The openness of the score might enable experimental practices, but why is it so important that Organ2/ASLSP is performed then, that it is materialized? What does this add to the thought within the score itself? Most of all, a score fundamentally bears within it that is has to be performed, and because there is no one way to perform a piece, this is where new questions come in. Especially in a score with the almost philosophical direction ‘as slow as possible’. In a way, the setting in Halberstadt takes the score, that is a starting point for many questions, and provides the performative framework in which Organ2/ASLSP can truly be studied and reconsidered over and over again: they provide an experimental system, you could say. I wondered whether one could consider Organ2/ASLSP an experimental system and if so, what this STS approach would actually add when studying a case from the arts.


First, let’s consider the performance with Rheinberger’s vocabulary once again. Perhaps the epistemic thing in Organ2/ASLSP is not so much ‘the artwork itself’as Borgdorff argues, because it seems impossible to pin down ‘the’artwork in this case. Rather, the open character of the work and the intentional holes that are left by John Cage allow one to ask questions.


The fact that it is difficult to formulate what these holes precisely entail only underlines their vagueness and their similarity to Rheinberger’s epistemic things. Karin Knorr Cetina argues that instead of in routine procedures, epistemic things come in where there are still questions. They make the researchers question their own routines repeatedly.

 

Maybe, the epistemic thing of Organ2/ASLSP in Halberstadt lies within the openness of the score as intentionally created by John Cage: this openness generates questions and complicates the process of performing the musical piece considerably. Moreover, I have no idea what this openness would look like and how it would be defined, and that seems to fit with the concept of the epistemic things, as they lack “the wholeness, solidity, and the thing-like character they have in our everyday conception” (Knorr Cetina 2000, p. 190).


According to Rheinberger’s words, a network of people thus has to search for the ‘right’ material settings to let this epistemic thing come to the fore. As we have seen, in Halberstadt these settings concern among other things the time, the instrument, and the interpretation of Cage’s ideas. Importantly, these settings will evolve over time as the network will change as well. Interestingly enough, the current people working on the project are very aware of the importance of the technical objects, as they consciously keep the openness of the future in mind: the organ for instance has to be open and adjustable, because new generations need to be able to approach the performance differently. Decisions like that underline the importance of the materialization of the initial score: only by trying and doing new questions can emerge that otherwise would have never been asked and only by materializing you can activate people like myself, who would otherwise never had thought about it, to think and linger along with the project.


All in all, Rheinberger’s concepts helped me to accept the openness of this project and instead of struggling with the undefinable questions about, for example, the notions of the ‘original’ or ‘progress’in art, it helped to bring into view current problems and new questions. Instead of merely focussing on the history of a project, Rheinberger’s theory forces you to focus on an unknown future. This emphasis on the future is something that fits seamlessly with the performance of Organ2/ASLSP in Halberstadt. Essentially, music is always traveling and developing through time, even a piece of Bach will travel through records, performances, instruments and other material means in order to keep existing, but in Halberstadt they flip this idea into the future. They set the material means and assume that the music will travel into the future. In a way, they test the social activities on which music is based.


Paralleled with Rheinberger’s theory this can form an interesting field of study, because the analogy of a laboratory in which an experiment is carried out can here be combined with the sociology of music: the study of arts in the making. All that, without losing a focus on the ungraspable factor that seems to be present in many artworks, whatever you would like to call it: the project, the artwork, the performance or ‘simply’the epistemic thing.    

 

References

 

  • Borgdorff, A.H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research in Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

  • Knorr Cetina, K. (2000). Objectual Practice. In Schatzki, T., Knorr Cetina, K & Von Savigny, E. (eds.). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory.New York: Routledge.

  • Rheinberger, H.J. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

From Science to Art: Using Concepts from STS
  • You want to learn more about how scores can inform musical practices? Then click here. 
     
  • Or do you want to find out how musicians question and rethink musical routines? Then this is the way to go.