When is Art Research - presentation by Brian Kane, PhD candidate in Music (composition), UC Berkeley

When one juxtaposes the kinds of research operative in the hard sciences, or even in the humanities and social sciences, with the research made by composers of new music, the latter is bound to appear shabby by comparison. The scientific investigation into the nature of matter will always overshadow the investigation composers make into their musical material. Even the human sciences, which share many of the same interests with new music, seem to out-perform new music in achieving their aims. For example, Foucault’s work has done more to clarify our thinking about the unhappy relationship between power and sexuality than has Michael Finnissy’s massive piano cycle, "English Country Tunes," a work intended to be about England’s hypocritical and repressive attitude towards homosexuality. The critical re-descriptions at work in Finnissy’s music speak a coded language to those who are initiated into its fluency. Unlike the widespread appeal and utility of Foucault’s work, Finnissy work appears crabbed, inaccessible, subjective, inscrutably particular and idiosyncratic. Considering the hermetic nature of this type of musical "research" why would any university be interested in supporting it?

Well they’re not, because "research" is a term used to disguise an economic motive, a veil for the profitability of higher education. Research in the hard sciences can mean big money for universities, in the form of government or independent grants, patents, and so forth. Plus there is always an endless supply of inexpensive labor and intellectual power in the form of graduate students, to carry out the tasks necessary to fulfill the demands of research. Nobel prize winning scientists and economists, as well as notable scholars in the humanities, critical theory, psychology, and sociology help to augment the situation of the university through the productions of their intellectual labor, as well as the "prestige" they shed — an essentially auratic feature necessary in the marketing of any university to the parents of the undergraduates who pay the bills. In comparison to the concrete and saleable achievements of other disciplines, a composer (even a Pulitzer prize winner) hardly seems indispensable to the university when budget cuts come from on high.

But research isn’t just a term used to veil the manner in which the university makes money for itself; it also veils the manner in which individuals within the academy pursue their own economic motive. Here’s my cynical answer to the question at hand: "when is art research?" When you are trying to get grant money....

For instance, if I were savvier I’d propose for my dissertation a large orchestra piece about my Jewish heritage. I’d be sure to include many of the vocal musical tropes taken from the long tradition of Jewish liturgy (highly transformed, of course) and plenty of klezmer-ish clarinet parts accompanied by violins invoking the long-lost days of the stettel by, naturally, being tuned in scordatura, 1/2 step sharp. With a piece like that I could leisurely drag out the years of graduate school far beyond the limits of my finite funding. I could participate in interdisciplinary workshops, receive travel grants to visit the "old country", and use my Fullbright to spend time in the archives looking for the musical markings on ancient "cee-dur-`im."

Or perhaps the dissertation need not be my Jewish piece. It could just as easily be about a number of other catch phrases tantalizing to the dispensers of grant money. The important thing to "snatch the cash" is that it involves a heavy dose of the politics of personal identity. Lest not you be perceived as recondite, overly intellectual, theoretical (without practice) and worst of all, elitist. For these demands are the demands of the marketplace, which are reflected in the organization and distribution of funding. Autonomous art, (and I don’t mean some reified and a-historical notion of autonomous art) does not snugly fit in this infernal machine. Yet naively perhaps, what many composers value in the academy is a shelter from the demands of the market place. So composers learn to describe their work under the guise of the research paradigm in order to survive — yet, criticism of the given is inimical to the reproduction of the given.

The most obvious and acceptable way in which the art of music can be defined as research is when it involves new technology. The making of new software applications, new controllers, and other kinds of technology for the production, dissemination, performance and control of music are easily sheltered under the banner of research. This has historical precedents dating back to the 1950s — to the early days of electronic and tape music — I’m thinking of Babbitt and the development of the Ph. D. in composition as well as Stockhausen’s annual reports on recent findings in the electronic studio in Cologne. New music alone does not pay the bills. We must remember that even the Poeme Electronique’s raison d’etre was as an advertisement for the Phillips Corporation.

Today, the field of live interactive electronic music, and the use of alternative controllers, are the most easily aligned with computer and software manufacturing — a billion dollar, corporate-controlled and vastly monopolized enterprise. The bogus ideals of "interactivity" and "virtuality" are cheaply disguised models for falsely alienating and neutralizing the quotidian in order to sell it back at a profit. Just visit the Experience Music Project!

Although I have no problems with live interactive electronic music per se, I do have a problem when it is made distinct from the general practice of improvised music. Why should the use of an I-Book rather than a bass clarinet or trombone make any difference? I think it is no coincidence that great minds in live interactive music like George Lewis, are also great improvisers generally in non-"interactive" contexts as well.

This leads to a larger point: technique should absorb technology. I define technique in this expanded sense in the same way that Adorno did back in 1958: "If art is the external representation of something internal, the concept of technique embraces everything which pertains to the realization of that interior substance. In the case of music, not only the realization of spiritual substance in the notes is involved, but the transformation which makes these notes accessible to sensory perception as well. In short, both production and reproduction are involved. Musical technique embraces the totality of all musical means: the organization of the substance itself and its transformation into a physical phenomenon."

Technique is everything that is at a composer’s disposal to realize the music that one imagines, however detailed or general the imagining may be. Thus, in addition to the typical things embraced as technique such as a thorough knowledge of instrumentation, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and form, technique should also include:

• musicological knowledge and reflection
• active listening and critical evaluation
• analysis of scores
• model making, on computers or elsewhere
• some sort of coherent critical theory, or philosophy or metaphysics
• reflection and beliefs on the social situation of music, the historical state of its material, and its current reception
• the ability to speak coherently about one’s music
• etc.

Thus, the goal of research in composition is to develop technique in any or all of these ways. Studying scores is research. Listening is research. Sketching is research. Developing an aesthetic theory is research.

This expanded concept of technique is central to my preoccupations as a composer. As an example I would like to quickly turn to an electronic piece I recently composed called Melodrama.

The piece began to crystallize around my fascination with the sound of the glass harmonica. I recalled a short piece of Beethoven’s that I had heard for glass harmonica and reciter. I began to do a little bit of research (in the usual sense of the term) into the origin of the piece as well as the history of the glass harmonica.

• FACTS: Beethoven composed the "Melodram" in the fall of 1814 as incidental music for a play called Leonore Prohaska by Friedrich Duncker. Duncker was a civil servant and secretary to King Friedrich Wilhelm III. The play told the story of a heroic Prussian girl who, disguised as a male, enlists in the army to fight in the Wars of Liberation. Naturally, she dies from the wounds received in battle. The play was never produced.
• Beethoven probably wrote his "Melodram" for the variety of glass harmonica designed by Ben Franklin (1761) and manufactured in London. Franklin’s "armonica" is designed with glass bowls fitted concentrically on a horizontal rod and actuated by a crank attached to a pedal.
• According to the Grove, there is ample testimony that players of the "armonica" were apt to become deranged. This is attributed to "the irritating permanence of extremely high partials and the continuous contact of the sensitive fingers with the vibrating bowls." In some German towns the armonica was banned.
• It had it heyday in the years up until 1830. Goethe, wrote that in the sustained chords of this music he could detect "Die Herzblut der Welt".

Here’s an excerpt of the very beginning of the Melodrama:

(TRACK 1 — SOURCE 0’28")

• WHY THE GLASS HARMONICA? I was drawn to its "vibrant, piercing sweetness", the inextricable connection between its pure sine-wave quality and its slip-stick quality, its rubbing, its noise. It a sound that is already alienated from itself, divided, split. The sound embodied for me a contradiction, a dialectical sound.
• It has strange connotations: it is a kitsch instrument, not a serious instrument in our eyes. In Einstein’s book on Mozart it is relegated to the chapter on mechanical instruments. As kitsch it embodies both real collective wish-image and the evacuation of meaning.

• SCHOPENHAUER ON BEETHOVEN: Beethoven "presents us with the greatest confusion which yet has the most perfect order as its foundation; with the most vehement conflict which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful harmony. It is rerum concordia discors — the discordant concord of things." This last phrase is also dialectical.

• THE INTENTION: Rather than produce a work which "deconstructed" this sound, showing how it is comprised, revealing the mechanics of the sounds, reducing the "figuration" of our imaginative associations down to their "formalization", I sought to go in the other direction. I was interested in unfolding the imaginative possibilities suggested by the sound.

Naturally, we don’t have time to play the whole piece, but with this background I’d like to mention some of the concrete ways in which I constructed the piece. I used many techniques to create glass harmonica sounds. Some are quite realistic and could be confused with actual recordings of the glass harmonica while others bear a degree of similarity to the original sound, but seem quite artificially produced. More importantly, each sound has its own set of connotations and associations, inherent as well as established through it context in the entire piece.

You’ve already heard the source material. This material can be granularized to stretch it out and capture the interesting moments when one chord overlaps with another — and then layered in many tracks

(TRACK 2 — GRANULAR 0’20")

The opening D major chord can be slowed down in time to produce this death knell:

(TRACK 3 — DEATH KNELL 0’27")

I also recorded myself playing a single wineglass so that I could get recordings from it and build a sampler for myself to play. Then I could compose musical segments like this:

(TRACK 4 — CLEAN RUBBING 0’32")

At the end of that except you hear me clicking and tapping on the wineglass. The tapping became this rainstorm by overdubbing and re-recording a single sequence up to 50 times:

(TRACK 5 — RAINSTORM 0’18")

Finally, by modifying a patch that synthesized the sound of a wineglass, kindly provided by Ed Campion, I created this final sequence. I ran the original source material through a pitch detector that can be told to look for particular groups of partials. The result is this "abstraction" from the source material, overlaid with my own vocal performance.

(TRACK 6 — ENDING 0’38")

By the end of the sequence, which goes on for another 2 minutes, you are hearing only the highest detectable partials of the source material — an incredible high-pitched cluster — which for me signified a gesture leave-taking at the end of the piece.

Let me close by saying that all of these techniques for manipulating sound are quite simple and any good musician versed in electronic music could easily reproduce them. The goal was not a demonstration of technique in the narrow sense; rather, the goal was to create a work that imaginatively unfolded musical and connotative possibilities inherent in the source material, and my understanding of it, utilizing ALL the technique at my disposal. The piece should evoke Schopenhauer’s "rerum concordia discors" and Goethe’s "Herzblut der Welt" — both of which I take very seriously. In other words, the piece should embody the breadth of a thinking, perceiving subject and not the narrowness of a "project". Research is subordinate to art.