This paper
discusses the contemporary cosmogonies in music, danse, theatre,
(archi)tecture, the confluence of which will reveal itself in the process.
1 - MUSIC
In his 1947 Entretiens
sur la musique, Furtwängler looks upon classical tonal music, of which he
proved an excellent ambassador, and Schoenberg's and Weberns atonal music,
which he discovers from 1918 onwards, as two cosmogonies responding to
two very distinct cosmologies. In tonal music Furtwängler discerns a
Ptolemaic cosmology, where Homo fancies himself at the centre of the Universe,
as an inhabitant of an immobile Earth. And in atonal music, he discerns a
cosmogony that relies on a Copernician cosmology, where Earth and even the Sun
are lost in the Universe, carrying Homo « as a grain of sand ».
We will be pursuing
this cosmogonic view of music, nevertheless shifting its punctuation. (a) Rather than the classical music, as
Furtwängler so eagerly put it, it is the Renaissance music which should be
considered as ptolemaïc music, with its counterpoint disclosing
to us the aristotelecian or neoplatonician substance shocks, whose faculties
and operations each create
genuine spaces and times; in a similar way as do, at the very same moment,Uccello's horsekicks in painting and the
jolts of Machiavelli's and Montaigne's prose in literature. (b) On the
contrary, from 1600 onwards, and especially from 1700 onwards, tonal
music, also referred to as ‘classical', responds to a physics that positions
events according to the continuity of Galileo's « transformation
groups » and Newton's « absolute space ». Whereas atonal
serial music, from 1920 on, echoes Einstein's relativist and Planck's
quantal cosmology. (d) Finally, 1970 sees the birth of a music much more
biological than physical, which we will refer to as sequential.
1A - TONAL MUSIC, GALILEAN AND NEWTONIAN
(1600-1900)
On the morrow of
1600, on Galileo's inclined planes, marbles are supposed to roll down without
friction, just like they would falling down the tower of Pisa. The
Italian prose in the Dialogo, which the physicist uses to explain
himself, is strikingly smooth, similar to Malherbe's contemporary verse, and
Pascal's prose. Half a century later, Newton will accomplish a cosmology of the
perfect continuity, speculating on an absolute space. Every event in the world
takes place according to the derivatives of an infinitesimal calculus, common
to both Newton and Leibniz.
As a cosmogony,
tonal music pursues the same views, for instance, in Lully's Louis XIV court
ballets. All the same, this classical music was not conceived in one day, if we
take into consideration that L'Art de toucher le clavecin, at the end of
the 17th century, is still burdened with ornamental fireworks, besides which
measure is still mighty free ; by way of introduction, Couperin's only
concern is that an eighth be shorter than a quarter, and longer than a
sixteenth note. Yet finally, by 1700, Werckmeister succeeds in evenly tempering
the scale by dividing the octaves into twelve equal semitones ; Bach will
soon demonstrate, by means of his well-tempered harpsichord, that this sytem,
or any a similar one, permits the creation of five or six octaves at the least,
music in minor and major and in fact in any tonality, without irregularities
between the fifth and third chords.
To the point where,
around 1750, Rameau believed the time was right
for a strictly physical approach of consonance, based on the fact that any
fundamental tone (a C, D, A) simultaneously produces, in any case towards the
high-pitch, partial sounds, in other words, possessing a
wavelength equal to a half, a third, or a quarter of its own ; for
instance, a C simultaneously produces a C-octave, a dominant G in the following
octave, and then a subdominant E. From Rameau's point of view, partials account
for harmony, insomuch that the French would call them harmoniques.
Harmony consists of cadences, strings of notes where the
intervals that answer for melody,
find their « resolution ». Hence, to be read top-down:
B-G-D>>> C- G- E.
Harpsichord,
definitely well-tempered by 1800, and therefore becoming more and more a
homogeneous sonorous field, governed by supposedly natural harmony rules, such
as the Newtonian and Galilean Mechanical Laws. Musicians were politely
requested to obey a homogeneous, metronomical and calibrated time, and to
define it in view of their own pieces (Beethoven plans to slow down much of his
tempi in the completed edition of his works). As a consequence, music scores were
read as if it concerned the cartesian coordinates of a physical system: the
horizontal axis supporting time, the vertical axis annotating the sonorous
events with pitch, length, intensity. Shortly after, Helmholtz's resonators
will prove that the timbres depend on the difference in
intensities of the partials of the fundamentals accordingly to each instrument.
One can imagine the
Homo composer's pride, both as an interpreter or listener. The Kapelmeister was
a God. Or the Devil. Let's not forget that the physicist Laplace declared,
around 1800: « If you provided me with the positions, speeds and the
directions of the atoms in a state of the Universe, I would be able to predict
the entire future ». Anyhow, man controlled his music like a king governed
his kingdom, and God rules the King. The « moi » that Descartes
refers to was never so utterly a blocklettered "Moi” as it was by the bourgeois
musician, giving rise to Fichte's autogenerative Ich in
philosophy, around 1800. Hegel, then, will see his « I that is a we, and a
we being an I » fully accomplished among the audience of a concert hall.
Save for their complexity, learned and popular music both belong to the same
tonal system, supposedly « natural » and shared by all. cocAll « musical
forms » (suite, sonate, caprice, impromptu, intermezzo, etc.), naturally
abounded with reprises and da capoes, for their tonality is Echo, in the
same way that the perspective in classical painting is Narcissus, Echo's
fiancé. Sonorous mirrors and visual mirrors cooperate to define the outline of
the Kantian « I » and its unconditional freedom. Fellini definitely
pictures this absolutism well in Prova d'orchestra. Listening to Wagner
and Beethoven conducted by Furtwängler, Hitler admits, sent shivers up and down
his spine
Three musicians
were enough to embrace the essential of this authoritarian system so heavily
obsessed with precision. BACH turned tonality and its two modes major and minor
into a music of the Absolute Time, a fugated eternity, horizontal as well as
vertical, therefore harmonically and melodically complex, yet very simple in
terms of timbre and rhythm, virtually cardiacal. Mozart, in contradiction to
BACH, would turn them into a music of mood swings, rotating in his operas,
panicky yet nevertheless instantaneously mastered in the fierce intervals of
the piano concerto Köchel 466 ; sudden mood swings, which, by grace
of their accompanying melody, would remain enwrapped, composed (dominated) as
if from above. Combining both, Beethoven - in the spirit of Lamarck's Philosophie
zoologique (1809) - would make them the trial of historical time, in a
Napoleonic way, involving multiple simultaneous themes, reconcilable only
dialectically, as in Hegels Phenomologie des Geistes, Hegel being a
contemporary, strictly speaking.
Are we forgetting Händel and
Haydn? No. For they
coincide with tonality in itself, Händel in its cumulative capacity, and Haydn
in its unrestrained capacity of eruptions. As for classical music after
Beethoven, by then basically accomplished, its future was already becoming
apparent: differentiating
resolutions, accomplished by means of sentimental or existential insistences in
Schuberts case, or by means of a metamusic (cfr. metalanguage), alternately
creating vertiginous cross constructions and an abiding impression of the
far-distant and a resounding echo caught in an abyss, in Schumanns case. Until
all is swallowed up by Wagners modal chromatism and the Tristan
and Isolde Leitmotive. Making room for Spengler's 1917 release of
Der Untergang des Abendlandes.
1B - ATONAL MUSIC, EINSTEINIAN ET PLANCKIAN
(1920-1970)
What was to become
of the unity and unconditional freedom of a tonal and harmonic Ego in two
modes, once Golgi had succeeded in obtaining the first photographs of neurons
in 1902, and, above all, once Ramon y Cajal were awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize
for having photographed neuronal connections? A neuronal network allows
myriads of connections and layerings, but it does not obviously fit in a
Metaphysical or Freudian Ego, except perhaps disguised as a nervous function
among others, that of a self, continuing the beginning of a self of
an anterior animality (Damasio).
In fact, the
totalitarian tonal unity was no less uprooted by the new theories in Physics.
From 1905, Einstein had been maintaining that, with regards to speed nearing
the speed of light, Galileo's transformations group had to be replaced with
Lorentz's, thus discharging Newton's idea of an absolute space (independent of
time). Simultaneously, Planck discovered that energy could not split indefinitely
inside a radiating black body, and that it contained a certain
« grain », indicating that causality is not necessarily continuous.
The Universe consisted of the irreducible Discontinuous, exempt from the
Continuous inherent to newtonian infinitisemal calculus.
Whether consciously
or unconsciously, all cosmogonic artists would eventually respond to these new
cosmologies ; Picasso in painting, James Joyce in literature, Marcel
Duchamp in general semiotics and painting. However, it was in music that both
problem and solution would bring about a radical change. For tonality, along
with harmony and its cadences, had responded even more directly to newtonian
and galilean cosmology than the pictorial perspective or the I-you-(s)he
psychology in literature. Consequently, the musical cosmologies above all
needed to free themselves of tonality.
1B1. Non-repetition
and its combinatorial variations
Let's pay some
attention to Schönberg's unstoppable reasoning. Each repetition of a tone is
enough to induct a tonality. As a consequence, in order to avoid tonal
successions, it is necessary to produce a kind of music that avoids repeating
one of the twelve semitones of the scale before having used the other remaining
eleven semitones. Therefore, to be atonal, a musical composition
will have to produce a suite of nonrepeating
tones. And for any type of
development, one is subject to variations complying to the same programme,the
four most prominent of which are: (a) moving tones to other octaves (b)
the inversion of the sequencing ; (b) its retrogradation ; (c) its inverted
retrogradation ; (d)
transposing new sequences thus obtained to each of the twelve semitones.
When we apply this
strictly coherent panoply and protocol, the basic sequence becomes a series
; which we refer to as serial music. The
combinatory aspect of this system is omnipresent in the arts
of the same period. In Borges' Bibliothèque de Babel. In the OULIPO
poetry (OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, workshop of potential literature),
creating thousands of poems with only repetitions such as :
« Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir d'amour. D'amour, Marquise, vos beaux yeux me font mourir. Vos beaux
yeux, d'amour, Marquise, me font mourir. Etc. » In the « series »
of the « nouveau roman » according to Butor and Perec.
1B2. A music of
intervals (vs chords)
Tonality thus cast
aside, Webern is credited with assessing the system's positive challenges in
1930, with the introduction of the Interval, replacing Chord and
Cadence. A classical chord, according to the galilean-newtonian continuous,
consists either of superimposed tones that are directly consonant betwixt each
other, or of tones locked in a closing cadence, according to harmonic
instructions. But, in atonality, two or more notes simultaneously expressed or
set in a rigorous succession, willl engender groups that lack internal –
and a fortiori external – harmonic effect, installing listeners within
instabilities, or at the very least metastabilities. Moving them from the security of a Cosmos to the adventure
of a Universe.
Of course, some
intervals were privileged. Tonal partials forming an octave, and then a
dominant, and subdominant one, the augmented and diminished octaves are then
multiplied, followed by the augmented and diminished dominant and subdominant
ones. Webern's Variations Opus
27, published in 1937, opens with octave intervals, to be read from bottom
to top : « F / E » ; « F sharp / G » ; « A /
B flat».
1B3. The between
Instead of
surrendering to a space-time frame of reference, like the classical chords,
each and every serial interval creates a new reference frame, indicating,
according to einsteinian cosmology, that there is no privileged point of
view ; also indicating, according to the quantum mechanics, that the
interactions between the state-moments of the system are no longer triggered by
coninuous influences, but instead by undecomposable leaps (shifts). Thus music
encounters the betwixt, the between, which Paul Klee at the Bauhaus, in
the same period, represents as the singular object of painting between two
objects. And which Giacometti, between two passers-by, perceived as the sole
object of sculpture. A Between both spatial and temporal, twilling the
« non-being » and the « being ». Or even Heidegger'
« beings » et « Sein ».
Certain Rilke and Valéry poems define
both « poetry » and the « beloved ». Already in his
pre-serial period, Anton Webern occasionally reverted to some of Rilke's verse,
to define both his music and the « beloved », as in his Zwei Lieder,
opus 6, which ends like this: " Du machst mich allein. Dich einzig kann ich vertauschen
(exchange). Eine Weile bist du ; dan wieder ist es das Rauschen, oder ist ein
Duft ohne Rest. Ach, in den Armen, hab ich sie alle verloren, du nur, du wirst
immer wiedergeboren: weil ich niemals dich anhielt, halt ich dich fest". "I embrace you all the more strongly
for not squeezing you in my arms".
1B4. The absence of
interlude
As its entymology
suggests, cadence (cadentia, cadere, falling) provided the
listener with a secure return to a « natural place » (Aristotelean
and Neoplatonic), following a moment of perturbance, or perhaps well-measured
unbalance, expressive, as we say. The interval however, is not gravitational,
moving the listener in spite of himself into a coreless space-time.
Coincidentally, by the end of the serial system, by 1960, man would start the
practice of living weightlessly.
1B5. Composed and
component timbre
The timbres, those
sonorous « colours » relating to the intensities of the partials that
are characteristic of each instrument, served to enrich the classical chord, to
complete its slurs, but destabilized them ; thus it was reduced to
accompany the melody, rhythm and intensity, comparable to the ornaments on the
harpsichord. On the contrary, working whithin the Interval, timbre
will grow into a musical event by itself, or even into the dominant, or final
event. In jazz it
will overcome the melody, otherwise reduced to a « band's » obliging
rally. The blanks of the voice in Armstrong's singing are more effectual than
the filled spaces.
This prevalence of
timbre concurs with the introduction of new tools for producing et memorizing
it. Following the second World War, synthesizers in the
instrumentation and computing in construction allow its composition
in the fullest sense, in the same way that pitch, length and intensity would
have been composed in the past. Partials, playing a role of harmonic connection
in classical music, would henceforth be exploited as means of diversification,
intensification, unpredictability of the Interval. For nothing is more quantal
than timbres. Messiaen would look for them among their masters, the Birds. His
1930 Préludes include an introduction piece which is called La
Colombe, as atonal as Rameau's La Poule is tonal.
From 1960 on,
mobile recorders, such as the Nagra, make it possible to capture the timbres of
mammals in the savannah, of the cetacean in the oceans, of the polyphonic
pygmees in the woods. The « natural », « authentic » aspect
no longer consists of tone, but of timbre, as a plurification of partials.
1B6. Valorization of
noise
In the same way in which Michelangelo
accomplished classical scultpure by valorizing visual noise in his Slaves' and
Pietas', Beethoven would accomplish classical music by valorizing auditory
noise. As a young boy, he would treat his violon as a percussion
instrument ; and Therese Brunswick, upon visiting him for the first time,
was moved by his piano's dissonance ; his major works are conceived such
as to produce a melody that emerges from the matrix of a previously introduced
sometimes even prolonged noise ; the final measures of his last sonate opus 111 succeed in drowning a melody
in the noise up to four times, first towards the high-pitch, then towards the
low, again towards the high-pitch, and finally, towards the low. Yet, with this
master of the cadence, even noise enters the field of the differential
newtonian equations, and melody is always at hand, just behind us or still
coming.
The noise of serial
atonality, on the contrary, is, cosmologically speaking, that of the 1948
Information Theory (formare, in, forming) « sound/information »
couple. 1963 will see the discovery of the isotropic cosmological sound 2,7° K,
considered a fossilized
radiation dating from the Big Bang. Its dicovery will irreversibly transform
Homo from a cosmic dweller into Homo as an inhabitant of the Universe.
1B7. The rhythm of
timbre
From now on,
rhythm, as a control over Time, becomes the playground in which timbre can
fully express and develop itself. Webern's and Messiaen's ritardando and
rallentendo are countless and therefore abbreviated into « rit…… » and
« ral…… », and inserted to allow the Intervals to develop and display
all of their partials. With the metronome now becoming redundant, Schönberg, in
addition, stubbornly declares in his Cours de Musique, that all the
classical dynamics, - allegro, largo, andante, adagio, largo, sostenuto,
- used for indicating moods in classics, as well as the steps, paces, movements
that give vent to those moods, have become merely markings of abstract and very
global speeds. Which perfectly matches those musical compositions now
independent of cadence and chords (where the eternal Cosmos demonstrates its
conclusion), using
Intervals instead, and opening the way to a Universe consisting of partials.
1B8. The initial
multiple
Henceforward, the
titles of the works evoke the Multiple more often than the ‘One'. Messiaen's Les sons impalpables du rêve, Un reflet
dans le vent, Le Nombre léger for instance. The latter of which reminds us that, since 1900,
mathematicians had been wondering whether the Number should start from the
‘One' - as hoped for by an entire post-Platonic West - or rather, to the
contrary, from the Multiple, as was suggested by Dedekind around
1900 (Badiou, Le Nombre et les nombres).
1B9. The unpredicted
In its 1972
edition, the Harvard Dictionary of Music summarizes the characteristics
of serial music as such: unpredictability, pre-eminence of discontinuity,
zero degree of musical articulation, irreversible movement, generalized
nonperiodicity, perpetual renewal (for instance, the lowest note followed
by the highest, the longest followed by the shortest). And wonders whether this
particular system, to which we owe the genuine speleology of sounds engendered
in Stockhausen's Klavierstücke IX, more often than not inverses that
which what it is in pursuit of, namely when variation is narrowed
down and multiplied to such an extent as to break into monotony and statism.
This possibly
explains why only two human generations between 1920 and 1970 set about the
possibilities of serial music, contrasting to three long centuries of classical
music. But, musicians need not worry for long, for 1970 will bring about a
cosmological change engendering a change in musical cosmogony.
1C. LIVING
FORMATIONS AND SEQUENTIAL MUSIC (1970)
Ever since the
beginning, Homo, above all an angular and angularising primate, and therefore a
technician, had lived under the impression, as testify his religious or
rationalist philosophies, that all formational actions (Gestaltung), both
animated and inanimate, were a matter of modelling, or plasticity.
Yahweh models Adam, in the same way in
which the Greek demiurges would create a table, a statue or a temple. Speech
was considered the modelling of opposite sounds.
And music a modelling of intensive sounds,
especially if written out.
Now, from 1960 on,
the paradigms in Physics were starting to surrender to the paradigms in
Biology. The latter of which will - apart from a few modelling operations that
make it possible to create bladders, stomachs, valves, lungs, as well as set up
skeletons - initially apply a
non-plastician formational method: the sequence with its resequenciations.
In fact, (re)sequenciated formations, had been introduced from 1850 onwards,
with Berzelius' discovery of proteins. But more than a century
passed before we would clearly acknowledge that the inexhaustible variety in
proteins, in other words their creative force, depended on the way in which 20 amino-acids,
assembled by RNA-collectors, are sequenced on ribosomal RNA according to the
sequenciation of RNA messengers. (The latter in turn having been choreographed
by the sequenciation of DNA genes in a double helix DNA, itself perhaps
modelled by resequencing «supragenic modulators »?).
Really,
(re)sequenciation was not altogether absent from serial music, yet there it
exclusively served the purpose of creating intervals and their combinatories.
On the contrary, from 1970 onwards, the year in which Anfinsen's team unfolded
a protein, at once stripping it of its anatomical and physiological faculties,
and then allowed it to refold, with the result that it recovered
all its faculties, (re)sequenciation will be established as the biochemical
paradigm, whether consciously or not, of a « sequential music», or
« resequential », also known as, albeit rather plainly, « repetitive ».
This conversion of
cosmogonies (becoming biologist rather than physicist) need not necessarily
entail musical disruptions, mainly because, strictly speaking, music had always
been concerned with sequential matter. (a) It disposes of elements limited in
numbers, - pentatonic, hemitonic, anhemitonic scales, - rather resembling the
limited number of 20 amino acids in living beings. (b) The musical semitones
can be sequenced and resequenced at leisure, both in series (as treated
above), or in simple inexhaustibly varying successions. (c) The elements
are sufficiently homogenic to enable interaction, somewhat like the amino acids
disposing of an identical part, through which they are linked, and another
differring one. (d) In the same way in which a limited number of chemical bonds
(covalent, ionic, hydrogen, hydrophobe) is enough to establish sufficiently
varying attractions among the amino acids allowing billions of proteins, and
thus of organisms, in music the resonances between the partials ot tones, when
the latter are displaced in their sequence, generate millions of musical
productions. (e) Insomuch as the timbres, produced by synthesizers and captured
by its recorders, engender infinite rhythms.
Serial music was quite a confined system,
and allowed us to exhaustively browse all its facets. Sequential music,
on the contrary, is evolutionist, of an unpredectability not pursued, chased,
hunted, but rather encountered, served, almost suffered, in the order of a happening.
An attempt at summarizing its implications inevitably leads to pay attention to
some of its exemplary happenings.
(1) Irrepressible
resequenciation. – First of all, a happening a contrario.
1960 synthesizers enabled the production of stable chords, programmed in tone
as well as in the partials of tones. Emitting a perfectly stable chord, captive
in an immobile container, like an architecture, synthesizers provide the
perfect opportunity for a hinduizing musician, such as La Monte Young, to
create a nir-vana, a non-breath, of the absolute non-event. Yet, owing to their
internal irrational relationships, musical partials create metastable events,
especially when captured by auditory nervous systems, with their transductions,
organs of Corti, their afferences incessantly corrected by efferences. We can
point to the nirvana, but as to the impossible.
(2) Environmental
sound effects. – To generate spontaneous resequenciations,
why not bring together successions of notes, and even successive silences, in
an environment thematized as a site of hap, chance,
opportunity, fortune, accidents, hazards, risks and luck ? John Cage puts a grand
piano in the middle of a crossroads, waiting for the drone of passing trucks to
either engender a musical phrase intentionally played by himself, or simply
play Helmholtz' resonances on the sound-board without any musician.
(3) Resequenciating
distortions. – Tonal music instruments had been conceived and
adjusted to directly obey organs (fingers, hands, exhaling lungs), they
themselves obedient to neuronal decisions in the brain. The only major
exception was the hunting-horn, with its echo reminiscent of the depths of the
forest, which Schumann so eagerly uses to create impressions of spatial and
temporal distances. But our new synthesizers allow the creation of autonomous
relays between the performer's initiatives and the sounds that one can hear. Pauline
Oliveros created similar relays, semi-controlled, semi-autonomous,
engendering active, passive and actively passive sound resequenciations.
(4) Diffusive
delay-actions. – By I970, Steve Reich borrows the
language phrase Come out to show them, records it in a loop, but in a
way that each return is delayed with respect to the preceding one. The basic
monodic suite recurs in two voices, then eight, then sixteen, until finally its
complexification becomes complication, then confusion, eventually losing itself
in the noise, in the radical sense of the Information Theory couple « information/sound ». A
truly pure cosmogony according to a thermodynamic cosmology, where every event
of the Universe becomes a local negentropy (Pierre Curie), a state far away
from equilibrium (Prigogine), nevertheless not negating the increase
of general ambient entropy, equal at least, that finally reabsorbs it. With
this aiming, the content of the basic text does not matter. Nevertheless, the
mere fact of evoking blood as seen and shown during a racial
« riot » makes it clear that all facts are subject to the general
laws of Universe, like those of Thermodynamics,
even our most intimate emotions.
(5) Prolonged
delay-actions - Our
brains are basically constructed to exchange perceptions and muscular movement
with a nearby environment, hence their mechanism exhibits certain
speeds, certain intensities, and certain moderated contrasts. By putting any of
the latter off-range, the subject will either revert to a state of
inattentiveness, or will alternately be introduced to an unprecedented
space-time referential, « excited » as René Thom says. Of the same
nature as Come out, and featured on the same record, Steve Reich's
For four organs repeats a musical suite, this time progressively
prolonging it: « J'ai senti mon corps devenir vaste comme l'Univers
». « I could feel my body becoming as far-reaching as the Universe », as a
female physicist once said after listening to this happening lying down. Other
nervous distorsions are equally musically pregnant, such as synthesizers
producing a sound bordering on its silence, reaching to a kind of palpation of
the last excited neurons.
(6) Thematized
interactions of numerous brains. – It will not have gone
unnoticed that the perceived object in all of these sonorous happenings is, as
much as the musical event itself, the cerebral events that are provoked. By way
of conclusion, let's take a look at Steve Reich's For six
pianos. Piano, with its keyboard, sound-board, strings, hammers and dampers
is a particularly organizing instrument ; Arabs call its equivalent,
centrally lined up in the central
forefront of the stage, the Greek Kanôn, the law, the
referential frame ; the piano indicates the A to all strings. Let
us suppose then six piano's, and six pianistic brains, playing a suite of
notes, prescribing them a few well-defined possibilities of variation, just
like in serial music, but to be performed ad libitum. We have created an opportunity to
unveil, and even thematize, the perceptual-motor activity of six brains in
interhearing, intercorrecting, and thus (re)sequencing intercerebralities.
For an
Anthropogeny, it is important to stress the learned or popular character of
these productions. As much as serial atonal music is restrained and restraining
and therefore ideally also academic, in continuity with the tonal
music preceding it - Gould estimated he was destined to correct some
« incorrections » made by John Sebastian Bach, - sequential music is popular.
It can be heard in our human cradles, even in the anterior animality, more
generally in the elementary musics ; century after century the Chansons
à penser africaines survived by its inexhaustibly re-forming repetitions.
Popular music here does not only coexist with learned music, more often it is
privileged,
particularly in civilizations where traditionally melody emerges from rhtythm,
and rhythm itself emerges from partials.
Paradoxically,
in the second half of the 20th century, resequencial music has been a case
where cosmogony was almost preceding cosmology. More accutely, the sequential
musician succeeded in culturally thematizing resequenciation before biologists
did. Because, even though they are used to handling it from dusk till dawn,
biologists nevertheless continue, out of mental and linguistic habit, to speak
often in terms of plasticity (« the brain is plastic »,
« all living is plastic ». In Discovering Enzymes, and in
order to prove the originality of formations obtained through the
resequenciation, typical of the amino acids, Dressler and Potter concluded by
saying in 1991: « there is something musical in them ».
2 - DANCE
Dance and music are
so closely related in Anthropogeny, that it is difficult to define which came
first. We might even consider music as a simplified dance, almost mental, to the point where Bach and
Handel would use the « dance suites » as the initiating musical
form: toccata, allemande, courante, sarabande, rondo, etc. Indeed Homo,
being animal, and technician as well as semiotician, his motion would become
marching, his marching measure, both giving rise to rhythm. Dance thematizes
both rhythm and measure, as well as the movement it is supported by. Thanks to
independent sensori-motor circuits, each with their particular memory –
how else do we understand the hundreds of detailed movements which a classical
dancer remembers? – and also, more instantaneously, the influence
of Baldwin's reactions, i.e. motricity inducting a perception, which in turn
entails another motricity, in a tireless auto-engendering (in many cultures
dancers can keep dancing through day and night). The echoes that are a part of
sound and musical tone afford potently for the antoengendering of dance. In
exchange, this reengendering stirs up sound echoes and musical tones.
Consequently, the
dancer's spontaneous purpoce since history has been to equal in his limbs the
essential cosmic movements as conceived by his group. Both the Balinese dancing
girl and the Dogon dancer perform the universal rhythms ; in the same way
in which the French and Austrian royal ballets expressed royal governance, the
latter itself referred to as being of « divine law ». As insisted on
by Suzanne Langer's Feeling and Form in 1960, the « apt »
dancer should above first produce potent mental images, that
afterwards incarnate in his march and gesture. In spite of his restless nights,
Nourejev could be found at the barre at the crack of dawn, warming up his
anatomy and physiology in accordance with the imagination kindled by his late
day reading.
Now, from 1970 on,
at the time the Physical paradigms had begun to surrender to the Biological
paradigms, a new league of dancers appears in several western countries,
cultivating a dance characterized by the absence of a preliminary mental image,
even of any programme, whithout choreography. As if, from now on, instead of
straining to become a fugitive body miming an eternal Cosmos, one was expecting
to be a fugitive body which, reduced to its elementarities, would collaborate
with a Universe still to come. The dancer's discipline is struggling to clear
its mind, coercing the body to disobey, striving to discover the provocative
commotion of a pure ad-venir (to-come/happen).
An extreme example
of which is Tippeke, where Therese De Keersmaker wanders about the
woods, aimlessly, jolted by tics, (Dutch Tippelen, moving in very small
steps, erratically), reminding us of a Markov chain, where the
subsequent states of a system depend on the last state, without necessarily
being contained in a succession of anterior states ; reminding us even of
a Markov process, similar to the Brownian motion, where similar
ultimate states are continuous and also distributed stochastically. Both
notions date from 1938, and are therefore contemporary to serial music.
However, with the
same dancer and the same film maker and musician, Thierry Demey, modern
innovative dance usually proved to be more sequential than
serial. Striving to create those situations in which human organisms
are brought to recover their emergence states in an Evolution that is diffusive
(punctuated equilibria, "bushing”) rather than orthogenetic ; the feeling
of being a specimen belonging to an evolutionary species, a feeling which is
enhanced by working together in a troop. An occasion of feeling himself as a
radiolarian, an insect or a quadruped (Vincent Fleury). Or to activate the
seven elementary catastrophes of differential Topology according to which the
cellular layers that shape every organism were channeled into crease, fold,
dovetail, butterfly, hyperbolic, elliptic and parabolic umbilic (René Thom). Or
even to hint to those resequenciations, by which, in the primary elementarity
of its organism, amino acids started, some ten or so years ago, in fact four
billion years ago, to carry proteins, the latter themselves responsible for
sustaining ultrastructures, which in turn then sustain cells, and organs, until
producing living beings of whom it has become a part, as a game of interfaces
between interior and exterior environmnents. Without any confusion between the
different states of those emergences. But without strict punctuation as well.
Literary works bear
witness, at the same moment, to the same inversion between the mental and the
physical. In the traditional novel, the motion of limbs serves to carry out a
predertermined purpose, whereas, in Luc Eranvil's Zelsa (2000,
www.zelsa.be), it is the limb action that eventuates in a hint of outlined
purposes, and one reads, without any punctuation: « alors comptant
distraire son trouble ses jambes s'étirèrent hors de la couche elles le
menèrent sur le pont respirant l'air cinglant mâchant la brume qui serpentait
autour d'elle sa bouche alla porter la nouvelle à l'équipage rassemblé… ».
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1988) also abounds in similar reversals
of means and ends, corporal initiatives eventuating in vaguely engendering
ends.
To which scultpure
as well responded. In von Hagen's Körperwelten , around 1990, the
bodies are those of real living beings, nevertheless « plastinated » postmortally,
in other words: transformed through impregnation in a transparant
substance, primarily revealing arterial and venous networks. Almost the
opposite to Vesalius' « corporal factory » (De fabrica corporis
humani), which represents organisms mainly as a network of bones, conceived
as « partes integrantes » of physically
wholes subject to spiritual wholes, following a destiny predetermined by a Demiurge. That which
is initially perceived in plastination, is the sanguine branching engendering
physiologies in an almost stochastical way, which then fractally engenders
anatomies, producing, during the time of a life, mechanical or rhythmic actions
that determine animal, technical and semiotic destinies.
In October 2006, in
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, these new views were presented at an academic happening.
Pascal Pick, an anthropologist, explains the successive occurrence of the
organic movement of the Living Being, from the bacteria up until Homo. To
illustrate his point, he was accompanied
by a dancer, commissioned not only to mime the described movements, but even
more so to reinvent them by means of his body. The professor's naked feet
represented the link between the abstract lecture and the more concrete
movements of the artistic performance. The latter was called: Dancing
with Evolution. But it might just as well have been : Dancing the
Evolution.
3 - THEATRE
Theatre is closely
related to dance, even originating from it, in Greece, when the performed songs
in Dionysos' processions were interrupted by dialogues. Theatre and dance of a
same era often resemble each other just as much as music and dance.
Hence, in Bob
Wilson's Le regard du sourd, also known as the first monument of sequential
theatre in the seventies, certain actors, acting almost as dancers,
moved so slowly, in such a genetically primitive way, that crossing the scene
took them a quarter of an hour (the stretching fifteen minutes in both For
four organs and Come out to show them). It is this same Bob
Wilson who also, shortly after, with Philip Glass's repetitive
(resequenciating) music, will bring about Einstein on the Beach, where
the central action in six performance hours consists of immerging an audience
in the patiences and evolutionary detours of fifteen billion years of a
Universe, in which they themselves merely figure as states-moments.
Theatre being
language as well, Peter Handke picks up the case of the Austrian werewolf-child
Kaspar, using it to force a body blessed with both a human larynx
and pharynx, to not only reinvent movement and measure, but also reinvent the
transition from sound to tone, to musical tone (intensive) and linguistic tone
(distinctive).
Strikingly, in all
cases, location is essential. Except for the beach, between Earth and Ocean in Einstein
on the Beach, performances would often take place in obsolete factories,
serving as intersections between Workroom and Nature, such as the Cartoucherie
de Vincennes for Mouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil, or even Plan K in Brussels,
which successively accommodated Bob Wilson, De Keersmaker, von Hagen, as well
as providing room for an exhibition on the new (archi)tectures theories by the
Harvard School of Design.
A good example of
the power of location is a setting of broken pottery, in Italy, which at the
end of the performance is tramped across by a flock of sheep, and where the
film maker Thierry Demey shoots a theatrical happening, danced by a company
which this time is not directed by De Keersmaecker, but by his sister Anne
Demey, and using the music of Vivaldi. What apparent contradiction: an
ultracontemporary sequential dance and Vivaldi, a classical musician, and
therefore galilean-newtonian ! It is under these circumstances however
that our Venetian-redheaded priest reveals perhaps his true nature:
prophetically all in all a sequential musician. Which at once explains the
disdain or bewilderment that lasted three and a half centuries regarding his Stravaganze,
as
well as its sudden and tremendous success following 1970. Not to mention that Bach, who was keen
on duplicative (partly sequential) note for note and phrase for phrase (the
final to St. Matthew's Passion), more often than not drew inspiration
from it. As if (biochemical) resequenciation were hiddenly the
most archaic and the most prospective principle in humans.
4 - TECTURES
Why
« tectures »? Because, frankly, the word
« architecture » does not suit
anthropogeny. To start with, it acquires significance after 5000 B.C.
only, in other words, starting from the primary empires of Sumer, of Egypt, of
India, of China, of American Indians, where constructions, becoming more and
more extensive, required a competent and authoritative survey, preferably by a
work manager, arkHos, arki-tectôn , of a growing number
of craftsmen; giving rise to the
terms arkHi-tektonia, archi-tectura. Besides, and for this same reason,
« architecture » reminds us today of buildings first, and secundarily
of furniture. The neologistic « Tecture » applies to both, subsuming
them under the range of tekteïn : constructing as in entertwining,
superimposing, assembling.
The tectures, thus
apprehended, have two different anthropogenic roles. (A) Homo is a mammal, with
an indelible souvenir of spending 10 lunar months in a matrix; the tectures, surrounding as opposed to
the surrounded sculptures and the transversally displayed paintings, encourage
the continuation of a uterine enclosure (B) On the
other hand, hominian activity, being rhythmic in its pace, engenders a genuine social
theatre, in turn requiring a mise en scène, in which the tectures,
buildings and furniture, provide the scene. We should now inquire
into how these tectures, as contemporary cosmogonies, managed to fulfill both
of those functions in the 20th century.
From 1920 onwards, Bauhaus
theories are reminiscent of serial music, in any case in their propensity
towards the combinatory, the decentrement, non-gravity, austerity. In this way, in 1930, Le Corbusier's
Villa Savoye's main entrance is no longer positioned in the centre of an evenly
numbered colonnade, as had been the case ever since the Parthenon, but instead,
it is positioned behind the central pillar of an unevenly numbered colonnade,
which one has to circle in order to enter the house ; the bathroom
preaches Swedish gymnastics, almost as ascetic as one of Schönberg's or
Webern's pieces of « serial » music ; the building of La
Tourette « starts from its rooftopline and touches the soil as it
can ». At that moment, we find ourselves at the culminating point of the energy
machines - old as Homo itself – their predominance
established in 1800 with the steam engine, and thier climax coinciding with
nazism, fascism, stalinism, eugenism, youth movements, nudism, and Otte's
Mundaneum, a wordly totalizing Bibliotheca which Le Corbusier credited with a
project, on the eve of the Second World War. Following this War, the School of
Ulm, carries on the same principles into the 1970's, yet in the strain of the
new information machines, by now made of much lighter material
and brushed stainless steel-colours.
During the 1960's,
all that gives rise to the notion of industrial design, where
building and furniture will merge into one single discipline, sharing the same freedom of residence and
construction principle. Ideally, man was supposed conceiving himself up to the
last details his own home (Yona Friedman, Lucien Kroll, Elmar Wertz), supported
in his instant choices by new materials such as plastics, quasi instantly
applied to light wire frameworks, mainless
dismantled as well as reconstructed (Grataloup). Cardboard houses (Guy Rottier)
were proposed, just like houses revolving on their axis, thus allowing sunlight
to penetrate the living-room non stop. In an attempt to put an end to the
« arrogance of skycrapers », Paul Virilio et Claude Parent, drew/designed
homes, and entire cities, winding obliquely into the sky. Walking on a slanting
ground was ideally deemed to stimulate humane freedom at every step.
But, in 1972, this
theoretical fever abruptly comes to an end in just a few months.
Why? It's conceivable that the
« construction by the inhabitant » had reached its point of
saturation and mannerism, as happens to all doctrines. Or maybe, in the end,
Homo this mammalian was not looking for a home to remodel daily, maybe he
wanted it to be awaiting him, to welcome him, to provide him with the comfort
of his uterine archaism ; we know that Le Corbusier, builder of estates
(housing projects) and of cities ab ovo (Chandigar), in his old days, had a weak spot for a
cabin by the Mediterranean Sea, leaving it at noon to bathe in this water which
he referred to as « the Ancient », perhaps in remembrance of
Hölderlin's Archipelagos. Or maybe, the other Arts were on the brink of
discovering something entirely new and unpredictable , such as
resequenciated formations (Gestaltung), which tecture, with its particularly
inert and weighty material, was relatively unfit to explore.
And, indeed,
creating a resequential architecture would take up to a good
thirty years. Enzo Piano's Centre Pompidou in I977 is still but a premonition,
continuing the Bauhaus and Ulm School spirit in its insect-like exterior frame,
in its general transparency, its energy exchanges marked by the different
colours indicating water, electricity, information, and its monumental
escalator proclaiming the non-separation of floors, and its multifunctional (synergetically
working) spaces.
Whereas some of its functions could be considered resequential, the building's
shape, consisting of plain paralellepipeds, cannot. This stagnancy of formal
invention will become even more perceptible in the work of the Boffil ateliers,
eager to apply the most contemporary construction resources to the benefit of multiplying Greek
colonnades. As for the term « post-modernism », it turns out well in
excluding the Gestaltung of Bauhaus « modernism », but badly in
providing a new one.
Basically, we had
to wait until 2000, for Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum to announce a
different shape - a resequenciating one, in other words biological rather than
physical. And only recently, in 2006, the break was confirmed in a project
designed by the same architect for the Centre de la Création d'art in Paris.
Certainly, opponents will claim that the museum's architecture is but an
exception. Nevertheless the private homes meanwhile built by Frank Gehry reveal
the same resequenciating aspirations.
Besides, the
biological paradigms appear to have invaded industry. The body of the building
in Tom Mayne's « Phare Tower » project in Paris, is coated with what
the architect himself refers to as a ‘skin', saying that : « It
becomes metabolic the skin, it moves ».