Music As Episteme, Text, Sign & Tool: Comparative Approaches To
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I would like to dedicate this work firstly to Sue Achimovich, my mother, without whose constant support I wouldn’t have been able to have jumped across the abyss and onto the path; I would also like to dedicate the work to Dr Saskia Kersenboom who gave me the light and showed me the way; Finally I would like to dedicate the work to both Patrick Eecloo and Guy De Mey who supported me when I could have fallen over the edge … This edition is also dedicated to Jaak Van Schoor who supported me throughout the creative process of this work. Foreword This work has been produced thanks to more than four years of work. The first years involved a great deal of self- questioning; moving from being an active creative artist—a composer and performer of experimental music- theatre—to being a theoretician has been a long journey. Suffice to say, on the gradual process which led to the ‘composition’ of this work, I went through many stages of looking back at my own creative work to discover that I had already begun to answer many of the questions posed by my new research into Balinese culture, communicating remarkable information about myself and the way I’ve attempted to confront my world in a physically embodied fashion. My early academic experiments, attending conferences and writing papers, involved at first largely my own compositional work. What I realise now is that I was on a journey towards developing a system of analysis which would be based on both artistic and scientific information, where ‘subjective’ experience would form an equally valid ‘product’ for analysis: it is, after all, only through our own personal experience that we can interface with the world. This process of weaning myself away from my own work to be able to apply my method more generally was a difficult one. Now, however, I realise how important this process has been. This book consists of four major chapters. Using as its major tool post-Husserlian phenomenology and post- structural theory, the first chapter attempts to redefine ‘music’ not as a thing to be examined and dissected, but a way of interfacing with what I define as “sensual knowledge”, functioning ultimately to influence how we experience reality. Music is more than this alone, and the chapters following the first attempt to come closer to individual performances. The major point of departure is viewing musical experience as a complex type of cultural sign; here a ‘sign’ is not necessarily a specified object or idea, but something which signifies (creates meaning) for someone. This musical sign is placed in a different light in each of these chapters, and the object of analysis moves from the static musical object to the dynamic process of musical performance; the significance of the musical sign is revealed to exist as much in its creation as its material form (as far as it has one). One of the major themes of the work is the investigation of the way ‘musicality’ can be experienced by all the senses. I define this as the ‘multimediality’ of musical processes and the ‘multisensoriality’ of human musical experience. Other major topics include the notion of the embedded and the embodied ‘musical sign’. Here the sign is considered in terms of its semiosis in an ‘embedded’ (fully contextualised) environment and in terms of its ‘embodiment’ in human physicality. The whole first section is devoted to the discussion of an epistemology based on a transferral from product- to process-based thinking, representing a realisation of the importance of the dynamics of a contextualised and embedded situation to all processes of human semiosis. This study is intended to criticise and suggest alternatives to existing approaches to musicality. It is not intended to present a single all- encompassing solution to a problematic, restrictive paradigm stuck deeply in the confines of structuralism; it is rather intended to provide another set of options. I’d also like to take this chance to note that the theories that I propose are intended as models to be built upon rather than as complete edifices resistant to change; I have attempted to make suggestions about the complexity of musical experience based on five years of research in the Netherlands, Indonesia and the United States consisting of the analysis of interviews, meetings, encounters and also deeply personal experiences. Although the work is primarily about Bali, I have chosen to call this work ‘comparative’ because I believe strongly that ‘comparative’ experience is essential to the process of understanding how another culture experiences their music; before analysing the music of another culture, one has to deeply understand one’s own ‘musicality’ and the socially and culturally embedded set of signs that go into making us ‘musical’ human beings. The major theme of the entire work is the importance of music in creating and perpetuating Balinese culture. Music is demonstrated to be not simply an expression of the current social, political or philosophical situation, but also a cultural force which in turn can influence the way a culture develops. Two terms are related to the expression of Balinese musicality: tradition and innovation, where new artistic works are explored in terms of either perpetuating strong cultural givens inculcated by society (tradition) or breaking away with radical new ideas (innovation), acting to change the society in which the artist lives. Interculturality as a musical issue is also explored in terms of how and why people belonging to certain cultures are turning more and more to other cultures to answer many of the questions which aren’t sufficiently breached within their own cultural confines. This issue is dealt with in terms of what I refer to as self-reflexive interculturality which involves an artist finding in another culture what they expect or need to find rather than what is actually there, leading to western creations like utopia and exoticism. Balinese culture has influenced artists and theoreticians from the West who are attracted to this remarkably well- preserved culture. Through the perpetuation of complex cultural systems, the Balinese have been able to remain largely self-sufficient; not being too ‘adversely’ affected by outside influence. Their culture is for us a truly unique phenomenon, a structure that provides a coherent significative context to Balinese existence, supporting and perpetuating an intricately complex matrix of sound, movement and action. For the Balinese, music is certainly more than simply a diversion, but an important sacred and secular meaning-bearing phenomenon. In order to try and encompass this in theoretical terms it is necessary to open the discussion into a large number of different fields, including anthropology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, performance and ritual theory to name a few. I hope the reader enjoys the philosophical and theoretical journey I considered necessary in th.is work Bali has been experienced as the fantasy come true for anthropologists throughout the twentieth century, having all the right elements to be the perfect specimen for fieldwork; it is a relatively isolated island paradise with an enormous amount of mystical and exotic charm. Post-colonial theory, however, has made us aware of possible personal agendas fulfilled in all types of cultural analysis. It was through working with Bali both ‘practically’ and ‘theoretically’ that I was impelled to see my own culture in a different light and question those things I had accepted as arbitrarily true. I learned also about my own personal agenda, which involved finding in Javanese and Balinese gamelan the answers to all the questions left unanswered in my own musical culture. The Balinese concept and experience of musicality perpetuates a non-elitist musical system which is truly ‘multimedial’ in nature and philosophy, something which I’ve always maintained but which was not always acceptable in many situations within my own cultural environment. Cultural estrangement and the necessity for a ‘multimedial’ or ‘multisensorial’ music culture attracted me to Bali. In performing this research, however, I was also taught a great deal about intercultural misunderstanding. This has made me very wary of and sensitive to theorists who write about a music system they haven’t themselves learnt to play, as the process of education ‘inculcates’ certain embodied behavioural approaches which often provide epistemological information only communicable to those who have participated in the process of ‘learning’ it physically; in the field of ethnomusicology this may be a given, but in other academic fields practice is still to be appropriated into the realisation of theory. What can you expect to learn from this study? There has obviously been enough written about Bali, so factual/historical information about the island is not my major concern. Instead, I have opted to look at the way performing arts traditions—particularly music—are perpetuated, in which forms this can occur and how they are perpetuated in vital real-life environments, with specific emphasis on musical expression (which I will demonstrate is a ‘multimedial’ experiential process). We are provided with dynamic possibilities as both anthropologists and performing artists to experience the world ‘musically’ through the eyes of another. I hope that this work will provide the reader with an alternative insight into the multimedial communication of ‘musical’ knowledge, something which hasn’t really been considered theoretically because of specific sociocultural factors which are explored further on in this work. There are many, many people who I would like to thank for their contribution to this work. Firstly I’d like to thank my partner and friend Guy De Mey who supported me emotionally during this difficult period. He was there for me when times got difficult, as was Patrick Eecloo in the preparatory period preceding this.