[microsound] making/erasure

[CraqueMat]

I'm anxious to read Eco's ideas about the open work, I'm firmly in that 
category of belief. Especially with improvisation, which is a huge part 
of my work, anyway.

What's interesting about the open work is that it could become anything 
or be made FROM anything. It's interesting, for example, how pieces on 
Raster-Noton are described as "scientific" approaches to music making. 
This leaves me with the sense that these guys are bent over test tubes 
and petri dishes of individual motes of sound, expressing them with 
surgical accuracy and planning.

At the same time, a very very similar sounding label in 12K has many 
artists that espouse improvisation as a central figure in their music 
making.

Obviously I am over generalizing, as neither label can be described this 
way categorically, but as an example I think it's fitting. Two very 
different approaches which both share the benefit of 'the open work', i 
think, in two very different ways.

What's also apparent is that we don't necessarily know what's going on. 
The approach of the artist doesn't matter, but the end result is the 
same. A 20 minute free improvisation with no editing and no assist from 
a laptop may sound as complex and 'open' as an extremely well thought 
out concept and construction.

( BTW, Kyle Gann's article about electronic music profs and Max/MSP-ism 
is hilarious. I love his blog. )

-matt

Stephen Hastings-King wrote:
> hello charles.
> 
> thanks for the tip on morawski: i haven't heard of him before, so will 
> check out his work.
> 
> i'm  also pleased that the notion of open work is on the table again 
> because that's at the center
> of what i was thinking (but did not write below) about aesthetics as a 
> problem.
>  
> an open work is reassembled, it changes and it's meanings are made 
> differently each time. the varying character of such works migrate them 
> outside the object-orientation of aesthetic theory, it switches the 
> relation of making to the work. meanings--which lean on ways of 
> determining provisionally what a piece is---become as varied as those 
> who experience the piece.
> the boundary between experiencing and composing gets blurred.
>  
> i like the idea that one can present layers of sound or other forms of 
> information simultaneously without obvious markers as to hierarchy
> amongst them (but with attention to detail and clarity at each 
> layer--that's my preference anyway) and put an audience in the position 
> of organizing for themselves what they experience (or read) such there 
> is no object or phenomenon---there are only versions.  eco talks about 
> this mostly in the context of fixed media---stockhausen's klavierstucke 
> 11 (i remember the excerpt in audio culture better than the book as a 
> whole because i used audio culture multiple times in courses) and 
> texts---but i've also found it a really interesting hook for thinking 
> about improvisation and pieces that use environmental sound (scrambling 
> scale for example)---in an improvised context, thinking what you're 
> doing through a notion of open work puts performers and audience in the 
> same situation--the resulting versions are a numerous as is the 
> audience, the meanings explicitly made in the process and the whole is 
> transient. 
> 
> this pushes an interesting wedge between performance and recording that 
> i like to think about--it's through this that i got interested in making 
> recorded environments unstable by making pieces that one would 
> layer--play 4 cds simultaneously say---which requires a bit of planning 
> that's not at odds with improvising---such that every choice a listener 
> would make with respect to sound systems, how to deal with slightly 
> varied lengths of the component recordings, how well they know 
> individual recordings as separate environments etc. would change the 
> outputs. 
> i like to think that no two playbacks would be the same. 
> i know that the whole is other than the sum of the parts. 
> 
> i think there's a pretty basic critique of traditional aesthetic theory 
> performed in all this.
> 
> stephen
> 
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Charles Turner <vze26m98 at optonline.net 
> <mailto:vze26m98 at optonline.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:37:39 -0500, Stephen Hastings-King wrote:
>      > 1. the category of aesthetics is a problem. classical aesthetic
>      > theory takes the work as given for it's point of departure.
>      > bourgeois and materialist forms of aesthetic theory differ primarily
>      > in the interpretive frameworks they bring to bear on the artwork.
>      > in both, the processes of making are erased behind the work as
>      > totality and are replaced with one or another version of the mythical
>      > Artist.
>      > it seems to me that one of the many conceptual tasks that await
>      > us--whatever that means--out there in the world is to undo this
>      > category and the constraints that enframe it.
>      > this isn't exactly a new idea---lots of folk have addressed it one
>      > way or another since the 60s at least--in alot of cases, the way folk
>      > went at it was to tack on autobiographical statements after fairly
>      > straightforward aesthetic pronouncements.
> 
>     Hi Stephen-
> 
>     I've always found Stefan Morawski's distinction between "artistic
>     value" and "aesthetic valuation" to be useful. (The first chapter of
>     his 1974 _Fundamentals_ book sets it out.)
> 
>     Morawski was trying to justify both an historical materialist approach,
>     and an aesthetics that could encompass neolithic cave art, Poussin, and
>     Duchamp/Cage/Fluxus.
> 
>     Briefly, he posits artistic values as those attributes that an artist
>     instills in an "object" that cause us to relate to it as such. Artistic
>     value is then prior to any aesthetic understanding of the art object.
>     (As he points out, people were making art objects long before there was
>     any body of aesthetic thought.)
> 
>     Aesthetics is essentially a judgement of these artistic values, and an
>     attempt to come to terms with how general and particular values
>     instilled in art objects come to be significant.
> 
>     But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
> 
>     Best, Charles
> 
> 
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