Douglas Kahn: Sorry for the delay. a n e c h o i: OK so Doyg Kahn has now joined us a n e c h o i: I will be acting as a moderator kathyk: bravo Doug on some beautiful writing! Douglas Kahn: Kathy...Fran says hello. a n e c h o i: the chat will last one hour kathyk: yay. I'm thinking of visiting Australia this July. a n e c h o i: unless the dicussion peters out sooner Douglas Kahn: Thanks everyone for doing this! I really appreciate it. a n e c h o i: please excuse my spelling as my KBD is kinda wonlky these days a n e c h o i: wonky kathyk: wanky kathyk: winky a n e c h o i: no wonky kathyk: wenky a n e c h o i: it's aSV term a n e c h o i: an SV term Douglas Kahn: any questions? Douglas Kahn: Comments. a n e c h o i: I will be back in a sec eM.ichael ben: where did you begin in your approach to the history of sound, personally kathyk: I'm curious about some of the remarkably remote sources you have. How do you do research for an enormous project like this eM.ichael ben: have always been interested? eM.ichael ben: scared him! kathyk: take the 1st question, doug. Douglas Kahn: Personally, I was at Wesleyan as a masters student studying with Alvin Lucier. I wanted to look up sound so I investigated Luigi Russolo and found out that his idea of an art of noises was contradictory, in that it recuperated sound back into music. eM.ichael ben: sound as sound, as opposed to mimicry, ys? Douglas Kahn: As to the remote sources....I just followed up every little lead and each little lead from that. a n e c h o i: can you talk some more about recuperating music? a n e c h o i: or sound? a n e c h o i: explain the basic concept... Douglas Kahn: Luigi Russolo (LR) talked alot about the world of sound, but then when it came to actual sound, he disallowed imitation and allowed timbre. The latter had not been explored very much with in Western art music (WAM!), so it still could carry the moniker of worldliness. Same thing would happen to percussion next. Douglas Kahn: following on.... This is contrary to usual historical scenarios of modern music which make so much of dissonance. kathyk: I really resonate with your work, Doug, since I began as an art student, I've always ben shocked by the lack of "critical theory" in the musical realm compared to 20th cent. art. I feel that until recently the field of music has been isolated into an "absolute" field, and separated from social interactivity. Your work addresses this lack to some extent. Are there others you can name who theorize along the art model? Douglas Kahn: ....I'll be right with you kathy. Just finishing up on the earlier... The idea of musicalization of sound came up at a particuar time in the 1980s, like I said in the book, the idea was Dan Lander's, an audio artist and good friend in Toronto. Right now kathyk: hmmmm Douglas Kahn: re: critical theory and music. I think there's quite a few folks in musicology working with critical theory. The problem comes on what they choose to focus on. They always have an unstated idea of what constitutes music, and this does not permit them to go where alot of the action is: in noise and recording as artistic material, and into larger notions of a cultural history of listening, sound, etc. kathyk: too true! kathyk: How did music get so far from the experience of listening to sound? Douglas Kahn: Following up on the truncated comment about musicalization. Here in Oztralia, many people are familiar with the musicalization argument and ignore it. Which was the purpose of it in the first place. To break down the boundaries and allow people to go where they want to go with sound. a n e c h o i: Doug at some point could you revisit the concept of "recuperation"? Douglas Kahn: A recent issue of The Musical Quarterly is on listening, and there's a great book by James Johnson called Listening in Paris. These are recent phenomena. There's also a guy named Ola Stockfeldt who has come up with a notion of "adequate modes of listening" but he still cordons music off from the other sounds in the world, whereas so much of what has been interesting is the music and other art forms which work with them. kathyk: How does Johnson's work relate to Murray Schafer and the domain of acoustic ecology? Douglas Kahn: Kim, recuperation has to do with the main avant-garde strategy of music, to go outside of what's considered musical (or to find representatives of such extramusical sound inside music, e.g., resident noise), and to diminish its significance adequately so it can work as musical sound, as originally considered. It is an appropriation, but because it takes and diminishes sound in the spectre of the host, it's a recuperation. a n e c h o i: can you cite an example? Douglas Kahn: Kathy.... Johnson's book is a cultural history, whereas acoustic ecology might take up such a subject it has, in my opinion, lacked alot of intellectual rigor and pretty much disregarded about 25 years of theory. It's changing right now, however, check out Bruce R. Smith's book, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (on the sounds, voices and listening during Shakespeare) and Hillel Schwartz is starting to write on noise in an acoustic ecology sense. In fact, there's quite a few new writers beginning to tackle the cultural history and theory side of things. kathyk: Great! Thanks eM.ichael ben: i would suppsoe the lack of musical reification has inhibited both historians and theorists from tackling this in times past... whereas graphic art has had a long history of being an unchanging object Douglas Kahn: numena is oscillating! An example of recuperation: theoretically, every avant-garde composer through Cage, and plenty more afterwards. I think it really gets down to LR and Cage, however, since they worked up a formidable rhetoric, and in Cage's instance, a philosophy, based upon the appearance of working with the sounds of the world and the aurality (modes of listening) of their time, when in fact both were a musical hedge against a range of possible listenings. It is no mistake, for instance, that Cage got going in the early 50s, just as television and kid kulture radio began to kick in. Media changed aurality. Douglas Kahn: to Michael Ben.... I'm not sure what you mean, but it seems there has been no lack of musical reification in terms of notation. That's often why musicologists who emphasize performance can look adventurous. eM.ichael ben: yes, but recodings are quite different experientially eM.ichael ben: you do not need to read music, for instance, to listen... eM.ichael ben: whereas notation is quite different eM.ichael ben: you must play and read to get it eM.ichael ben: any idiot can look at a painting and say this or that... hence academia! ;-) eM.ichael ben: just kidding eM.ichael ben: but i am intrigued by the experiential difference... Douglas Kahn: Yes, but we're talking about the type of thinking that has been generated or not been generated about music, by musicologists. They are still really tied to notation, just as most scholars are tied to print. eM.ichael ben: mmm Douglas Kahn: It's true, however, what you say about recording. Things would be very different if phonography didn't just appear in the late-19th century, in the historical scheme of things, very very recent. eM.ichael ben: i'm sorry i can't seem to be more articulate about my thinking here... eM.ichael ben: the more concrete a thing gets for more people, the more need there is to comment on it... recording makes sound concrete in a way more comparable (accessible?) to graphics, or even text than musical notation... maybe i just feel this way as a person for whom reading music has never been easy... my own bias... a n e c h o i: speaking of recordings...how did the "multiple" or "copy" limit peoples modes of listening? Douglas Kahn: It is important to note that a real difference has come about in music making for that generation of composers and musicians who have had access to an incredible range of recordings. Zorn comes immediately to mind as an early example. It was not that long ago that avant-garde, experimental music and ethnomusicological recordings, for instance, were rare. Zorn's pastiche can be traced to being part of that culture of recording, and also to television channel surfing and radio dial twisting, things that didn't exist in the first half of the century. <<< a n e c h o i c is now known as anechoic >>> eM.ichael ben: hmm, yes Douglas Kahn: I'm not sure multiples or copies limited listening at all. That would be Jacques Attali's take on it. For him, the phonograph was the evil steam engine of musical industrialization. anechoic: but didn't exact copies/reproducible performances change the expectation of the listener? Douglas Kahn: I'll be back in a minute. anechoic: hence producing the shell of a commodity? eM.ichael ben: i think it oes change modes of listening, just as the printing press changed modes of reading/text eM.ichael ben: does change, i mean eM.ichael ben: and graphics too anechoic: instead of it being a document of a musical performance Douglas Kahn: Kim...it no doubt has that effect. However, the same effect was achieved in WAM prior to mass availability of recorded music through the repetition of the repertoire. In general, and especially in the present day, most people will never hear live a fraction of what they've heard in recording or transmission, therefore, their audition wouldn't have the chance to be skewed. There are certainly other normalizing factors at work. anechoic: hasn't that resulted in our inability to sense nuance and subtlety in muscial performace? Douglas Kahn: I think the ability to record voices and sounds had an enormous impact on hearing. Much of the book argues that very point. In fact, modernism itself was concurrent with the advent of phonography and they share many key features with one another. anechoic: has the multiple subverted our ability to from other modes of listening? anechoic: form david t: a quiet talk. :) Douglas Kahn: Kim... I'm not sure why it would necessarily diminish our ability to do so. In fact, repeated listenings can teach a person that there is much more than at first meets the ear. anechoic: ah...good point anechoic: what about Eno's idea of generative music? eM.ichael ben: yes, but some would argue that modern technologies like phonography or photogrpahy predigest the art in some way eM.ichael ben: just they're being published, issued says something different than hearing a piece live eM.ichael ben: or seeing someone's face in person Douglas Kahn: Don't get me going on Eno. Don't have much respect for they guy, frankly. It seems to me he took alot of other people's ideas and moved them into commercial music, and didn't give much credit. anechoic: as well as that we can never truly "hear" a piece of music the same way twice anechoic: no please go on about Eno...he needs some bashing! ;) Douglas Kahn: My in print bashing extends to calling him the Maxfield Parrish of contemporary composition. eM.ichael ben: haha anechoic: hahahaha! perfect! anechoic: but seriously what about his idea of gen music? anechoic: or just the idea apart from his claim of "owning" it Eddie: (Edward)it's no fair to bash such an easy target as Eno Douglas Kahn: I think he's okay as a producer. But if it wasn't for that, if he had try to launch his musical ideas among the arts at the time, without relying on his popstar credentials, he wouldn't have gone very far at all. anechoic: gen music? Douglas Kahn: remind me of the concept. anechoic: generative music is created from algorithms that operate within some bounds but never produce the same music twice anechoic: deterministic/statistical Douglas Kahn: that was the theoretical underpinning of Schonberg's tone rows, of every little nook and cranny of WAM in integral serialism, at the root of Cage's indeterminacy,and found in Terry Riley's work like In C. eM.ichael ben: the difference being he accomplishes it with computers? anechoic: but Schonberg's used systems to create his tone rows and were played the same time each time they were performed anechoic: gen music is not played back the same way but operates within boundaeries anechoic: boundaries Douglas Kahn: fine, I said that because the tone-rows distanced the composer from hearing the "music in his head", it did for the composer, what Cage's indeterminacy would do to distance the composer as just another listener. Cage used indeterminate process with Lejaren Hiller in his computer piece HPSCHD. anechoic: ah anechoic: why has this mode of hearing never really "caught on" with the general public? anechoic: and where does the power reside in musical reproduction? corporate or consumer?> anechoic: I'll step aside and let some other members ask some q's Douglas Kahn: I saw an Eno installation where he used tape loops to set up phasing, and claimed the same thing...."the music is always different." This was his, stated, inheritance from Reich. But the music was banal, whereas Reich's early tape-phase pieces were extraordinary. It's one thing to have a schtick, it's another to have it be interesting. david t: has there been much work in that field anyway? (chance-generated stuff) it seems like the idea has been abandoned somewhere along the road. Douglas Kahn: Kim....I'm not sure of what mode of musical listening you're talking about, and how the corporate and consumer fits in. If I get your drift, the fact that Eno's music is never the same doesn't necessarily empower the consumer/listener. anechoic: I guess I was hinting towards the dfact that the reproduction implies corporate power...control of the user experience...gen music is less about control and more about extending the way we approach music as well as our expectations of the musical act anechoic: I know that Eno represents a type of power that is somewhat amorphic anechoic: great artists steal lesser ones borrow anechoic: but he did try to change listeners expecxtations of the musical performance Douglas Kahn: David....Cage's chance music was short-lived. Indeterminate processes took over. He sees an important difference in the two whereas others don't (Jim Tenney, for ex., thinks Cage is pretty confused on the point). The ideas behind it are found quite a few places nowadays. eM.ichael ben: i believe this ties into the point i was trying to make ealier... the difference between being a spectator and a consumer... the reification becoming a product... Douglas Kahn: Kim...I'm not studied up enough on Eno to comment. Every time I've tried I get kicked back by all the derivation of ideas from the 1950s and 60s, Cage, Fluxus, et. al.... anechoic: yeah I know what you mean...he seems to suck in all prior art knowledge and then put it in an Eno wrapper and let academics pat him on the head anechoic: but I thought very highly of his Generative Music release for Sseyo anechoic: some of his best work Douglas Kahn: There is nothing in indeterminacy per se or in related concepts that prevents them from becoming reified as well. The way that Cage controlled a composition, from outside its boundaries, is in fact what happened with photography viz. drawing in the 19th century. Yet no one would claim that photographers have given up control. eM.ichael ben: yes, that's not what i'm meaning though... david t: so what is the problem with generative/random/indeterminate music? shouldn't we be hearing by-products of it? david t: stupid question david t: we are hearing byproducts of the concept Douglas Kahn: David.... I don't think there's any problem with it, just as there is no intrinsic benefit to it. It has been around so long that it's what you do with it specifically that counts. david t: already... sorry eM.ichael ben: i'm thinking now of the viewer to consumer shift... the commodity... eM.ichael ben: changing expectations of the viewer/listener... david t: you're right. what i'm thinking is that it's basically one of the core ideas in music anyway. improvisation relies for a good part on indeterminancy, for instance. Douglas Kahn: the relationship between improvisation and indeterminacy is a complicated one. Really good improvisation, ironically, requires a musical internalization that is based on repetition (theoretically). I'm thinking of the Lexicon of Musical Scales and Modes (Slonimsky) that Coltrane would give to his musicians when they first entered the band, and how he would go to sleep with his sax and wake up in the morning playing. I saw Fred Frith at the Kitchen one time and he tried to improvise. It was pretty bad. If the singer got faster and louder, he would get faster and louder, if he got slower and quieter, she would get slower and quieter. Pretty bad. david t: he may not have been on his best day either Douglas Kahn: Cage himself had a bug up his butt about improvisation. He saw it as being tied to the ego he wanted to rid music of. If you talk to improvisers, however, they often talk about the best moments being those times when all ego has been abandoned. eM.ichael ben: yes! Douglas Kahn: Are there any questions on the non-musical parts of my book? david t: but, i see what you mean. still, the repetitions are material set in time, & events (sometimes unforeseen) happening outside the piece is what triggers them... david t: so there is a modicum of chance which is has not so much room in more 'strict' music david t: remove the extra 'is' after which david t: i'm probably insisting on a fairly trivial aspect anyhow david t: :) Douglas Kahn: My attitude about improvisation is that it requires damn near yogic discipline, and is in no way a quick ticket to freedom. It is a matter of internalization upon internalization. When a particular moment is sparked (triggered), it has whole worlds and languages to move through. Indeterminacy also, it takes much compositional prowess to set up a rich, complex, supple experience for everyone concerned. anechoic: can you speak a bit about your inclusion of Willhelm Reich in your book? what is the connection to sound? anechoic: does orgasm and motility come into play with pop music? Douglas Kahn: Reich came into plenty of play in the arts during the 1950s and 60s. There's often a conceit that "theory" belongs to the pomo present (since the early 80s), what I tried to show in the book was that at earlier times artists had their theorists like Reich (or with Burroughs, Korzybski and L. Ron Hubbard). In terms of WR and music, Jim Tenney was, like his wife at the time, Carolee Schneemann was very influenced by Reich. Some of the same ideas trickled down through Arthur Janov and primal screaming and made their pop debut with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, although Janov himself got the idea after watching a performance artist at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London during the mid-1960s. I'll try to remember his name... Douglas Kahn: WR would say that orgasm is connected to everything. Douglas Kahn: In my book, WR makes an appearance in a discussion about Michael McClure's "beast language".... MM was fooling around with kundalini yoga and orgone therapy at the same time, going through "dark night of the soul" and had a vision of beast language that formed the basis of his "meat science" and mammalian patriotism. anechoic: I did Reichian analysis for 4 years back in the 80's and was a big fan of his Douglas Kahn: When researching the whole postwar era I came to realize how Reich was seemingly everywhere, or at least everywhere that was interesting. Someone could do a book on his influence on the arts alone.....not me. anechoic: when you speak of "dark night of the soul" this is an alchemical reference...what connection does spirituality play in WAM... Douglas Kahn: St. John of the Cross, I believe, the mystical nadir which forms the launching pad for either suicide or a top-level meeting with the numinous (the blinding white light of god). Spirituality is all over WAM in different ways, some of it pretty deep, other times predictable and pretentious. After a certain point, Stockhausen made a career out of it. There's a book by Jocelyn Goodwin on spirituality and music. Douglas Kahn: Shall we call it a day? anechoic: one last q from me: what is your opinion of the emergent genre of glitch? Douglas Kahn: A good night of the soul? anechoic: does anyone have any other q's? anechoic: if not, I'd like to call for wrapping this up... Douglas Kahn: Good question. Two reasons, first one as an excuse to tell you about a symposium we're having here in Sydney on 15 April called anechoic: going once... Douglas Kahn: just a minute, I'll answer your glitch ??? anechoic: OK david t: i must confess i have not read the book, so nothing from me. :) anechoic: is glitch about "failure" or "interruption"? david t: but thank you for the chat regardless david t: is it still a glitch when you can control it? Douglas Kahn: called Audio Ideas on certain trends where subcultural musics meet experimentalism (glitch included). caleb.k will be taking the recent Wire article about glitch to task, Mitchell Whitelaw will be talking about ideas of "materialism" and I'll be talking about some recent, amazing music by Sydneysider Peter Blamey. anechoic: is there a URL for the conf? anechoic: does Peter Blamey have CD's available? Douglas Kahn: Back to glitch. Glitches appeared in the avant-garde at the beginning of the avant-garde. Alfred Jarry in his short story Phonographe includes a glitch by making the story skip/repeat, like a faulty needle. anechoic: that would have been my next q: about glitching text! anechoic: I've done some work with text and Markov chains anechoic: I wrote the liner notes to an upcoming Ritornell comp in this manner Douglas Kahn: Milan Knizak, the Fluxus artist, more recently the cultural minister of the Czech Republic (how's that!) did broken music by cutting different lps up pie-wise and piecing them back together. david t: should the glitch be seen as a catalyst to experimentation then? david t: rather than a specific 'genre' of experimentation? Douglas Kahn: Milan Knizak, the Fluxus artist, more recently the cultural minister of the Czech Republic (how's that!) did broken music by cutting different lps up pie-wise and piecing them back together. david t: should the glitch be seen as a catalyst to experimentation then? david t: rather than a specific 'genre' of experimentation? anechoic: ok...so unless Doug has more he wants to say I move that we end here? Douglas Kahn: You'll have to ask him, but caleb.k, who I believe is a regular on microsound, likes to talk about breaking code instead of glitch. When it's associated with fucked up CDs it can become tied to failure (witting or unwitting) of consumer design. Whereas with glitch as noise... noise is not just transgressive but is also generative. That's the other side of it in the history of the a-g and experimentalism. Noise is related to cosmogenesis... the chaos from which all comes. In this way, noise hang on anechoic: ok Douglas Kahn: In this way, noise is a positive sign of plenitude, the richness of the world. caleb david t: oh yeah Douglas Kahn: oops, caleb's move away from the surface of consumer artefacts down to the code gives glitch that chance at plenitude. Douglas Kahn: In other terms of larger cultural trends, one attribute of modernist art is a revelation of materials and processes. Glitch fits right in. Douglas Kahn: one more question or let me thank you all for the discussion. It's been great. anechoic: so is glitch moving backwards instead of forwards? are we rehashing all the modernist issues? anechoic: we can end here if you don't want to answer that! Douglas Kahn: We're not rehashing modernist issues because they are reappearing in entirely different social environs. david t: modernism means you're going forward, isn't it? :) Douglas Kahn: Christian Marclay takes alot from Duchamp but Duchamp never grew up with popular culture and music. Douglas Kahn: One last word. If you're interested in glitch, check out Paul DeMarinis' website. He has some very sophisticated things to say about surface noise and the sounds of technology per se. Thanks again. anechoic: thank you Doug!!! eM.ichael ben: Thanks much for chatting with us, Douglas, it's been fun! OK, a good night to all... david t: thank you! david t: yeah, good night, i'm tired Eddie: thanks for your time douglas Douglas Kahn: My pleasure.