Iris ter Schiphorst
Composing today? (2002)
Lecture given at Folkwang University in 2002, published in: Parergon (Norway), issue 25/26, 2004
Excerpt: Writing and Music
It is all too easy to forget that what we customarily define as "music" owes its very existence to notation. It goes without saying that this form of writing is both incredibly productive and accompanied by a profound, irrevocable exclusion.
The history of writing is the history of a medium becoming increasingly effective and abstract; over time, it has gained independence from specific locations, moments, and bodies—in short, from musical practice itself. To put it another way: the price of this efficiency is, among other things, the loss of the oral context that essentially belongs to writing and, indeed, once necessitated it. Not until the 20th century did other storage media begin to challenge the hegemony of writing—media that operate without code and thus decisively modify the exclusionary criteria of notation.Strictly speaking, what we call music owes itself to two forms of writing: the alphabetic script and musical notation. Until the early modern period, it was primarily scholars of writing (Schriftgelehrte) who defined what music was to be, rather than "composers" or musicians.
Much like alphabetic script, musical notation has become increasingly effective and rationalized throughout its development. It has become capable of "inscribing" more and more detail, thereby gaining independence from the musical practice that once defined it and the prevailing concept of music. The history of notation documents the respective stages of the "textualization" of musical practice (initially pitch, then rhythm, etc.).
As notation gained greater independence and autonomy, the status of the composer was elevated. However, the influence of the scholars did not diminish; after 1800, they simply assumed new titles, such as musicologists or music critics. (The relative weight of these positions is perhaps reflected in the fact that copyrights for scholars existed as early as 1796, while copyrights for composers have only existed for about a hundred years.)The history of notation is inseparable from the respective historical technical-instrumental possibilities. The intertwining of instrumental prerequisites and "notation" became particularly evident in the 18th century. The fully written-out triad with all its inversions (which gradually replaced and expanded upon the figured bass) can be understood as a "notated grasping" (Be-Greifen) of the triad on the keyboard.
With the ultimate triumph of equal temperament around 1800, notation experienced a further surge in efficiency. (In this context, musicology began to speak of "musical logic" for the first time.) From this point forward, notation became as effective and abstract as the phonetic alphabet, which, with its reservoir of 26 letters, not only allows for infinite linguistic combinations but is also capable of transcribing any language. The same can be said for the storage capacity of notation from this era onwards. It claimed to "transcribe" the musical styles of other cultures (though we now know that this form of notation is bordering on the absurd within other ethnological contexts) and, by the 20th century, referred only to a pitch reservoir of twelve equal tones. (Eimert rightly points out that the continued distinction between sharps and flats strictly no longer belongs to this code.)At this stage, it becomes clear that instead of "notation," one might prefer to speak of a numerical code. This numerical code became increasingly independent of contemporary musical practice, eventually losing almost all reference to it during the 20th century.
In Serialism, this graphic-numerical code underwent further rationalization and an increase in efficiency, aided by new technical prerequisites. This allowed parameters that were previously "unnotated"—and thus peripheral—such as dynamics and timbre, to be "inscribed."However, this increase in efficiency became problematic for the first time and seemed to paradigmatically demonstrate, or anticipate, what philosophy would address shortly thereafter: the problem of writing and the problem of ratio (reason). It was as if this numerical code had reached an endpoint—as if logic pushed to its extreme, a total rationalization, were somehow coupled with a loss of meaning (Sinnverlust), or more precisely, a loss of the senses (Sinnenverlust). When applied consistently, Serialism leads merely to a statistical equidistribution of musical material on the paper as well as in space. This over-determinism results in a complete lack of development—or a "senselessness" (in both meanings of the term).
One might argue—somewhat loosely—that a certain history of writing, its telos, and its universalist concept, reached an end here. Writing was led ad absurdum by its own internal logos.Composers naturally responded to this crisis. Questions regarding the closure of form and notation were already being negotiated by Boulez and Stockhausen in 1958, as well as in the autonomous aleatory of Lutosławski (independent of Cage’s influence). However, the aleatoricism of John Cage is considered decisive for a fundamental shift in music and the relationship between notation and sound. Interestingly, the juxtaposition of "total determination" (Serialism) and "complete chance" (Cage) generated vital compositional impulses, as neither principle proved strictly feasible in practice.In this context, one must also mention Ligeti’s 1960 distinction between texture (post-serial) and structure (serial), as well as the concept of musique informelle, presented by Adorno in 1961 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. Yet, their "new" criteria—open form, the spatialization of musical time, etc.—created a new problem: music theory, which has always been inextricably linked to the numerical code, is fundamentally unable to analyze works that do not obey the telos of that code using its established methods.
(...)
Interestingly, around the same time, philosophy began to scrutinize the ambivalence of writing (albeit in a different context). The paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, for example, claimed in his seminal book Gesture and Speech (Technique et langage) that the rise of writing was accompanied by a gradual narrowing of thought. (Notably, Evangelisti’s theses in From Silence to a New Sound World are based almost exclusively on Leroi-Gourhan’s research.)In his 1967 book Of Grammatology, Derrida also took up many of Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas, asserting that (phonetic) writing was, at its origin, "nothing other than an original and powerful ethnocentrism, which has the prospect of assuming mastery over our planet." A different focus was set by the father of media theory, Marshall McLuhan; he diagnosed the "end of the era of writing" and, in his 1963 book Understanding Media, directed attention toward new media and the ways they transform the world.(...)Ultimately, what is initiated in all these debates is more than just a critical view of writing; it is a critical view of Modernity itself.