Some notes on Cage, Minimalism, and :zoviet*france:
What follow are some notes and opinions on some types and aspects of music.
I think that the works of John Cage are pivotal - not necessarily for what they are as sonic events or experiences, but more for what his creative practice did historically.
Cage's challenge was to take the insight of Music Concrete (MC), where all sound is fair game, and translate it into a notational performance context : hence: 4'33", four minutes and 33 seconds of notated rests. This throws the sonic texture out of the instrument and into the present moment of pure sound of the concert hall itself - the material that MC would record as grist for their compositional practice centred on the tape recorder.
Xenakis took this further, and used clusters of notational objects to create sonic densities in time. Both act as an end game of the Western Chromatic Expansion - begun in the 13th century with polyphony, right through the Romantic Chromaticism of the 19th century and the "liberation" of each note according to the strict rules of serialism in the 20th. Cage et al took this to the logical conclusion, and I believe that much, but not all, minimalism, while interesting and valuable, was a failure of nerve.
Minimalism retreated from the challenge of sound itself - they wanted "players" to play music. Minimalism's failure is to not comprehend the full impact of the machines that helped make it come to be. Early minimalist music was often centred around the tape recorder: Terry Riley and Steve Reich both were early and active users of the machine, and using it for looping processes. Both artists went back to instrument playing: Reich with his ensemble, Riley flipping things about with In C. To their credits, both occasionally have some focus on releasing music that contains some looped audio (Reich's City and Riley's re-release of You're No Good).
In this way, I see Glass and Adam's careers as beautiful but not very important side lights to the thrust of musical development that I find most critical. Adams's and Glass's musics are much more conservative than the pioneering efforts of Rley and Reich. I consider Riley and Reich greater composers, even though their output is mostly based around small ensembles, solo performance, or tape composition. And this is why I see ZF as an important historical actor: ZF - an inherently ensemble-based collective - used a combination of the minimalist process of short repeated motifs that are composed of audio clips - very much in line with paleo-Music Concrete practice, while often avoiding the necessity of tape by using various electronic delay systems; all the while using the liberated function of sound from Cage (radio broadcasts, scraped notes, processed instruments, etc.) Blown through a pile of electronic effects, the sound of ZF stands as a bridge between a post-minimalist composition systme and what is happening now with contemporary loop-based software products, such as Ableton Live.
These products, which include but do not need, a "recorder style" interface are conceptually predicated on just the aesthetic juncture described above. What is very interesting is that it provides a compositional practice completely alien from the classical notational tradition - and is much more in line with the practice of Music Concrete. What is quite amusing is that this practice is independent of style: it can be used to make "avant-garde" music (viz: my CDs K.2, Live) or pop-dance music (viz: The Skeptics - everything@once!)
This shows that this aesthetic, which stands as a direct refutation of Stockhausen, actually has more practical and creative traction. Unique, non-repeating sounds (as dictated by Stockhausen) DO repeat, as long as they are presented in simulation. Something that exists as a representation of a sound, i.e., a recording, can be replayed, again and again.
The last inherently unrepeatable point is that of live improvisation.
Hence, the beauty of my CD, LIVE, where I consciously involuted that process, and used pre-recorded non-original samples and loops from both commercially available CDs (by Robin Storey and others) and from the internet where many sounds can be had for free, and used them in am improvisational and live manner - in fact, I even used material from previous CDs of mine as "grist" for the performance / improvisation mill.
Now: the goal is to do this with Video - which feeds directly into principles of Performance Cinema. VJ with brains and purpose. Where narrativity is not abandoned or embraced - where everything exists as data to be used for whatever creative purpose the artist deems necessary.
All of this requires a completely different notion of intellectual property and a much more nuanced sense of copyright. Not boundaries and borders as presently understood - but permeable membranes of practice and use. Given the present political climate, which is teetering on acute fascism, I don't see this happening soon, but technology requires it.
Our tools imply a freedom of information as data - where data can be acquired, processed, and output. It is to what end that this data is used that remains a major and contentious point in contemporary composition practice, and goes quite beyond plunderphonic artists like Oswald and Negativland, but includes them and their necessary art, as well more recent efforts in this direction such as Danger Mouse's "Gray Album".
I think an important point is to avoid simple formalism: it's important to provide meaning, and how we go about acquiring meaning from a piece and how we intend with the development of a work still remains critical and primary to creative practice.
What is also very liberating about this is that it doesn't mean that "players" are excluded - virtuosity on an instrument is a very useful thing: it's one kind of music that can only be had through a dedicated and regular practice. However: unlike the previous umpteen thousands of years - it's no longer the only game in town. I discussed this in terms of hypertypes in an old SPARK column back in 2000.
In conclusion: the music of ZF (and Robin Storey, in particular) is, I believe, an important link and moment in musical history, whose development is similar to my own. I believe that ZF's relative obscurity is a travesty, but not uncommon in the world of music: it took Mendelssohn's PhD to resurrect the music of JS Bach to its rightful place as a linchpin of 17th century European Musical development.
I think that the works of John Cage are pivotal - not necessarily for what they are as sonic events or experiences, but more for what his creative practice did historically.
Cage's challenge was to take the insight of Music Concrete (MC), where all sound is fair game, and translate it into a notational performance context : hence: 4'33", four minutes and 33 seconds of notated rests. This throws the sonic texture out of the instrument and into the present moment of pure sound of the concert hall itself - the material that MC would record as grist for their compositional practice centred on the tape recorder.
Xenakis took this further, and used clusters of notational objects to create sonic densities in time. Both act as an end game of the Western Chromatic Expansion - begun in the 13th century with polyphony, right through the Romantic Chromaticism of the 19th century and the "liberation" of each note according to the strict rules of serialism in the 20th. Cage et al took this to the logical conclusion, and I believe that much, but not all, minimalism, while interesting and valuable, was a failure of nerve.
Minimalism retreated from the challenge of sound itself - they wanted "players" to play music. Minimalism's failure is to not comprehend the full impact of the machines that helped make it come to be. Early minimalist music was often centred around the tape recorder: Terry Riley and Steve Reich both were early and active users of the machine, and using it for looping processes. Both artists went back to instrument playing: Reich with his ensemble, Riley flipping things about with In C. To their credits, both occasionally have some focus on releasing music that contains some looped audio (Reich's City and Riley's re-release of You're No Good).
In this way, I see Glass and Adam's careers as beautiful but not very important side lights to the thrust of musical development that I find most critical. Adams's and Glass's musics are much more conservative than the pioneering efforts of Rley and Reich. I consider Riley and Reich greater composers, even though their output is mostly based around small ensembles, solo performance, or tape composition. And this is why I see ZF as an important historical actor: ZF - an inherently ensemble-based collective - used a combination of the minimalist process of short repeated motifs that are composed of audio clips - very much in line with paleo-Music Concrete practice, while often avoiding the necessity of tape by using various electronic delay systems; all the while using the liberated function of sound from Cage (radio broadcasts, scraped notes, processed instruments, etc.) Blown through a pile of electronic effects, the sound of ZF stands as a bridge between a post-minimalist composition systme and what is happening now with contemporary loop-based software products, such as Ableton Live.
These products, which include but do not need, a "recorder style" interface are conceptually predicated on just the aesthetic juncture described above. What is very interesting is that it provides a compositional practice completely alien from the classical notational tradition - and is much more in line with the practice of Music Concrete. What is quite amusing is that this practice is independent of style: it can be used to make "avant-garde" music (viz: my CDs K.2, Live) or pop-dance music (viz: The Skeptics - everything@once!)
This shows that this aesthetic, which stands as a direct refutation of Stockhausen, actually has more practical and creative traction. Unique, non-repeating sounds (as dictated by Stockhausen) DO repeat, as long as they are presented in simulation. Something that exists as a representation of a sound, i.e., a recording, can be replayed, again and again.
The last inherently unrepeatable point is that of live improvisation.
Hence, the beauty of my CD, LIVE, where I consciously involuted that process, and used pre-recorded non-original samples and loops from both commercially available CDs (by Robin Storey and others) and from the internet where many sounds can be had for free, and used them in am improvisational and live manner - in fact, I even used material from previous CDs of mine as "grist" for the performance / improvisation mill.
Now: the goal is to do this with Video - which feeds directly into principles of Performance Cinema. VJ with brains and purpose. Where narrativity is not abandoned or embraced - where everything exists as data to be used for whatever creative purpose the artist deems necessary.
All of this requires a completely different notion of intellectual property and a much more nuanced sense of copyright. Not boundaries and borders as presently understood - but permeable membranes of practice and use. Given the present political climate, which is teetering on acute fascism, I don't see this happening soon, but technology requires it.
Our tools imply a freedom of information as data - where data can be acquired, processed, and output. It is to what end that this data is used that remains a major and contentious point in contemporary composition practice, and goes quite beyond plunderphonic artists like Oswald and Negativland, but includes them and their necessary art, as well more recent efforts in this direction such as Danger Mouse's "Gray Album".
I think an important point is to avoid simple formalism: it's important to provide meaning, and how we go about acquiring meaning from a piece and how we intend with the development of a work still remains critical and primary to creative practice.
What is also very liberating about this is that it doesn't mean that "players" are excluded - virtuosity on an instrument is a very useful thing: it's one kind of music that can only be had through a dedicated and regular practice. However: unlike the previous umpteen thousands of years - it's no longer the only game in town. I discussed this in terms of hypertypes in an old SPARK column back in 2000.
In conclusion: the music of ZF (and Robin Storey, in particular) is, I believe, an important link and moment in musical history, whose development is similar to my own. I believe that ZF's relative obscurity is a travesty, but not uncommon in the world of music: it took Mendelssohn's PhD to resurrect the music of JS Bach to its rightful place as a linchpin of 17th century European Musical development.
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