Risks calculated for a mutation

It is comforting to be able to state that, for once, a forum of electroacoustic music is posing questions of real musical pertinence, that is it is no longer taking refuge in the purely technological but is finally preoccupying itself not with means of fabrication but forms, culture, sources, in short: with thought.
All too often, in fact, such international encounters seem to want to place their respectability above all suspicion by giving themselves an image that is scientific, positivist, pragmatic without a hint any artistic lack of focus; this no doubt is why they generally emphasize high technicality rather than aesthetic questionning, the more abstract and qualifiable domain rather than the quantifiable. Thus engineering takes the limelight more and more and everything takes place as though the musical project was nothing more than a pretext for technological speculation with no end but itself.
Many of these symposiums very often are nothing but information exchanges, something not without its merit if only it would not miss the point by losing sight of music. Happily, for some years, some have raised their voices to denounce this situation; I am thinking particularly of people like Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Barry Truax, Michel Chion, Fausto Razzi and a vew others, or of what we are beginning to read occasionally in the Computer Music Journal or elsewhere.
This is why I am delighted to be able to broach themes of reflection that deal with bonified problems of the music of this fin de millenaire marked as it is by what seems to be a profound mutation of societies, and thus with the manifestations of art that they arouse.
Under the vague - and already dated! - term "postmodernism", a number of new avenues, some of which seem promising, are opening themselves to the composer; but this fact should not escape questionning since today more than ever, novelty does not constitute a guarantee in and of itself. What follows is a contribution to this questionning and draws on certain elements from my essay Le postmodernisme en musique: Aventure neo-baroque ou Nouvelle aventure de la modernite? published in the Montreal revue Circuit.
The historical necessity of change must not be allowed to obscure the dangers that menace the culture of western societies - consumer societies - and consequently the art and music that reflect them. In view of the tendency towards levelling values (the equivalent of the advertising spot and Citizen Kane, of comic strips and of Proust or Van Gogh, of the tribulations of "little green men" and those of Joseph K, of rock and of J.S. Bach) and of the complicit indifference towards an "invasion of a sub-culture of mass proliferation" (Scarpetta), I consider it, according to others, essential and honest to come to terms.
At the same time this text, though somewhat polemical, is not a denegation. It is an attempt to answer an interrogation, a quest, a need.
I dare to hope that in the indifferential bric-a-brac of the super-market of culture, the solutions and works that will emerge can already be found (a notion of posterity very foreign, I know, to the "hic et nunc" that prevails today). They are obscured for the moment by a showy enthropy with which they are sometimes confused. But, as was written somewhere by Henry Miller, "confusion is the word we invented for order when we don't understand it."

Origins: a contestation of modernism

"(...) A certain current is imprinting itself more and more on the West, which perceives the present situation as checkmate of the project of modernism, across the derivative of what it was incarnating, that is universal, progressivistic, rationalistic, or even humanistic." (1985:1)

Thus it is that Chritian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz, translators of the work of J½rgen Habermas, Le discours philosphique de la modernite, depict the conjecture: a tragic statement of tomorrows that disillusion.

"(...) it is deducted from the actual situation, not only a rupture of fact with the project of modernism, but again the necessity of taking in stride this rupture with the Enlightenment and with what it promised. That is what is supposed to thematise notions recently forged of post-modernism, of post-Aufklîrung and of post-history" (ibidem).

From then on, if one holds to a vision of simplification, though hardly caricature-like, for the fundamentalist post-modern everything modern must fall into question: its ideology, its plan, (the heritage of the Enlightenment, the underlying notion of progress, etc.), its teleology, its aesthetic extensions and the artistic movements that followed. How is it possible for these then to be shocked at such distrust towards the destructive radicalisations of the avant-garde, of their extremist attempts, of evocation of reference and rarefecation ending in works approaching vacuity? Silence, a white sheet, a page devoid of words, a geometric purge, motionlessness. The deception is so profound, the betrayals seem so debilitating that the condemnations are unqualified: the baby is thrown out with the bath water, Rationalist ideas considered fanciful and unrealistic (as we enter the era of "virtual" reality and simulation) are abandoned wholesale and "the irreparable Machiavellianism of modernism" (Bouchindhomme and Rochlitz 1981: VII) is accused of the tragedies and mistakes of the past (totalitarianisms, world conflicts, cultural dictatorships, etc.).
In face of this global condemnation, measure is taken of the disillusionment and skepticism that followed the nice certainties but also, it must be admitted, of despotism, of ruptures and of the anathemies of modern art.

Mutation or eternal return?

"The real question about post-modernism, notes Lyotard, is that of modernism, where does it start and where does it end?" (1985: 43)). As the refusal of the rupture is erected in principle and an aesthetic of syncretism is engaged [[[tous ozimuts]]], a radical rejection is ever closer. In a gesture of somewhat adolescent resentment, not without traces of oedipian behaviour, the post-modern individual today burns what his father admired yesterday. In this attitude there is a whiff of anarchism a la sixty-eight, but an anarchism which having succumbed to the seductions of consumerism ought to "abandon the subversive or critical dimension in favour of a simple cohabitation with post-industrial society." (Compagnon 1990: 171).
Let us at least recognize that if modern radicalism, in a "veritable passion of amnesia, of beginning again from point zero" (Scarpetta) rejects all tradition to liberate post-modern eclecticism from what it considers the hindrance of the past, it, considering that anything goes, contains within itself loans of modernism, become in spite of the moment - among other things - tradition. As defined in a recent American dictionary, it is:
"A movement or style characterised by the renunciation of twentieth century modernism, or by its rejection (including modern and abstract art, avant garde literature, functionalist architecture, etc.) and typically represented by works that incorporate a variety of historical and classical styles and techniques." (quoted in Compagnon 1990: 144).
It is also said, mainly in France, and rightly so, that post-modernism is above all an architectural movement that opposes ideas and theorectical discussions of the avant-garde, notably those of Bauhaus, as well as functional art by pretending a return to ornamentation and a mixture of styles, to overloading and to the Baroque.
Actually, all activity is confronted a little blurredly by thùs "new given" that modifies the social behaviour of the golden industrial age in a reasonable way. Certainly one may question the difference of nature that is supoosed to exist between the actual rupture and those that have shaken modern history since its origins. Already in 1970, Octavio Paz, speaking of Mexican literature stated that "Post-modernism is nothing more than the critique of modernism, at the breast of this movement and without surpassing its aesthetic borders, according to certain modernists." (1984: 106) This is where Lyotard reflections are implicated: where does modernism end? Are we not, in fact, assisting a new unexpected event or, as several authors have suggested, merely the latest of modernism's misfortunes?
These contradictions, these simultaneous splits are schizophrenic by nature, something which is undoubtedly not unrelated to the manifestations of "derealisation" visible everywhere in the contemporary world. But, of course, post-modernism, no less than modernism, shouldn't be seen as unequivocal. Just as one entity may have several faces or a same language engender several discussions. It is advisable, for products of post-modernism, to define to levels that could be called superior and inferior (not ascribing to the notion of major/minor). This last leve, that of laxity and seeming counter-culture, for the moment, outweighs and masks the first, that of a harmonious pluralism. Meanwhile, it is possible, in the general jumble of fashionable ideas that guarantee the most insignificant productions, to make out the premises of a new consciousness.
[[[Il n'en reste pas moins que, dans un premier temps,]]] the post-modern position tends to define itself in a hollow; negativism similar to modernist exclusivism but different in its lack of theoretical focus. It could be said to be the "ideology to end all ideologies." There is little of what Nietzsche perceived already in modernism, this "tired nihilism that attacks nothing anymore" (banalisation of values by eclecticism, "zero degree of general contemporary culture") (Lyotard 1988:22).
The post-modern artist believes himself to have been manipulated, the victim of intolerance. For those whose cognitive and analytical faculties are thin, revolt will be irrational, a-critique, ]]] visceral. It also often becomes derisory, puerilely counter-cultural, reactionary, simplistically volunteer and allowing itself to be tempted by a new obscurantism. This post-modern has gotten over everything, but in a feeble manner "Slack, "cool," fundamentally allergic to all totalitarian projects, the post-modern subject is no longer disposed to combat them." (Finkieldraut 1987) The time of grand causes is passe, one no longer dies for ideas, with a shiver one falls back on the only value that seems to still offer some credibility: individualism. "Grand recitals" (Lyotard 1979:7) have lost their legitimacy; the future is disqualified and it is clear, as Nattiez put it, that "it is an attitude that precisely makes no bets on the future" and lives aesthetic and maybe political or present activity. Post-modernism is no longer ethical, it is pragmatic and regards with condescension idealisms that seem nonetheless like the last vestiges of a past naivete. Its cynicism is rigorous.

Here and now, marketing and entertainment

Whether this phenomenon is a new jump-start or an irreversible mutation, music did not escape it. From then on, its language will hardly focus on formal syntax refinements, as is the case for experimental music, but rather on skimming off the subtleties of the muscial discourse considered dissuasive for a mass clientele. An idea that is probably originally founded on a democratic impulse; "(...) there we have a renewed search for an equilibrium between production and reception of the musical work" (Guertin) or, as Nattiez expresses it in his own way: "(...) the time is come to find and revive a new balance between the poetic and the aesthetic" (1987: 373). Certainly! But how and at what price?
For the moment it seems that the magic formula may be summed up thus: return to the "audible," simplicity of musical engagement, importance of melody, melange of genres, integration of elements borrowed from traditional music, the priority of pleasing the ear and of amusement. Et voila! The word is unleashed, the obsessive "sesame" of the leisure civilisation: entertainment. Above all entertain. What Scarpetta calls the "actual reabsorption of culture into 'amusement.'" How did this happen?
In the course of the past few decades, a socio-economic phenomenon has turned the cultural landscape upside down and driven artistic production into the maelstrom of the laws of the market. "From the 1960's on," writes Compagnon, "art (...) is distinguished more and more uneasily by publicity and marketing." (1990:143) the industry of leisure, of which music is a part, keeps one eye riveted on the sales indicator. The profitability of populism, that divine post-war surprise, seen in the giganticism of concerts, the obsessive, terrorist, presence of commercial success, the media emphasis, has given birth in many "skilled" composers to a syndrome associating frustration and guilt feelings of their confidentiality, megalomanian hope of equaling the popular success of their own field. How? To make use of the same tactics and offer products that respond to demand. But it is soon obvious that this cameleon-music has nearly no chance of winning the public on the streets and nearly every chance of losing the public in the music hall. Imitating that which pleases provides no assurance of pleasing; it's not the popular that is wanted. It is, however, musically, the base hypothesis of post-modern ambition. And it's time to quote Kagel:

"It is impossible to change musical language in the hope that it will become so popular that lots of people will listen with pleasure (...) There are composers who have done a great deal of speculation on this; they began writing pieces that were overtly regressive, if I dare say so, or may be defined as 'anti avant-garde.' But the success of these composers was fortuitous, a success that may be forgotten. (...) The music might be speculative, it might be elitist (I don't believe in the word, elitist, I use it here pejoritavely) but if you speak your truth, you will have the chance to touch a lot of people (...) it is truth underlying the musical message." (Maurizio Kagel in an interview with Claude Shryer for "Musique actuelle," Radio-Canada at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, broadcast April 7, 1990)

Unhappily, what commercial realism proposes to the mass public, which has become as much absolute arbitrator as potential buyer, is a syncretic dose of diverse cultural crystals selected on the basis of a group of statistically representative consumers. "But this realism of 'anything goes' is really about money," emphasizes Lyotard. "In the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to measure the value of works by the profit they bring in." (1988: 22) A method that is encouraged by the cultural organisms of governments that tend to become vast anonymous socities, managers of the distractions and games of the industrial empire. The volume of the audience being the criteria of evaluation, these organisms measure then the quality of the creators by the quantity of their publics. Thus, incidiously, they impose the obligation to please great numbers, in short, a liberal replica of Soviet "jdanovism"[[[]]]. Music then, no longer qualifiable, becomes, like any other consumer product, a quantifiable value.
What is a bad sign, is the abdication of certain composers, and the compliance with which, by critical deficit or by excess of materialistic appetite, they cede to the pressure of the age. Let us be inspired rather by the demand of Xenakis, who said not long ago:

"(...) a composer, and an artist generally or a scientist, should know how to work even if there is no immediate response. He should arrive at a point where he sees it as something personal, absolute and profound and his decision should be independant of all environments or circumstances." (Iannis Xenakis in an interview with Serge Provost for "Musique actuelle," Radio-Canada, broadcast February 10, 1990)

The race for success and immediate profit, the rule of the short term, "carpe diem," are in music, as elsewhere in our societies, the corollaries of the dirge of confidence in the future; they favour a mercantile proliferation that threatens to extinguish it and destroy it.

Some complexity/ Of complexity

At this point I would like to make it clear that efforts of rediscovery of composers and their publics, though they might seem to me misguided and at times suspect, represent for me at least a legitimate and understandable preoccupation. It's not the intention that I wish to question, but the means employed. The withdrawal from thought which often occurs, to the benefit of demagogical proposals and productions directly inspired by advertising methods, represents not only a certain cowardice but most of all an impasse. In short the result is that authentic composers who allow themselves to be abused by this situation will find themselves, to their dismay, stripped of their personality and forced to enter the mill of the leisure industry, "that creation of the technical age that reduces works of spirit to rubbish."(Finkielkraut 1987: 183) It is not then in the name of some aesthetic puritanism, from which I am as removed as I am from the contemporary slackening, that I rail against the hegemony of pleasure, but out of respect for thought. For, as Ghislaine Guertin so aptly expresses it,

"It remains to consider whether the desire to join the auditor implies making concessions to ease or not. I think that it is a primordial question. One could also ask: where there is intelligence, why would there not equally be pleasure?" (CIRCUIT, Vol 1, no. 1, 1990, Montreal)

As for me, I ask myself whether what we call "the return to the audible" should have to serve as a synonymous simplification, in many cases, of impoverishment. We know that the music of Gesualdo was plethoric, something that did not contribute to his popularity, during his own lifetime. Did Mozart truly write too many notes? Scores reputed to be unplayable have become quite legible in our day, have they not? Here also, passing time has proven that the road least accessible is always the one to choose.

How can there be a return to schematicism at the very moment when scientific discoveries teach us that the universe is ceaselessly complexifying? Man, depository of a subconscious of stunning richness, architect of labyrinths, philosopher, creator of systems, producer of pretenses, is himself a paroxysm of sophistication, "(...) his cortex is the most complex material organization that we know; machines he has engendered are an extension of this." (Lyotard 1988: 127) If there is meaning to history, it goes from the cell to the organism, from the unique to the multiple, from the elementary to the complex, it is not a sort of timid stagnation like some sort of stop-frame. "Culture is complexity," says Vadeboncoeur. Let's meditate on this warning from J.F. Lyotard:

"The increase in complexity in the majority of domains, including "lifestyles" and everyday life, is sketched out like this century's horizon. It marks out a decisive task: to teach humanity very complex ways of feeling, understanding and doing that excede what they demand. At the very least, it implies resistance to simplisticism, to simplistic slogans, to demands for clarity and facility, to the desire to restore secure values. It already appears that simplification is barbaric, reactive." (1988: 127)

Assuming music still to be a manifestation of thought rather than some kind of merchandise, one might ask on what basis it should, contrary to all else, be moving towards simplification.

The acousmatic: a post-modern road?

Yet despite the more derisory or reprehensible aspects of a sensationalist post-modernism, omnipresent because of ceaseless exhibition by the mass media, it would be absurd to take refuge in denial of reality (in the psychoanalytical sense) and to underestimate the importance and fall-out of a current that for want of better we call post-modern. In view of manifestations, which, taking advantage of the actual confusion of values, have a tendency to monopolize attention, it can be supposed that our age is going through a fundamental questionning and a broad aesthetic transformation. Is it a new episode of the serial we call modernism, or, more optimistically, the precursory signs of a synthesis corresponding to the one that heralded tonality? Or perhaps again, are we simply undergoing, as some contend, a low period in the history of music? Any answer would be a risk.

Whatever it will be, we find ourselves at a moment when the artist, suffering from his isolation, attempts to reduce "the 'discrepency' between the poietic and the aesthetic." (Nattiez) Sometimes this transition is primed by some "classic modern" whose intuition and talent force a way through. In this sense, composers who have become "classics" may be considered announcers of a certain "deviation." In any case it is clear that they are not aiming at a simplification but, on the contrary, at enriching the means and language. I'm thinking of the mix of referals in Stockhausen's Hymnen or Telemusik or in Berio's Sinfonia, of the incorporation of "slag," of resonant impuritites in Cage and Kagel, of "Feldman's "knowing simplicity," or yet of the presence of the East in Scelsi or of Bach in Kagel again.

And it would not be surprising if I dwell a little longer on the acousmatic. This new art does not seem to me at all foreign to post-modern workings; it could moreover be one of its coherent tracks. But a track apart.

Without complex, the acousmatic doesn't worry about romping with modernism, returning to the melodious or acquiring popularity. It is not founded on any of the principles of musical tradition and thus seeks neither to escape nor return to it.Its independence in regards to systems (modal, tonal, atonal) is complete since its language obeys other criteria. Having no distant past, it is immune to temptations of nostalgia; its thought and means of implementation are entirely new and its liberty total. But if this novelty and the rupture it introduces into the laws of resonant organization relate it to a new modernist attempt, it may be considered meanwhile that certain traits of post-modernism are immanent in it. For what makes it structurally a post-modern expression, is that it draws its very existence from projection of acoustic images, from resonant pretenses, and that it is, like cinema, a art of "de-reality." But, unlike the narrative images of cinematographic fiction, these "images or utopias of sound" (Bayle) cease to be representations of reality, they are "not appearance but simulation." (Baudrillard 1961: 17) Or, as Fancois Bayle says regarding sound images in space, "perspective is no longer a science of realist representation but a tool for forging hallucinations."(1988: 44) Illusion, artifice, artefact, denaturalisation, the ear-trumpet are all founding motions of post-modernism for which, remarks Scarpetta, "... everything is always already some kind of reflection, semblance, sham. " (1985: 86)

Likewise in the post-moderrn vein, one of the great acquisitions of the acousmatic since the appearance of "musique conrete" is the desanctification of the "major" (traditional instrumentarium) and the "minor" (noise), or, in other words, of "pure" music and "impure." Besides, acousmatic works also often make use of borrowed elements and sounds belonging to music or events of other times and places. Does the "everything that makes sound is good" of the "musique concrete" composer equal the "anything goes" of the post-modern? Not quite. There is an essential difference here between two apparently identical positions. If the strategy of music claiming to be post-modern gives evidence of its borrowing, the reverse is true of the acousmatic which consists (except for its precisely referenced allusions) of disorder in anonymous sound, of deleting its context, of absorbing it, of integrating it inot the structure after habing isolating it acoording to mechanisms of phenomenological reduction (the reduced hearing of Pierre Schaeffer). Traces of the origins, of anecdote, may remain perceptible, but the intricacy is such that generally the sense is perverted.
Nevertheless, acousmatic thinking seems to be closer to a sort of enlightened post-modernism than to the formal intransigence of the avant-gardes. And it assumes a certain "impurity" (in the Scarpetta sense). This may explain the distrust that persists, in perfect reciprocity, between composers that have resolutely turned their backs on serial structuralism and those that are still tempted by extrapolation of its models in disguised forms.

Where are we?

As will all transition periods, it is certainly difficult to disentangle what, with the persistance of an anterior reflection, must be ascribed to stiff conservativism. Considered as a rear-guard action, selective resistance to the pressure of the era loses all significance; it is nothing but a conventionalism and contains nuances inherited from modernist absolutism. Symmetrically, naive ecstasy in response to the technological explosion seems emphatic and deserves to be demythified by a more critical approach.
Post-modern awareness is without doubt the result of two expressions: a certain exhaustion of modernism and a rejection of its excesses. But what remedy does it propose? "A quite different (aesthetical) logic: a logic that works with preludes, with the unreal, and with recycling," contends Scarpetta (1985: 361). "An unconvincing tendency to the protection of tradition, customs of predecessors, to a cultural anthropological inheritance," answers Finkielkraut. In each contention is a measure of truth. But if we want to escape the trap of exclusion, in which modernism was cought, we must look at more than just its failures, we must adequately appreciate its positive dimension, which is considerable. In the name of what perfection may we condemn such a rich era? May we seriously claim that the today's neo-baroque wave will not also be suppressed in the future because of mistakes it is committing and disappointments to which it is leading? Does history escape absolutes? Why should something erected today be an exception to the rule? Let us not be too trusting of this indispensible episode, but neither should we fall into a negativistic cramp: let us stay attentive and sensitive. As regards attempts to eliminate Kandinsky, Adorn, Le Corbusier, Mallarmy, Joyce, Artaud, Wevern and others with the complaint that they are unapproachable and uninteresting to the mass public, they are so ridiculous that there is no need to comment further.
It seems that the only possible choice is an attempt to synthesize, avoiding dictatorship and showing adequate clear-sightedness. In the process it must not be forgotten that the death of art, so often proclaimed - perhaps even wished - is an unavoidable eventuality. And art today is in danger of suffering a meaningless death. Abuse and a return to barbarism. If culture and intellect abandon their rights, it is not impossible that music, torn between childish playfulness and an abyss of technological possibilities, suffering already now from a lack of thought, will lose the very thing that makes up its substance and will become a mere sign and empty form: the disappearance of the message, the self-sufficiency of the media.
The rediscovery of the baroque, the baroque of our century, with its search for another expression, may - if it doesn't fall into effemeral snares - become a bond between two externally different streams. But caution is more than ever needed in practice.
The best way to summarize my considerations, I think, would be by borrowing their conclusion from Christine Buci-Glucksmann:

"(...) if post-modernism will not be reduced to being simply an accident of modernism, promoting the techno efficiency discussion of "new technologies," it must cultivate a true amnesia in regards to modernism, in the Freudian sense. An amnesia: neither an eclectic and nostalgic restoration of the past and its values (tradition, religion and sacred "fundamentalists" ...), nor a resigned acceptance of shams and surface effects in a nihilistic and cynical world." (1985:41)

It seems thus urgent - to continue this psychological treatment - that the music of our time be made aware of its confused condition and undertake to unleash, from between the volontarism of its modern "super-ego" and the over-confidence of its post-modern "id" the profound forces of its "ego," that is, of an integral personality.

Montreal 1990 (revised, 1994)

"Le postmodernisme musical," broadcast 27.01.90 on "Musique actuelle," produced by Helene Prevost for Radio-Canada. Guests included: Frederic Rzewski, Regine Robin, John Rea, Ghislaine Guertin, Jose Evangelista, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Raymond Gervais. Moderator: Colette Mersy.

BAUDRILLARD, J. 1981: Simulacres et simulation, Paris, editions Galilee.

BAYLE, F., 1988: L'Odyssee de l'espace, L'espace du son, Dhomot, F. ed., pp 23-20.

BOUCHINDHOMME, C., ROCHLITZ, R., 1985: "Avant propos des traducteurs," in HABERMAS, J., Le discours philosophique de la modernite, Paris, Gallimard.

BUCI-GLUCKSMANN, C., 1985: La postmodernite, Le Magazine litteraire, no. 225, pp. 41-42.

COMPAGNON, A. 1990: Les cinq paradoxes de la modernite, Paris, editions du Seuil.

FINKIELDRAUT, A., 1987: La defaite de la pensee, Paris, Gallimard

LYOTARD, J.F., 1979: La condition postmoderne, Paris, editions de minuit.

LYOTARD, J.F., 1985: Retour au postmoderne, Le Magazine litteraire, No. 225, p. 43.

LYOTARD, J.F., 1988: Le postmodernisme explique aux enfants, Paris, Christian Bourgois editeur.

NATTIEZ, J.J., 1987: Musicologie generale et semiologie, Paris, Christian Bourgois editeur.

PAZ, O., 1984: La fleur saxifrage, Paris, Gallimard

SCARPETTA, G., 1985: L'impurete, Paris, Grasset.

SCARPETTA, G., 1988: L'artifice, Paris, Grasset.

Référence: http://nic.savba.sk/logos/mca/cecm/ifem94/papers/Dhomont.html