This blog started off as some conversations between CMZ and myself on the philosophical and aesthetic issues associated with mixing jazz and 'new' music in a concert setting. In addition to its interesting intellectual implications, this is a practical question for us; we represent two organizations presenting a concert doing exactly that; Bigmouths. Though the language we are using in this blog maybe a a little abstract, the issue, for us, is a very immediate one, and this blog is hopefully a think-tank for solutions to practical as well as philosophical questions. CMZ's last post got me thinking about 'the work'– integrity and autonomy, conditionality and reflexivity. As we will see in the future { link }, i agree with CMZ that the notion of tripartition developed by Molino, and expanded by Nattiez in Music and Discourse, is a powerful concept, and will be a usefull touchstone moving forward. The tripartition of esthesis, poetics and the immanent level forces one toward a more expansive concept of the work. We should remember, though, that Nattiez uses his approach primarily as a means of situating anlaysis (both particular analyses and analytic practices) in particular semiotic frames. He sets out to make a theory of theory, or a way of talking about analysis. The object of analysis may have changed character or configuration, and analysis itself may be viewed somewhat more critically, but it is the project of analysis which is the primary focus of his work.The ex-physicist in me loves a metaphor that's waiting for us on the other side of the E/I/P tripartition— the work as a diffraction pattern, cause by the interference of the the esthesic field and the poetic field. But if you really run down that metaphor, you have to remember that you get a diffraction pattern even when you send one photon of light through the grating - the wave theory of light is both right and wrong, that physicists, faced with incommensurate results between two theories, found that allowing both to have the status of 'true' (or better - 'useful') actually allowed the conversation to move forward.In the spirit of filling in some gaps, though, I'd like to try to connect some of these ideas to this blogs previous posts ({ here } and { here } ) before moving on to new concepts.Here's an interesting thought; on the tension between pre-ontological intuitions and aesthetic views, Lydia Goehr writes:
On the level of phenomena and practices we have two existing aesthetic views. The resulting tension that exists, given contrasting views, is accommodated in practice because it exists in practice. It is accommodated if for no other reason than to provide variation and diversity in how we experience musical works. Are these different kinds of experience and the related criticism and evaluations to be encouraged? If they are, and if the tension in exciting and accommodated in practice, should the philosopher then strive to resolve or do away with the tension?" Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, p. 56For those unfamiliar with the book, it deals with (among other things) the ways in which the aesthetic frames and conclusions of analysts, historians and philosphers are inextricably connected to their definition of 'work.' Her rather bold definition for the work (and relegation of many favorite chestnuts to (non)category of non-work) certainly rubs some the wrong way, but i thought that i'd mention her work as a rather powerful statement that our aesthetic frames and historical understanding do, in fact, shape what constitutes a 'work' for a given individual or community. In particular, i enjoy in that quote the implication that aesthetic difference between works (and styles and genres and cultures and subcultures) is an important thing to consider, but that the path from that consideration may be resolution, synthesis, or simple enthusiastic contemplation of the difference.Drawing from my above metaphor of wave/particle duality, I've found a useful rubric for parsing these questions when talking to students is the notion of a spectrum between 'atomism' and 'reflexivism' — Loosely, one might say that theories of "work" exist along a spectrum ranging from an 'atomist' view of the work (emphasizing the integrity and autonomy of a specific work; Philodemus; 'seperability principle', etc.), and a 'reflexive' view (in which the work is leant meaning and even existence by its interactions with actors, such as musicians, listeners and the market place; Adorno, DeNora's 'affordance,' etc.). These are clearly just a short hand, and complex arguments have many constituent parts, and different parts of an argument may be more atomist than another, etc.but this is an oversimplification, that i have found helpful to have ready-at-hand, even if we do put them down later as the conversation evolves.. These days, emphasis of the interconnectedness of works to other works and/or their interconnectedness to the socio-culture network which led to its existence is surely in ascendance—a pure 'atomist' view doesn't really happen in serious scholarship very much, certainly not after Adorno's work was sublimated and integrated into so much of musicology. i feel, though, that atomism is still in play, in the marketing and management of music, in the pedagogy of music (very strongly) and sometimes in an encrypted form in scholarship which appears otherwise firmly planted in the realm of social or aesthetic reflexivism.If this is even a middlingly-good description of the situation we are in as artists and presenters, then all this mucking around about aesthetics and postmodernity in our (thus far) rather confused way makes sense— if we do want to talk about what constitutes a work, we _must_ figure out how we (collectively) want to situate that project aesthetically. Personally, i'm not quite sure how to talk about it yet, but that's what we're working on here. Perhaps this will make fun reading, perhaps not.Since CMZ has come clean about the ploy-ful-ness of his past posts, i will similarly fess up to manipulative efforts in my previous posting. My goal was various:— by fore-grounding the questions of production, reception and pluralism, i wanted to force a conversation ostensibly about 'the nature of the work' to always refer back to the socio-cultural context in which works inhabit.— i wanted to set the discussion of pluralism squarely in the realm of the Pragmatists, mostly because i feel that their construction of pluralism is the most useful take on that question that i have seen. In particular, Bernstein's 'engaged fallibalistic pluralism' might even be able to deal with provocations such as CMZ's questioning the situation of pluaralism soon after asserting it. A consideration of the Pragmatic take on this seems It also seems appropriate for our little project, in that it focuses heavily on the actors, not the work— engagement is the work of artists and audiences, and we are writing from the position of artists and audiences.— i wanted to salvage resistance, not simply in an anti-establishment, smash-the-state way, but something which helps us be critical and effective as artists and presenters of arts. i certainly agree with CZ that resistance is not the primary role of 'new music,' but i tend to think, as a practical matter, that it is a necessary condition; poetic projects must have some ability to handle the buffeting in the marketplace, if it is to retain a distinct character of its own, to maintain itself "in the margins" (using CZ's phrase), and not be co-opted, or, as might seem more likely, to simply cease to be.