The concept of concrescence will be used throughout the thesis and embodies an analogous framework for comprehending a holistic musical experience in which various perspectives, agents, performers, instruments, computers and audiences are interconnected to such an extent that the traditional boundaries between them become obscured or even dissolve. This gives rise to the emergence of a new, novel experience that is more than merely the sum of its parts.
The concrescence
My initial inspiration for creating a model to describe the interconnected dynamics of live remixing, was process philosopher, mathematician and physicist Alfred North Whitehead and his notion of the concrescence. His process-relational approach seemed apt when describing the musical experience as emerging from our collective engagement with one another. To Whitehead, experience is a description of relationships among moments of experience rather than the intrinsic nature of an entity. His view of the universe as comprised of occasions or events, rather than fundamentally "things", resonated with my view of live remixing as an art of playing the process, rather than the material.
Whitehead's philosophy emphasizes creativity as the fundamental mechanism that introduces novelty, transforming disjunctive, separate events into a unified whole - a process he terms "concrescence." This creative advance moves from a state of disjunction, where elements exist separately, to conjunction, synthesizing these elements into a novel entity that both encompasses and transcends its constituents.
"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical
principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity,
disjunctive among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their nature entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in progress of passage into conjunctive unity. Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion
embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from
the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition." (p. 26) (Whitehead 1929)
Gilles Deleuze, which inspired the rhizomatic counter concept to hierarchy in my Triaxis model, elaborates on Whitehead in his book "The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque"(Deleuze 1993):
For Whitehead the individual is creativity, the formation of a New. No longer is it the indefinite or the demonstrative mood, but a personal mood. If we call an element everything that has parts and is a part, but also what has intrinsic features, we say that the individual is a 'concrescence' of elements. This is something other than a connection or a conjunction. It is, rather, a prehension: an element is the given, the 'datum' of another element that prehends it. Prehension is individual unity. (p. 88)
Whitehead describes individual entities as ‘concrescences’ - unions of elements that transcend mere connection or conjunction. This process involves ‘prehension,’ where each element or part, rich with intrinsic qualities, actively grasps or takes in other elements, integrating them into a unified whole. This act of prehension is central to the individual’s identity, marking it as a distinct unity within the broader fabric of the universe.
To support the intention of developing the Triaxis model through extending these philosophical underpinnings, I will refer to Whitehead's statement on the purpose of philosophy from "Process and Reality" (1929):
The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. [...] The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? (p. 20)
There is however an obvious disclaimer that needs to be expressed; I am an artist, not an educated philosopher, and although I would prefer to engage in an inter-disciplinary collaborative research with experts in this field, doing so is unfortunately outside of the scope of this project. To fully adress the complexity of Whitehead and Deleuze's philosophy would require a thesis that would have very little room left for live remixing. I used these concepts creatively as inspiration for the development of the Triaxis, and I have strived to be consistent despite my lack of formal education in philosophy beyond the level of "Ex. phil.".
Facilitation of inter-subjectivity
Just as the experience of a human being cannot be derived from inspecting their organs, neither can we truly describe the sonic concrescence merely by observing the moving parts or through abstractions. Its "will" or direction is a collective outcome of all the involved agents - from the audience’s reactions to the instruments’ responses, unforeseen events, and collective intuition.
There is a fascinating inter-subjective nature of live remixing, where in the most extreme cases the remixician's only source for sound is through other musicians or performance artists, creating and facilitating a musical interdependence where the remixician has to extend their notion of subjectivity. Moreover, the identity and subjectivity of the musicians being remixed will undergo equal challenge in this regard. The remixician can suddenly sample or live effect the voice of a singer and take on their role or function. They can change their sonic characteristics, morph the timbre, amplify certain frequencies, flip, reverse or even shift the perception of interagency through real-time effects, chain reactions, envelope followers or tapping of other musicians' MIDI signals, return channels or even sensor data like accelerometers or conductive tactile interfaces.
As I engage in music production and performance, I often feel that I act as a facilitator or catalyst, enabling opportunities for the sonic concrescence to emerge through synchronous actions, technological networks, and sensory transductions. This resonates with my improvisational yearning to create music that is honest and authentic, not preconceived in form, arising spontaneously, continually recontextualized, shaped, and transmuted in the moment.
In this sense, I view live performance not to be "my music"; rather, I aspire for the music I express to serve as a catalyst for the concrescence to emerge. It no longer feels like a distance exists between the audience and myself as the performer who is there to "show something" or narrate a story I know through and through. Rather it is a journey towards togetherness, come what may.