I. Organized Sound

The definition of music which dominated thinking in the 20th century is that of music as being organized sound. However this definition seems to have fallen into disuse in recent times, and I've often heard it dismissed as being too broad and too vague to be useful. Rarely though have I seen this definition held up to the light of the context in which it was formulated, and with reference to the person who first uttered it. Once we take these aspects into account it becomes clear that this definition, while it may indeed only have limited usefulness as a dictionary entry, does encapsulate the essence of what music is with respect to the ideals of individualistic expression that informed the 20th century.

The term organized sound was coined by the composer Edgard Varèse sometime before 1940. Varèse, like many other composers of the time, was searching for new ways to express creativity which paralleled the freedoms that visual artists were already enjoying. Music had always been seen in terms of its transience, which was considered its advantage over the plastic arts: composers worked with the abstractions of notes and rhythms which were neither representational nor referential in nature. Visual artists enjoyed the liberalization of their craft when their works ceased to be representations of objects: painters like Mondriaan envied the craft of musicians, and sought to express ideas of pure abstraction which paralleled music. Composers in turn sought ways to escape the limitations of abstraction, and turned to technologies such as the tape recorder and mechanical sound generators to create music which was in a sense material, or concrète, in its form. 

But there is more to the context of Varèse's definition than the composer's will to escape the confines of musical abstraction. Varèse was a proponent of the Bohemian lifestyle[1]: his wife Louise Varèse was an important translator of Arthur Rimbaud, and Frank Zappa, an outspoken champion of the Bohemian ideal, named Varèse as his favourite composer. Seen from this perspective, we may infer that Varèse was giving us more than just a compact definition for music when he formed the expression organized sound. He was celebrating a new independence from the musical dogmas of his time, promoting the freedom of composers and musicians to decide for themselves what music is, and breaking from centuries of enslavement to artificially constrained notions of pitch, harmony, rhythm and counterpoint. As Adorno wrote in 1945: "The idea that the tonal system is exclusively of natural origin is an illusion rooted in history"[2]. Rebelling against a tonal system which was seen as artificial and totalitarian was an expression of liberty, and music making became thereby an expression of one's social and political beliefs.

II. Music and Politics

Leaving out the obvious examples of music with text (such as national anthems), the link between music and politics can be a complex topic. In the program notes to De Staat Andriessen writes "abstract musical material - pitch, duration and rhythm - are beyond social conditioning: it is found in nature. However, the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity"[3]. For him, the simple act of organizing sounds was a political act: "How you arrange your musical material, the techniques you use and the instruments you score for, are largely determined by your own social circumstances and listening experience, and the availability of financial support"[ibid.]. However, he goes on to write: "everyone can see the absurdity of Plato's statement that the mixolydian mode should be banned ... I deplore the fact that Plato was wrong. If only it were true that musical innovation could change the laws of the State!" [ibid]. Perhaps musical innovation by itself cannot change the political landscape. But musical innovation does mirror social and political changes as they happen, and perhaps by reflecting and focussing attention on these changes music can influence the direction they take, as a magnifying glass can be used to start a flame.

The composer Hanns Eisler was able to defend himself from the accusation of having written "communist" music during the McCarthy trials by claiming that musical notes could not possibly have political meaning[4]. The music was political only by nature of its combination with the texts of Brecht; it was placed in a political context and thereby became political by association. Eisler himself may have been a communist, but that could not be proved by referring to his music. But are there other, subtler ways of politicizing music? The music of The Beatles had an unexpected impact on Soviet Russia in the 1960's which reverberated into the Gorbachev period[5]. Loud rock music was played outside the papal residence (the Nunciatura) in Panama by American forces trying to bully Manuel Noriega into giving up his refuge there (they succeeded)[6]. Andriessen famously took part in a noisy protest during a performance of Quantz against what was called "undemocratic" programming of the Concertgebouw orchestra[7]. So in spite of the innate neutrality of notes and rhythms, there are ways of using music politically which can lie outside the intentions of its maker.

What can we say then of the makers of music today? Is making music still a political act? I think that in recent times the act of making music has become predominantly a technological act, since technologies previously irrelevant to the creation of music have now become essential parts of the music making process. And whereas in Andriessen's time access to orchestras and concert halls was primarily a sociopolitical question, in our era of globalization access to technology is primarily an economic question.

III. Technology and Music

Da Vinci wrote "Painting is superior to music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not have to die as soon as it is born"[8]. But music transcended this inherent limitation and became something that could be held in one's hands: it became the phonogram, the cassette, the compact disc. Instead of being the expression of a moment in time, it became a commodity to be bought and sold like bread or hoola-hoops: music became flotsam in the tidal currents of market economies. However the new medium of internet, with its ability to transfer information fast and over large distances, is changing the nature of this commodification of music: music distribution has become democratized in a way which was unimaginable less than a generation ago. As Paul Lansky writes, "every 'copy' of a compact disc contains exactly the same set of numbers as the original digital master ... Everyone owns the original, and the propriety of ownership is no longer bounded by physical laws, only by legal statutes ... a digital format is not a result of 'intercorporate negotiations', but rather a mathematical object whose manipulation is the business of computers ... Anything in a digital format can ultimately be read as a string of bits, and reproduced by anyone"[9].

Technological changes are also enabling ways for creative minds to examine and test definitions of music in interesting ways. Music is a temporal art form which unfolds itself over time for the listener, and the temporal order of experiencing music has traditionally been directed by the composer, but what happens when the listener is given the power to influence the form of a composition as it is being played? Mechanistic processes using computers allow us to compose music which transcends the limits of human experience. But can music exist outside the realm of human temporal experience, for example, using pitched sounds above or below the limit of human hearing, or rhythms with a pulse interval of 20 years? Or how about compositions which unfold over 1000 years[10]? What is the difference between Beethoven's 9th symphony and Leif Inge's version of the same piece, which spans 24 hours[11]? The possibilities derived from the mechanization of music creation are stimulating composers to challenge the assumptions of what music is in ways that are even more profound than Cage's 4' 33"[12].

But technology can also be a limiting force for individual musical creativity. While at its core the computer is nothing more than a number cruncher, in practice its marriage to software transforms it into a device which potentially funnels creative processes into narrow channels of pre-cooked production processes. There is a real danger that the limitations imposed on the user by currently popular music-making software can have long-lasting effects on how we make music, just as the three and a half minute limitation imposed by the Gramophone is still the norm for popular music in spite of the fact that it has long been artificially maintained by the recording industry. 

IV. Musick (sic.)

The title of this essay makes reference to Aleister Crowley's addition of the letter 'k' to transform the word magic into Magick [13]. His reason for doing so was to explicate the importance of the individual human will acting creatively in accordance with nature. I like to think of music of the 20th century as being Musick in this same way, since so much of it arose from individuals' perseverance in creating music based on the dictates of their own will, using any materials available to them, instead of blindly following artificial restrictions of tradition and dogma. The allure of technology is intoxicating for those who explore the possibilities it promises. But one can be coerced into giving up hard-won freedoms by software that promises easy answers to the difficult challenges of musical expressivity.

Notes

1. This put him at odds with some of his contemporaries who had a more conservative view of music. Varèse and Charles Ives, for instance, did not get along with each other. (Peter Dickinson, in The Musical Times, Vol. 117, No. 1605 (Nov., 1976), pp. 910-911).

2. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003

3. Andriessen, program notes to De Staat, 1994

4. Goehr, Lydia. The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2002

5. Pavel Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, Penn State Press, 1997, p. 3

6. Ronald H. Cole, "Grenada, Panama, and Haiti: Joint Operational Reform" Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 1998-99, pp. 57-64

7. Yayoi Uno Everett, The Music of Louis Andriessen, Cambridge University Press 2006

8. Da Vinci, Trattato I, 29. 

9. Paul Lanksy, "The Importance of Being Digital" commissioneed by the tART Foundation in Enschede and the Gaudeamus Foundation, 2004

10. http://longplayer.org/

11. http://www.notam02.no/9/

12. An interesting note about a recent performance of this piece: "On January 16, 2004, at the Barbican in London, the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK's first orchestral performance of this work. The performance was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and one of the main challenges was that the station's emergency backup systems are designed to switch on whenever apparent silence (dead air) is detected. They had to be switched off for the sole purpose of this performance." (source: http://ubu.com/film/cage_433.html)

13. Aleister Crowley, Magick: book 4 Weiser Books, 1980