Prisms: towards a contemporary critical philosophy of new music

Transcription

1 José Júlio Lopes Enlightening New Music Prisms: towards a contemporary critical philosophy of new music Introduction This paper argues that we need to re-think new music in today s world. That means that we need to know, in the first place, why is today s world a problem, and, next, what is the current situation of today s new music. The first issue seems to have an obvious answer. Insofar as we are all contemporaries of today s world, we are experiencing the world in everyday life and that gives us the feeling that we understand it, because we know it. It looks easy and simple. But, at the same time that life seems easier and the world more fit to our needs, we discover the unquietness of a strange situation in which we are not so comfortable: there is a lack of ideas and ideals for the world; there is some will, ignored, to project; there is perhaps some distraction or loss of provocative power of present thinking At the same time as we distract ourselves with some very interesting questions and take satisfaction in cultural achievements, the world, in its political, economical and cultural dimension, changes and moves towards a new configuration. And so there arise certain questions that are new for us, and, of course they are strange to Adorno s experience and also to his grid of thoughts and worldviews. One of them has to do with a kind of technological turn (to use an expression of Foucault) of our era. Another has to do with social and political changes in the structures of society. A third one concerns internal changes in the arts and music. The second issue is not so clear. Perhaps we should ask first what new music is today. Of course there is no easy answer, and briefly, as a first step, I will make reference to a semiotic or linguistic aspect. The expression new music shows, at least, a strong need to establish frontiers, to run away from a previous situation, to start anew (in a less

2 defined field). The expression new music loses the symbolic power of the term avantgarde or radical music, and assumes a different position from the former designation contemporary music. New music is a weak designation, in fact. It is softer and more open. Open to relativism. On the other hand, contemporary is a term that was connected with time, revealing the symbolic need to identify the more recent musical production that is not commercial and that avoids its reification in the market of cultural goods, different again from avant-garde and radical music. One might perhaps think that the very designation new music is also a symptom of present times, in which thought has been dismissed: avoiding at all cost showing a radical position; avoiding to create a closure for music. The fact is that, behind an innocent designation, there is a great deal of ideology. And this is precisely where rethinking music should begin. What follows is a mosaic of questions, not seeking answers. The method we will use is a musical metaphor imported from the domain of musical composition. And so, there will be no chronological sequence of events to analyse. The order will be decided specifically for the purpose of this reflection. In other words, we will build a series of topics. This will be, as I might call it, a serial method, in order to avoid the ambition of solving now with this text all the problems of the world and the many contradictions of new music. So, I will concentrate my efforts on just a few topics and I will try to share with my lectors some of the questions that have a strong relevance in my research. Wagner and the avant-garde After almost a century of modern and avant-garde music, it seems today that we have reached a kind of dissolved pathos, absence of the will to judge, contradictory and ambiguous institutional relations, a feeling that the means of expression are exhausted, an undefined orphanage of originality and authenticity, a crisis of poiesis and aesthesis... This list, in fact, sounds familiar: something of that kind was said after Wagner s explosion and he was, as we know, a precursor of the avant-garde gesture. And despite Adorno s view about Wagner and avant-garde art, we should rethink both, and also his position.

3 The post-wagnerian moment was in fact one of exhaustion or, at least, a moment in which a strong feeling of arriving at the end of something prevailed. This was on account of the fact that Wagner had indeed extended musical material to an extreme point, and had historically grounded new perspectives and paths to the mechanics of musical communication. In other words: new musical features and questions in terms of emotional engineering and pathos. And this, of course, is not just a question concerning musical technique or musical aesthetics, but also one concerning political issues and their consequences or, as one could perhaps say, in modern words: a group of questions that belong more to a philosophy of communication than to cultural criticism (bearing in mind Adorno s view on this matter). It was the fact that Wagner had a lot to say that made music go further in exploring new means of expression and a new musical rhetoric and language. At this point we should recall Nietzsche s view, very briefly: for him, language is originally rhetoric, rhetoric being a kind of unconsciousness of language. Language is thus built over a forgotten rhetoric, because in myth and in singing, language emerges full of rhetorical effects, as the surface of a rhetoric structure. This is important if we consider music as a language and if we apply all the modern theory of language to music and so we could speak about speech, acts of speech, meaning, communication. In addition to many other aspects, what concerns Adorno in his work on Wagner s work is something that today we would call a communication problem: the phantasmagoria, the idea of hiding the structure (hiding the orchestra in the pit, for instance), corresponds obviously to communication strategies that are a consequence of an ideological constellation in which art and politics coincide. As Adorno says, The emancipation of colour achieved by the orchestra intensifies the element of illusion by transferring the emphasis from the essence, the musical event itself, to the appearance, the sound (VW: p.98; GS 13: p.93). 1 The problem seems to be the effect of illusion that Wagner creates with his Gesamtkunstwerk the total work of art, a consequence of his impatience towards anything isolated that lives for itself, in Adorno s words. 1 Die Emanzipation der Farbe selbst, welche diesem Orchester gelang, steigert das illusionäre Moment, indem der Akzent vom Wesen, dem musikalischen Ereignis an sich, auf die Erscheinung, den Klang fällt.

4 Wagner, as a composer (or should we say, as a creator), was a man who had a vision for the world (Weltanschauung) he was contemporary of an era of visions and his works were created to spell out that vision, as a speech, and with a very singular rhetoric. Music is called upon to do nothing less than retract the historical tendency of language, which is based on signification, and to substitute expressiveness for it (VW: p.99; GS 13: p.94). 2 Wagner was a world maker (to quote Goodman s idea) like others in his time, like Marx. And he needed a total work of art to represent and to express his worldview. Clearing the way to what would become an avant-garde movement was something that Wagner did not foresee as such. Nevertheless, his theory (and the contradictory and dialectical result from his relation with Nietzsche) enunciated for the first time some topics that would be re-spelled and reworked in the future by the avant-garde artists at the end of the 19 th Century and, more clearly, by the avant-garde of the first-half of the 20 th Century. Das Kuntswerk der Zukunft is in fact something that avant-garde art started to experiment with, and that the future (I mean, our present) is now offering. Let us examine this in more detail: the term avant-garde originated in the realm of military craft. Applied to the arts, it functions as a metaphor that points to what goes ahead, as in war; those who are in a position in which they can see in the first place, arrive at a determined point before the others, explore unknown territories. The world of the arts was then seen as a battlefield. The same metaphor was used at the same time in the revolutionary movements, and also to qualify the function or role of the Communist Party that Marx and Engels (contemporaries of Wagner) had just founded: it was the avant-garde of the proletarian movement. The man who began using the term was an anarchist, Bakhunine, who, in his exile in Switzerland, after the civil fights in Dresden (where he in fact met Wagner on the barricades), founded a magazine devoted to the arts with this very title, Avant-garde art. Although this may seem an historical curiosity or an historical fait-divers, there is some power in the exploration of this metaphor. So we may say that in fact Wagner was ahead. He did arrive somewhere before others. He did 2 Es wird also der Musik nicht weniger zugemutet, als die geschichtliche Tendenz der Sprache, die auf die Signifikation hin, zugunsten der Expression zurückzunehmen.

5 something new. And here is another important word and concept that another Wagner s contemporary (and admirer), Charles Baudelaire, would theorize in depth. New became the touchstone for the modern artist and for modern art. Seeking for the new is then the energy that moves art and that gives power to originality. Artists at this time were fully a social and symbolic construction of modernity, inspired by Kant and Hegel, and also modelled by the romantic concentration of self-centred creative awareness. A constellation of individual poetic talents concentrated in one person that was shining like a star and also producing some stardust, and sometimes going down to Earth. Something of a divine origin, that made him aware of a social differentiation and function. There is no full rational explanation for the fact that what we call talent is not common to all men, and is accordingly seen as a gift something that cannot be explained strictly in human terms. This model corresponds to the reification of autonomous artists. In his extreme position, the artist attempts to reach originality, authenticity, as a mark of his truth and sincerity as an artist. The new, the experimental which it implies, means, for Adorno, that the artist cannot predict the result of his practice. And here resides essentially the paradigm of modernity, meaning a lack of control of the material. Avant-garde canonized Adorno considered art to be a form of knowledge, as did Hegel. This distinguishes Adorno s position from that of many other thinkers, for whom art is finally nothing but a mirror, a reflexive reaction to the world and therefore far-removed from intellectual interest. Just under this point of view illusion becomes, for Adorno, one could say, dangerous. Because illusion hides the frontier between art and the world, and turns the aesthetic experience in an experience in itself distant from a critical experience of being in the world. But avant-garde art has also a certain political allure. Being a radical artistic path, it was seen sometimes as the place of political correctness in art. The avant-garde was even sometimes left wing art. Because being radical, the avant-garde was very often against a situation, produced powerful manifestos, had a political rhetoric, and induced shock.

6 In the meanwhile, however, avant-garde art has been captured by the institutions. And here we can use hard theory jargon for this phenomenon. In fact, the movement was assimilated by the ideological system that was able to integrate deviation as a norm. And so, radical art became fashionable, was to be sold and bought in the market place, was to be legitimated as a bourgeois value, and was to be legitimated by the museums. The institutionalization of the musical avant-garde was the last blow ton of the neverending aesthetic movements that flourished in the 20 th century (see the case of Boulez and IRCAM in Georgina Born, 1994). As we learned from Baudelaire, Benjamin and also, of course, Adorno, this dialectical development of artistic and aesthetic paths is essentially modern. It belongs to what Habermas inscribes in the so-called modernity programme (which, in his view is perhaps not yet exhausted). Although the quest for the new in art did not end, it is no longer driven by exclusively aesthetic reasons, but it is rather powered by the technological contamination of artistic praxis that is dramatically changing musical experience and introducing new forms of musical production and reception where art and communication come together to produce a new theory. Now, when the boom of the modern/post-modern discussion of the eighties is far-gone, we can see that this blow had the effect of clearing the way for a post-modern style of thought supported by a new relativism. A new relativism that is critically weak and is grounded on an old and well-known philosophical assertion (rapidly understood and assimilated by sensus communis) saying that taste is not to be discussed. In short, this leads to what we shall call the musical correctness of today s musical thought 3. And it deserves some critical attention as it postulates a relativism that is strange to Adorno s perspective. In other words, the ever-lower level of tolerance of the common ear is now imposing its deafness does this means that a new regression has set in? Are even welleducated ears becoming deaf? Another point of view may be taken from Adorno s thoughts on the culture industry (and its correlatives in a theory of mass consumption of cultural goods). After assimilating a few of Adorno s ideas (but also Marcuses s) as a vulgata for an enlightened thinking on 3 On this matter, one should bear in mind that the expression post-modern in terms of musical aesthetic theory seems to refer not to a philosophical and historical theme, but rather to both an aesthetic and technical quality to be acknowledge in the compositional conceptual array.

7 music and cultural management (mixed with some neo-liberal statements and enterprise management techniques), a mediating and informal instance composed by an international corporation of universal aesthetic curators in concert halls, foundations, art galleries, musical institutions, etc., extends its mission to a full programme of commissioning living composers. This is not new. It also happened in the world of fine arts leading to the museum phenomena (as we can see in Jean Clair s paradoxe du conservateur ) (Clair, 1988). New music composers who are internationally successful are now considered as in some sort collected items of some imaginary museum of musical works (Goehr) some of them are really fashionable and rather transitory, one must recognize. Insofar as art became a socially manifest need, it turns into an enterprise driven by profit, says Adorno. The reason why one should re-think the strength or symbolic power of the avant-garde gesture has to do with what, in my view, is the weakness of the present situation. One of the symptoms of the ideological state of the arts today is the peaceful co-existence of old and new forms and configurations of art (mostly imposed by the industry). And, in fact, what is today radically new has a technological radical tone. It is true that, as Adorno points out, art which is radically produced is frequently reduced to the problem of its elaboration. The problem of technology is a political problem. If, according to Adorno, technical rationality is today the rationality of domination, there is, in fact, the need to think about technological changes also in the arts as a problem of domination. Never before has the future of the arts (and of music, in particular) been so dependent on and connected with the development and interest of the industry and the market. That is why one should consider whether there is some space for resistance, and in what terms. And also, one should ask if such a resistance would not be a regressive way (namely, because perhaps some Adorno should be reviewed). A discussion on new music is needed for all these reasons. Innovation, in terms of Benjamin s thought, is connected strictly with the composer s sincerity, on one hand; on the other hand, today, innovation is technically driven by the needs of industry and also by an utopian project that industry sells to the masses: the

8 dream that each one can be an artist, through technological devices or artistic gadgets made available to everyone everywhere. Conclusion The weakness of present thinking about music is perhaps a symptom of a temporary capitulation of philosophy facing the cultural configuration of a new era. It is a general failure of critical thinking that it has lost its power to provoke. Therefore, to enlighten this discussion, Adorno s criticism and style of thinking must be invoked in order to rethink music, its historical, aesthetic, social and political relations furthermore, music is now asked to play a central role in the redefinition of the arts system and experience, because of the reconfiguration of the aesthetic and communicational experience on account of an increasingly technological artistic praxis. The fact that Adorno s style is contradictory is perhaps one of the main inspirations for a contemporary critical philosophy of new music. Just because of the ideology that is behind this classification, because of so many questions to be asked for. A provocative style should raise questions, should namely call into question the established truth in what even modern composers believe (not only modern, of course, but also the so-called postmodern and others) the apparently definitive and achieved thruth that the vulgata of media industry, in its alliance with the cultural industry, propagates: audiences will be translated into numbers, numbers mean a genuine desire and power, a sort of common taste (sensus communis) legitimated by mechanisms of social control hidden behind democratic arguments.