"To varying extents, each of these pieces also suggested a problem that electronic music now faces. Its sounds are either deliberately artificial or alterations of the familiar. In either case, electronic swells and sonic polyps, far from becoming abstract musical tools, tend to seem self-conscious, all too vulnerable to cliched imaginings. The basic electronic vocabulary has become inextricably associated with scores that suggest groundlessness or strange other worlds (as in science fiction, horror and nature films)...."
- Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 1992, reviewing League of Composers/ISCM concert tribute to the late Bulent Arel
Polyps! Ambiguous analogy - they can be beautiful coral thingies on the seabed OR potentially lethal tissue growths in the colon
"Groundlessness" is a good, evocative, hard-to-pin description of electronic abstraction
To the larger point, though ---
cf Mark Fisher on future-capture, the trammeling of the once-unknown by cliches, an encrustation of associations -
"The problem is that the word ‘futuristic’ no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen. In the 70s, ‘futuristic’ meant synthesizers. In the 80s, it meant sequencers and cut and paste montage. In the 90s, it meant the abstract digital sounds opened up by the sampler and its function such as timestretching. In each of these cases, there was a sense that, through sound, we were getting a small but powerful taste of a world that would be completely different from anything we had hitherto experienced. That’s why a film like Terminator, with its idea of the future invading the present, was so crucial for 90s dance music. Now, insofar as ‘futuristic’ has any meaning, it is as a vague but fixed style, a bit like a typographical font. ‘Futuristic’ in music is something like ‘gothic’ in fonts. It points to an already existing set of associations. ‘Futuristic’ means something electronic, just as it did in the 60s and 70s." [my underline]
cf Phil Knight, commenting (earlier on this very blog, I think)
"The Future always has that aura of thrilling trepidation... feeds the Spenglerian hunger for infinity.... The Future marks a further distancing from the natural world, from the tangible, and therefore takes us closer to our destiny, which we expect to be angelic, but know to be alienation. But, the ride to the future in music is not exponential - it just feels that way. The move from acoustic to electric to electronic suggests a teleological progression, but I can't see how you can get any more artificial than synthesized music. Once you are there, you have reached the peak of abstraction.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It is interesting that for the NY Times classical / avant-garde reviewer at the Bulent Arel elegy, electronic music was already in the rear-view mirror in 1992 - even as things like Rufige Cru's "Terminator" and a score of other techno-rave tunes / directions were reigniting a fresh future for electronic dance music.
A little less than a decade earlier, John Rockwell was already voicing a similar sentiment circa 1984- that electronic music, once clearly - and for many alarmingly - the future destiny of serious composition, had now slipped into the passé zone - and was now a backwater of serious music.
"Only a few years ago, electronic music seemed ready to sweep all other music aside. Traditionalists worried nervously about music composed by machines, and predicted a dehumanizing Armageddon. Today, outside a few specialist enclaves, one hears very little about the subject. The odd loudspeaker still pops up at a contemporary-music concert, adding a bit of amplification, synthesized sound or filtering to live instrumentalists. But otherwise, along with their abandonment of serialism, composers seem to have forsaken electronically generated or reproduced sound, as well."
(from All American Music - the chapter on David Behrman, taken to represent a new direction of humanized electronic music - homemade, funky, miniaturized)
Generally speaking, futurism lost its innocence and evolved to become all too synonymous with a dystopian Babylon-on-steriods hellscape. The only strand of futurism that goes against this trend (but does it really?) is Kurzweilian transhumanism. In recent years we've seen a queering of futurism with cross-overs between tech transhumanism and gender identity based culture with the likes of Arca and other artists of the Deconstructed Club variety.
ReplyDelete"Only a few years ago, electronic music seemed ready to sweep all other music aside."
And indeed it did. It's just that the electronic nature of music (from studio production to distribution formats) is decreasingly perceived as noticeable, or at least noteworthy, like water to a fish.
Well, Rockwell talking about the world of serious composition, not the pop world of Human League and Jam & Lewis. And within the serious composition world, what gets called still 'classical', there was a dramatic drop in profile for electronic music by the end of the '70s. Including many composers who had once been enthused proponents of tape music and electronic sound - but now returned to orchestras and acoustic instruments. Those who stuck with electronic composition and advanced further into digital etc etc, got a less attention from the outside world - it became one of those pockets of work that carries in the academy, with festivals and concert series, but an audience not much bigger than the sum total of practitioners. The CDs of computer music would come out on labels most people have never heard of or come across, whereas in the 1950s-1960s and even into the early '70s, you had forbiddingly alien electronoscapes coming out on major labels like Columbia (through the Music of Our Time imprint) and RCA's Red Seal and so forth...
ReplyDeletehave to admit when that NYT reviewer started waxing about the compositional and conversational brilliance displayed by “Mr. Babbitt” (after sort of dismissing all the other stuff played) my immediate reaction was “ohh he’s one of THOSE guys”
ReplyDeleteamong old school classical music people, there’s a definite Type of Guy—adventurous but very focused on the old parameters: pitch relationships, rhythmic subdivisions, etc. with babbitt being the modernist american exemplar and boulez being the modernist european one—who dabbles in or otherwise takes a cursory intellectual interest in electronic music, yet just comes across as fundamentally immune to its unique visceral power/charm as a medium. so of course these people have been declaring it dead since day 2. "hasn't the novelty of these whooshing sound effects run its course?" etc.
tod dockstader mentions in liner notes somewhere that a radio show in the early 60s included one of his pieces in a program that was supposed to be a sort of farewell to electronic music. the host apparently felt that by then it was obvious electronic music wasn’t going anywhere, and it was time to put it in the rearview mirror.
or take charles wuorinen. even though he’s technically a Pulitzer Prize-winning electronic musician, you can just sense this sort of deafness in his portentously titled “times encomium” (bet it only won because the judges were the same type of listener). there’s a telling interview from a few years before he died where he smugly says something like “they said electronic music was going to change everything, and… well?” from his perspective it’s patently obvious that electronic music has not changed the musical landscape.
probably the funniest example i know of, though, is when some IRCAM composer in the 90s wrote an article declaring the medium to be dead (i think they say “tape music” but it’s clear what they mean) and like, every notable electronic music pioneer (stockhausen, bayle, dhomont, risset, boehmer, etc.) wrote a joint letter to the same journal, basically each saying the author of the first article’s an idiot in their own way.
so idk, maybe saying something’s been creatively exhausted can come from a place of un-discernment just as easily as from a place of prescience or acute historical perspective.
yes Wuorinen is a good example of a recidivist, if that's the right word - flirtation with electronic music, when it's trendy (or perhaps the enthusiasm was genuine) and then back to the orchestral. i quite enjoy Time's Encomium for its creaky pomposity but yes it's definitely something using the machinery to do what they would have done anyway with the old instrumentation, rather than exploring its unique distinct potentials.
Deletethere are quite few other examples of more thoroughly enamored electronic composers who go back to the old tools - Ann Southam, Paul Lansky (after the longest run of using only electronics etc). There was a piece in the NYT about how he had finally decided electronic/digital was exhausted and had returned to the fold.
For some people, when Penderecki stopped working with electronics was some kind of "proof". The late Luis de Pablo often argued that composing with a computer was not bad, but somehow dangerous if someone was intending to go beyond the usual (and for him, electronics were, after some testing, not that attractive) I have been thinking about the evil twins from The Brood by Cronenberg, what can be done with unwanted sound polyps?
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