[microsound] 1 bit symphony

[David Powers]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Andrew C. Smith
<andrewchristophersmith at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Why does everything have to be meta? For some time now, it has seemed
>> that artists and musicians are more interested in talking about the
>> concepts behind their work than actually working.
>
> What do you mean by "working"? Do you mean creating something? Why can't a concept be something?

Well, a concept is "something," but when it is expressed directly
through words, I would normally consider that to be philosophy instead
of art. You seem to imply that commentary on a work is of equal value
to the work itself. I would say that if the artwork isn't able to
seduce the spectator on its own merits, any commentary is irrelevant,
and without value.

Now, I do not deny that concepts are a significant part of art;
however, following Adorno, I would say that the "spiritual" (or
"conceptual") dimension of artworks only comes into being as a result
of the artwork's form which can be nothing other than the relationship
of its sensuous elements. There would thus be a dialectical
relationship between the conceptual and sensual aspects of artworks,
with the conceptual aspect being something that is only revealed as
one becomes intimately familiar with a work of art and follows its
inner movement.

The problem I have with works influenced by the conceptual art
movement, is that they reduce the dialect between the conceptual and
the sensual dimensions to a simplistic relationship of Idea->physical
realization of the idea, where instead of dialectical tension we have
a one to one correspondence. This sounds suspiciously like Platonic
philosophy where material reality is simply the physical manifestation
of Platonic Ideas.

Furthermore, the conceptual aspect of an artwork is NOT identical with
the creator's concept. In fact, it is not even a fixed property of the
artwork, but changes over time as human consciousness and human ideas
themselves change. Whatever ideas an artist may have about the work
she creates, matter only insofar as those ideas lead to the creation
of a compelling work of art; they have no value in themselves. When an
artist creates a compelling work of art, whatever ideas might have
inspired the work must NOT be privileged over and above the artifact
itself, for once the artwork begins to be objectified, the object
itself makes its own claims which the honest artist must be willing to
heed.

By the way, I'm not completely against conceptual art; it works, I
think, when the artworks envisioned are never realized, and indeed are
in fact impossible to realize outside of the realm of thought.

> And, to his credit, Perich totally hand-made these things rather than just burning a CD of some chip-tunes, > in part (I think) to emphasize the physicality and fragility of the object.
>

Okay, the physicality sounds interesting, but the question I'd ask is:
how does the materiality impact the composition? I had a listen to the
first movement, and my first thought was that the musical material
really seems inappropriate to the 1 bit timbre. I really can't imagine
I'd ever listen to this work again. In fact, although I'm not the
biggest fan of overly rationalized techniques such as those used by
the serialists or Xenakis, in this situation such techniques might
actually have worked--or indeed aleatoric techniques derived from
Cage. I mean seriously, I'd almost prefer to listen to the soundtrack
to Super Mario Brothers, at least it's catchy!

> If you've ever been to a Loud Objects performance (where they take soldering irons to microcontrollers that are actively generating 1-bit sound, and all the work is done on an old-school overhead projector) you get this sense of something physical and unpredictable happening.
>
>> If you were really immersed in your work, there is no need for
>> language to explain your thought. The work itself says all that needs
>> to be said; if you could put it into ordinary words, what would be the
>> point of creating the artwork?
>
> There's no such thing as being immersed in your work (How are you defining "work"? Just the music? Just the words? Why can't both constitute the "work"?).

Being immersed in one's work means submitting to the objective demands
which the artwork makes upon the creator.

> Thought is mediated by language–whether that language is linguistic or musical–and so, as far as I'm
> concerned, using a second mediator to convey a thought does no great harm. This isn't a crutch; it's
> interdisciplinary.
>

Thought is mediated by music? Here we come to the crux of the problem
I have with your argument. If you view music as simply a medium to
convey the composer's thoughts, you would certainly be correct.
However, I do not believe that this is what music is. If the composer
merely wishes to give expression to certain thoughts, going to the
trouble to compose music would seem like an enormous waste of time.

Furthermore, I do not think one can say that Ideas are some kind of
Platonic substances that exist outside of music and/or language and
are then "mediated." Rather music and language are two different forms
of thought, music is not a mediation of thought but more a modality of
thought that is quite different than the modality of language. If I
close my eyes and improvise a musical phrase in my mind, I'm not
taking a pre-existing idea and translating it into music; the musical
phrase IS the thought.

I am firmly convinced that the composer's intentions really only
matter as a point of departure for creation. When a composer submits
to the objectivity of her creation, the creation takes on a life of
its own, and the composer must submit to the objective demands made
upon her. Great art results in the struggle between the composer's
subjective intentions and the objective reality of the artwork; it
does not result when the composer treats the objective artifact as a
mere vessel which is to be filled up with the composer's ideas.

> The point is that you can't put it into ordinary words, just as you can't put it into only music. If something could be reduced to only music, how would that be any better than reducing it to only words?
>

First of all, the starting point of aesthetic experiences is the
encounter with the work itself. The trouble with commentary is that it
colors the listeners response to the work, whereas I feel the
intuitive encounter with a work on its own terms is very important.
Second, what music expresses, not only cannot be reduced to words, but
it possibly can't be expressed by words at all--or at least, not
without resort to poetry!

~David