Montage erzeugt einen “Konflikt der Diskurse” gegen ihre (be)herrschende Hierarchie, in der dem Subjekt und den Dingen feste Orte zugewiesen werden: Alles muß dort eindeutig bestimmbar, mit sich selbst identisch sein. Doch in der Montage bleibt die “Widerständigkeit und Nichtverfügbarkeit des Materials” bestehen. Realitätspartikel als “Manifestationen von Lebenspraxis” nehmen sich im Innern eines Kunstwerks “anarchisch ihr Recht”…
“Das Disparate schreiben” nennt es Fichte an einer Stelle, die Widersprüche stehen lassen, sie produktiv werden lassen; die Aktivität des Lesers herausfordern, Zusammenhänge zu erschließen.
Sabine Röhr, Hubert Fichte: Poetische Erkenntnis. Das Literarische Weblog.
Die Dschungel. Anderswelt.
Das Literarische Weblog, gegründet 2003/04 von den Fiktionären.<BR>Für Adrian Ranjit Singh v. Ribbentrop.
“Konflikt” DRAWING DISTINCTIONS LINKS CONTRADICTIONS
Herbert Brün
I shall tell what I think while remembering Arnold Schoenberg, rather
than tell what he thought while predicting us. Where he was right, we
should be deeply ashamed, and where he was in error, I, at least, shall not
gloat. I can hear and understand the music he desired to compose, and
while writing the following pages I thought, not only, but in particular, of
his Trio.
DRAWING
Arnold Schoenberg, just as Karl Kraus and Charles Ives, knew and ex-
pressed how passionately dedicated he was to the society which, as he
understood it, he could not stand, and which, as it understood him, could
not stand him. His life and letters and prose and poetry and theory and
composition demonstrate how he tried to distinguish himself in and from
this society. Both. To draw both distinctions at once was his theme and
subject matter, even though this meant courting blatant contradiction
while dealing, apparently, with mere conflicts.
To the understandable horror of all believers in consistency, coherence,
communication, perfect models, and other such comfort providing, dis-
tinction removing paradigms, he successfully drew this distinction; is suc-
cessfully drawing it.
DISTINCTIONS
Not many people know how passionately dedicated they are to the society
which they can not stand. Unaware of their living in contradiction they
live in conflict.
Not many people know how passionately dedicated they are to the society
which can not stand them. Unaware of their living in conflict they live in
contradiction.
Nobody can stand not being stood.
Nobody wishes to admit that.
Everybody, therefore, searching for an admissible degree of relative com-
fort resorts to proper English and falsifies the issue, thus: It is difficult to
understand why one is not understood.
This proper English falsification underlies the prose and poetry written
about Arnold Schoenberg by those of his friends and followers who, once
his apologetic avowers, today, equally apologetically, disavow him. It is an
underlie, because it is not at all difficult to understand why one is not un-
derstood, and that one is not stood because one is understood, and that one
can not stand that which one understands precisely because one does.
Not many people know that a discovered contradiction needs to be pro-
tected against apologetic explanations reducing it to mere conflict.
Even fewer people know that conflicts can be resolved within the system
in which they are said to be conflicts, and that contradictions can not.
To turn contradictions into conflicts is the concern of the reformer who
criticizes the flaws in a desired system.
To turn conflicts into contradictions is the concern of the revolutionary
who criticizes the flawlessness of an undesired system
discourse …to hold discourse—at least—with a computer…
Herbert Brun
(1973)
Composers who attempt to compose music with the assistance of computers, and who, instead of keeping their mouths shut, respond to the request to tell why and how they propose to breed immortal beauty for all of us by marrying mere technical logic to fertile inspiration, these composers have to override such exalted expectations with a careful report on the notions, theoretical and otherwise, on which they base their various interests for experimental research in music. I shall attempt to do that now.
Anyone who attends either a concert of new music or a lecture on speculative ideas concerned with new music may occasionally come away with a question in mind. Was this music? Is that music? Did they mean “music”? Did all this even have anything to do with music? In the attempt to do justice to these questions as well as to the events which provoked them, I usually come to a full stop having reached the big question: What is music?
Three cases may arise:
A question is answered, and dies. The discussion stops.
Or, a questions survives all its answers. The discussion then absorbs the answers and continues from there.
Or, a discussion survives the already answered question. This is unpleasant to behold and therefore best skipped over with a charitable smile.
Noone can, under all circumstances, be quite sure with which of these three cases one is confronted. Noone, however, can avoid implying by word, gesture, and stress of choice, which case one assumes it to be. I would even go one step further and say which case I want it to be. And reasoning may be brought to bear on it. If I say that the question “What is Music?” survives all its answers, then it is because I have a vested interest in music, being a composer, and because I know that once we know what music is—there won’t be any. We may delve into the well of the past and inquire what people then thought music could be and come up with useful documentation as to what music was then. Useful, because without it, we, today, would know only what music was today. We then can go to the composers and ask them. And if they know their profession, they certainly know what music was, but if they begin to say what music is, something flips, and turns their good intentions into advertisements of what music is to be.
Still, there must be something that allows us to use the general term music, if only to be able to set it off against the general terms “acoustical phenomena” and “aurally perceivable sensations”. That something, of course, can not be music, but it can be found in all music, can change continuously and tremendously while remaining the same thing. I am speaking of a ratio, a rational relationship. In all music there is manifestly implied the rational relationship between the chaotic image of an unlimited, unconditioned and disordered universe of all audible phenomena and a tentatively defined image of an equally disordered but artificially limited and conditioned sub-system that we at a given time consider our temporary acoustical ALL. Every composer of music has testified to this relationship, knowingly or unknowingly measured it, and the composer’s work reports on what the composer was able to measure up to. If today we try it with computers, nobody can possibly say whether any result of this attempt will correspond to what has up to now been called a “work of art”, or whether it will define what from then on will be called a “work of art”, or whether it will miss altogether that function in society which makes some creative communication a “work of art”. The contemporary relevance and significance of a composition should be achieved in that it does not appeal to existing means of understanding music but rather creates new means for musical understanding. It not only will show noticeable changes in the concept of the acoustical system, not only propose new schemes of organization, but also provoke the creation of new circuits in the listener’s mind. This provocation is the aim and purpose of all creative and scientific projects. It is in this sense that the cooperation of composer and computer is for here and now considered to be a natural idea. Whether it will lead to “music” or to “electronic brains” or to a new aspect of both is a question fascinating enough to render fascinating all attempts at a satisfactory answer.
Compared to these somewhat lofty ideas, the work on and for their implementation proceeds in rather small steps and no one at this moment has yet been given a chance ever to justly evaluate whether these small steps stumble in the right direction. The first step I took was to envisage both, the computer and what I call music, as two different systems, and to explore the possibility of their mutual compatibility. I use the term “system”, whenever I mean to speak of a collection of elements wherein each element can be in either of at least two different states and where the change of state in one element results in a change of state of the whole collection. The term “element” I use when referring to something as a whole that I do not consider as made up of a set of elements. Indeed, it frequently depends on observers and their particular purpose at a given time whether they regard an object as being a system or as being an element. A composer may at one time consider the piano to be a system which can adopt as many states as about 88 elements will allow, each of which, and any number of which, can be “on” or “off”, at least. At another time the composer may think of the piano as an element which changes the state of a system called orchestral timbre. I hope composers frequently consider all possible ways simultaneously, but think it vital that they know which way of looking at them determined their final choice.
Dependent on the number of elements in a system and on the number of states which each of these elements can adopt, each system has a definite number of states in which it can appear. This number of possible states of a system I shall call its information potential. As this is an important notion for my purpose, I shall express it as follows: If I am faced with a certain state of affairs, be it in music, language, politics or family, I will, for the purpose of understanding and evaluating, not only need to know the precise present constellation of all the elements, but also the number of possible states out of which this particular one which faces me had been selected. If you play several little tunes on a recorder, you will find that not only is the system called “recorder” able to be in as many states as the tunes demand, but that the tunes exploit the system “recorder” to the limit. One can say that here two systems simulate each other almost completely, they even imply each other. No number of little tunes played on a piano will ever define the large system called piano for you. This means that each message which we receive has to be investigated in respect to two questions:
What kind of a source-system does this message imply?
How much of that system did the message exploit?
Every musical composition is in this sense a message. In order to hear the musical events as they are being carried to you by acoustical events, it is necessary to find out as much as possible about the originating system before you can be sure you have heard what actually had been played and that it was music. For how is anyone to say whether what one heard was music or not, as long as the listener is not even sure as to what “it” was that was heard? And in order to even begin to know what it was that was heard, the listener must be able at least to estimate how many “similar” acoustical events the choice of each particular one eliminated. Not only the results of the composition but also the processes of composition are parts of this message. Here, one can see that we noticeably approach that concept of musical composition which considers the interrelations and interdependencies that join acoustical events together as even more important for musical meaning than the acoustical events as such alone. Every decent analysis of a musical work will try not only to state the kind, form, and quantity of acoustical events in the piece, but, more than that, will try to find out as much as possible about the schemes, plans, processes, and logics which the composer may have employed for making decisions. These last mentioned methods of bringing a specifically planned order into a system of generally possible orders I shall call “the algorithms” by which changes in the system can be controlled. And I call them “algorithm” because this word has both a rather general and a quite specific meaning. It does not specify any one particular method; it does not imply any particular degree of complexity or convenience or efficiency. But it is specific in one point: It means any set of instructions which will control the changes of state in a system in such a way that from a given initial state to a given final state, each intermediate state generates its follower. If we now call an algorithmically controlled change of state a “transformation”, then we can say that an algorithm produces an uninterrupted chain of transformations between a given initial and a given final state of a system. Or, the other way around: If two states of a system appear to be connected by an uninterrupted chain of transformations, then we may assume the presence of a controlling algorithm. Now, it is rarely the case that there is only one lonely algorithm responsible for what we hear, see, or otherwise perceive when we look at systems. Usually there are many simultaneously active. But, also usually, they are active in a kind of hierarchic power distribution. There are the little algorithms which control counting, addition, multiplication, etc. They may obey an algorithm which tells them when to go into action. This may be controlled by an algorithm which controls the relative dimensions of sequences and thus may direct a “lower” algorithm to eliminate its product and to start again from another given state. And so on and so forth.
Let us cut this promising excursion short and say that we now have all I need in order to make the following statement: A system is defined by its information potential and by those algorithms that can control this particular system. Two systems are compatible with each other when they are similarly defined. The degree of compatibility of two systems determines the degree to which they can simulate each other, to which one system may behave in analogy to the other. We are interested here in three main degrees only: fully analog, partially analog, and not analog at all. The system called “Thermometer” is fully analog to the system called “Temperature”, partially analog to the system called “The Weather”, and not at all analog to the system called “Language”. An analogy is a chain of transformations in one system simulating a chain of transformations in another system. Communication is based on analogies, on degrees of compatibility between different systems.
The largest, most general and thus most flexible systems we can control today are found among the electronic high speed digital and analog computer installations. The number of states representable by such machines is enormous; the elements, simple and semantically uncommitted, can stand for almost anything enumerable, quantizeable, measurable; the network potential offers the conditions for nearly any algorithm one can think of. Thus, it is a system especially designed for utmost compatibility with all kinds of other systems, large or small, simple or complex, open or closed, numerical or logical. It is, therefore, up to the computer users to find or to construct the system in which their problems can be expressed and solved, in which the processes they desire to observe and to test can be seen as chains of transformations. Once the users have defined the system they need, they are able to plant it as a subsystem into the computer. This “planting” procedure is usually referred to as “programming”.
A computer program is a set of instructions. If fed into the computer system in an appropriate code, the program communicates to the computer the structure, size, dimensions, rules, algorithm, etc. of a system which the computer system is to simulate. Under the control of such a program, the computer system will act as an analogy to the system which the programmer had in mind when writing the program. It is quite probable that not all composers think of their activities as being operations on and in systems, that not all processes leading to the final appearance of a musical work take place in only one or in any system. However that may be, the computer has to be programmed in order to be of any assistance, and programs can only be written by users who consider at least part of the work, the processes and the data with which they are concerned, as changes in and states of a system that they had defined.
If the term “composition” is taken to mean “programmed operation on given data”, then a computer can “compose” music. If, on the other hand, the providing of the “given data” is taken to be an important part of “composition”, then the computer only executes a program, for it can not “give data” as yet. An apparent middle-of-the-way concept of composition programming offers itself: Let all of the data which the composer provides define the initial state of the computer system; let one part of the composer-written program instruct the computer to adopt this initial state and then operate on it, so that the results of this operation can be used as “given data” by another part of the program; under control of a third program segment, every now and then, let some state of the system be interpreted and operated on as the next initial state; finally, let a fourth section of the program select from system-states lying between these “initial” ones those that are to appear as results in the output. This section also instructs the machine as to the format in which the output is to appear.
Here the composer defines a point of departure and the various processes and algorithms by which “given data” are to be generated and operated upon and by which results are recognized and notated. It is quite correct, in such a case, to say that the computer generates the result of the composition, the piece, but rather careless to conclude that the computer composes it. Even without a machine, the composer working at a desk with pencil and paper on a musical score, generates the finally notated result under control of some rules, conditions, stipulations, premises, liberties, memories, changes and so forth, all of which interact in ways that reflect a system, known or not known as such to the composer, which is considered by the composer as the plan and idea of composition. This compositional concept initiates, accompanies, controls and eventually stops the process of generating data and results, but is not identical with it.
Every musical idea implies the system in which its acoustical realization may become its structural analogy. The compositional process begins with an analysis of the implication and continues with a search for, or with the construction of, a system with the appropriate generating potentials. It may just as well be stated here that every generating system also implies the musical ideas which it can represent. Bad composition usually results from some failure in compatibility between idea and generator.
A programmed computer can be a suitable generator if the program has been determined by those composers who are aware of the implications of their musical ideas and of the implications of computer systems. The most important step toward a correct recognition of such sometimes vague and “never heard of” implications is taken when composers, through knowledge or deliberate stipulation or both, determine the invariants which significantly define their ideas and which should be preserved in the generated analogy. Most readily preserved in analogies, and thus by computers, are proportions, relationships, quantities, weighted probabilities, functions, statistics and multivalent simultaneous hierarchies of either permissive or restrictive rules and conditions. In fact, it would mean by-passing the possibilities offered by the machine system if a program were to instruct the computer merely tautologically to code a specified set of determined, discreet data, fixed point by point; one would thus actually degrade the computer to the redundancy of a glorified typewriter. It is admittedly not always absolutely clear to composing programmers whether, at any given moment of the work, they happen to be programming analogies or only tautological coding and bookkeeping procedures. Nor can those composers who compose without computer assistance always know whether they are creating a coherence of sound where this did not exist before, or whether they just keep on using an existent one to fill preplanned, plausible slots in an orderly fashion. The difference being that it is usually easier to inspect and to correct programs than to inspect and correct composers without getting painfully involved with their “personalities”.
It is necessary, at this point, to mention that all composers who work with computers continue writing “pencil and paper” pieces which however show that the knowledge of immense possibilities they learned from machines keeps encouraging them to look for a “like richesse” in their own minds. No matter how artificial we may make the systems we wish to work with: their conception, their response, and the wealth of unpredicted questions they raise in our minds as we contemplate their potentials are certainly not at all artificial, but genuine results of a feed-back which provokes visions of unknown territories for research and creation, edging us on to ask for more, while the little conservative skeptics and the big official guardians of culture can only cry yea or nay, their only feed-back being the cud they chew.
The composer’s program must contain, in one form or another, a set of instructions which not only tell the computer when the execution is finished but also what to do with the results. Depending on the composer’s specifications and, of course, on equipment available to a particular installation, the output of a computer may appear in any one or all of the following forms:
Printed on paper pages in a code of symbols and characters stipulated by the programmer, and easily translatable into a written musical score by a copyist. (To have the computer print out the final score immediately is a purely technical refinement, which could be implemented if and when it should be deemed necessary, useful and, last not least, worthwhile.)
Punched cards that could be fed as data, for instance, into a sound synthesizer which might again be a computer with a digital to analog conversion attachment.
A digital magnetic tape, which will store the information obtained in a nearly indestructible form, and which could be used again as input data for another program or computer or even for the analog equipment of any electronic music studio.
A graphical representation of the resultant data, either as a printout of the computer or, more refined in format and detail, by a computer controlled “Plotter”, which can draw anything that the composer is able to specify in the program.
Audio tape (see 2) on which the output voltage of the computer system is recorded at a rate of up to 40,000 samples per second so that a play back would potentially contain a noisefree representation of the auditory frequency range.
There are more possibilities available and every day new inventions are being announced. In any case, it should be noticed that the output format envisaged by a composer represents one of the important factors which ought to determine the nature of the composed program. While one kind of musical idea requires the generation of a detailed score for a specified number of instruments (which are to play precise pitches of determined durations at exactly indicated time points), another kind of musical idea would be sufficiently notated by a generated graphical display of special symbols, their position and size on the page, thus leaving undetermined the number and kinds of instruments which are to be used in performance. Quite different from both preceding alternatives, and to be considered and programmed quite differently, would be a musical idea which is to be realized directly by synthesized sound on tape.
It should be obvious: the composer who wishes to work with a computer system has to think about, decide upon, and find solutions for the same problems that face the composers who write a piece at a desk with nothing but pencil and paper and an occasional table of numbers on the side and a history of music in their past. But there is a difference. The composers at a desk generate the piece step by step, witness the process in every detail and thus can add or withdraw consequences, redundancies and the like, can audaciously, bitterly, moodily or lazily modify everything by direct, point by point inspection of what they had just written or of what they were just about to be write. In other words, they edit while they work. The composer who writes a program has to predict all of that, is then out of the game while the computer executes the given instruction, and can only edit the whole program after having carefully inspected the output of a computer run.
The difference has among many consequences one that could be stated by a sentence which, if not entirely valid at all times, at least expresses an observed tendency and furthermore clearly gives away the position taken by the author of this paper: The prevalent compositional proposition of a composer, in a particular work, may either be to have that which was defined as elements generate the structure of the piece, or to have the stipulated structure of the piece, which the composer sees as a system, generate the elements. The latter is definitely the alternative most appropriate to the conditions under which a system of digital and analog computers will assist a composer in creating music of contemporary relevance and significance. The programming composer composes the structures of systems in which the elements function as variables, each according to its temporary context, as potential carriers of meaning, unprejudiced by semantic or mythical traditions. Such systems may often be analogies to present day social systems, (not as they are seen, but as they are) or to a possible future social order. The musical result of structural composition would thus participate in society’s self-representation: a self-critical gesture of communication.
Communication with and within society is an eternal and thus constantly present and forever fluctuating problem because it depends on the fulfillment of too many demands: A system of practically unlimited information potential needs innumerable at least partially analog systems which could simulate the significant transformation chains in the larger system. Furthermore, it is not at all easy to know which algorithms are in control, even though one notices their presence. Thus a system called listener may analogically follow the changes of state in a system called music, but at the same time be unable to trace the algorithms that would establish as an uninterrupted chain of transformations that which the listener experienced as arbitrary randomness. The easy way out, of course, is to assume that actually all systems are sufficiently analog, so that a decrease of communication could only be due to some mistake, error or malicious obscurantism in the source-system which emits the undecipherable message. This assumption claims the invariability, the absolute consistency of systems. I claim that this assumption not only is unfounded, but that it actually prevents the solution of communication-problems.
The composition of music is an analogy to communication with and within society in the following sense: It refers to a practically unlimited system, namely the acoustical universe. It chooses more or less strictly defined fields of this system as its working ground. It decides on the algorithms which are to control the changes of state in this system. It determines whether a musical message is to consist of interrupted or uninterrupted chains of transformations, whether all the controlling algorithms are to be made known or whether some are to be kept hidden and elusive. But the most important point is this: A composition of music attempts to be only analog to a communication. It does not attempt to be one. It has all the necessary makings; it obeys all the demands, it adheres to all the rules of communication; but it does not communicate anything but itself. Thus it expressly intends to simulate that which we usually define as “not intended messages”, as “manifestations of circumstances”, as “natural processes”, only that this simulation is intended, and thereby represents and implies a criticism and a correction of conditions as they appear to be, and a proposition and plan for conditions as we would rather have them be.
In this sense, the composition of music is much more difficult than one might think at first and, furthermore, will always be just as difficult again the next day. For nothing is sooner lost than new ways and new languages…
To conclude: It simply is not the computer that threatens to replace people, the human brain, the composer. Much rather it should be asked whether these three could eventually learn how to understand and to handle the systems which they themselves have valiantly conquered from chaos; whether we could and eventually would learn how to have discourse with music, with society — or, at least, with a computer, so that it may slowly dawn on us where, in reality, substitution does threaten. With such knowledge, we then might successfully try to make ourselves once again, even briefly, appear irreplaceable.
bagatellen Beethoven Bagatelles, Op. 126
Herbert Brün
This is a set of observations, reflections, comments, and speculative
statements. They all refer to a set of pieces composed for the piano. The pieces
are not usually considered a very important part of Beethoven’s output.
Most often, the set is spoken of with the slight condescension that
meets pieces that are considered light, trivial, frivolous, and incidental. Or
they are mentioned with the puzzled awe that greets all tricks, especially like
tricks that involve putting a large object in a small bottle. But these pieces
are not mere tricks.
These pieces are often considered examples of a certain kind of piano
piece that flooded the salons and recital halls of the nineteenth century:
impromptus, serenades, songs without words, musical portraits, character pieces,
miniatures, novelties, etudes, and so on. All of these names refer to a kind of
piano piece that Beethoven, when he wrote one, called “Bagatelle”.
But in the intention behind the composition of this kind of small scale
piano piece, the difference between tricks (or novelties) and a musical
statement emerges. The intention behind the worst of this type of small piece
requires the presentation of an almost meaningless musical idea in a meaningful
musical expression; the intention behind Beethoven’s Bagatelles requires the
presentation of a meaning-charged musical idea in a small, terse, yes even
fragmentary, form.
Among Beethoven’s numerous short compositions for piano, there are
twenty four that he himself gave the title “Small Things (Kleinigkeiten) or
Bagatelles”. They were published in three stages: first, seven bagatelles,
Op. 33 (in the year 1803); then the 11 new bagatelles, Op. 119 (20 years
later); and shortly thereafter (in the year 1825) the “Six Bagatelles, Op. 126”.
The dates of publication, however, say next to nothing about the time in which
the individual pieces of a collection were composed. Research into Beethoven’s
many sketch books has shown that problems and ideas from widely divergent
creative periods are addressed and given form in these “small things”, the
Bagatelles.
This fact is a symptom of a condition about which the pieces themselves
are concerned: It is as if there is a contradiction between small, constructive
musical elements (motivic ideas) and formal development It is as if Beethoven
were acutely aware of how, in the first moments of music, something
less (or something more) is promised than is delivered as things are worked out.
The central problem is how to keep the working out of a potent element of
musical construction (motive) from dampening the impact created by the
juxtaposition of different musical events created with these elements (motives).
In other words, can a potent motive undergo an extended development without
becoming either pompous or cumbersome and tiredly strained? And (the second
aspect of the problem) can an extended development be constructed that does not
minimize the contrast between one musical event and another?
Almost all of these bagatelles lay aside so-called “classical balance”.
They do it drastically and openly, so that the intention and the concern is
unmistakable. Now this concern can be discovered very often in Beethoven,
particularly in the late sonatas for piano and string quartet. Indeed, this one
concern leads both to the dynamic expansions of the sonatas and quartets, which
take on dramatic dimensions, and to the charged compressions found in the small
art of the bagatelles, which seem lapidary, fragmentary, yes, even ironic.
Beethoven wrote about the 6 Bagatelles, Op. 126, in a letter to his
publisher Schott in Mainz. In the letter, he speaks of “Six bagatelles, or
“little things”, for piano alone.” He says that “many of them are the most
worked out, and probably the best of the type, that he has yet written”. In it,
Beethoven indicates that he knows the publisher and the public
will find it difficult to accept something shorter than a symphony,
a Missa Solemnis, or a holf-hour sonata from a composer of Beethoven’s
stature. What he must be trying to say is something that should be
clear to anyone who looks dosely into the score. Whoever knows the
last five sonatas of Beethoven and the painstakingly composed element
of rhapsody in them, whoever values their unyieldingly developed
abundance, will be astonished to meet it in the Bagatelles, in the
sharpest reduction, presented through the most concentrated of means.
The presentation is of the subtlest type: at no point does one have
the impression that something requires more time than it has been given
or that a threadbare idea gets by just by avoiding any development.
Herbert Brün: Writings | Compositions | Recordings | Graphics | Links
designing society in honour of living contradictions instead of standing ovations to conflicts Technology and the Composer
Herbert Brun
(1970)
As read to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Stockholm, June 10, 1970.
I.
Between 1877 and 1896 Edison and Berliner developed their cylindrical and disc phonograph systems, providing us with the new ability to store audio signals and to retrieve them from storage by electro-mechanical means. About half a century later, and nearly 30 years after Lee DeForest had initiated Electronics with the first vacuum tube (the triode audion), the phonograph-disc was joined by magnetic tape and the phonograph by the tape recorder. During the last 15 years great progress has been made in learning how the computer could assist the musician towards achieving ever higher degrees of precision in storing and retrieving audio information.
The emergence of electronics, vacuum tubes, transistors, and all kinds of increasingly sophisticated circuitries supplied the impetus to delve anew into the still only vaguely answered questions about the physical nature of sound, the possibilities of analyzing and of synthesizing any desired sound, the problems of psycho-acoustical phenomenology. It also led to a vast arsenal of electronic sound sources, sound modifiers, devices for control and amplification of sound, to microphones and loudspeakers, but most important of all: it led to an improved concept of storage, to the concept of simulated memory, to the programmable studio and to the even more programmable digital and analogue computer system.
Although composers became aware of these developments rather early — although Busoni, Schoenberg, Varese, Schillinger, Stokowski, Chavez, and many others wrote and talked about the promising influence of science and technology on composers in their search for new compositional procedures — it was not until rather late in the game that some notable connections between technology and composition were established. Most of the time since 1906, when Dr. Thaddeus Cahil demonstrated his Telharmonium or Dynamophone, was dedicated to the invention and enormous improvement of techniques for the production, manipulation and performance of sound. In 1916 Edgar Varese asked for new musical instruments and enrichment of our musical alphabet, and a few years later for the cooperation between electrician and composer. From 1927 till 1936 he tried to get financial support for the development of an electronic instrument for composition at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Harvey Fletcher and Rene Bertrand would have collaborated with him on the project. He could neither get a Guggenheim Fellowship nor any help from sound studios in Hollywood. In the meantime Hammond had produced his organ, the Novachord, the Solovox, and one can follow this instrument-oriented trend through the years up to the present.
In the United States composers began work with tape and tape recorders in about 1950. The next ten years saw the establishment of various studios and laboratories, where composers, musicians, and technicians could collaborate in furthering all kinds of projects pertaining to the relationships between electronics and music. In North America almost all such studios are located at and affiliated with universities. Major examples are the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and the studios at the Universities of Illinois and Toronto. Now there are hundreds of such installations to be found in the western hemisphere; and if ten years ago many a music department chairman did not know what an electronic music studio was, today that chairman would at least always know whether the school has one or not.
For some time now music has been getting involved with the computer. This also began mainly at universities, notably at the University of Illinois, where Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson completed their first computer assisted composition in 1956. If one combines positive experiences with apparently justified expectations then one can predict that the interaction between computers and the composer will prove far more fertile with regard to compositional procedures than will either the availability of new instruments, or the more and more streamlined modular compactness of portable studio equipment and tape recorders, or even the integration of performing humans into ever-more sophisticated circuitries that allow for unlimited amplification of naturally redundant autobiographical sound portraits.
As the composer meets technology through the computer, both have a chance to see one another far more clearly than the usual barriers, namely sound and industry, permit. The composer has begun to recognize that technology is not merely the provider of instruments, of devices, of conveniences; in short, the composer is learning that technology is not just techniques and engineering. The composer now defines technology as the science and art of applying knowledge to the desire for problem solving and I, for one, concede that technology would have a far more beneficial impact on society if its potentials were controlled by technologists rather than by industrialists and politicians.
It is desirable that the technologist take a fresh view of the composer. The time has come for the technologist to see that composers are not merely music makers, or art makers, who think that their products have to measure up to an established standard of culture and who are eager to call them merchandise and sell them. Many composers today would like to live in a socially concerned and courageously heuristic environment: they are looking for problems; they do not claim to know but are eager to create models for solutions; they would rather produce some dynamic input than find their product flatly output and consumed; they have experienced the width and the narrowness of at least one medium in depth and so can move in it or on to the next. They would want contemporary technology to return the respect they have for it by using and assisting them so that their work may escape the psychologist’s case study and the aesthetician’s collection, and instead, be given a chance to become a dynamic input to the contemporary social system. Together with technology, the composer defines input as something that induces and initiates such changes of state in a system as would not occur, without this input, at the moment or possibly ever.
II.
The story of music and technology tells of a very old couple which composers keep visiting in order to have their dreams materialize, their intentions implemented, their problems solved. It depicts in various terms, largely depending on the storyteller’s choice of emphasis, the emergence of our need for the control of acoustical events for a purpose, and our ways of catering to this need through a maze of apparently continuous chains of either observed or stipulated problems, and either found or invented or stipulated solutions. The story would show composers to be motivated by a more-or-less intuitive allergy to the inevitable decrease of information in the systems through which they see their world at any given time; even the systems they love exhibit symptoms of decay and stagnation, and all they can do is retard the final curtain by creating systems wherein that which passes swiftly in reality would stay alive a little longer in an analogy. It does not matter much in what language and in which terminology composers happen to think their thoughts: their concepts of what is to be music next are always related to some technological considerations, and this relationship ranges from extreme subtlety to gross obviousness. There ought to be no need at this point to elaborate on the rather commonplace notion that technological considerations show the way from a musical idea to its realization, first in some code and then in a performance; and that technological considerations lead to the availability of the acoustical phenomena needed by composers for an audible representation of their musical ideas. It may be appropriate, however, to remember that musical ideas are thinking models in more or less deliberately stipulated linguistic systems; that, for reasons to be discussed later, the complexity of such systems is increasing in many a sense and dimension and that, therefore, composers now have to turn to technology with the additional request for assistance in handling the systems they stipulate.
But as composers turn to technology today, they are bound to find themselves forced into two intertwined admissions: that the belief according to which we live in a technological era is merely a belief, unsubstantiated by any sufficiency of facts; and that the concept conjured up by the word composer needs broadening until it embraces more than just music, painting, or the arts in general; that it must extend its pretensions towards the regions where the languages thrive, grow old and wither, the natural, artificial, formal, and the dead alike.
As long as technology is ruled and controlled by hard and fast beliefs and as long as it makes its way to the people through a veritable maze of filters consisting of almost exactly those same hard and fast beliefs, we are living in the era of hard and fast beliefs, in the ideological, not in the technological era. The services that technology renders to all those who—being no technologists—need destructive power in order to survive better knowledge, and to those who—not being composers—use the languages of an incurably sick system to curse and condemn even the discussion of attempts at composing a yet-unpolluted one: these services never were designed by technologists.
Technology being the science and the art of applying knowledge to the desire for problem solving, it takes a believer and ideologist to present as applied knowledge the advanced techniques of murder, brain-washing, and destruction. Where such a presentation is accepted and successful there one cannot help but rebel against the power that language wields over thought, imagery, and desire. For much of the power of presentation rests in language, in the grammatical and syntactical innocence with which it acceptably supports even the unspeakable. As long as all this power and innocence act in favor of the believer’s and ideologist’s presentation, attenuating the voices of everyone else, so long the technologists and the composers have an axe to grind in common.
If ever there will be a technological era worth talking about, it will be thanks to technologists and composers. By their joint efforts, extended over a prolonged period, they may contrive to emancipate thought from language sufficiently for a rehabilitation of both, and continuing from that, introduce an era for mankind where every thought has its language, and where all people have at their disposal a device that will respond to each person’s input according to the language stipulated by that person. Today we still labor and suffer under the oppression of those who can hide their determined unwillingness behind a modestly confessed lack of understanding, behind less modestly uttered claims for everyone’s right to misunderstand, behind aggressive attacks on an allegedly unrealistic but in effect only nonconformist intellect. Tomorrow, in the technological era, if it is to merit this label, this kind of hide-and-seek game should have lost its power-illuminated glamour, and have made place for a prosaic and, thus, nonviolent confrontation, in language and in action, between those who can articulate the desire for an intelligent society and those who understand, but do not want it. There should be no question as to what an intelligent society is, nor as to who wants it and who doesn’t. The difference between technology and composition will dwindle to an insignificant degree of a nuance; whereas the difference between nuances of thought will acquire significant proportions, worthy of the discriminating potentials of the human mind.
When, many years ago, I was first invited to give talks and lectures, the invitations meant that I was to be a composer of music who is to discuss and to present music for an audience interested in music. I felt that, therefore, I had to show how the thoughts I really wished to talk about were relevant even to music. Under this pressure I soon found out that the composition of music, is, in fact, relevant to the thoughts I consider important at any given time. Finally, I asked myself: What if it were true that composition simply is the generator of relevance, and that composers, no matter of or in what, are people who desire that whatever they create be relevant to whatever they consider important? If this were true (and I stipulate it is), then I could go on and state: The thoughts I consider important, and the medium in which I try to create what otherwise might never happen, are related through my desire for relevance; thus they become representatives of two systems which ought to show a high degree of mutual analogy, once a structure composed by me is applied to both. Wherever such an attempt is successful one can consider the process as a model of some effective method for reaching a desired state; this, then, allows for a new look at what may now appear to be—besides and beyond being desired—also desirable.
The definition of a problem and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the problem have of the system to which it refers. A problem may thus find itself defined as a badly interpreted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty output device, or as a faulty output due to a malfunction in an otherwise faultless system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultless and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problem to anyone opposed to change.
To the composer, however, a suggestion of change is a signal sent out by the system, signifying a deficiency of input and the urgent request for the creation of what otherwise may never happen, be it even a new and different system. The composer’s basic attitude is system-conscious and is nourished by observations which give repeated reassurance that it will always look only the way the composer looks at it, and so may look different if looked at differently.
Discerning between composition of art and the far broader concept of an art of composition I contend that the latter need reach a higher level if the former is to be an input for, not only an output of, society. I suspect that an intuitive awareness of the recent meagerness of input has led, almost justifiably, to the contemptuous sneer at the word culture prevalent in many circles, intellectual and otherwise. Many words, including this one: culture, could be rehabilitated if they were to refer to the dynamics of input rather than to the kinetic triumphs of output. Not that there is a lack of continuously offered input. But the words that indeed refer to it also reject it. The message announcing an offered input is called a threatening disaster, disorder, anarchism, and the like; yes, this society’s language is in such a panic that it frequently, in its confusion, calls a threatening disaster that which actually was nothing but a message of its own accomplished output. Such an obvious disorder in so highly a respected system as our language is a challenge to all those composers who are not exclusively interested in their music. It is a challenge to the art of composition in general; and the composer—oscillating between music, languages, linguistics, analogies, systems, structures, logics, logistics, some mathematics, and an enormous repertory of words burdened with apparently indelible and frequently quite obsolete meanings—calls it all just so much language and begins to search for some way in which the composer might construct languages that do not yet support any power but their own.
In the meantime I shall use the term language for denoting structured systems which are made by humans, which humans thus can change or replace, and which, as a significant property, possess the capacity for involvement in the storage and transmission of intended messages or unintended messages or both. Technologists in all the branches of science and engineering, and composers in all the arts, both continuously design, construct, create, and change languages of all kinds, in order to store and transmit the thoughts or images they had in mind. Little of this is heard in an environment where power can be seized, and more power gained, by redesigning, reconstructing, and recreating thoughts and images that comfortably fit the language everybody knows and speaks already, where trust and confidence can be earned by proving these thoughts and images to have existed for generations as popular grammatical fictions in a language common to us all. No wonder then if within such boundaries everybody thinks they know what everybody is talking about and words are said to mean simply what people take them to mean.
But wherever it is true that, as the saying goes, words mean what people take them to mean, these words cannot escape the meaning given to them by people. Where there is no escape, there are no alternatives, there is no freedom; and any meaning that argues with words which never escaped it just tells the story of its life. Every thought, idea, or concept, as it emerges for the first time in a given society, needs words so that it be expressed, be presented, be heard, understood, and finally communicated. In search of such language one has to either create new words, or add and attach new meanings to old words. If a word, in the course of time and usage, has accumulated many kinds, shades, nuances of meaning, then we have to consider the context in which the word appears in order to know which particular meaning it is to carry. From this it follows that a new meaning of a word may be suspected, or assumed, if the context is such that none of the conventional meanings would fit. It is easier to coin and integrate into language a new word, a new sound, a new visual unit, than to make an old one mean something new. This is because the newly coined word announces its newness in every context. Its function is unambiguous and thus not context-bound. A new meaning, on the other hand, cannot be announced by an old word alone but only by a context to which the old word is a newcomer, in which it had never functioned before. The older a word is, the more meanings it has accumulated, the more ambiguous it becomes, the more context-bound it is. Whereas a new word adds to the language by enlarging the vocabulary, a new meaning adds to the language by increasing the significance of context.
All this I contend to be analogously the case in all systems in which the elements enter into temporarily significant coalitions, and where some communicable meaning becomes associated with either their moments of appearing or with the particular structure causing their appearance. Words in language, gestures of sound in music, definitions of visual units and colors in painting are just a few of the many terms denoting such coalitions.
On the one hand, I concede that in order to relate or permute established thoughts and ideas it may be sufficient to know what the listener takes words to mean, and to form one’s language accordingly. The success of this language is then measured by the degree of comprehensibility. The problem of the speaker here is a problem in communication. The speaker’s aim consists in having a new constellation of old thought understood by the currently valid rules and usages. For the presentation of new thoughts, on the other hand, the speaker should be requested to make words mean what they heretofore had not meant, thus adding to the available repertory of a word’s meanings that new meaning which is necessary for the presentation of the new thought. The success of this language can only be measured by the degree to which it questions the sufficiency of meanings already associated with words, and by the quality of the thoughts that so become audible for the first time; at which time there is, obviously, never enough of the kind of evidence available that would allow for completely correct evaluations.
As this is the point where the arts, including music, come in, let me formulate a useful term. Where a new thought is presented, the speaker’s problem is not any longer only a problem in communication, but one of communication. My useful term is introduced thus: A speaker with a new thought has to solve a problem of anticommunication. The syllables “anti” are used here as in antipodes, antiphony, antithesis, not meaning “hostile” or “against” but rather “juxtaposed” or “from the other side”. Anticommunication faces communication somewhat as an offspring faces the progenitor. And just as the offspring eventually will in turn become a progenitor so will anticommunication, in time, become communication. This knowledge ought to make it possible for a community of people to have a good time with either. Indeed it should be noted that the good time lasts longer with anticommunication which leaves a lot open for the next occasion than with communication which puts everything neatly away on the spot. Anticommunication is an attempt at saying something, not a refusal to say it. Communication is achievable by learning from language how to say something. Anticommunication is an attempt at respectfully teaching language to say it. It is not to be confused with either non-communication, where no communication is intended, or with lack of communication, where a message is ignored, has gone astray, or simply is not understood. Anticommunication is most easily observed, and then often can have an almost entertaining quality, if well-known fragments of a linguistic system are composed into a contextual environment in which they try but fail to mean what they always had meant and, instead, begin showing traces of integration into another linguistic system, in which, who knows, they might one day mean what they never meant before, and be communicative again.
However, when something new is conceived, introduced, and noticed, then there appears a temporary gap, an interregnum which will disappear only when that “something new” begins to be accepted, understood, and used: when it begins to grow old. This time of transition is a time in which messages are sent that no one receives and in which messages are received that no one sent.
This is the time in which a language gained is a language lost. By most people this time is experienced only occasionally, in passing, in some concert, some exhibition, some reading, and then usually not too happily; for it gives them a hard time or no time or too much time, but no answer to their question: “What does it all mean?”
It is this time, however, that is the almost continuous time present for those poets, painters, and composers who move with it, who always think of themselves as living and working just in that mute and dumb moment where the language they gained got lost, where it won’t do and say what they would have it do and say. It is therefore a sign of understanding and perceptivity if one expects their productions, their works and words to escape the prevalent level of communicativity under the condition that all of their activities and objects be at least propositions and at best provisions for the next, now the future, level of communicativity. Creative Art resides in poetry, music, dance, painting, architecture, theater, film, television, writing, and even in “Happenings” only if each of these sub-disciplines functions by anticommunication, which is my term for potential and virtual expression in a field devoid of communicative guarantee. One ought to expect, yes, as an ambitious audience, even demand that this field be cultivated at a time later than the last harvest and earlier than the next.
But what if it is not only the much maligned audience, the people who come to listen and to see who have the wrong expectations? What if it is society itself, and therewith also the performers, the dancers, the actors, the musicians, who do not know that their profession consists in handling competently the temporary incompetence of their language? What if it is a property of all our social systems not to have matured enough in order to liberate and promote language from its fictitious status of a slave which will do the best it can, to the status-independent existence of students and scholars, who will try to do better than the best they or anyone can?
III.
I challenge technology to escalate its push towards a socially beneficial technological era by designing and constructing for all of us the compound facility wherein and wherewith many people can be induced to come and enjoy the effort of learning how to compare and measure their languages against and with their imagination and their desires. I am speaking of an artificial system which should function as an accepted member of society and be respected and used equally by the few and by the many, as long as this differentiation will have any validity left.
I imagine a building in which the arts are met by technology and the sciences on their common ground. They all investigate, stipulate, create, and exploit systems. They are all faced with the puzzles and the functions of structure. And their aims and results complement one another because of their difference. While the sciences observe or stipulate systems which are to be analogous to an existent truth or reality, and while technology stipulates and creates systems that are to function in an existent truth or reality, the arts stipulate and create systems which are analogous to an existence desired to become true or real.
All three must be represented with all their branches and departments in the team that has to invent, to stipulate, to study, to discuss, and eventually to decide on the interior and exterior requirements that such an artificial system must be able to fulfill. Let me mention just one area of research that might demand no less than such a team’s collective efforts before it will even begin to reveal its dimensions and secrets.
What if it were true that, as the saying goes in many quarters, the human mind is limited by nature to the potentials we already know, and that we may thus not expect it to ever possess the properties necessary for the creation of what we call an ideal society? If this were true we would need artificial systems that possess those properties to guide us. And if it were true that, as the saying goes in other quarters, the human mind has shown here and there the potential for change and development but that precisely the rarity of such an event generates hostility against it in the many who did not participate in it, then we would need artificial systems that remove the property of rarity by demonstrating the participation of all. No matter on which assumed truth it is based or to which conjectural reality it may be meant to correspond: any such artificial system should possess properties that we either cannot have, or do not yet have, but that we need and thus should be able to imagine or be taught to imagine.
It is quite obvious: any such artificial system will contain a computer installation. But what kind of an installation? Nobody knows yet because it should not be developed before the software, the programs that define the structure of the system, have been written. And these programs should be written, and the assembler code should be constructed, only after a decision has been reached as to what the whole system is supposed to do for the user. The user, however, is not to be seen as a paying consumer, whose demands have to be educated until they fit the available offers.
The word user refers instead to a member of one subset of the set of all possible kinds of input. The first task then is to define this subset until it contains every possible kind of user. Every user is an element of at least two social systems: the social system the user sees and at least one social system that sees the user. The artificial system must be able to insist on getting just so much input from the user as it needs for identifying the social systems in which the user’s existence is definable. The response of the artificial system could then adopt the property of an input to any one or all of the systems defining the user’s existence. The complete set of all possible kinds of input would thus contain all users and all responses by the artificial system. If we roughly define input as something that induces and initiates such changes of state in a system as would not occur without this input, at the moment or possibly ever, then we may expect that the artificial system thus would be capable of supporting what I called corrective action as well as what is called creative acts.
What is asked for is a heterogeneous assembly of input-oriented minds that would define an intelligent society, redefine the user, and develop an artificial system that by its response capability would show its users their roles in an intelligent society so that they may become induced to also want it in reality.
Inevitably such a project progresses in stages of partial fulfillment of set goals. At every significant stage, however, the results reached should be incorporated into a systems program which is to be submitted to and analyzed by technologists. They, in response to this input, would proceed to invent and construct the apparatus, the hardware, the computer, the input-output interface which best can represent, simulate, execute, and display the functions of an artificial system that possesses properties which we either cannot have or do not have yet. Clearly this installation will also be used to reach the next stage of significance, and will, if intelligently conceived, eventually only have to be modified and improved. Should there ever come the day, and an invention or discovery be made, that would render obsolete this whole machinery, possibly even the whole project, it will be either a no-man’s day or a day for world-wide celebration.
Work on the project has to begin simultaneously in as many places as possible all over the world. Every school, every university or equivalent institution could assign to a selected but preferably heterogeneous group of its members the task of starting research towards a definition of the potential user in the immediate environment up to and including the areas overlapping with those defined by neighboring groups.
The building I imagine should be planned and constructed at each place, combining special features reflecting local preferences with those more general features that would make it a compatible member of a world-wide network of equivalent institutions. Everywhere it should grow as the results of such research accumulate everywhere.
Composers in the technological era are professional members of such projects. Their profession is the art of composition and their work establishes and demonstrates connections of various kinds between various elements, stipulated and desired connections that cannot occur in the eternal feedback loop of empirically functioning thinking processes.
Technology in the technological era sees the composer’s work as an input of a particular nature, as an analogy to a desired reality which may have to be implemented and to be observed in functional action before anyone can possibly judge whether such a reality is—besides and beyond being desired—also desirable.
To the question whether a statement is true, let there be added the question: what if it were true?
To the question whether a composition is music, let there be added the question: what if this were music?
So that language may not become a fossilized fetish, let it be praised for the thought it expresses, but ruthlessly criticized for the ideas it fails to articulate. Language is not the standard against which thinking is to be measured; on the contrary: language is to be measured by a standard it barely reaches, if ever, namely the imagery of human doubt and human desire.
To measure language, with imagery as a standard, is the function of art in society. The arts are a measuring meta-language about the language that is found wanting. If the imagery succeeds in containing, anticommunicatively, for later, the simulation, the structural analogy to that which was found wanting, then, who knows, it may tell us or someone some day with breathtaking eloquence and in the simple terms what we, today, almost speechlessly have wanted so much.
Our present era meanwhile dictates in ever more venomous terms that we must turn to artificial systems if we wish to conduct intelligent research and intelligent experiments without causing bloodshed, corruption, and misery.
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(A few days after this paper had been read, the chairman of the meeting requested that I submit to the experts present at the symposium a proposal summarizing the goals and ideas implied by my paper. The experts, then, were to vote on whether to recommend that steps be taken towards an implementation of the proposal.)
I propose that an international apparatus be defined and initiated which would investigate and analyze submitted ideas, compositions, statements and general propositions with regard to their function (potential or real) as structural models. The apparatus should be so formed and equipped that it can answer the following questions: What is the composition and the structure of that system in which the submitted item would have the greatest significance? In which system, social, political, physical, would the submitted item be compatible with concepts of truth, reality, practicability, etc.?
(The assembled experts declared this proposal to be incomprehensible. They requested that I resubmit it with an explanatory addition.)
Explanatory Addition
The apparatus mentioned above would face each and every statement, but not with the question: “Is this a consistent statement?” The question would be: “Which system needs to be stipulated so that, therein, the statement becomes consistent?”
This kind of questioning statements is and has always been the composer’s profession. In looking at the composer’s work we perceive the extent to which the composer succeeded in establishing that system in which the composed statements are consistent; we no longer discuss the value of statements but rather the value of the systems implied by the statements.
As the composer stipulates systems, elements, and structures, the composer becomes increasingly proficient in recognizing the problems that appear in systems.
Problems may attack a system from within—a malfunction in the system—or from without: the system as a whole is questioned. The states, and thus also the problems of large complex systems, do not show themselves in their real totality but rather in smaller less complex subsystems which imply—by analogy or by disintegration—the system wherein they are consequences and consistent or inconsistent statements.
In contradistinction to Industry and Business who must dominate the system to which they adjust, Technology and The Arts need neither dominate nor adjust. Composers and technologists are not concerned with the exploitation of, and adjustment to, problems. They are concerned with the solution of problems and, as a first step in this direction, with the design of models, structural analogies, of the desired solution.
The construction of models for problem-solving in the broadest and most general sense is the goal which Technology and Composition have in common. In order to reach and to effectively demonstrate this goal they have to preserve their independence from temporarily ruling values which always imply and reaffirm only the system that ought to be investigated and that gave rise to the problem. If technologists and composers were to join forces in an internationally supported endeavor of systems-research and systems-creation they could hope to avoid loops of futility, to preserve their independence from temporarily ruling values, to reach and to effectively demonstrate their goal. Their findings, discoveries, suggestions, and explanations should throw considerable light, be it welcome or not, on our ability of changing, if need be, just those concepts which we most automatically take for granted.
The contemporary distance between composers in the technological era and the systems that rule their lives is a required prerequisite for their effectivity as temporarily inabsorbable, critical, and necessary inputs to their society.
(Whereupon the experts, who, really, were only specialists, refused to vote on the proposal. Some argued that it was irrelevant to the meeting’s theme. Some argued that it would offend member states in UNESCO. This argument was flatly denied by the participating representatives of UNESCO, but to no avail.)
Notes
Hugh Davies: Repertoire Internationale des Musiques Electro-Acoustiques, International Electronic Music Catalog. London, 1967, The M.I.T. Press, 1968.
Lowell Cross: Electronic Music, 1948-1953 in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 7, No. 1, 1968.
L.A. Hiller and L.M. Isaacson: Experimental Music McGraw-Hill Book Co., N.Y. 1959.
Über die Maßen beeindruckend fleißig, Frau Puck! 🙂
Nevertheless, a really interesting supplement to the basic ideas on discourse.
“Interesting”? … “Nevertheless”? …. 1.”Interesting”?
1.1. What does this word tell you?
1.1.2. When is “interesting” for you?
2. “Nevertheless”?
2.1. Is “nevertheless” in opposition to “allwaysthemost”?
2.1.2. Can they contradict creatively eachother ?
marcofogg Marco Stanley Fogg
Marco Stanley Fogg is the protagonist of Paul Auster’s “Moon Palace”. He grew up with his mother until he was eleven when she was killed in a traffic accident. There was never any father in his life but his uncle Victor with whom he lived after the death of his mother. Uncle Victor was the only person to give hold to his life and to whom he could talk about everything. In a way he became dependent on his uncle who was his only family. Marco Fogg was a calm person who felt comfortable in the presence of his uncle Victor. Marco’s life was very boring because day after day he went to college. He was very ambitious to reach a higher education though he never had any close relationships to other students.
After the death of his uncle Victor, Marco Fogg totally changed into an other person. From that point on he abandoned himself “to the chaos of the world” [p.80], he let himself go. He didn’t care about where he was going to or what he would do in the future, but in a way he was conscious of that carelessness. He wasn’t anymore that average young student he used to be. The situation of loneliness had caused a mental transformation, his carelessness had made him lose his apartment, so he led a life on the streets for several months, a life in the Central Park – Marco Fogg was isolated from society! In order to survive he sold the books he received from his uncle. This gradual process of regression went on until Kitty Wu and his friend Zimmer took him in.
Marco Fogg moved in to Zimmer and started picking up his bits and pieces of his life. He found a chance to make himself useful by translating a manuscript for Zimmer. There was a purpose to his life again. Kitty Wu with whom he fell in love gave him also hold to start a “new life”. At that stage of his relationship with Kitty Marco’s sexual impulses were stronger than anything else. After a while he started looking for a job. At the Columbia University Marco found a job description. He started to “serve as live-in companion” [p. 97] for Thomas Effing, but Marco wasn’t aware of the fact that Effing was his grandfather. Marco started paying much attention to Effing and his life. He was very helpful and patient with Effing, always showing his interest also when he was treated bad by him. Learning much about life Marco assumed more responsibility as he used to. He began to see the world in an other way, in the way of Effing. During the time he was together with Effing he was happier than ever before. When Effing died Marco received a large amount of money. Marco promised to contact Effing’s son, Solomon Barber who was his unknown father.
The first time when Marco saw Barber he was shocked about his outward appearance, but later he admired him because of his self-confidence. At that stage he didn’t want to believe the fact that Solomon was his father, but then he was even a bit proud to have Barber as his father. During that time his girl-friend Kitty became pregnant. Marco was so happy about it that he couldn’t await to see his child, but Kitty felt differently toward that baby. She wanted an abortion and went through with it, but Marco couldn’t accept Kitty’s decision and decided to withdraw from her for a time. During the time he was separated from her he lived together with his father Solomon. Barber and Fogg went to the grave of Fogg’s mother. Solomon fell into an open grave where he broke his back and consequently died. The death of Barber made Marco call Kitty. When he asked her to take him back she refused him because she didn’t want to be hurt again.
All his loss he come to know during his life made him walk. He started walking alone towards the West. Marco was angry and confused about that what happened that he began walking without ending. During his walking he thought about his life and he came to the conclusion that his past life was settled. Marco Fogg was going towards his new life- his future!