The Composing Body: Naldjorlak and the Nature of Musical Meaning
Rob Casey
The nature of meaning in Western art music has tended to centre on the dispute between
absolutists who contend that music has no meaning outside of the content of the work
itself and referentialists who argue that music alludes to the world beyond, to concepts
and experiences outside of the aural patterns set forth in a piece of music.1 It is, despite
ongoing conjecture, generally accepted that the two viewpoints need not be mutually
exclusive. Musical meaning comes about as a result of a confluence of formal musical
structures and perceptual skill. 2 I will, in this article, explore models of musical
meaning with respect to Eliane Radigue’s composition for solo cello, Naldjorlak. Using
this piece as a point of departure for a discussion of contemporary works that loosely
gather under the umbrella term ‘experimental’ and can, to a greater or lesser degree,
trace their roots to the iconoclasm of John Cage, I will examine the applicability of
theories of meaning to contemporary experimental practices and suggest that the
prevailing duopolistic debate be redrafted to include, at its heart, the actions and
experiences of the performer. I will show that by bringing the music of a composer such
as Radigue into the heart of that debate we enrich both our understanding of the work
and our understanding of the wider question of meaning in music.
Consider Joanna Demers’ description of Kyema, the first movement of Radigue’s
Triologie de la mort, a piece Radigue composed to commemorate the death of her son
in an automobile accident:
[Kyema] begins with the fading in of two sustained but undulating pitches, a
root and its fifth. At around 1:30, a third line enters, a simple melody whose
tonic is one octave above the root of the piece. This melody spins out pitches of
a major scale, with no particular rhythm, trajectory, or development. This
section continues with little variation until around 5:45, when two new sustained
tones enter. By 6:45, all other pitches have begun to fade out except for the new
low tonic. Like the preceding section, this new one spins out a slowly moving
melody an octave above its root, with each line pulsating at a different rate.3
1
Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1956).
2
Nicholas Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 2 (2001): 170-195.
3
Joanne Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 94.
Demers’ attempt to render the music in analytical terms is at odds with Radigue’s own
account of her compositional procedures. Eschewing notions of formal tonal relations
Radigue revels in a process in which there are:
No acceptable intervals to tolerate or obey. No harmonic progression. No
recursion or inverted series, no respect for rules of atonality tending toward
“discordant.” Forget everything to learn again.4
Theorists are not obliged, of course, to let the composer have the last word on what is or
is not meaningful but Radigue’s outright rejection of systemized processes of pitch
organisation should usher studies of her music away from reductionist analytical
description towards other possible processes of engagement. Any such moves will
almost inevitably rely heavily on the historical context in which her music was
conceived. Often associated with the originators of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer
and Pierre Henry, under whom she served an apprenticeship, Radigue’s music is
arguably more a product of the American experimental tradition than Schaeffer’s Studio
d’Essai. Before she herself determined to become a serious composer Radigue
frequently travelled to America in the company of her artist husband Arman. These trips
enabled Radigue to meet and befriend the likes of Marcel Duchamp, James Tenney,
Philip Corner and John Cage. The only surviving work of Radigue’s dating from this
period is a graphic score entitled Asymptote Versatile (1960).5 The score echoes Cage’s
use of overlays and charts in his pieces Fontana Mix (1958) and Cartridge Music
(1960). Having exercised the ire of her mentor Henry with her fascination for tape loops
and feedback it was inevitable when Radigue moved to New York in 1970 that she
would find affinity with the music of local minimalist composers La Monte Young,
Philip Glass and Steve Reich. She became synonymous with drone music but unlike the
static drones employed by Young in pieces such as Composition 1960 No.7 Radigue’s
music is wedded, however imperceptibly, to the process of transformation. In contrast
to Reich who wanted to be able to ‘hear the process happening throughout the sounding
music’6 Radigue’s drone pieces obfuscate the process and play with an illusory sense of
4
Eliane Radigue, ‘The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal’, Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009), 4749.
5
Dan Warburton, ‘An Interview with Eliane Radigue’, Wire Magazine, 260 (2005)
http://redlodge.tumblr.com/post/10308525395/interview-w-eliane-radigue-in-the-wire-260 (accessed 10
September 2012)
6
Steve Reich, ‘Music as Gradual Process’ in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph
Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum International Publishing 2004), 304.
stasis. The listener, as Dan Warburton points out, becomes cognizant of change in her
music only when it has taken place, not as it is happening.7
As befits a composer indebted in one way or another to musique concrète and Cagean
experimentalism Radigue’s pieces blunt the analytical tools of theorists. Irreducibly
whole, her lengthy mutating drone textures resist segmenting. Her musical gestures are
not aggregated from discrete elements as Demers’ description suggests, but exist as
monolithic presences and must be contemplated as such. Within these compositions
absolutists do not find objective syntactical relationships assembled together to create a
greater musical whole but a singular opaque object whose meaning is lost when broken
apart under such analyses. As a result the music of Radigue and many of her
contemporaries will often elicit critical conjecture rooted not in the materiality of the
music but in the perceived stylistic paradigms with which it becomes associated.
Radigue is examined in the context of her formative years as an assistant to Pierre
Henry, her almost singular use of an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer and the influence
New York minimalist composers had on her work. The music is implicitly bound up in
the geographical (Paris, New York), technological (ARP synthesizer) or philosophical
(Buddhist) influences that gave rise to her music. If we accept, however, that meaning
emerges from the binds of both music and social structure then the inability of Demers’
analytical reductionism to divine meaning in Radigue’s musical structures leaves her
compositional output overly reliant on these extra-musical factors to determine its value.
Radigue’s drone textures do not readily lend themselves to reductive analysis, nor does
such an approach, as Radigue’s own testimony indicates, give clues to the creative
impulse that shaped them. We must be able to examine the piece in a way that does not
imply the music is merely a proxy for situating the composer in a compositional or
philosophical school. As Meyer, Goehr and Cook argue, musical meaning cannot be
distilled into either purely absolutist or referentialist terms but arises from a complex
union of both intrinsic and external properties. 8 It would therefore be facile to consider
that meaning lies only outside of the structural properties of Radigue’s music. The
opacity of those structural properties should not deter the search for meaning therein.
7
Dan Warburton, ‘An interview with Eliane Radigue’.
Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music; Lydia Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’, History and Theory 31,
no. 2 (1992): 185; Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’.
8
Arguably it was Europe in the late 20th century, and the UK and Germany in particular,
that was most receptive to the ideas that had matured under the avant-garde of the 1960s
New York School. 9 Since their inception in Germany in 1992 the Wandelweiser
collective of composers have taken Cage’s radical aesthetics concerning sound, duration,
silence and indeterminacy as their point of departure and from fringe avant-garde
beginnings become a pervasive influence on contemporary composed and improvised
music. As with Radigue’s work, long form duration, stasis and almost imperceptible
change play a central role in their music. A legacy of the American avant-garde and an
attribute common to both Radigue and the Wandelweiser composers is that a fixed
analyzable score is not deemed essential to the realization of a compositional idea. In
fact often it is starkly counterproductive. For the Wandelweiser composers the
performer’s ‘singular presence is more important than anything written on the page.’10
Describing the compositional process that was the genesis for a version of his piece
calme étendue for solo cello Wandelweiser member Antoine Beuger illustrates how
experimental music has in many cases, since Cage, redressed the hermeneutical bias of
Western Art music and prioritised instead the embodied experiences of the performer:
[…] my task in composing versions for different instruments then was to find an
activity on the instrument, say on the cello, which reveals something about what
it is to play cello […] the focus not being to find out what variety of sounds may
be produced on a cello, but to find one single activity, which is really about
playing cello, rather than violin or viola or a wind instrument etc. The activity
was the focus, the sound resulting from the activity its natural result: this is how
this activity sounds.11
Beuger delegates responsibility for the work to the sensorimotor experiences of the
performer. The music takes shape, not according to any systemized compositional
process guiding structural relationships, but through the actions of the performer. The
activity is the point. Central to Radigue’s compositional process is a similar elevation of
performance over any reverence for systematic procedures and deterministic scores.
Fixating on the note relations or cultural context gives little insight into the
sensorimotor experiences that are primarily responsible for shaping both her electronic
and instrumental music. Any examination of meaning in her work must be refocused,
9
Michael Pisaro, ‘Wandelweiser’, http://erstwords.blogspot.ie/2009/09/wandelweiser.html
(accessed 12 September 2012).
10
Pisaro, ‘Wandelweiser’.
11
James Saunders, ‘Antoine Beuger’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music ed.
James Saunders (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), 237.
drawn away from the theoretical structures that position the work stylistically and
moved back toward the sense data that is the starting point of the musical experience.
To delve deeply into such music is to examine the mechanics of human behaviour that
are responsible for its production. Attention must be turned to the actions of the
performer whether it is Marcus Kaiser’s actions in performing calme étendue, Charles
Curtis’ in performing Naldjorlak or those of Radigue herself when performing her
electronic music direct to tape. To do so necessitates a move away from the purely
objective toward an understanding of consciousness. The nature of consciousness is
itself, of course, fraught with heated debate and considerable speculation but by
bringing that debate into the realm of aesthetic discourse we begin to formulate
explanatory theories of meaning in contemporary performance.
The competing claims of analytical objectivism and cultural prescription must make
room to accommodate a theory of meaning as action. This article will outline the
increased understanding of the role the body plays in the conscious act, how this
understanding is being assimilated in the work of contemporary artists, the challenges
this presents for theorists and make the case for adapting cultural and analytical models
to incorporate a dynamical distributed layered phenomenology of music. Including
broadly phenomenological principles in the debate on music and meaning will facilitate
more substantial discussions of the experimental forms that have given rise to works
such as Naldjorlak. This renewed approach will begin to account for the way composers
have embraced the determinative role of the biological systems in which their music is
embedded.
Music and Action
Many composers, including Luigi Russolo (Risveglio di Una Citta: 1913), Luciano
Berio (Sequenza V: 1966) and Helmut Lachenmann (Pression: 1969), have
accommodated the performing action in their scores, notating physical gesture instead
of or in addition to traditional notational forms.12 In the 1950s John Cage, Morton
12Juraj
Kojs gives a comprehensive account of the development of action-based scores in his article:
‘Notating Action-Based Music’, Leonardo Music Journal 21 (2011): 65-72.
Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown experimented widely with graphic symbols
and text based scores. Those who fell under the influence of Cagean aesthetics such as
the affiliation of poets, artists and musicians known as Fluxus and later the
aforementioned Wandelweiser collective, have placed the event at the heart of their
practice, focusing on a creative moment in which the art is dynamic and alive, in which
it is ‘happening.’ 13 The notation employed by these composers is viewed as an
incitement to action. The score in these circumstances gives fewer and fewer clues as to
what the music might sound like. As the graphics or prose employed have become
increasingly divorced from what it is to experience the work, musicologists are required
to reorient their discipline away from the artefact, the Werktreue or Notenbild, and
toward the dynamic lived experience of the art as it develops and changes through its
practice. This music raises questions about the lived process at the heart of the music
that critical discourse must engage with. Michael Pisaro remarks of text scores such as
Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South (1972) or Christian Wolff’s Prose Collection
(1968-1971) that ‘one of the characteristics of this music generally is that you do not
really find out how the score functions until you try it out.’14 In the case of Eliane
Radigue’s Nadjorlak the necessity of a fixed score is removed from the equation
altogether and the lived moment is all that marks the music’s existence.15
Naldjorlak
Almost the entirety of Radigue’s oeuvre is synonymous with the ARP synthesizer on
which she began in the 1970s to compose her extended explorations of the subtle
transitions between drone-like sounds. She began in 1955 to work with musique
concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer in his Studio D’Essai on Rue de l’Université in
Paris, and later in 1968 became an assistant to Schaeffer’s colleague Pierre Henry
13
Reflecting on the MOMA exhibition of Fluxus objects and scores, Gillian Young remarks on the
difficulties created by the objectification of material that was intended for physical interaction and user
experience: ‘the museum is an institution governed by tenets of conservation and visual display; inside of
it, the distributed, object-based aspect of Fluxus performance unfortunately and understandably withers.’
Gillian Young, ‘The Score: How Does Fluxus Perform?’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no.
2, (2011): 38-45.
14
Michael Pisaro, ‘Writing Music’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music ed. James
Saunders (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 231-241
15
Of course recordings capture and fix a performance but that is only an instance in the life of the piece
as it is reshaped in each concert situation.
during the creation of his seminal work L’Apocalypse de Jean. Moving away from the
dialectical juxtaposition of recorded sound common to the musique concrète aesthetic,
she began to explore extended durations and rates of change through the use of
feedback and tape loops in works such as Accroméga, Elémental (1968), Usral (1969)
and Opus 17 (1970). In 1971 in New York she discovered the Buchla synthesizer and
then became enchanted with the ARP with which she has composed ever since. Making
no use of the keyboard itself Radigue, after prolonged careful preparation, ‘performs’
her compositions directly to tape, adjusting the potentiometers and filters of the
instrument in real time. 16
In 2005 she began a cycle of three works entitled Naldjorlak for acoustic instruments
which culminated in 2009 with a performance in Bordeaux of a piece for cello and two
basset horns. The title of the work refers to the ‘motion of all life toward unity.’17 The
first piece in this triptych, the starting point for this article, is for solo cello and was
composed for American cellist Charles Curtis. Commenting on the gestation of the
work, Radigue describes the ‘primitive and naïve discovery’ of the sounds of the
instrument being ‘as if we were digging into the depth of the essential nature of the
cello, down to its roots. The score became the whole body of the instrument.’18 The
piece centres on exploring a tuning that unifies the constituent parts of the instrument.
At its heart is the phenomenon of the wolf tone: the overtone arising when a played note
matches the resonating frequency of the body of the cello. It is used in this piece as a
reference point for the tuning of all the resonant parts of the cello. By adjusting either
the length or tension of the tailpiece, endpin and the tailpiece wire Curtis is able to tune
the instrument’s constituent parts according, more or less, to the frequency of the wolf
tone. The wolf tone is, as Curtis remarks, somewhat hostile to his efforts to use it as a
fixed reference point:
The wolf tone itself is to some degree tuneable, it slides up and down a bit in
response to greater and lesser overall string tension. If one of the cello strings is
tuned exactly to unison with the wolf tone, the wolf tone evades that frequency
and settles nearby. This may be due to sympathetic resonances cancelling the
16
The tactile compositional processes employed by Radigue can be viewed in the film produced by the
Austrian Institute for Media Archaeology, ‘A Portrait of Eliane Radigue’, http://vimeo.com/8983993
(accessed 10 September 2012).
17
Annea Lockwood, ‘Sound Explorations: Windows into the Physicality of Sound’, Leonardo Music
Journal 19 (2009): 44-45.
18
Garden Variety, ‘Program Notes: Naldjorlak’,
http://www.gardenvariety.org/projects/radigue/notes.html (accessed 12 September 2012)
strong beating frequency of the wolf tone. I tune the cello in a kind of consensus
tuning, getting everything near, but not too near, to the wolf tone, then adjusting
the other elements accordingly. Every adjustment of a single element causes
changes in the other elements, but over time it is possible to get everything in a
very close range, within a small semitone at any rate.19
No written instructions exist to direct the performance of the piece. The music emerged
from close negotiations between composer and performer. It is not intended that the
piece be performed by anyone other than Curtis, thus negating the need for any written
points of reference. Naldjorlak is comprised of three sections. The first begins with a
continuous drone on the C string tuned two octaves down. Over the course of an
indeterminate period Curtis works upwards toward (but never exactly achieving), a
unison frequency with the cello’s wolf tone. This game of cat and mouse with the
instrument’s wolf tone is the second section of the piece. In section three Curtis moves
on to bowing the tailpiece, endpin and tailpiece wire before bringing the composition to
an end. The duration of each section is not pre-determined but has been left at Curtis’
discretion. This is a short descriptive account of what takes place during a performance
of Naldjorlak. As with Demers’ reductive analysis of Kyema parsing the music into a
sequence of objective events gives few clues to a depth of meaning bound up in the
actions that determine these structures. Before examining the degree to which
Naldjorlak. supports either referentialist or absolutist claims on its meaning it is
instructive to examine the roots of our understanding of meaning itself.
Meaning and Music
The competing claims that absolute and extra-musical theories have on meaning in
music have been at the heart of musicology for more than 200 years.20 During this
period musical meaning has drifted between the two determining stools of social
context and artistic absolutism. Prior to the nineteenth century music was largely
dependent on the cultural context of its reception for its meaning. Meaning was not
19
20
Garden Variety, ‘Program Notes: Naldjorlak’.
Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’.
viewed as intrinsic to the musical properties of a given work but was tethered to the
social, political or religious function that it performed.
This began to change when the enlightenment ideals of the late 18th century heralded a
move toward artistic absolutism. The advent of the ‘art for art’s sake’ credo advocated
purging music of its utilitarian role. A distilled, pure form of expression was sought to
replace the didactic functional music that preceded it. Out of the move toward musical
absolutism emerged two strands of theoretical doctrine: transcendentalism which
detached music from its socially construed meaning by raising it to a level of spiritual
significance and formalism which turned the search for meaning increasingly inward
toward the essential structures of the form. Following a period in the 19th century when
claims about the meaning of musical works were being made without recourse to
objective analysis, transcendentalism fell out of favour and formalism remained into the
early 20th century as the arbiter of musical value and meaning. Absolutism encouraged
composers to formalise an axiomatic rule-governed system that would became the basis
for fixed incontrovertible musical meaning. This drive for absolute music reached its
apotheosis under Serialism. Serialism enabled axiomatic first principles of composition,
in the form of pitch class relations, to undergo increasingly complex compound
operations. By adhering to objectivist principles Serialists ensured that meaning could
endure the most intricate algorithmic abstractions. From humble beginnings a complex
edifice of ‘transcendent rationality’ could be constructed. This compositional process
guaranteed the analyst that within the thicket of symbolism there was rational
transcendent meaning awaiting discovery.
The drive for musical absolutism required a period of self-examination in music in
which the properties of the form could be recontextualised.21 In order to formulate an
absolute art form it was important to clearly delineate between what was musical and
what was extra-musical. This necessitated discriminating between the referential
properties that were not thought constitutive of the musical core and the structural
properties that defined it. Referential properties such as the perceived expressive
qualities of a piece of music were seen as being arbitrarily imposed on a work whereas
the sounding structural properties such as the pitches and rhythms belonged directly to
21
Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’.
it. Under this essentialist doctrine any given property must belong to one of these two
mutually exclusive categories. To admit cross-category membership of any property
would compromise the integrity and purity of the form. Despite repeated and concerted
efforts to clearly define the criteria for musical and non-musical properties no consensus
was achieved and this exercise in musical taxonomy rumbled on without resolving the
debate on musical meaning in favour of either absolutism or referentialism.
Meaning in music has since become a more nebulous concept that relies on the formal
structures of music and the cultural and psychoacoustic factors that condition our
reception of those structures. The immutable line between musical and extra musical
categories that absolutists craved has been replaced with a more permeable boundary.
The 1990s saw an increasing adherence amongst musicologists to a predominantly
culturally determined view of meaning.22 Giving up on the idea of absolute musical
meaning theorists moved away from the authority of the score, advocating an
interpretative multiplicity over and above the primacy of any singular objective truth.
This perspective inevitably is vulnerable to the charge of arbitrarily imposing extramusical phenomena upon intrinsic structural properties. The problem, as Nicholas Cook
sees it, is that there is a lack of substantive theory to explain how the musical properties
lend credibility to the more imaginative interpretations it elicits. The absence of an
empirical framework to constrain the more fanciful interpretations of a musical work
raises questions regarding the possibility of informed, objective discussion determining
the value or significance of any given work. Cook argues that this trend in ‘culturally
oriented musicology’ presents interpretation as musical fact, as if the meaning of a work
is harvested directly from the structural materials and not the cultural context of its
creation. Echoing the longstanding ‘binding problem’ at the heart of cognitive science
Cook points out that there is not enough examination of the nature of the binds that link
formal internal structures to the socially constructed tropes that together colour our
musical experiences. For Cook the use of expressive language in critical theory gives no
clue as to how the musical material supports the interpretative discourse imposed on it.
In an attempt to tackle this issue Cook draws on Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of
conceptual blending which outlines how meaning emerges from a fusion of both
22
Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’
structural and cultural elements. Conceptual blending presupposes a structural similarity
between two independent domains. For example, spatial and frequency domains in
music have long been linked by a perceived structural similarity. Zbikowski has given a
comprehensive account of the role cross domain mapping plays in enabling us to
conceptually embed music in physical space:
Correlating musical pitches with vertically oriented, two-dimensional space, for
instance, leads quite naturally to an imaginary world in which pitches become
things that move through space: the successive notes of a scale gradually
descend and ascend; in other passages, some notes leap, while still others fall.23
Musical structures will not support the arbitrary imposition of extra-musical properties.
There must be a perceptible link between domains, as otherwise no conceptual blending
will occur. The structural properties common to both domains will create a ‘blended
space’ that also enables the perceiver to fuse the properties unique to each contributing
domain. Just as the qualitative property of water, its wetness, is characteristic of neither
of the reactants hydrogen or oxygen the emergent quality of our musical experience
may not be represented in either the musical or social structures that combine in our
experience of a work. The qualitative experience is not always evident in the building
blocks of that experience.
While a musical work ‘affords’ an assortment of possible interpretations, meaning is
still constrained by the perceptual, cultural and material structures that interact in
creating qualitative experience. Meaning is not present within the work but is negotiated
via its interaction with social and perceptual structures.
Cook characterises music as an object awaiting the meaning conferred by linguistic
interpretation. He separates meaning out, classifying it as either ‘potential’ or ‘actual’.
Potential meaning he regards as pre-reflective, ‘not already semanticized.’24 Potential
meaning is rooted in the felt experience, the pre-conceptual physically grounded
engagement with music. Linguistic interpretation actualizes the potential meaning of
that felt experience. Cook implies that meaning is hierarchically determined with
semantic interpretation substantiating the opportunity for meaning that felt experience
23
Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory and Analysis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 65.
24
Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, 188.
affords. He makes the analogy with hearing a foreign language: ‘you do not grasp the
meaning, but you do sense its meaningfulness.’25 The physical nature of the experience
creates an amorphous background of potentiality from which conceptual meaning is
plucked.
Describing pre-reflective experience as ‘potentially’ meaningful and comparing it to a
language with which we are unfamiliar erroneously diminishes the role our
sensorimotor experience plays in formulating meaning. Positing the notion that
language makes up some apparent shortfall of information in sense experience perhaps
suggests an inadequate description of sense experience rather than any meaning
deficiencies inherent in proprioceptive experience. To suggest that the information
encoded in our physical interactions with the world is, in the absence of conceptual
decoding, no more meaningful to us than an unfamiliar language would question
whether sense perception is a suitable way for maintaining connections with our
surroundings. Experimental music challenges the hierarchy of this model.
Although the structural framework for Naldjorlak is set, Radigue ensures the felt
experience of the performer within those structures is central to determining the work.
This music subverts what Merleau-Ponty describes as the ‘body as transmitter’
viewpoint and reinstates the body to the core of rational thought. Rejecting the passive
role ascribed to the body Merleau-Ponty states:
The sensible is what is apprehended with the senses, but now we know that this
“with” is not merely instrumental, that the sensory apparatus is not a conductor,
that even on the periphery the physiological impression is involved in relations
formerly considered central.26
Radigue does not use the cellist Charles Curtis as a body through which she can
transmit her ideas outward but involves Curtis in determining the structures of those
ideas. In addition to structural and cultural signifiers the sensorimotor experience of the
performer is, for composers such as Radigue charged with meaning. Meaning is unique
to the performer’s body but is inscribed upon it in a way that suggests embodied
meaning is more ‘actual’ than ‘potential.’ In order to enrich our understanding of the
music it is necessary to explore the level at which meaning is bound up in those
25
Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, 185.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1962), 10.
26
physical actions. Following on from Cook’s assertion that musicology must examine the
way in which music may support the meanings ascribed to it, Radigue’s work
necessitates the close examination of the role the body plays in formulating meaning in
the first place. Theorists must examine how the performer’s actions may be
accommodated in any reasoned debate on meaning in music. Philip Thomas remarks
that experimental music in particular would be well served by a more comprehensive
theory of performance:
Literature (scholarly or otherwise) relating to experimental music on the whole
focuses upon issues of compositional technique, notation and aesthetics.
Through necessity, performance issues are discussed but these are generally
restricted to descriptions of the performer’s task (almost by default, the nature of
much of the music requires analytical discussion to revolve around the
implications and realisation of the score). However, what the performer actually
does, rather than what she is required to do, is a theme that needs
investigating.27
With the adoption of action-based scores, indeterminism and aleatoric techniques in the
20th century, composers and theorists are no longer modeling systems of Newtonian
determinacy but are confronted directly with the problem of contending with, as
Thomas points out, what the performer is doing. Employing elements of improvisation
as well as graphic, indeterminate and action-based scores renders music inescapably
worldly. The Werktreue is subjected to continual and often radical reshaping by the
circumstances of its performance. Central to this process is the performing experience,
human consciousness and what James Gleick describes as ‘the mind’s capacity for selfreflection, self-reference, self-comprehension; the dynamical and fluid creation of
concepts and associations.’28
The intrinsic properties of Naldjorlak were not systematically fixed but came about
through a collaborative process between composer and performer. Prioritising the doing
over the fixed artefact in this piece, Radigue initiates a feedback loop comprising the
actions of Curtis and the responses of the instrument which, like a dynamical system,
orbit the initial conditions set down by the composer and the tuning of the instrument
tending toward the final ‘unity’ that the title describes. For Radigue the creative process
is not dependant on structural systems or cultural codification for meaning but, as will
27
Philip Thomas, ‘A Prescription for Action’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental
Music, ed. James Saunders (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), 78.
28
James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (London: Abacus, 1994), 314.
be made clear, on qualitative experience. John Dewey contends that ‘to think effectively
in terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms
of symbols, verbal and mathematical.’29 It is incumbent on musicology to meet those
demands and examine qualitative experience and the way in which meaning is infused
in, and directs, the actions of the performer.
Action as Language in Performance
In Naldjorlak, Radigue employs an embodied process of composition, exploring a
holistic approach to creating music in place of the model that builds upon localised
musical functions. Naldjorlak describes a phenomenology of composition, exploring the
mind, body and environment in which the music is embedded. The piece evolves
through the symbiotic relationship Curtis experiences with his environment during
performance. Radigue comments that the piece invites him to ‘tame’ the ‘wild and frail,
versatile and volatile world of sounds.’30 In attempting to chart a Husserlian course
between the opposing poles of descriptive and experiential musical discourse it becomes
necessary to counter assertions that in the face of the primacy of experience, there
remains no valid reason to describe the musical event. What value could be found in
reducing a primarily experiential discipline to semiotic discourse if, in the absence of
bodily experience, it fails to retain meaning in the transition? The actions of Charles
Curtis in realising Naldjorlak are meaningful independent of the universal intelligibility
that ex- post-facto description may attach. Descriptive representation appears only to
fulfill the role of fixing strategies of engagement and filtering experience of the work
through socially construed language. This, critics might contend, strains away the
sensorial experience guiding the artwork. In the absence of composed determined
systems, the guiding principle of a work and by extension, its meaning, would often
appear worryingly solipsistic, to be internal to the performer, that is to say, not to be
experienced in common with anyone else. How, in the absence of a mediating symbolic
language, does the experience that lends the piece its structure acquire meaning? For the
work to be meaningful only to the performing subject it seems necessary for the subject
to appeal to a language original to itself. In the absence of a private subjective language
we are left only with the shared symbolic language we adopt to describe sense
experience thus negating the concept of internal, private experience.
29
30
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 46.
Garden Variety, ‘Program Notes: Naldjorlak’.
Theorists grapple to find a way to bridge the dichotomous gap between dynamic,
sensorial experience and its description. Voeglin argues for a phenomenological
philosophy of sound that embraces the intersubjectivity of the act of listening, a
philosophy of participation that has at its centre the immersive experience of an object
rather than descriptive or explanatory language normally used to objectify and
disseminate the experience of that object.31 As mentioned above, theorists often favour
meeting this challenge by embedding the work in the trappings of extra-musical rhetoric
rooted in social or cultural theory, thereby relativising the experience at the expense of
the phenomenological nature of the encounter. The question, as Voeglin illustrates, is
whether phenomenology and semiotics can co-exist in a meaningful account of sound
art.32 Does one depend on or inform the other or is the gap between experience and
description an unbridgeable one? In the absence of semiotics how does the
phenomenological experience become meaningful and how can, or does, it matter
whether the unspeakable experience is constituted in symbolic language? Language, it
appears, is in direct conflict with the embodied nature of the performing actions in
Naldjorlak and other experimental works whether they be improvised or verbally or
textually prescribed. The deliberate foregrounding of action and experience in music
has led directly to the marginalisation of prescriptive scores. Musicians have found that
anchoring embodied meaning to symbolic meaning inhibits not only critical but
compositional practice. Their music is determinedly worldly. It is set in train by a
process that reflects what Merleau-Ponty would regard as the ontological flesh of our
being, not just in, but of the world, back to us. 33 In a discussion of fixed and
indeterminate scores David Tudor comments:
if I play music … where I’m called upon to make actions, especially if the
actions are undetermined as to their content, or at least let’s say undetermined as
31
Salome Voeglin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (London:
Continnum Books, 2010).
32
This question has also been a focus for ethnomusicologists such as Harris Berger and Steven Friedson.
Should we, as Friedson ponders, dismiss ‘what people are telling us, and once again, begin to listen along
with them’?
Steven M. Friedson, Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2009), 10.
33
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
to what they’re going to produce, then I feel like I’m alive in every part of my
consciousness.34
Naldjorlak is composition by practice, by action, embedded in place and experience,
freed from notions of music as artefact or product (Ergon). In its place is the resumption
of music as a primarily experiential activity (Energeia).35 The work is constituted in the
actions of Charles Curtis as he actively engages his environment. Consciousness
constitutes the presence of the object from the raw materials made available to it by his
sensorimotor engagement with the world. The act and the piece are therefore mutually
determinative. The dynamic constitution of the piece is dependent on the directedness of
the performing or listening action and the music as object, being the focus of those
actions, determines the meaning of the act.
The body is at the centre of this creative practice taking the score as call to action, and
embracing its own agency in the aesthetic moment. It is not dependent on descriptive or
prescriptive language supplied by critic or composer for legitimation but authoritatively
construes meaning in the doing propelled by the modulating feedback loops informing
and being determined by the performer’s fleshy being. Meaning emerges from the
incitement of this loop and the effort expelled in its creation and preservation. The aim
of performance is not to fix the work in its totality, crystallizing it as werktreue or
notenbild but to inhabit the aesthetic moment in every performance and by doing so
become complicit in the intersubjective creation of the work anew.36
Voeglin asserts that critical language is not, as it would pretend to be, transparent
structure but describes it, in Heideggerian terms, as having its own tendency toward
speech. Speech is, Voeglin points out, its own practice, ‘a thing thinging’. Following
Merleau-Ponty, she contends that critical language must avoid translating or extending
the experience in speech but must, as speech accomplishes thought, achieve sensorial
engagement with the work. As a phenomenological enterprise it should reveal the
meaningful structures of experience and eschew its role as an explanatory or deductive
34
David Tudor and John Cage interviewed by Mogens Andersen in a broadcast of Danmarks Aradio on 3
June 1963. Featured on the CD David Tudor – Music for piano, ed.RZ 1018-19 (2007): Quoted in Philip
Thomas, ‘A Prescription for Action’, 77.
35
Benson explores in detail the idea of Ergon and Energeia with respect to fixed notation. Bruce Ellis
Benson, The improvisation of musical dialogue: a phenomenology of music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
36
In a conversation with Curtis he indicated that the ‘piece is in the making of the sound.’
mediator of artistic experience. The artwork is subjected to the suffocating weight of a
priori socio-political and cultural meaning, rendering the dynamic experiential nature of
the work mute in its smothering embrace. The performing experience and the
sensorimotor nature of it, while being of course intimately familiar to those performing
the actions, remains, as Louis Armstrong asserted, obscured from propositional
language.37 This article is not concerned with the semiotics attached to experience in
order to actualize what Cook refers to as the ‘potential meaning’ found therein but with
the degree to which those experiences can be construed as meaningful irrespective of
linguistic interpretation. The performer’s experience of a work plots a course between
scientific inquiry and the immanent inner realm of consciousness that Husserl describes.
For the musician performance is infused with a level of meaning that reveals its
ephemeral nature in the face of linguistic accuracy, evading both scientific precision and
poetic expression, leaving both critical and compositional theory with a crisis of
confidence.
The problem is that at the level of conceptual awareness we do not perceive discrete
packets of experience, abstracted from the environment. The experience of the
performing action is not extracted from the action, existing independently of the
performing body and made available for conceptual reflection. For the performer the
experience is the action, it is the movement that elicits sound from the environment and
is inextricably interwoven with it.38 It is imprinted on the body as it moves through the
environment and cannot be extricated from it in order for us to achieve consciousness of
it. When the experience is mediated by language the perception becomes untethered
from the ‘impression’ of that experience. Merleau-Ponty highlights the problem faced
by artistic discourse when he says that the ‘structure of actual perception alone can
teach us what perception is.’ Our conception of the perceived experience is constructed
when ‘we overlook it in favour of the object perceived.’39 This mirrors Armstrong’s
insight into the pointlessness of trying to define jazz. It is the nature of the perceiving
act to remain obscured from consciousness, ‘a dialectic whereby perception hides itself
37
Armstrong’s possibly apocryphal response to an entreaty to define jazz was ‘man, if you have to ask
you’ll never know.’ Steven C. Tracy, ‘A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory and the Power to Weld
Fragments’ in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison ed. Steven C. Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2004), 95.
38
When I asked Charles Curtis to what degree did he view performing as a physical or mental act his
response was: ‘Physical, all physical.’
39
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 4
from itself.’40 These experiential structures are embedded in rational scientific thought,
and critical discourse acting as a descriptive methodological call to action can bring to
light the pre-conceptual experiential structures that endow rational discourse with
meaning. To admit the immersive perceptual experience and meaning produced in the
performance of Naldjorlak into critical discourse it is necessary to navigate a course
between a phenomenological and a semiotic language. Is there pre-conceptual meaning
at the heart of experiential structures that can contribute to an aesthetic sensibility that
makes room for the intersubjective constitution of works like Naldjorlak?
The intentional structures implicit in the character of the work direct consciousness
outward toward the material world. In doing so the music comes to rely heavily on the
underlying sensory background that inform judgement making. The performance is not
a dialectical collection of events, a sequence of actions or judgements, but a space or
place that orients the musical experience through bodily behaviour towards material
objects in the world. It advocates a ‘freedom to … be overwhelmed, submerged in a
continuous sound flow where perceptual acuity is heightened through the discovery of a
certain slight beating, there in the background, pulsations, breath.’41 This is what makes
the performance meaningful to the performer. The performer’s perception of the work is
rooted neither in sensation nor judgement. The experience is immersive: Curtis
perceives the sound, the flow, the totality of the event as it is constituted in his
experience of it, not the sensation of vibrating air molecules on the ear drum as they
resonate from the cavity of the instrument.42
As percepts are products of the cognitive process and objects do not exist in the way
they are ultimately perceived (we do not perceive acoustic vibrations or neural synapses
firing) the system of internal representation of an external reality offers no account of
how the percept comes about from the material nature of the performing experience in
40
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 58
Radigue, ‘The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal’, 49.
42
The ‘binding problem’ which plagues theories of internalised representation requires neural patterns to
be matched to the external stimulus from which the percept is constructed. Skarda renders the problem
redundant by arguing that the phenomenal basis for the percept exists as a whole already within the
organism. She stresses the distinction between this model and subjectivism by rejecting the interiority of
subjectivism in favour of a system that retains the necessarily interdependent nature of the perceived and
physical reality thus binding the interior and exterior in a way that contradicts the ‘internal sphere of
reality’ advocated by subjectivist accounts of consciousness. Christine Skarda, ‘The Perceptual Form of
Life’, in Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion, ed. Rafael Núñez and
Walter J. Freeman (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999), 79-93.
41
the first place. A cognitivist model of consciousness as the basis for performing actions
therefore does little to elucidate the sensorial experience that shapes the work. The
actions undertaken in the course of performance play a crucial role in articulating the
percept but the ‘phenomenal basis’ of the percept, the raw material from which it is
constructed (acoustic vibrations) has already been apprehended by the organism and
awaits articulation by the neural network.43 Neither is perception, as intellectualism
contends, grounded by judgment.44 Intellectualism can make no distinction between the
phenomenal basis of perception and judgment. Perception, intellectualists contend, is
not passive reception but equates to judgment of what is given in experience.
Intellectualists thus tend toward a Cartesian view of perception, stipulating that objects
are perceived not by the senses but by the mind. The sense data is fixed and determinate
and judgment of that data characterises our experiences of it. According to this
perspective omitting belief or judgment from perception absents the performer or
listener from the experience in its entirety. Merleau-Ponty rejects any unification of
judgment and perception, arguing that the two remain distinguishable in everyday
experience:
Ordinary experience draws a very clear distinction between sensing and
judgment. For it judgment is the taking of a position, it aims at knowing
something valid for me at every moment of my life, and for other minds, actual
or possible; sensing, by contrast, is giving oneself over to appearance without
trying to possess it and know its truth.45
Eliane Radigue’s extended, repeating drones enable the performer to give himself over
to the music without recourse to judgment, or taking an intellectual position. Giving up
fixed objective systems and moving music toward the pre-reflective, embodied naiveté
that Radigue suggests is the starting point of her compositional process does not
relinquish the music’s claims on meaning. Immanent meaning is contingent on the
embodied qualitative nature of the performer’s experiences.
The work is made manifest by both intentional and bodily perception of the world, it is
neither subjective nor objective, neither wholly internal nor external but an irreducible
phenomenon constituting our being of the world. The performance is experienced not as
a state of mind but as a state of being, determined by the sensorimotor structures of the
43
Skarda, ‘Perceptual Form of Life’, 84.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
45
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 34.
44
body. There is no linear causal connection between response and stimulus but the two
coincide as part of a circular structure of experience. In performance the stimulus, in the
form of the response of the instrument and the room acoustic, determines movement,
and Curtis’ movement determines the stimulus. Performing actions anticipate responses
from the environment and modulate subsequent actions according to the anticipation of
desired input. Through a preferred posture, hand position, or an inclination of the head
in concentration the performer adjusts his equilibrium in order to afford optimal
perception of the environment. The ‘unthinking’ way we adjust our bodies in this
manner not only signifies a causal link between our bodies and perception but grounds
perception in a background of ‘lived through meanings which moves towards its
equilibrium.’46 The assertion is not that that the composition links the performing body
and the environment via a causal relationship but that it ensures body and environment
coincide as part of a circular phenomenological structure.
Musical Meaning Embodied in Performance
Mark Johnson contends that meaning, reason, rationality, inference and imagination are
all rooted in structures of bodily experience.47 Johnson argues that the manner in which
our bodies extend in space and the way in which we engage and manipulate objects
generates patterns or ‘image schemata’ that, once reinforced by experience, give rise to
expectation and anticipation. These image schemata serve as the basis for the
conceptual systems we develop in order to make sense of the world. Countering
objectivist assertions that rationality is propositional and algorithmic, Johnson
formulates a compelling argument for embodied, non-propositional image-schematic
structures as the basis for the metaphoric projections that structure the abstract
reasoning essential for inferential and creative thought. While objectivists may argue
that image schema can be broken down further and be shown to be propositional in
nature Johnson argues that
such finitary representations will not capture their analogue nature and the
crucial role they play in image-schematic transformations [such as] scanning an
image, tracing out the probable trajectory of a force vector, superimposing one
schema upon another, and taking a multiplex cluster of entities and contracting it
into a homogeneous mass.48
46
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 153.
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
48
Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 4
47
While Curtis would be able to describe his relationship to the cello throughout the three
sections of the piece in propositional terms, the felt awareness he has of the instrument
and environment is non-propositional in nature. This qualitative sensing of the physical
world is fundamental to the contemporary act of performance, but its essence is elusive
to both analysts and composers as it cannot be reduced to literal propositional
description.49
The graphic score is often employed to serve as a bridge between traditional
propositional musical structures and the embodied environmentally driven act of
improvisation and often does so by graphically tracing vector trajectories that may be
interpreted as glissandi in the case of Cage’s Ryoanji (1983-85) or spatial relations in
Earle Brown’s December 1952 that are open to any number of pitch or temporal
relations. The dynamic felt patterns that describe the performing experience central to
the realisation of this music form a pattern that is non-literal and figurative in nature. It
delivers a degree of meaning to the performer that is not always clear to the observer.
This opacity leads Cook, as an observer, to begin differentiating between ‘potential’ and
‘actual’ categories of musical meaning.50 The performer has no such use for delineating
levels of meaning. The performer of timbre-based indeterminate music does not
experience the performance in terms of the ordering of finitary predicate and argument
symbols that would for Cook constitute ‘actual’ meaning, but through the physical
enactment and experience of forces in performance. Curtis’ embodied experiences of
these force structures negotiate a dialogue with his environment that enables him to
discern patterns in the environment that, in turn, allow him to ‘develop meaning
structures’51 Conceptual structures that inform approaches to performance, tonal or
serial, determinate or indeterminate perspectives suggest an objectivity that exists as a
shared culturally agreed construct. However the ‘image structure’ from which meaning
is inferred perhaps somewhat independently or at least in addition to externally shared
concepts is embodied in the performer. It is true that meaning does not exist entirely
independently of external factors such as cultural tradition, linguistic community or
stylistic convention, but viewing performance through the prism of those social forces
offers only a context with which to frame an individual work. The detail within this
49
This may account for Curtis’ view, expressed in conversation, that he was unsure he could ‘teach’ the
piece to other cellists.
50
Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’.
51
Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 13.
framework remains largely untended by such discourse. In a comment that is analogous
to Pisaro’s observation that understanding the scores of Wolff and Lucier comes only
through ‘trying them out,’ Johnson contends that ‘understanding […] involves our
whole being.’52 In addition to our being embedded in a socio-cultural and linguistic
community, our physical capacities and well-being, emotions and attitudes play a
determining role in our comprehension of our existence in the world.
The repetition of bodily movements in constituting a work imbues the performer’s
actions with meaning and a comprehensibility that objectivism cannot account for with
formalised logical systems. Alongside shared cultural, social or aesthetic concepts their
repeated physical actions are fundamental to shaping the structures they employ in order
to guide their interaction with an instrument, their environment and other musicians.
Objectivism discusses only that which can be empirically shown to be part of the world.
Echoing Merleau-Ponty, Johnson argues that the metaphorical nature of the image
schemas he refers to are ‘structures in our understanding and experience of the world
and, as such, are not ordinarily part of the world, and, as such, are not ordinarily part of
our self-reflective awareness, though they are part of our awareness.’ They can properly
be called ‘structures of understanding’ because they are patterns in terms of which we
‘have a world,’ which is what is meant by ‘understanding’ in its broadest sense.’53
Meaning and Motor Intentionality
John Searle argues that meaning arises only when intentionality is conferred on a
symbol, word, image or concept. 54
Sounds or arbitrary symbols may become
meaningful when a person or persons confer intentionality on them. Intentionality, as
Searle describes it, enables a concept to be directed at an object or event in the real
world. Intentionality attaches ‘conditions of satisfaction’ to a mental state, such as hope,
joy, fear or hate, by directing the mental state towards an object or event in the world.
‘…my belief ‘that it is raining’ has as its conditions of satisfaction (i.e., what would
make it true) that it is raining outside. My desire ‘for a cold drink’ has as its conditions
satisfaction my obtaining a cold drink.’55 We direct our mental states toward sounds,
52
Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 102.
Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 82-83.
54
David Borgo, Sync or Swarm, Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2005),
177.
55
Borgo, Sync or Swarm, Improvising Music in a Complex Age, 180
53
objects, symbols or events and by doing so confer meaning on them. Key to Cook,
Johnson and Searle’s account of meaning is that meaning must be mediated by human
intentionality and understanding. Meaning does not reside in the objective relationship
between symbols and the observable world but is created by the individual through the
imposition of direction on the mental state toward some objects or ‘states of affairs’ in
the world. Linguistic meaning, for example, comes about through just such an
imposition direction of mental states toward vocal utterances or notational symbols.
Contained within those linguistic structures must be conditions of satisfaction and the
psychological state expressed in executing the communicative act such as belief, desire
etc.56 The human intentionality that Searle and Johnson attribute to illocutionary acts are,
they maintain, responsible for conferring meaning on language. They assert that
objectivist theories that posit a de facto relationship between sentence structure and
‘states of affairs’ cannot offer a satisfactory account of meaning.
Behind a network of intentional states, according to Searle, there is a Background of
pre-intentional, non-representational shared structures, such as those physical skills that
we bring to bear on the world. These physical skills elude objective description.57 The
Network ‘fades off’ into the pre-conceptual Background that constitutes these preconceptual abilities. Searle contends that the Background is meaningless because the
non-representational structures of which it is comprised do not allow for a distinction
between intentional content and a form of externalisation. Nor do pre-intentional
structures posit any condition of satisfaction. Johnson argues that Searle’s refusal to
confer meaning on pre-intentional structures is a convenient way of drawing the curtain
around the problem before it becomes infinitely extended. ‘The Background terminates
the quest for further explanation by serving as a ‘given’ of physical skills and stances
that claims to need no further analysis, since it is not intentional.’58 Johnson denies a
neat division of labour between Background and Network arguing that pre-intentional
structures extend into the cognitive domain and are employed in navigating the
conceptual vicissitudes of abstract reasoning.
56
John R. Searle, ‘Meaning, Intentionality and Speech Acts’ in John Searle and his Critics, ed. Ernest
Leopre and Robert Van Gulick (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1991)
57
Johnson, The Body in the Mind.
58
Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 187
For Searle intentionality posits the notion of representational content being directed
toward something in the world. It has an about-ness that the pre-conceptual background
does not. He believes that each movement involved in goal oriented action is subsumed
by the overarching intentionality of the action.59 The act of skiing has as its condition of
satisfaction, Searle argues, the goal of arriving safely at the bottom of the mountain. All
the subsidiary actions involved in achieving that goal are governed by the ‘flow’ created
by the over-arching logical intentional structure.
Dreyfus points out that Merleau-Ponty rejects that a person’s movements be governed
by the intentionality and the associated conditions of satisfaction to which Searle refers.
Putting forward an argument that tallies more readily with a phenomenological thesis of
performance Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is drawn towards equilibrium without
being consciously aware of what that equilibrium is before it is achieved. ‘The
performer is solicited by the situation to perform a series of movements that feel
appropriate without the agent needing in any way to anticipate what would count as
success.’60 Citing research by Freeman, Dreyfus notes that the ‘brain does not form
conditioned responses to specific stimuli but, on the basis of experience, it produces its
own attractors which are evoked and modified on the basis of further experience.’61
Recalling in an interview an occasion when two students approached her to remark on
her work, Radigue exclaims:
They came up to me and said: “You do realise that it’s not you creating your
music” And that suddenly made sense to me. I’d always considered that I was
only following the sound, doing what the sound told me to do. I know where I
start from and where I have to get to, but it’s the material itself that determines
the duration.62
In tending toward equilibrium, the performer is responding, reinforced by experience, to
the solicitations of the environment in which they are embedded. We are not
‘transported toward a point in space of which we have formed a representation
59
Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Husserl’s and Searle’s Representationalist
Accounts of Action’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 287-302.
60
Dreyfus, ‘A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Husserl’s and Searle’s Representationalist Accounts of
Action’, 294.
61
Dreyfus, ‘A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Husserl’s and Searle’s Representationalist Accounts of
Action’, 297.
62
Dan Warburton, ‘An interview with Eliane Radigue’.
beforehand.’63 The body is solicited to act by the environment without any need of
representation.
Concluding Remarks
It is incumbent on any comprehensive theory of meaning in music to ask if existing
discourse is applicable to practices in the non-tonal, non-virtuosic forms engaged in by
experimental practitioners. In addition to the sociological and aesthetic considerations
that guide the music’s creation it is pertinent to ask if, given the limitations of
objectivist and cognitivist models of inquiry, alternative models may contribute to our
understanding of the mechanics of performance in contemporary action-oriented music.
While composers have long conceived musical structures as propositional in nature,
atomistic constructions comprised of argument symbols (notes) and their predicate
functions (the contextual properties and relations of those symbols), contemporary
practice prioritises a physically driven act of creation more in keeping with embodied
descriptions of cognitive systems.
An objective description of musical structures, such as Demers’ account of Radigue’s
Kyema necessitates that the subjective experience is actively weeded out leaving,
ideally, only the observable mind-independent reality of those relationships notated in
either a musical score or recording. Loosening the binds of the Werktreue concept,
experimental music charts a path down the dichotomous gap between the internal
disembodied autonomous agent of the music’s creation and critical objectivism.
Theorists must engage a process of description that has human experience at its heart. A
performer’s experience is rooted in pre-conceptual bodily phenomena and the
musician’s proprioceptive awareness of her body. In Radigue’s Naldjorlak the body
does not act as a mere interface between compositional or intentional content and
external world but rather, in the absence of notation, constitutes the work in its
ontological form. The structure of the work, its realisation and reception, and to a large
degree, its meaning, are not just affected by the body but in phenomenological terms
constituted by it.
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http://erstwords.blogspot.ie/2009/09/wandelweiser.html Accessed 12 September 2012
Austrian Institute for Media Archaeology, A Portrait of Eliane Radigue,
http://vimeo.com/8983993 Accessed 10 September 2012