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Citation: Pace, I. (2017). Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, eds, Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014). Tempo, 71(281), pp. 107-115. doi: 10.1017/S004029821700047X
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books
Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, eds, ArtisticExperimentation in Music: An Anthology (Leuven:Leuven University Press, 2014).
The category of the experimental in music hastwo developed histories. The first and mostfamiliar, at least to English-speaking musiciansand musicologists, is used to group together arange of composers and associated musicians,predominantly from the US or UK, with JohnCage and other members of the ‘New YorkSchool’ as central figures, preceded by earliercomposers such as Charles Ives, Henry Cowelland Harry Partch. Their work is said to form acategory of ‘experimental music’, distinct froman ‘avant-garde’, in which latter category areplaced the likes of Pierre Boulez, KarlheinzStockhausen, Luigi Nono and many others. Itcan be dated back to when László Moholy-Nagyinvited Cage to form a Center for ExperimentalMusic in the School of Design in Chicago in1941, which fell through due to lack of funding.In 1954, Wolfgang Redner lectured on‘American experimental music’ at Darmstadt,1
and the following year, John Cage published hiskey essay ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’.2
There was then something of a hiatus in thewritten exploration of the term until the publica-tion in 1974 of Michael Nyman’s bookExperimental Music: Cage and Beyond, in whichthe ‘experimental’ vs ‘avant-garde’ dichotomywas cemented. Since then, the term has beenused widely in literature on new music and theexperimental/avant-garde model continues toinform the wider historiography of twentieth-century art music. Some have attempted toexpand the term ‘experimental music’ to encom-pass variously a wider range of improvisationaltraditions, radical work undertaken by
African-Americans, or more generally manytypes of iconoclastic music,3 though these endea-vours often threaten to render an already diffuseterm so vague as to lose distinction.
The term had earlier antecedents: Christophvon Blumröder and Heinz-Klaus Metzger havetraced the use of the terms Experiment and experi-mentell back to the mid-nineteenth century inwritings of Schumann, Wagner and Hanslick,then in a form of German music historiographyoriginated by August Reißmann in 1877, bywhich history can be read in terms of speculativeexperiments with arrangements of tones and thederivation of systems thereof;4 then in critics’responses to new music by Schoenberg –Schoenberg himself wrote in his Harmonielehre(1911) of ‘those purely formal investigations,those experiments, that would reduce beautyto an arithmetical problem’ – or the microtonalwork of Julián Carrillo, Ivan Wyschnegradskyand Alois Hába.
This conceptual tradition feeds into the firsthistory, but arguably more profoundly into thesecond, for which a key event is PierreSchaeffer’s lecture ‘Vers un musiqueexpérimentale’ at a conference in Paris in1953.5 Schaeffer employed the term to refer tomusic produced in a laboratory, thus especiallythat involving electronics, tape or computers,used in various ways that can be compared toscientific experiments. This type of definitionwas taken up by Lejaren Hiller, Moles, LuigiRognoni, and others, sometimes expanded toincorporate other extensions of musical meansand resources, and was also employed in writ-ings of Eimert, Berio, Nono, Stockhausen andPousseur, from the 1950s up to the 1970s; overallit was the dominant conception, especially in
1 Wolfgang Edward Redner, ‘AmerikanischeExperimentalmusik’ (1954), in Im Zenit der Moderne.Geschichte und Dokumentation in vier Bänden – Die internationa-len Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, 1946–1966, vol. 3, ed.Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg: Rombach,1997), pp. 178–189; translated into English in Amy C. Beal,‘Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt1946–1956’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53/1(Spring 2000), pp. 128–35.
2 John Cage, ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’ (1955), repub-lished in Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 13–17.
3 For example, George Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: theAACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, c. 2008); James Saunders, ed., The AshgateResearch Companion to Experimental Music (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2009); and Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Musicsince 1970 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
4 Christoph von Blumröder, ‘Experiment, experimentelleMusik’, in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed.Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag,1995), pp. 118–40.
5 Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Vers une musique experimentale’ (1953), inLa revue musicale no. 236 (Vers une musique experimentale),ed. Pierre Schaeffer (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1957), pp. 18–23.
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continental Europe, until the appearance of theNyman book.
If this second history has been in relativedecline for several decades now, then many ofthe articles in this important new volume editedby Darla Crispin and the late Bob Gilmore usethe term ‘experimentation’ to renew that history.Not only renew it, but also expand it, for if it hadearlier been used primarily in the context ofcomposition and some related use of technology,here it is also employed to investigate perform-ance and other practical musical activities (andnot just those employing markedly newresources or techniques). In many cases, theserender ‘experimentation’ as a sub-section of thediscipline of artistic research into music, forwhich the Orpheus Research Centre in Music(ORCiM) in Ghent, who produced this book, isa leading pioneer. This connects with thedebates on composition and performance asresearch conducted in TEMPO by John Croft,Camden Reeves and me, but the emphasishere is upon theorisation and documentation inthe form of writings about practice.
This weighty tome contains 35 articles; I willconcentrate primarily on those relating to newmusic. The editors state explicitly that the term‘experimentation’ should ‘not be taken to referonly to the twentieth-century development ofexperimental music’ but instead to an attitudeand set of questions ‘that can be applied to anysort of music, as the articles on Monteverdi,Brahms and jazz make clear’ (p. 9). But despitethis disclaimer various of the authors still feelthe need to re-examine definitions, includingGilmore himself in ‘Five Maps of theExperimental World’. He ponders why thework of Charles Ives might be consideredmore ‘experimental’ than that of Stravinsky,and is sceptical about the extent of commonal-ities between many composers labelled as‘experimental’, noting the major dissimilaritybetween the later work of John Cage andHarry Partch. He concludes that experimentalmusic might be best viewed as an ‘invented trad-ition’ in the sense defined by Eric Hobsbawmand Terence Ranger in their 1983 book, TheInvention of Tradition.
His five definitions, the first two derived fromCage’s ‘History of Experimental Music in theUnited States’: (i) ‘the introduction of novel ele-ments into one’s music’ (allowing that some maybecome no longer novel after a period of time, asCage argued about Ives); (ii) ‘an action the out-come of which is not foreseen’; (iii) a canonicalor historicist definition entailing a self-consciousengagement with an existing ‘tradition’, which
Gilmore associates especially with the work ofJames Tenney, a tradition unified by analogiesto scientific experiment as ‘composition asresearch’ and one which is differentiated fromothers by the fact that it can be continued overdifferent generations and so is less focusedupon individual works (p. 26); (iv) a traditionbrought about as much through sociological asmusical factors, with networks of institutions,promoters, patrons, performers, critics andothers, drawing upon the work of art sociologistHoward Becker;6 (v) the definition provided inNyman’s book, by which the ‘experimental’ isdistinguished from the ‘avant-garde’.
In line with his notion of an ‘invented trad-ition’, Gilmore makes clear his preference fordefinition (iii) but also unpacks some of theothers. Definition (ii) has different implicationsdepending upon whether the unpredictabilityof the outcome occurs during the compositionor at the moment of performance. If the former,then this is also true of many types of compos-ition employing systems to generate types ofmusical material unavailable through pure intu-ition, including for example some of the workof Stockhausen, Ferneyhough or RichardBarrett, none of who have commonly been cate-gorised as ‘experimental’ composers. As such, itmight be best defined as ‘extra-intuitive processcomposition’, a term which encompasses quitea bit of work examined elsewhere in the volume.
Overall, the volume includes roughly equalnumbers of essays with theoretical or practicalemphases respectively. The attempt to providea solid theoretical foundation for artistic researchdoes not really add up to more than the sum ofits parts, but nonetheless there is much fromwhich future artistic researchers can draw andwhich they can develop. Inevitably the claimsto produce a comprehensive theoretical modelhave to be gauged alongside consideration of‘admission’: exactly which practitioners (or the-orists) are allowed to participate, and how repre-sentative is their work? A glossary is provided forthose less well-versed with the theoretical ter-minology, and the term ‘Artistic Research’ (par-enthetically subtitled ‘research in-and-throughartistic practice’) is given six different meanings(more than Gilmore provides for ‘experimentalmusic’), corresponding to its employment by dif-ferent contributors. This lack of unity in termin-ology makes the process of finding a commontheoretical framework even harder.
6 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1982).
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The most important contributor towardsthese theoretical foundations is MichaelSchwab, who draws upon the theories of ‘experi-mental systems’ supplied by philosopher of sci-ence Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Three terms fromRheinberger are core: experimental systems arethe smallest units of empirical research, designed‘to give unknown answers to questions that theexperimenters themselves are not yet able toask’ (p. 113). This conception enables a frame-work more in line with the nature of existing art-istic practice than those constrained by the needto posit clearly framed initial research questions.Schwab argues cogently that the outcome mat-ters more than the means, whether the latterbe the material employed or the approachtaken. Experimental systems employ technicalobjects, fixed and accessible objects, sometimesthe results of previous experimentation, whichcondition and limit experimental systems, and‘embody the knowledge of a given researchfield at a given time’ (p. 113). The results ofsuch systems are Rheinberger’s epistemic things,which are ‘used to indicate the unknown as itarrives in a knowledge domain’ (p. 113).
Schwab also derives a model specifically forpractice as research from Rheinberger and talksabout the ‘exposition’ of Practice as Research(PaR), arguing that the term can be replacedby ‘the performance of practice as research’,‘the staging of practice as research’ (p. 36).Finally he arrives at a definition: ‘the discursivesupplementation of practice that can allow forthe emergence of different identities of this prac-tice’, a formulation more in keeping with a dis-tinct identity for artistic research, as alwayssupplementary to some more conventional prac-tice. This can be mapped onto a further term,‘second-order art-making’ for a type of artisticpractice as ‘writing’ (compared to first-order,more conventional artistic practice), ‘in whichone may see art’s embrace of secondary formatsthat engage in difference or even différance . . . asa means to self-define a practice without relationto discipline or similar external frames that canbe used to construe the identity of that practice’(p. 37).
What is not yet clear is how this model and itsterminology relate to a specifically musical con-text. Schwab himself notes that despite the cur-rency gained by Rheinberger’s ideas in debatesaround artistic research, ‘no coherent picturehas emerged as to how his theory may product-ively be employed in this context’ (p. 31), otherthan loose allusions to work referencing thesciences. He set out to do this in a more rigorousfashion, by supplying ORCiM participants with a
series of questionnaires. The resulting technicalobjects included scores, musical instrumentsand hardware, as well as habits of performance,and aspects of the institutional context includinglocating or funding. As for epistemic things,Schwab found that practitioners were not sofocused upon the art work as some type offinal definitive outcome but rather on a widerprocess, of which that might be part, and theimportance of intensity of experience, morethan knowledge, though most were happy withthe production of supplementary output (lec-tures, papers, texts).
Paulo de Assis expands this to produce amodel of ‘epistemic complexity’ in musical prac-tice, defined as ‘The continuous accumulationand sedimentation of such kinds of knowledge[through discourses and performance stylesaround sketches, instruments, editions, record-ings] represents an exponential growth of com-plexity that involves technical, artistic, aesthetic,and epistemic components’. (p. 41). Here andelsewhere I have major problems with a primar-ily semiotic model of music, at least when for-mulated in a paradigmatic rather than syntagmaticmanner. Kathleen Coessens writes that ‘Semioticand symbolic systems provide the medium –tools, languages, codes – that permit the artist totranslate his or her creative thinking and actinginto something durable’. (p. 75), going on toemploy Yuri Lotman’s concept of a ‘semiosphere’.
But this model is reductive and de-materialisingin a musical context, reliant on sounds needingsome external referent (in this case ‘creativethinking and acting’), and a somewhat antiquatedidea of ‘expression’ (she says elsewhere in thesame article that ‘The body of the artist is hisor her first medium of expression; (p. 71)); thisdoes not allow for ‘sounds being themselves’or a purer idea of research as utterly intrinsicto practice. More interesting is Coessens’s ‘TinyMoments of Experimentation: Kairos in theLiminal Space of Performance’, a solid attemptto theorise the uniqueness of a real-time per-formance. This has much potential (in any per-forming arts context) and some of thefundamentals she underlines – ‘no revision, noreprise, no hesitations’ – should be taken morereadily into account by others assessing thistype of research, as should the fundamentalimpermanence of performance (a recording is aquite fundamentally different entity).
Valentin Gloor focuses on the role of ‘associ-ation’ in artistic experimentation and is one ofthe few contributors who makes reference toChristopher Frayling’s influential delineation ofa tripartite model of research ‘through’, ‘into’
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and ‘for’ art.7 Like others, Gloor is aware of thelimitations of the scientific model, in particular ageneral principle by which experimentation takesplace without external observation, as well as aneed for an (assumed) ‘objectivity’, both princi-ples which would exclude plenty of artistic prac-tice; thus he argues that research methods needto be redefined.
In an essay on the ethics of artistic research,Marcel Cobussen describes a research projectundertaken by two Swedish (Henrik Frisk andStefan Östersjö) and two Vietnamese (Ngo TraMy and Nguyen Thanh Thuy) performers,entitled ‘Six Tones’. Cobussen rightly exploresthe post-colonial differential of power betweenthe two pairs of performers, and alludes toGayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Can the SubalternSpeak?’8 That to ‘speak’ can take many formsbeyond the verbal/written is certainly clear inthe context of this volume, but this allusion isironic when neither Ngo nor Nguyen makeany written contribution of their own (thoughÖstersjö co-authors with Coessens a more exten-sive article on this project).
Many of the writings in the volume by com-posers share a common format: first they setout their own views on what artistic experimen-tation/artistic research entail, then argue howthese are made manifest in specific projects oftheir own. One of the most lucid essays is byRichard Barrett, who distances himself from aCageian notion of ‘experimental music’, definingan ‘experiment’ for him as ‘an interrogation ofsome aspect of reality for the purpose of under-standing and explaining it, enabling its integra-tion into a more general understanding, whichis thereby changed, subtly or radically’ (p. 105),then expanding upon this in terms of the scien-tific model of presentation of a hypothesis,then testing this by experiment. Barrett goeson to argue that his ‘questions’ cannot be definedsimply; rather, he suggests that ‘making music ismy way of trying to understand things’ and ‘myway of trying to share and communicate thesethings’ (p. 106). Recognising how scientificexperiment must encompass the possibility offailure, Barrett argues that musical experimenta-tion involves listeners becoming fellow experi-menters. From this perspective he addressesmusical improvisation, defined as ‘a method of
composition’ (p. 107), and traces its employmentin his codex cycle, and also his major cycleCONSTRUCTION for which he does provideone research question, ‘whether it was able tosustain its intensity over such an unbrokentotal duration’ (p. 110) of two hours.
Barrett’s conception of musical experimenta-tion is inspiring and, in acknowledging thatexperimentation may provide enlightenmenteven if an initial hypothesis cannot be demon-strated, truer to the spirit of experimental science(in which he has some background) than otherwork here. Nonetheless, Barrett’s conceptiondoes concur with Schwab’s findings on epistemicthings, as does that of Yolande Harris. Harris’swork raises other questions of intentional andpoietic biases, because of her more didactic atti-tude. Of the work of Hildegard Westerkamp,she says that ‘participants explore these everydaysoundworlds, activating the constellation ofbody-imagination-world’ (p. 169). But might somelisteners not equally appropriate Westerkamp’swork as a novel formof ambient acousticwallpaper,to accompany certain types of events and gather-ings at their homes, for example?
Larry Polansky, in a short essay, outlines thetechniques involved in the composition of sev-eral works: reversing the roles of conventionalaxes of musical notation, requiring a pianist hav-ing to learn sign language, even following anextremely extensive process which can take asmuch as three years. He legitimises this throughdidactic claims like ‘if we truly hope to not havewar, we can’t just do what we usually do. Weare xenophobic by nature. How we modulatethat fundamental part of our makeup with theintelligence also handed to us by evolution iswhat might make it possible’ (p. 183). I remainunconvinced that such an experience wouldhave any impact upon any performer who isnot already convinced of its premises – whoelse would undertake such a thing?
Much more successful is William Brooks,researching the history for particular collabora-tive oral deliveries of W.B. Yeats’s verse (pre-sented using the Rheinberger-Schwabterminology). Brooks then goes on to describethe process of composing and first performancesof his own piece Everlasting Voices, directly draw-ing upon Yeats’s work. He focuses in particularon the interdisciplinary aspect of much artisticresearch, simply in the sense of drawing uponproblems or propositions from other art formsor science.
Godfried-Willem Raes notes the suspicionsaroused when artists become embroiled in thehumanities, suspicions about the ability of the
7 Christopher Frayling, ‘Research in Art and Design’, RoyalCollege of Art Research Papers 1/1 (1993–94), p. 5.
8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, inMarxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelsonand Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988),pp. 271–316.
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artist to achieve the level of critical distanceexpected of other types of scholars. Raes adheresmore closely to older scientific models (with aseparation between art and research, and a priv-ileging of certain types of output) than mostother contributors, claiming that researchrequires that there be ‘something beingresearched’ involving ‘a question, a problem’which ‘exists with respect to that something’.Raes puts this bluntly: ‘Art and research arenot the same thing, although they may occurtogether’ (p. 56). More generous is the viewgiven by Bart Vanhecke, that ‘experimentation’in music or the arts refers either to ‘innovative-ness in artistic creation’, ‘unpredictability or inde-terminacy in procedures or outcomes’ or‘experimentation in the scientific sense’ (p. 91);Raes would only count the latter of these asresearch. Vanhecke also suggests that artisticpractice ‘is the expression of the complete mean-ing of aesthetic concepts – aesthetic ideas –within his or her aesthetic universe’ (p. 92), adefinition upon which he expands, but whichraises the same problem as the semiotic modelsof Coessens and de Assis.
Vanhecke identifies a tripartite model ofexperimentation identical to that of Frayling(though he is not mentioned), identifyingresearch ‘for’ art with scientific experimentation;those forms of research taking place ‘through’ or‘in’ art are quite distinct. As examples of thesecond category he suggests Cage’s preparedpiano, Partch’s new instruments and scales, andStravinsky’s structural use of rhythm, all newforms of artistic expression, thus producing‘experimental music’. His example of the thirdcategory, Schoenberg’s development of dodeca-phonic technique as a response to the need tofind new methods to handle and control the evo-lution of the tonal idiom, is much stronger.Broadly, to Vanhecke, experimentation ‘through’art involves new means of expression of anessentially stable aesthetic universe; experimen-tation ‘in’ art entails developments in that uni-verse itself; this may be predicated upon arather old-fashioned dichotomy between formand content. Like Gilmore, he is relativelyunsympathetic to calling something ‘experimen-tal’ when it has achieved a certain normativityor cultural traction.
The contributions by performers are in gen-eral less theoretically sophisticated, even wherethey have provided important theoretical reflec-tions elsewhere. Catherine Laws contributes astrong chapter on ‘Embodiment and Gesture inPerformance’, considering bodily movementand gesture in a tradition of empirical
musicology. In another chapter, she considersMorton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, drawingupon an analysis of the work by Frank Sani,9
but is less successful in translating this into a pro-gramme for performance (though this in partrelates to the limitations of the analysis).Suggestions are presented for care over touch,minute matters of rhythm, gauging rests, andso on, but seem mostly intended to justify themodel of ‘the practice of practising as an experi-mental process’ (p. 289).
Mieko Kanno, like Laws, considers practising,in a brief article which details her separation ofhands when learning Sciarrino’s Per Mattia, draw-ing upon strategies developed by MichelangeloAbbado for studying Paganini Caprices, butthis does not go much beyond simple pragmaticsuggestion. Of the other articles by performers,the most interesting are Luk Vaes’s interviewwith Theodor Ross about performing Kagel’sAcustica with the composer, a type of contem-porary HIP-style research which uncovers awealth of fascinating and vital information, notleast about Kagel’s relationship with radio produ-cers, but also the difficulties inherent in recon-structing the experience of working with thecomposer present, and Gloor’s strong case forconceiving the Liederabend according to theRheinberger-Schwab model.
Various writers are occupied with the bound-aries between artistic research and experimenta-tion (though others use the terms almostinterchangeably), or between either and somesupposedly more familiar artistic practice. JuanParra Cancino is clear that one should avoid‘claiming that what we normally do as artistsin itself constitutes research’ (p. 307). But Ihave yet to be wholly convinced that themodel of the ‘experimental system’ adds muchto a simpler model of artistic research (in thebroadest sense, which can include practice-as-research) as a part of critically self-reflexive practice,a model presented by Vanhecke, who thus con-cludes that only artists themselves can carryout such research, since others lack the same‘unmediated, direct access’ (p. 94).
All of this raises crucial questions of legitim-ation. If, contra Parra, one accepts that a lot ofwhat artists do constitutes research, and that itdoes not necessarily require extra written docu-mentation, then those who invest time in suchextensive theorisation would not necessarily
9 Frank Sani, ‘Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari: a pitch ana-lysis’, at www.cnvill.net/mfsani3/mfsani3.htm (accessed 7March 2017).
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gain additional academic capital. As career routesfor composers and performers become morescarce because of cuts to arts funding in manyparts of the Western world, many look to estab-lish positions in academia instead, and are forcedinto an ever-more competitive economy ofresearch prestige. This could translate into anew aesthetic hierarchy in which those whosework is deemed most ‘research-like’ or even‘experimental’ (if one accepts various of theideas in this volume) will be at a distinctadvantage.
Raes’s view on these matters is like a throw-back to an unmediated modernist privileging ofdifficulty. He equates ‘art that is not problematic’with ‘art that does not research anything’, whichhe decries as ‘purely reproductive, at most some-what interpretative, craftmanship’ (p. 56), whichhe associates with commercialisation. HisBabbitt-like solution to this degradation is ‘thecreation of permanent arts laboratories: sanctuar-ies from which experimental art can connect toits contemporary environment and to theresources provided by both science and technol-ogy within that environment’ (p. 58), whichmight in Raes’s utopia form the essence ofhigher arts education. He cites his own organisa-tion, the Logos Foundation in Ghent, STEIM inAmsterdam and IRCAM in France as positiveexample because of their development of newinstruments and electronic interfaces.
The economic arguments of Gilmore arewholly different: he notes positively the supportof Ives for Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition inthe late 1920s, and that of Betty Freeman forPartch, Harrison, Cage, Reich and others. Ives
became rich through his work in insurance;Freeman inherited from her father. Gilmore sug-gests that institutions for ‘experimental music’such as those of Phill Niblock in New York, orWalter Zimmermann or Johannes Fritsch inCologne, ‘would never have survived as longas they did if they were purely dependent oninstitutional funding’. The implication is thatthe artistic possibilities for small-scale institutionsrelying upon private capital and ticket sales arewider and more adventurous than for those sup-ported through subsidy, derived from taxation.This argument is perfectly respectable, articu-lated most explicitly in a musical context byGeorgina Born,10 but is that of a free marketeer;it would be music to the ears of conservativepoliticians who would cut subsidy further.
In Europe, unlike North America, the pri-vately funded sector of academia is relativelysmall at present, and so artistic experimentationin an academic environment is likely to remainsubject to wider external scrutiny. This is notnecessarily a bad thing; the question is how,and on what basis, such scrutiny is conducted.If more musicians are to continue to engage inpractice, as described in this volume, questionsof legitimation will not go away; nor will compe-tition for such funding from those whose artisticmethodologies, attitudes and outputs are verydifferent. Artistic Experimentation in Music drama-tizes the issues and should serve as a majorstimulus towards more incisive perspectives.
Ian Pace Q110.1017/S004029821700047X
10 Georgina Born, ‘On Music and Politics’, in Red Strains: Musicand Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, ed. RobertAdlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 64.
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