29 See Umberto Eco, La struttura assente. La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale (Milano: Bompiani, 2004 [1968]), 256. 30 Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 256. 31 See Maria Corti’s contribution to the investigation “Strutturalismo e critica”, published in Cesare Segre, ed., Catalogo Generale de Il Saggiatore (1965), XXVII-XXXI. 32 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); orig. ed. Mythologiques I. Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964). 33 Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 314. 34 Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 315-6. 35 Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 316. 36 This same overturning happens at the musical-compositional level. As Enrico Fubini writes, speaking of Cage, “if at one time the musician’s job was to bring order into chaos, now it is rather a question of acknowledging chaos in the world of nature, without adding anything to it” (Enrico Fubini, La musica: natura e storia [Torino: Einaudi, 2004], 55). 37 Edgar Morin, Method, trans. and introduction by J.L. Roland Bélanger (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 48; orig. ed. La Méthode (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). 38 Edgar Morin, Method, 52. 39 Edgar Morin, Method, 54. 40 See Felix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992). 41 See Felix Guattari, Chaosmose. 42 See Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); orig. ed. Mille Plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 43 Emanuele Quinz, “Strategie della Vibrazione. Sull’estetica musicale di Deleuze e Guattari,” in Roberto Paci Dalò and Emanuele Quinz, eds., Millesuoni. Deleuze, Guattari e la musica elettronica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2008 [2006]), 19. 44 Christoph Cox, “Come fare della musica un corpo senza organi? Gilles Deleuze e l’elettronica sperimentale,” in Roberto Paci Dalò and Emanuele Quinz, eds., Millesuoni, 87. 45 Christoph Cox, “Come fare della musica un corpo senza organi? Gilles Deleuze e l’elettronica sperimentale,” 89. 46 Christoph Cox, “Come fare della musica un corpo senza organi? Gilles Deleuze e l’elettronica sperimentale,” 91. 47 Emanuele Quinz, “Strategie della Vibrazione. Sull’estetica musicale di Deleuze e Guattari,” 31. 48 Christoph Cox, “Come fare della musica un corpo senza organi? Gilles Deleuze e l’elettronica sperimentale,” 92-106. 27

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49 Christoph Cox, “Come fare della musica un corpo senza organi? Gilles Deleuze e l’elettronica sperimentale,” 105-6.

CHAPTER NINE NEW MEDIA: MUSICAL AESTHETICS AND THE CHALLENGES LAUNCHED BY THE NEW TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS

1. Premise To speak of contemporary music and new media is to speak about electroacoustic music, orstill more generally–technological music. In this last chapter, I will pose a number of questions linked to technological music, seen from the angle of vision of aesthetics. I will linger specifically on the subject of the aesthetic experience in general, and how it emerges in the relationship with the new technological means. The topic of aesthetic experience, in the context of musical discourse, cannot but take us back to questions linked to listening, since the musicutiliser relationship happens primarily, but not always exclusively, in the dimension of listening. On this, it will be useful to return to some theses recently expounded by Gianmario Borio. But first, I want to frame the musical and conceptual context in the ambit of which technological music is developed. Aesthetics must tackle technological music, which is to say that vast dimension in which there is a place for experiences that, aside from their greater or lesser complexity and there more or less specific collocation within a genre, arise from the combination of the musical and the technological level. The experience of technological music also arises in the form of the analytical, scientific study of sound, in the sense of physical-acoustic phenomenon. This aspect alone justifies philosophy’s interest in music, which begins and can begin only by taking a step back: it does not address music itself at once, given the open multiplicity of its expressive forms, but

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2. Composing Music and New Technologies After the dodecaphonic and serial revolution, composers expressed the need to go beyond the narrow limits of a tradition that, after only a few decades, already seemed to have grown old. Serial music, which had been the candidate to oust tonal music, representing the more authentic revolutionary spirit, did not in reality succeed in consolidating its primacy over tonal music. Technological music in the 1940s and 1950s, was one of the responses that composers attempted to give to the state of immobility and ‘unspeakability’ of a panorama that seemed fixed at the deathbed of the last great serialist, Anton Webern. In these terms, electroacoustic music may be said to be a phase along the road to the evolution of music, snaking from jolt to revolution to rupture and moments of calm. François Delalande has spoken of an “electroacoustic paradigm”, by which he means a twofold process of development and rupture. Electroacoustics may be said to be something within “the continuity of a triple development: from the note to the sound, from doing to hearing, from improvisation to the fixing of the detail of execution”, but also something whose specificity is to be identified outside the musical context. If until 1948 there were two broad modalities of creation and transmission, namely oral tradition and writing, from that time on there was to be a third, electroacoustics. If this is the case, electroacoustics is to be considered a galaxy within which we chance upon products that are even qualitatively, formally and essentially different, but express a new view of composition, of music, of treatment of sound–all in all, a new view of the world. Once this trend was established, there was no artist who was not bound to face the problem of the relationship between music and technics, between compositional praxis and available instruments. Of course, technical development has always conditioned or inspired composers’ imagination, raising the problem, however, of the relationship between technics and imagination, at times assigning primacy to the former rather than the latter. It is this, for example, that concerns Theodor W. Adorno, for whom the composers should not run after new materials, wondering what unusual things they can do in using them, and how they can use them skilfully. The use of technics in the artistic context, its fecundity for the

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compositional spirit–these depend rather on the power of self-sacrifice with which the composers obey the new materials, without hastily subjectivising them and without handling them as though they were what– in naïve, unsophisticated fashion–not long ago was called “means of expression”2. Art can and must make use of technics, but must always safeguard the priority of the aesthetic ends over the means. But is it technics that contributes to the development of music, or is it music that stimulates the application in music of pre-existing technologies? In contrast with those who maintain that it was technology that offered composers the key to a new, unexplored universe which they would never otherwise have discovered, I hold–with the support of the testimony of Luciano Berio–that technico-technological progress supplied the tools for the concrete fulfilment of that conceptual revolution that was already in progress and whose roots are in serial music. Berio writes: Boulez tends to think, for instance, that architecture changed because of glass and steel and that, analogously, music should change because of the new techniques, the computer, etc. In fact, speaking of electronic music, Boulez tends to forget its history, he seems intensely led to forget the creations of Stockhausen and others (myself included). I rather continue to believe that it was architectural thinking, with the extent of its resolutions and functions, that became aware of glass and steel, just as musical thinking, at the beginning of the Fifties, became aware of oscillators and sound generators in general, which were already there, just as, for the architects, glass and steel were already there3.

In fact, Boulez is the perfect representative of a certain way of looking at the relationship between composition and new technologies, becoming the spokesman of a stimulating, constant integration between music and technics. According to Boulez, “musical material has evolved over the centuries, providing for each age a typical sound profile that is continually renewed–slowly perhaps, but inevitably”4. In addition, especially starting from the mid-20th century, technology provided the arts with a remarkable quantity of instruments whose use gave substance and life to an authentic artistic, aesthetic and sound revolution. The composer (or the artist) is fully aware of the state of development of technologies and, in the event that s/he is interested in using them, will venture into a territory that was initially conceived to arrive at other objectives and perform other functions. The first laboratories of electroacoustic music, installed in radio and television stations (Milan, Paris, Cologne, Tokyo, etc.), are places where instruments (oscillators,

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amplifiers, wave generators, etc.) created to perform a certain function are used to produce electronic music. Thus the composers through an intuition that is both sure and unsure–sure of its direction, but unsure of its outcome– … have assumed that modern technology might be used in the search for a new instrumentation. The direction and significance of this exploration did not emerge until long after the need for it arose: irrational necessity preceded aesthetic reflection, the latter even being thought superfluous and likely to hamper any free development5.

The fact is that the relationship between science and music, technology and composition has by now been consolidated, although suspicions and prejudices may persist. According to Boulez, scientists will go on tracing music back to an intuitive, utopian, irrational dimension, in which it is difficult to produce anything valid. Yet the composer cannot avoid learning “the language of technology”6: unless s/he is also an engineer or a computer scientist, s/he will have difficulty in fully understanding the mechanisms underlying the workings of certain instruments. Nonetheless– as happened for centuries in the case of various musical instruments (violin, flute, trumpet, etc.) involved in the process of orchestration–s/he will be able to become familiar with them and use them in composing. Boulez seems consistent regarding the guideline he had given to the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which, as Georgina Born writes, embodies Boulez’s ambitious vision of making music progress, setting up a new relationship between music, science and technology, with a view supporting a new development of musical composition. This experience, however, is to be seen in the context of a general climate that permeated Central Europe and in which the best-informed composers were moving. The music of western art, as we said at the beginning of this section, was experiencing a crisis from which they believed they could escape by way of the synthesis of music and technology. The imperatives that emerged were progress, scientificity and universality. Regarding this, The place of IRCAM in these historical developments is particularly significant. The institute is often depicted as the latest and most megalomaniac embodiment of Boulez’s personal vision. It is also widely held to be a progressive experiment, both aesthetic and sociological, in the transformation of contemporary composition and one that might provide a path out of the historical impasse. Despite these gigantic ambitions, IRCAM is shrouded in mystery. Little is know, beyond publicity and polemics, about the internal dynamics of the organization7.

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Apart from these specific aspects, Boulez wanted to pursue the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, giving it institutional authority: the IRCAM like Bayreuth8. From Boulez’s viewpoint, the musician’s inventiveness should include a certain understanding of contemporary technology. When this is absent, scientists, technicians and musicians, though working side by side and helping one another, will carry out activities that will remain mutually marginal. In contrast, Boulez’s grand design was always to prepare the way for their integration and, through an increasingly pertinent dialogue, to reach a common language which would take account of the imperatives of musical invention and the priorities of technology. This dialogue will be based as much on the sound material as on concepts9.

As may easily be understood, Boulez’s point of view is greatly offbalance in the direction of an almost unshakeable faith in the possibilities, the opportunities and the instruments that science can make available to musical composition. It would seem, however, that there is a certain imbalance in favour of technics, as though technological music were the corollary of the domination of technology in the present era and of its relentless pervasiveness. But if technological music is the new koiné, questions arise not only in the sphere of music, but in aesthetics and philosophy.

3. Technologisation of the Arts: Aesthetic Considerations. General Reflections Human life today is a flow of an indiscernible energy, generated by the fusion of time of the organism and time of the machine, between time of the subject and time of the species. This unprecedented situation, at once anthropological and ontological, produces the mutual weakening of the terms, once distinct and separate: organism, machine, subject and hypersubject blend and are dissolved now, one into the other. In their place is the flow, in a continuous, universally spread present, of an indistinct uproar of energy, at one and the same time vital and machinic, subjective and collective. The basis, from which all this is generated and maintained, is the technological flow10.

This long quotation will help us to arrive at once at the heart of the technical problem: what aesthetics in the neo-technological, digital world? Costa’s analysis starts from and develops around this question, which

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develops in parallel and in connection with another question: what is the situation of art in the neo-technological world? The move from technics to technologies first, and to neo-technologies subsequently, has been an authentic change in the production of art: images, words, sounds–all that was the result of bodily and manual operations becomes the result of technological operations. This radical change refers to a process that began at the beginning of the 20th century and which is called “dis-humanisation of art”, which develops in at least three directions: a) dissipation of the ‘symbolic’; b) hyper-rationalisation; c) desubjectivisation and technologising. a) According to Mario Costa, every tragic view of life is generated and produced by the intense activity of the symbolic, i.e. of literature, religion or philosophy, and the idea of the tragic is simply what on each occasion is constructed and implemented by each of their particular forms and articulations11.

This means that life, though torn, traversed by suffering and injustice, devastated by grief and anguish, cannot yet be properly considered a tragic situation. First, it is a fact, after which it becomes ‘tragic’ when literature, religion or philosophy make it their own and re-develop it in symbolic forms. For Costa, the contemporary age consigns to us a situation that is difficult to challenge: the dispersion of the tragic consequent on the catastrophe of the symbolic. In the absence of the “intense activity of the symbolic”, the “tragic” fails. The neo-technological world no longer needs any symbolic development simply because it is reduced to a minimum, to the mere acknowledgment of the state of affairs, the desymbolisation of life, its de-metaphysicisation, the radical secularisation of meaning12.

What has happened is that the need to develop life and human beings symbolically has disappeared. This is followed by the reinforcement of a world in which the human being is no longer set in a cultural or symbolic dimension, but “in an external, material technological world”13. We are completely in the post-human age. b) Welcoming and accepting the idea of living in the post-human era means, however, that there was a preventive stage in which the human being was dismissed and subsequently dissolved. This process coincides with what has been variously defined as a process of rationalisation, mathematisation or scientificisation of the world. We are speaking of the process that, with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, we shall call

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Aufklärung or, with Kant, understand as the passage from childhood to a more advanced age. It is the path of enlightenment, of clarification. It is the path of calculating, scientific, enlightened, de-mystifying reason. It is the path of progress. Max Weber, as is well known, was one of the first to identify in western societies this specific “process of rationalisation” (Rationalisierung), which is accompanied by a general “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt). Modern societies tend to desacralise the mythic-symbolic-magical sphere, reducing reality to calculable, measurable, scientifically manageable entities. This is an “instrumental” rationality, directed towards the goal, and it penetrates all sectors of society, including that of the arts and, more specifically, of music. Weber, in the fundamental Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik14, identifies this musical declination of the process of rationalisation in the rise of the tonal system While limiting himself to the scope of western music15, in this essay, published posthumously in 1922, Weber maintains that, as happens in western society in general, the passage from primitive to modern music brought about the gradual elimination of the mystical, irrational, magical element, replaced by the rational. Weber’s approach is historical, and develops starting from the first primitive forms of music, going on to concentrate on the process of rationalisation of interspersed relations. The greatest result of this process is the formulation of the temperate system. Johann Sebastian Bach’s great experience is set precisely within this process of development and rationalisation of music, characterised by a progressive, radical thrust that seems to be moving along the line of continuity towards the serial and electroacoustic outcomes. It is not a case only of rationalisation of thought, but also of instruments and technologies16. Cologne electronics, like stochastic music or algorithmic compositions, these are only a few of the possible examples that can paradigmatically show the direction in which we are moving. It is increasingly the direction towards the hyper-rationalisation of compositional procedures, confirming in this Weber’s hypothesis of a gradual, inexorable process of withdrawal from any mystical, emotional, contemplative, spiritual residuum. c) Speaking of mathematisation, technologisation, computerisation of compositional procedures also means glimpsing a danger that was widely predicted from the earliest days of electroacoustic music: namely, the desubjectivisation of those procedures, which thus may end by surrendering to the ‘machine’, the object. From this point of view, as Costa writes, there is a strict correlation between de-humanisation of art, de-humanisation tout court and technologisation of the world. In his shrewd analysis, Costa

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connects to this subject what he calls generative art, in the sense of that art that “results from the activation of a technological device”, and that has particular features: 1) it replaces the old artistic procedures of the technical-manual type with mental procedures, with the transformation of emotional experiences into intellectual attitudes; 2) it decrees the superiority of mental work over the result of this work; 3) it weakens the concept of form, which loses any need to exist and becomes at best possibility of form; 4) it is based on self-efficiency of the devices put into use; 5) it is based on giving up control of the operations implemented and on acceptance of chance; 6) it clarifies the question of the completeness of the work, nullifying it, in the sense that a given result is one of many possible results17 (this is what Cage, for instance, considers to be characteristic of any experimentation: we never know what results it may lead to). Music is fully inserted in this plot, ending by being an epiphenomenon as compared with the general phenomenon of “de-humanisation”. The dialectic between subject and object, which in Hegel’s thinking has a positive result with the affirmation of the subject, is controversially overturned into its opposite, in the context of Adorno’s negative dialectics. If we wish to radicalise this perspective, the gradual strengthening of the role of technology, of the electronic instrument, of the almost autonomous object, as well as the case of randomness and indeterminacy taken on as a method, may be said to represent the affirmation of the primacy of the object over the subject, at this point dispossessed by and subordinated to a pervasive technics and incontestable logic. The subjectivity and individuality of the composer yields to the objectivity and rationality of the technological means. The advent of technologies may thus be said to have decreed the “defeat of the human”18. This is probably an unstoppable process because the new technics, as Jacques Ellul has written, is presented as unified, universal and independent19. Adorno was of the same opinion, writing that the compositional trends after WWII surrendered control of music by means of the ego and preferred to let it flow without intervening20. One of the most frequent criticisms of a composer like Cage is that he definitively renounced artistic intentionality and subjectivity. Is this a case of complete, definitive selfsacrifice, analogous to the way the subject, in late-capitalist society, gives up personal choice, yielding passively to the rock-like, unmodifiable logic of the system? Cage’s aim was to go beyond a communicative conception of music, rooted in the internal structure of the composition, in order to move towards what Daniel Charles has defined as “the poetics of evanescence”. This aim inevitably implies a gradual withdrawal of the ego

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(we may recall, in the case of Cage, that he was influenced by oriental philosophy) from the procedures of composition, by way of chance operations, which always, however, were initially directed by the composer. Hence the compositional rationale of the subject is partly safeguarded. The object has not yet definitively replaced the subject: they are not face to face without mediation, nor is the object (the machine) established as something extraneous to the subject. With the rise and development of technological music, both noise and sound appear as particular cases in the virtual universe of possible sonar worlds. We must undertake the exploration of this new world, dominate it, subject it to new rules, while always disconcerted by the opacity that the substance of these unprecedented sounds contrasts with the desire to know and dominate21. The tendency to total control of the parameters and processes of composition, though it has its beginning in the subject, finds its completion outside the subject. The triumph of technics, indeed of technology, seems to be a recurrent topic in many philosophical studies (as we have seen and will see) devoted to this subject. And this also happens in the context of studies closest to the musicological ambit. The composer Nicola Bernardini, who can certainly be numbered among those who habitually use electroacoustic instruments, at the end of the 1980s expressed a certain embarrassment in facing the subject of the relationship between aesthetics and technics. This composer–and it is important to stress that he is a composer–affirms that he has often found himself faced with the impossibility of “expressing an opinion, an appraisal or in any case the recognition of any link with the sound object” in whose presence he found himself in listening to or studying works of contemporary music22. One of the reasons for this difficulty is the sense of confusion of the elements that might be defined as ‘aesthetic’ with those that might be defined as ‘technical’. The strength, the power of Technics, for Bernardini, together with a substantial erosion and fragility of Aesthetics, has led to an almost inevitable result: “in the uncontrolled mélange Technics kills Aesthetics, crushing its movements until it makes it disappear”23. This voice from ‘within’ the world of composition is an authentic alarm bell that induces us to reflect on the imbalance that is always possible between the technical-technological and artistic-aesthetic elements. The consequences of this possible imbalance are not only within the composition or the work of art, but have repercussions at both

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theoretical and receptive level. Thus we come to the problem of the aesthetic experience.

4. Defining the Aesthetic Experience: Many Questions, Few Answers It is not simple to speak of experience. The Latin term experientia, for instance, has at least two meanings: experiment (attempt, test, danger) or experience (practice, appraisal)24. These meanings are not easily reconcilable: an action carried out with appraisal cannot be thought of as a test or attempt; nor can a choice that is the fruit of experience be presented as an experiment, since it is not a matter of a new situation. To simplify and direct our attention to this specific experience, namely the aesthetic experience, we may say that in the general sense experience is the outcome of the union of two moments: it as at one and the same time lived experience and ongoing experience, stratification of past experiences (which in aesthetic and hermeneutic praxis come together in the concept of ‘tradition’) and current ‘unfoldment’ of new horizons (which, in the case of aesthetic experience, correspond to the articulation of the horizon of expectation and its fulfilment/disappointment). This general connotation takes on decisive importance in the case of aesthetic experience, since it seems to be structured internally as free, dynamic play between past, present and future, or–as Gadamer would say–between temporal distance (Zeitenabstand), history of the effects (Wirkungsgeschichte), awareness of historical determination (Wirkungsgeschichte Bewußtsein) and blend of horizons (Horizontvermelschung). It is on the level of the constant overturning of opening and closing, light and shade, resignation and hope that the production and enjoyment of art offer their characteristic features and also explicate their aesthetic value. Nor is this all. Reflection on the nature and potential of the aesthetic experience, even where, as in the case of Hans R. Jauss, it blends with the literary hermeneutic or with other, more specific forms of research, drives us to reevaluate it with regard to the experience of existence. If, for example, we follow the reasoning of Odo Marquard25, it is possible in modern post-industrial society, to speak of the end of experience, of the hour of experience connected to a crisis of expectation: in this scenario aesthetic experience comes to occupy the space, the void, created following the frenetic succession in daily life of expectations that find no (re)solution in experience, thus continually increasing the distance

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between these two levels. Reality becomes increasingly unreal, so that, according to Marquard, art is transformed inversely into antifiction: aesthetics draws away from the principle of expectation, of utopia, of possible worlds, thus draws away from the principle of experience, of “knowing enjoyment”, of the aesthetic salvation of the real world and of interhuman communication (does not technological music perhaps answer precisely to these characteristics?). In reality, art and aesthetics never lose this (possibly negative/confrontational) link with the expectation nor with Utopia nor with the possible worlds; yet at the same time they approach the beginning of experience that is as singular as intersubjective, creating an ideal circle between experience of reality and experience of unreality, all in a communicative, relational context. It is increasingly complex today to conceive of experiences that, although they lack characteristics specifically connected to the world of art, are without some ‘aesthetic’ quality. On the other hand, the idea of ‘aesthetic experience’ has become increasingly suspect and uncertain, not so much because the old common feeling remains that the aesthetic experience is of the aesthetist, institutional, elitist kind, as because, sending us back as it does to processes of integration, harmony, equilibrium, it seems for that very reason to send us back to something far from the condition we have recognized as our own for about a hundred years26.

As many scholars have maintained, contemporary existence takes on aesthetic characteristics to the degree in which aesthetics is attributed, on the basis of its derivation, to the ambit range of feeling. This, however, is valid provided that we think of ‘feeling’ as a category that has within it a positive and a negative pole, and thus take into consideration experiences ascribable to the sphere not only of the pleasant, but also of the unpleasant, of more powerful sensations, “such as those provided by perversions and drug addictions”. Taking this as the standpoint from which to evaluate aesthetics today (and Perniola holds that this is the commonest standpoint), the tendency is to absorb practically everything: “If in the time of protest people said ‘Everything is politics’, now one might maintain that ‘Everything is aesthetics’”27. Side by side with this prodigious expansion of the horizon of the aesthetic experience, we are witnessing a corresponding increase in the skills implemented in the field of aesthetics. No longer a sector of knowledge, it has become a sort of ‘general theory of culture’, capable of speaking of contemporaneity starting from the various observers who have been activated in it–and it has also, of course, moved away from the traditional philosophical sector:

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historical, anthropological, sociological, psychological and mass-media. Although at the beginning aesthetics too was presented as a blend of various disciplines, it is certain that the diversified composition of aesthetics, in the contemporary context, is without precedent in its history. There is a further difference between what Perniola defines as the “potpourri of modernity” and that of contemporaneity. In the former it was a case of discussing while remaining well aware of the clear, well-defined contradistinctions (beautiful-ugly, art-not art, sensitive knowledgeconceptual knowledge); in the latter, everything becomes mutually confused, the rule of ambiguity and of the equivalence of non-comparable elements reigns supreme: everything has the same value. Yet the need to clarify the picture always emerges. In 2007, introducing the volume Dire l’esperienza estetica, Rita Messori wrote: For more than ten years, we have witnessed a genuine turnaround in the aesthetic ambit: the calling into question of the aesthetic-philosophical identification of art and the restatement of the aesthetic experience as the central question of the discipline. Research, both theoretical and historiographic, has therefore been concentrated more on the meaning and role that sensitivity and affectivity, in their various changing declensions, take on in a general view of research and formation of meaning28.

In fact, the passing of identification of aesthetics and philosophy of art, of the Hegelian stamp, has led to the broadening of the discipline to unexpected horizons. The inevitable starting points of this opening are, from an ‘insider’ perspective, the ability of aesthetics to withstand and read the transformations of contemporaneity, and, from an ‘outsider’ perspective, its ability to confirm how and in what ways we may today speak of aesthetic experience. Moreover, in the case of technological music, the problems multiply. If, as we shall see with reference to only some of the many theoretical models available, it is complex enough to speak of aesthetic experience ‘in general’, it seems still more complex to speak of aesthetic experience in relation to the enjoyment of technological music. But let us attempt to trace a path that permits us to answer the question: ‘Is the enjoyment of technological music a form of aesthetic experience?’. We must inevitably go back to John Dewey–who defines the aesthetic experience as a “quality” inherent in any experience realised–and specifically to the reading given to his Art as Experience. Bear in mind that aesthetic experience (which is inextricably related to ‘ordinary’ experience) cannot be interpreted only as the contemplation of works of art, which has a place in the broader universe of the possibilities

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offered by the aesthetic experience, activated every time there is a successful interaction between the human being and the environment: Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one’s own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events. … Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful perception which is esthetic experience29.

The aesthetic experience originated by art is for Dewey the moment of balance among the various spheres of human activity. But Dewey’s work raises many questions, starting with two of his most important bequests: a) having freed aesthetics from the narrow bonds linked to its definition as ‘philosophy of art’, which led to a broader definition of ‘philosophy of experience’; b) having relaunched “the old idea of art as techne. In foregrounding the relationship between ‘experience’ and ‘nature’, Dewey in fact rediscovers the Greek link between techne and physis”30. The aesthetic experience, as Dewey understands it, is something in which there is a perfect balance between acting and suffering, making/doing and receiving. The absence of this harmony, inscribed in a perfect, lasting relationship, implies a loss of contact with reality and hence a lack of the possibilities of experience31. This approach, however, risks excluding a notable quantity of experiences that we would clearly call aesthetic, starting from the experience of art, but to which might be added any relationship between us and what we consider to be aesthetic objects. Circumventing the imbalance, disorder and disharmony between acting and suffering, between making/doing and receiving, is perhaps a regulatory horizon, a utopian ideal, that often conflicts with ‘pathic’ conditions that are far from reassuring, both in the world of art (and music) and in the world outside of art. Stefano Velotti rightly stresses that, The depth and breadth of experience depend … on the level of maturity (and hence of experience) reached by the person who experiences. Experience is not exhaustible, it is not an object, and therefore cannot be wholly dominated and controlled: its “significant content” … depends rather on the ability of the subject who experiences to grasp, as far as possible, the relationships between action and passion that constitute it. Any interference in the perception of these relationships limits the experience to the point, as has been indicated, that the excess of just one of

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These specifications make it problematic to define the limits within which to speak of aesthetic experience, unless by imagining a sort of progression, of graduality, in qualitative terms, of every experience that we can initially consider to be aesthetic. If it is a complex matter to trace the limits of aesthetic experience, it is less complex to trace the conceptual clarity of his schema: it has a perceptive structure, a representational conceptualisation, an organic bodily mobility, that becomes expressivity and feeling when an aesthetic object dense in ‘depth’–what tradition calls a ‘work of art’– prompts a perception that is still ‘deeper’, a typology of experience that is anthropological, organic, perhaps even ontological, a perception that cannot remain closed in an ‘institutionalisation’ of the artistic …33.

Elio Franzini stresses that making a connection between the idea of experience and the interaction between organism and environment is useful to re-mark the social value of the aesthetic, but at the same time emphasises a view robbed of those “cognitive” connotations that are a cornerstone of phenomenological descriptivism, and that … see experience only as “operative mode”, fleeing from any “naturalisation” of it, which is only the equal and opposite aspect of an equally equivocal psychologisation of it34.

However, if we followed Franzini along his theoretical path, this would lead us to the heart of a web of theoretical questions that would be difficult to face here, since analysing the way aesthetic experience is thematised in the phenomenological ambit would mean going back to Edmund Husserl. Husserl moves the subject “on to the level of a transcendental experience, which is not seeking ways of constituting a possible experience, but rather the attempt to grasp its conditions of possibility”35. We shall therefore continue on the path we were tracing: when we speak of interaction between organism and environment, what is the ‘environment’ in question? It may be the natural, the urban or, in our own time, the virtual environment36. The truth is that the distinction among these three types of ‘environment’–to which many more could be added– does not influence the general, but rather the specific thesis. A further specification should be made, in order to confirm whether Dewey’s approach is fitting for contemporaneity and its novelties. One of these is linked to the role assigned to corporeity in the 20th century and at the

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present time, a corporeity understood as much in its being characteristic of the “sentient body”37 as in its relationship with the new technologies. Salvatore Tedesco offers an intersected analysis of John Dewey and Arnold Gehlen, placing the discussion on aesthetic experience at the crossroads between two directions: a) relationship between humans and technics; b) relationship between instincts and action. Aesthetic pleasure, obviously not separated from aesthetic experience, consists–in an aesthetic reading of Gehlen’s anthropology–in arriving at the freedom from action consequent on the suppression or reduction of the concatenation of triggering stimulus and instinctive motor response. In this sense, aesthetic experience is linked to the residuum without function of a developmentally primordial triggering effect that is now free from action and from any obligation. The emancipation of the instincts, for Gehlen, and the replacement of the organ with the inorganic tool and, still further on, the automatism of the machine are “the real destination of the exempting strategies and also of the process of self-learning directed by the circle of the action”, which Tedesco defines as “the general form of interaction between perception and movement in the human being” 38. In this rapid review of some theories of the aesthetic experience, it is useful also to refer to the so-called “aesthetics of reception”, which was developed in the ambit of the “Konstanzer Schule” (School of Constance), especially in the context of the reflection of Hans Robert Jauss. In the frame of the aesthetics of reception, aesthetic experience is articulated in three aspects: a productive (poiesis), a receptive (aisthesis) and a conclusive aspect which, though defined as katharsis, alludes not so much to ‘purification’ in the Aristotelian sense as to the possible identification of the reader with the work, by virtue of which there emerge the communicative, intersubjective, relational and social traits of the aesthetic experience. The starting point that sustains this theoretical option is not that of considering the work of art as a casket containing the immutable message at which the user must attempt to arrive, but rather the idea that the audience is the bearer of an active, productive motion, reclaiming its centrality for the development of the work. In the ambit of the aesthetic experience, Jauss tends to privilege precisely the communicative, intersubjective, relational moment. But there is another element that Jauss argues in open disagreement with Adorno: the concept of ‘aesthetic pleasure’, considered as the source of the normative power of the aesthetic experience. The whole structure of his Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung and of one of the chapters in Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik39 is the result of a

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critical dialogue with Adorno’s aesthetic theory, directed towards the definition of an aesthetic praxis in which the mechanism of the cultural industry causes the degeneration of any aesthetic experience. Regarding this picture, it is only the “monadic” artwork that can resist, thanks to its determined negation, and its observer who reflects in solitude and has given up any aesthetic pleasure. This passage presents in condensed version Jauss’s two main polemical targets: Adorno’s tendency to keep both art and aesthetic experience at a distance from any communication, and the refutation of aesthetic pleasure. For Jauss, negative aesthetics is guilty of diminishing the social function of aesthetic experience, because this experience is forced to remain within a categorial frame of affirmation and negation, neglecting to appraise the role and the value of the mechanisms of identification, analysed in receptive key, which are activated in aesthetic experience. In a word: the independence of art is reclaimed to the detriment of its communicative and normative function, because, in Adorno, this function is deferred and destined to a pacified humanity. Moreover, Adorno’s aesthetics denies the user any possible participation in constituting the meaning of the work. Jauss shows that reception, enjoyment, formation of taste, identification, catharsis and communication are always described in negative terms in Ästhetische Theorie40. In open, manifest polemic with this approach, Jauss proposes a model of aesthetic experience understood as liberation from and for something, a liberation that can be achieved on three different levels: consciousness as productivity that creates a world as its own work, consciousness as receptivity that makes it possible to perceive the world differently from the way it is presented, and finally, in an intersubjective perspective, harmony with a judgment required by the work or the identification with norms of action traced in it, and which must necessarily be established41. Within this approach, Jauss recovers the dimensions of poiesis, aisthesis and katharsis. As for the third dimension, Jauss raises the problem of the identification of the user-subject with what the work of art represents or is intended to represent, with the norm that it is intended to propose or criticise–an identification that is far from clear and unambiguous42, but which absolutely cannot be excluded. Art has a social function in relation to the normative dimension connected to it. This function is carried out in different ways, but always by means of mechanisms of identification: by rupture (negative characteristic), production of the norm (of its establishment or its assimilation) or consent (affirmative characteristic)43. To this is added the intersubjective, communicative characteristic of the aesthetic experience, in which is

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presupposed an ever-changing play of enjoyment of self in the enjoyment of the other, of the experience of self in the experience of the other44. If this, broadly speaking, is Jauss’s ‘continental’ point of view, most of the analytic philosophers who have dealt with the topic of aesthetic experience are aligned on a very different front. The analytic tradition, especially under the leadership of Arthur C. Danto and George Dickie, has substantially rejected aesthetic experience, turning its attention to a definition of art that can do without this notion. As Paolo D’Angelo points out, it is from these premises that the institutional and procedural theories of art arise, doing without the aesthetic qualities of the object and giving central place to the possibilities of identifying it as a work of art45. But not all analytic philosophers share this approach: examples include Richard Shusterman or Jerrold Levinson. The former, in his paper “The End of Aesthetic Experience”46, after analysing and dissociating himself from a multitude of Anglo-American theoreticians, launches into what D’Angelo has called a “passionate defence of the aesthetic experience”. This is not a banal theoretical fact, above all because in the case of Shusterman we witness an attempt to hold together the aesthetics of Dewey, the pragmatist tradition and analytic aesthetics. Bringing these guidelines together might lead to an interesting result, since it is a question of a “transformational” concept, very different from the merely demarcativedefinitory concept typical of analytic philosophy, and hence attentive to the phenomenological consideration of aesthetic experience and its relationship with experience in general47.

With Levinson–recently engaged in developing a non-minimalist conception of aesthetic experience–we conclude this rapid, concise overview. He begins by defining aesthetic experience “as the sort of perceptual-imaginative experience”48 that follows a mental state we might define as aesthetic attitude, characterised by openness, receptivity, positivity and good disposition. This is a sort of preliminary condition to which Levinson assigns an important role, since this attitude conditions the aesthetic experience which follows it. However, the articulation of his arguments is not based on this manner of characterising aesthetic experience, to which he prefers “a characterization of a more direct sort … minimalist conception of such experience”49. What Levinson means by minimalist aesthetic experience (of which Noël Carroll is famed for being one of the main supporters) is that type of experience in which there is a perception or cognition of aesthetic and/or formal properties of some object. A first comment made by Levinson on the minimalist aesthetic experience is that it is not necessarily gratifying or

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valuable, attributes that are contemplated in a non-minimalist aesthetic experience. The dimension of mediocrity is excluded in this latter case, whereas it is relevant in the former. Levinson attributes great importance to this specification: his model of aesthetic experience calls for its being not simply pleasant or entertaining, but “rewarding or valuable in some way”50. This characterisation accounts for one of the two elements that, for Levinson, define the aesthetic experience. The second is precisely the positive response or reaction of a hedonic, affective or evaluative nature, regarding a condition of aesthetic attention. Among examples of this type of reaction we may number enjoying or savoring such perceiving, being moved by what one is perceiving, registering an emotion in relation to what one is perceiving, valuing the perceptual activity one is engaged in, finding worthwhile the sustaining of that perceptual activity, admiring what is revealed in the perceptual experience being had, and so on51.

The first element rather regards the aesthetic attention or perception. By aesthetic attention we mean that type of attention that is concentrated on the perceptible character, forms and properties of an object, on whatever content may emerge from those forms and properties, and on the relationships among forms, properties and contents, while aesthetic perception is to be understood as the outcome of aesthetic attention, more precisely “a perceptual activity in which, however, both the imaginative capacity and the embodied corporeality of the perceiving subject should be understood to invariably play a role”52. In the light of these considerations, a non-minimalist conception of the aesthetic experience would lead to the following definition: Aesthetic experience is experience that has as its core aesthetic perception of some object, grounded in aesthetic attention to that object, and in which there is a positive hedonic, affective, or evaluative response to the perception itself or the content of that perception53.

Levinson himself remarks that a definition of this kind might include many typologies of experiences that go beyond those included in the aesthetic appreciation of art and nature. He makes specific reference to sexual, pharmacological and mystical experiences. These three types of experience, he explains, cannot be considered aesthetic because a) the sexual experience generally involves a different kind of attention from that defined earlier, which in this case is of a purely sensory, appetitive nature

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and which aims above all to ensure and maintain arousal; b) the pharmacological experience implies a relationship with the outside world that is generally presented as typically diminished and is felt to be an experience of reduced cognitive value and activity; c) in the mystical experience the distinction between subject and object is completely dissolved, “and with it any sense of an object’s properties as distinct from perception of them, and of the object as existing independently of the subject”54. In the concluding part of his work, Levinson once again stresses that the essential condition, if we are to talk of aesthetic experience, lies in the positive hedonic, affective or evaluative response. This clarification is important for what I shall say later.

5. Aesthetic Experience, Music and New Technologies The ‘mediatisation’ of reception has raised (and continues to raise) questions about the theories of the aesthetic experience, which is broad enough to include all those experiences that involve sensitivity–not only those related to the enjoyment of the beautiful. But we shall concentrate attention on the musical sphere. We must now return to the more specific question of the aesthetic experience that is triggered when music is enjoyed by means of the new technological means: here we recall the book, already mentioned, edited by Gianmario Borio who is also the author of an important essay published there, on the subject of “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology”. The theses that interest us here start from a basic question: can the concept of ‘inattentive reception’ be reconciled with the aesthetic experience? Technical reproducibility55 has not only profoundly influenced the ways of diffusion and listening to traditional or ‘classical’ music; it has created a specific kind of music: “on account of its mass diffusion, linked to the primary form of production on a disc”56. This is socalled ‘popular music’. The opening up of the musicological and philosophical world to this new ambit of music, Borio writes, has raised a series of questions: in how many and in what ways does ‘inattentive reception’ become evident? Does this behaviour inevitably exclude aesthetic experience? What relationship is created with traditional music and how is listening to traditional music influenced by listening to popular music? Is there a specific reception of popular music that reveals a

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dimension of listening for classical music to be added to the earlier modalities? After referring to Adorno, Salzer, Schaeffer and Boulez, Borio takes stock of the situation, distinguishing between listening as exercising one’s sense of hearing, which we all do every day, and listening to music as an action in the context of aesthetic experience. Naming Erika FischerLichte57, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht58 and Martin Seel59 as authors who in some sense give the idea of the direction in which the theories of aesthetic experience are developing today, Borio points out that their theories “consider performance its prime reference; for each of them the nature of the artistic representation changes and becomes an event with the features of a collective ritual”60. Stressing the performative aspect, the event (Erlebnis) rather than the process (Erfharung) marks a possible change of route in the sphere of the discourse on music: the key moment in the communication process now seems to be the performative act with its social conventions and emotional implications, while the text is relegated to a document of cultural history which has little to do with the genuine aesthetic experience61.

The distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, generally considered in the perspective of an oppositive relationship, prompts Borio to make an interesting hypothesis: why not reject the primacy of one of the two concepts and suppose that reproductive technologies are capable of establishing a new connection between the two? In support of this thesis, Borio goes back to Benjamin’s concept of “aura”. The reception of classical music is not characterised by a direct relationship with the object, which is the case with the visual arts. Music has two forms of existence, as text, or as performance: “Here the aura is manifested in the interplay between the normative reference–the text without which there can be no performance–and the emotions aroused by an impeccable, enthralling performance”62. In popular music, Borio goes on, the tensions are radicalised in the relationship between the electronic means (cold) and the atmosphere of the concert (warm), while neither of the two poles overrides the other. In this case, however, there is a prevalence of the Erleibnis component which is mixed with the ‘aura’ component. But in the case of the recording, in which the work is presented after being technologically perfected and aesthetically finished, there is an ‘aura’ dimension too, though in a different manner: “its sonic information gives tangible form to a nexus of meanings emanating from a specific place and time, and irradiating in any number of different places and times”63. And it is the CD that fills the gap

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that kept Erlebnis and Erfharung separate, by virtue of the function of “mediation” between “event” and “process” that can complete this specific “medium”. There is a further element that is added to the aesthetic experience achieved by the mediation of the CD, regarding the possibility it offers of ‘structural listening’. The CD (or any digital recording) is generally listened to in a state of focus and isolation, and thus in a situation of concentration that promotes a notable increase of attention on the details, and not only on the work as a whole. From this point of view, Borio adds, the fastidious care with which Glenn Gould, Herbert von Karajan or Sergiu Celibidache made their recordings is an important indication of how the care taken with work done in the recording studio can produce results that are exceptional in terms of clarity in the structure and articulation of the sound. This means that “the means of reproduction free the performer from the acoustic limits imposed by the concert hall and the contingencies of public performance; in fact, they benefit, rather than hamper, the transmission of musical sense”64. The availability of technical and digital reproductions is also a very useful cognitive and formative instrument for those who study music (instrumentalists, composers, critics, etc.). They have at their disposal a vast repertoire and an almost infinite archive of performances and interpretative models. Furthermore, Borio concludes, the diffusion and ready accessibility of recordings has opened the way to new models of teaching, which make it possible to go more deeply into aesthetic and interpretative questions than ever before. Regarding technological developments, Borio’s analysis, which takes up some of Benjamin’s theses, moves attention from the phenomenon of reception to that of production: “the multiple mediations introduced by electronic devices call our attention to their role in production”65. This aspect shows how the aesthetic experience cannot be discussed solely in relation to performance and reception, but also takes in the creative process. The new technologies, Borio says in conclusion, are giving new stimulus and new nourishment to the aesthetic experience, and are also raising “the question of new modes of listening transversally within all the musical genres”66.

6. (Almost) Concluding Considerations Is it possible to keep together the various indications contained in the argumentations proposed by the authors mentioned thus far? To clarify,

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we shall attempt to answer two questions: a) is an aesthetic experience activated by technological music a real possibility? b) if so, what characteristics may it have, not least in the light of what has been said so far? a) Tedesco developed a comparison of Dewey and Gehlen, from which emerges, in Gehlen’s anthropology, the relationship between technical development and liberation of the instincts. Gehlen attributes aesthetic pleasure “to exemption, that is to say what is linked to those forms that make us perceive our experience as ‘free of obligations’ and thus liberating”67. To this is added the tendency that emerges in Dewey to consider disorder, disharmony and chaos as components that make cognition and judgment–and hence aesthetic experience–impossible. Cognition and judgment seem to be the preliminary conditions of aesthetic experience, to which, in the case of Levinson, is added a positive type of aesthetic attention, be it hedonic, affective or, indeed, evaluative. Jauss’s point of view reappraises the positive element of aesthetic experience, from the angle of vision of a reappraisal of aesthetic pleasure, against the ‘negativity’ of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. There is, moreover, the displacement of theoretical attention from the author to the user, considered as active and productive subject not only in the aesthetic experience (which however remains individual, even when opened to intersubjectivity) but also in the process of making the work. In the threefold division into poiesis, aisthesis and katharsis lies the nature of aesthetic experience, whose course ends in the dimension of the intersubjective communication. There is, however, another aspect which it is important to bring out, one we neglected earlier but which we must now recall: the work is placed along the receptive line that Jauss, drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutics, defines as Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation)68. With regard to this horizon in which the user is placed and the expectations it creates, the work is presented as worthwhile, as aesthetically valid if it establishes a Horizontswandel (change of horizon), thus displacing the horizon of expectation. This is a key element in the case of contemporary music, more precisely in those cases where, as we said in Chapter Six, a work does not correspond to the listener’s expectations. b) In the light of what has been said thus far, it might be said that the only condition that seems necessary for the activation of an aesthetic experience–in the sense garnered from what the authors cited have said–in the relationship with technological music is the displacement of the horizon of expectation. All the other possible conditions seem not necessary, but possible. The relationship with a work of technological

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music may activate an aesthetic attention of the positive kind (affective, hedonic or evaluative), but also a negative attention; it may or may not be related to the cognitive dimension; it may or may not have as its object a work traceable to the concept of order. The aesthetic experience activated by technological music risks creating problems for all the models cited hitherto, raising several difficulties. This type of experience does not generally seem to conform to any of these models: something is always missing. There are two alternatives: either we decide not to consider this type of experience an aesthetic experience, or we must modulate the analyses already recalled. I would personally tend to review the theses of the authors mentioned, none of which recognises the possibility that an aesthetic experience may be given even in the absence of pleasure, order and cognition. It remains true that there may be works of technological music that respond to all three criteria. Thus, generally speaking, the elements that serve for an optimal characterisation of the aesthetic experience activated by technological music may be: a) aesthetic attention and aesthetic perception as defined by Levinson; b) suitable (not necessarily, but preferably, optimal) perceptive capabilities; c) horizon of expectation; d) response or reaction, not necessarily positive, but actually demanding the displacement of the expectation; e) possible, but not necessary, involvement of cognition, in the sense not of instrumental ability to understand what is listened to, but actual possibility to understand the work–in this case, too, this possibility should preferably be guaranteed. This last aspect takes us back to a characteristic typical of some technological music, namely its tending towards the stimulation of the senses, of sensoriality and corporeity, rather than a more or less profound intellectual experience. This may usefully be integrated by the suggestion of Mario Costa, who with regard to the fruitive attitude of technological music, invites us to pay proper attention to the profound transformation of the attitude of the awareness at the moment of reception, bearing in mind that a) the sound signifiers, however aesthetised and given form, no longer penetrate the subject but remain outside it; b) any Hegelian connection between “time of sounds” and “time of subject” is interrupted: here the sounds, rather than existing in a linear “inner time”, exist in an inner space, i.e. in a “space of awareness” created virtually by the sounds and itself fulfilling the function of a discontinuous, multidimensional “spatialised time”; c) here, to sum up, enjoyment must be made objective listening and emotional “feeling” must be replaced by “hearing and the cold pleasure of the intellect”69.

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What is not convincing in all Costa’s outline is this last passage, where he refers to the lack of emotional “feeling” in favour of “hearing” linked to a cold pleasure of the intellect. An intellectualist tendency in much contemporary music cannot be denied, but it regards the composer above all, and to a lesser degree the listener, who is more often drawn into a sensorial, rather than an intellectual, experience. In any case, what seems clear is that the specific experience of technological (or electroacoustic) contemporary music developed in the dimension of listening makes it difficult to speak beyond doubt of aesthetic experience in the ‘strong’ sense, as happens, for example, with the contemplative-cognitive experience that may be generated by the relationship with a traditional cultural object. This is not because the artistic or aesthetic results are of lesser value, but because the conditions of existence of the artistic objects, like the conditions of existence of the user, are inscribed within a horizon that is substantially opaque, reticular, complex and schizophrenic70, precluding that profundity that was traditionally considered a characteristic typical of aesthetic experience (in relation to the arts), and which was probably lined to a clarity of the aesthetic discourse that seems to have been blurred in the works of the 20th century. Aesthetic experience becomes less clear, cloudier, more uncertain and disorienting. Just as we have spoken of the end of the great stories, perhaps now, in relation to many contemporary works of art and musical compositions, is the time of the end of the great aesthetic experiences. But this is not necessarily a bad sign.

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Notes 1

Giovanni Piana, Filosofia della musica (Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1991), 55. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios,” in Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1963) (Gesammelte Schriften 15: Komposition für den Film - Der getreue Korrepetitor [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003], 369-401). 3 See Luciano Berio, Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga (New York-London: Boyars, 1985), 147 and 149; orig. ed. Intervista sulla musica, edited by Rossana Dalmonte (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 20113 [1981]). 4 Pierre Boulez, “Technology and the Composer,” in Simon Emmerson, ed., The Language of Electroacoustic Music (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), 5. 5 Pierre Boulez, “Technology and the Composer,” 8. 6 Pierre Boulez, “Technology and the Composer,” 10. 7 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 6. 8 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture, 94. 9 Pierre Boulez, “Technology and the Composer,” 12. 10 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica. Il destino dell’arte nell’epoca delle nuove tecnologie (Milano: Costa & Nolan, 2007), 5. 11 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, 23. 12 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, 31. 13 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, 31. 14 Max Weber, The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music, trans. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel and Gertrude Neuwirth (London: Feffer & Simons, 1958); orig. ed. Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik (München: Drei Masken, 1921 [1912]). 15 As Antonio Serravezza rightly avers, Weber, by means of the choice of “point of view adopted”, identifies one model as pre-emiment and makes the others commensurate to it, directly or indirectly (see Antonio Serravezza, “Max Weber: la storia della musica come processo di razionalizzazione,” Musica e storia I [1993], 173-209). 16 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 226. 17 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, 108-9. 18 Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, 35. 19 See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson, introduction by Robert K. Merton (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); orig. ed. La technique, ou l’enjeu du siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1954). 20 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una fantasia. Essay on Modern Music (London-New York: Verso, 1992), 269-322. We may answer Adorno in the words of Cage: “Most people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I use chance as a discipline. They think I use it–I don’t know–as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask” (Richard Kostelantez, ed., Conversing with Cage [LondonNew York: Routledge, 20052], 17. 2

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Jean Molino, “Il puro e l’impuro,” in Enciclopedia della musica, vol. IV “Piaceri e seduzioni nella musica del XX secolo” (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), 1057-8. 22 Nicola Bernardini, “Estetica e tecnica: appunti imbarazzanti,” in Serena Tamburini and Mauro Bagella, eds., I profili del suono. Scritti sulla musica elettroacustica e la computer music (Casalvelino Scalo: Musica VerticaleGalzerano, 1987), 109. For an interesting analysis of the relationship between composer and technology and its aesthetic implications, see Laura Zattra, Studiare la computer music. Definizioni, analisi, fonti (Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it Edizioni, 2011), especially Ch. 12. 23 Nicola Bernardini, “Estetica e tecnica,” 110. 24 The terms esperienza, experience and expérience derive, in fact, from the Latin experientia, a word which shares its semantic-conceptual field with the terms periculum and peritus, which “refers […] both to the idea uncertainty and risk and to that of competence and mastery” (Mario Perniola, “Come leggere Art as experience nel quadro dell’orizzonte estetico attuale?,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica. A partire da John Dewey [Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint. Supplementa, 2007], 131). Perniola, however, calls attention to the great difference between this semantic field and the semantic field to which we must refer in considering the German Erfahrung. In this second case, experience is presented as “the path by way of which the spirit is completely installed in the whole kingdom of its truth” (132). 25 See Odo Marquard, Krise der Erwartung-Stunde der Erfahrung: Zur ästhetischen Kompensation des modernen Erfahrungsverlustes, Skepsis und Zustimmung. Philosophische Studien (Stuttgart: Meiner, 1994). 26 Stefano Velotti, “È ancora possibile un’esperienza estetica?,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 62. 27 Mario Perniola, “Che fina ha fatto la bellezza,” La Repubblica (12 June 2007). 28 Rita Messori, ed., Dire l’esperienza estetica (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2007), 7. 29 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005 [1934]), 18-9. 30 Leonardo Amoroso, “L’estetica come filosofia dell’esperienza. Rileggendo Dewey con Garroni,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 107. 31 Stefano Velotti, “È ancora possibile un’esperienza estetica?,” 65. 32 Stefano Velotti, “È ancora possibile un’esperienza estetica?,” 63. 33 Elio Franzini, “Fenomenologia ed esperienza estetica,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 90-1. 34 Elio Franzini, “Fenomenologia ed esperienza estetica,” 87. 35 Elio Franzini, “Fenomenologia ed esperienza estetica,” 85. 36 See Roberto Diodato, “Esperienza estetica e interattività,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 137-49. 37 For an aesthetics centred on this topic, the main reference is still Richard Shusterman and his “somaesthetics”. 38 Salvatore Tedesco, “Il modello antropologico dell’esperienza estetica fra Dewey, Gehlen, Plessner,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 74.

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39 See Hans Robert Jauss, Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1972) and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982); orig. ed. Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Munich: Fink, 1977). 40 About these questions, see Hans Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. 41 Hans Robert Jauss, Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung, 13. 42 On this, Jauss attempts to schematise the model of aesthetic identification starting from five different modalities of identification: associative, admiring, cathartic, sympathetic and ironic. 43 See Hans Robert Jauss, Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung. 44 See Hans Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. 45 See Paolo D’Angelo, “La critica dell’esperienza estetica nella filosofia analitica angloamericana,” in Luigi Russo, ed., Esperienza estetica, 111-122. 46 See Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, 1 (1997), 29-41. 47 Paolo D’Angelo, “La critica dell’esperienza estetica nella filosofia analitica angloamericana,” 121. In addition, by the same author, see at least Introduzione all’estetica analitica (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2008). 48 See Jerrold Levinson, “Verso una concezione non minimalista dell’esperienza estetica,” CoSMo 6 (2015), 83-99; orig. ed. “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” in Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The passages quoted here are taken from an online version of Levinson’s essay, which can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja& uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjTmufdxtXOAhXBFiwKHQJ1AXsQFgghMAA&url=http %3A%2F%2Fibrarian.net%2Fnavon%2Fpaper%2FToward_a_Non_Minimalist_C onception_of_Aesthetic_E.pdf%3Fpaperid%3D16769430&usg=AFQjCNEYucFy LwjOawssNuCKvhCh5n4Atg. This quotation is on page 4 of the online text, to which I refer henceforth. 49 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 4. 50 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 5. 51 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 156. 52 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 15. 53 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 16 (italics in the original). 54 Jerrold Levinson, “Toward a Non-Minimalist Conception of Aesthetic Experience,” 18. 55 With reference to electronic devices, we should speak, not of “technical reproducibility”, but of “electronic producibility” and “transmedial technological event”. It is a matter of a technical, aesthetic, social and anthropological metamorphosis of the greatest importance: “In this eclipse of the reproductive technological memory and in this disturbing coming to pass of a living electronic reality that does not reproduce but produces placeless trans-medial events, perhaps

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it would be best to redefine the sense not only of aesthetics but of contemporary ontology” (Mario Costa, L’estetica dei media. Avanguardie e tecnologia [Roma: Castelvecchi, 1999], 48). 56 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” in Gianmario Borio, ed., Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, 8. 57 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London-New York: Routledge, 2008). 58 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 59 See Martin Seel, “On the Scope of Aesthetic Experience,” in Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin, Aesthetic Experience (London-New York: Routledge, 2008), 98-105. 60 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 16. 61 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 16. 62 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 17. 63 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 17. 64 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 19. 65 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 19. 66 Gianmario Borio, “Aesthetic Experience under the Aegis of Technology,” 20. 67 Salvatore Tedesco, “Il modello antropologico dell’esperienza estetica fra Dewey, Gehlen, Plessner,” 78. 68 See, especially, Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provocation der Literaturwissenschaft (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1967). For a partial translation of this book, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bathi, introduction by Paul de Man (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982). 69 Mario Costa, L’estetica dei media, 79. 70 I agree with Nicola Bernardini, who writes that: “the tonal and rhythmic development of music in the western world has created webs of increasingly intricate significant relations, clearly reflecting from the first the global process (i.e. at the social level) of the passing from the stratified differentiation of mediaeval society to the functional differentiation (notably more complex) of bourgeois society” (Nicola Bernardini, “Estetica e tecnica,” 113).

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INDEX

Adorno, Gretel, 32n, 65n Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, xii, 1, 2, 5, 8n, 15-8, 29, 31n, 32n, 34n, 57, 63, 65n, 68n, 69n, 76, 77, 85n, 92, 94, 102n, 107, 1096, 119, 122n, 123n, 124n, 12636, 143n, 144n, 153, 192, 196, 198, 205, 206, 210, 212, 215n Alperson, Philip, 68n Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), 50, 51 Amoroso, Leonardo, 216n Anders, Günther, 125, 143n André, Mark, 20 Arbo, Alessandro, 4, 8n, 39, 40, 45, 65n, 66n, 67n, 126, 139-42, 144n, 145n Armstrong, Louis, 152-4 Arndt, Jürgen, 159, 164n Arnheim, Rudolf, 170, 177-9, 188n, 189n Attali, Jacques, 59, 60, 65n, 69n, 126 Autopoieses, 51 Ayler, Albert, 157 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 14, 31n, 120, 130, 197 Back, Les, 145n Bagella, Mauro, 216n Baroni, Mario, 33n, 66n Barrett, Richard, 20 Barrière, Françoise, 48 Bartók, Belà, 18 Basie, Count, 154 Bauckholt, Carola, 28 Baudelaire, Charles, 38 Baumgarten, Alexander G., 36, 65n Bayle, François, 48 Bechet, Sidney, 153

Bedrossian, Franck, 28 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 17, 18, 31n, 56, 106-8, 120, 122n Beiderbecker, Bix, 152 Bélanger, J.L. Roland, 189n Bender, John W., 31n Bender, Olaf, 51 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 55, 107, 123n, 124n, 127, 138, 144n, 210, 211 Bent, Margaret, 33n, 66n Berg, Alban, 14, 45 Berger, Peter L., 102n Berghahn, Klaus L., 68n Bergson, Henri, 3 Berio, Luciano, 24, 33n, 193, 215n Berlioz, Hector, 107 Berlowitz, Béatrice, 34n Berman, Marshall, 126 Bernardini, Nicola, 199, 216n, 218n Bernstein, Leonard, 22 Besseler, Heinrich, 126 Bianchi, Stefano, 66n Bijsterveld, Karin, 58, 59, 69n, 145n Billone, Pierluigi, 20 Blocker, Gene, 31n Blumenberg, Hans, 95, 102n Bodei, Remo, 37, 65n Boivin, Jean, 66n Boltzmann, Ludwig, 182 Borio, Gianmario, 126, 144n, 145n, 191, 209-11, 218n Born, Georgina, 67n, 194, 215n Boulez, Pierre, 18, 27, 33n, 67n, 108, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124n, 172, 181, 193-5, 210, 215n Bretschneider, Frank, 51 Brewster, Bill, 163n Britten, Benjamin, 8n, 108

240 Broughton, Frank, 163n Brown Jr., Oscar, 154 Brown, Frank London, 158 Brown, Norman, 79 Brubeck, Dave, 156 Buch, Esteban, 145n Bull, Michael, 145n Busoni, Ferruccio, 43 Cage, John, xiii, 8n, 21, 26-8, 33n, 46, 50, 67, 72, 78-83, 86n, 87n, 108, 185, 188n, 189n, 198, 199, 215n Calvino, Esther, 8n Calvino, Italo, 7, 8n, 9n Cappelletti, Arrigo, 159, 163n, 164n Carboni, Massimo, 95 Carr, David, 102n Carroll, Noël, 207 Cascone, Kim, 49, 50, 67n Castanet, Pierre-Albert, 45, 126 Castelli, Enrico, 69n Celibidache, Sergiu, 211 Cendo, Raphaël, 28 Cervantes, Miguel de, 63, 64 Char, René, 27 Charles, Daniel, 86n, 198 Chartier, Richard, 51 Cherry, Don, 157 Chion, Michel, 33n Chopin, Fryderyk, 31n Clair, Jean, 65n Claren, Sebastian, 20 Clifton, Thomas, 72-4, 85n Clozier, Christian, 48 Cocteau, Jean, 45 Coleman, Ornette, 157 Coltrane, John, 157, 158 Contini, Gianfranco, 180 Cooper, Lindsay, 33n Copland, Aaron, 22 Corra, Bruno, 42 Cortez, Jayne, 158 Corti, Maria, 180, 189n

Index Costa, Mario, 91, 92, 99, 102n, 103n, 195-7, 213, 214, 215n, 218n Cox, Christoph, 186, 187, 189n, 190n Cox, Frank, 20 Crawford, Richard, 163n Cresto-Dina, Piero, 136, 144n Croce, Benedetto, 122n Cross, Lowell, 47, 67n Cunningham, Merce, 79, 80 Czernowin, Chaya, 20 D’Angelo, Paolo, 207, 217n D’Aversa, Anna Sara, 58, 69n Dalmonte, Rossana, 33n, 66n, 215n Danto, Arthur C., 207 Daugherty, Michael, 22 Davis, Miles, 156 de Man, Paul, 218 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 179 Debussy, Claude, 106 Delalande, François, 192 Deleuze, Gilles, 170, 184, 186, 187, 189n, 190n Demers, Joanna, 65n, 68n DeNora, Tia, 145n Desideri, Fabrizio, 126, 144n, 145n Deupree, Taylor, 51 Dewey, John, 202-7, 212, 216n, 218n Dickie, George, 207 Diodato, Roberto, 216n Dixon, Bill, 157 Dolphy, Eric, 157 Donà, Massimo, 41, 66n Dorfles, Gillo, 23, 33n, 66n Doubrovsky, Serge, 122n Douglas, Susan J., 145n Duchamp, Marcel, 50, 66n, 85n Eco, Umberto, 85n, 170, 172, 17981, 188n, 189n Ellington, Duke, 152, 154, 156 Ellul, Jacques, 198, 215n Emmerson, Simon, 215n

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music Endoh, Tetsuya (Gero 30), 62 Eye, Yamatsuka, 62 Fadini, Ubaldo, 97, 103n Fahle, Oliver, 32n Fedele, Ivan, 26, 33n Feinstein, Sascha, 160, 161, 164n, 165n Feldman, Morton, 185 Ferneyhough, Brian, 19 Ferrari, Luc, 48 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 210, 218n Fischinger, Oskar, 50 Flying Saucer Attack, 185 Foucault, Michel, 117-21, 124n Fourier, Jean B.J., 27 Francastel, Pierre, 95, 102n Frangne, Pierre-Henry, 145n Franzini, Elio, 204, 216n Franzoso, Giacomo, 159, 163n, 164n Frith, Fred, 33n Fronzi, Giacomo, xi, xii, 32n, 33n, 86n, 144n, 145n Fubini, Enrico, 44, 45, 64n, 65n, 66n, 67n, 68n, 122n, 126, 144n, 189n Fukuyama, Francis, 102n Galante, Francesco, 33n Gann, Kyle, 81, 86n Garroni, Emilio, 216n Gebur, Thomas, 122n Gehlen, Arnold, 93, 102n, 205, 212, 216n, 218n Gero 30 (Tetsuya Endoh), 62 Gillespie, Dizzy, 154, 155 Giotto, 14 Giovannucci, Alessandro, 143n Girloy, Paul, 163n Givan, Benjamin, 161, 164n Glenn, John, 50 Godani, Paolo, 52, 68n Goebbels, Heiner, 33n Goehr, Linda, 55, 56, 68n Goethe, Johann W., 111

241

Goldmark, Josephine, 59 Gomarasca, Alessandro, 61, 69n Gould, Glenn, 211 Grasso, Francis, 150 Greene, Larry A., 159, 164n Grimaldi, G., 69n Grisey, Gérard, 19 Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, 67 Guattari, Félix, 170, 183, 184, 186, 189n Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 66n Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 210, 218n Gusdorf, Georges, 85n Hanslick, Eduard, 126 Hanson, Howard, 22 Harrison, Thomas J., 85n Hasegawa, Hiroshi, 62 Hawkins, Coleman, 155 Haydn, Joseph, 8n, 56, 106 Heemskirk, Joan, 68n Hegarty, Paul, 65n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 37, 38, 198 Heidegger, Martin, 29, 72, 93, 94, 96, 98, 102n Helmholtz, Hermann L.F., 27 Henry, Pierre, 46, 172 Henze, Hans W., 108 Hines, Earl, 152 Hjelmslev, Louis Trolle, 170, 188n Hogarth, William, 178 Horkheimer, Max, 92, 94, 102n, 122n, 196 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 32n, 65n Huovinen, Erkki, 144n Husserl, Edmund, 94, 98, 102n, 204 Ikeda, Ryoji, 50, 51 Imberty, Michel, 126 Isacoff, Stuart, 163n Ives, Charles, 18 Jameson, Fredric, 31n Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 29, 30, 34n

242 Jauss, Hans R., 29, 134, 200, 205-7, 212, 217n, 218n Joans, Ted, 158 Johnson, James P., 155 Jones, Andrew, 33 Jones, LeRoi, 158 Joplin, Scott, 152 Joseph, Branden W., 33, 79, 83, 86n, 87n Kafka, Franz, 57 Kagel, Mauricio, 19 Kahn, Douglas, 43, 65n, 66n Kandinskij, Wassily, 75, 76, 85n, 123n Kant, Immanuel, 37, 53, 54, 80, 197 Kart, Larry, 153, 163n Kelley, Robin D.G., 155-9, 163n, 164n Kennedy, J.M., 103n Kernis, Aaron Jay, 22 Klee, Paul, 123 Klotz, Heinrich, 32n Kobler, John, 83 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 164n, 165n Kosakai, Fumio, 62 Kosmicki, Guillame, 48, 66n, 67n Kostelanetz, Richard, 33n, 79, 86n, 87n Kraftwerk, 185 Kurtág, György, 19 Kuspit, Donald, 14, 31n La Cecla, Franco, 123n LaBelle, Brandon, 65n Lacan, Jacques, 180 Lachenmann, Helmut, 19 Lacombe, Hervé, 145n Lamb, Joseph, 152 Lanza, Andrea, 32n Lapassade, Georges, 103n Lehmann, Harry, 17, 32n Leppert, Richard, 31n, 122n, 143n, 144n Leucci, Fiorenza, 67n

Index Levinson, Jerrold, 207-9, 212, 213, 217n Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 73, 85n, 180, 181, 189n Ligeti György, 19 Lim, Liza, 20 Lima, Dimitre, 68n Lincoln, Abbey, 154 Lincoln, Abraham, 152 Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica, 85n Liszt, Franz, 107 Livraghi, Enrico, 97 Luhmann, Niklas, 18 Lukàcs, György, 52 Lussier, René, 33n Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 31n Mâche, François-Bernard, 48 Maffesoli, Michel, 103n Mahler, Gustav, 3 Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen, 17-25, 32n Main, 185 Malec, Ivo, 48 Malevich, Kasimir, 178 Manzoni, Piero, 31n, 79 Marc, Franz, 123n Marclay, Christian, 50 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 41-3, 66n, Marquard, Odo, 200, 201, 216n Masami, Akita (Merzbow), 62 Masonna (Yamazaki ‘Maso’ Takushi), 62 Massumi, Brian, 31n, 189n Matassi, Elio, 8n Mayuko, Hino, 62 McClary, Susan, 144n Melo Pimenta, Emanuel D. de, 86n Menotti, Gian Carlo, 8n Mercer, Chris, 20 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 4, 8n Merton, Robert K., 215n Merzbow (Akita Masami), 62 Messinis, Mario, 68n, 122n Messori, Rita, 202, 216n

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music Metzer, David, 85n Metzger, Frank, 50 Meyer, Leonard B., 135, 144n, 1747, 188n Michaud, Yves, 123n Mikawa, Toshiji, 62 Milhaud, Darius, 108 Mingus, Charles, 154, 157 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 50 Molino, Jean, 45, 67n, 216n Monk, Barbara, 155 Monk, Nellie, 156, 163n, 164n Monk, Thelonious Sr., 155 Montani, Pietro, 95, 102n Moradi, Iman, 68n Morgenstern, Dan, 159, 164n Morin, Edgar, 183, 186, 189n Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll”, 153 Mowitt, John, 144n Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 56, 106 Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 122n Napier, Mark, 68n Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 33n, 41, 66n, 106, 108, 109, 122n, 126 Negroponte, Nicholas, 49, 67n Neina, 51 Nicolai, Carsten (Alva Noto), 51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102n, 103n Nyffeler, Max, 86n Olivier, Dominique, 33n Oschatz, Sebastian, 50 Oval, 50 Paci Dalò, Roberto, 189n Paddison, Max, 109, 122n, 131, 132, 136, 144n, 215n, Paesmans, Dirk, 68n Paik, Nam June, 83, 84 Pallardy-Roger, Danielle, 33n Pannonica de Koenigswarter, Kathleen Annie, 156 Parente, Alfredo, 5, 6, 8n

243

Parker, Charlie, 155 Parmegiani, Bernard, 48 Pastore, Luigi, 122n Pauset, Brice, 20 Pellegrino, Paolo, 32n, 143n, 144n Perniola, Mario, 65n, 201, 202, 216n Piana, Giovanni, 215n Pimmon, 51 Pinch, Trevor, 145n Plato, 40 Plessner, Helmuth, 216n, 218n Plotinus, 37 Polillo, Arrigo, 163n Popp, Markus, 20 Poppe, Enno, 50 Porché, Wladimir, 47 Porzio, Michele, 86n Pouivet, Roger, 145n Poulenc, Francis, 108 Poullin, Jacques, 172 Pousseur, Henri, 33n, 67n, 182 Powell, Bud, 155 Pratella, Francesco Balilla, 42, 43 Prevignano, Andrea, 65n Prieberg, Fred, 44, 46, 67n Pritchett, James, 26, 86n Quinz, Emanuele, 186, 189n Rahn, John, 124n Raponi, Martina, 62, 65n, 69n Rauschenberg, Robert, 79, 81, 83, 84 Rea, John, 21, 22, 33n Reger, Max, 108 Reibel, Guy, 48 Rihm, Wolfgang, 19 Riley, Terry, 108 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 75 Rimbaud, Arthur, 85n Roach, Max, 154 Roads, Curtis, 28 Robey, David, 188n Rognoni, Luigi, 30, 31n, 34n, 86n, 92, 98, 99, 102n, 103n, 123

244 Roncaglia, Gian Carlo, 163n Rosen, Charles, 8n Rosenkranz, Karl, 37-9, 65n Rosner, Alex, 150 Rossi, Paolo, 22, 33n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 40 Russo, Luigi, 216n, 217n Russolo, Luigi, 42-5, 67n Ruzicka, Peter, 32n Sadler, M.T.H., 85n Sakamoto, Ryuichi, 51 Salvatore, Gianfranco, 103n Salzer, Felix, 126, 210 Sani, Nicola, 33 Satie, Erik, 45, 46, 67n Scarnecchia, Paolo, 68n, 122n Schafer, Raymond M., 41, 66n Schelling, Friedrich, 37 Schenker, Heinrich, 126 Schiller, Friedrich, 37, 52-4 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1, 37, 38 Schneider, Marius, 101, 103n Schnittke, Alfred, 19 Schönberg, Arnold, xii, 14, 16, 17, 18, 75, 77, 80, 106, 114, 115, 123n, 185 Schubert, Franz, 107, 133 Schumann, Robert, 107 Schurig, Wolfram, 20 Sciarrino, Salvatore, 28 Scott, James, 152 Scott, Tony, 68n Sedlmayr, Hans, 96, 102n Seel, Martin, 210, 218n Segre, Cesare, 189n Serra, Carlo, 33n, 86n Serravezza, Antonio, 2, 8n, 31n, 32n, 123n, 215n Settimelli, Emilio, 42 Shakespeare, William, 63 Shepp, Archie, 157 Shusterman, Richard, 207, 216n, 217n, 218n Signore, Mario, 102n Solis, Gabriel, 164n

Index Southern, Eileen, 163n Sterne, Jonathan, 66n, 143n Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 5, 27, 28, 50, 77, 108, 185, 193 Stravinskij, Igor, 8n, 16, 18 Sublette, Ned, 163n Subotnick, Morton, 50 Sun Ra (Herman Poole Blount), 157 T:un[k], 51 Takasugi, Steven Kazuo, 20 Takemura, Nobukazu, 51 Taketani, Ikuo, 62 Takushi, Yamazaki ‘Maso’ (Masonna), 62 Tamburini, Serena, 216n Tatum, Arthur “Art”, 155 Tavani, Elena, 102n Taylor, Cecil, 157 Tedesco, Salvatore, 205, 212, 216n, 218n Thibaud, Jean-Paul, 138, 145n Tiedemann, Rolf, 8n, 32n, 65n, 122n, 124n Tomlin, Adele, 218n Torke, Michael, 22 Truax, Barry, 28 Tudor, David, 80 Vainio, Mika, 50 Valéry, Paul, 85n Valtorta, Luca, 69n Varèse, Edgar, 46, 185 Varga, Bálint András, 215n Vattimo, Gianni, 8n, 85n, 96, 100, 102n, 103n Velotti, Stefano, 203, 216n Velvet Underground, 185 Vizzardelli, Silvia, 144n von Karajan, Herbert, 211 Wagner, Richard, 14, 42, 107 Waller, Thomas “Fats”, 155 Ware, Wilbur, 158 Warhol, Andy, 188n Weber, Max, 72, 197, 215n

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music Webern, Anton, xii, 5, 14, 27, 28, 34n, 45, 76-8, 85n, 98, 108, 181, 192 White, Michael John, 83 Wilkinson, Elizabeth M., 68n Williams, Martin, 160, 164n Willoughby, L.A., 68n Wilson, Ombra, 158 Wisniewski, Maciej, 68n

Xenakis, Iannis, 19, 48, 108 Yamanouchi, Juntaro, 62 Yeznikian, Franck, 20 Zattra, Laura, 216n Zé, Tom, 33n Zenni, Stefano, 161, 163n, 164n Zilsel, Edgar, 95, 102n

245