Mark Fell—One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning
As a practising artist working with what he calls time-constitutive processes, Mark Fell has an interest in different descriptions of time and temporal experience and how these relate to musical structures and experiences. His essay draws from recent anthropological research and current philosophical perspectives in order to critique Husserl’s use of musical metaphors in his account of time-experience. It attempts to show how Husserl’s position is grounded in a culturally specific analysis that is both sustained by and embedded within his beliefs about music, focusing on Husserl’s analogy between temporality and spatial perspective, and attempts to apply critiques of spatial perspective to Husserlian temporality. Finally, music production softwares are discussed. Fell argues that these can be compared to different modes of temporal experience, showing how these both sustain and construct specific temporal paradigms in response to which creative practice is structured.
Holger Schulze—How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh
This essay investigates four major methodological, epistemological and ontological issues currently at stake in the rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary research field of sound studies. As research on sound seeks more and more disciplinary definitions and methodological trajectories Holger Schulze asks a troubling question concerning the overall concept of this field: How to think sonically? This question is investigated by the four connected questions: How to think spatially? How to think corporeally? How to think beyond logocentrism? How to think imaginatively? In sound studies, Schulze argues, various efforts to transform epistemological approaches in cultural theories come together. Therefore the impact of neighboring concepts and approaches is scrutinized in this essay as well as being put into context to use for research in sound studies. The author discusses major concepts such as the auditory dispositif, a possible ontology of vibration or radical empiricism as well as approaches such as the sociology of spaces, body theory, or aural architecture; he proposes to sound studies scholars to explore the more particular research aspects of proprioceptivity, experientiality, and generaticity as well as a method like writing a sonic fiction.
Achim Szepanski—Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle
Achim Szepanski’s essay explores the position of Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle regarding their concepts on aesthetics and especially of music, which contain two special forms of non-representationalism. Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle agree that representational aesthetics has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze|Guattari prefer the productive capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic logic of the Real/One. Laruelle would reject Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including relationship between material and forces) and would instead postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the real—the real, here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science. Non-musicology goes from the real to the transcendental, then to the occasion of music. Sonic thought or non-musicology composes theory as its own object and therefore delivers a kind of echo to the work of the musicians, to their way of the becoming-of-music. Laruelle starts to write a new music-fiction.
Julia Meier—Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari show how a work of art can come into being, how creative processes can take place, and how this is related to the human body without representing it, but presenting it as a becoming-other that has manifested a bloc of sensations of dehumanized “affects and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 312–13). In order to describe the parameters that are necessary to create music or art, they mainly refer to the biological theses of Jakob von Uexküll, and present their concepts of “territory” and “refrain,” which they have abstracted from geographically associated sonic motifs of birds. In order to reflect on artistic processes that are capable of creating a new sound which has become something that is no longer recognizable and thus has the capability to affect us profoundly—an own distinctive style—Julia Meier examines the music of the New York-based duo The Black Soft who succeed in breaking and destroying well known musical patterns in order to be able to get rid of their cliché functions and thus to create a kind of abstract sound or form where the cliché has been identified, but then has been “deterritorialized,” which renders sonorous forces that are not sonorous. What becomes sonorous then in The Black Soft’s compositions, is the spasmodic, convulsive rhythm of what could be characterized as a “hystericized” body. The listener gets viscerally affected and dragged into this convulsing sound body, thus “becoming” it him/herself.
Adam Harper—Images of Thought | Images of Music
A century after Luigi Russolo’s futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises” and following a distrust of such demands, Adam Harper was asked to write a new musical manifesto, and he chose as its one main assumption the direct equation of music with thought. Like the thinking that resists Deleuze’s Image of Thought, music must resist the presuppositions of an Image of Music. Chief among them are definitions of music’s relationship to sound he critiques as “sonocentric.” Music, rather, should be considered as a medium of differences not necessarily privileging or determined by sound(s). It is culturally and psychologically mediated as multiple “images of music,” however, and music that transcends these images can be regarded as “modernist,” and is a vital way of reflecting the emergent subjectivities and collectivities of modernity.
Aden Evens—Digital Sound, Thought
“Digital Sound, Thought” asks what, if anything, is distinctive about sound recorded and reproduced using digital technologies. Framing the analysis around the insistence that sound—based in motion and heard only in duration—carries with it its past and future, the bulk of this essay offers an extended examination of the digital, to see what befalls the essential motion of sound when it is captured as a static sequence of numbers. The topology of the digital pushes in two opposed directions, both flattening all digital content into a plane of equivocation and reaching toward its own outside to discover a significance always lacking in the digital itself. These two poles of digital operation are both modes of abstraction, which is the digital’s chief technique, and both poles find their model in the bit, which is the principal technology of the digital. The bit also lends to the digital its possibilistic character: every bit gets its meaning in part because it might have had the other value; every 0 could have been a 1 and vice versa. Combinatoric possibility in the digital substitutes for the open-ended potential of non-digital objects, with important implications for the nature of sound in digital culture.
Sebastian Scherer—Sonotypes (sonic thought iv)
In his experimental essay|performance|composition “Sonotypes” Sebastian Scherer explores various incarnations of his own thought process during the production of text and sound. By referencing various scientific and artistic methods of sonification and by taking “sound thinking” literally he translates his thoughts into sound by exchanging the computer keyboard with a musical keyboard and a sequencer program. This self-reflexive modus operandi makes the thought process audible and suggests alternative ways of generating, perceiving, and comprehending thought and sound.
Notes
1My translation of: “Alors je dirais que le concept philosophique n’est pas seulement source d’opinion quelconque, il est source de transmission très particulière, ou entre un concept philosophique, une ligne picturale, un bloc sonore musical, s’établissent des correspondances, des correspondances très très curieuses, que à mon avis il ne faut même pas théoriser, que je préférerais appeler l’affectif en général.… Là c’est des moments privilégiés.” Gilles Deleuze, “Image Mouvement Image Temps.” Cours Vincen
nes—St Denis : le plan—02/11/1983. www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=69&groupe=Image%20Mouvement%20Image%20Temps&langue=1 (accessed February 10, 2011)
2See also Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and his|its concept of “wildness”—“sound” can be read as “wildness” with regard to “music” (as sound organized by a traditional composer)—the unformed, unintended, untamed in comparison to John Sullivan Dwight’s canonization in Thoreau’s time of European Classical Music (and in particular the compositions of Beethoven) as the paradigm for a future American Music.
Works cited
Cox, C. (2003), “How Do You Make Music a Body without Organs? Gilles Deleuze and Experimental Electronica.” Available online: http://faculty.hampshire.edu/ccox/Cox-Soundcultures.pdf (accessed September 15, 2015).
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jonas, H. (1954) “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14(4) (June): 507–19.
Klein, J. (2010), “What is Artistic Research?” Available online: http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/15292/15293 (accessed September 15, 2015).
Murphy, T. S. and Smith, D. W. (2001), “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”, ECHO: A Music-Centred Journal, 3 (1). Available online: http://www.echo.ucla.edu /Volume3-Issue1/smithmurphy/ (accessed June 2, 2015).
Nietzsche, F. (2009), Writings from the Early Notebooks, R. Geuss and A. Nehamas (eds), trans. L. Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noë, A. (2009), Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
Rilke, R. M. (2001), “Primal Sound” in D. Rothenberg and M. Ulvaeus (eds), The Book of Music and Nature. An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 21–4.
Rilke, R. M. (2007), Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. II: 1912–26, trans. G. J. Bannard. Leiserson Press.
Thacker, E. (2011), In The Dust Of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. UK: Zero Books.
Thoreau, H. D. (1962), The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, B. Torrey and F. H. Allen (eds). In fourteen volumes (bound as two). New York: Dover Publications.
Thoreau, H. D. (1973), The Illustrated Walden, J. L. Shanley (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thoreau, H. D. (1998), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Varèse, E. and C. Wen-chung (1966), “The Liberation of Sound”, Perspectives of New Music, 5(1) (Autumn—Winter): 11–19.
2
Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media
Krien Clevis
Autobiographical sightline: Time-sound-memory
My earliest memory goes back to my second year, to 1962 and a nineteenth-century town house in Blerick/Venlo, close to the Dutch/German border. This memory, if it is a real one indeed, is not linked to some image but to sound: I am a busy toddler, leaning on the edge of my playpen. I remember this because I heard music on the radio: Maria Callas, Madame Butterfly (as I would learn years later). This was also the first time, as I remember now, that I had to cry, moved by the beauty I heard. Sometime later on (about a year or so, a long time in a child’s experience), I cherished that memory and whenever I wanted to listen to the radio I would go and sit in the intimate space of my playpen. The Top 40 was my favourite show, and for a long time it would really bother me when some song no longer made it to the list. Trying to cheer me up, my mother would tell me that there also were evergreens, but that didn’t convince me, for it meant you had to wait until some deejay would play your favorite evergreen on the radio, implying you were completely dependent on his whims.
In the early 1970s my parents became fervent collectors of Alle 13 goed, a series of albums with top favorites, and this allowed me to play my best loved songs any time ad nauseam. Still, I realized that something quite different was going on as well. I had become aware of the notion of fleetingness, transitoriness. Things could simply be over, never to return again. I would be eagerly looking forward to an anniversary or some outing, but when the day arrived I was also quite sad, because I realized that soon it would be over again. If time made it possible for things to take place, because of the passing of time things would also be gone again in a flash, vanishing into the past. I began to record specific moments in stories and I started drawing—to capture some of the moments soon to be lost.
This new awareness in me, fuelled by a single song or sound fragment, proved defining for the rest of my life and, through its documentation, also for my artistry. The “Proust phenomenon,” the power of smells to trigger early memories, is well known of course.1 Although my abovementioned memory was evoked not by a smell but by a sound, classical music in particular, the effect has basically been the same.2 In my case it pertained to a feeling of sorrow that not until much later was I able to link to the notion of the passing nature of all things. This is important to me because it touches on what in essence a memory embodies: that which is not there anymore. I remember, and therefore I am. To me this understanding implies a desire to organize and cultivate some memory—reconstructing it, as well as shaping it and showing it. Our autobiographical memory exists as thoughts, on paper, and in images, and it is invoked by images, smells, or sounds.
The autobiographical “sightline” emerges here as an all-decisive factor in the things I created (artistic) and studied (historical). It allowed me to design a life of my own, whereby the autobiographical realm functions less as a straightforward “explanatory” factor than as a catalyst of memory (Kruithof 1995). For example, my photo work Et in Arcadia Ego is an attempt to map memories (or the realization of things passing) in a new way (see Figure 2.1).
Artistic research: Thinking-through-making
I grew up with images. My father was an architect, my mother was multi-creative. As a child I would sit at my father’s drawing table and make sketches of the people who were going to live in the houses he designed. Had I been raised in another family, I might perhaps have developed other talents. From an early age, I wanted to become an artist. Although I did not have one particular art discipline in mind, I was fascinated by images and in particular by their content, which also determines their form. This is where the initial starting point can be situated: why do I want to create certain images, what is it that I want to express, and what does it mean or represent?
Figure 2.1 Et in Arcadia Ego (2010–2012). Duratrans Light Box, frame: old bed shelves, 130 × 160 × 25 cm.
Artistic research is a specific mode of research of and in the domain of art from the perspective of the arts. This may apply to all arts (fine art, composing music, performative art). It implies research by artists of their own work, which is realized in the questions they ask in relation to particular concerns in (the development of) their work. Unlike in strictly scholarly research, these concerns come into being in part by doing, trying, developing, making. In this context, making involves such various mental activities as thinking, analysis, study, understanding, reflection and scrutiny. This process of making, including the problems that present themselves as the work evolves, gives rise to critical reflection, which in turn provides the basis for further research, also in other contexts (cultural, historical, scientific, and so on).
Human beings are capable of three creative modes of action in particular: visualizing, complementing and symbolizing. Visualizing, in the sense of man who builds what he has seen—to understand nature—and who subsequently tries to express it (where nature suggests unlimited space, man will build a fence); complementing, in the sense of adding something that is missing; and symbolizing, as the main step
that expresses the mode of man-made action, namely the power to translate, transform something into a new product, medium or place. The Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) thus characterized the basic principle of creating or making: as a process that takes place in order to appropriate a place and the transposition that comes about between idea and imagination or translation in a tangible object (1980). In the research of artists the process of making coincides with the process of thinking:3 making = knowing → reflecting → artistic research.
Performativity through materiality
Sound, smell and image are all autonomous sensory entities, they are tangible and have autobiographical power; they all appeal to our sense of memory. Tangibility, tactility, grabbing, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing also apply to materiality, the material with which we create art (in whatever form). Artistic research is thinking through the material, determining its language, and what it represents; but also: what does the material do, and what does it bring about? The material represents and is performative at the same time.
Sonic Thinking Page 4