“Rethinking and putting the avant-garde into perspective would help us understand a new episteme and conceptual apparatus that overarches the art of the 20^th century” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2)

“In art there is no such thing as perfection. And a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor’s work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing. When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative. The result is not new; but it is new insomuch as it is a different approach” (Duchamp, 1973, p. 123)

Introduction

On May 3, 2014 I had the luck to experience a feeling that could provoke the envy of almost any curious and inquisitive musician in search for novel musical experiences. I was lucky enough to put my hands on a replica of a medieval organ and improvise in the Orgelpark, a concert venue located in the heart of Amsterdam. That improvisation was my first musical encounter not only with a replica of a medieval instrument but also with an organ. Before that occasion my knowledge about organs was very limited and I knew little about how to perform with an organ. Being an amateur self-taught pianist my only advantage compared to a person who has never played an organ was that the keyboard of a piano resembles that of an organ – although in that situation the keys of the medieval organ were considerably larger than those of my piano and the former had two keyboards producing different sounds whereas a piano has only one keyboard composed of a larger amount of octaves. I knew nothing about bellows, stops, pipes and most importantly about the music that should typically be played on a medieval organ from around 1480. So I played just whatever came to my head in that specific moment passing through contemporary genres like jazz and blues. When I started playing the initial notes of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody I expected that some expert organist would have shouted his head off at my sacrilegious act. Surprisingly, not only I was not able to see much embarrassment around me, but I could even hear a pianist accompanying my chords with the melody usually sung by Freddy Mercury on a grand piano located on the opposite side of the concert hall. Even Johan Luijmes, the artistic director of the Orgelpark did not blame me for having ruined the instrument but encouraged me to experiment with organs in the future.

This experience occurred during a break from one of the symposia that the Orgelpark is currently organizing to gather the opinions of expert organists, organ designers and builders in order to reflect on possible ways of building a new Baroque organ. More precisely, the dream of the project team of the Orgelpark is to accomplish a dual goal: on the one hand the new organ will be designed in a way that Baroque music - particularly that of Johann Sebastian Bach - can be played on it; on the other, the organ “should also make its sound accessible in an innovative way, thus giving composers the possibility to create new music” (Peters, 2014, p. 1). Both the surprising reactions to my improvisational experience and the dual goal of the Orgelpark mirror a common understanding of music as involving much more than aesthetic and perceptual pleasures. For the project team of the Orgelpark, the organ is not only a musical instrument but also a technological artefact, “a device that generates questions and answers” as well as the materialization of aesthetic and philosophical claims of the actors that are involved with its construction or performance (Peters, 2014, p.2; Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010). In this paper I will analyze how the project team of the Orgelpark is trying to materialize their claims about music and its functions through the construction of the new Baroque organ. In particular, I examine from artistic as well as philosophical perspectives how and for which purposes these actors are dealing with history as a reference to recreate past musical cultures for the contemporary musical scene.

The activity of reconstructing past musical cultures started around the 1960s when several Western musicians started to play music on period instruments – musical instruments from the period of the music being played – and to study historical sources about past performances. From this the practice of historically informed performance (hereinafter HIP) developed with the aim of reproducing ‘authentic’ sounds and performances of earlier eras. From interviews conducted with researchers and musicians involved in the project team of the Orgelpark[1] and observations carried out during my visit to the concert venue, I will firstly show that a new aesthetic episteme[2] is emerging within HIP practices. This significantly differs from the initial (orthodox) approaches to early music based on more objectivist and empiricist performances to be achieved through adherence to the available scientific documentation about past musical cultures. This new aesthetic episteme, I will argue, can be conceptualized as a continuation of an aesthetic mentality that firstly originated amongst avant-garde artists more than a century ago. Avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp sought to substitute the conventional artistic approaches of imitation or representation of past practices with new experimental strategies “meant to reconstruct and reinvent the past” by assigning new meanings to traditional artworks (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2). I argue that although the project team of the Orgelpark shows a general willingness to move away from the orthodox, imitational approach to early music, it could be more aware of the potential benefits that an experimental approach could generate by taking inspiration from the artistic and philosophical ideas of Duchamp. The French-American artist can provide suitable theoretical considerations capable of helping the project team of the Orgelpark to achieve its dual goal of innovating the contemporary musical scene with tradition. Following Duchamp, tradition can be kept alive through an experimental (re)discovery of the past meant to assign new meanings to past artworks – or, for the Orgelpark, to sounds – for contemporary and future audiences. This paper is not intended only for those involved in the project of building the new Baroque organ or in similar activities, but is also directed to whoever intends to broaden his/her understanding of music through philosophical considerations or join the historical performance debate. 

Understanding the organ as a technological artefact

Before entering the analysis of the different philosophical ideas that lie behind the construction of the new Baroque organ, I believe that readers should firstly be aware of the common conception of music that the people involved in the Orgelpark seem to hold. Indeed, I believe that any discussion about authenticity, originality or innovation in music cannot be undertaken without reflecting on broader considerations on the function and properties of music itself.  The first question that might be asked to those involved in this project could be: so what? Why should one attempt to recreate old sound qualities produced by an ancient instrument? After all, we can still survive and our ears be pleased with the music that circulates nowadays. This consideration could be valid if we theorize the organ only as a musical instrument that produces a certain set of notes written down in scores. Hans Fidom, the director of the research centre of the Orgelpark, suggests instead that the activities that are currently taking place in the Orgelpark like the construction of a new Baroque organ involve much more than the production of potentially beautiful notes. In order to explain his philosophical conception of music he often referred to the concept of musicking, originally developed by Christopher Small in 1998. With the creation of this new term, Small intends to criticize an old but still persistent musicological approach that focuses on musical analysis of written scores without taking the social contexts of their creation and reception into account. In contrast, he favors a new musicological approach that considers both the production and listening of music as situated activities, entirely dependent upon their context of use. His idea is that music should not be seen as an object but as a process. For this reason he suggests to substitute the noun ‘music’ with the verb to musick, indicating any human activity that relates to music performance that lasts in time and occurs within a certain space. In Small’s words:

“To musick is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance […]. Using the concept of musicking as a human encounter, we can ask the wider and more interesting question: What does it mean that this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?” (Small, 1998, pp. 9 – 10 as quoted by Peters, 2014, p.9)

The adoption of this concept allows two main considerations: the first is that it is possible to deal with questions regarding music and its functions also from disciplines that are not commonly included in musicological analyses[3]; the second is that it becomes obvious that musical notes or scores cannot coincide with the totality of human activities associated with music and that the organ is not only to be conceived as a musical device that produces notes. Hans Fidom conceptualizes the organ not only as a musical instrument but also as a ‘musical time machine’. In his words:

“The organ is in my opinion a musical time machine. Anything you can say about organs immediately reflects developments in political or artistic kinds of histories. It’s not just about sounds, or just about arts: it’s in fact about life itself. The organ is a mirror, it’s always a mirror of anything in culture. So if you listen to a medieval organ like the one we have here in the Orgelpark you can imagine how these sounds penetrated the world around 1480, which is completely different from ours. So it gets us into contact with that and that’s why I call it ‘time machine’ or ‘time travelling machine’” (Interview with Hans Fidom).     

Tackling the same issue, Peters (2009) explains how, as a result of several restorations these old instruments “can be considered as coral reefs, containing the material and artistic sediments of ages. They are vehicles of information about how the instruments were designed and built, how they were meant to sound, and how they were part of musical practices, both secular and religious” (p. 5). In another article, Peters (2014) refers to the organ as a technological artefact that can help reveal the intentions and believes of the different cultures that have played, built or restored it. Adopting these conceptions, we can conceptualize it as a “device that generates questions and answers” as well as the materialization of aesthetic as well as philosophical claims by the actors that are involved with it (Peters, 2014, p. 2; Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010). Similarly, I adopt the same approach by analyzing how the project team Orgelpark is trying to materialize their claims about music. More precisely, since their aim is to build an organ that could reproduce Baroque music – particularly that of Bach – and to render it aesthetically interesting for contemporary musical practices, I will try to analyze how they intend to materialize their claims of an ‘authentic Baroque sound’ and how they seek to render it innovative through the building of a new organ. This of course raises many philosophical questions like ‘what is an authentic sound?’, ‘is it possible to know exactly a sound from a past musical culture?’, ‘shall we accurately imitate certain aesthetic properties of sound qualities from the past or rather experiment with sounds in order to innovate the contemporary musical scene through tradition?’. In the following section will attempt to report their answers to these questions as well as to locate them within the broader historical performance debate.

The changing nature of HIP: towards the consolidation of a (new) experimental approach

Reflecting on my improvisational experience with the replica of the medieval organ at the Orgelpark, I hypothesize that I would not have enjoyed the same degree of liberty in the historical context of the German composer Paul Hindemith. Indeed, his historicist attitude during the commemoration of the year of Bach’s death in 1950 led him to believe that if we wish to experience the original sound of Bach we need to objectively study how the instruments from his era were built and played: only by doing so we can wish to experience a similar listening effect and honor the composer’s intention (Sherman, 2003). A decade after Hindemith, musicians and historians started to play music on period instruments and to investigate scientific documents about past musical cultures (Butt, 2004). From this the practice of historically informed performance (hereinafter HIP) developed with the aim of reproducing ‘authentic’ sounds and performances of earlier eras through period instruments. By contrast, these practices were heavily criticized by Theodor W. Adorno from the early-1950s who believed that only through the “‘progressive’ modern performance resources contemporary societies could reveal the full import of Bach’s music” (Butt, 2004, p. 4). Here lies the assumption that even the most accurate reconstruction of past instruments will not allow us to understand Bach, because contrarily to what Hindemith thought, Bach was certainly not content with the means of production of his time but conversely “stood head and shoulders above the pitiful concerns of its own age” (ibid.). This pessimistic diagnosis was later echoed by Pinchas Zukerman who argued that “the thought that the shrill and rasping Baroque organs are capable of capturing the long waves of the lapidary, large figures is pure superstition. Bach’s music is separated from the general level of his age by an astronomical distance” (Butt, 2004). Nevertheless, according to Butt (2004) this traditional approach to HIP persisted almost unchanged until the early 1990s when HIP scholars and musicians started to realize that “instead of reaching some sort of understanding with the composer, HIP in its orthodox mode dealt mainly with empirical evidence, thus substituting objectivism for subjectivism, relativism for critical appreciation” (p. 8).

All the interviewees at the Orgelpark followed this point by agreeing that it is practically impossible to know exactly the sound of Bach or experience the exact same listening effect of earlier eras. Peters (2009) pointed out that in the process of restoring an existing organ something is inevitably lost. In order to reconstruct historical sound qualities from the past, one must look at how ancient organs were built. The problem is that as the result of bad restorations, many original parts of these ancient organs have been modified or destroyed: we will never thus be able to know exactly how these organs were built if we wish to reproduce the original sound. There seems to be an understanding that scientific practices alone will never be able to serve the purposes of recreating an authentic sound. Hans Fidom adds to this his explicit criticism to whoever claims to be able to produce an authentic sound: “any pretention that I can perform the world of Bach in an authentic way to say as if he himself would play is in fact intolerable”, and again, “They [referring to the adherent of the orthodox approach to HIP] pretend to be authentic but they don’t really try to understand. Not at all! But that’s the obligation, you should try as good as possible and then be very humble as soon as you enter the organ bench” (Interview with Hans Fidom). Johan Luijmes also indicates that attempting to imitate exactly the sound of Bach with an excessive objectivism and empiricism would inevitably lead to a detriment of the listening experience:

“The way my teachers used to deal with past musical cultures has nothing, or very little to do with music. It has only to do with how they thought people have played. For the people who were not interested in authentic practices they found it strange. Those HIP practitioners stopped playing music for aesthetic purposes and only thought about how it was played in the past without caring about the listening effect. I was educated in this fashion (that strongly aimed at authenticity) but now I am much more liberal in how people play Bach” (Interview with Johan Luijmes)

It is thus possible to notice an acknowledgment that the orthodox approach to early music practices[4] not only inevitably entails problems related to the limited scientific documentation available about how organs from the past were built or performed - and, as a consequence, the impossibility to reconstruct an authentic sound exactly as it was originally perceived - but also raises doubts about the usefulness for contemporary audiences of an approach that seeks to imitate certain aesthetic qualities inherent in ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ sounds or performance practices. The concerns expressed by Johan Luijmes reveal that many previous attempts to reproduce an authentic sound as well as performance practices have focused too extensively on emulating technical and stylistic aspects of past performances and often failed to create new cultures of listening and performance with a present significance for contemporary performers and listeners[5]. As the dual goal of the Orgelpark implies, the project team will not only attempt to reproduce the sound qualities of an organ that would potentially by approved by Bach but put particular emphasis on the innovative nature of the sound that they intend to create. In a recent article Peters (2014), referring to the new Baroque organ that the Orgelpark plans to build, describes it as a “‘hyperorgan’ that provides the organ player and the composer with a range of yet unheard sounds and possibilities” (p. 4). He continues by explaining in which ways the new organ could potentially innovate the contemporary musical scene:

“The new Baroque organ translates aspects of complex historical musical cultures in order to create new cultures of performance and listening for the twenty-first century. Not only will the organ offer the possibility to play every pipe individually in any combination through the MIDI console, it will also be wired so that it can be amplified electrically. An aspect of the design plan is to have loudspeakers in the organ case. This enables the somewhat mind-boggling situation where the organ pipes could be sampled to give the organist or the composer the possibility to combine the material sound of the organ with the digital samples that can be manipulated. […] This combination of the material and digital might be one of the more defining aspects of the musicking practices that could evolve around the new Baroque organ” (p. 10)

I believe that a new aesthetic episteme[6] characterizes the approach of the project team of the Orgelpark to early music. My claim is that this aesthetic episteme is a protraction of an aesthetic attitude that firstly emerged when avant-garde artists attempted to give new meanings to artistic practices more than a century ago. Moreover, I agree with Buzatu (2014) when she claims that “if we are asked to concentrate thousands of pages devoted to the avant-garde phenomena and label them with a single […] term, that would be experimentalism” (p. 3). Thus a new, experimental approach is emerging within HIP practices, one that does not seek to recreate historical musical cultures through imitation but rather, through personal “non-mimetic, defamiliarized, and innovative” interpretations of the past (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). With these new considerations it now becomes clearer why the people that on that May 3^rd were attending the symposium at the Orgelpark welcomed my ‘strange’, experimental way of performing with the replica of a period instrument.  

Experimentalism in fact substitutes the search for beautiful ‘authentic’ sounds to be judged according to certain aesthetic criteria with the consideration that the recreation of historical musical cultures is not a goal in itself, but is a learning process. This is meant both for understanding the intentions of the original creator of the artwork in his context – in this case would be trying to understand Bach and not only the greatness of his music – and, perhaps most importantly, for self-understanding, namely understanding ourselves and the reality that surrounds us here and now (Duchamp, 1957)[7]. The world in which we live in is indeed incredibly different from the one in which Bach wrote his music: it is much more diversified and characterized by the widespread “recognition that we are confronting with many levels of reality” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). For this reason, experimentalism would better fit our historical context, since, as Buzatu (2014) argues, “through experimental exercises, different versions of reality become co-present and the intrinsic polymorphism of our world is revealed. The experiment – scientific or artistic – is the most radical re-vision of reality” (p.5).  

Elsewhere in the paper I have mentioned the concept of aesthetic episteme. This was coined by Alina Buzatu and she lucidly explains it in her article Theories of the Avant-garde: Prolegomena to a new aesthetic episteme:

“We ought to explain the use of a paradoxical phrase: aesthetic episteme. The two terms (aesthesis and episteme as two modes of cognition, emotional and rational) collide, but only at the superficial level. Episteme is a term coined by Michel Foucault, that has become intensely visible in the contemporary theoretical discourse. It somehow covers the cognitive unconscious of an epoch (i.e. a set of fundamental assumptions not entirely visible for the ones operating with them)” (Buzatu, 2014, p.2).

I believe that the experimental approach of the Orgelpark is indeed characterized by an aesthetic episteme. In the rest of her article she attempts to render visible those “fundamental assumptions [that are] not entirely visible for those operating with them” and explains that “rethinking and putting the avant-garde into perspective would help us understand [this] new episteme that overarches the art of the 20^th century” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2). This is precisely what I intend to do in the rest of this paper. I will firstly show why being conscious of art theories[8] is of fundamental importance in the creation of artworks like the new Baroque organ in the contemporary artistic condition. Secondly, I will attempt to show how Duchamp can help understand the benefits of an experimental approach by providing innovative experimental strategies.

The importance of theories in the production of (experimental) artworks in the contemporary artistic condition

The project team of the Orgelpark indeed shows a general willingness to move away from the orthodox, imitational approach to early music and promotes the construction of the Baroque organ as an experimental system[9]. However, I believe it could be even more aware of the potential benefits that an experimental approach could generate by reflecting on other theories that could give value to and guide its experimental approach. Indeed, I had the impression from the interviews that the arguments that justified the choice of adopting an experimental approach to early music mostly revolved around the mere – although valid - critique of the orthodox approach and its defects. It needs to be remembered that the project is still at its very early stages but I believe following Arthur Danto (1964) that, particularly in our contemporary artistic situation, solid theoretical frameworks are needed to make sense of the creation of any artistic work like the new Baroque organ. This consideration deserves a brief elucidation.

Danto was the first analytical philosopher who tried to conceptualize artworks as essentially dependent on art theories rather than on the sole direct aesthetic experience of the spectator. This philosophical attitude was inspired by the cultural revolutions brought forward by the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s characterized by the inclusion of common objects in art institutions and societies assigning them the status of art (Horvath, 2013). Following those changes it has indeed become useless to declare that artworks should be thought of as objects with certain intrinsic aesthetic or perceptual properties. In 1964, Andy Warhol[10] had exhibited the Brillo Boxes (as in Figure 1) and elevated them as artworks even if they were almost identical to those found on the shelves of supermarkets.

Danto comes to the conclusion that what makes art nowadays cannot be the sole aesthetic properties of an artwork. Since amongst two perceptually and aesthetically indistinguishable items one can be treated as an artwork while the other as a common object, for Danto there must be something else that determines the status of art, something “external to the artwork itself” (Danto, 2003, p. 20). Aesthetic and perceptual dimensions cannot anymore by themselves define art, but artworks in order to be recognized as such necessitate an extra-material domain, unperceivable by our senses but only retrievable by our intellect through reflections and imaginations. The eye cannot by itself grasp the differences between artwork and non-artworks, but these differences will be determined by the relations that link the artefact to elements that the eye, and in music also the ear, cannot detect (Danto, 1964; Danto, 2003). This is when philosophy comes into play, whose task is not to formulate a list of intrinsic aesthetic properties that differentiate two objects, but rather to search for theoretical explanations that could explain something that our senses alone are unable to grasp. The question of what distinguishes artistic spheres from the other realms is the paradox on which Danto’s analytical philosophy sits: hence, to answer the ontological question posed by the avant-garde we need philosophy, since it is a question almost entirely dependent on our minds. For Danto in short, we need philosophy to produce art. Art cannot exist without a theory that assigns the status of art to an object (Danto, 1964).

I thus believe that the Orgelpark, thanks to the mental openness of the people involved in the project whose admitted intention is “not to impose any sort of musical understanding” (Interview with Hans Fidom), could further reflect on theories that might support and give value to its new experimental approach to early music. I will try to show how some philosophical standpoints of Marcel Duchamp[11], one of the first avantguardists, can help developing valid justifications as to why an experimental approach is needed, what are its potential benefits and how it can contribute for the Orgelpark’s dual goal of innovating through the recreation of past musical culture for new practices of musicking.   

Seizing experimental strategies from Marcel Duchamp

It might appear odd to believe that Marcel Duchamp, mostly famous for the artistic revolutions that he provoked in visual arts since the early-1910s[12], could help an institution that seeks to recreate past musical cultures. However as I have tried to show, by adopting Christopher Small’s conception of musicking it becomes possible to deal with questions regarding music from disciplines that are not commonly included in musicological analyses such as philosophy or art history. Not only it is possible but, following Danto (1964) this has become of fundamental importance after the revolutions of the avant-garde that shocked the traditional idea of art based on direct aesthetic experience. Avant-garde artists like Duchamp – and later, as I have shown, Warhol – promoted a new, conceptual art based on the fundamental critique of those artist that produced ‘retinal’ paintings, only aimed at the satisfaction of the eye. In Duchamp’s opinion, art had to be relocated “at the service of the mind” (Duchamp, 1957, p.2). Art should be in this view an intellectual expression rather than about the production of something intended only for aesthetic contemplation[13].

In 1912 Duchamp abandoned painting and dedicated the rest of his artistic career almost entirely to the creation of readymades. Readymades can be conceptualized as a manufactured objects transformed into art simply by their selection and placement in an art institution. As the name already indicates, Duchamp shows that it is possible to make art and innovate through art with something that already exists in reality[14]. For Duchamp, it is the deliberate choice of the artist that counts much more than the actual fabrication of any work of art (Duchamp, 1957). In his view, artists through the power of their imagination can rehabilitate and regenerate something that was originated in the past and keep it alive by assigning it new meanings and by transposing them in new contexts of use. Moreover, this process of regeneration can also occur through intentional distortions as the case of his infamous readymade L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) shows.  

L.H.O.O.Q. is a photographical reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to which Duchamp provocatively added a mustache and beard. This is an example of a “readymade aided” meaning that Duchamp in this circumstance did not expose an object as he had found it but added graphic details and a title to it. It is precisely through these distortions of the original artwork that Duchamp could accomplish a number of innovations. Firstly, he was able to assign radically new meanings to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa : he used tradition – in this case an extraordinarily traditional painting such as the Mona Lisa – to promote ideas that could have a present significance such as the endorsement of a new role for femininity, the exaltation of androgyny and other issues of gender, sexuality and identity[15]. Secondly, Duchamp managed not only to promote new ideas but to reintroduce the Mona Lisa itself in the present.  As Lafarge (1996) points out, Duchamp’s achievement with L.H.O.O.Q was “to bring the Mona Lisa back from the dead. By attacking its iconic status, he removed it from historical time and brought it into the present, the only place where art can be experienced. L.H.O.O.Q was actually an act of rescue […] rather than an act of desecration” (p. 2). Thirdly and perhaps mostly importantly, given his “extreme respect and love” for his audience, Duchamp allowed other people to rethink and reinterpret both the Mona Lisa and Leonardo (Duchamp, 1957, p.1; Sgarbi, 2013). LaFarge (1996) shows indeed how important L.H.O.O.Q was in this regard: “What L.H.O.O.Q. did […] was to nominate the petrified painting as a center of activity: a subject of debate, parody, paradox, criticism, thought, and reinvention. L.H.O.O.Q. simultaneously documents Duchamp’s thought processes and implicitly invites further interventions” (p. 2). T. S. Eliot (1919) and Arthur Danto (1964) can help to give value to this point. In 1919, Eliot wrote in his Tradition and the Individual Talent:

“What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered [emphasis added] and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new”  (Elliot, 1919, p.1)

Elliot here in short argues that once a new artwork is created, the whole history of art changes. Just like through Picasso we now look at the paintings of Cezanne with a new eye, so Duchamp did with Leonardo. The distortions operated by Duchamp to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa spurred interest in both the artist and its artwork thus leading more people to look at his art with new eyes. LaFarge (1996) points out that in this new climate, several new considerations and reflections were made about the Mona Lisa. Certainly one of the most remarkable of these was Lillian Schwartz’s discovery that the chief model for the Mona Lisa could have been Leonardo himself (LaFarge, 1996). Duchamp thus, through intentional distortions of an ‘original’ artwork, allowed other artists to reinvent, rediscover Leonardo and to create new art through new art theories. This exactly goes in accordance to Danto’s (1964) conception of artistic matrix, produced by the number of artistic predicates[16] available. A predicate for Danto is what makes possible to distinguish art from non-art: for example, by arguing that art “is impressionist” we create an ‘artworld’ – a term coined by Danto to indicate the cultural context to which art is dependent – in which impressionism would be a qualitative criterion that distinguishes artworks from non-artworks. In his article Danto shows that an artistic matrix will always allow 2ⁿ possible art forms (ⁿ being the number of predicates). This means that we can create more art by adding predicates to the matrix of predicates that we already have in place to understand art. By creating a distorted ‘replica’ Duchamp has enlarged our understanding of art through art theory. However, this whole process of addition of art theory was not performed by Duchamp alone. This consideration leads to the second experimental strategy that I take from Duchamp – the first could be called intentional distortion – namely, embrace of otherness.

In 1957, the elderly Duchamp argues that in the creative act there is always a gap between intention and realization. This means that artists are never able to express themselves fully. For this reason, as Duchamp argues, their art “must be refined as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator or the audience” (Duchamp, 1957, p. 139-140). In the end of his article he specifies that “all in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (Duchamp, 1957, p. 140). In sum in order to act creatively, to innovate, one always inevitably needs contribution from other people, an embrace of otherness. Moreover, in The Great Trouble with Art in This Country (1946) Duchamp offered a more detailed view of the sort of otherness that he preferred:

“It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass, the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. From his Impression d’Afrique I got the general approach. This play of his which I saw with Apollinaire helped me greatly on one side of my expression. I saw at once I could use Roussel as an influence. I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter” (Duchamp, 1946, p. 21).

Duchamp preferred being influenced by a writer instead than from a painter because he, similarly to what Small does with music, considered painting as a human activity, as “one means of expression among others, and not a complete end for life at all” (Duchamp & Peterson, 1975, p. 136). He also adds: “In other words, painting should not be exclusively retinal or visual; it should have to do with the gray matter, with our urge for understanding. This is generally what I love. I didn’t want to pin myself down to one little circle, and I tried at least to be as universal as I could” (ibid.). By considering painting as a human activity, as one means of expression among many other, Duchamp is essentially suggesting that an encounter with other perspectives is necessary for his “urge for understanding” (ibid.). Seeking to understand ourselves and reality that surrounds us through an experimental approach requires thus an encounter with others – an embrace of otherness – so that different versions of reality become co-present in order for the intrinsic polymorphism of our world to be revealed.   

Conclusion

In this paper I have shown that a new aesthetic episteme is emerging within HIP practices as I could observe in the Baroque organ project of the Orgelpark. I have suggested that this derives from an older aesthetic mentality that firstly originated with avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp, who sought to experiment with tradition in new and innovative ways. Under the experimental approach of the Orgelpark I argue that attempting to reproduce certain sound qualities through the new Baroque organ is only one step if the goal is to understand, and not merely imitate historical musical cultures. The next step to undertake would be to experiment with the sounds of new Baroque organ to understand Bach and, as Duchamp would concur, to keep him alive in the contemporary musical scene. I have proposed two experimental strategies from the works of Duchamp – and many other strategies could be similarly retrieved from other avant-garde artists - that can be used to enhance the learning process of the Orgelpark and innovate through the recreation of historical cultures. The first shows that traditions can be rediscovered and past artists can be interpreted with new eyes through an intentional distortion of artworks as Duchamp did with his L.H.O.O.Q. The Orgelpark could act similarly and through the affordances of technological devices – MIDI console and loudspeakers – connected to the organ (such as alteration or manipulation of sound qualities) rediscover the sound of Bach with new ears, stimulate discussions and interest in Bach and create new art through new artistic reflections and theories, as Danto’s conception of the artistic matrix demonstrates. Nevertheless, to add new and more predicates to the artistic matrix an embrace of otherness is inevitably needed and, as Duchamp suggests, one could be inspired by views coming from foreign disciplines. Peters (2014) argued that the Orgelpark tries to attract many interested publics such as “organ players, composers, and organ music audiences […] but also scholars working on sound, innovation, artistic research, and listening practices” (p. 2). I suggest that the Orgelpark should extend this list also to people that are foreigners to processes of organ building or organ music. The Orgelpark should attract musicians that typically do not play Baroque music but rather jazz, blues or any other contemporary genre. The Orgelpark could thus keep Bach alive by allowing audiences to look at Bach with new eyes and experiment with the new Baroque organ in new ways and innovative ways.

References

Bijsterveld, K., & Peters, P. F. (2010). Composing Claims on Musical Instrument Development: A Science and Technology Studies' Contribution. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35(2), 106-121.

Butt, J. (2004). Playing with history: the historical approach to musical performance. Cambridge University Press.

Cook, N. (1998). Music: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Danto, A. (1964). The Artworld. The journal of philosophy, 571-584.

Danto, A. C. (1981). The transfiguration of the commonplace: a philosophy of art. Harvard University Press.

Danto, A. C. (2003). The abuse of beauty: Aesthetic and the concept of art. Open Court Publishing.

Danto, A. C., & Greenberg, C. (1997). After the end of art: Contemporary art and the pale of history (Vol. 197). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Duchamp, M. (1946). The Great Trouble with Art in this Country. Interview to Marcel Duchamp by Johnson Sweeney. In Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 4-5.

Duchamp, M. (1957). The creative act. M. Dachy (Ed.). Sub Rosa.

Duchamp, M. (1966). Apropos of ‘Readymades,’. Art and Artists, 1(4), 47.

Duchamp, M., & Peterson, E. (1975). The essential writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du sel. M. Sanouillet (Ed.). Thames and Hudson.

Eliot, T. S. (1919). Tradition and the individual talent. Selected essays, 4, 2-3.

Sgarbi, V. (2013). Il sogno della pittura: come leggere un'opera d'arte. New York: Universe Publishing.

Haynes, B. (2007). The End of Early Music: a period performer's history of music for the twenty-first century. Oxford University Press.

Horvath, G. (2013). Why the Brillo Box? The recovery of the aesthetic. In Applied Social Sciences: Philosohy and Theology, Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Latour, B., & Lowe, A. (2011). The migration of the aura or how to explore the original through its facsimiles. Switching Codes, 275-297.

Mink, J. (2000). Marcel Duchamp. Art as Anti-Art. Taschen Verlag.

Moure, G., & Duchamp, M. (2009). Marcel Duchamp: Works, Writings and Interviews. Polígrafa Edition.

Peters, P. (2009). Retracing old organ sound. Authenticity and the structure of artistic arguments. Journal for contemporary philosophy. 1 (2), 5-19.

Peters, P. (2014). How to build an authentic replica? The new Baroque organ in the Orgelpark as a research organ. Maastricht University.

Sherman, B. D. (2003). Inside early music: conversations with performers. Oxford University Press.

Small, C. (2011). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Wesleyan University Press.

Weiss, J. S. (1994). The popular culture of modern art: Picasso, Duchamp, and avant-gardism. Yale University Press. Newcastle, pp. 37-44.

Images

Figure 1. N.d. (2013a). Warhol’s Brillo Box at the Salone del Mobile, Milan, 2013

Retrieved on June 2, 2014 from http://www.yellowtrace.com.au/claire-rosen-photography/

Figure 2. N.d. (2013b). L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) by Marcel Duchamp. Retrieved on June 4, 2014 from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vyWZDurtC6Y/UQsGd7BSzVI/AAAAAAAACTg/fvG_lucuQkI/s1600/lhooq.jpg  

INNOVATING WITH PAST MUSICAL CULTURES: REINFORCING THE EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH OF THE ORGELPARK WITH AVANT-GARDE STRATEGIES BY MARCEL DUCHAMP

“Rethinking and putting the avant-garde into perspective would help us understand a new episteme and conceptual apparatus that overarches the art of the 20^th century” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2)

“In art there is no such thing as perfection. And a creative lull occurs always when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor’s work where he dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing. When on the other hand you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an approach can be creative. The result is not new; but it is new insomuch as it is a different approach” (Duchamp, 1973, p. 123)

Introduction

On May 3, 2014 I had the luck to experience a feeling that could provoke the envy of almost any curious and inquisitive musician in search for novel musical experiences. I was lucky enough to put my hands on a replica of a medieval organ and improvise in the Orgelpark, a concert venue located in the heart of Amsterdam. That improvisation was my first musical encounter not only with a replica of a medieval instrument but also with an organ. Before that occasion my knowledge about organs was very limited and I knew little about how to perform with an organ. Being an amateur self-taught pianist my only advantage compared to a person who has never played an organ was that the keyboard of a piano resembles that of an organ – although in that situation the keys of the medieval organ were considerably larger than those of my piano and the former had two keyboards producing different sounds whereas a piano has only one keyboard composed of a larger amount of octaves. I knew nothing about bellows, stops, pipes and most importantly about the music that should typically be played on a medieval organ from around 1480. So I played just whatever came to my head in that specific moment passing through contemporary genres like jazz and blues. When I started playing the initial notes of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody I expected that some expert organist would have shouted his head off at my sacrilegious act. Surprisingly, not only I was not able to see much embarrassment around me, but I could even hear a pianist accompanying my chords with the melody usually sung by Freddy Mercury on a grand piano located on the opposite side of the concert hall. Even Johan Luijmes, the artistic director of the Orgelpark did not blame me for having ruined the instrument but encouraged me to experiment with organs in the future.

This experience occurred during a break from one of the symposia that the Orgelpark is currently organizing to gather the opinions of expert organists, organ designers and builders in order to reflect on possible ways of building a new Baroque organ. More precisely, the dream of the project team of the Orgelpark is to accomplish a dual goal: on the one hand the new organ will be designed in a way that Baroque music - particularly that of Johann Sebastian Bach - can be played on it; on the other, the organ “should also make its sound accessible in an innovative way, thus giving composers the possibility to create new music” (Peters, 2014, p. 1). Both the surprising reactions to my improvisational experience and the dual goal of the Orgelpark mirror a common understanding of music as involving much more than aesthetic and perceptual pleasures. For the project team of the Orgelpark, the organ is not only a musical instrument but also a technological artefact, “a device that generates questions and answers” as well as the materialization of aesthetic and philosophical claims of the actors that are involved with its construction or performance (Peters, 2014, p.2; Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010). In this paper I will analyze how the project team of the Orgelpark is trying to materialize their claims about music and its functions through the construction of the new Baroque organ. In particular, I examine from artistic as well as philosophical perspectives how and for which purposes these actors are dealing with history as a reference to recreate past musical cultures for the contemporary musical scene.

The activity of reconstructing past musical cultures started around the 1960s when several Western musicians started to play music on period instruments – musical instruments from the period of the music being played – and to study historical sources about past performances. From this the practice of historically informed performance (hereinafter HIP) developed with the aim of reproducing ‘authentic’ sounds and performances of earlier eras. From interviews conducted with researchers and musicians involved in the project team of the Orgelpark[1] and observations carried out during my visit to the concert venue, I will firstly show that a new aesthetic episteme[2] is emerging within HIP practices. This significantly differs from the initial (orthodox) approaches to early music based on more objectivist and empiricist performances to be achieved through adherence to the available scientific documentation about past musical cultures. This new aesthetic episteme, I will argue, can be conceptualized as a continuation of an aesthetic mentality that firstly originated amongst avant-garde artists more than a century ago. Avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp sought to substitute the conventional artistic approaches of imitation or representation of past practices with new experimental strategies “meant to reconstruct and reinvent the past” by assigning new meanings to traditional artworks (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2). I argue that although the project team of the Orgelpark shows a general willingness to move away from the orthodox, imitational approach to early music, it could be more aware of the potential benefits that an experimental approach could generate by taking inspiration from the artistic and philosophical ideas of Duchamp. The French-American artist can provide suitable theoretical considerations capable of helping the project team of the Orgelpark to achieve its dual goal of innovating the contemporary musical scene with tradition. Following Duchamp, tradition can be kept alive through an experimental (re)discovery of the past meant to assign new meanings to past artworks – or, for the Orgelpark, to sounds – for contemporary and future audiences. This paper is not intended only for those involved in the project of building the new Baroque organ or in similar activities, but is also directed to whoever intends to broaden his/her understanding of music through philosophical considerations or join the historical performance debate. 

Understanding the organ as a technological artefact

Before entering the analysis of the different philosophical ideas that lie behind the construction of the new Baroque organ, I believe that readers should firstly be aware of the common conception of music that the people involved in the Orgelpark seem to hold. Indeed, I believe that any discussion about authenticity, originality or innovation in music cannot be undertaken without reflecting on broader considerations on the function and properties of music itself.  The first question that might be asked to those involved in this project could be: so what? Why should one attempt to recreate old sound qualities produced by an ancient instrument? After all, we can still survive and our ears be pleased with the music that circulates nowadays. This consideration could be valid if we theorize the organ only as a musical instrument that produces a certain set of notes written down in scores. Hans Fidom, the director of the research centre of the Orgelpark, suggests instead that the activities that are currently taking place in the Orgelpark like the construction of a new Baroque organ involve much more than the production of potentially beautiful notes. In order to explain his philosophical conception of music he often referred to the concept of musicking, originally developed by Christopher Small in 1998. With the creation of this new term, Small intends to criticize an old but still persistent musicological approach that focuses on musical analysis of written scores without taking the social contexts of their creation and reception into account. In contrast, he favors a new musicological approach that considers both the production and listening of music as situated activities, entirely dependent upon their context of use. His idea is that music should not be seen as an object but as a process. For this reason he suggests to substitute the noun ‘music’ with the verb to musick, indicating any human activity that relates to music performance that lasts in time and occurs within a certain space. In Small’s words:

“To musick is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance […]. Using the concept of musicking as a human encounter, we can ask the wider and more interesting question: What does it mean that this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?” (Small, 1998, pp. 9 – 10 as quoted by Peters, 2014, p.9)

The adoption of this concept allows two main considerations: the first is that it is possible to deal with questions regarding music and its functions also from disciplines that are not commonly included in musicological analyses[3]; the second is that it becomes obvious that musical notes or scores cannot coincide with the totality of human activities associated with music and that the organ is not only to be conceived as a musical device that produces notes. Hans Fidom conceptualizes the organ not only as a musical instrument but also as a ‘musical time machine’. In his words:

“The organ is in my opinion a musical time machine. Anything you can say about organs immediately reflects developments in political or artistic kinds of histories. It’s not just about sounds, or just about arts: it’s in fact about life itself. The organ is a mirror, it’s always a mirror of anything in culture. So if you listen to a medieval organ like the one we have here in the Orgelpark you can imagine how these sounds penetrated the world around 1480, which is completely different from ours. So it gets us into contact with that and that’s why I call it ‘time machine’ or ‘time travelling machine’” (Interview with Hans Fidom).     

Tackling the same issue, Peters (2009) explains how, as a result of several restorations these old instruments “can be considered as coral reefs, containing the material and artistic sediments of ages. They are vehicles of information about how the instruments were designed and built, how they were meant to sound, and how they were part of musical practices, both secular and religious” (p. 5). In another article, Peters (2014) refers to the organ as a technological artefact that can help reveal the intentions and believes of the different cultures that have played, built or restored it. Adopting these conceptions, we can conceptualize it as a “device that generates questions and answers” as well as the materialization of aesthetic as well as philosophical claims by the actors that are involved with it (Peters, 2014, p. 2; Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010). Similarly, I adopt the same approach by analyzing how the project team Orgelpark is trying to materialize their claims about music. More precisely, since their aim is to build an organ that could reproduce Baroque music – particularly that of Bach – and to render it aesthetically interesting for contemporary musical practices, I will try to analyze how they intend to materialize their claims of an ‘authentic Baroque sound’ and how they seek to render it innovative through the building of a new organ. This of course raises many philosophical questions like ‘what is an authentic sound?’, ‘is it possible to know exactly a sound from a past musical culture?’, ‘shall we accurately imitate certain aesthetic properties of sound qualities from the past or rather experiment with sounds in order to innovate the contemporary musical scene through tradition?’. In the following section will attempt to report their answers to these questions as well as to locate them within the broader historical performance debate.

The changing nature of HIP: towards the consolidation of a (new) experimental approach

Reflecting on my improvisational experience with the replica of the medieval organ at the Orgelpark, I hypothesize that I would not have enjoyed the same degree of liberty in the historical context of the German composer Paul Hindemith. Indeed, his historicist attitude during the commemoration of the year of Bach’s death in 1950 led him to believe that if we wish to experience the original sound of Bach we need to objectively study how the instruments from his era were built and played: only by doing so we can wish to experience a similar listening effect and honor the composer’s intention (Sherman, 2003). A decade after Hindemith, musicians and historians started to play music on period instruments and to investigate scientific documents about past musical cultures (Butt, 2004). From this the practice of historically informed performance (hereinafter HIP) developed with the aim of reproducing ‘authentic’ sounds and performances of earlier eras through period instruments. By contrast, these practices were heavily criticized by Theodor W. Adorno from the early-1950s who believed that only through the “‘progressive’ modern performance resources contemporary societies could reveal the full import of Bach’s music” (Butt, 2004, p. 4). Here lies the assumption that even the most accurate reconstruction of past instruments will not allow us to understand Bach, because contrarily to what Hindemith thought, Bach was certainly not content with the means of production of his time but conversely “stood head and shoulders above the pitiful concerns of its own age” (ibid.). This pessimistic diagnosis was later echoed by Pinchas Zukerman who argued that “the thought that the shrill and rasping Baroque organs are capable of capturing the long waves of the lapidary, large figures is pure superstition. Bach’s music is separated from the general level of his age by an astronomical distance” (Butt, 2004). Nevertheless, according to Butt (2004) this traditional approach to HIP persisted almost unchanged until the early 1990s when HIP scholars and musicians started to realize that “instead of reaching some sort of understanding with the composer, HIP in its orthodox mode dealt mainly with empirical evidence, thus substituting objectivism for subjectivism, relativism for critical appreciation” (p. 8).

All the interviewees at the Orgelpark followed this point by agreeing that it is practically impossible to know exactly the sound of Bach or experience the exact same listening effect of earlier eras. Peters (2009) pointed out that in the process of restoring an existing organ something is inevitably lost. In order to reconstruct historical sound qualities from the past, one must look at how ancient organs were built. The problem is that as the result of bad restorations, many original parts of these ancient organs have been modified or destroyed: we will never thus be able to know exactly how these organs were built if we wish to reproduce the original sound. There seems to be an understanding that scientific practices alone will never be able to serve the purposes of recreating an authentic sound. Hans Fidom adds to this his explicit criticism to whoever claims to be able to produce an authentic sound: “any pretention that I can perform the world of Bach in an authentic way to say as if he himself would play is in fact intolerable”, and again, “They [referring to the adherent of the orthodox approach to HIP] pretend to be authentic but they don’t really try to understand. Not at all! But that’s the obligation, you should try as good as possible and then be very humble as soon as you enter the organ bench” (Interview with Hans Fidom). Johan Luijmes also indicates that attempting to imitate exactly the sound of Bach with an excessive objectivism and empiricism would inevitably lead to a detriment of the listening experience:

“The way my teachers used to deal with past musical cultures has nothing, or very little to do with music. It has only to do with how they thought people have played. For the people who were not interested in authentic practices they found it strange. Those HIP practitioners stopped playing music for aesthetic purposes and only thought about how it was played in the past without caring about the listening effect. I was educated in this fashion (that strongly aimed at authenticity) but now I am much more liberal in how people play Bach” (Interview with Johan Luijmes)

It is thus possible to notice an acknowledgment that the orthodox approach to early music practices[4] not only inevitably entails problems related to the limited scientific documentation available about how organs from the past were built or performed - and, as a consequence, the impossibility to reconstruct an authentic sound exactly as it was originally perceived - but also raises doubts about the usefulness for contemporary audiences of an approach that seeks to imitate certain aesthetic qualities inherent in ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ sounds or performance practices. The concerns expressed by Johan Luijmes reveal that many previous attempts to reproduce an authentic sound as well as performance practices have focused too extensively on emulating technical and stylistic aspects of past performances and often failed to create new cultures of listening and performance with a present significance for contemporary performers and listeners[5]. As the dual goal of the Orgelpark implies, the project team will not only attempt to reproduce the sound qualities of an organ that would potentially by approved by Bach but put particular emphasis on the innovative nature of the sound that they intend to create. In a recent article Peters (2014), referring to the new Baroque organ that the Orgelpark plans to build, describes it as a “‘hyperorgan’ that provides the organ player and the composer with a range of yet unheard sounds and possibilities” (p. 4). He continues by explaining in which ways the new organ could potentially innovate the contemporary musical scene:

“The new Baroque organ translates aspects of complex historical musical cultures in order to create new cultures of performance and listening for the twenty-first century. Not only will the organ offer the possibility to play every pipe individually in any combination through the MIDI console, it will also be wired so that it can be amplified electrically. An aspect of the design plan is to have loudspeakers in the organ case. This enables the somewhat mind-boggling situation where the organ pipes could be sampled to give the organist or the composer the possibility to combine the material sound of the organ with the digital samples that can be manipulated. […] This combination of the material and digital might be one of the more defining aspects of the musicking practices that could evolve around the new Baroque organ” (p. 10)

I believe that a new aesthetic episteme[6] characterizes the approach of the project team of the Orgelpark to early music. My claim is that this aesthetic episteme is a protraction of an aesthetic attitude that firstly emerged when avant-garde artists attempted to give new meanings to artistic practices more than a century ago. Moreover, I agree with Buzatu (2014) when she claims that “if we are asked to concentrate thousands of pages devoted to the avant-garde phenomena and label them with a single […] term, that would be experimentalism” (p. 3). Thus a new, experimental approach is emerging within HIP practices, one that does not seek to recreate historical musical cultures through imitation but rather, through personal “non-mimetic, defamiliarized, and innovative” interpretations of the past (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). With these new considerations it now becomes clearer why the people that on that May 3^rd were attending the symposium at the Orgelpark welcomed my ‘strange’, experimental way of performing with the replica of a period instrument.  

Experimentalism in fact substitutes the search for beautiful ‘authentic’ sounds to be judged according to certain aesthetic criteria with the consideration that the recreation of historical musical cultures is not a goal in itself, but is a learning process. This is meant both for understanding the intentions of the original creator of the artwork in his context – in this case would be trying to understand Bach and not only the greatness of his music – and, perhaps most importantly, for self-understanding, namely understanding ourselves and the reality that surrounds us here and now (Duchamp, 1957)[7]. The world in which we live in is indeed incredibly different from the one in which Bach wrote his music: it is much more diversified and characterized by the widespread “recognition that we are confronting with many levels of reality” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). For this reason, experimentalism would better fit our historical context, since, as Buzatu (2014) argues, “through experimental exercises, different versions of reality become co-present and the intrinsic polymorphism of our world is revealed. The experiment – scientific or artistic – is the most radical re-vision of reality” (p.5).  

Elsewhere in the paper I have mentioned the concept of aesthetic episteme. This was coined by Alina Buzatu and she lucidly explains it in her article Theories of the Avant-garde: Prolegomena to a new aesthetic episteme:

“We ought to explain the use of a paradoxical phrase: aesthetic episteme. The two terms (aesthesis and episteme as two modes of cognition, emotional and rational) collide, but only at the superficial level. Episteme is a term coined by Michel Foucault, that has become intensely visible in the contemporary theoretical discourse. It somehow covers the cognitive unconscious of an epoch (i.e. a set of fundamental assumptions not entirely visible for the ones operating with them)” (Buzatu, 2014, p.2).

I believe that the experimental approach of the Orgelpark is indeed characterized by an aesthetic episteme. In the rest of her article she attempts to render visible those “fundamental assumptions [that are] not entirely visible for those operating with them” and explains that “rethinking and putting the avant-garde into perspective would help us understand [this] new episteme that overarches the art of the 20^th century” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 2). This is precisely what I intend to do in the rest of this paper. I will firstly show why being conscious of art theories[8] is of fundamental importance in the creation of artworks like the new Baroque organ in the contemporary artistic condition. Secondly, I will attempt to show how Duchamp can help understand the benefits of an experimental approach by providing innovative experimental strategies.

The importance of theories in the production of (experimental) artworks in the contemporary artistic condition

The project team of the Orgelpark indeed shows a general willingness to move away from the orthodox, imitational approach to early music and promotes the construction of the Baroque organ as an experimental system[9]. However, I believe it could be even more aware of the potential benefits that an experimental approach could generate by reflecting on other theories that could give value to and guide its experimental approach. Indeed, I had the impression from the interviews that the arguments that justified the choice of adopting an experimental approach to early music mostly revolved around the mere – although valid - critique of the orthodox approach and its defects. It needs to be remembered that the project is still at its very early stages but I believe following Arthur Danto (1964) that, particularly in our contemporary artistic situation, solid theoretical frameworks are needed to make sense of the creation of any artistic work like the new Baroque organ. This consideration deserves a brief elucidation.

Danto was the first analytical philosopher who tried to conceptualize artworks as essentially dependent on art theories rather than on the sole direct aesthetic experience of the spectator. This philosophical attitude was inspired by the cultural revolutions brought forward by the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s characterized by the inclusion of common objects in art institutions and societies assigning them the status of art (Horvath, 2013). Following those changes it has indeed become useless to declare that artworks should be thought of as objects with certain intrinsic aesthetic or perceptual properties. In 1964, Andy Warhol[10] had exhibited the Brillo Boxes (as in Figure 1) and elevated them as artworks even if they were almost identical to those found on the shelves of supermarkets.

Danto comes to the conclusion that what makes art nowadays cannot be the sole aesthetic properties of an artwork. Since amongst two perceptually and aesthetically indistinguishable items one can be treated as an artwork while the other as a common object, for Danto there must be something else that determines the status of art, something “external to the artwork itself” (Danto, 2003, p. 20). Aesthetic and perceptual dimensions cannot anymore by themselves define art, but artworks in order to be recognized as such necessitate an extra-material domain, unperceivable by our senses but only retrievable by our intellect through reflections and imaginations. The eye cannot by itself grasp the differences between artwork and non-artworks, but these differences will be determined by the relations that link the artefact to elements that the eye, and in music also the ear, cannot detect (Danto, 1964; Danto, 2003). This is when philosophy comes into play, whose task is not to formulate a list of intrinsic aesthetic properties that differentiate two objects, but rather to search for theoretical explanations that could explain something that our senses alone are unable to grasp. The question of what distinguishes artistic spheres from the other realms is the paradox on which Danto’s analytical philosophy sits: hence, to answer the ontological question posed by the avant-garde we need philosophy, since it is a question almost entirely dependent on our minds. For Danto in short, we need philosophy to produce art. Art cannot exist without a theory that assigns the status of art to an object (Danto, 1964).

I thus believe that the Orgelpark, thanks to the mental openness of the people involved in the project whose admitted intention is “not to impose any sort of musical understanding” (Interview with Hans Fidom), could further reflect on theories that might support and give value to its new experimental approach to early music. I will try to show how some philosophical standpoints of Marcel Duchamp[11], one of the first avantguardists, can help developing valid justifications as to why an experimental approach is needed, what are its potential benefits and how it can contribute for the Orgelpark’s dual goal of innovating through the recreation of past musical culture for new practices of musicking.   

Seizing experimental strategies from Marcel Duchamp

It might appear odd to believe that Marcel Duchamp, mostly famous for the artistic revolutions that he provoked in visual arts since the early-1910s[12], could help an institution that seeks to recreate past musical cultures. However as I have tried to show, by adopting Christopher Small’s conception of musicking it becomes possible to deal with questions regarding music from disciplines that are not commonly included in musicological analyses such as philosophy or art history. Not only it is possible but, following Danto (1964) this has become of fundamental importance after the revolutions of the avant-garde that shocked the traditional idea of art based on direct aesthetic experience. Avant-garde artists like Duchamp – and later, as I have shown, Warhol – promoted a new, conceptual art based on the fundamental critique of those artist that produced ‘retinal’ paintings, only aimed at the satisfaction of the eye. In Duchamp’s opinion, art had to be relocated “at the service of the mind” (Duchamp, 1957, p.2). Art should be in this view an intellectual expression rather than about the production of something intended only for aesthetic contemplation[13].

In 1912 Duchamp abandoned painting and dedicated the rest of his artistic career almost entirely to the creation of readymades. Readymades can be conceptualized as a manufactured objects transformed into art simply by their selection and placement in an art institution. As the name already indicates, Duchamp shows that it is possible to make art and innovate through art with something that already exists in reality[14]. For Duchamp, it is the deliberate choice of the artist that counts much more than the actual fabrication of any work of art (Duchamp, 1957). In his view, artists through the power of their imagination can rehabilitate and regenerate something that was originated in the past and keep it alive by assigning it new meanings and by transposing them in new contexts of use. Moreover, this process of regeneration can also occur through intentional distortions as the case of his infamous readymade L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) shows (Figure 2).  

L.H.O.O.Q. is a photographical reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to which Duchamp provocatively added a mustache and beard. This is an example of a “readymade aided” meaning that Duchamp in this circumstance did not expose an object as he had found it but added graphic details and a title to it. It is precisely through these distortions of the original artwork that Duchamp could accomplish a number of innovations. Firstly, he was able to assign radically new meanings to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa : he used tradition – in this case an extraordinarily traditional painting such as the Mona Lisa – to promote ideas that could have a present significance such as the endorsement of a new role for femininity, the exaltation of androgyny and other issues of gender, sexuality and identity[15]. Secondly, Duchamp managed not only to promote new ideas but to reintroduce the Mona Lisa itself in the present.  As Lafarge (1996) points out, Duchamp’s achievement with L.H.O.O.Q was “to bring the Mona Lisa back from the dead. By attacking its iconic status, he removed it from historical time and brought it into the present, the only place where art can be experienced. L.H.O.O.Q was actually an act of rescue […] rather than an act of desecration” (p. 2). Thirdly and perhaps mostly importantly, given his “extreme respect and love” for his audience, Duchamp allowed other people to rethink and reinterpret both the Mona Lisa and Leonardo (Duchamp, 1957, p.1; Sgarbi, 2013). LaFarge (1996) shows indeed how important L.H.O.O.Q was in this regard: “What L.H.O.O.Q. did […] was to nominate the petrified painting as a center of activity: a subject of debate, parody, paradox, criticism, thought, and reinvention. L.H.O.O.Q. simultaneously documents Duchamp’s thought processes and implicitly invites further interventions” (p. 2). T. S. Eliot (1919) and Arthur Danto (1964) can help to give value to this point. In 1919, Eliot wrote in his Tradition and the Individual Talent:

“What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered [emphasis added] and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new”  (Elliot, 1919, p.1)

Elliot here in short argues that once a new artwork is created, the whole history of art changes. Just like through Picasso we now look at the paintings of Cezanne with a new eye, so Duchamp did with Leonardo. The distortions operated by Duchamp to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa spurred interest in both the artist and its artwork thus leading more people to look at his art with new eyes. LaFarge (1996) points out that in this new climate, several new considerations and reflections were made about the Mona Lisa. Certainly one of the most remarkable of these was Lillian Schwartz’s discovery that the chief model for the Mona Lisa could have been Leonardo himself (LaFarge, 1996). Duchamp thus, through intentional distortions of an ‘original’ artwork, allowed other artists to reinvent, rediscover Leonardo and to create new art through new art theories. This exactly goes in accordance to Danto’s (1964) conception of artistic matrix, produced by the number of artistic predicates[16] available. A predicate for Danto is what makes possible to distinguish art from non-art: for example, by arguing that art “is impressionist” we create an ‘artworld’ – a term coined by Danto to indicate the cultural context to which art is dependent – in which impressionism would be a qualitative criterion that distinguishes artworks from non-artworks. In his article Danto shows that an artistic matrix will always allow 2ⁿ possible art forms (ⁿ being the number of predicates). This means that we can create more art by adding predicates to the matrix of predicates that we already have in place to understand art. By creating a distorted ‘replica’ Duchamp has enlarged our understanding of art through art theory. However, this whole process of addition of art theory was not performed by Duchamp alone. This consideration leads to the second experimental strategy that I take from Duchamp – the first could be called intentional distortion – namely, embrace of otherness.

In 1957, the elderly Duchamp argues that in the creative act there is always a gap between intention and realization. This means that artists are never able to express themselves fully. For this reason, as Duchamp argues, their art “must be refined as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator or the audience” (Duchamp, 1957, p. 139-140). In the end of his article he specifies that “all in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (Duchamp, 1957, p. 140). In sum in order to act creatively, to innovate, one always inevitably needs contribution from other people, an embrace of otherness. Moreover, in The Great Trouble with Art in This Country (1946) Duchamp offered a more detailed view of the sort of otherness that he preferred:

“It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass, the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. From his Impression d’Afrique I got the general approach. This play of his which I saw with Apollinaire helped me greatly on one side of my expression. I saw at once I could use Roussel as an influence. I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter” (Duchamp, 1946, p. 21).

Duchamp preferred being influenced by a writer instead than from a painter because he, similarly to what Small does with music, considered painting as a human activity, as “one means of expression among others, and not a complete end for life at all” (Duchamp & Peterson, 1975, p. 136). He also adds: “In other words, painting should not be exclusively retinal or visual; it should have to do with the gray matter, with our urge for understanding. This is generally what I love. I didn’t want to pin myself down to one little circle, and I tried at least to be as universal as I could” (ibid.). By considering painting as a human activity, as one means of expression among many other, Duchamp is essentially suggesting that an encounter with other perspectives is necessary for his “urge for understanding” (ibid.). Seeking to understand ourselves and reality that surrounds us through an experimental approach requires thus an encounter with others – an embrace of otherness – so that different versions of reality become co-present in order for the intrinsic polymorphism of our world to be revealed.   

Conclusion

In this paper I have shown that a new aesthetic episteme is emerging within HIP practices as I could observe in the Baroque organ project of the Orgelpark. I have suggested that this derives from an older aesthetic mentality that firstly originated with avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp, who sought to experiment with tradition in new and innovative ways. Under the experimental approach of the Orgelpark I argue that attempting to reproduce certain sound qualities through the new Baroque organ is only one step if the goal is to understand, and not merely imitate historical musical cultures. The next step to undertake would be to experiment with the sounds of new Baroque organ to understand Bach and, as Duchamp would concur, to keep him alive in the contemporary musical scene. I have proposed two experimental strategies from the works of Duchamp – and many other strategies could be similarly retrieved from other avant-garde artists - that can be used to enhance the learning process of the Orgelpark and innovate through the recreation of historical cultures. The first shows that traditions can be rediscovered and past artists can be interpreted with new eyes through an intentional distortion of artworks as Duchamp did with his L.H.O.O.Q. The Orgelpark could act similarly and through the affordances of technological devices – MIDI console and loudspeakers – connected to the organ (such as alteration or manipulation of sound qualities) rediscover the sound of Bach with new ears, stimulate discussions and interest in Bach and create new art through new artistic reflections and theories, as Danto’s conception of the artistic matrix demonstrates. Nevertheless, to add new and more predicates to the artistic matrix an embrace of otherness is inevitably needed and, as Duchamp suggests, one could be inspired by views coming from foreign disciplines. Peters (2014) argued that the Orgelpark tries to attract many interested publics such as “organ players, composers, and organ music audiences […] but also scholars working on sound, innovation, artistic research, and listening practices” (p. 2). I suggest that the Orgelpark should extend this list also to people that are foreigners to processes of organ building or organ music. The Orgelpark should attract musicians that typically do not play Baroque music but rather jazz, blues or any other contemporary genre. The Orgelpark could thus keep Bach alive by allowing audiences to look at Bach with new eyes and experiment with the new Baroque organ in new ways and innovative ways.

References

Bijsterveld, K., & Peters, P. F. (2010). Composing Claims on Musical Instrument Development: A Science and Technology Studies' Contribution. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35(2), 106-121.

Butt, J. (2004). Playing with history: the historical approach to musical performance. Cambridge University Press.

Cook, N. (1998). Music: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Danto, A. (1964). The Artworld. The journal of philosophy, 571-584.

Danto, A. C. (1981). The transfiguration of the commonplace: a philosophy of art. Harvard University Press.

Danto, A. C. (2003). The abuse of beauty: Aesthetic and the concept of art. Open Court Publishing.

Danto, A. C., & Greenberg, C. (1997). After the end of art: Contemporary art and the pale of history (Vol. 197). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Duchamp, M. (1946). The Great Trouble with Art in this Country. Interview to Marcel Duchamp by Johnson Sweeney. In Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 4-5.

Duchamp, M. (1957). The creative act. M. Dachy (Ed.). Sub Rosa.

Duchamp, M. (1966). Apropos of ‘Readymades,’. Art and Artists, 1(4), 47.

Duchamp, M., & Peterson, E. (1975). The essential writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du sel. M. Sanouillet (Ed.). Thames and Hudson.

Eliot, T. S. (1919). Tradition and the individual talent. Selected essays, 4, 2-3.

Sgarbi, V. (2013). Il sogno della pittura: come leggere un'opera d'arte. New York: Universe Publishing.

Haynes, B. (2007). The End of Early Music: a period performer's history of music for the twenty-first century. Oxford University Press.

Horvath, G. (2013). Why the Brillo Box? The recovery of the aesthetic. In Applied Social Sciences: Philosohy and Theology, Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Latour, B., & Lowe, A. (2011). The migration of the aura or how to explore the original through its facsimiles. Switching Codes, 275-297.

Mink, J. (2000). Marcel Duchamp. Art as Anti-Art. Taschen Verlag.

Moure, G., & Duchamp, M. (2009). Marcel Duchamp: Works, Writings and Interviews. Polígrafa Edition.

Peters, P. (2009). Retracing old organ sound. Authenticity and the structure of artistic arguments. Journal for contemporary philosophy. 1 (2), 5-19.

Peters, P. (2014). How to build an authentic replica? The new Baroque organ in the Orgelpark as a research organ. Maastricht University.

Sherman, B. D. (2003). Inside early music: conversations with performers. Oxford University Press.

Small, C. (2011). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Wesleyan University Press.

Weiss, J. S. (1994). The popular culture of modern art: Picasso, Duchamp, and avant-gardism. Yale University Press. Newcastle, pp. 37-44.

Images

Figure 1. N.d. (2013a). Warhol’s Brillo Box at the Salone del Mobile, Milan, 2013

Retrieved on June 2, 2014 from http://www.yellowtrace.com.au/claire-rosen-photography/

Figure 2. N.d. (2013b). L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) by Marcel Duchamp. Retrieved on June 4, 2014 from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vyWZDurtC6Y/UQsGd7BSzVI/AAAAAAAACTg/fvG_lucuQkI/s1600/lhooq.jpg  

Return to Archives

Figure 1. Warhol’s Brillo Box at the Salone del Mobile, Milan, 2013 (n.d., 2013a)

Figure 2. L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) by Marcel Duchamp (n.d., 2013b)