What Is Speculative Music Composition?
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44 PARSE JOURNAL Abstract One of the challenges of contemporary music composition is to speculate upon “possible worlds” as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where the lyrical impulse in music is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the more-than-human world. Such sensitivity arises from a compositional superfuity where subjectivity is “dislocated presence” for new modes of perception to appear that resist representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantifcation and instrumentalisation. Music composition today should ask listeners to listen beyond anthropocentric terms, including the ways in which the resistance of the world—its conficting and dynamic materiality—exceeds both conceptual thought and technological control. Tis “speculative turn” in music composition is indeed not to excise music’s resemblance to language, and by extension music’s capacity for expression, but to decentre music’s humanised expression from its privileged position for the possibility of a music independent of from language, thought and intentions, where music’s materiality can exceed human agency. Such music would suggest a critical materialist sound—a sound world outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, thus placing the listener in a space where they are required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life. 45 What is Speculative Music Composition? MING TSAO Ming Tsao is Professor of Composition at Gothenburg University, and holds compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, a PhD in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, ensemble recherche, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus and Ensemble an MA in Mathematics from the San Francisco State University, an MA in Ascolta, in venues such as the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, Wien Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and a BM in Music Composition Modern, Wittener Tage Festival, Maerz Musik, and the Darmstadt New Music from the Berklee College of Music. Further studies have included logic and Courses. He is currently working on a new opera, titled Das Westzimmer, to philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also currently be premiered in 2020, which speculates on the historical connections between Visiting Professor of Composition at the Höschule für Musik, Teater und fn-de-siècle Vienna and late-Tang-Dynasty China. Music by Ming Tsao can Medien in Hannover. Performance projects include the opera Die Geisterinsel be found on the labels Kairos Music and Mode Records. Books by Ming Tsao for the Staatsoper Stuttgart in 2011, and his full realisation of Stockhausen’s include Abstract Musical Intervals: Group Teory for Composition and Analysis Plus Minus successfully premiered in the Wittener Tage Festival 2013. His (2000). His music is published by Edition Peters. 46 PARSE JOURNAL O COMPOSE a speculative music is frst to draw associations with the medieval category of a “musica speculativa”, that esoteric part of music theory that lies beyond the practical and theoretical Taspects of musical composition to address existential questions of “why?”1 It was during this period when music was considered part of the quadrivium that included, besides music, the arts of number or proportion, geometry and cosmology.2 Mathematics was indeed always considered an essential aspect of Example 1. Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Hudemann” puzzle canon (1728) for four voices, a “musica speculativa” that bound the composition where one must solve the correct time interval for the entrance of each voice. of music with a natural philosophy, which included a network of identities, relationships and correspondences so that what was abstract to the senses was given concrete form.3 Te topics treated Tis “sophisticated network of meanings” that in a speculative music included “the harmonies of the is evident throughout Bach’s music is what the angelic orders, the zodiac, and planetary spheres, the composer Helmut Lachenmann refers to as “aura”,9 elements, the soul, and the human body; the hidden i.e., “the history of the material in wider extra- correspondences of nature; the secrets of number; musical contexts, in all spheres of our social and the power of sound; and the moral responsibilities cultural reality, of our conscious and subconscious of a music that wields this power.”4 In other words, awareness, our archetypal memory and magical ideas inherent to a speculative music were considered predeterminations, both collective and individual.”10 metonymic: not thought as “evocative metaphors, Such aura is important for a speculative music in sufcient to themselves, but as points of entry to a that it allows for the entire cultural world of the sophisticated network of meanings, which is called composing subject to be “registered in the nuances into play whenever its components are mentioned.”5 and hints of its detail—a refection of the intense It is the latter concerns, “the hidden correspondences confnement in which that world is bound, and of nature; the secrets of number; the power of sound; the accordingly magnifed reverberations of the and the moral responsibilities of a music that wields tiniest shift or tremor.”11 Such tremors are what this power”, that merit a renewed consideration of composer Brian Ferneyhough describes in the what speculation in music composition means today.6 music of the second Viennese School as “mnemonic triggers” that serve to “evoke much larger primal Such obscure and mystical ideas continued into the contexts” in the form of “a magic lantern show” that period of Johann Sebastian Bach, when the high art actively mobilises all sorts of “dimly realized, but of musical counterpoint—the essence of composition nevertheless communal subconscious perceptions” in that cultural period— was viewed in relation in the imagination of the listener.12 Aura is to the efect of alchemical transformations and essential to a composer’s materials and cannot be magical relations, where “the activity of associations, extirpated through a reduction to sound—in Pierre contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a Schaefer’s sense of an acousmatic listening where a liberation of symbolic energy.”7 Te music was often sound’s sources, including its broader cultural and inscribed graphically, as ciphers to be refected upon historical associations, are “bracketed out”.13 Indeed, by initiates (for the “magic” to be “squeezed out”) as music’s aura, as Lachenmann reminds us, is always many of the so-called “puzzle canons” demonstrated.8 dialectically mediated through the acoustic-physical MING TSAO 47 aspects of sound (the inherent resistances of the 1. Godwin, Joscelyn. “Speculative 13. Schaefer, Pierre. “Acousmatics”. Music: Te Numbers Behind In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern sound material as it is produced on instruments by the Notes”. In A Compendium of Music. Christopher Cox and Daniel performers), sound’s structuring (the local resistances Contemporary Musical Tought. Warner (eds.). New York, NY: imposed by the composer onto the materials) and London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2004. p. 77. 14 Routledge. 1992. Vol. 1. p. 256. tonality. Lachenmann expands upon the tonal 14. Lachenmann, Helmut. aspect of material by including the rhetorical 2. Martineau, John (ed.). “Bedingungen des Materials”. In Quadrivium: Te Four Classical Musik als existentielle Erfahrung aspects of music—tension and relaxation, gesture, Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften consonance and dissonance—or, what he would Music & Cosmology. New York, NY: 1966-1995. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & later call music’s “textual” dimension.15 “Nothing Bloomsbury Publishing. 2010. Härtel. 1996. p. 35. in music stands alone. Everything becomes what 3. Godwin, Joscelyn. Music and the 15. Heathcote, Abigail. “Sound it is in memory and in expectation through its Occult: French Musical Philosophies Structures, Transformations, and 1750-1950. New York, NY: Broken Magic: An Interview physical contiguity with its neighbor and its mental University of Rochester Press. 1995. with Helmut Lachenmann”. In 16 connection with what is distant from it.” No p. 4. Contemporary Music: Teoretical music is devoid of expressive elements and it is the and Philosophical Perspectives. Max 4. Ibid. Paddison and Irène Deliège (eds.). “subject’s drive to expression” that animates music, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing whose content is “the profusion of things which obey 5. Reeve, Neil H. and Kerridge, Limited. 2010. p. 334. 17 Richard. Nearly Too Much: Te Poetry the rules of musical grammar and syntax.” of J.H. Prynne. Liverpool: Liverpool 16. Adorno, Teodor. “Music and University Press. 1995. p. 182. Language: A Fragment”. In Quasi Speculative music composition cannot do away una Fantasia: Essays on Modern 6. Godwin, op. cit., p. 4. Music. Rodney Livingstone (trans.). with music’s resemblance to language, since music’s London: Verso. 1998. p. 5. most speculative reach happens through a system of 7. Mellors, Anthony. Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne. 17. Ibid., p. 6. interconnections whose tendencies “culminate and Manchester: Manchester University synergize, percolating by the reticular connections Press. 2005. p. 129. 18. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. “A and antagonisms across the channels of prescribed Letter to Steve McCafery”. Te Gig. 8. Yearsley, David. Bach and No. 7. November 2000. p. 44. signifcation so as to challenge and displace the whole the Meanings of