From Redlegs Masticate, March 27, 2007

I want to focus on a couple of essays written 40 years ago to illuminate the possible future of electronic music, and how this possible future of music relates to our historical situation. Naturally, the future of electronic music will not be a total break with musics of the past, but will eliminate what is retrograde and engage what is forward-looking. I reserve the right to define as I see fit the meaning of these admittedly loaded terms. To start, I use as a cue an article published by the Varèse scholar Chou Wen-chung in the (1966) v.5 number 1 issue of Perspectives of New Music, “The Liberation of Sound”. This is compiled from a few lectures and statements Varèse made between 1917 and 1961. The earliest of these statements, those from 1917, were originally published in the iconoclastic periodical 391 edited by Francis Picabia, the notorious Dada instigator, and reveal the intimate contacts between certain currents of modernist music and art. One sentence in this early statement strikes me as particularly interesting: “Why Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives.” Nowadays Luigi Russolo, Marinetti, and others in the Futurist school are regarded as near deities by aspiring and veteran electronic musicians while nevertheless falling far short of these pioneers’ efforts, in my opinion. The Art of Noise (pop group active in the 1985-95 period) just doesn’t compare, even to Russolo. And Varèse makes short shrift of even this radical new step in the theory of music. This echoes what Marcel Duchamp said of Futurist painting: “The Futurists were stricly a continuation of the Impressionist movement. I was not interested in continuing this trend.” Varèse again from the 1917 statements in 391: “Music should pulsate with life” and the new sounds generated by advances in technology should “lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.” I would like to expand on this idea, for Varese makes further comment on it in the 1936 article exerpted by Chou in the 1966 compilation. Varèse wishes us to differentiate between cadence and rhythm: “Cadence or the regular succession of beats and accents as little to do with with the rhythm of the composition. Rhythm is the element in music that gives life to the work and holds it together. It is the element of stability, the generator of form. In my own work, for instance, rhythm derives from the simultaneous interplay of unrelated elements that intervene at calculated, but not regular time lapses.” That is an interesting statement. This complements what he said earlier in the lecture: “When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived. When these sound-masses collide the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows.” I can’t help but be reminded of certain works by Gyorgi Ligeti at this juncture, the “Atmospheres” and “Lontano” in particular. This is really taking the Master’s words to heart.

Varèse closes by comparing the genesis of his compositions to that of crystal formation. He quotes a mineralogist on the process: “The internal structure is based on the unit of crystal which is the smallest grouping of the atoms that has the order and composition of the substance. The extension of the unit into space forms the whole crystal. But in spite of the relatively limited variety of internal structures, the external forms of crystals are limitless.”

We have here in these statements nothing less than a yardstick by which one can measure to what extent music escapes the confining strictures of the past. Use it as a checklist: does the music express “the old conception of melody or the interplay of melodies”? Is it encumbered by the old diatonic scalings? Does it merely mirror the quotidian elements of everyday life instead of pulsating with its own inner rhythm, one not directly related to its cadence? Does it fail to move beyond the traditional limits of frequency and dynamics as embodied in the symphony orchestra and its flagship instrument, the piano? To the extent it fails on these levels and more, it aligns itself with the past. Of course, this is only a minimum requirement for the new expression, a necessary but insuffcient condition for compelling musical expression.

Another interesting essay on music was published in the same period, Summer 1965, in the journal American Imago, by Richard Sterba, titled “Psychoanalysis and Music.” He admits at the outset that most of the articles at this intersection of disciplines are “highly speculative”, but to dismiss them outright would be rash, it seems to me. One paper, “Musikgenüss und Phantasie”, quotes from Hegel: “Music captures our consciousness which does not find itself opposite an object, and due to this loss of liberty it is carried away by the flowing current of tones.” Sterba expands: “this emotional surrender to the tones abolishes the flow of intentional processes and leads to an abandonment of the outside world and a submission to a hallucinatory regression in form of phantasies and memories…music, like dreams, slipactions and neurotic symptoms are expressions of the mentally supressed.” Other observations by Sterba, filtered through the prism of his research: “Primitive music is more narcissistic, modern music more object-libidinous.” We cathect to emotional objects outside of our immediate experience more than the “primitives”, in other words. So we are more social, more empathic than the “primitives”? This needs a great deal more exposition, not forthcoming in this article. Sigmund Pfeiffer brings it down to the Darwinian level by observing that music has biological roots. The croaking of the frogs at mating time…air becomes eroticized by being taken into the lungs and expressed through the vocal cords. This is music as an auto-erotic expression, and, Pfeiffer asserts, an analogue to hysteria. Sterba interprets Pfeiffer: music is a regression to the pleasure principle of primary narcissism. Object-libidinous tendencies are foreign to it. (What happened to the “modern” differentiation? Pfeiffer answers this by asserting that modern music approximates itself more and more to formal language structures, through its use of increasingly complicated melodies and rhythms; the more it approximates itself to language structures, the less it remains music. It will turn from objectless art to artless objectivity if fresh tendencies toward tapping the force of regressions are not reinfused into the musicmaking process. How does this relate to Varèse’s theories?) Another theory, adumbrated in a 1935 article by Desiderus Mosonyi, posit the origin of music in pain. The pain-scream is transmuted through playful imitation (nice people, these primitives) into music. The songs of early humanity are mourning songs. Mosonyi goes on the maintain that rhythm (or cadence, if we are to follow Varèse) takes on the function of blunting the original instinctual outburst of the pain-scream through the use of repetitive structures. He elaborates on his theory of musical composition: as Sterba interprets it, “in the unconscious there is present a still confused dreamlike musical hallucination, which originates from an awakened affective complex. The musical representatives of the complex are allowed to transgress the threshold of the preconscious after connecting themselves with well-established musical formulae and thus are capable of becoming conscious. The affective charge comes from the unconscious; if it is low the preconscious can transform the material offered into a play with familiar forms. If the tension of the latent content is greater, then the transformation needs greater resistance on the part of the censor. Restlessness, frequent change of motives, of rhythm, of harmony, of the feeling tone, melodic and harmonic liberties of the composition will then betray the conflict.”

We live in an age of restlessness. As the communist theoretician and agitator Antonio Gramsci observed with such poignancy, “the conflict arises precisely because the old has died and the new cannot be born.” But it could be born. This is my manifesto.