In the thirteenth century the great Jewish cabbalist Abraham Aboulafia dreamed of a clearly operated, rational but nevertheless mystical working prophecy by the help of sound. He invented a whole cosmos of strategies of reading, singing and reciting which should be used to come so close to God that the proof of this “unio” could be (here the situation is not really clear) the creation of a being which is as close to human beings as it is said in the first book of the Torah about father Abraham at Haran. Normally this being is called a Golem. Abraham Aboulafia created his “ars” (in the Latin sense of the word) on the background of the newly invented or discovered western European music, which is based on atomic, combinable particles or elements (Aboulafia 2009). He tried to combine sound and its elements to a prophecy which is founded in structure like language of letters but much more sonic inspired and sonic excited. Mystic thinking and operability (practicality?), heritage of antiquity and Jewish Absoluteness (Unbedingtheit) are pushed into abstraction, but remain rooted in the religious world of Jewish life and thinking—a world of imagination as reproducible, repeatable forms of thinking. In Plato’s myth the sound as structure of all beings and the unity of all being can reach experience. Here, 1,500 years later, as sound, the series of notes becomes a “melody” which ceaselessly configures the letter-complexes of creation, which equips these elements with a background, which establishes an audible resonance as space of creative prophecy. In this way, it was possible to avoid the mythology of sound as well as to respect the non-transgressing line which separates creator and creation, despite the respect of letters and the respect of the revealing power of words. Also some hundreds of years later, when legends, which are much closer to the abyss of magic and popular beliefs, are widespread, it seems to me that the specialty of sound and its strength, the letter and its combinations to connect with the whole existence of human beings and to change it, is well remembered. One of the most important characteristics of the Golem of Prague was the fact that he was mute. The magic text of his creation was sound, because it was spoken and became audible. But the result of the magic procedure was not allowed to create a resonance in the creation. The real existence in the real world distinguishes the space of the Golem of Prague from the space of the rational prophecy of Abraham Aboulafia. The Golem of Prague is subject of the LAW. But it is a law which is not made for him and which he cannot comply. The resonance, the echo of his existence is death as the inscription on his forehead showed.
We are—strangely enough—back at the point where we left sound in antiquity. It seems that today, since sound is a nearly valueless coin of every-day experience, it is difficult to remember times and situations where sound became a question of life and death. I myself remember very well times in which even the imagination and writing of something which could become sound tended to become a question of life and death.
But this is another story.
Works cited
Aboulafia, A. (2007 [1284]), Sepher haOth, G. Lahy (ed. and trans.), Roquevaire: Éditions Lahy.
Aboulafia, A. (2009), Hayyé ha-Ôlam ha-Ba: La Vie du Monde à Venir, G. Lahy (ed. and trans.). Roquevaire: Éditions Lahy.
Cicero, M. T. (1979), “Somnium Scipionis,” in K. Büchner (ed. and trans.): De Re Publica, Stuttgart: Reclam.
Darwin, C. (1981), The Descent of Man and the Selection in Relation to Sex, J. T. Bonner and R. M. May (eds), vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heraklit (1922), “Fragmente,” in H. Diehls and W. Kranz (eds), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidmann.
Kircher, A. (1650), Musurgia Universalis, Rome: Corbelletti, Grignani.
Plato (1976), “Symposium,” in J. Burnet (ed.), Opera, tom. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plato (1962), “Politeia,” in J. Burnet (ed.), Opera, tom. IV. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rötzer, F. (2005), “Sound-Laser.” Available online: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/20/20992/1.html (accessed September 28, 2015).
10
One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning
Mark Fell
Jacob: Time is underground and above us.
Mother: No Jacob, time is all around us.
Jacob: And only time lords can see it!
Mother: There are no time lords Jacob.
A conversation overheard on a train in South Yorkshire, UK.
In 2013 I made a short silent film that I claimed was about music, time, and technology. Shot entirely on the remote Finnish island of Hailuoto, it interweaves text with the island’s frozen, inert, and haunting landscapes. As a meditation on time and music placed within a space that is both motionless and silent (a place without time and music), the work’s central dichotomy was intended to parody how music is often characterized as timeless, universal, or spiritual—a view that, in my opinion, is particularly problematical.
Drawing from anthropology, philosophy, and computer music software the film presents a brief analysis of the temporal mechanics of musical and technical systems. It opens with a rejection of Varèse’s famous remark that “music is organised sound” and I want to begin my discussion at this point. For me saying that music is organized sound is a bit like saying that food is organized flavor: it is an aesthetic description that ignores the intake of necessary dietary requirements, the role-play around the consumption of food, the pathologies of over or under eating, the distinction between junk and fine dining and so on. Similarly, being strictly Varèsian I think “music as organised sound” is like claiming that car parks are organized white paint: ostensibly these are the materials that are “organized” to form the thing we call a car park. But imagine that one day the painter of those white lines decides to get “experimental” and make markings that are quite unlike anything found in nearly all other car parks. The car park inspector would probably be unhappy with such lines on the grounds that the thing they construct is in no way car-park-like. The Varèsian car park painter’s reply “but car parks are organized white paint” would do little to appease the inspector. Why? Because the organization of white paint in car parks is itself part of a wider organization of behaviors, codes, conventions and so on that enable people to meaningfully interact with one another within the social space of the parking area. The Varèsian “music as organised sound” sentiment ignores all this. I would like to propose that we reject attempts to define “music” by appealing to some abstract, universalizing or formalist agenda. We should not ask what music is, but what music does.
For me this question led to thinking about the relationships between music and commonly held beliefs about time. And, to lay my cards on the table from the outset, how music might function as a framework within which time-experience is both constructed or interpreted. The following text, which I began to write around 2010, was my attempt to think about these issues and how they related to my practise as a musician and artist, and I hope it is of some interest for that reason. My work at that time, particularly the two releases Multistability (Raster Noton, 2010) and UL8 (Editions Mego, 2010), explored very unusual rhythmic patterns that did not follow the conventions found in most house and techno (the traditions within which my work is predominantly grounded). Here, by contrast, patterns were of variable duration, events were specified in milliseconds not tempo, and structures were not subdivided into ratios of a larger overall duration. Similarly, in my visual practice, I was making works of extended duration with minimal change that aimed to challenge the audience’s attention. My thinking around this subject was also sparked off after reading Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, a book that my friend Yasunao Tone recommended to me. Subsequently Husserl’s text became caught up in my own thinking. I began to ask myself the following questions: What is time? How do we experience it? How does music function within this experience? What beliefs are present within that experience?
On reflection I admit that some of these questions are somewhat naíve, and clearly these concerns are not peculiar to my work—as mos
t of us with any interest in musicology or philosophy are aware, time is a somewhat overbearing feature of both. The favored term of both departments is temporality. In philosophical discourse temporality refers to the subjective experience of time, and in musical discourse it refers to the temporal forms, structures, paradigms present in specific musics. Despite the shared word, I think that when philosophers talk about the structure of music, and when musicians talk about experience of time, it tends to be rather facile.
In his book Microsound (2004), Curtis Roads identifies different levels of temporal structure: from the largest (i.e. infinite) to the smallest, which he calls the sampling rate of the universe. Roads describes musically significant divisions of time such as Macro, Meso, Sound Object and Micro. Here the Macro is the overall musical piece typically lasting from minutes to hours; the Meso is said to represent groupings of sound objects that form distinct sections within the overall composition; the Sound Object is referred to as a basic unit of musical structure (typically an individual note); finally at the Micro level are the sound “particles” that constitute the note itself. Having discussed the subject of temporality with Roads1 I get a sense that his main concerns are the hypothetical “zones of ambiguity” or boundaries between those divisions, and specifically how computer technologies enable the composer to transgress or redefine these. According to Roads, using the techniques he has developed, an individual microsonic particle can form a note or phrase or indeed be extended to form an entire score. Roads’s concern therefore is to get beyond the conceptual abstraction of music as notes and arrangements of notes, and enter a realm beyond these structural hierarchies. Yet his diagrammatic depiction of temporality—consistently shown as a kind of “frame-based” linear phenomenon, with a determinate now point and timescales extending into the past and imagined future—ultimately reinforces those hierarchal divisions. It is almost as if one were to divide a picture into a kind of jigsaw puzzle, complain about it, and then try to reassemble it in a different order. It more or less reasserts the familiar Western musical score albeit in rather more scientific language. Similarly it more or less reasserts popular beliefs about the structure of time as a series of regular moments (frames) that pass through the temporal window of the present.
When thinking about temporality (i.e. of how time feels to us) Husserl often refers to musical structures, and for me his beliefs about music are as one-dimensional as Roads’s beliefs about time. I assume that most readers are aware of Husserl’s argument, but for those who are not, I will give a very basic account of his position. When we observe the movement of something, a bouncing ball for example, it does not appear as a series of detached positions, or as several balls one after the other in rapid succession. Instead it appears to have a continuous and unbroken momentum. Husserl suggests that in order to have an unbroken impression, one must in some way hold onto an impression of an object’s previous state and also anticipate the state that will follow. He suggests that our experience of that which is “happening” occurs because we retain a trace of what has just happened, and symmetrical to this, we calculate what is about to happen. This process is not like memory or prediction because it occurs within the phenomenological now—the temporal fringe of the present. Husserl therefore suggests that the “present” has a threefold structure which includes that which has immediately happened, and how we hold onto it, and that which is about to happen, and how we anticipate it. He calls these protention and retention.
My main concern here is how, in order to illustrate his position, Husserl compares this temporal process to musical formations, arguing that the structure of temporality is like the structure of a melody. He suggests, for example, that we listen to a piece of music note by note, but in doing so we hold onto the larger musical structure, the melody, of which each note is a constitutive part.
When a melody sounds, for example, the individual tone does not utterly disappear with the cessation of the stimulus or of the neural movement it excites. When the new tone is sounding, the preceding tone has not disappeared without a trace. If it had, we would be quite incapable of noticing the relations among the successive tones; in each moment we would have a tone, or perhaps an empty pause in the interval between the sounding of two tones, but never the representation of a melody. On the other hand, the abiding of tone-representation in consciousness does not settle the matter. If they were to remain unmodified, then instead of a melody we would have a chord of simultaneous tones, or rather a disharmonious tangle of sound.
Husserl 1992
He goes on to explain how temporality is produced.
If the stimulus disappears, the sensation also disappears. But then the sensation itself becomes productive: it produces for itself a phantasy representation the same or almost the same in content and enriched by the temporal character. This representation in turn awakens a new one, which is joined to it in a continuous fashion, and so on.
Husserl 1992
This productive representation of original sensation is the basis for Husserlian time constituting consciousness. Temporality therefore emerges as a product of the interplay between retentions and protentions, and thus the temporal appearance of an object is actively constituted by the observer:
what we are able to find and describe here as the phenomena of time constituting consciousness, of the consciousness in which temporal objects with their temporal determinations become constituted.
Husserl 1992
I want to consider Husserl’s comparison between the two things—experience of time on the one hand, and experience of music on the other. Is it a coincidence that the particular brand of time-consciousness described by Husserl corresponds so closely to the musical paradigm that he alludes to? And, if it is not a coincidence, what then is the relationship between the two? I want to suggest that Husserl’s description of temporality, and his formulation of protention and retention, are actually based upon his generalized ideas about musical structures.
It is important to acknowledge that Husserl is remarkably vague about the kinds of music he asks us to imagine. When he describes musical structures he talks of melodies, tones, and notes in a very general sense and never offers particular examples. In fact nowhere in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness does he refer to a specific tradition, genre, work, score, instrument, tempo, time signature, timbre, volume envelope or pitch. One commentator even asks, “One almost begins to wonder whether Husserl ever listened to music” (Gallagher 1998). As a consequence of this ambiguity, Husserl’s discussion plays upon our shared assumptions about what music is: what constitutes a musical sound, the tempo of the piece, the relative complexity of melodic patterns, and so on. He assumes that the general structure of “melody” is of a sequence of ordered events that happen in the same order and with more or less the same dynamic emphasis each time it is played or heard. His ambiguity requires that the reader share these assumptions as if they were unquestionably the case. And in this sense Husserl asks the reader to compare the idea of melody to the idea of time.
The symmetry between these two “ideas” is remarkable: Husserl’s description of temporal events and their “running off,” or the way an event “sinks into the past,” could equally apply to the note’s volume envelope (specifically the decay phase of a piano note as its energy vibrates within the body of the instrument and dissipates into the space that contains it). Similarly the diagrams he uses to illustrate his arguments could be easily mistaken for variations on a Western musical score that adhere to a linear timeline principle: “—in all these diagrams inner time is displayed as a line, a continuum of points flowing horizontally” (Larrabee 1993).
Ostensibly Husserl aims to clarify his definition of the temporal by making reference to this general sense of “melody.” But one could equally suggest a very different description of what is happening in Husserl’s analysis: one where temporality is actually modeled on, and in response to, prior beliefs about musical structure. According to this alternativ
e description Husserl’s “melody” could be said to promote a specific sort understanding of temporality. Imagine for example Husserl in the throws of contemplating this issue: if his prior beliefs about how a melody occupies or demarcates time were not present, then perhaps his specific analysis of temporality might have taken some other form. For me it is more than a coincidence that during his analysis of this issue, Husserl conveniently stumbles upon something (i.e. melody) that so closely shares many fundamental common features with the particular form time-experience (temporality) he wants to describe, that the two became almost identical. It is clear to me that Husserl’s beliefs about music formed part of his thinking about temporality, and that, within his argument, ideas about music and ideas about time are combined in a rather more complex manner, where one is not simply illustrative of the other. I want to suggest therefore that in Husserl’s discussion, musical structures provide a model according to which temporality is understood, constructed, interpreted, and vice versa. According to this view beliefs about music and beliefs about time are linked, and music should be considered to be a fundamental component of time-constituting consciousness.
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