*note: I was going to post a before class reflection and post class reflection on the themes of this week's set reading. As this is kind of impossible now that my thoughts and notes are tainted by the linear perception of time, consider this a wibbly-wobbly/timey-whimey approach the topic, skewing between past and present thoughts and covering reflections on the in class listening and discussion along the way.
Four articles were presented for week 2, and pretty soon into the second one it became fairly apparent that the common thread or theme running through them was about perception. Covered in the reading broadly, the first article I tackled was by Michel Chion, from a book called Audiovision. Chion is supposedly an important authority in the realm of film scoring and sound design. A great article, delving into the listening process from a scientific and psychological angle. Chion discusses the different types of listening and the sources for sounds. It's so serendipitous, at the time of reading the article, since this is something we were focused on in Spacial practice this week. Chion's approach to listening involves 3 levels, being causal, semantic, and reduced. This is a separate discussion to the notions of active and passive listening, which I'll get to later.
So to briefly describe how each type of listening works, causal listening is like being a sonic detective. The act of listening to discover what made the sounds we are listening to. It's like passive transcription, and I say passive because I'm a subscriber to the jazz concept that transcription should involve playing an instrument. Causal listening is an "Is that what it sounds like?" approach to listening. Do I really hear trumpets and car horns? But Chion is quick to admit the depth of the challenge in this form of listening. That sound sources are a complicated thing. The sound of someone writing is a pen on paper controlled by someone's hand and mind. There's a table beneath it, and it's in a certain space. The causal ear, I would deduce, is part of the analytical mind, and it is most commonly the the first reaction we, as modern human's, have to sound.
Semantic listening then, while causal listening is like a deduction of sound sources, a semantic ear discerns the sound's meaning. Like semantics in language, an argument over the meaning of a single word, can challenge an entire concept. Chion says that the semantic ear is part of the causal listening process, the deduction of relationship of sounds in art, the significance of a musical phrase, or indeed piece. This can be something that requires education, to interpret meaning in a work, or to merely be in tune with the concepts presented, or some works may transcend this need for prior knowledge or sensitivity, and speak on a deeper level, in easier to comprehend codes.
Reduced listening is objectively listening to sound as sound. Combating the subjective views that everyone can make up their own minds about what a piece means/says/sounds like, it's a way of reducing the semantic and causal aspects of sound into deal-able quantities. It is more or less a type of formalism, discussing music in a way of adjective, pitch, volume, tonal character, etc.
This type of ear comes much less naturally, especially if we're dealing with sounds where the source isn't known to us.
These 3 types of listening aren't separate things. Passively they are merely the aspects of our perception of sound. Actively they become distinct through their difficulty to separate. I will refer back to here throughout the reflection on the further reading and listening from class.
In Morton Feldman's article, he discusses the perception of sound from the composers point of view. I love how personal he makes it, the way he identifies his art, and identifies it's enemies, on personal levels. His notion that sound should be perceived as it is, and not controlled, is in a sense a reduced listening compositional approach. His antagonists, the Boulez and Stockhausen ilk (and I'll admit to honestly love their music), sought to organise sound by predetermining the parameters that made their music "indeterminate". The perception there - that the composer is in control of this otherwise seemingly random arrangement of sound - to justify the outcome. Feldman's argument is that the Boulez opinion (that it doesn't matter as much how it sounds, but how it's made), demotes sound to a lower rung, in fact admits that the music they were composing wasn't aesthetically enjoyable to listen to and that the methods were the only way they could justify it to themselves - in a way, almost composing their music out of spite for it. It also perceives sound and music separately, that music has to be organised, otherwise it's "just sound", where Feldman perceives them as one and the same.
While I love the Cage/Feldman approach to composing in an arbitrary, or with "chance", fashion, I seriously question how one can create music this way without deciding something. Today, because of both schools of thought taking their respective methods the distances they have, the effect it has on me is - more or less - as equals. Where Cage composes a piano piece from the I-Ching, it begs the question, what are the parameters that turn the results into notes on the page? And how were those rules conceived? Conversely, to predetermine your music on every level only to set in motion randomly generated music is a logical fallacy, and verging on egotism. The graphic scores and other such chance tools Feldman and his contemporaries employed to take themselves out of the equation, while clever and interpretable on any level, depending/according to how adventurous the performer is, is still being perceived as a musical map of pitch and tone and rhythm etc, and performed (most probably) on a western musical instrument. Does a composer really get the credit for drawing a circle on a page, and writing "play your best tricks here"? On the other hand, is it valid to show your work as music when you admit that the sound is irrelevant to you and you're mostly just showing off how clever your process was. In this sense Feldman's argument is about appreciation of sound over ideas.
Both sides of this argument are valid in different circles, in varying amounts today. In the end, for me there is a balance that the artist needs to strive for. Maybe in the 1950's this balance wasn't an aesthetic necessity, because this was a different time, the time when these challenges and questions needed to be asked and confronted. Today these questions have many answers that can make either argument more or less relevant. For me, controlling sound is my craft, but the degree of control employed depends on the source of the sound, it's musical/formal qualities, and what i want it to say on a particular topic. Simply letting sound be sound, and calling it your own work has "been done" to many degrees. That doesn't discount it as valid compositional technique, but the context in today's world, in the now, makes it trickier to achieve without being derivative, or merely academic, a study piece. Perhaps this is where music and sound art split? Perhaps one set of compositional challenges are "musical" challenges, while the other have distanced themselves to become something else entirely? As it influences my work - and I see myself as musician and artist - being one and the same, in fact I will put it out there that I see sound art as a sub genre of music - I think that these pre and indeterminate methods of creating music are both merely processes for experimentation, and arriving at a completed work still requires aesthetic choices about the end product to be made.
Now, as I have just commented that the Feldman school of thought has mostly "been done", I would like to qualify my opinion by discussing my reactions to two pieces that were played in class, Pole's Armature Double, and Graham Lambkin's Amateur Doubles. Fascinatingly the very first thing I thought when Pole's piece began was "what is that sound?" I seriously caught myself in causal listening. I couldn't figure out if it was brass or strings or synths. There was a lot of sounds coming and going in the first few minutes and it took me a while to identify them. This just goes to back up Chion's argument that causal listening is the most common action for our ears/minds while the reduced listening takes much more active focus. So it's a pretty straight up 70's ambient prog piece. Really cool sounds, really meditative, lots of drones coloured in with cool flute and rhodes licks. Lambkin's piece again activated my causal ear, listening for the connections to Pole, and since what it sounded like was similar, I spent a good part of the time figuring out if it was a cover or a recording of the original recording. As it turns out, it was the latter. A microphone it the car with that Pole album playing. The sound is completely different, and the context is completely changed. But is it valid? I struggled in class to accept the Lambkin piece, mostly because I didn't find it aesthetically pleasing. But upon further thought I have come to really like it. Lambkin has recontextualized the original sound source, he's focused it in time and space, and he's made it new again in a way that perhaps doing a studio recording of a cover version wouldn't have done. But has it "been done" before? Like Sherrie Levine photographing Alfred Steiglitz's photograph of Marcel Duchamp's famous found object, The Fountain, does this piece by Lambkin need to exist? Does it say anything? Or is it simply an amateur double? I think Lambkin is taunting us to accuse him of this, and in such a way, I am afraid to admit, I can't fully get behind the attack on his work. I'm not usually one to hold back my opinion, but he has succeeded in baiting me to call him out, but also hit me with something that I can't quite combat. Hence my earlier comment that this sort of thing is trickier to achieve, but Lambkin has created a context to make it work. Do I have to like it though? Well, no, I don't have to like it, but I don't dislike it anymore.
I touched on a concept a few paragraphs earlier of a split between music and something called sound art. This is a segue into the article by Bruce Russell. Before I comment on his article, I should contextualize my response to it with this, The Fundamentals Of Sonic Art & Sound Design by Tony Gibbs. A book I borrowed from the university library on Monday and read a bit, only to (more or less) throw it away in disgust. Aside from the practical flaws to the books presentation/layout etc (which I wont get into here), Gibbs is addressing us from the perception of "sound art" being new and exciting and proving that sound can be more than just a secondary art form, as it has existed in the music world, the film world, etc. He then goes on to define it more or less in a musicological way. I admit I don't know how or where he takes the concept because i found it obnoxious and put it down around page 30.
Bruce Russell on the other hand makes a clear and present argument on how he sees the distinction for sound art vs music. Now I really liked this article when I read it, and in class that was challenged, and with a fresh perspective I might see it with the same hypocrisies as Gibbs' book. But Russell beings his writing with the (convenient) disclaimer that he isn't trying to define a separation between music and sound art, but that he is discussing how they are different to him, or perhaps in his work. Now I did say that when I read it I liked it, but I must stress that I did not agree with it. As I touched on earlier, I don't see sound art and music as separate. Russell's analogy was nice though. That sound art is to music, what abstract painting is to classical/representational painting. I propose that they are more closely linked with the same analogy - Sound art is a sub genre of Music, as abstraction and representational are sub genres of painting. It's a nice try on his behalf, but again it comes back to how we perceive our work, and how we perceive sound. There is an element of needless semantics to this argument, and I also think it's something that needlessly pigeonholes artists and alienates audiences. This perception that many (indeed some of those in this very course) have that audiences are unable to comprehend, and therefore unable to accept certain sound practices as "music" (and this has gone on for years) has pushed audiences away and created a gap between genres, or perhaps created a high brow and low brow thinking. But is it that black and white? Music is nice and sonorous and anything else mustn't be music, so we'll call it something else. I totally disagree. In the end both work with sound, and both set about achieving some semantic and aesthetic discourse. What I like about Russell's article is that he is looking for his place in amongst all this. And I think that's all we can ever really do. Allowing it to remain in flux is probably better than defining yourself and fixing it in time, an artist needs to allow for growth if he/she hopes to continue on the path, or indeed this could be said about life in general. This brings up a zen parallel. That allowing for growth, or "having an empty cup", as a follower of zen would say, is the only thing you really need to follow your path. You should remain open to all possibilities, and this definition of sound artist vs musician is too much of a road block for my craft. I have vexed it from my process, and can see myself in either light, happily. I will let my audience decide for themselves how they prefer to see (or indeed, hear) my work. That is, for me, what is more important.
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