Criticism & Sound Art / Experimental Music

[flies]

In the 20th century, visual art became nonrepresentative, and the body of criticism that emerged from that development reflects it. Fictions were also produced that undermined immersion or that made indeterminate the ontological level of the story, or that had unreliable narrators. There are parallels in all the arts regarding the growing predominance of abstraction in the 20th century.

I'm interested in your idea that abstraction has become more important in music over the last 100 years. One could argue that synthesized sound is "more abstract" than that produced by "real instruments", on the other hand music concrete/sampling in general seems like a move toward representation. The advent of recorded music brings an overwhelming surge of representation.

[nnudl]

In the 20th century, visual art became nonrepresentative, and the body of criticism that emerged from that development reflects it. Fictions were also produced that undermined immersion or that made indeterminate the ontological level of the story, or that had unreliable narrators. There are parallels in all the arts regarding the growing predominance of abstraction in the 20th century.

I'm interested in your idea that abstraction has become more important in music over the last 100 years. One could argue that synthesized sound is "more abstract" than that produced by "real instruments", on the other hand music concrete/sampling in general seems like a move toward representation. The advent of recorded music brings an overwhelming surge of representation.

Hmmm. Seems to me that representation and abstraction are not mutually exclusive in music as they are in visual art. Most music is abstract (more apt would be 'metaphorical' and/or 'connotative') and represented in some way - by musicians, on a score, on a recording etc. I hope you would agree that the actual sound produced is not the same as the music, purely in perceptual terms - hence the ability to listen to the same recording through speakers, headphones, in the car etc. and perceive the same piece of music. Indeed this is also true of performances, each of which do not represent the nouminal (or imaginary - see Lydia Goehr's book) musical work. Performances, like recordings and scores, are representamina.

But also important to this is the nature of the aesthetic object (representamen) that is undergoing criticism. Music written on a score (the represented) has a different kind of existence to music that is only recorded - it may be that one can only gain a full understanding of a written work having heard a performance and examined a score. Therefore analysis and criticism of written works is usually based on the structure of the work considered 'outside of time' and on the page (hence Schenker, Reti, Forte and other theorists interested in harmonic/melodic/pitch structure, and not interested in duration). Most conventional musical analysis (which can be considered a form of criticism) does not address with the question 'why is this piece this long?' - or worse 'is this piece too long?'

It seems to me that that the move away from the pitch structure and harmonic organisation, and toward organisation in time has lead composers to solve durational problems (probably beginning with Cage, but also Schaeffer/Henry and others). Problems like the 'weight' of certain gestures, rates of change, differing varieties of change, density/sparceness in time, overall duration etc. It turns out that these priorities have always been priorities, its just that analysts have preferred to see durational structuring as essentially arbitrary (or contingent, dependant on 'deeper' fundamental structure).

[washline]

My point is not really all that controversial. The parallels to abstraction and antirepresentation in the visual arts are in areas like atonal music or free improvisation where the privileged status of melody and harmony was overturned. Music has never really been "representational" except for when it might have been onomatopoeic. So when you look for parallels, you have to look also at the intrinsic differences between the artistic forms in order to note the similarities in aesthetic revolutions. Musique concrete is an interesting case, but it is fully dependent on the development of recorded sound, and such recorded sounds, in toto, do not constitute the entire content of a musique concrete work. Borrowed and appropriated sounds, yes, full reduplication no. It's probably more a case of quotation.