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2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Instrumentality as Distributed, Interpersonal, and Self-Agential: Aesthetic Implications of an Instrumental Assemblage and Its Fortuitous Voice

verfasst von : Deniz Peters

Erschienen in: Musical Instruments in the 21st Century

Verlag: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

Philip Alperson, in ‘The Instrumentality of Music’, extends the commonsense concept of musical instrument to an understanding encompassing the instrument’s musical, cultural and conceptual situation. This understanding shifts the focus from a work-based aesthetic to one in which “listeners appreciate the human achievement with specific regard to accomplishment in the context of the demands of the particular instrument involved”. With this advanced understanding of instruments and the instrumentality of music in place, I shall discuss a moment of genuine instrumental discovery (as opposed to deliberate design). During an improvisatory extension of the piano’s sound board as part of a trio exploration with Bennett Hogg and Sabine Vogel using fishing wire, suspended bansuri flutes, contact microphones, and, vitally, transducers placed inside violins and on the piano’s sound board, an unintended feedback loop formed, resulting in an additional voice, curiously turning the trio into a quartet. While the found voice’s dynamics and character could be nuanced by varying the dampening of singular piano strings, as well as via the sustain pedal, it could, overall, only be summoned up and influenced in an indirect manner, via an ensemble effort. In analysing the situation of the discovery and in discussing its aesthetic implications, I offer a contribution to Alperson’s notion of instrumentality in two respects: performers may together form a single voice, that is, their instrumentality might join; and an installation may, under certain conditions, acquire its own instrumental agency and identity, extending the cultural situation to include the natural environment, and the algorithmic.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Musical Instruments as Assemblage

Nächstes Kapitel Interactivity of Digital Musical Instruments: Implications of Classifying Musical Instruments on Basic Music Research

Simon Waters, in his ‘Touching at a Distance’, extends and argues a strikingly similar point, with fascinating insight on the body-sound relation. He summarises: “The constraints and constructs upon which music depends are not only, not even mostly, to be found in the physical object of the instrument, but also in the physiology of this particular body, in the assumptions and embodied knowledge which operate in this particular player, and in the interpenetrations between all of these and the framing acoustic and social environment” (Waters 2013, p. 123).

In the sense that a listener can simultaneously appreciate both the work and the performer’s instrumental accomplishment.

Alperson’s insight opens up a view on all the socially and perceptually fine-grained detail involved in what, in ordinary talk and understanding, has sedimented to the vague and near meaningless expression that this or that practice or object ‘blurs the boundaries’ between instrument and, say, composition.

The project which I direct is called Emotional Improvisation: Musical, Interactive, and Intermedial (Austrian Science Fund FWF/AR188, 2014–2019) and hosted by the University of the Arts Graz.

In a nutshell, the practice continuously developed by Landscape Quartet (Bennett Hogg, Sabine Vogel, Stefan Östersjö and Matt Sansom) resists standard soundscape art techniques and approaches that represent nature in sound, instead playing in and with the natural environment, with a particular emphasis on connecting with it, and on giving it a voice. Hogg reasons that he chooses “to work in ‘Nature’, taking up an ecosystemic approach to the working process as a way to resist the ecomimetic tendencies of producing work with ‘Nature’; not trying to ‘render’ the natural through the cultural” (Hogg 2013, pp. 264–265). Vogel (2015, p. 332) describes Landscape Quartet’s practice of “reconfiguring” an outdoors work indoors.

In ‘Tuning-in’ (Vogel 2015, esp. pp. 327–329), Sabine Vogel describes her practice of “tuning-in” whereby she—via “slow walking, listening, feeling, smelling, watching, observing, meditating, being still and aware” (Vogel 2015, 327)—develops a sense of the environment, and experiences the reciprocity of its presence and her own presence in it.

Vogel (2015, p. 328) mentions her ongoing practice of placing her bansuris so that the wind can play them. In earlier pieces she had stuck flutes into the soil (for a work on hills at Allenheads) and hung them off a beam (for a work at Klagshamns Udde), but, according to personal conversation, she had never before suspended them off a fishing line that itself functioned as an Aeolian harp, nor had the bansuri resonated with a string so that they could be heard without microphones and electronic amplification.

An appreciation of the factors that went into the constitution and ongoing restitution and unfolding of the new instrumentality during listening makes a difference. If a listener did not notice the existence of an intentional dynamic between the performers directed at establishing and maintaining a shared instrumentality, then much of the identity of the performance—the substance of its intricate interpersonal dimension—would be missed.

cf. Sherrie Tucker’s intriguing account of the experience of rubber band group improvisation: “At first I experienced choices. […] Then, we all became a body/organism and I stopped thinking in terms of what my own impulses were […] and tuned in to what the organism was doing. […] It wasn’t a passive experience to fold into the organism, but a different way of being. […] There was a shift in consciousness. Maybe it was the reorientation from self-consciousness to group-consciousness?” (Hahn 2016, p. 158).

I am grateful to Férdia Stone-Davis drawing my attention to this in personal conversation (2016).

A term fittingly coined by Sarah-Indriyati Hardjowirogo in her ‘Medien-Musikinstrumente’ (forthcoming).

Simon Waters’s idea of “treating performance as a complex dynamical system in which the feedback loops and interpenetrations between performer, instrument, and environment are fully recognised” (Waters 2013, p. 122) anticipates my point.

Georgina Born’s consideration of the microsocialities of performance and her current contribution to a social aesthetics of music (Born, forthcoming, esp. pp. 56–59) is a brilliant and rare example of this.

Alperson, P. (2008). The instrumentality of music. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66(1), 37–51.CrossRef

Born, G. (Forthcoming). After relational aesthetics: Improvised musics, the social, and (Re)theorising the aesthetic. In G. Born, E. Lewis, & W. Straw (Eds.), Improvisation and social aesthetics. Duke University Press.

Buber, M. (1923). Ich und Du. Leipzig: Insel Verlag.

Hahn, T., et al. (2016). Banding encounters: Embodied practices in improvisation. In G. Siddall & E. Waterman (Eds.), Negotiated moments: Improvisation, sound, and subjectivity (pp. 147–167). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hardjowirogo, S.-I. (Forthcoming). Medien-Musikinstrumente. In R. Großmann & S.-I. Hardjowirogo (Eds.), Musik und Medien. Laaber: Laaber.

Helmreich, S. (2012). Underwater music: Tuning composition to the sounds of science. In T. Pinch & K. Bijsterveld (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sound studies (pp. 151–175). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hogg, B. (2013). When violins were trees: Resistance, memory, and performance in the preparatory experiments for landscape quartet, a contemporary environmental sound art project. Contemporary Music Review, 32(2–3), 249–273.CrossRef

Vogel, S. (2015). Tuning-in. Contemporary Music Review, 34(4), 327–334.CrossRef

Waters, S. (2013). Touching at a distance: Resistance, tactility, proxemics and the development of a hybrid virtual/physical performance system. Contemporary Music Review, 32(2–3), 119–134.CrossRef

Titel: Instrumentality as Distributed, Interpersonal, and Self-Agential: Aesthetic Implications of an Instrumental Assemblage and Its Fortuitous Voice
verfasst von: Deniz Peters
Verlag: Springer Singapore
Buch: Musical Instruments in the 21st Century
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2950-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-2951-6

Copyright-Jahr: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_6

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