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This 'noise,' this anarchic
anti-music is an expression of the freedom to work with any and all sounds
in any combination. It expands the concept of'music' by including all that
'music' rejects. It is anarchic because it does away with hierarchies of
sound-relations and allows for equal representation of all
sounds.
The democratization of sound that
we claim for anti-music is certainly nothing new: from Russolo to Cage,
Xenakis, Coleman, Musique Concrete, AMM, Karkowski, Hecker etc., there is
an established tradition of anti-music. Unfortunately, as is all too often
the case with art, this tradition has come to be appreciated more for
its expansion of purely
esthetic concerns than the theoretical developments and implications of
its praxis. While esthetic traditions are continuously challenged the
theories creating/created by esthetic shifts too often become
over-simplified and/or slip into oblivion. If anti-music is to truly be
"from the other side" of music then it is essential that we move beyond
thinking about music within the boundaries of individualistic estheticism
and begin to consider the implications and potential of anti-music within
a broader social context.
In the essays of Herbert Brun and
Howard Slater the question of why we make this 'noise' is taken up.
For Brun a key idea is that of anti-communication. Experimental art offers
us the other side of communication and makes possible a flow of ideas
that, if we have only the languages of communication, could not come into
being. Where "communication puts everything neatly away on the spot"
anti-communication remains open. Anti-communication expands the scope of
all communication.
In Abreaction..., Howard
Slater takes to task Freud's theory of the unconscious and examines the
potential of music to directly tap the unconscious in a process of
auto-theorization. As Brun sees in anti-communication the ability to
sidestep the inadequacies of language Slater sees in auto-theorization
(which is attained by the creation of mobile cathetic energies that cannot
be "subsumed and overdetermined by being immediately expressible in
words") the ability to confront repression and socially-repressive
mechanisms, and release desire.
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WHAT IF THIS WERE MUSIC?1
Herbert Brun |
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When, many years ago I was first
invited to give talks and lectures, the invitations meant that I was
to be a composer of music who is to discuss and to present music for an
audience interested in music. I felt that, therefore, I had to show how
the thoughts I really wished to talk about were relevant even to music.
Under this pressure I soon found out that the composition of music, is, in
fact, relevant to the thoughts I consider important at any given time.
Finally, I asked myself: What if it were true that composition simply is
the generator of relevance, and that composers, no matter of or in what,
are people who desire that whatever they create be relevant to whatever
they consider important? If this were true (and I stipulate it is), then I
could go on and state: The thoughts I consider important, and the medium
in which I try to create what otherwise might never happen, are related
through my desire for relevance; thus they become representatives of two
systems which ought to show a high degree of mutual analogy, once a
structure composed by me is applied to both. Wherever such an attempt is
successful one can consider the process as a model of some effective
method for reaching a desired state; this, then, allows for a new look at
what may now appear to be - besides and beyond being desired - also
desirable.
The definition of a problem and the
action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals
or groups that discovered the
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