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Drastic or Plastic?: Threads from Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Musik und Graphik," 1959

2012; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pnm.2012.0033

2325-7180

David Gutkin,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN WITH A GEDENKSCHRIFT BY JEROME KOHL GUEST EDITOR DRASTIC OR PLASTIC?: THREADS FROM KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN’S “MUSIK UND GRAPHIK,” 1959 DAVID GUTKIN INTRODUCTION: CAPTURING TIME URIOUSLY, EARLE BROWN, John Cage, and Morton Feldman all invoke photographs or cameras in discussions of the nonconventional musical notations they had begun developing in the 1950s. Commenting on his iconic December 1952—a score that consists of thirty-one vertical and horizontal line-segments arrayed across a single page—Brown recalls that his initial idea was to create a box with motorized, moving pieces in a three-dimensional configuration that would sit in front of the performer(s). That plan having failed, Brown’s eventual score was, in his words, “like a photograph of a certain set of C 256 Perspectives of New Music relationships of these various horizontal and vertical elements.”1 Rather than comparing notation to a photograph, Cage, in his lecture “Experimental Music,” speaks of one notational technique he devised —“a geometrical means”—in terms of a camera: “the composer resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture.”2 Cage again compares score to camera and performer to photographer in a later lecture, “Composition as Process,” this time in reference to Morton Feldman’s early graphic score, Intersection 3: The function of the performer in the case of the Intersection 3 is that of a photographer who on obtaining a camera uses it to take a picture. The composition permits an infinite number of these, and, not being mechanically constructed, it will not wear out. It can only suffer disuse or loss.3 Much later Feldman recasts the analogy between camera and performer in respect to his early graphic scores. Speaking with Cole Gagne in 1980, he says: I did find things that I never expected [in the performance of his graphically notated pieces]. For example, I found that my most far-out notation repeated historical clichés in performance more than my precise notation. Precise notation is my handwriting. My imprecise notation was a kind of roving camera that caught up very familiar images like a historical mirror.4 Whatever else these analogies between notation and photography may mean, I propose they reflect that notation, like photography, is marked by a complex of intersections with time. Roland Barthes suggests in his well-known volume Camera Lucida that the photograph exists in a schizophrenic temporal condition. Photography’s “madness” is the “that-has-been” made present here and now. Rehearsing a common trope, photography for Barthes is accordingly shot through with deathliness, while sound as a present temporality seems almost living.5 But in his musings on music—which usually concern notated Western music—he never considers how that repertoire, like photography, hinges upon a complex disjunction of time and space. Instead bodies, liveness, and temporal presence dominate his musical poetics. But musics that are necessarily entwined with their notated mediation may also inspire reflections on estrangement and death as they, like photography, seem to lead a temporal double life. Theodor Adorno writes that the “immortalization of music through writing contains a lethal aspect: what it holds Drastic or Plastic? 257 at once becomes irretrievable” and as such “all music making is a recherche du temps perdu.”6 I do not, however, solely wish to stress the element of alienated time in notation, and instead prefer to simply observe that the inscribing of music bears upon time in multiple ways. An interpretation of the composers’ statements above demonstrates just a few possible temporal conceptions of notation. When Cage speaks of “a geometrical means” which becomes in effect a “camera” given to the performer, he makes the score a technology of a purely potential and variable future time. Notation’s profound entwinement with the idea of potential, or possibility, is in fact a centuriesold idea. Dorit Tanay has argued that whereas Western notation had hitherto been a means of setting down what was already given in performative practice, the emerging theories of rhythmic notation during the Ars Nova of the fourteenth century, notably those of Johannes de Muris, “reversed” this sequence. With “logical possibilities tak[ing] priority over the listing of empirical data,” a...