Inhalt: #4 – Frühjahr 2005
CLARENZ BARLOW
ALBERT FEINTHEIL: EINE TEILAUTORETROSPEKTIVE
PROF.BARLOMEW CLARIFIER: 50 YEARS OF THE AVANTGARDE
K’RHEINTHS B’ROULÈS:SATISFACTION IN ARTMAKING
JENS BRAND
MEIN LIEBER SOHN
FRANK CORCORAN
ITS A COLD WIND BLOWS ON AN IRISH COMPOSER
BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
MAURICIO KAGEL
VORZEITIGER SCHLUSSVERKAUF
PÈTER KÖSZEGHY
GRENZÜBERSCHREITUNGEN - WEGE
NEUES ZU FINDEN?
KUNSU SHIM
DIE KUNST - VERBUNDEN UND AUFLÖSEN
(KÜNSTLICHES UND NATÜRLICHES) - DIE GEGENWART
CHRISTIAN UTZ
VOM GEKERBTEN ZUM OFFENEN RAUM
Composers stray into the realm of musicology at their peril; their private mythologies, the delicate cats’ cradles of interwoven fact, theory and sensibility with which they surround themselves are seldom able to withstand intense systematic scrutiny. At the same time, our present age has become habituated to approaching art work and attendant circumambient theory as a single, indivisible object of regard. Thus, we as composers are captured in the particularly undignified position – damned if you are and damned if you aren’t – of either polemically rejecting theoretical considerations in toto (and thus, by implication, falling victim to the most undifferentiated of all background ideologies) or else embracing them with embarrassing promiscuity, the by-product of professional self-doubt or befuddlement as to our place in the cultural scheme of things. It is often enough the practice to buttress such discussions as this with suitably weighty quotations. So it will be on this occasion, albeit not the expected Adorno passage (or at least, not yet), but with the following extract from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: “A Historical Materialist views (cultural treasures) with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror... there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” There can of course be little argument against the general thrust of this passage, Historical Materialism or no. At the same time it has also frequently been at least as arguably true that composers have notoriously failed to act out to the letter their role of unquestioning packager and purveyor of normative socio-cultural value. It may indeed be that this very inconvenient entanglement in, and compromise with, hierarchies of construed social value is sometimes able to act as a foil to quite spectacular subversions of those very qualities nominally being celebrated. However that may be, it is perhaps only since Schoenberg, that “professional outsider”, that composers have been definitively freed – so at least the theory – from the embrace of such ambiguous shackles. One argument is that they have paid too much for this comfortable freedom, and that independence from social constraint is at best a double edged sword, leading to marginalisation and the renunciation of a key role in the shaping of social awareness. If this truly be so, then one of our most pressing current concerns should surely be the investigation of ways and means whereby the presently emaciated faculty represented by Kant’s “reflective judgement” might again come to fuel a lively degree of introspection anent society’s prevailing infrastructures of evaluation. What, however, a work of art is good for is not necessarily, or even frequently, what makes it a good work of art. Thus, I see composers today as condemned to an uncomfortable balancing act between the surreptitious sizing-up of nebulous criteria of public appeal and the protection of some ideally inviolable core of abstract artistic values. Seldom the twain do meet. I do not mean to be woundingly critical here; no doubt I am as motivated by similar considerations as any of my colleagues. I am nevertheless driven to question whether the individual work, in favourable circumstances, might still be able to deliver a similar dislocation of its own vehicle as a path to some act of self-questioning. Schoenberg had his quasi-teleological interpretation of occidental music history; we know that Adorno considered him to be the only genuinely dialectical composer to emerge from the dodecaphonic constellation, and that it was precisely the fractured, partial and almost always provisional nature of Schoenberg’s marshalling of both his inherited and self-generated forces which gave rise to that rift. The very particular nature of Schoenberg’s genius may be seen as compelling evidence of the immensely fruitful potential of the “state of material” and its personal parsing through a sort of “creative tense” – one where before and after were sublated into a latticework whose coordinates were local instantiations of work-identity. Seen from such a standpoint it becomes clear that neither the “good for what it is” approach nor the league-table means of establishing essentialist comparative status retain much plausibility. I will return to this issue more than once in this discussion. For the moment, allow me to broach the matter of Adorno’s “barbarism” pronouncement. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism.” This seems a straightforward enough enunciation of moral imperative. But what are we to understand by the term “barbarism” itself? Is it unambiguously the case that Adorno was being totally condemnatory? As an immensely literate individual, Adorno will surely have been fully conscious of the etymological origins of the term. “Barbaros”, from the Ancient Greek, means primarily “foreigner” or, more specifically, “someone not belonging to the dominant linguistic community”. As someone for whom art, and the special insights afforded by art, were his very life blood, are we really to assume that a single sentence represents, in effect, a death sentence, as deadly for the heart of language as Auschwitz was for its inmates? […]
Excerpt from Ferneyhough: Barbarians at the Gates
Read more in the physical issue #04 !