Philosophical thinking about music is only needed when the entire musical culture is undergoing the serious change

 

These public interactive lectures were given by philosopher Harry Lehmann during 26. Contrasts International Contemporary Music Festival. His area of theoretical work lies in the fields of aesthetics, art philosophy, music philosophy, systems theory and social theory. His writings include books, critical articles and catalog essays on contemporary art, literature and New Music. In the first lecture it is a discussion about Opra by the Norwegian composer Trond Reinholdtsen and the DeDeconstruction in it.

The second lecture gives a comprehensive overview of changes in the new music in the wake of the digital revolution, talking about Conceptual Art and Conceptual Music. The model of conceptualism, a model in the visual arts and in music conceptual music is crucial for the development of art music in the last 10 years and one can understand conception music only in comparison with conceptual art. And finally the basic pieces of the third lecture is that we can reconstruct the recent music history as a history of setting boundaries and crossing boundaries in aspect of the reflective notion of art music. 

The summary of the lectures is below.

The DeDeconstructionists

The whole historical process is accompanied by the creation of meta styles like postmodern music, relational music, conceptual music and e-player music (that is a music which is composed with the help of virtual orchestras). The Norwegian Opra by composer Trond Reinholdtsen actually works with all this different meta styles. The Reinholdtsen’s opra is a virtual music, it is postmodern music, conceptual music and it is relational music at once. The piece reflects the internal differentiation process of new music in the 20s and 21st century. Let’s start with an analysis and interpretation of transformations in Ø trilogy. (Here is the lecture video in German — D. S.)

This is an opera and it has been premiered at Munich Biennale in 2018. The opera lasts 4 hours, it consists of 5 parts and I will concentrate only on one part. It’s guiding for the play: what kind of music is it, how is this music composed, and how is it produced. The second aspect is the visual aspect: why do these creatures look the way they do, what kind of aesthetics is that and third what are these creatures singing — what is the text, what is the opera about. For music theater it is especially important to know how text music and visual images interact. Only in this way the aesthetic content of the piece can be understood. Let’s first take a closer look at the musical aspect in the music, one could hear probably the most technologically advanced opera music ever performed at any music festival. 

First, the opera is produced entirely with the virtual orchestra, on the other hand the composer himself sang the voices of all the actors involved. Reinholdtsen has composed not only simple songs but also polyphony choirs with his own vocal material. In addition, he manipulated the vocal material very strongly. The characters speak at absolute speeds they sing in inhuman highs and lows, and they dance to many rhythms. They do not exhibit any particular musical aesthetics but are rather characterized by a radical pluralism of styles, for example, the recitative music for large symphony orchestra, microtonally tuned organ, Bach cantata, techno, serialism and much more.

And the first thing is the three protagonists are introduced one after the other. As far as the creatures wear masks we are dealing with three archetypical creatures, so in this aspect no individual stories are told in this opera. These three characters share a common attitude, namely they do not like the world as it is. The first creature suffers from a cold snowy north and becomes melancholic. The second creature sings about the blue flower of romanticism and takes refuge in a romantic dream with art. For the third creature it is important to change the world — in other words to make a revolution. Accordingly, this creature demands discipline by shooting around with a drying pipe. It’s seen all the elements of the communist dictatorship gather together. The great promise of the revolution is apparently covered for. That it is why there is also a pathetic “carrot symphony”. So we see a melancholic, a romantic, a revolutionary. All three creatures are deniers, they suffer from the world as it is.

And it starts when three protagonists giving up the identities and symbolically moving to the desert trying to retreat into the private sphere. The desert’s fathers were Christians by Christian aesthetics and hermits who retreated into the desert at the beginning of Christianity. The irony of this story, however is, that they did so at the very moment when the persecution of Christians seized and Christianity became the state religion in the Roman Empire. Living in poverty, loneliness from contemplation seen as the best the second best way to salvation after it had become impossible to die. The earth will actually can thus be interpreted as a great search for meaning and the realm of ideas searching for alternatives to melancholy, romanticism and revolution.

Perhaps the most pressing question one might ask is what kind of visual aesthetics is Reinholdtsen working? It should be obvious that this is an aesthetic of ugliness, primitivism and shabbiness which has the strongest association with “art brute” which you can literally translate like “raw art”. Jean Debuffet is the founder of art brute here you can see one of his sculptures with the name “Pleurnichon”, which literally means “the whining one”. This work shows striking similarities to Reinholdtsen’s three creatures. The main idea of group is to imitate the art of children and the mentally ill. This is because children and mentally ill people would have followed spontaneous, natural autistic impulses and would have been shaped by culture, so they would have unobstructed access to art. According to the approved philosophy art, art does not have its original culture but here it has its origin in nature.

Here you can read a quote from Jean Debuffet (1949) in which the basic idea of the aesthetics is formulated: 

‘By this (Art brute) we mean works by people who have remained untouched by cultural art, in whom adaption and imitation — unlike with intellectual artists — play little or no role at all. The authors of this art thus obtain everything (i.e. themes and materials) from their own inner being but not from the clichés of classical art or the current art movement’.

One can see from this quotation that it was an extremely culturally critical avant-garde movement. And it is this kind of aesthetics that Reinholdtsen refers to in the Ø trilogy. 

What is important however is that the art group’s aesthetic is itself only a single aesthetic moment and aspect which is combined with music and text, and in combination with music and text the art brute transforms its original meaning. In other words, the Ø trilogy is not only art brute opera but something else. This becomes especially clear when the fourth creature comes into play. This character is personified Hegelian spirit. This interpretation of naming is obvious so far as the creature sings sentences from Hegel’s “Phenomenology of spirit”. 

So there’s an Aria in which the Hegelian spirit sings about himself. So trolls will be trained in Hegelian thought. For the reception of the opera it is crucial how Hegel’s philosophy is visually contextualized through art brute aesthetics. The basic contradiction of the opera is the performative contradiction. On the one hand, these three crude and naive creatures, on the other hand, they sing key sentences from Hegel’s phenomenology. One is thus confronted with an extreme contradiction between the anti-intellectualism, on the one hand, and the highly challenging intellectualism of Hegel’s philosophy on the other. For the understanding of the Ø trilogy it is crucial how this contradiction is interpreted. At first glance it seems to work with the means of deconstruction. This is a standard method for creating differences, for example, in relation to tradition to fix identities or too old role models. The theater deconstruction becomes a technique of unmasking in which “what is this” enchanted by the “how”. Ideas and forms of high culture are transferred into popular culture where they appear ridiculous and the authority is undermined. If, for example, a theater director in a Shakespeare’s piece has the king performed as a pop singer — this usually delegitimizes the king’s claim to power.

The implicit prerequisite for deconstruction however is that one can actually recognize in the king a person who possesses power. But trolls as childlike creatures do not allow themselves to be exposed. You cannot discredit what they say by the way they say it. this is precisely the function of the art brute aesthetics, it creates artificial characters that cannot be deconstructed when they will cite Hegel. They do so with an infantile seriousness they seem like 5-year-old children and behave foolishly, so that one cannot help but believe that they are naively and willingly embarking on a great quest for meaning. So the trolls are not deconstructivists, they are actually the Dedeconstructivists in the Ø trilogy. The construction turns against its own principle and deconstructs itself. 

Conceptual Art and Conceptual Music

The fact is that conceptual music is catching up on a development that already took place in the visual arts half a century ago. So if one wants to develop a theory of conceptual music it is inevitable to start with examples from theories of conceptual art. 

In 2012, I published the book “The digital revolution of music and music philosophy” and there is also a chapter with a title “musical concepts”. But at the notion of conceptual music it did not really exist at that time (at least not in the German-speaking world so there was no entrance in the musical dictionary). It was not a musicological terminus in other words. In the following years I started to develop a theory of conceptual music and the basic idea is to draw an analogy from the visual arts to music. So the final goal of this lecture is to develop a general theory of conceptualism with both which can explain the visual conceptual art and conceptual art or conceptual music.

A preliminary note: our philosophy should not try to write art history but rather should refer to the well-established canon of conceptual art and second it is not wise to invent a theory of conceptual art from scratch, it is more promising to work with the self-description of conceptual artists. And in this aspect I will use both canonical pieces of conceptual art and as well as definitions of conceptual art as a material resource, as material for theory building. If we talk about conceptual art, is there any underlying structure or any coming ground to distinguish conceptual art from non-conceptual art? And here’s my hypothesis. The general principle of conceptualism is an isomorphism and isomorphism between the concept and the percept. 

There are three different aspects first the concept is available instruction which prescribes how to produce and how to perceive and work. The concept sometimes shrinks to the title of the work sometimes it is hidden in an artistic aesthetics and sometimes it is a blueprint or an outline of an artwork. The percept is the sensory impression which is triggered in the recipient by the perceived article. And thirdly and that is the most important respect and isomorphism is a one to one relationship between two entities or, in other words, it is a mapping that preserves the structure of the map entities. What makes conceptual art unique, is this specific kind of mapping between language and perception.

Оn the one hand the verbal instruction determines what one will perceive in an artwork and the other hand the perception of the artwork allows the recipient to recognize the concept on which it is based.

Conceptual art has two aspects which are important, first the isomorphism principle should be able to include different, diverse and heterogeneous examples. Secondly it should be highly selected, the truth exclude most of the art and draw a short distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual art. Today it became common to call all conceptual art but then the category of conceptual art becomes useless.

A Reflexive Notion of Music

I would like to present to you a model how the idea of new music has changed due to the digital revolution of music and the thesis is, as the title suggests, the concept of the notion of art music has become reflexive. In my opinion music philosophy is not really an academic discipline, philosophical thinking about music is only needed in those rare historical moments when the entire musical culture is undergoing the serious change and as a result it becomes necessary to rethink the whole concept and the whole notion of art music. My thesis which I had presented in 2008 was that exactly this at the beginning of the 21st century caused a change from a literary to a digital music culture. Many of the arguments in the book we had hypothetical 8 years ago and have now become almost self-evident. Above all there are many new works in new music in which this change towards digital music culture manifests itself. And accordingly it is much easier to say today in what sense the notion of music has changed. You can listen to it here. 

Let us start with the descriptive question, what was the historical notion of new music? New music was constituted at the beginning of the 20th century. New music can constitute itself. In contrast to classical music this suspension of the total system by new music has strong implications. One immediate consequence is that new music is distinguished from popular music which is anchored in the tonal system and follows a beat. This music is that a direct consequence of the abstract negation of classical music which follows the principle of tonality and accordingly as melody rhythm and harmony.

Digitization is triggering a paradigm shift with the two complementary questions — what is music and what is good music. Or redefined idea of absolute music which new music followed throughout the 20th century is replaced by a reflexive notion of music. So the answer to the question of what is art music can be given as “art music is reflexive music” but about the normative aspect of all music today one can even say that our music is well-made trade or innovative.

We had seen that newness and that newness in new music can no longer be generated by material purpose and by crossing borders. This does not mean however that one has to give up the whole idea of art music to produce something genuinely new instead. It’s more about redefining the idea of being new if newness cannot be generated either with musical material all through a filter transcription of the notion of music. It can still be created with new aesthetic contents. This brings me to the end of my lecture, where the digital Revolution works as a catalyst for a paradigm shift in music. One can observe disintegration of the historical paradigm of music which was based on the idea of absolute music and material progress. Of course one will have to wait and see which new self-description of art music will actually prevail in the digital music culture but I see the greatest innovation potential in this reflexive art music that operates in a content aesthetic way.

The lectures were supported by the Goethe-Institut in Ukraine.