Matthew Mendez

This chapter examines Hugues Dufourt’s music-historical appreciations of Edgard Varèse, whose notion of “art-science” was an all-important inspiration for his conception of musique spectrale. For Dufourt, Varèse was the first composer to grasp the ramifications of then-recent discoveries in modern physics, particularly quantum field theory’s revision of the relationship between space and elementary particles. The chapter discusses how, in Dufourt’s view, this led Varèse to formulate analogous ideas about sonic space—above all, a fundamentally spatial understanding of sound objects as being co-constitutive with their surrounding medium. For Dufourt, this idea has been the foundation stone for the spectral approach, albeit in a radicalized form made possible by the psychoacoustic timbre space research of the 1970s. In order to take the full measure of Dufourt’s historiographical claims about this new field-inspired approach to sound, the chapter subsequently attends to some of his philosophical sources, particularly the work of Gaston Bachelard, founder of the French epistemological tradition. Dufourt follows Bachelard in insisting that “objectivity,” and thus the sound object, is a function of historically contingent processes of mediation, measurement, and visualization. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the extent to which Dufourt’s fusion of ideas from Varèse and Bachelard commits him to a new sonic ontology, or whether he can instead be read as arguing that ontologies are always thoroughly historical phenomena, tied up with changes in the scientific method, the scale of objects of measurement, and technical “relays.”

Erik Satie’s vogue among the postwar avant-garde has been traditionally imputed to the Dadaist, anti-art influence of his late works. Significantly less attention has been paid to the midcentury reception of Satie’s Montmartre-period music, whose mystic, esotericist ambiance runs contrary in many respects to his subsequent creative agnosticism. This chapter examines the afterlife of Satie’s fin de siècle output by way of a pair of “case studies” from 1963-64: two “actions” by the German sculptor-performance artist Joseph Beuys, and the famous public premiere of Vexations presented by John Cage (I consider its less well-known antecedents, as well). Some attention is also paid to a third Satie enthusiast, the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, whose practice serves to bridge the art- historical perspective of Beuys scholarship and the more strictly musical one of much commentary on Cage. To varying extents, all three men engaged with the homeopathic content of Satie’s Rosicrucian work, and in particular the formula “heal like with like,” which tallied well with a broader fascination among 1960s artists for phenomena that exposed spectators to psychological and even physical danger. Both Beuys and Cage employed Satie’s “ahistorical” music as what the former called an “art pill,” which they hoped might remedy modernity’s “loss of meaning.” Yet their respective visions of art- religion had two very different termini: while Beuys replaced the debasements of modern historical memory with the icons and symbols of an idealized, but ultimately inauthentic, past, Cage took up Satie’s investigations into repetitive extremes in an effort to liquidate that memory altogether. In both cases, it quickly becomes difficult to draw any easy distinctions between “productive” forgetting and “irresponsible” amnesia.

This article sketches the development of Jean-François Lyotard’s musical thinking through the lens of the composer with whom he was most often associated, John Cage. I contend that the affinity Lyotard felt for Cage’s work came about on the basis of two shared concerns: first, an interest in creative strategies hinging on passivity and indifference and, second, a related desire to approach singular events free from the interference incurred by human cognition. In Lyotard’s “libidinal” phase, as well as his later Kant-centered work, his investigations indicate that Cage’s artistic practice is founded upon a series of logical paradoxes. However, it can be argued that Lyotard’s revision of Cage’s aesthetic theories in post-Freudian terms more openly faces up to these paradoxes than Cage’s own sunny Jungianism does.

Though much has already been written on the relationship between Iannis Xenakis and John Cage, in this paper I contribute to this discussion by arguing that their parallel adoptions of chance — whether Zen-cum-“anarchical” as in Cage, or mediated and controlled through the scientific method as in Xenakis — represent a response to a common intellectual phenomenon. This is the apparent exhaustion of humanistic ethics and all of its attendant notions: subject-object dualism, the primacy of the ego and dialectics, and anthropocentrism. A fundamental dissatisfaction with humanistic subjectivity was also the essential preoccupation of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, a thinker noted for producing some of the most incisive commentaries on contemporary music in recent years. Particularly pertinent in this context is Lyotard’s longstanding focus on the ethical realm, which he saw as more important than ever given recent anti-humanistic philosophy’s rejection of foundationalism. I demonstrate that Cage and Xenakis were unique among composers of their generation in also refusing to lose sight of this same concern. Yet while both composers go very far in dissolving subjectivity and the self-propriety of reason by following what is akin to a Lyotardian aesthetics/ethics of the sublime, each also makes compromises on the extent to which they ask their listeners to passively submit to an Other of reason. From a humanistic perspective, such a move appears little more than “enslavement” to an amorphous, ungovernable “nature”. Lyotard, however, follows Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that this is actually a fundamentally ethical act insofar as it requires an obligation prior to any post facto rationalization. Though Xenakis and Cage both reject traditional political praxis, they remain partially unsatisfied with this extreme “ethical” alternative and its apparent dangers, and in spite of themselves, they ultimately admit of some of the reflective politics which they appear to disdain.

Founded in 1900, the Berlin-based Phonographische Zeitschrift was the leading German-language periodical devoted exclusively to the early sound recording business. Beginning in 1906, it featured regular contributions from the critic Max Chop (1862-1929), who covered recent industry developments, reviewed new recordings, and wrote features instructing consumers about the techniques of listening best suited to the novel apparatus. However, one of the subjects to which Chop devoted especially keen attention was the problem of the reproducibility of so-called “hypermodern” music—above all, that of Richard Strauss. In a series of columns discussing some of the earliest Strauss recordings, Chop broached the possibility that the acoustic reproduction process was inherently unable to accommodate his works. In a word, Strauss was not “plattenmöglich”.

My paper traces the shifting explanations Chop provides for the claim that Strauss’s idiom precluded successful phonographic inscription. While he largely frames the difficulty in terms of “objective” technical affordances, his reasoning also shades into aesthetic valuation, thereby underwriting a subtle revival of some of the polemicizing associated with earlier debates surrounding Straussian Nervenkunst. Yet if Chop’s assessments are worthy of consideration from the perspective of Strauss reception history, they are perhaps equally salient as symptoms of some of the philosophical puzzles posed by the analog mediation of music. If subsequent technological advances would soon enough render Chop’s complaints moot, his deployment of recording practice as aesthetic legitimizer reflects a moment in phonographic history when the ontology of musical reproduction was still up for grabs.

In a 2006 conversation with Michael Finnissy, Julian Anderson described himself as deeply sympathetic to the creeds of musical modernism, arguing for modernism’s ongoing relevance as an individual and even collective project, and insisting that he very much continued to “feel attached to a culture which didn’t fear it had to please.” Yet for all this, the precise nature of Anderson’s relationship to aesthetic modernism has remained far from certain. For one thing, his music rarely trades in any of the surface features stereotypically associated with high modernist repertoires. For another, as commentators have often pointed out, Anderson’s work seems to embody an affirmative, celebratory ideal of aesthetic experience starkly at odds with the practices of negation associated with (now-canonic) midcentury modernism. Likewise, his music’s efforts at engaging older modernist exemplars have often been deeply ambivalent, with perceptible slippages between his modernist sources of inspiration and the eventual sounding products.

Concentrating on a handful of case studies from Anderson’s catalog, my talk will examine some of those slippages, tracing the vicissitudes of his ongoing confrontation with earlier models of modernist practice. Doing so in turn offers a privileged window onto Anderson’s unspoken, unconscious assumptions about the nature and viability of today’s modernist enterprise. Situating Anderson at the heart of recent scholarly debates about so-called “alternative modernisms” (many of which have indeed centered on triangulating the coordinates of a specifically British modernism), I argue that his music’s persistent, and crucial, appeal to folk and vernacular repertoires hardly debars him from consideration as a modernist. On the contrary, it means his music must be understood in relation to the most radical formulation of the “alternative modernisms” rubric, which first arose in the context of transnational postcolonial studies. Here too, however, Anderson’s orientation is necessarily ambivalent: as an almost-lifelong resident of the former imperial metropole, it is not clear to what extent his subject position enables his work to lay claim to “alternative modernities.” Yet in his music, this results in a most productive tension—between tropes associated with the “natural” and “collective,” and acknowledgements of their fraught character. Thus does negation slip back into Anderson’s practice.

For two decades now, composer Peter Ablinger has been at sporadic work on a series of installation pieces entitled Quadraturen III. In each of Quadraturen III’s nine entries, the guiding principle has generally been the same—“acoustic speech synthesis,” whereby a voice recording is subjected to a spectrogram analysis, making it possible for the audio’s continuous analog curve to be digitally sampled and reinterpreted as a discrete set of musical data points. This information Ablinger then feeds into a custom-designed playback apparatus for piano—an “upgraded” Vorsetzer, as it were—the idea being that the sheer speed and quantity of the attacks will produce a simulacrum of the original voice, which the hearer will recognize as such with the aid of a simultaneous projection of the corresponding text. The listener thus “wavers” between the reception of an (admittedly mediated) vocality, and something like what composer Clarence Barlow, pioneer of the applications of Fourier analysis and computer-assisted composition Ablinger here relies upon, has (1997) dubbed “spectastics” (spectral stochastics).

Foremost among the questions raised by Quadraturen III is: in an age of almost unlimited digital means and manipulability, why does Ablinger rely upon the defiantly analog medium of the piano to reconstitute his phantom voices? After all, as Carolyn Abbate (2001) has observed, the enterprise of producing speaking (and singing) automata was already technologically démodé by the latter stages of the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth. With this fact in view, this paper will interrogate Ablinger’s application of the player piano as a skeuomorph, here defined binarily, as both a holdover from an old medium to a new one, and as a previous design element retained ornamentally (i.e. non-functionally). First, I posit that Ablinger’s installations amount to so many anarchival “sonic time machines,” in the media-archaelogical acceptation of Wolfgang Ernst (2013, 2016). I will then argue that Ablinger’s experiments can be understood as demarcating a particular mode of (here, technologized) hearing, facilitating what Tom Gunning (2003) refers to as the “re-enchantment” of the player piano via the “marvelous” reproduction of the voice. In this, Ablinger capitalizes on the ambivalent status of his antiquated medium, the player piano having long been poised between critical antipodes, the one claiming it dehumanizes, the other that it acts as carrier of the musical “soul.” Quadraturen III finally cuts both ways, for the mediation of piano sound in the reproduction of vocal timbre also serves to play up our awareness of what Steven Connor (2001) calls the “lost estrangement” of the pervasively mediatized twenty-first century voice.

During his lifetime, Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was frequently mentioned in the same breath as Cathy Berberian and Bethany Beardslee, as one of the foremost new music vocalists active anywhere. This paper examines a cross-section of his best-remembered roles and performances, each in works addressing some of the key sites of sociopolitical contestation after 1968. Drawing on original interviews, I argue that Eastman’s (in)ability to invest these virtuoso roles with compelling interpretive force was a reflection of his own ambivalence as a gay African-American “playing whitey’s music,” as one former associate put it.

Though the forthcoming publication of The Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music (Christian 2018) bids fair to initiate a new phase in English-language scholarship on spectral music, the relevant literature remains heavily skewed towards journalistic perspectives and “bargain basement hermeneutics” (Heile 2014). As more and more of the associated repertoire achieves historical status, efforts to situate spectralism in broader theoretical, economic, and historiographical frames have not kept pace, with only rare exceptions (Drott 2009; Pasler 2011). To this end, this presentation will examine one of the most celebrated commissions from the period of spectralism’s development and consolidation, George Benjamin’s Antara (1984-87). Initiated by Pierre Boulez to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the commission was one of the flagship projects of IRCAM’s early years. As has been recounted elsewhere (Born 1995), IRCAM was then a source of intensive public scrutiny, and Benjamin’s score crystallized a number of debates centering on issues of patronage, technology, and new music’s social role. Antara was constructed using recordings of South American panpipe players, whom Benjamin observed busking in the nearby Place Igor Stravinsky; these were supplemented with samples of the Pompidou Center’s exposed girders. In classic spectral fashion, the score’s sonic material was generated through acoustic analyses of these recordings, so that Antara literally “incorporated” the aural topography of the surrounding Beaubourg district, reinscribing its power dynamics for the age of Mitterrand’s grands projets. Informed by recent approaches from modernism studies (Brodsky 2017) and sound studies (Wißmann 2014), I argue that the Antara venture, initiated in an Orwellian year, reflected new music practitioners’ anxieties as the hopes pinned on IRCAM—the idea that it was “the place where the force of artistic utopia asserts itself most powerfully at the very heart of industrial society” (in Yaari 2008)—gave way to collective disenchantment.

Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of John Cage's earliest and most canny European critical interlocutors. While this is a fact which has been largely overlooked in the English-speaking reception of Lyotard's work, the common thread running through his work on music is undoubtedly its widespread indebtedness to Cage's example, in particular the latter's essentially anti-humanist orientation. Indeed, it could be argued that the sole constant criteria underwriting Lyotard's efforts in toto was a concern to map out modes of thinking and creating entirely free of the fundamentally anthropomorphic biases of the humanist tradition. As a result, the Lyotardian analytic “toolbox” provides an apposite means of engaging with Cage's artistic production, one which serves as a helpful counterweight to the sometimes narrow frame of reference guiding current musicological research on Cage. Of particular interest in this regard is the homology between the evolution of Cage's working methods and that of Lyotard's thought. Cage's somewhat fraught shift from the “aesthetic of indifference” to the engaged environmentalism of the 1970s, and Lyotard's about-face from the passively affirmative Freudo-Nietzschean “libidinal aesthetics” of the post-1968 period to the more sober reflections on incommensurabilities and the return to “critique” in the later years are clearly part of the same movement away from an apolitical aesthetics. I will demonstrate that the difficulties Lyotard has in making this awkward shift have their analogue on a concrete musical level in the works of Cage's later years, starting with the “impossible” Freeman Etudes.