Music is no longer made to be represented or stockpiled, but for participation in collective play, in an ongoing quest for new, immediate communication, without ritual and always unstable.
The main objective of this new music is the creation of new discursive structures that will remain open to all sorts of possible conclusions.
The essence of a musical work is at once its genesis, its organization, and the way it is perceived.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
A valid musical aesthetics would have to show how the spiritual substance of a work of art—what traditional philosophy called the artistic idea—is constituted in the life of its components, in the way in which they continually modify each other, forming ever new constellations.
The indeterminate, improvising bigmouth. Open wide. The aesthetic concept of ‘openness’ or of the ‘open work’ serves as a nodal point for the different approaches to music-making on this program. Improvisation growing out of the ‘jazz’ tradition and indeterminacy explored in ‘concert music’ have been instrumental in challenging, if not deconstructing, the traditional idea of the authorial score and of the functions of the performer, thus expanding our notion(s) of the musical ‘work’. Investigating the differences between these approaches is quite fascinating and instructive, however it is their similarities, brought forth by the juxtaposition of these musics on this program, that will help to provide a rather flexible frame through which we can investigate the deeper issues and challenges of the musical ‘work’, challenges heightened by our postmodern condition and the pluralism of our creative environment(s).
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.
A number of recent pieces of instrumental music are linked by a common feature: the 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—the projection of the possibility of freedom—and discloses a field of possibilities upon which we are encouraged to experiment and to play. Our experimentations with and our interpretations and experiences of the work constitute the work itself. Meaning is multifarious.
designates a conceptual order in which grand, synthesizing schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which the traditional bases of rational understanding—unity, coherence, generality, totality, structure—have lost their authority if not their pertinence… Postmodernist strategies of understanding are incorrigibly interdisciplinary and irreducibly plural. Like the theories that ground them, they make up not a system but an ethos.
The shift to postmodernism has brought new sets of possibilities, freedoms, challenges, problems, and risks. In an age in which the foundations of human knowledge have withered away, in which anything is potentially valid as a work of art, in which simulacra proliferate, in which everything happens simultaneously in the perpetual present, the contours of our pluralistic situation require a serious reconsideration of what we are doing. Something must be done in order to avoid tripping into the void of fragmented relativism. A re-conceptualization of the ‘work’ as process, as flow, as communicative action would be one point of departure.
The Work of Open(ness)(ing):
Conceptions of what constitute the work, musical practices, and traditions are too diverse for us to pinpoint or theorize a particular status of the work without excluding other valid works and approaches to music-making. We can no longer hold the work in an objectified state suspended above a subject / object dualism. I am suggesting that we explore the notion of a work as a flow or process or environment connected to lived experience. A field of possibilities upon which lived experience unfolds.
Just as the openness of improvisation and indeterminate composition shifts the ‘work’ to the dynamic process of improvised creation and of intersubjective engagement between performers, a new conception of the ‘work’ as collective engagement must be expanded beyond the performance context in order to confront the challenges posed by pluralism. It must flow into the context(s) in which the event is positioned. It is my contention that this music serves as a model for a democratic, utopian space in which subjects cultivate interpersonal relations, act collectively and critically, make decisions outside of the ‘dogmatic image of thought’, and creatively engage in communicative action. John Mowitt in his essay ‘The Sound of Music in the Era of its Electronic Reproducibility’ writes, ‘perhaps contemporary music can be seen as a gateway to the new collectivity, since it situates subjects within an emergent structure of listening which offers experiential confirmation of social configuration.’ A gateway to intersubjective experience.
The expanded work, through opening the concept of openness itself and which is not really a ‘work’ but a constellation of concepts and activities, calls for collective engagement beyond the immediate performance context. It takes into account the entire process of collaboratively organizing an event as well as how this event and the music and ideas presented and discussed are woven into the broader social and cultural fabric. It activates reflexive, ‘fallibilistic’ responses. It stimulates and activates new fields of possibilities, new connections between artists, composers, critics, audiences. It opens new perspectives from which we explore the relations between art, language, sound, and ideas. It re-directs the democratic and utopian ethos of inter-subjective, creative improvisation, found in this music, towards us, our lives, our discussions, towards how we engage in critical stances towards art, towards how we create space in which creativity and conceptual insight can be explored.
The music this evening, 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. This is our responsibility: to carve out spaces in which and through which music flows, a task made arduous by the dominance of commodified forms.
Engaged fallibilistic pluralism allows us to shift away from sedimentation and stability towards action, towards praxis basking in instability, contingency, ambiguity and to do so with a smile. Or is that a smirk?
The World of Openness: a footnote
While we float in a decentralized, plural world, the ideological and economic forces of the culture industry have tightened the reins, through the commodification of almost every corner of our world, on the way in which music is produced and consumed. Even those artists who reject the forces of the culture industry or who critically and subversively act within its power structures are forced into some relation with bottom-line driven, hyper-capitalist consumer culture. It is pervasive. Musicians who create and perform outside of the demands of appealing to a wide audience, outside of marketability, of mass taste and conventions, of the cult of the image find themselves just there: outside, marginal.
It is my view that creativity and ideas percolate in the margins of consumer culture. In fact, the composed and improvised music presented in ‘Big Mouths’ and the artistic cultures from which these musics have developed derive their very strength from their positions outside of mainstream culture. Indeed, this is an attempt to salvage the idea of music as an act of resistance. I would like to point out, however, that this resistance to mass culture is somewhat of a secondary effect of the primary act of creating and exploring a space in which sound and ideas can be shared without being harnessed by the demands of the culture industry and of processes of commodification and desire. In effect, this music does resist mass culture, but it does so by creating the possibility of alternative visions, more engaged intellectual discourse, opening collective, creative space. Bigmouths is merely one experiment in the opening of openness.