After Sound: Toward a Critical Music PDF
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After Sound After Sound Toward a Critical Music G Douglas Barrett Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc First published 2016 © G Douglas Barrett, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barrett, G. Douglas, author. Title: After sound: toward a critical music / G Douglas Barrett. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000521 (print) | LCCN 2016002614 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501308116 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501308109 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501308093 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Sound in art. | Silence in art. | Art and music. | Music–Social aspects. | BISAC: MUSIC / History & Criticism. | MUSIC / General. | PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics. Classification: LCC NX650.S68 B37 2016 (print) | LCC NX650.S68 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/08–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000521 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0811-6 PB: 978-1-5013-0812-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0809-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-0810-9 Cover design by clareturner.co.uk Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Introduction 1 Part 1 Silence and Collectivity 1 The Limits of Performing Cage: Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN 19 2 The Silent Network: The Music of Wandelweiser 39 Part 2 Language and Authority 3 “IDEAS MATTER”: Žižek Sings Pussy Riot 63 4 Music to the Letter: Noise, Language, and the Letter from Schoenberg 96 Part 3 Speculation and Sense 5 The Debt of Philosophy: Music, Speculation, and The Sound of Debt 119 6 The Metaphoricity of Sense: Hong-Kai Wang’s Music While We Work—with Lindsey Lodhie 143 Conclusion 161 Acknowledgments 169 Notes 171 Selected Bibliography 214 Index 231 Introduction Music After Sound This book seeks to reimagine music as a critically engaged art form in dialogue with contemporary art, continental philosophy, and global politics. Represented by a diverse set of artists and musicians working during the past ten years, the artworks and analyses herein interrogate religion, gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, education, debt, finance, speculation, and labor. The discussions that follow will question received ideas about music and rework some of its basic tenets. Before proceeding, then, we must suspend the notion of music as a series of discrete sounds identifiable as tones, or “notes” with determinate pitches, etc., and which, taken together, compose what is commonly referred to as a musical work. For not only is the “work-concept” exemplified by the late-eighteenth-century musical score put into question, but here musical tones also remain optional. In fact, sound does not form the primary focus of the artistic practices pursued in this book. The first two chapters, for example, are dedicated to silence, the very absence of sound— or, more precisely, the two rather different configurations of post-Cagean silence found in the experimental music collective Wandelweiser and contemporary art and AIDS activist group Ultra-red. But isn’t music composed of sound? One may object to the idea that silence can figure as a music without sound by arguing, for example, that John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″ refers to sound through its absence: by presenting the concert hall, the audience, and a musician who remains silent, sound is alluded to precisely by its withholding. Sound, in this argument, functions as the irreducible condition of music: music is seen as the aesthetic form that gives sound its proper seating.1 What happens, though, when sound is radically rescinded as the epistemological grounds upon which music is situated as an art form? What if music had never been a “sound art” in the first place? It might come as a surprise, but the very notion of music as sound is a relatively recent invention. With its roots in the writings of a group of German thinkers in the early 1800s, the equating of music with instrumental sound 2 After Sound severed from language and social meaning, which was later termed “absolute music,” has remained with us to this day. Now solidified and expressed at the level of everyday language, the concept is tacitly accepted any time someone says, “I didn’t care for the lyrics, but the music was great.” For prior to the advent of absolute music, the concept of music included language (“lyrics,” for example) within the premodern tripartite harmonia, rhythmos, and logos—or harmony, rhythm, and language, or rational thought. Note that “sound” does not make an appearance in that trio.2 Absolute music, further sedimented in the mid-nineteenth-century musical aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick—particularly his notion of the “specifically musical” (as opposed to the “extra-musical”)—would undergo its most exhaustive sequence in the music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expanding to include electronic sound and recording technologies among other formal and technological innovations. This music, which stretches from Beethoven to Boulez, but also includes Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pierre Schaeffer, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, worked through the same artistic modernism that brought us abstract expressionism and the subsequent debates around medium specificity in the visual arts. (It was “the same” artistic modernism because the birth of absolute music, as many would have it, was also the birth of artistic modernism.)3 Beginning in the 1960s, conceptual art would initiate a dismantling of medium specificity that extends to recent debates around the “postmedium condition” and beyond.4 Yet while postwar (“visual”) art exceeded medium to incorporate conceptual and discursive strategies, the concept of music as a “medium” composed by sound would never quite receive such questioning.5 Furthermore, language (including conceptuality, “logos,” etc.) has remained categorically excluded from music, thereby precluding such discursive forms. How, then, can music become critical (in and of its own form)? Whither Criticality? Critical music turns on the question of language because for critical engagement of any kind, meaning is necessary. Language is distinct from meaning, but the two nonetheless rely on one another since language forms the substance and expression of meaning. Ideas leave traces, carve impressions into the world. Constituting a specific kind of matter(ing), concepts impose a consequential Introduction 3 materiality: ideas matter, to paraphrase philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It was, for example, by adopting conceptual art’s self-reflexive incorporation of language, along with the strategies of critical negation inherited by the historical avant- garde, that contemporary art would—at best—become capable of intervening in a broader cultural, political, and artistic field. The framework through which we may conceive of this potential can be formulated as what I term (in Chapter 3) materialist conceptualism: the notion of a conceptual art that acknowledges the inherent discursivity of artistic practice while taking into account the material impact language and ideas have on the real. But does this mean that critical practice is possible today? Considering the historical present, in which everything up to and including thought itself has proven commodifiable, is not the very notion of criticality a naive and outmoded concept? If critical art strives, in Chantal Mouffe’s words, to “contribute to unsettling the dominant hegemony,”6 is it possible to “unsettle” a system that so radically reincorporates the logic of its own unsettling? For the prospect of locating any form of contemporary critical (art) practice—not only music—seems, if not impossible, at least paradoxical. Perhaps critical art may take the form of what Boris Groys describes as “paradox-objects,”7 works that appear simultaneously to contain thesis and antithesis. If the tension that arises through such a contradiction leads to a crack in the existing order, an opening onto a special kind of difference, then perhaps in such a case a critical practice might emerge. As such, critical art is circumstantial, provisional, contextually dependent, and historically specific; it requires reflection and reflexivity, intention and enunciation. “Critical in its content,” writes Guy Debord in 1963, “such art must also be critical of itself in its very form.”8 As a form of critical art, critical music is critical in and of its own form. Not limited to discourse and beyond unquestioned forms of representation—critical music requires more than simply music “about” various issues—such an art must question its forms and their respective histories. Critical music not only reinvents existing aesthetic forms, but also intervenes into the broader cultural, political, and social universe that surrounds them. Critical music takes risks; it is engaged. Yet this is not to restrict such a notion of engagement or commitment to the discursive, but rather to recognize, through the critical legacy of conceptual art, that art—especially contemporary art—is necessarily constituted by (and is an instantiation of) concepts and language.9 And so to achieve this kind of engagement, music’s concept as (nonlinguistic) sound requires revision. Or at least circumvention.
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