Open forms, improvisation. In his comments about the program for bigmouths (‘Works (?) for 16 October’), Douglas Boyce pinpoints an essential aesthetic concept that serves as a nodal point for the different approaches to music-making on this program and for the discussion of the ‘work’ within pluralism: openness.
In many respects, improvisation, particuarly from the jazz tradition, and indeterminacy explored in certain quarters of concert music—Earle Brown being a central figure—have been responsible for challenging, if not deconstructing, the traditional idea of the score as authority and for expanding our notion(s) of the musical ‘work’. ‘Openness’, which does tend to take on a quasi-moral, teleological veil in some poetic discourses, puts into relief the similarities of the music that will be experienced on bigmouths—music which has been traditionally segregated within musical culture.
Umberto Eco, in his essay ‘Openness, Information, Communication’ from his The Open Work, writes:
In its advocacy of artistic structures that demand a particular involvement on the part of the audience, contemporary poetics merely reflects our culture’s attraction for the ‘indeterminate’, for all those processes which, instead of relying on a univocal, necessary sequence of events, prefer to disclose a field of possibilities, to create ‘ambiguous’ situations open to all sorts of operative choices and interpretations. An open work involves the interpreter/audience in a more active engagement with the choices and possibilities that the work discloses. The work is not an object subject to sedimentation or to consumption, rather it is a process. Its results are not a matter of physical residue but of the activity that stimulates choice, autonomy, interrelationships, communication. In his ‘Poetics of the Open Work’, Eco explains: …considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work. Thus, he is not merely free to interpret the composer’s instructions following his own discretion (which in fact happens in traditional music), but he must impose his judgment on the form of the piece, as when he decides how long to hold a note or in what order to group the sounds: all this amounts to an act of improvised creation.
The open work calls for improvised creation and discloses a field of possibilities upon which we are encouraged to experiment and to play. Our experimentations with our interpretations and experiences of the work constitute the work itself. In what ways might ‘openness’ help us to orient ourselves within pluralism and to cultivate Bernstein’s ‘engaged fallibilistic pluralism’?
Douglas writes that the works on this program are ‘excellent loci for consideration of the efficacy of the recoverability conditions in definitions of the ontological status of the work.’ This is an important observation when looking at how and why the music relates to this discussion and to the larger context of the event as a whole. The music on bigmouths does not clarify or explain or demonstrate the ideas developed in this forum. Rather, the music, as instigating the interactions between its performers, audience, and context, is the actualization of communicative action. There is a sense of praxis here. Fully embracing openness, this music opens the further possibility of the expanded work intricately connected to the larger tapestry of human endeavor.