The theme of Stockholm New Music
(18-25 feb, 2006) was "Place and space", the relation
between music and the room. Interesting indeed, but also a vast
and difficult issue. To handle the theoretic challenge, the festival
had chosen to spend a load of money on a book, guiding the listener
through the week. The first part containing short essays on the
subject of the festival, the second part presenting the program
with brief comments on every piece performed. In order to present
different viewpoints on the subject, the festival was subdivided.
Every day a new theme, for example "The freedom of the fragment",
"Speaking with angels", "The wanderers dreams",
"Cities" and "Where is the place?". A good
way to approach the music from different angles with different
associations. But before we can talk about the festival, we should
explore the twilight zone between the room and the sounds.
How does architecture relate to
music?
The Perfect
Loudspeaker
One of the oldest and most explored
links between music and architecture is the notion of the acoustics.
A certain room sounds a certain way; the sound is a proof of its
physical extension and constitution. A compulsory example of the
acoustic connection is the highly developed music by Palestrina,
whose multiple antiphonal choir was located in different parts
of the church. Another is the old saying that music by Bach should
be heard in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, since that's where
it was heard the first time. Some have driven this one step further
by rebuilding the room, to make it more appropriate. Eccentric
examples of this are Wagner's self designed opera on the holy
hill of Bayreuth and the visionary open-air concert place for
Prometheus by Alexander Skrjabin. Stockhausen himself, inspired
by the geometrical projects of architect Buckminster Fuller, designed
the Kugelauditorium, a spherical loudspeaker construction for
the World Expo in Osaka 1970. The German architect Fritz Bornemann
transformed it to a pavilion, and the speakers were arranged to
achieve a realistic three-dimensional effect around the listener.
Many composers have used the technical construction as a theme,
but not implemented as natural as in this project. Most often
the room is silenced with soft panels, and after this the music
is added with overlayered reverbs, rooms and sound narratives.
Over the last decades researchers have made efforts to design
and differentiate the sound environment. But this is rather an
expansion of the profession of the architect or building engineer
than a new approach towards music itself. Acoustics is a thing
for people working with sound ergonomics, or the question of how
to build the perfect loudspeaker.
Form and
Topography
Another crucial point is the many
formal similarities between architecture and music in terms of
topography and morphology, i.e. how the room/music develops over
time. École des Beaux-Arts, the academy of architecture
in Paris in the 18th century used different formal criteria in
the analysis of a building. The concept Disposition combined the
relation between plan and volume (Parti), and the experience of
a walk through the building (La marche). La marche was the most
important thing, how to move through a sequence of rooms according
to a certain pattern. There is a parallel between this and the
sonata form in the traditional music theory; a predestinated sequence
of musical events; a strictly controlled room with a direction
and a clear goal. In her thesis "Musikens rum; Metaforer
Ritualer Institutioner" (1995), architect and musicologist
Catharina Dyrssen makes the connection between the Gothenburg
Concert Hall and the Haeffner symphony by Mozart. In her analysis
she uses the connection between La Marche and the sonata form,
which by all means is a proof of certain similarities between
the walk in a classical room sequence and the morphology in a
certain type of music; The form is in both cases narrative and
directed towards the Grand Finale. Unfortunately the analysis
fails to create a wider connection between architecture and music.
The fact that B comes after A is not enough to make a relevant
connection, other than on a rhetorical level. The background chapter
of the thesis is interesting and informative, but the analyzes
fails to convince. The double exposure of the Haeffner symphony
and the Gothenburg Concert Hall becomes the Memento Mori of structural
analysis.
The Vehicle
of Representation
Finding the acoustic connection
too technical and the formal too analogue, some have tried to
superimpose architecture and music through different strategies
of representation. Is it possible to transform different representations
of music to space, and vice versa? On the 1958 World Expo in Brussels,
corporate giant Philips was represented by a pavilion designed
by the architect Le Corbusier. Unlike all his other buildings
in his career, this was co-signed by the young engineer Iannis
Xenakis. The 75-year old composer Edgar Varése wrote the
music in the pavilion. Through mathematical transformations and
graphical representations the gap between sound and concrete wall
was overlapped. The dynamic shapes representing different theoretical
parameters can be traced in Xenakis works from his entire career.
Like his predecessor Pythagoras, all his life Xenakis tried to
superimpose music, architecture and mathematics. Some people say
he was a mediocre mathematician, but the result is rich, complex
and intellectually challenging. But most convincing is not the
transformation act between the different languages - it’s
the music itself. The vibrating house of Xenakis is liberated
from time and place. The music is archaic, monolithic, naked and
beautiful, all at the same time. Another example of transformation
through representation is a house by Steven Holl, where he uses
the formal similarities more obvious than Xenakis. In fact he
is very close to Dyrssen’s connection between crescendo
and the height of the ceiling. Without hesitation Steven Holl
translates the image of a score by Bela Bartók ("Music
for strings, percussion and celesta"), whose repetitive arpeggio
is transformed to arched roofs, one after the other. It is a nice
piece of architecture, but it is not the connection we are looking
for.
The Metaphysical Place
The examples above have proved to
be rhetoric figures, obvious analogies or shown that the works
are classics thanks to the quality of the room/music itself. Let
us widen the perspective and let go of the physical room, maybe
this expanded field can help us further. If we are searching for
a meaningful connection between music and architecture, maybe
it doesn’t have to do with similarities. Is there a point
where they collapse into each other? Could a fruitful place to
start looking be in the subjective experience, inside us? In our
perception the two concepts superimpose completely, which is a
methodological problem. The field of our study becomes immense.
We have to choose a discourse: psychology, sociology, cultural
studies, politics etc. But instead of even trying to make one
consistent theory, I will analyze one example. Maybe this will
deconstruct all problems that have occurred during our search
for a connection.
A Case Study: Morton Feldman
During the 50-60’s, the artists
of the New York school contributed to the development of a phenomenological
and postmodern theory of the time. This occurred in many disciplines
at the same time; the abstract expressionism in painting, the
choreography of Merce Cunningham, the everyday poetry of Frank
O’Hara and the open ears of John Cage. The composer Morton
Feldman combined notions of space and sound in his works like
no one before. The music of Feldman is very quiet and delicate,
like the breath of a small bird. The durations of his late quartets
are extreme, one is around seven hours, but they never coagulate
to stiff minimalism. The music slowly unveils like an oriental
rug, with notes and arpeggio like millions of knots, slowly modulating
creating a big unity. In contrast to the dialectics between matter
and essence in traditional metaphysics, Feldman never creates
any ideal objects. The music has no ambition to create meanings
or sentences with different figures or narratives. Without musical
expressions and gestures the pieces become very material, tangible
and prosaic, the result becomes meta music. Feldman’s aesthetics
is all about presence, where the sound is allowed to interact
with the context of its performance. The music is a transparent
layer, a thin japanese paper, on which he calmly sketches a new,
metaphysical room. This interaction between context and music
makes it site specific, with the ability to interact with any
place in the world. The piece invites the environment to become
a part of it, like a subtler version of 4’ 33’’
by John Cage, or a whispering counterpart to the Non-sites of
Robert Smithson. By deconstructing the notion of form, Feldman
reduces the music to a constant rebirth, continuously presenting
one new room after the other – always returning to the beholder
as a cognitive imperative, appealing to experience the present
again, and again, and again… When matter collapses with
essence, the musical signs dissolves and the sound suddenly re-appears
very close to the listener, almost as a physical phenomenon. The
music becomes like wallpaper, or like the weather. It’s
just there. Morton Feldman disliked the sonata form because of
its narrative character. He wanted to make sound rather than form.
This ambition, together with his construction of metaphysical
places, implicates a strong connection to the phenomenology. A
comparison with the traditional definition of room in architecture
can help us define the construction of place in the music Feldman
– or rather how he dissolves and questions the definition
of a place, the way it was defined in terms of form and structure
by predecessors like the École de Beaux Arts. Feldman describes
his music with terms used when describing a room, such as measures,
proportions and scale. He describes his music like walking along
the streets in Berlin – where all houses look the same,
even if they are not. Or like a stationary procession, not unlike
a motif from a Greek temple frieze ("Essays", Zimmermann,
1985). The comparison with an antique thympanon indicates his
will to deconstruct classical elements to make something new.
Very similar to the intricate details of the greek temple, whose
subtle distortions in the perspective increases the tension of
the visual appearance, Feldman writes detailed instructions for
the musician how to act in every situation. What you might experience
as extended, monotonous chords over immense time is in fact thoroughly
notated clusters of sound with a constant change of measures,
proving his will to give every bar a unique character. Feldman
is thus aware of the relation between the phenomenological room
and the notion of interpretation. What you might hear as an open,
floating space of sounds, is in fact an exactly notated, concentrated
flow of superimposed clusters of sound.
The case of Morton Feldman is an
example of how to connect architecture and music on the level
of perception, where the construction of mental objects and cultural
constructions in both discourses can give a new understanding
of objectiveness and the notion of space. By avoiding structuralistic
methods of analysis, instead using a phenomenological perspective
(based on the experience of the subject), a fruitful connection
between music and architecture can be established. These two disciplines
meet in the metaphysical room, the non-geometrical place, where
it can appear as a mental construction or a discoursive object.
But even if Feldman succeeds to melt down sound and space to meta
reality, many questions are still to be answered. Is it possible
to describe this room in terms of topography or morphology? Is
there a new terminology to explore, invent or analyze beyond what
we can physically measure? What does this world look like?
Alvin Curran
at Stockholm New Music Festival
Closely related to the metaphysical
space of Feldman is the works of the American composer Alvin Curran.
He was born in 1938 in Rhode Island, but started out his musical
journey in Rome in the late 60’s, where he founded the radical
musical collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA (MEV), working with
noise and improvisation in collective, political forms. He has
since been one of the forerunners in experimental american music
made outside the concert halls, and in his music he uses electronic
and environmental found sounds, very often with an engaged attitude
towards the spatial notion of sound. His suite for solo piano
"Inner cities" was performed during the Stockholm New
Music Festival. The piece is also related to "Invisible Cities"
by Italo Calvino, where Marco Polo is describing dreamy, beautiful
cities for the listening Kublai Khan. At the festival Belgian
pianist Daan Vandewalle performed the whole piece. "Inner
Cities" lasts for more than four hours, thus belonging to
the same tradition as Satie's "Vexations", Feldman's
late chamber works and "The Well Tuned Piano" by La
Monte Young. What these works have in common is the focus on the
subjective experience. Because of the extreme duration, the listener
is forced to experience the music in a new way, like in slow motion.
The first part begins with a few repetitive chords, like a stuttered
preparation. The arpeggios and sensitive dissonances of the second
part sounds like Morton Feldman. One piece is added to another,
like facades on a street, and the flow of sounds is slowly transforming
to a mighty city. "Inner Cities" emphasizes the physical
aspect of the performance of the piece, the sacrifice that has
to be done, both as a performer and a listener.
Another brilliant work not performed
during the festival but worth a mention is the record "I'm
sitting in a room" (1969). This composition is interesting
not only because the composers names are almost the same but it
also explores the boundary between sound and space. The first
thing we hear is the composer Alvin Lucier reading:
"I am sitting in a room different
from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound
of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into
the room again and again until the resonant frequencies
of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance
of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is
destroyed..." |
The voice in the room and the reverb,
one layer added after the other, evolves into a poetic interpretation
of what a room sounds like. This is with no doubt one of the most
intelligent pieces ever made on the subject place and space.
Stockholm New Music raised many
questions, among them maybe the most important - doesn't all music
relate to the place? The thematic approach and theoretical ambition
of Stockholm New Music Festival proved their awareness of the
fact that sound and space are two sides of the same coin, happening
inside our head, all the time. The major conquest of the festival
was the strategy to contextualize music. What happens if we approach
music from a new point view, the notion of place? What does the
poetic room look like, the room of the city, the mental experience
etc. The change of focus towards the experience of the room/music
can give us a new understanding of the constitution of a place.
As we have seen in this article, deconstructing the dichotomy
between room/sound has helped us unveil a seamless room based
on experience, context and interaction. The subjective, imaginative
place is rich and complex (almost redundant), but is so far the
most adequate example of an alloy between architecture and music.
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