The actual composition of Spiral consists of a series of signs indicating transformations of parameters such as duration, intensity, register, or segmentation. The performer is presenting with the task of modeling as closely as possible the receptions over shortwave, and subsequently transforming these events according to very rigorously conceived specifications. It is a tremendously structured work, with intricately conceived patterns of increase and decrease in major musical parameters, yet the actual content to fit into the structure is left open to whatever the radio happens to be offering at the time of performance. Perhaps no other work so closely demonstrates Marshall McLuhan’s most famous dictum “The Medium Is The Message,” or in other words  the primary impact of a particular type of media is not the specific content or subject matter that this medium  carries but rather the scale and patterns of association and differentiation that the medium itself introduces, irregardless of the content.

This is a piece I plan to continue to study and perform and over the summer will likely post a series of further realization of the work, including the use of subtractive synthesizers, so check back soon!

Iannis Xenakis – Mists by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

For some reason the player is way the heck down at the bottom of the page, just find the play button.

Dual by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

By doing away with the presence of a single uniform and continuous temporal metric, Cage was in all likelihood seeking out exactly the kind of sacralized perceptual orientation, and what the psychedelic generation might celebrate as expanded consciousness, that Marshall Mcluhan wrote had been suppressed by the invention of the mechanical clock. As always, reinforcing his claims that modern electrical man is ever becoming more psychically attuned to habits characteristic of tribal man, rather than industrial/mechanical man, Mcluhan theorized that the mechanical clock had the effect of relating all phenomenon to repeatable, uniform units. Whereas tribal man experienced time as the durations between a plethora of often unrelated events, mechanical man learned to relate all events to a single ‘tempo,’ as it were. And as Cage dismissed the very notion of a tempo, along with it necessarily went the division of the music into salient, discrete units. This is another departure from the earlier Music of Changes.

If one is able to imagine the host of perceptual/aesthetic consequences that go along with the dismissal of a unifying metric, and if one is able to similarly dismiss the completely unrelatable bias that artists obligatorily represent autocratic, privately-expressive viewpoints, than one can celebrate Cage for being the tuned-in psychonautical expeditionary that he was. Moreover, in Etudes Australes the dismissal of a unifying centrist orientation goes far beyond merely the temporal aspect. Cage, in a late interview with Joan Rettalack, expressed his preference during the early decades of his career towards all notes existing in their own dynamic strata, in other words not related to a common unifying dynamic orientation. The Etudes don’t contain a single dynamic marking, but if one understands the principle of non-centrist art than one will automatically situate each note on different levels. And even if one doesn’t understand that principle, and insists on remaining a simpering, obsequious servant to notions of authority and artistic legitimacy, thoroughly un-Cagelike as it is, one can at least soothe the paranoia about doing something wrong because Cage himself recommended that particular kind of performance practice – as he put it, “this way each note is at its own center.” Though if one is leaning on authority that way, that person is caught in a center-to-margins relationship with whoever he thinks is supposed to be some kind of authoritative viewpoint, that person should really be playing more industrial-oriented music anyway.

Now, the replacement of center-to-margins relationships with the simultaneous inter-referential neural network of differentiated information is in fact the very crux of Marshall McLuhan’s life’s work, and I would argue of Cage’s as well.

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Natural Selection by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Music Of Changes by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.