The Disembodied Spirit: The History Of Photography As A Study In Myth.

It is evident by now that the main thrust of this article is to begin to relate how escaping the “blinkered” experience of the singular point of view, which Finnissy drew attention to in the introductory program note to the History, is a fundamental aesthetic and perceptual principle dominating the work. Awareness of the critical differences between total field awareness and the fixed point of view can save the listener from the frustration of trying to follow a singular path in the music where so many concurrent threads asserting non-uniform temporal orientations render the reduction to a central thread incoherent. Many listeners would doubtless object that relating all phenomena to a common, master thread or understanding music primarily in terms of it’s sequential trajectory is an unavoidable, natural fact of the human psyche. They would be mistaking their own deep engrainment in this particular perceptual habit as an immutable law of musical cognition. Meanwhile, composers such as Finnissy, Babbitt, and Cage, among others, have engaged in rhythmic practices that thrust both listener and performer into a world where they have to attempt to grasp many conflicting temporal relationships at the same time. Presented with this complex field of information, where uniformity is not to be found along linear continuums, the apprehender must turn his attention to the work as a whole, not merely as it unfolds in time, as the myriad connections there are to be found take place within the total field. As shown in Example 6, anyone seeking insight into the role and development of any of the recurring metrical orientations must, through memory, consider and compare the multiple places where such figures occur and implode them into a composite perspective found only in contemplation of the whole. Again, the overriding principle is multiplicity: whereas the rhythmic complexity compels awareness of multiple meters and temporal spans, the non-linear reiteration of those rhythmic figures compels contemplation of numerous non-adjacent moments in the work at once.

The metaphor of ‘having to be many places at once’ would be just as applicable to a discussion of many other aspects of Finnissy’s work, harmony and phrase structure among them, though it is beyond the scope of this article. However, it will be useful to the current discussion to connect the above commentary to what is perhaps the defining feature of The History Of Photography In Sound: the pervasive use of allusion, manifested both in the extensive recall of historical specimens combined in fluid montage, as well the extensive self-allusion within the cycle itself, with a plethora of shared materials making appearances in numerous movements. The self-allusion invites forming peripatetic connections across the whole cycle, while the allusion to historical samples invites peripatetic awareness of history itself as a static whole.

…

However, allusion in The History Of Photography In Sound goes far beyond the extensive network of long-range associations that emerges as each movement refers to numerous other movements in the cycle. Besides alluding to itself, the cycle weaves an expansive trove of musical references drawn from remote corners of our musical past into its latticework tapestry. Finnissy writes in his introduction,

My title uses the word ‘photography,’ and its plethora of associations, to convey a certain kind of musical material: documentary – snipped out from different periods in the past, and different locations across the world – a collection of exterior facts. These refugee facts are then situated, more or less provocatively, in the eventual composition. (Introductory program not to The History Of Photography In Sound)

This use of historical specimens demonstrates Finnissy himself, as composer, engaging with his own recollection of the musical past as a static field using precisely the psychological habits which have been suggested in this article are germane to apprehension of the music. Reference to the writings of Marshall McLuhan are again most useful for providing insight into the aesthetic outlook behind Finnissy’s panoramic recall of the musical past, as well. Furthermore, as the weaving together of historical specimens through pun and collage was also a defining feature of the literary technique of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, reference to comments by both authors on the subject provides further inroads into understanding the effects.

In a critical review of poetry by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot called particular attention to Pound’s panoramic grasp of an extraordinary range of literary history, and his ability to endow an instant of modern awareness in poetic utterance with a special potency and charge by imbuing it with a long-reaching multitude of reference and meaning far beyond its local context:

Most poets grasp their own time, the life of the world as it stirs before their eyes, at one convulsion or not at all. But they have no method for closing in upon it. Mr. Pound’s method is indirect and one extremely difficult to pursue. As the present is no more than the present existence, the present significance, of the entire past, Mr. Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past; and when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed. Such a method involves immense capacities of learning and of dominating one’s learning, and the peculiarity of expressing oneself through historical masks. Mr. Pound has a unique gift for expression through some phase of past life.[1]

This passage could just as easily have been Eliot’s reaction to Finnissy’s History Of Photography, had he the opportunity to hear it, as the work is loaded with a diverse range of samples drawn from across our musical past. Many of the samples are listed in the introductory program note, but they are also labeled in the score.

The use of allusions or quotations in a musical work is not in and of itself necessarily of consequence, though the recognition of them may satisfy a certain antiquarian relish. However, the encyclopedic montaging of diverse samples that Finnissy engages in with The History Of Photography In Sound represents the composer himself interacting with musical history as a static whole, via memory, which itself is an example of precisely those auditory habits he alludes to in his program note. The musical moments from our past that he brings to life in the History become more than frozen moments in time, as he characterizes photographs. Instead, they are continuously re-animated in the present, much like Eliot’s comments on Pound. Consequently, by not viewing the sources as frozen in their own time and place in history, his view of history itself transcends a simply linear conception, namely one that looks at history as a procession of separate moments with causal or responsive relationships to the events surrounding them. He abandons this rational habit in favor of simultaneous awareness of wide-ranging periods and utterances from that past in a composite field view. In doing so, as a creative mind he manages to even himself not be a frozen consciousness in his own time and place, the exact opposite of the prototypical Romantic artist visionary with its prejudices towards private expression and singular vision. It calls to mind a statement that McLuhan emphasized in many contexts throughout his career: in the electronic age man becomes a kind of disembodied spirit, not necessarily corporeal in one time and place but with the ability to be everywhere at once. McLuhan argued that through electric media, such as telephone or television, with their powers of instant recall and the ability to implode distances of time and space, man is not confined to his own living room, for example, but may communicate with or attain awareness of many different places across the globe in the same evening. This characterization of modern consciousness, deftly summarizes Finnissy’s global musical consciousness and provides the best possible model of apprehension for anyone confronting the many simultaneous overlaid fields of melodic and rhythmic strands competing for attention in the music itself

The difference between considering each thing in its own turn and considering all things together as a static whole is a prominent thread running through James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is not only a covert principle, being the primary organic source for Joyce’s signature prose style, which is based on combining constellations of ideas into loaded utterances in the form of puns. Beyond that, it is an overt topic developed in conversations among characters and at times figuring in their private trains of thought.

At the beginning of the Proteus episode, which is by and large concerned with the protean, fluid life of ideas, we find the main character, Stephen, walking and musing to himself about the nature of sequence vs. field and their respective relationships to the “ineluctable modalities” of sight and sound.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark.[2]

There are a number of significances in this passage that are pertinent to the present discussion and to the perceptual modes at the heart of Finnissy’s History. To begin with, like the Finnissy, we are drawn into a present, immediate setting that is endowed with extra charge by being suffused with references beyond the present context. In just this short passage already are contained references to Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Lessing. Because of these allusions we are invited to participate in something much more than the mere passage of this one moment on its way to the next, but rather we are in contact with a vast range of literary history, experienced together as a static whole in the short space of this short scene. The reference to nacheinander and nebeneinander recalls the eighteenth-century German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s writings on this very subject. He used these terms to distinguish modes of presentation akin to the visual arts vs. the poetic arts:

In the one case the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after the other (nacheinander) in a sequence of time, and in the other the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence (nebeneinander) in space.[3]

Joyce’s autobiographical character Stephen is obviously thinking partly of sequence as he walks, ‘a stride at a time.’ At the same time, he is closing out the sequential progress of his steps and his procession along a spatial continuum simply by closing his eyes. He displays a marked preference for the total field experience of acoustic space ¾ I am getting on nicely in the dark.

This, of course, presents a striking parallel with the passage quoted at the outset of this article from Finnissy’s introduction to The History Of Photography In Sound, which itself demonstrates a marked aesthetic preference for the acoustic modality.  It is the propensity to look at a range of material in the same glance, the nebeneinander, which unites works like Ulysses and The History Of Photography In Sound in relying so heavily on a rich network of reference combined in fluid montage.

Ezra Pound, described an essential aspect of his own method as the technique of presenting “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”[4] Such is the technique of myth, which McLuhan declares our modern world has made a natural mode of thought:

Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. (Understanding Media, 25)

…

Both Ulysses and The History Of Photography In Sound re-animate history as a giant static nebenainder. However, both also allude to themselves just as much as they allude to historical samples, and the manner of self-allusion in the former requires much the same kind of long-range awareness as the latter. In Ulysses, like the self-allusion examples cited from Finnissy’s work, concepts and themes are developed not by devoting separate discrete sections to their unpacking and in-depth detailing, but rather continually emerge across the whole work in a succession of varied contexts. For example, the concept of metempsychosis, which is a reference to the Ancient Greek notion of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls. It is a compositional concept central to the work, naturally, as Joyce’s use of allusion is a kind of reincarnation of ideas in a contemporary setting. But the term itself is also referred to directly in the work in over a dozen instances spanning the whole.[6] Consequently, the reader must maintain a kind of running catalog, each further treatment of the theme contributing to a composite impression of it. Again, the disembodied spirit, who may not focus from the fixed vantage point of where he currently is in the text but instead must turn his attention, within memory, to many places at once. Analogous treatment is focused on further concepts such as consubstantiality, literary analogues including Hamlet and Telemachus, and even the characters themselves, who continuously re-emerge in disparate scenes and settings. Thus, insight into the development of ideas in the work emerges through a myriad network of association chains, presented simultaneously. This is precisely the mode favored in The History Of Photography In Sound, as has been suggested earlier the numerous incarnations of musical matter appearing in disparate scenes and settings spread out across the entire work establish webs of association across the whole of the work.

The Ear Is Not A Camera: The Divide Between Visual And Acoustic Perceptual Habits In Finnissy’s The History Of Photography In Sound.

In most photography, unlike painting or drawing, the view is disconcertingly blinkered, directly ahead. Everything is completely still. The camera and its lens (its eye) do not move. This fixed-perspective immobility is haunting and unnatural. In writing music, both my ears, and their accompanying brain and hand, have to remain mobile, alive. Acknowledging the fluidity, movement and characteristics of sound, discovering and exploring, getting the hands dirty and relishing it. Not putting ‘already musical’ sounds on a pedestal, and admiring them from a safe or discreet distance … The ear is not a camera …[1]

This passage, drawn from Michael Finnissy’s introductory program note to his massive eleven movement cycle of solo piano works, The History Of Photography In Sound, gives much more than background on the creative premises underlying the whole. He has here described two entirely different modes of perceptual orientation, the awareness of which is critical to anyone seeking insight and a more profound level of engagement with this work. On the one hand, we have the faculty of sight/vision with its attendant characteristics of the single fixed viewpoint and detachment or removal from the scene or environment before us. The medium of the photograph encapsulates this manner of apprehension by presenting the frozen moment in time and locating the viewer at the fixed position of the camera lens, at some distance to the scene. On the other hand, we have the auditory faculty with its directly opposite characteristics of immersion, awareness of a field of unconnected activity in opposition to linear/spatial concepts such as focus and vanishing point, and the intense degree of participation necessary to make sense of that field.

This distinction between the perceptual habits pertaining to the eye vs. the ear echoes a fundamental premise developed by media theorist Marshall McLuhan.[2]

The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. … Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniform connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships. (The Medium Is The Massage, 111)

One of the central hypotheses in McLuhan’s work is that the prominence of printed media following the invention of the Gutenberg Press resulted in an overwhelming perceptual bias towards visual/spatial orientation, with its particular set of associative habits; a development reflected in every imaginable political, social, scientific, and cultural sphere of the Western experience. However, the explosion in electric media throughout the twentieth century was and is reversing those effects, compelling and reinforcing psychological habits of total field and an experience of the world and its varied environments as a “simultaneous happening.”

This provides a most useful framework for understanding musical developments in our recent past, and in many ways Finnissy’s History Of Photography In Sound is the ultimate musical exploration of the new sensory world that McLuhan argues has been made inevitable by electric media. If the perceptual faculties germane to visual vs. acoustic space represent opposite poles of the spectrum of our imaginative capacities, Finnissy’s music is situated far towards the extreme auditory end of that spectrum, which Finnissy himself pronounces in his introduction to the cycle. James Joyce writes, in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, “the first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.”[3] In this spirit, the present article will develop a framework for more fully understanding the auditory mode of apprehension alluded to by Finnissy, with reference to writings by McLuhan, as well as John Cage, James Joyce, and others. This framework will be used as a basis for suggesting a particular set of imaginative faculties compelled by important musical characteristics featured throughout the cycle of works, beginning with the extreme rhythmic/temporal multivalence which is an almost constant force in these eleven movements. Rhythmic complexity in the cycle thrusts listeners into a world of myriad conflicting temporal dimensions simultaneously, thus exemplifying the move away from a single fixed viewpoint alluded to in the program notes. The discussion will then focus on the extensive use of allusion, both within the cycle and to a vast range of historical specimens drawn from our musical past. The prominence of allusion compels habits of total field awareness, and the necessity of imploding a complex of disparate musical events into composite perspectives in order to grasp the role and development of recurring musical materials. Analogues will be drawn between the effects of latticework chains of allusion running throughout the work and the effects of temporal multivalence, showing that both reinforce the same constellation of perceptual habits.

These are areas of the mind traditionally referred to as “right-brain” awareness, and just as patterns of self-allusion within the work compel such long-range field awareness from listeners, the expansive use of historical allusions demonstrate Finnissy, as author, taking a panoramic look at the musical past with the very same habits of total field view. Furthermore, the implosion of multiple disparate historical references into hybrid musical textures presents a musical analogue to a literary technique traditionally understood as myth, pioneered in the early-twentieth-century by authors including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Their comments on the technique of myth offer substantial illumination of the aesthetic effects underpinning Finnissy’s work.  In particular, reference to topics developed in Joyce’s Ulysses provides an overt discussion of field awareness vs. sequential trajectory, and thus prove a valuable counterpart to contemplating analogous forms within The History Of Photography In Sound.

Le démon de l’analogie 
Le réveil de l’intraitable réalité 
North American Spirituals
My parents’ generation thought War meant something

This is the first expansive large-scale solo project I’ve undertaken since the complete Babbitt concerts and I’m really excited about doing it, the music is an absolute miracle.

I’ll be performing Natural Selection on Saturday Dec. 1, 2012 at the Firehouse Space at the Collide-O-Scope Music season opener, in a collaboration with virtuoso violin duo String Noise (Conrad Harris, Pauline Kim-Harris). For more information visit http://www.collidemus.com.

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.