Portfolio of Compositions (and accompanying commentary) Alexander Kolassa ThesissubmittedtotheUniversityofNottingham forthedegreeofDoctorofPhilosophy July 2015 i Abstract The first half of this commentary/thesis will explore changing perceptions of the musical work and the creative process. Ultimately, it will seek to identify and expose the myth of whatwemightcallthe‘tyrannicalcomposer’.Thatistosay,asuspicionofwhatisimplied hierarchically by the figure of the composer and the consequences this has on critical thought,scholarship,performanceandthepublicperceptionofmusic,newandold. By drawing upon recent research in, among other things, semiotics and mediation theory, I seek to reimagine the traditional composer-performer-audience relationship as somethingfarmoredemocraticandlinearthanis oftengivencredit. Discussions typically reservedforovertlychallengingand‘experimental’genresofmusiccanherebereframed and proposed as a defence of related but contrasting styles of acoustic avant-garde composition. The above argument will be supported in the second chapter by a selection of case studiesdrawinguponmyownportfolioofcompositions.Analysisofsomeoftheseworks will ask questions about composer authority and agency and draw upon my practical experience as composer of the works in question. The composer will ultimately be understoodnotasadictator-likefigureandprivilegedarbiterofthe‘musicalwork’,butas ademocraticallymotivatedcreativeagent,dialecticallyandcollaborativelyinvolvedinthe mediationandreceptionoftheperformedwork. ii Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Nick Sackman for his practical insight and guidance, as well as his enthusiastic involvement with my music; our supervision sessions have been a constant source of motivation for me. I would also like to thank Robert Adlington, whose help writing the written portion of this submission (and also my undergraduate dissertation) has had an immense influence on me. The music department here at the University of Nottingham has put up with me for seven years, and I could not think of a better faculty to work with and learn from. A special thankstoPhilipWellerforhistime,conversationandFrenchaccent. It has been a particular pleasure to be part of the postgraduate community in the musicdepartment.ThoughIcouldnotfiteveryone’snameintothis,Iwouldliketothank Charlotte Bentley, Jonathan Herrick, James Cook, Matthew Lewis, Adam Whittaker and Angela Slater for the inspiration they have given me, the patience they have shown, and thedrafts theyhavereadthrough.A veryspecial thank you to theRadcliffeTrust forthe Bursary that has sustained me over the years; this made everything possible. Last, but not least, an enormous thank you to my parents, for their unwavering love and support, financial assistance, Skype conversations and for always being there if I ever needed to escape. iii Contents UnrealCity 6’’ hoquetperpétuel 8” anincongruouscollision(ofevents) 6’’ Aphasia(forpiano) 10’’ (GrandHotel)Abgrund 11’’ PreludesonataforBassClarinet&Piano 10’’ AMillionRandomDigits 5’’ Triptych(forfourvoices) 5’’ (Losespejos)amutetheatre 5.30’’ Total: 66.30’’ Chapter1 TheMythoftheTyrannicalComposer:Rehabilitating andDemocratisingthe‘WorkConcept’ 1 Chapter2 (Losespejos)amutetheatre:personalmethodologyandcreativeintentions 24 CompositionCommentary 35 Bibliography 75 AccompanyingCD 1- UnrealCity(live:studentsoftheUniversityofNottinghamPhilharmonia) 2- anincongruouscollision(ofevents)(live:UniversityofNottinghamArcoEnsemble) 3- Aphasia(forpiano)(synthesizedrecording) 4- (GrandHotel)Abgrund(synthesizedrecording) 5- AMillionRandomDigits(synthesizedrecording) 1 Chapter 1 The Mythofthe TyrannicalComposer:RehabilitatingandDemocratising the ‘Work Concept’ Recent changes in government arts funding policy and the dramatic merging of various contemporary music organisations into the ACE-affiliated ‘Sound & Music’ (2008) prompted outrage from many of the country’s most prominent composers. An open letter written early in 2012 by Colin Matthews and Nicola LeFanu, and endorsed by a further 250 artists, accused Sound & Music of abandoning ‘virtually all of the long- established constructive activities of its constituent parts’.1 In the four years that this organisationhadbeenresponsibleforthepromotionofNewMusicthefocushadshifted, Matthews and LeFanu suggest, towards ‘a bland and unfocused endorsement of “sound art”andthepromotionofrelativelyfringeactivities’.Thesignatoriesoftheoriginalletter included, according to Norman Lebrecht (on his ArtsJournal blog), the‘grand old knights of English music’2and as such it is hard not to read antagonisms between different types of contemporary composition here. A response, signed by an arguably more ‘diverse’ range of composers, practitioners and academics, attacked the implied assertion that ‘notated contemporary composition should receive a specially privileged status’. This response goes on to suggest instead, that it is ‘notated contemporary composition’ that is itself the ‘fringe activity’ and that musical practice today, less inclusive and often overtlycollaborative,oftenseeksdirectlyto‘defysimplisticcategorisation’.3 1Theopenlettercanbefoundhere:http://www.holstfoundation.org/media/Open-Letter- SAM-ACE.pdf<accessed20/06/2014>. 2Regrettably,thebloghassincebeenremovedfromtheInternet. 3Asabove,thesourceforthishasalsosincebeenremovedfromtheinternet. 2 There is, proposes M. J. Grant, in a paper that develops its argument using the sign theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, a ‘constitutive difference between what is commonly known as “experimental music” and other types of contemporary composition’.4The difference seems subtle, and concerns Peirce’s concept of symbol and index. In short, experimental music ‘doesn’t represent something, it presents something…’; it does not, Grant claims, ‘tell us something’ but rather it ‘shows us something’.5This distinction, whichconcernssemioticintention,helpstoexplaintheSound&Music‘dispute’(forwant of a better term). If there is indeed a turn towards favouring an ‘experimental’ music— which I am intentionally conflating with ‘sound art’, LeFanu and Matthew’s derided ‘fringe activity’—it is unsurprising. This shift from the representative to the presentative semiotic mode mirrors, I would suggest, the Lyotardian commentary that characterises the postmodern as possessing a ‘praxis based on the refusal of any metanarrative which claims to subtend and explain phenomena’.6The ‘sound artist’, unlike the authoritarian figure of the ‘composer’, shows rather than tells, while the traditional means by which music is mediated is deemed historically top-down, Euro-centric and rightly viewed with some scepticism. Where the act of showing is here comparable to an invitation that factors in the creative and interpretative agency of all participants, telling is didactic and privileges the message of a single creator, or composer. It is at this point, though, that theory risks losing touch with reality. Ideologically loaded critique of this kind overlooks what is truly radical, or at least meaningful in any 'musicking'.7My defence of the ‘composer’ will be a defence of the role as it is understood in so-called ‘notated 4Morag Josephine Grant, ‘Experimental Music Semiotics’, International Review of the AestheticsandSociologyofMusic,34/2(2003),174. 5Grant,‘ExperimentalMusicSemiotics’,183. 6CecileLindsay,‘ExperimentsinPostmodernDialogue’,Diacritics,14/3(1984),52. 7ToborrowfromthelateChristopherSmall. 3 contemporary composition’. It will start with an examination of a number of positions whichviewthefigureofthecomposerinacriticallight. * * * GeorginaBornhasdescribedthefollowingnightmarescenario: The ontology of the musical work envisions a hierarchical assemblage: the composer-hero stands over the interpreter, conductor over instrumentalist, interpreter over listener, just as the work ideal authorizes and supervises the score,whichsupervisesperformance,whichsupervisesreception.8 I am reminded of Frederico Fellini’s Prova d’orchestra (1978), in which the setting of an orchestral rehearsal becomes the scene for a revolutionary metaphor.9With literally apocalypticresults,thebeleagueredorchestral musicians riseup andgo onstrikeagainst the dictatorial figure of the conductor (the composer is strangely absent from the drama). Similar sentiments are found expressed from a Marxist perspective in Cornelius Cardew’s denunciation of Stockhausen as part of the ‘cultural super-structure of imperialism’.10This wasacriticism rootedinStockhausen’s mystical andsingularpersona, and the result of Cardew’s own reinvention as Maoist and political activist. Cardew lamentedtheneed,inherentinStockhausen’sstyle,foraspeciallytrainedgenreofplayer capable of delivering this music for an audience. This performer is expected to concentrate and contemplate ‘sounds for their own sake’.11By promoting a ‘mystical 8GeorginaBorn,‘OnMusicalMediation:Ontology,TechnologyandCreativity’,Twentieth- CenturyMusic,2/1(2005),26. 9Orchestral Rehearsal (prova d’orchestra), Frederico Fellini (dir.) (Infinity Media, 2006), DVD. 10Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London: Latimer New Dimensions Limited,1974),47. 11Ibid.,49. 4 world outlook’—with himself at the centre—Stockhausen is becomes an ‘ally of imperialismandanenemyoftheworkingandoppressedpeopleoftheworld’.12 Georgina Born’s sophisticated criticism of musical modernism and the work concept is instantiated within her own ethnographic study of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Born claims that IRCAM propagates a kindofaesthetic/philosophicalinertia,whichresultsfrom anumberoffalseuniversalisms regarding progress in art and technology. Headed by its charismatic and iconic ‘leader’ Pierre Boulez, IRCAM has come to near-monopolise the idea of ‘modernism’ in music (at least in France). By hi-jacking the musical ‘avant-garde’ IRCAM effectively became synonymous with the primarily European ‘work-’ and ‘composer-’ centric musical vanguardism that has dominated New Music discourse for much of the twentieth century.13IRCAM ‘legitimises’ itself, and in so doing legitimises its own concept of the hierarchically mediated musical ‘work’, as arbitrated by the ‘reified individual author’ or composer.14 Thispostmoderncynicismtowardaprogress-orientatedavant-gardeisnotuncommon today. It is widely felt in the United States, for example, that during the 1960s and 70s, the institutionally elitist post-Schoenbergian serial music was disseminated through a ‘kind of force-feeding in which a reluctant public, strung along by a cast of academic composers, [was] made to digest what would otherwise have been set aside’.15This position is regularly reinforced through recourse to Milton Babbitt’s ‘Who Cares if You Listen’,anarticlethatis,infact,notquiteasunyieldingasitisoftenassumedtobe.Inthe 12Ibid.,54. 13Born,‘OnMusicalMediation:Ontology,TechnologyandCreativity’,15. 14Born,RationalizingCulture…315. 15 Pieter C. van den Toorn, ‘Will Stravinsky Survive Postmodernism?’, Music Theory Spectrum,22/1(2000),104. 5 recent BBC documentary The Sound and the Fury (aimed to coincide with a yearlong celebration of twentieth-century music at the Southbank Centre, 2013), the obligatory IRCAM segment (apparently conflating the entirety of the post-war European avant- garde) felt comparatively dismissive. In an episode that celebrated the narrative of a minimalism which ushered in a ‘return of tonality’—and following a segment discussing the‘sacredminimalism’ofArvoPärt—thenarratorbegan: …Modern classical music had finally ceased to alienate its audience, but that didn’t mean the avant-garde was left for dead. Back in Paris, the city where Claude Debussy first threw open the floodgates for a century of musical reinvention, an underground bunker had been forged. A scientific laboratory equippedtoblastmusicfromtheendofthe20thcenturytothe21st.16 Here, the music in question is seemingly robbed of its ‘musicality’. Where other ‘genres’ are celebrated for their capacity to reach normatively conceived (and ostensibly mainstream) audiences, the post-war avant-garde is literally buried ‘underground’ because of its commitment to an unpopular aesthetic. It may seem a well-intentioned critique to accuse the kinds of composers that come from IRCAM of an overreliance on essentially ‘arbitrary intertextual references to science, computing[…] biology, maths, physics, and structural linguistics’ etc. but criticisms of this kind, and those which—as with Georgina Born’s—observe an excessive over-reliance on the pseudo-scientific metalanguages spokenbycomposers toothercomposers,reallyonlytell half thestory.17 I would suggest that it may be unfair to deny pre-emptively the possibility of a music, mathematical in presentation though it may be, to communicate to an audience on an emotional level. The New Musicology has reminded us that it is in the ‘irreversible 16'Easy Listening?', Sound and the Fury, BBC Four, Ian MacMillan (dir.), aired 26th February,2013. 17Born,RationalisingCulture…223. 6 experience of playing, singing, or listening that any meanings summoned by music come into being’.18 Here, I have sympathy with Susan McClary who, while criticising the ‘terminal prestige’ of the very vanguards of new music under scrutiny here, is able to show a not inconsiderable sensitivity to the affective capacities of this type of music. Withoutdrawinguponthequasi-mathematicaljargon,whichmay‘requirelittlemorethan a specialist’s grasp of combinatorial techniques’, it should, she claims, be possible to discussthemusicinbroadermoremeaningful,experientialandculturalterms.19 On the back of her criticism of IRCAM-formalism, Born has sought to develop an all- encompassingontologicalframeworkforthebroader,anddiverse,culturalpracticesthat constitutes music. Such a model should see the art-work (or cultural object), not as a disinterested and abstract object of aesthetic inquiry, but as a culturally mediated index of socialrelations and the cumulative result of its manifoldtransmissions, exchanges and mediations. To do this, Born draws upon the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell to reconceive of the musical art-work as ‘an invisible skein of relations, fanning out into social space and time’.20She is rightly sceptical of overly reductive binarisms that regard ‘active’ and co-creational types of listening against other passive and disengaged modes of engagement.21Such reductions, Born contends, presuppose the composer-centric ‘reifyingparadigm’of the“musicitself”,which,wearetold,automaticallyendangers any broader understanding of a social and mediated music. Her solution—a sociologically influenced one—thus focusses on ‘relations between musical sounds, human and other 18CarolynAbbate,‘Music–DrasticorGnostic?’,CriticalInquiry,30/3(2004),505. 19 Susan McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, CulturalCritique,12(1989),65. 20Born,‘OnMusicalMediation:Ontology,TechnologyandCreativity’,17. 21 Georgina Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’,JournaloftheRoyalMusicalAssociation,135/1(2010),81.