Spahlinger This Is The Time of Conceptive Ideologues No Longer PDF

This article was downloaded by: [Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile]
On: 15 January 2014, At: 16:27

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Contemporary Music Review

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20
this is the time of conceptive

ideologues no longer
mathias spahlinger
Published online: 26 Nov 2008.
To cite this article: mathias spahlinger (2008) this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer ,
Contemporary Music Review, 27:6, 579-594, DOI: 10.1080/07494460802410302
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460802410302
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 27, No. 6, December 2008, pp. 579–594
this is the time of conceptive

ideologues no longer1
mathias spahlinger
Downloaded by [Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile] at 16:27 15 January 2014
on the title
the title is not so much a title as a motto. it is a portmanteau of two quotations:
dies ist die zeit der könige nicht mehr. this is the time of kings no longer.
schämet euch, shame on you,
dass ihr noch einen könig wollt; ihr seid that you want a king: you are
zu alt; zu eurer väter zeiten wärs too old; in the days of your fathers
ein anderes gewesen. euch ist nicht it would have been different. you are
zu helfen, wenn ihr euch selber nicht helft. not to be helped, if you don’t help
yourselves.
(hölderlin, 1985, p. 742)
the second quotation stems from the ‘deutsche ideologie’ of karl marx, which begins
with the famous sentence ‘in every epoch the dominant thoughts are the thoughts of
the dominant classes’. in the present context, it is intended as a plea or a
recommendation to composers (as well as musicologists) to resist the pressure of
expectations that they slide into a passé yet enticing role, the role of the ‘active,
conceptive ideologue, who makes the perpetuation of the illusions of this class about
itself into their principal source of sustenance’ (marx and engels, 1983, p. 46).
incidentally: the more passive effort to comply also has its pitfalls: the critical idea of
yesterday can become ideology today—through clinging on to it, or through doing
nothing while it is exploited by others.
two theses will be pursued in parallel here, and while they could be discussed and
critiqued separately—because they don’t necessarily follow one from the other—in
my estimation they do belong together:
(1) new music is underestimated. the potential of fundamental changes made 100
years ago has not been exhausted, has in fact scarcely been recognized. thus
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/07494460802410302
580 m. spahlinger
speculations about new trends are off the mark, because they imply the
expectation of a qualitatively comparable conceptual leap.
new music is or reflects the very revolution of revolutions, because she

has discarded the conventions, without, however (like other changes in para-
digm), having replaced them with new conventions: thus she has made the
relationship of human sociality to convention, as a whole, into a valid topic for
discussion.
(2) the dominant culture-bearer, the petty bourgeoisie, comes up with all kinds
of ‘innovations’ which resemble and stand in the way of new music to
render her harmless, to rescind her promise—out of a poorly understood self-
interest it carries on the ideological business of the real ruling class, the
bourgeoisie.
what is to be done? what now? what has no one composed before? which market
niche remains unexploited? what has a future and substance beyond mere trends?
whither will or should new music go?
the situation of new music

new music is the first and (as far as we know) the only music that suspends or
disables the syntactical and language-like systems of its own tradition. in addition,
unlike prior changes of paradigm, she has not put new conventions in place of the
old. she is a child of the enlightenment, of technical-scientific objectivism and the
industrial revolution, and of the political power of the bourgeoisie. she is by nature
self-aware, and as such anti-ideological.
in new music, the relation of the parts to the whole is reconsidered from the
ground up. there are both external and internal reasons for the discarding of the tonal
system (with all of the partial systems that depend upon tonality). the internal
reasons have to do with the inherent logic of advanced chromaticism, which could no
longer be pushed out any further, since every roving chord could freely move to any
other; and the external impetus would be the relativization of the language through
confrontation with foreign musical cultures, in the wake of colonialism, imperialism,
and the critique thereof.
‘what is sounding in reality?’ is the question that new music asks; asks again in a
new, material-oriented way.
in the time of tonality, this question was synonymous with the question ‘what is
sounding in reference to the system?’ because the system was the human reality of
perception. sounds that didn’t act within the system were not music.
all that was counted as real, and rightly so, was human reality: that which
(physically) sounded, as related to reason—that is, together with a system of
selective apperception and interpretation. this is what was meant by the phrase
Contemporary Music Review 581
‘labor of the spirit in spirit-amenable material’ (hegel); it is also the true sense of
the hegelian idea, that the real is the reasonable, and the reasonable is the real.
new music asks the materialistic question: what is sounding independently of the
cultural system of perception, tonality? and she brings to consciousness: the object (of
perception) independent of consciousness is geared toward consciousness, the as-
such is only for us.
the question ‘what is sounding in reality?’ is posed by new music, and it implies:
only so much can come into consciousness from the object of perception as comes
from consciousness itself, from the conditions of our perception and interpretation,
be they the biological premises of our perceptive apparatus, or the musico-cultural

premises of our society.
new music does not create new conventions which, as if they were ‘products of nature’
(marx and engels, 1983, p. 68), count as essential, self-evident (thus not understood),
largely subconscious, in a word, positive, as was the case with the old conventions.
all attempts to imbue self-designed rules, democratically determined laws, or
relationships determined at the bargaining table with the trappings of some kind of
‘second nature’ are doomed to fail.
which is just as well! one is tempted to say. our laws will all be identified as man-
made, even the divine ones. it’s about time!!
new music is thus essentially part of enlightenment, or even enlightened, thus anti-
ideological, provided that she takes the state of her material seriously.
the transition from the religious ritual, which must be believed, to theater is (since
antiquity) the transition from myth to self-aware myth. one who looks behind the
façade of religious practice is a heretic. the one who goes to the theater, and then
leaps on stage to stay the hand of the murderer and protect the innocent, hasn’t
understood the rules: the murdered one will, after all, take a curtain call for their
artful death, and graciously receive the applause of the public.
art has always been self-reflexive. traditionally she drew attention more to the
method of presentation than to the presented object itself.
inasmuch as traditional music was communication in music, thus is new music a
communication in music about music—self-reflection of art, of language, and of
spirit as a whole.
what is ideology?
ideologies are contradiction-free, tendentially homogeneous world-views, they
constitute values, normalize behavior. noticeable in our violent-infantile consumer
society is the inadequacy of consciousness, in its current state, vis à vis the
suppressed, objectively possible consciousness: the disjunctness of historical
consciousness vis à vis history is the disjunctness of history herself.
thus ideology is a term of criticism. it does not merely refer to an omnium-
gatherum of ideas and fantasies, an arbitrary ‘weltanschauung’, though in standard
usage the term carries this positive connotation.2 marx, however, instead emphasizes
582 m. spahlinger
its use to legitimate behaviors, to justify abuse of power—in a word, the dominance
of the dominant idea, and the way that dominance is disguised.
he who owns nothing but his labor and is forced to carry it to market in exchange
for wages is a worker.
he who takes labor, in exchange for money, draws off the added value and
accumulates capital is the employer.
that is ideology! in marx’s turn of phrase, it’s ‘necessary illusion’, in adorno’s,
‘societally necessary illusion’.
this definition of ideology as inadequate vis à vis a possible consciousness implies
that power can and ought to exist without domination, a society in which the
potential sources of power, such as the political power of the economy, are
democratically controlled.
in connection with music, this problem complex can be summarized in two
questions:
(1) what political, societal, and economic changes, and especially what technical
innovations in the realm of production, have changed thinking and, by
extension, composition, and what would be an appropriate reaction of
composers to these changes?
(2) which attitudes of thought might disguise the conditions at hand, simply by
presenting themselves as apolitical, as autonomous, as the end product of a
pseudo-independent intellectual history; and how can it be avoided that a
communal ethos (the societal formation of sense) which has finally attained
consciousness through confrontation with aesthetic problems is again
concealed, transformed once again into the ‘societally necessary illusion’?
in its immediacy (organicism), all thought (if one can call it that) serves self-
preservation and self-reassurance. however, thought that is deserving of the name
has, according to bruno liebrucks (liebrucks, 1964, p. 10),3 no drive for self-
preservation. only insofar as thinking is and can be self-reflective—that is, insofar as
it fathoms the conditions of its own genesis and takes these as its central theme—can
it also be non-ideological or even an ideology critique.
the bourgeoisie has played its role. the ideological character of bourgeois
democracy is in plain sight. equality before the law ignores the contradiction
between pro forma democracy and antagonistic society. the fundamental bourgeois
ideologon, the exchange of equivalent goods and services, conceals the fact that labor
is not a commodity like any other, because labor creates its own value.
the bourgeoisie has ceased to be the bearer of a societal or an aesthetic utopia. the
era in which a great figure such as beethoven was aptly identified as a bourgeois
composer—that is, was synonymous with a political freedom movement—are
definitively over. i know not a single representative of the bourgeoisie who is truly
interested in radical art. new representational art is the dictum, the composers gaze
down into the chasm of proletarization seeking a market niche and simultaneously
look upward in search of funding. in this way they are a kind of competitive bicyclist
of culture, occasionally in teams, but in the end each competes with every other,
unified only by the name of a mutual sponsor.
what is the situation of composers and what is the petit bourgeoisie?4

the hitherto most revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie, has brought forth the
potential for its own demise: an unprecedented increase in productive power. this
was only possible through the enlightenment: the unfettered (even inhuman)
questioning of everything obsolete and of every prejudice. new music has its origins
here.
the petit bourgeoisie is, so to speak, the heterogeneous chameleon—even marxist
theory defines them as heterogeneous: decisive in this definition is not the ownership
or non-ownership of the means of production, as it was before, but rather the middle
layer, far below the owners of the means of production; but, among those who are
dependent upon wages and salary income, relatively privileged and advantageously
situated. composers are often torn between the two levels, even within one and the
same individual: ‘freelance’ to the point of self-exploitation, their own scribe,
manager, part copyist at the photocopier—and ‘employed’, and thus their own
sponsor: ranging from the precarious work situation of the music school teacher or
contracted instructor to the permanent state employee.
the entirety of hans magnus enzensberger’s output (‘on the inexorability of the
petit bourgeoisie’) (enzensberger, 1976) could be submitted as evidence here, except
for the following sentence: ‘it (the class of the petit bourgeoisie) decides, what is
thought. (the dominant thoughts are not always those of the dominant class, but
rather those of the petit bourgeoisie.)’ this is but a fine point in the definition of
ideology as affirmation of power relations. the petit bourgeoisie does not have the
power, but it does have privileges; its ideology supports the power which is not its
own.
the petit bourgeois composers want to know which direction is forward; but they
don’t want to go there—out of fear of losing their privileges, even if these are not yet
fully attained.
all classes speak of their own interests as if these were the interest of all mankind.
the petit bourgeoisie takes this as its theme in the guise of a dispassionate pleasantry
and the purposelessness of art; this it fancies to be free of ideology; and thus its
conception of ideology remains ideological. freedom from ideology becomes itself a
kind of ideology:
the environment minister of hessia, in connection with the proposal to renew biblis
A,5 calls for ‘a speedy and unideological audit through the federal government’.
let it be understood clearly: ideology is the bedazzlement through which it’s always
the other guy that suffers.
the diminutive one tends to make all large things into small things. reason
transforms the paradox (through reflection) into the contradiction (‘thinking reason
584 m. spahlinger
hones the difference between distinct matters into the essential difference, into the
polarized antithesis’) (hegel, 1964, p. 61).
conversely, the petit bourgeois transforms the appeal for freedom (a word that
decent people can only utter with tears of indignation) into an appeal for more free
time, which uncritically implies the existence of its opposite, work/unfree time.
thus the lucid contradiction becomes the dictum of ‘anything goes’, the harmless,
undifferentiated juxtaposition.
the bourgeoisie, the hitherto most progressive class, had the great utopia, the grand
conception of history—which has since devolved into legitimation of power. the petit
bourgeoisie has systematically taken each progressive initiative of the bourgeoisie or

even of the petit bourgeoisie and transformed it, in the sawtooth of its self-
preservational instincts, into little ideologons.
beyond the alternative free/unfree ( ¼ work) time, one occasionally, as a composer,
has an inkling of what it could mean to say ‘suppose that I had produced for your
benefit . . .’ (marx and engels, 1981, p. 462).6
what would be the counterpart to the free spaces? free spaces are like free wishes.7 i
am in favor of the freedoms we take for ourselves, and against those that are
granted to us.
what have the composers done with the state of musical material in new music?
on a prior occasion,8 i investigated the characteristics of music which could
potentially be political. at the time i isolated four aspects, and no others have
appeared since then.
political aspects of music:

function
mode of production
content/topic
compositional method
if one wants to do things right, as it were, when composing, then according to my

observations, it can only be achieved in relation to just one of these aspects (or, at
most, two simultaneously). if one conceives, for example, of a new mode of
production, in which the musicians emancipate themselves from the composer, and
increasingly assume the responsibility for deciding what they will play, then one can’t
expect that to emerge which the composer considers politically and aesthetically
correct in relation to the functional side, the (perhaps textual) content, or the
compositional method.
i certainly have no intention of repeating myself here by reciting the
specific political implications of these aspects. instead, i want to call attention
to some ideologia which have become commonplace in connection with these
aspects.
function
the achievement of autonomy in art is a heritage of the bourgeoisie. emancipation
from the duties to the church, and liberation from preordained purpose has made it
into a medium for self-reflection.
an interesting paradox is that the idea of an autonomous music is fully established
in modern consciousness, but not autonomous music itself. music with a function or
a text is vastly more common than that without. at the same time, one can ask those
most oblivious to such problems what music is in the cinema, the opera, or the rock
concert; and receive the response that it’s what’s left over when you take away the
picture, the text, the plot, and the stage action.
i spoke of autonomous music as the medium of self-reflection. this idea descends
into shallowness and becomes ideology when it translates into free space and
playground, when nothing is left to conquer, only things to defend. the idea of
autonomous music doesn’t work anymore as an emancipative mechanism against the
power of the status quo, but rather defends the status quo—an instructive example
for how a mere clinging to once critical thought becomes apologetic. incidentally, it’s
no different with the bourgeois notion of political autonomy.
the function of autonomous music today is to disguise and deny its function—its
function as distinguishing feature, sphere of identification, and self-adulation of a
self-anointed elite, its vocabulary of reasoning (even in adorno)—and to discredit
anything that is not bourgeois, autonomous art as non-art. and, more profoundly,
particularly in relation to new music, the function of nonfunctional music is nothing
less than a vigorous defense against the imposition that it should serve to reflect the
political and social implications of function, content, means of production, and
especially aesthetics itself. the mere belief that music is transcendental or brings about
transcendence is already ideological.
questions of this sort seem to have completely vanished from today’s public
discourse.
content/topic
along with tonality, the expressive archetypes are passé. at first glance, it appears
paradoxical: one of the midwives of new music’s ‘material revolution’ was musical
expressionism, in particular the breaking of expressive taboos.
since the tones—and gradually all the other parameters—are only to be related
to one another, it becomes evident that text, story, picture, expression also lose their
a-priori unity. the autonomy of the individual musical attributes relative to one
another to the point of dissolution corresponds to the incapability of music to usurp
the autonomy of other art forms. only by demonstrating its distance from its topic can
music draw nearer thereto. only by depicting expressivity, exhibiting and revealing its
mechanisms independently of their expressive intent, only by showing unmediated
expressive intent as an illusion does music become heightened expression.
586 m. spahlinger
the relation of music to (for example) text, despite heroic achievements by
schnebel, gerhard rühm, helms, even ligeti, has once again arrived at the expressive
interpretative tropes and the poignant turns of phrase (more regressive than those) of
the nineteenth century.
mode of production
the act of ‘making the function of the composer superfluous’ (as i dubbed it in the
subtitle of a collection of concept pieces) (spahlinger, 1993) counts among the
essential societal, in this case practical implications of musical material since 1910.
through the example of music notation one can most clearly see the relationship
between educational tendency and the blockade thereof. it was early in the history of
atonality that one spoke of an equality among pitches, but what is crucial is equality
among people.
not just the twelve notes of our tempered chromatic scale have become equal (one
should say, have been qualitatively neutralized), but rather all attributes of music
have ceased to be dependent variables of tonal order. in the face of this fact,
traditional notation is inadequate.
a bach fugue is appropriately notated, because the notation represents the most
important sense-bearing attributes, so that they can be heard with the eye—that is,
through the act of reading them. this presupposes that notated music is uniform, that
scale-derived pitches and meter-dependent rhythm bear the principal ideas and that
all other attributes can be treated as dependent variables.
in new music, unlike ‘accustomed’ forms, foreground and background are
interchangeable, main ideas can transform into peripheral ideas (i would even say
must, if it is to be considered new music). not just as timbre music (which utterly
resists efforts at direct notation) does new music have infinitely many sense-bearing
attributes. there cannot be one adequate, uniform notation system (auxiliary symbols
are always derived anew), because the material of new music is from its conception
asystematic or even anti-systematic, heterogeneous; in a word, anarchic—free from
domination.
the breakup of the hierarchy in production, and what the nature of new music is
within itself, appear as two inseparable sides of the same thing. because the written
word, as the medium for issuing commands, has brought forth modes of thought that
are only possible in writing, so is musical thinking channeled through that which can
be captured by writing: that which cannot be written also cannot be thought—or only
as a resistance against writing and institutionalized power.
a little aside, by way of warning: contemporary musicology still only deals with
non-notated music relatively rarely.
improvisation seems to be holding its own as a discipline, even appears in
pedagogy (and why not? if one has understood it correctly then one can express it
simply and pass it on), but as a tool for evolving into a state of political, but also
aesthetic, maturity, it scarcely has made progress.
after literally 40 years of effort in this endeavor we stand (by my estimation) exactly
where we stood in 1968. why? because all this anti-authoritarian child’s play
frequently fails to rise to the level of art, and because these free spaces do not
correspond to any concomitant increase in the democratic control over the power of
economics.
he who wishes to avoid being an ideologue, especially the ideological figurehead,
must come to realize that, since 1968, music which comes about purely through
communication between equals and avoids serving the channels of labor division has
nearly vanished completely, outside some remainder stock of the free jazz tradition.
instead, children’s concerts in the vein of haydn’s ‘kindersinfonie’ are celebrating a

renaissance. not to say there’s anything wrong with that . . .
as always, musicians are being trained as executants in the existing (hierarchical)
institutions which reproduce tradition nearly to the exclusion of all else, imitating the
revolutions of yesteryear.
the living composers orient themselves to this. that a musician can correctly
execute something which he fails to understand, that the composer can praise his
performance as the best of all possible performances, and nobody has understood a
thing, that is evidence of a (pardon me) pre-deluge idea of communication. that says,
‘communication is then perfect, when the recipient behaves correctly.’ then one can
go ahead with the commissary-joke: ‘. . . and that’s and order!’—‘what is an order?’—
‘an order is . . . to be obeyed!!’
compositional method
the method with which music is put together (i.e. com-posed, but also improvised or
transmitted orally) naturally interests me as a composer the most. but not as one
might expect, in that i think one could best observe the beautiful itself, aesthetic
consciousness while at work, purely on one’s own person, if only one could disregard
the disruptive factors, the purposes that music serves, the work conditions and
performance conditions, the extramusical content which it might convey.
perhaps what ernst bloch said about poetry is also true for music: presumably it
cannot stand on its own at all. i would go a lot further.9 whether people find the
beautiful to be beautiful or recognize that which is kitsch or (more charitably) well-
meaning, is a first-rate political topic. the aesthetic consciousness, too, cannot be
anything but conscious existence. in musical habits of thought and compositional
methods, the general habits of thought and work methods of the time recur, or are
perpetuated; and everything depends upon the method by which the music is put
together, how it belies temporality (forward or backwardly oriented) or how,
sensually, with pleasure and intelligence, it provides adequate answers and asks
questions. then composition becomes work on aesthetic consciousness.
the following quotations of eisler and adorno are usually taken as contradictory,
but i would plead that they be thought together, so each may be better understood
through the other.
588 m. spahlinger
‘a new music can not emerge through a revolution in the material, but rather only
through a change in society, in which a new class becomes empowered and in which
art has a new societal purpose’ (eisler, 1973, 1977).
‘but the ideological moments that come to bear on the various arts are by no
means of a purely material nature, but reach far into the aesthetic components of the
matter itself’ (adorno, 1968, p. 93).
to paraphrase wittgenstein one can say that the meaning of musical material is its
use in music. to think these two thoughts together as a contradiction can mean:
neither is the ‘progressive’ material progressive when it is not used in a manner
appropriate to the material involved, that is, self-reflectively . . .

. . . nor is it unthinkable that the means-to-end relation (and we did see that the
end purpose is only one of four political attributes of music)—that this relation may
remain ‘pre-modern’, and thus the new end purposes (at first) don’t cause many
changes to the music.
i now want to give several examples for how the most progressive material, the
implicit reflection-of-self, which became possible through the ‘material revolution’ of
the start of the twentieth century, has continually given in to timidity or other
overpowering circumstances and stood still in mid-path.
examples for compositional method

dodecaphony
the twelve-tone technique takes subjective volition as its central theme!
the subject is arbitrary. people invent their symbols arbitrarily in relation to the
objects they are intended to signify. the words do not sound similar to the objects to
which they refer.
analogous things can be said about tonal systems. otherwise all tonal systems would
be identical or at least similar. (the only universal seems to be: the octave always plays a
role.) this arbitrariness was in all traditional music a collective subjective arbitrariness,
it was human actuality, had a societally conditioned objectivity.
the twelve-tone technique (and comparable compositional techniques which rely
on formal logic and rules) has replaced collective subjectivity with individual
subjectivity and thus opened up the possibility that this aspect of what constitutes
reality can become conscious.
a strategy to avoid regression into tonality became a strategy for guaranteeing
cohesion, thus a restoration of a classical idea: everything must relate to everything
else, where possible derived from one principal idea (cf. weltformel [stockhausen]).
thus a method that reflectively went beyond free atonality (it is no longer mere
specific pitch-by-pitch negation of tonality, but rather negation and conscious-
making of sense constitution as a whole) became in the worst cases a knitting pattern,
whose sub-linguistic, sub-compositional correctness could be ratified by any
musically clueless onlooker.
for it is not far from the structural identity function, which is (in this case
positively) to be achieved, especially not in the horizontal dimension: every twelve-
note row can produce any twelve-note chord; every eleven-note chord can derive
from every 11 note row; every ten-note chord from almost any ten-note row, and so
forth. each individual can calculate for themselves at what point the difference
between one row and the next becomes significant.
much more profound is that, under easily constructible circumstances, the first five
notes of a twelve-tone row contain every interval, and in all cases the first seven notes
contain every interval, so each constellation has no recourse through which to
differentiate itself from all the others.
mechanical repetition
mechanical repetition is non-figurative, it has no systematic attributes, no formal
implication, is capable of endless continuation. in contrast, organic, figurative
repetitions are limited in number, often they appear in groups of no more than two
or three, they create punctuation and teleology. in both cases one can say: repetition
engenders separation. figurative repetition is one of a partial figure which has a
qualitative beginning and end. mechanical repetition, on the other hand, is practically
endless: one cannot identify the beginning of a loop or of a wheel.
mechanical repetition was eagerly taken up by the futurists as a challenge to the
romantic understanding of art, but usually in a provocative, simply external fashion.
thus in honegger’s pacific 231, really a piece of program music, one can demonstrate
that the composer lacks the means to represent, via continuous acceleration and
retardation of simultaneous different tempos, the circular perpetual motion of a
closed loop. this last fails principally due to the conventional conception of harmony:
the employed sonorities remain latently tonal, functional; they produce divisible sub-
figures.
at the end of alban berg’s lyric suite, movement 4, the problem of mechanical
repetition is treated not as an external content and ‘represented’, but as an internal
problem of compositional material—transformed into an aesthetic problem and
solved as such. the twelve-tone row is divided into three groups of 3, 4, and 5 notes,
which rotate against one another in such a way that every possible three-tone
constellation is sounded: negation of any exclusivity of the traditional conception of
harmony, implicit in the musical material as a whole.
in minimal music, by contrast, there are types of mechanical repetition robbed of
any potential for sociological, technological, or perception critique. some wishy-
washy dominant-like chord with an unresolved suspension, a chordal gestalt or
similar material, in permanent repetition is often nothing more than wallpaper.
critical visualization [German: vergegenwärtigung—Ed.] of the non-gestalt becomes
harmless apology. in the same way, the worker alienated from his work tends to
‘voluntarily’ continue, after his work day, to do the things he was compelled to do on
his shift. or better, out of a pressure to relax, he repeats the day’s activities with an
590 m. spahlinger
apparently higher degree of ‘freedom’—the assembly line worker kills time at the slot
machine or the computer game—and the only music which appeals to an individual
who has contracted hearing damage at his hazardous workplace is the even louder
music at the disco.
open form
along with the concrete negation of tonality, the form-generating tendency of
harmony is neutralized. the material of new music has no formal implications.
already op. 11 of schoenberg swaps formal sections in the course of composing, but
the result is still a definitive version.
what do we presume about prestabilized harmony, when we expect coherence that
is linked to temporal unfolding? under the conditions since 1910 form can only be
open, or a closed form must reveal itself as arbitrary—which means the same thing.
subdivision and dramaturgy serve to punctuate and generate closure. but in new
music these can only be proportion and process. the first consists of cuts that have no
internal justification; the second always has an open beginning and an open-ended
conclusion.
the practice of the fragmentary paper trail, which i have definitely practiced as well,
objectifies the problem. in using a material without formal implications, there is no
reason not to further subdivide the interchangeable parts into even smaller units, ad
infinitum. materialized into (actually arbitrary but not apparently arbitrary) sections
on interchangeable pages, something like a real open form emerges. the nonobjective
object, which the artwork has always been, becomes the objective non-thing. but
form, including open form, takes place in the mind.
chance
compositional methods that operate with chance create the greatest imaginable
challenges in all of music history to the discipline of the performers. they must,
precisely and without regard for the level of difficulty or the discomfort or the empty
time, reproduce what chance requires of them; for if the music seems the least bit
‘human’, if a declaration of taste or expressive impetus or a traditional expectation of
tension and release, dramaturgy, climax, teleology, finality should sneak in, then it is
no longer what is meant by ‘anarchic harmony’, the most radical and cavalier
realization of a central idea of new music: the nonfigurative is exposed to the figure-
making consciousness, which thereby comes to a consciousness of its self.
just by avoiding the tonal system, however, we still never hear the sound itself, as a
common misconception in the wake of cage would have it.
actuality is reality modulated by our modes of perception. the as-such is only for
us. everything that is, is what it is, in and through its context. if sound in traditional
music was actuated by the tonal system, and only sounds that related to this system
were heard as relevant, then today sounds are what they are only in relation to one
another (to make the analogy explicit: like between people in a democratic
situation)—that is, in constantly changing relationships. through the constant change
of categories, the categories themselves are brought to consciousness.
in chance music, this means that the (exclusive) mutual relationship is avoided,
abstractly negated, in certain circumstances presupposed or created by the listener.
nonintentional composing refers the listener to the intentionality of perception itself.
how few performances of cage’s music take this radicality seriously! how many
compositions supposedly in the tradition of cage are half-hearted and wishy-washy,
and only serve to bear witness to the ‘angst of the petit bourgeois in the face of chaos’
(schumacher, 1978).
most recent example:

musique concrète instumentale
noise is the quintessential anarchic material, because it is n-dimensional, resists
quantification, scalation, and identification.
music without tension and release is hard to imagine. harmonic syntax was a
system of immanent pseudo-causality (for example, e the minor ninth, spread over
five octaves, is not really a dissonance anymore, but in relation to the rules of
dissonance, handling it is one after all: the interval is resolved in relation to its scale,
just as a minor second would be. so not what the dissonance really is, but rather what
it is in relation to the musical system of a culture, is what decides its behavior).
musique concrète instrumentale reintroduces tension and release, albeit on a non-
tonal basis, and along with it the causal relation (after cage and its abolition), in a
realistic and thus illusory10 fashion; at best an as-if, without the epigones that apply
this material retaining even an inkling of self-awareness or self-observation in the course
of manufacturing sense for the listener. musique concrèete instrumentale, as a logic of
she-boom, has descended into a mere ‘extended technique’. with salt and pepper shakers
these playing techniques that have become harmless are sprinkled over the score to
convey the impression of yesterday’s radicality. it’s all permitted today, and the high-
pressure bowing that once intended to represent the labor of its execution has
become the tristan chord of the twentieth century. because of the unmediated
boundlessness of noisy material in all possible directions it is easy to manufacture the
illusion that this is new music, whose distinguishing feature is openness.
progress
progress in the consciousness of freedom, stripping away all fictitious bonds to nature
(marx and engels, 1983, p. 68), that would be a reflection, but also a relativization, of
our idea of progress.
my impression is that the composers (i.e. we) do not know what forward progress
means aesthetically, because we do not know, or don’t want to know, what it means
592 m. spahlinger
politically. i’m afraid that we are merely apprehensive: where forward would be, we
don’t want to go. for if things were more just and peaceful on this planet, then we
would have to lose some of our privileges—but we could gain friends in the process; an
audience, too, as far as i’m concerned, if true progress didn’t also mean a dissolution of
the distinction between artist and audience. as it has been for centuries and still is, art
has always shamefully borne some complacency with the abuse of power.
the concept of progress has become discredited—following the logic of credos
from more enlightened times—as if we had the choice to believe it or not. most
recently it tends to be disclaimed. this in itself is a recurring petit bourgeois
ideological archetype, to alternately disclaim and advocate progress, depending on

whether the economy presages a possibility for accessing the bourgeoisie or
conversely presages a recession. those who deny progress may not want to have lived
in beethoven’s time; they have sufficient imagination to know that life without
aspirin, central heating, and a cd collection meant a shorter life expectancy—but they
frequently counter with the question whether people in the old days might not have
been happier. the bourgeoisie, however, has always placed its bets on technological
progress. its history is the history of the industrial revolution. the revolutionary
proletariat defined itself as the bearer of social progress. both kinds of progress are
looked upon skeptically by the petit bourgeois; after all, they do not do much to
change his class status or his problems.
but it is unquestionable that progress exists: technological progress continues
apace, with or without democratic control. there must be a corresponding progress of
freedom, an adequately equipped consciousness.
being conscious, including being aesthetically conscious, cannot mean anything
other than conscious being. to help create an adequate aesthetic consciousness, to
make one’s own thoughts and senses, together with their preconditions of existence,
into the object of sensory contemplation is the pleasurable work of those whom
earlier times referred to as artists. this societal progress toward more civilized
conditions depends on us recognizing and determining our own position.
but please, without hymns or devout songs, and without professions of faith.
the future
the non-believers shall inherit the earth. ‘through the material revolution’ new music
has completed a similar step (but on a higher level of reflection) as the one from
ritual behavior to the theater: in the theater, what something appears to be is identical
(in a reflective, contradiction-rich sense) to what it is. identity of identity and non-
identity. all attributes of new music are potentially reflected in themselves, the
opposite of themselves. that is the historical state of the material.
‘the true is the undivided whole’ (hegel, 1952, p. 21). (this line from hegel is not
definition, but autoreflection; it is valid for all levels of self-consciousness, of
awareness of oneself.) that which we take as real always affects the entirety of the
network of relationships. all that is, is what it is in and through its context. in new
music, this context is not the artwork’s immanence, but rather the ‘entire
relationship’, the societal, linguistic, constituent correlation with sense. in the
much-scolded marx we read the astounding sentence ‘language is consciousness’
(marx and engels, 1983, p. 30).11 this whole is simultaneously the realization (the
critique, if you will, including self-critique) that the hierarchical, closed, formally
logical, rule-bound, objectified whole is the untrue (adorno, 1951, p. 80; see also
liebrucks, 1963).
but since 1910 it is necessary to dissolve within thinking, to think as separate that
which cannot be divided: the gestalt, the one-sided, unmediated unity.
Notes
[1] Lecture held at the colloquium of the European Center Hellerau and the Institute for New
Music of the Musikhochschule, Dresden, October 2006. First published in German in
MusikTexte, 113, May 2007. Used with permission. Translated from the German by Philipp
Blume.
[2] cf. klaus and buhr, 1972, entry ‘ideologie’, p. 546.
[3] ‘the self-preservation drive of the intellect has no counterpart in reason. an epoch which sets
its self-preservation instinct on means of destruction, of which earlier times would not have
dared to dream, unmasks the self-destructive character of all unmediated self-preservation.’
[4] questions that arose in the discussion following this lecture appear to warrant the following
comment: this text is not intended to settle a score with anyone: it should be taken more as a
plea, to remind people to look beyond differences of interest to consider what all those have
in common that live on this planet and are dependent on wages or salary.
[5] biblis A: a nuclear power plant in Hessia, scheduled to close down in February 2007.
[6] ‘suppose we had produced as humans: each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and
the other. i would firstly demonstrate my individuality in what i produce, created an
embodiment of its peculiarities, and thus in the act of production enjoyed an individual
expression of my vitality, taking a singular joy in seeing in the object my own personality as
objectified, made available for sensual contemplation, and thus beyond any doubt knowing
its exalted power. secondly, in your enjoyment or use of my product i have the unmediated
pleasure not only of being aware of having satisfied a human need with my work, thus having
embodied the human being and provided the need of another human being with the object
that fulfills that need. thirdly, to have been the go-between between you and your species, to
be known and regarded by you as a complement to your own being and a necessary part of
your self , that is, to feel re-affirmed by your regard and your love. fourth, in my own vital
expression to have produced your vital expression as well, meaning that my activity has
reaffirmed and made real my true self, my human, my communal self . . . my work would be
a voluntary expression of life, and thus a pleasure of life.’
[7] the title of the colloquium at which this lecture was presented was ‘freiräume und
spannungsfelder’ (‘free spaces and fields of activity’); it took place from 5 to 7 october 2006
at the european center for the arts in dresden-hellerau.
[8] ‘wirklichkeit des bewusstseins und wirklichkeit für das bewusstsein’ (actuality of
consciousness and actuality for the consciousness), in: musiktexte, 39, 39–41. cologne, april
1991.
[9] ‘presumably poetry cannot stand on its own there, where no common ground exists, from
which its figures emerge, and no common great light that breathes life into them, gives them
their way of having a fate.’ in bloch, 1964.
594 m. spahlinger
[10] realistic is illusory. realism is a means of representation among many, not reality itself. the
photographer is never in the picture which he is taking. from this it cannot be assumed,
however, that after the removal of the subject the objective reality remains; the representing
subject does not sign his work, like the painter, but rather remains hidden behind the
camera.
[11] ‘language is as old as consciousness—language is the practical consciousness, because it also
exists for other people, thus especially for me . . . hence consciousness is from the beginning
already a product of society . . .’
References
Adorno, Theodor (1951). Within and without. In Minima moralia, reflections from a damaged life.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Adorno, Theodor (1968). Schwierigkeiten. In Impromptus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, p. 93. Also
in Collected writings vol. 17 (1982), p. 253. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Bloch, Ernst (1964). Durch die Wüste, frühe kritische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Eisler, Hanns (1973, 1977). Materialien zu einer Dialektik der Musik. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam Junior
Verlag.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (1976). Von der Unaufhaltsamkeit des Kleinbürgertums. In Karl
Markus Michel & Harald Wieser (Eds.), Kursbuch 45: wir kleinbürger (pp. 1–8). Berlin:
Kursbuch/Rotbuch Press.
Hegel, G. Friedrich (1952). Phenomenology of spirit. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Hegel, W. Friedrich (1964). Science of logic II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Hölderlin, Friedrich (1985). Empedokles, Frankfurt edition, vol. 13. Frankfurt: Roter Stern.
Klaus, Georg, & Buhr, Manfred (Eds.). (1972). Marxistisch leninistisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie,
vol. 2. Reinbek: Rowohlt Press.
Liebrucks, Bruno (1963). Reflections on the statement of Hegel, Das wahre ist das Ganze. In Max
Horkheimer (Ed.), Zeugnisse, Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag. Frankfurt:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Liebrucks, Bruno (1964). Sprache und Bewusstsein, vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Akademische
Verlagsgesellschaft.
Marx, Karl, & Engels, Friedrich (1981). Werke, supplemental vol. 1. Berlin: Dietz.
Marx, Karl, & Engels, Friedrich (1983). Werke, vol. 3. Berlin: Dietz.
Schumacher, Joachim (1978). Die Angst vor dem Chaos. Über die falsche Apokalypse des Bürgertums.
Frankfurt: Syndikat Verlag.
Spahlinger, Mathias (1993). vorschläge, konzepte zur verüberflüssigung der funktion des komponisten.
[suggestions (also a play on the word vorschlag ¼ appoggiatura or grace note), concepts for
making superfluous the function of the composer]. Vienna: Universal Edition.

Spahlinger This Is The Time of Conceptive Ideologues No Longer PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Spahlinger This Is The Time of Conceptive Ideologues No Longer PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile]

On: 15 January 2014, At: 16:27

Contemporary Music Review

this is the time of conceptive

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460802410302

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

this is the time of conceptive

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

new music is or reflects the very revolution of revolutions, because she

the situation of new music

be they the biological premises of our perceptive apparatus, or the musico-cultural

what is the situation of composers and what is the petit bourgeoisie?4

bourgeoisie has systematically taken each progressive initiative of the bourgeoisie or

political aspects of music:

if one wants to do things right, as it were, when composing, then according to my

instead, children’s concerts in the vein of haydn’s ‘kindersinfonie’ are celebrating a

appropriate to the material involved, that is, self-reflectively . . .

examples for compositional method

differentiate itself from all the others.

most recent example:

ideological archetype, to alternately disclaim and advocate progress, depending on

You might also like