Experimental Affinities in Music

Experimental Affinities in Music Experimental Affinities in Music Edited by Paulo de Assis Leuven University Press Table of Contents 7 Introduction Paulo de Assis 15 Chapter One Explosive Experiments and the Fragility of the Experimental Lydia Goehr 42 Chapter Two Omnis ars ex experimentis dependeat: “Experiments” in Fourteenth-Century Musical Thought Felix Diergarten 64 Chapter Three “Vieltönigkeit” instead of Microtonality: The Theory and Practice of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century “Microtonal” Music Martin Kirnbauer 91 Chapter Four Inscriptions: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann 105 Chapter Five Nuance and Innovation in Part I of the “48” Mark Lindley 128 Chapter Six Tales from Babel: Musical Adventures in the Science of Hearing Edward Wickham 147 Chapter Seven From Clockwork to Pulsation: Music and Artificial Life in the Eighteenth Century Lawrence Kramer 168 Chapter Eight The Inner Ear: An Interview with Leon Fleisher 177 Chapter Nine Execution—Interpretation—Performance: The History of a Terminological Conflict Hermann Danuser 5 Table of Contents 197 Chapter Ten Monumental Theory Thomas Christensen 213 Chapter Eleven Testing Respect(fully): An Interview with Frederic Rzewski Luk Vaes 237 Appendix 239 Notes on Contributors 245 Index 6 Introduction Introduction Paulo de Assis Orpheus Institute, Ghent In the years 2011, 2012, and 2013, the International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory was constituted under a single rubric: “Artistic Experimentation in Music.” This overarching title aimed at disclosing and discussing artistic practices that questioned, challenged, or moved away from dominant or orthodox musical practices. Beyond looking at historically situated examples of “experimental music” (as in the “American Experimental Tradition”), or at experimental practices based on data collection, measurement, and observation (as abundantly done in recent decades in the areas of performance studies and performance science), the aim of this three-year programme was to bring together diverse historical, methodological, and artistic approaches that contribute to a new discourse on experimentation as an “attitude” and not simply as a quan- tifiable phenomenon. By an experimental “attitude” we mean a willingness to constantly reshift thoughts and practices, to operate new redistributions of the sensible, affording unpredictable reconfigurations of music, art, and society. As the German philosopher Ludger Schwarte (2012, 187, my translation) formulated it, “Aesthetic experimentation starts when the parameters of a given aesthetic praxis are broken, suspended or transcended, in order to work out a particular mode of appearance that reconfigures the field of the visible and of the utterable.” In music, the movement from interpretation to experimentation seems to be particularly arduous. The whole philosophical and psychoanalytical move away from interpretation into more creative and experimental modes—observable already in the 1960s and 1970s in works by Michel Foucault (1970, 1972), Jean- François Lyotard ([1971] 2002), Félix Guattari (1972, 1979), and Gilles Deleuze and Guattari (1977, and others), but also, even if from a different horizon of thought, in works by Paul Ricœur (1970, 1974)—remains largely marginal to most musicians and musicologists. On the other hand, the more recent epis- temological debate on experimentation (Ian Hacking 1982) and “experimental systems” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger 1997), with its fundamental move away from theory-driven practices and with its practice-led approach, is basically unknown to the music community. The breaking, suspending, or transcend- ing of musical practices finds its first obstacle in two all-too-often fetishised qualities: instrumental virtuosity and compositional handcraft. Professional musicians are spontaneously willing to experiment as long as it helps them to achieve “solid” results—that is, to confirm and reiterate the world as it is. Experimentation is usually understood as referring to something still in a phase DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.11116/9789461661883.ch00 7 Paulo de Assis of development, not yet fully accomplished; and from this follow the negative connotations sometimes attributed to it. “Established” composers and performers hesitate about being labelled as “experimental” precisely because they claim to know exactly what their goals are and what they are doing. Scholastic virtuosity and technical accomplishment are so fundamentally inculcated into the making of music that any wish to introduce an experimental attitude is equated with some form of dilettantism—unless one takes experimentation as a synonym for “testing,” for repeating experiments to confirm or negate a given hypothesis; that is, unless one reduces artistic practices to pseudo-scien- tific endeavours with quantitative methods and results. On the other hand, the creative and productive option of embracing an experimental approach while keeping to high standards of technical skill, even virtuosity, is precluded by a still dominant authoritarian concept of musical works and prevailing aesthetic orientations, which, on the basis of disputable ethical concerns, disallows creative reconfigurations of “works,” “images of works,” or “images of thought.” In his essay “Five Maps of the Experimental World” Bob Gilmore (2014, 23–29) presented five different definitions of the term “experimental music,” which should not be equated with “experimentation” in music but which (even though focused in a specific time and geographical space, mostly recent and North American) offer some basic common ground for a broader discussion. Gilmore’s five definitions of experimental music are as follows: (1) The “experimental involves ‘the introduction of novel elements into one’s music’” (Gilmore 2014, 25, quoting Cage [1959] 1961, 73). [John Cage’s “soft definition.”] (2) “An experimental action is ‘an action the outcome of which is not fore- seen’” (Gilmore 2014, 25, quoting Cage [1959] 1961, 69). [John Cage’s “hard definition.”] (3) “‘Experimental’ in music should mean more or less what it does in the sciences” (Gilmore 2014, 26). It implies a method of trial and error applied to composition (composition as research sensu lato). [James Tenney’s definition.] (4) In the 1990s Daniel Wolf talked about a “post-experimental” phase, meaning that “‘experimental’ refers to a type of music of a particular historical era, essentially, if not quite exclusively, the music of the fifties, sixties, and seventies stemming from Cage’s ‘hard’ definition” (Gilmore 2014, 27). This era implies the operating and maintenance of a complex “experimental scene” that supports itself from within and that includes “the composers themselves, [and] mediating factors compris[ing] a complex network of festivals, foundations, academic institutions, ven- ues, private patrons, performers, publishers, publicists, critics, musicologists, and so on” (ibid.). (5) “‘Experimental’ is all the interesting new music that isn’t avant-garde” (Gilmore 2014, 28). [Michael Nyman’s definition.] 8 Introduction This typology, succinctly but rigorously proposed by Bob Gilmore, situates itself in an “experimental world,” which is inspired by the thought of the sociologist Howard S. Becker (see Becker 1982), but crucially remains musically (and not sociologically) oriented. Even if limited to music from the twentieth century, it is a most useful typology both from the viewpoint of historical musicology as well as from the perspective of composers, providing a common framework of reference to diverse practices. Two complementary questions become inescapable: (1) Was there no experimentation in music before the twentieth century? and (2) Are there no polit- ical implications when one advocates and puts into action an “experimental attitude”? Or, formulated differently, Does experimental music (or experimentation in music) remain in a beautifully encapsulated limbo, independent of the world “out there,” as suggested by Daniel Wolf’s definition, which seems based on an ivory-tower “experimental scene”? At the very end of his essay, Bob Gilmore (2014: 29) refers to the first question, stating, “As regards the work of older composers, I’m of the opinion that some music is inherently, not tempo- rarily, experimental.” What, then, is music that is “inherently experimental”? Reflecting on this question triggers many other related questions: Is there an experimental attitude recognisable in different times, styles, and places? Are there any detect- able “experimental affinities” throughout music history? How do new artistic paths emerge through experimental performance or compositional practices? What is the character, function, and potential of experimentation in musical practice? How does experimentation shape artistic identity and expertise? These were the fundamental questions discussed at the International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory in the years 2011, 2012, and 2013. The 2011 Academy—Aspects of Artistic Experimentation in Early Music (convenor: Luk Vaes; guest faculty: Mark Lindley, Martin Kirnbauer, Edward Wickham)— was centred on artistic experimentation from the Renaissance and Baroque, with particular attention to experimental behaviour in practices of notation and tuning. The 2012 Academy—Interpretation versus Experimentation (convenor: Paulo de Assis; guest faculty: Hermann Danuser, Thomas Christensen, Frederic Rzewski)—challenged the concept of “interpretation” in the field of music performance while investigating musical “experimentation”

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