A Sense of Wonder

Once upon a time there was just an ape with his bones. The ape took those bones in his dexterous hands and hit them against things. They made a noise and it was good. It also felt good to hit things too. And thus music was born.

A member of a Facebook group I run, which is called Electronic Music Philosophy, the other day made a very gracious post in which he praised the group's existence and appreciated the challenge to think about electronic music making which it poses. In the course of his post he made the suggestion that what the musician needed was not things but what he tentatively called "a sense of wonder". He went on to relate tales of his remote music making past in which he had recorded metronomes under plastic bowls, altering the sound with guitar pedals, or used a convector heater (which contained spring elements) as a primitive reverb tank. The way he related the tales I felt that, reading, it was almost like I was there observing his sonic experiments. The sense of wonder with its inherent questions such as "I wonder what will happen?" and "What will this sound like?" were palpable. I very much connected with his idea that what mattered was not the craftsmanship or price of the equipment you were using but this sense of wonder that he was imbued with. 

There were a few responses to this post and many of the comments expanded upon this point. The poster made the point that he later got rid of the convector heater reverb and replaced it with something digital which was much more convenient. But, subsequently, he found that what he gained in convenience he lost in texture. The convector heater hadn't really been a musical device at all, of course, and yet it provided a unique texture that something made for the purpose could not provide for all its utility and convenience. This set me thinking once more along lines aligned with this sense of wonder. It struck me that authenticity in music is much more important than convenience. Much electronic music today is entirely based around "convenience". Is this not, in the end, why people use computers and why Digital Audio Workstations were invented? But I sense in a lot of this a lack of authenticity, the authenticity that comes, I think, from someone following their perhaps naive musical ideas in a very innocent way. 

Sometimes I think we forget this. We get caught up in consumerist notions that music is about what you use. It can be but not in the sense that unless you have the latest cool or most highly regarded equipment then what you do musically is useless. This couldn't be further from the truth. A Moog bass sound or an Oberheim pad sound are unique and deeply satisfying but if the entirety of music consisted of just either then we would all be musically impoverished. Music's ultimate value is in its variety, in its being made up from all possible sounds, real and imagined. This includes the sounds made by convector heater reverbs. So what becomes prime currency in this context, as I've said before, is the idea and, as the commenter in the Facebook group suggested, this needs to be somewhat innocent, approached with a sense of wonder. It needs to be practiced with a sense of experimentalism as opposed to that knowing sense which is destructive of ideas.

One way to practice this electronically is to do sound manipulation. This is a kind of electronic music pretty much anyone, whether musical or not, can make. What you need to do this can be as simple as your phone, onto which its quite likely you can download a free recording app turning your phone into a sound recorder, and a computer onto which you could download free sound manipulation software. (Apps are also available and a tablet combines both devices in one.) And so, pretty much for free if you already have the hardware, you are able to pursue the idea of making music by recording and manipulating sounds. If you are doing this you are carrying on in a noble line of electronic music making that extends back many decades. Its also a way of making music that utilizes a completely different set of skills to that based on the playing of an instrument which is bequeathed us by the orchestral tradition. It is something that is an expressly electronic form of music making for you need electronic equipment to be able to do it. As I'm sure anyone who has done it could tell you, it is in many ways quite a relaxing and satisfying method of making music and one which is much more unpredictable than pawing a keyboard making conventional tunes. Often you end up with sound collages you could never have imagined from the sounds you first recorded. This method also has the benefit of making any sound you can record into something musical and so, I think, encourages the sense of wonder I'm focusing on here.

Such music is also a form based in ideas for its what you can imagine to do with the sounds you record that counts. Not every musician is the most imaginative and some seem to miss that ideas are important, thinking instead that because they have a large setup up or certain pieces of equipment that this substitutes for lack of creativity. Of course, that's not true. What counts in the end is always ideas and this, indeed, is what differentiates music one piece from another. I think of many musicians both past and present who are not by any means known for what they have or use but are known for variety of musical ideas they have or the experimentalism with which they pursue them. In short, I'm put in mind once more of the mission statement that Tony Rolando of Make Noise, the Eurorack synth company, brought to my attention when I interviewed him some weeks ago. He said that

"We see our instruments as a collaboration with musicians who create once in a lifetime performances that push boundaries and play the notes between the notes to discover the unfound sounds. We want our instruments to be an experience, one that will require us to change our trajectories and thereby impact the way we understand and imagine sound."

This sounds so much more than, and so different to, the consumerist mantra of the mere collection of highly prized musical things as if this alone makes any musical statement or impact. It sounds much more like my commenter's sense of wonder and seems, to me at least, to contain a sufficient innocence that allows musical surprises to happen in the first place. Musical surprises and wonders do not happen to people who either think they know it all or have it all. You need to stay a little innocent, naive and wondrous for that. So I don't think its coincidence that Make Noise manufacture the Phonogene as one of their modules. The original phonogene was a magnetic tape device that Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of Musique Concrete, the original electronic way to manipulate sounds, used. Rolando has created a digital version for use in Eurorack modular synth systems. Rolando and Make Noise seem to have the sense of wonder too to my mind.

Of course, all of this has to fit in with other notions. A "sense of wonder" is fine from the creator's point of view. It can be an exciting and personally meaningful sonic journey for them. But what about any listeners? When your creation hits their ears you lose control of it. No musician controls how a listener hears it for no musician controls the network of relations that constitutes the way a listener hears and receives music. It may just be a kaleidoscope of weird sounds to them. This once again reminds me that music is a two-sided thing. It is to do with two roles, that of creator or maker and that of listener or hearer. Both roles are different and each of us can take up each one. Even as the same person we may be different people when taking up one of the roles or the other. I listen to things I would never make and make things that in others I might not listen to. I wonder if you are the same? This, I think, is because makers are not listeners. They are makers. And listeners are not making anything. They are listening to something instead. These roles are different and that should be noted. However, I think that both roles would be enhanced if they were carried out with a sense of wonder. This sense would give a necessary openness, the openness in which something gets a chance to make an impression. So often musical ideas, from the perspective of makers or hearers, are killed before they have a chance to develop simply because our minds are closed. Closed minds are conventional minds, ones not open to change or difference.

A few weeks ago again I interviewed Marc Doty, the synth demonstrator and educationalist. I knew at the time that we had some things in common and some not and in my interview with him I tried to ask questions that would highlight that. One difference between us was my enthusiastic interest in Eurorack synthesis and his lack of it. He said that any Eurorack system he could design would bore Eurorack enthusiasts to death. He is not interested in fancy functionality so much as in what he hears as an authentic analog tone. In some respects I regard Marc as an analog tone fetishist but he is also a fetishist for what I've referred to before as a "player's paradigm". Marc sees a necessary and deeply enjoyable connection between players and instruments in the making of music such that any form of electronic music which relies more on sequencing or machines is a turn off for him. 

Now one of the reasons I like Eurorack (and other modular formats such as Buchla and Serge) and its inherent possibilities so much is that I see it as embodying exactly the sense of wonder I've been talking about in this blog. Eurorack, as I envision it, is the freedom to build any synthesizer or sound manipulation or processing device that you can imagine. Its the most flexible way to make electronic pieces of music currently available and, overall, no one is controlling it. It is the wild west. (Software might object here. I'm open to discussing it but software has a big problem in that its often not very tactile.) You get to build whatever you want (or can afford) and use it both according to and contrary to its purposes. This is not electronic music obsessed with tone or that normalises one tone above all other tones. This is exploratory, "what will happen next?" electronic music making. I think its good to not be sure what will happen next. I certainly think its better than fetishizing one kind of tone even if that tone is memorable. We should no more get attached to sounds than we should to things. The sense of wonder is more important.

The exciting thing about sounds is their difference. For its only with difference that we can begin to distinguish and use sounds. Hearing sounds in all their particularity and difference is what the sense of wonder I've been repeatedly mentioning here is all about and so ways of making and using sound which maximize sound possibilities are more valuable to me. Yes, of course we all have sounds we like and like to use. I like the sound of Moog's Taurus bass pedals, for example. But thats just one sound within a world of sounds and its the world that gives each sound its own value. So we shouldn't belittle the other sounds. All sounds are equal in nature. Each sound is an opportunity to make something unique, momentary, revelatory, something that, as the Make Noise blurb intimates, might change our thinking about sound and its use. So I'm very much about sounds and making new ones and building new combinations of them.

Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every Eurorack enthusiast is like that. In any discipline you will find plenty of non-ideological copyists who just want to look cool or feel part of a cool group. Having money buys people a place at many a table. But that's my vision for it. I am quite prepared to say that a decent number of Eurorack users are just people with disposable cash who want a trendy hobby but who, when it comes to musical ideas, are lacking imagination. Money doesn't buy ideas you see. But its the same with people who buy hardware synths or plugins too. Having things does not equal having ideas or creating things of interest. Being interesting, I think, is the prime musical virtue but that too relies on having ideas and a sense of wonder. This is not the same as making some music that is "good" or likeable, by the way. Electronic music, in my view, is a music of ideas because it simply opens up so many possibilities for the manipulation and combination of sounds. It becomes frustrating when one just hears the same ones over and over. These ideas, in the end, require thought, experimentation and time. And a sense of wonder.

Perhaps that was what made the ape hit things with bones in the first place? 

Musical Maturity

Having written my blog yesterday and dispatched it both to the archives and to the wilds of the Internet, I went for a walk. I go for a walk pretty much every day (as the fading heels on all my shoes will attest) because, as many philosophers record somewhere in their works, walking is thinking time. Thinking is an activity in which your relaxed mind feels free to come up with ideas, things which might start you down paths that you otherwise might miss. Thinking is thus a vital activity if you don't just merely want to be trapped in your convictions. Convictions, as Nietzsche wrote in his book Human, All Too Human, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Convictions are self-built prisons.

I started off with an idea for a blog today discussing repetition in music. The idea of repetition reminds me of a clearly still important memory somewhere inside my damaged psyche. As a young teen I was still at that stage where I did what my mother told me. And she wanted me to go to Sunday School. I was well into the phase where I found this boring but this particular Sunday we'd been asked to bring a favourite record along to discuss with the group. I took Wings of A Dove by Madness since at that time I was a Madness fan. The staid Sunday School teacher wasn't very impressed by Wings of A Dove which, even for Madness, who I think its not indelicate to say are not the world's most accomplished musicians, is somewhat of a simple song. "Its quite repetitive" was the teacher's only comment before moving along to the next record. As a 14 year old I didn't take this very well.

Wings of A Dove is indeed quite repetitive but, now much older than 14, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. The Sunday School teacher clearly took repetitive to mean "not interesting or varied enough" or "simplistic" but even these designations don't tell you anything necessary about an impression some music will make. This is because the more you think about it the more you realize that something's repetitiveness or simplicity is not an easy route to judgment. Right now, if I asked you, I'm sure you could come up with pieces of repetitive and simple music that you both liked and didn't like. Both would be equally repetitive, equally simple, but these qualities would not help you to distinguish a like from a dislike or a good from a bad. There are repetitive songs which I'm sure drive you crazy. There are also dance clubs worldwide that resound throughout the night to a 4/4 beat that never stops.

Repeating patterns, themes, leitmotifs and suchlike are at the heart of much music, particularly in the mainstream, and its very likely that much of the music you hear and make is based on it. Indeed, we may even say that repetition is at the heart of the musical traditions we have received. This is true whether the songs we value are of the "verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus" type or songs based in a simple repeated riff or hook. When I think about repetition I ask myself why this is so. I think mainly of two advantages it seems to have. Firstly, its a simple structure. This makes it not very difficult to understand or follow. So its easy to get into. This leads into the second feature I think of, its safe and secure. Structure always offers security because in a physical world one needs to know one's bearings. A relatively simple repeating pattern achieves this admirably. So repetitive music offers everything the listener needs. Its easy to comprehend and offers safety in familiarity.

But then I asked myself what a non-repeating song might sound like. What happens if we start to step outside these easy to understand and safe surroundings? Some examples came to mind. The first is the track Flutter by Autechre. This track was composed in a very deliberate way in 1994 at a time when so-called "raves" were being banned by the British Government. These were unofficial parties which would spontaneously be arranged and several hundred people would descend on some illicit location and music and usually drugs would take place. The Government tried to ban these events and, in so doing, defined the kind of music being played there as "repetitive beats". The track Flutter was Autechre's response to this in that, so they claim, no bar of the track, which could be played at 45rpm or 33rpm, repeats at all. As Autechre later said of the process of writing this track, they lined up as many different drum patterns as they could and then simply strung them together to produce a piece of music that never repeats a single bar even once. As such, this could not be banned if played at the raves because it was quite literally non-repetitive. Flutter is still a friendly way into the world of non-repetition though since, if you listen to the link I've given, you'll hear it does have a repeating melody.

A second example of music which eschews the path of easy repetition is that broad swathe of music labeled "kosmische". The example I choose here is Popol Vuh's In den Gärten Pharaos which is much like the music on their previous and first album, Affenstunde. Its a 17 and a half minute piece of studied abstraction. But, if you've listened to it, yes, you will tell me that it contains repetitions within it, not least the percussive sections where repeat rhythm patterns are played on bongos and suchlike. I agree with you that it utilizes repetition in parts but then so did Flutter. My point here is not that one should swap a childish reliance on repetition for the maturity of music that never repeats, as if, in a very crass and stupid way, one were good and the other bad. If anything, its to open the musician's mind and the listeners' ears to the possibilities. I have already noted that repetition or lack of it is, in itself, no guarantee of anything. Neither a repeating nor a non-repeating compositional strategy guarantees a piece of music people will or won't like or, more importantly, that will or won't be interesting to some listener. For example, some people love Discipline by Throbbing Gristle. Others have it as a high contender in the "worst song ever" category and I've read more than one person say its not music at all. What I think it is is a masterpiece of the mixture of repetition and noisy abstraction.

                           "Wreckers of civilisation" Throbbing Gristle

Were this a blog in which I were cataloguing even more and more examples I'm sure I'd spend the rest of my Sunday morning now going on an interesting musical journey through music that uses abstraction and repetition in interesting ways. Should you have examples of such, because everyone's exposure to music is only as wide as their own experience, then I hope you'll note these in the various comment sections where you see this blog. Its good to share musical experiences. However, I'm always conscious that I need to keep these blogs focused and to the point. More than one Facebooker has told me in the past that my usual 10 paragraphs (or so) is too long for him to bother with. These are those for whom music much longer than 3 or 4 minutes is regarded much like a prog rock drummer's 10 minute drum solo. Its dull and boring and who wants to listen to that?

But this comes to be relevant to this blog because, having thought about repetition on my walk, a narrative started to unfold in my mind. It was a narrative of growing maturity. I thought of the younger me. Aged 9 I was a member of my local Cub Scouts. We didn't have a car but the Cub leader had invited me to a local swimming pool on a Monday night to learn to swim. I had to walk (on my own) but it was in a direction I'd never gone before. It was very much out of my comfort zone. Well, inevitably, I got lost and more and more upset. Eventually a passerby asked me, the crying child in the street, what was wrong and if I was alright. I spluttered through my tears that I couldn't find the swimming pool. The helpful stranger set me right. I hadn't walked far enough down the main road to find the left turn I was supposed to take. I arrived at the pool in a strange area just as the session was finishing. But, of course, through all my trauma I now knew where the pool was and had enlarged the local territory with which I was familiar.

It was this narrative of growing maturity, accommodation to new territory and a growing ability to deal with new things that particularly appealed to me in a musical context from this traumatic personal recollection. As children we are used to a fairly tightly defined local area. Yes, we may go off on little adventures but its always within the context of a comfort zone and tied to our personal sense of confidence. This naturally varies from person to person but in each case it can be enhanced and grown. This fits in very nicely with what I was saying yesterday about training the musical sense in each of us. This is not a given, a static thing once and for all the same. It can be nurtured and matured or it can be left to stagnate and become stunted or malformed. As people we go from being children nervous about the world to adults meant to be more confident and able to deal with a bigger territory. A child may stick close to home but an adult might be expected to be able to travel from city to city or even country to country. It is normal human development to mature and develop the skills necessary to deal with this.

So when I now write a blog about musical maturity, which is what this blog has been about, this is what I mean. I mean developing a musical sense which does not stick in one rut. I mean the ability and even the desire to want to tread new ground with a confidence that has naturally developed. It means that, like cities or countries, we do not see going to one or another style of music as bad or good. We just see them as different and as each with their own challenges or good points or bad points. The 9 year old me listened to his mum's Abba records. The 47 year old me still remembers that but wants to explore abstract electronics, music composed by chance operations and music made on modular synthesizers. This is how it should be for to have stuck with the Abba records would have been to have refused to grow, change and develop. In such people something is not ideal and has gone wrong. It is the ideal to spread one's wings if one has them for this is how you learn to fly. So by "musical maturity" I very much mean an appreciation of music based on an analogy to the adult geographical sense. Its an ability and willingness to move about more freely, to accept and even welcome difference, to judge on something more than the local, childish values you had in younger days.

Music as Education

As far as criticisms of my blogs go, I'm happy to take a few hits. You would need to be spectacularly naive and utterly blind to the world to think that you could write a blog which some might take as criticism and then post it 10 or 15 times on Facebook and Twitter without any comeback. Of course, I try to write my blogs in a detached style. I do not write rants here nor use the language of the street. I try to give a calm and sensible discussion of the points I want to raise with at least the impression given of an open mind and a use of reason and argument. If you treat people fairly they will do the same in return is how I hope it goes. Of course, I can't guarantee this and occasionally I come across a less charitable respondent spilling his bile for my thoughts. I regard that more as his problem and not mine. My only golden rule in all of this is that you can think what you like but you need to be able to rhetorically support it with reasons you are prepared to discuss. 

This point was brought home to me in an excellent and thoughtful comment someone left under my blog, now almost a month old, about gear fetishization on social media forums to the detriment of actual music. This is the most popular blog I've ever written (approaching 5000 reads) and probably the most contentious too since I plonked it fairly and squarely into the middle of many Facebook groups that I'll clearly admit are groups about electronic music equipment as opposed to what to do with it or the music I hope ends up being made with it. (That, in many ways, was exactly the point of the blog!) For many the blog was a stumbling block or a blind spot. Others, and I'm warmed to say it was quite a few, seemed to get the point too. Of those, one by the name of "agustin n" made an excellent point which I'd like to snip from the comments to that blog and post here:

"I think the problem is mainly that, to admire someone else's gear, you just need to open your eyes (and say "good synths bru"). But to admire his/her music you have to open your heart/mind and that needs a lot more commitment. Like engage in a feeling with a stranger (over the www) and, in that, expose yourself. "Hey I enjoy your vision and relate to your feelings" is a lot more committed thing to say and... people are usually afraid of exposing themselves. But, nevertheless, I think its important that we as artists do..."

I've noticed a lot of this since I stumbled into writing blogs overtly about electronic music which I then posted to public forums. I was surprised to find they accrued thousands of reads not least since my music posts still accrue barely any listens. But they are different things and there need not be any translation from one to another. Perhaps, for example, my thoughts are interesting but my music is not. However, what I took on board very much from Agustin's insightful comment was that talking about things, objects, doesn't entail very much. If I like synth X instead of synth Y then so what? Looking at a picture of your gear and purring with desire isn't going to stretch me or anyone else in any way. As desirous creatures its as easy as letting a human drive have its head. But getting involved in their music and its ideas is much more intimate. Or, at least, it should be. And this brings me to why we're here today.

I have long had an itch regarding music that needed scratching. When I started becoming interested in John Cage it itched much more than it had before because of the peculiarities of this extremely interesting man. Cage is interesting not least because he is a composer but he is also someone who completely refuses to stop talking about music as an idea, as a set of ideas, as a bunch of compositional strategies or goals and even as something that is part of a bigger whole, life itself. Already, as I'm sure you will see, we have gone far beyond the customary topics in a Facebook group dedicated to swapping pictures of one or two pieces of gear and saying how much you want them or how much you love owning them. To be blunt, it is my general position that music makers should become more like Cage and less like your average Facebook group member. But this is a digression from my point here today. 

Music of Changes is a piano piece composed by John Cage in 1951 and first performed by David Tudor (for whom it was written) on January 1st 1952. It is described by many as a piece of indeterminate music, in some sense, although in terms of performance it is very determined. It was composed using chance operations (Cage's second piece written this way) but does have a resulting score which the performer is expected to follow like any other. So it is indeterminate in its composition but not in its performance. The more well known 4'33" is, of course, indeterminate in both composition AND performance. I use this piece as an example today because it seems to be one that evokes strong emotions. The You Tube comments under the video that I've linked here refer to it as "bullshit" and "masturbation material" and another wishes to withdraw the description "music" from it as if it did not deserve such an artistic description. (Someone also says its not art.) I first heard this piece of music, by listening to this very video, about 3 weeks ago. I had expected to find it difficult (thank you commenters for making it impossible to come to this with an open mind!) but was surprised when I found myself listening to the whole piece (44 minutes worth) without once feeling the need to stop or switch it off. It goes without saying that I am unaccustomed to listening to piano music on a regular basis.

Now I could not say that I "like" Music of Changes. But I can say that as an intellectual musical exercise I find it interesting and edifying and I can even say that I appreciate it. I'm glad it exists. Others seem to have been enraged by it (as, indeed, by 4'33" which came shortly after this in Cage's career). Now when music provokes such strong reactions we have a reason to ask what is going on here. To some the apparent randomness or abdication of authorial responsibility seems to be the issue. The thought is that if someone does not take responsibility then chaos is the result and chaos is bad. Chaos is irresponsible. Allowing chaos to occur is a moral affront to listeners, a trying to get them to accept that anything goes. And, in more general terms, anything cannot be allowed to go. Not, at least, if one calls oneself a composer and composes piano pieces to be performed at piano recitals.

                                      Autechre performing live

Fast forward 64 years to a piece called Feed1 by Autechre from the album Elseq1-5. What do we have here? To the casual listener it sounds very much like an all electronic version of Music of Changes in general terms. Things are happening (from a listener's ear point of view) very chaotically and perhaps even randomly. (Forget that both pieces are not really random at all if you can.) There seems to be no guiding idea behind it. Some describe Feed1 as "the sound of energy" or "the extreme power of electricity" but another pines that he doesn't really understand what people like about it and he asks for musicians to inform him of its point or value. This is a very good question. What is the point or value of any piece of music? I can't help but think that if more people asked this kind of question before they started then there might be less thoughtless music in the world. And that wouldn't be a bad thing in a world drowning in music.

What I think that both John Cage and Rob Brown and Sean Booth (who comprise Autechre) have in common is that they don't just make music. They also think long and hard about how to make it too. It is not some casual pursuit for these people. It is their life's work and purpose and so they take its arrangement and composition very seriously. Neither of them are joking or being frivolous. I would very much like to encourage this mentality in all music makers but especially in the electronic ones which is the music that I generally favour. As a means to this end I think its important to make one big change in our personalities not just as musicians but as people. This change is to move away from valuing things based on a "like" using a value system in which something I like is "good" and something I don't is "bad". Let me put this another way: we need to change from people who value things based on their appeal to us into people who value things based on their ability to change us. Let me explain.

Six years ago both John Cage and Autechre were just names to me. I knew nothing about them except perhaps that Cage had composed a piece of music which had no music. But in the intervening 6 years I have come to be aware of the music of both of them and interacted with a number of interviews I've read from both of them. I am now acquainted with how they sound and some of their thoughts. It is not the case that I like all or even most of the music that they have produced (although I surely do like some in both cases) but, much more importantly than any of this froth, I see them both as vitally important musical influences. They are interesting and original and this changes me as someone appropriating their work. Of course, the world of social media which works on popularity (because this suits the commercial purposes which are the reason social media exists) will not value them for this. Social media wants us to believe that likes, faves and retweets are all that matter. Popularity is king and numbers are what count. Neither Cage nor Autechre are ever going to be mainstream popular. And I say thank god for that.

Cage and Autechre are worthwhile and of value because listening to them might just change you for the better. Or even change you at all. They are musicians who are going to challenge your preconceptions and make you think about what music is and what it is for and what it should do. In this respect it really doesn't matter after that whether you like or dislike their music. If it changes you and makes you think I would regard this as the far greater service than a stroke of your musical ego. Of course, we are now into Agustin's spooky area for to be changed we will need to open ourselves up to new experiences, new thoughts, ones that challenge our status quo (and I don't mean Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi here!). In order to change we need to first be open to change and this is what the world of likes discourages for to be taught that something I like is good and something I dislike is bad is to be groomed in musical conservatism and conventionality. This way does not lie progression, growth or maturity. Of course, we may feel happy and safe in our conventionality and want to be left within our boundaries. But isn't life more generally about living on the edge, the thrill of taking a risk, the danger of knowing and feeling that you are actually alive? 

I think that it is and, slowly, over many years now I've been trying to educate and encourage a curious musical mind, one that will listen to music I might not like to try and find the value in it. Utilizing this attitude I've discovered Cage, Autechre, Boards of Canada, the whole world of German Kosmische music and many other things besides, ones that probably no one else has heard of and who will never be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of likes. My musical vocabulary, and my life more generally, have been enriched and educated beyond anything I could have imagined. And this was only in a few years. Who knows how much further it could progress? What's more, I've developed new attitudes towards music and sound, ones I never would have thought of by myself with my likes and dislikes. I've learnt that music is not just an education in sound but in life too. 

I've also learnt that the musical sense is not a given, something to be left as it is. Its something to be trained, educated and explored. Indeed, this is the most beneficial way of using it. So you should give things a chance you don't like. You may end up liking it. I've lost count of the things I used to dislike I now like. Because tastes will and do change and we can and do learn new things from new sounds. Even if we don't "like" something it can still educate us in other ways. What a great service some piece of music would do us personally and musically if it made us more appreciative of music or sound in general. What is a simple "like" beside that? And more, as musicians ourselves we should not be afraid to outrun our boundaries. We should try to do things we consider beyond us. How else are we supposed to grow? We need to "expose ourselves" as Agustin suggested. This might encourage failure. But which is better, the setback we grow and learn from or the stunted safety of never trying?



If you like electronic music, have a thoughtful disposition and are on Facebook you might want more chat like this. In which case feel feel to join my group Electronic Music Philosophy there.

The Music of Possibility: A Noise Manifesto

Today's blog starts with a question: what links French composer Edgard Varese, 80s sampling supergroup The Art of Noise, Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, silence-loving indeterminist John Cage, German Industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten, the creator of Musique Concrete (Pierre Schaeffer), the name of a leading Eurorack manufacturer (Make Noise), the first all electronic score for a motion picture (Forbidden Planet), the more abstract entries into the canon of German Kosmische Musik, the harsh and unpredictable sounds of circuit bent instruments, the electronic jazz of Autechre, EBMers Nitzer Ebb, the glitch madness of Richard Devine, the Japanoise of Merzbow and Masonna, the IDM of Aphex Twin, the cut up, breakbeat craziness of Venetian Snares, a Berlin festival called Atonal.... and this list could go on forever!?

The answer is NOISE.

Actually, whilst the answer is noise it is more particularly the musical use and contextualization of noise, noise as a musically useful entity. But what even is noise? If it is members of German band Faust hitting a concrete mixer or Einstürzende Neubauten using electric drills or the weird shrieks of something that has been circuit bent this seems quite obvious but how might we define it? The temptation is to describe noise as unmusical sounds put to musical uses and I'm sure more than one reader was tempted to think that. But is it that simple? As a recent blog of mine showed, such a composer as John Cage, plus other pioneers such as Pierres Schaeffer and Henry, would hardly be likely to agree with this. Cage was so extreme (as some would judge it) as to believe that all sound was music (even including the sounds you might want to call noises) whilst Schaeffer's term Musique Concrete actually means real music, music made from real sounds, or noises as we might call them.

Now it can't really be argued against that many of those who pioneered working with noises (which is directly parallel to the rise of electronics in music) did so in order to be unconventional or counter to the prevailing movements in music of their times. (They might have described it as broadening our conception of music itself, however!) Some musicians simply plugged in their electronic instruments and tried to make normal music, of course. But a large number of those utilizing electronic equipment did not. They were wise to the fact that electronics meant new sounds and noises. A stand out example for me is the work of Louis and Bebe Barron who composed not the score for the film Forbidden Planet, it didn't have one, but what is described in the credits as "Electronic Tonalities". It was likely called this because the sound FX of the film and the "music" of the film cannot be distinguished at all. It is just one endless stream of strange, otherworldly tones. Or noises. The Barrons built their own circuits to make the score and many of them were destroyed in making the sounds they made meaning the score was literally unrepeatable. So outrageous in musical terms was their sound creation for the time that they were banned from being nominated for an Oscar. This was as recently as 1956, or 60 years ago.

An even earlier pioneer with things electronic was French composer, Edgard Varese. Varese emigrated to New York City in 1915 and, as a composer, was beset by the idea of making new sounds. In 1917 he wrote "I long for instruments obedient to my thought and whim, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, which will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm." He went on to compose two avantgarde percussion pieces in the 1920s, Hyperprism and Ionisation, the first of which reportedly created a riot and the second of which used two variable tone sirens but it is in 1930, during a round table discussion in Paris, that he gives his "Liberation of Sound" manifesto and it is worth quoting at length here.

"The raw material of music is sound. That is what the "reverent approach" has made people forget - even composers. Today when science is equipped to help the composer realize what was never before possible - all that Beethoven dreamed, all that Berlioz gropingly imagined possible - the composer continues to be obsessed by traditions which are nothing but the limitations of his predecessors. Composers like anyone else today are delighted to use the many gadgets continually put on the market for our daily comfort. But when they hear sounds that no violins, wind instruments, or percussion of the orchestra can produce, it does not occur to them to demand those sounds for science. Yet science is even now equipped to give them everything they may require.

And there are the advantages that I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of subharmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differential of timbre, of sound combinations, and new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound projection in space by the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, contrapuntally, since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them - all these in a given unit of measure of time which is humanly impossible to attain."

However, there are even earlier precursors to the coming age of electronic noise than this. Around the time of Varese's emigration the Italian Luigi Russolo was writing his now famous The Art of Noises booklet. This booklet, of course, directly inspired both the name and musical practice of the 80s supergroup, The Art of Noise, who utilized the most advanced and expensive sampling technology of their time, the Fairlight and the Synclavier, to turn noises into instruments. A perfect example is their first hit, Close To The Edit. The video to this track is also highly symbolic as four characters destroy a piano with electric saws, a chainsaw and other implements. It almost seems as if traditional music, and its instruments, is being replaced by a new electronic noise music based on any sound that can be made or imagined. A technological, noisy future awaits.

But back to The Art of Noises a moment for within it Russolo describes our emergence from a bucolic past into a noisy present and future.

"Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent...

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure."

Luigi Russolo and friend playing hand cranked noise instruments called Intonarumori which produced rattling and scraping noises. These were all destroyed during World War 2.

This narrative we find mirrored in the mid to late 1970s in the UK and Europe when "Industrial" music was born. The first thing to note about it is that it was purposely artistic. Groups such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire in England were people of musical and artistic ideas. Where they differed was in the sounds they used to express these ideas and this gives them a direct link to the motivations of earlier composers like Russolo and Varese. For the Industrialists, including later ones into the early 1980s in continental Europe, especially Germany, it was the sound of a dark, industrial wasteland that was the sonic inspiration as they sought to probe and make use of sonic extremity. Noise and noises were the sonic materials that they worked with and, in a very serious and composerly way, they knitted together noisy compositions from an acute awareness of sound. It is sometimes common to regard this music as somehow a lesser kind of music because it uses instruments in non-traditional ways (for example, Cosey Fanni Tutti's playing of the guitar) but this is, of course, nothing more than the sniffy disparagement of more conservative minds.

But now we sit here at the end of 2016 and none of this seems very new. We have computers that can hold sample libraries full of terabytes of sounds if we want to. Literally any sound we can record or invent can be used musically. We have 50 years of commercial synthesis to call upon with all the amazing instruments and their timbral possibilities that go with it. Before that we passed through a brief age of music made with magnetic tape and radio equipment. Yet how adventurous are we now? The old divides are still apparent. We take on new habits and these habits become the new norms we must seek to subvert. Is there a sense that we have now done all that can be done sonically? Are the dreams of Russolo and Varese and others like Cage and Schaeffer complete? This is really a twofold question for I am asking if we have now found all the sounds there are to be found but also if we are using the totality of sound when we compose music.

A few things suggest not. One form of music which creates a harsh divide is the appropriately enough named Harsh Noise music. This even has regional forms such as Japanoise, which is harsh noise originating from Japan. This is, in as straight a form as could be maintained, the use of outright electronic noise regarded as music. It can be seen to be on the cutting edge in that so many are ready to denigrate it as either not artistic or as not music. I look forward to those who take either pathway here presenting their fully worked out definitions of both art and music for our appraisal. In a collection of electronic music lectures and documentaries I have collected together on You Tube there is one called People Who Do Noise. Its an 80 minute documentary but I wonder how many who watch it (and you should!) get to minute 80 because some of those minutes contain the harshest of noises. The comments underneath this video (which you should read) are a kind of street fight over what music is, if this is a valid form of it or if it is just, as one commenter thinks, "over pretentious, meaningless bullshit".

Of course, the accusation of pretentiousness has been heard before. In my last blog but one it was used of John Cage's very own noise experiment, 4'33". One thing that seems to link those who work with noise is their utter seriousness of interest in the noise that they make or make room for people to hear. It is often thought that those working with noise must be somehow the opposite, not at all serious or joking, because, so I assume, it seems that some cannot escape the conventionality of the view that real music is melody and harmony conventionally understood. This, of course, is not so and certainly not since the onset of electronics in music. As Varese said earlier, we can now have any scale we like. Or even none at all. From the very first electronic musical instruments, such as the Theremin (the instrument which, lest we forget, got Robert Moog interested in synthesis), electronic noise music and its exploration has been veering away from traditional ideas of music, as Varese pointed out it would have to. New possibilities mean new opportunities. It was thanks to these new possibilities that new phenomena emerged. We now associate space with weird sounds exactly because electronically generated sounds and scores seemed to better fit these mysterious places so alien to our experiences. 

And so it can be seen that noises powered by electronics come to express things that more traditional instruments and forms of music could not. They are an extension of our sonic expressivity. I personally believe that this is all to the good for human beings that always have within them the desire to break new ground, to explore. We are creatures cursed to experience a physical world and that physical world includes sound. So, to my mind, it is utterly human to want to know what can be done and to find out in the doing of it and, what's more, to use new possibilities in sound to better express the experiences of life that we have. To that end, music with electronics had to involve the bringing of noise within the fold of musical creativity and it has immeasurably enriched us all as a result. Of course, conservatism will still hold the mainstream and try to limit, curtail and push back on the noisy neighbors that seek to broaden and strengthen our artistic appreciations and impulses but the boundaries of acceptability must always be pushed if we are to advance. Who one hundred years ago would have imagined the musical possibilities of sound and noise we have today? We live in the world Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises dreamed of. 

I leave the last word to John Cage who, in 1937, prophetically uttered the following words in his lecture "The Future of Music: Credo":

I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 mph. Static between the (radio) stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sounds effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of sound effects recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat and landslide. 

TO MAKE MUSIC

If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.  

WILL CONTINUE TO INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS.

The question is, how much do we live up to the hopes and dreams of our musical forbears? How much of a music of exploration and possibility do we make?

For more like this you can consider joining my Facebook group Electronic Music Philosophy 

ANUS HORRIBILIS: 2016 in Review

And so we come to that time of year when when start to look back on what has gone before and we start to espy what might be ahead around the next corner. I do not think it will be very controversial to say that 2016 has been one of the worst years many of us have lived through. From the deaths of creative icons such as David Bowie or Prince (plus many others not named here) to political and social upheavals which threaten difficult times ahead for many, and a more selfish "me first" attitude in general, 2016 has seemed determined to punch many people in the face and rock them back on their heels. Of course, we don't know how this will all turn out in the end. Part of the human curse is to live neither in the past nor in the future but always in the present. Things are always happening around us the significance of which may end up eluding us. 

It was impossible during this year, even as isolated as I am from wider society in my self-enforced half-hibernation, to keep all of these horrors out and my music was greatly affected by it. I spent the first six months of the year making dissonant noise collages which were aesthetically displeasing - even to me who made them. Thereafter followed three months in which I found music largely impossible and beside the point. Of what import is art when you see the wider world becoming more self-obsessed, regressive and antediluvian by the day? In the last couple of months I desperately wanted to make more music just so I could prove to myself that it wasn't a skill I had lost. I was reaching out trying to do it but more often than not this was met by a frustrated lack of creative impetus. I somehow managed to produce 4 or 5 projects which were dark and minimalist, a reflection upon dark times personally and politically.

And so I come to my final album of the year: ANUS HORRIBILIS. This is a review of my music in 2016. It picks out not the best tracks of my year (best is always a subjective, contingent choice that bears a connection only to the moment it sprung from) but the most representative. It is ANUS Horribilis and not Annus. It is not a horrible year, though it certainly has been, but a horrible arse. Or two if you check out the cover of this compilation. This was, unfortunately, the only honest picture I could pick for the cover, much as I despise the two men depicted. 2016 has been a horrible arse of a year and these two men perfectly represent that as they shit out any old crap on their personal, narcissistic and self-aggrandizing journeys through life.

All this means that if you are looking for happy pop songs and cheery melodies you've come to the wrong place. But if you've ever listened to anything by me before then you should know this wasn't exactly the place to come for that anyway! I have been much influenced by some comments of Edgar Froese's that he made in a BBC documentary some years ago which I watched in the past year a couple of times. He was speaking about how, in the late 1960s, German bands could set out on their own musical journeys, ones that weren't just Germans making American Rock n Roll or British Beat music. His answer was simple and brilliant: be abstract. This is something I think I have been working towards anyway. But its one thing to be abstract and another to be interestingly so. And, for all my dabbling in chance operations in composing music and in attempting to produce music that I did not write but merely oversaw, I did still want to make something that I felt expressed something genuine. I have not yet asked myself how I square the circle of letting music be what it will whilst also wanting to produce sounds that are authentic to something I recognise as the world. Maybe that is an adventure that yet awaits me.

My year in review consists of 15 tracks and there now follows a short history of how they came to be and why they exist in this review.

1. Gestalt

Gestalt (German: form, shape, figure, likeness) is a sound college and a very formal piece of music. It exists simply to explore sound. It was made entirely by accident. It is all sound textures and audio surfaces. It has no significance beyond this and is literally a sound void. I now read it as, perhaps, prophetic of personal and political voids.

2. Halle Neun

Markthalle Neun is a place in Berlin once of my acquaintance. This piece functions as a piece of nostalgia for it and those I was there with. The past clings to us even as we speed away from it.

3. Dogs

Dogs was a piece I made at first just with the sounds of dogs barking and growling. It was a sound experimentation piece and a piece in which I tried to make music from everyday sounds. In the end I added the cheap beat to give it a further flavor. This is a piece in which I try to see music in things which might not be thought to be musical because we should see more than just surfaces in life.

4. Cycle

Cycle is a tragic piece in which the mood of the same things happening over and over again forever is captured. Think of this as The Myth of Sisyphus, The Musical. It was originally written for an album called Adrift so maybe that is indicative of the mood in which it was created.

5. Rhenium

Rhenium was written for an album called Elements and all the song titles were chosen at random from the Periodic Table. I always regard my music itself as somewhat elemental. It is never very grand or intensely layered. It is most often just simple sounds expressing simple ideas, emotions or desires minimalistically done. One thing I hope to do (I don't try, I wouldn't know how) is to sometimes create a little beauty amongst the darkness. This piece is a little bit of that.

6. scram

Scram is a pure chaotic noise piece. It represents confusion, chaos, whatever you think that means. But it not as harsh as many I did this year. Chaos need not be harsh to be chaotic. 

7. Schneider

Schneider is titled after Florian Schneider, a member of Kraftwerk from 1970-2008. Musically, it was one of my attempts to introduce more lively drums into a piece of music. When I first started out making music many years ago it was the drums that were often the problem because whilst its easy to do this straight it sounds very boring. So keeping things lively but different yet still interesting is always a challenge. The sound of this track is generally noisy and buzzy as I was very taken with overdriven or saturated sounds at the time. Life had a lot of distortions, as it still has now, and these became musically represented.

8. The Terror of Brute Minds

The title should be self-explanatory in this year of all years and is a direct political comment. We live in disturbing times and who knows what horrors yet await us? The piece itself is drony, unsure of itself, one minute hopeful and the next in fear. 

9. DC Offset

This piece was made using a cut up method in which a piece of audio was recorded and then re-ordered by chance means. This again is meant to represent ideas of chaos and randomness and even being arbitrarily assigned to places you might not want to be. The title relates to nothing because why should it?

10. Slaves to Convention

Another track that is a political/social commentary. Convention I have been educated to see as dangerous to human beings on many levels. It amounts to living life according to habit, unthinkingly. And that can never end well. Musically, this sets out uncertain but then gains a conventional beat over which the randomness plays.

11. It Doesn't Matter

This piece is the most recent one I have composed and is partly a throwing up of the hands in disgust and partly a refusal to be dragged down with the weight of what goes on around us. Two sounds are panned hard left and hard right indicating choices. Again abstractness is key here because I don't like my music to be too definite. I want it to suggest chaos, openness, emptiness, a void. I don't want it to tell you what to do, how to be or how to feel. Because that's your responsibility.

12. Endurance

As a statement this is simple: this is the one thing you need in life. Musically, this is a little more of the beauty in the darkness. We all need a bit of encouragement sometimes.

13. My Life is Eternal Night

This musically tries to represent an eternal night of the soul, the landscape in which it seems we now all wander.

14. VoxPopuli

Those brute minds are back again in this noise piece which represents the populist voice which has been so active this year. It ain't pretty.

15. Es Tut Mir Leid

Es Tut Mir Leid (German: I'm Sorry) is a bit self-pitying. I'm sorry because I exist. The piece itself is a bit at cross purposes with an offbeat running contrary to the main kick sound. Life feels as if its not in time with itself so why would I not feel sorry for myself?

So there is my brief rundown of my musical year in review and the 15 tracks that emerge from that year as the representatives of what I did in it. I would say I hope you enjoy it but, to be brutally honest, I don't think music is merely about enjoyment and this year is one its been hard to enjoy at the best of times.

You can hear ANUS HORRIBILIS at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

First Thoughts On Non-Intentional Music

The former scientist and self-appointed culture arbiter, Richard Dawkins, in the recent past on his Twitter account remarked regarding 4'33" by John Cage that it was, and I quote, "pretentious". Quite what Dawkins, a man who used to abide by the rules of science until he found that popularity required less concern with things like evidence and prudence, meant in detail by this brief comment we will never know. He was merely dismissive and felt that this was enough to inform his acolytes of the correct disposition to have towards it. From the context of the tweet it seemed as if he was not too familiar with the piece either, as if he had only just been made aware of it before commenting. It seems that such off the cuff remarking now stands in place of considered comment and argument in the minds of scientists turned experts on all things.

For those who have more familiarity with the study of music, however, it is to be hoped that the piece 4'33" by John Cage is rather more well known, by reputation if not through an experience of it being performed. It is the prime example, in the work of Cage or of anybody else for that matter, of non-intentional music. Non-intentional music is somewhat of a hot potato amongst musical types and, I think, not always well understood. Many musicians seem to instinctively take against it for reasons they cannot find the words to express. This, in turn, leads to a sense of irrationalism on their part or, worse, the suggestion that their beliefs might simply be based in a conventionality that cannot be expressed nor that dare speak its name. In what follows I hope to use Cage and his paradigmatic composition as lenses to focus on non-intentionality in music and to bring forward some initial thoughts about it.

                                                 John Cage

Philosophical Background

Conventional understandings of music may be summarized in the following way: music is thought of as communicative, self-expressive and intentional. This, perhaps controversially, can be boiled down to a view of music as some kind of intended information or, essentially, knowledge. In contrast, the Cagian Turn that will be described in this blog is towards unintentional sound, interpenetration, chance and indeterminacy in music. This, as can be seen, is nothing to do with communication or expression and is expressly anti-intentional. If we see the conventional form of music as a way of communicating knowledge of some kind then Cage's conception of music may even be seen as swapping knowledge for wisdom of some kind instead. 

Cage himself was influenced by eastern spiritual thinking early in his musical career in the 1940s. Under the Indian teaching he came to find important, he found that music was regarded as something to calm the mind rather than as merely entertainment or as the communicative, expressive, intentional thing I mentioned above. In this view music takes on a more therapeutic guise. But more than this, in the tradition he learned of, music was to calm the mind in order to open it up to "divine influences". This need not be thought of religiously even if he received the idea in a spiritual context. Cage himself resolved that these influences were all the sounds of our environment, the sounds of nature, and nothing more "divine" than that. These influences can then be read as opening a person up to a loss of control, intention and determination since they are necessarily things co-existing with us in their own ways but not controlled by us. But we are getting ahead of ourselves now and there seems to be a wider philosophical context that we can bring to bear here.

The western mind, in recent centuries, might be taken as Descartes' image of the Cogito (from Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). "I", the thinking subject, is in this viewpoint taken as the centre of the universe and me understanding myself and the things around me is regarded as enlightenment. I, and those like me, use this knowledge to control and manipulate the world around us. Music, our subject in this blog, understood under this way of thinking cannot be anything other than an expression of this "I" and communication from and about it. It also stands to reason that this must be intentional since the Cogito is seen as the locus of rationality in a universe made rational by our ability, so it is claimed, to think, reason and see things clearly. So a music existing under this frame of mind must be rational, intentional and deliberative just as this worldview claims itself to be. 

This was not the thought world from which Cage's new appreciation of music sprang. In eastern philosophy things are not thought to be in need of manipulation by autonomous subjectivities. Instead, all things exist in harmony and the goal is balance. Hence the requirement for calmness and the letting go of control I mentioned previously. Music in this context becomes something different too, as we might expect, but it requires a philosophical and attitudinal change to appreciate this. Within this view personal likes and dislikes, which come from the ego, must be cast aside for they are literally the definition of a narrow mind. Instead, one must learn to see and hear things as just things. Based on the necessary philosophical change from west to east, the rational self of western conception must be de-emphasized in terms of ego. What I like or dislike becomes unimportant and is replaced by a simple interest in things. As Cage phrases this for musical relevance: "Sounds should be honored rather than enslaved". This makes music primarily not entertainment or communication but discovery, an opening of self to possibility. Music, sound, is thus opportunity, not least for change.

Put crudely, then, we can contrast a western controlling, manipulating vision based on information with an eastern one of co-existing in harmony with all around. Apply this to music and divergent paths become apparent.

If you want a practical example of how this differing vision works in musical practice we need look no further than John Cage's regular work with the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Cage wrote much music to go alongside dances arranged by Cunningham during his career but NOT as a musical accompaniment. Both said that they wrote work, whether dances or music, that was not written for the other but that just took place side by side at the same time. Cage did not write music to interpret the dancing and Cunningham did not compose dances to fit any of Cage's music. They just symbiotically existed in the same place, at the same time. This, it can be seen, imitates a view of the world in which lots of things just happen to co-exist simultaneously, each with their own causes and with any relation between them open to whatever interpretation can be given to it. A natural harmony of multiple things just being as they are then takes place.

Cage expresses this kind of thing as his ideal when he states that his wish is that art, and his music, "imitate nature in her manner of operation". That is, he wants his music to work as nature does, to be naturalistic rather than conventional. To understand this in musical terms we need to ponder for a while just how nature does work. Under modern scientific thinking this is not as a deterministic, mechanical universe but more chaotically and indeterminately such as that universe envisaged by the theories of quantum mechanics which are probabilistic in nature and question ideas of causality and determinism. For example, the so-called Uncertainty Principle questions the position, trajectory and momentum of things. We do not need to delve into this any further but just need to note the relevance of these on-going scientific investigations to our understanding of music here.

But what follows from these philosophical ruminations? On the thinking that Cage takes up it stands to reason that here an art/life or music/life distinction vanishes. This is simply unnecessary if one now sees sounds not as communications or intentions but as simply things that exist in their own right. Sounds are just sounds and are a co-existing part of life. Thus, Cage expressed the desire that we just let sounds be themselves. So music need not be intentional sounds or sounds made with devices crafted with the intention of making music on them. So-called "noises" can be music or musically useful too. For if, taking this philosophy forward, "music is continuous" (since all sound is now music) then there can be no differentiation of sounds with some designated "musical" and others not. All are just components of a universal music of sound. Under a Cagian aesthetic the idea "musical sounds", as a distinction from other kinds of sounds, is annulled as nonsense. Life itself, the environment, is music. 4'33", to which I now turn, thus becomes the outworking of a theory of music and not simply a curiosity or a weird joke.

4'33"

Upon its initial performance by the pianist David Tudor in 1952, John Cage's piece 4'33" was reported to have "infuriated and dismayed" the audience. Cage suggests someone even suggested they run him out of town. There was, so it is said, "uproar". We need to remember that this first performance was given at an avantgarde concert attended by cutting edge artists of the time. So it is not as if the audience were the most conservative of folks. But why was there uproar as Tudor performed Cage's instructions to the letter, going through the three movements, one of 30 seconds, another of 2'23" and a third of 1'40" (making 4'33")? Some observations of mine:

- They expected something but got, as they thought, nothing. (This is actually not true. The piece had been meticulously composed by Cage, as he said, "note by note" using timings and measurements. It was not easily or simply conceived.)

- They expected what I described above as the musical conventions. They regarded music as intention but saw and heard none.

- They expected to understand the musical proceedings but didn't and so confusion was created.

- They were, as Cage would later say, "blinded by themselves".

- They expected intentional sound but, instead, got unintended sounds. Thus, they were literally unable to hear the music.

At this point we need to be reminded of Cage's conception of music. This was that there is no difference between sounds in terms of musical usefulness but also, in another discovery he made, between sounds and silence. This latter discovery was informed by entering an anechoic chamber meant to silence all sound. Whilst he was in it he realized he could still hear both the high-pitched noise of his nervous system and the lower pitched sound of his blood flow. But he also realized that the "silence" (which wasn't silent) had enabled these new sounds to be heard. The silence, in fact, he realized was a giving up of intention for in the silence there was still sound. The silence was a turning from noises made to noises that were just there, from intentional to non-intentional sound. Silence, thus, in his conception, was literally a change of mind, a new way to see (or, rather, hear!). We need to note here that Cage equates music with sound. He says for example that "Music is continuous. It is only we who turn away." This is a recognition both of his discovery that nowhere is silent but also of how this same silence can open our ears to non-intentionality and the play of sounds as nature's music. 

There is somewhere else that mentions a similar thought. In his famous book The Art of Noises from 1916 Luigi Russolo writes about health promoting "poeticized silences" made up of an "infinity of noises, and that these noises have their own timbres, their own rhythms, and a scale that is very delicately enharmonic in its pitches". He calls them "the smile of certain countrysides" for he is talking about the country and the natural world. This phraseology itself suggests just such a natural, non-intentional music as Cage refers to, something which in today's language we might refer to as "ambient noise".

John Cage himself thought that 4'33" was the music of the listener "rather than the composer's". In 4'33" the composer opens a metaphorical (and sometimes possibly an actual) door to new possibilities. He offers an opportunity to change your mind, to live in harmony with all the sounds around you, to hear differently. Cage contrasted this himself with record collections which, in his view, might be thought of as "the end of music". If you are following the line of thinking here you may be able to ascertain why.

Method

Some words about Cage's methodology may be in order here for context. Cage could not hear his music in his head. He did not follow a composerly method of hearing ideas and then trying to recreate them in sound nor did he even work experimentally with sounds until something clicked and he somehow fettled a piece from his sound sources. What's more, he signed off from traditional musical learning such as Solfege (which trains pitches), something he didn't want to learn as he saw it as a limitation on the possibilities of sound if they were reduced to training in tones. What you learn becomes the limits of your world, right? Meanwhile, in the mid 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg, the composer and music theorist, had been Cage's teacher for a year and told him that he had no sense for harmony and that this would eventually limit Cage like hitting a brick wall. Cage determined to bang his head against the wall forever if that became the case.

Cage's method was to compose pieces of music in order to hear what his music would sound like. He never heard this until or unless it was performed somewhere and, given the nature of his pieces, this would often be different on each occasion it was performed. So Cage wasn't composing with sounds as per the usual procedure. He wasn't constructing a building he had the plans for. He was constructing intellectually conceived ideas in which sounds and combinations of sounds might take place. Sensory experience was a result of his intellectual, composerly activity. He did not know what the result would be in anything except a general sense or in the sense that anyone can imagine how something might be. He didn't know what 4'33" would sound like on that day in 1952 when it was first performed. But he did compose and structure the conditions of its performance. The natural leeway built into many of Cage's works, both in terms of the instructions given for their performance and the equipment used (prepared pianos might not make consistent sounds, radios could splutter forth anything), only exacerbated the lack of foreknowledge he could have about how his compositions would sound. Cage's music was not about creating a physical copy of something in his head. It was something he arranged for without knowing what it would be.

But this leads us to a question: If I construct an intellectual musical experiment, a la Cage, to enable the hearing of sounds, am I then responsible for any and every sound that takes place within that experimental space that I conceived and designed in an intentional sense?

The answer, I think, has to be no. I think Cage would say no too since his compositions were expressly intended to explore and engage non-intentional sound. But if I am not responsible for every sound made in an intentional sense then we must accept that non-intentional sounds can play musical roles, at least, as a minimum, in such spaces. But once this door is opened it cannot be shut again for there is no reason to say that non-intentional sounds cannot be perceived or conceived as musical if a context is regarded as musical. So it is important to see that, even if one does not go as far as Cage in a philosophical sense, one has already admitted that non-intentional sounds have musical uses and can be musically perceived and conceived. We must admit that something like the self-generating modular synthesizer patch so common today can be musical even if the musician who arranged for it to take place is not personally making each sound happen. At a minimum, distance has been introduced between a composer and the composed in all its detail.

Intention

In speaking at a later point about 4'33" Cage mused that "...what they thought was silence... was full of accidental sounds". He described his musical purpose at one point as "I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that sounds of their environment constitute music which is more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went to a concert hall". The major intention of Cage was to introduce indeterminacy to music. This was far more radical a thing than chance operations in a piece's composition for the latter could leave a piece of music still very deterministic. Chance operations only distance the composer from their likes, dislikes, thoughts and memories as composing is taking place. But it is indeterminacy of outcome or performance that changes the game, not knowing what you will hear. Indeterminacy is somewhere defined as an inability to foresee the greater part of the result of a composition or performance which is made up of non-intentional sounds. That silence played so great a part in John Cage's composing was therefore deliberate because, as already discussed, silence was equivalent to the hearing of non-intentional sounds. 

This raises questions. Say one composes a piece using chance operations and that piece results in indeterminacy. In what sense can the music be said to be intentional? Surely one must, as a minimum, admit to levels or shades of intentional influence or even intent itself. One might want to speak of deferred intent. What is clear is that strategies can indeed by devised which threaten the intentional link some always seem to want to make. Improvisation is not one such strategy though for, by Cage's standards, it does not involve either chance or indeterminacy since an improvised performance involves performers constantly making educated, knowing choices, even if these are spontaneous. So it is not enough to improvise. One must take steps to design all the effects of personal likes and dislikes, memories and tastes out. This is just one reason why Cage's own pieces were so deliberatively designed.

There have been numerous performances of Cage's 4'33" and many have not been in accordance with Cage's clear aesthetic intentions in composing the piece. These were to encourage a change of mind from one way of hearing to another, to encourage the indeterminacy of non-intentional sounds, to focus attention. But in performances of the piece which have become pieces of theater or mimes or in which something distracting is done during the time period of the piece's performance this aesthetic intention is impugned. "Aha!" you may say. "So Cage did have intentions!" Well, indeed, yes he did. But these intentions did not extend towards the creation of intentional sounds so much as the creation of experimental (read: indeterminate) compositions. We must defer to this reality rather than steadfastly insisting that any intention at any stage of the composition or designing of a piece of music makes everything within the composition's space itself intentional. "Non-intentionality" in musical terms need not mean "to have no intentions whatsoever in any sense". This would be a reductio ad absurdum rendering music composition impossible. 

Cage quite clearly did have intentions - at the compositional level - since the purpose of his music was to have a purpose. He firmly believed that although 4'33" was written for any instrument, or combination of them, it did have a formal structure (which he had determined) and so was something which could potentially be violated. Regarding unfaithful performances of his pieces he said "I don't believe that a bad, thoughtless, undevoted performance of one of my works is a performance of it" (emphasis mine). So its as well here to remind people that Cage did not see his music as a con, a joke, a game, an elaborate hoax or as anything other than entirely serious musical compositions which explored composing non-intentionality at the level of performance using non-intentional sounds or silence (which are the same thing). This is demonstrated not least in that within 4'33" as composed intentional sounds are themselves expressly not permitted. Cage had intentions for his works but these should be distinguished from intentionality within them.

Cage conceived that 4'33" could be performed at any length (but whilst keeping the same title). Yet, in contradistinction to the conventional notions of musical etiquette and practice, it attempts to express nothing and communicate nothing. Intentional as a compositional experiment, the sounds within its time frame are in no way intentional. It was designed to be so. The conventional ideas of music are, thus, subverted and refuted. This could then be said to be anti-music in which not just an art form but a philosophical tradition is exposed. Cage lost friends because he wrote this piece, or so he said, and so someone somewhere must have thought that something was at stake in 4'33" and maybe you reading this do too. But I do ask readers to consider one more thing here, the difference between cause and intention. All sounds have causes but not all sounds are intentional. That there are non-intentional sounds themselves should be a non-controversial thought. It is only their musical appropriateness that may bring them into disrepute with some who see music as purely an intentional matter. But how they justify that theoretically seems hard work indeed should they wish to justify their beliefs and their musical designations.