Re: [microsound] toplap_manifesto

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

List et al,

I'm intrigued by a music manifesto that seems to call for a "pure music" but
then focuses on code -- as a language -- and then calls for the revelation
of the screen.

The screen is not the piano; the screen is a camera placed inside the piano,
viewing the tuning of the strings. This comparison fails, however, because
the laptop is a much more complex beast.

For these two elements--the screen and language--bring music "far outside
itself." In fact, it reveals that Western music has been primarily focused
on authoring and writing music over playing it. So far outside itself, in
fact, that we reach back inside. The screen is the ultimate writing pad,
en/coded only for those who know how to read it. It is the ultimate display
of written authority: here is my text, here are my "haptic" finger skills
blatantly typing away. Thus, under the same coda, the entirety remains
"obscurantist" and "dangerous" until we can see, understand and manipulate
the very code of the machine itself and all of its parts down to the binary
code. 10100101010101111000.

Which is in part what Cory Arcangel was driving at with the Beige project
and the 8-bit Construction set record and all that:
    http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/
    http://www.beigerecords.com/

Cultures that don't author music via tonal-point notation, such as, for
example, call-and-response based music (often African), often engage in a
participatory relation to music (dance/ritual/movement/social). It is a mark
of Xenakis' colonialism that he thinks that Happenings etc. bring music
"outside itself;" on the contrary, they exhibit a relation to a differential
system of inscription (one of the "griot," the storyteller, of collective
ownership sans identifiable property or possessor, to bring in a term from
Dj Spooky's recent book, _Rhythm Science_). One might even be tempted,
although it would be the wrong direction, to argue that such a relation is
"purer" then sitting down & listening to the playing-out of _language_ --
which more closely resembles the atmosphere of (a) speech than music -- and
at that, projected via a screen, which brings us closer to television or
cinema, to the written text projected/emitted.

In any case, the TopLap manifesto, by focusing on language and the screen,
would seem to remove it two steps from Xenakis, who in my point of view, was
a musical purist to the point of a certain remnant of futurism (to borrow a
quote from Mathew Shipp although not sign it, a "musical fascist").

    http://djspooky.com/articles/shipp.html


The ultimate irony vis-à-vis Xenakis is that even Happenings (as a Western
rupture) remain authored. In Alan Kaprow's invention, the audience remains
confined to sets of instructions (ordered to do certain things at certain
times or not do certain things -- like don't clap, etc). So Xenakis'
objection, far from recognising a latent "Romanticism" (and if the merger
between math and high electronic art isn't "romantic" I don't know what is),
in fact turns a blind eye to the core constituency of its own composition.

Or perhaps that's "blind ear."


best,

    tobias



> " The program is to be transcended - Language is the way. "
>
> Any thoughts on/interpretations of this line?
>
> - Scott Carver



tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com --
McGill Communication + Philosophy
--- New School Philosophy --------
ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot +++