CONTEMPORARY MUSIC STYLES :
TIMELINE
1650 – 1850
CLASSICAL
1800 – 1900
ROMANTIC
1880 – 1960
POST-TONAL (Modern)
Atonal / General (integral) Serialism (12-tone rows)
1945 – 1975
MODERN / POSTMODERN
Total (multiple) Serialism / Indeterminate (chance) / Aleatoricism
electroacoustic music, musique concrète, experimental music, atonal music,
minimalist music
Post-modernism (a critical thinking strategy/discourse)
Post-structuralism and deconstruction can be seen as the theoretical
formulations of the post-modern condition. Modernity, which began
intellectually with the Enlightenment, attempted to describe the world in
rational, empirical and objective terms. It assumed that there was a truth to be
uncovered, a way of obtaining answers to the question posed by the human
condition through reasoning. This thinking strategy is mirrored in thought
strategies such as ‘Structuralism’ and can be seen in language theories such as
Semiotics and in music as systems, such as Serialism.
Post-modernism does not exhibit this confidence, gone are the underlying
certainties that reason promised. Reason itself is now seen as a particular
historical form, as parochial in its own way as the ancient explanations of the
universe in terms of Gods.
The postmodern subject has no rational way to evaluate a preference in relation
to judgements of truth, morality, aesthetic experience or objectivity. As the old
hierarchies of thought are torn down, a new clearing is formed on the frontiers of
understanding: quite what hybrids of thought will metamorphose, interbreed
and grow is this clearing is for the future to decide.
Whereas structuralism was concerned with the whole (the gestalt) being the
goal of meaningful endeavor, music of the post-modern era was looking for new
meanings, signs and forms in the elements and their discursive inter-relationship
with their context.
POST STRUCTURALISM
By the mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories of human
existence. In the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that meaning was to be found within the
structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words. For
Marxists, the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of
economic structures. Psychoanalysts attempted to describe the structure of the
psyche in terms of an unconscious.
In the 1960's, the structuralist movement, based in France, attempted to
synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the
existentialists' claim that each man is what he makes himself. For the
structuralist the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic
structures over which he/she has no control, but which could be uncovered by
using their methods of investigation.
Originally labelled a structuralist, the French philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault came to be seen as the most important representative of the poststructuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by
rule governed systems, but he disagreed with the structuralists on two counts.
Firstly, he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could
explain the human condition and secondly he thought that it was impossible to
step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively.
Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the
multiple interpretation of texts. Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche, Derrida
suggests that all text has ambiguity and because of this the possibility of a final
and complete interpretation is impossible.
POST-MODERN MUSIC / THEORISTS
Total Serialism – juxtaposition, structured randomness. (Anton Webern)
Music Concrete – searching for new microtonal elements, textures, timbres,
orientation. (Pierre Schaeffer)
Indeterminate (chance) Music – removing control over the composition by
dissolving any prescribed notion of what can be labeled a property of music
sound. All experienced sounds are of equal value. (John Cage)
John Cage: 1958 "Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and
Electronic Music"
Silence (1961)
In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play"
which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to
suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life
we're living".
…on Music, Representation and Kant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ2vUBU8Qo
Cage’s: Theory
While interested in breaking down traditional definitions and concepts, Cage
did not elaborate on the premises of de-constructionism or modern aesthetics,
merely presenting them. He held neither a college degree nor studied in a music
academy, learning music personally from Arnold Schoenberg, the arch-modern
composer of twelve-tone music. Cage's popularization of random sounds as
music do not bear regular listening -- he anticipated the "happenings" of
performance art or spontaneous art in the 1960's, and indirectly foresaw the
success of electronic music created exclusively with synthesizers and other
electronic devices. Cage had hit upon a formula for creativity, calling his musical
creations "purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play." Paraphrasing the
French philosopher Henri Bergson, Cage maintained that disharmony is a
harmony "to which many are unaccustomed."
At times, as in the essay "Experimental Music," Cage appears to want to draw
inspiration from nature and human emotion.
Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to
theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by
encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a
sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a
sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding
heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of
someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant
that grows? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily
correspond with another's. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And
sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear
them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.
Thus music is not merely the sound of musical instrument but that of other
human-made objects and, ultimately, the sounds of nature. While this may be a
novel definition of music, Cage does not acknowledge that while program music
attempts to evoke images and feelings, abstract music need not, even while
adhering to compositional standards. Cage's project is not so much to expand
but to overthrow the definition of music. His compositions, Cage admits, are
called Dadaist, but he argues in the essay "Indeterminacy" that in Dadaism
actions occur but space or emptiness is not taken into account, as in his music.
For Cage, silence is that space, although absolute silence does not exist. Cage's
affinity with contemporary architecture, specifically glass-walled buildings as in
Mies van der Rohe and with modern art, as in the deconstructed images of
Marcel Duchamp, emphasize the analogy between looking through rather than
looking at. Cage's music intended to look through sounds and not at them, the
latter being traditional music.
Cage's famous composition 4'33", consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of
silence, was intended to point to the ambient sounds around the listener of the
work, which then become the work of music. The work revolutionized modern
music, but the work only illustrates a theory or argument -- few listeners will
return to "listen" to such a novelty again. Some critics even argue that 4'33" is
not nor cannot be intended as music at all, for it lacks the communication of
feeling identified as musical aesthetics. They argue that Cage says his music
does not convey feeling (or leaves itself open or transparent to feeling) but that
this is not true. Cage's performances convey feelings, indeed provoke them -and this was Cage's unconscious or denied intention.
Thus Cage argued that the purpose of music (and art) must change:
“Art may be practiced in one way or another, so that it reinforces the ego in its
likes and dislikes, or so that it opens that mind to the world outside, and outside
inside. Since the forties and through the study with D. T. Suzuki of the
philosophy of Zen Buddhism, I've thought of music as a means of changing the
mind. I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the
artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found
a way to let the sounds be themselves. And, in being themselves, to open the
minds of people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than
they had previously considered” (Richard Kostelanetz).
Cage insisted that his music differed from any previous music because it carried
the insights of Eastern philosophy and opened the mind in a way that no
historical music did. In this Cage anticipates the claims of modern electronic
music, of minimalist, ambient and New Age music. But these styles of music are
still radically opposed to his contrived and random sounds, being deliberate in
evoking a specific feeling that "opens the mind" and represents music that lets
the "sounds be themselves."
In the 1950's, Cage hit upon a method of composition that would be the
counterpart of the frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, etc. that constitute
the mechanisms of tradition composition. The avant-garde method was
randomness. Cage discovered the I Ching. By tossing the coins he came to
hexagrams that offered ideas, and from the ideas he developed parameters for
"chance-controlled music." He does not elaborate on the nature of this
inspiration except to say:
I derived the method I use for writing music by tossing coins from the method
used in the Book of Changes. It may be objected that from this point of view
anything goes. Actually , anything does go but only when nothing is taken as the
basis. In an utter emptiness anything can take place. And, needless to say, each
sound is unique ... and is not informed about European history and theory.
In later years, Cage referred to his 1940's approach to music and composition as
"disinterestedness," reflecting the perennial thinking that surrounded the topic
of East and West. But after his pivotal 1952 composition of 4'33" Cage used more
technical terms such as chance and indeterminacy.
With the passing years, Cage become increasingly interested in audio
technology, amplifying sounds with machines and microphony, even using
Geiger counters in one composition -- all ironic tendences toward the silencing
of silence. Cage was determined to show that silence did not exist. But in that
premise he had separated himself from the perennial philosophy he had
professed in the 1940's and gradually abandoned after his 1952 composition of
4'33".
The idea of breaking institutional structures in music and art is analogous to
breaking down structures in society, as Theodor Adorno, the Marxist critic of
Cage, has noted. The indirect purpose of Cage's music is to break down
repetition and structure. Wrote Cage:
In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where
everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an
object and its duplication. If we didn't have this power of forgetfulness, if art
today didn't help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those
avalanches of rigorously identical objects (For The Birds).
Other critics have seen Cage's assumptions of expanding music to include all
sounds and using technology to identify and amplify sound is simply an
extrapolation of Western cultural ideas of domination and do not take into
account Eastern ideas after all.
Conclusion
The nature of silence is a key concept of both Eastern and Western thought. Cage
understood from his popular readings that they could converge. He applied the
concept of silence to music and tried to liberate silence from feelings or context,
from an social and historical context. But Cage's compositions, while making
statements opposed to historical aesthetics, did not discover therein a
psychology or philosophy of silence, less an aesthetics. Silence became a
utilitarian tool for compositional use, not unlike those historical composers he
criticized. Though he argued for the equal status of all sounds, sounds, music,
had no meaning, not useless but meaningless. Cage meant that Beethoven,
Mozart, and sounds of traffic in a big city were all equivalent -- except that he
didn't need any of them. http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/cage.html
Atlas Eclipticalis: Cage laid transparent paper over maps of the heavens,
connecting the dots in ways suggested by the ''I Ching'' (the Chinese tome, when
asked, told him to connect different colored stars in different ways), and then
transferred those lines, with a minimum of compositional involvement and a
maximum of graphic elegance, into conventional musical notation. New York
Times, 1987.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLGEwlBxjA
Prepared Piano:
Sonata V: http://listverse.com/2007/12/13/top-15-most-influentialclassical-composers/
Cage’s influence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GnJLXL4Lw
http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/the-original-creators-john-cage
Aphex Twin: Drqks
Omgyjya-Switch7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLOrgnfW9w