Quotes presented during Etude/Presentation as performed during the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme Spring Forum, Klækken Hotel, March 2017 (please scroll down for further reading).

             D1: “The esthetics of music is not popular. Musicians suspect it of being abstract talk far removed from musical reality; the musical public fears philosophical reflections of the kind one ought to leave to the initiated, rather that plaguing one’s own mind with unnecessary philosophical difficulties. Understandable as this mistrustful irritation with the sundry chatter of self-proclaimed music esthetics might be, it would be erroneous to imagine that esthetic problems in music are located in the hazy distance beyond everyday musical matters. In fact, when viewed dispassionately, they are thoroughly tangible and immediate. Anyone who finds it burdensome to have to read the literary program of a symphonic poem by Franz Liszt or Richard Strauss before a concert; who asks for dimmed light at a lieder recital, making the lyrics printed in the program illegible; who finds it superfluous to familiarize himself with the plot summary before attending an opera sung in Italian—in other words, whoever treats the verbal component of the music at a concert or opera with casual disdain is making a music-esthetic decision. He may consider his decision to be based on his own taste, when in fact it is the expression of a general, dominant tendency that has spread ever further in the last 150 years without sufficient recognition of its importance to musical culture. Above and beyond the individual and his coincidental preferences, nothing less that a profound change in the very concept of music is taking place: no mere style change among forms and techniques, but a fundamental transformation of what music is, what it means, and how it is understood. Listeners who react in the manner described above are aligning themselves to a music-esthetic “paradigm” (to use the term that Thomas Kuhn applied to the history of science): that of “absolute music”. (Dahlhaus, 1989, pp. 1-2)

B1: “One may object to the idea that silence can figure as a music without sound by arguing, for example, that John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33’’ refers to sound through its absence: by presenting the concert hall, the audience, and a musician who remains silent, sound is alluded to precisely by its withholding. Sound, in this argument, functions as the irreducible condition of music: music is seen as the aesthetic form that gives sound its proper seating. What happens, though, when sound is radically rescinded as the epistemological grounds upon which music is situated as an art form? What if music had never been a “sound art” in the first place? It might come as a surprise, but the very notion of music as sound is a relatively recent invention. With its roots in the writings of a group of German thinkers in the early 1800s, the equating of music with instrumental sound severed from language and social meaning, which was later termed “absolute music”, has remained with us to this day. Now solidified and expressed at the level of everyday language, the concept is tacitly accepted any time someone says, “I didn’t care for the lyrics, but the music was great.” For prior to the advent of absolute music, the concept of music included language (“lyrics”, for example) within the premodern tripartite harmonia, rhythmos, and logos—or harmony, rhythm and language, or rational thought. Note that “sound” does not make an appearance in the trio. Absolute music, further sedimented in the mid-nineteenth-century musical aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick—particularly his notion of the “specifically musical” (as opposed to the “extra-musical”)—would undergo its most exhaustive sequence in the music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expanding to include electronic sound and recording technologies among other formal and technological innovations. This music, which stretches from Beethoven to Boulez, but also includes Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pierre Schaeffer, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, worked through the same artistic modernism that brought us abstract expressionism and the subsequent debates around medium specificity in the visual arts. (It was “the same” artistic modernism because the birth of absolute music, as many would have it, was also the birth of artistic modernism.) Beginning in the 1960s, conceptual art would initiate a dismantling of medium specificity that extends to recent debates around the “postmodern condition” and beyond. Yet while postwar (“visual”) art exceeded medium to incorporate conceptual and discursive strategies, the concept of music as a “medium” composed by sound would never quite receive such questioning. Furthermore, language (including coneptuality, “logos”, etc.) has remained categorically excluded from music, thereby precluding such discursive forms.” (Barrett, 2016, pp. 1 – 2)

A1: “Something of significant proportions has happened to art since the sixties. Philosophers have talked about “the end of art” as the end of progress. It is easy to see that the grand theory (the development within modernity) now lacks fuel; the adjective “contemporary” has replaced the “modern” in art. But it is important that we see that the traditions of modern art (Cubism, Abstract Art, Surrealism) are still among us, together with a lot of neglected genres from the past, and countless new ones. This cultural broadening is ultimately tied to extensions of cultures that let the youth decide together with the market. So what is dying? What is dying is the progress of grand theories/contexts: we cannot continue as if nothing has happened. From our position in time, it is easy to see how it is like the Tower of Babel—progress moving upward, to the final end, when art must let philosophy as pure thinking take over. It is the pyramidal structure of modernity that will take an ultimate step beyond itself and into itself /…/ it is only when we contextualize identity (for example, art) that understanding emerges. This has been a mark in history but a change of perspective is urgent: contemporary art demands and deserves an alternative model. Modernity’s emphasis on progress and the development of artistic practice, coming closer to the final answer (the end), is now replaced with simultaneous progress towards many ends and backwards in order to reconstruct old art for new purposes. The development forwards encompasses what is behind.” (Entzenberg, 2013, p. 10)

D2: “The historical philosophy of art forms, however, is based in the philosophy of religion, as with E.T.A. Hoffmann and Hegel: classical art is influenced by myth, romantic art by Christianity, and modern art—a “service of worship of pure beauty”—by a religious consciousness in which religion is art, and art religion. And the art form in which the “modern ideal” most purely manifests itself is “absolute” instrumental music. “Therefore instrumental music is the pure and immediate existence of the absolute or modern ideal, free of all specific structure—historically, too, it belongs entirely to this ideal; and even though it is conceptually the first art form, because it is the most abstract, it is the newest in its historical genesis.” Instrumental music is “free” and “absolute” because it has dissolved itself from meanings that adhere to music due to its origin in “natural sound” or speech. “The meaning that sound also possesses outside of music in nature or in the world of the human mind—the latter being the human voice and language—either remains excluded in this art, or, if it is incorporated, this can only happen by transmitting the idea that reveals itself as pure essentiality, free of all finite appearances, in tones inasmuch as they are tones and not merely sounds.” Weisse formulates philosophically what E.T.A. Hoffmann expressed poetically: that as soon as affections, which are of themselves foreign to “pure music”, nevertheless permeate music through song, they are “clothed in the crimson shimmer of romanticism.” The “tone” in which, according to Weisse, the idea is manifested, is the “artificial” instrumental tone in contrast to the “natural sound” of the voice; and it is the “artificiality”, to use Hanslick’s term, that makes the musical material “competent to the spirit”. “Tones, which through rhythm and harmony are combines into melody and into the musical work of art, are not immediately natural sounds but are produced through mechanical art; not merely in order to subordinate them externally to the will of the striving spirit that rules them, but also to purify them of all special, finite meaning that, as an alien content, would disturb and cloud the absolutely spiritual content with which they are to be imbued”. (Dahlhaus, 1989, pp. 100-101)

B2: “Sound art theory posits a novel artistic context, “sound art”, because the existing context, music—here construed as an ahistorical caricature of (absolute) music spelled as “Music”—is deemed acritical or, indeed, too weighed down by historical, technical, or institutional baggage. Sound art then sees this de-historicized isolation of sound as a subversive move. In its attempt to distance itself from “Music”, sound art theory ironically commits a move strictly homologous to the construction of absolute music: it extracts from a historically multivalent music the single medium of sound (and then wonders why sound art cannot move beyond the tenets of medium specificity). Indeed, sound art theory will remain incapable of providing an adequate critique of music if its scope remains limited to sound /…/ While my approach differs from new musicology and sound art theory, it shares the historical specificity of Dahlhaus’s critique wherein absolute music is recognized as a temporal rupture in the organization of music as a concept. The task is then to move beyond music’s reduction from a previously multivalent form to the monodimentional medium (or, more accurately, the sense) of sound, while ultimately exceeding either paradigm. Indeed, if a group of German writers could so thoroughly alter the concept of music, why cannot music undergo another equally significant change?” (Barrett, 2016, pp. 89-90)

A2: “Art has been “sick” for almost fifty years, so it is about time for it to get well again. Maybe a cure will get art back on track. The art historians provide diagnoses or continue to study traditions until the manifestations have gone astray. But have we really understood how important our own time is for understanding art? We cannot restore the old roads towards some end, which would legitimate the roads taken. We need to consider why we have taken these old roads and why we are attracted to these new ones. We do not have a reliable map anymore. We have a multitude of roads and different houses inhabited by different art forms, changing shape constantly. Thus, to point out one road as the correct one (and to build a canon) becomes a mere gesture of nostalgia. But a clash of systems is signaled by the use of the term “contemporary” as opposed to “modern” in art. There seems to be only one characteristic that all art today has in common: time. The term ”contemporary art” does not say anything about what it looks like, where it is created, and for what purpose. The only thing it expresses is that it is created now, and we must prevent people from thinking that this is the next step in the progressive machinery of modernity. This old story died as the only theory of art, as Danto writes, during the sixties and after that we have had post-historical art ( characterized by not being developmental). However, this situation is confusing. What we have today is a manifold of positions, a non-reducible pluralism of theories, retromania, and newly invented art forms in the age of digital culture, where a sort of incoherence and complexity rules. This is only a problem if we think of it as a new step (upwards) towards completion. If, on the other hand, we accept this broken crystal and not try to mend it or try to create from its ruins some semi-structured line of development. This situation is new and this might be the best climate for creation in the entire history of art. Art lives in fertile times that set no limitations on creation. Nevertheless, of course, reality is less permissive and art theory (the house) can dismantled [sic] and can dismiss some of its former inhabitants. But the manifold of theories, internally contradicting each other, makes common taste something that belongs to the dark eighteenth century when art disappeared into the hands of the newly created art system and the newly established philosophical discipline, aesthetics /…/ The pluralism of our time might be understood as a loss of direction, as an expression of laissez-faire attitude, and of the idea that everything goes and has the same value in the end. We cannot have the normativity of art according to it. This is part of this view that is ultimately wrong. When something is cultural and inscribed in history, it changes. But it is difficult to even approach the artwold of today with the goal of creating yet a new layer that we can reduce to something that we can defend in principle. When, as today, this assumption is applied to a mixed culture, it obviously becomes confusing. As a result, a culture lacking one dominant theory is understood as lacking theory altogether. Is it correct to talk about the death of art when this theory is replaced by countless versions of old and new theories, or a combination of them?” (Entzenberg, 2013, pp. 18-19)

C1: “Around the turn of the millennium, there was a palpable increase in attention to corporeal parameters among many composers of my generation. Moreover, the confrontation with Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘musique concrete instrumentale’ strengthened my conviction that I had touched upon an issue that had been a late presence in postwar composed music for some time. The striking upsurge in the popularity of Lachenmann’s music at the end of the 1990s and the renewed interest in intermediality and interdisciplinary collaborations in the performing arts convinced me that the cross-disciplinary experiment had gained in relevance again after several decades of relative calm. In terms of music history, approaching musical performance as choreography or theatre is clearly nothing new. And yet other motivations seemed to be at play in today’s compositional experiments that were different from the impulses I recognised in Mauricio Kagel’s instrumental theatre, the multimedia happenings of the Fluxus movement, and similar historical explorations on the boarders of music, choreography and theatre /…/ At the end of the 1990s, the status of the music-making body was still an under-explored theme in composed music, although the body had been ubiquitous in other performing art forms (particularly contemporary dance) since the beginning of the decade. In parallel with this—and this parallel is probably characteristic of the spirit of the time—the body had also become the subject of emerging interdisciplinary theory.” (Craenen, 2014, pp. 7-8)

C2: “…a spatial interpretation of the listening experience can shed a different light on both the fascination and incomprehension that a composition like 4’33’’ can still evoke. In the silence of 4’33’’ it is not only a matter of emancipating environmental, aleatoric, or noise-like sounds. One of the effects of experiencing the silence of the work /…/, whether or not a side effect, is an increased awareness of collective physical presence. In that respect, the prophetic nature ascribed to 4’33’’ gains an extra dimension. The spatial aspect of the silent music we have discussed resonates with a number of global priority shifts in art music after the serialism of the 1950s and early 1960s: the growing attention to “perceptual realism”, the prioritising of action and the unique nature of the performance, the rethinking of the relationship between composer, performer, and audience, the aspiration towards interactive models, and, more recently, the aim for inclusive, ecological models of musical experience.” (Craenen, 2014, pp. 52-53)

C3: “Compositional ambition is no longer only directed at making the music sound as good as possible but now tries to involve the body that thinks, experiences, and performs the music in the very composition: the music-making and, to a lesser extent, the music-perceiving body present themselves as potential musical themes. Or so it appears at first sight. But what does all this mean, exactly, if we think through the musical consequences of these issues? What freedom remains to compose sound elements if the instrumental body itself becomes the subject of the musical programme? There is still a considerable difference between a change of perspective where the body becomes visible in performance and a genuine inclusion of the body as material in a compositional practice. As the body becomes visible and audible, a new set of problems arises, leading to the beginnings of a shift in what is usually considered abstract or concrete in music practice. If music becomes so concrete that it coincides fully with the instrumental action of the performing body, it will become extremely difficult to identify anything in this music that can be abstracted from its performance /…/ In contemporary music practice /…/ a tendency can be seen in many composers since the 1960s towards the “concrete”. The young composer Simon Steen-Andersen (2010, 54) labels this tendency as aiming for a “hyper-idiomatic” approach to music, a tendency that, in his view, reaches its tipping point at the moment when performance and sound ideal coincide. From that point on, the possibility of reversing the hierarchy in the musical creation process arises: the ultimate goal towards which the performer aims is no longer the sound ideal but instrumental actions that have now become autonomous, thus degrading sound output, as it were, to a variable by-product. This provocative claim makes it clear that the issue of the abstract and the concrete are far more than a semantic debate. The allocation of abstract or concrete qualities to specific actors in musical practice typifies both the allocation of roles and responsibility and, more generally, the relationship between composition and performance in practice.” (Craenen, 2014, pp. 62-63)

B3: “For Oliveros—as with Boundry and Lorenz—“music is not an object but a process engaging bodies, time, and space”. Like the other artistis in this book, their project posits a form of composition based on radical forms of commonality. As a process of engaging bodies, time, and spaces, these artists rearticulate a music beyond sound that stands both in dialogue with and as a challenge to contemporary art and its institutions. Not simply an escape or an exit, they compose collective forms through an iterative engagement with the past. In After Art, Joselit concludes, “One need not exit the art world or denigrate its capacities. Instead, we must recognize and exploit its potential power in newly creative and progressive ways”. (Barrett, 2016, p. 167)

C4: “The image of the music-making body that comes into focus at the end of this study is one of a body that can operate as a zero point of compositional thinking. All the paths we have trodden, as speculative as some of them may have been, have ultimately led us to a music-making body that not only is present as an acting subject but also thinks and perceives the music, as such preceding the positions of listener, performer, and composer. At the zero point, we find a body experiencing music that cannot be localised but is situated, that is not scalable but certainly concrete. Translated into compositional practice, this may inspire us to a way of composing that attempts to bridge the gap between composition, performance, and experience by taking the physical reality of music-making and experiencing music as a starting point (perhaps not for the first time), without needing to hark back to a romantic “naturalness” or mystic intuition of the body. On the contrary, the intention is to make the inevitability of the body tangible through its musical transformations and metamorphoses.” (Craenen, 2014, p. 262)