Contemporary Music

Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives

Irène Deliège, Max Paddison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, the book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers, including Célestin Deliège, Pascal Decroupet, Richard Toop, Rudolf Frisius, Alastair Williams, Herman Sabbe, François Nicolas, Marc Jimenez, Anne Boissière, Max Paddison, Hugues Dufourt, Jonathan Harvey, and new interviews with Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm. Part I is mainly theoretical in emphasis. Issues addressed include the historical rationalization of music and technology, new approaches to the theorization of atonal harmony in the wake of Spectralism, debates on the 'new complexity', the heterogeneity, pluralism and stylistic omnivorousness that characterizes music in our time, and the characterization of twentieth-century and contemporary music as a 'search for lost harmony'. The orientation of Part II is mainly philosophical, examining concepts of totality and inclusivity in new music, raising questions as to what might be expected from an autonomous contemporary musical logic, and considering the problem of the survival of the avant-garde in the context of postmodernist relativism. As well as analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology, critical theory features prominently, with theories of social mediation in music, new perspectives on the concept of musical material in Adorno's late aesthetic theory, and a call for 'an aesthetics of risk' in contemporary art as a means 'to reassert the essential role of criticism, of judgment, and of evaluation as necessary conditions to bring about a real public debate on the art of today'. Part III offers creative perspectives, with new essays and interviews from important contemporary composers who have mad

PART I
Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives

Chapter 1
The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory1

Hugues Dufourt

Introduction

In this chapter I set out to formulate the conditions for a possible theory of music today, while in the process providing a historical sketch of categories of music theory (with specific focus on the study of acoustics) since the seventeenth century. My approach draws on recent studies in the history and philosophy of the science of music and also on present research into computer music and the cognitive psychology of music. After the pioneering studies of Crombie, Walker, Palisca and Drake, researchers such as H.F. Cohen, Paolo Gozza and Antonio Serravezza have made important contributions to the history of the science of music. The aims of this field of research are now clearly defined and its problems have been identified and categorized. Its historiographical models may be seen as a counterpart to research into computer music and the cognitive psychology of music.

What I seek to do here is to join these two approaches. In the first section, ‘Clock, ruler and balance’, I argue that the principles of music change when they become a part of the physics of inertia. In the seventeenth century music ceased to belong to the field of cosmology and became a part of the study of mechanics. The revolution in this field led to a new way of using concepts and to new ways of thinking about music. The mechanistic theory of music reached its high point in the nineteenth century with Helmholtz. The first part of this chapter is therefore devoted to a necessarily brief historical account of the mechanistic principles of music, which is also at the same time a history of the process of musical rationalization, in the sense in which Max Weber used the term in his pioneering sociological study The Rational and Social Foundations of Music.2 In the second part, entitled ‘The fundamentals of spectral music’, I discuss what I see as the logical conflict upon which the new science of sound was constructed in the twentieth century. The technology of the production and control of sound and of electroacoustics and digital processing mean the establishment of new standards for understanding our sound world. Because our musical culture – which is both scientific and artistic – devises perceptual stratagems and then uses them as its basis, its defining characteristic could now be said to be the search for sonic illusion.

Clock, ruler and balance

As with all forms of technical activity, music today is part of industrial society. Whether popular or art music, it is the expression of a form of civilization which has given pride of place to automation and speed within the hierarchy that governs its life-style and aesthetic values. A civilization based on quick reflexes copies the structures of automation in all decisions of everyday life and rejects the slow reactions of traditional society. I would call a society industrial when it offers a general explanation of all psychic functions on the basis of reflexes – that is, when it tends to apply automation to relations in all aspects of life.

The theory of music which developed during the twentieth century is characterized by a high level of analytical abstraction. It substitutes sensory receptors for receptor endings. To our physiological organs it adds tools, then machines that can transform movement, machines that create and control movement, and, finally, machines that process information. Music, nowadays, is neither created nor played without machines, computers, and systems for analysis and measurement. Solutions to historical problems concerning the origins and limitations of physiological functions, particularly those affecting sensory-motor coordination, are sought through laboratory experimentation.

The theory of music was born in the seventeenth century and founded on the doctrines of mechanistic reflexology. As a result it has retained certain basic determining factors from its original context. Musical instruments, musical notation, and, specifically, thinking about music are regarded merely as technical devices. Music is a construction made by machines that can change movement into something sensorial. The manufacture of musical instruments, particularly after Vaucanson, eliminated the difference between organization and manufacture. Making music always comes down to constructing an automaton; that is to say, something that provides intelligible and functional substitutes for activities which formerly, in the musical traditions since Aristotle, were the domain of instrument manufacture and of physiological techniques developed by performers. In their very design, their use and their function, musical instruments in traditional civilizations required an implicit reference to some similarity between nature and art, between life and technical means. The musical instrument in industrial society is a reductionistic object that merely simulates functions and establishes well-tempered relations between structures. While traditional instruments were the result of a compromise between mechanics and human physiology, modern instruments aim at modes of compatibility and forms of coexistence between patterns of representation, operational models and structural laws. The traditional instrument was a regulatory device based on the model of an organism. The internal organization of its mechanical system revealed the integration of parts and whole and reproduced their internal and reciprocal relations. In brief, it implied the use of technology to copy life. Thus the traditional instrument mimicked physiological behaviour and incorporated its functional activities.

The contemporary musical instrument is very different. It is a theoretical and experimental construct that requires a thorough analysis of the conditions in which sound is produced as well as a strict determination of the conditions of its variation. The musical instrument of our time is the result of purely rational invention for which adaptation and regulatory criteria have become problems to solve. We know, for instance, that regulatory devices were added to the model of the clock after Descartes’ death. Christian Huygens (1639–1695) used the pendulum with isochronal oscillations (1657) for clocks, as well as the coil spring for watches (1675). By applying the principle of inertia to the representation of circular uniform movement, Huygens was able, in 1659, to express centrifugal force quantitatively.3 As Pierre Costabel has argued, Huygens was the first scientist who imagined the relations between mathematical theory and experimentation as being interdependent and as forming a whole.4

Huygens was the first to study the oscillations of the composite pendulum, which he considered to be formed of a large number of simple pendulums, each one of which corresponding to a small part of the mass of the composite pendulum. Huygens’s theory defines the value of the moment of inertia of a solid in relation to an axis; this makes it possible to establish the identity of the average of durations relative to all simple pendulums, and the duration of one oscillation. With the invention of the coiled pendulum oscillator, the balance (le fléau; that is, the beam of the weighing scales) was given an alternating movement that has its own period. The spiral spring embodies the idea of the isochronicity of the oscillations of a mechanical system, the structure of which is maintained by a continuous use of energy. The use of the spiral pendulum oscillator for watches turns a complex mechanism of wheels, cams and levers into a theorem of rational mechanics. The first clock to work with a pendulum was built in 1657 by Salomon Coster according to Christian Huygens’s instructions. It can be considered as the prototype of future musical instruments.

The new instrument, whether electromagnetic, electroacoustic or computer, is in fact the result of a combination of theoretical and experimental – and therefore artificial – procedures. The musical instrument no longer belongs to the realm of conventional instrument building (that is, organology), but rather to that of technology. Mechanical invention is no longer a part of the universal organization of matter by life. It has become one of the applications of knowledge which tends to simplify its models, to make its organizational standards homogeneous and the design of its parts uniform, and to unify its metrical and qualitative characteristics, so as to ensure the greatest precision in the manufacture and standardization of the product.

Modern mechanics, which based the science of movement on inertia, has introduced indifference and disequilibrium into the regulatory system of traditional musical instruments. The construction of servo-mechanisms or electronic automata must compensate today for the loss of the kind of functional standards that applied before to the musical instrument as a part of the world of general organology. The technological phase seems to have changed the very organization of musical instruments; the technical standards of regularity and predictability in their construction cannot be equated with mere technique. The musical instrument of today is an automaton that receives, transmits, computes, interprets or synthesizes information. Sensors, transducers and analysers have replaced the physiological functions of our own sensory receptors. To produce a synthetic sound is to manufacture the components of an excitory mechanism; physicists and psycho-acousticians can digitize the characteristic multiplicity of its vibrations.

In the Renaissance, and above all in the seventeenth century, instrument making became a real science. Physicists, musicians and instrument makers all worked together. Sebastian Virdung in 1511, Martin Agricola in 1528, Michael Praetorius in 1614 and 1620, and Marin Mersenne in 1636 and 1637 laid the foundations of musical-instrument technology. Technique and technology – the revelation of the rules of an art – became in the eighteenth century the description of the arts themselves and their practitioners. The concept is due to Leibniz, who defined its main aspects at the end of the Nouveaus Essais (1705). This science of art and its products is in fact a science of the labours of the human hand. It is linked to another aspect of technology: the science of the concrete application of an abstract principle. It is one thing to explain and develop the theory of an art – that is, to consider the purely theoretical side of knowledge implicitly contained in applied work. It is another thing to infer all the potential for invention from the resources of applied science, which is no longer fundamental science and is not yet technical application. Huygens, Boyle and Hooke belong to the cohort of new inventors who were to base instrument making on a body of theoretical physics and on exact knowledge. When, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, music theorists (who were also musicians and acousticians) such as Zarlino, Mersenne, Werckmeister, Sauveur, Rameau or Tartini, wrote their treatises, instrument making had already benefited from the progress that had taken place in mechanics, making it much more accurate. But the modern technology of musical instruments really progressed thanks to the first dynamic study of elasticity, a study of string vibration. At the same time, progress in the understanding of acoustics, elasticity and friction improved the precision of scientific measuring devices and industrial manufacturing methods. The development of instrument making and instrumental practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was based on the first scientific revolution that took place in the seventeenth century and made the development of mechanical construction models possible. A resonator with a given periodicity was considered to be a simple pendulum, and its isochronal oscillations led to the generalization of the concept of resonance in the nineteenth century. Resonance is, of course, at the very foundation of all sound reproduction devices such as the record player or the telephone.

Two other basic properties of sound production – interference and the Doppler effect – as well as the study of the visible spectrum also played an essential part in the development of electroacoustics in the nineteenth century. If we accept, as Bacon and Leibniz did, that the work of technicians and mechanical engineers can lead to new theories, we can also consider that research and the knowledge of theoretical principles can lead to a rational change in modes of production. Up to the nineteenth century, mechanics, as a universal science, held sway over most of the other sciences. The nineteenth century, with the production of energy and the development of the new means of communication that ensued, discovered new theoretical orientations. Ampère’s electromagnetism and Faraday’s induction led to the understanding of the common characteristics of electromagnetic induction and light. The musical instrument of the twentieth century, based on sound synthesis, is a distant continuation of the knowledge which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, with the study of the mutual relationship of mechanical, light and electromagnetic phenomena.

The development of musical instruments therefore belongs to different domains. It shows that scientific explanations can be sanctioned by practice, as in the case of temperament. And, contrariwise, it shows that industry can be guided by theory, by the application of rules that stem from general principles, as in the case of synthesis techniques. Paolo Rossi writes:

Mersenne and Gassendi both rejected as dogmatic Descartes’ effort to base physics on universal principles; they were much more aware than he was of the fact that ‘real physics’ is closely tied to the gentilles inventions of engineers and technicians. For Mersenne, the descriptive knowledge of the phenomena and practice of the mechanical arts was the essential and characteristic element of the new science.5

Until recently, the theory of music owed its development to that of mathematical and physical acoustics. From the very start, which traditionally goes back to Pythagoras, the theory of music was born of the refusal to search for the secret of experience in the study of its data alone. The theory of music is a speculative effort to understand, explain, organize and unify the complex multiplicity of phenomena. This emphasis ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Contemporary Music: Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory
• Part I: Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives
• Part II: Philosophical Critiques and Speculations After Adorno
• Part III: Creative Orientations
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects