Editor's note: we are publishing the following text by Francesco Toninelli in two parts, for ease of reading.
_“The actual world of a score might be the occurrence of a situation in which there is no outside of the work (the aforementioned ‘strongly framed center’ reminds me of a powerful religion that causes endless problems that are also the problems of capitalism). Where there is no outside of the work, we might encounter the real world through a music that is transparent. What if that were simply enough?”_
(Manfred Werder, Simon Reynell: _Interview 2013_, author's translation)
_“Here we see that opacity is certainly not an obstacle or a limit. To touch a luminous and deep opacity also means that one cannot work and resist in the false light «that now illuminates things only to disintegrate them». Opacity is also a poetic and/or political critical weapon. One of the instruments of everyday insurrection”_
(Jean-Marie Glaize: _Opacité critique_, 2012, transl. Michele Zaffarano)
Like the two authors quoted here, evidently, I think that the form of a work is influential on its political reality. In this text in two parts¹ I would like to offer a reflection on some instances intercepted in the work of those who make and think with sound, starting from two historical examples that have generated clear and influential premises.
Alvin Lucier is properly a minimalist: his forms are indeed arbitrary but do nothing more than the bare minimum suggested by the internal logic of the work.
Compositions like Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas illustrate a physical phenomenon in a form that serves perhaps first of all to declare a beginning and an end of the performance, a formal process whose material and consequently perceptual result is predictable after listening to a short portion of the composition and is in itself of little importance compared to the acoustic phenomenon it brings to light (or we might say “that it amplifies”). I would like to call this poetics “transparent”, insofar as it conceals nothing, encodes nothing. But this interpretation meets two limits.
The first is that this transparency is limited to the work and does not extend to the whole channel of transmission of signs reaching the author, because the author's intentions are intrinsically unknowable.
The second is instead a sensory matter: Lucier's work is in any case composed of sounds emitted deliberately for the realization of the piece, which demand attention, presuppose listening and live in a cultural frame that distinguishes an inside and an outside of the work. Lucier's sine waves, even if very subtle, thus generate for the ear a barrier toward what that place would have been at that moment without those sine waves (for instance, staying within the American twentieth century, Cage's 4’33 or 0’00 pose no auditory obstacle).
Pauline Oliveros breaks the author-listener paradigm more deeply by working directly on the perception of whoever reads her deep listening exercises: there is no intermediary, only instructions on how to listen (even the interpreter, the musician who performs the composition, has here vanished after centuries).
I find that in these respects Oliveros's remains to this day one of the most radical hypotheses of what art can be.
Nothing is obstructed because the creation of form is shared with a different and new logical entity, the active listener, who performs the listening for themselves.
One of the postures of these godfather and godmother of so-called sound art is well described in the words of Manfred Werder when he speaks of letting the spontaneous abundance of the world emerge. No secret in sight, only a direction of attention and an exclusively temporal frame in perceiving what is available to the senses at every moment.
Werder's music is in constant collusion with the world as it comes about: generating silence instead of sound so as to let the already existing audible show through. A sum of the post-Cageian spirit of the Wandelweiser group: going beyond it, Werder is perhaps one of the few to work, like Oliveros, on overcoming the listener-performer dyad as well as the more widely addressed composer-performer dyad.
Let us reread the first quotation at the opening.
_“Where there is no outside of the work, we might encounter the real world through a music that is transparent. What if that were simply enough?”_
Werder's scores work radically on an inherent scarcity (linguistic, communicative, of power) so as to open themselves to the abundance of the world.
Preceded by a series of works with an essential yet detailed writing (Werder speaks of an “economy of language”² and an “economy of precision”³) and which still envisage the presence of performers who generate sounds, his seminal work 2005 (1) inaugurates a style of writing that prescribes no action. It does not impose itself as a score to be performed, nor as an indication for the orientation of listening, but seems to be first of all a description of a condition: space, time, (sound).
In its radical openness, this description does not preclude the two previous hypotheses, it does not preclude any hypothesis; the role of the interpreter as realizer of sounds is far off, much further downstream in the actualization of the piece, and Werder himself expresses a distinction between the moment of the score and the moment of realization, where the former is an instance of the world and the latter is an instance of the score.
wandelweiser.de/werderscores/ew13.044a.pdf
wandelweiser.de/werderscores/ew13.046a.pdf
wandelweiser.de/werderscores/ew13.047d.pdf
wandelweiser.de/werderscores/ew13.047f.pdf
wandelweiser.de/werderscores/ew13.048d.pdf
Yet if Werder upholds this hypothesis of integral transparency, it is also true that his scores (and we could argue: any score) maintain a level of mystery, something to be deciphered: an opacity intrinsic to language and to communication itself.
I am thinking in particular of the series of found phrases and found words: the compositional process is clear, but on what exactly do they place attention?
spider air eucalyptus wasp petals rain
There is nothing in the score to suggest that it is a score, which seems instead to concentrate on reflecting, in a literary dimension, that “abundance of the world” already mentioned.
I personally find that an answer to this question is not necessary and that its existence is tied to the theme of the lack of instrumentality dear to the composer: score as material for investigating formal questions that are ultimately questions about the world; score as a place of occurrence where coincidence can take place.
_“Words, a score, a performer, a place, a listener, they all are permanently drifting – drifting along, they meet contingently as part of the world’s abundance. Meeting contingently they actualize their potentiality and, permanently become what their drift implies.”_⁴
The political position of a poetics of transparency is evident: on the one hand showing everything, avoiding secrets so as to leave the possibility of understanding and choosing. On the other, not imposing one's own will on others; not occupying space and perception. Making everyone a participant in a form that goes beyond the logic of the inside and the outside of the work and that is first of all a space for reality where “a real sense of meeting and sharing can emerge”⁵.
Such a poetics may rest on unveiling the internal logic of the work, but above all it seems to say: here is the world. There is no secret.
_às vezes, em dias de luz perfeita e exacta,_ _em que as cousas têm toda a realidade que podem ter_
(sometimes, on days of perfect and exact light, when things have all the reality they can have)
(Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro: _O Guardador de Rebanhos_ XXVI, 1914, transl. deepseek)
Notes
¹ The title refers to a question posed by Harun Farocki in the conclusion of the film Schnittstelle (1995) and was the initial stimulus for this research. I thank the project angolo cieco and in particular Liam Baldini for the precious viewing recommendation. The same goes for the text from which the second opening epigraph is taken.
² Manfred Werder, Simon Reynell: Interview 2013, on anothertimbre.com
³ James Saunders, Manfred Werder: Interview February 2004, published in THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION to EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC (Ed. James Saunders), 2009
⁴ Manfred Werder: TEXT SCORES - STATEMENT (1), published in John Lely and James Saunders, Word Events, Perspectives on Verbal Notation, Continuum, 2012
⁵ Jason Kahn, Manfred Werder: on 2005/1 winds measure recordings wm28, booklet of the audio release, 2010
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →