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Underground > Radio & Music >

Mmmm, conceptual...

No star here laces

12:14 / 07.02.03

Let us talk about this and hopefully then descend into a heated shit-storm about pointless intellectual knackery in music...

13:46 / 07.02.03

Do you think it's pointless intellectualism, Byron? I think it's a beautiful idea, in its way: the antithesis of the pop notion that music should be individual, experiential, and above all ephemeral.

It reminds me of the Long Now Foundation's idea of building an enormous clock that ticks once a year and chimes once a millennium. It's a different conception of time, leading to a different concept of performance.

There's something to be said for the idea of making art for the future, art that will endure long after the artist dies. every artist looks for immortality on some level, but when it's undertaken with this degree of consciousness, it makes for an intriguing thought experiment—and one that can have real implications for generations to come: didn't we do a thread some time back about the proposed earthworks around the nuclear-waste dumping site? The site will remain dangerous for 10,000 years, and scientists and artists are working together to try to develop art with a high degree of permamnence that will convey this danger to the humans of the future...

I've got more thoughts on this, but I'll post them later: after all, there's no hurry...

No star here laces

14:17 / 07.02.03

I don't think it's conceptually pointless, Jack. But the very fact that you get the beauty of it without actually listening to it says it all, really, doesn't it? The beauty is in the idea, not in the music, so is it really music at all?

14:43 / 07.02.03

Well, now, that depends on where you place music in the scale between temporal and spatial arts.

Most of the visual arts are spatial—they result in the creation of a physical object existing in space. The medium and the message are one here—a sculpture is its own content.

The performing arts are, to one degree or another, temporal: they provide an experience that unfolds over a period of time, and is irreducible. The purest form of this would be live improvised music or improvised dance—one-offs, appearing out of the ether, enduring for a while, and then gone without a trace.

Most artforms have elements of both the temporal and the spatial—a film is a physical object made of celluloid, but the experience of it is temporal. Literature produces physical objects—books—which are experienced in terms of time (although, unlike most of these other in-between artforms, the time investment is determined by the person experiencing the art...).

So where does music lie along this scale?

Isn't musical notation itself a sort of literature? Must a score actually be performed for it to be "music"?

Some people (I'm not one of them, alas) can look at a score—read a score—and "hear" the music, fully-formed, in their head: is their experience of the music less "real" than that of those among us who must use our physical ears to experience the music? Is it perhaps more real, since their experience more immediate, in the sense of bypassing the intermediary (the performer)?

Is the experience of the illiterate listening to A Book At Bedtime more or less "real" than that of the one sitting down and reading the book hirself? Can the illiterate man who hears Oliver Twist being read aloud be fairly said to have "read" Oliver Twist? He has undeniably experienced it temporally...

15:16 / 07.02.03

The beauty is in the idea, not in the music, so is it really music at all?

Well that's the question raised by lot's of Cage's stuff isn't it? The silence, and the record players with brushes instead of needles and so forth.. not my area, but isn't he generally credited with introducing "non-musical" sounds to 20th C. music?

Presumably, like lots of visual conceptual art, it's supposed to be confrontational, more concerned with challenging the listener/viewer's ideas about music and provoking new ideas and arguments, than with actually being worth listening to / looking at in it's own right..

I think to dimiss this as pointless is almost like taking the position of all those boring buggers who go on and on about the Turner Prize every year - "I don't want to look at that, it's bloody horrible" etc. (Always quite funny, cos in a sense, the fact that the art produces those reactions is a vindication of the artists intentions..)

Sorry if this post reads like a string of cliches, btw..

20:10 / 07.02.03

See, even with the most outlandishly "conceived" music (and I would think that John Cage's 4' 33" would be the ne plus ultra on that score), I don't think the beauty ever rests entirely in the concept. It's easy to sneer at four-and-a-half minutes of silence until you're in a concert hall watching a performer sitting motionless at the piano, and you're suddenly aware of just how loud silence can be: there's an authentic experiential rush there.

Another example: here's something that, at first blush, exemplifies pointless intellectualism—process composer Tom Johnson's pieces most famous work, Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass (in RealAudio). It's tragically self-referential and abstract, and extended meta-joke, but still lots of fun to actually listen to, even moreso in a live setting: listen to the audience in that recording! They're having a ball! And listening to it constitutes a genuinely complete artistic experience—like a statue or a film, it is its own message, quite literally laying down the terms under which it must be judged.

And time distortion, as with "As Slowly As Possible," strikes me as a particularly rich vein to mine. I'm thinking on the one hand of John Oswald, who, in his Greyfolded project, subjected thirty years' worth of live recordings of the same song (The Grateful Dead's "Dark Star") to the Plunderphonics technique, to create a single composition stretching to to four hours—at one stroke expanding a single song and compressing a three-decade career.

A little closer in spirit to the Cage piece: I heard a story on NPR some months ago (wish I had a link, but I haven't) about a fellow doing the someting similar to classical pieces, creating recordings by electronically extending each quarter-note to a full minute or more—stretching the Minute Waltz to an hour. It's a wonderful concept, but the execution, judging from the sound samples I heard, was equally impressive—hypnotic, each note folding into the next like a time-lapse dissolve, full shimmering orchestral textures layering one over the other until a single tone comes pure. Remarkable stuff, both soothing and trippy.

And a beautiful idea, yeah, but doubly beautiful in the execution.

Old brown-eye is back

19:01 / 08.02.03

Ok, couple of things. It is music because it's a series of notes and/or sounds - you may have to be God himself in order to listen to it all, but it still qualifies. Music does not have to be 'beautiful' in order for it to be music (or enjoyable); likewise it can be both entirely accidental and ridiculously, achingly deliberate as in this case. Concept-wise, as (I guess) an attempt to negate history this manages to be both satisfying and really, really silly. Hoorah! "The performance has already been going on for seventeen months." Look at John in that picture - he's laughing his ass off.

That's the second time that Greyfolded's been brought to my attention out of nowhere in as many days. Time for further investigation.....

13:14 / 05.05.06

Update: today the Cage piece moves from an E to an E-flat. This note will be held for the next twenty-six months. Note it on your calendars.

14:17 / 05.05.06

I can imagine (fondly), years from now, elderly music lovers proudly looking back over their life experiences/accomplishments: "... and I heard 11 notes* of 'As slowly as possible' - I was part of it, I was there!" I love the idea of making a semi-regular pilgrimage, every couple years, to hear the notes change. If I had the resources, I might do it myself.

I find it very moving that this kind of ultra-long-term art projects a possible future in which there is an audience to applaud the final note (whether the artist literally believes this or not). It's intrinsically, essentially optimistic. (And, in the event of total societal collapse, I like to think of the piece going on in the rubble, the score passed down hand-to-hand by a secret society of monklike musicians. That'd be good, too.)

*presumably not in their entirety.

foolish fat finger

20:56 / 05.05.06

I...