I stated earlier that musical composition is at its roots a practice of technical adoption. 'Technical' is a troublesome term to pull into the conversation; composition, especially the composition of concert music since the rise of serialism has a powerful reputation of drifting toward the abstract, the formal, the mathematical, and so the unreal. An appropriately historically minded view of the technical will build a bridge between Early and Late; such a view will also help us understand how that divide became so wide.
Both 'technics' and 'technology' derive quite directly from the Greek term 'techne.' In philosophy since Heidegger 'technics' is used to capture systemic practices exteriorized from the human mind. This conceptualization of technics encompasses, but is not limited to technology. It can be understood as a kind of tool-being, but with the notion of tools beyond physical devices and items to include conceptual frameworks and cultural practices.
In ancient Greek philosophy, the term techne receives as much attention in texts concerning rhetoric as it does in texts concerning physics and the natural sciences, a fact perhaps a bit surprising from our technologically and materially focused age. Heidegger's lectures at Freiburg in 1923 on the Nicomachean Ethics set the stage for much of the thinking around this subject for the following century. (6)
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is an extended examination of the "intellectual virtues," including nous, episteme, sophia, techne, and phronesis. Heidegger deploys (as is his want) several neologisms to parse these concepts. For him, techne is rendered as verrichtend-herstellendes Verfahren, (routine-directive-productive operating) and phronesis as fursorgliches Sichumsehen [Umsicht], (solicitous circumspecting); these are modes of thought concerned with the contingent and changeable. Episteme (observing-discussing-revealing determination) and sophia (authentic-seeing understanding) are categories of thought addressing the necessary and unchanging.(7)
Heidegger's approach connects the ethical element of techne's rhetorical roots with ontological questions of being, but the connection is made in specifically temporal terms. The ethical element may be expected, given the ethical implications of Bonaventure's typology of authorship that we saw earlier, but the temporality of this parsing is also significant. For Heidegger, as for many philosophers who follow him, techne, the generative, creative and expressive virtue, is situated in dynamic, changing time and linked to times's contingency and changeability. This tension between the eternal and the ephemeral, between being and becoming will return again and again in our survey of stances of musical composition.
Building on Heidegger's ontological technics, Stiegler in Technics and Time (8) puts forward a system of thought in which life, at all levels, is technics. The computerization of the world-system, the inescapable significance of the tool in the emergence of humanity as a species, the negentropic and self-replicating agenda of all life; technics in his conceptualization is the production and maintenance of ordered systems that maintain life.(9) Stiegler's statement that "[to be] human is essentially the process of the adoption of the past, and of technics" emphasizes the extent to which technics are exteriorizations of systems of thought and action, while at the same time highlighting the extent to which technics are always brought into practice via their selection, through their adoption by people. (10) We will now see how this notion of technics can help us understand how the technical nature of composition links it to history, not merely a particular historical context, but also to an understanding of composition as an stance of a relationship to history.
tradition, inheritance & adoption
The technical object (that which is adopted) has an inescapable historicity (Stiegler 71). Technics are always developed within a historical milieu and are linked to that milieu. So in technical adoption, the opposition of the old and the new is replaced by a partnership, a continual back and forth–what has been is made new through a process of adoption.
We have already seen just such an historically contextual adoption in Dillon's description of Chaillou's reading of Gervais reading, creating a new text while recreating an old one. But we have also already seen it in the myriad practices of copying, stealing, borrowing and referencing that proliferate through the Early Modern. Parody masses, paraphrase masses, cantus firmus technics, refrains in the Parisian motet repertoire--these are the meat and potatoes of introductory courses, these are the endless source of dissertation proposals, these are the foundations of entire careers.
The musicology of these repertoires is so powerful in this discussion because it is (along with ethnomusicology) here that we post-Romantics first had to make peace with the idea that the 'composer' is perhaps not the most helpful concept, a situation we 'discovered' again in through the growth of ethnomusicology. We use the composer as an index for the collected traces of musicking that we call 'works' and 'repertoires' and 'scores.' But in doing so we amplify the ideologies of authorial intent and genius, as well as those of the autonomous work. In the study of music of the Early Modern, variations from instantiation to instantiation or trace to trace are not problems to be solved but essential, revelatory, and fascinating aspects of music's way-of-being.
We have also seen this closer to the once so-called Common Practice. Instrumental study has long framed itself in terms of adoption of technical skills/apparatuses, interestingly often tied to an individual; Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist, Czerny's The School of the Velocity, Isidore Philipp's Exercises de Tenues. There is a theory of practice here in the Bourdieuian sense, but it is not merely conceptual, it is an embodied theory of practice. Interpretation, often opposed to the 'merely' technical aspect of performance is often presented as such a chain of adoption: Beethoven begat Czerny, who begat Liszt, who begat von Bülow, who begat Barth who begat Rubenstien. The rise of semiotics as a component of the theoretical discourse concerning the 18th and 19th centuries is also a way of talking about a process of adoption. (11) Similar phylogenies are frequently presented for composers, in press and program notes and the blogosphere. These family trees are often associated genres or particular pieces – the Beethoven Late Quartets lead to the Bartok Quartets that lead to the Ligeti Quartets.
Academic models of compositional training are also revealing; four part choral writing, species counterpoint, the whole notion of "ear training," and the heavy emphasis on "repertoire knowledge" in doctoral exams are all efforts to encourage or mandate particular kinds of adoption. Here, compositional voice is something achieved after the internalization of techniques, an internalization of the previously exteriorized. But this anxiety of influence manifests in many other ways–more horizontally in poly-stylistic context, like the manic catalogues of a Maximalist like John Zorn, or more transcendentally through the invocation of an almost (and some times actual) spiritual connection with a particular age or period, such as the aesthetic neo-medievalisms of Pärt or Kyr.
Moderns and the problem of change
But our discussion of technical adoption has yet to relate adoption to change, especially the fragmentary and discontinuous change associated with aesthetic Modernism. This approach to composition will illustrate for us the inevitability of 'technical historicism,' in that even the most future- or eternity-oriented projects of composers have stances concerning the relation of the past (as it is present) and the future (as it emerges into the present). It is here that we will see the intersection of memory and imagination, the dual role of heritage as generative gift and as constraining obligation must be sorted out.
Stravinsky's Neo-classicism is the textbook example. In Pulcinella, the adoptive project is overt, generating a seemingly eternal debate over the 'title' of composer. The oppositions of Stravinsky versus Pergolesi or the pseudo-Pergolesi mirrors but inverts the collective action of Chaillou and Gervais, replacing generative adoption with the transgressive language of theft.
Stravinsky's other works show a plurality of historical stances, all involved in some kind of adoption. Stravinsky's earlier "Primitivist" works are strongly temporalist in their stance, though their connection is to a mythic (or perhaps proto-historical) past rather than the great Classical heritage. Of course this is discontinuous history, in which a mythology is adopted, or perhaps is created in order to be adopted; it is an idealized, ancient ritual of sacrifice that is laid claim to by Le Sacre du Printemps, not a careful archeological or anthropological reconstruction. Nonetheless, this is still a relationship with a temporal if mytho-historical milieu. The late, serial works, though different in their aesthetics than the neo-classical also often present a heritage, either religious (Requiem Canticles) or philosophical (Agon).
This is a complicated and occasionally contradictory set of approaches. Taruskin (12) looks at the Stravinsky's rhetoric of the eternal and ties his ideas of the Modern to approaches to the performance of Early Music:
Music [...] which evolves parallel to the process of ontological time [is] inducing in the mind of the listener a feeling of euphoria and, so to speak, of "dynamic calm". The other kind [...] dislocates the centers of attraction and gravity and set itself up in the unstable; and this fact makes it particularly adaptable to the translation of the composer's emotive impulses. [...] The music that adheres to psychological time likes to proceed by contrast. [...] I have always considered that in general it is more satisfactory to proceed by similarity rather than by contrast. Music thus gains strength in the measure that it does not succumb to the seductions of variety. What it loses in questionable riches it gains in true solidity. (Stravinsky: Poetics of Music 41-43)The vitriolic attacks on him and his work by Adorno are of the opposite view. (13) These attacks are at least as critical of his works' historical stances as the aesthetics or craft of the works. Now, this attack involves much more than Stravinsky's 'historicism'(14) but the general historicist framing of those attacks demonstrates the power of historical discourses to shape reception. Burkholder(15) points out that the later works can be understood as efforts to historically differentiate themselves from the earlier works, but the serial works in particular can be understood as particular efforts to situate themselves in history not by differentiation but by adoption.
The push outward towards a depersonalized, ontological, and/or eternal time that we saw in Stravinsky's rhetoric is in effect a careful emplacement of his work in history, stabilizing the work and its signification through transcendental and trans-temporal rhetoric; even the transcendence of history is an historical project. His reliance on language and historical de/contextualization highlight the constructedness of both; the construction of both particular composers and the composer role, the reconstruction of valences of elements of a musical milieu, and the storytelling involved in the project of history itself.(16)
Stravinsky's complex relationship to mythology, history and the eternal is distinct, certainly, but is far from unique. Rather than clarifying a bright line between reactionary Classicists and visionary Modernists, the work of many of Stravinsky's contemporaries appear to be involved in a persistent and varied project of technical adoption which results in divergent structures, some emphasizing continuity, some discontinuity, some both in the same gesture. The inescapability of history is at the same moment shown by the complex relationship of many of Stravinsky's contemporaries to the past. Webern's intense commitment (as difficult to discern as it might be at times) to Renaissance polyphony, or the formal references in Schoenberg's Suite, or the relationship of complementarity to the tonic/dominant relationship present in his theoretical positions all speak to complex and varied relationships with the past. For the generations following, one might expect Adorno's hope for a fundamentally new relationship to time and history to be fulfilled. What does emerge is a varied and often contradictory set of historical stances. Composers as 'advanced' as Berio (in Sinfonia) or Gilbert Amy (in En Trio) produce collages of 'masterworks,' blurring the line between the new works and their source material, a strong echo of Chaillou and Gervais.
Even Boulez, the enfant terrible for so many for so long, the great destroyer of connections to the past (consider the reception of Structures Ia) becomes both a conductor of the lush French masterpieces of Ravel and Debussy and the composer of similarly lush soundscapes (Dérive I). Even the high modernity of his piano sonatas are consciously historicized in his own writings ("Sonata, que me-te-veux?").
Boulez's role with Chereau in the pivotal Bayreuth centennial production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is also telling of a rather more subtle relationship to history than it appears at the surface. Asked about the reactions of the press to his 'radical re-workings' of the traditions of Bayreuth, he responds:
Well, my main goal was to get rid of the so-called 'Tradition,' which for me is so unbearable. What is Tradition? If you get to this point, Tradition is merely mannerisms of somebody which are transmitted and transformed into worse mannerisms which have no raison-d'être.
Pierre Boulez
13', ff.
Wagner - The Making of Der Ring Des Nibelungen (2005)(17)
Again, Stiegler's notions of technics and milieu both help us to understand these Late Modern historical-compositional stances, while resonating with the processes of musicking in the Early Modern. The play of technics and milieu always leads to change, either through discontinuous adoptions or the process of anamnessis, which leads to discovery in the everyday (Stiegler 43). This dynamism comes from the inevitable displacement of technics from one milieu to another. The more general the milieu, the more likely it is to become naturalized and forgotten; it vanishes into the quotidian background. When we forget the milieu, we forget the dynamic between technics and milieu which is always occurring, so the change appears surprising. (Stiegler 77) Aristotle labels this phenomenon anamnesis using as a metaphor the fish which is unaware of water until it lacks it (Stiegler 109). In Stravinsky's discontinuous adoptions, the collages of Berio and Amy or in the recontextualization of Wagner by Boulez, we see the emergence and exploitation of potentials that emerge as milieus shift.
Stiegler's technics, though built from recapitulation in fact emphasize changes. Rather than theorizing a reason for change, this approach obligates us to explain stasis. This is not the legitimizing retroactive telos of the uncritical genealogies of the The Great Composers and/or Musicians we saw when first discussing the relationship of technics and inheritance, but something rather more tychastic and emergent. Praxis is larger than individuals, and change is fueled by the frisson between technic and milieu. 'Selves' are not the most useful way of understanding change, but they are essential for discussion of the becoming of change.
But scholarship has shown us that the idea of associating composition with identity is a relatively Late Modern notion, arising in the Romantic and applied retroactively to the Classical, only to begin to unwind in the pluralisms of the 20th Century. It is a historically outlier—as Brailau says, the notion of an individual composer in any context is always a problematic, if not untenable position.(18) The body of tradition is a chain of adoption, not the work of a singular person (Stiegler 71).
Chaillou and Gervais are merely a metonymy of the actual process of adoption. Composition is a complex activity, involving practices and material of many valences from many different cultural fields, and so in seeking a way to described this action, it seems helpful to grab onto the people that were there, the composers holding the pen over the blank page, but we must remember that the self is the locus of adoption, not the core. The author is not dead, we simply dreamed him alive and are now awaking.
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6 This course was significant for its integration of the temporal and rhetorical aspects of techne and for the influence the course had on student's attending the course, including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. The impact of the course as well as the subtleties of Heidegger's argument is explored in Steven Mailloux's 'Rhetorical Hermeneutics: or On the Track of Phronesis' in A COMPANION TO RHETORIC AND RHETORICAL CRITICISM, (Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted, eds.) (especially 458-459).
7 Heidegger 1992a: 377; 1989: 255). and also C.D.C. Reeve's Aristotle on the Virtues of Thought. in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Richard Kraut, ed.)
8 Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation Bernard Stiegler Translated by Stephen Barker 2009, Stanford University Press.
9 Though Stiegler doesn't discuss music that often apart from Husserl's (in)famous melody or the materiality and temporality of recorded sound, but he makes clear that artistic practices are technical in his sense of the term., Music is clearly a technical system in his construction, as is dance (Stiegler, 93) or film is technics (The entirety of Volume 3 of Technics and Time).
10 Stiegler, Bernard, perf. The Ister. Dir. David Barison and Daniel Ross. Black Box Sound and Image, 2004.
11 Agawu's Playing with Signs or Tarasti's A Theory of Musical Semiotics.
12 Text & Act, 113-114
13 Philosophy of Modern Music, 1949
14 An excellent and compact overview of Adorno's critiques of Stravinsky and others can be found in Max Paddison's Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture, especially his fourth chapter, 'Critical Reflections on Adorno.'
15 J. Peter Burkholder, "Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years" The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 115-134, specifically 124-125
16 Burkolder, 123
17 This is a 'behind the scenes' documentary of the production, far more interesting than it was intended to be.
18 Constantine Brailau 'Reflections on Collective Musical Composition in Problems of Ethnomusicology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 102-9