Part Two

Music, generally speaking, is not a genre medium. It is a complex form. 36 And as a form it has regulation mechanisms and dynamics encapsulating it and articulating structures and modulations. Such "mechanics" are the product of theoretical thinking on one side, and practical strategies on the other; in this sense they are historical products, arisen within different theoretico-cultural pathways in many diverse (endogenous) medium-specific experiences and geo-social (exogenous) sources. What we are about at the current time, the diverse currents and undercurrents we experience, are momentary points in resulting and intermingling "orbits" running through histories. Yet the fertile understanding of these processes seems to be far from accomplished within authors, and perhaps especially newish authors, 37 somehow encouraged to this by the current information mechanisms and a marketable idea of newness per sé. 38 Something from the modernist and post-modernist attitude of actual time as present time 39 rooted into some sort of permanent mode of action. This attitude, built out of the notion of marketable time and the paradigms of fashionable experiences, of course is not a simple gesture onto time. It englobes at least three different optional cultural managements of memory and mnemonic facts.

On one side we have the "ending of history" discourse, for example fashioned in the "here and now" attitudes arising with the late '50s and matured in the '60s, mostly of Cageian derivation and the many fluxes into and from his theoretical work, as well as the various precedent hyper-vitalistic movements like Futurism and Dadaism. 40 This attitude brought, in many instances, directly into the "improvisation" theoretical discourse, 41 as a radical reaction to the hyper-positivistic trends in music and culture of the '50s, but in the end another competitive strategy.

Then we have the reaction "against" history, we could summarize in a "there and then" attitude. In a certain sense this is the immanence of the idea of "ethnographic present" of the early anthropological discourse, brought into the musical discourse as a reduction of structures to the roots of "tone" or "rhythm," we can see in the '60s/'70s minimal music and its fascination, at least in the beginning, with oriental modes 42 conceived of as in the idea of a cyclical orientation about a "fulcrum." 43 But also in the quotational (now post-modern) "stand-still," where each past or present event, independently from its background, 44 is reason for a possible repetition. A quotation in the form of sign or signical structure, to the point of pillage. 45 And "finally" the restoration model, the reappraisal of a diatonic conception of tonalism, or of tone as a fetish and form of genuine category, 46 yet of a fearful and mute conformism to the well-known 47 and the supremacy of one's own ideological stand. 48 This is visible of course in all the many proudly tonal "new musics", but also in the tonal drift within drone musics and drone oriented modes. 49

All three strategies are actually and basically amnemonic strategies, in that all of them tend to deny to be results of specific historical dynamics, in favour of a "romantic" idea of the author, the artist as representative of some kind of "divine sparkle", outside time and outside space. These strategies are also flanked by a lightly mnemonic attitude, a "social anthropology" attitude of adherence to history, 50 to the contemporary and contingent as a new fetish. This type of historicistic adherence is ultimately amnemonic itself, in that it just relates to the surface of the sociopolitical movements of the moment, always in a progressive, linear and up-to-the-point history, which instead of questioning when, how and what it deals with, simply defends the nowness of "facts," the "zeitgeist," the "actuality" in vogue, as a more genuine, honest idea of respecting multiplicity, yet plundering it in favour of its own reasons and motives. 51

Of course respect for time, for histories doesn't mean bowing to the past as to an unquestionable govern of form and growth. And it cannot mean using time as a pretence to confirm one's own ideological state, as a confirmation of "common" laws disguised in the form of "natural" laws. And in music as a way to stand against the "reemergence" of noise through sound. Too often that type of respect has only conveyed the fixity of given categories, and led to "museal" dynamics, 52 as compulsorily reductionist models to the world complexities. Fortunately, "lateral" to these approaches to time, there is 53 a conscious, perhaps "simply" geolocal idea of explicit systems, realized through links between diachronic, geovariant "points" 54 and cultural phylogeneses. 55 These are recognized as such, in their unfolding processes, and as generators for cultural currents and medium-specific choices. This is a field of action implied, in the many possibilities and several contextualities of time, by few authors, who have distinctly attempted to have noise and its "instability" as part of the structural unfolding of their works, greeting its generative role as a foundation part to their conception of music; authors that have been able to do so in some of their works, projecting music outside the realm of musicology, with a well structured leap into the biological realm of sound and perception. 56






notes:

36 a "form-medium"; i.e. it is a medium, in that it is part of the relation between sounds and perception, but at the same time a form, as it is independent from both sound (sources) and perception (system), as such. back
37 especially those arrogating the idea of being "avant-garde" or representing the up-to-date manifestations of "our time." back
38 not even this a "new" process, though its present dynamical shape has peculiarities of post-romantic non-persistency, and of market dissipation. back
39 the idea of an irrelevancy of diachrony. back
40 this, obviously being a generalization, has just an indicative content; differences being the norm. back
41 alea and indeterminacy being just custom attributions. Compare these with the stochastic systems in Xenakis e.g. back
42 raga, tala and so on. back
43 conceptions moving from the "mystical" ideas about "lost ages and knowledge", or the more "illuministic" myth of the noble sauvage. back
44 from its substratum. back
45 plagiarism in its many forms: more conscious use of other's works as a form of "homage" or direct reference (as in many forms of Pop-Art and similar conceptions of the object), or in a more sly and parasitic attitude with the use of samples from a supposed social (and mediatic) reality as aproblematic and de-responsibilized form of sound-source exploiting (includingof course the many "third ways" inbetween). back
46 i.e. admitted to the category of "naturality." back
47 to the comforting assurance of familiar places, common places, "common ears". See Luigi Nono: «When one comes to listen, one often tries to rediscover oneself in others. To rediscover one's own mechanisms, system, rationalism, in the other. And that:that'sa violence that's thoroughly conservative» (L'erreur comme nécessité, lecture given in 1983 and republished in Ecrits, p. 256). back
48 Eurocentric of course, though at times veiled by "ethnophiliac" politics... Exoticism at its best. back
49 within tonality and diatonicity, but also microtonality, though often of an unexplored character. back
50 to historiography. back
51 i.e. cannibalizing history. back
52 i.e. to preserve according to the existing rules. back
53 and there has been. back
54 morphologies, theoretical models. back
55 physiological and morphogenetic articulations. back
56 authors like Iannis Xenakis (in his electroacoustic works, from Bohor to Persepolis etc., about 1957-1978), Luigi Nono (in part of his otherwise "theatrical" approach, e.g. A Pierre. Dell'azzurro silenzio, inquietum, 1985 and Post-prae-ludium per Donau, 1987), Maurizio Bianchi (in his more mature works: Endometrio/Carcinosi, 1982-83), Vivenza (in his Réalités Servomécaniques, 1984), Yeast Culture (in his Iys, 1990), Francisco López (in his Buildings [New York], 2001), The New Blockaders (their "final" TNB est mort! parts 1-4, 1995), Mnortham (in his The Stomach of the Sky, 1997), Giancarlo Toniutti (in his *KO/USK-, 1997), as some possible references. (I have also mentioned myself, though embarrassing it could be, because I think I cannot be silent about the fact that I am myself working into sound, and thus I "must" be part of the general considerations about the subject of this essay. I have chosen to quote this work out of those I have realized, simply because I felt it was the most adequate within the issue I have been trying to demonstrate with this essay, not forgetting of course, that, if I am thinking what I have written here, most if not all of my works tend to respect the "principles" mentioned in the text). back